We are delighted to update you on the progress of the Abayudaya Community Health and Development Plan that provides essential life-saving services to adults and children throughout the region. This project promotes peace and cooperation among Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Uganda. Click here for the newest update.

The Abayudaya Executive Committee, the democratically elected community council, requested that Be'chol Lashon serve as the clearinghouse for long range planning and fundraising efforts on behalf of the Jewish community of Uganda. All funds raised for the Abayudaya Community Health and Development Plan have been matched dollar-for-dollar by a challenge grant, as will all additional donations. This inspirational project is becoming a reality through your generosity. To donate, click here.

African American Art & Culture Complex
762 Fulton @ Webster, San Francisco
Parking Avaliable
Free Holiday Event

December 1st, 8pm
Jewish Community Center, San Francisco
3200 California Street
$25-32

The Klezmer Connection
with David Buchbinder and Hilario Duran

Canadian trumpeter and founder of Toronto’s famed Ashkenaz Festival David Buchbinder teams up with Cuban-born Juno Award-winning pianist and composer Hilario Durán, and a crew of brilliant musicians to create a spectacular musical fusion. This one-of-a-kind concert will feature a mix of sounds from contrasting traditions - Bulgar and Bembé, Sher and Son Montuno, Hora and Habanera.

“Exuberant, epic, stirringly rhythmic, sometimes flamboyant, sometimes beautiful and subtle, and always interesting.” – Live Music Report, Toronto

Thursday, January 10th from 8:00 to 9:00 pm
Congregation B'nai Emunah, San Francisco

& Sunday, January 13th, from 10:30 am to 12:00 pm, noon
San Geronimo Valley Community Center
sponsored by Congregation Gan HaLev

Have you ever thought about converting to Judaism? Are you in the process, newly Jewish (Mazal Tov!), or an old hand? Make sure you remain joyous in your choice with the help of Rabbi Daniel Kohn, whose new book provides crucial information about the emotional and social impediments and even opposition that converts to Judaism may encounter on their spiritual path.

Join him for a seminar, discussion and book signing to learn about ways to keep your enthusiasm, excitement, and commitment to Judaism and the Jewish people undiminished. For more information, click here.

The Be’chol Lashon Newsletter is reaching more and more people every month. Please send us information about events in your community or articles of interest that relate to Jewish diversity.

Please e-mail newsletter submissions to Esther Fishman, Esther@JewishResearch.org. Submissions are subject to editing for content, clarity and style.

Special thanks to all the contributors who make the newsletter interesting and informative

By Ilene Prushner, September 6, 2007, Christian Science Monitor

Israel said Wednesday that it would grant citizenship to several hundred refugees from the Darfur region of Sudan, following a burgeoning debate over how to handle the influx of refugees from the war-torn African nation into Israel.

Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit said he would work with the United Nations to set a quota for granting citizenship to Darfurian refugees in Israel, who number between 300 and 500.

"Israel, with its history, must offer assistance," Mr. Sheetrit told a gathering of activists in Petach Tikva, near Tel Aviv. "It can't stand by and shut its eyes. But a quota must be set."

Advocacy groups say that up to 1,700 refugees and economic migrants from Sudan are now in Israel – about 1,200 of whom have come in during the past six months alone across the loosely guarded border between Egypt and Israel.

Israel's decision was met with praise from groups that have come to the aid of the refugees. But most expressed concern that the decision was limited to those from Darfur, and that Israel was not examining all its applicants for refugee status individually.

"We commend this decision and we're very glad that someone who, a year ago, was considered an infiltrator from an enemy country will now be treated like a regular immigrant coming from abroad," says Romm Lewkowicz, the spokesman for the Hotline for Migrant Workers, one of the foremost Israeli groups aiding the Sudanese refugees. Sudan's Islamic government remains hostile toward Israel.

"But we don't think that these decisions should be based on the goodwill of this minister or that," he says. "Israel should evaluate on a case-by-case basis, in line with international refugee conventions that Israel has signed. We still have an article of law saying Israel won't check individual cases of any refugee or migrant coming from an enemy country, and so long as this still holds, we haven't achieved our main goals."

Israeli policy toward the refugees so far has been multifaceted and ad hoc. Some of the refugees here from Sudan are being held in various jails for lack of other facilities in which to house them. Others have been taken in by various kibbutzim and families. While most Sudanese and others fleeing Africa have been permitted to stay, Israeli officials have indicated they will start pursuing a policy of "hot return," in which Israel's border guards force asylum-seekers back into Egyptian territory.

Israelis have complained about the use of that policy, as well as the possibility of future deportations of Sudanese refugees. In Israel, a nation of many refugees, the Sudanese issue has generated much concern, but many also worry about being overwhelmed by African migrants who may not be fleeing imminent danger, as they have already gained refuge in Egypt.

The range of political responses indicate the divided feelings over the issue. Several prominent members of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, signed a petition demanding that Darfurians not be deported. But Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has instructed his minister of Internal Security to work on building a more serious fence or barrier to keep infiltrators out. Currently, several parts of the border are guarded with coils of barbed wire that have proved to be fairly easy to overcome.

Groups also worried that Wednesday's decision was a signal that the Israeli government would make a distinction between refugees from Darfur and other Sudanese.

"This is the right humanitarian decisions and it's the right Jewish decision, but we urge the government to go the extra mile and to offer citizenship to all the Sudanese refugees in Israel, since Darfuris are only about a third of them," says Eitan Schwartz, of the Coalition for the Advancement of Refugees from Darfur (CARD). "The government sees the people from south Sudan as economic migrants rather than genocide survivors."

The last time Israel offered a group of refugees citizenship en masse was during the leadership of Menachem Begin, who granted citizenship to a group of about 400 Vietnamese "boat people" fleeing the war in 1977.

By Samuel Freedman, November 3, 2007, NYTimes.com

One Sunday morning in 1995, Ron Wolfson and Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman braked to a halt in an oddly enlightening traffic jam. The line of cars was creeping toward Saddleback Church in Southern California, whose services were drawing thousands of worshipers. As two Jews, Mr. Wolfson and Rabbi Hoffman had crossed the sectarian divide to try to figure out how and why.

As they inched down the road, they spotted a sign marked “For First-Time Visitors.” It directed them to pull into a separate lane and put on emergency blinkers. Bypassing the backup, they soon reached a lot with spaces reserved for newcomers. When Mr. Wolfson and Rabbi Hoffman emerged from their car, an official Saddleback greeter led them into the church.

Those first moments on the perimeter of the church set into motion a dozen years of increasing interaction between a Jewish organization devoted to reinvigorating synagogues and one of the most successful evangelical megachurches in the nation, the Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.

This has not been a studiously balanced bit of ecumenicism. Synagogue 3000, the group led by Mr. Wolfson, an education professor, and Rabbi Hoffman, a scholar of liturgy, went to the church to figure out what evangelical Christians were doing right that Jews were doing wrong or not at all.

“To put it bluntly,” Mr. Wolfson said, “if there are thousands of people waiting to get in, I want to know what’s going on. I want to know what they’re doing that’s tapping those souls.”

The latest outgrowth of this unlikely learning curve is Hallelu Atlanta, a gathering tomorrow of 4,000 members of 18 congregations. With its amalgam of praise songs and spiritual testimonies, Mr. Wolfson describes the event as “a Jewish tent meeting.” A similar event outside Los Angeles in 2002 drew 5,000 participants.

Since 1995, Synagogue 3000 and its precursor, Synagogue 2000, have taken member congregations and seminary classes to Saddleback and had Mr. Warren conduct a workshop in congregation-building for nearly 20 Jewish leaders.

Mr. Warren has delivered a d’var Torah — a sermon on the weekly Torah portion — at Sinai Temple, a prominent Conservative congregation in Los Angeles. His books “The Purpose-Driven Church” and “The Purpose-Driven Life” inspired similar volumes by Mr. Wolfson (“God’s To-Do List”) and Rabbi Hoffman (“Rethinking Synagogues”).

All this cross-pollination comes as a historical and theological anomaly. In the postwar decades, American Jews have built sturdy ecumenical bonds with Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants and African-American Christians on social issues like civil rights and economic injustice. In the aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, many Jewish congregations sought out Muslim leaders or congregations for dialogues.

Evangelical Christians, however, tended to excite the greatest wariness among Jews, with the exception of certain Orthodox groups that make common cause on issues like school vouchers. Not even the rise of Christian Zionism has overcome Jewish anxiety about a brand of Christianity whose defining word, “evangelism,” connotes a determined effort at conversion.

“Some Jews, especially in areas where they are a minority, fear that Christianity is contagious,” said Mark I. Pinsky, an author based in Florida whose books include “A Jew Among the Evangelicals.” “On another level, there is a palpable resistance ­ call it arrogance ­ to the notion that these relative ‘newcomers’ to religion have anything to teach us. And finally, there is the class issue, that evangelicals aren’t as deep as we are, that they are in their sanctuaries for entertainment, rather than for spirituality.”

