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B’Nai B’rithm a g a z i n e

B’nai B’rith Finds Durban Final Document ‘Fatally Flawed’

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It is the 100th birthday of the amazing and beautiful Tel Aviv and you are invited to join the

celebration. You’ll enjoy endless concerts, shows, exhibitions and special events and feel the warmth

of 100 “Shaloms” from the people of Israel. And after celebrating in Tel Aviv, you can discover the

glory of Jerusalem, the beauty of Haifa, the mystery of the Dead Sea, the grandeur of the Gallilee

and the many wonders of Israel. So come to Israel this year – during the 100th anniversary of Tel Aviv.

You’ll love Israel from the first Shalom.

Shalomsfrom Tel Aviv

on our 100th Anniversary.

B’NAI B’RITH Traveler-Israel 100 Anniversary 8.125”x10.875” Ad

100On the beach at Tel Aviv In Tel Aviv near the ancient city of Jaffa.Azrieli Towers, Tel Aviv

B’nai B’rith international 2009 Mission and travel The Global Voice of the Jewish Community

For more information, contact the B’nai B’rith international Mission and travel office at 877-222-9590

or visit www.bnaibrith.org and click on Missions and travel.

Join us for a Jewish view of the world you’ve always wanted to explore!Enjoy specially tailored itineraries. Meet with local Jewish, B’nai B’rith, and government leaders.

Israel Jewish Family Tour August 19-31, 2009Take your family on a journey of a lifetime! Visit sites that will appeal to young and old in Jerusalem and the Old City. Experience Masada, the Dead Sea, the Galilee, Akko, and Caesarea.

European Days of Jewish Culture and Heritage September 6-16, 2009Visit local programs in Europe celebrating Jewish Festivals and Traditions. More information available soon!

Cuban Missions September 9-17, 2009 December 9-17, 2009 Meet Jewish leaders and learn the history of the Jewish community in Cuba. Talk to the people first hand – bring needed supplies and be made aware of their projects. Tour synagogues and Jewish community centers in Havana, Santa Clara, and Cienfuegos and participate in programs with local congregations. Visit cultural and historic sites.

Argentina/Uruguay Adventure October 14-23, 2009 Explore this beautiful region, its culture, and its people. See Buenos Aires and experience its Jewish culture. Visit Iguassu Falls and tour historic areas including the bullfighting ring in Colonia del Sacramento and Jewish Montevideo, Uruguay. Enjoy a tango show.

Turkey Jewish Highlights October 18-29, 2009Visit this cosmopolitan country with thriving Jewish sections. Tour historic synagogues and modern cities like Istanbul. Take a Bosphorus cruise, see ancient cities. Experience Izmir’s Jewish life. Explore Topkapi Palace, Hippodrome, St. Sophia, and Pamukkale Hot Springs. Enjoy a Whirling Dervishes Show.

Spain - A Jewish Perspective October 28 - November 4, 2009Explore Spain’s Sephardic Jewish heritage in Segovia, Toledo, and Cordoba. Visit Madrid, enjoy a traditional Flamenco show in Seville, guided tour of Prado Museum, and explore the beautiful city of Barcelona.

Panama & Costa Rica Chanukah Tour December 9-17, 2009Celebrate Chanukah and explore the natural wonders of this region. Visit Panama City and the engineering marvel, the Panama Canal. Enjoy Costa Rica, including the Arenal Volcano, Tabacon Hot Springs, and Monteverde Cloud Forest.

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BLEED_SUMMER09_BBM_MissionTravel.indd 1 5/12/09 12:51:00 PM

B’nai B’rithM a g a z i n e

The 2009 B’nai B’rith International Policy ConferenceDecember 6-8 in Washington, D.C.

Newspaper headlines shout out the major issues facing today’s Jewish world. But headlines are just that; they don’t give the whole story. To find out the information behind the headlines, make plans to attend

This is your chance to hear from top experts from government, public policy organizations, and B’nai B’rith.

As an added bonus, you will have a chance to witness B’nai B’rith history as a new administration comes into office and you will have the opportunity to pay tribute to outgoing International President Moishe Smith for his leadership.

Watch for details or write: conference@bnaibrith.org

BBM_PolicyConf_AD.indd 1 5/11/09 9:29:34 AM

B’nai B’rithM a g a z i n e

DEPARTMENTS

By Moishe Smith,President, B’nai B’rith International

Editor’s Note 7From the EVP 8

page six

We Need to Cut Dependency on Foreign Oil—Now!

10Marvel Comics has entered the fray over the refusal of the Auschwitz State Museum to return portraits Holocaust victim Dina Babbitt was forced to paint while imprisoned at the notorious concentration camp. Comic book artists have created “The Last Outrage,” which relates Babbitt’s decades-long fight to retrieve seven portraits of Sinti and Roma women prisoners—also known as Gypsies—on whom Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” planned to perform experiments.

By Janet Lubman Rathner

14As small-town Jewish communities nationwide are shrinking, they aim to not only stave off demise but also to promote growth. One of the more unusual approaches comes from Dothan, Ala., where last fall the Blumberg Family Relocation Fund began offering Jewish families up to $50,000 to relocate to Dothan. Other Jewish communities are mounting their own revitalization campaigns—some with more success than others.

By Janet Lubman Rathner

20It’s no secret that Israel has an image problem. In pro-Israel circles, advocates sound a near-constant refrain about the need for better hasbara—a term that liter-ally means “explaining.” During the recent Gaza War, Israeli officials and pro-Israel groups tried to convey a basic message: Israel was forced into war by a terrorist organization that fired rockets at civilians, remained committed to Israel’s destruc-tion, and was unsympathetic to the plight of Gaza’s populace. It was no easy task.

By Uriel Heilman

Israel’s Complex Message

Holocaust Comic

Small-Town Jews

Letters to the Editor 12 Policies on Aging 26

31 Durban’s ‘Flawed’ Document

The United Nations Durban Review Conference on Racism delivered a final document that was deemed “fatally flawed” by B’nai B’rith International. “We condemn this rubber-stamp document in the strongest terms possible,” BBI Honorary President and Head of Delegation Richard Heideman said from Geneva. “The adoption of this document shows nothing has changed since 2001, no lessons have been learned—and the hope for a unified approach to fighting racism and intoler-ance around the world will again go unfulfilled.”By Joel Samen

35 Summit of AmericasThe Fifth Summit of the Americas “opened with great expectations, but, in the end, was a conclave of wishful thinking,” according to B’nai B’rith International President Moishe Smith. The Summit of the Americas is a series of international gatherings of the leaders of North and South American countries. The stated purpose of this summit was to focus on confronting the global economic crisis and on how to combat the corresponding spike in poverty.By Harvey Berk

36 Holocaust Remembrance

B’nai B’rith International and the Alpha Epsilon Pi Frater-nity joined forces at more than 65 campuses nationwide in April and May to hold memorials for Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day. Each campus’ activity varied depending on what the fraternity deemed best, but many were based on the nationwide B’nai B’rith program, “Unto Every Person There Is a Name,” where participants read the names of those who perished in the Holocaust. By Rachel Mauro

Cover illustration by Vivian Hayward. Jewish family photo courtesy of Grow Jewish Tulsa.

2009summerPhoto courtesy of Israel Ministry of Tourism

6 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

Point of View

upon public transportation. We further urge that federal, state, and local officials mandate enhancements in fuel economy standards for all modes of transportation and improve mass transit options.

These and other changes will require increasing public awareness through broad education campaigns. B’nai B’rith pledges its support for the effort to raise public consciousness about the crucial impor-tance of this cause.

I am honored to be a senior director of Energy Alternatives for the 21st Century (EA-21), a leadership coalition comprised of those who agree that it’s time to end our unhealthy dependence on imported oil.

The U.S. public must be educated about the need to face our energy crisis and its foreign policy and national security implications.

This goal will necessitate the commit-ment of civic and religious groups, in coordination with government, industry, universities, and researchers toward a com-mon, and vital, purpose.

With the 2008 U.S. elections now behind us, with gas prices fluctuating since last summer, and with the nation’s attention focused squarely on the current economic crisis, we now face the risk that America’s interest in energy security will fade. We must not allow this to happen. Our national security, our already fragile economy, and the future of our planet all hang in the balance.

poses great risks for the United States and the rest of the world.

While the United States comprises approximately 5 percent of the world’s population, it consumes approximately 25 percent of the world’s oil. More and more, it is relying on oil from countries adverse or even hostile to American strategic interests.

Consequently, U.S. dependence on Orga-nization of Petroleum Exporting Coun-tries (OPEC) member nations and rogue regimes is on the rise. As a result, America’s wealth is being exported to places where it is being used to underwrite tyranny, anti-Semitism, terrorism, and brutal repression. This is simply unacceptable.

We therefore call for urgent action to head off the ever-expanding energy crisis. The United States and its allies must initiate a public campaign that employs creativity, cooperation, and commitment to develop a comprehensive, environmen-tally sound energy plan.

This plan must include the moderniza-tion and expansion of our energy infra-structure with sensitivity to our natural environment. It will also require dra-matically increasing energy efficiency and conservation.

We call on U.S. officials to support rap-idly developing, producing, and marketing renewable and alternative technologies.

We also call for economic and other incentives to purchase more fuel-efficient or alternatively fueled vehicles and to rely

On Passover eve this year, many B’nai B’rith members and other Jews worldwide celebrated a ritual that

comes around only once every 28 years. The Birkat Hachamah, or Blessing of the Sun, marks the moment, according to Jewish tradition, when the sun returns to the spot in the sky it occupied during creation.

In modern times, Birkat Hachamah is strongly connected to environmental activism and also points to a strong Jewish commitment to a solvent energy policy.

The late Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, the Brooklyn-based spiritual leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch, in 1981 called on his followers to be inspired by the sun bless-ing “to harness solar energy, the heat and warmth of the sun, to use it as a source to generate electricity.”

With that in mind, in this column I would like to shine a spotlight on one of the great-est national security challenges of our time: America’s dependence on foreign oil. B’nai B’rith has long believed that the development of a comprehensive energy agenda is essential to national security and the economic and social well-being of this country.

Just as the United States is taking extensive measures at home and abroad to protect the safety of its citizens, it is imperative that we take the steps necessary to enhance our national energy security.

Our increasing dependence on fossil fuels, particularly foreign oil, for transpor-tation, electricity, industry, and other uses

We Need to Cut Dependency on Foreign Oil—Now! By Moishe SmithPresident, B’nai B’rith International

Editor’s note

(continued on pg. 9)

Moishe SmithPresident, B’nai B’rith InternationalDaniel S. MariaschinExecutive Vice PresidentHarvey BerkInterim Director of CommunicationsHiram M. ReisnerEditorial DirectorJanet Lubman RathnerSenior EditorRachel Mauro Joel SamenContributing EditorsSimeon MontesaArt DirectorVivian HaywardGraphic DesignerRuth E. Thaler-CarterCopy EditorTheodore FischerProofreader

Advertising Office: Fulton Advertising 301-604-3466

Editorial Offices: 2020 K St., NW, 7th Floor,Washington, DC 20006202-857-6681 or bbmag@bnaibrith.org

Readership: Approximately 175,000

Signed articles represent the opinions of their authors and are not necessarily the view of B’nai B’rith or B’nai B’rith Magazine. Return postage must accompany unsolicited material, for which no responsibility is assumed. Contents ©2009 by B’nai B’rith. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.

The B’nai B’rith Magazine (ISSN 1549-4799) is published quarterly (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter) by B’nai B’rith, 2020 K St., NW, 7th Floor, Washington, DC 20006, and is indexed in the Index to Jewish Periodicals. Subscription rates: U.S. and possessions, one year, non-member, $12; Canadian member, $12; Canada non-member, $17; overseas member (outside U.S. and Canada), $36; overseas non-member (outside U.S. and Canada), $48. Members of Hil-lel and BBYO, $7.50. $5 of member dues goes toward B’nai B’rith Magazine.

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B’nai B’rithm a g a z I N ESUmmEr 2009 VoL 123, No. 2

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 7

promote international stability.The values of the Jewish tradition and

the vital interests of this great nation impel us to embrace the mission of energy security in our time.

Let us resolve today to answer that call, and to summon all of our ingenuity and determination to turn energy security from a policy prescription to a reality.

Now is not the time for shortsight-edness—for kicking the can of energy security down the road. We urge the new administration and Congress to act on campaign promises about lessening America’s dependence on foreign oil, and we ask U.S. citizens to hold their public officials accountable for adopting a comprehensive energy program that will strengthen our national security and

The worldwide reach and influence of B’nai B’rith International is highlighted in two stories appearing in this issue of the magazine.

In April in Geneva, a delegation of 50 B’nai B’rith leaders and members from 11 countries attended the United Nations Durban Review Conference on Racism, a gathering that ended in a document that BBI Honorary President and Head of Delegation Richard D. Heideman labeled “fatally flawed.”

The text contains multiple references to Israeli “racism” against Palestinians, singling out the State of Israel as an of-fender of human rights. The conference also was tainted by a rambling diatribe against Israel from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. B’nai B’rith, which had the largest Jewish delegation at the conference, made its presence known, with Heideman addressing the conference on its blemished legacy.

Also in April, President Moishe Smith attended the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, a conference also defiled by the actions of a rogue leader, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Contrary to the purpose of the confer-ence, designed to discuss the faltering world economy and increased poverty, Chavez concentrated on bringing Cuba

back into the Organization of American States’ fold and removing U.S. sanctions.

“This is the type of undemocratic behavior that has characterized the Venezuelan president for years, and is what has justified B’nai B’rith to join with those who cherish democracy in calling for Chavez to be isolated,” Smith said.

These two stories, in the B’nai B’rith Today section of the magazine, show why the continued attendance of BBI at international events is so crucial to Israel’s future and her image, to human rights, and to the preservation of civil society as a whole.

