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Monday, August 29th, 2011
WET/DRY VAC GMACH
Setting up a gmach for dry vacs to clean water damage.
Can u pls tell people to bring dry vacs to Rabbi Brown's shul in FR on Lannett av across from TAG HG
And pls announce to those who need dry vacs that they should text me at 516 244 6571 and that we hope to have some available by 2pm.
This service is being sponsored by the JCC of Far Rockaway in conjunction with Achiezer
Thanks - Richard Altabe.
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Jews in a Whisper
By ROGER COHEN
London
IN his novel "Deception," Philip Roth has the American protagonist say to his British mistress: "In England, whenever I'm in a public place, a restaurant, a party, the theater, and someone happens to mention the word 'Jew,' I notice that the voice always drops just a little."
She challenges him on this observation, prompting the American, a middle-aged writer, to say, yes, that's how "you all say 'Jew.' Jews included."
This prompted a memory: sitting with my mother in an Italian restaurant in the upscale London neighborhood of St. John's Wood circa 1970 and asking her, after she had pointed to a family in the opposite corner and said they were Jewish, why her voice dropped to a whisper when she said the J word.
"I'm not whispering," Mom said and went on cutting up her spaghetti so it would fit snugly on a fork.
But she was - in that subliminal, awkward, half-apologetic way of many English Jews. My parents were South African immigrants. Their priority was assimilation. They were not about to change their name but nor were they about to rock the boat. I never thought much about why I left the country they adopted and became an American. It happened. One thing in life leads to another. But then, a year ago, I returned.
I was at my sister's place and a lodger of hers, seeing I had a BlackBerry, said, "Oh, you've got a JewBerry." Huh? "Yeah, a JewBerry." I asked him what he meant. "Well," he shrugged, "BBM - BlackBerry Messenger." I still didn't get it. "You know, it's free!"
Right.
None of this carried malice as far I could see. It was just flotsam carried on the tide of an old anti-Semitism. The affable, insidious English anti-Semitism that stereotypes and snubs, as in the judgment of some gent at the Athenaeum on a Jew's promotion to the House of Lords: "Well, these people are very clever." Or, as Jonathan Margolis noted in The Guardian, the tipsy country squire commenting on how much he likes the Jewish family who just moved into the village before adding, "Of course, everybody else hates them."
Of course.
Jewish identity is an intricate subject and quest. In America, because I've criticized Israel and particularly its self-defeating expansion of settlements in the West Bank, I was, to self-styled "real Jews," not Jewish enough, or even - join the club - a self-hating Jew. In Britain I find myself exasperated by the muted, muffled way of being a Jew. Get some pride, an inner voice says, speak up!
But it's complicated. Britain, with its almost 300,000 Jews and more than two million Muslims, is caught in wider currents - of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and political Islam. Traditionally, England's genteel anti-Semitism has been more of the British establishment than the British working class, whereas anti-Muslim sentiment has been more working-class than establishment.
Now a ferocious anti-Zionism of the left - the kind that has called for academic boycotts of Israel - has joined the mix, as has some Muslim anti-Semitism. Meanwhile Islamophobia has been fanned by the rightist fabrication of the "Eurabia" specter - the fantasy of a Muslim takeover that sent Anders Breivik on his Norwegian killing spree and feeds far-right European and American bigotry.
Where then should a Jew in Britain who wants to speak up stand? Not with the Knesset members who have met in Israel with European rightists like Filip Dewinter of Belgium in the grotesque belief that they are Israel's allies because they hate Muslims. Not with the likes of the Jewish writer Melanie Phillips, whose book "Londonistan" is a reference for the Islamophobes. Nor with those who, ignoring sinister historical echoes, propose ostracizing Israeli academics and embrace an anti-Zionism that flirts with anti-Semitism.
Perhaps a good starting point is a parallel pointed out to me by Maleiha Malik, a professor of law at King's College London. A century ago, during the Sidney Street siege of 1911, it was the Jews of London's East End who, cast as Bolsheviks, were said to be "alien extremists." Winston Churchill, no less, argued in 1920 that Jews were part of a "worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development."
The lesson is clear: Jews, with their history, cannot become the systematic oppressors of another people. They must be vociferous in their insistence that continued colonization of Palestinians in the West Bank will increase Israel's isolation and ultimately its vulnerability.
That - not fanning Islamophobia - is the task before diaspora Jews. To speak up in Britain also means confronting the lingering, voice-lowering anti-Semitism. When Roth's hero returns to New York, he finds he's been missing something. His lover, now distant, asks what.
