When I was ordained in March 1981 with s'mikha from HaRav HaGaon Harav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik zt"l and Rav Nahum Lamm shlit"a at Yeshiva University's Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), I undertook to be a Rav b'Yisrael, a rabbi and teacher in the greater Jewish community. I have been a Rav for 30 years and have practiced in pulpit and community rabbonus for more than 18 of those years. It is because I love the Jewish People, and particularly because I am devoted to the Judaic education of young people -- of all ages, of all backgrounds -- that I write this considered commentary on my profound disappointment over what I have seen and experienced first-hand at the Irvine-based community day school called "TVT" or Tarbut v'Torah.
Irvine is not New York or Los Angeles, and – given its Jewish demographics – it is proper, even for an Orthodox Rav, to modify expectations in light of the reality of the community and what it realistically can accept in terms of Jewish education, what it reasonably can sustain. I write from that recognition and perspective.
I have been in Tarbut / TVT. I know many of its students. I deeply care for them.
I am deeply pained that, for exactly the same money – or even significantly less – that has been invested in the school, Tarbut / TVT could be a fine community Jewish Day School. Instead, it does not meet its mission as a community Jewish Day School. One readily can discern the focus that donors devoted on the campus grounds and the externals of the facility, but a more experienced and trained eye discerns sadly the lesser focus devoted on the quality of the Judaic component of the academic program. (It is beyond the scope of this commentary to opine on the school's secular program or its administration. Neither approbation nor disdain should be inferred from this commentary regarding either of those two subjects.) This severe weakness is commonly perceived, and it is commonly acknowledged among Jewish educators outside the community. It is discussed quietly among rabbis of all Jewish denominations in Orange County, several of whom lament privately that the Morashah Day School extends only through sixth grade. However, it is regarded as rabbinic-career political suicide to say it aloud, with attribution, within the Jewish community of Orange County. I thank G-d for imbuing me with the courage to write this.
It is not difficult to know what a formal Jewish education can offer its students. Throughout Southern California, there are noble efforts to that effect. Institutions under Orthodox auspices are not the only ones. There are noble efforts under Conservative and Reform auspices, too. In Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley, Bruce Powell has created a burgeoning model of a community Jewish Day School. Tragically, however, Tarbut's / TVT's Jewish studies program is dramatically weaker than one finds at many fine Jewish schools run in the United States under Reform or other denominational auspices.
The students at Tarbut / TVT deserve better. I know many of them personally. Many are bright -- and they would love to learn more. They are quite capable of being taught text knowledge. Certainly, at a tuition of some $15,000 per head, they deserve it. TVT / Tarbut should be a school where capable students learn Jewish knowledge, book knowledge, side-by-side with secular curricula. But it is not. I know this from very personal knowledge: from what I personally have seen, what I have tried to share of myself, and -- primarily -- from what parents themselves privately and confidentially have brought to my attention throughout my three years in Orange County. I have spoken privately with select students and with select faculty through three years here. There is great fear to speak openly about the lacunae. "Rabbi Fischer," I am asked, "Please do something about this. Please say something. Please write something. Please tell what is happening -- or, more accurately, what is not happening -- here. But, please, promise me that you will not quote me. My friends will attack me. My children will lose their friends. Please do not quote me."
There is no need to fear. I will not quote and will not attribute. I speak only as a Rabbi of 30 years -- as a Congregational Rav and as a professional Jewish educator. I speak only in my own name, and I bear full personal responsibility for every word I write here. For a period now extending through several years, Tarbut V'Torah (TVT) consistently has failed its parents and students, failing to transmit a substantive Judaic knowledge foundation to the vast majority of its students. The academic lacunae are palpable, and the failure to transmit substantive Judaic information and to inculcate meaningful Jewish learning is manifest. Given the expansive and lush grounds on which the Tarbut V'Torah campus is situated and the $15,000 annual tuition charge for each student, this poignant institutional failure to achieve the results charted at leaner, more modestly funded Jewish Day Schools operated throughout America under Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox auspices respectively cannot be attributed to a lack of material wherewithal, thus amplifying the concern.
At Tarbut / TVT, the students are not taught to navigate a Chumash. They do not learn Chumash text as part of their curriculum between grades 1-12. They cannot read a Rashi commentary. Over 90% never even have heard the most basic terms that children at any other Jewish Day School would have learned. The kids should be looking and learning inside real texts – Chumash, Rashi, Mishnah.
The level of Hebrew reading at Tarbut / TVT concerns me. I have met any number of parents who have brought their 12-year-old sons and 11-year-old daughters into my office, to start them on the paths of their respective bar- and bat mitzvahs. I would take out four Siddurim -- one for the student, one for the Mom, one for the Dad, and one for me. Typically, I also would invite our Youth Director to participate in the session, handing him a Siddur, too. I would ask the student kindly to read something in the Siddur so I could gauge the level of intensity needed for the forthcoming curriculum of bar/bat mitzvah study. The experience typically would be profoundly disheartening.
This educational shortfall is universally recognized among Jewish educators and rabbis in the region, but there is an understanding within the community that discretion is appropriate. One Youth Director after another who has worked with me has seen first-hand and experienced the Tarbut / TVT failure. Each has expressed amazement. The Youth Director would sit in my office with me, as we -- and the parents -- would gauge the prospective bar/bat mitzvah student’s Hebrew reading to assess the need and plan out a learning program. Because I always would have the Mom and Dad in the room with us, too, as the child would read Hebrew from the Siddur, the parents also would be startled.
As in public schools, where many parents consign pedagogical authority to the employed teachers without always investigating what is being taught and how, many of the parents of TVT students understandably do not investigate what their children are learning at Tarbut V'Torah, often because they understandably do not know how to check or what standard to expect. They are not professionally trained Jewish educators, and they understandably do not have a skills set in that area. Yet even they know that something is severely wrong when their intelligent child, after six years at some $15,000-a-year, sits in the Rabbi's office at age 12 or age 11 and barely is able to read a line of Hebrew smoothly, much less to identify basic Judaic concepts or terms.
If the parents lack the skills set, how then do they know there is a problem? Consider that I do not read Chinese. But if my son, after attending a Chinese-language class for six years at $15,000 a year, were asked to read from a Chinese book, and he were to articulate only a handful of syllabic sounds in a sixty-second minute, and then were to stop after just a few more syllables over three or four more minutes, I would be quite unsettled. And if he then were to turn to me, seeing my dismay, and say “Don’t be angry at me, Dad. I really am trying, but I can’t read this so well. It is a foreign language with a different set of alphabetical characters.” Well, after six years -- and knowing how well my child is able to acquire other knowledge skills -- that would tell me something very sobering about my $90,000 investment.
That is the core of the problem at TVT / Tarbut v'Torah. For those less professionally trained and experienced in the area of Jewish pedagogy, the difficulty to recognize the scope and depth of the problem is amplified and obfuscated by two factors:
(1) A small number of TVT / Tarbut students independently are intensely home-schooled by their parents, after school and on weekends, because those parents are among the proportionately few in South Orange County who enjoy the Judaic background and skills-sets sufficient to perceive that their respective children otherwise are not being taught a meaningfully substantive Judaic knowledge base. Then, after being home-schooled, those proportionately few children are presented to the broader community as “proof” that TVT / Tarbut is doing a fine job.
(2) The second obfuscation is more subtle. The Rabbi and the temple Youth Director -- whether Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or Orthodox -- is assigned, within the separate institutional framework of the temple that provides services for its members, to train the 12-year-old boy or 11-year-old girl, over the course of the following 8-12 months leading up to bar/bat mitzvah, to essentially quasi-memorize the bar/bat mitzvah service. Thus, on “Bar/Bat Mitzvah Day,” those present at temple hear a young lady or fellow chant and otherwise lead aspects of the service with the perceived erudition that implicitly comes with years of training, learning, and study.
But the actuality differs. Professional and experienced pedagogues in secular schools have encountered this same educational phenomenon when first meeting a child entering the first grade. The child is tested in entry-level reading skills and is given a page, or several pages, to read. The child reads beautifully. The parent beams proudly, but the teacher methodically reaches for a second book of similar grade-level, but written by a different author, illustrated with different pictures. Inexplicably to the parent -- but all-too-common to the trained pedagogue -- the same child cannot read from that comparable book. The trained pedagogue instantly discerns that the child was taught "sight reading," not phonics. Thus, the child essentially has quasi-memorized that first book, page by page. But the child remains helpless when exposed to other illustrations, another page lay-out. The child has not yet been taught to read. Many pedagogues maintain that there nevertheless is some value in teaching "sight reading" if it encourages a foundational love for books and love for reading among nursery children and kindergarteners. However, by eighth grade, it is recognized that "sight reading" is not sufficient.
The same phenomenon underlies the Bar/Bat Mitzvah phenomenon. The Tarbut / TVT student leads the service at the temple. Perhaps she reads from the Torah. Perhaps he reads a Haftorah. Perhaps she leads a portion of the prayer service. Yet, if the same boy were to be asked -- only moments later -- to read also from the Haftorah that appears on the page that precedes or follows his Bar Mitzvah Haftorah, the result well could surprise. Likewise, the boy or girl is taught essentially to quasi-memorize portions of the prayer service that he or she leads. But if he or she were to be asked moments later, quietly and confidentially, to read in the same Siddur from prayers that appear a few pages before or after what he or she has been taught essentially to memorize, the results well could surprise. Thus, for the audience -- the assembled congregation -- an appearance of erudition redounds to the school's reputation. Would that it were so!
Ultimately, then, the need in Orange County is not exclusively for a Brooklyn/Los Angeles-quality yeshiva day school. Naturally, as an Orthodox Rav, it is my goal and dream to see a Jewish Day School of such caliber established some day in Irvine so that my Orthodox rabbinical colleagues and I do not have to endure the enormous logistical challenges and difficulties of having our children educated two hours away at YULA in Los Angeles. But as a Rabbi who recognizes the variegation of the Jewish demographic locally and understands with the experience of a career spanning a quarter century what is at stake and what realistically can be achieved for the Jewish community that I love and whom I am dedicated to serve -- an Irvine-based South Orange County Jewish community of more than 100,000 Jews who are not predominantly Orthodox but who deserve excellence for the tuition dollars being invested in their most precious resources, their children -- it is deeply, deeply painful to watch profoundly bright and capable young children in our community being denied exposure to substantive Judaic knowledge.
As a Rabbi, it devolves on me to observe aloud that wonderful, bright young people are processed year-after-year through Tarbut's / TVT’s revolving doors at a tuition rate that certainly implies a substantive education, yet that demands from and offers them so much less than one typically would find provided to graduates of a Jewish Day School run under Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or Orthodox auspices.
I know the children because my focus as a Rabbi always has included attending with utmost concern to elementary students, teens, and college students. I know, first-hand in the confidentiality of my relationships with families of Tarbut / TVT students, how deeply so many of those parents are pained. There are parents who literally have broken down, crying in my office. I know, from that same base of direct and confidential personal knowledge, how relieved those parents are when the year-long quasi-memorization process ends, with their sons and daughters emerging from the Bar/Bat Mitzvah having publicly presented the appearance of having a Judaic education. I know the scope of what rabbis in Los Angeles -- who may speak more candidly on the subject because they are outside the penumbra of political fall-out and personal exposure when speaking -- think of TVT / Tarbut. (The school's reputation outside Orange County and its environs is one that I have not encountered in my quarter century in the Rabbinate.) From a career in the rabbinate, I know what other Jewish community and denominational schools can and do teach their charges.
It thus is a matter of grave public concern, compelling a Rabbi to speak out, even as it is a matter of political suicide in South Orange County to discuss this subject publicly with candor. But I am a Rabbi, and that is my calling. It is my soul's yearning. It is incumbent on me to share these concerns publicly. We need only view the greater American society's economic fall-out, in the face of the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae setbacks that were perceived by many who knew that the system was in grave danger but who chose not to speak because their personal political considerations for advancement and personal fundraising opportunities diverted them. And, then, one day Bear Stearns collapsed, and then Indy Mac, and then Lehman Brothers. Yet, with deference to the significant economic and financial institutional concerns of an American polity in which I share, I feel obliged even more to share the present concern. The need for a dramatic overhaul and re-conception of Tarbut V'Torah (TVT), its mission, and its educational aspirations for students and parents who deserve better is most compelling because, at bottom, we are talking about the right of Jewish young people to receive the substantive education they deserve and for which their parents believe they are paying. They are good young people. They are capable of learning great things. And, if they miss these opportunities to grow in Jewish text knowledge -- the study of Chumash, Rashi, Mishnah, Talmud, and so much more -- during their childhood and teen years, they may never get that opportunity later, once "life happens."
And what will they have left to pass down to their children?
This statement of public concern concludes with one more area of attention. A Jewish community day school that offers its students the opportunity to participate in formal daily prayer services lays a foundation for them to have an option to grow spiritually in yet another way, and also to learn the skill of navigating through a prayer book. Those who daven daily are not perfect. But if tefilah -- Jewish prayer (davening) -- is taught with sensitivity and formal training, it sometimes can assist a school's administration and faculty in an effort to guide young people from evolving in their teens towards the coarseness sometimes found in segments of external society. Coarseness is the hallmark of teen evolution in certain circles of society, but the Jewish Day School model aims for something more noble and uplifting. Dirty words, filthy language, coarse sexual references and humor are not compatible with a successful Jewish Day School model. TVT / Tarbut should offer its students the opportunity to pray every day -- a formal Shacharit option each and every school morning, with all boys age 13 or over donning tefillin and with Sephardic boys wearing a tallit in the tradition of their parents. Such prayer need not be mandatory, but it should be a formal curricular offering in much the same way that so many other community Jewish Day Schools offer. Similarly, Tarbut / TVT should offer a formally scheduled Mincha prayer opportunity, even if only optional, every afternoon.
If there is no one else to lead such a daily Shacharit service, I publicly volunteer to lead it. Just as I remain available -- as I have for three years -- to teach Torah text as a formal faculty member. I extend that offer because it is easy to offer analysis and observation when one is not prepared personally to accept a challenge and take up a gauntlet. But the faculty member need not be I. Nor need the prayer leader be I. But it is time. And if not now, when?
Showing posts with label Jewish Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jewish Education. Show all posts
Monday, August 1, 2011
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Israel Independence Day 5771 - Yom HaAtzma'ut 2011
As American Jews, we are proud and engaged citizens of the United States. We are loyal to America, pay taxes to her, support and often have fought in her armed forces, often giving our lives for her. See, e.g., the website of the Jewish War Veterans of America at www.jwv.org . Many Jews have served America as public office holders, government administration professionals, and military professionals. We celebrate America’s holidays as our own, because they are own: Thanksgiving as a day to thank G-d for bringing us to these shores of a New World, far away from the continents of blood libels, Crusades, and Inquisitions. Columbus Day with thanks that he took that wrong turn and found this place. Veterans Day with gratitude for all who have fought under our flag for freedom. Presidents’ Day to celebrate a tradition of American political leadership that consistently has affirmed our place in America. Memorial Day to remember our fallen soldiers who fought so that America could be safe for liberty. Independence Day for marking the historic break from tyranny and the pursuit of liberty. Thus, our commitment to the country of America is primary and all-engrossing.
At the same time, we also are part of an eternal people, the Jewish People, with our eyes and hearts always turned to Tzion – to Zion – to the heart of Jerusalem where G-d set His eternal dwelling place on the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. For two thousand years of bitter Jewish Exile, through dispersion and persecution, we never abandoned our bond with and yearning for Zion. In our daily prayers, we faced and still face towards the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. Three times daily, we prayed and still pray for G-d’s return to Jerusalem. After meals that we eat with bread, we recited and still recite our prayer that He rebuild Jerusalem speedily in our days. For two thousand years, we sat and still sit on floors, weeping bitter tears by candlelight as we remembered Jerusalem on Tisha B’Av Night and Day, mourning and fasting for a return to the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem and for restoration of the Jewish People to the land that G-d promised Abraham, Isaac, and Israel (Jacob). The Holy Land, then, is part of our core heritage as Jewish People, and we cannot be separated from the Land of Israel and our connection to our forebears who lived and died there. Indeed, many proud American Jews, like Jews all over the world, arranged through the centuries, and still arrange, to be laid to rest in Israel after a full and rich life.
When the State of Israel was reestablished in 1948, that event marked an historically awesome and momentous event in Jewish faith. After nearly two thousand years of never ever giving up the claim and the hope, we saw its fulfillment begun: a Jewish Commonwealth reborn in the land we spiritually never had left. By 1967, when three Arab armies based in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan forced Israel to fight for her survival in a fearsome and ultimately miraculous defensive war that resulted with Israel’s liberation of East Jerusalem and the reunification of the City of Jerusalem as the temporal capital of the State of Israel and as the Eternal Spiritual Capital of the Jewish People, our lives as Jews everywhere were changed forever.
Israel’s independence, then, is part of our essence as Jews. Militarily, our loyalties are to America. Politically, to America. Economically, to America. Spiritually, even as Catholics throughout the world turn to the Vatican and as Moslems make their haj to Mecca, our eyes and hearts turn to Jerusalem and to Israel. We celebrate her independence as our own. We send money to support her institutions. We lobby our elected officials to take steps to offset those who would endanger her. We visit her, again and again. We send our children to learn there, whether at a yeshiva seminary for a year after high school, or for a Birthright trip, or an Aish program in spiritual discovery, or any of scores of other programs. We learn the ancient Hebrew language with modern inflections, pray almost exclusively in Hebrew, and we visit the holy sites in Bethlehem (where Rachel is buried), Shechem (Nablus, where Joseph lies), and of course Hebron (the resting place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah). Some of us plan our retirements to include significant time in Israel. So many of us, by now, have family living in Israel – cousins, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, grandchildren, and others – who not only speak pure Hebrew but with Israeli accents.
Israel Independence Day, then, is in good measure our celebration, too. We are invested in Israel – spiritually, emotionally, historically through our ancestors, materially. We take pride in Israel’s strides and advances, concern ourselves with her evolution, and plan our lives with the knowledge and understanding that we live in the most miraculous of times, an era that our grandparents and theirs barely could have imagined – an age and a time when many millions of Jews have returned to live in a Jewish country in Israel, with borders open to Jews everywhere so that we never again need be a people with nowhere to flee from persecution. Ours is the miracle era with the city of Jerusalem reunited and now with many hundreds of thousands more pouring into and rebuilding the cities of Judea and Samaria in the heart of our patrimony where Judaism all began. Regardless of whether a particular American Jew personally ever will set foot in Israel, much less live there, the day of Israel’s independence – Yom HaAtzma’ut – is a day for each and every American Jew to celebrate heartily and gratefully, within our hearts, among our families, as part of our communities, and as an eternal Jewish people whose spark never will cease and to whose eternal existence the modern State of Israel bears existential witness.
At the same time, we also are part of an eternal people, the Jewish People, with our eyes and hearts always turned to Tzion – to Zion – to the heart of Jerusalem where G-d set His eternal dwelling place on the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. For two thousand years of bitter Jewish Exile, through dispersion and persecution, we never abandoned our bond with and yearning for Zion. In our daily prayers, we faced and still face towards the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. Three times daily, we prayed and still pray for G-d’s return to Jerusalem. After meals that we eat with bread, we recited and still recite our prayer that He rebuild Jerusalem speedily in our days. For two thousand years, we sat and still sit on floors, weeping bitter tears by candlelight as we remembered Jerusalem on Tisha B’Av Night and Day, mourning and fasting for a return to the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem and for restoration of the Jewish People to the land that G-d promised Abraham, Isaac, and Israel (Jacob). The Holy Land, then, is part of our core heritage as Jewish People, and we cannot be separated from the Land of Israel and our connection to our forebears who lived and died there. Indeed, many proud American Jews, like Jews all over the world, arranged through the centuries, and still arrange, to be laid to rest in Israel after a full and rich life.
