Palestinian Authority Minister of Health Dr. Hani Abdeen visits 8-year-old Sarah Ghanem, from the village of Durah near Hebron, while she is treated at Hadassah Hospital’s pediatric oncology-hematology department in Jerusalem on Sunday, May 5. (Courtesy Hadassah)

Palestinian Authority Minister of Health Dr. Hani Abdeen visited Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem on May 5. The hospital said Abdeen was the first P.A. health minister to visit the facility.

Abdeen, accompanied by other senior officials from the Palestinian Authority, met some of the dozens of Palestinian physicians who are doing their residency training there.

Abdeen met with the hospital’s acting director-general and director of Hadassah-Ein Kerem, Dr. Yuval Weiss, in the pediatric hematology-oncology department, where 30 percent of the patients are Palestinian.

“Hadassah considers cooperation with our Palestinian neighbors a top priority,” Weiss said. “Medicine is a bridge to peace. There are no borders when it comes to treating patients.”

Abdeen said the delegation was there to get feedback from patients and “to find ways to further collaborate.”

Ilan Fluss from Mashav, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s aid agency, helps to implement an advanced irrigation system in Senegal in 2011. (Israel21c)

Struggling to be heard over a flock of bleating sheep, Israel’s ambassador to Senegal invites a crowd of impoverished Muslims to help themselves to about 100 sacrificial animals that the embassy corralled at a dusty community center here.

The October distribution, held as French troops battled Islamists in neighboring Mali and one month after Muslim radicals killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, is held annually in honor of Tabaski, the local name of the Muslim Eid al-Adha feast. The distribution is broadcast on national television in a land that is 95 percent Muslim, providing Israel with a powerful platform to burnish its image among Senegalese.

“It registers very strongly with locals that Israelis give them sheep for a Muslim holiday while most Arab embassies do nothing,” said Eli Ben-Tura, the Israeli ambassador.

The animals are just part of the millions that Israel has spent over the years in Senegal, a French-speaking Western African nation of 12 million where the average monthly salary is $158. In return, Senegal has supported Israel’s erection of a barrier to protect itself from Palestinian terrorism and, in December, signed over oil prospecting rights in its territorial waters to an Israeli-owned mining company.

Over the past decade, Israel’s trade with Senegal has more than tripled.

“Like Israel, Senegal is an island of stability in an unstable region,” Ben-Tura told JTA in an interview earlier this month at the Israeli Embassy overlooking Independence Plaza in Dakar, the capital city.

The importance Israel places on its partnership with Senegal was evident in Ben-Tura’s speech on April 30 at Israel’s 65th Independence Day celebration at the Grand Theatre National, a magnificent structure built with Chinese funding in 2011 near Dakar’s main port.

Speaking to an audience of 1,000, Ben-Tura listed Israel’s latest gifts to the country: training for hundreds of farmers; preparations to train thousands more by Israeli experts stationed in the country; and the establishment of a permanent depot for agricultural equipment and disease control.

Even intercultural activities have not been overlooked. After speeches by Ben-Tura and Mamadou Talla, Senegal’s minister of professional training, Israel Ballet artistic director Ido Tadmor and 40 local artists performed a modern dance routine featuring tea cups. Dozens of onlookers avidly recorded their every move on smartphones.

“Cultural exchange with Africa has been neglected for too long,” Ben-Tura said.

Yet beneath this seemingly symbiotic partnership may be a deeper concern.

Mali, which used to be part of a federal entity with Senegal, last year witnessed an Islamic insurgency so powerful that French troops were called in to quell it. Some 475,000 people became refugees, many of them in Senegal. Some observers believe Senegal is wooing Israel and the West mainly for protection from the Islamic upheaval.

“The effects of the insurgency are not felt here for the time being,” said Oleg Sergeev, minister-counselor of the Russian Embassy in Dakar. “But the Senegalese authorities are turning westward out of concern over the possibility that the Mali insurgency may be trickling over.”

