Be'chol
Lashon Update 4/27/04
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Mazel Tov to Rabbi Sholomo Levy on the completion
of African American Lives!!!
Book: African American Lives
B”H
Shalom L’khol,
It is with great pleasure that I announce
the book I have been working on for over a year, African
American Lives edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman
of the Department of Afro-American Studies and director
of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University,
and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, renown scholar of the
African American religious experience, is now available
to the public.
As an associate editor and senior writer
on this project, I had the honor of writing many of the
biographies presented in this extraordinary volume of
over 600 entries totaling more than 1,000 pages of text.
None gave me more pride to write than the biographies
of the first black rabbis in America—Rabbi Arnold Josiah
Ford and Chief Rabbi Wentworth Arthur Matthew—whose life
stories speak to the realities of being black, Jewish,
and human in America. Many of you will also find my articles
on Noble Drew Ali, Sammy Davis Jr., Amiri Baraka, Louis
Farrakhan, Amy Jacques Garvey, Father Divine, Maya Angelou,
and Tiger Woods (just to name a few) to be extremely
interesting. You will also be delighted by Lewis Gordon’s
wonderful biography of philosopher and visionary Cornel
West.
Our ambitious project, which will ultimately
consist of 10 volumes, has been praised by the New York
Times, received accolades from Publishers Weekly for
being “well-written, even lyrical, and balanced,” and
the Library Journal recommends it as being “essential
for any serious African American collection.” In referring
to my colleagues and me in the acknowledgments, Professors
Gates and Higginbotham wrote that, “The quality of this
book owes much to their scholarship, their skills as
writers and editors, and to their energy and unflagging
dedication.” I wish that I could give each of you a free
copy of this book as a token of my appreciation for your
love and support.
Video Interview with Prof. Gates on CBS The Early Show
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/26/earlyshow/leisure/books/main613888.shtml
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Groups Question Own Inaction on African Killings
With the commemoration last week of the
10th anniversary of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, amid
growing warnings of new atrocities in Sudan, human rights
activists complain that the organized Jewish community
has failed to act on its implied commitment to see that
such tragedies "never again" be allowed to
occur. Jewish organizations, with a handful of exceptions,
have remained largely mute as government-sponsored militias
in Sudan have routed black Muslims from the western province
of Darfur over the last 14 months, in what United Nations
observers have called a campaign of "ethnic cleansing."
The conflict in Darfur persists at the
same time that attention is being drawn to the failure
of the international community to stop the Rwandan genocide,
which began 10 years ago this month and left 800,000
dead in less than 100 days. In the discussions surrounding
that anniversary, the Jewish community's lack of protest
to the killings in Rwanda has come under public scrutiny
for the first time. "We, who say that the lessons
of the Holocaust should never be forgotten, failed to
act as we could have," said Rabbi David Saperstein,
director of the Washington-based Religious Action Center
of Reform Judaism.
Jewish organizations have mounted widely
praised campaigns for human rights in the recent past,
most notably a coordinated push for intervention in Bosnia,
where the Serbian military was decimating the Muslim
and Croat populations in the early 1990s. Jewish activists
at the time frequently cited the silence of the world
community in the face of Nazi atrocities during World
War II, which they vowed would not be repeated. "The
Jewish community's voice has a special moral resonance
when it comes to issues of genocide," said Kenneth
Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "It
is a voice that we would like to enlist wherever large-scale
murder takes place." Roth said, however, "it
has been an inconsistent alliance."
The Sudan crisis is widely described as
the world's most pressing right now. In the past month,
reports of atrocities there have been issued by leading
humanitarian agencies, ranging from Amnesty International
and the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees
to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Experts
say nearly 750,000 black Muslims have been driven from
their homes in the desert province of Darfur over the
past year by aerial bombing campaigns in concert with
raids by government-sponsored Arab militias. The campaign
is not directly related to a decades-long Sudanese civil
war pitting Arab Muslims in the north against Christian
and animist blacks in the south.
Government forces agreed to a cease-fire
in Darfur April 8, but observers have not reported any
halt in hostilities. USAID has predicted that 100,000
civilians may die in the coming months. The situation
in Darfur has gone mostly unnoticed for the past year,
but commemoration of the Rwanda genocide this month put
Africa's woes back on the Western agenda. In the past
week, President Bush and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi
Annan both criticized the Sudanese government publicly
and called for immediate humanitarian aid to Darfur.
