The Robert M. Beren Academy in Houston is open to kids 18 months old and all the way through high school. (Courtesy Robert M. Beren Academy)

NEW YORK (JTA) – With day school tuition fees on the rise, New York housing costs among the highest in the nation and the job market still tough, the Orthodox Union has a solution for Orthodox Jews under pressure: Move to Houston.

In a first-of-its-kind partnership for the organization, the OU is working with some prominent Modern Orthodox Houstonians to promote America’s fourth-largest city as a more affordable, pleasant and viable alternative to life in the dense Orthodox Jewish communities of the New York-New Jersey area.

It’s not just that Houston has a booming job market, less expensive housing and better weather than New York, the Houston boosters say, but the city has all the key ingredients necessary for Modern Orthodox Jewish living: day schools, Orthodox synagogues, eruv enclosures, kosher eateries and mikvah ritual baths.

“The community, we felt, is at a tipping point,” said Stephen Savitsky, chairman of the OU’s board. “Houston has sustainable, affordable housing. There’s no state income tax and a great job market. It has affordable Orthodox living.”

So far, the program is limited mostly to public relations: There will be a campaign whose exact strategy has yet to be mapped out, and the OU and Houston Orthodox Jews are paying for an ambassador of sorts, Rabbi Moshe Davis, to promote Orthodox Jewish Houston. The OU is not offering tuition subsidies or any other kind of financial incentives to families looking to relocate to Houston, and OU officials declined to say how much money they are planning to spend on the program. While several local Orthodox institutions are involved, the Houston Jewish federation is not.

But as the effort ramps up, the OU says it wants to bring in the federation, promote Houston on the OU jobs board, hold organizational conferences and marriage retreats in Houston, and possibly move some jobs to Texas from the OU kosher supervision operation. If the Houston pilot program is successful, the OU says it will expand it to a handful of other cities across the country — what Orthodox Jews call “out-of-town communities” because they’re not in the New York area.

“We decided to focus on one community, Houston, to promote as a destination community,” said Simcha Katz, the OU’s president. “But Houston is just the pilot.”

The effort to have community members move from the metropolitan area with the country’s largest concentration of Orthodox Jews to Texas is a reflection of the challenges facing American Orthodoxy.

Between their relatively large families, day school tuition costs and the premium that consumers pay for kosher food, Orthodox families face considerable financial hurdles. As the nation’s economic woes drag on, Orthodox leaders fear that the Orthodox lifestyle will become unsustainable for a growing proportion of the community.

“If we don’t find a way of making Orthodox Jewish life affordable, we’re going to have a serious problem,” Savitsky said. “We can’t be myopic. What’s going to happen in another generation? The cost of housing and other issues are just choking the Orthodox community.”

Perhaps the clearest sign of that pressure is the increasing interest among Orthodox Jews in alternatives to Jewish day school, by far the largest financial drain on Orthodox families. The last five years have seen the opening of a Jewish high school in East Brunswick, N.J., that utilizes distance learning to keep tuition at $5,000 per year, a failed effort to open up a no-frills day school in Englewood, N.J., and a growing movement of Hebrew charter schools that receive public funding and are drawing Orthodox students.

While tuition rates at the Orthodox day schools in Houston range from $10,790 per year in kindergarten to the $18,883 at the Robert M. Beren Academy, the only Jewish coed high school in the area, those sticker prices are still considerably lower than New York-area schools.

“What has happened to affordability in New York is out of control,” said Etan Mirwis, a native New Yorker who moved to Houston 16 years ago and is helping spearhead the effort to promote Orthodox life in the city. A businessman involved in real estate, Mirwis is also president of Torat Emet, a Jewish elementary school in Houston.

“With the number of children the average Orthodox family has, what are you going to need to make to pay your bills, live comfortably and not be on scholarship? In New York, it’s in the hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Mirwis, who has seven children. “In Houston, you can do it for under $100,000.”

Thirty years ago, Houston wasn’t on the Orthodox map. There was no eruv enclosure and a dearth of synagogue, food and school options. But that changed as young couples moved to the area, in part due to job growth in the city’s energy and health care sectors. The ensuing expansion of Orthodox infrastructure has had a domino effect.

Today, Houston Orthodox leaders say there are 500 to 600 Orthodox families in the city among a total Jewish population estimated by the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston at 40,000 to 45,000. Precise numbers are hard to come by because Houston has not conducted any Jewish population studies recently.

What’s clear, Mirwis says, is that Houston is a place where Orthodox Jews not only can be comfortable but actually live better Jewish lives.

“You should be able to support your family with one person working and one person at home to keep the Orthodox lifestyle going,” he told JTA. “You need it to maintain the ideal family environment committed to the Jewish traditions of taking care of your children, going into Shabbos not in the 17th minute [before sunset], going to minyan in the morning, setting aside time for learning. Today that hardly exists.”

Plus, on Feb. 2, the temperature in Houston was a balmy 77 degrees.

“Your coffee’s warm but your milk is sour/Life is short but you’re here to flower,” the lyrics state. “Dream yourself along another day/Never miss opportunity.”

Those were words Matt Seidler lived by, his father, Marc, said in a tearful eulogy for his son on Jan. 17 at Sol Levinson and Bros. Funeral Home.

“He loved the Air Force. It was his calling. There was no second choice,” Marc Seidler said. “He was very happy with his band of brothers, and [being in the U.S. Air Force] reconnected him with the importance of family. He loved getting the letters and e-mails and packages.”

Marc Seidler went on: “I wonder where he got his bravery from. He never questioned his commitment to his country. We can all learn from Matt. Our freedom is something we should never take for granted.”

More than 500 mourners – including dozens of members of the military and the Jewish War Veterans of the U.S.A. – attended the funeral service for Matt Seidler, an explosive ordnance disposal technician who died Jan. 5 of injuries sustained from an improvised explosive attack in Shir Ghazi in the Helmand Province of southern Afghanistan. The Baltimore-born Seidler, who was assigned to the 21st Civil Engineer Squadron headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base in El Paso County, Colo., died only two days after his 24th birthday.

Also killed in the attack were Senior Airman Bryan R. Bell, 23, of Erie, Pa., and Tech. Sgt. Matthew S. Schwartz, 34, of Traverse City, Mich. At least 1,472 service members have died in Afghanistan as a result of hostile action, according to the military.

