It’s taken two years, but in mid-April Washington’s nearly century-old Kline Galland Center opened its new home health care agency to all eligible clients in the Jewish community and in King County.
After complying with hundreds of federal Medicare regulations and working in close partnership with the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, which granted $45,000 in operating funds for the new service while it proved its competence to the state, Kline Galland earned Washington’s Department of Health certification and now offers a full continuum of healthcare services.
“This is an important program for us and a great gift that the Jewish community can give to the greater community,” Kline Galland CEO Jeff Cohen told JTNews. “Kline Galland is a five-star rated facility. If we can take that Kline Galland quality and follow it into people’s homes, we can continue to be the preferred partner of hospitals who are referring patients to us.”
To help fund the program’s transition to viability, the Jewish Federation marshaled its resources in 2011 by contacting its nearly 2,000-member Washington State Jewish Action Center mailing list, asking them to support Kline Galland’s new venture.
Hundreds of letters poured in, blowing away the competition.
“Several applicants applied to become a home-health provider,” said Cohen. “We generated over 200 letters of support from the Jewish community. Our competitor generated three.”
Currently, the Kline Galland’s rehabilitation unit is caring for 10 patients. But with the expansion of services into private homes, independent and assisted living communities, and adult family homes, Cohen said he hopes to serve hundreds, if not thousands more each year.
“The Jewish Federation sees serving the needs of our community’s elderly as a critical obligation, especially as this population grows here in Seattle,” said Nancy Greer, the Federation’s interim president and CEO. “Thanks to support raised specifically for the needs of older adults under our philanthropic model, Federation donors were vital partners in this important accomplishment for Seattle’s Jewish community.”
The Kline Galland’s newly expanded division couldn’t be more well timed. Under the new Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program added to the Social Security Act and implemented in 2012 under the Affordable Care Act, Medicare will reduce its payments to hospitals that have “excess readmissions” within 30 days of a discharge from a facility. The incentive, said Cohen, is to get people well, if possible, outside of the hospital setting.
“Hospitals are laser-beam focused on preventing these readmissions,” said Cohen. “Under Obamacare [the Affordable Care Act], hospitals are looking for partners that can help prevent these readmissions.”
In order to qualify, Medicare and most insurance companies require patients to be under the care of and referred by their doctors. Patients must also be “homebound.”
Diane Tepfer, 68, flew to Seattle for knee replacement surgery at Virginia Mason Hospital in April from her home in Washington, D.C. Tepfer spent time in Kline Galland’s rehabilitation wing before she was discharged to a temporary apartment in South Seattle, where she has been using the new home health services.
Tepfer told JTNews that as of her current nine visits from their in-home caregivers, she has been progressing, getting stronger and better every day, and learning how to take care of herself once she gets back home.
“I had physical therapy, I had occupational therapy, I had a shower aide, and I had a nurse,” Tepfer said. “They came into where I live and found ways to make it safer for ‘ADLs,’” or activities of daily living, she said.
Tepfer’s Medicare coverage and her supplemental insurance plan covered the procedure and all additional expenses, leaving her with no out-of-pocket co-pays. She said she has been impressed by the overall experience.
“I feel very fortunate to have their services,” Tepfer said. “They’re all very experienced. Sometime by the end of the month I’ll go home.”
Pam Swanborn, the program’s clinical director since May 2012, has been working as a physical therapist for 18 years, 13 of them previously in Swedish Medical Center’s home health program.
According to Swanborn, in order to qualify for in-home care, it must take “a considerable or taxing effort to leave the home, or require assistance, or it could be that there is a condition that prevents them from leaving home for safety reasons.
“Let’s say someone is at a high risk for infection, or there can be cognitive issues,” said Swanborn. “If someone has severe dementia or has memory issues, it wouldn’t be safe to leave the home without assistance. If someone is wheelchair-bound but has systems in place to allow them to get out of the home on a regular basis, then they wouldn’t qualify.”
To determine whether someone qualifies for home care, home health sends a clinician to the home to make an initial assessment.
“We try to gather all of that information over the phone before we go,” Swanborn said. “The first visit typically takes about an hour and a half. It’s a comprehensive assessment — cardiac, respiratory, musculoskeletal, full vitals testing, a comprehensive medication review, a fall-risk assessment, that looks at whether they have any incontinence issues or balance issues, do they have any vision impairments, hearing impairments, and any mobility issues, like whether or not they can get in and out of bed.”
Kline Galland’s home health services include nursing, physical, speech and occupational therapy. Other staff includes medical social workers, and certified nursing assistants who also function as home health aides. They can provide assistance with light chores, errands, bathing, and meals, but Medicare will only reimburse for the cost of a home health aide if one of the other skilled therapies is also being provided.

A teacher at Torah Day School of Seattle has been charged with four counts of first-degree child molestation after being accused of groping two young girls in his 1st- and 2nd-grade classes.
Jordan Eareckson Murray, 32, known to his students as Rabbi Yaakov Murray, was jailed briefly before being released on $100,000 bail on May 3. He may enter a plea to the charges when he is arraigned May 19 in King County Superior Court.
In a statement filed in King County Superior Court, police detective Michael Moore wrote that according to statements from the girls, Murray touched them under their clothing as they stood by him in front of the class. He appeared to focus elsewhere as the desk shielded his actions from view, Moore wrote.
“The defendant is a clear danger to children given the circumstances of this crime…secretly molesting these girls in class in front of others,” wrote deputy prosecutor Carol D. Spoor in court papers.
Murray, a married father of three, declined to make a statement to police. His attorney, Brad A. Meryhew, who specializes in defending clients charged with sex offenses, did not return a telephone call to his office for comment Friday.
Murray is not an ordained rabbi but was allowed by the Orthodox school’s administration to call himself one as a “merely honorary” title, Moore wrote.
He has no known criminal convictions, said Dan Donohoe, a spokesman in the prosecutor’s office, contrary to news reports that said otherwise.
Murray moved to Washington State 20 months ago and has taught at the school in the Columbia City neighborhood since the start of the 2011 school year, according to Moore’s statement.
He has been on unpaid administrative leave since “the first school day after the allegations were reported to us,” wrote Randy Kessler, president of the school’s executive committee, in a statement.
“The next day, we notified parents of the investigation, and since then, we have been cooperating fully in the investigation,” Kessler’s statement continued. “By promptly reporting this matter to the appropriate authorities, TDS has taken the necessary action to ensure the safety of our students.”
The statement added that the school would have no further comment “out of respect for the privacy of our students and others involved in this matter, and because this matter is still under legal investigation.”
Rabbi Sheftel Skaist, head of the school, urged parents in a post shared on Facebook late Friday: “We are diligently working to find an appropriate safety program that will assist our community to move forward and further ensure a safe school environment for our students. We are researching programs that provide updated safety protocols, specialized staff training, parent workshops, and classroom presentations for students.”
The post also asked that people affiliated with the school “not respond to any media inquiries regarding this matter.”
Kessler said in a telephone interview he has two children in the school, which is in its seventh year.
“It has been a wonderful experience for us,” he told JTNews.
He also said he had met Murray but would not comment further.
About 130 youngsters from kindergarten to 8th grade, almost all from Seattle, attend TDS classes in a former public school, Kessler said.
He declined to discuss the screening process for prospective faculty and staff, nor would he release the notification letter sent to parents. The school’s website was taken down after the matter came to light.
“We just want to not provide anyone with information that they could use in a detrimental fashion,” Kessler said. “There’s just so much going on right now.”
He said he knew of no falloff thus far in enrollment, attendance or interest among families with children who might attend the school. He would not say whether the children described in court papers were still going to class or enrolled at the school.
David Chivo, executive vice president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, said he was told of the matter while it was under investigation, before Murray posted bail, but said he had heard nothing from the school since then.
“The Federation supports strong and immediate action by law enforcement and the courts to bring the individual in question to justice. Keeping children safe at all times and in all places is of paramount importance,” according to a statement released by the Federation. “Our thoughts are with Torah Day School families at this difficult and painful time.”
Kessler said he had not heard from any other Jewish schools in the area except for a call of support from Rivy Poupko Kletenik, head of school at the Seattle Hebrew Academy.
“I honestly don’t think that this has anything to do with the fact that this is a religious school or an Orthodox school,” he said.
Det. Moore, in the charging papers, wrote that the investigation began April 23, following two referrals from Child Protective Services, a state agency.
A relative of one of the assaulted girls told Moore she had noticed a pattern that began early in the current school year: Her relative, the other girl who said she had been molested, and four other 1st- and 2nd-grade girls in Murray’s classes complained frequently of “stomach aches, headaches and general nervousness,” but “appeared fine and acted normally” after going home early.
Moore wrote that one of the two girls listed in the complaint talked to the other about Murray. Both then told the second girl’s sister, who had babysat for Murray’s three young children, and eventually they told the girls’ mother.
“The [two] girls mentioned a book they have seen and read called the Let’s Be Safe book,” the detective wrote. “The book deals with safety rules and is used at the school and in [the sisters’] home.”

Thinking about the Holocaust often comes from a Central and Eastern European focus, with recognition of the existence, established lives, and the eventual destruction of much of Sephardic Jewry further out on the periphery. Now those boundaries are expanding, thanks, in part, to a symposium at the University of Washington.
“Sephardic Jewry and the Holocaust: The Future of the Field” brought together the university’s new Sephardic Studies Initiative, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C., international scholarly authorities, and Seattle’s Jewish community for two days of talks in the Allen Library April 28-30. Support also came from the Hanauer Outreach Fund of the Department of History at the University of Washington and Jack M. Karako, in memory of Rosina Karako-Smeraldi. Leah Wolfson, senior program officer in university studies at the USHMM for Advanced Holocaust Studies and symposium co-convener, said she approached the
UW with the idea for the symposium after Devin Naar was appointed assistant professor of Jewish studies and history and put in charge of the Sephardic Studies Initiative. “This symposium was also an opportunity for the Center and the Museum to engage with the Pacific Northwest,” Wolfson told JTNews. “Given the strength of the Sephardic community here and the recent appointment of Dr. Devin Naar in the Jewish Studies Program and history department at the University of Washington, Seattle was a logical choice to convene this type of an endeavor.”
The symposium was scheduled for spring 2013 to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the start of the Jewish community’s deportations from Salonika (now Thessaloniki, Greece) to Auschwitz. Eighty percent of the community perished.
Enthusiastic public support greeted the symposium. Sunday night’s keynote lecture, given by Stanford professor of Jewish history and culture Aron Rodrigue, sold out. Rodrigue’s talk, “Sephardim, Memory and the Holocaust” delved into the constructed memory of life on the Island of Rhodes among the remnant of the Rhodes Jewish community, of which 151 of about 2,000 people survived.
Recounting the history and travails of Jews from Rhodes, Rodrigue praised “the memory of Rhodes Jewry and how it lives in a diasporic space.” Rhodes Jews immigrated to Africa, North America, Latin America and Europe, settling into new communities, but they always retained their connection to their “chico Yerushalayim,” their little Jerusalem, said Rodrigue.
A local Rhodesli, retired Seattle pediatrician Sam Tarica, was moved by the lecture. “My uncle Jacob survived with my father’s help and ended up in the Belgian Congo. My father and mother escaped the Nazis, but all of our relatives [except for Jacob] were lost. It was so distressing to know they had the longest and farthest deportation of any group,” he said.
Regarding the symposium’s purpose — shedding light on the Sephardic Holocaust experience and parsing out the future of the field — Naar said, “I think that it is crucial to emphasize that not only did we attempt to find a place for the varied experiences of Sephardic and North African Jews within the standard narratives of the Holocaust, but more importantly, we initiated a discussion about how the very nature of our understandings of the Holocaust change when viewed from the Mediterranean. “With the added dimension of European colonialism, the North African cases broaden the standard geographical scope of the Holocaust considerably, and introduce questions about Muslim majority contexts,” Naar continued. “Together with the experiences of Jews in the Balkans and Greece, we can begin to develop a previously unexplored Mediterranean lens through which to view experiences of occupation, dispossession, persecution, resistance, and extermination that enrich and also challenge the more familiar narratives focused on Eastern Europe.”
The enhanced learning offered by the symposium offered an extended benefit for local organizations. “The symposium offered the Holocaust Center a wonderful opportunity to learn about the latest research in the area of Sephardic studies, allowing us to share that knowledge and perspective with educators and students throughout the Pacific Northwest,” said Dee Simon, executive director of the Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center.
At the end of the symposium, University of California at Irvine professor of history Marc Baer reiterated this idea of dissemination and education. “We also need to consider our audience,” he said. “While we have a built-in audience of Sephardic Jews because this is their history, we should address ourselves to a wider audience, because the stories we are telling have great significance for others, too. In all of our research, the question of what it means to be a Sephardic
Jew also challenges what it means to be French, Spanish, German, Greek, or Turkish, and demonstrates how national identity changes over time.”

