JEWISH NEWS THE CHICAGO

July 24-30, 2015/8 Av 5775

www.chicagojewishnews.com

One Dollar

FIGHTING BACK

A Chicago group addresses the specific needs of the Jewish community relating to Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis Pluto, a Jewish kind of place Iran deal battle gets personal Jewish athletes in Hitler’s stadium

Lady Gaga’s Israeli shoe designer

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Chicago Jewish News - July 24-30, 2015

The campaign for (and against) the Iran deal gets personal By Ron Kampeas JTA

WASHINGTON – Vice President Joe Biden had an inti-

mate phone call this week with about a thousand Jewish leaders, beseeching, teaching and preaching the Iran nuclear deal. Biden’s imploring hourlong call typified how personal the

campaign for and against the Iran nuclear deal is becoming. President Barack Obama, speaking to veterans, cast the deal as one that would save American troops from dying in a

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fruitless war. The pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, a deal opponent, is bringing in its members for faceto-face meetings with lawmakers. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu worked the weekend American talk shows. So did John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state who brokered the deal and called one of Netanyahu’s signature criticisms “dumb.” Much of the focus is on Congress, which has two months to review the agreement between Iran and six world powers led by the United States. It could vote to disapprove, which would kill the deal, but such a vote must garner two-thirds of Congress to overcome Obama’s pledged veto. Biden, on the call, began by alluding to his longstanding relationship with the Jewish community. “Quite frankly,” he said, “I wouldn’t be in this job or any job that I had in elected politics were it not for this community, among others.” Instead of taking questions, Biden unfolded a Q and A with an imaginary Jewish interlocutor who addressed him as an old friend would: “What’s the deal here, Joe?” The questions the vice president put to himself reflect concerns raised by a number of pro-Israel organizations, among them the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “So Joe, doesn’t this mean that even if this stops them from getting a nuclear weapon, they’ve got $100 billion and they’re going to out there and destabilize?” Biden asked himself, reflecting concerns about how sanctions relief will fuel Iranian mischief. His answer: The Iranians would do much greater damage with a nuclear bomb than they would without one. “Imagine stopping them now in the Gulf of Aden” – referring to Iran’s backing for the Houthi insurgency in Yemen – “and stopping them if they had a

nuclear weapon,” Biden said. “As bad, as much of a threat as the Iranians are now to destabilizing the conventional force capability in the region, imagine what a threat would be if we had walked away from this tight deal.” Kerry also was unusually conversational, and personal, in lengthy interviews he gave the news media, but not so convivial. In an interview on NPR, he grew livid when asked about criticism that he and Obama were overly eager for a deal. “I mean, really, it’s one of the dumbest criticisms I’ve ever heard in my life because it has no relationship to reality of what we were engaged in,” he said. “President Obama, in almost every conversation, would say, ‘Remember John, you can walk away.’” One of the main purveyors of the “too eager” trope is Netanyahu. “We were right when we said the desire to sign an agreement is apparently stronger than anything else,” he said the day the final agreement was announced. Obama in his speech in Pittsburgh to the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars cast opponents of the deal as similar to backers of the Iraq war. “In the debate over this deal, we’re hearing the echoes of some of the same policies and mindset that failed us in the past,” Obama said. “Some of the same politicians and pundits that are so quick to reject the possibility of a diplomatic solution to Iran’s nuclear program are the same folks who were so quick to go to war in Iraq and said it would take a few months. And we know the consequences of that choice and what it cost us in blood and treasure.” The intensity reflects the stakes as Congress begins its review of the deal.

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Vice President Joe Biden beseeched about a thousand Jewish leaders in a phone call on the Iran nuclear deal. (JTA)

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Chicago Jewish News - July 24-30, 2015

Pluto – a Jewish kind of place By Edmon Rodman Special to Chicago Jewish News

Doing its own orbital horah out there around 3 billion miles from Earth, Pluto, the dwarf planet, is a very Jewish place. Not that Chabad plans on opening a shul there anytime soon, but considering its size, journey and status, Pluto has a lot in common with the Jewish People. First, there was the humiliation. Some people are always trying to cut us down to size, and in 2006, Pluto, when the planet of my youth was downsized to a mere dwarf planet, could you blame me for feeling bad? Like some Spanish king, the scientific authorities suddenly changed the rules, passed a decree and excluded Pluto from the solar system, how could we not help but identify? In truth, we are a small people (That is, unless you don’t like us, and then, like an object seen in a powerful telescope, we loom very large.) But we have not let our size alter our course of trying to repair and improve things when we can. Then, there is Pluto’s path through space. As for Jews, it’s different. Out of whack with the ecliptic, or plane of travel of the bigger planets, Pluto in its 248 Earth-year orbit around the sun, travels in an elliptical orbit, around 17 degrees off the plane of the rest of the planets. Is it any surprise that many Jews as a tiny minority feel off the ecliptic too? Now, after the New Horizons spacecraft did a flyby of my favorite ‘planet’ and phoned home with new pictures, we can see, like Israel after the Six Day War, how something small can assume a place of respect a little outside of the usual orbits. Sure, Pluto is small, as scientists have now found it to be only 1,473 miles in diameter (In comparison the Moon’s diameter is 2,159). But it has heart, and a big one. In fact, in the new photos, a bright feature on the surface called the “heart” is estimated to be 1,000 miles wide. “Three billion miles away, Pluto has sent a “love note” back to Earth,” began a news story on the NASA website. Jews, of course, have a lot of heart too. We help build hospitals, and museums, and many of us are teachers and healers, and social workers, but sometimes feel that it even with a photo of a heart 1,000 miles wide some would still not see it. From the Pluto flyby we can see that what we once only knew as a featureless, grey blob, actually has a landscape of varied ge-