A 2006 graduate of Westminster High School who became a Bar Mitzvah at the now-defunct Beth Shalom of Carroll County, Seidler entered active duty in November 2009. Before joining the Air Force, he took classes for a year in business administration at Stevenson University and started in a multimedia design program at Carroll Community College.

Standing at attention and holding American flags upright in the cold, drizzling rain, approximately 40 leather-clad members of the Patriot Guard Riders motorcycle club lined the front of Levinson’s to pay respect to Seidler and his family, as well as to prevent potential disruptions by members of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church. (Church members have shown up frequently at soldiers’ funerals across the country to voice their opposition to what they view as American tolerance of homosexuality.)

“We’re here to be there for the soldier’s family,” one Patriot Guard member said. “It’s the least we can do. Right now, they have to have their time.”

At the funeral, members of the military in the audience stood up as a high-ranking Air Force officer presented the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, the Air Force Commendation Medal and the Air Force Combat Action Medal to Seidler posthumously.

On the podium near the flag-draped casket, Moses Montefiore Anshe Emunah Hebrew Congregation’s Rabbi Yerachmiel Shapiro led the mourners in the 23rd Psalm. He noted that Seidler, known for his modesty and humility, “would probably be embarrassed by all of this.”

“When it comes to Matt, we have much to mourn for, and much to honor and celebrate,” Shapiro said. “We mourn his life just as he was starting to blossom and grow. But we are overwhelmed by the dignity and honor of a young man who gave everything for his country.”

The rabbi recalled Seidler’s childhood growing up in Finksburg, being a Cub Scout, attending a Montessori school and playing in old refrigerator boxes with his younger brother, Justin.

“He loved his Bar Mitzvah because for that one day he was hot stuff, the center of attention,” Shapiro said. “He was extremely proud of being a Jewish man. … He observed and respected the Jewish tradition.”

In addition, Shapiro said that Seidler possessed a curious, adventurous nature. “Matt loved to explore, whether it was Kings Dominion, Gettysburg or the [Maryland] Science Center,” the rabbi said.

Seidler also was creative and competitive throughout his life, whether he was playing Frisbee, pool or poker with friends or dreaming about his future, according to Shapiro.

“Matt always told people he planned to be a CEO when he grew up,” he said. “He had a quiet, reserved nature. It was hard for him to share internal thoughts.”

Joining the Air Force was an opportunity for Seidler – who loved dressing up in costumes as a kid and pretending to be a cowboy or pirate – “to be a real superhero,” Shapiro said. “He didn’t just join any unit. His job was to defuse and detonate bombs. He knew what he was getting into.”

Always a stubborn individual, Seidler utilized his nature for the common good. “Matt Seidler was strong-willed, full of convictions for his values, and stood up for what he believed in,” the rabbi. “He wanted to help his fellow soldiers and serve his country.”

The Air Force transformed Seidler. “He became a man,” Shapiro said. “He grew in confidence and comfort in himself, and developed a camaraderie of friends that he enjoyed. He became a lover of nature and the outdoors.”

The rabbi also said, “At least he found himself and lived his dream while he was alive. Matt never said negative things about anyone. He was an encourager and he led by example. He followed his dream and didn’t let fear determine his path. If he was here, he’d say, `Don’t cry for me. You’ve got to understand, I was doing this for you.’ ”

When last speaking with his son, Marc Seidler said, “He was the happiest he’d ever been in his life. He told us he loved us, and that’s not easy for a 24-year-old to say to his mother and father. … We were blessed to have him for 24 years. He was a good guy, with not a mean bone in his body.”

Matt Seidler, who was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, is survived by his parents, Marc and Lauren Seidler; his brother, Justin Seidler; his grandparents, Pearl and Aaron Seidler, and Leda Hoff; and other family members, friends and extended family in the U.S. Air Force and EOD Unit. Contributions in his memory may be sent to the Matthew Seidler Memorial Fund, c/o Susquehanna Bank, Attn: John Cole, 532 Baltimore Blvd., Suite 202, Westminster, MD 21157; or the EOD Memorial Foundation (www.eodmemorial.org), Fisher House Foundation (www.fisherhouse.org) or the USO (www.uso.org).

How about bring the synagogue to the big city?

That’s the thinking behind the monthly Friday night services being held in Manhattan by Temple B’nai Jeshurun of Short Hills, N.J. Once a month, 20- and 30-somethings who grew up in the Reform synagogue in northern New Jersey are among those who gather in an auditorium borrowed from The Community Church of New York.

On the Friday night of Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, about 50 people came for services and the free sushi and wine that followed. The services attract from 40 to 120 people each month.

Rabbi Matthew Reimer, 37, the assistant rabbi at TBJ, launched the monthly service in October 2010 to reach a cohort less likely to be engaged in Judaism at this moment in their lives.

“We are seeing more and more Jews in this age group disconnected from Judaism,” said Reimer. “People are getting married later and later, and they don’t come back [to synagogue] until they have kids. But there are lots of different ways to get them to be engaged in Jewish journeys.”

Live music sets the tone, with everything from folk music to reggae to Debbie Friedman tunes and maybe one or two traditional kabbalat Shabbat melodies. “The only way I know to make this work is to build off of amazing music,” Reimer said. It helps that Reimer himself is part of the cohort he is trying to reach, and that the service never lasts more than an hour.

“Honestly, if we didn’t have this, we probably would not go to Shabbat services,” said Lindsay Liben, nee Orringer, who grew up at TBJ and is working toward a master’s degree in social work at New York University. She initially enjoyed seeing old friends from her youth, but has also found over time that she looks forward to seeing new friends attracted to the service.

“It’s a place to have a connection to Judaism without too much of a commitment,” said her husband, Michael.

Dan Katz, who grew up at TBJ, comes with his girlfriend, Jill Rosenblum, originally from Marlboro, N.J., for the sense of community it creates.

“I had a N.J. Jewish community at B’nai Jeshurun. But in New York, the 25- to 35-year-old group does not have access to that Jewish community,” said Katz. “When Rabbi Matt Reimer said he was starting to build a community in New York City, to me it connected.”

Katz and Rosenblum brought some friends to the first service, and then brought more. Now they come regularly.