For the first time in almost three decades, Jewish Family Service of Greater Seattle is set to bring on a new leader. Will Berkovitz, who will succeed long-time CEO Ken Weinberg, takes over the social-service agency at the beginning of July.
“It is extremely exciting,” Berkovitz said, but “I really find it immensely humbling.”
The humility comes, in large part, from the work Weinberg and his staff have done in building the organization from what served a much smaller Jewish community with fewer needs when he began in 1975 to an agency that now has nearly 200 employees and a $9 million budget that serves more than just Jews. JFS now serves clients across the region from multiple religious, socioeconomic and ethnic groups.
“This community feels just a passion and sense of protectiveness to the agency. It’s really special,” Berkovitz said.
Berkovitz, 44, is already well known within Seattle’s Jewish community. He is an ordained rabbi who spent seven years at Hillel at the University of Washington, four of them as its executive director. The social justice and service work he infused into Hillel led him three years ago to the national Jewish social justice and service organization Repair the World, where he served as vice president of partnerships. His history will allow him to hit the ground running at JFS, he said. Still, “there’s going to be an awesome learning curve.”
However, he added, “it’s not completely foreign territory for me, and I’m hoping the professionals there will be teaching me and I’ll be a student of theirs for a strong period of time.”
Berkovitz’s career has taken him parallel to the Jewish Family Service world. Last year he was a keynote speaker at a national conference for the umbrella agency for Jewish Family Services across the country. He provides ongoing couples counseling, which he has done since his Hillel days. And his travels with young adults at Hillel to perform service trips in developing countries brought him in contact with indigenous populations similar to those served by JFS’s immigrant and refugee resettlement program.
Berkovitz will come into JFS with a vision for how he wants to run the agency, but he will need to put that into the context of what already exists.
“It’s going to be an interesting balancing act,” said Eric LeVine, JFS’s incoming board president.
Berkovitz’s vision begins with continuing what he did at both Hillel and Repair the World in measuring outcomes of program areas, which feeds into a revisiting of the agency’s strategic plan, some of which had to be put on the backburner after the start of the 2008 recession. And the need for emergency services such as the food bank and rent assistance continues to grow.
“Demand in a post-recession world still continues to be very high,” LeVine said. “It’s a great opportunity for us to take a step back and challenge the status quo a little bit and test our assumptions.”
Of course, revisiting the agency’s strategy means growing the agency, which means finding new revenue streams.
“A static agency is a dying agency, so I think we can’t be static,” Weinberg said. “We have to find ways of finding new leads, new projects, as well as those things that are already important to us.”
Even in the very near term, Berkovitz and his staff will face some heady obstacles.
“I can see cuts from the federal government, cuts from the state government, and I think it’s going to be enormously challenging to keep the agency going [and] keep the agency vital, to grow where we need to grow,” Weinberg said.
In the long term, Berkovitz can see expansion — and revenue — from small neighborhood service centers, much in the same way banks are opening corner branches, or using the Internet to reach people in outlying areas to provide services.
In the near term, the implementation of the Affordable Care Act will affect both the agency’s clientele and its administration, as JFS will be required to provide health insurance for its sizeable part-time staff.
Similarly, as the Baby Boom generation approaches retirement age, the need for Medicare and other services will be unprecedented.
“For the next 10 years we’re going to see the largest increase of older adults in the history of the world,” Weinberg said. “What are we going to do about it? And who will assist us? Who will be our partners in facing those challenges?
“I will do my best to share with him my thinking on these, but he and his team here will have to come up with solutions,” Weinberg said.
As much as JFS supporters, and Berkovitz himself, acknowledge the big shoes he will need to fill following Weinberg’s departure, Weinberg said Berkovitz needs to be judged on his own merits.
“He is his own unique human being with his own strengths, and I think it’s really important the community, the board, the workers, everyone pull for him, and sort of let go of Ken,” Weinberg said.
Berkovitz agreed.
“I come from a rabbinic background, so I believe deeply in understanding the roots of the tradition that comes before you and not cutting yourself off from your roots,” he said. “It’s in my nature to move with that understanding.”
That reflective perspective was a big reason why Berkovitz rose above, as LeVine put it, the 20 candidates the agency vetted for the CEO position.
“He brings a really outside-the-box creativity at how to look at some of the problems the agency’s been looking at for decades,” LeVine said.
Michele Rosen, who with former Starbucks president Howard Behar led the CEO search committee, told JTNews that Berkovitz’s ability to connect both with donors and the agency’s clientele resonated with the search committee.
“That was the first thing that people noticed, that he really had empathy for the people that come to JFS,” she said. “I think that’s critical.”
Berkovitz did not slide through the search process, Rosen emphasized. Her committee began searching in August, and continued until the May 3 announcement.
“There were at least 20 candidates that…had long screening processes, so this was not a shoo-in at all,” she said. “We had to do right by us and by him.”
Rosen, was a board member at Hillel UW during Berkovitz’s tenure there, so she knew firsthand about his work on social justice issues and how he centered that mission around Judaism. But she said many members of the search committee learned only during the interview about that added dimension to how he can move JFS forward.
“Will’s ability to understand the role of Judaism…and say this service that we perform on behalf of others, the responsibility we feel to take care of people in need who can’t take care of themselves at that moment, is in the very of DNA of what is in the Torah and other teachings,” she said. “That’s our responsibility.”
Berkovitz has long struggled with the idea of God and religion, and he said he has given a lot of thought into what the Jewish part of Jewish Family Service will mean in the future.
“It’s some of the work that’s done in a secular space that actually allows for the possibility of serving the Jewish community as well,” he said. “The balance of that is going to be something that is going to have be worked out deeply.”
It was only having the opportunity to work on a national scale that gave Berkovitz the realization he could be more effective at home.
“The impact I want to make is on the local scale in our community,” he said. “The degree to which that was important to me, that my kids could see [my wife] Lelach and I live out our values deeply like that, I don’t think I could have understood it until I was in the thick of it.”

Joel Magalnick, who has been editor of JTNews since 2003, was named publisher this week by the JTNews board. He served as acting publisher since May 2012 following the departure of former longtime publisher Karen Chachkes. He will maintain the role of editor as well.
“I’m gratified that the board has put the trust of this community institution in my hands, particularly given the fragile financial state of newspapers as a whole,” Magalnick said.
JTNews board chair Peter Horvitz cited Magalnick’s handling of the paper’s finances during a difficult year.
“Joel has always been a good editor, but in the last year he has shown impressive growth as a publisher and has been instrumental in the turnaround of JT News’ financial performance,” Horvitz said. “He deserves much praise for his accomplishments and we’re delighted with his leadership of JTNews.”
Shelley Bensussen, board chair of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, which owns JTNews, agreed.
“Joel has done an excellent job managing the paper through a difficult year, with a transition in leadership at JTNews, and in a marketplace where print media is being challenged every day,” she said. “He has demonstrated that he has the mix of leadership and editorial skills to take on the key position of publisher.”
The appointment took effect May 7.