Speaking of Israel’s worldwide image, we also have a story on the Jewish state’s problems in getting out the word that her importance on the world stage is not just militarily strategic and religious, but extends to the cultural, scientific, and technological realms as well. We explain how Israel has learned from past mistakes in presenting herself during times of war and how she is trying to move on to show her more positive sides.

We hope you enjoy this issue of the magazine and have a wonderful summer.

Hiram M. ReisnerEditorial DirectorB’nai B’rith International

8 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

Abraham Lincoln’s Secure Place in Jewish History By Daniel S. Mariaschin Executive Vice President, B’nai B’rith International

schoolboy immigrant from Russia, not too long off the boat at Ellis Island.

Over the years, we’ve come to learn of Lincoln’s close attachment to individual Jews and to issues of the time affecting the still-small (perhaps 150,000 Jews living in the United States on the eve of the Civil War) community they represented.

The Library of Congress, which hosted a major exhibition this year devoted to Lin-coln, has in its possession correspondence between Lincoln and Abraham Jonas, his good friend from Quincy, Ill., whom the president re-appointed as postmaster of the city in 1861. The letters reveal not only the usual exchange of good wishes but views on current political issues.

Then there was Dr. Isachar Zacherie, a chiropodist who first treated Lincoln in 1862. Zacherie became a confidante of the president and represented him as a special emissary on political matters.

The president seemingly intervened on behalf of a Jewish Union army captain, C.M. Levy, who had been court-martialed and ultimately thrown out of the service on charges that are still unclear today. Levy was attached to the Quartermaster Corps, and had been involved in provid-ing food and clothing to hospital-bound Jewish soldiers in Washington, D.C. Levy’s father-in-law, Morris J. Raphall, a well-known New York rabbi, wrote to Lincoln in 1864, thanking the president “for the generosity and justice” with which the captain had ultimately been treated.

Lincoln’s sense of justice affected not just individual Jewish friends and soldiers:

Lincoln was seen as a man of inherent human decency, a quality at times absent even in the far reaches of what today we’d call Western Europe.

Each of us has his or her personal con-nection to the 16th president and the Civil War, usually beginning in our childhood years. My mother was an avid reader of books about Lincoln and his family; she was always struck by the tragedy of the loss of Lincoln’s sons Willy and Tad, and the overwhelming effect it had on Mary Todd Lincoln.

My father once brought home a book of Matthew Brady’s battlefield photographs from the public library in our town, and I remember being mesmerized by the black-and-white starkness of the soldiers and their surroundings.

There was a time when we observed two presidential birthdays in February: Lincoln’s on the 12th, and George Wash-ington’s on the 22nd. Before they were morphed into a single vacation-and-shop-ping day, schoolchildren were drawing pictures of each, and learning of the basic value of honesty (and what today we’d call transparency) exhibited by both.

My parents owned a small women’s clothing shop, and we observed the birth-days in a special way every year. My father placed photo enlargements of portraits of Washington and Lincoln in antique-like oval frames and displayed them in our store windows. When we’d discuss Lincoln at home, my father would always recall how he had to memorize and deliver the Gettysburg Address as a 14-year-old

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth and is being commemorated by count-

less museum exhibitions and television documentaries, hundreds of scholarly and popular articles, and more than a few books on the man, his presidency, and his times.

We often see Lincoln’s visage and refer-ences to his words and deeds in the world around us. Ken Burns’ landmark docu-mentary series on the Civil War and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s best selling book “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” attracted large audiences and many readers.

And the symbolic importance of President Barack Obama’s taking the oath of office on the Lincoln bible sent an un-mistakable message that studying Lincoln is not just a matter of looking back, but being part of the living continuum of history itself.

At these times of tremendous economic uncertainty at home, with protection of our borders a daily concern, with battles against terrorists and their supporters in far-off places, with the specter of a nuclear Iran becoming closer by the day, and with untold challenges of hunger and disease worldwide, the observance of Lincoln’s “200th” is indeed timely—and welcome.

For all Americans, and especially Jews, Lincoln represented all that was right about America: The Great Emancipator’s mission to preserve the Union and free the slaves contrasted with the whims of potentates and rulers in Europe, where Jews often lived at great peril.

From the EVP

B’NAI B’RITHINTERNATIONAL

International President Moishe Smith

Honorary PresidentsGerald KraftSeymour D. ReichKent E. SchinerTommy P. BaerRichard D. HeidemanJoel S. Kaplan

Executive Vice PresidentDaniel S. Mariaschin

Honorary Executive Vice PresidentDr. Sidney M. Clearfield

Chairman of the ExecutiveDennis W. Glick

Senior Vice PresidentsJohn R. RofelSeymour G. SaidemanHarold I. SteinbergJacobo Wolkowicz

TreasurerHarold Shulman

International Vice Presidents

Pablo Sergio Grinstein Argentina

Dr. Peter SchiffAustralia and New Zealand

Matilde Groisman GusBrazil

Rochelle WilnerCanada

Hernán Fischman Chile, Bolivia, and Peru

John ManheimEurope

John P. Reeves Europe

Arie Bar Zion Israel

Leon BirbragherNorthern Latin Americaand the Caribbean

Daniel MermelsteinUruguay and Paraguay

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 9

Lincoln also convinced Congress to adopt amendments to a chaplaincy law that called for only Christians to be chap-lains to allow “the appointment of brigade chaplains of the Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religions.”

________________

The occasion of Lincoln’s 200th is surely bittersweet; whenever I walk by Ford’s The-ater here in Washington, D.C., I invariably think about the tragedy of the Lincoln assassination—just at the moment the Union was saved—and it always leaves me with an empty, unfulfilled feeling.

In another part of town, as my taxi takes me home from Washington’s Reagan National Airport, I view, from the win-dow, the Lincoln Memorial. I can’t quite see the magnificent statue of Lincoln on his chair, which sits at the top of the steps, just inside the memorial.

But I always think of the man whose humble beginnings never left him, whose courage and sense of principle drove him to save a country and an experiment in

democracy not yet 100 years old, and whose basic sense of fair-

ness and decency touched all Americans, including our small, but proud, Jewish community.

This is an anniversary worth celebrating indeed.

He rescinded General Ulysses S. Grant’s in-famous General Order Number 11, which called for the expulsion (within 24 hours) of Jews living in the Department of Ten-nessee, a military zone that included parts of Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

The order, ostensibly aimed at Jewish peddlers, caused immediate consternation in Jewish communities around the nation and prompted an outcry from Jewish leaders in Paducah, Ky., who wired the president and requested a meeting.

A three-person delegation, led by Cesar Kaskel of Paducah, met with Lincoln. The meeting produced a now-famous ex-change in which Lincoln says to the Jew-ish representatives, “And so the Children of Israel were driven from the happy land of Canaan.” Kaskel explained that the visit was to enlist the president’s interven-tion in the case: “…and that is why we have come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.”

To which Lincoln responded, “And this protection they shall have at once.” Lin-coln soon after wrote to the then-chief of staff of the Union army, Henry Halleck, instructing him to rescind the order.

B’nai B’rith’s Missouri Lodge also sent two letters to Lincoln, one asking for the order to be rescinded and the other thanking him when he took that action. Other B’nai B’rith leaders met with Lincoln to thank him.

Holocaust Comic BookNo Laughing MatterBy Janet Lubman Rathner

has emerged as an important medium for education in recent years,” says Medoff, explaining the effort.

“[Students] can look at a single panel cartoon and grasp the material faster than reading from a text. When I told Dina of our plans for the comic strip, she was very pleased and grateful.”

The “Last Outrage” appears in the comic book “X-Men: Magneto Testament.” The five-issue mini-series arrived at newsstands and comic book shops in February, and Marvel plans to compile the entire story in a graphic novel. Medoff penned the story, and the afterward was written by Stan Lee, publisher of Marvel Comics and creator of superhero staples. Adams and Kubert inked the drawings.

A Question of OwnershipFollowing the liberation of Auschwitz—where in an effort to make their final hours less bleak she painted a mural of Snow White in the children’s barracks—Babbitt immigrated to the United States and became a cartoonist for Warner Brothers. Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, Speedy Gonzalez, and Wile E. Coyote are just a few of the characters whose antics often came to life through her skills.

Today, at 86, Babbitt is retired, lives in the northern California town of Felton, and fights for the return of her paintings—a battle she has waged since 1973 when she was first contacted by the Auschwitz Museum and informed that the portraits were in its possession.

“They wanted to know why [the paint-ings] came about,” says Babbitt, who visited the museum and saw the paintings

T he Holocaust as funny-page fodder is not as bizarre as it might first appear.

Marvel Comics, creator of superheroes the X-Men, Captain America, Spider-Man, and the Hulk among numerous others, has entered the fray over the refusal of the Auschwitz State Museum to return portraits Dina Babbitt was forced to paint while imprisoned at the notorious concen-tration camp.

Comic book artists Neal Adams and Joe Kubert—and Rafael Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute of Ho-locaust Studies—have created “The Last Outrage,” which relates Babbitt’s decades-long fight to retrieve seven portraits of Sinti and Roma women prisoners—also known as Gypsies—on whom Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” planned to perform experiments.

The Nazis considered Gypsies, whose dark complexions indicated ancestral roots in India, to be racially and socially inferior. Like their Jewish neighbors, Gypsies were persecuted and imprisoned in concentra-tion camps. According to the United States Holocaust Museum, some 220,000 to 500,000 Gypsies lost their lives at the hands of Hitler’s army.

Babbitt agreed to paint the portraits of the doomed women in exchange for her life and that of her mother (see B’nai B’rith Magazine, Winter 2006). She sealed the bargain on a day when approximately 4,500 Czech Jews were herded to their deaths in the Auschwitz gas chambers; the two women were spared.

“The Wyman Institute has long been interested in finding cutting-edge ways to teach the lessons of the Holocaust to the next generation, and comic book art

1 0 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

Comic Book, continued on pg. 37

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 1 1

Courtesy of Neal Adam

s & Rafael M

edoff.

Marvel Comics’ take on how cartoonist Dina Babbitt survived Auschwitz and some of the portraits of Gypsy prisoners (bottom right) she was forced to paint in exchange for her life. The paintings are on display at the Auschwitz State Museum. Babbitt wants the portraits back and Marvel is trying to help.

1 2 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

PUBLISHED SINCE 1886

SPrINg 2009B’Nai B’rithm a g a z i n e

B’nai B’rith Regional News Moves to the Web

Diabetes Impact Increases

in Jewish Community

Israeli Women’sRoles Grow

Lower East Side:

Fading into Jewish History

lettersto the editor

Gilad Shalit

Dear Editor:In 2005, Israel gave up all of Gaza with hopes for peace. Indeed, Israel evacuated 9,000 Israeli civilians from Gaza. What has Israel gotten in return? More than 8,000 rockets shot toward Israel—rockets that are aimed at innocent Israeli civilians and are still coming today.

A year after Israel gave up Gaza, Iran-backed Hamas kidnapped Israel Defense Forces Staff Sergeant Gilad Shalit. Shalit was on patrol on the Israeli side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Gaza when seven terrorists infiltrated Israel and carried out the attack, kidnapping him.

In violation of the Geneva Convention, the terrorist group denied the Red Cross access to Gilad Shalit.

On the one-year anniversary of his kidnap-ping, Hamas released an audio recording of Gilad Shalit stating he was in poor health and posted it on its website, signaling that the terrorist group was indeed responsible for his capture.

Israeli officials, at the urging of the Israeli public, have doggedly pursued Shalit’s release because of the high value Israeli and Jewish society places on human life.

Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak stressed that freeing Shalit was a top priority of Israel’s recent defensive operation in Gaza and that Israel was constantly working to ensure his release. Yet Israel stopped their defensive efforts with-out Shalit being freed. The time to free him is now.America should

not send any of our tax money to help Hamas-led Gaza until they stop shooting rockets into Israel and free Gilad Shalit.

It’s bad enough that American tax money went to bonuses of failed executives. Can you imagine if we give it to Hamas terrorists?

SincerelyMike RabkinRockville, Md.

Helping Out with Senior Housing

Dear Editor:I want to thank you for your recent article, “Diabetes Impact Increases in Jewish Com-munity.” It is a critical challenge for many. I want to also thank you for highlighting, as a part of the article, the resident information programs at both B’nai B’rith Homecrest House in Silver Spring, Md., and B’nai B’rith Apartments in Deerfield Beach, Fla.

The network of B’nai B’rith residents relies on the contributions of individual time, tal-ents, and resources to provide this program-ming, as they are not covered by our federal, state, and local funding partners.

If readers and their lodges have not been to a B’nai B’rith senior residence lately, I invite them to go to the B’nai B’rith International website, click on Senior Services, then Senior Housing, and look up a nearby residence. Call them and ask for a tour. Then, if you can, ask how you can help.

The donation of your time, your talents, and, if possible, your resources will be greatly appreciated!

Sincerely,Chuck ThorntonDirector of Marketing and DevelopmentB’nai B’rith Homecrest HouseSilver Spring, Md.

Remembering the Lower East SideDear Editor:The article “The Lower East Side” by Hillel Kuttler sent me back almost 68 years. My grandmother, my mother, and her two brothers came from Russia, while my father and his family came from Austria—all this just before the turn of the century.

My grandmother lived on Essex Street. When my mother married, she and my fa-ther went to live at 138 Eldridge Street. The building was just around the corner from Delancey Street.

The street level was where Mrs. Herman had her coffee shop on one side, and a dry-goods store was on the other side of the stairs going up to the apartments.

Our apartment was the first one, but the stairs [were] to the back. Across the street was the old synagogue. And I can still hear the chanting when it was Shabbat. Our shul, though, was on Hester Street, about three blocks from where Grandma lived.

Your article really brought back a lot of memories of my youth.

The man who had boxes on his back and called “lamps, lamps, lamps for sale” or the ice man who used to stop off at Mrs. Herman’s coffee shop for, as he put it, “the best coffee in all of New York.” Yes, your article took me back to a world that no longer exists.

