Maayan Jaffe JNS.ORG

Meet at camp, get married?

Dan and Jen Silber met at Camp Moshava. (photo from Silber family via jns.org)

Eighteen-year-old Bernie Kozlovsky spent from sundown to sunrise on a boat with 16-year-old Sonia Rosenbaum in the summer of 1972.

“We talked until dawn,” Kozlovsky recalls about that summer at the Orthodox Jewish NCSY overnight camp in northeastern Maryland. Kozlovsky worked in the camp kitchen. Rosenbaum was a camper. From that summer forward, neither dated another individual. Forty-three years later – including 39 years of marriage, six children and seven grandchildren – Kozlovsky attributes his successful relationship to the spark that formed during his summertime experience.

Not much has changed.

Today, the (camp) fire is still burning at Jewish summer camp. Dating and marriage are byproducts of summers spent banging on the table during Birkat Hamazon (Grace after Meals), engaging in loud and intense games of color war, and celebrating Jewish culture with Hebrew plays and folk-music campfire sing-alongs.

No one is pushed to date at Jewish summer camp, said Lauren Ben-Shoshan, who met her Israeli husband, Alon, as a counselor at URJ (Union for Reform Judaism) Camp Harlam in Kunkletown, Penn., in 2004. The couple now lives in Israel.

“Camp is a positive place for Jewish learning, physical activity and connecting with the outdoors. No one wants campers to feel bad because they didn’t find their spouse when they were 15, 19 or 22. But there is a covert understanding that [marriage is] a nice byproduct of Jewish summer camp, when it happens,” said Ben-Shoshan, who is also a Jewish educator.

It occurs more often than many realize. According to Camp Works, a report released in 2012 by Foundation for Jewish Camp, Jewish adults who attend Jewish overnight camp are on average 10% more likely to marry within the Jewish faith than their peers. The 2000-01 National Jewish Population Study found that number to be higher, with 78% of individuals who attended Jewish summer camp in-married, as opposed to 62% of their non-camper peers.

What’s the secret sauce? Is it that romantic Shabbat at sunset by the lake or in the secluded woods? That’s part of it, but it is more likely a result of the “intensity” of the camp experience, Ben-Shoshan believes.

“The days last forever, but camp feels like it only lasts a minute, so even if camp is only two months, these are two very intense months,” she said. “You see the campers and counselors in stressful situations, how they interact with peers and with the kids, the meals, how they interact with co-workers. It is all these things that happen in life, that could take several months in the ‘real world,’ you see within a week at camp.”

Jewish summer camp focuses heavily on community-building, noted Aaron Bogage, who attended the BBYO International Leadership Training Conference for several summers and now works at the overnight BBYO Chapter LTC. He said there are always “quite a few couples per session,” explaining that these relationships form because everyone is “extremely open” with each other and open to meeting new people. “Everyone is genuinely excited to get to know the rest of the teens.… There is a sense of community that comes from camp,” he said.

One can start to pinpoint new couples, according to Bogage, by looking at who sits where during meals and what campers do during free time. Bogage has not met his significant other through camp, but his good friend met a girl last summer from another state. They are still together despite the physical distance between them.

Jen Silber, executive director of Habonim Dror Camp Moshava in Street, Md., said there is a focus at camp on building healthy peer relationships. “We want [campers] to learn about communication, how to express their needs in relationships, feel confident being themselves and develop trust,” she said.

Silber, who met her own husband as a camper and then staffer at Moshava, argues that friendships and romantic relationships that people form at summer camp tend to be “deeper” and more authentic than those forged at school or in other environments. Campers and counselors feel accepted for who they are, she said.

Read more at jns.org.

Maayan Jaffe is former editor-in-chief of the Baltimore Jewish Times and a Kansas-based freelance writer. Reach her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter, @MaayanJaffe.