Grab a Frisbee and a few friends and you’ve got yourself a game of Ultimate. But get serious about it, and maybe the sport can bring together Israeli Jews, Arabs and Palestinian teenagers to become a meaningful effort toward peace in the ongoing Middle East conflict.
That’s what David Barkan did. Since 2009, his organization Ultimate Peace has been doing just that. Barkan spent 20 years playing competitive Ultimate, and in 2005 he took some Jewish Ultimate players to spend a few weeks in Israel to introduce the sport to kids, hold clinics, and play in tournaments.
“When I came back from Israel it became obvious to me that we needed to use this as a peace-building tool,” Barkan said. “I could see it had an effect on the kids that we worked with.”
From that, Ultimate Peace was born.
“The idea was simple,” Barkan said. “You bring them together, with Ultimate as the tool, to build bridges of understanding across the cultures, across the borders, with the hope that they not only enjoy playing Ultimate, and playing Ultimate together, but potentially change and transform, and become friends.”
Sixteen of these coaches in training, or CITs, who create new teams in their home communities as well as coach the players, visited Seattle during the last weekend of April, both to compete at Spring Reign in Burlington, the largest youth Ultimate tournament in the world, and to talk about the program.
One of those players, Areen Shihade, 16, is an Arab Israeli girl from the northern Israeli town of Tamira and a budding leader in Ultimate Peace. Before she joined the group, she would quickly become angry, she said, but Ultimate has helped control her temper. She attributes her newfound calm to one unique aspect of the sport: “In the game, there is no referee, so we have to deal with our little problems on the field,” she said.
The self-refereeing aspect to Ultimate is what Barkan, who said that he too was once hot-headed on the playing field, sees as the key to a successful program.
“Soccer wouldn’t have worked,” he said. “The violence in it isn’t conducive to it, the fact that you can pull the guy’s shirt and elbow when the referee’s not looking. The whole point of this is personal accountability.”
If your opponent is also your referee, you have to figure out a solution on your own, he said, and that’s a skill that can be applied to daily life.
“They’ve already said that’s transferred to their lives outside: How they behave with their families, how they are interested in other sports, and what kind of students and citizens they are,” Barkan said.
Like the game itself, the Bay Area-based Ultimate Peace operates from the grassroots, relying upon donations and sponsorships to hold weeklong summer camps, pay its coaches, buy equipment and uniforms, and send its players to tournaments such as Spring Reign. More than 300 teens from the Middle East have participated in Ultimate Peace since its inception. While in Seattle, the senior rabbis and members of Temple Beth Am provided home hospitality and transportation.
Moses Rivkin, an Ultimate coach and teacher at University Prep in Seattle’s Northend, has been involved with Ultimate Peace since its inception and worked with the camp in Israel. The visiting CITs spoke at his school, as well as rode the bus from Seattle to Burlington with his students, where he could see how they interacted with each other.
“It was cool to see them plugging into each other’s earbuds and sitting in these close quarters together, laughing together, and talking about how their days had gone,” Rivkin said.
Several University Prep students that Rivkin coaches have since applied to the Ultimate Peace coach-in-training program at this summer’s camp, he said.
Though the Middle East kids talked to many groups about their program, they also came to play Ultimate. Spring Reign organizers were at the last minute able to seed MashUP, as the team calls itself, with the A-level high school teams, which ended up being the right call.
“They are so good. They would have rolled over the B division,” said Jeff Jorgenson, one of the directors of Spring Reign. “It was highly competitive, a lot of strong throws, a lot of big jumps, a lot of downfield — all the elements you want to checkbox in a quality Ultimate match.”
The team members talked about Ultimate Peace at the awards ceremony, but they spent plenty of time on the field intermingling with the other teams.
“It was emotional for me, because I’ve got so many games under my belt,” Jorgenson said, “to see that players from Ultimate Peace have come from such a troubled part of the world, where they can still rise up and play with respect for themselves, respect for their teammates, and remember the real victor in a game is how well you play if you give it your all.”
Asmaa Hijazi, a 16-year-old Arab Israeli from the town of Tamira, said the energies she has devoted to the program have been life changing. Hijazi first heard about Ultimate Peace’s weeklong camp two years ago and decided to attend because she was interested in the sport. It quickly became much more than a game.
“Just going through the camp, and having weekend practices, we talk about many things,” she said of her teammates. “We’re always talking about our lives… just as if I was in Tamira and I’d see Arab Muslims.”
Hijazi has been traveling to other towns, both Arab and Jewish, to teach the sport and to recruit kids to come to the camp. She said her family has noticed a change in her, in particular how she has gotten less temperamental.
“When they saw me getting involved in the program and the national team, they saw how much I love it, and how good it is,” she said.
For Elad Strasman, 16, a Jewish Israeli from the city of Ra’anana, being a part of the program “changed my perspective about Arabs and Palestinians,” he said. The former soccer player said that being a part of the leadership program has given him the courage to say something if one of his peers makes a disparaging remark about his newfound friends’ cultures.
The real test will occur in the coming years, when the first cohort of players and coaches-in-training leaves the nest and faces the high pressure of the military — or the receiving end of Israel’s military tactics. Barkan said Ultimate Peace hopes to get the Israelis who join the army to take advantage of a community-service program that would allow them to continue coaching. But Barkan hopes active duty will allow his players to see the ongoing conflict differently.
“If they have a relationship, they’re way more likely to do the right thing when these guys go in the army, and they go into the neighborhoods of the kids who are in their program,” he said. “Can you imagine how that’s going to be for them and how they’re going to think differently than the others around them would?”
That’s the hope of Barkan and Israel’s Ministry of Sport and Culture, which he said has embraced Ultimate Peace. What has become clear is what started as a modest program has become something more positive and fulfilling than its creators could have imagined.
“I’d be really happy about it if it was a cool week for some kids in the Middle East who wouldn’t have otherwise met each other,” said Rivkin, the University Prep teacher. “But to see these incredibly articulate CITs who’ve really grown up in the program, talking about how it changed their life, and coming here and talking to our students about how it changed their life and maybe touching them in some way, it’s a really profound thing for me. I’m glad it exists.”

WASHINGTON (JTA)—He had them until abortion.

U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) was addressing the Reform movement’s Consultation on Conscience conference about his passion, human rights and success in creating mechanisms to combat human trafficking and shine a light on global anti-Semitism. The crowd gathered in a large Capitol Hill conference room Tuesday afternoon was transfixed, laughing along with Smith’s practiced self-deprecation and applauding his commitment.

Until Joanna Blotner, a reproductive rights activist, asked him about his other signature legislation—a bid last year to cut all funding for abortion except in cases of “forcible rape.” Why, Blotner wondered, would Smith seek to limit women’s options?

There was a fraught silence. Smith stumbled through a series of non-sequiturs before settling on the classic congressional non-defense defense: The language cited by the woman already appeared in earlier laws.

“We went back to that,” he said, referring to a 1976 law banning funding for abortion overseas.

Forcible rape—the term implies that rape without violence is consensual—became a buzzword last year that helped topple what had been seen as two surefire GOP Senate bids, in Indiana and Missouri, and became a symbol for the party’s supposed alienation from growing swaths of the electorate.

In the wake of Mitt Romney’s sound defeat in the presidential election, Republican leaders have regularly emphasized the need to reach out to groups among which the GOP made a poor showing—women, minorities and increasingly, Jews.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), the chairwoman of the Republican Conference in the U.S. House of Representatives, hosted a roundtable recently for Jewish leaders that brought together figures who rarely find themselves in the same room together, let alone in dialogue.

Hardcore conservatives such as Republican Jewish Coalition Executive Director Matt Brooks and Sarah Stern, founder of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, exchanged laughs with liberal counterparts like Rabbis David Saperstein and Jack Moline, both of whom are known in the media for their closeness to the Obama White House.

“In order to be an effective leader, you have to reach out to the whole community,” said Nicolas Muzin, the conference’s director of coalitions, who leads outreach to minority communities.

Such GOP-Jewish confabs, while never commonplace, once were at least as frequent as the annual get-together between Senate Democrats and Jewish groups. They stopped soon after the 2000 election of President George W. Bush, whose first term was notorious for its with-us-or-against-us posture toward interest groups, and the ascension of an uncompromising congressional GOP led by hardliners such as Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), the former majority leader known for seeking to crush liberal influence in Washington. Leaders of interest groups perceived as liberal—a sobriquet that characterized many of the mainstream Jewish groups—stopped having their calls to Republican leaders returned. Worse, they were told to stop trying.

No longer. After a decade in which Jewish outreach was largely restricted to a small coterie of like-minded conservative groups, Republicans are reaching beyond their comfort zone in an effort to make inroads with the wider Jewish community. Muzin said there are plans to replicate the meeting with other minority communities on the national level and to encourage lawmakers to use the meetings as templates for similar get-togethers in their districts.

Muzin gleefully described the long and effusive “thanks for the invite” voicemail he received from Moline, and how he played it back for his delighted boss, McMorris Rodgers. The congresswoman responded by borrowing the habit cultivated by Democratic politicians of injecting a subsequent speech to a Jewish group with Jewishisms.

“You may not know that much about me, but I grew up in a rural area of eastern Washington where people grow wheat and apples,” she said a few nights later as the lead GOP guest at the Israeli Embassy’s Independence Day celebrations. “We wouldn’t have known a matzah ball from a basketball.”

At the roundtable hosted by McMorris Rodgers, participants focused on shared agendas, in particular getting tough with Iran and keeping the deduction for charitable contributions at 35 percent, as opposed to the 28 percent sought by the Obama administration. Both are softballs when it comes to Jewish-Republican dialogue and have broad community appeal.

But participants on both sides of the table said they anticipate areas of disagreement, like Medicaid and Medicare, two programs popular among Jewish leaders that Republicans hope to restructure.

“On domestic policy there will be differences, and the members were well prepared for that,” Muzin said.

Evidence of the gap between good intentions and working relationships was evident during the Reform confab this week, which was top heavy with Democrats from Congress and the administration. The two Republicans who participated—Smith and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)—emphasized their eagerness to work with the other side, something that Democrats never felt the need to do.

Graham, like Smith, earned a warm welcome. He addressed an area of agreement with the Reform movement, immigration reform, and delivered several thinly veiled digs at Romney, whose rhetoric was seen as driving away Hispanics.

“My party has turned a corner,” Graham said. ” ‘Self-deportation’ is not a good idea.”

At the McMorris Rodgers meeting in her office, some potentially contentious issues such as immigration reform and preserving entitlements came up briefly when the organizational leaders were asked about their priority agendas. Participants, speaking on background because the contents of the meeting were off the record, said even asking such an open-ended question was refreshing and was taken as evidence that the GOP was ready to listen.

Saperstein, the head of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, said the meeting suggested that the party was ready to listen.

“They could not have been more attentive, more politely responsive at the range of views they heard, more open to engaging with the community,” he said.

The confab included presentations by two top congressmen—Reps. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and Pete Roskam (R-Ill.), the chief deputy majority whip.

Royce outlined his bid to expand Iran sanctions beyond those currently targeting its energy sector to encompass virtually anyone doing business with the country—a model he said had helped moderate North Korea’s behavior in the past. Roskam discussed the charitable deduction, comprehensive immigration reform and the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Stacy Burdett, the director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Washington office, was impressed at how the meeting appeared to be more than a polite exchange. Royce and Roskam were well briefed on what interests the Jewish community, she noted, and McMorris Rodgers wrote down every suggestion.

“It’s a renewed effort to regularize contact,” she said. “Meetings like this are a great opportunity to exchange views and for the members to hear what the organizations are focused on, and for the organization to learn what the members are interested in.”