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 1 3

Thank you for that wonderful article. I am sitting at my computer crying, not only for the sadness of that world and all its innocence that is gone [but] with a prayer in my heart that maybe, some time, we can have at least the peace that I lived through and the knowledge that we really need another peaceful time. Sincerely,Rosella BonhamTucson, Ariz.

a a a a

Dear Editor:In the article on the Lower East Side by Hillel Kuttler, on page 28 you quote Lori Weissman as saying that the 2000 census showed 30,000 Jews on the Lower East Side. Considering that the census does not ask if people are Jewish, that is quite a trick!

I am the author of the annual article in the “American Jewish Year Book,” which provides population statistics for almost 1,000 American Jewish communities.

By the way, our figure for Utah is 4,400, but I would not dispute the 5,000 figure in your article in the same issue on Utah Jews.

Sincerely,Ira M. SheskinAssociate ProfessorDepartment of Geography and Regional StudiesUniversity of MiamiCoral Gables, Fla.

CORReCtiOns

A photo credit on page 50 of the Spring issue, with a story on the remains of the Jewish farming colony of Clarion, should have read: Courtesy of Stacey Smith, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Provo Area Office.

David Harris is executive director of the American Jewish Committee not the American Jewish Congress.

1 4 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

Phot

o co

urte

sy o

f Blu

mbe

rg F

amily

Photo courtesy of Blumberg Family

Photo courtesy of The Image Agengy and The Downtown Group

Dothan, Ala.Top: The family of Mathew and Michelle Reed is the first to arrive in Dothan, Ala., courtesy of the Blumberg Family Relocation Fund. Middle: Downtown Dothan circa 1904, when many of the town’s early Jewish residents, including the Blumberg family, were merchants. Bottom: Downtown Dothan circa 2009, dressed up and gentrified to attract new young families.

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 1 5

Jews have lived in small American towns ever since 1585, when Joachim Gans arrived with Sir Walter Raleigh’s expedition to Roanoke Island, off the coast of what now is North Carolina, and formed a diminutive colony. Later generations

gravitated to small burgs, mostly for financial and professional reasons, escaping the world of pushcarts and crowded big-city streets.

But with time passing and opportunities drying up, small towns have had to confront a Jewish exodus that has depleted their ethnic and religious frameworks, as community groups and synagogues atrophy in their congregants’ wakes.

Dothan, Ala., has taken an unusual approach to reversing this trend. Larry Blumberg, a hotel developer and lifelong Dothan resident, has established the Blumberg Family Relocation Fund, which last fall began offering Jewish families up to $50,000 to relocate to a place that bills itself as the “Peanut Capital of the World.”

Small Towns Look to Increase Jewish Populations By Janet Lubman Rathner

Photo by Getty Images

1 6 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

“It [the money] can be used for a number of things: relocation costs, educational debts, down payment on a home, seed money for a business,” Blumberg says. “What we require is that someone stay in Dothan for at least five years. They sign a multi-year obligation and, for every year that they remain, one-fifth of the grant will be forgiven.”

There are some caveats. The fund helps with access to employment leads, but “some-one’s got to have a skill set and background that would match up with the job opportu-nities here. We don’t want to bring folks here who can’t be productive and then become a burden to us and find unhappiness,” Blum-berg explains.

Dothan, which has approximately 60,000 residents, has never had a substantial Jew-ish population. At its peak, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, approximately 120 Jewish families worshipped at Temple Emanu-El, the town synagogue. Today, that number has dropped to around 40. But what Dothan’s Jewish community lacks in size, it makes up for with enthusiasm.

In 80 years of operation, Temple Emanu-El boasts of never having missed a Shab-bat evening service. There are monthly tot Shabbats and family services, an active sisterhood and brotherhood, a religious school, an adult education program, and community outreach. While Reform in affiliation, the synagogue accommodates

a diverse membership with a blend of religious practices, something the congrega-tion’s novice rabbi acknowledges.

“What some people, particularly those who come from the North, where the large Jewish centers are, might view as a liability [the blend of practices], I view as an asset. I would be ecstatically happy to remain here,” says Lynne Goldsmith, who arrived in Dothan two years ago for her first pulpit. “This is a very warm, welcoming community. If somebody shows up who has never been here before, everybody goes up and introduces themselves. I think that is something unique to Dothan and maybe unique to smaller Jewish communities.”

Blumberg’s goal is to bring at least 20 Jew-ish families to Dothan, and he has pledged $1 million to do so. The fund’s website has been inundated with inquiries; the first recipients, Matthew and Michelle Reed of Sanford, N.C., have arrived with their two young children, and Blumberg is confident that more will follow once they see what Dothan has to offer.

Matthew Reed, 25, who until February was an Army aviation mechanic stationed at Fort Bragg, is now working for Bell Aero-space Services, Inc. in nearby Ozark, where military helicopters go for tune-ups and maintenance. The Blumberg Family Reloca-tion Fund assisted in his job search. Michelle Reed, 26, is beginning work as a medical assistant at an outpatient hospital clinic. Al-

though both have Alabama roots and wanted to return to their home state once Matt completed his stint in the Army—his family is in the town of Arab, Michelle grew up in Montgomery, and her father is a Dothan native—Dothan was not on their radar.

“We didn’t come here solely for the financial [incentive], but it was nice to get it. We’re definitely planning on staying here. The people are friendly and it’s close to fam-ily,” Michelle says.

The Reeds did not use the Blumberg car-rot when they moved, as those costs were covered in Matt’s discharge from the Army. However, when the family buys a home—they’re renting until they get acclimated to Dothan—Michelle says she expects some of that incentive will be applied toward the down payment.

Michelle says another reason for coming to Dothan is the desire to raise her children in a Jewish environment. While some might question how easy that will be when the new hometown’s sole Jewish connection is one very small—albeit very active—synagogue, she isn’t concerned.

“There may not be many Jews here now, but, hopefully, in the next few years they’ll be bringing in more families with children and then my kids can grow up with them,” Michelle says.

And in the meantime, “The people here are very nice, and it’s just somewhere that we

The small Jewish community of Tulsa, Okla., does not reflect the city’s size nor its many Jewish amenities. Jewish groups in Tulsa are working to publicize what their city has to offer. Left: Camp Shalom at the Charles Schusterman Jewish Community Center. Right: Model Seder at Temple Israel.

Photos courtesy of Grow Jewish TulsaTulsa, Okla.

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 1 7

feel we can make home.”Daryl Shapiro, a native of Johannesburg,

South Africa, who came to Dothan 19 years ago to be the tennis pro at the Dothan Country Club, says Jewish families will be surprised at what they find in this southeast-ern Alabama city near the borders of Georgia and Florida.

“The people here [Jewish and non-Jewish] are fantastic. It’s a nice lifestyle. I think once they come and see what’s here, they’ll be happy they made this move,” Shapiro says.

Unlike some small communities that are losing Jewish populations, economic vibrancy has not been an issue in Dothan. In the last 30 years, companies such as General Electric, Michelin, Sony, the Joseph M. Farley Nuclear Generating Station, and Southeast Medical Alabama Center have ar-rived, adding to an already-healthy job pool, courtesy of nearby Fort Rucker, which trains military, civilian, and international personnel in aviation and leadership skills.

A further indication of Dothan’s overall economic health: B’nai B’rith International and the Dothan-based Wiregrass Foundation received a grant from the U.S. Department

of Housing and Urban Development to develop and sponsor a $4-million affordable-housing complex for 39 senior units.

“Our expertise helped in securing this funding, and we [will] develop a presence that reinforces the Jewish presence in the community,” says Mark D. Olshan, associate executive vice president and director of B’nai B’rith International’s Center for Senior Ser-vices. “The Jewish community is small, but we’ve developed a strong relationship.”

Where Dothan does suffer is in guilt by association, Blumberg says.

“There’s a lot of stigma about the South, some rightfully so. But in Dothan, I never encountered any anti-Semitism, and race rela-tions are wonderful,” he says. “The sit-ins and boycotts in Montgomery and Selma—we nev-er had any of that here. We formed a biracial committee…to assure that the communities worked together. We’ve had some great local leadership over the years, and it has really fostered a wonderful environment here.”

If You Build It, They Will ComeOther Jewish communities seeking to grow are taking note of Dothan. Jewish leaders

from Meridian, Miss.—a town of 38,000, of which just 34 pay dues to its synagogue, Beth Israel—recently visited to collect infor-mation on Dothan’s relocation program.

Another was Tulsa, Okla., which with a population of 400,000 hardly qualifies as a small town but where just 2,300 of those residents are Jewish, creating similar concerns about rejuvenation. Grow Jew-ish Tulsa—a collaborative effort of six local Jewish organizations that follows some of the Dothan model—promotes the city’s Jewish support services and combats the Sooner State’s bible-thumper image.

“Dothan is just one of several communities we looked at with efforts to grow or revitalize their Jewish communities. They were happy to share with us, and sent a copy of their paperwork,” says Heather Lewin, reten-tion, recruitment, and marketing director of Grow Jewish Tulsa. “[Similar to Dothan,] we have sent information packets and letters explaining our mission to federations and synagogues in Houston, Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland, and more. Our job bank is going strong…and we are building a list of links, [called] Job Junction, on our

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website. Six of the original 12 people referred to me have found work.”

Grow Jewish Tulsa stemmed from a 2006 study by the town’s Jewish Federation that Lewin says revealed a near 20-percent drop in population in the youth demographic. “Once Tulsa’s Jewish kids turn 18, most of them leave. The national average for this phenomenon is only a 9-percent drop,” he notes. “At the same time, the number of Jews in Tulsa age 70 and over is 6-percent higher than the national average.”

This despite the fact that Tulsa is a cultural hub, Lewin says.

“We have a symphony, a ballet, opera. We have three synagogues, a federation, a JCC, and a Jewish Day School. It’s not much of a challenge being Jewish here, [but] I think people have the wrong impression of Okla-homa,” she notes. “Some might be concerned about moving to the so-called Bible Belt, but it’s a lot more diverse [than people realize].

“We are not offering the whopping finan-cial incentive of Dothan, but that’s because we already have so much to offer. We feel like you get a big-city lifestyle without all the traffic and paying for parking. We just need to let people know about it.”

Blumberg is delighted that other small towns and challenged Jewish communities are looking to Dothan for inspiration.

“I’d love for us to work out a detailed model, where we’ve laid out the ABCs in a very comprehensive fashion and other com-munities could embrace it,” he says. “I’ve seen it go the other way in so many small towns. Selma and Jasper, Ala., had vibrant Jewish communities when I was growing up, and their temples are shuttered now.

“It’s important for Jews to live in small towns, where you go to school with non-Jews, play together, socialize together. In larger cities, you don’t have the same degree of inter-action, and the lack of familiarity does lead to more misunderstanding.”

The Continuing LossEfforts to preserve and reinvigorate are not always successful.

In recent years, Jewish communities in Clarksburg, West Va.; Fitchburg, Mass.; and Weldon, N.C., have each lost their one syna-gogue. Declining membership and subsequent inability to cover operating costs were behind each instance.

Weldon’s nearly century-old synagogue closed in 2004 after 92 years of operation. “It was a sad thing, but we should have closed it years ago. We just could not maintain it. There were only four families left,” recalls Stephen Bloom, 62, a general district court judge who lives in the small (5,700-resident) Virginia/North Carolina border town of Em-poria. Bloom worshipped at Temple Emanu-El in Weldon for many years, driving 20 miles south for Shabbat services and religious school activities for his children. He now travels 60 miles north to a synagogue in Richmond, Va.

In its heyday, Temple Emanu-El served 50 families, many of them involved in the region’s now greatly reduced agricultural and textile industries. Like so many of their neighbors, the Blooms are affected by the area’s profes-sional and social limitations. Bloom’s children are now in college. He says that when they graduate, they will make their lives elsewhere.

“I can’t blame them. There’s nothing for them here. We’re in a rural area that’s poor,” he says. “The community is trying to re-invent itself with green industries and development, but that’s going to take awhile. Emporia has been won-

derful for me, but I’m one of the exceptions. We’ll probably move when I retire.”

A Helping HandIn Petersburg, Va., the Defense Department’s Base Realignment and Closure Commission expansion at nearby Fort Lee is bringing 13,000 military and civilian workers to the area, boosting the depressed local economy with an influx of $1.7 billion. There, Brith Achim, a 100-family unaffiliated synagogue with a Conservative focus, is in the seventh year of a partnership with Beth Ahabah, a Reform congregation in Richmond.

On Sundays, Brith Achim children travel 20 miles to attend Beth Ahabah’s religious school, which has an enrollment of 275. On weekdays, the youngsters—six these days, down from a high of 20—meet in Petersburg with Brith Achim Rabbi Dennis Beck-Berman for Hebrew lessons and bar/bat mitzvah tutoring.

For years, Brith Achim dealt with its dearth of religious-school-age children by combining grades. Beck-Berman says this “‘one-room schoolhouse arrangement’ was never a great solution.”

He says working with Beth Ahabah is suc-cessful on several fronts. In addition to provid-ing Brith Achim children with a well-rounded religious educational experience, the syna-gogues’ varied approaches toward observance, the long histories many members

Left: Downtown Petersburg, Va., exemplifies a local economy awaiting a comeback. Middle photo: In the 1950s, Petersburg flourished, as did the Jewish merchants who ran a number

of the town’s businesses. Right: Congregation Brith Achim remains vibrant in Petersburg, through an innovative partnership with a bigger-city synagogue in Richmond.

With time passing and opportunities

drying up, small towns have had to confront a Jewish exodus that has depleted their ethnic

and religious frameworks, as

community groups and synagogues atrophy in their

congregants’ wakes.

Photo by John A, Rooney, Jr.

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 1 9

Petersburg, Va.

share with Brith Achim, and the expense of membership—it doesn’t cost as much to belong to Brith Achim—means no congregant has yet to leave one synagogue for the other.

Martin P. Beifield, Jr., rabbi at Beth Ahabah, says the 700-family synagogue is happy to lend a hand to Brith Achim. “We are all in the business of building a sense of community. I’m glad we’re able to help. It would be a shame for it to fold up and go away,” Beifield says.