“It’s a nice way to lay low, relax and unite with your fellow friends at the end of a long week,” said Rosenblum.

Reimer adapted a musical Friday night service he had created while at Temple Shaaray Tefila in Manhattan before coming to TBJ. The band includes Matt Turk, a solo artist with three albums who is also musician in residence at B’nai Jeshurun, an independent Manhattan congregation well known for attracting 20- and 30-somethings to its weekly Shabbat services.

The suburbs-come-to-the-city idea received a boost from NextDor, a project of Synagogue 3000, the congregational renewal group. Launched in 2009, NextDor (“dor” means “generation” in Hebrew) was designed to engage non-affiliated young Jews in synagogue-sponsored events. TBJ partnered with seven other suburban synagogues in the metropolitan New York area to fund two NextDor interns. TBJ provides the Shabbat service; other synagogues are putting together a Purim party and other events.

The Shabbat service is not limited to those who grew up at TBJ. In fact, they were just one part of the crowd on Jan. 13.

Dan Wald, Isaac Hattem and Asaf Ben-Gai, who became fast friends through Ithaca College’s Hillel, are all in their mid-20s and found the service through NextDor. Wald and Ben-Gai are from outside of Boston, while Hattem is from Westchester County in New York.

“Our grandparents are always pushing us to get involved and have Jewish lives,” said Wald, who saw the service on the NextDor listserv. “I thought we’d come out — and there’s sushi!”

And single Jewish women. “I’d like to meet a wife,” Wald acknowledged, and his buddies agreed.

“Girls are on our minds most of the time,” said Hattem.

Before the sushi was gone, they met Francesca Cohen, 22. Originally from Toronto, she and her family moved to Summit when she was 14 and joined TBJ. Her parents pushed her to attend the gathering.

“I didn’t know what to expect, but I wasn’t expecting this,” she said. “I didn’t expect it to be so informal. It’s pretty comfortable. The people are nice. They introduced themselves to me. There was free food, and a lot of singing.

“I’ll come back for sure!”

But after Canyons, the state’s largest ski resort, opened the nation’s first ski-area, glatt kosher restaurant this season, the Jews came. And ate. And they were satisfied.

“Response has been phenomenal,” said executive chef John Murcko, who is the vice president of food and beverage at Talisker Corp., which bought Canyons in 2008 and opened the kosher Bistro at Canyons last December.

“We were at 100 percent capacity from the day we opened through the New Year’s Day weekend,” he said. “Word of mouth has been tremendous. Locals are discovering us as well, not just our destination visitors.”

The restaurant has brought more than kosher dining to the resort town of Park City, but also an eruv and weekly Shabbat services – at least for the ski season. The town already had a year-round Reform synagogue, Temple Har Shalom.

Murcko, who was named by Salt Lake Magazine last year as the Best Chef in Utah, said the idea of opening up a kosher restaurant was to stand out.

“Talisker has always sought to create the finest dining and hospitality experiences – and differentiate ourselves from our competition,” he told JTA. “We knew that individuals and families that keep kosher would enjoy a gourmet bistro in Park City, and that locals who love fine bistro-style dining would, too. We started planning it months ago, and we are very pleased how it has come together.”

Murcko traveled to New York to learn kosher cooking, while chef Zeke Wray spent time in Toronto and Los Angeles.

The cuisine is categorized as “New American Kosher Bistro.” Breakfast takes a minimalist approach: bagels and cream cheese, granola, fruit and yogurt for $16. Lunch options are comprised largely of salads and sandwiches, including a kosher Reuben, grilled chicken salad and Israeli couscous on pita.

It’s at dinner that Bistro really cuts loose, starting with the appetizers, including vegetarian chopped liver and seared ahi tuna. There also are plenty of soups – a nice way to end a day on the slopes – but you won’t find chicken with matzah balls. If the soup isn’t enough to keep you warm, the main courses will, from the smoked duck breast with ragu of braised red cabbage, fennel, apple and duck confit to ribeye steaks accompanied by roasted squash, sage white bean puree, leeks and warm smoked cherry tomatoes. The menu also features an array of lamb, pasta and fish dishes — or pastrami sandwiches for those so inclined.

Those looking for Jewish-style cooking should be sure to come on Shabbat. The $85 prix fixe, five-course Friday night dinner includes gefilte fish, chicken noodle soup (still no matzah balls) and a choice of turkey involtini, standing rib roast or chicken schnitzel all served with potato kugel on the side. The $65 Shabbat lunch is six courses built around a hearty flanken cholent.

The Bistro’s COR kashrut certification comes from the Kashruth Council of Canada, the largest kosher certification agency north of the border. COR certifies more than 1,000 facilities and thousands more products.

COR Rabbi Tsvi Heber oversees Bistro, and two New York-based rabbis, Yosef Kirszenberg and Mendel Wilmovsky, serve as the on-site authorities.

Kirszenberg, 46 and originally from Argentina, has been coming to Utah from New York for the last two years to run programs at Canyons. Since the restaurant opened, he has been spending 2 1/2 weeks out of every month in Utah overseeing the Canyons’ kosher dining, examining the 3-mile-long eruv that encompasses the resort hotel area every Friday and leading Shabbat services.

“We have a beautiful shul — it was built especially to be a shul — in the same building as the restaurant,” Kirszenberg said, adding that Canyons has had a minyan every week since the restaurant opened.

Kirszenberg, who is a Lubavitcher, now leaves his wife and nine children, aged 1 to 21, at home in New York when he comes to Utah to work, but he says he hopes to be able to move with them to Utah sometime in the future.

And what about skiing?

“Not yet, but everyone is pushing me to do it,” he said. “The last time was when I was 9 years old in Argentina.”

Mollie Darmon, left, and Allie Lichterman, seniors at Frankel Jewish Academy in suburban Detroit, using their iPads in class. (Frankel Jewish Academy)

WEST BLOOMFIELD, Mich. (JTA) – Toward the end of his life, Apple’s visionary leader, Steve Jobs, was visited by another computer innovator, Microsoft’s Bill Gates. The conversation turned to the future of education.

As related in Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of Jobs, both men agreed that computers had made surprisingly little impact on schools.