Erica Nash got her finish line after all. When the Nash family arrived at their Bellevue home just after midnight last Friday morning, they didn’t expect a dozen friends to be there waiting in the dark with a surprise: The finish line Nash wasn’t able to cross four days earlier in Boston.
“I finished 25.7 miles of the marathon,” Nash said. “That’ll have to do.”
More than a week later, the final mile of her race is still a bit cloudy.
“The last thing I remember seeing in my head was the ‘One mile to go’ sign,” she said.
She was trying to figure out how to maneuver the last downhill on Beacon Avenue, one of the main arteries through Brookline and into Boston, when “I saw one runner down on the side of the road, and then all of a sudden everybody was stopped,” she said.
She heard ambulances, then realized the runners had been barricaded. Ripples came through the crowd about a bomb threat. Then about a bomb. She had her phone, so she tried to call her husband. He and their two kids were supposed to be somewhere near the finish line. But the city had shut down the cell phone network to avoid a possible remote detonation.
She tried texting.
“Nothing would go through, then all of a sudden they would go through, but they were coming out of sequence,” she said.
That confused things further. Her husband had just parked at Copley Square, near the finish line in Boston’s Back Bay. They explosions went off while the Nashes were in the elevator.
“The first thing they saw were a roll of sheets, Mylar blankets, rolling down the sidewalk,” Nash said. “A swarm of police officers came and were yelling, ‘Get back, get back!’ and shoved them all into the Westin, where they were held for a few hours.”
Meanwhile, on the course, things were getting complicated. Nash has cerebral palsy, and what had been a very warm day became cooler as the sun disappeared from between the buildings on Beacon Ave. She knew she needed to warm up and relax her muscles. She was sitting against a wrought-iron fence and decided it would be a good idea to get to a friend’s home in Brookline, which was very close by.
“Because I have CP I know that my muscles tend to spasm and whatnot, and I stood up, and I was like, ‘Okay, I just need to settle in and let my muscles reengage and I’ll be fine,’” she said. “Within 15 seconds I was vomiting and started to collapse.”
Help was swift and immediate. She kept hearing she was turning blue, but she tried to refuse treatment, even after EMTs put her into an ambulance. She wasn’t one of the injured.
“They needed to get to the other people because they were bleeding,” she remembers yelling at them.
Triage at Massachusetts General Hospital could not have been better.
“They were really prepared,” Nash said. Each patient had “a team of four to six people, the doctor for each team indicated who he was, everyone was color coded by what team they were…. They clearly had drilled for this. They knew what they were doing.”
The next several hours, however, became difficult. Nash’s legs began to convulse — and kept convulsing for seven or eight hours.
“They wouldn’t stop moving,” she said. “My achilles and all the muscles around my tibia, it just felt like they were going to rip from the bone.”
Nash spent two days in the hospital. She is using a walker because she hasn’t been able to put weight on her feet. After the long flight to SeaTac, when the family arrived home to their surprise greeting, “it seemed to take forever to get from the door to the finish line,” Nash said.
Also awaiting them was a redecorated living room.
“There were hundreds of cards and emails and gifts for us from everybody in the Jewish community. It was really amazing,” she said. “We’re very lucky. I don’t know what people without this kind of community would do.”
Recovery appears like it will be a slow process for the entire family. They stayed with Nash’s in-laws in the Boston suburb of Newton, and she said her 11-year-old daughter Hannah was scared to leave the house.
On the night of the attack, “she would not go back to Boston,” Nash said. “She didn’t want [my husband] to go back. She felt like that guy, or guys, they’re still out there and she didn’t think it was safe.”
In the time since, Hannah has taken on what Nash called an “ultimate caretaker” role, and exhibited other signs of anxiety.
It took a little longer for 7-year-old Jonah to process what he had been through, but earlier this week he curled up in his mother’s lap for several hours and lay quietly.
“He said he didn’t really know what to say,” Nash said. “He didn’t know how to explain it.”
Her husband, she said, was also reluctant to return to work, because he was afraid he’d continually start crying in his office.
At this point, she said, “we’re trying to integrate normal back into our lives.”
Once her muscles heal, Nash will get back on the road. When she was a child, her parents were told that because of her cerebral palsy she’d never walk. Having completed two marathons — in Birch Bay, near the Canadian border, and in Jerusalem — and, of course, almost a third, Nash’s accomplishments go beyond the normal boundaries most people push against to complete such a tough race. After this year’s Boston Marathon, she had planned to retire to half-marathons, but now she may go back for one more.
“I started with a group of people who, like me, had different challenges, and I kind of want to know if they’re okay,” she said. “I’d like to see them at the start line again.”

Enrollment in greater Seattle area Jewish day schools has been something of a roller coaster over the last decade, according to several longtime educators here, but the onset of the global economic recession in 2007 forced many families to rely on grants and scholarships to continue giving their children a private school education. Most day schools are seeing more young faces in their classrooms, but the trend is that many of those children are receiving much more financial assistance than they had in the past.
School heads agree that “no child is ever left behind” — families who cannot afford the tuition will be given the help they need, which has kept many of the day school enrollment figures fluctuating within a fairly narrow range.
But Rabbi Rob Toren, executive director of the Samis Foundation, the primary granting agency for K-12 Jewish day schools in Washington, told JTNews he would still like to see more Jewish families choose a Jewish day school education across the board.
“Enrollment, currently, is about where it was 15 years ago,” Toren said. “Orthodox enrollment is up, whereas enrollment in the community or in ‘egalitarian’ schools is down over this time period, consistent with trends elsewhere in the U.S.”
At the Seattle Hebrew Academy, the student population hovered between its high of 215 in 2005 and a low of 199 students in 2011, with a close second occurring this year in 2013, showing an enrollment of 214, according to Rivy Poupko Kletenik, SHA’s head of school.
“If the economy has affected anything,” said Kletenik, “it’s that we have less full-tuition payers. Eight years ago, it was more like 44 percent of our students that were on tuition assistance and now we’re well over 60 percent.”
When asked if these figures reflected the effects of the catastrophic downturn in the economy, Kletenik was unequivocal.
“It absolutely did,” she said.
The Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle in Bellevue told JTNews the school is thriving in its 2012-13 academic year.
“This year, enrollment at the Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle is the highest it has been in four years,” said Amy Adler, the director of admissions and external relations at JDS. “We currently have 236 students enrolled in our preschool through 8th-grade program.”
Adler credits a new tuition-grant program at the school for providing the incentive for many families to enroll there, according to feedback she has received.
The Torah Day School, located in the Columbia City neighborhood of Seattle is also experiencing a significant growth spurt. 
“We have grown from 52 students in year one,” said Rabbi Sheftel Skaist, TDS’s head of school, “to just over 130 students in year seven, an average annual enrollment increase of about 17 percent. Neither the economy nor the cost of tuition seems to have been a direct factor in our enrollment trend.”
The Seattle Jewish Community School is experiencing strong growth as well. Its kindergarten has a waiting list, head of school Shoshana Bilavsky told JTNews, while it is enjoying a 14 percent increase in enrollment overall.
But SJCS was not necessarily a victim of the recession. A rather significant drop in enrollment, nearly 25 percent during the 2006-2007 academic years was the result of leadership changes and the loss of their building, said Bilavsky.
“Finding our current location, exercising a right of first refusal to actually purchase the building, having the founding head of school return to the helm, followed by another experienced head of school these past three years, has seen enrollment making its way back up to the 2006-7 numbers, in spite of setbacks due to the economic downturn of 2009,” Bilavsky said.
However, like so many of the other Jewish day schools in the area, the noisier halls have not translated into a rosier balance sheet. 
“We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of our families applying for financial aid and our tuition assistance is a larger percentage of our budget than it has been in the past,” Bilavsky said.
Rabbi Bernie Fox, head of school at the Northwest Yeshiva High School on Mercer Island, told JTNews the most significant factor in his school’s enrollment is the size of the 8th-grade graduating classes from the local Jewish middle schools, but a close second, he said, is the cost of tuition.
The 75 students currently enrolled at NYHS are a little more than half of what the student population was in 2001-02, its highest enrollment number in the last 15 years, when 132 students attended classes there.
Like other Jewish schools, Fox said enrollment at NYHS increases and decreases from year to year.
“NYHS provides financial aid to its families that cannot pay full tuition,” said Fox. “Our goal is that no child should be denied a Jewish education because the family lacks the resources to pay full tuition.”
Still, he said, some parents are willing to pay and others won’t. The cost of tuition, said Fox, is also a concern for non-day school students who may want to transfer to the NYHS.
“NYHS is currently offering a $5,000 merit-based scholarship for incoming freshmen and sophomores,” added Fox. “The scholarship is renewable for the balance of the recipient’s years at NYHS.”
According to Toren, the highest enrollment figures for the entire K–12 day-school system in Washington occurred from 2001 through 2003 when there were 730 students, but those numbers “declined rapidly until 2011,” when it rebounded to 642 students.
Today, said Toren, “the increase of students that brought the current total up to 688 has come mainly from the Orthodox community.”
The number of students attending the Menachem Mendel Seattle Cheder, a Chabad-affiliated Orthodox school, “has been stable and steady over the past 10 to 12 years,” according to Tziviah Goldberg, an MMSC board member.
MMSC, located in Seattle’s Northend in the Maple Leaf neighborhood, has a preschool and grade school for boys and girls, and continues through 12th grade for girls. Despite holding steady in enrollment, however, the school has experienced ongoing financial concerns.
“We are at 90 students now, and it’s been varying between 85 and 95,” Goldberg said. “Samis supports us with financial aid dollars, however, we are up to 82 percent of the population [that is] on some sort of aid and the Samis dollars do not cover it all. Our student body is generally committed to Jewish education, regardless of cost. Trends seem to indicate that it will be about the same going forward.”

In early spring, the AP physics class at the Northwest Yeshiva High School was one of only 100 teams around the world to qualify for the 2013 Team America Rocketry Challenge (TARC). However, May 11, when the team would fire its rocket, is a Saturday — Shabbat.
For several days it was unclear whether the team would be given an accommodation to fire its rocket without violating Shabbat, but as of April 19, the team’s teacher, Peter Brodkin, said he was confident an accommodation would be made.
“As of this moment, I think we will be able to do it,” he said. “It’s just a question of needing to keep with the rules of the competition and keep with the rules of Shabbat.”
TARC has been very accommodating, Brodkin said.
“They’ve been very helpful and sympathetic to the cause. They are allowing us to prepare our rocket on Friday before Shabbat, and then on Saturday, someone will press the button for us, and we will just be observers.”
This is not the first time the Orthodox high school has run into accommodation issues due to Jewish holidays. In 2010, the girls’ basketball team qualified to compete at the state championship in Yakima, yet their first game fell on the Fast of Esther. The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association refused to provide an accommodation for the team to play on another day. After much ado, the team forfeited the game and lost its seeding.
Those associated with the school feared the same fate would befall the rocket team. But, at least by press time, will likely be the case, at this time.
Whether they travel to Washington, D.C. or not to compete, the rocket team’s accomplishment is celestial. A qualifying rocket needed to hit an altitude of 750 feet, have a total flight time of 48 to 50 seconds and recover a raw egg safely with a 15-inch parachute.
NYHS’s rocket soared 752 feet and descended in 46 seconds, close enough to target. NYHS joined a record-setting 725 other teams from Spain to California to make the challenge.
Team members Jessica Schwartz, Joel Jacobs and Itai Amon designed their approach using computer simulations to determine the optimal design, weight, and type of engine.
“We built this rocket competition into the curriculum as a way to get real-world application of theories,” Brodkin said. “A couple of years ago the National Association of Rocketry sent me a flyer, talking about this specific competition. Last year we didn’t qualify, but we learned a lot and had a lot of fun.”
This year, NYHS had two teams. One qualified. Brodkin said the team accomplished this feat due to its perseverance.
“We spent a number of Sundays and many hours outside of class,” he said. “They are a very determined group. They made this happen.”
Brodkin said the team gave its all to the project, both academically and with the labor involved.
“We made the design on the computer that’s supposed to get us in the ball park,” Brodkin said. “But when you build the rockets it doesn’t come out as nicely as the computer suggests it will. Once you launch, you keep having to launch and launch until you get it right.”
TARC is the world’s largest rocket contest, sponsored by the Aerospace Industries Association and the National Association of Rocketry. It was created in 2002.
Approximately 7,000 students from across the nation compete in TARC each year. Teams design, build and fly a model rocket that reaches a specific altitude and duration determined by a set of rules developed each year. The contest is designed to encourage students to study math and science and pursue careers in aerospace. TARC has been growing every year in both attendees and prizes.
The top 100 teams, based on local qualification flights, are invited to Washington, D.C. in May for the national finals. Prizes include $60,000 in cash and scholarships split between the top 10 finishers. NASA invites top teams to participate in its Student Launch Initiative, an advanced rocketry program.