As an impoverished Muslim nation heavily dependent on foreign aid, Senegal must toe a careful line in its embrace of the Jewish state. Anti-Semitic books with titles such as “Hitler the Zionist Puppet” are sold here at bookstands and in 2009 several hundred people burned an Israeli flag at a rally to protest Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

The Senegalese government, then chair of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, condemned the attack as “unjustified and unacceptable.” Still, the government’s condemnations never went beyond words.

“It was a very strong reaction, but it didn’t have an impact on diplomatic relations,” said Christian Clages, the German ambassador to Senegal.

Senegalese officials declined to address the reasons for their country’s closeness with Israel. But observers attribute it variously to the country’s moderate brand of Islam, its relative openness to the West and its past disillusionment with Arab regimes. In 1973, under pressure from Arab countries, Senegal severed its ties with Israel.

“The Arabs threatened sanctions and promised free oil but never delivered, to the bitter disappointment of the Senegalese,” said Zvi Mazel, a former Israeli Foreign Ministry official who negotiated the restoration of diplomatic relations in 1994.

Senegalese moderation was on display in 2012 when Jamra, one of the country’s leading Islamic associations, protested the release of an anti-Muslim film, “The Innocence of Muslims.” The online video triggered violent protests around the world, but in Senegal, it led to the first meeting between Jamra and the Israeli Embassy.

Jamra’s executive president, Imam Massamba Diop, told JTA he learned in his November meeting with Ben-Tura that Israel had nothing to do with the film. And despite his organization’s generally pro-Palestinian posture — it considers Israel’s blockade on Gaza illegal and organizes pro-Palestinian activities in Dakar — Diop supports his government’s friendly relations with Israel.

“The Senegalese people deeply appreciate the event,” Diop said of the embassy’s sheep distribution.

Another Senegalese Muslim leader, Sheikh Paye, arrived at the Israel Independence Day celebration in a shiny, traditional white-and-gold imam robe. A spiritual leader in one of Dakar’s 19 neighborhoods, Paye told JTA that his attachment to Israel stems neither from gratitude for its largesse nor considerations of realpolitik.

“My late father used to be a good friend of several Israeli ambassadors here,” Paye said. “He died three months ago, shortly before the Israeli Embassy’s invitation arrived. It’s an honor to represent him here to people from a country he loved but never visited.”

Pascale Bercovitch, an Israeli handcyclist who competed in the 2012 London Paralympics, has overcome the loss of her legs to become a world-class athlete. (Courtesy Pascale Bercovitch)

TEL AVIV (JTA) – Pascale Bercovitch has a firm handshake and a ready smile. She’s hard to keep up with as she takes an elevator to a cafe on the ground floor of her gym in northern Tel Aviv and talks about her hopes to compete in 2016 in Rio De Janeiro.

It’s easy to forget that she’s 45 years old and has no legs.

“I love to find my limit and push it, to succeed more than I did yesterday,” Bercovitch told JTA. “What interests me is the journey.”

For Bercovitch, who has represented Israel as a rower and handcyclist in the Summer Paralympics, the journey has been long, spanning three decades, three sports and two countries. But she has never stopped competing, even after a gruesome accident left her without her legs at age 17.

Born and raised in a suburb of Paris, Bercovitch started training as a gymnast at age 10. In high school, she began training for competitions and also became a dancer.

Those plans came to an abrupt end one morning in 1985 when Bercovitch, late for school and rushing to catch a departing train, got caught under its wheels. Both of her legs had to be amputated.

“What hurt the most was that I couldn’t dance and I couldn’t do floor gymnastics, couldn’t jump, couldn’t run,” she said. “It was inconceivable. I couldn’t live like that.”

The injury, though, didn’t stop her from fulfilling another dream — moving to Israel, where she felt she could “build a small state” and “do something new and good.” She went on to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces, where she became one of the first volunteers in a wheelchair.

“I understood that there was no other choice than to fulfill your dreams,” she said. “Life can end in an instant. What’s important is to savor every moment. It didn’t matter how.”

Once in Israel, Bercovitch started swimming as part of her rehabilitation and was invited to join the Israeli national team leading up to the 1992 Paralympics in Barcelona. It took her until 2008, though, to make it to the Games.

Without a full-time salary, she had to quit the 1992 team. For nearly the next two decades she worked as a journalist and documentarian, producing “Three-Hundredths of a Second,” an award-winning film on the 2000 Israeli Paralympic delegation to Athens.