With growth headed to Petersburg, which today has a population of approximately 33,000, and the possibility of more families and children joining Brith Achim, Beck-Ber-man has been asked by some in his congrega-tion about the possibility of re-opening the religious school.

“My answer is simple: When we have over two dozen kids, we’ll consider it. Will we ever get to that point? It would be wonder-ful,” Beck-Berman says.

In the meantime, will this partnership with Beth Ahabah keep Brith Achim afloat?

“I don’t see it closing anytime soon, but it will be more and more difficult to maintain the building. We’ve spent tens of thousand of dollars on the roof recently. At some point, we may have to move,” Beck-Berman says.

To that end, Brith Achim recently created an endowment fund that Beck-Berman says is “not to be touched now, but is to cover growth for coming years.”

The ‘Ebb and Flow’When reinvigoration efforts like the Brith Achim/Beth Ahabah partnership and others succeed in preserving a small town’s Jewish community, the benefits are far-reaching, observers say.

“Even Jews who are not part of these smaller communi-ties appreciate the fact that there is Jewish life in a lot of different places in America,” says Lee Shai Weissbach, a professor of history at the University of Louisville and author of “Jewish Life in Small-Town America: A History,” published in 2005. “They would feel deprived, maybe even under siege, if there were only a few enclaves where fellow Jews could be found.”

Gary Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research, an independent research nonprofit based in San Francisco, says whenever Jews leave one com-munity another venue benefits.

“Ebb and flow always happens. It’s sad to see these places close, [but] somebody’s loss is somebody’s gain,” Tobin says. “One could have tremendous nostalgia for Egypt and Syria, where Jewish communities existed for thousands of years. Now they’re in Israel and the U.S.”

However, Scott Sperling, director of the Mid-Atlantic Council Union for Reform Judaism in Washington, D.C., and a former circuit-riding rabbi in the Pacific North-west, believes that when a small town’s Jewish residents have to reach beyond their community for religious connection, the

loss is profound.“You start to hear the death rattle, and there

is tremendous discomfort and pain wait-ing for these communities,” Sperling says. “People are deeply invested in the history and the doings. It’s a tragedy for them.”

And it’s not just a town’s Jews that suffer if a Jewish community disappears for any reason.

“There’s something certainly lost for the town itself. Having a Jewish community, even a small community, means there’s a certain element of diversity in that small town that might not exist otherwise,” Weissbach says. “It’s part of the mix, and an advantage in that town’s cultural richness.”

More information about the Dothan Jewish community and the Blumberg Family Reloca-tion Fund can be found at www.BFJCS.org.

More information about the Tulsa Jewish community and Grow Jewish Tulsa can be found at www.jewishtulsa.org.

Photo courtesy of Russell Wayne Davis

Photo courtesy of Rabbi Dennis Beck-Berman

2 0 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

Not long before the Israeli Air Force dispatched fighter jets over Gaza last December, in what would

become the opening barrage of Israel’s 22-day war with Hamas, Israeli officials gathered for two separate meetings in Jerusalem to discuss possible scenarios for a confrontation with the Palestinian terrorist group.

No decision to launch an operation had been announced, but officials involved in hasbara—explaining Israel’s message to the world—figured a military action was in the offing. Israel’s cease-fire with Hamas had fallen apart in late June 2008 and, with the increase in Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel, pressure was mounting.

At the meetings, which included officials from the Prime Minister’s Office, Foreign and Defense Ministries, Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Shabak internal security ser-vice, and spokespeople from municipalities in southern Israel, participants covered talk-ing points, decided roles in a time of crisis, and discussed conveying Israel’s message in a coordinated and comprehensive way.

When Operation Cast Lead was actually launched on the night of Dec. 27, 2008, the group sprang into action.

Diplomats from the foreign minister on down took to the airwaves, explaining to reporters from New York to New Delhi why Israel had launched the operation to curb Hamas rocket fire. The IDF set up a news center where reporters could get fast access to accurate information about the fighting, including videos of forces in combat.

When, in the early hours of the war, Hamas claimed that nine Israeli soldiers had been

taken captive and two killed, Israel was able to demonstrate that the claims were false with a response that was immediate and effective.

“Speed is the top priority,” says Yigal Palmor, spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry. “The goal is to bring your message as fast as possible to the widest possible audience.”

Israel stepped up her public relations ef-fort as the war unfolded. The morning after the war began, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni went on NBC Television’s “Meet the Press” to make Israel’s case and clarify the Jewish state’s objectives.

“Our goal is not to reoccupy [the] Gaza Strip. We left [the] Gaza Strip,” Livni told

NBC’s David Gregory. “We dismantled all the settlements. But, since [the] Gaza Strip has been controlled by the extremists, and since [the] Gaza Strip has been controlled by Hamas, and since Hamas is using [the] Gaza Strip in order to target us, we need to give an answer to this.”

The effort was not limited to traditional media.

On the war’s third day, the IDF launched a channel on the popular website YouTube, where viewers around the world could get ac-cess to video clips supporting Israel’s case.

The IDF posted footage of Hamas weapon storehouses in Gaza, booby-trapped schools in Gaza City, rocket crews firing from

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 2 1

The DifficulT chore of GeTTinG israel’s MessaGe across

By Uriel Heilman

Palestinian civilian areas, and Israeli medical teams treating Palestinian wounded.

By the conflict’s fourth day, Israel’s consul-ate in New York had opened an account on the social messaging website Twitter and held a virtual press conference.

In keeping with Twitter’s format and short-hand, the questions and answers were limited to 140 typical characters each.

“the sole purpose of this opt. [operation] is 2 protect Isr’s s.border & 2 allow ISR 2 live safely. this opt. is indiferrent 2 politics.”

Another message read: “we’re not at war with the PAL people. we’re at war with a group declared by the EU& US a terrorist org,”

As the war dragged on into January, the newly established National Information Directorate at the Prime Minister’s office held multiple daily conference calls to ensure accurate and timely information was getting to those who needed it. The IDF also sent

mobile text messages to reporters’ cell phones to give them minute-by-minute updates.

Pro-Israel groups also tried to get the mes-sage out. The B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem participated in brainstorming ses-sions with other advocacy groups and worked with the IDF and the Israeli government to quash false rumors about the fighting.

“We were asked to use materials …to un-dercut the argument that Israel was targeting civilians purposely,” says Alan Schneider, di-rector of the B’nai B’rith World Center. “The sources coming out of Gaza were Hamas and Al Jazeera. We tried to present an alternative, more accurate version.”

B’nai B’rith held conference calls with Jewish leaders around the world, published articles in newspapers dispelling rumors, and distributed materials to members detailing IDF efforts to spare civilians. These included dropping leaflets in Gaza warning residents before air strikes and making phone calls to tell them to evacuate their homes.

“They were not getting this information through normal media,” Schneider says.

The Israel Project, a nonprofit that provides Israel-related resources to journalists, held news conferences in Sderot, Ashkelon, and Jerusalem, as well as Washington, D.C., and flooded reporters’ email boxes with statistics, photos, phone numbers of potential inter-

view subjects, and news summaries. At the foreign media’s headquarters in

Jerusalem, housing the IDF spokesman’s of-fice in the same building as the TV networks enabled army spokespeople to be available around the clock. All material was translated into multiple languages, and the IDF re-cruited officers to talk to foreign press in their native tongues, including Arabic.

Over the course of the 22-day war, IDF of-ficers conducted more than 1,200 interviews, and representatives from Israel’s government ministries, embassies, consulates, and advocacy groups conducted thousands more.

They tried to convey the same basic mes-sage: Israel was forced into war by a terrorist group that fired rockets at civilians every day, remained committed to Israel’s destruc-tion, and was unsympathetic to the plight of Gaza’s populace, which it was using as pawns. Despite this, the IDF was conducting the war in the most humanitarian way possible.

So, was their effort successful? (We’ll get back to that.)

israel’s PR ProblemIt’s no secret that Israel has an image problem.

From the op-ed pages of daily newspapers to ivy-covered university campuses to the streets of Europe, the Jewish state’s image is not rosy.

In pro-Israel circles, advocates sound a

On Dec. 27, 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (center) gives a press conference while sitting next to Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni (right) and Defense Minister Ehud Barak (left).Photo by Getty Images

2 2 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

near-constant refrain about the need for better hasbara—a term that literally means “explaining,” but is used as a catchall for Israel’s public relations.

“Since the day I entered public life, there al-ways was the question [of ] where is the Israeli hasbara,” says Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States. “I don’t have the answer to that.”

There is some debate over who is respon-sible for Israel’s image. Many point to the government, arguing it does a poor PR job. A few say Israel’s actions—particularly vis-à-vis the Palestinians—are to blame.

One school of thought says no one is at fault; it’s the nature of Israel’s strength relative to her enemies in the Arab-Israeli conflict. If Israel were weak, she might find more sym-pathy in the court of public opinion. Instead, Israel is powerful, and her use of power makes it appear to many to be a Goliath.

“There’s a price to pay for being strong,” says Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat who now heads the U.S.-Israel Institute at the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv. “That doesn’t mean that we’re not under siege. That does not mean that we’re not under threats.”

For many Israelis and Israel supporters around the world, however, Israel is in the role of David, not Goliath.

The world may see a powerful Israeli army

bombing a school in Gaza, but Israel’s sup-porters see defensive action to protect her citizens from being fired upon by rocket crews operating near the school and using weapons stored on school grounds. The world may see Israeli bulldozers demolishing Palestinian homes, but Israel supporters see the cleaning out of terrorist hideouts that hide arms-smug-gling tunnels between Egypt and Gaza.

The world may see a lopsided casualty count with a hundred times more Palestin-

ians killed than Israelis during the recent war, but Israel supporters see an army that takes pains to avoid civilian casualties while fighting a terrorist group that specifically targets Israeli civilians.

In the Middle East, where the truth often lies in nuance rather than in photos or 60-sec-ond video news reports on 24-hour cable news channels, Israel faces an uphill battle in making her case.

“There are a lot of anti-Israel groups that

Israeli soldiers, just back from Gaza, take a rest along the Gaza-Israeli border in Israel, while tourists and Israelis take their break at a coffee shop on trendy Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv.Top photo by Getty Images. Bottom photo by Israel Ministry of Tourism

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 2 3

are putting things out that are not accurate,” says Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, founder and president of the Israel Project.

That’s where hasbara comes in. “We are for transparency,” says IDF

spokeswoman Maj. Avital Leibovich. “We don’t have anything to hide.”

“What we want to do is connect to people in a way that they can understand Israel’s point of view,” adds Palmor of the Foreign Ministry.

In times of conflict, this means getting information out quickly and effectively, whether by emailing reporters, arranging a press conference in Mandarin for the Chi-nese press, or embedding a reporter from the BBC with IDF troops in Gaza.

In the times in-between, it means showing the world that there is more to Israel than conflict.

“We have a good product; come, try the product, taste it, and form your own opinion,” says David Saranga, consul for media and pub-lic affairs at the Israeli Consulate in New York. “Make your own mind up about Israel.”

hasbara Beyond the ConflictWhen Saranga held the news conference on

Twitter about Israel’s Gaza operation, the goal wasn’t only to communicate Israel’s message in a forum popular among young people.

It was also to showcase the Jewish state as a cutting-edge innovator, quick to develop and adapt to new technologies. The news conference on Dec. 30, 2008, was the first time Twitter was ever used for such a pur-pose, and it caught the attention of not only people passionate about the Israeli-Palestin-ian conflict but technology buffs as well.

The event spurred write-ups on numerous blogs (online diaries, or web logs) and in a few news stories, including a piece in the New York Times’ “Week in Review” section.

“We succeeded [in] reaching a niche of people who are interested in technology and were interested in the press conference because it was interesting technologically, not because they were interested in the conflict,” Saranga says. “It made Israel relevant to people who are interested in Twitter.”

The idea is to add new dimensions to the ways people perceive Israel, showcasing fac-ets of the country in interesting and relevant ways for various audiences. That may mean courting the medical community with news

of Israel’s scientific advances, talking to art-ists about Israeli art, or bringing vintners to Israel to discover Israeli wines.

“We try to respond to the audience with information about Israel so that they can see Israel in a way that is close to their heart[s] and values,” Palmor says. “The overall strat-egy is not just to give people information or increase awareness about Israeli culture, economics, sports, gastronomy, literature, theater, or technological development, but to make people understand that Israel is a country with values and culture, and it’s not just what you see in the headlines.”

The Israeli Consulate in New York has run with this idea.

In July 2007, the consulate caused a stir when it helped Maxim, a monthly men’s magazine, put together a five-page spread of IDF women soldiers striking sexy poses against various Israeli backdrops.

“They’re Drop-Dead Gorgeous and Can Take Apart an Uzi in Seconds,” the headline read. “Are the Women of the Israeli Defense Forces the World’s Sexiest Soldiers?”

“We took an existing brand, Maxim, and connected Israel to it,” Saranga says. “The

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idea was to do a project targeting adults in a specific age cohort.

“People perceive Israel through two lenses alone: the conflict and religion. What we want to do is add…the human face. We want to show that Israel is a normal place, that it’s a place of great cultural creation, that it’s a hot place in terms of lifestyle.”

This is the re-branding of Israel: getting niche audiences to associate the Jewish state with positive, rather than negative, images.

By that measure, Israel scored a coup when Sports Illustrated used a shot of Israeli super-model Bar Refaeli on the cover of its annual swimsuit edition in February. Esquire did a follow-up feature, “5 Israeli Women We Love, from the Swimsuit Issue & Beyond.”

“All of a sudden, Israel is producing more than its share of spectacularly beautiful mod-els and actresses,” the tagline read.

Israel’s non-conflict hasbara effort goes beyond bikinis.

It can result in a travel story on kibbutz spas in a major U.S. daily, or press about an initiative to make Israel the launching ground for a network of environmentally friendly electric cars. These outcomes could stem from something as simple as an email or as com-plex as an all-expenses-paid press junket.