LOS ANGELES (JTA) — Sit back by the bonfire and pop open a brewski, it’s Lag b’Omer.
Since we have been counting the Omer — a biblical measure of barley that was brought as an offering to the Temple — each evening from the second night of Passover, what better way to mark the coming holiday than by downing a barley beverage, cold and carbonated?
What’s the occasion?
Lag b’Omer marks the ending of a plague during the Bar Kochba revolt in the second century CE. According to tradition, students and soldiers were dying and the plague ended on that day.
The one-day holiday, which this year begins on the night of April 27, is the 33rd day of the counting of the Omer — in Hebrew, the letters that spell “lag” represent the number 33.
In remembrance of those who died, the Omer season, which lasts 49 days and ends the night before Shavuot, is a period of partial mourning — no dancing, parties, weddings, not even haircuts. It is also a period of study and reflection.
Today, to celebrate the reprieve, the holiday for many has turned into a day to cut loose. Festivals are held with rides for the kids and, especially in Israel, there are bonfires.
The bonfire flames are said to represent the light of the Kabbalistic teachings of Rabbi Simeon bar Yochai, whose yahrzeit is observed on Lag b’Omer. Thousands visit his tomb on Mount Meron, not far from Safed, to pay homage. There it is considered an honor to offer the visitors a Chai rotel — an ancient measurement of about 15 gallons of drink. The choices are non-alcoholic beverages and wine; why not beer?
In the U.S., seeing a barley and beer connection, the college-age demographic and beyond have found other ways to brew up enthusiasm for this minor holiday. Beginning several years ago at college campus Hillels, such as at the universities of Wisconsin and Washington, the holiday was observed in part by the quaffing of beer at “Lager b’Omer” events.
Last year, three Boston synagogues brought in seasoned home brewer Aidan Acker for an evening of beer making and talking about the holiday called “Fermenting the Omer,” which made sense since most beer is made by fermenting a brew of malted barley, hops and yeast.
This year, I was planning a Lag b’Omer bonfire and get-together in my backyard. Wanting in on this new Jewish use of beer, I spoke with Alex Ourieff, a Jewish foodie and self-taught home brewer. Ourieff had tied beer recently to another Jewish holiday, Tu b’Shevat, by brewing a seven-species beer.
“For the seven-species brew, I combined pomegranate molasses, barley, wheat, dried figs, green grapes, date sugar and olive leaf extract,” said Ourieff, 25, who will soon attend the Culinary Institute of America in Napa, Calif.
“I like layering flavors, it’s a mental exercise,” he added, providing a taste of his creativity.
Home brewing has grown as a hobby since President Jimmy Carter signed a bill in 1978 allowing up to 100 gallons per adult to be home brewed, tax free. Stores such as Sound Homebrew Supply in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood have bubbled up to supply and educate the hobbyists.
“The Sumerian Hymn to Ninkasi is about beer making, and the Code of Hammurabi includes laws about beer,” said Greg Beron, of Culver City Home Brewing Supply Company near Los Angeles, after I explained to him my Lag b’Omer mission of connecting with barley.
“In recent excavations near the Pyramids in Egypt near where the people who build them were housed, they have found bakery/breweries,” he added, trying to give me a historical connection.
A more recent fan of the brew was Michael Steinberg, a friend of Beron’s and prize-winning home brewer who had retired and moved to Las Vegas. Since he was given a beer-making kit in 1999, Steinberg estimates he has brewed hundred of gallons.
“I like beer at Hanukkah,” Steinberg said. “It goes better with brisket and latkes than wine.”
As to a special Lag b’Omer brew? Ourieff, thinking about the holiday bonfires, suggested making a smoked beer by roasting the barley before brewing.
“It will have a dark, smoky flavor,” he said, suddenly making a columnist thirsty.
Since the days until Lag b’Omer were few — it takes about five weeks to make beer — Ourieff directed me to several craft breweries that made “smoked porters.”
Sitting by the fire with a smoky barley brew, we could raise our glasses to friendship, to Bar Yochai’s light and drink our Omer.

Editor’s Note: This is part two in a series about the turnover in the Seattle Jewish community’s leadership.
With the turnover of so many top-level Jewish professionals in our community, what should agencies be looking for in their new leadership? Josh Gortler, who spent 37 years as CEO of the Caroline Kline Galland and Associates nursing and senior-care facilities, has a unique insight into this Jewish community.
“It is not a job, it is a commitment,” Gortler told JTNews. “The person’s primary function is to run the agency that they get paid for, but they cannot have a blind eye to what’s happening in the total community, because what happens to one affects the other.”
Three major organizations, the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, Jewish Family Service of Greater Seattle and the Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle hope to announce new leaders in the coming months. As was reported previously in JTNews, a half dozen synagogues are seeking new rabbis or executive directors as well.
A Jewish professional, Gortler noted, “is representing not only their own institution, but they’re representing the entire Jewish community. We’re all part of the kehilla.”
And being part of the kehilla, the community, Gortler said, means support of everyone’s religious observance — or lack thereof — and other organizations within the community.
“Your institution has to be number uno, but you cannot move your eye from the rest of the community,” he said.
Judy Neuman, CEO of the Stroum Jewish Community Center, echoed many of Gortler’s sentiments.
“I hope that they’re creative thinkers [and] I hope that they would put a high premium on true, community collaboration,” she said, “both in terms of strategically thinking about the community more holistically and working together to serve those needs.”
Neuman pointed to her own experience of having worked in the corporate world for many years, and as a lay leader in the Jewish community, which gave her good insights into both. She said she hoped that local agencies might take a look at someone with similar experience.
“That gave me a big running start, and it also helped me think communally and not only just the JCC,” she said.
In its search for a new chief executive, representatives from the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle conducted close to 100 interviews — not of candidates, but of “community members, donors, non-donors, partners, rabbis, etcetera, etcetera,” said Robin Boehler, who with Andrew Cohen co-chairs the Federation’s CEO search committee.
Those meetings resulted in a list of nearly unanimous attributes: “Thinking and acting strategically, communicating effectively, inspiring others in building commitment, and leading and managing change,” Boehler said.
Given the Federation’s flagging or flat community campaigns over the past several years, excelling at all of these attributes and growing the campaign could be a tall order, but Boehler thinks the right candidate is out there.
“The bent of this search is not just to find someone who can manage and run the Federation,” she said. “It’s to lead the Federation and the community, and to be someone who communicates incredibly well back and forth, in and out, and every direction what the value of having a Jewish Federation in a community like ours can bring.”
The new CEO will replace Richard Fruchter, who stepped down from the position in July 2012 after six years in the position. The Federation’s chief operating officer, Nancy Greer, has held the position of interim CEO while the search has been underway.
The search has narrowed to four candidates, Boehler said, with each either planning to visit Seattle or having already visited to meet with the full search committee.
“If all goes well, we’ll narrow it to a smaller field and we’ll bring them again in May,” Boehler said, with the hopes of announcing a new CEO by mid-June and a start date as close as possible to July 1.
Jewish Family Service has big shoes to fill when its CEO of 29 years, Ken Weinberg, retires from the position in June. Right now, the search, which began in October, has narrowed from 10 interviewed to two. JFS hopes to announce its final candidate by the end of this month.
“I’m very excited about the two candidates,” said Emily Alhadeff, JFS’s board president. “They’re both great and both different from each other.”
They are also very different from their would-be predecessor.
“We’re not even trying to find another Ken,” Alhadeff said, “because that person does not exist.”
Weinberg was instrumental in building up an agency that, when he came on as a geriatric social worker in 1975, had 15 employees and a budget of approximately $500,000. Today, close to 200 people work for JFS, with a budget approaching $9 million and a much wider array of programs for a much larger population in need of emergency or social services.
“One of Ken’s strongest assets is he really empowers the people who work with him,” Alhadeff said. “Every single staff person in that building, or who works for JFS, truly believes in the mission, and I think that’s what also makes JFS so strong.”
Whichever candidate is hired will be walking into new financial challenges due to external realities such as the federal budget sequester and likely cuts in funding from the state legislature.
“Institutional funding is way down, so we need to figure out how we’re going to fund our programs and how we’re going to keep funding while doing that,” Alhadeff said.
Weinberg plans to continue to work with JFS in an advisory role. Like Weinberg, Maria Erlitz, head of school at the Jewish Day School in Bellevue, does not plan to walk away from the academy she helped found more than 30 years ago when she retires at the end of the school year.
“She’s still in the community,” said Robin Castrogiovanni, who with Mindy Geisser is leading the search committee for Erlitz’s successor.
“We’re taking our time,” Castrogiovanni said of the search. “We want someone who has a full complement of skills in order to come into the school. We’re not trying to replace Maria with another Maria. She’s a unique individual, someone who’s left a legacy.”
That said, JDS’s adoption of what’s known as inquiry-based education, which gives students the ability and leeway to use their natural curiosity to help them learn, means “someone who’s coming in new has to buy into the fact this is the education we’re providing,” Castrogiovanni said. “We are taking a stand to make sure that we fit into the future of education and preparing our kids for the future.”
That doesn’t appear to be a barrier, as candidates are still submitting applications for the position despite the search committee having already brought in some potential finalists to visit the campus.
The committee hasn’t ruled out bringing in an interim head of school if they don’t find the right permanent candidate. Castrogiovanni said the committee wants to be sure its next head can properly engage both in outreach to the Jewish and non-Jewish communities as well as be an expert in educational management. And, though it probably should go without saying, the right person is someone “obviously who has a passion for Jewish education.”

