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vol. 86, no. 9
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friday, april 30, 2010
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16 iyar 5770
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jtnews.net
a jewish transcript publication
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$2.00
i n s i d e
www.jtnews.net
h vi ih hingn
n ew s
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Pag 14Pag 12
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Rabbi Dan Bridg, rmr xcutiv dirctr Hilll at th Univrsit Washingtn, had th plattr; lngtim supprtr and rmr bard prsidnt Michl Rsn had th r;and lngtim supprtr Jl Gamran had th actual pic papr — th mrtgag th Karn Mars Gamran Famil Cntr r Jwish Li, hm Hilll at th Univrsit Washingtn — that atr six ars and $12 millin bcam wrth nthing mr than its ashs. “It was a cmmunal ndavr. Thr wr crtainl sm incrdibl gnrusdnrs,” said Rabbi Will Brkvitz, currnt Grnstin Famil xcutiv dirctr at Hilll UW, “but it wasn’t just lks lik that. It was rall th $100 gits, th $50 gits, th$1,000 gits. It was a cmmunal rt. That, I think, sas a lt abut th Sattl Jwish cmmunit.”
Joel Magalnick
Editor, JTNews
Special RepoRt
Relative to the news that some Jewish day schoolsacross the country are shutting their doors, Jewishschools in Seattle appear to be surviving, and in somecases thriving.But the past two years have not been easy. While theve primary and secondary day schools have seen steady or slightly reduced attendance, drops in undraising andincreases in requests or tuition assistance have beenmuch larger. Te Northwest Yeshiva High School, thestate’s only Jewish high school, will be covered in a utureissue o
JNews.
o account or these shortalls, school administrators havehad to get creative in nding grants, shiting priorities, andin some cases nding new modes o learning or the students.Compared to a number o schools in places like Mem-phis, enn., Lakewood, N.J. and even Los Angeles thathave shut down or will do so at the end o the school year,things in Seattle aren’t so bad.Te overriding theme at a January conerence o ourJewish day school associations, at which representativesrom several local schools were in attendance, was how tostay aoat during the economic crisis.“We’re all dealing with the same challenges o trying tomake quality Jewish educational experiences or children,”Scott Goldberg, director o the Institute or University-School Partnership at Yeshiva University, told the JA WorldNews Service. “Tat commonality drove our programmingrom the macro-level — needing to do more with less andreally orcing us to reassess how we do things.” While reassessment at local day schools has beenongoing — some sta has been laid o or positions havebeen let unlled, or example — it has not or the mostpart resulted in massive inrastructure changes.School leaders acknowledge a private education isexpensive, and understand all too well the gap betweenthe actual cost o a child’s education and his or her am-ily’s ability to pay or it. Yet many are captive to that cost— Orthodox amilies, and some non-Orthodox ami-lies, will not accept anything less than a comprehensiveJewish education.“Public school is not an option,” said Rivy PoupkoKletenik, head o school at the Seattle Hebrew Academy.“For our population there really aren’t alternatives.”wo organizations have tried to ll that gap. Te JewishFederation o Greater Seattle this past year gave nearly $450,000 o campaign and auxiliary unds to each school, with the exception o the orah Day School. But the Fed-eration also brought in ewer dollars last year in its cam-paign and is running slightly behind that this year.“Our goal, o course, is that any amily that wants tohave their kid have a quality Jewish education should beable to have that, so I think we’re all struggling with thatsame issue,” said Richard Fruchter, the Federation’s CEO.Te Samis Foundation, a trust intended specically toprovide unding or Jewish day schools that’s unique tothis state’s Jewish community, has also been able to pro- vide much-needed relie.“We have to thank God every day that we have a SamisFoundation that is helping us,” Kletenik said. “Tat isreally what sets Seattle apart rom other cities that arereally struggling.”“Samis has stepped up or us,” said Robert Sulkin,board president o the Jewish Day School. “I we didn’thave Samis, we couldn’t give tuition assistance to the[level] we’re giving it and not reduce programming.”But i the recession continues, all the assistance goingto the ve elementary day schools may simply be pro-longing some difcult decisions.“I the recession continues,…certainly Samis does nothave enough resources that we can make up the gap o increasing scholarship needs and decreasing individualdonations,” said Rabbi Rob oren, Samis’s grants admin-istrator.In response to the recession, Samis increased its allo-cation to schools by 7 percent last year and 8 percent orthe upcoming year. “We’re looking at decits despite thatincrease,” oren said.Te Federation assesses the increase in need will be20 to 30 percent.“Tough there’s some glimmer o blue sky in the econ-omy, it takes time or that to translate to individual am-ilies, and then campaigns and philanthropy,” Fruchtersaid. “It’s still not a happy scenario or schools, or oursocial service agencies, or even the Federation itsel.”Despite the economic diiculties, all ive schoolsbelieve they are doing okay, i not well.
