Nuuuu, again Jews are a part of the story

Jackson kids’ Jewish mother could regain custody

June 28, 2009

LOS ANGELES (JTA) -- Reports are conflicting over whether the Jewish mother of two of the late Michael Jackson's children will seek custody.

Jackson, the "King of Pop" who died Friday of unspecified causes, and Debbie Rowe are the parents of Prince Michael I, 12, and Paris Michael Katherine, 11. By virtue of having a Jewish mother, they are considered Jewish.

According to London's Sunday Times, sources close to Rowe said she will not fight Katherine Jackson, the pop star's mother, for custody of the children, and that she would be satisfied with more access to them.

But Iris Finsilver, Rowe’s attorney, told the Associated Press that she was certain that Rowe would seek custody of the two children. Finsilver had previously confirmed that Rowe was Jewish.

Jackson married Rowe, his former nurse, in 1996, when she was six months pregnant following his divorce from Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of the famed late singer Elvis Presley.

Rowe signed a contract waiving her parental rights after she and Jackson divorced in 1999. She later contested the contract, among other arguments expressing her fears that the children were exposed to the teachings of the Nation of Islam through their nanny and some of Jackson’s siblings.

An appeals court ruled in her favor in 2006, but ultimately the custody battle was settled out of court.

Legal authorities contacted by the Los Angeles Times in general agreed that under California law, Rowe would be likely to regain custody, even if Jackson had designated another guardian in his will.

Jackson had a third child, Prince Michael II, with a surrogate mother whose identity has not been revealed.

Theology Expert Offers Guide to Three Major Faiths

Theology Expert Offers Guide to Three Major Faiths

Iquitos Journal

Adopting Forebears’ Faith and Leaving Peru for Israel

Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Peruvian Jews celebrating the Sabbath at a synagogue in Iquitos.

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By SIMON ROMERO

Published: June 21, 2009

IQUITOS, Peru — If Ronald Reátegui Levy someday finds that he is the last Jew of Iquitos, it may well be of his own doing.

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Times Topics: Jews and Judaism | Peru

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Tomas Munita for The New York Times

Ronald Reátegui Levy, a Jewish oil field inspector, has persuaded many Jews in the town to move to Israel.

His dream, which he has vigorously pursued, is to persuade the descendants of Sephardic merchants who settled in this remote corner of the Amazon basin more than a century ago to reaffirm their ties to Judaism and emigrate to Israel.

“It is getting very lonely here,” said Mr. Reátegui Levy, 52, an inspector at Peru’s national oil company, referring to the more than 400 descendants of Jewish pioneers who have formally converted to Judaism this decade, including about 160 members of his immediate and extended family. Nearly all of them now live in Israel.

Until recently, such a rebirth of Judaism here seemed unlikely. The history of Jews in Iquitos, dating from the late-19th-century rubber boom that transformed this far-flung Amazonian outpost into a once thriving city of imported Italian marble and a theater designed by Gustave Eiffel, was almost forgotten.

But Mr. Reátegui Levy and a handful of others began organizing the descendants of dozens of Jews from places as varied as Morocco, Gibraltar, Malta, England and France who had settled here and deeper in the jungle, opening trading houses and following their star in search of riches and adventure.

The rubber trade collapsed, and fortunes here and upriver in the Brazilian city of Manaus vanished. Some Jewish immigrants perished young, succumbing to diseases like cholera. A few stayed, marrying local women and raising families. Others returned home, leaving behind descendants who clung to a belief that they were Jews.

“It was astounding to discover that in Iquitos there existed this group of people who were desperate to reconnect to their roots and re-establish ties to the broader Jewish world,” said Lorry Salcedo Mitrani, the director of a new documentary, “The Fire Within,” about the Jews of the Peruvian Amazon.

Scholars compare the Jews here with groups like the Hispanic crypto-Jews of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico, the Lemba of southern Africa or the Bene Israel of India, who in varying ways have sought to reclaim a Jewish identity that had seemingly been weakened through time.