Eight years later, in Beijing, she joined the delegation for a different sport — rowing — which allowed her to take advantage of her arm strength. Her passion for athletics, she said, made it possible to overcome the 16-year gap between Games.

“It’s a virus that I have inside me,” said Bercovitch, who placed eighth in 2008. “Sometimes it’s dormant and sometimes it wakes up. When there’s the opportunity, you don’t have to tell me twice.”

Since 2008, Bercovitch has split her time between training, writing and motivational speaking, which she’s done since she was a 19-year-old soldier. On May 8, she spoke at the Ruderman Family Foundation’s Advance Conference in New York, which focused on how the Jewish community approaches disabilities.

“I come from my own small corner,” Bercovitch said. “I don’t come as an expert. I come to shine a light on things people know. I can give people strength.”

Amid competitions and conferences, Bercovitch finds time for two daughters, 3 and 11. Though she wakes up at 5 a.m. daily to work and train for as long as five hours at a stretch, she makes sure to be home by 4 p.m., when her children return from school.

“She’s a very moral person,” said her coach, Oz Dudai, who began training with her last year. “She has a lot of courage and fearlessness. She does things full strength. No one can stop her.”

For the 2012 London Games, Bercovitch tried a new sport, handcycling, and placed fifth. In a recent international competition, she had improved to second and hopes to be on the podium in Rio de Janeiro three years from now.

Dudai said that even qualifying for the team would be difficult for a 45-year-old. “A woman like Pascale can make the Olympics,” he said.

After surviving her accident and returning to competition after a 16-year break, age is no obstacle for Bercovitch.

“I feel that everyone is with me when I represent Israel,” she said. “Whenever I go to the Olympics, I get letters in the mail. People bring me flowers.”

Win or lose, though, Bercovitch says as long as she’s in the game, she’s happy.

“I understood from a young age that I have an athletic spirit,” she said. “You don’t have to do dance or gymnastics. It doesn’t matter what the sport is.”

JERUSALEM (JTA) – Haredi Orthodox youths mobbed the Western Wall plaza by the thousands to protest Women of the Wall as they held their monthly prayer service.

The youths, many of them students from haredi Orthodox yeshivas, filled the Western Wall Plaza by 6:40 a.m. on Friday, 20 minutes before Women of the Wall, a women’s prayer group that holds monthly services at the site, also called the Kotel, began praying. Because haredi Orthodox women had packed the women’s section of the plaza earlier in the morning, Women of the Wall were forced to pray in the back section of the plaza, further away from the Kotel itself.

The Women of the Wall service to mark Rosh Chodesh, the beginning of the new Hebrew month, was the first since a ruling last month by a Jerusalem District Court judge that the group’s services do not violate the law and merit police protection rather than arrests.

Police were on hand Friday morning to protect the women, a reversal of scenes from months past, when women wearing prayer shawls to the monthly service would be arrested for breaking a law that outlawed any deviation from “local custom” at the wall. Police arrested three haredi protesters, and a police spokesman said more arrests may be in the offing as police review video.

[WHAT'S NEXT? Read Ben Sales' analysis of how haredi Orthodox Israelis are mobilizing in Israel's religious pluralism battles.]

One day before the service, Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteynman, a haredi leader, called on thousands of students to protest Women of the Wall.

When the service began on Friday, it was met by an ongoing din of screaming, and shrieks erupted when a woman wearing a prayer shawl tried to push through the mob to reach the service. Police, alternately holding hands or linking arms, held back the crowd while two officers, with difficulty, escorted the woman through.

“It’s sad that they’re using the Kotel to advance their interests,” said an Orthodox graphic designer from Jerusalem, 29, who declined to give her name. “They want to change all of Israel. It’s an insult to this place.”

Women of the Wall’s service has rarely, if ever, seen this many people come to protest. Many of the haredim said that they were there to pray, as many Jews do daily at the wall.

“I came to pray and to protest gentiles who masquerade as Jews,” said Pini, 17, from Jerusalem, who would not give his last name. “I’ve taken hits here and I’ll take more hits. They’re making the Torah crooked. They want us to be like them.”