When the State of Israel was reestablished in 1948, that event marked an historically awesome and momentous event in Jewish faith. After nearly two thousand years of never ever giving up the claim and the hope, we saw its fulfillment begun: a Jewish Commonwealth reborn in the land we spiritually never had left. By 1967, when three Arab armies based in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan forced Israel to fight for her survival in a fearsome and ultimately miraculous defensive war that resulted with Israel’s liberation of East Jerusalem and the reunification of the City of Jerusalem as the temporal capital of the State of Israel and as the Eternal Spiritual Capital of the Jewish People, our lives as Jews everywhere were changed forever.
Israel’s independence, then, is part of our essence as Jews. Militarily, our loyalties are to America. Politically, to America. Economically, to America. Spiritually, even as Catholics throughout the world turn to the Vatican and as Moslems make their haj to Mecca, our eyes and hearts turn to Jerusalem and to Israel. We celebrate her independence as our own. We send money to support her institutions. We lobby our elected officials to take steps to offset those who would endanger her. We visit her, again and again. We send our children to learn there, whether at a yeshiva seminary for a year after high school, or for a Birthright trip, or an Aish program in spiritual discovery, or any of scores of other programs. We learn the ancient Hebrew language with modern inflections, pray almost exclusively in Hebrew, and we visit the holy sites in Bethlehem (where Rachel is buried), Shechem (Nablus, where Joseph lies), and of course Hebron (the resting place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah). Some of us plan our retirements to include significant time in Israel. So many of us, by now, have family living in Israel – cousins, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, grandchildren, and others – who not only speak pure Hebrew but with Israeli accents.
Israel Independence Day, then, is in good measure our celebration, too. We are invested in Israel – spiritually, emotionally, historically through our ancestors, materially. We take pride in Israel’s strides and advances, concern ourselves with her evolution, and plan our lives with the knowledge and understanding that we live in the most miraculous of times, an era that our grandparents and theirs barely could have imagined – an age and a time when many millions of Jews have returned to live in a Jewish country in Israel, with borders open to Jews everywhere so that we never again need be a people with nowhere to flee from persecution. Ours is the miracle era with the city of Jerusalem reunited and now with many hundreds of thousands more pouring into and rebuilding the cities of Judea and Samaria in the heart of our patrimony where Judaism all began. Regardless of whether a particular American Jew personally ever will set foot in Israel, much less live there, the day of Israel’s independence – Yom HaAtzma’ut – is a day for each and every American Jew to celebrate heartily and gratefully, within our hearts, among our families, as part of our communities, and as an eternal Jewish people whose spark never will cease and to whose eternal existence the modern State of Israel bears existential witness.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
On the Increased Urgency for a New Jewish Educational Vision to Guide the Pedagogic Model of Tarbut v'Torah (TVT) in Irvine, Orange County, California
When I was ordained in March 1981 with s'mikha from HaRav HaGaon Harav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik zt"l and Rav Nahum Lamm shlit"a at Yeshiva University's Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), I undertook to be a Rav b'Yisrael, a rabbi and teacher in the greater Jewish community. I have been a Rav for 27 years and have practiced in pulpit and community rabbonus for more than 15 of those years. It is because I love the Jewish People, and particularly because I am devoted to the Judaic education of young people -- of all ages, of all backgrounds -- that I write this considered commentary on my profound disappointment over what I have seen and experienced first-hand at the Irvine-based community day school called "TVT" or Tarbut v'Torah.
Irvine is not New York or Los Angeles, and – given its Jewish demographics – it is proper, even for an Orthodox Rav, to modify expectations in light of the reality of the community and what it realistically can accept in terms of Jewish education, what it reasonably can sustain. I write from that recognition and perspective.
I have been in Tarbut / TVT. I know many of its students. I deeply care for them.
I am deeply pained that, for exactly the same money – or even significantly less – that has been invested in the school, Tarbut / TVT could be a fine community Jewish Day School. Instead, it does not meet its mission as a community Jewish Day School. One readily can discern the focus that donors devoted on the campus grounds and the externals of the facility, but a more experienced and trained eye discerns sadly the lesser focus devoted on the quality of the Judaic component of the academic program. (It is beyond the scope of this commentary to opine on the school's secular program or its administration. Neither approbation nor disdain should be inferred from this commentary regarding either of those two subjects.) This severe weakness is commonly perceived, and it is commonly acknowledged among Jewish educators outside the community. It is discussed quietly among rabbis of all Jewish denominations in Orange County, several of whom lament privately that the Morashah Day School extends only through sixth grade. However, it is regarded as rabbinic-career political suicide to say it aloud, with attribution, within the Jewish community of Orange County. I thank G-d for imbuing me with the courage to write this.
It is not difficult to know what a formal Jewish education can offer its students. Throughout Southern California, there are noble efforts to that effect. Institutions under Orthodox auspices are not the only ones. There are noble efforts under Conservative and Reform auspices, too. In Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley, Bruce Powell has created a burgeoning model of a community Jewish Day School. Tragically, however, Tarbut's / TVT's Jewish studies program is dramatically weaker than one finds at many fine Jewish schools run in the United States under Reform or other denominational auspices.
The students at Tarbut / TVT deserve better. I know many of them personally. Many are bright -- and they would love to learn more. They are quite capable of being taught text knowledge. Certainly, at a tuition of some $15,000 per head, they deserve it. TVT / Tarbut should be a school where capable students learn Jewish knowledge, book knowledge, side-by-side with secular curricula. But it is not. I know this from very personal knowledge: from what I personally have seen, what I have tried to share of myself, and -- primarily -- from what parents themselves privately and confidentially have brought to my attention throughout my three years in Orange County. I have spoken privately with select students and with select faculty through three years here. There is great fear to speak openly about the lacunae. "Rabbi Fischer," I am asked, "Please do something about this. Please say something. Please write something. Please tell what is happening -- or, more accurately, what is not happening -- here. But, please, promise me that you will not quote me. My friends will attack me. My children will lose their friends. Please do not quote me."
There is no need to fear. I will not quote and will not attribute. I speak only as a Rabbi of 27 years -- as a Congregational Rav and as a professional Jewish educator. I speak only in my own name, and I bear full personal responsibility for every word I write here. For a period now extending through several years, Tarbut V'Torah (TVT) consistently has failed its parents and students, failing to transmit a substantive Judaic knowledge foundation to the vast majority of its students. The academic lacunae are palpable, and the failure to transmit substantive Judaic information and to inculcate meaningful Jewish learning is manifest. Given the expansive and lush grounds on which the Tarbut V'Torah campus is situated and the $15,000 annual tuition charge for each student, this poignant institutional failure to achieve the results charted at leaner, more modestly funded Jewish Day Schools operated throughout America under Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox auspices respectively cannot be attributed to a lack of material wherewithal, thus amplifying the concern.
At Tarbut / TVT, the students are not taught to navigate a Chumash. They do not learn Chumash text as part of their curriculum between grades 1-12. They cannot read a Rashi commentary. Over 90% never even have heard the most basic terms that children at any other Jewish Day School would have learned. The kids should be looking and learning inside real texts – Chumash, Rashi, Mishnah.
The level of Hebrew reading at Tarbut / TVT concerns me. I have met any number of parents who have brought their 12-year-old sons and 11-year-old daughters into my office, to start them on the paths of their respective bar- and bat mitzvahs. I would take out four Siddurim -- one for the student, one for the Mom, one for the Dad, and one for me. Typically, I also would invite our Youth Director to participate in the session, handing him a Siddur, too. I would ask the student kindly to read something in the Siddur so I could gauge the level of intensity needed for the forthcoming curriculum of bar/bat mitzvah study. The experience typically would be profoundly disheartening.
This educational shortfall is universally recognized among Jewish educators and rabbis in the region, but there is an understanding within the community that discretion is appropriate. One Youth Director after another who has worked with me has seen first-hand and experienced the Tarbut / TVT failure. Each has expressed amazement. The Youth Director would sit in my office with me, as we -- and the parents -- would gauge the prospective bar/bat mitzvah student’s Hebrew reading to assess the need and plan out a learning program. Because I always would have the Mom and Dad in the room with us, too, as the child would read Hebrew from the Siddur, the parents also would be startled.
As in public schools, where many parents consign pedagogical authority to the employed teachers without always investigating what is being taught and how, many of the parents of TVT students understandably do not investigate what their children are learning at Tarbut V'Torah, often because they understandably do not know how to check or what standard to expect. They are not professionally trained Jewish educators, and they understandably do not have a skills set in that area. Yet even they know that something is severely wrong when their intelligent child, after six years at some $15,000-a-year, sits in the Rabbi's office at age 12 or age 11 and barely is able to read a line of Hebrew smoothly, much less to identify basic Judaic concepts or terms.
If the parents lack the skills set, how then do they know there is a problem? Consider that I do not read Chinese. But if my son, after attending a Chinese-language class for six years at $15,000 a year, were asked to read from a Chinese book, and he were to articulate only a handful of syllabic sounds in a sixty-second minute, and then were to stop after just a few more syllables over three or four more minutes, I would be quite unsettled. And if he then were to turn to me, seeing my dismay, and say “Don’t be angry at me, Dad. I really am trying, but I can’t read this so well. It is a foreign language with a different set of alphabetical characters.” Well, after six years -- and knowing how well my child is able to acquire other knowledge skills -- that would tell me something very sobering about my $90,000 investment.
That is the core of the problem at TVT / Tarbut v'Torah. For those less professionally trained and experienced in the area of Jewish pedagogy, the difficulty to recognize the scope and depth of the problem is amplified and obfuscated by two factors:
(1) A small number of TVT / Tarbut students independently are intensely home-schooled by their parents, after school and on weekends, because those parents are among the proportionately few in South Orange County who enjoy the Judaic background and skills-sets sufficient to perceive that their respective children otherwise are not being taught a meaningfully substantive Judaic knowledge base. Then, after being home-schooled, those proportionately few children are presented to the broader community as “proof” that TVT / Tarbut is doing a fine job.
(2) The second obfuscation is more subtle. The Rabbi and the temple Youth Director -- whether Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or Orthodox -- is assigned, within the separate institutional framework of the temple that provides services for its members, to train the 12-year-old boy or 11-year-old girl, over the course of the following 8-12 months leading up to bar/bat mitzvah, to essentially quasi-memorize the bar/bat mitzvah service. Thus, on “Bar/Bat Mitzvah Day,” those present at temple hear a young lady or fellow chant and otherwise lead aspects of the service with the perceived erudition that implicitly comes with years of training, learning, and study.
But the actuality differs. Professional and experienced pedagogues in secular schools have encountered this same educational phenomenon when first meeting a child entering the first grade. The child is tested in entry-level reading skills and is given a page, or several pages, to read. The child reads beautifully. The parent beams proudly, but the teacher methodically reaches for a second book of similar grade-level, but written by a different author, illustrated with different pictures. Inexplicably to the parent -- but all-too-common to the trained pedagogue -- the same child cannot read from that comparable book. The trained pedagogue instantly discerns that the child was taught "sight reading," not phonics. Thus, the child essentially has quasi-memorized that first book, page by page. But the child remains helpless when exposed to other illustrations, another page lay-out. The child has not yet been taught to read. Many pedagogues maintain that there nevertheless is some value in teaching "sight reading" if it encourages a foundational love for books and love for reading among nursery children and kindergarteners. However, by eighth grade, it is recognized that "sight reading" is not sufficient.
The same phenomenon underlies the Bar/Bat Mitzvah phenomenon. The Tarbut / TVT student leads the service at the temple. Perhaps she reads from the Torah. Perhaps he reads a Haftorah. Perhaps she leads a portion of the prayer service. Yet, if the same boy were to be asked -- only moments later -- to read also from the Haftorah that appears on the page that precedes or follows his Bar Mitzvah Haftorah, the result well could surprise. Likewise, the boy or girl is taught essentially to quasi-memorize portions of the prayer service that he or she leads. But if he or she were to be asked moments later, quietly and confidentially, to read in the same Siddur from prayers that appear a few pages before or after what he or she has been taught essentially to memorize, the results well could surprise. Thus, for the audience -- the assembled congregation -- an appearance of erudition redounds to the school's reputation. Would that it were so!
Ultimately, then, the need in Orange County is not exclusively for a Brooklyn/Los Angeles-quality yeshiva day school. Naturally, as an Orthodox Rav, it is my goal and dream to see a Jewish Day School of such caliber established some day in Irvine so that my Orthodox rabbinical colleagues and I do not have to endure the enormous logistical challenges and difficulties of having our children educated two hours away at YULA in Los Angeles. But as a Rabbi who recognizes the variegation of the Jewish demographic locally and understands with the experience of a career spanning a quarter century what is at stake and what realistically can be achieved for the Jewish community that I love and whom I am dedicated to serve -- an Irvine-based South Orange County Jewish community of more than 100,000 Jews who are not predominantly Orthodox but who deserve excellence for the tuition dollars being invested in their most precious resources, their children -- it is deeply, deeply painful to watch profoundly bright and capable young children in our community being denied exposure to substantive Judaic knowledge.
As a Rabbi, it devolves on me to observe aloud that wonderful, bright young people are processed year-after-year through Tarbut's / TVT’s revolving doors at a tuition rate that certainly implies a substantive education, yet that demands from and offers them so much less than one typically would find provided to graduates of a Jewish Day School run under Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or Orthodox auspices.
I know the children because my focus as a Rabbi always has included attending with utmost concern to elementary students, teens, and college students. I know, first-hand in the confidentiality of my relationships with families of Tarbut / TVT students, how deeply so many of those parents are pained. There are parents who literally have broken down, crying in my office. I know, from that same base of direct and confidential personal knowledge, how relieved those parents are when the year-long quasi-memorization process ends, with their sons and daughters emerging from the Bar/Bat Mitzvah having publicly presented the appearance of having a Judaic education. I know the scope of what rabbis in Los Angeles -- who may speak more candidly on the subject because they are outside the penumbra of political fall-out and personal exposure when speaking -- think of TVT / Tarbut. (The school's reputation outside Orange County and its environs is one that I have not encountered in my quarter century in the Rabbinate.) From a career in the rabbinate, I know what other Jewish community and denominational schools can and do teach their charges.
It thus is a matter of grave public concern, compelling a Rabbi to speak out, even as it is a matter of political suicide in South Orange County to discuss this subject publicly with candor. But I am a Rabbi, and that is my calling. It is my soul's yearning. It is incumbent on me to share these concerns publicly. We need only view the greater American society's economic fall-out, in the face of the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae setbacks that were perceived by many who knew that the system was in grave danger but who chose not to speak because their personal political considerations for advancement and personal fundraising opportunities diverted them. And, then, one day Bear Stearns collapsed, and then Indy Mac, and then Lehman Brothers. Yet, with deference to the significant economic and financial institutional concerns of an American polity in which I share, I feel obliged even more to share the present concern. The need for a dramatic overhaul and re-conception of Tarbut V'Torah (TVT), its mission, and its educational aspirations for students and parents who deserve better is most compelling because, at bottom, we are talking about the right of Jewish young people to receive the substantive education they deserve and for which their parents believe they are paying. They are good young people. They are capable of learning great things. And, if they miss these opportunities to grow in Jewish text knowledge -- the study of Chumash, Rashi, Mishnah, Talmud, and so much more -- during their childhood and teen years, they may never get that opportunity later, once "life happens."
And what will they have left to pass down to their children?
This statement of public concern concludes with one more area of attention. A Jewish community day school that offers its students the opportunity to participate in formal daily prayer services lays a foundation for them to have an option to grow spiritually in yet another way, and also to learn the skill of navigating through a prayer book. Those who daven daily are not perfect. But if tefilah -- Jewish prayer (davening) -- is taught with sensitivity and formal training, it sometimes can assist a school's administration and faculty in an effort to guide young people from evolving in their teens towards the coarseness sometimes found in segments of external society. Coarseness is the hallmark of teen evolution in certain circles of society, but the Jewish Day School model aims for something more noble and uplifting. Dirty words, filthy language, coarse sexual references and humor are not compatible with a successful Jewish Day School model. TVT / Tarbut should offer its students the opportunity to pray every day -- a formal Shacharit option each and every school morning, with all boys age 13 or over donning tefillin and with Sephardic boys wearing a tallit in the tradition of their parents. Such prayer need not be mandatory, but it should be a formal curricular offering in much the same way that so many other community Jewish Day Schools offer. Similarly, Tarbut / TVT should offer a formally scheduled Mincha prayer opportunity, even if only optional, every afternoon.
If there is no one else to lead such a daily Shacharit service, I publicly volunteer to lead it. Just as I remain available -- as I have for three years -- to teach Torah text as a formal faculty member. I extend that offer because it is easy to offer analysis and observation when one is not prepared personally to accept a challenge and take up a gauntlet. But the faculty member need not be I. Nor need the prayer leader be I. But it is time. And if not now, when?
Irvine is not New York or Los Angeles, and – given its Jewish demographics – it is proper, even for an Orthodox Rav, to modify expectations in light of the reality of the community and what it realistically can accept in terms of Jewish education, what it reasonably can sustain. I write from that recognition and perspective.
I have been in Tarbut / TVT. I know many of its students. I deeply care for them.
I am deeply pained that, for exactly the same money – or even significantly less – that has been invested in the school, Tarbut / TVT could be a fine community Jewish Day School. Instead, it does not meet its mission as a community Jewish Day School. One readily can discern the focus that donors devoted on the campus grounds and the externals of the facility, but a more experienced and trained eye discerns sadly the lesser focus devoted on the quality of the Judaic component of the academic program. (It is beyond the scope of this commentary to opine on the school's secular program or its administration. Neither approbation nor disdain should be inferred from this commentary regarding either of those two subjects.) This severe weakness is commonly perceived, and it is commonly acknowledged among Jewish educators outside the community. It is discussed quietly among rabbis of all Jewish denominations in Orange County, several of whom lament privately that the Morashah Day School extends only through sixth grade. However, it is regarded as rabbinic-career political suicide to say it aloud, with attribution, within the Jewish community of Orange County. I thank G-d for imbuing me with the courage to write this.
It is not difficult to know what a formal Jewish education can offer its students. Throughout Southern California, there are noble efforts to that effect. Institutions under Orthodox auspices are not the only ones. There are noble efforts under Conservative and Reform auspices, too. In Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley, Bruce Powell has created a burgeoning model of a community Jewish Day School. Tragically, however, Tarbut's / TVT's Jewish studies program is dramatically weaker than one finds at many fine Jewish schools run in the United States under Reform or other denominational auspices.
The students at Tarbut / TVT deserve better. I know many of them personally. Many are bright -- and they would love to learn more. They are quite capable of being taught text knowledge. Certainly, at a tuition of some $15,000 per head, they deserve it. TVT / Tarbut should be a school where capable students learn Jewish knowledge, book knowledge, side-by-side with secular curricula. But it is not. I know this from very personal knowledge: from what I personally have seen, what I have tried to share of myself, and -- primarily -- from what parents themselves privately and confidentially have brought to my attention throughout my three years in Orange County. I have spoken privately with select students and with select faculty through three years here. There is great fear to speak openly about the lacunae. "Rabbi Fischer," I am asked, "Please do something about this. Please say something. Please write something. Please tell what is happening -- or, more accurately, what is not happening -- here. But, please, promise me that you will not quote me. My friends will attack me. My children will lose their friends. Please do not quote me."