“Computers and mobile devices would have to focus on delivering more personalized lessons and providing motivational feedback,” Gates said. One of the many projects Jobs had hoped to develop before he died, Isaacson explained, was “to disrupt the textbook industry and save the spines of worn-out students by creating electronic texts and curriculum material for the iPad.”

Jobs might have been happy to learn that at least two Jewish schools are already aiming to do precisely that. The Scheck Hillel Community Day School in North Miami Beach is now offering an entirely paperless Talmud course, thanks to the iTalmud app.

“The increased levels of engagement, portability, and space and cost saving have been enormous,” said Seth Dimbert, the school’s director of learning technologies. “Normally, when you study the Talmud, each page is covered with cross-references and tertiary commentaries, and you have bookshelves filled with dozens or even hundreds of secondary reference texts. Using an iPad application puts all of that reference material in hypertext. It’s an ideal way to study the Talmud, which is in some sense the original hypertext.”

The leader in iPad integration in Jewish schools is probably Frankel Jewish Academy in suburban Detroit, whose students began this school year with a nice surprise: Each received a new iPad2, thanks to a generous gift from a donor.

“The move to this incredible new technology gives teachers access to so many more sources and enables students to leverage their learning,” said Patti Shayne, the school’s director of technology. ” With the iPad, students have one central place for assignments, communications and in many cases, text books and reading material. They will be able to access sources not available before. Our job is to make that learning as inspiring and exciting as possible and prepare FJA students for a future where competency with all web-based devices is the norm.”

The students aren’t the only ones in the school who have embraced the iPads. The teachers had a chance to play with them before the students even returned from summer break. One teacher at FJA was already an iPad pro: Robert Walker, who teaches government, was an early adopter of the iPad.

“Where I see the iPad really impacting learning is that it appeals to so many different learning styles: Students will have more freedom in choosing the direction they want to go to master their coursework,” Walker said. “While meeting the requirements, students will also have the ability to go above and beyond what they are required to do. It’s a powerful tool that will support learning in any number of ways.”

One way the iPad will help students learn is by giving them the opportunity to review a lecture they might not have fully understood the first time. FJA’s chemistry teacher recorded himself going through a problem and then uploaded the video onto the students’ iPads.

“Students now have the opportunity to watch his demonstration several times,” Shayne said. “Sometimes you don’t catch it all and some students are hesitant to speak up. With the iPad they can listen to the explanation as many times as they need at home or at school.”

That same chemistry teacher uses a free app called Mahjong Chem, which his students use to practice matching elemental names to symbols, naming polyatomic ions, assigning oxidation numbers, earning electronic configurations and understanding metric prefixes. Other apps being used include Pages (for word processing), Keynote (for presentations) and Numbers (an app similar to Microsoft Excel).

Students are allowed to purchase their own apps as long as the apps meet the standards of the school’s Acceptable Use Policy. Teachers may even require students to purchase apps, a requirement Shayne explained to parents as the equivalent of asking students to purchase a calculator, notebook or other school supply.

Are the students using the iPads for serious academic work or are they just expensive video game consoles with a pretty screen?

Twelfth grader Shira Wolf of West Bloomfield says it’s a mix.

“In Jewish Leadership, our teacher, Mr. [Marc] Silberstein, is trying to be completely paperless, so we went over the syllabus on our iPads and got to play around with the neuAnnotate app to annotate it,” she said. Wolf also noted that it’s common to see her peers playing the popular game ‘Words with Friends’ on their iPads during study hall or even in class, which is frowned upon.

“We used to teach technology as a subject,” said Shaindle Braunstein-Cohen, director of Detroit’s Project Chesed and a former director of the David B. Hermelin ORT Resource Center in West Bloomfield, which provides technology services to the community. “We would teach how to use a device. It’s no longer the ‘something’ that we teach; it’s the platform on which we deliver information.”

So, what’s next? Shayne anticipates the current crop of iPads will be used for about three years before they are refreshed. “As to what the future holds,” she said, “maybe one of our students will invent it.”

(Rabbi Jason Miller writes about how information technology and social media are transforming the Jewish community and is president of Access Computer Technology, based in Michigan. His latest project is called Torah Daily.)

This week, crowds of people will be flocking several times a day to Temple Har Shalom in this picturesque ski town, but they won’t be coming for Shacharit, Mincha or Maariv services.

Instead, for 10 days the synagogue is serving as one of the venues of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, with five screenings daily through Jan. 29.

It’s the fourth consecutive year that Har Shalom has become the “Temple Theatre” — one of the many elements that makes this Reform synagogue unusual.

Another is that Har Shalom is probably the only shul in the world with ski-in/ski-out services.

“At Har Shalom, Hebrew school is on Wednesdays; Sundays are for skiing,” says Ed Barbanell, who works at the University of Utah and has two sons in the Hebrew school.

On Friday afternoons during ski season, the synagogue holds a Kabbalat Shabbat service at the Sunset Cabin in Deer Valley, one of three ski mountains in Park City. The other two are Park City Mountain Resort and Canyons, which this winter opened the nation’s first glatt kosher restaurant at a ski resort.

“I am someone who spent about four seconds of his life thinking about Shabbat, but if I’m on the mountain, I’m there,” Jack Amiel, a Hollywood screenwriter and former resident of Los Angeles, said of the Kabbalat Shabbat services.

“You get people from Switzerland and France and New York and Pennsylvania,” he said. “You sing, you dance, you pound the floor to keep the beat with your ski boots. It’s fantastic.”

Until 1995, Park City had no synagogue. That year, a group of Jews took out an ad in a local newspaper declaring that “The time has come!”

It took another decade to build up enough momentum to begin construction. In the interim, the community grew and Seagram’s fortune scion Adam Bronfman, a well-known Jewish philanthropist who has a home here, donated the money to hire a full-time rabbi. Bronfman’s gift had a couple of conditions attached: The rabbi had to be willing to perform interfaith weddings and embrace interfaith families, and he had to be able to play guitar and ski.

Rabbi Joshua Aaronson was hired in 2002, and since then the synagogue’s membership has tripled. Among its members are many well-off Jews who have bought ski homes here and stayed for the high quality of life.