[READERS RESPOND: Read JTA's letters blog for first-person accounts of Friday's Western Wall clashes.]

Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency who has been endeavoring to broker a modus vivendi at the wall by expanding the prayer area, said the events of Friday morning underscored the need for a compromise. In a statement he described an “urgent need” for a solution that would “allow any Jew, group of Jews or Jewish community to pray at the Western Wall according to their own custom.”

Sharansky praised the police for protecting those engaged in prayer from “rioters.”

As the service went on, the crowd of haredi Orthodox men tried to push through the police barricade several times. The men almost succeeded before police officers pushed them back, sometimes manhandling a student or two along the way. As attempt after attempt to breach the police line failed, the men began throwing cups of water and coffee at police, journalists and – when they could – the women praying. One protester threw a chair.

At times, the haredi Orthodox crowd broke into song, chanting about the failure of wicked plans and the dominion of God.

Young Israeli Orthodox women turn out by the hundreds to protest Women of the Wall’s monthly prayer service at the Western Wall, May 10, 2013. (Ben Sales)

Throughout, Women of the Wall conducted its full prayer service, trying to sing over the screams that rose every time a song began. For the first time in months, men and women mixed at the service with no divider to separate them.

“This is an embarrassment and a shame how some people are acting to people who just want to pray,” said Bracha, 66, who participated in Women of the Wall’s service and also would not give her last name. “There’s space for everybody. People need to relate with understanding to those who don’t do the same thing as them.”

For some supporters of Women of the Wall, Friday’s conflict was about more than the right to pray freely at Judaism’s holiest site.

“This is a struggle for democracy in Israel,” said Lucas Lejderman, 30, a counselor in the Conservative Jewish youth movement here.

Whether protesters will turn out in equal numbers when Women of the Wall meet for next month’s Rosh Chodesh service is unclear. As the crowd dispersed, the women sang Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem. As if on cue, the handful of protesters who remained booed at the top of their lungs.

An Iron Dome anti-missile battery was moved near the Israeli border town of Haifa in the hours following a second airstrike on Syrian targets, May 5, 2013. (Avishag Yashuv/Flash90/JTA)

TEL AVIV (JTA) – Twice in three days, Israeli warplanes entered Syrian airspace and fired on suspected weapons caches bound for Hezbollah — and nothing has happened in response.

Some experts are predicting that will continue to be the case following airstrikes near Damascus on Friday and Sunday that are widely believed to be the work of the Israel Defense Forces. According to reports, the strikes targeted shipments of long-range, Iranian-made Fateh-110 missiles capable of striking deep into Israel.

Israel hasn’t commented on the strikes, but the IDF has moved two Iron Dome missile defense batteries to its northern border and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delayed his departure to China for several hours to convene his security cabinet. Meanwhile, Syria’s foreign minister told CNN on Sunday that the strikes amounted to a “declaration of war.”

But such gestures, analysts say, are merely symbolic. Torn by a civil war now in its third year, the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad is too beleaguered to fight back. And Hezbollah, the Lebanese party considered a terrorist organization by the United States and Israel, is considered too preoccupied propping up its Syrian patron to respond.

“Today Israel can act with impunity in Syria,” said Hillel Frisch, an expert on Arab politics at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. “The [Syrian] air force isn’t functioning and there’s no defense system. It’s very exposed and weak.”

Syria’s civil war augurs a major strategic shift for Israel. The two countries have technically have been in a state of war since the Yom Kippur War ended in 1973. And though the border since then has been largely quiet, Syria was Israel’s only neighbor to pose a threat of conventional attack.

But the weakening of the Syrian regime has raised the frightening prospect that its stocks of chemical weapons may fall into the hands of Hezbollah. Israeli officials have said for months that they would take action should Syria transport unconventional weapons to Hezbollah. In January, Israel bombed a Syrian weapons convoy near the Syria-Lebanon border. In 2007, Israel allegedly bombed a Syrian nuclear reactor.

Syria and Hezbollah didn’t respond to those attacks, either. But Hezbollah expert Eyal Zisser said Israel still needs to remain cautious.