Jewish Day School of Metropolitan Seattle
According to Maria Erlitz, head o school at the JewishDay School in Bellevue’s Crossroads neighborhood,things are going “very, very well.”Tey have lost some students, though not all attritionhas been directly related to the economy, but the incom-ing kindergarten is larger than this year’s 8th grade grad-uating class. In addition, Erlitz told
JNews
, she has beenreceiving an inordinate number o inquiries rom par-ents with children in public schools about applying orthe middle school.“Classes, even on Mercer Island, [are] getting to beover 30 kids,” she said. “It’s not looking as pretty as they hoped it would.”Tat every 8th grade student who applied last year
ar Jws ss srvvg — w m-
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Page 6
M.o.t.: Mmbr h trib 7wh’ Yur jQ? 9 ar & enrinmn 14cmmuniy cndr 17liy 19th shuk cifd 22
Early Spring Family Calendar
For complete details about these and other upcoming JFS events and workshops, please visit our website: www.jfsseattle.org
For Adults Age 60+
Endless Opportunities
A community-wide program offered in partnership with Temple B’nai Torah & TempleDe Hirsch Sinai. EO events are free and opento the public.
Navigating the Elder Network
With Pam Piering, Director o Aging andDisability Services, City o Seattle
m
ta, Ma 610:00 – 11:30 a.m.
Temple B’nai Torah. 15727 NE 4th,
Bellevue
What About Homelessness?
A Committee Which is Making a Dierence
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ta, Ma 2510:00 – 11:30 A.M.
Temple De Hirsch Sinai1530 East Union,
Seattle
RSVP
Ellen Hendin, (206) 861-3183 orendlessopps@jsseattle.org regarding all
Endless Opportunities
programs.
For the lgbtq coMMunity
Strengthening LesbianRelationships
Explore how you can build a healthier, strongerrelationship with a woman you love. Facilitatedby Dr. G. Dorsey Green, lesbian psychologistand co-author o
Lesbian Couples: A Guide toCreating Healthy Relationships.
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Wa, Ma 56:30 – 8:30 .m.
JFS, 1601 16th Ave,
Seattle
Dessert and socializing ollowing the discussion.$12/person.Scholarships available.Advance registration required.
Contact
Emily Harris-Shears, (206) 861-8784 oramilylie@jsseattle.org
For pArents
PEPS
PEPS is now oering a peer support groupexperience or parents o newborns within aculturally relevant context. Jewish and interaithparents are invited to join us!
Contact
Marjorie Schnyder, (206) 861-3146,amilylie@jsseattle.org or go tohttp://www.pepsgroup.org/register-or-peps/js.
Parenting Mindully:The Middah o Faith
Drawing on Jewish Values through Musar
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sa, Ma 1611:00 a.m. – 12:30 .m.
Co-sponsored by and held atTemple B’nai Torah15727 NE 4th Street,
Bellevue
FREE. Advance registration encouraged.
Contact
Marjorie Schnyder, (206) 861-3146 oramilylie@jsseattle.org
Volunteer to MAke AdiFFerence!
For details, please see Volunteer Opportunitieson our website, or contact Jane Deer-Hileman,Director o
Volunteer Services
, (206) 861-3155or volunteer@jsseattle.org
For JeWish WoMen
Programs of Project DVORA (DomesticViolence Outreach, Response & Advocacy)are free of charge.