There is no need to fear. I will not quote and will not attribute. I speak only as a Rabbi of 27 years -- as a Congregational Rav and as a professional Jewish educator. I speak only in my own name, and I bear full personal responsibility for every word I write here. For a period now extending through several years, Tarbut V'Torah (TVT) consistently has failed its parents and students, failing to transmit a substantive Judaic knowledge foundation to the vast majority of its students. The academic lacunae are palpable, and the failure to transmit substantive Judaic information and to inculcate meaningful Jewish learning is manifest. Given the expansive and lush grounds on which the Tarbut V'Torah campus is situated and the $15,000 annual tuition charge for each student, this poignant institutional failure to achieve the results charted at leaner, more modestly funded Jewish Day Schools operated throughout America under Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox auspices respectively cannot be attributed to a lack of material wherewithal, thus amplifying the concern.
At Tarbut / TVT, the students are not taught to navigate a Chumash. They do not learn Chumash text as part of their curriculum between grades 1-12. They cannot read a Rashi commentary. Over 90% never even have heard the most basic terms that children at any other Jewish Day School would have learned. The kids should be looking and learning inside real texts – Chumash, Rashi, Mishnah.
The level of Hebrew reading at Tarbut / TVT concerns me. I have met any number of parents who have brought their 12-year-old sons and 11-year-old daughters into my office, to start them on the paths of their respective bar- and bat mitzvahs. I would take out four Siddurim -- one for the student, one for the Mom, one for the Dad, and one for me. Typically, I also would invite our Youth Director to participate in the session, handing him a Siddur, too. I would ask the student kindly to read something in the Siddur so I could gauge the level of intensity needed for the forthcoming curriculum of bar/bat mitzvah study. The experience typically would be profoundly disheartening.
This educational shortfall is universally recognized among Jewish educators and rabbis in the region, but there is an understanding within the community that discretion is appropriate. One Youth Director after another who has worked with me has seen first-hand and experienced the Tarbut / TVT failure. Each has expressed amazement. The Youth Director would sit in my office with me, as we -- and the parents -- would gauge the prospective bar/bat mitzvah student’s Hebrew reading to assess the need and plan out a learning program. Because I always would have the Mom and Dad in the room with us, too, as the child would read Hebrew from the Siddur, the parents also would be startled.
As in public schools, where many parents consign pedagogical authority to the employed teachers without always investigating what is being taught and how, many of the parents of TVT students understandably do not investigate what their children are learning at Tarbut V'Torah, often because they understandably do not know how to check or what standard to expect. They are not professionally trained Jewish educators, and they understandably do not have a skills set in that area. Yet even they know that something is severely wrong when their intelligent child, after six years at some $15,000-a-year, sits in the Rabbi's office at age 12 or age 11 and barely is able to read a line of Hebrew smoothly, much less to identify basic Judaic concepts or terms.
If the parents lack the skills set, how then do they know there is a problem? Consider that I do not read Chinese. But if my son, after attending a Chinese-language class for six years at $15,000 a year, were asked to read from a Chinese book, and he were to articulate only a handful of syllabic sounds in a sixty-second minute, and then were to stop after just a few more syllables over three or four more minutes, I would be quite unsettled. And if he then were to turn to me, seeing my dismay, and say “Don’t be angry at me, Dad. I really am trying, but I can’t read this so well. It is a foreign language with a different set of alphabetical characters.” Well, after six years -- and knowing how well my child is able to acquire other knowledge skills -- that would tell me something very sobering about my $90,000 investment.
That is the core of the problem at TVT / Tarbut v'Torah. For those less professionally trained and experienced in the area of Jewish pedagogy, the difficulty to recognize the scope and depth of the problem is amplified and obfuscated by two factors:
(1) A small number of TVT / Tarbut students independently are intensely home-schooled by their parents, after school and on weekends, because those parents are among the proportionately few in South Orange County who enjoy the Judaic background and skills-sets sufficient to perceive that their respective children otherwise are not being taught a meaningfully substantive Judaic knowledge base. Then, after being home-schooled, those proportionately few children are presented to the broader community as “proof” that TVT / Tarbut is doing a fine job.
(2) The second obfuscation is more subtle. The Rabbi and the temple Youth Director -- whether Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or Orthodox -- is assigned, within the separate institutional framework of the temple that provides services for its members, to train the 12-year-old boy or 11-year-old girl, over the course of the following 8-12 months leading up to bar/bat mitzvah, to essentially quasi-memorize the bar/bat mitzvah service. Thus, on “Bar/Bat Mitzvah Day,” those present at temple hear a young lady or fellow chant and otherwise lead aspects of the service with the perceived erudition that implicitly comes with years of training, learning, and study.
But the actuality differs. Professional and experienced pedagogues in secular schools have encountered this same educational phenomenon when first meeting a child entering the first grade. The child is tested in entry-level reading skills and is given a page, or several pages, to read. The child reads beautifully. The parent beams proudly, but the teacher methodically reaches for a second book of similar grade-level, but written by a different author, illustrated with different pictures. Inexplicably to the parent -- but all-too-common to the trained pedagogue -- the same child cannot read from that comparable book. The trained pedagogue instantly discerns that the child was taught "sight reading," not phonics. Thus, the child essentially has quasi-memorized that first book, page by page. But the child remains helpless when exposed to other illustrations, another page lay-out. The child has not yet been taught to read. Many pedagogues maintain that there nevertheless is some value in teaching "sight reading" if it encourages a foundational love for books and love for reading among nursery children and kindergarteners. However, by eighth grade, it is recognized that "sight reading" is not sufficient.
The same phenomenon underlies the Bar/Bat Mitzvah phenomenon. The Tarbut / TVT student leads the service at the temple. Perhaps she reads from the Torah. Perhaps he reads a Haftorah. Perhaps she leads a portion of the prayer service. Yet, if the same boy were to be asked -- only moments later -- to read also from the Haftorah that appears on the page that precedes or follows his Bar Mitzvah Haftorah, the result well could surprise. Likewise, the boy or girl is taught essentially to quasi-memorize portions of the prayer service that he or she leads. But if he or she were to be asked moments later, quietly and confidentially, to read in the same Siddur from prayers that appear a few pages before or after what he or she has been taught essentially to memorize, the results well could surprise. Thus, for the audience -- the assembled congregation -- an appearance of erudition redounds to the school's reputation. Would that it were so!
Ultimately, then, the need in Orange County is not exclusively for a Brooklyn/Los Angeles-quality yeshiva day school. Naturally, as an Orthodox Rav, it is my goal and dream to see a Jewish Day School of such caliber established some day in Irvine so that my Orthodox rabbinical colleagues and I do not have to endure the enormous logistical challenges and difficulties of having our children educated two hours away at YULA in Los Angeles. But as a Rabbi who recognizes the variegation of the Jewish demographic locally and understands with the experience of a career spanning a quarter century what is at stake and what realistically can be achieved for the Jewish community that I love and whom I am dedicated to serve -- an Irvine-based South Orange County Jewish community of more than 100,000 Jews who are not predominantly Orthodox but who deserve excellence for the tuition dollars being invested in their most precious resources, their children -- it is deeply, deeply painful to watch profoundly bright and capable young children in our community being denied exposure to substantive Judaic knowledge.
As a Rabbi, it devolves on me to observe aloud that wonderful, bright young people are processed year-after-year through Tarbut's / TVT’s revolving doors at a tuition rate that certainly implies a substantive education, yet that demands from and offers them so much less than one typically would find provided to graduates of a Jewish Day School run under Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, or Orthodox auspices.
I know the children because my focus as a Rabbi always has included attending with utmost concern to elementary students, teens, and college students. I know, first-hand in the confidentiality of my relationships with families of Tarbut / TVT students, how deeply so many of those parents are pained. There are parents who literally have broken down, crying in my office. I know, from that same base of direct and confidential personal knowledge, how relieved those parents are when the year-long quasi-memorization process ends, with their sons and daughters emerging from the Bar/Bat Mitzvah having publicly presented the appearance of having a Judaic education. I know the scope of what rabbis in Los Angeles -- who may speak more candidly on the subject because they are outside the penumbra of political fall-out and personal exposure when speaking -- think of TVT / Tarbut. (The school's reputation outside Orange County and its environs is one that I have not encountered in my quarter century in the Rabbinate.) From a career in the rabbinate, I know what other Jewish community and denominational schools can and do teach their charges.
It thus is a matter of grave public concern, compelling a Rabbi to speak out, even as it is a matter of political suicide in South Orange County to discuss this subject publicly with candor. But I am a Rabbi, and that is my calling. It is my soul's yearning. It is incumbent on me to share these concerns publicly. We need only view the greater American society's economic fall-out, in the face of the Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae setbacks that were perceived by many who knew that the system was in grave danger but who chose not to speak because their personal political considerations for advancement and personal fundraising opportunities diverted them. And, then, one day Bear Stearns collapsed, and then Indy Mac, and then Lehman Brothers. Yet, with deference to the significant economic and financial institutional concerns of an American polity in which I share, I feel obliged even more to share the present concern. The need for a dramatic overhaul and re-conception of Tarbut V'Torah (TVT), its mission, and its educational aspirations for students and parents who deserve better is most compelling because, at bottom, we are talking about the right of Jewish young people to receive the substantive education they deserve and for which their parents believe they are paying. They are good young people. They are capable of learning great things. And, if they miss these opportunities to grow in Jewish text knowledge -- the study of Chumash, Rashi, Mishnah, Talmud, and so much more -- during their childhood and teen years, they may never get that opportunity later, once "life happens."
And what will they have left to pass down to their children?
This statement of public concern concludes with one more area of attention. A Jewish community day school that offers its students the opportunity to participate in formal daily prayer services lays a foundation for them to have an option to grow spiritually in yet another way, and also to learn the skill of navigating through a prayer book. Those who daven daily are not perfect. But if tefilah -- Jewish prayer (davening) -- is taught with sensitivity and formal training, it sometimes can assist a school's administration and faculty in an effort to guide young people from evolving in their teens towards the coarseness sometimes found in segments of external society. Coarseness is the hallmark of teen evolution in certain circles of society, but the Jewish Day School model aims for something more noble and uplifting. Dirty words, filthy language, coarse sexual references and humor are not compatible with a successful Jewish Day School model. TVT / Tarbut should offer its students the opportunity to pray every day -- a formal Shacharit option each and every school morning, with all boys age 13 or over donning tefillin and with Sephardic boys wearing a tallit in the tradition of their parents. Such prayer need not be mandatory, but it should be a formal curricular offering in much the same way that so many other community Jewish Day Schools offer. Similarly, Tarbut / TVT should offer a formally scheduled Mincha prayer opportunity, even if only optional, every afternoon.
If there is no one else to lead such a daily Shacharit service, I publicly volunteer to lead it. Just as I remain available -- as I have for three years -- to teach Torah text as a formal faculty member. I extend that offer because it is easy to offer analysis and observation when one is not prepared personally to accept a challenge and take up a gauntlet. But the faculty member need not be I. Nor need the prayer leader be I. But it is time. And if not now, when?
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Olive Tree Initiative and the Jews: Travels and Travails:
How the Jewish Federation of Orange County, the UCI Hillel, and the Hillel Foundation of Orange County Softened the Pro-Israel Partisanship of Several UCI Jewish Students in 2008
The University of California at Irvine (UCI) published a book of approximately 112 pages in Spring 2009 as part of its “Expressions/ Impressions” series. It is volume 6 in the series and is subtitled “Special Edition: Olive Tree Initiative (OTI).” It contains personal memoirs, averaging 2-3 pages per author, by virtually every participant on the first OTI trip. The volume is instructive, beginning with information published at the end:
On pages 110-111, OTI formally lists with gratitude the institutions and individuals whom they acknowledge as their “partners”: the institutions and individuals that “Olive Tree Initiative would not have been possible without.” These include, inter alia, Rose Project of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, Hillel Foundation of Orange County, Shalom Elcott, Jay Feldmann [sic], and Jordan Fruchtman. On Page 12, Daniel Wehrenfennig, the then-doctoral student who put together the program, writes: “The Jewish community through the Rose Project of the Jewish Federation in Orange County offered crucial financial support at just the right moment, as well as important contacts in the region.”
The faculty leaders’ theme of the trip was to convince students that they can be citizen peace builders and play a role in bringing peace by learning to refrain from taking sides and instead to listen and learn and communicate. Certainly, it is very important, and a central role of the liberal arts university, to educate students to listen respectfully to and learn from those with conflicting viewpoints. But there is no virtue, after listening and learning and understanding, in refraining from partisanship. It helps that the side is just. Sometimes it is righteous to take a side. The OTI trip did not soften the understandable partisanship of the trip’s Moslem Arab students, but its exceptional ideological tilt attenuated Jewish attitudes for Israel.
Other than a solid memoir by Isaac Yerushalmi, one of the OTI participants, virtually every other Jewish person’s memoir reflects a softening of position – not necessarily to pro-Palestinian, not necessarily to neutral in all cases, but to a greater sense that there needs to be a Palestine alongside Israel, augmented by a deep belief that the masses of Palestinians really sincerely want a peaceful coexistence with Israel, but are obstructed in their dream solely by their political leaders. Contrasted alongside the Jewish students’ softening, among the Palestinian and other Arab students there is an overarching sense that some may have evolved positively in viewing their fellow Jewish UCI students as humans, but that they also were traumatized by seeing in-person, and without meaningful context, the “suffering in Palestine,” the Israeli military checkpoints, the refugee camps. Although some of the Moslem students speak warmly of a Friday night Shabbat dinner the OTI group had on the terrace of a Canadian-Jewish family who recently had made aliyah to East Jerusalem, the Palestinians came out strongly, even strengthened, for Palestine. Two or three speak of their shock in viewing what they honestly saw as apartheid – military checkpoints at the security wall, the people in Qalqilya walled in except for a few hours each day, spiffy new superhighways for Jews to drive from one Judea-Samaria community to the next but barred to Palestinians who instead must use separate roads. Different color licensed plates. The students seem utterly unaware of context:
“I have heard people talk about Palestinian apartheid, and I dismissed this as an overstated comparison. . . . But it wasn’t until I visited the West Bank that I became keenly aware that this was an area inhabited by two groups who were nevertheless separated. I witnessed an elevated Israeli-built superhighway intended for settlers overlapping a narrow road mandated for Palestinian usage. . . . There is no point in building two roads over each other unless it is desired to prohibit at least one group of people from going to certain places.” (P. 54)
Daniel Wehrenfennig, the former UCI doctoral student who now directs OTI, was the central crafter of the itinerary. His own personal bias is that Judea and Samaria are “occupied Palestine.” He formally decided not to bring the students to Sderot or the Golan Heights. (P. 11) So, on a trip that relied heavily on perceptions at the hot spots, the students never saw the shell-shock impact of the unilateral Gaza disengagement, the resultant nightmare sustained in Sderot by those who took risks for peace. And they never saw the facts on the ground in the north, the hands-on actual stakes for Israel in holding the promontories of Golan. But they were brought to several Palestinian “refugee camps.” Those locations were deemed safe. One student came away from OTI’s visit to Bethlehem’s Kanistat al-Mahid (Christians call it “Church of the Nativity”) with an understanding that the site “is a focal point of Palestinian resistance. The nativity church is arguably one of the most abused and neglected holy Christian sites. In it you will find Israeli bullets that have damaged statues of saints only a few meters away from the birth spot of Jesus Christ.” (P. 56)
They met a Holocaust survivor at Yad Vashem who impacted them, but one of the Palestinian students writes in her memoir that, through the Yad Vashem experience, she now better understands why Israel essentially is xenophobic towards Palestinians:
“I understand that after two thousand years of persecution and then the Holocaust, the panic they felt and the sense of urgency to get out of Europe may explain that sometimes you don’t care whose land you’re in and whose farms you’re stepping on. You just want to get out and try and seize any opportunity to a life of security, free of fear and torture. . . .BUT . . . I hope future generations are less overwhelmed with anxiety, fear, and distrust of others, as I feel many Jews are. I hear Jews say Hamas, Iran or the Arabs want to wipe out the Jews, throw them into the sea, etc., etc. . . . These claims from Iran and Hamas are at their heart media stunts which in turn play into Israeli politicians’ rhetoric and instill even more fear and xenophobia in the people.” (Pages 38-39)
An Israeli soldier, Yuval, who had served in Lebanon in 2006 spoke apologetically to the group, saying “. . . I would always ask myself what I was doing, why we have wars, etc.” The UCI student continues: “He spoke of Lebanon’s beauty, the mountains, the sea, the nature. . . . This encounter, although unique, left me uneasy. The truth is, as he spoke of Lebanon’s beauty, I felt violated. As if my country is some protected jewel of mine and Yuval had snuck into my room and held that jewel, enjoyed its beauty, and then threw it on the floor and stepped on it. And although the jewel is still here and mine, it is tainted. He had come into Lebanon uninvited, admired its beauty yet contributed to its destruction.” (P. 42) Consistent with the OTI strategy of presenting Israeli speakers primarily left of the mainstream, the group also met with Yonatan Adiri, a former advisor to Shimon Peres. “He both praised and criticized Israel’s democracy,” (P. 46) complaining primarily about compromises that have to be made to form and maintain multi-party coalition governments in Israel. It is ironic that, in advocating compromise with Palestinian Arabs who are not motivated by Israel’s best interests, he lambasted compromise with Israeli Jews, his own people.
The students were afforded a presentation by an Israeli professor, Muli Peleg, a long-time far-Left “Peace Now” organizer and advisor to Yossi Beilin, formerly one of the Knesset’s most far-Left members and a key shaper of the now-discredited Oslo Accords. Peleg left an impression on many of them, with his basic narrative that Israeli and Palestinian leaders never will make peace, but that peace only will come via the “bottom-up process” – i.e., bypassing the established leadership and institutions, and instead starting with people like the students at UCI who then spread the word, build the momentum, mobilize NGOs, and create a movement from the bottom, working its way up until the leaders at the top have no choice but to make compromises for peace. “One of the speakers on our trip, Muli Peleg, a professor in Tel Aviv, believes that one of the main obstacles is convincing Israelis that Palestinians want peace . . . .” (P. 61) There seems no perception that Israel had disengaged unilaterally from South Lebanon and from Gaza, twice taking risks for peace, being punished brutally for having taken those risks. Southern Lebanon has been controlled by the Hezbollah and Gaza by Hamas ever since.
Most of the students come away with a sense that there is no discernible solution to intractable differences in the region, so there needs to be a two-state solution. Their model is the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, co-owned by an Israeli Jew and an Israeli Arab, where Israelis eat and Arabs eat. An Arab woman had come into this center for Jewish-Arab coexistence a few years ago, blew herself up, and thereby murdered 21 people and severely wounded 51 others. The Haifa community came together to restore the restaurant. That restaurant becomes the metaphor of the two-state. The OTI students learned from a Captain in the Israeli Defense Forces that 95% of the two populations want peace. “Unfortunately, it is the other five percent who are not willing to compromise.” (P. 26) It is noteworthy that, when UCI Olive Tree Initiative emphasizes that its program balances Palestinian Arab views and speakers with Israeli views and speakers, in order to provide UCI students a fair and balanced understanding, the selected Israeli presenters are disproportionately left of the mainstream of Israeli society, thus skewing the UCI students’ perceptions. The UCI OTI group did go to Ariel, a city of nearly 20,000 and capital of the Jewish communities in Samaria, where they heard Ron Nachman, the mayor. However, that session does not resonate in the students’ memoirs. Thus, the IDF captain and Prof. Peleg are misperceived as representing mainstream Israeli perspective as a normative counterweight to Palestinian Arab propagandists.
The UCI Hillel Shaliach, Tzvi Raviv, participated. His only memorable thought was his last sentence: “I believe the future of Israel as a Jewish-democratic state is tied with the creation of an independent prosperous Palestinian state.” (P. 44) That was the Zionist professional who served the Jewish students at UCI Hillel for the two or three years he was on shlichut, and who participated on this trip after helping with the creation of OTI in tandem with UCI Hillel and its director. Shannon Shibata, the tour guide, portrays herself as someone who came to the region as pro-Palestinian but changed to neutral, after getting to hear all sides’ narratives, and she echoes the OTI theme, repeatedly encouraging the students to go back as neutrals committed to peace. It is not clear how much Shibata is paid by OTI.