ography, with an abundance icy mountains as high as 11,000 feet high, and surprisingly, considering Pluto’s age of over 4.5 billion years, no craters. It’s an individual that’s learned how to survive-

a skill we all can appreciate. Back on Earth, where our mission seems to be more about throwing rocks at each other, it’s good to know, especially for Jews who around the world are expe-

riencing increases in anti-Semitism, that perceptions can change. What was for generations seen as a distant, cold, outof-step rock, can now be seen as a place drawn closer, with fea-

tures like our own home, and a heart, even if it just reminds us tha we all have one.

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Chicago Jewish News - July 24-30, 2015

Contents

Jewish News ■ Newly unsealed court records may provide fodder for those who believe Ethel Rosenberg was wrongly convicted and executed. Rosenberg and her husband, Julius, who were Jewish, were famously put to death in 1953 in Ossining, New York, for conspiring to share atomic secrets with the Soviet Union. The potentially exculpatory material is in testimony by Rosenberg’s brother David Greenglass. Greenglass, who died last July at 92, was the lead witness in the McCarthy-era case against the Rosenbergs. In the 1951 trial, Greenglass said he shared information he had obtained from the Los Alamos, New Mexico, headquarters of the Manhattan Project with the Rosenbergs and that he saw Ethel Rosenberg transcribe the information on a typewriter in 1945. In the newly released 46-page transcript of a grand jury hearing on Aug. 7, 1950, which is believed to be the last material from the case to have remained classified, Greenglass made no mention of his sisters’ typing and said he had never discussed spying with her. After Greenglass’ death, the Rosenbergs’ sons, issued a statement saying that David and Ruth Greenglass had passed atomic secrets to the Soviets, then “pinned what they did on our parents – a calculated ploy to save themselves by fingering our parents as the scapegoats the government demanded.” ■ Nearly $50,000 worth of gold coins believed to have been buried during or immediately after World War II were discovered in Germany. Using a metal detector, an amateur archaeologist found 10 coins in a hollow under a tree near the town of Lueneburg; professionals then excavated 207 more, Reuters reported. The coins from several European countries date from 1831 to 1910. Two aluminum seals bearing swastikas and the words “Reichsbank Berlin 244” were discovered with the coins. “This was all found under a pine tree that is around 50 years old ... and that must have grown afterwards ... so we know it must have been buried in the last days of the war or shortly afterwards,” Mario Pahlow, a German archaeologist, told Reuters. Pahlow and other archaeologists studying the coins said they likely were stolen from the Nazi government’s gold reserves. ■ A Holocaust refugee turned Wall Street financial adviser was invited to mark her 100th birthday by ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange. Irene Bergman, 99, is still working and would be one of the oldest people ever to open or close the trading day at the exchange. “It’s very important to me and I’ll tell you why: My father was vice president of the Berlin stock exchange and I’m sure he would be very happy.” Bergman immigrated to the United States in 1942 after fleeing the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and, before that, Germany. An employee of Stralem & Co. since 1973, Bergman currently works out of her New York apartment. ■ A British Jew who fled Nazi-ruled Austria as a child is funding the rescue of up to 2,000 Middle East Christians. George Weidenfeld, a publisher who is also a member of Britain’s House of Lords, says he has “a debt to repay” to Christians fleeing ISIS because the Quakers and the Plymouth Brethren fed and clothed him and helped him to reach Britain in 1938. Weidenfeld, 95, is spearheading Weidenfeld Safe Havens Fund, which supported the flight of 150 Syrian Christians to Poland on a privately chartered plane to allow them to seek refuge, making them the first beneficiaries of the resettlement project. Having arrived in Britain on a train a year before the start of the World War II with just a few shillings to his name, Weidenfeld went on to establish the Weidenfeld and Nicolson publishing business a decade later. He was made a life peer of Britain’s upper house in 1976. “I had a debt to repay,” Weidenfeld said. “It applies to so many young people who were on the Kinderstransports”– the German-language name for the organized shipment of Jewish children, often by their own parents with help from religious and secular non-Jewish helpers, to save them from the Holocaust. The fund aims to offer 12 to 18 months of paid support to the refugees. ■ The excavation of a mass grave of Holocaust victims in Lithuania was halted following an appeal by the Jewish community and the country’s chief rabbi. Martynas Siurkus, a municipal official in Siauliai, announced that the work would be halted “until the appropriate respect is guaranteed for the human remains of the people murdered and buried in the mass grave.” Rabbi Chaim Burshtein had issued a statement calling for a halt to the removal of the bones in the mass grave discovered during road construction work in Siauliai, a city in northern Lithuania located 120 miles northwest of Vilnius, the nation’s capital. “Please halt all disturbance and moving of these human remains,” Burshtein wrote in reference to the work. JTA

