Birthright Alumni Center Tied to Haredi Outreach Group

So, as if the fundie Christians are not the bane of Jews all over the world we see that the fundie Jews are learning to play the same game, this game though, to the detriment of all other Jewish movements.

By Gal Beckerman

Published September 02, 2009, issue of September 11, 2009.

Many of the young people who pass through the Jewish Enrichment Center in Lower Manhattan view it with great affection. It is often the first time they have come in contact with a Judaism that is engaging and accessible. The rabbis responsible for the center’s educational and religious programs are charismatic and approachable people who, participants say, have had a large impact on their lives.

As the official New York follow-up organization for Taglit-Birthright Israel — which sends young people on free trips to Israel and lately is trying to keep them Jewishly engaged when they return — there could hardly be a better model.

But there are also those Birthright alumni who have been turned off by the JEC, sensing that it has a hidden, religious agenda that clashes with Birthright’s declared nondenominational and pluralistic stance. Their suspicions have now been substantiated with the revelation that the JEC’s rabbis were trained at Ohr Somayach, a Jerusalem-based ultra-Orthodox yeshiva with international branches and a publicly declared goal of turning secular and nonobservant Jews into ba’alei teshuvah. The JEC, it has emerged, was launched as an outreach arm of the yeshiva.

For some Birthright alumni who spoke recently with the Forward, this confirmed what they had already surmised.

The realization for one person came when he was asked to memorize lines of Talmud and encouraged to wrap tefillin every day. For another, it was the weekend he was required to spend with a Haredi family on Long Island if he wanted one more trip to Israel. And for a few, it came only after an all-expense paid month at a Jerusalem yeshiva, where they were presented with a stark choice of abandoning their current life for a more religious one.

As the Forward reported on September 4, the JEC which has received nearly $5 million from philanthropist Michael Steinhardt since 2005, has a virtual monopoly on reaching Birthright alumni in New York and is run by Orthodox rabbis involved in kiruv, or religious outreach. What has only now become clear is the JEC’S connection to Ohr Somayach, which engages openly in a form of Jewish evangelism.

“They are ideologically ultra-Orthodox, but they would never identify themselves that way,” said Allan Nadler, a professor at Drew University who has studied the Orthodox world, referring to Ohr Somayach. “It’s the soft sell. Come for dinner, come for lunch, hang around, smoke some weed after Shabbos. But there’s always an element of deception.”

In conversations with the Forward, a handful of Birthright alumni have painted a picture of the JEC as a place where Orthodoxy is the end goal, though it is encouraged through slow, gentle steps that are often difficult to perceive.

“If they had just said, if their whole mission statement was, we’re Orthodox Jews, we’d love to present this lifestyle to you and see if it’s for you, and then did the same exact things that they are doing, that would not bother me,” said David Siegel, who was involved with the JEC for two years and went on three of the center’s follow-up trips to Israel. “But they know they can’t do that. People will get scared.”

Rebecca Sugar, Birthright Israel NEXT’s director of alumni outreach in New York, declined to comment. In a letter to the Forward in response to the September 4 article, she wrote that “NEXT, NY is inclusive regarding the various branches of Jewish expression,” and referred to the secular programming she has organized.

Michael Steinhardt also responded through his publicist that, “I stand 100% behind the work of Rebecca Sugar and her associates and I believe that Birthright NEXT New York gives representation to all views within the Jewish spectrum.”

The outreach has become a focus, especially after a report issued in March found that 44% of alumni no longer in college have not attended any Jewish program since their return from Israel. A further 39% have attended just one or two programs. Only 4% have taken part in more than four programs.

The JEC’s ties to Ohr Somayach were first noticed by David Kelsey, a blogger, on the Web site Failed Messiah. He discovered two references to the JEC on the Ohr Somayach Web site. One referred to the center as an “outreach affiliate”; the other called the JEC the “latest outreach post of Ohr Somayach’s international network.” Both references also mentioned Mordechai Mindell and Lawrence Hajioff, who attended Ohr Somayach’s Monsey, N.Y., yeshiva and are, respectively, the executive director and educational director of the JEC.

Officials of Ohr Somayach told the Forward that they had an “informal relationship around 2003” with the JEC. Tax returns for Ohr Somayach International, the organization’s Brooklyn-based office, show that donations totaling $25,000 were made to the JEC from 2002 to 2003. Presented with this information, Mindell responded in an e-mail: “The JEC has never been nor are we now an affiliate of the Ohr Sameyach organization.”