The Jewish institutional community, rather
than leading the push for international acknowledgement
of the "ethnic cleansing" — as it did in the
case of Bosnia — has itself been prodded to make its
first public mentions of the Darfur crisis in the past
weeks. The executive director of the American Jewish
Committee, David Harris, briefly mentioned the need for
action in Darfur during his weekly radio address on April
12, and a "genocide warning" was issued on
April 7 by the Committee on Conscience, a body formed
to lead the genocide-prevention efforts of the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
These remarks don't represent the first
Jewish institutional involvement in Sudan. In 2002, Jewish
organizations — notably the Reform Action Center — were
instrumental in pushing the Bush administration to negotiate
a cease-fire in the 19-year Sudanese civil war. Concerning
Darfur, however, most human rights observers interviewed
by the Forward agreed with Smith College professor Eric
Reeves, a leading proponent of intervention in Darfur,
who told the Forward that "given the clear evidence
that this is genocide — I don't see a response to it
by constituents from the Jewish community." Expectations
of a Jewish communal response to Sudan today, and Rwanda
10 years ago, stem in large part from the successful
campaign on behalf of Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the
early 1990s. Agitation by Jewish organizations is widely
credited with influencing the decision of the Clinton
administration to approve NATO bombing of Serbian forces
in 1995.
"In Bosnia and Kosovo, the
American Jewish community was the single most important
voice for protection and bringing an end to ethnic
cleansing," said Holly Burkhalter, who was the
advocacy director at Human Rights Watch during the
1990s. The resources devoted to Bosnia in 1994 have
been cited by communal leaders as a prime reason that
the Jewish community was unable to turn more attention
to Rwanda. Looking back to 1994, Felice Gaer, director
of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement
of Human Rights at the American Jewish Committee, said: "What
I see from that time is a great deal of activism with
regards to Bosnia. On Rwanda I don't see any formal
public statements or meetings." That silence was
not unusual. Most religious and ecumenical groups,
like most of the international community, stood silent
while the Hutu-led Rwandan government carried out its
coordinated massacre of ethnic Tutsi Rwandans.
But even with the general silence, Will
Recant — an executive at the American Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee, which led an $800,000 relief effort to Rwanda
after the killings ended — said he remembers that during
the genocide he was "a little surprised that there
wasn't more of a consciousness being raised from the
Jewish world." Explanations for the differing responses
to Bosnia and Rwanda are manifold, said Samantha Power,
whose recent book "'A Problem From Hell': America
and the Age of Genocide" chronicles U.S. responses
to genocide in the 20th century. Activism on behalf of
Rwanda, Power said, was made difficult by the speed of
the killings there, coupled with aftershocks from the
bungled American mission to Somalia a year before. Moreover,
media depiction of the Rwandan conflict as "age-old
tribal warfare" made intervention seem hopeless.
But, Power said, nothing had a greater impact, at least
on the Jewish community's involvment in Bosnia, than
the stark images from Serbian-run concentration camps. "There
was a really strong sense of identification with people
who looked like those from the Holocaust," Powers
said. "That is what moved Jewish groups — not immediately,
but after a few months." Such identification has
gone lacking in Rwanda and Sudan, she implied.
Gaer, like many in the human rights community,
is now preparing concrete policy proposals for Darfur
that will give the community a position around which
to mobilize. "So far the Jewish community has not
been ahead of the rest of the pack on Darfur," Gaer
said. "But once aroused, don't underestimate the
capacity of this community to mobilize action."
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Genocide and Conscience
The continuing agonies of the African continent
— in Liberia and Sierra Leone, Congo and now Sudan —
are a constant reminder to the rest of the world of the
fragility of what we call societal decency. The inability
of the international community to address those agonies
and aid the sufferers is an ongoing stain on the world's
conscience.
In the litany of African suffering, Sudan
holds a special place. The continent's largest country,
it has been a flashpoint for decades in the confrontation
between the expansionist Islamic culture of Arab North
Africa and the Christian and animist traditions of sub-Saharan
Africa. It is home to what is believed to be the world's
most persistent slave trade. The Islamist government
in Khartoum has given important aid and comfort to Al
Qaeda and other terrorist gangs. The confrontation between
Sudan's two warring cultures has led to continuing bloodshed
in recent decades, on a scale that has repeatedly raised
charges of genocide. Its continuation is an affront to
humanity.
