Jewish Week
At Moishe House Birthright Moves In
Birthright Israel trip participants have a new Shabbat dinner invitation waiting for them when they return: at their local Moishe Houses.
Moishe House, a growing network of subsidized communal residences for young Jewish adults, recently announced it would team up on Shabbat programming with Birthright NEXT, an initiative that helps the free Israel trip alumni deepen their engagement in Jewish life.
Located in 20 North American communities, from Palo Alto to Philadelphia to Great Neck, Moishe Houses already host Friday night dinners regularly — around two per month each — but directors hope to benefit from NEXT’s programming and extensive network of Birthright alumni.
“We are very similar if not the same populations, and it’s an opportunity that can serve as a model in the Jewish community about the value of Jewish organizations working collaboratively instead of competitively,” said Morlie Levin, CEO of Birthright Israel NEXT.
For both organizations, which share many of the same funders, including the Jim Joseph Foundation and Lynn Schusterman, the partnership just made sense.
“Of the people who live in Moishe Houses, over 50 percent have been on Birthright and over 90 percent have been to Israel,” said David Cygielman, the co-founder and executive director of Moishe House. Continue reading…
Yeshiva To Parents: Filter The Internet
Administrators at Tiferes Yisroel yeshiva in Flatbush are demanding that parents install a Web filtration system on their computers to restrict and monitor Internet behavior as a prerequisite for student enrollment, a daily paper first reported this week.
A letter circulated among parents insists that if parents cannot “avoid” having the Internet in their homes at all, then they must purchase a subscription to WebChaver, through which they choose a “chaver” — or friend — of their choice to receive e-mail updates with details about the family’s Internet usage.
“They really just want to monitor the parents,” one father told The New York Post. “I’m not paying $60 a year so they can monitor me. I don’t go to that school – my kids do.”
It is unclear whether the school intends to monitor the behaviors of children or of their parents or of both, based on the stories and blog posts circulating.
“One thing is certain about all teenagers,” said David Bryfman, director of the New Center for Collaborative Leadership of the Board of Jewish Education of New York, who has written about kids and Internet use. “If you want them to do something – ban it! The more inaccessible you make something for our increasingly savvy teens the more they will treat it as a challenge and try and circumvent any software that we might put in place – and eventually they will find a way.”
Bryfman said that other schools ban the Internet completely, which he opposes. “Cyberspace, virtual worlds and social networking have unlimited potential in educational settings that educators and educational institutions are only beginning to realize,” said Bryfman.
A call to the yeshiva for comment on Monday was not returned in time for publication. Original version…
ShareFor Orthodox Lesbians, A Home Online
Israeli group Bat Kol to launch English website as ‘life-net’ for those struggling with acceptance.
Like so many newly religious American immigrants to Israel, 20-year-old Sarah Weil immersed herself in Torah studies and the intricacies of Jewish law, learning intently with the strictest chasidic rebbetzins in various Jerusalem seminaries.
“I desperately wanted to keep Torah and mitzvot and be in the Orthodox world,” said Weil, who made aliyah in 2005.
There was only one problem — no matter how many times she tried to talk herself out of it, Weil, now 26, knew that she was gay, and that homosexuality is considered an abomination in the eyes of many in the Orthodox community.
“I would pray every single day that God would make me ‘normal’ and would direct my attraction toward men,” she told The Jewish Week. Being gay and being religious seemed to Weil like two lines that would never intersect. Being in a secret relationship with another American olah, Talya Lev, only complicated things.
As the two struggled in the closet, they found, seemingly out of the blue, a lifeline. Through a friend, they discovered a fledgling organization called Bat Kol, the only group in Israel devoted to the needs of religious lesbians.
Weil and Lev dove into volunteer work for Bat Kol (Hebrew for “Daughter of a Voice” or “Small Voice”), doing everything from lobbying for gay rights to partaking in the group’s many social and support structures. Eventually they began to play lead roles at the organization.
Now, with the help of a grant from a major Jewish incubator, Weil and Levy are preparing to launch an English version of the Bat Kol website, which up to now has only been in Hebrew. When it is completed in the next few months, the new site will enable religious lesbians here and around the world to tap into Bat Kol’s rich body of resources — a kind of comforting shoulder to lean on in cyberspace — as they struggle for acceptance and try to negotiate two vastly different worlds.
For religious lesbians, Weil said, the new English site will be what she calls a “life-net,” a cross between a lifeline and a safety net.
Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, spiritual leader at New York’s LGBT synagogue, Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, said that Bat Kol would’ve been “enormously helpful” when she was growing up as an Orthodox — yet gay — teenager at The Frisch School in Bergen County in the late ’70s.