"Jews."
"We've got some of them in England, you know."
"Jews with force, I'm talking about. Jews with appetite. Jews without shame."
I miss them, too.
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 Click For More Info *************** New Documentary Follows Leading Yiddish Writer's Life in New York CitySholem Aleichem arrived in New York in 1906 as the world's most famous Yiddish writer - a distinction his comic but often disturbing stories of Eastern European life might have mocked as grandiose. Seeking refuge from Russian pogroms, he hoped to explore "the Golden Land" his readers were settling in and earn needed money as a playwright. Yet like more than a few newcomers to this flinty city, the Jewish Mark Twain, as he was known, left within a year, humiliated and disillusioned. He got caught up in what he himself might have called an earthquake - a churlish reception from the cutthroat New York literary, newspaper and theater worlds. One editor's review contained a Dorothy Parker-like swat: "I made use of the privilege ordinary mortals have when they don't like a play and I left in the middle." Sholem Aleichem is usually associated with the rustic shtetls of Eastern Europe; his stories were the basis for "Fiddler on the Roof." But a new documentary, "Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness," shows that he also had a bittersweet immersion in the bustling metropolis of early-20th-century New York, making two trips and staying for a total of almost three years. On his second trip, he lived at 110 Lenox Avenue at 116th Street and finally at 968 Kelly Street in the Bronx. He died in the Bronx on May 13, 1916, at age 57. His funeral was among the largest New York had ever seen, with perhaps 150,000 people viewing a cortege that began at Kelly Street, paused outside Ohab Zedek, a synagogue in Harlem, so the great cantor Yossele Rosenblatt could chant the El Mole Rachamim (God Full of Compassion), wound down to the Lower East Side for eulogies and ended in a Brooklyn cemetery. Although he asked to be buried among the "plain people, the toilers, the common folk," his coffin was moved years later to a cemetery near the Brooklyn-Queens border, where he was placed among elite Yiddish labor and political figures, four graves away from Abraham Cahan, one of the reviewers who panned his plays in 1907. What did Sholem Aleichem make of New York and America? The writer Hillel Halkin says, in the documentary, "He saw that precisely because it was such a wonderful land for Jews" the country would eventually destroy Jewish culture. But Joseph Dorman, the documentary's director, whose earlier film "Arguing the World" was about four New York intellectuals, put a more optimistic twist on it. "He had a strong aversion," Mr. Dorman said, "to what he saw as excessive American materialism - the search for money and wealth above all else - and he certainly saw how American capitalism was dissolving Jewish tradition even more quickly than was happening in Russia." "But," Mr. Dorman added, "he was no fool and saw that it was also doing great things for the Jews. During his lifetime there was a thriving Yiddish culture here impossible in Russia under the tsars." Sholem Aleichem was born Solomon Rabinowitz (the pen name he took is the greeting "Peace to You") in a small town in Ukraine in 1859. His middle-class family had a devastating financial setback, but he had the fortune of falling in love with Olga Loyev, a girl from a wealthy family whom he had been hired to tutor, and, in their mostly bourgeois life, they had six children. He began writing about Menachem Mendel, an overly optimistic luftmensch (an impractical person who literally lives on air) who speculated, to his wife's dismay, in all kinds of get-rich-quick schemes. Then came stories about Tevye the Dairyman, a peddler whose daughters progressively challenge his Jewish traditions, with one marrying her gentile lover and converting to Christianity. In 1905, Sholem Aleichem barely escaped a pogrom, so the next year, leaving all but his youngest child behind, he and his wife sailed to New York. He was greeted as a cultural hero by the Jewish elite, and William Randolph Hearst's organization, which was planning to open a Jewish newspaper, offered him a $5,000-a-year contract to write stories, an offer he did not accept. Mr. Dorman, 53, a grandson of immigrants, described, over a lunch of cheese blintzes, how Sholem Aleichem had to navigate the shoals of two impresarios - the great Yiddish actors Jacob Adler and Boris Thomashefsky. The two ended up reaching a star-crossed compromise to put on different Sholem Aleichem plays against each other on the same night. Although traditionalist critics praised the plays, more radical reviewers found them politically incorrect or old-fashioned. A biography by his daughter Marie Waife-Goldberg defended the plays as too psychological for an audience that demanded shund - melodramas with happy endings - but the consensus was that Sholem Aleichem was a far better story-spinner than a playwright. Within two weeks the plays closed. A cartoon that ran before Sholem Aleichem's second visit in 1914 suggested a plausible explanation for his failure in New York. It showed a coastal fort manned by America's leading Yiddish writers, with Sholem Aleichem and other refugee authors approaching in rowboats. "Yiddish American writers, together let us defend out fatherland which we have built with our blood and our ink!" the caption read. Much of one of his greatest serialized novels, "Motl, the Cantor's Son," was written here during that second trip and published in English in The New York World newspaper. Through the eyes of an upbeat 8-year-old boy, the novel tells of the death of Motl's father, which paradoxically allows him to throw off European Jewish culture and emigrate to America. "Lucky me, I'm an orphan," he exults, as David G. Roskies, a professor of Yiddish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary, points out in the documentary. Motl's adventures take him through Ellis Island, a sweatshop, astonishment at Charlie Chaplin movies, the subway and chewing gum. Motl and his mother eventually find some security with a small store. The documentary notes that Sholem Aleichem, sick with tuberculosis, could not make the transition as successfully as the young Motl. Still, his funeral brought out the same people who had not wished him well. Three years after his death, he achieved theatrical success when the actor Maurice Schwartz staged a popular production about Tevye. The Tevye stories themselves eventually became "Fiddler on the Roof," which brought the story of Sholem Aleichem's vanished world to stages and theaters across America.