What got Mr. Wolfson and Rabbi Hoffman over those impediments was what is known in Jewish parlance as a “shidduch,” Hebrew for “a match.” From the early years of Saddleback, which Mr. Warren founded in 1980, the pastor had relied on an observant Jew, Mel Malkoff, for expertise in land acquisition and property development.

Mr. Malkoff in turn told his rabbi, Elie Spitz, of Saddleback’s propulsive growth since Mr. Warren started the congregation with seven people in his home. (It now has 82,000 members and routinely has 25,000 people attend its multiple Sunday services.) Mr. Spitz then told Mr. Wolfson, and before long he was stuck in traffic.

For all its utility and good will, the relationship between Mr. Wolfson’s group and Mr. Warren’s church has required some delicate diplomacy. Saddleback may be politically centrist on the evangelical Christian spectrum — Mr. Warren has taken on AIDS and global warming as key causes — but on issues including abortion and gay rights it stands in polar opposition to the socially liberal mainstream of American Jewry.

When Mr. Warren conducted his workshop for Synagogue 3000’s leaders in 2005, several participants challenged his view of homosexuality as abnormal and unbiblical. “Every faith has its own parameters,” Mr. Warren responded, calmly and firmly, in an exchange preserved on a DVD of the session. “You can’t believe it all.”

On the topic of conversion, Mr. Warren told his Jewish listeners, he “doesn’t believe in coercion” though he “does believe in persuasion.” That seemed to placate, if not necessarily please, the group.

The Jewish leaders were visibly captivated, however, when Mr. Warren recounted building the church — going door-to-door seeking people who belonged to no congregation, asking them why they didn’t belong, devising an initial program to directly meet their desires.

Those desires resonated immediately for Jewish leaders frustrated in the failure of synagogues to engage the unaffiliated, the disaffected, the spiritual seekers. Mr. Warren’s informants had told him they yearned for a friendly welcome, quality child care, a sermon that had a pragmatic message for their weekday lives and an overarching sense that the church cared more about each member as a person than as a revenue stream.

Mr. Warren told the workshop listeners what he had come to realize: “A congregation isn’t a building. God dwells in people.” He explained that Saddleback did not construct its own building until it had 10,000 congregants. Even in the church’s current vastness, a decentralized network of ministers and laity seek to connect every newcomer to at least six longtime members.

“The biggest challenge we have in transforming synagogue life,” Mr. Wolfson said recently, recalling the workshop, “is transforming the basic relationship of most Jews to most synagogues.” He added: “It’s a fee-for-service model. I’m going to write you a check, and you’re going to give me what I need — a rabbi on call, High Holy Days seats, a Hebrew school for my kids. It’s not deep.”

Mr. Hoffman said the most obvious exception in the Jewish world was the Chabad movement of the Lubavitcher Hasidim. Its success at what is called “inreach,” meaning proselytizing unobservant Jews, has become a source of fascination, envy and enmity. In a strange way, it may have been less controversial for Synagogue 3000 to emulate Christians who are total outsiders rather than a Hasidic sect that competes for the same pool of Jewish souls.

“Jews need to be more quote-unquote evangelical,” Mr. Wolfson said. “We need to do a better job of presenting Judaism to our own people. The story doesn’t get across that Judaism is a way to find meaning and purpose in your life. And that’s another lesson I’ve learned from the evangelical model.”

By JTA Staff, November 5, 2007, JTA

Australia’s Progressive movement has paved the way for the country’s first gay Jewish union.

The Council of Progressive Rabbis of Australia, New Zealand and Asia adopted British guidelines for same-sex ceremonies at its biennial conference held last week in Tasmania.

Council chairman Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins said the English model makes an important distinction between the commitment ceremony and a marriage ceremony.

“The distinction is also necessary for legal reasons, as it conforms with Australian law,” Kamins told the Australian Jewish News.

The guidelines were offered to the Progressive rabbis by Rabbi Mark Solomon, a former Australian rabbi who is part of the British Liberal movement.

The Australian council agreed earlier this year to allow, but not require, its rabbis to conduct same-sex ceremonies.

Delegates from Hong Kong, Singapore and New Zealand attended the conference in Hobart, the capital of the island, which has a Jewish population of about 100 and is home to the oldest Australian synagogue in use.

By JTA Staff, November 5, 2007, JTA

Argentina’s first lady and senator Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s victory in presidential elections Oct. 27 is positive news for the Jewish community, according to Aldo Donzis, president of the DAIA, the nation’s Jewish umbrella organization.

The government of her husband, Nestor Kirschner, was active in seeking justice for the terrorist attack on the Jewish community building in Buenos Aires in 1994, and initiated projects to fight anti-Semitism, discrimination and xenophobia.

The first lady and now president-elect was active in these efforts, according to Donzis.

By Marc Angel, November 7, 2007, Forward.com

Every year, thousands of non-Jews make the fateful decision to convert to Judaism. Some are seeking spiritual fulfillment. Many are married to or planning to marry a Jewish spouse. Others have a Jewish father or grandparent and desire a full sense of belonging to the Jewish people. Some have discovered Jewish ancestry and wish to reconnect with their roots. Many are living in Israel and want acceptance as Jews in the Jewish state. Whatever their original motives, they are a remarkable — and growing — part of the Jewish people.
The conversion phenomenon should be a source of celebration for Jews. Each convert gives eloquent testimony to the ongoing attractiveness of Judaism and Jewish peoplehood.

At a time when thousands of people are considering conversion to Judaism, however, Israel’s Orthodox rabbinic establishment is raising ever-higher barriers to them. While Israel’s chief rabbinate accepts many candidates who are willing to become fully committed Orthodox Jews, it will not readily accept those who are not ready for total commitment. Thus, a would-be convert must usually spend years studying Torah and halacha, or Jewish law, and adopt an entirely Orthodox lifestyle in order to be considered for conversion.

Now, Israel’s increasingly ultra-Orthodox-dominated chief rabbinate is attempting to impose its views on the Jewish Diaspora. Here in the United States, it has already forced the Rabbinical Council of America — the Diaspora’s largest Orthodox rabbinical association — into line.

In the spring of 2006, Rabbi Shlomo Amar, Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi, proclaimed that the chief rabbinate would no longer accept conversions performed by Orthodox rabbis in the Diaspora, except for those specifically approved by the chief rabbinate. The RCA had to decide how to respond to this affront to the integrity of its members. After all, the chief rabbi was basically saying that RCA members can’t be trusted to do proper halachic conversions.

Sadly, the RCA leadership capitulated to the demands of Rabbi Amar. The RCA agreed to establish regional rabbinic courts to handle conversions in line with the dictates of the chief rabbi. This means that individual RCA rabbis may no longer perform conversions and expect them to be sanctioned by the RCA — or by the chief rabbinate. Power is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and only into the hands of those who agree to adopt stringent and restrictive positions. The result is that many non-Jews who considered halachic conversion will turn to non-halachic means of conversion, or will give up on conversion altogether.

This is a tragedy — and an unnecessary one at that, since there is no halachic reason why the chief rabbinate’s view should carry the day. The Talmud and classic codes of Jewish law actually grant considerable leeway in the halachic acceptance of converts. While converts must “accept the mitzvot,” or commandments, there is wide latitude in understanding what this phrase means. The Talmud itself says that we must instruct the candidate for conversion in “some of the major and some of the minor commandments.” There is no requirement or expectation that the candidate must learn all the mitzvot in advance of conversion, nor that he or she will promise to keep all the mitzvot in every detail after conversion.

Yet many contemporary rabbinic authorities have taken a far narrower and more exclusionary view. Zvi Zohar and Avi Sagi (in their book “Giyyur ve-Zehut Yehudit”) found that the narrow view gained traction only as recently as 1876 when Rabbi Yitzchak Shmelkes ruled that conversion was to be equated with an absolute commitment to observe all mitzvot. Any candidate for conversion who was not committed to becoming fully Orthodox in observance was to be rejected. Later rabbis adopted this new position, until it became normative among right-wing (and much of the rest of) Orthodoxy.

Of course, great rabbinic voices opposed this radical change in approach. They favored maintaining the far more flexible and inclusive views of the Talmud, Maimonides and Shulchan Aruch. A great representative of the classic halachic view was Rabbi Benzion Uziel, who served as chief Sephardic rabbi, first in British Mandate Palestine and then in the State of Israel, from 1938 to 1953.

Rabbi Uziel argued that not only may rabbis do conversions in less than ideal circumstances, but they are obligated to do so — even when the would-be convert is not expected to become fully observant religiously. Since so many conversion cases involve intermarriage or potential intermarriage, Rabbi Uziel believed we should perform conversions in order to maintain whole Jewish families that can raise Jewish children within the Jewish community. He viewed himself as being “strict” in his opposition to intermarriage, not as being “lenient” in matters of conversion.

Historically, the halacha has allowed rabbis to draw on the full array of halachic sources; to consider the nuances of each individual conversion case; to use their own judgment on whether to accept or reject a candidate for conversion. Now, the halachic options have been sharply curtailed. A rabbinic bureaucracy is usurping the authority of individual rabbis.