“The plague for Jewish lesbians is invisibility,” Rabbi Kleinbaum said. “Bat Kol is a wonderful organization. I have known of them for many years. I myself counsel many people who are struggling with issues of Jewish religious identity and being gay. It’s essential that there be a visible presence of organizations like Bat Kol. Visibility is the most important thing to combat the loneliness that so many Jewish lesbians feel.” Continue reading…
Orthodox Mental Health Needs Not Being Met: Study
As stigma against treatment lessens, population remains largely underserved.
A just-published survey of more than 100 Orthodox mental health professionals revealed that despite significant improvements in the past 25 years, the psychological needs of today’s Orthodox Jewish community are still far from being met.
“Unfortunately, even thought the mental health world spends a lot of energy studying diverse population minorities, it tends to be that religious minorities like Jews and Orthodox Jews have been omitted from that population,” said Eliezer Schnall, clinical assistant professor of psychology at Yeshiva College of Yeshiva University and the project’s lead researcher.
The study, called “Psychological Disorder and Stigma: A 25-Year Follow-up Study in the Orthodox Jewish Community,” follows up on an original study conducted in 1984 by Dr. Shalom Feinberg, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at YU’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his wife Dr. Karyn Feinberg, school psychologist at Yeshiva Har Torah in Queens. Schnall and his team distributed the survey among a listserv of about 450 mental health professionals from Nefesh — an organization formed in 1992 to bring together Orthodox mental health professionals and rabbis. About 100 replies were received.
Respondents answered questions on topics such as the most prevalent psychological disorders within the Orthodox community, how well each segment of the community is being served and how much stigma is still associated with mental health conditions.
Schnall presented his team’s findings at the American Psychological Association convention in San Diego last week.
“On the one hand about 50 percent are telling us that [the Orthodox population is] at least somewhat underserved, and that’s a situation where we are not where we want to be,” Schnall told The Jewish Week. “But … the number of those who in 1984 said needs are adequately met was only 10 percent — now the number is 40 percent.”
The most common patient visits involve marital problems, followed by a combination of anxiety disorders, substance abuse and affective (mood) disorders like depression, according to responses in Schnall’s survey.
In the quarter-century between studies, the responding clinicians who felt that community members mistrust the mental health field has dropped from 87 to 59 percent; clinicians who felt that mental health patients are stigmatized fell from 93 to 70. Mental health visits are still perceived as relatively expensive, with 47 percent of doctors in 2009 responding that patients view psychological services as unaffordable; that figure was 57 percent in 1984.
“Clearly the needs are being met better now than back then,” Shalom Feinberg said. “It seems like there has been light years of progress. So how does one explain the numbers. Our take on this is that there’s a greater awareness of psychopathology now. There was so much more denial and so much less awareness of the existence of problems than there was back then. The bar has been raised now.”
Reposted on FailedMessiah
Summer camp that stresses cuisine, fashion?
Incubator Camps Debut At The Y
Fashion students
After spending three weeks honing his culinary skills at the 92nd Street Y’s Passport NYC program this summer, 15-year-old Daniel Krane has gone from preparing a latke or two onChanukah to vowing to host full Shabbat meals for his family.
“I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t starve to death in college,” said Krane, who had joined his triplet-sister Rebecca — a much more experienced cook — at the new Upper East Side sleep-away program.
Passport NYC, one of five programs launched this summer through the Foundation for Jewish Camp and Jim Joseph Foundation’s “Jewish Specialty Camp Incubator,” brought in teenagers from across the country to delve into fashion, culinary arts, music or film — and become experts on New York City all the while. Infused with a pluralistic Jewish flavor, programs included Shabbat and kashrut observance. Incoming ninth through 11th graders attended one of two three-week sessions this summer and slept in Y dormitories.
“These fields are all very ‘New York’ — we wanted to give them the most sophisticated, high-quality experience, and use New York as our playground,” said Sharon Goldman, program director of Passport.
The camp’s head director, Molly Hott, added, “The glamorous part of Passport NYC is that it’s a hybrid of everything: it’s the traditional summer camp meets college program, where you have the drive to follow one track. It also has a teen tour flair to it.”
Integral to their New York experience were meetings with experts in their fields of choice — the fashion campers, for example, enjoyed visits to Elle Magazine, Michael Kors, Bloomingdales and JCrew.
“The fashion industry is so competitive right now,” said Julia Baer, 14, from Westchester. “Having an experience like this gives you a step up.”
By working with teachers and with each other, campers say they were able to build confidence and conquer fears.
“I’m not good at finishing things, and here I got to see my idea grow from a little spark to being on the big screen,” said Gabby Gasser, 15, a film camper from Kansas City, Kan.
Similar sentiments emerged inside the kitchen.
“I was so afraid to pick up a knife — I didn’t want to cut myself,” said Shawn Feldman, 15, who now hopes to give some basic cooking lessons to the children she baby-sits.