Confdential Support Group
Peer support, education and healing orJewish women with controlling partners.
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o
Confdential location, dates and time.
Contact
Project DVORA
, (206) 461-3240or contactus@jsseattle.org
Healthy Relationships,Responsive Communities
Facilitated by Danica Bornstein, MSW, LICSW
Discuss the impact o community on ourintimate relationships and explore Jewishvalues, while learning strategies or building thekind o supportive, responsive communities inwhich healthy intimate relationships can thrive.
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Ma, Ma 36:30 – 8:30 .m.
At JFS, 1601 16th Ave.,
Seattle
$10/person. Scholarships available.
Contact
Michelle Liton, (206) 861-3159 ormliton@jsseattle.org
1601 - 16th Avenue, Seattle(206) 461-3240
JFS services and programsare made possible throughgenerous community support o
t a, a vwww.jfa.
For the coMMunity
AA Meetings at JFS
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ta a 7:00 .m.
JFS, 1601 – 16th Avenue,
Seattle
Chai Chavurah
A Judaic/12 Step Study Gathering or Jewsin or considering recovery, their amilies andtheir riends.
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saa, Ma 8
Second Saturday each month
1:00 .m.
Temple B’nai Torah. 15727 NE 4th,
Bellevue
Contact
Eve M. Ru, (206) 861-8782 oremru@jsseattle.org
sAVe the dAte!
ta, Ma 11
n - 1:30 .m.
Westin Seattle HotelGuest Speaker:Costco CEO Jim Sinegal
ca
Gail Pollack at (206) 861-3151or gpollack@jsseattle.org
For children oFAging pArents
Difcult Behaviors: Respondingto Depression, Mental Illness &Substance Abuse
Part of the Caring for Our Aging ParentsWorkshop Series
Learn to recognize depression or substanceabuse in your aging parents, and how to helpthem obtain the support they need.
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Ma, Ma 37:00 – 9:00 .m.
Seattle KollelSeward Park neighborhood o
Seattle
Advance registration encouraged.$10/person. Scholarships available.
Contact
Emily Harris-Shears, (206) 861-8784 oramilylie@jsseattle.org
For single pArent FAMilies
Dinner & A Movie!
Join other Jewish single moms and dads andtheir children or dinner, a chance or parents totalk & connect and a movie or the kids!With a catered kosher meal and movie snacks.
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sa, Ma 165:00 – 8:00 .m.
JFS, 1601-16th Avenue,
Seattle
Advance registration required by May 11.Donations welcome.
Contact
Marjorie Schnyder, (206) 861-3146 oramilylie@jsseattle.org
he
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is the Voice o JewishWashington. Our mission is to meet the interests o our Jewish community through air and accurate coverage o local,national and international news, opinionand inormation. We seek to expose our readers to diverse viewpoints and vibrant debate on many ronts, including the newsand events in Israel. We strive to contribute tothe continued growth o our local Jewishcommunity as we carry out our mission.