In 2000, a Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle demographic study showed Seattle’s northeast quadrant as the state’s fastest growing Jewish community. Recent U.S. Census data suggests it still is. Add to this a trend of young adults turning away from organized religion, and you have a recipe for three new Jewish programs gaining footholds in that neighborhood.
Nicknamed The Hub @ SJCS when the idea germinated two years ago, Jewish Junction launched in January with the appointment of manager Niva Gurewitsch. A Seattle Jewish Community School initiative, it partners with PJ Library, the Stroum Jewish Community Center, and the Seattle Jewish Cooperative Playschool.
Jewish Junction, explains Gurewitsch, was “created in response to a need for young families living in Seattle’s metropolitan core and northern suburbs to more easily access community programming and activities.” It transforms SJCS into a multi-use communal hub where participants “meet and connect with other families interested in expanding their Jewish community.”
The popularity of programs held during The Hub’s pilot year, like those mentioned above and Community of Mindful Parents lectures, made the need for something like Jewish Junction clear. “Over 50 percent of the participants…weren’t affiliated with the school,” said Gurewitsch. At the beginning of last year, SJCS won a Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education 2011 Challenge Award for $125,000 for the initiative, a competitive grant given to schools driving revenue through innovation. 
As a non-denominational, free or
fee-for-service organization with no membership, “our hope is to provide a casual and comfortable entry point into the organized Jewish community in ways that support and encourage sustained participation,” Gurewitsch added. They’re reaching out through Facebook
(www.facebook.com/JewishJunction) and Twitter (@JewishJunction), with a website launching soon.
While Gurewitsch is housed at SJCS, the Junction functions independently of the school and is funded by grants from the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, local family foundations, and private donors.
“Jewish Junction provides a secular opportunity for engagement of families,” said Amy Hilzman-Paquette, director of community engagement at the Federation, and the “opportunity to connect families” with the organized community.
Renee Cohen Goodwin, Chief Operating Officer of the SJCC, calls programs co-sponsored with Jewish Junction a “mobile SJCC,” and wrote in an email that programs that happen away from their Mercer Island or North Seattle campuses, like summer camp, the preschool co-op, the young families’ Passover seder, and fitness classes, “are important steps in providing the wider community with more avenues to build connections with one another.”
The Junction does not compete with synagogues or day schools, Gurewitsch stresses, but is a “matchmaker” between families and organizations and resources, letting families “discover how, where, and with whom they want to ‘do Jewish.’”
Attracting participants from young adults with and without children to older adults, Mercaz Seattle (www.mercazseattle.org)
is a learning and gathering center founded and run by Rabbi Avi and Rachel Rosenfeld in their North Seattle home. Rachel describes Mercaz as “open Orthodox,” borrowing an idea started by Rabbi Avi Weiss in New York.
“My husband and I have always been interested in different models for Jewish engagement,” she said.
Mercaz began as a monthly melaveh malka (traditional meal after the end of Shabbat) to which 12 to 40 people would come for an evening of music, stories, and songs. “We saw that it was sparking something,” she said.
Mercaz now hosts one Friday night service and meal and one Saturday evening meal each month, plus classes. Women and men sit and sing together at the inclusive gatherings, but a mechitza (divider) is erected for services.
Bellingham native and University of Washington grad Rabbi Rosenfeld was ordained by Yeshivat Chovevei Torah in New York, and is a chaplain at Swedish Medical Center. Rachel Rosenfeld has a master’s in education and teaches part-time at Herzl-Ner Tamid Conservative Congregation and Congregation Beth Shalom. They have three children, ages 7, 5 and 2.
“We’re trying to reach whoever wants to come,” and make an effort to avoid schedule conflicts with neighborhood synagogues, Rachel said. “We’re not trying to replace [the synagogue],” but rather add a Modern Orthodox outlook not generally found in Seattle.
For young adults without children, Selah Seattle has taken a similar approach, says founder Renna Khuner-Haber. It also doesn’t compete with synagogues, but creates a place for those who don’t find a peer community at local houses of worship.
Moving to Seattle a year ago to begin graduate studies at Bastyr University, Khuner-Haber says she was looking for “strong, spirited, Friday night davening.” Not knowing where to find it, she hosted a gathering at her house. Fifteen people came. Now the home-based egalitarian monthly services and Shabbat vegetarian potlucks attract 30 to 40 participants.
Selah (www.facebook.com/SelahSeattleMinyan) is run by a volunteer leadership team and sees itself as part of the independent minyan movement evolving around the country.
“The independent minyan is what the havurah movement was two generations ago,” said Khuner-Haber.

As a college English major, I learned the prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s 14th-century language invokes the onset of springtime — April with “his showers sweet” — as an inspiration for pilgrimages.
Nowadays, catching up on what I didn’t learn in college, I head out on my own religious journey at this season. Unlike Chaucer’s characters’ travels, my pilgrimage takes me no farther from home than a Shabbat afternoon seat in my nearby synagogue and the back pages of my siddur.
This is the season when Jews traditionally learn Pirke Avot. Some read a chapter a week all the way through the summer up to Rosh Hashanah. But some, like the group I attend, just go from Passover to Shavuot.
What is Pirke Avot? And why is Rivy Poupko Kletenik, JT News columnist and Seattle Hebrew Academy head of school, teaching it every Shabbat afternoon?
“I loved my father’s books,” she says, calling her resources “friends that I take out every year.”
The books and the love of teaching are now an inheritance from her father, the late, learned Rabbi Baruch Poupko, who in his last years enjoyed sitting in and watching his daughter’s Shabbat afternoon classes.
“There’s such a wealth of strong opinions,” she says of the many commentators she brings into these springtime spiritual explorations. “Psychological, Chassidic, academic, even Christian scholars.”
Pirke Avot has landed so deeply in our everyday wisdom that its origins in the early years of the Common Era — ca. 200 BCE to 200 CE — have become almost irrelevant:
“Who is wise? One who learns from every person…. Who is rich? One who is happy with what he has.” (Chapter 4, v. 1)
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what I? And if not now, when?” (1:14)
“Find yourself a teacher. Make yourself a friend. Judge everyone favorably.” (1:6)
“There are four character types: ‘mine is mine and yours is yours,’ an average character…; ‘mine is yours and yours is mine,’ an unlearned person; ‘mine is yours and yours is yours,’ a very pious person; ‘yours is mine and mine is mine,’ a wicked person.” (5:13) (Translations paraphrased from Artscroll siddur)
“Pirke Avot” is often translated as “Ethics of the Fathers,” or “Chapters of the Fathers,” but that title turns out to be misleading. In fact, a dozen years ago, a collection of Jewish-mother wisdoms called “Pirke Imahot” mirrored the name, but missed the history. Pirke Avot is indeed a collection of memorable sayings by men who presumably were fathers, arranged in chapters (“Pirke”). But the title engages us in classic Jewish word play.
Does “avot” here really mean “fathers”? Sayings of great rabbis? Actually, as we were reminded in the first class this year, the word “avot” usually means just the forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So the teachers whose sayings have been collected in this classic book — this part of the Mishna — aren’t “avot”? In fact, maybe the title doesn’t refer to people at all.
“Av,” plural “avot,” often means the essence, the fundamental, the original. So these chapters of sayings by teachers from a foundational time in Jewish history are actually “chapters of fundamentals,” — basically, the ethical bases for a good life, as passed down from teacher to teacher, collected in the critical years of Jewish development that surrounded the 70 CE destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.
Challenged from within by the nascent Christian movements, and from without by the cultures we learned in college to call “classical,” the voices of those who received the tradition’s wisdom remain alive in Pirke Avot.
My own father’s remembered voice comes alive as I write this. Dave Yellen was a kid in 1920s Beaumont, Texas, one of five sons of a learned immigrant father, the town’s shochet, known as “the Reverend L.M. Yellen.” What I know about our family’s history of learning at this season is that the little boy who became my dad so badly wanted to go play baseball on springtime Saturday afternoons that he taught himself how to start crying. His soft-hearted father fell for it, and, I’m glad to report, it did his son’s Jewish identity no harm.
But the story speaks to the spirit of the season. The weather improves, the days grow longer. And it is that very spirit that placed the study of Pirke Avot into Sabbath afternoons all over the Jewish world.
Perhaps, considering some of the tales of Chaucer’s pilgrims, a lot more than a kid’s baseball game was at stake. As it says in this intro from the Lehmann-Prins Pirke Avoth, part of Rivy Kletenik’s treasured collection:

When nature awakens from its winter sleep, field and meadow reflect the beauty of spring, the stately fruit trees gladden the eyes and the heart with their splendid blossoms, then man, too, feels a stirring of new life and hidden desires. In this season, therefore, as a way of restraining those awakening passions, the Sages enjoin us to read the Chapters of the Fathers, a remarkably fine collection of ethical teachings…. These ethics differ considerably from those of other nations, for the latter are man-made, whereas Jewish ethics emanate from God.

Indeed, the compilers of Chapter 1:1 of Pirke Avot trace the lineage of Jewish wisdom from Moses, hearing it straight from God on Sinai, directly to their own teachers.
The often-quoted Hillel, he of the “If I am not for myself, who will be for me” verse, gets the last word here. Not one of his many Pirke Avot quotations, but, conveniently, his famous voice from that part of the Talmud titled Shabbat. Rabbi Hillel is asked to sum up the whole Torah on one foot. His reply works equally well for a good sport or a good student: “What is hateful to you, do not do to someone else. The rest is commentary. Go and study.”

During the first weekend in April, guests from California to Connecticut converged on Seattle in honor of Ruth Schocken, whose life story is a poignant reminder of survival. She turned 100 on April 3.
The life of this German-Jewish immigrant who escaped the Nazis at age 25 and created a new life in the Pacific Northwest can be seen as a testament to family values, hard work and exceptionally strong will, both mentally and physically.
Though all three of Schocken’s adult children live in the area and are actively involved in their mother’s life, she lives independently, though her physical mobility has recently decreased. Still, Schocken has a matter-of-fact quality about herself, according to her daughter, Barbara Lahav.
Before offering up a generous slice of marzipan-covered birthday cake, Schocken spoke with JTNews between visits from out-of-town relatives as her daughter helped supply anecdotes. Flowers and family photo displays decorated a cozy living space. A framed letter from President and Mrs. Obama shared birthday congratulations from the White House.
Growing up as the youngest of eight in Bielefeld, Germany, Ruth Hamlet Schocken experienced loss early on. Her oldest brother died during World War I. Louis, her father, was a meat wholesaler and an active member of the local synagogue; of her mother, Schocken said, “the whole town liked her cooking.”
As a youngster, Ruth pitched in, bringing bread to the communal oven. She later trained in window display and visual merchandising and went to work for her sister Thea and brother-in-law Fritz at the Leeser Silk Haus in Herford, Westphalia.
“[By that time] we were just lucky we got out,” she recalled. “The SS were already coming around the store and wouldn’t let people go in.”
This was in 1938, just before Kristallnacht. They couldn’t leave Germany because “they had no liquid assets,” said Lahav. “Everything was tied up in the store.”
But one evening Schocken left work late, forgetting to turn off her iron. By the next morning, “the whole interior burnt down — but my sister ran to me smiling,” she said.
They now had insurance money and a way to leave “because of an iron,” she said. “In less than a year we got out.”
They made it to the U.S., but not without some lasting trauma: A fear of uniforms left Schocken unable to tolerate even a driving test.
After coming to Seattle, Schocken met her husband, another German-Jewish refugee, through friends.
“It’s like little Switzerland [here],” she said. “I came to Seattle because my sister and brother-in-law were here already; I first came to Cincinnati but didn’t like the heat.”
Her husband Heinz, which he Americanized to Henry, was related to the famed Schocken literary and publishing family through his father, whose older brother Salman established Schocken Books and became publisher of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. Amos Schocken, a cousin of Ruth Schocken’s children, runs the newspaper today.
Establishing roots in Seattle revolved around synagogue and social connections with other refugees.
“The Jewish Club of Washington was a very important gathering place for our family,” said Joe Schocken, Ruth’s son, of the club that reached out to new arrivals and helped provide moral and financial support. The club disbanded last year.
But the Schockens joined another institution that has thrived throughout the years — the Herzl congregation on 20th and Spruce in the Central District, which is now Herzl-Ner Tamid on Mercer Island. The family is in its fourth generation of membership — four generations happy to celebrate the centennial of its matriarch.
“It’s obviously very special to have mother at this age, [for her] to enjoy and participate in the lives of her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren,” said Joe Schocken. “It’s great to be able to tell the story and create family history.”

