Archive for March, 2009

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

After about two hours of driving northward, we finally emerged from Highway 90 at the shores of a fog-blanketed Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, where a few rays of sunlight poked through the clouds and reflected off the waters on a chilly January morning.  

Positively unique adventures in the Golan Heights

Only two hours before, my boyfriend Lior had started up his mother’s Volvo as two of his closest friends piled into the backseat for the ride from Ra’anana to the mountainous region of Ramat HaGolan. Roni and I would be the only women with the four men — Lior and his army friends Raz and Zvika, with another army buddy, Eyal, driving separately. They were a band of brothers on a tour of their old army bases and we were along for the ride. The journey seemed possible only in Israel, where the personal and the political are so seamlessly braided.

I closed my eyes for the next 20 minutes as we lumbered along the small northern roads and tagged behind Eyal, who led the group through the Golan Heights in his European-sized Federal Express truck. Suddenly, Lior jolted me awake — we had arrived at a military base, where their friend Yuval was serving a few weeks of army reserve time. Though Yuval had served with them in the Israel Defense Forces from 2002 to 2005, the Gaza conflict had prompted a precautionary draft up north as well. Continue reading…

A Jewish Leprechaun!!! Carl Nelkin.

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Standing on the bima behind a golden menorah, an emerald green leprechaun read from the megillah last Purim, a plush green top hat perched on his head and a red Irish-chasidish beard glued onto his flushed cheeks.

Carl Nelkin, a native of Dublin, prays regularly at the Dublin Hebrew Congregation – Terenure Synagogue, the Irish capital’s main Orthodox shul, and has been a guest cantor in Laredo, Texas; New York City and England. An aviation lawyer by day and recording musician by night, he uniquely blends Celtic and Yiddish melodies to create albums available nowhere else. Inspired by both the great Irish tenor John McCormick and Toronto Cantor Louis Danto, Nelkin released his first bicultural CD in 2003, entitled “Irish Heart – Jewish Soul -

Carl Nelkin (center) reads Megillah; Rabbi Lent wears the red feathers (right). Carl Nelkin.

 avourite Irish and Jewish Songs.” And in January, after accumulating more than 25 years of learning about the Holocaust, he unveiled a second album, “The Little Trees Are Weeping – Songs of the Holocaust and Resistance.” Though he felt emotionally compelled to create the Holocaust memorial album, Nelkin feels that he has carved out more of a niche for himself in the quite rare Irish-Jewish music market.

“I wanted to show a blending of Irish and Jewish culture through music,” Nelkin said, noting that Dublin has about 1,500 Jewish residents. “I interpret the Yiddish music with Irish instruments. They both have a history of persecution, they both have a history of trying to establish their own state.” Continue reading…

Raphael Siev, Irish Jewish Museum curator. Rachel King.

by Sharon Udasin

For any visitor to Dublin’s rustic Irish Jewish Museum, the warm-natured, red-bearded curator Raphael Siev was more than a familiar face: he was a fount of information and an admired Irish-Jewish leader.

Siev, 73, died of a short illness in the last week of January, during which he had insisted upon speaking at a Holocaust memorial event, The Independent newspaper in Dublin reported.

“Thousands of people went through the museum,” said Rabbi Zalman Lent, spiritual leader at the Dublin Hebrew Congregation and Chabad emissary to Ireland. 

The museum, formerly the Walworth Road Synagogue, opened its doors in 1985, in an inauguration led by Chaim Herzog, the Irish-born former president of Israel and son to Ireland’s first chief rabbi, Siev had told a group of Columbia Journalism graduate students when they visited the museum a year ago. Continue reading…

Not my article, but one that I thoroughly enjoyed (from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal). And don’t listen to what the Times says — this was a great Guys and Dolls production!!!

By JOANNE KAUFMAN New York

‘I’m going to do something very unactressy and get something to eat,” Lauren Graham said winningly, scanning the menu at a restaurant near the Nederlander Theatre, where she just opened in the Broadway revival of the classic musical “Guys and Dolls.”

Zina Saunders

Her order: an egg salad sandwich (and yes, she told the waiter, she absolutely wanted the accompanying capers and anchovies), mint tea as a hedge against the rigors of eight performances a week, and a double cappuccino. It was an unintended reminder of Lorelai, the coffee-obsessed, smart-talking, fast-talking single mother Ms. Graham played to unanimous acclaim for seven seasons (from 2000 to 2007) on the hit series “Gilmore Girls.” Continue reading…

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

A simple search for “Israel” on Google Maps will give you more than just roadways and town names: photographed piles of Gazan rubble will pop out of the map, taking precedent over images of Israel’s popular landmarks and landscapes.

Google can’t control which images appear because the content is entirely user-generated — also called “open-source” — meaning that Web surfers can add or delete content as they please. And on many such open-source sites right now, including Wikipedia and Flickr, Israel’s image is far from favorable.

But David Saranga, the media consul for the Consulate General of Israel in New York, plans to fight back. After launching a pro-Israel campaign through Twitter.com during the Gaza war and by bringing Maxim magazine into Israel last year, he says he is recruiting the best in the business to revamp Israel’s online image. 

In just a few weeks, he will bring six American new media experts to photograph Israel, with funds from the Consulate and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Rather than selecting people based on their photography expertise, Saranga said that he is choosing his team members based on their proficiency editing blogs and open-source media. Continue reading…

A 9-year-old boy whose parents operate the Chabad of the Five Towns died in his sleep Friday night, leaving his family and community in a state of trauma. Continue reading…

by Sharon Udasin
Staff Writer

Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip ended more than a month ago, but for two college campuses in the snow-flushed mountains of central New York, the aftershocks from the war with Hamas continue to reverberate.

In the latest tremors, the most recent edition of the Ithaca College alumni magazine ICView, featured ’08 grad Emily McNeill’s eyewitness account of Israeli settler violence in Palestinian land. It sparked a campus-wide battle among students, faculty and alumni. 

Meanwhile, two miles north at Cornell, the formerly peaceful Muslim and pro-Israel organizations broke what had been an increasingly friendly dialogue with a series of antagonistic rallies and protests.

“Ithaca is a very liberal town — it’s sort of in its own little bubble,” said Shai Akabas, president of the Cornell Israel Public Affairs Committee. “There are more people who lean to the far left side of the political spectrum, and some of those people tend to take more stances against Israel. That may to some extent spur the far-left student population to take action.”

Last month, a group of Cornell students decked the campus Arts Quad with signs condemning Israel’s war on Gaza and 1,300 black flags to represent the dead from both sides, The Cornell Daily Sun reported. Cornell’s Islamic Alliance for Justice did not organize the Feb. 9 protest, though some members participated in the display, its president, Tara Malik, told The Sun. But by that same afternoon, many of those same signs had been vandalized and stolen. Continue reading…

I guess she didn’t do a complete 180…

3/3/09: Hillary Clinton's Guestbook note at Yad Vashem. -US Department of State Official Blog

Yad Vashem is a testament to the power of truth in the face of denial, the resilience of the human spirit in the face of despair, the triumph of the Jewish people over murder and destruction and a reminder to all people that the lessons of the Holocaust must never be forgotten. God bless Israel and its future.

—Hillary Rodham Clinton 
March 3, 2009