The silence of the organized Jewish community
in the face of repeated atrocities and incidents of genocide
on that bleeding continent is an affront of a different
order. Jewish organizations and their leaders have earned
the prominence and credibility they enjoy on the world
stage in large measure because they speak for a community
that has known suffering and sought to learn from it.
They speak often and powerfully on memory and its lessons.
They remind the world of its failure to intervene when
it mattered to stop the Nazi genocide during World War
II. They call on the world community to learn from its
failure, so it will not recur.
And yet, confronted with new atrocities
in today's world, they fail again and again to take the
lead and speak out. They failed in Rwanda. They failed
in Liberia. They failed in Congo. And, as Nathaniel Popper
reports on Page 1, they have — with a handful of brave
and noteworthy exceptions — failed in Sudan.
As the Jewish community prepares for the
annual observance next week of Yom haShoah, the Holocaust
Remembrance Day marking the anniversary of the Warsaw
Ghetto uprising, the most appropriate way of honoring
the dead might be a serious accounting by the living.
The leaders and spokesmen of the Jewish community should
begin a process of study, reflection and debate. What,
we need to know, did the Holocaust actually teach us?
And when will we learn it?
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Shades of Black and Shadows on the Life of a Writer
"Ah just couldn't see mahself married
to no black man. It's too many black folks already. We
ought to lighten up the race."
— From "Their Eyes Were Watching God," by Zora
Neale Hurston
When you begin a book with a quotation
like that, you're inviting trouble to come in, kick off
its shoes and stay awhile. That's Marita Golden's intention.
She wants to ignite debate about one of the oldest, rawest
issues among African-Americans. The aching honesty in
the words of Zora Neale Hurston's character, from 1937,
Ms. Golden says, evokes a continuing aesthetic hierarchy
among African-Americans that puts light skin at the top
and dark skin at the bottom. It's the subject of her
new book, "Don't Play in the Sun: One Woman's Journey
Through the Color Complex," which was published
this week by Doubleday.
This book, Ms. Golden's 11th, showcases
her penchant for writing that weaves personal experience
into explorations of topics like single parenting. She
first won critical attention for her 1983 autobiography "Migrations
of the Heart," about coming of age in Washington
in the 1960's. She also won acclaim in 1989 for her novel "Long
Distance Life."Today, at 53, the soft-spoken Ms.
Golden has become something of a black literary godmother.
In 1990 she founded the Hurston/Wright Foundation, named
for Hurston and Richard Wright, which supports black
writers. In 2002 she and the writer E. Lynn Harris held
the equivalent of a literary rent party for the foundation,
together editing an
anthology of black writers called "Gumbo."
For "Don't Play in the Sun," Ms.
Golden interviewed black people, including a psychotherapist,
a cultural historian, a biracial writer, a TV producer
and her friends and her husband. The book's title comes
from her mother's warning that the sun would make her
deep brown skin even darker and less attractive. Through
the prism of her own skin, Ms. Golden explores the belief
that light skin and European features remain the highest
standard of beauty in most places in the world. Color,
though, is not just a black thing, she says. It is not
even an American thing, with versions of lighter-is-better
in India, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean. Ms. Golden
considers this global obsession a legacy of
colonialism.
But this book focuses on black Americans.
In America, she says, the color hierarchy is a legacy
of slavery, when light-skinned blacks often fetched more
on the auction block and were prized as house servants
because they looked more like whites (and sometimes were
their relatives). While there is sharp disagreement among
blacks about the degree, or even the notion, of a color
hierarchy, Ms. Golden leaves that dispute unplumbed.
For her, even in the 21st century, gradations in color
make a difference, and the topic still needs airing.
"The topic of color-ism is a powerful
metaphor for all forms of marginalization," Ms.
Golden said over lunch in Manhattan, her long silver
earrings dangling, her hair in a short, natural style.
Even for whites the theme resonates, she said, in the
idea that "tall, blond, blue-eyed Nordic types are
privileged over shorter, darker, non-Nordic types." Researching
the book, she said, She went to high schools in Washington
and read articles in Essence and in Vibe, she heard young
black men say "the dark girls are O.K., the light-skinned
girls are pretty." Essence magazine's May issue
excerpts Ms. Golden's book with the cover headline "Blue-Black,
High Yellow. Yes, We Still Have Color Issues."