In summary, the publication confirms that the OTI program is not anti-Jewish or anti-Israel, but surely is deeply repugnant to an identifying Jewish community’s ideals for what a normative and healthy Jewish community should be supporting. There would not be Jews today if Judaism’s forebears had been neutrals. When the world was polytheistic, Jews were not neutral on the question of monotheism. When the ancient world worked seven days, Jews were not neutral on the question of a day’s Sabbath. Jews do not send children to Jewish day schools or Hebrew schools for Bar/Bat Mitzvah study to be neutral. Mainstream normative Jews are fair and honest, and also are not neutral. By contrast, while portraying neutrality, the Israeli portion of the two-week OTI trip is top-heavy with apologists from a distinctly Left orientation that minimizes context and Jewish rights to Judea and Samaria. One swallow does not a summer make, nor does Mayor Ron Nachman of Ariel counterbalance a program inexorably tilted, even if unintentionally, towards moral relativism. One student, a non-Jewish/ non-Arab/ non-Moslem lady, came away with this lesson from her OTI travels: “Both Jews and Palestinians have suffered. I cried for both fathers of suicide victims and for the Palestinians who face humiliating discrimination on a daily basis.” (P. 72) In the words of another OTI student upon her return from the trip, and back at her UCI classes:
“Recently we had an assignment on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Our group had to show the Israeli perspective. One person said, I’m so glad I’m in the Israel group because I’m so pro-Israel. That made me upset because I couldn’t figure out why he would be so one-sided. It doesn’t help that he is Asian, not Jewish, so I don’t know where he’s coming from with this. So even on a small level, [now that I have been on OTI]I can help people better understand [neutrality].” (P.93)
Clearly, the problem transcends OTI, which is an important focus, and the greater problem is that the Orange County Hillel is in the hands of people who are focused on raising money but who, among their critical decision makers, include inter alia individuals who have no vision of Jewish authenticity nor the capacity or depth of Jewish knowledge for having such vision. They run an annual Poker Game, which many of the Hillel directors deem the annual highlight of the UCI Hillel calendar year. Soon after the wrenching Moslem Student Union (MSU) annual Hate Israel Week, they do a reactive week of pro-Israel programming whose substance completely dilutes Israel and her character, so that students learn very little about Israel while watching various non-Jewish dance groups perform and while patronizing booths that mostly are substantively superficial, offering very little about Israel. (That week’s main value is that members of the local Jewish community come down to campus and mingle.) The UCI Hillel has moved away from meaningful weekly Shabbat programming to an occasional once-monthly TGIF dinner. Sukkot and Chanukah have passed by. Meanwhile, it is clear that the Federation is in terrible hands. They do a very good job for the community at the annual Lag B’Omer Israel Fest, and some of their agencies do good work, completely separate from affiliation. Thus, the staff of Federation does little by way of Family Services; rather, Jewish Family Services does its excellent work with its own people, even as that agency has been compelled by the economy to merge into the Federation tent. Perhaps most importantly for the job security of Federation professionals in a community whose lay leaders seem mostly to value superficial displays of wealth and substantively void edifices, they raise some good amounts of cash in a city where, as one rabbi of ten years’ pulpit experience explained, “The Jews here are committed a mile wide and one inch deep.”
So we have a Hillel Foundation of Orange County and a UCI Hillel that is rudderless, without a vision or the people in the critical roles capable of having a vision, and a Federation being guided by those with a vision inimical to ours supported by patrons who are pleased that their Jewish Community Center is 125,000 square feet with a gymnasium, health and fitness center, two basketball courts, pool and aquatics center, and a Holocaust memorial garden. And it was designated a “Facility of Merit” by Athletic Business Magazine, too. With that kind of wealth, it is easy to see how the community would not notice, below the radar, that the Federation has submitted the community’s name and reputation, and has devoted Jewish charitable funds, towards so deeply flawed and damaging a project as the UCI Olive Tree Initiative.
The University of California at Irvine (UCI) published a book of approximately 112 pages in Spring 2009 as part of its “Expressions/ Impressions” series. It is volume 6 in the series and is subtitled “Special Edition: Olive Tree Initiative (OTI).” It contains personal memoirs, averaging 2-3 pages per author, by virtually every participant on the first OTI trip. The volume is instructive, beginning with information published at the end:
On pages 110-111, OTI formally lists with gratitude the institutions and individuals whom they acknowledge as their “partners”: the institutions and individuals that “Olive Tree Initiative would not have been possible without.” These include, inter alia, Rose Project of the Jewish Federation of Orange County, Hillel Foundation of Orange County, Shalom Elcott, Jay Feldmann [sic], and Jordan Fruchtman. On Page 12, Daniel Wehrenfennig, the then-doctoral student who put together the program, writes: “The Jewish community through the Rose Project of the Jewish Federation in Orange County offered crucial financial support at just the right moment, as well as important contacts in the region.”
The faculty leaders’ theme of the trip was to convince students that they can be citizen peace builders and play a role in bringing peace by learning to refrain from taking sides and instead to listen and learn and communicate. Certainly, it is very important, and a central role of the liberal arts university, to educate students to listen respectfully to and learn from those with conflicting viewpoints. But there is no virtue, after listening and learning and understanding, in refraining from partisanship. It helps that the side is just. Sometimes it is righteous to take a side. The OTI trip did not soften the understandable partisanship of the trip’s Moslem Arab students, but its exceptional ideological tilt attenuated Jewish attitudes for Israel.
Other than a solid memoir by Isaac Yerushalmi, one of the OTI participants, virtually every other Jewish person’s memoir reflects a softening of position – not necessarily to pro-Palestinian, not necessarily to neutral in all cases, but to a greater sense that there needs to be a Palestine alongside Israel, augmented by a deep belief that the masses of Palestinians really sincerely want a peaceful coexistence with Israel, but are obstructed in their dream solely by their political leaders. Contrasted alongside the Jewish students’ softening, among the Palestinian and other Arab students there is an overarching sense that some may have evolved positively in viewing their fellow Jewish UCI students as humans, but that they also were traumatized by seeing in-person, and without meaningful context, the “suffering in Palestine,” the Israeli military checkpoints, the refugee camps. Although some of the Moslem students speak warmly of a Friday night Shabbat dinner the OTI group had on the terrace of a Canadian-Jewish family who recently had made aliyah to East Jerusalem, the Palestinians came out strongly, even strengthened, for Palestine. Two or three speak of their shock in viewing what they honestly saw as apartheid – military checkpoints at the security wall, the people in Qalqilya walled in except for a few hours each day, spiffy new superhighways for Jews to drive from one Judea-Samaria community to the next but barred to Palestinians who instead must use separate roads. Different color licensed plates. The students seem utterly unaware of context:
“I have heard people talk about Palestinian apartheid, and I dismissed this as an overstated comparison. . . . But it wasn’t until I visited the West Bank that I became keenly aware that this was an area inhabited by two groups who were nevertheless separated. I witnessed an elevated Israeli-built superhighway intended for settlers overlapping a narrow road mandated for Palestinian usage. . . . There is no point in building two roads over each other unless it is desired to prohibit at least one group of people from going to certain places.” (P. 54)
Daniel Wehrenfennig, the former UCI doctoral student who now directs OTI, was the central crafter of the itinerary. His own personal bias is that Judea and Samaria are “occupied Palestine.” He formally decided not to bring the students to Sderot or the Golan Heights. (P. 11) So, on a trip that relied heavily on perceptions at the hot spots, the students never saw the shell-shock impact of the unilateral Gaza disengagement, the resultant nightmare sustained in Sderot by those who took risks for peace. And they never saw the facts on the ground in the north, the hands-on actual stakes for Israel in holding the promontories of Golan. But they were brought to several Palestinian “refugee camps.” Those locations were deemed safe. One student came away from OTI’s visit to Bethlehem’s Kanistat al-Mahid (Christians call it “Church of the Nativity”) with an understanding that the site “is a focal point of Palestinian resistance. The nativity church is arguably one of the most abused and neglected holy Christian sites. In it you will find Israeli bullets that have damaged statues of saints only a few meters away from the birth spot of Jesus Christ.” (P. 56)
They met a Holocaust survivor at Yad Vashem who impacted them, but one of the Palestinian students writes in her memoir that, through the Yad Vashem experience, she now better understands why Israel essentially is xenophobic towards Palestinians:
“I understand that after two thousand years of persecution and then the Holocaust, the panic they felt and the sense of urgency to get out of Europe may explain that sometimes you don’t care whose land you’re in and whose farms you’re stepping on. You just want to get out and try and seize any opportunity to a life of security, free of fear and torture. . . .BUT . . . I hope future generations are less overwhelmed with anxiety, fear, and distrust of others, as I feel many Jews are. I hear Jews say Hamas, Iran or the Arabs want to wipe out the Jews, throw them into the sea, etc., etc. . . . These claims from Iran and Hamas are at their heart media stunts which in turn play into Israeli politicians’ rhetoric and instill even more fear and xenophobia in the people.” (Pages 38-39)
An Israeli soldier, Yuval, who had served in Lebanon in 2006 spoke apologetically to the group, saying “. . . I would always ask myself what I was doing, why we have wars, etc.” The UCI student continues: “He spoke of Lebanon’s beauty, the mountains, the sea, the nature. . . . This encounter, although unique, left me uneasy. The truth is, as he spoke of Lebanon’s beauty, I felt violated. As if my country is some protected jewel of mine and Yuval had snuck into my room and held that jewel, enjoyed its beauty, and then threw it on the floor and stepped on it. And although the jewel is still here and mine, it is tainted. He had come into Lebanon uninvited, admired its beauty yet contributed to its destruction.” (P. 42) Consistent with the OTI strategy of presenting Israeli speakers primarily left of the mainstream, the group also met with Yonatan Adiri, a former advisor to Shimon Peres. “He both praised and criticized Israel’s democracy,” (P. 46) complaining primarily about compromises that have to be made to form and maintain multi-party coalition governments in Israel. It is ironic that, in advocating compromise with Palestinian Arabs who are not motivated by Israel’s best interests, he lambasted compromise with Israeli Jews, his own people.
The students were afforded a presentation by an Israeli professor, Muli Peleg, a long-time far-Left “Peace Now” organizer and advisor to Yossi Beilin, formerly one of the Knesset’s most far-Left members and a key shaper of the now-discredited Oslo Accords. Peleg left an impression on many of them, with his basic narrative that Israeli and Palestinian leaders never will make peace, but that peace only will come via the “bottom-up process” – i.e., bypassing the established leadership and institutions, and instead starting with people like the students at UCI who then spread the word, build the momentum, mobilize NGOs, and create a movement from the bottom, working its way up until the leaders at the top have no choice but to make compromises for peace. “One of the speakers on our trip, Muli Peleg, a professor in Tel Aviv, believes that one of the main obstacles is convincing Israelis that Palestinians want peace . . . .” (P. 61) There seems no perception that Israel had disengaged unilaterally from South Lebanon and from Gaza, twice taking risks for peace, being punished brutally for having taken those risks. Southern Lebanon has been controlled by the Hezbollah and Gaza by Hamas ever since.
Most of the students come away with a sense that there is no discernible solution to intractable differences in the region, so there needs to be a two-state solution. Their model is the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, co-owned by an Israeli Jew and an Israeli Arab, where Israelis eat and Arabs eat. An Arab woman had come into this center for Jewish-Arab coexistence a few years ago, blew herself up, and thereby murdered 21 people and severely wounded 51 others. The Haifa community came together to restore the restaurant. That restaurant becomes the metaphor of the two-state. The OTI students learned from a Captain in the Israeli Defense Forces that 95% of the two populations want peace. “Unfortunately, it is the other five percent who are not willing to compromise.” (P. 26) It is noteworthy that, when UCI Olive Tree Initiative emphasizes that its program balances Palestinian Arab views and speakers with Israeli views and speakers, in order to provide UCI students a fair and balanced understanding, the selected Israeli presenters are disproportionately left of the mainstream of Israeli society, thus skewing the UCI students’ perceptions. The UCI OTI group did go to Ariel, a city of nearly 20,000 and capital of the Jewish communities in Samaria, where they heard Ron Nachman, the mayor. However, that session does not resonate in the students’ memoirs. Thus, the IDF captain and Prof. Peleg are misperceived as representing mainstream Israeli perspective as a normative counterweight to Palestinian Arab propagandists.
The UCI Hillel Shaliach, Tzvi Raviv, participated. His only memorable thought was his last sentence: “I believe the future of Israel as a Jewish-democratic state is tied with the creation of an independent prosperous Palestinian state.” (P. 44) That was the Zionist professional who served the Jewish students at UCI Hillel for the two or three years he was on shlichut, and who participated on this trip after helping with the creation of OTI in tandem with UCI Hillel and its director. Shannon Shibata, the tour guide, portrays herself as someone who came to the region as pro-Palestinian but changed to neutral, after getting to hear all sides’ narratives, and she echoes the OTI theme, repeatedly encouraging the students to go back as neutrals committed to peace. It is not clear how much Shibata is paid by OTI.
In summary, the publication confirms that the OTI program is not anti-Jewish or anti-Israel, but surely is deeply repugnant to an identifying Jewish community’s ideals for what a normative and healthy Jewish community should be supporting. There would not be Jews today if Judaism’s forebears had been neutrals. When the world was polytheistic, Jews were not neutral on the question of monotheism. When the ancient world worked seven days, Jews were not neutral on the question of a day’s Sabbath. Jews do not send children to Jewish day schools or Hebrew schools for Bar/Bat Mitzvah study to be neutral. Mainstream normative Jews are fair and honest, and also are not neutral. By contrast, while portraying neutrality, the Israeli portion of the two-week OTI trip is top-heavy with apologists from a distinctly Left orientation that minimizes context and Jewish rights to Judea and Samaria. One swallow does not a summer make, nor does Mayor Ron Nachman of Ariel counterbalance a program inexorably tilted, even if unintentionally, towards moral relativism. One student, a non-Jewish/ non-Arab/ non-Moslem lady, came away with this lesson from her OTI travels: “Both Jews and Palestinians have suffered. I cried for both fathers of suicide victims and for the Palestinians who face humiliating discrimination on a daily basis.” (P. 72) In the words of another OTI student upon her return from the trip, and back at her UCI classes:
“Recently we had an assignment on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Our group had to show the Israeli perspective. One person said, I’m so glad I’m in the Israel group because I’m so pro-Israel. That made me upset because I couldn’t figure out why he would be so one-sided. It doesn’t help that he is Asian, not Jewish, so I don’t know where he’s coming from with this. So even on a small level, [now that I have been on OTI]I can help people better understand [neutrality].” (P.93)
Clearly, the problem transcends OTI, which is an important focus, and the greater problem is that the Orange County Hillel is in the hands of people who are focused on raising money but who, among their critical decision makers, include inter alia individuals who have no vision of Jewish authenticity nor the capacity or depth of Jewish knowledge for having such vision. They run an annual Poker Game, which many of the Hillel directors deem the annual highlight of the UCI Hillel calendar year. Soon after the wrenching Moslem Student Union (MSU) annual Hate Israel Week, they do a reactive week of pro-Israel programming whose substance completely dilutes Israel and her character, so that students learn very little about Israel while watching various non-Jewish dance groups perform and while patronizing booths that mostly are substantively superficial, offering very little about Israel. (That week’s main value is that members of the local Jewish community come down to campus and mingle.) The UCI Hillel has moved away from meaningful weekly Shabbat programming to an occasional once-monthly TGIF dinner. Sukkot and Chanukah have passed by. Meanwhile, it is clear that the Federation is in terrible hands. They do a very good job for the community at the annual Lag B’Omer Israel Fest, and some of their agencies do good work, completely separate from affiliation. Thus, the staff of Federation does little by way of Family Services; rather, Jewish Family Services does its excellent work with its own people, even as that agency has been compelled by the economy to merge into the Federation tent. Perhaps most importantly for the job security of Federation professionals in a community whose lay leaders seem mostly to value superficial displays of wealth and substantively void edifices, they raise some good amounts of cash in a city where, as one rabbi of ten years’ pulpit experience explained, “The Jews here are committed a mile wide and one inch deep.”
So we have a Hillel Foundation of Orange County and a UCI Hillel that is rudderless, without a vision or the people in the critical roles capable of having a vision, and a Federation being guided by those with a vision inimical to ours supported by patrons who are pleased that their Jewish Community Center is 125,000 square feet with a gymnasium, health and fitness center, two basketball courts, pool and aquatics center, and a Holocaust memorial garden. And it was designated a “Facility of Merit” by Athletic Business Magazine, too. With that kind of wealth, it is easy to see how the community would not notice, below the radar, that the Federation has submitted the community’s name and reputation, and has devoted Jewish charitable funds, towards so deeply flawed and damaging a project as the UCI Olive Tree Initiative.
Monday, December 20, 2010
An Open Letter to the Orange County Jewish Community
An Open Letter to the Orange County Jewish Community
From Rabbi Dov Fischer
There is now a full-blown county-wide community controversy over the forthcoming speech at UCI by George Rishmawi. In separate letters respectively e-mailed during Shabbat evening November 19, 2010, from the professional directors of both the Orange County Jewish Federation and the Orange County Hillel, it is emphasized that the speaker coming to UCI campus for the “Olive Tree Institute” (OTI) – an institute that the OC Jewish Federation and the OC Federation Rose Project, and the OC Hillel respectively support and endorse – is George S. Rishmawi, not George N. Rishmawi. In their public letters, the OC Hillel in particular targets for searing personal attack a woman in the Irvine Jewish community, who apparently spearheaded the controversy by first challenging the propriety of the Federation and the Hillel allying so frontally with OTI. In the letter from Hillel, this woman is explicitly named three separate times in a remarkably personal and disparaging way. In addition to the Hillel letter, an appended letter, signed by student leaders at UCI whose names were gathered for the letter, names this woman explicitly four times. I leave it to others to evaluate who wrote the students’ letter and who helped organize the signatures of some one hundred UCI Jewish students, past and present, in a matter of one or two days. However, I am galvanized to write because the effect of the responsive letters by the Orange County Jewish Federation director and the Hillel professional is to delegitimize this lady as a voice in the greater Jewish community.
I know this lady. I have spoken with her twice or thrice in the past year, and I know others who have worked with her. She is a passionate supporter of Israel and a pest, a nudnik, a real annoyance . . . to anyone who fails to act with the energy, passion, and frontal direct path that she feels others should follow. Her approach is not always the right one, but she is a valid participant in the greater community’s support for Israel. So she has annoyed Hillel and the Federation in the past. And now, having ostensibly conflated George N. Rishmawi with George S. Rishmawi, this lady seems to have been targeted as fair game for explicit ad hominem character assassination, to negate her as a serious voice in the community. Interestingly, the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles also wrote the OC Jewish Federation two or three days ago to express virtually the same concerns that this lady raised. However, the name of Simon Wiesenthal has not been attacked, nor has the name of the Wiesenthal executive who signed that letter. Thus, it appears that the Orange County Jewish Federation and Orange County Hillel shied away from “picking on someone your own size.” Instead, she was targeted.
