The language of the Lord
By SHARON UDASIN
10/15/2010 16:31
Growing up in a combination of Spain and Ukraine, Josue Campomar felt like he had it all – girls always eyeing him, success in his work and studies and, eventually, his own car.
But despite becoming a regular guest at the most popular parties in Kiev, he found that something was missing. “I felt that I was empty inside – I wasn’t really happy,” said Campomar, now 23. “Then my girlfriend left me, and I came back to the church thanks to that.” And then he came to Israel.
The eldest in a Roman Catholic family of 10 children, Campomar moved from Spain to Ukraine 13 years ago, when his parents decided to help the priest at the Parish of the Assumption of the Holy Virgin Mary, located in the Ukrainian capital. But he himself wasn’t always certain about becoming a member of the clergy, toying with the idea that perhaps he “could live outside the church” during his high school years. But eventually finding little fulfillment elsewhere, at 18 Campomar decided to make the move and enter a Kiev seminary, Redemptoris Mater.
After an initial two years of classroom study and then two years of practical training in the south of Poland, Campomar elected to do something e n c o u r a g e d increasingly by his seminary and others – to spend some time in Israel and eventually study modern Hebrew at an ulpan.
Ulpan programs are known to be a hub of diversity, predominantly filled with new immigrants, Arab Israelis looking to learn Hebrew and Jewish students spending a semester abroad. But ulpan teachers say that in recent years, they have seen a remarkable influx of priests and priests-in-training being sent to ulpan programs officially by their seminaries.
“As long as I can remember, we’ve had many kinds of people from all over the world – Christians and some Muslims and Jews, obviously. But as for priests, I’ve never seen so many,” said Tali Debbi-Sasson, who has taught since 1996 at the ulpan program at the Rothberg International School and at Mila, a private ulpan in downtown Jerusalem.
Debbi-Sasson said she has seen a particular increase of priests enrolling in ulpan programs during the past two to three years and has taught at least 10.
One student, Alexandre Comte from France, believes that the influx stems from the gradual improvement in relations between Catholics and Jews ignited by .
“After the Second Vatican Council [1962-5], the church began to see the Jewish people in a new way, and we understood that we had to improve our knowledge,” said Comte, 33, who came here for the sole purpose of studying Hebrew. “John Paul II said the Jewish people were our brothers in belief.”
His younger colleague Campomar, however, initially came for a different purpose – to partake in a year-long work-study program at Domus Galilaeae – also known as Beit Hagalil – a monastery located in front of Lake Kinneret on the Mount of the Beatitudes, where Catholics believe Jesus delivered his most important sermon. But a year extended into two years, and now into three.
As many of his colleagues at Domus Galilaeae have been choosing to do lately, Campomar decided to enroll in Mila last October, and then at the Hebrew University in July.
While in Jerusalem, he stayed in the Domus Mamre monastery in Ras el-Amud near the Mount of Olives.
“At Beit Hagalil, we get people who come to visit during the day for free. We show them the house, and we always need someone who speak Hebrew to guide the tours,” Campomar said.
“That’s why I learned modern Hebrew.” Continue reading…
New Research From Israel
Bulking up the immune system, molecular imaging, inhibiting breast cancer cells.
When Facebook And Philanthropy Meet
Chabad schools poised to win big money from Kohl’s national schools giveaway.
Hebrew Academy in Huntington Beach, Calif., might only have 300-odd students, but when it comes to community outreach, it seems to have no trouble harnessing the power of social networking to press its cause.
The pre-K through 12th grade institution, which attracted nearly 150,000 votes in a national contest for public and private schools, topped the Jewish institutions on a list of schools to win $500,000 each from Kohl’s Cares, the philanthropic arm of Kohl’s department stores. As part of a “Giveback” promotion in honor of its 10th anniversary, the retailer pledged to donate $10 million — a cool half-million-dollars to each of the top-20 vote-getters on the schools’ Facebook applications. The contest began July 7 and ran through Sept. 3, and collectively, schools accrued more than 11 million votes, according to the Facebook application page.
“This has been very exciting for us — obviously winning the money, but in addition to that bringing our parents together in a way that they’re excited and very proud of the school,” said Rabbi Yitzchak Newman, dean of the Hebrew Academy. “It has done a lot to get our message out and to understand our mission, which is providing Jewish education.”
As of this week, Kohl’s had yet to release the official list because it must individually approve each of the winners’ grant applications.
“Those schools’ votes and each school’s proposed programs are currently being verified by the third-party partner to ensure school submissions and budgets comply with contest terms and conditions,” said Vicki Shamion, Kohl’s senior vice president of public relations and community relations. “Once completely verified, all winners will be announced. Until that time, we are not commenting on the winning schools.”
But on an unofficial tally board from the last day of the contest, it seemed that as many as 11 of the top 20 candidates were Jewish schools, most of them affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, according to a screenshot posted by the Marquette College Educator blog (http://marquetteeducator.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/kohls-winners.jpg).
If that holds true, Hebrew Academy placed fifth place overall with more than 148,000 votes and trailed the first place school by roughly 15,000 votes. Among the nine winners who were not Jewish schools, the majority were Christian day schools. One of the only New York winners, Silverstein Hebrew Academy in Great Neck, L.I., received more than 139,000 votes, while the only Jewish school in Charlotte, N.C., received over 143,000 votes. Continue reading…
(Posted on Jewlicious.com)
Elke Reva Sudin, one of the artists featured in the “Punk Jews” article I wrote for The Jewish Week a few months back, let me know today that she and her husband Saul are launching a unique new venture — SUDINmagazine — a magazine unifying Jewish art from all over the world.
The non-profit magazine, which will come out annually, launches this Chanukah and is fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Also published alongside the yearly print book will be a website with “more constantly updated material, like a central place that’s not affiliated or discriminatory,” according to Sudin. They’re expecting to include a ton of video, cover art events and get people from Jewish communities around the world to contribute their thoughts and artwork, she says.
To accomplish all this, however, the Sudins are aiming to raise $5,000 to finance their project.
Watch Elke and Saul’s appeal here:
Can Heeb Still Shock Online?
With the Internet awash in outrageous images — from porn to boogieing IDF soldiers in the hotbed of Hebron — can a racy Jewish magazine whose stock in trade is shock value have the same impact solely online?
That’s the question this week following the announcement that Heeb Magazine — known for its covers featuring Roseanne Barr in Hitler attire, a sexualized image of Jesus and a pig trouncing a loaf of challah — has shut down its print edition.
After nine years of entertaining readers and riling adversaries, Heeb will operate solely in its recently re-launched online form, but editors promise that its shock value will be as strong as ever — if not stronger. Newly appointed editor-in-chief Erin Hershberg, a blogger who’s been a huge fan of Heeb since its inception, intends to include more food stories, music reviews and what she calls “goy columnists.”
“The print world has lost its shock value because of the Internet anyway,” Hershberg told The Jewish Week. “Heeb has to change its tune, and if anything my intent is to keep it low-brow but also to keep in a lot of high-brow and keep a play between the two.” Continue reading…
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.”
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A look inside the head of journalist Sharon Udasin
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