“We were isolated for so many decades, living on the jungle’s edge in a Catholic society without rabbis or a synagogue, in which all we had were some vague notions of what it meant to be Jewish,” Mr. Reátegui Levy said.

“But when I was a child, my mother told me something that forever burned into my mind,” he said. “She told me, ‘You are a Jew, and you are never to forget that.’ ”

Iquitos lies four degrees south of the Equator, reachable only by boat or plane. Isolation, intermarriage and assimilation nearly wiped out the vestiges of Judaism here. Storefronts chiseled with Jewish surnames like Foinquinos and Cohen, and a cemetery ravaged by vandals, served as some of the few reminders of the community that once thrived here.

But by the end of the 1990s, some of these descendants, including Mr. Reátegui Levy, were brought together by Víctor Edery, a patriarchal figure who organized religious ceremonies in his own home, keeping a few customs alive even if it was done by blending Jewish and Christian beliefs.

Still, the existence of the Jews of Iquitos posed some philosophical challenges to some Jews elsewhere. Since nearly all the Jews who originally settled here were men, their descendants could not attest to having Jewish mothers, ruling them out as being Jewish according to strict interpretations of Jewish law.

Moreover, the Jewish community of about 3,000 people in Lima, the capital, largely preferred to ignore the Jews of Iquitos, some scholars say, in part because of the thorny issues that the Jews here posed about race and origins. This is, after all, a country where a small light-skinned elite still wields considerable economic and political power — and Lima’s Jews are often seen as an elite within that elite.

“The notion of a Jew who looks like an Indian and lives in a poor house in a small city in the middle of the jungle is, at best, an exotic footnote to the official history of Peru’s Jewry as Lima sees it,” said Ariel Segal, a Venezuelan-born Israeli historian whose arrival here in the 1990s to study the community also helped serve as a catalyst for the Iquitos Jews to organize.

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By the start of this decade, the Jews here were gathering to observe Shabbat each Friday and during the High Holy Days at the home of the patriarch, Mr. Edery. After he died, they met on Próspero Street at the home of Jorge Abramovitz, 60, whose father, a Polish Jew, moved here long after the collapse of the rubber boom.

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Many people in Iquitos with Jewish ancestors formally convert and emigrate to Israel.

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Times Topics: Jews and Judaism | Peru

While they lacked a rabbi, they conducted services in Hebrew they learned from cassette tapes. They cleaned their cemetery and began burying their dead there again. They persisted in their campaign to be recognized as Jews and to be allowed to emigrate to Israel.

Finally, they persuaded Guillermo Bronstein, the chief rabbi of Lima’s largest Ashkenazi synagogue, to oversee two large conversions, easing the way for hundreds to move to Israel. The exodus included nearly the entire Levy clan, descended from Joseph Levy, an adventurer who put down stakes here in the 19th century.

Mr. Reátegui Levy, the oil field inspector, moved in 2005 with his wife and six children to Ramla, a dusty city southeast of Tel Aviv. But despite dreaming for decades of such a move, he said he had trouble adjusting to Israeli life.

He said he missed his house with cacao and passion fruit trees, and the status of being a manager at PetroPerú. He murmured something, just audible over the din of this city’s thousands of motorcycle rickshaws, about losing the spark of love with his wife.

So, unlike nearly all the Iquiteños who moved to Israel, Mr. Reátegui Levy moved back, alone.

He still attends Shabbat at Mr. Abramovitz’s home each week, along with 40 or so other regulars who dream of formally converting and moving to Israel. While their numbers have dwindled, he encourages them and regales them with tales of fertile land in the Golan Heights and the bravery of his eldest son, Uri, who is in the Israeli Army.

But something keeps Mr. Reátegui Levy here in Iquitos, the same decaying jungle city that attracted his great-grandfather from Tangier so many decades ago. “My family, my heart and soul, all that I hold dear are in Israel,” he said. “Maybe I am back here for a reason.”