I therefore write and soon will be posting on my website. Among other stations I hold in the community are: Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, Member National Executive Committee Rabbinical Council of America, former National Vice President Zionist Organization of America, and former Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review. I comment here on several matters:
1. Do Not Stand by Your Brother’s Blood. I have the deepest contempt for people who see someone being slandered or character-assassinated, who further recognize the grave injustice, privately shake their heads with a sense of shame over the injustice that the Jewish community is at it once again, destroying someone daring who challenges a defective aspect of the status quo, but who then remain silent rather than defend someone being attacked. They fear that, if they speak out to defend, then they also will see their own names and reputations besmirched and sullied by the same people ready to character-assassinate. So I write to speak out against the attempted character assassination of this lady. And although I have seen and spoken to her only once in the past five months – for thirty seconds at a wedding that I conducted, where she was but one of the assembled invited guests – I am stating publicly, here and now, that I will stand by her if any further attempt is made after this evening, November 20, to further assassinate or attack her character or motives.
2. The Enormous Value of Orange County Hillel and Hillel at UCI. I believe that Jewish students at UCI deserve the fullest, strongest possible programming in Israel education. Thus, I support UCI Hillel and personally continue to respect its professional director. I am proud to have my name associated with OC Hillel, on whose Board of Directors I proudly served the past three years. I am very glad that UCI Hillel has played a critical role in so many ways to support Israel on campus and to advocate for Jewish students at UCI. UCI Hillel runs an annual pro-Israel week on campus on Ring Round, works closely with UCI Chabad to facilitate aspects of Jewish observance for those students interested in Judaism, and even has coordinated with Hillel of Long Beach to bring Rabbi Drew Kaplan to campus every week for students interested in meeting with a rabbi. UCI Hillel has met with UCI administrators in the aftermath of Moslem Student Union (MSU) acts of hate. UCI Hillel continues to deserve support.
3. Absolute, Unequivocal, Utter Rejection of Irresponsible Suggestions That UCI Is Not Safe for Jews. I further reject – absolutely, unequivocally, and utterly – any and all suggestions or intimations that Jewish students are so unsafe as Jews at UCI that they should consider avoiding the school. I have walked Ring Road many times while wearing my yarmulka, and I never experienced a problem. I have spoken for the UCI Campus Interfaith Center as an invited speaker on several different occasions at UCI, always being treated respectfully. There is a robust Jewish presence at UCI, and I condemn – outright condemn and denounce in the strongest possible terms – any suggestion that UCI is less safe for Jews than is any other American campus.
4. The “Olive Tree Institute” Does Not Deserve Jewish Federation Funding nor Hillel Endorsement as taglit-Birthright Does. I believe it is not responsible for a Jewish organization to bring Jewish students lacking the most maximal possible education in the area of Israel and Mideast Studies to engage in “dialogue” with trained anti-Israel propagandists and others whose life agendas unalterably are to present the anti-Israel narrative in a gentle, yet sophisticated way. According to the Orange County Jewish Federation’s chief professional officer, “The Rose Project has, in the past, provided scholarship funds for knowledgeable Jewish students to participate in OTI’s annual trip to the Middle East, in the company of students of other faiths.” This tangible monetary support of OTI by transferring Jewish funds from the Rose Project of the Jewish Federation to the OTI is appalling. This is, in my opinion, a profound and irresponsible misuse of Jewish communal funds earmarked for Jewish students at this moment in time. By contrast, the Taglit-Birthright Hillel program is a fabulous investment of Jewish funds in the future of our community.
5. On George N. Rishmawi and George S. Rishmawi. The “Olive Tree Initiative” (OTI) is bringing George Rishmawi to UCI. First, the George Rishmawi it is not bringing is George N. Rishmawi. In the explicit words of the chief professional officer of the Orange County Jewish Federation, George N. Rishmawi is “despicable.” That adjective seems sufficient for the moment. And that brings us to George S. Rishmawi, who apparently is the George Rishmawi coming to UCI under the aegis of the Olive Tree Institute.
6. So Who is George S. Rishmawi? In the original OTI announcement, the Olive Tree Initiative described George S. Rishmawi as follows:
"George S. Rishmawi is a leader and co-founder of the ISM, the International Solidarity Movement, and the head of the Siraj Center for Holy Land Studies (http://www.sirajcenter.org/), a Palestinian NGO that operates in the West Bank to lead educational tours about Palestine and the Israeli Occupation.
Born in Beit Sahour, a city known for non-violent resistance, George S. Rishmawi is coming to UC Irvine as a guest of the Olive Tree Initiative, and for those of you interested in becoming part of OTI 4, George is one of our primary contacts in the West Bank."
(Emphases added.) Cf. http://palsolidarity.org/2007/06/2416/
George S. Rishmawi has devoted himself for years to “resistance against the Israeli occupation.”
The Siraj Center for Holy Land Studies. The website of the Siraj Center tells more about the Siraj Center and George S. Rishmawi:
Siraj organized fact finding missions to Palestine in order for people all over the world to have first hand experience of the on going Israeli occupation by meeting with Palestinians and Israelis and meet face to face with the real issues of illegal settlements, the Israeli Wall, Water issues, borders and refugees. . . . (Emphases added.)
As an example of his strategy to use tourism and manipulate children to embarrass Israel and delegitimize Israel’s security concerns, in one case George S. Rishmawi coordinated a donkey ride for Palestinian children that was aimed at creating a horrible anti-Israel media visual depicting Israeli armed forces blocking children from entering Jerusalem on Easter Sunday:
It is hoped that the image of the donkey at the checkpoint will speak with the innocence of a Palestine child who would simply ask the world, especially the Christian world, 'why can't we ride to Jerusalem like Jesus anymore?'
As Sunday's ride progresses, at some point, the donkeys will approach a military checkpoint, and campaigners hope all the world will see what happens next. Most likely, cameras will snap images, not of palm fronds being thrown under the donkeys feet as 2,000 years ago, but of guns and uniforms blocking the way.
"Right now, the checkpoint is heavily militarized," explains Rishmawi. "There is a military base with lots of patrols going back and forth. Rooftops in the area have been camouflaged, and Israeli snipers are all over the place." (Emphases added.)
See “Children Ask Why They Can’t Enter Jerusalem on a Donkey,” http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/news_syndication/article_050318donkey.shtml
See also http://www.sirajcenter.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5&Itemid=6 . One of the Siraj Center’s projects is “Abraham Path Walks.” Click the link on the Siraj Center Home Page, and it brings you to: http://www.abrahampath.org/downloads/Walking_in_Palestine_detailed_info_110610.pdf Look at the map on Page 3.
7. More about George S. Rishmawi – and the Palestinian [C]enter for Rapprochement in Between People. According to the revised announcement by OTI, now posted on Facebook, heralding the visit to UCI by George S. Rishmawi, he also is a former Board Member of the Palestinian [C]enter for Rapprochement in Between People in Beit Sahour. (Emphases added.)
See http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171310602897452
The Palestinian [C]enter for Rapprochement in Between People (PCR) in Beit Sahour reports its history as follows:
In 2000, we mobilized our dialogue group and international friends for actions to reclaim the military base that was located on town land and was a major issue in the community. We successfully held nonviolent protests at the base (even getting inside the base by the hundreds) and this success led to the formation of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). PCR was heavily involved in ISM for five years, during which it had employed around ninety percent of its efforts and finances to support ISM. PCR hosted ISM in its headquarters until 2005 when the headquarters was moved to Ramallah.
http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=&to=en&a=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcr.ps%2Fread%2Fpcr-history
8. Gary Fouse Makes an Observation and Asks a Question. Gary Fouse has been teaching ESL at the UCI Extension school for more than a decade, having begun after retiring from the US Drug Enforcement Administration. He is not Jewish. He describes having attended many of the Moslem Student Union (MSU)-sponsored events at UCI during his decade on campus. He describes having listened to many of the speakers and on several occasions confronting them with questions. As a retired law enforcement officer of almost 30 years service, he feels he can recognize hate speech and volatile situations. Consequently, he follows these issues at UCI and blogs regarding them. He observes:
In light of Mr Rishmawi's coming appearance to UC Irvine, a controversy has erupted within the Orange County Jewish community. The central question is this: If this speaker is, in fact, a co-founder of the ISM, why are the Rose Project, the Jewish Federation of Orange County, and perhaps, the University of California supporting even indirectly a venture that exposes Jewish students to elements that are devoted to destroying and/or establishing divestment boycotts of Israel? Those questions are being posed to the above entities as we speak. There may be a legitimate explanation for this, but the associations are troubling to many, and it is fair to ask the questions. On Monday, it will be made clear just what affiliations, if any, this speaker has or has had with the ISM.
I should note here that if certain Jewish students at UCI or anywhere else are against Israel to begin with -and there are those- then they can go meet with whomever they want to as far as I am concerned -as long as they are not meeting with enemies of the US. But what about Jewish students who have a strong Jewish identity and support Israel? Do they know exactly who they will be dealing with on these trips to the Holy Land? Perhaps so. Some of them too may decide it is in their interest to do so and hear the other side, which they can decide for themselves. Ditto for bringing certain speakers to campus. I am not questioning the right of this speaker to appear at UCI. But who is supporting this financially?
(Emphases added.) See http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/ . To that I personally would add, as the father of a Jewish college-age student: Heck, if my son could have a rare opportunity to get away from his college studies and requirements for a period of time to travel to Israel, to experience the Middle East and Israel, I can think of better ways for Jewish philanthropic funds to be expended on my son than by helping subvent his tuition fee to participate with either George N. Rishmawi (described by the OC Jewish Federation as “despicable”) or George S. Rishmawi. Unless, of course, there is yet another George S. Rishmawi who is not a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), active in The Palestinian [C]enter for Rapprochement in Between People in Beit Sahour, involved in the Abraham Path Walks that define the word “Israel” out of the map of “Palestine,” or the Siraj Center for Holy Land Studies that sees Israel as an illegal occupation, the Security Wall as an illegal expression of Zionist Apartheid, and that seeks to press Israel on the “refugees.”
Or to put it another way: Has the Jewish Federation of Orange County or OC Hillel ever sponsored UCI college students to attend a similar-length fact-finding inter-cultural visit to the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria (the Jewish West Bank settlements), so that students could fairly gauge for themselves during a comprehensive tour, and living with Jewish families for a week or two up-and-down Judea and Samaria, who those settlers are, hear from those settlers and learn about Jewish roots in the lands of Judea and Samaria?
9. The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – From the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Which leads to the question: What is the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)? In a letter addressed personally to the chief professional officer of the OC Jewish Federation and Jewish Family Services, Rabbi Aron Hier, director of Campus Outreach for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, wrote:
I have become aware of an event on November 22, 2010, in which the Olive Tree Initiative will be providing a platform for anti-Israel activist and International Solidarity Movement cofounder George Rishmawi. Further, the Olive Tree Initiative that will be hosting him is funded in part by Jewish philanthropy, through your organization as well as Hillel at UC Irvine.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center urges the Jewish Federation to disassociate itself from an event that invites the leader of a group whose own website states the following:
“Apartheid is not going to be defeated by words alone; occupation, oppression and domination are going to be dismantled the same way they were erected — through people’s action. The Israeli army and apartheid in Palestine can be defeated by strategic, disciplined unarmed resistance, utilizing the effective resources Palestinians can mobilize — including international participation.”
We further urge the Jewish Federation to investigate the Olive Tree Initiative, which has selected a speaker who advocates overthrowing the Jewish State. What kind of group would funnel impressionable Jewish students into this “wolf in sheep’s clothing” program that aids and abets the enemies of Israel in their pernicious mission?
I look forward to hearing from you about this serious matter.
Rabbi Aron Hier
Director
Campus Outreach
cc: Rabbi Marvin Hier
Rabbi Abraham Cooper
Rabbi Meyer May
(Emphases added.)
10.The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – From the Anti-Defamation League. The International Solidarity Movement (ISM), co-founded by George S. Rishmawi, was studied in an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) background investigatory report: http://www.adl.org/Israel/israel_int_solidarity.asp
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a well-organized movement that spreads anti-Israel propaganda and misinformation and voices support for others who engage in armed resistance against Israel. . . . ISM’s regimen involves recruiting and coordinating Western volunteers going to Palestinian areas for orientation meetings with Palestinian organizers and to discuss upcoming protests and actions. Once there, these volunteers engage in such tactics as obstructing the activities of the Israeli Army. . . . Since 2001, hundreds of ISM volunteers have placed themselves in front of Israeli Army vehicles, removed concrete boundaries from roads, confronted Israeli troops, and in some cases, stayed in the homes of suicide bombers.
Continuing its report, the ADL further has written:
ISM volunteers often publicize their actions and experiences in the Palestinian areas by preparing statements, articles and diaries and distributing them via the Internet among a variety of anti-Israel groups. Upon return to their home countries, ISM volunteers often describe their experiences in articles and during lectures at high schools, churches, libraries and college and university campuses. Many, though not all such speaking engagements, are organized as part of the ISM-co-sponsored Wheels of Justice bus tour.
During their speaking engagements, ISM volunteers have presented a biased, distinctly anti-Israel view of the Middle East, equating Israel with both apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany. For example, during the fourth annual Palestine Solidarity Movement conference at Duke University, Rann Bar-On, a Duke student, ISM member, and one of the conference organizers, compared the treatment of Palestinians by Israel to “Algiers under the French or Poland under the Nazis. There is always violence under occupation.” The ISM’s Brian Avery criticized the U.S. media for a “campaign of misinformation by Zionist-leaning news editors.”
Numerous ISM volunteers have been arrested, deported and denied entry into Israel. In response, some ISM volunteers have deceptively sought to enter Israel by changing their name in an effort to circumvent their ban from entering Israel.
Ties to Violent Groups
Although ISM claims to be a non-violent group, some of its volunteers recognize violence as a legitimate means of achieving Palestinian goals. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has warned that ISM activity “at times” is “under the auspices of Palestinian terrorist organizations.” For example:
■Several ISM members met with Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ leader in Gaza, on August 24, 2008. Haniyeh held the meeting to welcome participants of the Free Gaza Movement, an ISM-affiliated campaign that sailed two boats into Gaza port a day earlier in an effort to bring international attention to what its organizers have called the "increasing stranglehold of Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine."
■Richard David Hupper, a Pennsylvania man who was sentenced in August 2008 to three and a half years in prison for donating $20,000 to Hamas, allegedly contributed to the terrorist organization while volunteering with ISM in the Gaza Strip in 2004. He was eventually kicked out of Israel for working with ISM, according to court documents. Hupper pleaded guilty to providing material support and resources to terrorists in May.
■In June 2007, Hisham Jam Joun, an ISM trainer in Israel, said in a letter posted on ISM’s Web page: “Even if part of the population supports military resistance to the conflict, it is only because we see the violence and injustice of a military occupation on a daily basis.”
■Two British suicide bombers met with ISM members before blowing up a popular bar in Tel Aviv near the U.S. embassy in April 2003. ISM claimed that the only contact it had with the suicide bombers “was a brief social encounter” at an ISM apartment in Rafah. However, five days before the Tel Aviv bombing, the bombers attended a memorial service in Rafah for ISM volunteer Rachel Corrie, an American college student crushed to death in 2003 while trying to block demolition of a Palestinian home in Gaza by an Israeli army bulldozer (the Israeli Army’s investigation of the Corrie death concluded that the soldiers operating the bulldozer had no intention of harming her).
■In March 2003, Israeli troops raided ISM’s West Bank offices in Jenin and captured a suspected member of the terrorist organization Islamic Jihad. The Israeli army identified Shadi Suqiyeh, who was hiding in the ISM office, as a senior member of Islamic Jihad who had planned a number of foiled attacks on Israelis. A statement released by ISM soon after the incident explained that Suqiyeh was brought into the apartment by an ISM volunteer "concerned about his welfare" because "under Israeli military curfew, Palestinians spotted in the streets are shot on sight."
■More ties to hard-line Palestinian groups were revealed three months later, when ISM issued a press release inviting volunteers to “join the ISM, the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces and the Apartheid Wall Defense Committee…to block construction of the apartheid wall” during the Freedom Summer 2003 campaign. The Palestinian National and Islamic Forces is a group made up of members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the hard-edged wing of Arafat's Fatah organization.
■In an article in the Palestinian Chronicle in 2002, ISM co-founders Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf wrote: “We accept that Palestinians have a right to resist with arms, as they are an occupied people upon whom force and violence is being used.” Palestinian resistance, they say, “must take on a variety of characteristics - both nonviolent and violent.”
Tactics
By using international ISM volunteers, who return to their home countries after a stint with the group and describe their experiences in articles and at lectures, local Palestinian activists have generated international attention to their cause.
ISM received its first substantial media coverage in spring 2002, when volunteers slipped into Yasir Arafat’s compound, bypassing the Israeli military that surrounded it. ISM members executed their second major action that year when they entered the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem during a military standoff between Israeli and Palestinian forces.
ISM volunteers have since taken part in various actions, including the annual Freedom Summer campaign. Volunteers have resisted the building of the Israeli security fence designed to deter terrorists by establishing a protective barrier between Israel and the West Bank. Referring to it as the “Apartheid Wall,” volunteers have tried to block construction of the security fence in some areas while attempting to tear certain sections down in others.
In the U.S., experienced ISM members recruit volunteers through various other pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel groups and through the ISM’s Web site. The ISM Web site previously included an “Information Pack,” which provided basic information on getting involved in the anti-Israel cause and offered suggestions, including tips on speaking with the press. In one section, it suggests that “when possible say ETHNIC CLEANSING” when referring to “the expulsion of Palestinians from historic Palestine in 1948 as well as the current situation.”
The packet also urged volunteers to “say RESISTANCE or RESISTANCE TO INJUSTICE [when] VIOLENCE is mentioned,” and to “emphasize STATE TERRORISM [when] TERRORISM is mentioned.”
11. Conclusion. In sum, the George S. Rishmawi who is coming to UCI under the aegis of the Olive Tree Institute, an agency funded in whatever part by the Rose Project of the Orange County Jewish Federation, and an accepted adjunct to UCI Hillel’s vision for encouraging UCI Jewish students better to understand the perspective of those opposed to Israel as an occupier, in whole or in part, of Palestine, is neither the same person as George N. Rishmawi nor as any of the other George S. Rishmawis who assuredly may be found in the world. Nevertheless, he is a skilled, experienced, and gifted tactician in the war against Israel, and his particular area of media-savvy expertise, even during Intifada time, is in presenting the more palatable side of the war to remove a Jewish state of Israel from the map.
In the free marketplace of ideas, we can welcome any and all George Rishmawis to UCI to ply their subtle propaganda. They should be permitted to speak free of the fascist repression that the MSU utilized to silence the Honorable Michael Oren, Ambassador of Israel to the United States, and Prof. Daniel Pipes before him. And Jewish students at UCI who are curious to hear this George Rishmawi should enjoy themselves. Nevertheless – all the more so, now that the Jewish Federation of Orange County has merged with Orange County Jewish Family Services – it is highly objectionable that meaningful Jewish community philanthropy has been diverted towards the Olive Tree Initiative in the past, and that such funding diversions have not been foresworn for the future, so that Jewish funds can better be targeted to address the kinds of real family needs that deeply challenge the Orange County Jewish community and its families in this time of great recession. Every dollar from the Jewish Federation of Orange County towards an Olive Tree Initiative matter represents a dollar less for the real needs of a Jewish community whose children could benefit from so much more Jewish education and whose families include many in dire straits.
It is absolutely unacceptable that a lady who is so passionately devoted to the cause of Israel – a cause we all share even in the face of few, if any, George Rishamwis standing alongside Orange County Jews in our deep uncompromising love for Israel – should now be the target of a concerted vilification campaign to humiliate her by name, target her for obloquy, in the effort to shut her up and to cast her as a pariah in the community of Jewish public participants. And while she and several others may have mixed up their “N”s and “S”s, it is a shame that the Orange County Jewish Federation and the Orange County Hillel lacked the elegance and dignity to mind their Ps and Qs.