Nancy Gilbert, who serves on the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and owns a company in Boca Raton, Fla., that organizes trips to Israel, took her first ski vacation here in 2003 after seeing Park City host the Winter Olympics in 2002. Within weeks, she and her husband, Mark, an investment banker and major Democratic donor — they hosted Joe Biden for a fundraiser at their Florida home in 2009 and Michelle Obama at their Park City house in 2011 — decided to buy property and build a second home here.

Gilbert credits Aaronson with transforming the Jewish community in Park City.

“He’s a mover and shaker,” she said, calling him a perfect fit for this “small community with a big vision.”

A few years after he came to Park City, before the synagogue construction was complete, the rabbi asked Sundance Film Festival organizers if they were interested in using the temple as a venue. Once an agreement was in place, several Sundance-specific elements were incorporated into the social hall, such as high-end speakers and heavy curtains to block out light.

Designed by the German-Jewish architect Alfred Jacoby, the synagogue features blue-and-white, stained-glass window in the sanctuary by Japanese-American ceramic artist Jun Kaneko. Kaneko was recruited by congregant Josh Kanter, a past chairman of the International Sculpture Center. Kanter considers the result to be “a central component of Utah’s public art collection.”

The collaboration between the synagogue and Sundance has worked out well for both sides, the rabbi says.

“Our values are aligned,” Aaronson said. “Sundance is interested in intellectual freedom and helping make the world a better place through film. We’re interested in the same things through Jewish values.”

Temple president Doug Goldsmith, a fourth-generation Utahan, credits Aaronson for his children’s decision to undergo bar and bat mitzvahs — and for making Har Shalom welcoming to people like his wife, who is not Jewish.

“Non-Jews have been on the board and on the pulpit carrying the Torah and nobody blinks,” he said. “There is total acceptance for families who choose to live a Jewish lifestyle.”

The emergence of the local Jewish community has coincided with increased involvement in Sundance by individual congregants.

“Shabbat at Sundance,” an invitation-only Friday night dinner and Kabbalat Shabbat held as an official Sundance event, was the brainchild of Shari Levitin, a California native who moved to Park City 20 years ago as a senior vice president for Marriott. Levitin’s deepening involvement in Har Shalom coincided with her joining the Sundance Institute’s Utah Advisory Board. She hosted the first Shabbat at Sundance events at her home in 2008 and 2009 as a way of introducing the festival’s leaders to Har Shalom’s machers.

“It was a smashing success,” Shari says, with many more local Jews now involved in the Sundance Patron Circle and Utah Advisory Board.

Goldsmith says the greatest benefit of Har Shalom’s collaboration with Sundance is getting people from all over the world into the shul.

“Having people literally from all over the world being able to enjoy the incredible temple we were able to build really demystifies what’s in a synagogue,” he said. “They come in, they feel at home. It’s a great thing for us to do to be fully engaged in Park City.”

This year, on the last day of Sundance, the Temple Theatre will be turned back over to Har Shalom for a synagogue fundraiser featuring the first screening of Amiel’s new film, “Big Miracle” starring Drew Barrymore, five days before it opens nationally.

Filipinos light Chanukah candles in their home in South Tel Aviv on Nov. 24, 2010 in advance of the Jewish holiday. (Miriam Alster/FLASH90/JTA)

TEL AVIV (JTA) — With eyes closed, it would have been difficult to guess that the female voice with the amazing range singing a Hebrew classic was a shy-looking, 11-year-old Filipina.

But there was Kathleen Eligado performing Miri Aloni’s “Ballad of Hedva and Shlomik” before a prime-time television audience of a million Israelis. Eligado, born in Israel to Filipino migrant worker parents, is one of the stars of the popular Israeli show “Music School,” a kind of “American Idol” for kids, finishing the season in second place.

Her performance gave new meaning to the quintessentially Israeli song. Lyrics written to describe the culture shock of leaving the kibbutz for the city — “I’m alone in a strange city, as if I have no choice” — seemed in Eligado’s rendition to be the blues of a Third World immigrant who ends up in Tel Aviv.

Yet for Eligado and thousands of other children of foreign workers from the Philippines and elsewhere, Israel is now home — for many, the only home they have ever known. Some came to Israel as children; others were born in the country. Tel Aviv alone is home to an estimated 3,600 children of foreign workers and asylum seekers, according to the city’s municipality data.

As they integrate into Israeli society, the children of foreign workers are crafting identities that are similar yet distinct from those of the country’s Jewish majority.

Of all the nationalities represented among migrant workers, Filipinos are the quickest to integrate, said Tamar Schwartz, a social worker at Mesila Aid and Information Center for the Foreign Community in Tel Aviv.

“Compared to other migrants, Filipinos usually speak articulate English, often are well-educated and have a strong family ethic that emphasizes discipline and respect for elders,” Schwartz said. “And incidents of child abuse are low. As a result, there is less of a gap between them and Israeli society, which makes it easier for them to integrate.”

But while Filipinos excel at integrating into Israeli society, the biggest challenge is avoiding deportation.

In 2006, under pressure from advocacy groups, the Israeli government — in what was billed as a one-time-only measure — provided about 900 children with permanent residency. Their close relatives — parents and siblings — received temporary residency, which would become permanent only after the children served in the Israel Defense Forces.

Among the children who received permanent residency in ’06 is Jewellri Joy, 18, now serving in the IDF Police Corps. Like many children of foreign workers living in Tel Aviv, the Israeli-born Joy, whose mother is from the Philippines and whose father is from Thailand, attended the Bialik-Rogozin School.

Most of her fellow students were children of foreign workers and asylum seekers, along with immigrants from Ethiopia or the former Soviet Union and a few native Israelis. Still, Joy said that growing up in south Tel Aviv made her “totally” Israeli.

While her family attends Mass at St. Anthony’s Church in Jaffa and celebrates Christian holidays, not Jewish ones, she said she would have no problem dating or marrying an Israeli Jew. Joy said that one of the main reasons she enlisted in the IDF was to provide her family with permanent residency.

In 2010, the Israeli government approved the recommendations of an interministerial committee to provide residency to an additional group of children and their families. To qualify, the child had to speak fluent Hebrew and be enrolled in the first through 12th grades of a state school during the 2010-11 school year. The child’s parents had to have entered Israel legally, even if they had since overstayed their work permit.