With media outlets flooded with conflict stories from the Middle East, it often is not easy to get them to devote more ink or air-time to a story on Israel. That just raises the bar for hasbara promoters to come up with innovative ideas to attract positive attention.

One of the Foreign Ministry’s primary modes of operation is to “bring people for visits to Israel who can tell about Israel,” Palmor says, using theme-specific trips for journalists and other opinion-shapers focused on various aspects of Israeli society.

In May 2006, a coalition of groups includ-ing Israel21c, the America-Israel Friend-ship League, America’s Voices in Israel, and the Israeli Foreign Ministry, took a group of entertainment reporters from assorted American magazines on a carefully choreo-graphed trip focused on Israeli “cool.” The writers visited trendy Tel Aviv nightclubs, met with Israeli rock stars, and explored the heart of the avant-garde scene.

Jessica Hopper, a radio journalist, writer, and publicist from Chicago, says she hadn’t really thought much about Israel at all until she was invited on the trip.

“I think I only had one preconception: that we’d get blown up,” Hopper says. “Being members of the media, we consider ourselves more enlightened, but we didn’t

really have an accurate picture. We’re seeing that the country and people here live totally normal lives despite the conflict.”

American Jewish groups also organize trips to Israel for lawmakers from federal, state, and local legislatures. Each visit focuses on political and military issues, and provides a multi-day show-and-tell opportunity to make Israel’s case.

Israel is also stepping up efforts to improve her image through new media.

This spring, the Israeli Consulate in New York brought six American photographers and new media professionals to Israel for a campaign to post positive pictures of Israel online. Participants were chosen based on their proficiency in editing open-source online media such as Wikipedia and Flickr, where users can upload photos and share them free of charge.

This way, the Foreign Ministry hopes, next time the word “Israel” is typed into Google’s search engine, the first image will be of the Galilee or of the sun setting over Masada, rather than a shot of an Israeli tank barreling through an olive grove somewhere in the West Bank.

When it comes to the conflict, however, the issue is to project an accurate image of Israel to the world.

did israel’s hasbara work during the war?It didn’t take long after Israel launched Opera-tion Cast Lead in Gaza for outrage to flare worldwide. Protestors from Madrid to Caracas took to the streets in protest. The Qatar-based TV network Al Jazeera broadcast gruesome images of the dead and wounded, often in

montages overlaid with dramatic music.The opinion pages of newspapers from

London to Lahore printed harsh condemna-tions of the Israeli assault. In Spain, represen-tatives of the ruling Socialist Party joined in anti-Israel demonstrations where participants called for a holy war and praised Hezbollah, the Lebanese terrorist group.

In Israel, hundreds of journalists seethed at being kept out of Gaza by the IDF, which had imposed a ban, saying it was necessary to keep them out of harm’s way. Many reporters say they suspected the real reason was that the IDF wanted control over the information coming out of the battlefield.

At the same time, however, it was journal-ists who provided the context for the war, explaining what precipitated the Hamas-Is-rael confrontation in terms that gave Israel’s perspective a fair shake.

For example, here is CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Dec. 29, the third day of the war: “To give you a better idea of what Israel is dealing with, here’s the raw data on Hamas. The group took over Gaza back in June of last year, after winning parliamentary elections the year before. Dating back to 1987, during the first Palestinian uprising, Hamas has never wavered in its commitment to Israel’s destruc-tion, and is considered a terrorist group by the United States, the European Union, and, obviously, Israel. The organization is believed to have between 15,000 and 20,000 troops, thousands of short-range rockets, and ample

Israeli tanks destroy a house in Gaza, seen from the Israeli side of the border.Photos courtesy of Getty Images

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 2 5

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funding, some of it coming from Iran.”Perhaps most importantly, governments

in Europe, North America, and elsewhere blamed Hamas for the fighting—essentially adopting Israel’s position, even if they criti-cized her execution of the war. Even in the Arab world, in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, government officials criticized Hamas for provoking confrontation.

“This time,” veteran Israeli columnist Hirsch Goodman wrote in the Jerusalem Post, “Israel got the public diplomacy right.”

“We think we did a very successful job,” says Yarden Vatikay, director of the Prime Minister’s Office National Information Direc-torate, which coordinated the hasbara efforts. “We think we were successful in making most of the countries understand that the Hamas is a terror organization, that it is responsible for what happens in that area because it just broke the ceasefire and expanded into shoot-ing [into] densely populated civilian areas.”

The secret, Vatikay and others say, was better preparation, coordination, and disci-pline in Israel than in the past.

“This time, there was more of a central-ized spokesmanship,” says Leibovich, the IDF spokeswoman. She contrasts this effort with Is-rael’s widely criticized performance during the

2006 Lebanon war, when every Yossi, Dudu, and Kobi in the IDF gave ad hoc interviews as they saw fit on subjects of their choosing.

This time, a minimal number of people gave interviews to the press, and they talked to each other beforehand to coordinate their messages.

“This enabled us to speak in one voice, unified, with no additional interpretations, using the same terminology,” Leibovich says. “I think in this we were very successful. We were on the same page as the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office. We were very well-synchronized.”

That’s not to say the war was good for Is-rael’s image; in most of the world, it certainly was not. The question is, did Israel do the best it could, given the circumstances?

“When you’re talking about spokesman-ship, there is no scientific way to measure the doctrine,” Leibovich says. “Especially during crises, we should evaluate each day at a time. When you look back at a week, you always have your little victories and a few losses. Not everything is perfect and not everything is easy.”

Palmor says the Foreign Ministry relies on public opinion surveys to gauge worldwide opinion about Israel. Almost always, he says, the polls confirm what is already obvious.

“Operation Cast Lead in Gaza certainly caused a deterioration of Israel’s image—in some places more, in others less; in certain audiences more, in others less,” Palmor says. “Despite that…the media that supported Israel before the war continued to support Israel, and those that opposed Israel contin-ued to oppose, and those who were neutral continued to be neutral.”

In the battle for hearts and minds, the most critical audience for Israel is arguably not the press or the public, but foreign governments.

On Jan. 18, the last day of Operation Cast Lead, six European heads of state arrived in Jerusalem and expressed support for Israel. Standing with then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the leaders of France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Czech Repub-lic blamed Hamas and backed Israel’s call for clamping down on weapons-smuggling from Egypt into Gaza. Some also called on Israel to ease conditions for Palestinians in Gaza.

Ultimately, Vatikay says, the question isn’t whether hasbara was successful, but what worked and what didn’t.

“We understand what kind of success we had and what issues worked more and what worked less,” he says. “It’s not a win-or-lose game.”

2 6 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

Facts: A) Lots of older people borrowed against the value of their homes to pay for home care, send kids and grandkids to college, etc.

B) For a lot of people, that house is the major/only asset/retirement savings. Fore-closures reduce the value of neighboring houses by as much as 9 percent. For people who have no other savings, or saw their sav-ings crash in the market, this can delay or dismantle retirement dreams.

5) Myth: Healthcare reform is not an aging issue. People ask me why we concentrate on healthcare when older people already have healthcare coverage. Facts: A) Medicare has gaps. The prescrip-tion benefit still doesn’t make sense and leaves lots of seniors with huge bills.

B) Medicare doesn’t cover skilled nursing care (at home or in a facility) most of the time.

C) Being uninsured before Medicare eligibility begins (at age 65) means being less healthy and spending more money (yours and Medicare’s) after you get on the program.

D) If you are “older” but under 65 and you don’t have insurance, it’s almost impossible to obtain or afford. Right now, insurance companies want to cover people who won’t cost them money. That’s a sen-sible business model, but it’s not a sensible healthcare system.

The worlds of health insurance, aging policy, and retirement benefits are complicated and confusing. If you have a question, or you’ve noticed something that is not well understood, let us know by contacting us at 866-999-6596 or emailing senioradvocacy@bnaibrith.org.

2) Myth: Social Security is the big looming problem on the baby boomer retirement fiscal nightmare horizon.

Facts: Social Security will be strained by the retirement of the baby boomers because it is a largely pay-it-forward system; current workers help support current retirees, so a large generation retiring when the generations that come after are smaller is a problem. But the fundamentals of the system are still strong, and the future is not so bleak, especially since subsequent generations don’t have the huge disparities caused by the boom. (The U.S. birthrate has been a little more stable since, so we probably won’t have this problem again in 60 years.) After spending several years fending off attacks on Social Security and attempts to put Social Security money in the stock market, we can almost see a silver lining in the economic disaster of the last year: People now understand that we need a guaranteed benefit system, and we can’t put the money in the market and hope to retire in an up year.

3) Myth: A housing crisis hurts only homeowners.

Facts: This is admittedly a new one, but it has given me the chance to revive some old rants and make them relevant. There is an af-fordable rental-housing crisis in this country. We don’t have enough, we haven’t main-tained it, and it’s often not near public trans-portation. We need to address this. Many of the people needing affordable rental housing are older, and that makes it more difficult because not just any apartment will do. Meanwhile, the foreclosure crisis has caused an unknown number of renters—who paid on time and did nothing wrong—to be turned out on the streets to find new places to live on short notice when this segment of the housing market is already scarce.

4) Housing Myth Part 2: Older adults aren’t affected by foreclosure because their mortgages are paid off.

In my circle of friends—acquaintances, older store clerks, and forgotten cousins to whom my Dad sends emails—I have

become known as something of an expert on anything to do with aging (which is fine, since that’s my job).

My motto has become: If I don’t know the answer, I do know how to find the an-swer. Sometimes I just have to explain that things are not as they seem or as everyone assumes. But I find myself giving a few long-winded answers, corrections, and rants an awful lot, just to dispel misconceptions and myths about aging, aging policy, aging programs, and so on.

So here they are: my top five myths and misconceptions about aging policies and programs.

1) Myth: Medicare covers nursing homes (or long-term care).

Facts: By “long-term care,” we mean the long-term services and supports people often require, whether it be a visiting nurse or moving to a skilled nursing facility. Many people incur these costs only in the final years of life, and some will never encounter them at all. But they can be very expensive, and Medicare, the healthcare program for people 65 and older (and people with disabilities), does not cover these costs. The public program that does cover them is Medicaid, which only covers them for the poor, so you have to spend all your assets to qualify; not an appealing prospect. This is why one of B’nai B’rith’s healthcare reform principles is that reform can’t be done in a vacuum. We can’t pretend long-term care costs aren’t part of healthcare just because Medicare, and most private health insur-ance, doesn’t cover them. Tip: Medicare does cover short stays in nurs-ing facilities (about three months) for people recovering from surgery or injury who are ex-pected to be discharged, and also covers some home-care services for people on hospice.

Correcting Misconceptions about Policies on AgingBy Rachel Goldberg, Ph.D.

T H E

j- b l o g o s P H E r E :T h e a J e w i s h

w O R L D

L O g s a O n

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 2 7

By Rachel MauRo and Joel SaMen

logging. Web 2.0. Social media. These terms might be confusing, but they represent a fast-growing trend in how people and organizations communicate publicly in the era of the Internet

and, in particular, how Jewish organizations are reaching a younger demographic.

Blogging is at the forefront of this digital revolution, along with social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.“Blog,” a contraction of the terms “web” and “log,” signifies an online diary maintained by an individual and, more often of late, a professional organization. Blogs are often subjective in nature. Subject matters range wildly, but generally an author has a central theme connecting the blog’s postings.

J-Blogosphere is a term for the community of Jewish bloggers on the Web. The number of J-bloggers is impos-sible to determine, as anyone who signs up with a blogging service such as blogspot.com or WordPress can consider him- or herself a blogger, and not all Jewish bloggers identify themselves as Jews. And, like with the rest of the blogosphere, J-blogging covers the gamut—from Orthodox to Reform; conservative to liberal; cultural, religious, and everything in between.

The online world is having an effect on the real world: Some of the better-known blogs, like Jewlicious.com, are starting to organize “real-life” events, such as rallies, parties, and trips to Israel. Many Jewish organizations, including B’nai B’rith International (BBI), are taking notice and are including blog components on their websites. As the revolution sweeps over us, the collective Jewish world is logging on to see what comes next.

Jewish Bloggers ConventionLast summer, Nefesh B’Nefesh, a leading organization in advocating Western Diaspora immigration to Israel, spon-sored the first international Jewish Bloggers Convention, in conjunction with WebAds, a company that does niche and community-targeted advertising. Another convention is in the planning stages for this summer.

Benzi Kluwgant, Nefesh B’Nefesh’s marketing and com-munications manager and organizer of the event, calls blog-ging “another way to reach out and affect public opinion across the world.”

The convention consisted of two panels: one on increas-ing readership and one on showcasing Israel to the outside world. Some 200 participants took part in person in Jerusa-lem, and another 1,000 watched a live feed online, accord-ing to officials. Zavi Apfelbaum, director of brand manage-ment at the Foreign Ministry, and Binyamin Netanyahu, then-leader of the opposition and now prime minister, both stopped by to give speeches about the importance of blogging.

Most of the bloggers who spoke were immigrants to Israel who started writing to document their aliyah experiences for family and friends back in their birth countries. “It started out as a brain dump,” Devra Ariel explains about her

B

blog, Every Day and Its Challenges, during an interview for the live feed. “I had stuff that I’d written, and I had nowhere to put it. So I put it up in a blog. And then I realized that I had to have a goal.”

Although many of these writers started blogging out of a similar experience, there was very little consensus on the meaning of their craft. The nine panelists and two modera-tors argued back and forth on such topics as the merits of self-promotion and Israel promotion. Others disagreed on whether blogging is a community or a hobby.

“I’m not overly comfortable with the whole idea of a J-blogging community,” says Rabbi Gil Student, writer of the Torah-centered blog Hirhurim. “There are many reasons why I might not be comfortable with a blog; there are many

reasons why other bloggers might not be comfortable with me—and I’m fine with that.”

“The blogging community is kind of like any community of interests,” counters Esther Kustanowitz, moderator and author of pop culture blog, My Urban Kvetch. “It’s just about being open to different people and having a support system there when you need it.”