I hereby am putting on public notice those who may be planning to finish off this lady’s reputation by humiliating and character-assassinating her that I will stand by this lady. I endorse the letter of Rabbi Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Beyond the smoke and mirrors, let it be clear that the burden of proof devolves onto the Jewish Federation and Jewish Family Services of Orange County, the Rose Project of the Jewish Federation, and Orange County Hillel to justify to the Jewish community of Irvine and throughout our County its continued engagement with and endorsement of an agency that perhaps is acceptable for deeply studied dilettantes but that is not a proper investment of Jewish community resources for the education of UCI Jewish students who, having done Birthright, next need a deeper Israel experience to better understand why the bond between the Jewish People and the Land of Israel is immutable, even as the City of United Jerusalem is the only eternal capital of Israel – period.
Respectfully submitted,
Rabbi Dov Fischer
Rav, Young Israel of Orange County
rabbi@yioc.org
From Rabbi Dov Fischer
There is now a full-blown county-wide community controversy over the forthcoming speech at UCI by George Rishmawi. In separate letters respectively e-mailed during Shabbat evening November 19, 2010, from the professional directors of both the Orange County Jewish Federation and the Orange County Hillel, it is emphasized that the speaker coming to UCI campus for the “Olive Tree Institute” (OTI) – an institute that the OC Jewish Federation and the OC Federation Rose Project, and the OC Hillel respectively support and endorse – is George S. Rishmawi, not George N. Rishmawi. In their public letters, the OC Hillel in particular targets for searing personal attack a woman in the Irvine Jewish community, who apparently spearheaded the controversy by first challenging the propriety of the Federation and the Hillel allying so frontally with OTI. In the letter from Hillel, this woman is explicitly named three separate times in a remarkably personal and disparaging way. In addition to the Hillel letter, an appended letter, signed by student leaders at UCI whose names were gathered for the letter, names this woman explicitly four times. I leave it to others to evaluate who wrote the students’ letter and who helped organize the signatures of some one hundred UCI Jewish students, past and present, in a matter of one or two days. However, I am galvanized to write because the effect of the responsive letters by the Orange County Jewish Federation director and the Hillel professional is to delegitimize this lady as a voice in the greater Jewish community.
I know this lady. I have spoken with her twice or thrice in the past year, and I know others who have worked with her. She is a passionate supporter of Israel and a pest, a nudnik, a real annoyance . . . to anyone who fails to act with the energy, passion, and frontal direct path that she feels others should follow. Her approach is not always the right one, but she is a valid participant in the greater community’s support for Israel. So she has annoyed Hillel and the Federation in the past. And now, having ostensibly conflated George N. Rishmawi with George S. Rishmawi, this lady seems to have been targeted as fair game for explicit ad hominem character assassination, to negate her as a serious voice in the community. Interestingly, the Simon Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles also wrote the OC Jewish Federation two or three days ago to express virtually the same concerns that this lady raised. However, the name of Simon Wiesenthal has not been attacked, nor has the name of the Wiesenthal executive who signed that letter. Thus, it appears that the Orange County Jewish Federation and Orange County Hillel shied away from “picking on someone your own size.” Instead, she was targeted.
I therefore write and soon will be posting on my website. Among other stations I hold in the community are: Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, Member National Executive Committee Rabbinical Council of America, former National Vice President Zionist Organization of America, and former Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review. I comment here on several matters:
1. Do Not Stand by Your Brother’s Blood. I have the deepest contempt for people who see someone being slandered or character-assassinated, who further recognize the grave injustice, privately shake their heads with a sense of shame over the injustice that the Jewish community is at it once again, destroying someone daring who challenges a defective aspect of the status quo, but who then remain silent rather than defend someone being attacked. They fear that, if they speak out to defend, then they also will see their own names and reputations besmirched and sullied by the same people ready to character-assassinate. So I write to speak out against the attempted character assassination of this lady. And although I have seen and spoken to her only once in the past five months – for thirty seconds at a wedding that I conducted, where she was but one of the assembled invited guests – I am stating publicly, here and now, that I will stand by her if any further attempt is made after this evening, November 20, to further assassinate or attack her character or motives.
2. The Enormous Value of Orange County Hillel and Hillel at UCI. I believe that Jewish students at UCI deserve the fullest, strongest possible programming in Israel education. Thus, I support UCI Hillel and personally continue to respect its professional director. I am proud to have my name associated with OC Hillel, on whose Board of Directors I proudly served the past three years. I am very glad that UCI Hillel has played a critical role in so many ways to support Israel on campus and to advocate for Jewish students at UCI. UCI Hillel runs an annual pro-Israel week on campus on Ring Round, works closely with UCI Chabad to facilitate aspects of Jewish observance for those students interested in Judaism, and even has coordinated with Hillel of Long Beach to bring Rabbi Drew Kaplan to campus every week for students interested in meeting with a rabbi. UCI Hillel has met with UCI administrators in the aftermath of Moslem Student Union (MSU) acts of hate. UCI Hillel continues to deserve support.
3. Absolute, Unequivocal, Utter Rejection of Irresponsible Suggestions That UCI Is Not Safe for Jews. I further reject – absolutely, unequivocally, and utterly – any and all suggestions or intimations that Jewish students are so unsafe as Jews at UCI that they should consider avoiding the school. I have walked Ring Road many times while wearing my yarmulka, and I never experienced a problem. I have spoken for the UCI Campus Interfaith Center as an invited speaker on several different occasions at UCI, always being treated respectfully. There is a robust Jewish presence at UCI, and I condemn – outright condemn and denounce in the strongest possible terms – any suggestion that UCI is less safe for Jews than is any other American campus.
4. The “Olive Tree Institute” Does Not Deserve Jewish Federation Funding nor Hillel Endorsement as taglit-Birthright Does. I believe it is not responsible for a Jewish organization to bring Jewish students lacking the most maximal possible education in the area of Israel and Mideast Studies to engage in “dialogue” with trained anti-Israel propagandists and others whose life agendas unalterably are to present the anti-Israel narrative in a gentle, yet sophisticated way. According to the Orange County Jewish Federation’s chief professional officer, “The Rose Project has, in the past, provided scholarship funds for knowledgeable Jewish students to participate in OTI’s annual trip to the Middle East, in the company of students of other faiths.” This tangible monetary support of OTI by transferring Jewish funds from the Rose Project of the Jewish Federation to the OTI is appalling. This is, in my opinion, a profound and irresponsible misuse of Jewish communal funds earmarked for Jewish students at this moment in time. By contrast, the Taglit-Birthright Hillel program is a fabulous investment of Jewish funds in the future of our community.
5. On George N. Rishmawi and George S. Rishmawi. The “Olive Tree Initiative” (OTI) is bringing George Rishmawi to UCI. First, the George Rishmawi it is not bringing is George N. Rishmawi. In the explicit words of the chief professional officer of the Orange County Jewish Federation, George N. Rishmawi is “despicable.” That adjective seems sufficient for the moment. And that brings us to George S. Rishmawi, who apparently is the George Rishmawi coming to UCI under the aegis of the Olive Tree Institute.
6. So Who is George S. Rishmawi? In the original OTI announcement, the Olive Tree Initiative described George S. Rishmawi as follows:
"George S. Rishmawi is a leader and co-founder of the ISM, the International Solidarity Movement, and the head of the Siraj Center for Holy Land Studies (http://www.sirajcenter.org/), a Palestinian NGO that operates in the West Bank to lead educational tours about Palestine and the Israeli Occupation.
Born in Beit Sahour, a city known for non-violent resistance, George S. Rishmawi is coming to UC Irvine as a guest of the Olive Tree Initiative, and for those of you interested in becoming part of OTI 4, George is one of our primary contacts in the West Bank."
(Emphases added.) Cf. http://palsolidarity.org/2007/06/2416/
George S. Rishmawi has devoted himself for years to “resistance against the Israeli occupation.”
The Siraj Center for Holy Land Studies. The website of the Siraj Center tells more about the Siraj Center and George S. Rishmawi:
Siraj organized fact finding missions to Palestine in order for people all over the world to have first hand experience of the on going Israeli occupation by meeting with Palestinians and Israelis and meet face to face with the real issues of illegal settlements, the Israeli Wall, Water issues, borders and refugees. . . . (Emphases added.)
As an example of his strategy to use tourism and manipulate children to embarrass Israel and delegitimize Israel’s security concerns, in one case George S. Rishmawi coordinated a donkey ride for Palestinian children that was aimed at creating a horrible anti-Israel media visual depicting Israeli armed forces blocking children from entering Jerusalem on Easter Sunday:
It is hoped that the image of the donkey at the checkpoint will speak with the innocence of a Palestine child who would simply ask the world, especially the Christian world, 'why can't we ride to Jerusalem like Jesus anymore?'
As Sunday's ride progresses, at some point, the donkeys will approach a military checkpoint, and campaigners hope all the world will see what happens next. Most likely, cameras will snap images, not of palm fronds being thrown under the donkeys feet as 2,000 years ago, but of guns and uniforms blocking the way.
"Right now, the checkpoint is heavily militarized," explains Rishmawi. "There is a military base with lots of patrols going back and forth. Rooftops in the area have been camouflaged, and Israeli snipers are all over the place." (Emphases added.)
See “Children Ask Why They Can’t Enter Jerusalem on a Donkey,” http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/content/news_syndication/article_050318donkey.shtml
See also http://www.sirajcenter.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5&Itemid=6 . One of the Siraj Center’s projects is “Abraham Path Walks.” Click the link on the Siraj Center Home Page, and it brings you to: http://www.abrahampath.org/downloads/Walking_in_Palestine_detailed_info_110610.pdf Look at the map on Page 3.
7. More about George S. Rishmawi – and the Palestinian [C]enter for Rapprochement in Between People. According to the revised announcement by OTI, now posted on Facebook, heralding the visit to UCI by George S. Rishmawi, he also is a former Board Member of the Palestinian [C]enter for Rapprochement in Between People in Beit Sahour. (Emphases added.)
See http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171310602897452
The Palestinian [C]enter for Rapprochement in Between People (PCR) in Beit Sahour reports its history as follows:
In 2000, we mobilized our dialogue group and international friends for actions to reclaim the military base that was located on town land and was a major issue in the community. We successfully held nonviolent protests at the base (even getting inside the base by the hundreds) and this success led to the formation of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). PCR was heavily involved in ISM for five years, during which it had employed around ninety percent of its efforts and finances to support ISM. PCR hosted ISM in its headquarters until 2005 when the headquarters was moved to Ramallah.
http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=&to=en&a=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pcr.ps%2Fread%2Fpcr-history
8. Gary Fouse Makes an Observation and Asks a Question. Gary Fouse has been teaching ESL at the UCI Extension school for more than a decade, having begun after retiring from the US Drug Enforcement Administration. He is not Jewish. He describes having attended many of the Moslem Student Union (MSU)-sponsored events at UCI during his decade on campus. He describes having listened to many of the speakers and on several occasions confronting them with questions. As a retired law enforcement officer of almost 30 years service, he feels he can recognize hate speech and volatile situations. Consequently, he follows these issues at UCI and blogs regarding them. He observes:
In light of Mr Rishmawi's coming appearance to UC Irvine, a controversy has erupted within the Orange County Jewish community. The central question is this: If this speaker is, in fact, a co-founder of the ISM, why are the Rose Project, the Jewish Federation of Orange County, and perhaps, the University of California supporting even indirectly a venture that exposes Jewish students to elements that are devoted to destroying and/or establishing divestment boycotts of Israel? Those questions are being posed to the above entities as we speak. There may be a legitimate explanation for this, but the associations are troubling to many, and it is fair to ask the questions. On Monday, it will be made clear just what affiliations, if any, this speaker has or has had with the ISM.
I should note here that if certain Jewish students at UCI or anywhere else are against Israel to begin with -and there are those- then they can go meet with whomever they want to as far as I am concerned -as long as they are not meeting with enemies of the US. But what about Jewish students who have a strong Jewish identity and support Israel? Do they know exactly who they will be dealing with on these trips to the Holy Land? Perhaps so. Some of them too may decide it is in their interest to do so and hear the other side, which they can decide for themselves. Ditto for bringing certain speakers to campus. I am not questioning the right of this speaker to appear at UCI. But who is supporting this financially?
(Emphases added.) See http://garyfouse.blogspot.com/ . To that I personally would add, as the father of a Jewish college-age student: Heck, if my son could have a rare opportunity to get away from his college studies and requirements for a period of time to travel to Israel, to experience the Middle East and Israel, I can think of better ways for Jewish philanthropic funds to be expended on my son than by helping subvent his tuition fee to participate with either George N. Rishmawi (described by the OC Jewish Federation as “despicable”) or George S. Rishmawi. Unless, of course, there is yet another George S. Rishmawi who is not a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), active in The Palestinian [C]enter for Rapprochement in Between People in Beit Sahour, involved in the Abraham Path Walks that define the word “Israel” out of the map of “Palestine,” or the Siraj Center for Holy Land Studies that sees Israel as an illegal occupation, the Security Wall as an illegal expression of Zionist Apartheid, and that seeks to press Israel on the “refugees.”
Or to put it another way: Has the Jewish Federation of Orange County or OC Hillel ever sponsored UCI college students to attend a similar-length fact-finding inter-cultural visit to the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria (the Jewish West Bank settlements), so that students could fairly gauge for themselves during a comprehensive tour, and living with Jewish families for a week or two up-and-down Judea and Samaria, who those settlers are, hear from those settlers and learn about Jewish roots in the lands of Judea and Samaria?
9. The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – From the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Which leads to the question: What is the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)? In a letter addressed personally to the chief professional officer of the OC Jewish Federation and Jewish Family Services, Rabbi Aron Hier, director of Campus Outreach for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, wrote:
I have become aware of an event on November 22, 2010, in which the Olive Tree Initiative will be providing a platform for anti-Israel activist and International Solidarity Movement cofounder George Rishmawi. Further, the Olive Tree Initiative that will be hosting him is funded in part by Jewish philanthropy, through your organization as well as Hillel at UC Irvine.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center urges the Jewish Federation to disassociate itself from an event that invites the leader of a group whose own website states the following:
“Apartheid is not going to be defeated by words alone; occupation, oppression and domination are going to be dismantled the same way they were erected — through people’s action. The Israeli army and apartheid in Palestine can be defeated by strategic, disciplined unarmed resistance, utilizing the effective resources Palestinians can mobilize — including international participation.”
We further urge the Jewish Federation to investigate the Olive Tree Initiative, which has selected a speaker who advocates overthrowing the Jewish State. What kind of group would funnel impressionable Jewish students into this “wolf in sheep’s clothing” program that aids and abets the enemies of Israel in their pernicious mission?
I look forward to hearing from you about this serious matter.
Rabbi Aron Hier
Director
Campus Outreach
cc: Rabbi Marvin Hier
Rabbi Abraham Cooper
Rabbi Meyer May
(Emphases added.)
10.The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – From the Anti-Defamation League. The International Solidarity Movement (ISM), co-founded by George S. Rishmawi, was studied in an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) background investigatory report: http://www.adl.org/Israel/israel_int_solidarity.asp
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a well-organized movement that spreads anti-Israel propaganda and misinformation and voices support for others who engage in armed resistance against Israel. . . . ISM’s regimen involves recruiting and coordinating Western volunteers going to Palestinian areas for orientation meetings with Palestinian organizers and to discuss upcoming protests and actions. Once there, these volunteers engage in such tactics as obstructing the activities of the Israeli Army. . . . Since 2001, hundreds of ISM volunteers have placed themselves in front of Israeli Army vehicles, removed concrete boundaries from roads, confronted Israeli troops, and in some cases, stayed in the homes of suicide bombers.
Continuing its report, the ADL further has written:
ISM volunteers often publicize their actions and experiences in the Palestinian areas by preparing statements, articles and diaries and distributing them via the Internet among a variety of anti-Israel groups. Upon return to their home countries, ISM volunteers often describe their experiences in articles and during lectures at high schools, churches, libraries and college and university campuses. Many, though not all such speaking engagements, are organized as part of the ISM-co-sponsored Wheels of Justice bus tour.
During their speaking engagements, ISM volunteers have presented a biased, distinctly anti-Israel view of the Middle East, equating Israel with both apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany. For example, during the fourth annual Palestine Solidarity Movement conference at Duke University, Rann Bar-On, a Duke student, ISM member, and one of the conference organizers, compared the treatment of Palestinians by Israel to “Algiers under the French or Poland under the Nazis. There is always violence under occupation.” The ISM’s Brian Avery criticized the U.S. media for a “campaign of misinformation by Zionist-leaning news editors.”
Numerous ISM volunteers have been arrested, deported and denied entry into Israel. In response, some ISM volunteers have deceptively sought to enter Israel by changing their name in an effort to circumvent their ban from entering Israel.
Ties to Violent Groups
Although ISM claims to be a non-violent group, some of its volunteers recognize violence as a legitimate means of achieving Palestinian goals. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs has warned that ISM activity “at times” is “under the auspices of Palestinian terrorist organizations.” For example:
■Several ISM members met with Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ leader in Gaza, on August 24, 2008. Haniyeh held the meeting to welcome participants of the Free Gaza Movement, an ISM-affiliated campaign that sailed two boats into Gaza port a day earlier in an effort to bring international attention to what its organizers have called the "increasing stranglehold of Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine."
■Richard David Hupper, a Pennsylvania man who was sentenced in August 2008 to three and a half years in prison for donating $20,000 to Hamas, allegedly contributed to the terrorist organization while volunteering with ISM in the Gaza Strip in 2004. He was eventually kicked out of Israel for working with ISM, according to court documents. Hupper pleaded guilty to providing material support and resources to terrorists in May.
■In June 2007, Hisham Jam Joun, an ISM trainer in Israel, said in a letter posted on ISM’s Web page: “Even if part of the population supports military resistance to the conflict, it is only because we see the violence and injustice of a military occupation on a daily basis.”
■Two British suicide bombers met with ISM members before blowing up a popular bar in Tel Aviv near the U.S. embassy in April 2003. ISM claimed that the only contact it had with the suicide bombers “was a brief social encounter” at an ISM apartment in Rafah. However, five days before the Tel Aviv bombing, the bombers attended a memorial service in Rafah for ISM volunteer Rachel Corrie, an American college student crushed to death in 2003 while trying to block demolition of a Palestinian home in Gaza by an Israeli army bulldozer (the Israeli Army’s investigation of the Corrie death concluded that the soldiers operating the bulldozer had no intention of harming her).
■In March 2003, Israeli troops raided ISM’s West Bank offices in Jenin and captured a suspected member of the terrorist organization Islamic Jihad. The Israeli army identified Shadi Suqiyeh, who was hiding in the ISM office, as a senior member of Islamic Jihad who had planned a number of foiled attacks on Israelis. A statement released by ISM soon after the incident explained that Suqiyeh was brought into the apartment by an ISM volunteer "concerned about his welfare" because "under Israeli military curfew, Palestinians spotted in the streets are shot on sight."
■More ties to hard-line Palestinian groups were revealed three months later, when ISM issued a press release inviting volunteers to “join the ISM, the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces and the Apartheid Wall Defense Committee…to block construction of the apartheid wall” during the Freedom Summer 2003 campaign. The Palestinian National and Islamic Forces is a group made up of members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the hard-edged wing of Arafat's Fatah organization.
■In an article in the Palestinian Chronicle in 2002, ISM co-founders Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf wrote: “We accept that Palestinians have a right to resist with arms, as they are an occupied people upon whom force and violence is being used.” Palestinian resistance, they say, “must take on a variety of characteristics - both nonviolent and violent.”
Tactics
By using international ISM volunteers, who return to their home countries after a stint with the group and describe their experiences in articles and at lectures, local Palestinian activists have generated international attention to their cause.
ISM received its first substantial media coverage in spring 2002, when volunteers slipped into Yasir Arafat’s compound, bypassing the Israeli military that surrounded it. ISM members executed their second major action that year when they entered the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem during a military standoff between Israeli and Palestinian forces.