Several important Orthodox voices in Israel and the United States have risen in protest of the vast injustice being committed in the realm of halachic conversions. In matters of conversion, we are not dealing with an abstract legal nicety: We are dealing with real human beings with real families. We have a responsibility to address issues of conversion with a full halachic toolbox. Indeed, our tradition demands this.

Rabbinic tradition teaches that one who oppresses a convert is violating 36 Torah laws. How many laws will be broken by the Orthodox rabbinic establishment in causing torment to halachically valid converts and their children? How many tears will be shed by victims of religious narrowness? How many would-be converts will be turned away from any possibility of a life of Torah and mitzvot due to the intransigence of certain rabbis?

This is precisely the time when we need a visionary, inclusive Orthodoxy that can convey the message of Torah Judaism in a spirit of love and compassion. I believe this kind of Orthodoxy will rise again. I believe every Jew can help make this happen.

Rabbi Marc D. Angel is rabbi emeritus of Congregation Shearith Israel in New York City, and founder and director of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals (www.jewishideas.org). A past president of the Rabbinical Council of America, he is the author of “Choosing to Be Jewish: The Orthodox Road to Conversion” (Ktav, 2005).

By Marilyn Karfeld, November 16, 2007, Cleveland Jewish News

China was where the babies were. So five Cleveland-area couples, eager to add to their families, traveled across the globe to adopt abandoned babies who would grow up with a dual Chinese-Jewish heritage.

Part of a wave of over 50,000 Chinese babies adopted by Americans since 1993, these children, now entering adolescence, are finding their place in school, in synagogue, and in the larger community.

Recently, the CJN talked about being Chinese and Jewish with the families of four adopted daughters and one son, whose early months as babies and toddlers were chronicled in these pages. (“Made in China,” CJN, Jan. 5, 1996; “Long journey to parenthood produces bouncing baby boy,” CJN, Feb. 13, 1998.)

Rachel Slack of South Euclid celebrates her 13th birthday in January, one week before her bat mitzvah at Temple Emanu El.

Naomi Hill, 12, of Shaker Heights, will become a bat mitzvah April 12 at The Temple-Tifereth Israel, followed by a family trip to China that summer.

Jennifer Ticktin of Beachwood, who turns 13 at Thanksgiving, is a student at the “Synagogue without Walls” and hopes to have a bat mitzvah next spring.

Samantha Becker-Weidman, nearly 13, moved with her parents from Shaker Heights to suburban Buffalo about a decade ago. She visited China two years ago and has no formal affiliation with the Jewish community.

Nathan Levin, 11, of Shaker Heights, is studying Hebrew and Jewish studies at Congregation Bethaynu in preparation for his bar mitzvah.

Rachel: Being Jewish is important

The only child of Linda and Bill Slack, Rachel is a serious and attentive seventh grader who “does not follow the pack,” her mother says. “She finds her own way.” Being Jewish is far more important to Rachel than being Chinese, the poised 12-year-old says. As a little girl, she did attend Chinese cultural and language classes, but after a few years, she chose to stop. Still, Rachel recognizes her roots make her special.

“People are really surprised to learn I’m Jewish because I’m Chinese,” says Rachel, who explains to inquisitive new acquaintances that she’s adopted and her mother is Jewish. “I’m proud I’m Jewish and Chinese because it makes me different. I think that’s pretty cool.”

For her bat mitzvah at Temple Emanu El, she’s studying her Exodus portion with Cantor Laurel Barr. She already knew how to read Hebrew, but it’s a lot harder in the Torah, which does not have vowels, she admits. Between practicing the prayers she already knows and listening to a CD to learn new material, Rachel is taking this challenge in stride.

“It is important to have a bat mitzvah if you’re Jewish,” she says, demure in a black skirt and print top as she stands at the bima in the Temple Emanu El sanctuary. She’s just finished a tutoring session and nervously holds a Torah as the photographer snaps her picture. “It’s like accepting responsibility for your own actions,” Rachel says of her impending bat mitzvah. “I think that’s important.”

When Rachel entered kindergarten, the Slacks joined Temple Emanu El, says Linda, who has found the Jewish community very welcoming of her Asian daughter. To further their daughter’s Jewish identity, this past summer the Slacks sent Rachel to the Goldman Union Camp Institute, the Reform movement’s overnight camp in Indiana.

While Rachel is looking forward to the party to celebrate her bat mitzvah, she insists it’s the ceremony and helping others that’s the most important part of the occasion. She’s selected dance tote bags to be centerpieces at her party, which she will donate after the event.

Dance, especially ballet, is her “passion,” says Rachel, who has been taking jazz, tap and ballet, her favorite, since she was 3. For the last three years, she has participated in dance competitions, passing tests to reach new skill levels. She also plays piano and belongs to a neighborhood softball league.

Since she was quite young, Rachel has modeled for corporate advertising campaigns, although of late the jobs conflict with her schedule. Rachel attends Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights, where she’s on the honor roll. She enjoys Power of the Pen, a program of competitive creative writing, and Asian studies, both extracurricular activities. In class, she chose to study French over Mandarin.

While English is her best subject, Rachel likes science the most. “I want to be a forensic scientist when I grow up,” she says. One day, Rachel would like to go back to China. But for now, she’s focused on celebrating the Jewish part of her identity at her bat mitzvah.

Naomi: Aspirations for theater

Naomi, clad in a pink terrycloth robe, dashes upstairs to change for an interview, returning minutes later in pink T-shirt, denim skirt and pale blue cardigan. She and her mother had uncharacteristically overslept that morning, missing tae kwon do. In addition to her martial arts class, Naomi’s list of favorite and frequent activities is astoundingly long: Rock climbing. Theater. Clarinet. Piano. Vocal lessons. Dance. Math team. Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. Creative writing. “I like them all,” pronounces Naomi. Of the performing arts, “I like clarinet best, although I’m not best at it. It’s fun to play with a band, to be part of a group. You are contributing to it while you are listening to it.”

This past summer, she went to Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan, her third summer there. Then, she attended the Fairmount Performing Arts Camp in Chagrin Falls, a program for youngsters “with serious aspirations for theater,” says her mother Freda Levenson. Naomi is “an honorary 20-something,” Freda admits sheepishly. Being the youngest of four siblings (24-year-old twins Chloe and Zeke and 21-year-old Arlo) has had far more impact on Naomi than the fact that she is Chinese, Freda asserts.

Last June, Naomi performed with the 14-member children’s chorus in the Strauss opera, “Die Rosenkavalier,” with Cleveland Opera. Next month, she will reprise her role as Helen, a girl in Ralph’s class, in the Cleveland Play House production of “A Christmas Story.” As for her heritage, Naomi says, “I tell people I was adopted from China at 6 months old and that I came from Nanchang. People don’t usually believe me at first if I tell them I’m Jewish.”

Attending Sunday and Hebrew school is “important to my mom and dad (James Hill),” she notes. After her April bat mitzvah, the entire family will travel to China. Naomi plans to donate any gift money to her former orphanage. The Hill family also visited China two summers ago, but didn’t make it to the orphanage in Nanchang, a big, gritty industrial city. “We wanted (Naomi) to see the beauty and cultural aspects of China,” Freda says.

Freda sees strong connections between Asian and Jewish culture: “A love of learning, the importance of family; the values are very similar.” Naomi hasn’t given her identity nearly as much thought. She tried learning Mandarin, she says, and would like to learn more, so “I’d know a little more about myself and can communicate with other people.”

As for concerns about how her youngest daughter will fit in socially as a teenager, Freda, an attorney and president of the Shaker Heights Board of Education, says, “People are intensely curious when they first meet her and then it disappears, like hair color and physical attributes.”

Jennifer: Energy to play, to study

Jennifer Ticktin bounces into the room and announces the Beachwood Middle School football team’s victory. She dashes to the refrigerator to grab a small carton of juice. Sipping through a straw and munching on a granola bar, she hoists five petite feet of energy onto the counter to answer questions about her life.

Like her father Dan, she’s an athlete, the pitcher on the Beachwood Recreation League fast-pitch softball team and champion at the “cone game” at Beachwood sports camp. She also dances-ballet and hip-hop-and has taken up acoustic guitar after playing piano for several years.

Attending the Jewish Community Center’s Camp Wise this past summer was “the best experience of my life,” Jennifer asserts. Although she loved attending Saturday morning Shabbat services in her pajamas, meeting new people and joining in the competitive Maccabiah games were the best part of camp, she says.

Jennifer dropped out of Temple Emanu El’s religious school three years ago. But now that her friends are preparing for their b’nai mitzvah, she decided she wanted one, too. She now studies with Rabbi Eddie Sukol of Synagogue without Walls and hopes her bat mitzvah will be in May.

She needs nine months to a year of preparation, and the date depends on how quickly she learns and how hard she studies. “Can we have it at Camp Wise?” she asks her mother. “If she’s willing to put in the hard work,” we want her to have that (bat mitzvah),” says Debbie. “She’s older now; she’s a better worker.”