Duo’s message is “laughter heals”

The comedy team of Rabbi Bob Alpert and Ahmed Ahmed on their August 2015 Laugh in Peace Tour. (photo from Laugh in Peace)

“Both Jews and Muslims have a lot in common. What are we fighting over? Jews and Muslims don’t eat pork, we don’t celebrate Christmas, we both use ‘ch’ in our pronunciation, and we are both hairy creatures of God,” says comedian Ahmed Ahmed. “The only real difference between Jews and Muslims is that Jews never like to spend any money and Muslims never have any money to spend.”

So goes one of the dozens of jokes featured in the Laugh in Peace comedy routine of Ahmed and Rabbi Bob Alper. It’s one Arab, one Jew, one stage. The unlikely duo’s show was in Israel (Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa) and the Palestinian territories (Ramallah) for the first time from Aug. 12-17. Together, Ahmed and Alper have performed more than 150 times during the last 14 years – throughout the United States, Canada and England – at synagogues, churches, mosques, theatres and college campuses.

Their story began as a gimmick by a savvy publicist, said Alper, a Reform rabbi who spent more than a decade at pulpits in New York and Philadelphia – or, as he calls it, “14 years of performing in front of a hostile audience.”

Alper admits he was at first resistant to the idea of the combined show. “My publicist calls me one day and says, ‘Bob, why don’t you do a show with an Arab comedian?’ I said, ‘Do you have any other ideas?’”

Ahmed was skeptical, too. “I got this call, ‘My name is Bob Alper and I am a Reform rabbi.’… He says, ‘I have an idea. I thought it would be great to do a show together.’… Well, I said, ‘That sounds good, where do you perform?’ He says, ‘Well, I perform in synagogues.’ … I thought someone was playing a joke on me.”

But the timing was right. In 2001, at the height of the terrorism of the second Palestinian intifada (uprising) in Israel, people were primed for comic relief. Alper says, when people are tense or sad, “comedy is even more important.”

Over time, the two have been more than just a successful and sought-after show. They’ve become good friends. The women in Alper’s small Vermont town fell in love with Ahmed through his visits and regularly inquire about his well-being. Alper has eaten in Ahmed’s parents’ California home.

“Ahmed’s dad asked about my family,” Alper recalled. “When I told him my wife would be having shoulder surgery the following month, he looked gravely at me and ordered, ‘You must stop twisting her arm.’”

They also believe they have played a role in breaking down barriers between Muslims and Jews. On college campuses, where Jewish-Muslim tension and antisemitism run rampant over the issue of Israel, Ahmed and Alper perform for mixed audiences. Jewish males wearing yarmulkes and females in hijabs sit side-by-side, smiling and laughing.

“When people laugh together, it is hard to hate each other,” said Alper, recounting how at the University of Arkansas it occurred to him that they were guests of the Razorbacks – a Muslim and a Jew performing at a school whose mascot is a pig.

They keep their shows apolitical, though they do touch on their personal religious experiences in the 90-minute performances, which generally are divided between solo acts of 30-35 minutes and a joint opening and closing. The closing includes stories from their travels.

Read more at jns.org.

Among the 2016 shows listed on Bob Alper’s website (bobalper.com) is only one in Canada, and it just so happens to be at Congregation Beth Israel on March 23.

Drought stress takes toll

A July 2014 Planet Labs satellite image of a reservoir in California’s Lake County that supplies water to nearby Yolo County. In a non-drought year, according to Planet Labs, the visible water would cover roughly twice the area as it does in this picture. (photo from Planet Labs via Wikimedia Commons)

California headlines this month scream “water shortage” – but the shortage is not limited to the western United States. According to a recent report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, while the demand for freshwater resources is increasing, the supply remains constant and many regions are starting to feel the pressure. The report states that water managers in 40 of 50 states expect water shortages in some portion of their states within the next 10 years.

Amid this grave prognosis, a new Israeli research project might make the Jewish state an important part of the solution.

In what is arguably one of the most innovative water research consortiums to date, researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Australia’s Monash University are working to develop “water-sensitive cities.” The description for the project, which is funded by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), says that water-sensitive cities adopt and combine decentralized and centralized water management solutions to deliver water security. The data gathered from the project may be used to support development of urban master plans in cities in Israel and around the world.