David Abitbol, a main writer for Jewlicious, cautioned against taking the idea of the online Jewish community too seriously. “One of the things that we have to be mindful of, when we’re talking about community and whatnot, is virtual community,” he says. “That’s why I urge you all to get out of the house, step away from the computer, and buy a bicycle.”

Photo by Getty Images

2 8 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

Conference photos courtesy of Nefesh B’Nefesh

Top: Jewish Bloggers Convention panel members (from left to right) David Bogner, David Abitbol, Rabbi Gil Student, and Esther Kustanowitz.

Bottom: Most of the bloggers who spoke were immigrants to Israel who started writing to document their aliyah experiences for family and

friends back in their birth countries.

Blogging vs. Traditional News MediaBeyond being the basis for community, some people view blogging as a counterpart to official news sources like newspapers and television broadcasts. Netanyahu calls this a “democratizing” effect. “It takes the power from the top and moves it to the bottom,” he says.

Yishai Fleisher, a moderator at the conference, straddles both worlds: He works as a program director at media net-work Arutz Sheva’s Israel National Radio, but is also the co-founder of the pro-Zionist blog Kumah. He sides staunchly with bloggers over traditional media.

“News media these days [are] about negativity,” he says. “News is never about the firefighter rescuing the cat. News is never about the good things that happen or, if it is, it’s at the bottom of the broadcast, and it’s very short.”

Blogging, he continued, is “the real news,” where one can read, for example, about going to the shuk, Jerusalem’s out-door market, on a Friday afternoon. Rather than focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or political scandals, Fleisher says, bloggers write about “those colors, those senses, those smells, those feelings; that is what the real Israel, or the Israel that we are living, is all about.”

The other bloggers on his panel agreed that they were writ-ing from a more personal perspective than the news media would, but added that they did not always paint Israel in a positive light.

“I’m not doing it to build Israel, and I’m not doing it to continue making aliyah,” says Gila Weiss, author of My Shrapnel, adding that, if there is something that she does not like about Israel, she writes about it. “Maybe it means that I’ve lost my idealistic fervor but, on the other hand, you can say that my love for this country is more mature.”

Organizations that BlogIsrael, of course, is just one of several issues that touch the Jewish community. Larger organizations are also catching onto the blogging trend, and are using this tool to reach out to their constituents online.

In February, B’nai B’rith launched two blogs on its website, one from the Center for Senior Services, the second from Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin. “Blogging has become an invaluable way to speak directly with our members and those interested in our organization,” Mariaschin says. “Through this relatively new device, we can express our thoughts on any issue in a form that can be read by anyone, anywhere.”

Sean Thibault, director of communications at the Reli-gious Action Center for Reform Judaism (RAC), says the RAC blog has proved to be a place “to explore new thoughts, ideas, musings—things not necessarily as institutionally voiced as some of our other stuff and materials” while, at the same time, creating a forum for various people from the Reform movement. Several staff members also post regularly.

Although the RAC blog just recently started accepting comments from non-staffers, Thibault is not concerned about policing the site. “For some [posts], you get positive feedback from those who are pleased; others get something else,” he says. “It comes with the territory of expressing yourself.”

Matthue Roth writes for Mixed Multitudes, the blog of MyJewishLearning.com (MJL), which started as a multi-faceted academic tool for a variety of people who were interested in Judaism. The blog follows in that vein.

“We try to encompass a range of differences and a range of fields,” Roth says. “We have posts on the blog that are kind of authoritative things; they speak in an authoritative manner, then we post our favorite Jewish song or punk rock song.”

Mixed Multitudes averages about 25,000 visits a month, according to Roth. Although MJL moderates its comments section for spam, legitimate comments are allowed to stay.

“They’re like a stick of dynamite that wants to get set off,” Roth says of his readers. But, for the most part, he finds them to be constructive; for example, a post about Jews in prison garnered comments from someone who had worked with such prisoners for 20 years. Roth calls the experience of learning from such interaction “humbling.”

Next on the Mixed Multitudes agenda is providing space for leading Jewish academics to guest-blog, Roth says.

“I think blogs are approaching newspapers now,” Roth says. “I think as blogs get more journalistic and legitimate…we’ll see more editing and a more polished blog. Eventually, we’ll get some blogs where there’s no difference between the blog and the physical, printed magazine. They’re all just articles in different forms.”

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 2 9

Zavi Apfelbaum (left), director of Brand Management at the Foreign Ministry, and Benjamin Netanyahu (center), then-leader of the opposition and now prime minister, sitting in the audience.

3 0 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

Leading Through Online NetworkingAs online communication becomes more and more com-monplace, a new generation of leaders is taking hold within the Jewish community, using technology in an innovative and exciting way. Through new methods of electronic network-ing, websites, and blogs, Jews across the globe are connecting, making friends, and developing ways to advance their causes.

This can be seen at MySpace and Facebook, websites that were developed for social networking, the latter initially between higher-education institutions, letting students cre-ate their own pages, upload photographs, and post personal information as a means of communicating with friends.

The online social networking universe soon expanded, as people started listing events on their schools’ pages, inviting friends to get-togethers—ranging from educational programs to parties—and sparking a sort of social calendar formed over the Internet.

Professional networking sites were also started in the same vein. Through websites like LinkedIn, users can post their résumés, connect with others in their fields or companies (both past and present), search job postings, and create busi-ness contacts.

Organizations (among them B’nai B’rith) have created their own groups on these networking sites, connections that Facebook and LinkedIn users can join as a way of support-ing and staying in touch with others involved with similar causes. These groups were built to serve as bulletin boards that list events and enable discussions.

Thus emerged Jewish social networking online. Increasing-ly, it seems people within the 20-to 30-year-old demographic are starting to look online for ways to connect with other people with whom they share an interest.

“B’nai B’rith is excited about using this new mode of communicating with the younger generation for program promotion and outreach,” says BBI Young Leadership

Outreach Coordinator Renee Howard. “We’ve seen success in not only generating interest about our events and issues, but as taking the first steps toward creating an international network of young Jewish professionals. Our Facebook page has 24 countries represented!”

Using the Internet was a natural progression for organiza-tions, including Jewish Community Centers (JCCs), as a way to get younger generations involved with the Jewish community at large.

GesherCity is one of the prominent websites that has emerged amidst this networking revolution. The GesherCity system is grassroots-oriented, with members taking the lead on planning, publicizing, and running events. Through part-nerships with individual JCCs, GesherCity sets up networks dedicated to given locations, also known as “bridges.”

Within these bridges, members can build “clusters,” or groups focused on specific common interests. For example, the Washington, D.C., bridge includes clusters for bicycling, bowling, crafts, kickball, moms and moms-to-be, and “Starbucks Sundays.”

“Our role here is to be a community resource,” says Jason Silberfein, director of the GesherCity JCC Association. “This demographic, [ages] 20s to 30s, tends to like to get together in groups. They like to decide how and when they get to-gether, not necessarily at one time every week at the temple. Through the clusters, people can get together in the situation that is most comfortable to them.”

The goal of all of this is to get young people involved with their Jewish communities after they have graduated college and before they have kids, at which point religious school often becomes a consideration and a way to draw them back into active participation. The hope is that, through creating opportunities for people in that 20-to-30 age demographic to get together with others their age who share common interests, like religion, bonds to the Jewish community will begin to form.

“People are waiting much longer to have families,” Silberfein says, “so in that age gap between graduating college and having kids, there was not a lot of focus. But our return rate is pretty high, because you’re going out with your friends.”

Younger Jews, and even some of their older compatriots, are also using a new resource called Twitter, through which people can “follow” each other’s activities from moment to moment. It might seem like too much contact for older generations, but is all the rage for the younger set.

Websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and GesherCity are helping reel in that tough age demographic for the Jewish community, getting the post-college but pre-kids group involved, on its own terms and through familiar means. Though many sign onto these sites or join groups as strang-ers, they end up building friendships through common interests and make ties that will help the next generation of Jewish leaders form powerful and wide-reaching networks.

Between blogging, social networking sites, and related new technology, the Jewish community is expanding into another new world.

J-blogging covers the

gamut—from Orthodox to

Reform; conservative to

liberal; cultural, religious,

and everything in between.

Following months of preparation and a week-long summit

in Geneva, the United Nations Durban Review Conference on Racism delivered a final docu-ment that was deemed “fatally flawed” by B’nai B’rith International (BBI) representatives on the ground at the conference in mid-April.

“We condemn this rubber-stamp document in the strongest terms possible,” BBI Honor-ary President and Head of Delegation Richard Heideman said from Geneva. “The adoption of this document shows nothing has changed since 2001, no lessons have been learned—and the hope for a unified approach to fighting racism and intolerance around the world will again go unfulfilled.”

The document contains multiple references to Israeli “racism” against Palestinians, singling out the State of Israel as an offender of human rights. Libya, which was chosen as the

chair of the conference despite a long history of supporting terrorism and violating human rights, helped seal the negative outcome of the conference.

Heideman, along with B’nai

B’rith Executive Vice President Daniel S. Ma-riaschin, led a delega-tion of 50 people from 11 countries, for the largest contingent from a Jewish non-govern-mental organization at the conference.

Delegation members included Chairman of the Council on U.N. Affairs Ambassador Joseph E. Harari; Senior International Vice President Jacobo Wolkowicz; Vice Chairman of the Council Aaron Etra; Director of U.N. and Intercommunal Affairs David Michaels; Klaus Netter and Armand Azoulai, who serve as

BBI Permanent Representa-tives in Geneva, monitoring the Human Rights Council

B’nai B’rith Finds Durban Final Document ‘Fatally Flawed’

By Joel Samen

32 36

continued on pg. 34

Inside this Issue A Legacy Through the Children 32

Summit of Americas 35

Unto Every Person There Is a Name 36

Photo by Annie Darmon, B’nai B’rith Europe

The U.N. Assembly Hall at Geneva during the Durban Review Conference on Racism.

Helene Shuter comes from a heritage of car-ing for Jewish youth

and helping to secure the next generation of leadership. “My parents always felt that the perpetuation of Judaism was through children,” says this Palm Beach, Fla., mother and grand-mother, who is also the wife of an obstetrician-gynecologist.

While her parents, Louis and Minora Howard, were living, they were always committed to Jewish youth. Both Louis and Minora have since passed on, but Shuter continues to pay tribute to their devotion. This past summer, Shuter dedicated the Torah Ark at B’nai B’rith Perlman Camp in Pennsylvania in honor of her parents’ memory.

Shuter made a donation on behalf of herself and her sisters, Bergha Miller of Chattanooga, Tenn., and Phylis Bagan of Highland Park, Ill. “I chose the children of B’nai B’rith [to receive our donation] because my folks loved anything having to do with children,” Shuter says. “I have always enjoyed and loved anything dealing with children.”

Shuter’s father was an active member of B’nai B’rith in North Carolina during the 1970s. The designated gift for the Torah Ark came from the estate of his wife with instruc-tion that it should be allocated to charity. For Shuter, her par-ents’ loyalty to B’nai B’rith and the chance to touch thousands of young Jewish lives at B’nai B’rith Perlman Camp made the Torah Ark a natural fit.

The dedication of the Ark gained even more significance to Shuter when she learned of B’nai B’rith’s Camp Passport.

Camp Passport, started in 2003, offers paid camp tuition and travel expenses for Israeli children ages 10–16 who have been directly affected by terror attacks.

The program, held at B’nai B’rith Perlman Camp as well as B’nai B’rith Beber Camp in Wisconsin, provides these chil-dren with a summer experience filled with recreation, friend-ship, and nurturing in an effort to help them recover from their experiences. “We loved the idea that B’nai B’rith was helping the children of Israel whose parents had been affected by terror,”

says Shuter. “From our Passport campers,

we see…[a] common bond and connection,” says Lewis Soh-inki, director of Perlman Camp. “The Camp Passport program allows kids to integrate with each other, develop relation-ships, and stay in touch. Some figure out how to come back to camp and stay a part of the community.”

Sohinki calls the Torah Ark “the centerpiece for the [Shabbat] Jew-ish experience” and says that the kids treat the Ark “with a lot of respect and tremendous pride.”

Thanks to the generosity of

Helene Shuter and her fam-ily, the campers of B’nai B’rith Perlman will enjoy the beautiful and meaningful Torah Ark for years to come.

To make your designated gift to B’nai B’rith for a specific purpose, please contact the Planned Giv-ing Department, 2020 K Street NW, Washington, DC 20006; 800-656-5561; plannedgiving@bnaibrith.org. Our professional staff will be pleased to work with you to reach your goals.

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B’nai B’riTh Today

A Legacy Through the ChildrenBy Rachel Mauro

Dr. Melvin and Helene Shuter standing in front of the Torah Ark at B’nai B’rith Perlman Camp in Pennsylvania.

Photo courtesy of the Shuter family.

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activities on a year-round basis; and others from the United States, Israel, France, Panama, Germany, Uruguay, Mexico, and Switzerland.

One of the low points of the conference was a 40-minute diatribe by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that included several anti-Israel and anti-Semitic comments. Members from more than 30 nations, including the entire European Union and the B’nai B’rith delegation, walked out of the U.N. Assembly Hall during Ahmadinejad’s speech.

“Following World War II, [Western civilization] resorted to military aggressions to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering,” Ahmadinejad said. “And they sent migrants from Europe, the United States, and other parts of the world in order to estab-lish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine.”

During an address to the conference chairman on the final day of the summit, Heideman

addressed Ahmadinejad’s com-ments on behalf of B’nai B’rith.

“This review conference will forever be remembered—and

blemished—by the hate speech that we witnessed not outside, but on the very podium of this conference by the man who

had been afforded the honor of first place among the high-level speakers,” Heideman said to the assembly. “In summary, Mr. Chairman, we do not believe that a single victim of racism, racial discrimination, and xenophobia will have reason to find solace from this process filled with pious declarations of intent.”