Siegel, a 33-year-old standup comic who starred in a promotional video for the center, described a slow process of being drawn into a religious life. He went on the first post-Birthright trip offered by the JEC, called Reloaded. When he returned, he got heavily involved in the center, partly as a way of earning another vacation in Israel. While the Reloaded trip cost him $600, the next 10-day program in Israel, called Legacy, was free as long as he attended several weeks of religious courses and spent two weekends celebrating the Sabbath at the home of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family on Long Island.

After that second trip to Israel, which he mostly spent studying in Jerusalem, the JEC rabbis offered Siegel an opportunity to spend a month at a yeshiva in Israel, Machon Shlomo, which would be completely subsidized. Following weeks of 10-hour study days, Siegel thought the program was interesting but knew he couldn’t go further. Some of his friends who had gone with him, he said, are still there and are now very observant.

Not everyone who attends the JEC feels nudged toward ultra-Orthodoxy. Many of the activities at the center are social and without a strong emphasis on religious practice. There are lectures from Jewish intellectuals, along with cocktail parties and an extensive adult bar and bat mitzvah program. But some of those who stay around longer, like Siegel and others, find themselves in one-on-one study sessions with the rabbis, from whom they feel pressure to become more observant.

“Each and every one of them on a person-to-person level is totally open to helping you understand life, spirituality, growth, relationships; anything you want to talk about, they’re open about it,” said another Birthright alumnus, who asked to remain anonymous. “The issue for me was eventually after spending a lot of time there, it became apparent that they did have an agenda to try and get me to incorporate Orthodox practice into my life. And that became awkward.”

After he started individual studies with a rabbi, the situation became strained. “Eventually they wanted me to start memorizing sections of Talmud even though that was not something I was interested in doing,” the anonymous alumnus said. “They wanted me to start wrapping tefillin. I didn’t want to do that, either. And instead of just saying, all right, do your own thing, they kept bringing it up and pressing the issue. It didn’t always feel as though they were willing to be totally supportive of my personal choices.”

In the end, he said, his feeling that the rabbis had ulterior motives forced him out of the JEC altogether.

Most of the young people involved with the JEC perceive no hidden agenda. They describe events and classes that take place in an open, nonjudgmental environment, devoid of any pressure. But this, too, conforms with Ohr Somayach’s methodology.

In an interview posted in 2006, Mendel Weinbach, head of Ohr Somayach yeshivas, described how outreach has helped increase the number of ba’alei teshuvahthe organization has been able to attract. “When we established Yeshivas Ohr Somayach some thirty-four years ago, our student body was made up of young people who came to tour Israel out of curiosity and were ‘picked up’ at the Wall or the Central Bus Station, etc.,” he said. “Today, such things don’t exist. We have established kiruv centers on university campuses, in communities, in many locations throughout the world and have trained hundreds of avreichim [who pursue a life of Torah study] in two-year kiruv courses to run them. This has produced many blessed products.”

Kelsey, who first discovered JEC’s ties to the ultra-Orthodox institution, was recruited to join an Ohr Somayach yeshiva 20 years ago, when he was 18. He has written on his blog and elsewhere about the successful attempts of groups like the JEC to act as a cover for Ohr Somayach while infiltrating the mainstream Jewish world.

“Mainstream organizational enabling, not just funding, is critical to their general success for recruiting in the Diaspora,” Kelsey said. “This is the only way for Haredi institutions to have substantial access in the Diaspora. In Israel, they can pick these people up at the Western Wall. In the Diaspora, they need the support of the secular Jewish community to fund and facilitate a much longer recruitment process.”

Contact Gal Beckerman at beckerman@forward.com

They're at it again

Christian right aims to change history lessons in Texas schools

State's education board to consider adding Christianity's role in American history to curriculum
Chris McGreal in Washington guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 22 July 2009 18.28 BST

The Christian right is making a fresh push to force religion onto the school curriculum in Texas with the state's education board about to consider recommendations that children be taught that there would be no United States if it had not been for God.

Members of a panel of experts appointed by the board to revise the state's history curriculum, who include a Christian fundamentalist preacher who says he is fighting a war for America's moral soul, want lessons to emphasise the part played by Christianity in the founding of the US and that religion is a civic virtue.

Opponents have decried the move as an attempt to insert religious teachings in to the classroom by stealth, similar to the Christian right's partially successful attempt to limit the teaching of evolution in biology lessons in Texas.