It would likely be an impossible task to separate Jonathan Medved’s love of Israel from his position as the founder and CEO of OurCrowd, his newest cutting edge Web-based venture capital fund. The fund allows would-be investors to peruse hundreds of Israeli startup companies online who hope to capitalize on Israel’s current status as one of the safest markets in the world.
At an event hosted by his brother, syndicated radio talk-show host Michael Medved and his wife Diane, and the Seattle office of the Washington-Israel Business Council, the longtime tech entrepreneur spoke to a crowd of 35 at the Island Crust Café on Mercer Island to “sell” the audience of intrigued fund managers, local techies, and hungry entrepreneurs on the opportunity of investing $1 million or more — at a minimum — to buy into a vast array of the most innovative and potentially blockbuster up-and-coming startup companies in Israel.
“The multi-nationals have come in force to Israel,” said Medved. “[Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer is making an almost annual trek to Israel. Google has built the most over-the-top offices and has two different research centers. Intel has 8,000 people in Israel, HP has 6,000, IBM has five different research centers, and Facebook has bought two companies. The big players now, they’re all coming to Israel.”
While at the same time many members of the area’s Jewish community congregated at a nearby venue to commemorate Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Medved contended that the wildly successful business and investment climate in Israel is its own powerful testimonial to the vibrancy of the country and ought to discredit anti-Semitic regimes.
“The fact that we are here, 70 years after the Holocaust, talking about how great it is to invest in Israel and how Israel is thriving, is a supernatural, incredible, wonderful affirmation of who we are,” Medved said. “Today we are the masters of the Internet, with all due respect, and not just in Israel but here and elsewhere abroad.”
A California native, Medved, who studied history at the University of California at Berkeley, moved to Jerusalem in the ’90s and lives there today with his family.
Medved has a history of birthing and nurturing several powerful high-tech companies. From 1982 through 1990, he was one of the founders and the executive vice president of marketing at MERET Optical Communications Inc., in Santa Monica, California. In Israel, he participated in several noteworthy high-tech companies and co-founded Accent, serving as its executive vice president of marketing from 1993-1994.
In 1995, he co-founded Israel Seed Partners and in 2006 became the CEO at Vringo, originally launched as a cell-phone ringtone company that has since reached a valuation in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Today, said Medved, Israel’s economy has a 4 percent growth rate and was one of only two countries in the world that did not experience an economic contraction during the global financial crisis.
Referring to a bar-chart graphic, the economic trendlines illustrated Medved’s essential message.
“Israel is actually growing steeper than China, growing steeper than Brazil, the very anemic line is the Eurozone, and the pathetic black line is the United States,” he said. “Not only are we proud of this, but Israel is now coming to the rescue of its friends and partners and growing jobs in this economy in a significant way.”
Eyal Levy, from the WIBC, GTD Capital LLC, and a former business associate of Medved’s looked at Israel’s economy from a broader context.
“There are about 100,000 people involved in the tech sector in Israel and they generate a significant amount of business,” Levy told JTNews, “but even in the tech industry, there definitely is a decline. Presumably, what he is doing could help overcome some of that.”
Both Medved and Levy don’t deny that Israel lacks the presence of the one, or maybe two, large companies that could sustain its business image globally and its multi-layered economy locally.
But then, they say, Israelis are good at innovating and selling off new ideas to entrepreneurs who can further the distribution and marketing aspects of a business.
“That’s why Jonathan’s proposal is a very good idea,” added Levy, “because that’s what Israel needs. He will find tremendous opportunities”
Over the last 12 years, said Medved, venture capital business in Israel accounted for about a half-billion dollars per quarter, which accounts for $1 to $2 billion a year invested in Israeli companies.
“The majority of the money is now coming directly from overseas venture capital funds and this last year, 26 percent of the money went to life sciences,” Medved said. “The growing area in Israel right now happens to be med-tech.”

Editor’s note: This is the first in a two-part series about the large turnover in leadership within metropolitan Seattle’s Jewish community. This issue, JTNews will focus on the synagogues. The next will focus on our local agencies.

When the announcement came two weeks ago that Temple Beth Am’s senior rabbinical team of Jonathan and Beth Singer would be leaving Seattle at the end of June to lead a synagogue in San Francisco, it sent a shockwave through both the Reform congregation and the Seattle area’s organized Jewish community. In part it was because the rabbis have been so involved in the area’s Jewish life, but also because it’s yet one more organization of the many in Seattle that needs to find new leadership.
Beth Am is at the start of its search process, as are Bellevue’s Temple B’nai Torah and the Seward Park neighborhood’s Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath, to find permanent replacements on their pulpits. In the meantime, Sephardic Bikur Holim, also in Seward Park, hopes it has completed its search for a new rabbi. Two other Seattle congregations, Temple De Hirsch Sinai and Congregation Beth Shalom, are conducting searches to replace their departing executive directors, who run the day-to-day tasks of operating a synagogue.
At the same time, three of the area’s major community agencies, the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, Jewish Family Service of Greater Seattle, and the Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle hope to have new leadership in place by summer.
“The word bittersweet is one we’re using frequently,” said Elizabeth Asher, president of Temple Beth Am’s board. “There’s a lot of emotion, because these rabbis have given us a gift of feeling very personally connected to them.”
But the three weeks since the board was notified of the Singers’ impending departure have also been a whirlwind of activity: The Reform-based Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), which is helping to facilitate the search, had a deadline of this week to receive the application forms for an interim rabbi while the search for a permanent replacement gets underway. That was in addition to the temple’s board needing to architect a plan to develop criteria for choosing a rabbi before it actually engages its search committee, as well as personally responding to the many members in the 900-family congregation who had questions and concerns about the transition.
“It’s an intense time, but we’re not scrambling, we’re not disorganized, we just have a lot to do in a short period of time,” Asher said. “We have to ensure there are seamless transitions.”
The biggest concern has been for the families of Bar and Bat Mitzvah kids whose ceremonies are scheduled during the summer and fall. A letter to congregants stated that “we will make sure that we maintain rabbinic coverage during this time for all scheduled life cycle events, especially b’nai mitzvah.”
Though both of the temple’s senior rabbis are leaving, Asher said the search getting underway will likely be to hire one rabbi.
“It seems to make sense that we first get our senior rabbinic position in place,” she said. “That person, I suspect, will want to have some input into an associate rabbi.”
Temple B’nai Torah, a Reform congregation in Bellevue similar in size to Beth Am, has had a few more months to begin preparations for the impending retirement of its longtime senior rabbi, James Mirel, in June 2014. Mirel will stay on as rabbi emeritus.
A search committee has been formed, and it has already begun planning congregational meetings to ascertain what its members want and need in a senior rabbi before passing that information on to CCAR, which will conduct this search as well.
“The meetings will probably be taking place in April, May and June,” said Shana Aucsmith, B’nai Torah’s board president. “We’ll be collecting the information to be right on schedule [for] what is considered the normal and best process.”
B’nai Torah’s associate rabbi, Yohanna Kinberg, who has been with the temple for nearly 10 years, was invited to apply for the senior rabbi position and has done so.
“We’re glad about that,” Aucsmith said. “That’s something we were hoping for.”
Kinberg told JTNews she entered the rabbinate with the idea of “being with people in their lives for the long haul.
“I would love to stay at TBT,” she added. “I want to see the kids who are being born now do their B’nai Mitzvah,” and even perform their weddings.
Kinberg’s husband, Seth Goldstein, is rabbi at Temple Beth Hatfiloh in Olympia, and she said the family is committed to staying in the area regardless of the outcome.
Aucsmith said the temple’s board and committee felt that engaging in the full hiring process would mean both the congregation and Kinberg can ensure they are a proper fit.
The rabbinical searches in Seward Park have come with more intensity. After Sephardic Bikur Holim decided in 2011 not to renew the contract of Rabbi Simon Benzaquen, a search committee embarked upon a year-long search for a rabbi to lead the Turkish Sephardic congregation.
The synagogue’s board president, Menachem Maimon, wrote in SBH’s April newsletter that an offer had been extended to a rabbi, though a contract was not yet signed. Maimon told JTNews the search is still underway.
Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath’s board also declined to renew the contract of its rabbi, Moshe Kletenik, necessitating the search for a new rabbi of the Pacific Northwest’s largest Ashkenazic Orthodox synagogue.
Kletenik will finish with the congregation this June, and board president Chuck Broches hopes to have a new rabbi in place by July 2014. The rabbi at a shul like BCMH plays a much more central part in the lives of its members, Broches noted.
“The rabbi plays an important role in providing halachic counsel on all sorts of things, ranging from kashrut to how the mikvah is operated,” he said, “a whole span of issues.”
Broches has been in touch with the Orthodox Union, the Rabbinical Council of America (of which Kletenik is a past president), and Yeshiva University, which has a rabbinic placement service.
With Passover finished, a committee appointed to create what Broches called a visioning process will be getting to work.
“We haven’t taken a real serious look at ourselves in 19 years, since Rabbi Kletenik arrived,” he said. “Our shul, like every other organization in town, has changed remarkably since then.”
The process of self-examination is one that all of these synagogues have appeared to embrace. Considering the long tenures of the rabbis being replaced — ranging from 16 years for Beth Singer and 18 for Jonathan Singer to 28 and 29 years for Benzaquen and Mirel, respectively — acknowledging the way each congregation has grown and changed over the years appears to be a crucial and mandatory step.
At B’nai Torah, Aucsmith said the search committee is embracing the opportunity to reach out to members to find out what they want and need in a rabbi.
“We’re really striving for it to be an inclusive process,” she said. “We want to get input from different segments of the community — a very engaging process and transparent process — so people feel they are a part of it.”
Asher of Temple Beth Am noted that while the rabbis do lead the congregation, the Singers tried to allow Beth Am to grow as a community that could transcend the rabbinical presence and make room for someone new should the need arise, as is happening now.
“We are looking at this as an opportunity to really reach even further and to redefine ourselves in some way to continue to grow,” Asher said. “That’s pretty exciting, actually. There’s an exciting element to this opportunity for us as well.”