When the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates
Jr. did a four-part PBS television series on blacks in
America this year, the segment on "Black Hollywood" showed
black actresses complaining that lighter-complexioned
actresses had it easier. Mr. Gates concluded that the
beige coloring of an actress like Halle Berry or a pop
singer like Alicia Keys has helped their careers, as
it did for light-skinned entertainers like Dorothy Dandridge
and Lena Horne.
In the 1960's the "black is beautiful" moment
promised change, and Ms. Golden said she eventually learned
to love her hair, her skin, her features. But she also
writes about parties among the black elite today in which
dark-skinned men escort light-skinned trophy wives. She
reports on the pain within black families in which color
shapes affections. "My mother was well aware that
the world attempted every day to erase me," Ms.
Golden writes. "She knew how little love lay in
wait, how few open arms stood ready to embrace little
brown-skinned girls with nappy hair and Negroid facial
features."
But the color complex is not just her personal
musing, Ms. Golden contends. She grew up in Washington,
long considered a capital of black bourgeois color and
class fixations. Check out who wins beauty contests,
stars in rap music videos, plays the female love interest
in Hollywood films, she argues. Light-skinned women on
and off screen are often hypersexualized by society,
Ms. Golden believes. By comparison, skin shade seems
not to be such an issue for black male actors, Mr. Gates
said in an interview, suggesting that sex plays a role
in the color complex.
If nothing else, Ms. Golden said, she hopes
her book prompts blacks to sit down in churches, book
clubs and in family meetings to wrestle with the color
complex as a painful remnant of slavery. She says it
can ensnare light-skinned blacks in a web of stereotypes
about their racial allegiances or feelings of superiority
to darker blacks. But not everyone agrees. David J. Dent,
an associate professor of journalism at New York University,
sees a broader standard of black beauty and a marked
erosion of intraracial colorism. Mr. Dent spent years
traveling around the country talking with blacks for
his book "In Search of Black America," (Simon & Schuster,
2000).
"I admire Marita Golden, but you can't
take her personal story and impose it on the whole of
black America," Mr. Dent said. "That's a problem
with a lot of contemporary black memoirs." Recently,
he said, "the most visible woman in the world was
Condoleezza Rice. She's a dark-skinned woman. Was she
concerned at all about her skin color?" The issues
for Ms. Rice are "the commission and 9/11," Mr.
Dent said. "People were not focused on her skin
color and features. That's where the world has gone."
She has heard that argument, Ms. Golden
said. She concedes that Americans seem to live in the
best and the worst of times for dark skin and black features.
What's new is that although Americans are furiously blending
and culture sampling, she said, the country's pop culture
— music videos, films, advertisements — also increasingly
exports gorgeous black people who look racially ambiguous. "The
world still becomes a village with one standard — McDonald's,
Coca-Cola, Jennifer Lopez and Madonna," Ms. Golden
said, her voice rising a bit. "Can Halle Berry open
a path for darker-skinned black actresses? The reason
pop culture is so important is, whether we like it or
not, it tells us where we fit into the culture, how we're
valued, what we're valued for."
Contemporary writers of color are now weaving
the legacy of colorism into their fiction and nonfiction
stories, Ms. Golden said. She mentioned the novels "The
Darkest Child" by Delores Phillips, "Song of
the Water Saints" by Nelly Rosario and "The
Farming of Bones," by Edwidge Danticat. And as a
challenge to those who dismiss its prevalence, Ms. Golden
notes that the color complex is also a frequent topic
or subtext of the work she sees at the Hurston/Wright
Foundation's writers workshops. "Whether they know
it or not, people really do want to talk about this," Ms.
Golden said. "The job of the writer in fiction or
nonfiction is to shape a language we can use to explore,
discover and shape this legacy/reality into something
we actually can use to free us, and not feel we have
to deny or run from it and what it has meant.
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A Torah Goes to India Where a `Lost Tribe' Awaits
Rabbis have branded a biblical tribe in
northeast India heretical, even though its members chant
songs from their mud-walled synagogues about returning
to Zion. And Israel's interior minister has banned them
from the country. But Sam Pfeffer, a retired Chicago
lawyer, is not deterred: If the tribe can't enter Israel
to get religion, he will take Judaism to them. On Sunday,
Pfeffer boarded a plane with a hand-copied Torah he bought
for $12,000 from a West Devon Avenue bookseller and is
heading to the Indian states of Manipur and Mizoram.