One of the panel, David Barton, founder of a Christian heritage group called WallBuilders, argues that the curriculum should reflect the fact that the US Constitution was written with God in mind including that "there is a fixed moral law derived from God and nature", that "there is a creator" and "government exists primarily to protect God-given rights to every individual".

Barton says children should be taught that Christianity is the key to "American exceptionalism" because the structure of its democratic system is a recognition that human beings are fallible, and that religion is at the heart of being a virtuous citizen.

Another of the experts is Reverend Peter Marshall, who heads his own Christian ministry and preaches that Hurricane Katrina and defeat in the Vietnam war were God's punishment for sexual promiscuity and tolerance of homosexuals. Marshall recommended that children be taught about the "motivational role" of the Bible and Christianity in establishing the original colonies that later became the US.

"In light of the overwhelming historical evidence of the influence of the Christian faith in the founding of America, it is simply not up to acceptable academic standards that throughout the social studies (curriculum standards) I could only find one reference to the role of religion in America's past," Marshall wrote in his submission.

Marshall later told the Wall Street Journal that the struggle over the history curriculum is part of a wider battle. "We're in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it," he said.

Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, which describes itself as a "counter to the religious right", called the recommendations "troubling".

"I don't think anyone disputes that faith played a role in our history. But it's a stretch to say that it played the role described by David Barton and Peter Marshall. They're absurdly unqualified to be considered experts. It's a very deceptive and devious way to distort the curriculum in our public schools," he said.

Quinn says that the issue is likely to lead to a heated political battle similar to the one in which the religious right tried to force creationism onto the curriculum. While it wasn't able to inject religious theories in to the classroom, the Texas school board did make changes to teaching designed to undermine lessons on evolution such as introducing views that the eye is so complex an organ it must have involved "intelligent design".

"I think, as there was with science, there's going to be a big political battle," he said.
Social studies teachers will meet shortly to consider the panel's views and make their own recommendations to the board of education which has the final say. The board is dominated by conservatives who appointed Barton and Marshall to the panel.

Other states will be watching what happens in Texas carefully as the religious right campaign seeks new ways to insert God in to the classroom after the courts limited the extent to which creationist theories could intrude on the teaching of biology. But religion is not kept out of schools entirely. Many children recite the pledge of allegiance in class each morning which includes a reference to the US as "one nation under God".

The panel made other recommendations.

Barton, a former vice-chairman of the state's Republican party, said that Texas children should no longer be taught about democratic values but republican ones. "We don't pledge allegiance to the flag and the democracy for which it stands," he said.

And while God may be in, some of those he influenced are out.

According to a draft of guidelines for the new curriculum, Washington, Lincoln and Stephen Fuller Austin, known as the Father of Texas after helping to lead it to independence from Mexico, have been removed from history lessons for younger children.

There's no doubt that history education needs a boost in Texas.

According to test results, one-third of students think the Magna Carta was signed by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower and 40% believe Lincoln's 1863 emancipation proclamation was made nearly 90 years earlier at the constitutional convention.

“Acknowledging Israel’s History”

In response to Obama's "Historic" speech to the Muslim world two weeks ago, Senator Robert Menendez spoke on the Senate Floor yesterday--please take a minute and call his office at 202-224-4744 to thank him.

Remarks of Sen. Menendez

Floor of the United States Senate

“Acknowledging Israel’s History”

16 June 2009

M. President,

Last Wednesday, just a few blocks down the street, a neo-Nazi opened fire at the Holocaust Museum. He murdered a security guard and terrorized the museum’s visitors, including school children, who had come to learn, to express sympathy, to pray. That evil act was the work of a killer who had made his hatred of other religions and ethnic groups well known. And it was a reminder that intolerance, ignorance and anti-Semitism have not yet been defeated in our world.

This tragedy reminds us of the need for sound understanding of one of the darkest episodes in the history of the world. Far too many misrepresent the significance of the Holocaust, especially in regards to the State of Israel and her people. And far too many deny it happened altogether, out of bigotry, hatred and spite.

In the face of so much misunderstanding, I’m compelled today to speak up about the role of the Holocaust in Israel’s history, and Israel’s challenges in preventing anti-Semitic murder from continuing to happen.

M. President,

The Holocaust was the most sinister possible reminder that the Jewish population in exile was in constant jeopardy. It was a definitive argument that anti-Semitism could appear anywhere, and its horrors galvanized international support for the State of Israel.

But let's be very clear: while the Shoah has a central role in Israel's identity, it is not the reason behind its founding and it is not the main justification for its existence.

