Three generations of the Wurtzel-Entel family were on board for the move of a lifetime.

Chana Wurtzel and her husband Yitzi, who live in Far Rockaway, Queens, were acting on years’ worth of dreams to finally make aliyah to Israel. They would be accompanied, of course, by their four children, ranging in age from 10 to 18 months. But Chana’s parents, Joan and Eliezer Entel, it turned out, were just as enthusiastic about the move as she and her husband were.

Then there was grandma — generation No. 4.

“I had no intention of ever going to Israel or living there or ever anything like it,” Mimi Glaser, 94, told The Jewish Week. In fact, Glaser, who also lives in Far Rockaway, had never even left the country.

But the weight of family ties ultimately wore Glaser down, and after a pilot trip to Israel last month — Glaser thought the country was “awesome” — the fourth generation had her plane ticket. Next month, the Wurtzel-Entel family will mark a rarity in the annals of aliyah when its four generations, from 18-month-old Yakirah to her 94-year-old great-grandmother will uproot their collective lives and start over in Israel.

Asked about her decision to reconsider the move, Glaser spoke of the pull of family. “I’ve become attached to my great-grandchildren,” she said. “Where they go, I want to go.”

“Four generations [making aliyah at one time] — this is something very rare,” said the Shai Melamed, the family’s emissary from the Jewish Agency, the group helping to facilitate its aliyah process. “But we see more and more young families with three to five kids making aliyah.” Many hail from the New York area’s large Orthodox population.

This summer, Melamed expects to see a dramatic increase in American olim from last year, which had already risen 20 percent from the year before. While he feels that the sluggish American economy is certainly playing a role in the increase, he says most of these families have had a long-term desire to come to Israel. But he warns families that their transition will by no means be easy.

“When we speak with families we try to get beyond the tears of joy in the movies,” Melamed said, referring to often emotional orientation films of others making aliyah shown by the Jewish Agency. “Sometimes we find families don’t know what to expect. Although it’s our interest to have people make aliyah, we think it’s our job to prepare them.”

Chana and Yitzi Wurtzel seem to be clear-eyed about the challenges of moving to Israel, and perhaps a bit anxious.

“We’re really starting our whole life all over again,” Chana, 33, said. “You have to get a new identity. You get there, and you’re like, ‘I’m still me even though I can’t speak the language and I’m not part of the culture.’ That’s what I’m most nervous about — lost of individuality and loss of capability.”  Continue reading…

They are the ultimate crossover artists, moving freely between the worlds of Orthodox religious observance and edgy secular artistic expression, albeit with a strong Jewish twist.

Some are chasidic outcasts, having left the fold of Satmar or Lubavitch. Others live at the fringes of the chasidic world, improvising a freewheeling sense of spirituality as they ply their trade as rap singers, hard rockers, clothing designers and visual artists.

For the last few years they have forged a loose-limbed community of their own, built around a moveable feast called the “Chulent,” a roving Thursday night party until recently headquartered at the Millinery Synagogue in Midtown that captures the energy of the hipster chasid scene.

Now, two documentary filmmakers and an Emmy Award-winning director want to tell their quirky Jewish journeys — and increase their visibility — in a series of short films to be posted online. And they’ve coined a phrase to define these outside-the-box seekers who want nothing less than to remake what it means to be Jewish and artistic — PunkJews. The words are deliberately run together, it would seem, to stress the collision of worldviews the group of artists is trying to reconcile, or at least hold in creative tension.

“The ‘PunkJews’ film itself grew out of this community,” said Saul Sudin, co-producer of the project with Evan Kleinman. “A lot of people in this documentary are on the fringes of Judaism — they’re thinking outside the box,” Kleinman said. “They’re not being accepted by mainstream Jewish institutions. That will change one day.”

The “PunkJews” poster boy, if you will, is Yitz Jordan, a popular African-American Orthodox Jewish rapper known as “Y-Love,” and his 10-minute segment is one of 10 short films in the series. Y-Love, say the filmmakers, represents the “PunkJews” ethic in the truest sense, and the theme of his segment — a black chasidic rapper trying to find an apartment in Borough Park — symbolizes the clash of cultures inherent in the PunkJews’ narrative. In a trailer for the film series, Y-Love, who converted to Judaism in 2001, sums up his housing predicament, with tongue planted firmly in cheek: “Moses himself couldn’t get an apartment in Borough Park — not with his black wife, who was from the Sudan.”

And then he offers a kind of manifesto of the PunkJews movement: “The modern new school Jewish movement has a huge task in front it — to re-brand God and Judaism to future generations of Jews. What PunkJews is part of is a countercultural, non-mainstream movement showing people you can have a strong cultural identity, religious observance level and still be as crazy with your friends as you want to be at the parties on Thursday night.”

“PunkJews” co-producers Kleinman and Sudin met at one of the Thursday night Chulent parties. The get-togethers, which have been occurring regularly for several years, and which often feature the young hipsters conversing in Yiddish, were originally held in Manhattan and have “been nomadic at times.” Now, says Sudin, a Pratt Institute graduate, the parties at  participant Mimi Klein’s home on Ocean Parkway.