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RabbiRob Toren
SamisFoundation
I received in my e-mail inbox a link toa ascinating Youube video: A violinistplaying at a subway station in a Washing-ton, D.C. Metro stop. What was interest-ing was that this was somewhat o anexperiment or, more accurately, a “gen-tleman’s wager” (an un-PC expression ora dollar-less bet).Tis was not your typical street musi-cian looking to pick up an extra buck ortwo. It was Joshua Bell, world-renownedconcert violinist, playing solo Bach parti-tas during rush hour. Te bet was aroundthe question o whether anyone would pay any attention and notice extraordinarily beautiul music being played by a consum-mate concert artist.Guess who won the bet? Te person who bet there would be signicant num-bers o passersby who would stop in theirbusy lives and take notice — akin to usSeattleites noticing “when the mountain’sout” even while driving to work in agoniz-ingly slow rush hour trafc on 520 —
lost
.Sure, one or two people stopped anddropped quarters into Bell’s violin case, acase that cradles a violin worth hundredso thousands o dollars! But the videorevealed countless passersby not payingany discernible notice to the artistry andbeauty right in ront o them. (Subway stations oten have quite good acoustics,by the way, albeit a bit too echo-y.)Tis interesting story o human oblivi-ousness to beauty or, let’s say generously,obliviousness to beauty
out o context
,seemed to me a
Midrashic
parable, or what our sages called a “
mashal
.” Expla-nation/digression: Rabbinic
midrashic
parables are stories our sages created toexplicate or explain a usually challeng-ing narrative in the orah, essentially interpreting one narrative by means o another, apparently more accessible one.Te “Joshua Bell in the Subway ale”occurred to me as a “
mashal
” o many o our people’s response to Jewish lie thesedays in the U.S. Here we have
something
o extraordinary beauty and power, attestedto by its adherents throughout the his-tory o this culture and this people, beingignored, passed by; our people too busy oroblivious or otherwise occupied to stop,observe, and appreciate. (Conession: I’ma snob, which means I don’t believe thatmusic or other great art is simply a mattero personal taste. Beethoven, or in thiscase, Bach, is simply better, greater musicthan Led Zeppelin or whatever gooy noiseteenagers listen to nowadays. Mozart iseven much greater than
Abbey Road
, anoisy album even an old snob like me canappreciate!). But, parentheses aside, I alsodon’t believe that Shabbat or Pesach or“
Shnayim ochazin b’talit
” (the provocativeopening
mishna
o Bava Metzia discussingthe dispute between two litigants layingapparently equal claim to a ound object,but pick any other nearly innitely as-cinating and compelling teachings romthe wellsprings o orah, both written andoral) are equal to whatever is “out there”in the marketplace o ideas and sensationscompeting or Jewish time, Jewish energy,Jewish wisdom.On an aesthetic plane, I suppose onecould argue whether Shabbat is moremoving or beautiul than hearing JoshuaBell play Mozart. But Jewish lie is notabout aesthetics, a value we inherit some- what rom Classical Greece, though aes-thetics play an important but limited rolein traditional Judaism. Indeed, so mucho Jewish lie deals with ways o livingone’s lie and how a community shouldideally live in “holiness.”Jewish tradition concerns itsel sooten with limits. Tis emphasis on limitsmay be the core problem as to why somany pass by its beauty, opting or what-ever else. Much o the message o our Wikipedia, cable V with 700-plus chan-nels, Google culture eschews limits. We celebrate reedom, bordering on anunbridled i not anarchic reedom.Te entire corpus o Jewish lie andlaw embraces norms and rhythms o per-mitted and orbidden, kosher and non-kosher, categories o work and rest, pureand impure; the word
kadosh
/holy has asits root meaning “separation.” It is similarto classical music, with its rigors o orm,melody, rhythm, instrumentation, yetmysteriously acilitating and providing aplatorm and ramework or genius — inaddition to the signicant technical acil-ity required to bring a score, a writtencode, to lie. In addition to the discomt-ing t between authentic Jewish conceptso holiness — not the spiritual, super-cial u o “holiness” as some sort o disembodied or out-o-body experience— and popular culture, the mist is alsoexpressed by the disconnected i not nar-cissistic sel (c. Robert Putnam’s
Bowling Alone
) in contrast to this collective iden-tity known as “the Jewish people” or, clas-sically, “
Knesset Yisrael/Klal Yisrael
.”Tis reminds me o the wicked son’squestion at the Pesach seder: “What’sall this to
you
, not him.” He denies hisinvolvement in the collective Jewishexperience o redemption and thus —and here’s the point — he denies a unda-mental truth o Judaism.he sages o the
Haggadah
declareone o their most serious opprobriums onthis wicked one: He is a “
kopher b’ikkar