There, members of the Bnei Menashe, who believe they
are descendants of an Israelite tribe driven from the
Holy Land some 2,700 years ago, will receive Pfeffer's
help in their efforts to convert officially to Judaism.
"They don't have a Torah, which is
the most important thing to have in Judaism," said
Pfeffer, 78. "That's why I am bringing them one." The
Torah Pfeffer chose is not just any holy book; he has
even reserved a separate seat for it on the plane. Believed
to be crafted in the 1950s by a Jewish scribe, the Torah
was recently restored, and Pfeffer was especially drawn
to it because an image of the Western Wall is embroidered
on the front. “Now the Torah goes on its long journey
to the Bnei Menashe, and with God's help, once they are
absorbed into Israel, the Torah will go back to Israel,
where I think it belongs," said Avrom Fox, owner
of Rosenblum's World of Judaica bookshop, who sold the
Torah to Pfeffer. “I hope Israel will open its doors
to these people as they did to Jews from the former Soviet
Union," Fox said.
The road to converting the Bnei Menashe,
however, is likely to be longer than Fox hopes. When
Pfeffer arrives in the Indian states later this week,
religious ceremonies will be held for the locals, who
will see a Torah for the first time. Eventually, Pfeffer
hopes Israel's religious court will come to the region
to perform bona fide conversions that would confer the
legal right to immigrate to Israel, like all recognized
Jews. Efforts to convert the Bnei Menashe began in earnest
about 18 months ago, when Amishav, an Israeli organization
committed to reaching out to "lost Jews" seeking
to return to Israel, established a Hebrew school in Aizawl,
the capital of Mizoram. Over the last decade, Amishav
brought about 800 members of the Bnei Menashe to Israel
and helped them convert to Orthodox Judaism. They now
live predominantly in the communities of Kiryat Arba,
Gush Katif and Beit El. Last year, Israeli Interior Minister
Avraham Poraz decided to bar additional members of the
tribe from immigrating to Israel, said Michael Freund,
director of Amishav.
"Sadly, I can only conclude that Mr.
Poraz's policy is one of racism, which discriminates
against the Bnei Menashe because of the color of their
skin," said Freund, referring to their dark skin
and Asian features. The Bnei Menashe claim a connection
to Judaism from the time of King Solomon, though these
ties are disputed. At that time, the tribes of Israel
split into two kingdoms. In 723 B.C. the Assyrians conquered
the kingdom of Israel and took 10 tribes into exile,
and they roamed across the world. Some say they escaped
to China. The Indian tribe believes that Christian missionaries
in the 19th Century forced them to abandon their Jewish
identity and convert to Christianity.
In 1951, three years after the state of
Israel was established, a local chief told the tribe
that God had told him his people should return to their
religion and original homeland. That began the movement
for the Bnei Menashe to go to Israel. The tribe has tried
to maintain rituals that resemble those in Judaism, including
their use of the lunar calendar. They also chant songs
about crossing the Red Sea and returning to Zion. But
because theologians and politicians disagree on their
connection to Judaism, the tribe is ineligible to immigrate
to Israel under the country's Law of Return.
Neither politics nor religious arguments
discouraged Pfeffer, a member of the Beth Hillel congregation
in Wilmette. Added a member of the Beth Hillel Congregation
in Wilmette. While he was teaching English in Israel
last year, Pfeffer met a woman from the Bnei Menashe
who was among the 800 allowed into Israel. Pfeffer became
determined to help the estimated 6,000 others left behind.
When Pfeffer returned to the United States, he headed
for the Indian consulate in Chicago to try to get a visa
to visit Manipur and Mizoram. But officials told him
the states were off-limits to foreigners. Pfeffer then
used his connections through Jewish firms doing business
in India and eventually received the permits.
His next obstacle was to find a Torah,
and that's when he found Rosenblum's. "There are
many things involved in getting a Torah," Pfeffer
said. "I had no idea that the Torahs go for so much
money. Mr. Fox had just received a Torah from Israel
so I told him I wanted to speak to my rabbi to make sure
it met all the religious requirements." Once his
rabbi gave the green light, friends and Pfeffer pitched
in the $12,000 for the Torah. Then he made plans with
two members of the Beth Hillel Congregation to make the
trip. "I am so excited, and the elders in the village
are excited," Pfeffer said. "They say they
could have 1,000 to 2,000 people for the reading of the
Torah because they never had a scroll to read from before."