Asked to describe herself, Jennifer doesn’t mention her Chinese or Jewish sides. She likes math, but gym, lunch and study hall are the best parts of the school day. When she grows up, she’d like to be a plastic surgeon because she has “always liked the doctor stuff” and is not squeamish around blood. A seventh grader at Beachwood Middle School, Jennifer says she never thinks about her identity, except to note her dislike of Li, the middle name her parents chose to honor her Chinese heritage.

“No one cares that I’m Jewish,” she adds. “I explain I’m adopted. My friends say, ‘Cool.’ I say I’m from China. They say, ‘That’s even cooler.’” She claims minimal interest in finding out more about China and would rather learn about the beach, which she loves. “Sorry, parents,” she trills. “I want to learn about Puerto Rico.” One whole wall in her room is a mural of the beach; surfboards hang from the wall, and southern California is her favorite state.

Dan, Jennifer’s father, says he rarely thinks about his only child’s Chinese heritage. “We just get on with the routine of being a family.” When Jennifer was young, Debbie acknowledges, people would comment on the toddler’s appearance, but no longer. “We look different from Jen,” she notes. “It’s right there in the open.”

“We’re not blood-related, but we’re a family,” Jen joins in. “Me and Dad have the sporty, active side. Me and Mom have the shopping side. When I was little, I worried because I didn’t look like my parents,” she continues. Now, “When I look in the mirror, I forget I’m Asian.” A second later, she contradicts herself. “When I look in the mirror I see the Chinese part of me and wonder what it would be like to live in China.”

Samantha: Just like the other kids

Adopting Samantha in China has transformed their lives, say Susan and Arthur Becker-Weidman. Already the parents of Emily and David, their two biological children, Susan and Art simply wanted another child. Since leaving Shaker Heights and resettling in the Buffalo area, they have focused their professional careers on adopted children and their families.

Art, a clinical social worker and therapist who formerly was director of Cleveland’s Jewish Family Services Association, focuses his private practice on attachment issues in adopted children, particular those from foreign countries. Some of these children suffered early in life in a variety of abusive foster homes. Others were adopted as older children; some never bonded with a caregiver as an infant and now have attachment issues.

They have had no such problems with Samantha, whom Susan describes as “the easiest to raise of our three kids.”

Two summers ago, the Becker-Weidmans all went to China with a group of families who had adopted Chinese babies. They visited Samantha’s orphanage in Maoming in Guandong province.The workers remembered Samantha and told the Becker-Weidmans a bit more about her history, such as the exact time of her birth. “That was meaningful for her,” says Susan.

At the orphanage, the staff showed the Becker-Weidmans, who have made contributions for an indoor gym, the equipment purchased with the money. “It let Samantha know we have continued the connection,” Susan says. While in Maoming, the Becker- Weidmans shopped for clothes, diapers and supplies for the babies. “We stayed two days in the same hotel where we stayed when Samantha was a baby, visited the same sites, spent time with the orphanage workers, played with the babies,” says Susan. “It was very moving. We felt lucky, but we feel lucky each day that she’s in our life.”

According to Samantha, going to the mall is her favorite activity, but she also enjoys a long list of sports, from gymnastics to volleyball to dance. Being adopted makes no difference in her life, she says. “I am just like one of the other kids.”

Visiting the orphanage in China, where she lived for the first six months of her life, made an impression. “Seeing that people were caring for these kids, that most of them already had a family that was going to take them home, made me feel happy,” Samantha says.

She is pleased to be Jewish, but does not attend religious school. The family has informally incorporated aspects of Chinese culture into their lives, including food, music and art on the walls. While Buffalo doesn’t have much of a Chinese community, the family goes to nearby Toronto, with the second largest Chinese community in North America, to buy Chinese goods and to attend holidays, such as the Dragon Boat Festival.

The Becker-Weidmans also belong to a group called Asian Connection, which includes about 200 to 300 families with children adopted from Asia, primarily China. Those families who include Asian culture as part of their lives, Art says, often have an easier time with their adopted children than those who don’t.

Nathan: Surprise son from China

His straight black hair flopping into his eyes, Nathan squirms on the living room sofa, uncomfortable and seemingly bored with answering questions from a stranger. A shy 11- year-old, he has trouble following the conversation. Nathan’s developmental delays were as big a surprise to Estee and Mark Levin of Shaker Heights as was the fact that he was a boy. Told by their adoption agency that they were getting a girl, the Levins were stunned to be handed a son when they arrived in China. Because of China’s one-child policy and the preference for males, very few boys have been among the thousands of abandoned Chinese babies adopted by Americans over the last 14 years.

When he was a toddler, the Levins discovered that Nathan had special needs due to a neurological disorder typically caused by trauma at birth. He attends special education classes in the Shaker schools, where Mark, a computer consultant who works from home, is chairman of the Parent Teacher Organization’s special-needs subdivision.

On Saturday mornings and Mondays after school, Nathan attends Hebrew class at Congregation Bethaynu, where Mark is active on the board of trustees and several committees. The family tries to take Nathan to Friday night services twice a month. He’s learning prayers with a tutor and Jewish music; the Levins hope he’ll be able to become a bar mitzvah at age 13, or whenever he is ready. “Like any Jewish father, I want to see my son have a bar mitzvah,” says Mark.

Nathan has made tremendous strides in public school and in Hebrew school, his parents say. While the adults talk, Nathan looks at a book and suddenly asks “where the glossary is.” He then announces he wants a “lamed” birthday cake, referring to the Hebrew letter. Then he changes his mind, and says maybe he’d like an “aleph” cake.

Estee, a marketing-information specialist, asks her son what sound does aleph make, and is very pleased when Nathan correctly answers none. The biggest issue for the Levins is that Nathan is a special-needs child, not that he’s Chinese, Estee explains.

As active members of Bethaynu, the Levins say congregants are not surprised to see a Chinese boy there. They had naming ceremonies at Bethaynu for Nathan and his sister, Sonia, 6, whom they adopted from China when she was 18 months old.

Early next year, they hope to go to Thailand to adopt another Asian girl, who is 10. The Levins wanted to bypass the diaper stage but discovered there are no 4-year-old children available for adoption. “It’s not about rescuing another child from life in an orphanage,” Mark says. “It’s about growing our family. That’s where the children are.”

The Levins make great efforts to honor their children’s Chinese heritage and celebrate Chinese cultural holidays. When Nathan was younger, he tried Chinese school, but found it very difficult. A group of families with adopted Chinese children organized their own school and club, and Nathan attended on Saturday mornings as a preschooler. Sometimes, the Jewish and Chinese holidays work together. Nathan refers to chocolate coins wrapped in gold paper, popular at Chinese New Year’s, as “Chinese gelt.” The Chinese Harvest moon festival coincides with Sukkot.

Many books about China and Jewish culture fill the Levins’ bookcases, and the children listen to Chinese music CDs. “Nathan sings those songs as well as ones from his other CDs,” Mark says. The Levins also subscribe to satellite TV, and the family watches Central China Television, with Chinese news and cultural shows in English.

They now belong to an Asian culture group, which has boys in it from countries such as Cambodia and Thailand. There are frequent talks with Nathan about his identity, Estee says. “During adolescence, this is when you start figuring out who you are.”

About two years ago, close to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Estee and Nathan were talking about slavery. Nathan kept asking his mother to read and reread the story of Harriet Tubman, who was running from the South to the North.Then one day, Nathan announces, “‘It’s the Passover story!” Estee recalls her son saying. “It’s the story of running from slavery to freedom.’”

Finding their soul

Traversing the prickly precipice between child and adult can be difficult for any adolescent, professionals in the field say. The passage for adopted Jewish children of Chinese heritage can be rockier. Not only do they not resemble their parents and grandparents, they don’t “look” Jewish. To provide that connection between their Jewish and Chinese sides and to head off any potential problems, families take trips to China and embark on family tree projects. Some youngsters attend Chinese cultural classes and Hebrew school and celebrate Jewish and Chinese holidays.

In the end, these experienced Cleveland parents say, raising a child with a dual heritage is fraught with the same issues as bringing up any child in America today. As Estee Levin notes, the home and the education they’ve provided will give their son Nathan “the mechanics he needs. But we want to make sure, as he becomes a young man, that he has soul, too.”’

By Dan Pine, November 15, 2007, j. Weekly

By now, Will Recant knows the melodies sung in the Havana Synagogue –– that’s Havana, Cuba –– better than those at his home synagogue in New Jersey.

Though no one’s keeping track, he’s probably celebrated more Shabbats in Havana than any other non-Cuban Jew. He’s probably been to Ethiopia and Venezuela and China and Rwanda more than any other American Jew.

Repairing the world can really rack up those frequent flyer miles.

As a senior executive with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (or the Joint, as it’s affectionately known), Recant travels the world to carry out the 94-year-old organization’s mission: rescue, relief and renewal of far-flung Jewish communities.

He was in the Bay Area last week to meet with supporters, appeal for funds and talk up the good work of the Joint.