The conference regretta-bly devolved into what was expected—a reaffirmation of the 2001 Durban declaration, which unfairly asserted that Palestinians are subject to Israeli “racism,” according to BBI officials. The outcome document of the review conference echoes that idea.

“Unfortunately, we knew this was the likely outcome as we prepared for the conference,” Mariaschin says. “Despite the support Israel has received from many nations, including the United States, Germany, and Canada, we continue to be disappointed by the presence of an anti-Israel bias globally. However, we cannot turn a blind eye to that darkness, but must instead bear witness to it and fight it.”

B’nai B’rith, an accredited non-governmental organization, has been active at the United Nations since the world body’s inception, and is the only major Jewish organization with an office dedicated to U.N. affairs and representation at U.N. in-stitutions in New York, Geneva, Paris, Vienna, and Santiago (Chile). BBI also has permanent representatives at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, European Union in Brussels, and Orga-nization of American States in Latin America.

B’nai B’rith Finds Durban Final Document ‘Fatally Flawed’

continued from pg. 31

Photo by Annie Darmon, B’nai B’rith Europe

BBI Honorary President and Head of Delegation Richard Heideman at the DurbanReview Conference on Racism.

3 4 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

B’nai B’riTh Today

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The Fifth Summit of the Americas, held in Trinidad and Tobago in

April, “opened with great ex-pectations, but in the end was a conclave of wishful think-ing,” according to B’nai B’rith International (BBI) President Moishe Smith.

Joining Smith in observing the summit was BBI Direc-tor of Latin American Affairs Eduardo Kohn, who noted that, “regrettably, the real hope of civil society—that govern-ments commit to making real changes to combat rampant poverty—must once again be postponed.”

The Summit of the Americas is a series of international gath-erings of the leaders of North and South American countries. Coordinated by the Organiza-tion of American States (OAS), the stated purpose of this sum-mit was to focus on confront-ing the global economic crisis and on how to combat the corresponding spike in poverty.

Chavez Taints EventHowever, according to Smith, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez urged the five countries that comprise the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA)—Venezuela, Bo-livia, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Ecuador—and the group’s guest, Paraguay, to approach the summit with a two-pronged goal: the United States lifting the embargo on Cuba and OAS restoring Cuba’s membership. When it was clear this was not going to happen during this meeting, the group refused to sign a final declaration.

“This is the type of un-democratic behavior that has characterized the Venezuelan president for years, and is what has justified B’nai B’rith to join with those who cherish democ-racy in calling for Chavez to be isolated,” Smith says.

“While we were disappointed that the final declaration was long on unrealistic goals and short on achievable objectives, it at least provided a glimmer of hope. To end the summit with no signed declaration is extremely disappointing.”

According to Kohn, while the economies of Latin America began to improve earlier in this decade, they are now be-ing affected by the same economic pressures that have hurt so many nations.

“There can be little doubt that poverty will return and, with it, the specter of corruption,” he says. “We can only hope that, when the OAS holds its General Assembly in June, these issues of dis-crimination, poverty, and

corruption will be at the top of the agenda and will be dealt with substantively.”

Signs of New EraDespite frustration that many of the summit’s tangible goals and objectives were not met, B’nai B’rith welcomed certain signs of a new era in U.S.-Latin American relations.

“We agree with Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner that this summit was ‘a great moment of change,’” according to Kohn. “The pledge of economic sup-port from President Obama

and his declaration that ‘it is not fair to blame the U.S. for all of the problems of the hemisphere’ represent a very real opportunity for those nations of the hemisphere that are willing to put rhetoric aside to come together to build a culture of peace and coexis-tence, and to deal with the rav-ages of discrimination, social unrest, and anti-Semitism.”

B’nai B’rith participated in sessions of non-governmental organizations that preceded the meeting of foreign ministers and heads of state.

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 3 5

B’nai B’rith Calls Summit of Americasa ‘Conclave of Wishful Thinking’

By Harvey Berk

B’nai B’riTh Today

B’nai B’rith International (BBI) and the Alpha Epsilon Pi Fraternity

(AEPi) joined forces at more than 65 campuses nationwide in April and May to hold memori-als for Yom HaShoah—Holo-caust Remembrance Day.

Each campus’ activity varied depending on what the frater-nity deemed best, but many were based on the nationwide B’nai B’rith program, “Unto Every Person There Is a Name,” where participants read the names of those who perished in the Holocaust. BBI is the North American sponsor of this program.

The “Unto” ceremonies are one way of recognizing the contributions of those who demonstrated heroism but may be unknown today.

This year’s theme for “Unto” focused on the more than 1 million child victims. The Yad Vashem Hall of Names, which has its headquarters in Jeru-salem, provided the names of these children.

Cooperation between B’nai B’rith and AEPi began in Au-gust 2007 with BBI President Moishe Smith becoming a brother of the fraternity at its annual convention. BBI has since helped the fraternity get involved in Holocaust com-

memorations, in addition to other partnerships.

AEPi had been holding its own Holocaust commemora-tions, but became intrigued with the “Unto” program, accord-ing to AEPi Director of Jewish Programming Jared Hakmi.

A Wealth of ObservancesLast year, the AEPi chapter at Temple University in Philadel-phia decided to add the recita-tion of the names of victims to its Holocaust commemoration, and other fraternity chapters have adopted the practice.

At Michigan State Univer-sity, BBI Senior Vice President John Rofel recited Kaddish for the victims and spoke at the fraternity house “about the importance of identifying and belonging to an organization like B’nai B’rith, and how valu-able that will be in the future to maintain a sense of Jewish identity for years to come.”

At the University of Con-necticut, B’nai B’rith arranged for member and World War II veteran Myron Cohen to speak on campus.

“He touched on [his] experi-ence in the Dachau camp—how shocking it was when he unknowingly went into a death camp and saw bodies on the ground,” says Alex Prager, of the

school’s AEPi chapter. “We’re very excited; we’re looking for-ward to it next year. This is some-thing that we want to continue.”

B’nai B’rith also held “Unto” programs at various locations around the country, including in Richmond and Falls Church, Va.; Chicago; Philadelphia; San Francisco; Baltimore, Potomac, and Pikesville, Md.; Farmington Hills, Mich.; Davie, Fla.; and Linden, N.J.

Additionally, B’nai B’rith Canada convened “Unto” pro-grams in several cities.

At the B’nai B’rith Martyrs’ Forest outside of Jerusalem, the

B’nai B’rith World Center held an “Unto” ceremony co-sponsored with the Jewish National Fund.

“The phenomenon of Jew-ish rescue and the instructive stories of the thousands of Jews who labored to save their en-dangered brethren throughout Europe are yet to receive appro-priate public recognition and resonance,” says World Center Chairman Haim Katz. “With great heroism, young Jews in every country in occupied Europe employed subterfuge, forgery, smuggling, conceal-ment, and other methods to rescue fellow Jews.”

3 6 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

B’nai B’riTh Today

B’nai B’rith, AEPi Join On Holocaust Commemoration

By Rachel Mauro

More than 65 AEPi campuses nationwide joined B’nai B’rith in remembering those who died in the Holocaust.

Interim Director of Communications Harvey Berk

Editorial Director Hiram M. Reisner

Designer Vivian Hayward

B’nai B’rith Today (BBT) is now a special section in B’nai B’rith Magazine. BBT will focus on timely, major issues affect-ing the members, supporters, and leaders of B’nai B’rith International, including regional success stories, programming, departmental initiatives, events, etc. Strictly regional news will now be covered on our upcoming websites, whose launch dates will soon be announced. If a regional story is newsworthy, timely, and unique, it will be considered for submission to BBT and publication in the magazine.

Photo by Renee Howard

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 3 7

that for years she had assumed were no longer in existence. “They interviewed me for two-and-a-half hours.”

Piotr M.A. Cywinski, museum director, says the portraits, a series of watercolors, “belong to history” as opposed to Bab-bitt and “should stay here where they are accessible for millions of visitors, in order to preserve the memory of the Nazi victims for posterity.”

“Documents such as these must not become ordinary objects for private use. Otherwise, the small amount of surviving evidence of genocide and original artifacts could be dispersed, and the authentic site of persecution would be deprived of its unique and universal significance,” Cywinski tells B’nai B’rith Magazine.

“These watercolors depicting Gypsies who perished in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp contribute signifi-cantly to commemorate and increase the awareness of the mass murder of…all vic-tims of genocide,” he says. Furthermore, Cywinski adds, since Babbitt painted the portraits under orders, she has no more claim to them than the Gypsies who posed for her.

“They were made on the order and for the use of…Dr. Joseph Mengele. Nobody asked for permission from the Gypsies…Their portraits were made under duress. [Dina Babbitt] has never owned these watercolors and thus there is no possibil-ity to return them,” Cywinski says.

He says representatives of the Sinti and Roma populations agree the portraits “should remain at the site where they were created, where they speak most loudly and play the role of the evidence of crime, which cannot be replaced with a copy.”

The Comic ConnectionCartoonist Adams, who transformed Bat-man from campy crime-fighter to dark, stark avenger of misdeeds and corruption, got involved with Babbitt’s battle after being approached by Medoff to sign a peti-tion on her behalf.

He and Kubert, creator of DC Comics heroes Sgt. Rock and Hawkman, joined what grew to be a list of 450 signatures

of comic-strip giants, includ-ing Mort Walker, creator of “Beetle Bailey”; Bil Keane, of “The Family Circus” fame; and Lynn Johnston, the brains and ink behind “For Better or For Worse.”

“We thought the comic-book artists would see [Babbitt] as one of their own,” Medoff explains. Adams says he would have cham-pioned Babbitt’s rights regardless of her profession, but that their shared passion for cartooning cre-ates a special bond.

“This is a connection, but I would help anybody,” Adams says. “That she would come and get a job after everything she went through...you ask as many people as possible to help and, if you’re lucky, enough will step forward.”

In 1947, in remembrance of its victims, Poland established a museum on the Auschwitz site. Last year, more than 1 million visitors toured the barracks, gas chambers and crematoriums, and viewed Bab-bitt’s artwork.

Adams says the museum’s behavior toward Babbitt mirrors the atrocities of the very group about which it is working to educate and alert the public.

“They’re acting like Nazis. Here you have an individual forced to create for the state on pain of death, and they’re saying its okay and they won’t give [the art-works] back,” Adams says. “It’s a preposterously stupid situation to hear their rationale.”

Babbitt, in an interview with B’nai B’rith Magazine in 2006, said she wants in her posses-sion the actual evidence of what she had to do to save her life.

“If it weren’t for those paintings, I wouldn’t be here,” Babbitt said. “I want my fam-ily, in perpetuity, to see them. I heard that an artist has the right to his own work. I consider them stolen.”

Comic Book, continued from pg. 11

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Reservations Faz 714-529-8333 714-529-2751

240 S. State College BoulevardBrea, CA (57 Freeway at Imperial)

www.lavnrose.com

Oakland Jet CenterManaging Owned &

Charter Jets Since 1963

(510) 569-9622 (510) 635-3173 fax

www.kaiserair.comOakland, CA

Happy Passover

5691-B Power Inn RoadSacramento, CA 95824T: (916) 381-8021F: (916) 381-1202E: Jeff@JohnJacksonMasonry.com

CA Lic.# 255203NV Lic. #12071

JOHNJACKSONMASONRY

Commercial • IndustrialBRICK • BLOCK • STONE • GRANITE

GLASS BLOCK • MARBLE • TERRA COTTA

Rebecca Dolan, Au. D.Kimberly Krantz, M.S.Christine Telleen, M.A.Katherine Salkin, Au. D.Donald E. Morgan, Ph.D.

Audiologists providing:• Diagnostic hearing testing and counseling.• Hearing aid fitting and service to individuals of all ages with hearing loss.

100 S. Ellsworth Ave., Suite 303San Mateo, CA

805 Veterans Blvd., Suite 115Redwood City, CA 94063

Hearing ResourceCenter of San Mateo

650-579-4470

Best Wishes Israel

28 STORES TO SERVE YOUWHERE SERVICE

IS STILL #1

916-451-6992Corner of Stockton & Fruitridge

5657 Stockton Blvd.Sacramento, CA

FRUITRIDGESHOPPINGCENTER

Reduce Your Heating & Cooling Costs By Over 50%

Visit Our Showroom - Open Monday - Friday 8-5, Saturday10-3

408.629.3740

European Rolling Shutters

www.ers-shading.com404 Umbarger Road, Suites A&B ~ San Jose, CA 9

5111 ~ Lic.# 522164

FullyRetractable

Awnings

Enhance And Protect Your Home With Our

Factory Direct Exterior Shading Devices: Awnings,

Sunscreens & Rolling Shutters - Designer on Staff -

Serving theEntire

Jewish Community415-459-2500

170 North San Pedro Rd.San Rafael, CA 94903

Congregation Rodef Sholom

Mount TamalpaisMortuary

SINCE 1968

714-846-0688562-592-3020

• MEDICAL EQUIPMENT• SICKROOM SUPPLIES• SPORTS MEDICINE SUPPLIES• ORTHOPEDIC ASSIGNMENT• MEDICARE ASSIGNMENT

SALES & RENTALM-F 9-7 Sat - 9-5

u ]t

Huntington Harbour Mall16881 Algonquin St. H.B.