The extreme characterization of this mistaken view is the following: the Western powers established Israel in 1948 based on their own guilt, at the expense of the Arab peoples who lived there. Therefore, the current state is illegitimate and should all be wiped off the face of the map.

This flawed argument is not only in defiance of basic human dignity but in plain defiance of history. It is in defiance of ancient history, as told in Biblical texts and through archeological evidence. And it ignores the history of the last several centuries.

Because of what’s at stake, it’s well worth reviewing this history in detail, and let me make a modest attempt at a very broad overview.

There has been a continuity of Jewish presence in the Holy Land for thousands of years. Jewish kings and governments were established in the area that is now Israel several millennia ago. After untold years of Jewish sovereignty, based in Jerusalem, the land of the Jewish people fell repeatedly to invaders: Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, many others.

Jews were repeatedly massacred and expelled, and the departure of so many from the land they had always called home developed into an unparalleled Diaspora.

From the 16^th century until the early 20^th century, the land that is now Israel was under the control of a distant Ottoman caliphate based in Istanbul—and during this time, as earlier, many Jews returned to their ancestral homeland.

The Ottoman Empire collapsed after World War I, and the treaty they signed with the Allied Powers granted Great Britain a mandate over the area then known as Palestine.

The League of Nations endorsed and clarified this mandate in 1922, requiring Britain to reconstitute a Jewish national home within the territory they controlled, in accordance with a declaration made by British Foreign Secretary Balfour in 1917, making the restoration of Jewish communities in that area a matter of international law.

By the time World War II had ended, there were more than 600,000 Jews living in the British Mandate of Palestine. In 1947 the United Nations approved a plan to partition the territory into Arab and Jewish states. The Jewish Agency accepted the plan. The Arabs did not.

On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel declared its independence. On May 15, five Arab nations declared war. Despite being surrounded on all sides, Israel prevailed and expanded its borders, providing a small additional measure of security against attacks which were certain to come—and did.

So, to be clear, the more than 700,000 Palestinians who left Israel were refugees of a war instigated by Arab governments, bent on seizing more land for themselves.

But the Arabs who left Israel after its modern founding weren’t the only displaced population in the Middle East. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Jews who left Europe during and after the Holocaust, in the 20^th century, more than three quarters of a million Jews fled or were expelled from their homes in Arab and Middle Eastern nations—in cities that many of their families had lived in for nearly a millennium.

Their possessions were taken, their livelihoods were destroyed, victims of nationalism and hatred of Israel.^[1]

M. President, several thousand years of history lead to an undeniable conclusion: the reestablishment of the state of Israel in modern times is a political reality with roots going back to the time of Abraham.

And so, the way to consider the immeasurable impact of the Holocaust on Israel is not to ask whether the state would exist otherwise.

It is, at least in one sense, to imagine how even more vibrant Israel would be if millions upon millions had not been denied a chance to know it.

M. President,

The attacks on Israel have barely stopped since 1948. Not just attacks by armies but attacks by individuals, attacks by tanks and terrorists—attacks have come in the form of stones and they have come in the form of speeches. Its enemies have attempted to assassinate its people with rockets and assassinate its national character with hateful rhetoric.

Today, it is still surrounded by hostility; its back is still to the sea. It is surrounded by hostility from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

In looking at the threat Israel faces on its southwestern border, one thing must be absolutely, indisputably, unequivocally clear: there is no moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas. Israel is a sovereign, democratic state of seven and a half million people—Jews, Muslims, Christians.

Hamas is a terrorist organization. It won control of Gaza after men in ski masks waged gun battles with another branch of Palestinian leadership. It used that control to launch rockets at sleeping children in the nearby Israeli cities of Ashkelon and Sderot. This is the thanks Israel got for withdrawing from Gaza.

Hamas does not recognize agreements that Palestinian leaders have reached with Israel in the past, it does not recognize Israel’s right to exist at all—and in fact it is ideologically committed to Israel’s annihilation.

Gaza’s people thirst for freedom and opportunity but are held hostage to Hamas’s thirst for destruction, and even today, after the consequences of menacing Israel became clear in a disastrous war, weapons are flowing freely through tunnels into Gaza, Hamas has rearmed, and it is readying itself for the day when it’s going to take on Israel again.

Hamas and Hezbollah may be the head of the snake when it comes to terrorism, but the tail extends much farther back. The weapons terrorists use were sent from Iran. Money they received was sent from Iran.