First on his agenda: rescuing the last of the Falash Mura, the Ethiopian Jews still in the home country. Recant says about 3,000 remain eligible to make aliyah, and the Joint is on the ground helping. About 300 depart monthly for Israel. “The Ethiopian government said, ‘OK, anyone who wants to go is free to go. You don’t need an airlift.’”

More than 110,000 Ethiopian Jews now live in Israel. Recant gives a mixed report card on how they’re doing. Although the people have made amazing strides in education and absorption, especially the younger generation, Recant laments their slow economic and cultural progress, noting, “In Jerusalem, the security guard at every restaurant is Ethiopian.”

Though he’s been all over the world, Recant has a fondness for the Jewish community in Cuba, which today numbers around 1,500. He says ever since 1992, when the country switched from being officially atheist to officially nonreligious, “There’s been a renaissance of Jewish life in Cuba. The synagogue is open.”

Making sure the Joint helped out in that effort, Recant has traveled to the island nation 50 times. His organization has special dispensation from the U.S. Treasury (the department that enforces the embargo), which allows him free travel.

Recant’s portfolio also includes the Joint’s efforts in general disaster relief. That covers everything from helping the victims of the 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami and rebuilding demolished mosques in Kosovo to rescuing Rwandan orphans.

One of Recant’s pet projects is the $10 million Agahozo Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda, now under construction, which will house 500 orphaned children. “A lot of what we do is build bridges for Jews and Israel,” he adds.

World traveler wasn’t exactly what Recant had in mind after earning his doctorate in political science at George Washington University. The son of Polish Holocaust survivors, he hoped to teach but in- stead found work as a fundraiser for the American Association for Ethiopian Jewry. He later became director, and when that organization folded in 1993, the Joint snatched him up.

Somehow, with all the globetrotting, Recant has managed to maintain a family life. He and his wife, Nancy, have two college-age daughters, both of whom had their bat mitzvahs in Cuba. His eldest daughter, Rebecca, seems to have a feel for the family business: She is currently volunteering in Argentina.

Recant is quick to acknowledge the role Bay Area supporters have played in the recent success of the Joint. He especially credits Alan Rothenberg, Harold Zlot, Annette Dobbs, Nancy Grand and Roselyne “Cissy” Swig for their leadership over the years.

Though he’s had his share of uphill climbs, Recant remains optimistic, not only about the Joint’s mission, but the future of the Jewish people worldwide. With the last of the Falash Mura reaching Israel, Recant says, “There is no current need for rescue in the Jewish world.”

After a few thousand years of global persecution, that’s quite a statement, though he’s quick to add, “That doesn’t mean you let your guard down. Anyone who knows the Joint knows the mission is still needed.”

By Zev Chafets, October 14 2007, NY Times

Geographically speaking, the Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn — 75,000 strong and growing fast — inhabits an enclave running from Avenue I in the north to Avenue V in the south and stretching eastward to Nostrand Avenue from West 6th Street. But the community’s true boundaries are at once more expansive and more constricted.

The SY’s, as the community members call themselves (pronounced “ess-why” — it’s a shorthand for “Syrian”), live in a self-created entrepreneurial and mercantile empire whose current sources of wealth are found everywhere from Coney Island to Shanghai. They are rich beyond the dreams of their immigrant forebears. Many live in multimillion-dollar mansions in the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn, summer in fabulous seafront homes on the Jersey shore and repair to winter enclaves in Florida. They have their own synagogue in China. Businessmen from the community spend so much time on the road that a small shop called Seuda’s in the Brooklyn enclave prepares packages of kosher Syrian delicacies that can be picked up on the way to the airport.

Yet no matter how far they roam or how worldly and successful they become, the SY’s of Brooklyn are bound by an invisible fence known as the Edict — a rabbinical threat of excommunication so dire and so powerful that it has fixed the true parameters of the community for generations.

The Edict was issued in Brooklyn by five Syrian rabbis in 1935. They had a simple goal: to preserve the age-old Syrian Jewish community in the New World.

This was not a unique challenge. Every immigrant group in the United States has faced something like it. Most struggle for a generation or two to maintain some sense of identity and solidarity and then make their peace with the assimilative power of America.

The Syrian Jews might have done the same. They arrived in New York at the start of the last century and settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. But the Eastern European Jews who dominated the Lower East Side at the time disdained them as Arabische Yidden — Arab Jews. Some of the Ashkenazim openly doubted that these foreigners from farther east were Jews at all. The Syrian Jews were deeply insulted. They are a proud people; community legend boasts that King David built the first synagogue in Aleppo, in what is now Syria. The SY’s came to derisively refer to the Ashkenazim as “J-Dubs,” a play on the first and third letters of the English word “Jew.” As soon as they could, the Syrians moved, en masse, to Brooklyn.

This independence was, in a way, natural. Back in the Ottoman Empire, religious communities that paid their taxes and kept out of trouble were generally allowed to live with a fair degree of autonomy. Why should the New World be different? But the Syrian Jews soon learned that in America, self-sufficiency alone did not ensure their survival. They hadn’t reckoned on the additional risk posed by the allure of the open society.

In the old country, the Syrians had been merchants for generations, and they started off in America as peddlers. As they prospered, they began opening stores in Manhattan. Conducting business outside the enclave meant meeting and dealing with non-Syrians, speaking proper English and demonstrating at least a rudimentary understanding of the customs and practices of the new land. These were skills worth learning. SY kids were sent to public schools to assimilate — though only up to a point. The goal was to produce children who, in the words of a community maxim, were “100 percent American in Manhattan and 100 percent Syrian in Brooklyn.”

In school, though, the SY kids mixed with other children, not only J-Dubs but also gentiles. The gentiles posed the gravest concern. Friendships with them developed, love affairs sprouted. There were intermarriages. Some Christian partners even volunteered to convert to Judaism.

Enter the rabbis with their Edict, in 1935. They wanted to build an iron wall of self-separation around the community. They couldn’t do this the Hassidic way, dressing the men in costumes of ancient design, physically segregating women and making sure that children received nothing in the way of useful secular education. After all, the Syrian men couldn’t be expected to make money if they looked like figures from 18th-century Poland.

And so the rabbis turned to the heart of the matter: matrimony. Most American Jewish communities in those days (and many today) viewed intermarriage as a taboo. Conversion, however, was a loophole. The Edict intended to close that loophole. It proclaimed, “No male or female member of our community has the right to intermarry with non-Jews; this law covers conversion, which we consider to be fictitious and valueless.”

A 1946 clarification added specifics: “The rabbi will not perform Religious Ceremonies” for such unkosher couples. “The Congregation’s premises will be banned to them for use of any religious or social nature. . . . After death of said person, he or she is not to be buried on the Cemetery of our community . . . regardless of financial considerations.”

With these words, Chief Rabbi Jacob Kassin effectively excommunicated any member of his flock who married a partner with gentile blood. (There have been exceptions for converts judged to be “sincere” — that is, those who converted without the intention to marry — but these have been extremely rare and always controversial.)

The Edict was a bold move. No Jewish community in the world (other than two small Syrian congregations in Mexico and Argentina) has ever had such an extreme rule.

Of course, enforcing it is something else. The rabbis had no means of coercion. If the Edict was going to work, it would be up to the tightly-knit clans of the enclave to enforce it on their own children.

At the end of this past August, Jakie Kassin, a community leader, grandson of the author of the Edict and son of the current chief rabbi, received a laminated wooden plaque measuring 4 feet by 2 feet for his inspection. It was the most recent incarnation of the Edict. The original Edict was a document signed by five dignitaries. Since then, it has been reaffirmed in each generation by a progressively larger number of signatories. The newest version, issued last year, was signed by 225 rabbis and lay leaders, testimony to the growth of the community and the enduring power of the Edict.

“Never accept a convert or a child born of a convert,” Kassin told me by phone, summarizing the message. “Push them away with strong hands from our community. Why? Because we don’t want gentile characteristics.”

Rabbi Elie Abadie is a medical doctor, a university professor and the spiritual leader of the elegant Safra synagogue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Born in Beirut and raised in Mexico City, Abadie is a leader of the younger generation of SY’s, some of whom now split their time between the relative freedom of Manhattan and the demands of the Brooklyn enclave.

Abadie is a cerebral fellow with a gentle manner, married to a J-Dub he met at Yeshiva University. But when it comes to the Edict, he is as unbending as Kassin, if a little more diplomatic. “It’s really a matter of statistics,” he explained to me. “Except for the Orthodox, the American Jewish community is shrinking, disappearing. In two generations, most of their grandchildren won’t even be Jews. But our community is growing. We have large families, five or six children. And only a tiny fraction of our kids leave. The Edict is what makes that true.”

Abadie and Kassin agree that the vast majority of SY youth abide by the strictures of the Edict. “Ninety-nine percent accept it,” Kassin said. “When someone doesn’t, it’s painful, but it’s better to lose a kid here and there and save the community. Families get sick over it, sure, but that’s how it is.”