Please Mention This Ad

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 4 3

AVANTI POOLS INC.NEW POOLS/REMODELS

8138 ORION AVE. • VAN NUYS, CA 91406

FAX: 818.501.5128818.501.3759

www.avantipoolsandspas.comSee us @ superpages.com

E-mail: avantipools@sbcglobal.net

Forward thinking swimming

pool design and construction

Lic.# 772516

CALIFORNIA

SUNSET DISTRICT 19TH AVECOMPLETE AUTOMOBILE REPAIRING & SERVICE

DOMESTIC & FOREIGN CARSTUNE UPS • BRAKES • WHEEL ALIGNMENT • FRONT SUSPENSION

Open Mon-Sat 8-6 Sunday 10-5 (Oil Changes Only)

(415) 731-72112095 19TH AVE. & QUINTARA, SAN FRANCISCO

$2.00 Off Regular Price On Oil Change

Mechanic On Duty

SUNSET SERVICE -SUPER LUBE

TOWING AVAILABLE

TED LAMPROS“Car Doctor”

CASTROL OIL CHANGE SPECIALSWHILE YOU WAIT... NO APPT. NEEDED

Ask About Our Specials

] u t

Please MentionThis Ad

D&D CREMATIONSERVICE

PETCREMATION

� Individual or Communal Service� Prompt Pick-Up!� Small or Large Pets� Veterinary Hospitals Welcome

(323) 879-9073(323) 268-7050

Serving All Of Southern CaliforniaON-SITE DOCUMENT DESTRUCTION

Est. 1988

• Offices coast to coast• Security-cleared personnel• Shredded in our truck

at your location

u ]

1-800-697-47338600 Tamarack Ave., Sun Valley, CA 91352

Mention B’nai B’rith Receive A Discount

Mobile Paper Shredding & Recycling

ECKHOFF ACCOUNTANCYCORPORATION

Payroll Services • Tax Planning and PreparationAccounting and Auditing • Computer Installation &

Management Services • Financial PlanningEstates & Trust Planning • Litigation Support

Business Valuation- 50 Years of Accounting Experience -

www.eckhoff.com(cpas@eckhoff.com)

Contact Michele Hassid

415-499-9400145 North Redwood Dr. • San Rafael, CA 94903

Please Mention B’nai B’rith When Calling

Reutlinger Community for Jewish LivingJewish Mysticism and KabbalahTravelogue Around the World�e Artist WithinPassion for Poetry

Jews In JazzGolden Age of Yiddush �eatreKlezmer Music 101Vistas of Ancient EgyptImpressionist Virtual ArtMusic �erapy and Choir

www.rcjl.org

4000 CAMINO TOSSAJARAIN DANVILLE, HWY 680

• INDEPENDENT

• ASSISTED LIVING

• ALZHEIMER’S

• SKILLED NURSING CARE

F r i n g a l eR E S T A U R A N T

Bete’ AvonThe UrgeTo Eat.

For Lunch or Dinner

570 FOURTH STREETSAN FRANCISCO • 94107

TEL•415•543•0573

( )OPEN 7 NIGHTS A WEEK

COLORADO

COLORADO

OUTDOOR KITCHENDISTRIBUTORS INC.“DENVER’S COMPLETE

BARBEQUE SHOP”Ducane, Broil King, OCI

Big Green Egg • BroilmasterNatural Gas & LP Grills

Bar Stools & Fireplaces & InsertsPatio Furniture & Accessories

303-991-99114401 S. Tamarac Pkwy.

Denver, CO 80237

Proud Supporters of B’nai B’rithTHE PEPSI BOTTLING GROUP

• BEVERAGE SALES• VENDING SERVICES• SPECIAL EVENTS

(801) 972-7400

3388 WEST 1987 SOUTHSalt Lake City, UT

Service & Repair1-800-903-4352Fax 972-7470

David MattsonMaster

Watchmaker #30287 N. Circle Dr.

Colorado Springs, CO

FREE IN-SHOP ESTIMATESWith Mention Of This Ad

(719) 475-8585http://ticktockshop.uswestdex.com

“Over 30 Years Experience”ONE OF THE LARGEST SELECTIONS OF WATCHES

AND CLOCKS IN THE PIKES PEAK REGIONSALES & SERVICE

FOR ALL MAKESANTIQUE CLOCKS RESTORED

PARTS MADE FOR OBSOLETE AND FOREIGN CLOCKSASK ABOUT

AUTHORIZED GUARANTEE SERVICE • FREE DELIVERY ON FLOOR CLOCKS

OUTDOOR KITCHENDISTRIBUTORS INC.“DENVER’S COMPLETE

BARBEQUE SHOP”Ducane, Broil King, OCI

Big Green Egg • BroilmasterNatural Gas & LP Grills

Bar Stools & Fireplaces & InsertsPatio Furniture & Accessories

303-991-99114401 S. Tamarac Pkwy.

Denver, CO 80237

4 4 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

This space could be

yours!To advertise in our Mart

Sections, call 866-612-4295.

Complete One-Stop Collision Center

24 HOURTOWING

Quality Repairs & Service Guaranteed• Foreign & Domestic, All Makes & Models

• Certified Body Men• Rapid Turnaround Time• Insurance Forms Expertly Processed• Insurance Company Recommended and Approved• Windshield Replacement

• Mechanical Repairs• Quality Used Cars Bought & Sold• Rentals Available

26 Bridge St. • New Milford 860-355-4230a-1 auto bo dy w o r ks.tr ip o d.co m

Hours: M-F 8am-6pmSat Hours by Appointment

CONNECTICUT

36 Lucy St.Woodbridge, CT(between Rte. 63 & 67)

(203) 397-2909(203) 387-8069

• State-of-the-Art Spray Booth and Bake Oven• FREE Estimate• FREE Loaner Car• Frame Machine & Measurement System

Foreign Car SpecialistsPorsche, Volvo, Mercedes, BMW

FREE Pickup & DeliveryYour Insurance Company Knows Us!

WOODBRIDGEAUTO BODY SHOP,

INC. Fax: (203) 389-4002

Marvin P. Schweitzer, NDWellness InstituteExperienced, Caring, Cutting EdgeHealth Care for the Whole Family

Advanced Wellness-Oriented DiagnosticsBotanicals • Homeopathy • Nutrition

Acupuncture • Energy Medicine • Oxygen TherapyNon-Invasive Allergy Testing and Desensitization

Candida • Environmental Detox

(203) 847-2788One Westport Ave., Norwalk, CT

www.wellnessinstitute-ct.com

Stamford MarbleImports Co.

“We are direct importers from around the world.”

Custom Fabrication & Installationto Architectural Specifications

12 Camp Avenue, Stamford, CTtel: 203.322.5457 fax: 203.329.9873

Fireplace Surrounds, Vanity Tops,Kitchen Countertops, Tables & more!

Architects & Decorators are Welcome!Large Selection of Marble, Granite

Ceramic Tile, Natural Stone.(including custom & hand painted tile)

Licensed By State OfConn #1177H

NY #CO-606856

203/531-5759

45 YEARSEXPERIENCE

FULLY INSUREDFAMILY OWNED

& OPERATEDINSECT &

DISEASE CONTROLFERTILIZING

TREE SURGEON TREE SERVICECOMPLETE

LANDSCAPING& LAWN CARE

LAWNS–NEW& RENOVATED

FOUNDATION SHRUBSTICK CONTROL

MEMBER CONN. TREEPROTECTIVE ASSN.

1 ARMONK ST.GREENWICH, CT

United We Stand

BAYBERRYINSURANCE

An Independent Agency

PAM ATKINS, CIC

• HOME • COMMERCIAL • FARMS

• LIFE • BOATS/MARINE • AUTO

(860) 445-5625One Fort Hill Road, Groton, CT 06340

AroundThe ClockHome CareCOMPANION-SITTERSPERSONAL CARE ATTENDANTSCERTIFIED NURSES AIDS24 HOUR SERVICE - 7 DAYSREGISTERED & LICENSED NURSES

(203) 262-6066Union Square Southbury

KLAFF’SLighting • Kitchens • Baths

Decorative Hardware • Tile & Stone

One of the first and largest family-owneddesign centers in the country — selling anunsurpassed selection of quality lighting,

baths, kitchens, decorative hardware, tile & stone. Gift certificates available.

South Norwalk • DanburgWestport (Lighting only)

203-866-1603Klaffs.com

Auto Repair Inc.Preferred Services Since 1972

State Certified Auto Emissions Repair174 West Center Street

Manchester, CTPhil, Jim & Paul Locicero

Family Owned and Operated Since 1972

Tel. (860) 646-5036Mon-Fri 7:30am-5:30pm

Foreign & Domestic Repairs

B ’ N a i B ’ r i t h 4 5

DELAWARE GEORGIA

ONCE A WEEK OR ONCE A YEAR

Why Use Document Security?...ON-SITE SHREDDINGTOTAL SECURITY • LOWER COST • SECURITY CONTAINERS

•PROFESSIONAL & PROMPT LOCALSERVICE • CERTIFICATE OF

DESTRUCTION ISSUED•WE RECYCLE

SERVING THE TRI-STATE AREA

WE CAN SHRED A BOX OFPAPER IN JUST TWO MINUTES

800-60-SHRED

GENERAL SALES SPECIALTIES, INC.Creativity Is The Key

To Our Success…And Yours

Buttons • Beverageware • Balloons • CalendarsWearables • Key Chains • Pens • Pencils

Email: gsi2@bellsouth.net or visit: www.generalsalesmiami.com8560 NW 56th Street • Miami, FL

(305) 592-2700 • Fax: (305) 592-2052

FreeCatalog

Providing:

Pre-arranging saves money

(813) 645-3231

WOODWONDERSCUSTOM FURNITURE

& CABINETRYRESIDENTIAL &COMMERCIAL

www.woodwonders.info954-981-1010

3160 Pembroke Rd.Pembroke Pk., FL

FLORIDA

Air Conditioning and HeatingSales & Service

Service on All Makes & Models • Heat Pump Specialist

Toll Free 1-888-612-9822

(912) 201-9822GA Reg. # CN-006153 Billy Cox - OwnerCUSTOM MADE INDOOR WEATHER

IDAHO

(208) 464-2736

Timber InnLodging, Bar and Grill

“You Will Love Our Log Inn”

P.O. Box 498, Pierce, ID 83546

5 Deluxe Rooms With a View

ILLINOIS

ILLINOIS

Relief MedicalServices, Inc.

RN’S • LPN’S • CNA’SCOMPANIONS • LIVE-INS

“Round The Clock Nursing”7 Days A Week

Private DutyHome Care • Assisted Living

Est. 1973www.reliefmed.com

323 E. Ontario • Chicago 312-266-1486

4845 Dempster • Skokie 847-679-6065

Mention B’nai B’rith

Reception & Conference CenterOn the River

www.riversidereceptions.com

630-262-8371Fax: 630-262-8372

35 North River Lane, Geneva, IL

• Receptions • Rehearsal Dinners• Showers • Meetings

• Retirement & Awards Dinners

THE SOURCE FORSERVICE - QUALITY - SELECTION

Entrance & Interior Locks • Cabinet Knobs & PullsSwitch Plates, Hinges • Towel Bars, Etc.

Faucets & Accessories

DECORATORHARDWARE

& BATH CO.Tues-Wed-Fri-Sat: 9:00-5:00

Monday & Thursday 9:00-8:00Closed Sunday

847•677•55333921 Touhy • Lincolnwood IL

(East Of Edens Expy-Touhy Exit) Since 1978

CENTRAL PARKSERVICE, INC.

“Your Dealership Alternative”Complete Auto Repair/Diagnostics

Foreign & Domestic

847-869-0076www.centralparkservice.com

2966 Central St., Evanston, ILMention B’nai B’rith for Free Safety Check

4 6 S u m m e r 2 0 0 9

This space could be yours!

To advertise in our Mart Sections, call 866-612-4295.

0408 AP BB3940777

For more than 50 years, B’nai B’rith has been serving the Jewish community through the B’nai B’rith Insurance Program. Our commitment to you continues to grow. That’s why we have sought out an array of insurance products to help suit your individual needs.

No matter what stage in life, we are confident that we have an insurance plan for you, designed to help you feel secure and provide you with the peace of mind that comes only when you know you are covered, even if the unexpected should occur.

Long Term CareMedicare Supplement1 Accident Protection1

Term Life1

Medicare Part DGuaranteed Issue Term Life1

So, when looking for insurance, look no further than the B’nai B’rith Insurance Program. To learn more about each plan’s features, costs, eligibility, renewability, limitations and exclusions, please contact Selman & Company, the Administrator for the B’nai B’rith Insurance Program, toll-free at 1-800-723-BNAI (2624).

••••••

The policies or provisions may vary or be unavailable in some states. The policies have exclusions and limitations which may affect any benefits payable. 1Depending on State of Residence, underwritten by Monumental Life Insurance Company, Cedar Rapids, IA; Transamerica Life Insurance Company, Cedar Rapids, IA and for NY Residents, Transamerica Financial Life Insurance Company, Purchase, NY 10577. 2Underwritten by New York Life Insurance Company, 51 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10010. 3Underwritten by Hartford Life Insurance Company, Simsbury, CT 06089. 4EA+ is not an insurance product. It is a travel assistance plan. 5Coverage provided and underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and its affiliates, 175 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA.

Administered by:

Look No

Further...

Emergency Assistance Plus (EA+)4

Group Catastrophic Major Medical2

Disability Insurance3

Discount Prescription CardShort Term Recovery Insurance Plan3

Auto & Home Insurance5

••••••

0609BBM10509669

www.elal.comTHE MOST NONSTOP FLIGHTS TO TEL AVIV FROM NEW YORK (JFK/NEWARK) AND THE ONLY NONSTOP FLIGHTS FROMLOS ANGELES, IN ADDITION TO NONSTOP FLIGHTS FROM TORONTO

Your visit to Israel begins the moment you board EL AL, the national airline of Israel.For more details, visit www.elal.com or call 800-223-6700 or any travel agent.

Client/Job#: ELA09012 Operator: kdPublication: Bnai Brith Trim size: 8 x 10.5Issue Date: Summer Bleed: N/AContact: Alex Ely - alex@adstore.com Safety: 1/4 inch

212-685-8899

Exciting. At EL AL we are pleased to announce some major upgradesand technological innovations on your fl ight from the USA to Israel:

• New planes, new routes

• Upgraded entertainment systems at every seat withprograms for the entire family

• New advanced sleeper seats in premium classes

• Improved health-smart meal options

And while any airline can upgrade its equipment, only EL ALhas one feature that no one else can offer — the hospitalityand professionalism of our Israeli crew.

Expanding. Innovating.Upgrading.

ELA09012_Bnai_Brith.indd 1 4/24/09 11:50:14 AM