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New Jewish Educational Center for the Bnei Menashe
of India
A new Jewish educational center was built
in northeastern India to serve a group that believes
it is one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. The center in
the Indian state of Manipur aims to serve the local community
of Bnei Menashe. Many members of the group are undergoing
formal conversions to Judaism and making aliyah.
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An Orphan no More - Foster Kid Finds Mom
Regina Louise Ollison was 40 years old with a 17-year-old
son of her own when she became, after a lifetime as an orphan,
somebody's child. "Everybody needs a mother, and it
doesn't matter when you get her,'' she said. In an unusual
Contra Costa County court proceeding, Regina was adopted
by the woman who had been denied the opportunity three decades
ago. The two had fallen in love with each other when Regina
Louise was a headstrong 11-year-old bouncing from one foster
home to another. Jeannie Kerr was a young counselor at the
Contra Costa children's shelter where Regina returned after
each failed placement.
But back then, the courts and the social
workers refused to place black children with white parents.
Both were devastated. Jeannie ended up marrying a military
man, having a son and moving to the South. Regina was
never adopted and left foster care at age 18. When she
attended San Francisco State on scholarship, she had
no name to offer when asked for an emergency contact.
She had no place to go when the dorms closed for school
breaks. There was not a single person in the world who
claimed her as family. "You need somebody to show
up for you,'' Regina said, talking over quesadillas at
a little Mexican place on Fourth Street in Berkeley.
She sat next to Jeannie, holding tight to her adoptive
mother's hand in a way that seemed somehow theatrical
as much as it was clearly emotional, as if she had watched
other mothers and daughters for so many years and now
wanted everybody to see her with her own mother.
"You need that flat mirroring
from somebody who loves you unconditionally and who
is so proud of you,'' Regina said. Her story, and her
need even at age 40 to reconnect with the long-lost
woman she now calls mom, reinforces the growing realization
that every foster kid needs an adult who will be there
well beyond childhood -- not just because it makes
sense for the adolescent but because it makes sense
for society. The average American child lives at home,
at least part time, until age 26. Yet the foster system
tosses kids into the world alone at 18. "Older
kids haven't been looked at as a group that needs a
home,'' said Mardi Louisell, consultant for California
Permanency for Youth Project. "The system is set
up to consider kids over 11 not adoptable, so social
workers often don't go about finding an extended family
that will be there for them beyond the age of 18.''
According to the California Department
of Social Services, about 25 percent of the kids emancipating
from foster care become homeless, 30 percent end up on
welfare, 33 percent land in jail, 45 percent have no
jobs and 50 percent fail to finish high school. Those
numbers drop when kids have adults in their lives who
provide love and safe harbor. And some visionary social
workers are realizing that these adults do not have to
be foster or adoptive parents. They can be anybody who
has an emotional, permanent commitment to the child:
a coach, a teacher, a counselor, the parent of a friend.
This kind of thinking is something of a revolution in
foster care. "It's about coming at it from a relational
perspective rather than a bureaucratic one,'' said Anthony
Barrows, a former foster kid from Massachusetts who spoke
at a national conference about foster-care "permanency''
last week in San Francisco. "You have to ask the
kids: 'Who's important to you?' And then help facilitate
that connection so it becomes something permanent in
the kid's life.''
On paper, Regina is a foster-care success
story, but it didn't feel that way to her. When she left
San Francisco State, there was no one to advise her about
getting a car loan or an apartment. There was no one
to share the exciting news about opening her first hair
salon or about the birth of her son or about landing
a two-book contract from Warner Books to write a memoir
of life in the foster system. She never stopped missing
Jeannie Kerr, the only person who ever called her “Pumpkin''
and "Sweetheart” and who told her she was smart
and capable of anything. Regina spent years trying to
find Jeannie through former counselors and the Internet.
A letter sent to an old address came back “Addressee
Unknown. '' Last June, she gave up. “I waited for 40
years for somebody to claim me, and I decided it was
never going to happen,'' Regina said.