,”a denier o the essence o Judaism. Prob-ably, more accurately,
an
essence, sincethere is considerable, ongoing dispute asto what
the
essence or
ikkar
o Judaismis. By denying the centrality o the col-lective Jewish people, elevating himsel as an individual over the collective, heis deemed a heretic. (Oh, how modernity hates the word heresy; again, the culture-conict between an unbridled individ-ualism and a collective with norms andstandards.)Many devote their proessional livesto reversing or stemming this seemingly inexorable march o assimilation. Assim-ilation accompanied by low birthratesand high rates o perpetual “passing by”(read: “opting out”). In many ways, thechallenges o cultivating a classical musi-cal audience are parallel to those acingJewish proessionals and organizations. Attend a typical Seattle Symphony oropera or chamber music concert — and we are truly blessed in this city by these wonderul world-class organizations andmany other “minor” ones — and you’llsee what advocates observe as the “gray-ing o the audience.” Many wonder wherethe next generation o devotees will comerom once all these gray heads — and Icount mysel proudly among this “wise”elite — are no more. And the “assimilation” or, more accu-rately, attrition is a serious problem. Onthe other hand, the concerns about thenext generation both among classicalmusic advocates and Jewish communalleaders are decades old. I recall readinga 1954 study conducted by the AmericanJewish Committee about the crisis o con-tinuity, the lack o eective Jewish educa-tion, the ongoing disaster o assimilationand intermarriage, even i rates back then were much lower than the currentroughly 50 percent. Sometimes I think we Jews just love a crisis mentality, eveni the crisis is real. It’s the mentality, thedrama, the “oy vey!” that we Jews so love. As noted Jewish historian, ormerly o theUW aculty, Deborah Lipstadt amously quipped, “We Jews never ail to nd thecloud in the silver lining.”For those o us at the Samis Founda-tion, devoted to Jewish education andthe continuity o the Jewish people, what other choice is there but to investin eective Jewish education? We aretruly blessed in our community to havesuch wonderul day schools and campsor those amilies possessing the wisdomand insight to not just “pass by” our glori-ous tradition. Even i we were not acinga crisis, which we Jews seem to so enjoy masochistically, this is the legacy SamIsrael bequeathed to the Jewish commu-nity o Washington State. I only more would pause or a moment and not justpass by, but stop and listen to this ach-ingly beautiul way o lie, which has sus-tained our people or 4,000 years.
Skg
Taking a moment to stop and smell the owers of our Jewishness can yield intellectual and spiritual treasures
accentuating the Positive
The article which appeared in theApril 9 edition o
JTNews
(“Opting out”)was oensive to me as a Holocaust survi-vor. Other survivors who read this articleshared some o the same eelings with methat a Jewish paper supported by Jewishpeople would be so insensitive to publishthis opinion in the week o Yom HaShoah.When we commemorate Yom Ha-Shoah, we pay respects to those who haveperished during the Holocaust. We alsopay respects to those survivors who haverisen rom the ashes and come to Americawithout knowing the language or customs.As survivors, we worked very hard to raiseamilies or years, and many o us kept ourpast inside. In the last ew decades manyhave decided to share their experiencesby going to schools and sharing their sto-ries to prevent uture Holocaust rom hap-pening.We survivors tell students about love andcompassion and the quest to live and neverto give up. We are the witnesses to some o the worst horrors—we don’t teach hate, weteach compassion and love or each other.Thereore, when we commemorateYom HaShoah we have to see the posi-tive — that each human is special and thateach one o us is dierent. Personally, I amalive because one person risked her lie.In Germany today, beore you gradu-ate rom high school, you have to visit aconcentration camp. I personally speak tothousands o people each year becauseeducators eel it is important to teach thehistory o the Holocaust.I hope that survivors are helping put anend to genocide by telling their stories.
Hnr FridmanFundr and Prsidnt emritusWashingtn Stat Hlcaust educatinRsurc Cntr
Protesting granDPa
So the South Arican Zionist Federa-tion has arranged to prevent Judge RichardGoldstone rom attending his grandson’sBar Mitzvah next month. Thus contin-ues the vilication and rejection o Gold-stone since the Goldstone Report onIsrael’s 2008-9 campaign in Gaza. A blog-ger wants to “spit in his ace and kick himin the ass.” What more is let — assas-sination? When a segment o Jewry cre-ates a sae haven or hatemongers, theyare taking the proverbial serpents to their
u
Page 4
rabbi’s turn
crr
Te name o Anna Cherkasov, oneo the 10 Jews Under 40 (April 16), wasmisspelled throughout the article.
JNews
regrets the error.
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