“Don’t play with your luck,” said Zisser, also from the Begin-Sadat Center. “There might be a response. Eventually something will happen. Everybody is taking precautions.”

Shlomo Brom, a senior research associate at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, said the attack sent a message that Israel will act unilaterally if  deemed necessary — in this case, the transfer of long-range weaponry to Hezbollah.

“There needs to be a reason for these attacks,” Brom said. “There was an attack because they crossed our red lines. If they stop crossing our red lines, we won’t hit every weapons transfer.”

Brom added that Hezbollah may avenge the weekend’s attacks several years from now, noting that its deadly bus bombing last year in Bulgaria may have been a response to Israel’s alleged assassination of a senior Hezbollah officer, Imad Mughniyah, in 2008.

Israel reportedly did not notify the United States before the strikes. On Saturday, President Obama said that Israel has the right to defend itself and that he will “let the Israeli government confirm or deny whatever strikes that they’ve taken.”

“What I have said in the past and I continue to believe is that the Israelis justifiably have to guard against the transfer of advanced weaponry to terrorist organizations like Hezbollah,” he told the Spanish-language network Telemundo. “We coordinate closely with the Israelis recognizing they are very close to Syria, they are very close to Lebanon.”

The attacks, according to Frisch, also showed Iran that Israel could bomb the Islamic Republic’s suspected nuclear weapons program — a possibility Netanyahu frequently raises. But Brom called an attack on Iran “a totally different story — a lot harder and a lot more complicated.”

Whatever the attack’s long-term implications, Zisser said Israel’s Syrian border is likely to remain quiet during the coming days.

“We are making too much of this,” he said. “We need to be patient.”

]]> http://azjewishpost.com/2013/syria-attacks-suggest-israel-can-act-with-impunity/feed/ 0 http://azjewishpost.com/2013/sharanskys-kotel-plan-losing-support-from-both-sides/ http://azjewishpost.com/2013/sharanskys-kotel-plan-losing-support-from-both-sides/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 23:43:04 +0000 PHYLLIS BRAUN - AJP Executive Editor http://azjewishpost.com/?p=22907

Natan Sharansky, head of the Jewish Agency for Israel, is tasked with finding a solution to the growing battle over women’s prayer restrictions at the Western Wall. (Miriam Alster/Flash90/JTA)

Following a court ruling in their favor, leaders of an organization pushing for women’s prayer rights at the Western Wall have withdrawn their endorsement of Natan Sharansky’s compromise proposal to expand the egalitarian section there.

A Jerusalem District Court ruled last week that Women of the Wall members who pray together in the regular women’s section of the Western Wall are not contravening the law. Members of the group have been routinely arrested or detained in recent months for wearing prayer shawls at the wall, a practice that prior to the ruling had been considered a violation of Israeli law requiring respect for “local custom” at the site.

The landmark ruling appears to have emboldened Women of the Wall, which has moved away from its earlier embrace of Sharansky’s proposal as a tolerable, if less than perfect solution.

“We have three options: to reject Sharansky’s plan, to embrace Sharansky’s plan or to say that right now it is not relevant for Women of the Wall,” Anat Hoffman, the organization’s chair, told JTA. “It’s completely not relevant for us. Our victory in court means that our place is safe.”

Protests over the high-profile arrests of women at the holy site led Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to tap Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, late last year to formulate a compromise solution. Under Sharansky’s plan, an existing egalitarian section of the wall known as Robinson’s Arch would be expanded and a unified entrance would be built leading to the wall’s traditional and egalitarian sections.

Initially, the compromise seemed to have worked. Both Hoffman and the rabbi of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinowitz, expressed cautious support. But Rabinowitz also has backtracked from a statement indicating that while he didn’t like the proposal, he could “live with it.”

“We must, along with the Chief Rabbinate and other great rabbis, examine if we should oppose the proposal referring to Robinson’s Arch, which is not part of the Western Wall synagogue, if this would be a solution acceptable to everyone,” Rabinowitz said in a statement last week.

On Tuesday, Sharansky said his proposals were meant as “long-term solutions,” not quick fixes for immediate concerns.