Researchers are grouped into teams, each focusing on a different aspect of creating water-sensitive cities.

Eran Friedler, senior research fellow and head of the Water Forum Project at Technion, leads a team whose objective is to develop a holistic vision for water-sensitive cities in Israel encompassing scientific, economic and societal aspects, and accounting for the potential effects of global warming on temperatures and rainfall regimes. The analysis seeks to quantify the effect of urbanization and changing urban texture on storm water harvesting potential.

Evyatar Erell, a professor in the Bona Terra Department of Man in the Desert at BGU, is responsible for water-sensitive urban planning and design. He explained that his role is to examine conventional hydrological planning of cities and to see how it can be improved. This means reducing impermeable surfaces (sidewalks, parking lots, driveways, etc.) in favor of more permeable surfaces, sometimes innovative ones, such as green roofs or the infusion of small bits of garden along footpaths.

“We are trying to determine how to use water as effectively as possible, to maximize its benefits to pedestrians, reduce energy consumption by our buildings, and ensure environmental sustainability,” said Erell.

Read more at jns.org.

More than fitness at the JCC

The fitness centre at the Rosen JCC in Orlando, Fla. (photo by Cyndy Phillips)

For Daphna Krupp, her workouts at the Jewish Community Centre (JCC or J) of Greater Baltimore have become somewhat of a ritual. She not only attends fitness classes but also engages with the instructors and plugs the J’s social programs on her personal Facebook page.

“It’s the gym and the environment,” said Krupp. “It’s a great social network.”

Krupp, who lives in Pikesville, Md., is one of an estimated one million American Jewish members of more than 300 Js around the country. Each J – in line with the bylaws of their umbrella organization, the JCC Association of North America (JCCA) – has a fitness centre that serves as one of its core businesses. Often, the fitness centre can be perceived as a for-profit enterprise of the J, with thousands of dollars invested annually in facility maintenance and gym advertising. But Steve Becker, vice-president of health and wellness at JCCA, says that is a myth. “JCCs are not fitness centres, we are engagement centres,” he said. “All fitness-related programs are structured to be relationship-building activities.”

The institution of the J was founded in 1854 as the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA), to provide help for Jewish immigrants. A Young Women’s Hebrew Association was established as an annex to the YMHA in New York in 1888. The first independent YWHA was set up in 1902. In 1917, these organizations were combined into a Jewish Welfare Board, and later renamed Jewish community centres. “After World War One, the Jewish Welfare Board morphed into an organization to meet the cultural, intellectual, physical and spiritual needs of the Jewish community,” said JCCA communications manager Marla Cohen, noting that physical needs were always part of the equation.

The much-debated 2013 Pew Research Centre study of the American Jewish community found that 62 percent of Jews say being Jewish is mainly a matter of ancestry and culture, rather than religion. The study showed a decline in non-Orthodox individuals involved with the organized Jewish community. As such, communal leaders – from award-winning author and lecturer Dr. Erica Brown to Jewish Agency for Israel president and chief executive officer of international development Misha Galperin – have been calling for increased “low-barrier, high-content” programming to meet Jews where they are. This, says Cohen, is a niche the J can fill. “For some people, aside from High Holiday attendance, working out at the J is probably the only flavor of Judaism they have. The J could be a very big part of these people’s Jewish identity,” Krupp said.

In the last two decades, many Js have opened their doors on Shabbat, in consultation with rabbis and community leaders. “These individuals are not choosing between the JCC and synagogue. They are choosing between everything else – the mall, soccer, snowboarding, you name it – and the J,” said Cohen. “The JCC just gives Jews another option. And many JCCs have stepped in offering meaningful programs for Jews seeking something other than a traditional service.”

Read more at jns.org.

Maayan Jaffe is an Overland Park-based freelance writer. Reach her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter, @MaayanJaffe.