Kassin knows this from personal experience. His sister Anna ran off with a gentile. Naturally it was a great scandal in the community, but the chief rabbi didn’t bend the rules for his daughter. “We cut her off,” Jakie Kassin told me. “We didn’t see her for 25 years. But we never stopped hoping she’d come back. Finally, after all these years, she made contact. We told her she was welcome to come back, but not with her husband or kids. She’s not here yet, but we do talk on the telephone.”

In addition to the strictures imposed by the Edict in instances of proposed intermarriage, any outsider who wants to marry into a Syrian family — even a fellow Jew — is subject to thorough genealogical investigation. That means producing proof, going back at least three generations and attested to by an Orthodox rabbi, of the candidates’ kosher bona fides. This disqualifies the vast majority of American Jews, who have no such proof. “We won’t take them — not even if we go back three or four generations — if someone in their line was married by a Reform or Conservative rabbi, because they don’t perform marriages according to Orthodox law,” Kassin said. Even Orthodox candidates are screened, to make sure there are no gentiles or converts lurking in the family tree. In addition, all prospective brides and grooms must take marital purity classes and pass a test for HIV.

The force of the Edict is lasting: the children of people who have been excluded under the terms of the Edict are themselves declared ineligible to marry into the community. A local rabbi in the community told me the remarkable story of a woman who confronted this fact. The woman, he explained, is the daughter of a Syrian Jewish man and a gentile who converted to Judaism. The woman was raised as a Jew, but the community regarded this as meaningless and had no contact with the family. Years later, the woman met and fell in love with a young SY. She moved to Israel and underwent a long and exacting Orthodox conversion. When she returned to the enclave, she was told that her conversion meant nothing — her father’s sin still made her ineligible for marriage. (Speaking publicly about such matters is strongly discouraged among SY’s; the rabbi spoke only on condition of anonymity and declined to name the woman.)

According to the rabbi, the community’s refusal to recognize the woman’s conversion drew the ire of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, at the time the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel. Rabbi Yosef, a man of volcanic temperament, came all the way from Jerusalem to Brooklyn and informed the local rabbis that he, himself, vouched for the girl’s Jewish authenticity. “There he was, in person, in Shaare Zion” — the largest SY synagogue — “dressed in his robes and vestments,” the rabbi, who was there, told me. “He gave an oath that he had personally affixed his name to the girl’s conversion document. She was as Jewish as he was, and he wanted her recognized as a member of our community.”

“And the answer was?” I asked the rabbi.

“No.”

“No? You turned down the chief rabbi of Israel?”

“We felt it was necessary,” the rabbi explained. “If we let our kids marry gentiles, they’ll try to slip their kids back into the community via conversion. And then the Edict will lack teeth.”

This affair nearly caused a schism in the Syrian community, which officially regards Rabbi Yosef as the world’s most authoritative Talmudic scholar. A group of dissident rabbis later met at the summer enclave in Deal, N.J., and accepted the conversion as valid: she could marry. They reasoned that it was wrong to humiliate Ovadia Yosef. They also reasoned that accepting this case as precedent would actually have a deterrent effect: how many other converts could expect the chief rabbi of Israel to go to bat for them?

Every Syrian rabbi is supposed to discuss the Edict from the pulpit at least once a year. When Lance Suede was 15, he heard his rabbi explain the rule. “It struck me as racist,” he recalls. “I was so upset by it that I went home and banged on the kitchen table in anger and frustration.” Today, he says he thinks it may have been a premonition.

By SY standards, Suede had an unconventional upbringing. When he was 7, his parents moved from the enclave to Long Island — Ashkenazi territory. There he met J-Dubs. The experience left him both admiring and unsettled. “They made me see the Syrian community in a different way,” told me recently. We were sitting in the starkly beautiful conference room of the Midtown law firm where he is a partner specializing in white-collar criminal defense. “In Brooklyn,” he went on, “the materialism was so far over the top it’s hard to even explain. I found Ashkenazi Jews more intellectual. They valued scholarship and education. They could be materialistic, too — this is America, after all — but it was tempered by their love of learning.”

Syrian Jews have always regarded advanced secular education with something like suspicion. Not only does it promote outside values, it also distracts a boy from his proper role as an apprentice in the family business. “To understand us, you have to know that we are profoundly Middle Eastern,” Suede said. “Education is never the most important thing. People in the community thought we were weird because my older brothers and I became professionals.”

Suede’s parents grew homesick for the enclave and returned when he was 15. But he had already been bitten by the bug of secular education and liberalism. He attended Brandeis University and Harvard Law School. Then he willingly returned to the community. “It’s a magical place,” he told me. “You come home from school and there are 10 women in the kitchen, your mother and aunts and cousins, cooking special Syrian delicacies. Every celebration is large, full of relatives. The etiquette is what they call fadal — just come over, don’t be formal. Very Middle Eastern. Very seductive and sensual.”

Suede began breaking the rules when he attended a convention in Manhattan for the National Organization for Women, where he met a gentile woman from Idaho named Kim Croffoot. Just attending a feminist gathering was an odd thing for a Syrian man to do; SY females are expected to stay home, rear children, socialize and, if possible, dazzle. To be assessed bijan, or gorgeous, is a high compliment.

Suede and Croffoot fell in love. She received a Reconstructionist conversion to Judaism and they made plans to marry. Suede expected resistance, but he underestimated its force. “Of course I knew my parents would be upset,” he said. “But I thought time would heal the rift. What son wouldn’t think that?”

He was wrong. “To this day, my wife and I and our children aren’t welcome in the family,” he told me. “I knew that generally you weren’t supposed to marry a convert. But when I heard the rabbi say that in shul, I thought that was just, you know, a strongly held opinion.” This is not as implausible as it seems. In Long Island, nobody knew anything about Edicts. And Suede’s parents never said a word: “When they saw how strongly I felt about racism, how I had banged on the table when I was 15, well, maybe they just didn’t want to get into a fight over it.”

Suede, who now uses the surname Croffoot-Suede, had another reason to suppose his family would eventually relent. Back in the 1920s, he told me, his grandmother’s sister married a gentile. “There was a scandal, but it eventually blew over,” he said. “I thought that’s how it would be for us.” But the Edict applies only to events after 1935. Croffoot-Suede’s grandmother’s sister had been effectively grandfathered into the community. He had no such luck.

Croffoot-Suede expressed his feelings by writing a play, “Syria, America,” which was performed in 2000 at the Greenwich Street Theater. Its subject was love and betrayal among four SY young men.

Last year, Croffoot-Suede’s grandmother died. He attended the funeral, although he didn’t sit with the rest of the family. Sensing a thaw, he brought his wife to the house of mourning in Brooklyn. It turned out to be a serious mistake. “My sister simply refused to meet my wife and she left to avoid it. She stormed out and we left, too. Next morning, my father called at 6 and told me not to come back to the shiva. He said he’d call later, and we could meet in the city for a meal and discuss it. That felt a little better. But he never called about it. My parents have sacrificed their relationship with me for the sake of the community.”

Despite his being ostracized, Croffoot-Suede says he still feels the emotional power of the enclave and affords the community a kind of grudging respect. “There are thousands of people who grew up in the community and are raising kids there who would say that it’s a fulfilling life,” he told me. “It can be very warm and loving — if you follow the rules.”

One of the rules of the community forbids indulging in promiscuous chit-chat with outsiders. This is a practice the Syrians brought with them from the old country, where a nosy stranger might be a business rival or a representative of the tax collector. Reporters, an American inconvenience, are equally unpopular. The community is still stewing about an article published in The New York Times last year that revealed the astronomical cost of real estate in the enclave — one house sold in 2003 for $11 million, which may have made it the most expensive house in Brooklyn.

My first trip to the enclave was conducted by a guide who insisted on being granted anonymity. He emphasized the need for discretion by recounting the cautionary tale of a man I later learned was named Sam Toussie. Some years ago, a reporter had come from some unremembered publication to write an “inside” story on the enclave. At the time, Toussie was a member of the community in good standing, but he made the colossal error of talking about SY affairs, on the record, to the journalist. When this was discovered, he was ostracized. But that did not go far enough for some of the hardliners, who, I was told, actually prayed for his death. When he did die, at a relatively young age, his passing was taken as a sign. “Somebody put the evil eye on him,” my guide told me darkly.

But the solidarity of the SY community is based on more than fear of excommunication and the evil eye. There are positive inducements as well. Chief among these are the support and charity that the community shows to its members. It is an intensely social place; weddings of 1,000 guests or more are common (there are volunteer societies that loan out dishes, silverware and even tables and chairs to enable everyone to entertain in a respectable fashion). Grown children often live within walking distance of the parents, and family Sabbath dinners of 30 or 40 are the norm. Being an SY means never having to say you are hungry. The community is charitable to a fault: at Sunday-morning house parties and festive holiday cruises, grandees compete by making donations to one another’s pet charities.

The result is the most generous cradle-to-grave mutual-welfare society this side of the Saudi royal family. The community’s annual spending on charity and other civic services, including education, is around $100 million. “The services here are preconception to postmortem,” David Greenfield, executive director of the recently formed Sephardic Community Federation, told me.