For Ben Krasnow, learning how to operate a chef’s knife was also a challenge.
“I never used one of those before I came to camp,” said the 14-year-old from Palo Alto, Calif. “I want to go out a get a real chef’s knife.”
Despite growing up in a largely secular Jewish environment, Krasnow said he was undaunted by the weekly Shabbat experience, a relaxation period that allowed campers the freedom to “be religious in [their] own way.”
“For five days a week it was ‘go, go, go,’ waking up at 7 and going to the kitchen by 9,” Krasnow said.
Next year Goldman and Hott plan to expand the program, hopefully opening enrollment to 12th graders, adding a musical theater track and creating multiple levels so that campers can return for three or four years.
Beyond jumpstarting their careers and enjoying Jewish New York, the Passport campers said they valued the unique friendships they quickly formed with other teens that they wouldn’t normally even think to befriend.
“I’m this little punk kid who likes music — and this is Julia ‘from the Upper East Side’ and we get along great,” said Lexi Zotov, 14, of Boston.
She added, “What I love about this is how versatile everyone is and how much we could learn from each other.”
Jewish Schools Shop For Retailer’s Cash
Competition fierce for Kohl’s department store’s $10 million in grants.
For Charlotte Jewish Day School, $500,000 could mean complete overhaul of school-wide technology, construction of a brand-new playground, or redevelopment of its individualized curriculum for 110 students.
“Jewish day school education, especially in cities where you’re the only Jewish day school, isn’t always on the front burner,” said Mariashi Groner, founder and director of the elementary school. With an extra half a million dollars, “We would be seen as a force to contend with,” she said.
Charlotte Jewish Day School, originally a Chabad-run program now turned community day school, is competing with public and private schools across America to land among the top-20 most popular schools in a Facebook voting contest run by Kohl’s Cares, the philanthropic arm of Kohl’s department stores. Kohl’s will be giving out a total of $10 million — $500,000 to each of the top-20 schools — as part of a “Giveback” promotion in honor of its 10th anniversary. As of Tuesday morning, the North Carolina school was ranked 10 with 13,659 votes, and of the top 50 schools, at least 20 were Jewish programs, with Silverstein Hebrew Academy of Great Neck, L.I., ranking number 2 (22,680 votes) and Cheder Menachem of Los Angeles ranking number 3 (22,340 votes). Of those 20, most are in some way affiliated with Chabad.
“There’s nothing that we’re not trying and no one we’re not reaching out to, but the real beautiful thing is that the community is standing behind us,” said Rabbi Dovid Ezagui from Silverstein Hebrew Academy, the front-running Jewish elementary school. “Our school is going through an expansion period now. We ran out of space in our current location and we’re building another location. The timing couldn’t be better.”
The contest, which began on July 7, runs through Sept. 3, and new schools can still enter. Each Facebook user is allowed to vote 20 times (five times per individual school) using the Kohl’s Cares application. While religious and private schools of all sorts are welcome to participate, the $500,000 prizes cannot be used for religious or politically partisan programs, or scholarships and financial aid, according to official regulations.
“Our whole city is talking about Charlotte Jewish Day School — that’s never happened before,” said Groner, who hosted an alumni vote-a-thon event on Monday night, where over 40 alumni showed up for Facebook voting sessions with their laptops.
“The parents who send their kids to the school should feel good about it,” added her son Bentzion, who is publicity manager for the campaign. “When we learned about the contest it wasn’t just about the money. For us the incentive was really to give the Jewish community a big boost, a sort of confidence.” Continue reading…
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Also featured on CrownHeights.Info and Chabad.org.
[Front Page image! from the Web.]
Front Page!!!
Law Students Aiding A Special Clientele
Holocaust survivors through legal morass
to get reparations.
Seven decades after she endured four years of unspeakable hunger, freezing temperatures, lice epidemics and perpetual fear of death in the Romanian ghetto of Dej Maturin, Penina Katzir once again felt naked, forced to reopen her wounds from the Shoah and answer the probing questions of an Israeli government-appointed psychiatrist.
“It was humiliation that you cannot even define in words,” Katzir said. “I didn’t file the original request forms with the Germans because they forced survivors to go to shrinks to prove that they were abnormal. …When it became the Israeli government’s responsibility, I was sure I wouldn’t have to go to a shrink and undergo such humiliation. But surprisingly and sadly it was the same — or even worse. In each and every committee, I needed to sit there and open the same old wounds again and again that I had spent my whole life repressing.”