But soon after her first book, "Somebody's
Someone,'' was published last summer, Jeannie -- whose
last name is now Taylor -- heard about it and sent an
e-mail through Regina's Web site. "I am so proud
of you, Sweetheart,'' the subject line read. Jeannie
left her phone number in Alabama. When Regina called
and heard Jeannie's voice, she couldn't speak. "Is
this my baby? Is this my baby girl?'' Jeannie asked.
They both cried. They reunited days later, meeting up
at LaGuardia Airport in New York during a stop on Regina's
book tour. "She was so polished and refined,'' Jeannie
recalled. "When I saw her gray hair, I flipped,''
Regina said. "Last time I saw her she had dark curly
hair.''
She gave Regina a photo album filled with
pictures from their time together so many years before. "It
took my breath away because I had no pictures of myself
as a child,'' Regina said. For the cover of her book,
Warner Books had to use a stock photo of a skinny little
girl, her face covered by an umbrella. Jeannie asked
why Regina had used "Regina Louise'' on her book
jacket instead of her full name, Regina Louise Ollison.
Regina said Ollison was the name of neither her biological
mother nor father. It was the name of a random boyfriend
of her mother when she had her first baby, given to the
child so no one would know the baby was the product of
incest. When Regina came along five years later, her
biological mother gave her the same meaningless last
name to keep things simple. "The name wasn't mine,''
Regina said.
With her son grown, Jeannie and her husband
moved back to the Bay Area. On Nov. 20, 2003, in the
same Martinez courtroom where their adoption petition
had been rejected 25 years earlier, Jeannie and Regina
became mother and daughter. Regina changed her name legally
to Regina Louise Kerr-Taylor. "To have this happen
was like seeing Jesus resurrected on Easter,'' Regina
said. Mother and daughter now live a block away from
each other in Walnut Creek, where Jeannie works as a
computer software instructor. "We all need to feel
as though we belong,'' Regina said, kissing her mother
goodbye before returning to her hair salon across the
street. "We all need somebody to hear us when we
say, 'I'm out here by myself. I'm scared. What am I going
to do?' ''
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Raising Our Jewish Children: An Adoption
Conference
While last year's conference
focused solely on issues of trans-racial and
multi-ethnic adoption, this year's conference
will also explore medical, legal, developmental
and parenting issues. Stars of David: A Jewish
Adoption Information & Support Network
is a non-profit organization providing a compassionate
network of support,
adoption information, and education to prospective parents,
adoptive families, adult adoptees, birth families, and the
Jewish community. For those of you in the Chicago Area, please
check out our beautiful conference brochure by going to:
http://jcbchicago.org and hitting the pdf link with the conference
brochure and complete information.
For more information call 773-467-3747
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For Spain's Jews, a Tense Time after Bombings
and Terrorist Plots
Nicholson family members love
getting out of Madrid on weekends, and often
they round up other young families for the
weekly kosher barbeque at Masada, a Jewish
retreat in the mountains outside Spain's capital.
Masada, it turns out, was on a list of bombing
targets police found in the hideout of the
Islamic militants suspected of blowing up
four commuter trains in Madrid on March 11,
killing 191 people. So will the Nicholsons
go back to Masada?
"Absolutely I would. You
cannot let that sort of thing stop you from
continuing with your life," Paul Nicholson
said, several days after his wife Dalia gave
birth to a baby boy, their second child. After
the train bombings, Spain's 35,000 Jews --
like most other Spaniards -- were outraged
that Islamic terrorists had struck in the
country. Videotapes and statements on behalf
of Al-Qaida said the attacks were meant to
punish Spain for supporting the United States
in the Iraq war. Most Jews already accepted
the importance of stringent security measures
for a small community in a country with a
large and rapidly growing North African population,
and a long history of anti-Semitism.
But at least this time, it seemed
after the March 11 bombings, the Jewish community
had been left out of the terrorist vendetta.
Many Jews thus were taken aback when, a few
weeks after the train attacks, the newspaper
El Mundo published the terrorists' plans for
further attacks -- including a map showing
Masada's precise location. "Masada is
pretty well off the beaten track," said
Nicholson, a New Zealand-born business consultant. "For
them to have been able to track it down, get
information about it -- you really wonder
a bit about the security in Spain for Jews." In
addition to Masada, the suspected terrorists
also had planned to blow up a suburban shopping
mall and bullet trains.