“I want to bring all those people in — I want to bring in the Jew that eats treif on Shabbos,” added Kleinman, who is a graduate of the Ithaca College Film School and a producer for NBC. “A Jew is a Jew no matter what you Jew [do Jewishly], and I want to bring all those people” under one big tent.  Continue reading…

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Also posted on Jewlicious.

And here’s a great analysis of the issues, by David Kelsey at The Kvetcher.

“As far as we were concerned he seemed to die on the operating table — even though he was still breathing,” she said. “We had been losing him over the years with Alzheimer’s and now he seemed to be truly gone. At the hospital their job is to keep you alive no matter what, and the people at the hospital were really lovely. But he could not stay in the hospital indeterminately.”

At the suggestion of Dr. Barbara Paris, director of geriatrics at Maimonides, the Kestenbaums decided on an option the family had never before considered: to transfer Gloria’s father to hospice care, through the Metropolitan Jewish Hospice.

Now, more patients than ever will be able to opt for Jewish end-of-life care, as Metropolitan Jewish Health System recently announced its acquisition of Jacob Perlow Hospice from Beth Israel Medical Center, as well as the Mollie and Jack Zicklin Jewish Hospice Residence in Riverdale, formerly run by the UJA-Federation of New York.

The merger makes the Metropolitan Jewish Hospice the largest hospice and palliative care program in New York State, as well as the largest Jewish hospice — and one of the only of its kind — in the region.

“The joining of two groundbreaking organizations will have an immediate effect on end-of-life care for all New Yorkers, especially for pediatric and clinically complex patients, as well as Jewish and Chinese patients who benefit from our truly unique, culturally specific, end-of-life programs,” said Barbara Hiney, executive vice president of the newly combined hospice and palliative organization.  Continue reading…

Sitting on a train approaching Manchester, England, recently, my friend Arron and I leafed through a copy of MetroNews — Britain’s biggest free paper — and came across an article about recent violence in Jerusalem caused by the latest settlement controversy.

I began to read the article aloud, nonchalantly voicing the words “Israel” and “Palestinians” as they passed by in the sentence.

“Sshhh,” Arron whispered. “Try not to say that around here.”

Growing up, Arron explained, he and his Jewish friends learned from a young age to avoid saying words like “Jew” and “Israel” in public. It was a precaution against the anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that continues to pervade Europe.

Instead, they created a secret, coded language. Jew became “wej” (its backwards cousin). “Eretz” (a Hebrew nom de plume for Israel meaning “land”) became the code word for the Jewish state or random Yiddish words. “We’re walking through a wej neighborhood,” Arron and his friends would say to each other.

One of many definitions of wej, according to UrbanDictionary.com, an online dictionary for slang and often-derogatory terms, is “the polite way of saying Jew in public without others knowing.” In France, a similar type of term, “feuj,” is also used colloquially to replace the word Jew — but this time, usually insultingly. From the French dialect similar to Pig Latin called the Verlan, feuj is simply the syllabic inversion of the French word for Jew, “juif.”

My language faux pas were by no means limited to the train ride into Manchester. Walking through the streets in London, in Liverpool, in Leeds — I breached the language barrier.

In London, I had just visited some of my British colleagues at The Jewish Chronicle office — which is, in fact, a veritable fortress against terrorism — and I was eager to discuss this with Arron. But I quickly learned from him that this too was off limits for conversation, at least on the street.

Local rabbis play down the “wej,” “Eretz” business, viewing the phrases more as forms of ethnic group dialect than paranoia.

“There’s a ‘Jewish British’ just as there’s a ‘Jewish American,’ in terms of speech. One of the things that has been fun in my 12 years here is learning all of the British expressions,” said Rabbi Mark Winer, the senior rabbi at West London Synagogue — Britain’s largest liberal shul.  Continue reading…

Spray-paint stencil artist Sarah Brega recently found inner peace at the unlikeliest of places — a series of Sderot bomb shelters she had decided to spruce up.

“It was really peaceful in Sderot — I picked two or three bomb shelters to decorate,” Brega said. “It was like my dream, to have this empty canvas and do whatever I want with it.”

Brega had joined six non-Jewish American peers and 12 Israelis — all predominantly graffiti artists — on a “Murality” mission called “Paint Israel: Make Art, Not War,” where they sought out artistic inspiration in spots like Sderot, Tel Aviv Herzliya, Jerusalem and Kiryat Gan.

This week, the Israeli-owned Eden Gallery here (437 Madison Ave.) is hosting near-simultaneous launch events at its New York and Tel Aviv locations, where it is featuring the work of these “Artists 4 Israel” in an exhibit entitled “Color: Correct.”

The pieces on display at New York’s Tuesday night event largely came from after the “Murality” trip, while Tel Aviv’s opening will include a makeshift project from the artists’ last day in Israel, comprised of objects they collected during the journey.

“We learned that the artists were doing this nonprofit work to support Israel, and since we’re an Israel-based gallery it seemed like a perfect fit,” said Guy Vardi, director of the gallery branch in New York.

Artists 4 Israel first came together during the Gaza war, under the leadership of artist Craig Dershowitz, who amassed a group of friends and acquaintances to make artistic signs at a 42nd Street pro-Israel rally.  Continue reading…