An SY in good standing can expect free K-12 parochial education and summer camps for the kids, access to a palatial communal ritual bath, use of grand recreational facilities in a community center now being doubled in size, high-level care for the aged and attention to whatever material problems life may present. “If there are poor people among us, we try to help,” Jakie Kassin told me. “If a person falters in business, other men step in. I’ve even seen people in the same business, direct competitors, raise money to put the man back on his feet.”

In the early 1990s, President Hafez Assad of Syria allowed his country’s remaining Jews, numbering 6,000 or so, to emigrate on condition that they didn’t go to Israel. Naturally, they went to Brooklyn instead. The new SY’s, as they are called, provided the enclave with fresh faces and some old-country authenticity. In return they were given housing, free schooling and whatever assistance they needed to establish themselves. “They even got us lawyers to take care of the citizenship process,” a recent immigrant told me. “It’s not just the money. We came to the U.S. with some money. It was the way they took care of us as brothers.”

Nonetheless, the SY’s say they do not want to be portrayed as enormously rich. “That’s a misperception,” Greenfield said. “There are about 50 very successful SY families. Another 20 to 30 percent are what you could call upper-middle class. But maybe a third of the community lives at twice the poverty level.”

These statistics are based on broad interpretation of what counts as the community. Many of those on the bottom rungs of the income ladder are non-Syrian Sephardic Jews, an inclusive term of art the community uses for Jews from Muslim countries. You can find Egyptians, Moroccans and Iraqis in the Syrian community. Even so, they are considered second-class citizens. “Let’s just say that the real SY’s are dominant,” my guide told me. “We set the tone. They join us, not the other way around.”

The non-Syrian Sephardim, many of whom are Israeli citizens, do a lot of the labor and neighborhood shopkeeping. “Israelis own the local grocery stores,” my guide informed me in a dismissive tone as we cruised down the enclave’s commercial strip on Kings Highway. “How much can a grocery store bring in, enough to take care of one or two families?” The community’s major institutions tend to be administered by J-Dubs like David Greenfield — experienced professionals willing, unlike most SY’s, to do white-collar work for hire.

Greenfield, who once was a staff member for Senator Joe Lieberman, is currently running a voter-registration drive in the enclave. Traditionally, the SY’s haven’t voted much, largely because of an aversion to showing up on government registries. That has changed, though, mostly because of the realization that voting can result in money for faith-based enterprises. The community is 2-to-1 Democratic, but they are ardent free-traders and hawkish on Israel and security; it is generally assumed that Bush took a majority of the community’s votes in 2004.

In 1995, Rabbi Abraham Hecht of Shaare Zion synagogue made one of the community’s first international political headlines. Hecht is a J-Dub, a Chabadnik preacher widely admired in the community for his polemical skills in English. During the days of the Oslo Peace Accords, Hecht displayed his eloquence by instructing an assembly that Israeli leaders who hand over territory in the Holy Land may, according to Jewish law, be killed. Five months later, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv by a Sephardic Israeli yeshiva student with a similar point of view. The Israeli government banned Hecht as a security threat, and he was suspended from his pulpit, but he still has supporters in the enclave. So does Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who, despite his softness on converts, has found financial backers for his theocratic Shas Party. Jakie Kassin claims, in fact, that the party’s seed money was raised in his living room in Deal, N.J., in the early ’80s.

There aren’t many famous SY’s. The actor Dan Hedaya, who played Carla’s sleazy ex-husband, Nick, on the TV comedy “Cheers,” grew up in the community. So did the designer Isaac Mizrahi, although his open homosexuality has made him persona non grata. Jerry Seinfeld’s mother, Betty, is an SY, but she married a J-Dub (not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Jerry might say) and brought up her family in Long Island, far from the enclave. Still, according to one Seinfeld biographer, Jerry Oppenheimer, she retained enough of her early training to warn her son never to marry a convert.

For many years, the most famous SY in the world was Eddie Antar, known professionally as Crazy Eddie. In the ’70s, he revolutionized the home electronics business and created an empire.

Nobody did retail theater better than Crazy Eddie. His souk-smart salesmen — many of them relatives and friends from the enclave — choreographed the shopping experience, waltzing the zboon (SY slang for “customer”) in well-rehearsed steps toward the be’aah, the sale. His ads (“His prices are insane!”) were commercial performance art. And when he was caught defrauding his investors for almost $100 million dollars and subsequently fled to Israel, Eddie provided an international drama that ended in extradition and prison.

The Crazy Eddie case became a cause célèbre, shattering longstanding community rules of silence and decorum. Eddie’s J-Dub wife, Debbie, caught him in flagrante delicto with his mistress, who also happened to be a J-Dub named Debbie, on the last day of December 1983 — a confrontation remembered among old-timers as the New Year’s Eve massacre. The massacre was a real bean-spiller, and it was followed by the testimony of Eddie’s first cousin (and partner and C.F.O.) Sam E. Antar on how the illegal schemes had been carried out. This gave the United States Attorney prosecuting the case, Michael Chertoff (now the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security), more than enough to work with. Eddie went away for six years.

Unlike the late Toussie, however, Eddie Antar was not expelled from the community. In fact, both Sam and Eddie live in the enclave today. Sam has a simple explanation. “They don’t usually take back rats,” he told me. “But everybody in our community knew that Eddie was setting me up to take the fall, especially after he skipped out to Israel leaving me holding the bag. I had worked for the Antar family my whole life. But because of the betrayal factor, I haven’t been ostracized. There was no edict against me.” As for Eddie, he is still considered mi’shelanu, “one of us.” “He did his time,” Sam said. “He paid the price. That’s the way people see it.”

Since the demise of Crazy Eddie and Nobody Beats the Wiz (another SY-owned business, sold on the verge of bankruptcy by the Jemal family to Cablevision for a reported $101 million in 1998), the shmatte trade has supplanted electronics as the signature Syrian business. Various V.I.P.’s own national companies like Century 21 department stores, the Rainbow shops, Conway stores, and Jordache and Bonjour jeans. Most of the merchandise these days is imported from the Far East, much of it through Wal-Mart and other chains. Sam Walton was a mentor to many young SY businessmen, who, now grown old and rich, still speak of him with a veneration usually reserved for high-class cantorial singers and first-class kosher chefs.

The Cayre brothers, from one of the world’s richest families, according to Forbes magazine, got rich in the ’70s producing Latin music on the Salsoul label and then got much richer distributing videocassettes via Wal-Mart. Joseph Cayre was also among the major financiers behind the World Trade Center’s Larry Silverstein.

Joe Sitt is another Sam Walton disciple, who has fondly recalled playing at the old man’s knee on his father’s sales trips to Arkansas. Sitt made his own money with Ashley Stewart, a line of upscale clothing marketed to plus-size African-American women. Since then, he has branched out. His company, Thor Equities, is currently engaged in a controversial effort to buy up most of Coney Island and recreate it as a modern entertainment district.

SY moguls tend to prefer the family-business model. Of course, they tend to be related to everyone else in the community. Including, it turns out, Solomon Dwek. Dwek, universally known as “the rabbi’s son,” is indeed the scion of a prestigious clan. His father is a highly regarded spiritual leader in the SY summer enclave in Deal, N.J. Solomon, still in his early 30s, made a name for himself as a high-stakes real estate developer in Monmouth County, N.J. Then, one memorable day in April 2006, according to an F.B.I. statement filed in federal court, he rolled up to the window of a PNC Bank branch in Eatontown, N.J., deposited a personal check for $25.2 million and later wired out by telephone $22.8 million against it. After the check bounced, Dwek was arrested by the F.B.I. for bank fraud.

In the wake of the bust, Dwek’s investors naturally began wondering what happened to their money. Solomon Dwek’s uncle Joseph Dwek claimed to be owed upward of $60 million. A close associate, Isaac Franco, demanded $30 million. Criminal and civil trials are pending in New Jersey. In all, the names of the allegedly defrauded investors reads like the guest list of an enclave bar mitzvah. It remains to be seen whether, under the circumstances, the SY community can once more display the unity, forgiveness and sangfroid it mustered for Crazy Eddie and Rabbi Hecht.

It’s a good bet they will. In March of this year, Chief Rabbi Saul Kassin wrote this in an open letter to his followers: “There is nothing more important than our unity.” Every ethnic leader in America talks about unity, but there are precious few willing and able to sacrifice their own children for its sake.

Seventy years after the promulgation of the Edict, it seems fair to say that, taken on its own terms, it has been an almost uniquely successful tool of social engineering. The enclave grows and thrives beyond the dreams of its founders. It offers a secure economic future and a sweet family life to those who remain within its confines. As for those who could not or would not fit in, well, every fight for survival has its collateral damage.

“People have to make a choice,” Jakie Kassin told me. “Sure, it’s rough sometimes. But I’ll tell you something — we should be an example to others. We’re building the No. 1 Jewish community on planet Earth, right here in Brooklyn.”