About 800 children were said to have met the criteria, but they are still waiting to receive their residency status. About 400 children were rejected and thus slated for deportation.

Unlike Joy, the majority of children of foreign workers have yet to receive any sort of legal residency status, Schwartz said.

Janelle Pancho, 16, born in Israel to Filipino parents, wanted to join her 11th-grade classmates at Herzliya’s Harishonim High School on a trip to Poland to visit Auschwitz. But without residency status, she cannot leave the country.

“I went to the local Interior Ministry office to get a special visa, but the clerk rejected my request,” Pancho recalled. “Then she asked, ‘Why haven’t you been expelled from the country?’ ”

Pancho said she thought that she had not received residency because of a bureaucratic mix-up.

Unlike children of migrants in south Tel Aviv, Pancho attended schools where the vast majority of her fellow students were Jewish Israelis.

“Even though I am not Jewish, I feel a part of it,” she said. “I’ve been invited over to my friends’ houses for Shabbat and Jewish holidays. And we even celebrate Passover at home, though not the way it is supposed to be done.”

But without residency status, Pancho will not be able to undergo her peers’ most important rite of passage — army service.

“All of my friends are beginning to get letters from the IDF to prepare for the first stage of draft. But I haven’t,” she said.

Pancho said she respected the Israelis’ desire to maintain a strong Jewish majority in Israel.

“I understand that this is supposed to be a Jewish state and that I am Christian,” she said. “But my parents came to this country as guests. They came to work. They have a right to establish a family. And there was nothing in the law that said that they were not allowed to.”

A survey conducted in November 2010 by Leah Ahdut and Karin Amit of the Ruppin Academic Center’s Institute for Immigration & Social Integration found that 49.5 percent of Israelis said they were in favor of giving citizenship to migrant workers’ children born in Israel while 42.5 percent said they were opposed. Arab, left-wing, secular or university-educated Israelis were more in favor. Religious and haredi Orthodox Israelis were less supportive.

But even after they have received citizenship, completed IDF service and seemingly integrated into Israeli society, some Filipinos still grapple with their split identity.

M., 24, fell in love with an Israeli Jew while serving in the IDF — first as an officer manager for a high-ranking officer and later as a noncommissioned officer tracking down soldiers who went AWOL.

“I hid it from my mother for a year,” said M., who requested anonymity to avoid hurting her mother, who is a devout Catholic.

“When my mom found out she kicked me out of the house,” she said.

Now M., who owns a women’s apparel boutique in an affluent town that is cultural light years from where she grew up in south Tel Aviv, lives with her boyfriend’s family.

“They have accepted me completely, as though I were a member of the family,” she said.

M. said that she celebrated Chanukah with her boyfriend and his family, but they also bought a Christmas tree. She cooked traditional Filipino Christmas foods like leche flan and pancit, a type of noodles that symbolizes long life.

“I also made them Siopao — Chinese buns — but I filled them with chicken instead of pork,” she said. “My boyfriend and his family are Jewish, you know.”

BALTIMORE (JTA) — Even after seven decades, Peter Nurnberger’s most basic biographical facts remain elusive. The Slovakian doesn’t know his birth date, his natural parents’ fate or whether they had any other children.

Peter’s adoptive parents hid him during the Shoah in their home in Kezmarok, 168 miles east of Bratislava, where he lives today. Now the retired civil engineer hopes that “Seeking Kin” readers can supply leads that help crack a mystery: Who else did they rescue?

Identifying such people and obtaining their testimonies are crucial to Peter’s goal of securing posthumous recognition for his adoptive father, Karl Nurnberger, as a Righteous Among the Nations, an honor that Israel’s Holocaust commemoration institution, Yad Vashem, confers upon gentiles who saved Jews during World War II. Karl’s wife, Paula (nee Blasenstein), was Jewish.

Only upon Karl’s death in 1958 did Peter learn that he had been adopted. Paula refused to discuss the matter; she died in 1964. Years later, Peter discovered that his natural parents were Yosef and Berta Hirschberg, that his first name was Moshe, that he was born in Bochnia, Poland, near Krakow, and that he’d been smuggled to Kežmarok as an infant. The little that Nurnberger knows about his natural parents, and of his being born in Bochnia, came from discussions in the early 1990s with Berta’s brother, Leopold Blasenstein, who had settled in Australia.

Karl’s candidacy for Righteous Among the Nations rests on collected scraps of information, conversations Peter vaguely recalls from childhood and the words of a woman he met more than 30 years ago who has passed away. After returning from visiting Yosef’s cousins in Israel in October, Peter mailed Yad Vashem a two-page document that laid out the relevant facts. One of the cousins broadcast his search on the Israeli radio program “Hamador L’Chipus Krovim” (Searching for Relatives Bureau).

Peter’s letter to Yad Vashem contains serious drawbacks, he believes: They are the words of a son, and they aren’t based on his own remembrances — he was a baby at the time.

Tereza Nurnberger, who translated for her husband during two Skype interviews with JTA in December, acknowledged that “chances are very thin that someone will be found” to attest to Karl’s wartime sheltering of Jews, and said that Peter agrees.

Estee Yaari, Yad Vashem’s foreign media liaison, said the application is being reviewed. Each rescue story, she explained, “is carefully examined to see whether it meets the criteria, the most basic of which is that a person risked his life to save Jews from deportation and murder. The stories must be substantiated with survivor testimony or archival documentation of the period.”

Peter “feels sorry that he doesn’t know if he will succeed in giving Karl this honor that he deserves and that he didn’t find people who know about those times — that it may be too late to find people,” his wife explained.

One person who has been located is Zoltan “Bezalel” Schulcz, who lives in Netanya, Israel. Schulcz told JTA that as a Kežmarok teenager during World War II, he escorted two Jews to the Nurnberger home. Schulcz did so at the request of a neighbor named Rozenzwaig, who he thinks was active in identifying safe houses where escaping Polish Jews briefly stayed before continuing their journey toward Hungary and, they believed, safety.

“I took them to [Nurnberger’s] corridor,” Schulcz, now 80, said by telephone in December. “I was told to take them 20 meters [60 feet], show them the house, then leave.”

Schulcz does not remember meeting Karl Nurnberger, the names of the Jews he brought there or precisely when the escorting occurred. Schulcz thinks that he delivered Jews to Karl’s house three or four times.