“The merit of these proposals [does] not depend on any day-to-day developments that happen in the courts or near the Kotel itself,” Sharansky said in a statement, using the wall’s Hebrew name.

“All the stakeholders have agreed that the next important step is the timeline, which will be developed by the prime minister’s office in the next few weeks.”

But the ruling appears to have lessened Women of the Wall’s appetite for compromise, leading the group to reassert a longstanding insistence on being allowed to pray as it wishes in the regular women’s section. The group has announced that at its monthly service on May 10, a member will read from the Torah in the women’s section; that hasn’t been done for a decade.

The ruling “allows Women of the Wall to pray how we always wished,” said Hoffman, “with women of all denominations in the women’s section, with our prayer shawls and Torah and shofar.”

TEL AVIV (JTA) — To get married in Israel, Dima Motel had to bring his family photo album and two of his ancestors’ birth certificates to a rabbinical court.

Then an investigator quizzed his mother in Yiddish. Israel’s Chief Rabbinate often asks Russian immigrants like Motel to prove that they’re Jewish, sometimes requiring documentary evidence that can be hard to obtain. Those who won’t submit to the process or who can’t firmly establish their Jewish bona fides can’t get legally married in the country.

“I felt like it was an invasion of my privacy,” said Motel, 27, who was declared Jewish after three hours of questioning. “It’s called an investigation of Judaism. It seemed like I was accused, but I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Israelis who chafe at procedures like these have rallied around a new source of hope: David Stav, a Modern Orthodox rabbi in the running to be Israel’s next Ashkenazi chief rabbi. Stav has cultivated an image as the liberals’ solution to a Rabbinate dominated by the haredi Orthodox, and he is waging a public campaign in advance of the chief rabbi elections that has won him a strong base of popular support.

“The Chief Rabbinate has arrived at a point where we have to decide whether it will have completed its historical duty or will change itself to the point where it will become a kind of institution that can confront the current challenges of Israeli society,” Stav told JTA.

But even if Stav prevails in the June elections, in which some 150 rabbis and public representatives vote for a chief rabbi, he will have little power to institute reforms — let alone instigate the sweeping changes many Israelis want.

The Rabbinate controls marriage, divorce and conversion for all Israeli Jews, secular or religious. Changes to the way the Rabbinate handles these matters cannot be made unilaterally, even by a trailblazing, reform-minded chief rabbi. Such a chief would be hemmed in by a sprawling bureaucracy, a potentially resistant Sephardic counterpart, and conservative-minded haredi opponents who can be expected to stridently oppose any perceived liberalization in religious standards.

Perhaps mindful of these limitations, Stav has called for a set of changes that focus more on streamlining the Rabbinate’s services rather than reforming them.

He proposes eliminating a rule that requires couples to be married by their hometown rabbi, which would allow Israeli couples to go shopping around for the rabbi who best suits their needs even as it maintains the Rabbinate’s Orthodox monopoly over marriage. Stav also says he would cut down on the number of women refused a writ of divorce, or get, from their husbands by encouraging the signing of a prenuptial agreement that includes severe financial penalties if the husband demurs. And he wants to transform the Rabbinate into an aid for people like Motel, rather than an inquisitor, by hiring investigators to help establish Jewishness.

Yet chief rabbis — whose role includes a demanding schedule of ceremonial functions — cannot insitute such changes on their own. Altering the hometown rabbi rule and hiring investigators both require the assent of the deputy minister of religious services, Eli Ben Dahan, a Moroccan-born rabbi and member of the Jewish Home party. Ben Dahan has personally expressed support for a Modern Orthodox and Zionist candidate for chief rabbi, but his party has not endorsed Stav and it’s unclear whether he’d agree to free up money for investigators.

More substantive reforms would require the approval of both chief rabbis, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, as well as the approval of the Chief Rabbinical Council, a 17-member voting body that controls Rabbinate policy. The council, a mix of appointed and elected members, is dominated by conservative elements.

“We need a radical revolution, and Rabbi Stav won’t bring that,” said Rabbi Gilad Kariv, CEO of Israel’s Reform Movement. He said Stav would “just give a cellophane cover to a ruined candy.