ISM volunteers have since taken part in various actions, including the annual Freedom Summer campaign. Volunteers have resisted the building of the Israeli security fence designed to deter terrorists by establishing a protective barrier between Israel and the West Bank. Referring to it as the “Apartheid Wall,” volunteers have tried to block construction of the security fence in some areas while attempting to tear certain sections down in others.
In the U.S., experienced ISM members recruit volunteers through various other pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel groups and through the ISM’s Web site. The ISM Web site previously included an “Information Pack,” which provided basic information on getting involved in the anti-Israel cause and offered suggestions, including tips on speaking with the press. In one section, it suggests that “when possible say ETHNIC CLEANSING” when referring to “the expulsion of Palestinians from historic Palestine in 1948 as well as the current situation.”
The packet also urged volunteers to “say RESISTANCE or RESISTANCE TO INJUSTICE [when] VIOLENCE is mentioned,” and to “emphasize STATE TERRORISM [when] TERRORISM is mentioned.”
11. Conclusion. In sum, the George S. Rishmawi who is coming to UCI under the aegis of the Olive Tree Institute, an agency funded in whatever part by the Rose Project of the Orange County Jewish Federation, and an accepted adjunct to UCI Hillel’s vision for encouraging UCI Jewish students better to understand the perspective of those opposed to Israel as an occupier, in whole or in part, of Palestine, is neither the same person as George N. Rishmawi nor as any of the other George S. Rishmawis who assuredly may be found in the world. Nevertheless, he is a skilled, experienced, and gifted tactician in the war against Israel, and his particular area of media-savvy expertise, even during Intifada time, is in presenting the more palatable side of the war to remove a Jewish state of Israel from the map.
In the free marketplace of ideas, we can welcome any and all George Rishmawis to UCI to ply their subtle propaganda. They should be permitted to speak free of the fascist repression that the MSU utilized to silence the Honorable Michael Oren, Ambassador of Israel to the United States, and Prof. Daniel Pipes before him. And Jewish students at UCI who are curious to hear this George Rishmawi should enjoy themselves. Nevertheless – all the more so, now that the Jewish Federation of Orange County has merged with Orange County Jewish Family Services – it is highly objectionable that meaningful Jewish community philanthropy has been diverted towards the Olive Tree Initiative in the past, and that such funding diversions have not been foresworn for the future, so that Jewish funds can better be targeted to address the kinds of real family needs that deeply challenge the Orange County Jewish community and its families in this time of great recession. Every dollar from the Jewish Federation of Orange County towards an Olive Tree Initiative matter represents a dollar less for the real needs of a Jewish community whose children could benefit from so much more Jewish education and whose families include many in dire straits.
It is absolutely unacceptable that a lady who is so passionately devoted to the cause of Israel – a cause we all share even in the face of few, if any, George Rishamwis standing alongside Orange County Jews in our deep uncompromising love for Israel – should now be the target of a concerted vilification campaign to humiliate her by name, target her for obloquy, in the effort to shut her up and to cast her as a pariah in the community of Jewish public participants. And while she and several others may have mixed up their “N”s and “S”s, it is a shame that the Orange County Jewish Federation and the Orange County Hillel lacked the elegance and dignity to mind their Ps and Qs.
I hereby am putting on public notice those who may be planning to finish off this lady’s reputation by humiliating and character-assassinating her that I will stand by this lady. I endorse the letter of Rabbi Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Beyond the smoke and mirrors, let it be clear that the burden of proof devolves onto the Jewish Federation and Jewish Family Services of Orange County, the Rose Project of the Jewish Federation, and Orange County Hillel to justify to the Jewish community of Irvine and throughout our County its continued engagement with and endorsement of an agency that perhaps is acceptable for deeply studied dilettantes but that is not a proper investment of Jewish community resources for the education of UCI Jewish students who, having done Birthright, next need a deeper Israel experience to better understand why the bond between the Jewish People and the Land of Israel is immutable, even as the City of United Jerusalem is the only eternal capital of Israel – period.
Respectfully submitted,
Rabbi Dov Fischer
Rav, Young Israel of Orange County
rabbi@yioc.org
Open Letter to a Jewish Student re the Olive Tree Initiative
Dear Friend,
You have written several people to explain the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) to them. I have read your words, and I share some thoughts.
1. You are active in something you cannot control. You will not always be at UCI. Not everyone thinks like you. With each ensuing year, the OTI becomes something that less-devoted Jews will choose to do also. Some will do it because they hear it is “awesome.” Cool foods, cool music, and you get to meet people who even know terrorists. (But don’t worry – Gomez will be there, so it’s safe.) Some will hear that it is fabulous on a resumé if you want to apply to a major law school or MBA program. Little by little, the founding generation and its successor passes, and what is left is an institutional protoplasm that takes on a life of its own, which you no longer can control. Not every trip to Jenin will be met with responses by Jews who understand why Israel had to smash through those alleys and kill terrorists, in the aftermath of an interminable series of suicide bombings emanating specifically from Jenin-trained suicide terrorists. They will see the propaganda movie that is shown to UCI Olive Tree Initiative students in Jenin, with the Arab body parts, and they will wonder why Israel had to be so cruel. They will hear about Jenin as a “Palestinian Refugee Camp” and will not even have the presence of mind to ask how the people in Jenin can call themselves “refugees” if they now supposedly are repatriated and live in the land from which they supposedly fled, “Palestine.” They will hear the George Rishmawis telling them at OTI programs about how Israelis literally shoot live ammunition randomly at Arabs. They will see the Israeli military checkpoints at the Security Fence, and it will lack context. It would be like someone who died in the 1990s coming back to life and seeing the TSA security lines at the airport. If people do not like the long oines and invasive body searches with context, imagine the impact of seeing it without context. Maybe there will be one or two Jews on the trip who know a bit, although definitely not what you know. But you will not be there. Who will be there to ask the Arab Palestine propagandist – who bemoans the “Israeli occupation” and says “all we ever wanted was our land” – the obvious question: “You had the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and the Gaza Strip before June 1967, so what were you trying to accomplish when you founded the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964? What were you trying to liberate when the anti-Israel Arab terrorist movement formally began in 1964?” Instead, the least-ignorant-Jew on the trip – a far cry from the most knowledgeable Jew – will become the Zionist voice: “Well, East Jerusalem. I guess Israel should let that be the capital of Arab Palestine, but Israel also should be allowed to have some of Jerusalem. And Israel should not have cut so deeply into the Arab West Bank – “Palestine” – with that fence just to protect a few settlers who probably don’t belong there. OK, guys, that’s my compromise, what’s yours?” Yes, there will be OTI visits with the Israel side, too, for “balance.” But, unlike the monolithic Palestine side that does not accept a permanent Jewish-sovereign polity anywhere in the Middle East, the Israel side will be diverse. There will even be the retired Israeli general who looks back on the 1967 liberation of Jerusalem – “haKotel b’yadeinu!” – and will apologize to the UCI students on the OTI adventure for his having been caught in the same "mindless euphoria” back then that caused Israelis to lose sight of the big picture. But he will assure his UCI OTI audience that he has atoned over the years and has been active in several “peace” campaigns in recent years, even writing the Israeli Prime Minister that Israel has it all wrong – and, after all, he knows because he served under the Prime Minister’s brother.
2. You continually are under the misapprehension that Daniel Wehrenfennig is something more than a grad student who just got a Ph.D. a year ago. Despite what has been conveyed to you, which you have conveyed to me, he is not a world-famous nor even a significant peace maker. He has some publications. I have publications, too. I published a law review study that was cited by at least nine different prominent federal judges in handing down significant multi-million-dollar federal decisions. That does not make me a Supreme Court justice. This fellow is not Richard Holbrooke. He is not Henry Kissinger. He is a fellow with some publications on ideas for citizen involvement in peacemaking, from Northern Ireland to “Occupied Palestine.” It is like a lovely slim blonde woman or a great-looking hunk of a guy coming to Hollywood and expecting to be hired immediately for a starring role in the first movie for which she or he auditions. In time, she or he is waiting tables. At a seedy bar. You see, the problem is that I come at it from the perspective of someone who not only loves all of Israel, including the communities of Yehuda and Shomron, including the Neve Aliza community I helped establish in 1985 in Karnei Shomron, but also from the perspective of a rabbi. I am a rabbi who cares about Jews. This is not a good program for Jews, and it does not bring Jewish students an inch closer to Judaism, to Torah, to Shabbat, to mitzvot. An OTI Friday night at Aish HaTorah with a group that is 80 percent non-Jewish doesn’t cut it, particularly when the program spends Shabbat Day in “Arab Palestine.” A program that appallingly but predictably spends most of Rosh Hashanah in “Palestine” and Jordan doesn’t cut it – even if they tell the Jews that “Hey, if you want to leave the group for two days for your holiday, that’s OK.” I expect that from a law firm where I work. I expect that at a public school in Iowa. That does not cut it as a program for Jewish students to be spending two weeks in Israel.
3. Note that this issue never really energized me until the salaried Hillel director and the Hillel student president each opted to launch mass-distributed character-assassination letters against a member of my shul. Those letters were sent to me and thousands of other Jews on Shabbat. What Jewish organization publicly desecrates Shabbat so blithely? And they really calumniated her. Can you imagine? Based on the dozens upon dozens upon dozens of signatures to the letter defaming this woman, every single UCI Jewish student leader, every UCI Jewish student group president and vice-president, every last Jewish group on campus, and dozens other present and former UCI Jewish students all supposedly were so infuriated by her that they supposedly all signed onto a hate-filled letter within a day? In a lifetime, you will meet many Jewish leaders and even rabbis whom you will think have sold out a bit, slowed down a bit, lost whatever idealism or gleam in their eyes they may ever have had. You will hear them patronize you and talk to you about “life experience.” Well, let me tell you: I have been there, done that. I also am an activist. I still respect your fire without seeing you as “some stupid dopey kid who needs to grow up.” If I thought you were unworthy, I never would be devoting this kind of time and effort to write you as extensively as I am writing you here. I cherish and value student activists for Israel. But just as I do not superimpose on you a prejudice that you are too young for a serious discussion, don’t you superimpose on me a prejudice that I am too old. And, as a Jewish activist myself, I will tell you that in forty years of activism, going back to my first campaign – to convince NBC to renew “Star Trek” for another season – I never have gotten that many signatures onto a petition or a letter, that 100% a response, in less than a day. So there was something rotten immediately. I am telling you that the two letters that were mass-distributed that Shabbat bordered on legally actionable slander. More, the three separate letters were coordinated – a campaign coordinated among the Federation professional, the Hillel professional, and the Hillel student leader. And those letters not only were nasty, not only may have been legally actionable, but also included – in at least one case – significant forgery of names who did not sign onto it and even opposed it. Those letters attempted to a destroy a good woman over a possible scrivener’s error, but instead they opened huge new cans of worms, revealing far more than any of us had expected. That is what it took to wake up many people in this community that something here is not right. If they can defame and destroy this woman today, and we remain silent, what will stop them from defaming someone else next time? So those of us who never stopped being activists – just got detoured a few extra exits by the need to rear children, put them through high school and college, and earn income to pay bills for the kinds of personal needs (electric, gas, water) that are not funded by the Federation’s Rose Project – woke up. We found each other. We started doing some research. And we could not believe what we learned.
4. We found, as much to our shock as to our chagrin, that there is a cover-up in play. Suddenly UCI Hillel conveys that it never has supported or advocated or encouraged UCI Jewish student participation in the Olive Tree Initiative. First of all, that is a lie. It is not merely a fabrication, a falsification, or a mendacity. This is not Foggy Bottom nor “Cat on a Hit Tin Roof.” Here, we talk plainly. I am a congregational rabbi in Irvine, a member of the national executive committee of one national rabbinic body, a leader in another national rabbinic body, a former Chief Articles Editor of a prominent law review and former clerk to a nationally prominent federal appeals court judge, and I am saying it plainly: It is an outright lie by UCI Hillel. By contrast, the truth is that UCI Hillel actively advocated for and encouraged UCI Jewish student participation in the Olive Tree Initiative. I know what Tzvi Raviv told me, and I know what Bruce Manning told me. And I am a bit surprised that you seem unaware that Hillel encouraged the formation of OTI. So, as always happens in politics when the truth gets uncomfortable and difficult to answer, people give up on answering the truth and start creating “straw men” instead, knocking them down gleefully. So we now are being told by certain Hillel spokespeople that the activists are accusing Hillel of paying money towards OTI. Not true. That Hillel is accused of supporting OTI with money. Not true. Rather, Hillel stands accused of having been among those encouraging the formation and establishment of OTI, and it stands accused of having used its resources to encourage UCI Jewish students to go on OTI programs. And it is time for UCI Hillel to stop covering up and instead to admit the truth of its role in the formative year of Olive Tree Initiative. That – along with an apology to the Jewish community and to the Jewish students it misguided. Similarly, we now are being told that the activists accuse Federation of funding OTI. Not True. Of financially supporting OTI. Not true. Rather, Federation stands accused of taking Jewish charitable funds during this Great Recession, a time when Jewish Family Services of Orange County was forced to abandon its independence and to merge into Federation because there no longer was enough Jewish charitable money available to it, and giving those Jewish funds towards the airfare and tuition of Jewish students attending the Olive Tree Initiative program. Again, that Federation money made it possible for those UCI Jewish students to travel with OTI to “Palestine” to hear those terrible anti-Israel speeches in “Palestine,” to see that hateful movie in Jenin, to hear George Rishmawi threaten that, if the demands of the “Palestinian peacemakers” are not met this year, then the “peace activists” of “Palestine” may well have no alternative but to turn to violence next year.
5. More “straw men” ensued. We were told that, in our ignorance, we are calling OTI anti-Semitic. Not true. That we are calling Daniel Wehrenfennig anti-Semitic. Not true. That we oppose Wehrenfennig because he is a German. Not true. That we regard OTI as anti-Israel. Not true. That we regard Wehrenfennig as anti-Israel. Not true. Rather, what is true is that we regard the OTI as a terribly unfortunate and misguided initiative, clutched at by Dean Michael Drake and Vice President Gomez as a publicity bonanza to show their donors that, you see, we are doing something about the Muslim Student Union and its annual “Hate Israel Week” and its incessant disruptions of Jewish speakers ranging from Prof. Daniel Pipes to Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. To paraphrase in common parlance, once we cut through the phraseology and rhetoric, we are hearing this: “Look, Jews, we have the Olive Tree Initiative. So stop bothering us. And stop telling Merage that, all because he is a Jew, he should stop giving us tens of millions of dollars. OK?” Likewise, originally, the Federation and Hillel proudly also bragged about their OTI involvement. It was once upon a time. Now, in the face of the revelations about what actually happens at OTI programs, they have reverted. Now they deny, and once we cut through the phraseology and rhetoric, we are hearing this: “We never said that. We don’t support it. We don’t fund it.” It is like Bill Clinton denying that he had sex with Monica Lewinsky. “I did not have sex with that woman.” Then they tell him she preserved a dress with his DNA on it. “Oh. Well, in that case . . . .” So now we are told that it is not Federation money; rather, it is Rose Project money. But the Federation is the Rose Project, and the Rose Project is the Federation. Let us hypothesize that Rose came and said to Federation “We want to donate money to start an Institute for Historical Review, to do research disproving that the Holocaust ever happened. We will fund research to prove the Holocaust is a hoax.” Would that project be accepted as an utterly independent “Rose Project of the Jewish Federation of Orange County for Denying the Holocaust”? Let us hypothesize, with greater warmth, that Rose came and said “We have met and tested Jewish kids in Orange County who go to TVT, and we are beyond-shocked at how little they know after twelve years at TVT, so we want to start a million-dollar-fund to start a Modern Orthodox Hebrew Academy in Irvine for grades 1-12.” Do you think – for a nano-second – that there would be a “Rose Project of the Jewish Federation of Orange County for Establishing an Orthodox Hebrew Academy in Irvine?” D’ya think so? The reality is that the Rose Project’s funding of those airfares and tuitions for the Olive Tree Initiative students is part-and-parcel of a project that the Jewish Federation of Orange County proudly has accepted under its wings, and Federation boastfully has bragged about that financial subventing of OTI whenever it has suited Federation’s public relations purposes.
6. More straw men: We are being told that activists have written that [student name withheld] is anti-Israel because he/ she supported OTI. Not true. Rather, we regret that the student or students, who care about Israel, have failed to see the longer-term consequences of their promoting OTI now. It is called the Law of Unintended Consequences. In the end, then, Jews are the losers – primarily Jewish students. Think about it: If this Olive Tree Initiative, which you tell us is so good for the Jews, really were so sound and worthwhile, why would UCI Hillel and the Jewish Federation of Orange County now, before your very eyes, be denying their demonstrable direct involvement in OTI? Alas, this misguided initiative now has spread to two other far-flung UC campuses where there are even fewer Jewish students like you who would know what to say in Jenin. This is not what may have been intended by those within the Jewish community who helped create it, but this is what has been created, a program that neither will bring peace to the region nor harm it, but will be used manipulatively by third-parties who were not on the original radar, including but not limited to: (i) the UCI Administration, manipulating this OTI program to excuse themselves for their abysmal record on protecting Jewish students walking along Ring Road during the worst moments of “Hate Israel Week” and failing to assure that the Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the State of Israel could speak with dignity to a UCI audience; and (ii) future Jewish students looking for something awesome for their resumes, while also enjoying an awesome Mideast experience in the hot spots like Jenin, in the company of people who count terrorists among their acquaintances, and maybe parlaying it to a great law or business graduate school – devoting their Mideast experience to “doing OTI” rather than, say, doing Birthright-Israel. And is it not ironic? The Olive Tree Initiative already was in full bloom, supposedly having peeled away layers of animosity and distrust that underlay prior Muslim Student Union (MSU) actions endangering UCI as a campus safe for Jews to hear Jewish speakers, when – nevertheless and despite OTI – the MSU still broke up Ambassador Oren’s appearance at UCI.
7. A final “straw,” perhaps better characterized as “the last straw.” One of the students would tell us that “We students are the new leaders of the American Jewish community. We are the future. We know best what is best for UCI. Your role in the community is to give us the funds. And otherwise – just butt out.” And so, a word to a friend. Irvine is our community, too. We, too, are its leaders. In the Irvine and greater Orange County Jewish community, there are nationally prominent experts on Israel and the Middle East, published authors, trained and experienced teachers, leaders capable of offering Israel advocacy training and teaching, Jewish leaders who actually fly across the country to teach and train others. There are Ph.D.s and scholars, scholarly researchers and exciting speakers. We are not called upon. Our offered services repeatedly are rejected. So be it. A $5,000 honorarium from an East Coast Jewish audience pays more than would the pro bono (free of charge) presentation that the same expert among us offers locally as a loving service to the community. But let us be clear: This issue transcends the students on campus. Perhaps you may have seen Breaking Away, an Academy Award®-winning flick. Its subplot is instructive. We the Jewish community live here in Irvine today, and we will be living here tomorrow, long after several of today’s UCI college and grad students have moved on. We have a long-term stake in the community, and we therefore have a stake in the neighborhood campus that brings occasional Jew-haters (including Jewish Jew-haters) out of their respective rat holes and into our midst. We are asked – even guilted – to contribute money to UCI Hillel, apprised that it is our obligation to do so because we have a stake. I personally have made such a donation to UCI Hillel. Some of us even have devoted hundreds of hours of our own personal time to students at UCI, even at the expense of personal family time, vacation time, and at the expense of money. We have seen students come into Irvine, then move on, much as I moved on in my life 35 years ago from the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University, and subsequently from the Westwood campus of UCLA Law School. Thus, it is important to recognize that, in the course of a lifetime, many of our respective lives are intersecting concentric circles, elliptical encounters. The world does not revolve around me, and it does not revolve around this or that student. One day it is about mobilizing the Irvine and Orange County Jewish community to help the former salaried Hillel Director actualize his hopes and agenda, and then he is gone, forgotten, but we still are here. Jewish organizational professionals come and go. We have seen the revolving doors at the Irvine Bureau of Jewish Education, the American Jewish Committee, the Tarbut v’ Torah school, and yes at UCI Hillel. Through each of the transitions, we donate money and time, patience and passion and participation. One day it is the new Hillel Program Director arriving all excited with big plans, and another day it is someone else with a different program agenda. But we the Orange County Jewish community remain here, committed and devoted to this place and to our friends and families and dreams, realizing that our tzedakah dollars are being allocated in ways that we find objectionable. While phantom students’ names are signed to documents without the signatories’ knowledge, assent, authorization – and in some cases over their explicit objections – it is we, the community, that receive the defamatory letters, breaking the peaceful moment as the Shabbat ends. We do not heatedly return the letters with overheated, over-exercised verbiage, telling the senders: “The students on campus are the leaders of tomorrow, so solicit the Big Gifts and Major Donations from them. It is they, the students at UCI, who alone are impacted at UCI, so let them tend to themselves, and how dare you approach with a fundraiser’s solicitations those of us who are not on campus?”