“Fear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”

A truly excellent commentary by Mr. Alperson

Op-Ed: Don’t fear ‘God,’ ‘Torah’ and ‘Judaism’

By Joel Alperson · June 15, 2009

OMAHA (JTA) -- “Fear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”

No, it's not a typo. The Shema, which starts “Hear O Israel,” is the central credo of the Jewish people. It states that there is only one God -- and as a result, only one set of divinely authored ethics and imperatives.

According to the Torah, the Jews were given the daunting task of bringing God-based universal ethics to the world. However, given the number of Jews who are uncomfortable with such a mandate and with religious imperatives in general, I now worry that our prayer could read “Fear O Israel.”

I have this worry because a great number of non-Orthodox Jews -- I am not Orthodox -- are afraid to mention the core concepts of our remarkable religion. We fear that by talking too much or even about any Judaism, even among ourselves, we’ll sound too Christian, too much like our religious oppressors of centuries past, or like Orthodox Jews.

Examples?

I’ve collected the mission statements of the largest 17 Jewish federations in North America, and not one mentions “God,” “Torah” or “Judaism.” Nor do the mission statements of the B’nai B’rith Youth Organization, Hillel, the National Council of Jewish Women, The Wexner Heritage Foundation, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, Hadassah and the Jewish National Fund. Of all the organizations I looked into, only United Jewish Communities mentions but one of the three words, Torah, in its mission statement.

Some surely will be quick to say that the above organizations were not created to convey religious concepts. That is precisely my point: How can we say these organizations are Jewish and at the same time don’t need to mention God, Torah or Judaism?

They are not afraid to use other religious terms -- many of them mention “tzedakah” (charity), “klal yisroel” (Jewish peoplehood) and “tikkun olam” (repair the world). Why are those words appropriate and not the others I’ve mentioned?

Many Jewish organizations apparently feel the need to embrace terms that are universal in nature and avoid terms that are more particularistic. Tzedakah, tikkun olam and klal yisroel are considered universal and inclusive terms.

But God? What about those Jews who don't believe in God, or have their doubts? Wouldn’t they be excluded when God is mentioned in a mission statement?

Torah? Authored by whom? God, man or a combination of the two? And what about those who don’t consider themselves to be Torah observant?

Judaism? Whose Judaism? Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist, Humanistic or something else?

The more our terms suggest that we’re not all the same, the more we shy away from using them. Yet the more we shy away from God, Torah and Judaism, the more we distance ourselves from the foundational elements of our religion and of our people. Consider, therefore, how much meaning we sacrifice to give the impression that we’re inclusive.

I realize that simply adding these words to rarely referenced mission statements is unlikely to significantly better the Jewish world all by itself. As they are currently used, the mission statements not only are guidelines for addressing our Jewish challenges. Perhaps more important, they offer insights into our collective Jewish psyches.

We must be the only people on the planet who believe we can transmit a message to future generations without saying specifically what that message is. Is it any wonder that most Jews cannot articulate Jewish purpose beyond some catch phrases or beyond merely expressing a desire that we survive as a people?

It cannot be coincidental that as generations of Jews become further and further removed from God-talk, they also give less and less tzedakah. We should no longer confuse generic feel-good terms with knowing specifically what the Torah, however we choose to interpret it, asks of us.

The great Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote that “Man is a messenger who forgot the message.” This particularly applies to we Jews: Too many have become messengers who fear their message. The sooner we overcome that fear, the sooner we can talk more about the brilliant and profound life Judaism offers us.

As we talk about, teach and increasingly live that life, more of the Jews we wish would join us will actually do so. They, too, have a need. They want purpose in their lives that money alone cannot fulfill. They want a sense of community that country club memberships won’t satisfy. In short, they want richness in their lives that Judaism and Jewish community can provide in endless amounts.

But make no mistake. We cannot effectively distinguish ourselves from all the other enticing options from which Jews can choose unless we speak to our discomfort-inducing distinctions. As we do this, our communities will become more compelling and more meaningful to more Jews. Ironically, rather than divisive, it is this approach that will make us more inclusive.

(Joel Alperson is a past national campaign chair for United Jewish Communities. He lives in Omaha, Neb. His views do not necessarily represent those of the UJC.)

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“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.