“Maybe it matters who the chief rabbi is for formal ceremonies, but it doesn’t really matter for how conversion and kashrut happen,” Kariv said. “The processes within the rabbinic establishment are so extreme that who the chief rabbi is doesn’t matter.”

Even if a reform-minded chief rabbi manages to get elected and push through some reforms, he could be thwarted when it comes to enforcement. Implementation depends on local rabbis and judges in rabbinical courts who are appointed and removed only by an appointment committee, also dominated by conservative elements.

Stav said he’s confident he’d be able to get the rabbis to cooperate. “If they don’t cooperate,” he said, “there will be problems.”

Stav’s primary competitors for the position of chief rabbi will be several haredi rabbis seen as moderates acceptable to both Israel’s haredi and centrist Orthodox communities. Among them are Eliezer Igra, a former Israeli combat soldier and religious judge; David Lau, chief rabbi of Modiin, a booming central Israeli city; and Yaakov Shapira, who heads the Merkaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem.

The past few Israeli chief rabbis, both Ashkenazi and Sephardic, have been haredi — a testament to the growing numbers and clout of the haredi community in Israel. Pending the likely passage of an amendment allowing chief rabbis to run for a second term, current Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar is the leading candidate in the Sephardic race.

The vote is limited to 150 people: a delegation made up of 70 rabbis, mostly from Israel’s biggest cities and towns, and 80 “public representatives” – mayors, Knesset members chosen by committee, and heads of local religious councils.

Stav’s supporters say that even if significant change doesn’t happen right away, having a chief rabbi with a moderate, open image will help advance religious pluralism.

“Change happens slowly,” said Dov Lipman, a Knesset member from the centrist Yesh Atid party, which has endorsed Stav’s candidacy. “There’s not going to be an overnight overhaul. But as a first step let’s have a rabbi who’s openly Zionist. Even that symbolic change is very significant.”

But other advocates for religious pluralism feel that the Rabbinate is too broken for any chief to make a difference and that the only solution is the most radical one: abolish the Rabbinate entirely and separate church and state in Israel.

“The system has become bankrupt,” said Uri Regev, a Reform rabbi and president of Hiddush, an Israeli nonprofit that promotes religious pluralism and opposes Orthodox control over religious issues in Israel. “The Chief Rabbinate has become a threat to the State of Israel and to the Jewish people. It should be abolished.”

]]> http://azjewishpost.com/2013/can-a-moderate-chief-rabbi-transform-the-israeli-rabbinate-not-really/feed/ 0 http://azjewishpost.com/2013/american-labor-unions-raising-millions-for-rabin-center/ http://azjewishpost.com/2013/american-labor-unions-raising-millions-for-rabin-center/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:37:13 +0000 sheila http://azjewishpost.com/?p=22741

The Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv, a museum dedicated to the memory and lifework of the slain Israeli prime minister. (Courtesy Rabin Center)

TEL AVIV (JTA) — The museum dedicated to the memory of Yitzhak Rabin raises nearly half its money from labor leaders.

It’s just not the labor you think.

Members of U.S. labor unions raised $1.4 million for the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Tel Aviv last year, 45 percent of the center’s total 2012 fundraising. Since 2005, American unions have raised $12 million for the center.

Labor leaders say programs at the center, which celebrates the slain Labor Party prime minister who signed the 1993 Oslo Accords and promotes dialogue among Israel’s cultural groups, meshes with their core values.

Rabin’s “commitment to peace in not just Israel but the world is amazing,” said J. David Cox, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “He was criticized for his willingness to make compromises, but life is full of compromises. That’s how you arrive at a solution.”

American unions have supported Jewish statehood since before Israel’s establishment in 1948. At the time, Jews were heavily represented in the American labor movement, and Israel, with its socialist roots and collectivist spirit, was seen as a natural ally.

Today, organized labor, particularly in Europe, has overwhelmingly shifted its sympathies to the Palestinians, routinely voting in favor of boycotting Israeli goods or divesting from Israeli companies. But American union leaders say they remain committed to Israel, supportive of what they see as a perseverant Western country with an ethic of social justice.