Propaganda supporting Hamas’s campaign of terror and calling for Israel’s destruction was conceived in, produced by and broadcast from Iran.

The fundamentalist regime in Teheran isn't just an emerging threat, it doesn’t just have the potential to be a threat to Israel’s existence, it is a threat to Israel’s existence. And under no circumstances whatsoever can we allow that conventional threat to become a nuclear one.

Especially in light of the threat of Iran, and in light of the threats extremists pose to so many innocent civilians around the globe, the importance of Israel as a strategic ally and friend to the United States could not be clearer. It is hard to overstate the value of having such a stalwart democratic ally in such a critical part of the world, an ally in terms of intelligence gathering, economics, politics and culture.

Israel is a rose in a desert rampant with repression, a force of moderation against fundamentalism and extremism. It is an ally we can constantly depend on, and count on, to be with us in international fora and on the key decisions that affect the safety and security of Americans around the world.

For more than six decades it has been a key U.S. trading partner and a scientific innovator. We have Israeli engineers to thank for everything from advances in solar power to cell phone technology to AOL Instant Messenger.

Equipment we’re using in Iraq to fight terrorism and keep American troops safe was developed in Israel—and medical treatments we’re using in U.S. hospitals to fight cancer, heart disease and chronic pain were developed in Israel. Israeli-born actors are stars of Hollywood, and an Israeli astronaut has accompanied Americans into space.

So it’s not just in the interests of Israel to have its full history recognized, it is in the national interests and national security interests of the United States. It is in our interests to fully remember the unbreakable bond that has made us both stronger over the last 61 years, and to make it unmistakable that our commitment is as strong as ever.

M. President,

The argument for Israel's legitimacy does not depend on what we say in speeches. It has been made by history. It has been made by the men and women who have made the desert green, by Nobel Prizes earned, by groundbreaking innovations and enviable institutions, by lives saved, democracy defended, peace made, battles won.

There can be no denying the Jewish people’s legitimate right to live in peace and security on a homeland to which they have had a connection for thousands of years.

We can and must move forward in the peace process, and look for ways to reach agreement between all sides. But we cannot erase the moral distinctions between tyranny and freedom and we must not edit history.

If we stay true to history and follow our moral compass, I'm optimistic that talks can lead to understanding and resolution of the very sensitive, detailed and tough issues we face.

M. President,

The next pages of Middle Eastern history are not doomed to be stained by an endless, senseless fight to the death. It doesn’t have to be that way. Different peoples of vastly different backgrounds have peacefully thrived in the Middle East for generations upon generations, and this coexistence can happen once more.

Let us remember the words of Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat in 1978 when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace, words that not long before would have seemed incredibly unlikely.

He said, quote, “Let us put an end to wars, let us reshape life on the solid basis of equity and truth. And it is this call…of the great majority of the Arab and Israeli peoples, and indeed of millions of men, women, and children around the world that you are today honoring. And these hundreds of millions will judge to what extent every responsible leader in the Middle East has responded to the hopes of mankind.” End quote.

I have been to Israel. I have shaken the hands of its citizens and visited its holy places. I know that in the heart of Israelis there is a strong desire for peace.

We can never lose sight of why peace is so important.

After the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, the Jewish people would forever be mindful that no one knows what turns history will take.

And every day we’re mindful that anti-Semitism has not gone away, whether in the form of a firebombing of a French synagogue, defamatory comments by a government official in South Africa or a senseless murder here in Washington, D.C.

Israel is the one place in the world, the one place, where anti-Semitism can be structurally impossible. It is the field of hope on which fear can be vanquished, the island of refuge that can stand firm no matter how stormy the sea of history turns. And that’s why we must always keep it safe, and always keep it free.

The United States is not simply allied with a government—it’s an ally of Israel’s people. It’s an ally of Israel’s democratic ideals. It’s an ally of its history, of its aspirations for peace and prosperity, its can-do spirit and amazing resilience in the face of threats from all sides. In that sense, we’re not just Israel’s allies, we’re admirers. We’re partners. And we are friends.

I plan to do everything I can to see that we support that friendship, this year, next year, every year.

Martin Luther King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We know that in Israel’s quest for security there will be trials along the way, there will be setbacks and there will be dangers too tremendous for words. But if we continue the work that we do, and continue to stay true to the values that drive our journey, then that long arc will eventually reach its resting place in the land of Israel, and a just and lasting peace will be at hand. Thank you M. President, and with that, I yield the floor.