The front page headline in the March 27 issue of Salom Gazetesi, the weekly newspaper of the Istanbul Jewish community, reads, “Apology brings friendship and stability.”
By all accounts, President Barack Obama is credited with brokering the reconciliation between Israel and Turkey on March 22. At the end of the president’s trip to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan to formally apologize for Israel’s raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla Mavi Marmara in 2010, which left nine dead in an unsuccessful attempt by the Turkish ship to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Turkey and Israel, former allies with strong military, trade, and tourism ties, broke off diplomatic relations. In spite of back-channel efforts, both countries were at a stalemate until late last month.
According to a statement put out by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Netanyahu “expressed Israel’s apology to the Turkish people for any mistakes that might have led to the loss of life or injury and agreed to conclude an agreement on compensation/nonliability.” In addition, the prime minister noted that Israel had significantly lifted restrictions on goods into the Palestinian territories, and he expressed his commitment to partnering with Erdogan “to advance peace and stability in the region.”
Erdogan, who has demanded an apology since the incident, has frequently criticized Israeli policies. He recently incited ire at a United Nations conference in Vienna by comparing Zionism to fascism, later saying “his remarks were misunderstood.” Erdogan accepted Netanyahu’s apology and agreed to restore the Turkish ambassador’s post to Tel Aviv and cancel legal proceedings against IDF soldiers. At press time, an immediate increase in Israel-Turkey travel was reported in Israeli media.
What sort of response does the local community have to the reconciliation? Opinions were sought from scholars, business people, political scientists, and Jews of Sephardic heritage, Israelis, Americans, and Turkish Jews living in Turkey. JTNews spoke with Resat Kasaba, director of the University of Washington’s Jackson School of International Studies; Joel Migdal, UW professor of international studies; Yoav Duman, UW Schusterman Israel Studies Fellow; Michael Koplow, program director at the Israel Institute and blogger at OttomansAndZionists.com; Isaac Azose, hazzan emeritus at Congregation Ezra Bessaroth; a local Israeli-American who wished to remain anonymous; and publisher Rifat Bali, from the Ottoman-Turkish Sephardic Culture Research Center in Istanbul.
The four questions:
Was the apology and resuming of diplomatic relations in the works? Why?
Resat Kasaba: “Both Turkey and Israel are concerned about Syria…the new coalition [in Israel] excluded the party opposed to an apology. With that out of the way, [it was] easier to do.”
Joel Migdal: “The rapprochement was definitely in the works. Several other factors pushed events forward. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s former foreign minister, had been the biggest opponent to an apology and compensation. His absence was important. So too was President Obama’s visit.”
Isaac Azose: “[President Obama] somehow convinced Bibi that it was in Israel’s interest to make the apology.”
Rifat Bali: “The Israeli government was divided in whether or not to apologize.”
In addition to U.S. pressure, other factors included Turkey’s quest for regional dominance, internal politics and domestic energy demands.
Michael Koplow: “The timing here [for reconciliation] is also related to [Turkey’s] successful talks with PKK [the Kurdistan Workers’ Party] leader Abdullah Öcalan.”
Yoav Duman: “Turkey is trying to gain dominance in the Middle East.”
Resat Kasaba: “The Turkish government was keen on playing a big role addressing regional issues.”
Michael Koplow: “In my view, Turkey changed its mind on reconciling. Making up with Turkey means that at least Israel is not entirely alone in the region. Nobody should expect Israel and Turkey to go back to where they once were.”
Do you think Israelis will vacation in Turkey again?
Anonymous Israeli-American: “Turkey is beautiful…and [there are] great deals from Israel. Israelis love to travel: When there is a good deal, they go.”
Joel Migdal predicts “an upswing in tourism.”
Yoav Duman: “There is a financial/economic incentive, and Turkey [offers] cheap vacations.”
Resat Kasaba: “People [in Turkey] are expecting a busy season.”
Isaac Azose: “We may see an ‘uptick’ in tourism from Israel, but not to the extent it had been for years.”
Will there be a lessening of anti-Semitism in Turkey, in light of the comments by Erdogan?
Rifat Bali: “Anti-Semitism in Turkey is not a result of the Mavi Marmara crisis but has much deeper cultural roots.”
Joel Migdal: “Turkey is going through a nationalist phase now, and anti-Semitism is part of that.”

For a country that has historically shied from the global spotlight, Bulgaria has been in the news lately. Mainly stemming from an attack last July in the city of Burgas that killed five Israelis and a tour bus driver, the diplomatic community has kept its eye on the country to see if its government would recommend to the European Union that Hezbollah, the organization deemed responsible for the attack, be designated a terrorist entity.
Thus far, the nation of about 7.5 million people has refrained from doing so. Its ambassador to the U.S., Elena Poptodorova, explained why.
“It should be discussed together by the European countries,” explained Poptodorova, who visited Seattle on March 17–19 as a guest of the local office of the American Jewish Committee. “Bulgaria would not initiate a process of nominating.”
Poptodorova said that her government was still making assessments, and even had plans to create a simulation of the attack.
“[They] want to answer questions about the type of explosive, how the whole movement of individuals was, the suicide bomber, how he was situated,” she said. “In other words, the investigation is still going on, and this is why the preference obviously is to have some more definitive conclusions and indices before Bulgaria can initiate [the terrorist nomination].”
There is a political angle as well: Economic issues forced the fall of the government in February, and elections will be held in May. Poptodorova said it’s likely interim prime minister Marin Raikov is waiting for a new elected prime minister to take on the initiative. According to the JTA news service, on March 29 Raikov said he had further evidence to provide to EU countries to persuade those still unsure of the source of the attack.
“It’s not for Bulgaria to initiate the technical procedure for the listing,” he said. “I think that our partners will be able to do this once they reach a certain level of consensus on this issue.”
Bulgaria is still relatively new at representative democracy. Declared a free state upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989, Bulgaria’s entered into NATO in 2004 and the E.U. in 2007.
“With regard to the European membership, the positive reaction and the positive development of the relations with the U.S. was part of…the proof that Bulgaria had moved forward from the status of a former satellite of the Soviet Union into a new geopolitical role and status,” Poptodorova said.
Bulgaria has also had a reasonably good relationship with its Jewish population, Poptodorova said both to JTNews and at a seder attended by area diplomats during her visit. Part of that stems from the country’s own history of having been occupied or enslaved for the better part of two millennia. Bulgaria did align itself with the Nazis when they came to power, which Poptodorova called “Europe’s biggest tragedy in history,” but part of that was self serving, she said — the government had hoped to retrieve territory it had lost in regional skirmishes.
But this is where the country diverged from the rest of the continent: March 19, the day she addressed a group of Jews and Bulgarian expatriates at the Stroum Jewish Community Center on Mercer Island, was the 70th anniversary of the day Bulgaria’s parliament rescinded its deportation order, thereby saving the country’s 50,000 Jews from the Nazis. Jews from neighboring Greece, however, have noted the effort came at the expense of 4,000 of its own Jews who died in the Holocaust.
“We had a very sizeable — compared to Bulgaria’s size of course — a very sizeable Jewish population, but most of them left for Israel when the State of Israel was founded,” Poptodorova said.
Today, the country has an active Jewish population of between 6,000 and 7,000 Jews, most of whom live in the capital, Sofia. While most Bulgarians are supportive of its Jewish population, there has been some increase in nationalist parties and groups, mostly due to the dire economic situation, Poptodorova said. Aside from an incident in the fall where swastikas were painted on buildings in Sofia, most nationalistic behavior has been rhetoric to this point.
“We don’t like it, we’re not happy with it, there have been reactions against them,” she said. “This is not to be underestimated, and I know that this is serious, but they don’t have any big effect on the general climate of the country.”

When some discover their life goals cannot be achieved, they shrug their shoulders and move on. Others, however, decide to empower themselves. When they see that their dream cannot be actualized they throw in a “…not yet.”
This is the story of Marla Gamoran. She’s a “not-yet” type of person.
Gamoran wanted to volunteer in Israel, but couldn’t find meaningful volunteer opportunities, so she created her own program that has not only benefited her, but dozens of other professional adults.
“After my husband and I purchased a small apartment in Jerusalem, I was looking for a way to spend my time in Israel,” she told JTNews. “I was interested in finding a Jerusalem-based volunteer opportunity.”
But such volunteer opportunities were sparse.
“I started my search on the web and was quite surprised to learn…that the programs all seemed to age out at 30 years old,” Gamoran, a former education administrator, said. “Moreover, none of the programs I found for older adults, with the exception of dentists, were structured to utilize the professional skills and expertise of the volunteer in the volunteer position.”
So Gamoran began her own volunteer program, Skilled Volunteers for Israel (SVFI), which matches experienced professionals with skilled volunteer opportunities in Israel.
“I decided to launch SVFI as a means of connecting professional North American Jews with Israel by facilitating the match between the skill and expertise of the volunteer with a real need within an Israeli non-profit or educational organization,” said the former Chicagoan.
“Given that there are over a million Jewish baby boomers in the U.S.A. alone, and that the boomers represent an educated, healthy segment of the Jewish population, and that for many of the Jewish boomers, we were raised with a strong and positive connection to Israel,” she said. “I felt that if I was looking for a means to volunteer using my professional background, so would others.”
In 2011, its first year of operation, SVFI placed four volunteers. At the same time, SVFI focused on building relationships with Israeli non-profits and establishing the processes needed for placement, screening and support of future volunteers and receiving organizations.
In 2012, SVFI placed 21 volunteers. In 2013, SVFI hopes to increase that number to 35.
The organization serves a variety of professionals, including scientists, organizational consultants, university professors, attorneys, rabbis, teachers, accountants and business people.
In addition, plans include starting a branch in Seattle, spearheaded by Saul Gamoran, Marla Gamoran’s brother-in-law and one of SVFI’s board members.
“I look forward to hosting an event this fall in Seattle to increase local awareness and draw skilled volunteers from the Northwest,” Saul Gamoran said. “Marla’s brainchild unearthed a tremendous reservoir of untapped desire among adults to volunteer in Israel using their professional skills.”
2013 will also see a pilot group-volunteer program, in collaboration with the Jewish Federation of Greater Miami.
Skilled volunteering placement requires personalized methodology, according to Marla Gamoran, similar to that of hiring someone for a job. The skilled volunteer position is designed to utilize the skills, experience and expertise of the volunteer to contribute to the needs of a project or program in an Israeli organization.
SVFI places volunteers though its own customized placements, as well as via collaboration with the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem, which includes a “Volunteer and Study” track within the yeshiva’s summer program.
“We had heard from organizations that they do periodically receive requests from individuals from abroad interested in volunteering, but don’t have the capacity to screen volunteers from abroad,” Marla Gamoran said, which tied in well to what SVFI could offer.
Past SVFI volunteer opportunities have included mentoring start-up businesses, providing strategic planning to an organization that serves children with disabilities, providing training on HIV prevention, and remediating English skills for disadvantaged students.
“In terms of most needed professions, our conversations with Israeli organizations indicate that there is high need for individuals who have writing, marketing, social media, teaching and tutoring skills,” Marla Gamoran said.
Organizers are currently working to establish a relationship with a clinic in south Tel Aviv, which is seeking medical expertise to serves refugees and asylum seekers.
“[Placement] takes creativity and ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking to determine how to best put to use the volunteer’s skills and the organization’s needs,” Marla Gamoran said.
In most cases, SVFI is matching the professional with the opportunity, but not much more.
“[The volunteers] are contributing not only their time and expertise, but the full cost of their stay in Israel, including housing, living expenses and travel,” she said. “We have a very limited number of placements that do include housing and board in youth villages in Israel where the volunteer participates in a program that requires a specific skill set.”

To learn more about the program, visit skillvolunteerisrael.org.