JEWISH NEWS THE CHICAGO

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Chicago Jewish News - July 24-30, 2015

European Maccabi Games to play at Olympic venues built by Nazis By Toby Axelrod JTA

BERLIN – They are roaring through Europe, raising dust as they go: Jewish bikers bearing an Olympic-style torch all the way from Israel to this German city. 11 core riders will pull their steel steeds into Berlin’s famous outdoor amphitheater, the Waldbuehne, to help usher in the 14th European Maccabi Games – the first ever in Germany – at a venue built by the Nazis for the 1936 Olympics. Other competitions will be held at the Olympic Stadium here, where Hitler presided over the opening of the games that year. The riders are following in the treads of the Maccabiah Riders, who rode through Europe in the early 1930s to promote the games then being held under British mandate in Palestine. The opening ceremony, which will feature remarks by German President Joachim Gauck and a concert featuring Matisyahu, Dana International and others, will usher in 10 days of sports, parties, a Limmud Germany learning event and more. Some 2,300 Jewish athletes from 36 countries will take part, cheered on by fans bused in from across the country by the Central Council of Jews in Germany. And the sports venues, including Berlin’s Olympiastadion, will be open to all, free of charge and under heavy security. Athletes will compete in 19 sports, as well as a few exhibition games pitting Jewish athletes against German soccer and basketball stars. They will try to break the Guinness World Record for the largest kiddush ever. The European Maccabi Games grew out of the Maccabi movement, which traces back more than a century to Turkey when Jews, then shut out of local sporting clubs, founded the Israel Gymnastic Club in 1895. Jews elsewhere followed suit. The first European Maccabi Games were held in Prague in 1929, and the second a year later in Antwerp. But with the rise of the Nazis, Jewish sports associations were banned. Germany’s Makkabi Club was reinstated only 50 years ago. In 1969, the quadrennial competition resumed, alternating every two years with the Maccabiah Games in Israel. Bringing the European Maccabi Games to Germany was a herculean feat, says Alon Meyer, head of Makkabi Germany. “People told me they never

could imagine setting foot in Germany because their parents and grandparents were sent away from there,” said Meyer, 41, a Frankfurt businessman whose father fled Nazi Germany for Palestine. “Now these people are coming back to see the changes [and take part in] the biggest Jewish event ever held on European ground.” The change to which Meyer referred is the dramatic growth in Germany’s Jewish population. Only a few thousand of Germany’s prewar Jewish population of 500,000 remained in Germany after the Holocaust. Today there are some 240,000 Jews here, most of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Membership in Jewish sports clubs has grown, too. Meyer wanted the competition to be held in the Olympic Stadium, those same stone halls where many Jewish athletes, though not all, were banned in 1936. “They came all the way to Germany and in the morning they got a call, they were not allowed to run. They found out right before the race,” said Steven Stoller, 64, of New Jersey, a distant cousin of the late Jewish-American sprinter Sam Stoller, who was told he could not compete by Avery Brundage, then president of the U.S. Olympic Committee. “I wanted to come to Berlin for my children, my future grandchildren, to have the story live on,” Stoller said. Jed Margolis, the executive director of Maccabi USA, will fly in from Philadelphia to cheer some 200 participating American athletes aged 15 to 85. “At one point in life I would say, ‘I will never go to Germany or buy a German product,’” Margolis said. “Yet there is a vibrant and growing Jewish community there. We want to support them and at the same time teach our next generation” about what happened there. Security will be tight for the event, in the stadium and beyond. Berlin announced the creation of a new digital reporting system for anti-Semitic incidents just in time for the games. “Security is the No. 1 priority,” said Lena van Hooven, spokeswoman for the games. But Danny Maron is not worried. He and the other Jewish bikers have been traveling through Eastern Europe with Israeli flags attached to their bikes. “We have no fear at all,” Maron said. “We are very proud.” Maron’s father, Yoram, a Holocaust survivor, said that he

Adolf Hitler, second from left, watching the Olympic Games in Berlin with the Italian crown prince, left,August 1936. (JTA)

wanted “to show the whole world that after all the death, we are still alive, and we keep moving.” At each stop, from Athens to Romania to Krakow, more Jewish bikers have woven into the pack. The Maccabi torch itself rides in a specially built case carried by Greek biker Kobi Samuel, 48.

“Two of our riders are descendants of actual Maccabi riders of the 1930s, nine are descendants of Holocaust survivors, and two of our bikers are actual survivors aged 73 and 78,” said filmmaker Catherine LurieAlt, who snagged Jewish talk show host Larry King as the narrator for her documentary about

the motorcycle rally. “This is where it all started,” Lurie-Alt said. “We are going through communities where Jewish populations were decimated, on our way to Berlin, where they will enter that stadium with jubilation and joy.”

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