“There wasn’t a nation here,” said John Coli, head of Chicago’s Teamsters Local 727, who was in Israel in April as part of a delegation hosted by the Rabin Center. “Now it’s totally different. [Tel Aviv] is a modern city. People have access to health care, to education. That’s what we want to build everywhere.”

Union support for the Rabin Center began in 2005 when Jeannie Gerzon, a former State of Israel Bonds employee who dealt with unions, began fundraising for the Rabin Center. American unions had long been buyers of Israel Bonds, the government securities that help fund Israeli infrastructure development.

Gerzon told JTA that the center has raised millions from unions by honoring national labor leaders in the United States. The leaders then call in favors from politicians and encourage businesses to open their checkbooks. The vast majority of contributions may come from these outside businesses.

A dinner last year honoring Coli raised $700,000 for the center, only $25,000 of which came from the union itself. In a typical year, Local 727 donates about $2,000 to the center out of $100,000 the local gives annually to a range of charitable causes.

Coli and Cox say that for them, part of Israel’s appeal stems from its strong labor union culture. According to Cox, Israel’s general union, the Histadrut, has more power than his AFGE.

“They get to bargain wages and benefits,” he said. “They have the ability to strike. We’ve got to get some worldwide solidarity with the union movement.”

Two American labor delegations were in Israel in April for meetings with Israeli union leaders and legislators from the Labor Party, in addition to visits to cultural and religious sites. Cox called Stav Shaffir, the 27-year-old freshman Labor parliamentarian, “dynamite and just fantastic.” Shaffir led Israel’s 2011 social justice protests.

Stuart Davidson, the chairman of the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center, said the visiting delegations hear from “the left and the right,” but movement leaders met with no members of the current center-right government. And despite Rabin’s legacy as a peacemaker, neither delegation spent significant time learning about the conflict or speaking with Palestinians.

Cox’s group met with Arab-Israeli union members, but did not meet with Palestinians despite visiting religious sites in Bethlehem, a Palestinian city in the West Bank. Coli’s delegation did not have any meetings with Palestinians or Arab-Israelis.

Davidson said he wants to expand contacts with Palestinian workers. The ongoing conflict, he said, could endanger future U.S. union support for Israel.

“The failure to make progress toward a peaceful resolution is problematic to all of us,” Davidson said. “It’s troubling to us. The inability to address those issues will make it harder.”

]]> http://azjewishpost.com/2013/american-labor-unions-raising-millions-for-rabin-center/feed/ 0 http://azjewishpost.com/2013/israel-fest-to-spotlight-innovations-hoopsters-maccabeats/ http://azjewishpost.com/2013/israel-fest-to-spotlight-innovations-hoopsters-maccabeats/#comments Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:50:27 +0000 PHYLLIS BRAUN - AJP Executive Editor http://azjewishpost.com/?p=22639 From the creation of the world’s first hybrid cucumber in the 1950s to the building of particle collectors for Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider, which led to the 2012 discovery of the Higgs Bosun or “God Particle”(a subatomic particle that accounts for the existence of matter and diversity in the universe), Israeli innovations have made major contributions to the world.

Celebrate 65 years of “Israel’s Incredible Innovations” and enjoy food, kids’ activities — including a chance to shoot hoops with members of the University of Arizona Women’s basketball team — and the a capella sound of the Maccabeats at the Israel 65 Festival on Sunday, April 21, noon to 6 p.m. on the campus of the Tucson Jewish Community Center.

Admission is $5; free for children age 5 and under. Free parking with shuttle transportation will be available.

For a timeline of major Israeli innovations, see http://azjewishpost.com/?p= 22345.

For me, it was a happy opportunity to stroll along the Tel Aviv promenade by the Mediterranean Sea. I passed some broken-down houses and came upon a very cool parody of Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” featuring such Jewish notables as David Ben-Gurion, Sigmund Freud, Golda Meir, Karl Marx and others (perhaps the bed was there to garner inspiration from the dignitaries while sleeping under the stars).

It was a cloudy, chilly day, which didn’t stop a woman in rain gear from sitting on the rocks surrounded by members of the city’s cat population. The sea also inspired a man who was davening from his pocket siddur (prayer book) while mothers pushing strollers, people walking dogs and I passed by.