Katzir, now 80, and her husband Yaakov, 78, underwent this obligatory mental health evaluation in 1998, joining a new wave of Holocaust survivors who were finally reclaiming war reparations that were lost somewhere in the complex bureaucracies of the Israeli and German governments, as well as the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Today, Katzir is one of approximately 200,000 to 250,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel, 60,000 to 90,000 of whom live under the poverty line. Only in the recent past has the government begun taking note that the money was not yet in the hands of the survivors, explained Michal Ben Attar, national coordinator of the Jewish Agency’s Project La’ad (“Forever”), launched in May 2009 to help these survivors claim their money.
“Only in the 1980s did society start to speak about the Holocaust,” Ben Attar said. “Only in the last decade was it legitimate to talk about these payments they didn’t receive.”
Israel may have recognized the problem, but getting the money into the hands of these survivors is still not easy. The process includes not only the intense psychiatric exam, but also submission of complex tax forms that require extensive legal review, which is financially prohibitive to most survivors. In an attempt to resolve this problem, the Jewish Agency established Project La’ad, which provides intensive training for volunteers around the country who make home visits to these survivors, notify them of their rights and help them fill out the basic forms.
“A lot of our volunteers themselves are second- or third-generation descendants of survivors, and sometimes they’re coming to complete a cycle that they never fulfilled,” Ben Attar said.
The volunteers include university students, Russian immigrants serving in the Israel Defense Forces and many others. They get funds from the Israeli government, the UJA-Federation of New York and the Canadian Jewish Federations. Since the launch, the project has recruited 2,500 volunteers and has reached out to 10,000 survivors, with an additional 18,000 in an unofficial pilot program the previous year, according to Ben Attar.
“The survivors are not able even to make the phone call and do the fulfillment of rights themselves,” Ben Attar said. “We need people with ambition” to help them.
And one of these groups has decided to take the project even further.
When Hebrew University first-year law student Liron Mark found out about La’ad from the campus volunteer coordinators, she and her friends knew that they needed to launch a branch of the project at the law school. Who better to review legal forms, free of charge, than Israel’s lawyers-to-be, she decided.
“People feel so bad about this whole situation, about how survivors have been taken advantage of by the government,” said Mark, who herself has two survivor grandparents. “Every time they need to go and fill out forms, and every time they have talk about what happened to them in the Holocaust, to prove that they experienced mental damage. It’s like a war of exhaustion between the government and the people.” Continue reading…
Birthright Goes To Hebron —Controversially?
An Australian Birthright trip made what is believed to be an unprecedented stop in Hebron last week complete with a post-visit webcast, raising questions about whether the program has shifted policy on visits to the West Bank.
The group, led by trip provider Israel Express in conjunction with Chabad on Campus in Melbourne and the Zionist Federation of Australia Israel Programs, toured Hebron’s Cave of Patriarchs, the second holiest site in Judaism after the Temple Mount and a site that is also holy to Muslims. Recently deemed a National Heritage Site by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Cave of Patriarchs is believed to house the graves of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives, according to all three major monotheistic religions.
“Be’ezrat Hashem [with the help of God], all the Birthright [trips] will come to Hebron, connect with ‘the mamas and the papas,’” said tour guide Daniel Gutman on the webcast, referring to Judaism’s matriarchs and patriarchs. The webcast still appears on video host WeJew.com but has since been taken down from YouTube.
Prior to the Hebron visit, trips to West Bank towns — as well as Gaza and most parts of east Jerusalem — have been consistently prohibited by Birthright, which sends young diaspora Jews on free 10-day trips to Israel. “Our tours do not travel to or through areas of the West Bank of Gaza,” reads a Birthright web page detailing its security measures. Similar stipulations appear on Israel Express’s Web site, which guarantees that tours do not travel in such places that they deem “unsafe.” Continue reading…
ShareFour Generations, One Aliyah
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…
R&R For The Heart And Soul: Chabad-Style NY Welcome For Wounded Israeli Veterans
A year and a half after the left side of his body was torn head-to-toe by shrapnel in the Gaza war, 23-year-old Ron Lichi was enjoying a relaxing tour of the Empire State Building, the White House and the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s gravesite, among other American tourist destinations.
Lichi, along with nine other soldiers wounded in the Gaza conflict, was in the U.S. for 10 days through a “Belev Echad” (one heart) trip provided by the Chabad Israel Center of the Upper East Side and the Chabad Terror Victims Project. With $100,000 raised purely by Rabbi Uriel Vigler and his wife Shevy from neighborhood donors, the soldiers selected for the trip were able to visit sites in New York City, the Hamptons, Niagara Falls and Washington, D.C.
“The trip has been a very good break from all the treatments and the physical therapies and those kinds of things,” said Lichi, who was a commanding officer in the Golani unit and was hit by friendly fire. “The most important thing for me on this trip was this community — the people who opened up their houses for us. It was amazing to know that there’s support for Israel, even abroad.” Continue reading…
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