We all were once strangers

A boat of new immigrants arrives in pre-state Israel on Oct. 2, 1947. (photo from the Palmach Archive via PikiWiki Israel)

The Passover seder begins by welcoming anyone who is hungry, an idea that comes straight from the Book of Exodus (23:9), which states, “You shall not oppress a stranger, since you yourselves know the feelings of a stranger, for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Later in the Torah, Leviticus 19:33 says, “When a stranger resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.” Leviticus 19:34 repeats this refrain, “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.”

Over the generations, the Jewish people have been “aliens” more than once. Well-known examples of Jews leaving their perceived homeland include the Jewish exile to Babylonia after the destruction for the first Temple, those who were fortunate enough to escape Nazi persecution for Israel or the United States, expelled Middle Eastern Jews who were moved to Israel after its founding, or residents of the former Soviet Union who left a life of religious oppression.

The immigrant experience is different for everyone, said Aaron Gershowitz, senior director for U.S. programs at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). He told this reporter that the challenges of an individual’s journey often depend on the environment they are leaving and the community to which they are relocating.

Take Inge “Irene” Brenner. She escaped from Nazi Germany on Dec. 28, 1938, for Havana, Cuba. From there, she traveled to the United States, arriving to join her husband in April 1939 at age 19. She immediately took up work at a small factory where she steamed hat plumes. Her employer provided her with the required documentation to book passage for her mother, father and sister to the United States. Due to a lack of funds, the family all lived together in a tiny apartment in New York.

“When I left Berlin, I was 19 and completely single-minded, [telling myself] ‘I must get out and save myself and my parents,’” Brenner said. “We just couldn’t have existed anymore. That is what happened to the rest of my family that didn’t get out – all of them were murdered in the gas chambers. There was nothing else I could do but make it. You just had to make it.”

Gershowitz said that “the economics of surviving” often mark the first several years (or longer) of the immigrant experience. It is only after that period that immigrants become more like others – more focused on family life, a career and a future for their children.

Over time, this was the case for Brenner. Once she and her husband could afford to leave the rest of the family and live on their own, they had two daughters who they raised to be American Jews, as opposed to Jewish Americans. Brenner said she wanted to leave her horrible past behind for a new life, which she feels she received “by the grace of God.”

“She was always proud to be Jewish, but it was always extremely hard for her to talk about how she got here,” said Benjamin Kopelman, Brenner’s grandson.

photo - Lev Golinkin — Lev Golinkin (photo by Diana P. Lang)

Lev Golinkin, author of a memoir on the immigrant experience titled A Backpack, a Bear and Eight Crates of Vodka, noted the irony that Soviet Jews came to the United States in search of religious freedom, yet many of them choose not to practise Jewish traditions, his family included.

“As soon as we could, we got away from the synagogue and Jewish organizations and melded into the secular American world,” he said.

Golinkin, who arrived in the United States from eastern Ukraine in 1989 at the age of 9, surmised that people turned away from religious observance because it was precisely the Jewish faith that made them targets for persecution in the former Soviet Union. Before escaping, Golinkin was being homeschooled because he had been regularly teased and beaten for his Judaism. Religion, therefore, was nothing to celebrate for him.

“I wanted nothing to do with that. I saw being a Jew as a stigma, a disability,” said Golinkin.

But as he grew up, Golinkin’s opinion changed.

“I think it is interesting that the Israelites stayed in the desert and didn’t start over until that generation had passed away. They needed a clean slate, they needed people whose memories are formed in the new land with the new traditions,” he said.

Read more at jns.org.

Maayan Jaffe is an Overland Park-based freelance writer. Reach her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter, @MaayanJaffe.

Ancient message of Jewish unity

A model of King Herod I’s renovated version of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. (photo from Ariely via Wikimedia Commons)

Between 19 BCE and 4 BCE, King Herod I renovated the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, enlarging and beautifying it. It is during this same period that we first learn of the Jewish pilgrimages to Jerusalem on what are known as the shalosh regalim, the three pilgrimage festivals.