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***************** Majorcan Descendants of Spanish Jews Who Converted Are Recognized as JewsPARIS - Centuries after the Spanish Inquisition led to the forced conversion of Jews to Catholicism, an ultra-orthodox rabbinical court in Israel has issued a religious ruling that recognizes descendants from the insular island of Majorca as Jews. The opinion focused narrowly on the Majorcan community of about 20,000 people known as chuetas and did not apply to descendants of Sephardic Jewish converts in mainland Spain or the broader diaspora of thousands of others who scattered to the Ottoman Empire and the Spanish colonies in South and North America. The island, isolated until a tourist boom that began in the late 1960s, is a sociological preserve for descendants of Jews who formed an insular community of Catholic converts that intermarried through the centuries because of religious persecution and discrimination that barred them from holding certain positions in the Roman Catholic Church through the 20th century. Most carry the names of 15 families with ancestors who were tried and executed during the 17th century for practicing Judaism. The religious court in Israel, led for more than 40 years by Rabbi Nissim Karelitz, sent another rabbi to the island in May to explore its warren of streets where a synagogue once stood and to examine the family trees of some of the chuetas who trace lineage back 500 years. In a two-paragraph opinion - typical of the private rabbinical court that deals with matters of conversions, marriage conflicts and financial disputes - Rabbi Karelitz issued a statement that said because of the intermarriage patterns of the chuetas, "all those who are related to the former generations are Jews." "The decision is a headline ruling," said Rabbi Israel Wiesel, a judge from Israel who explored the community in Palma, roaming the street where, for generations, many chueta families have operated jewelry stores. "Unlike other Marranos in Spain and Portugal, who lost their line of history," he said, "this particular community is unique and kept the pure line of history for the last 700 years, which means they are Jewish." In May, the regional government of the Balearic Islands became the first to create a memorial ceremony for Jewish descendants, marking the deaths of 37 people who were executed in 1691 by the Inquisition, and expressing regrets for persecution that chueta families suffered through the centuries. Bernat Aguiló Siquier, an amateur local historian who is descended from one of the 15 chueta families, said most of them stopped practicing Judaism altogether in the 18th century. But he said he still found the decision significant because it is "a recognition of a fact, as much as an act of justice." Shavei Israel, a private group that offers support and religious training for Jewish descendants in Spain and Portugal, had been pressing for the recognition for years. The result, according to its founder, Michael Freund, is that now "they no longer need to live in between worlds. We have succeeded in opening the door for them to come home." What that means in actual practice is still evolving. Mr. Aguiló said he hoped that it would inspire the state of Israel to grant citizenship to the chuetas. For now, Rabbi Wiesel said, the next steps for the Spanish island were more modest. "Rabbis will come and teach whoever is interested in learning," he said, "and offer every assistance to those who want to come back to the Jewish fold."
Warm and knowledgeable Rebbe available for the month of August. Experienced in gemara reading and all limudei kodesh. Warm, competent, and energetic.
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Five Towns Weather:
Monday: Mostly sunny and breezy, with a high near 81.
Monday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 65.
Tuesday: Sunny, with a high near 81.
Tuesday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 65.
Wednesday: Sunny, with a high near 80.
Wednesday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 65.
Thursday: Sunny, with a high near 80.
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