Peter Black, a senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, figured that Schulcz’s role likely dates to 1942 or 1943, prior to the Nazi occupation of Hungary and of Slovakia. From Bochnia, those who smuggled Peter very well might have traveled through Slovakia and on to Hungary, Black said.

“It only became dangerous in Slovakia [beginning] in August 1944, when the Germans went in to wipe out the Slovak uprising and used that opportunity to deport the rest of the Slovak Jews who were not deported in 1942,” Black explained. Until 1942, he continued, the Slovakian government of Jozef Tiso cooperated with the Nazis’ deportation orders, but ceased doing so after learning that the trains were traveling to death camps, not labor camps.

The existence of an underground railroad to Hungary is an aspect of the Shoah not widely known or well documented. Black said that numbers for those traversing Slovakia bound for Hungary “would be hard to know,” but figured that it didn’t exceed a few hundred people. Records of Polish Jews briefly hidden en route are even more unlikely because escapees were transient, he said.

“In a given town, I’d be surprised if it would have been more than a few dozen — but that’s just shooting in the dark,” he said of Kežmarok’s role. “There wouldn’t be records because people wouldn’t want to keep records.” He added, “I don’t think it’s been systematically studied.”

Peter Nurnberger said he learned that Karl and Paula sometimes sheltered up to 30 Jews, but usually a few people each night. He’s not sure if people stayed in a secret room built onto or part of the Nurnberger home, or were hidden in, under or near a woodshed in the yard. Investigating the property at 40 Huncovska St. is impossible now because the home was razed and a pediatric hospital stands on the site.

Peter first found out about the Nurnbergers running a safe house from the late Livia Sandorfy, a friend of Karl and Paula. On a visit to Sandorfy while on a business trip to Kosice in the late 1970s, Peter asked about the circumstances of his adoption. Sandorfy revealed that she had been hidden by the Nurnbergers — and dropped the bombshell that he had been hidden, too.

Sandorfy remembered that Peter was dropped off by two men and a woman who likely spent the night with another Jewish family before proceeding to Hungary. The Nurnbergers were urged to transfer the baby to an orphanage but refused, she told him.

From Sandorfy, he also learned that Karl later built a hideaway in the woods near the village of Mengusovce, and moved there with several families in the autumn of 1944.

“He took in everyone who was in need,” Peter said, adding that he obtained a document from the state archives in which Karl said that 113 people were saved there.

Peter also has a handwritten original list of the group’s weapons, all of which Karl transferred after the war to the Czechoslovakian army.

“If some people who were rescued will be found … it will confirm that my quest for recognition for Karl is justified,” Peter said. “I am proud of him. Why he did it, I do not know. He was a man who was able and ready to take that enormous risk and responsibility.”

Peter’s search is “a needle-in-the-haystack” effort, said Black, the museum historian, “but it’s worth a shot.”

Please send a message to seekingkin@jta.org if the Nurnbergers rescued anyone you know or if you would like our help in searching for long-lost friends or family. Include the principal facts in a brief e-mail (up to one paragraph) and your contact information.

Gustav Zoltay, left, the director of the Federation o Hungarian Jewish communities, and Peter Feldmajor, its president, at the founding of the new Hungarian Jewish Congress. (Szabolcs Panyi)

BUDAPEST (JTA) – A whistle-blowing rabbi and a reform-minded lay leader are at the forefront of new efforts to shake up Hungary’s entrenched Jewish establishment.

Late last year, Rabbi Zoltan Radnoti reportedly alerted authorities to complaints of embezzlement and tax fraud in the operation of Budapest’s main Jewish cemetery on Kozma Street. This led to a police investigation and an unprecedented raid on Dec. 1 on both the cemetery and the Jewish community offices that house the burial society, as well as a public airing of the scandal in the mainstream media.

“Many people in the Jewish community administration attacked me for airing internal affairs to the outside,” Radnoti, 40, told JTA. “I was told that I draw a salary from the Budapest Jewish Community, so I was disloyal to my employers.”

But, he added, “You have to fight for the truth no matter what. I think this could become the beginning of the cleaning-up of Jewish communal affairs.”

Joining Radnoti is Andras Heisler, a former president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary, or Mazsihisz, the official umbrella of the Neolog community, a moderate reformist movement to which the vast majority of affiliated Hungarian Jews belong. The Jewish community in Budapest, home to 90 percent of the country’s Jews, is the largest member of Mazsihisz.

Mazsihisz officially represents the interests of Hungarian Jewry to the government and is responsible for the annual distribution of millions of dollars of government grants and Holocaust compensation funds to Jewish organizations. Critics have long called for a reform of its financial and administrative operations, accusing the organization of being undemocratic, unrepresentative, monopolistic and opaque.

Managing director Gusztav Zoltai, 76, has been in office for two decades and has come under particularly sharp criticism for his leadership style and firm grip on power.

“Zoltai manages to hold on to power by switching people in key positions who are somehow dependent on him,” Janos Gado, an editor at the Jewish magazine Szombat, told JTA. Gado and others say that many, if not most, of those who elect communal leaders are financially dependent on Zoltai and the other office-holders they are electing.

Zoltai, who along with current Mazsihisz President Peter Feldmajer declined to be interviewed, was elected managing director in 1991, when the organization was first established to replace the communist-era Jewish body. A child survivor of the Holocaust who lost most of his family in World War II, he had worked previously as the stage manager of a theater.

Last spring, in a case reported in the Hungarian media, Radnoti and Heisler charged that the election of Jewish community officials had been manipulated to prevent changes in the top leadership — and specifically to prevent Heisler from becoming a delegate to the general assembly, the body that elects the top officials, including Zoltai.

Heisler had resigned as Mazsihisz president in 2005 following his attempts to overhaul the organization were thwarted and his calls for Zoltai’s resignation were rebuffed. But in December, with Radnoti’s support, he was elected to the Mazsihisz board, and now he is confident that, with allies like Radnoti, he can make a renewed push for reform.

“If Mazsihisz survives, it will survive in a different form,” Heisler said. “The way it operates now, it can’t continue. Zoltai must go; if he leaves there is a chance.”