All of the festivals – Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot – centre around the story of the Exodus in some way. But Passover is the first and foremost of the bunch.

Jerusalem always held a special place in the hearts of the Jewish people, but as the Romans built roads and as Herod expanded the Temple, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem became commonplace and served as a message of unity – “one Temple, one God, one Passover” – for all Jews, said Prof. Jonathan Klawans of Boston University’s department of religion.

Yet, detailed writings about what the pilgrimage festivals may have looked like during Temple times don’t exist. According to talmudic scholar Dr. Joshua Kulp, author of Schechter Haggadah: Art, History and Commentary, most knowledge on the subject comes from the works of the ancient historian Josephus. While later writings (such as the New Testament) describe what it was like in Jerusalem during the Second Temple era, those works were written at a much later time and some scholars doubt their accuracy.

It isn’t known where people stayed or slept when they were in Jerusalem, or how many people showed up (though most assume a large number), or what people felt at that time. What is known, Klawans explained, is that the pilgrimages were a social experience that pulled the Jewish people together.

It’s also clear that, for Passover, pilgrimage participants ate in Jerusalem as family units. A representative from each family would take an animal, bring it up to the Temple, and have it slaughtered. Then, the representative would bring the animal back, and the family would cook and eat the sacrificial meat. During this festive meal, families also drank wine, but not a specific number of glasses. They sang songs – specifically, the Hallel prayers, which is also part of the modern Passover seder.

Read more at jns.org.

Maayan Jaffe is an Overland Park-based freelance writer. Reach her at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter, @MaayanJaffe.

Waves of Jews to East Asia

Shanghai’s famous Bund district, where most of the buildings were built and owned by wealthy Sephardi Jewish families. (photo by Anthony Hartman via Wikimedia Commons)

It was a long trek: 6,000 miles by boat from central Europe to East Asia. But the towns of East Asia opened their gates for the waves of Jewish emigrants who had to find shelter from the tragic problems they faced first in Russia and, later, in Europe.

Though some believe their story still flies under the radar when compared to the prevalence of other Holocaust-related discourse – perhaps because most of Shanghai’s Jewish residents viewed their time in the city as a transient stage – historians now know there once was a large and thriving Jewish community in China. Records of immigrants kept by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which operated in Asia from 1917-1950, paint an inescapable picture of Jewish refugees who survived the war in Shanghai.

“The United States, Canada, Australia closed the doors to Jews and other immigrants in the 1920s.… HIAS had to … find other places that were willing to allow Jewish refugees to live there,” explained Mark Hetfield, HIAS president and chief executive officer. “Desperate measures called for creative thinking.”

photo - A plaque at a house in Shanghai that was formerly the residence of Jewish refugees, including W. Michael Blumenthal, who went on to serve as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Jimmy Carter — A plaque at a house in Shanghai that was formerly the residence of Jewish refugees, including W. Michael Blumenthal, who went on to serve as U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under President Jimmy Carter. *(photo by H. Barrison via Wikimedia Commons)*

The first Jews, Silk Road traders, arrived in China in the eighth century and settled in Kaifeng. The next Jews were those who arrived under British protection following the First Opium War. Many of these Jews were of Indian or Iraqi origin, due to British colonialism in these regions, and they became the largest dealers in opium. These included David Sasson (the “Rothschild of the East”), philanthropic businessman Sir Eli (Eliazer) Khadori and real estate lord Silas Herdoon. According to most accounts, the number of Sephardi Jews in China totaled around 1,000.

Around 4,000 Jews would then arrive as refugees from the Russian Revolution of 1917. Finally, a surge as large as 18,000 Jews arrived as refugees from the Holocaust in the late 1930s and 1940s. According to Peter Nash, a child survivor from Berlin who found refuge in Shanghai from 1939-1949, about 8,000 of these refugees originated from Germany and about 4,000 came from Austria.

Read more at jns.org.