But there is a time for everything under the heavens: A time to be still, and a time to speak. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. Among us as Jews there always is a time to love and a time for peace. But this also is a time to speak and time to refrain from embracing. There will be absolutely no support for the Federation of Orange County from this quarter, nor from those who share my concerns, until the Federation and Hillel publicly withdraw from their associations with the Olive Tree Initiative. Not one penny. My desk is loaded with ample Jewish charitable alternatives to support, and tzedakah never stops in my home. But tzedakah must be just. And there is never a shortage of worthy Jewish causes to support that never would spend a penny of Jewish tzedakah money to fly a local Jewish student to “Palestine” for a film viewing in Jenin depicting the Israeli people as barbaric and cruel murderers. No, not a charity for me.
-- Rabbi Dov Fischer
You have written several people to explain the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI) to them. I have read your words, and I share some thoughts.
1. You are active in something you cannot control. You will not always be at UCI. Not everyone thinks like you. With each ensuing year, the OTI becomes something that less-devoted Jews will choose to do also. Some will do it because they hear it is “awesome.” Cool foods, cool music, and you get to meet people who even know terrorists. (But don’t worry – Gomez will be there, so it’s safe.) Some will hear that it is fabulous on a resumé if you want to apply to a major law school or MBA program. Little by little, the founding generation and its successor passes, and what is left is an institutional protoplasm that takes on a life of its own, which you no longer can control. Not every trip to Jenin will be met with responses by Jews who understand why Israel had to smash through those alleys and kill terrorists, in the aftermath of an interminable series of suicide bombings emanating specifically from Jenin-trained suicide terrorists. They will see the propaganda movie that is shown to UCI Olive Tree Initiative students in Jenin, with the Arab body parts, and they will wonder why Israel had to be so cruel. They will hear about Jenin as a “Palestinian Refugee Camp” and will not even have the presence of mind to ask how the people in Jenin can call themselves “refugees” if they now supposedly are repatriated and live in the land from which they supposedly fled, “Palestine.” They will hear the George Rishmawis telling them at OTI programs about how Israelis literally shoot live ammunition randomly at Arabs. They will see the Israeli military checkpoints at the Security Fence, and it will lack context. It would be like someone who died in the 1990s coming back to life and seeing the TSA security lines at the airport. If people do not like the long oines and invasive body searches with context, imagine the impact of seeing it without context. Maybe there will be one or two Jews on the trip who know a bit, although definitely not what you know. But you will not be there. Who will be there to ask the Arab Palestine propagandist – who bemoans the “Israeli occupation” and says “all we ever wanted was our land” – the obvious question: “You had the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and the Gaza Strip before June 1967, so what were you trying to accomplish when you founded the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964? What were you trying to liberate when the anti-Israel Arab terrorist movement formally began in 1964?” Instead, the least-ignorant-Jew on the trip – a far cry from the most knowledgeable Jew – will become the Zionist voice: “Well, East Jerusalem. I guess Israel should let that be the capital of Arab Palestine, but Israel also should be allowed to have some of Jerusalem. And Israel should not have cut so deeply into the Arab West Bank – “Palestine” – with that fence just to protect a few settlers who probably don’t belong there. OK, guys, that’s my compromise, what’s yours?” Yes, there will be OTI visits with the Israel side, too, for “balance.” But, unlike the monolithic Palestine side that does not accept a permanent Jewish-sovereign polity anywhere in the Middle East, the Israel side will be diverse. There will even be the retired Israeli general who looks back on the 1967 liberation of Jerusalem – “haKotel b’yadeinu!” – and will apologize to the UCI students on the OTI adventure for his having been caught in the same "mindless euphoria” back then that caused Israelis to lose sight of the big picture. But he will assure his UCI OTI audience that he has atoned over the years and has been active in several “peace” campaigns in recent years, even writing the Israeli Prime Minister that Israel has it all wrong – and, after all, he knows because he served under the Prime Minister’s brother.
2. You continually are under the misapprehension that Daniel Wehrenfennig is something more than a grad student who just got a Ph.D. a year ago. Despite what has been conveyed to you, which you have conveyed to me, he is not a world-famous nor even a significant peace maker. He has some publications. I have publications, too. I published a law review study that was cited by at least nine different prominent federal judges in handing down significant multi-million-dollar federal decisions. That does not make me a Supreme Court justice. This fellow is not Richard Holbrooke. He is not Henry Kissinger. He is a fellow with some publications on ideas for citizen involvement in peacemaking, from Northern Ireland to “Occupied Palestine.” It is like a lovely slim blonde woman or a great-looking hunk of a guy coming to Hollywood and expecting to be hired immediately for a starring role in the first movie for which she or he auditions. In time, she or he is waiting tables. At a seedy bar. You see, the problem is that I come at it from the perspective of someone who not only loves all of Israel, including the communities of Yehuda and Shomron, including the Neve Aliza community I helped establish in 1985 in Karnei Shomron, but also from the perspective of a rabbi. I am a rabbi who cares about Jews. This is not a good program for Jews, and it does not bring Jewish students an inch closer to Judaism, to Torah, to Shabbat, to mitzvot. An OTI Friday night at Aish HaTorah with a group that is 80 percent non-Jewish doesn’t cut it, particularly when the program spends Shabbat Day in “Arab Palestine.” A program that appallingly but predictably spends most of Rosh Hashanah in “Palestine” and Jordan doesn’t cut it – even if they tell the Jews that “Hey, if you want to leave the group for two days for your holiday, that’s OK.” I expect that from a law firm where I work. I expect that at a public school in Iowa. That does not cut it as a program for Jewish students to be spending two weeks in Israel.
3. Note that this issue never really energized me until the salaried Hillel director and the Hillel student president each opted to launch mass-distributed character-assassination letters against a member of my shul. Those letters were sent to me and thousands of other Jews on Shabbat. What Jewish organization publicly desecrates Shabbat so blithely? And they really calumniated her. Can you imagine? Based on the dozens upon dozens upon dozens of signatures to the letter defaming this woman, every single UCI Jewish student leader, every UCI Jewish student group president and vice-president, every last Jewish group on campus, and dozens other present and former UCI Jewish students all supposedly were so infuriated by her that they supposedly all signed onto a hate-filled letter within a day? In a lifetime, you will meet many Jewish leaders and even rabbis whom you will think have sold out a bit, slowed down a bit, lost whatever idealism or gleam in their eyes they may ever have had. You will hear them patronize you and talk to you about “life experience.” Well, let me tell you: I have been there, done that. I also am an activist. I still respect your fire without seeing you as “some stupid dopey kid who needs to grow up.” If I thought you were unworthy, I never would be devoting this kind of time and effort to write you as extensively as I am writing you here. I cherish and value student activists for Israel. But just as I do not superimpose on you a prejudice that you are too young for a serious discussion, don’t you superimpose on me a prejudice that I am too old. And, as a Jewish activist myself, I will tell you that in forty years of activism, going back to my first campaign – to convince NBC to renew “Star Trek” for another season – I never have gotten that many signatures onto a petition or a letter, that 100% a response, in less than a day. So there was something rotten immediately. I am telling you that the two letters that were mass-distributed that Shabbat bordered on legally actionable slander. More, the three separate letters were coordinated – a campaign coordinated among the Federation professional, the Hillel professional, and the Hillel student leader. And those letters not only were nasty, not only may have been legally actionable, but also included – in at least one case – significant forgery of names who did not sign onto it and even opposed it. Those letters attempted to a destroy a good woman over a possible scrivener’s error, but instead they opened huge new cans of worms, revealing far more than any of us had expected. That is what it took to wake up many people in this community that something here is not right. If they can defame and destroy this woman today, and we remain silent, what will stop them from defaming someone else next time? So those of us who never stopped being activists – just got detoured a few extra exits by the need to rear children, put them through high school and college, and earn income to pay bills for the kinds of personal needs (electric, gas, water) that are not funded by the Federation’s Rose Project – woke up. We found each other. We started doing some research. And we could not believe what we learned.
4. We found, as much to our shock as to our chagrin, that there is a cover-up in play. Suddenly UCI Hillel conveys that it never has supported or advocated or encouraged UCI Jewish student participation in the Olive Tree Initiative. First of all, that is a lie. It is not merely a fabrication, a falsification, or a mendacity. This is not Foggy Bottom nor “Cat on a Hit Tin Roof.” Here, we talk plainly. I am a congregational rabbi in Irvine, a member of the national executive committee of one national rabbinic body, a leader in another national rabbinic body, a former Chief Articles Editor of a prominent law review and former clerk to a nationally prominent federal appeals court judge, and I am saying it plainly: It is an outright lie by UCI Hillel. By contrast, the truth is that UCI Hillel actively advocated for and encouraged UCI Jewish student participation in the Olive Tree Initiative. I know what Tzvi Raviv told me, and I know what Bruce Manning told me. And I am a bit surprised that you seem unaware that Hillel encouraged the formation of OTI. So, as always happens in politics when the truth gets uncomfortable and difficult to answer, people give up on answering the truth and start creating “straw men” instead, knocking them down gleefully. So we now are being told by certain Hillel spokespeople that the activists are accusing Hillel of paying money towards OTI. Not true. That Hillel is accused of supporting OTI with money. Not true. Rather, Hillel stands accused of having been among those encouraging the formation and establishment of OTI, and it stands accused of having used its resources to encourage UCI Jewish students to go on OTI programs. And it is time for UCI Hillel to stop covering up and instead to admit the truth of its role in the formative year of Olive Tree Initiative. That – along with an apology to the Jewish community and to the Jewish students it misguided. Similarly, we now are being told that the activists accuse Federation of funding OTI. Not True. Of financially supporting OTI. Not true. Rather, Federation stands accused of taking Jewish charitable funds during this Great Recession, a time when Jewish Family Services of Orange County was forced to abandon its independence and to merge into Federation because there no longer was enough Jewish charitable money available to it, and giving those Jewish funds towards the airfare and tuition of Jewish students attending the Olive Tree Initiative program. Again, that Federation money made it possible for those UCI Jewish students to travel with OTI to “Palestine” to hear those terrible anti-Israel speeches in “Palestine,” to see that hateful movie in Jenin, to hear George Rishmawi threaten that, if the demands of the “Palestinian peacemakers” are not met this year, then the “peace activists” of “Palestine” may well have no alternative but to turn to violence next year.
5. More “straw men” ensued. We were told that, in our ignorance, we are calling OTI anti-Semitic. Not true. That we are calling Daniel Wehrenfennig anti-Semitic. Not true. That we oppose Wehrenfennig because he is a German. Not true. That we regard OTI as anti-Israel. Not true. That we regard Wehrenfennig as anti-Israel. Not true. Rather, what is true is that we regard the OTI as a terribly unfortunate and misguided initiative, clutched at by Dean Michael Drake and Vice President Gomez as a publicity bonanza to show their donors that, you see, we are doing something about the Muslim Student Union and its annual “Hate Israel Week” and its incessant disruptions of Jewish speakers ranging from Prof. Daniel Pipes to Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. To paraphrase in common parlance, once we cut through the phraseology and rhetoric, we are hearing this: “Look, Jews, we have the Olive Tree Initiative. So stop bothering us. And stop telling Merage that, all because he is a Jew, he should stop giving us tens of millions of dollars. OK?” Likewise, originally, the Federation and Hillel proudly also bragged about their OTI involvement. It was once upon a time. Now, in the face of the revelations about what actually happens at OTI programs, they have reverted. Now they deny, and once we cut through the phraseology and rhetoric, we are hearing this: “We never said that. We don’t support it. We don’t fund it.” It is like Bill Clinton denying that he had sex with Monica Lewinsky. “I did not have sex with that woman.” Then they tell him she preserved a dress with his DNA on it. “Oh. Well, in that case . . . .” So now we are told that it is not Federation money; rather, it is Rose Project money. But the Federation is the Rose Project, and the Rose Project is the Federation. Let us hypothesize that Rose came and said to Federation “We want to donate money to start an Institute for Historical Review, to do research disproving that the Holocaust ever happened. We will fund research to prove the Holocaust is a hoax.” Would that project be accepted as an utterly independent “Rose Project of the Jewish Federation of Orange County for Denying the Holocaust”? Let us hypothesize, with greater warmth, that Rose came and said “We have met and tested Jewish kids in Orange County who go to TVT, and we are beyond-shocked at how little they know after twelve years at TVT, so we want to start a million-dollar-fund to start a Modern Orthodox Hebrew Academy in Irvine for grades 1-12.” Do you think – for a nano-second – that there would be a “Rose Project of the Jewish Federation of Orange County for Establishing an Orthodox Hebrew Academy in Irvine?” D’ya think so? The reality is that the Rose Project’s funding of those airfares and tuitions for the Olive Tree Initiative students is part-and-parcel of a project that the Jewish Federation of Orange County proudly has accepted under its wings, and Federation boastfully has bragged about that financial subventing of OTI whenever it has suited Federation’s public relations purposes.
6. More straw men: We are being told that activists have written that [student name withheld] is anti-Israel because he/ she supported OTI. Not true. Rather, we regret that the student or students, who care about Israel, have failed to see the longer-term consequences of their promoting OTI now. It is called the Law of Unintended Consequences. In the end, then, Jews are the losers – primarily Jewish students. Think about it: If this Olive Tree Initiative, which you tell us is so good for the Jews, really were so sound and worthwhile, why would UCI Hillel and the Jewish Federation of Orange County now, before your very eyes, be denying their demonstrable direct involvement in OTI? Alas, this misguided initiative now has spread to two other far-flung UC campuses where there are even fewer Jewish students like you who would know what to say in Jenin. This is not what may have been intended by those within the Jewish community who helped create it, but this is what has been created, a program that neither will bring peace to the region nor harm it, but will be used manipulatively by third-parties who were not on the original radar, including but not limited to: (i) the UCI Administration, manipulating this OTI program to excuse themselves for their abysmal record on protecting Jewish students walking along Ring Road during the worst moments of “Hate Israel Week” and failing to assure that the Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the State of Israel could speak with dignity to a UCI audience; and (ii) future Jewish students looking for something awesome for their resumes, while also enjoying an awesome Mideast experience in the hot spots like Jenin, in the company of people who count terrorists among their acquaintances, and maybe parlaying it to a great law or business graduate school – devoting their Mideast experience to “doing OTI” rather than, say, doing Birthright-Israel. And is it not ironic? The Olive Tree Initiative already was in full bloom, supposedly having peeled away layers of animosity and distrust that underlay prior Muslim Student Union (MSU) actions endangering UCI as a campus safe for Jews to hear Jewish speakers, when – nevertheless and despite OTI – the MSU still broke up Ambassador Oren’s appearance at UCI.
7. A final “straw,” perhaps better characterized as “the last straw.” One of the students would tell us that “We students are the new leaders of the American Jewish community. We are the future. We know best what is best for UCI. Your role in the community is to give us the funds. And otherwise – just butt out.” And so, a word to a friend. Irvine is our community, too. We, too, are its leaders. In the Irvine and greater Orange County Jewish community, there are nationally prominent experts on Israel and the Middle East, published authors, trained and experienced teachers, leaders capable of offering Israel advocacy training and teaching, Jewish leaders who actually fly across the country to teach and train others. There are Ph.D.s and scholars, scholarly researchers and exciting speakers. We are not called upon. Our offered services repeatedly are rejected. So be it. A $5,000 honorarium from an East Coast Jewish audience pays more than would the pro bono (free of charge) presentation that the same expert among us offers locally as a loving service to the community. But let us be clear: This issue transcends the students on campus. Perhaps you may have seen Breaking Away, an Academy Award®-winning flick. Its subplot is instructive. We the Jewish community live here in Irvine today, and we will be living here tomorrow, long after several of today’s UCI college and grad students have moved on. We have a long-term stake in the community, and we therefore have a stake in the neighborhood campus that brings occasional Jew-haters (including Jewish Jew-haters) out of their respective rat holes and into our midst. We are asked – even guilted – to contribute money to UCI Hillel, apprised that it is our obligation to do so because we have a stake. I personally have made such a donation to UCI Hillel. Some of us even have devoted hundreds of hours of our own personal time to students at UCI, even at the expense of personal family time, vacation time, and at the expense of money. We have seen students come into Irvine, then move on, much as I moved on in my life 35 years ago from the Morningside Heights campus of Columbia University, and subsequently from the Westwood campus of UCLA Law School. Thus, it is important to recognize that, in the course of a lifetime, many of our respective lives are intersecting concentric circles, elliptical encounters. The world does not revolve around me, and it does not revolve around this or that student. One day it is about mobilizing the Irvine and Orange County Jewish community to help the former salaried Hillel Director actualize his hopes and agenda, and then he is gone, forgotten, but we still are here. Jewish organizational professionals come and go. We have seen the revolving doors at the Irvine Bureau of Jewish Education, the American Jewish Committee, the Tarbut v’ Torah school, and yes at UCI Hillel. Through each of the transitions, we donate money and time, patience and passion and participation. One day it is the new Hillel Program Director arriving all excited with big plans, and another day it is someone else with a different program agenda. But we the Orange County Jewish community remain here, committed and devoted to this place and to our friends and families and dreams, realizing that our tzedakah dollars are being allocated in ways that we find objectionable. While phantom students’ names are signed to documents without the signatories’ knowledge, assent, authorization – and in some cases over their explicit objections – it is we, the community, that receive the defamatory letters, breaking the peaceful moment as the Shabbat ends. We do not heatedly return the letters with overheated, over-exercised verbiage, telling the senders: “The students on campus are the leaders of tomorrow, so solicit the Big Gifts and Major Donations from them. It is they, the students at UCI, who alone are impacted at UCI, so let them tend to themselves, and how dare you approach with a fundraiser’s solicitations those of us who are not on campus?”
But there is a time for everything under the heavens: A time to be still, and a time to speak. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. Among us as Jews there always is a time to love and a time for peace. But this also is a time to speak and time to refrain from embracing. There will be absolutely no support for the Federation of Orange County from this quarter, nor from those who share my concerns, until the Federation and Hillel publicly withdraw from their associations with the Olive Tree Initiative. Not one penny. My desk is loaded with ample Jewish charitable alternatives to support, and tzedakah never stops in my home. But tzedakah must be just. And there is never a shortage of worthy Jewish causes to support that never would spend a penny of Jewish tzedakah money to fly a local Jewish student to “Palestine” for a film viewing in Jenin depicting the Israeli people as barbaric and cruel murderers. No, not a charity for me.
-- Rabbi Dov Fischer
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