Mazsihisz has come under particular criticism for a lack of financial transparency — criticism the cemetery scandal seemed to bear out. Radnoti claims the investigation and police raid were sparked by material he furnished that document transactions without receipts, double-entry bookkeeping, sales of nonexistent grave sites and other abuses.

“It’s the tip of an iceberg,” said Gabor Miklosi, an investigative journalist who saw Radnoti’s documentation and broke the story on the popular Index.hu website.

After the allegations surfaced, Mazsihisz issued a statement saying that in its own internal investigation. the Budapest Jewish community had uncovered one case of abuse several months earlier that had involved a false receipt. The director of the cemetery was fired after repaying the money, the federation said.

“The irregularities that were committed did not involve the invoicing system of the funerary department” of the burial society, said the statement.

Sociologist Andras Kovacs, who co-authored a report last year that called for “urgent” reform of Mazsihisz, said the manner in which communal funds are distributed is “a totally dark area.” The report, issued in September by the London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, called for structural changes to ensure greater transparency and equitable distribution.

“There are a lot of rumors and gossip,” Kovacs told JTA. “Some former officials of the community suggested several times to launch an independent audit, but it never happened. It is always suggested that to raise questions about this could aid anti-Semites by putting the community in a bad light.”

In recent months, the government has been conducting negotiations that could lead to the withdrawal of some funding from Mazsihisz.

Under a new law, the state recognizes three official streams of Judaism corresponding to the three that existed prior to the Holocaust: Neolog, represented by Mazsihisz; Orthodoxy, whose presence in Hungary is tiny; and the so-called “Status Quo,” now known as the Unified Hungarian Israelite Community, or EMIH. Of the three, only Mazsihisz can currently receive direct government subsidies and collective compensation for unclaimed Jewish assets seized by the communists.

Several Jewish groups are now pressing to obtain direct government funding rather than be obliged to obtain funding doled out by Mazsihisz, which says it will fight any such reallocation.

Like many American Jews, my family history is deeply tangled in the tragedies of Jewish Europe. But I wasn’t going to engage with history on anything but an abstract level, through the detached eyes of a reporter.

That changed when I decided to pay a visit to western Ukraine. My family is from a shtetl called Shatsk, tucked into the far northwest corner of Ukraine’s Volynia province and a stone’s throw from the country’s borders with Belarus and Poland. In 1941, the young men of the village — including my grandfather and great-uncle — fled in the dead of night, convinced that the Germans would treat the village much as they did during World War I, when only men were targeted — for conscription.

This time around, the logic was that if the men were gone, what would the advancing soldiers want with a town full of women, children and the elderly? It was a miscalculation, and more than 1,000 Jews in the Shatsk area were shot into a mass grave by Black Lake, now part of one of Ukraine’s national parks.

For me and my family, Shatsk has always seemed like an impossibly exotic travel destination. I found it hard to believe that, as the Ukrainian census informed me, about 6,000 people lived there. Or that it had a nightclub called Sinatra and several ATMs.

But somehow, you can drive to Shatsk — and you don’t even need a souped-up DeLorean. After just four hours on roads whose quality varied from poor to middling to dear-God-is-this-a-road, my mother, our guide and I had traded the comparatively cosmopolitan Lviv — which was feverishly preparing for the 2012 European soccer championship — for the dusty roads of Shatsk, which lay dormant in the absence of summer’s rush of tourists.

The next day and a half was an emotional whirlwind.

A middle-aged Ukrainian couple — Tatiana and Stepan — let us into their home, which had been built in 1935 by my grandfather’s cousin and left unchanged in the decades since. We got the chance to step inside the tavern — now a branch of the Ukrainian national treasury — that my great-uncle ran and that elderly Shatsk residents assured us had been the social hotspot for the village.

We washed our faces in Black Lake and said the Shema. At the local Jewish cemetery, just four graves were legible and upright — and our family had connections to two of them.

There were the sharp, shooting pains of tragedy. I nearly buckled over and threw up when I realized that the slope the memorial to Shatsk’s murdered Jews sat on was not a landscaping feature but the mass grave itself. As lucky and honored as I was to be able to say the Mourner’s Kaddish and place a few stones on the memorial, there are some truths that even ritual can’t dull.

But there were also moments of triumph, like when we connected with the half-sister of my cousins who came to Brighton Beach in 1991. As we sat down to dinner with her and her family, swapped photographs and compared facial features (we all share the same eyes, it would seem), my mother and I felt blessed.

We had spent two days walking over what felt like hallowed ground — wondering if it was appropriate to take part in the regular rituals of travel, like toasting to our trip at a Shatsk bar, smiling in a photo or even admitting we were having a good time.

For 22 years, I had wondered what Shatsk meant for me. Was it a living, breathing place? Or just the graveyard of my family’s past? Was it some hell my family had escaped from? Or the bucolic paradise they spent decades in America pining after?

I’m aware of the challenges that come with heritage tourism. I spent 36 hours in Shatsk. Who is to say I’ve learned anything substantive about a place to which I parachute in, hunt around for some information and snap a few photos? How can I be sure that my newfound connection to Ukraine and my long-lost relatives is something more than fetishizing the past and longing for an idealized Shatsk that may have never existed?

But if heritage tourism is an imperfect science, it’s an important one. As a Jew in New York, it’s easy to lose sight of history — to view the past as a neat arc that started at Ellis Island, paused on a stoop in Brooklyn and triumphantly culminated in the green pastures of Westchester County or Long Island. If we consider the Old Country at all, it’s of a sanitized variety: Pop “Fiddler on the Roof” in the DVD player, rinse and repeat.

From visiting Shatsk, I know that my cousin Luba was tall and pretty with a good head for business. My great-uncle Chaim’s tavern was more popular than his competitor’s. For decades, the citizens of Shatsk have debated whether or not there’s some stockpile of gold hidden in the tavern’s basement.

My history has nuance now. Far more meaningful than the hazy memory of my 2002 B

Reporter Alex Weisler, second from right, and his mother, second from left, unite with lost relatives in Ukraine. (Alex Weisler)

ar Mitzvah, my journey to the past, I’m convinced, has made me an adult in the eyes of Judaism and God.

Like Dorothy landing in Oz, my trip to Shatsk allowed me to finally view my family tree in Technicolor. I’m a better man for it.