None of these attacks took place
thanks to a cell phone, found March 11 attached
to an unexploded bomb as a makeshift detonator.
Police used the phone to track the suspected
leader of the train bombings -- a Tunisian
named Sarhane Ben Abdelmajid Fakhet -- to
an apartment in Leganes, a southern suburb
of Madrid. When police tried to storm the
building, Fakhet and a group of followers
triggered an explosion, killing themselves
and a policeman and ripping off the front
of the apartment building. Police believe
several suspects remain at large, and the
Jewish community is taking no chances.
Jacobo Israel Garzon, president
of Madrid's Jewish community, said synagogues
in the city are beefing up their own security,
and Spanish law enforcement authorities have
been asked for additional help. Some people
are staying away from Jewish activities, he
said, but "those of us who are not afraid
are more numerous." In Barcelona, where
another 8,000 Jews live, Yitzhak Levy's home
is next door to that city's Masada. "When
I went last weekend there were only four families,
when usually there are 20 or 30," said
Levy, a spokesman for the community.
He says there has been no specific
threat against Jewish institutions in Barcelona.
Still, there is reason for caution: Investigators
believe the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in New
York and Washington were planned about an
hour away, in the beach resort of Salou. In
addition, many of the Al-Qaida suspects detained
in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks lived
in Catalonia, the northeastern Spanish region
of which Barcelona is capital. Levy says it's
clear the Madrid train bombings, which came
just three days before Spain's national elections,
influenced the outcome. Yet he accepts the
common analysis that many Spaniards voted
for the Socialist government not because of
its stance against the Iraq war but because
they felt deceived by the conservative government
of then-Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar.
Aznar's government first blamed
the attack on the outlawed Basque separatist
group ETA, despite increasing evidence of
involvement by Islamic extremists. Aznar has
said the government released new information
pointing to Islamic radicals as soon as it
became available, but many Spaniards felt
the government was trying to hide something,
afraid its support for the Iraq war might
backfire electorally. "For many people,
it was the last straw," Levy said. But,
he concedes, "I've heard Jews say the
winner of the Spanish elections was Osama
Bin Laden." On Sunday, a day after being
sworn in, the new Socialist prime minister,
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, announced that
he would make good on a campaign promise to
withdraw Spain's 1,400 troops from Iraq.
He previously had said he might
reconsider if the United Nations were given
control of Iraq as planned by June 30. After
his inauguration, however, Zapatero said it
seemed clear the transition wouldn't happen,
and he promised to bring Spanish soldiers
home "as soon as possible." Opinion
polls showed that around 70 percent of Spaniards
agreed with the decision. Many also are wondering
if the previous government's focus on the
Basque terrorist threat blinded it to the
possibility of an attack by Islamic extremists,
especially given Spain's pro-U.S. stances
and its crackdown on the local Sept. 11 cell.
An investigative report in El Mundo claimed
Spanish authorities had received warnings
from the intelligence services of several
countries, including the United States, Britain,
France, Germany and Israel.
"On at least 10 occasions,
Israeli intelligence agents had let their
Spanish colleagues know" that "Islamic
militants were preparing a major attack in
Madrid," journalist Fernando Mugica wrote.
Madrid's Garzon said the rapidity with which
Zapatero announced the pullout "gives
the impression that we are submitting to the
threats" of the terrorists. "Most
of my Spanish friends disagree with me," Nicholson
said. "But one Spanish government made
the decision to go in there, and for another
Spanish government to come in and change that,
all you're doing is answering the terrorists'
request. Whether that was right or wrong doesn't
really matter anymore."
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Sephardi Faithful Seek the Miraculous
Sephardi faithful are flocking
to see the "miraculous" likeness
of a Moroccan sage on the wall of an Israeli
home. A fervently Orthodox family in the northern
village of Rehassim invited reporters to see
the stain left by the soot of Sabbath candles,
claiming it formed the outline of a famous
portrait of the late Baba Sali.
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Jewish Philanthropist Funds Writing Contest
to Improve Christian-Jewish Relations
A young Jewish philanthropist
is funding a writing contest to bolster Christian-Jewish
relations. In the wake of the debate surrounding
Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," Elizabeth
Goldhirsh, 25, is funding a writing contest
on essays on the shared history and values
of Judaism and Christianity. The first-place
winner of "Reaching Common Ground" will
receive $25,000.
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