By Marion Fischel, August 30, 2007, Jerusalem Post

This summer Madrid witnessed a historic first: an open-air klezmer concert in the gardens of the Palacio de Oriente, under the stony gaze of several of Spain's medieval monarchs. Some 500 people, including approximately 200 Jews, attended. Many sang and danced to the strains of Bulgarian violin and hassidic nigunim, courtesy of Radio Sefarad music editor Argentinean Jorge Rozemblum and his band, Klezmer Sefardi.

This concert took place 515 summers after the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella had expelled the last remaining 200,000 official Jews from Spain. (Proper statistics are unavailable, but there are opinions that up to one-third of the country's population had converted from Judaism to Christianity in the previous centuries.) Casa Sefarad-Israel - a recently inaugurated Spanish Foreign Ministry project - hosted the event as part of its mission "to bridge the cultural gap between Spain and the Jews."

Despite its ignorance of Jews and Judaism, Spanish culture is still proud of its history as Sefarad, where trigonometry was developed by Jewish scholars and the Greek philosophers were translated into Arabic and Hebrew, "and from there into Latin, setting the stage for the European Renaissance," says American historian Jeff Malka, author of Sephardic Genealogy: Discovering your Sephardic Ancestors and their World.

And at a recent round table at Casa Asia - another Spanish Foreign Ministry project - "The X Factor of the Jews" was discussed, as participants tried to come up with reasons for the disproportionate number of Jews who have contributed to world history. Genetics? Book learning? Tradition? Moses, Jesus, Marx, Freud and Einstein were mentioned. The only conclusion reached was that it appeared illogical to mistrust and mistreat the Jews, says activist, writer and former member of the Spanish Parliament Pilar Rahola.

Still, relatively few Spaniards actually know any Jews personally, or are aware that they do. The nation's capital houses only two, low-profile kosher restaurants, and the entire country's Jewish population stands at an unclear and only partly documented 20,000-30,000. Yet while statistics show Spain to be more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to the Israelis, the admiration of many white-collar professionals in Madrid lies with a country that can and does defend itself against terrorism. This sentiment was voiced by Esperanza Aguirre, the president of the Comunidad Autonoma de Madrid, at the opening of Casa Sefarad-Israel in June.

The summer of 2003 marked an increase in anti-Semitic feeling in Spain due to public opinion over the second intifada. "There was no Jewish voice in the press here," says Jacobo Israel Grazon, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain. In 2003, he called a meeting with Argentinean-born media genius Solly Wolodarsky (instrumental in the creation of Israel TV and several resoundingly successful programs on Spanish TV) and Complutense University sociology Prof. Alex Baer. An Internet radio was decided upon. Radio Sefarad (www.radiosefarad.com) was born and its first program appeared on February 24, 2004.

"We are not a community radio," says Baer, 36, "but a Jewish radio for Spanish speakers of all races and religions."

He admits to being fascinated with the love-hate relationship that has existed between the Jews and Spain. "Israel is a touchy subject in Spain, still soaked with prejudice and stereotypes. These have lasted for centuries and don't disappear with 25 years of democracy. Radio Sefarad's mission is to contribute toward the 'normalization' of Israel and the Jews in Spanish public opinion," says Baer, who has worked with Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the Gesher Association of Spanish Jews and as part of a media analysis group with B'nai B'rith.

Radio Sefarad's director since the recent retirement of founder Wolodarsky, Baer recounts how in the summer of 2003 the Jewish Community of Madrid "went out into the streets to protest pro-Israel. This had never happened before, but we felt we needed no longer hide away in ghettos and we could be more outspoken. The radio is a continuation of this."

He recently published a study for the Real Instituto Elcano, entitled "Tanks Against Stones: The Image of Israel in Spain," in which he discusses the fact that there is more general hostility toward Israel in Spain than in other European countries. Baer blames this on "the convergence of public opinion's identification of Israel with the US - generally disliked in Europe - and the fact that traditional Spanish-Catholic anti-Semitic stereotypes tend to rear their heads in the media."

Nevertheless, when this summer the Jewish Community once more took to the streets to protest against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "countdown," it was joined by members of most Spanish political parties, with the exception of the United Left.

Radio technician and newscaster Jordi Galan Torregrosa, 26 - the only non-Jew in the Radio Sefarad team - recalls the prejudice and ignorance he witnessed as a child when a schoolmate wore a Star of David pendant. "Some kids said that he belonged to a sect. His name was David, he was probably a Jew."A musician and an art history graduate, presently studying locution, Galan Torregrosa says, "We do important work here by helping people get to know the cultural aspects of Judaism and get over the fear."

RADIO SEFARAD'S audience is mainly in Latin America, Israel, the US, Gibraltar and, of course, Spain. Its programming includes music, live events, interviews with celebrities and politicians, art, history, cooking and humor. Canadian Solly Levy is a contributor who has a weekly program called The Time of Sefarad, broadcast in Haketia (Moroccan Ladino mixed with Arabic). The Research and Broadcast Center for Sephardi Culture from Buenos Aires has its own slot. The radio also hosts a weekly dialogue with Maite Rodriguez Velara of the Judeo-Christian Center in Madrid, whose library includes a complete set of Talmud and is used by university students and professors.

Yet another close collaborator is Jorge Apizua, a security and defense consultant who discovered Radio Sefarad on the Internet, visited Israel in September 2006, and upon his return offered to do a weekly program on behalf of the Spain-Israel Solidarity Association. Casa Sefarad-Israel is soon, too, to begin its own program.

One of Radio Sefarad's programs is entitled Footprints, and encourages listeners to send in their family names to discover if they are of Jewish origin. People with names like Alonso and Perez are only just beginning to have inklings that their families might have been conversos long ago. Listeners from all over the world ask about conversion to Judaism and these are always referred to their local rabbis.

Madrid Chief Rabbi Moshe Bendahan says requests to know more about Judaism are divided into two categories: those who are sympathetic to Judaism, and those who are seriously interested in converting. The former are added to the community's cultural mailing list.

Bendahan has a weekly Torah portion spot on Radio Sefarad. "I like the notion that we are able to explain our sources to both Jews and non-Jews," he says. His wife, Coty, a holistic healer, hosts The Art of Looking After Yourself. This program, as well as History of a Hatred, is conducted by the content editor, Mexican and US journalist Karen Anhalt Costilo, 32, who also manages Mail from Our Listeners and The Sephardi and Ashkenazi Kitchen.

Anhalt Costilo says she received a letter from a young Catholic listener who enjoys Haifa-born graphic animator, graphologist and teacher Irit Green's Bible program so much, she recommended it to an Iranian friend, and they are both hooked. Radio Sefarad coordinates a weekly Jewish religious slot on Spanish National Radio, featuring Bendahan and Green.

Green, 54, also conducts interviews in the Hebrew Corner. Her CV includes stints at Yediot Aharonot and work on a Pink Panther film in the UK, and the creation of training movies for the IAF. Since 2006, she has discovered medieval Hebrew writing on a wall in Avila, which led her to identify 34 graves, and some seventh- or eighth-century writing in Trujillo. Green also found a Hebrew script in a synagogue in Caceres, where the Jews are documented to have prayed on their last Tisha Be'av in Spain, hours before their expulsion.

The English Corner is led by New Yorker Linda Jimenez Glassman, an English teacher at the Complutense University. During the Second Lebanese war, she visited Kibbutz Gonen (near Kiryat Shmona) and broadcast six interviews from there. Canadian Ariel Mercado, originally a Radio Sefarad listener, runs the French Corner.

Budding playwright Adan Levy's (The Odyssey of Adam and Eve) specialty is an irreverent, avant garde program called Tohu Vevohu. He also provides the technical support to the team and has designed and edits TV Sefarad, which is a year old and still developing.

The voice behind Eye on the Media is filmmaker Masha Gabriel, 32. She reads between the lines of the Spanish media and explains things from a Jewish and Israeli perspective. Together with Baer, she also gives news analysis, talks politics and runs a roundtable, all in her singular, witty style.

"The great thing about our radio is that for many non-Jews who are pro-Israel, this is a real point of contact," says Anhalt Costilo.

"The radio is a mini community," says Baer. "It is a meeting place for Jews and non-Jews. Jews often want to feel connected, but not necessarily to an official community. And there are increasingly numbers of non-Jews who identify with our culture and our ways."

Known to the team as "our first listener," David Poza, 31, a Christian industrial engineer, was initially attracted to the klezmer and other music and now is "really connected" to the radio. "I think Radio Sefarad's work is very important in making more visible (or in this case audible) the Jewish presence here in Spain," he says.

As Radio Sefarad celebrates its three and a half years on the Net, it is in the process of growing into an important portal to Jewish culture and to the reality of Israel at a time when increasing numbers of Spanish Jews are coming out of the closet, and even larger numbers of non-Jews are being given more than just a peek within.

By Amanda Gold, September 12, 2007, SFGate.com

As autumn approaches, and with it the Jewish high holidays, many of us find ourselves thumbing through recipe boxes and time-worn cookbooks to extract familiar fami