jews of color - B`nai B`rith UK

B’nai B’rith Recognizes Jewish Rescuers — See Page 31
B’NAI B’RITH
M
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PUBLISHED SINCE 1886
Jews of
Color
1 SPRING 2015
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SPRING 2015
Editor’s note
R
ecently, I attended the bat mitzvah of a close
cousin’s daughter. We are Ashkenazi, while
the bat mitzvah girl was adopted as an infant
from China. It was a joyful affair, and my cousin’s
daughter did herself and our family proud. Among
her friends were a virtual rainbow of young Jewish
girls—one adopted from India, another from China,
and yet another, the product of an interracial marriage
where the father is African American. This is the face of
our increasingly diverse Jewish-American community.
Thus, our cover story, by writer Miranda S. Spivack,
highlights “Jews of Color,” a growing segment of our
ethnic tapestry. Complementing the story is a sidebar
about the strong Jewish connection of Louis “Satchmo”
Armstrong. Elsewhere in this issue, you will read about
Beersheba, Israel’s booming city in the Negev, and one
of the reasons for its success, Ben Gurion University,
where remarkable research is underway to solve the mysteries of the human brain and aid in the treatment of
autism and dementia. Finally, we take a new look at old
wines—and new—that are kosher for Passover. Enjoy!
—Eugene L. Meyer
From the Vault
Isaac M. Rubinow: B’nai B’rith Secretary and
Social Welfare Visionary
By Cheryl Kempler
4 SPRING 2015
B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum
I
saac M. Rubinow was an economist
and a physician who believed
strongly in the necessity of instituting
government-sponsored medical and
pension programs. A series of lectures he
delivered in 1912, influenced the policies
of the Progressive Party of Theodore
Roosevelt. Described as selfless and
dedicated, Rubinow was identified with
the causes he valued, well in keeping with
those of B’nai B’rith.
From 1929 until his death in 1936,
Rubinow held the top staff position at
B’nai B’rith, as secretary—a job now
titled executive vice president. He
worked with President Alfred M. Cohen,
who was also board chairman of Hebrew
Union College, in Cincinnati. Typically,
the secretaries had important careers in
their own right, and their perspectives
affected the organization’s policies and
governance. Rubinow was such a man.
Born in Russia in 1875, Rubinow
was 23 when he graduated from New
Isaac M. Rubinow was a Russian-born
physicist, economist and B’nai B’rith secretary.
York University medical school. He
also obtained a doctorate in economics from Columbia University. After
years as an actuarial and statistician in
Washington, he headed the American
Zionist Medical Unit in Palestine.
Then, as secretary at B’nai B’rith, he
edited the monthly magazine, administered its youth organizations and
accompanied Cohen on his fundraising trips to lodges worldwide.
From 1933, Rubinow and Cohen
desperately tried to help Jews suffering
under Nazism. Warned that any organized protest that affected Germany’s
economy or reputation would jeopardize
the lives of B’nai B’rith’s members there,
they joined forces with other Jewish philanthropies, met privately with
State Department officials to request
action and proposed changes in U.S.
regulations which hindered immigration. Filled with despair, Rubinow’s
correspondence reveals that he correctly
perceived that those in power would
never intercede.
As some of his domestic proposals
became laws, Rubinow was considered
an expert who frequently testified about
“social insurance” in Congress and served
as consultant to President Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s Committee on Social
Security Legislation. FDR’s well worn
copy of Rubinow’s last book “The Quest
for Security” was autographed by the
president, who presented it to Rubinow
shortly before he died in 1936.
B’NAI B’RITH
FROM THE PRESIDENT
M A G A Z I N E
10 Jews of Color
6
Passover — A Time for
Reflecting
Spring 2015
By Allan J. Jacobs, President,
B’nai B’rith International
A minority within a minority, Jews of color are a growing segment of the
American-Jewish community. Whether by adoption, conversion or birth, coreligionists from diverse backgrounds are upending traditional views of what it
means to be a Jew.
By Miranda S. Spivack
31
B’nai B’rith Rescuers
B’nai B’rith International honors Jews
who rescued other Jews during the
Holocaust.
18 Satchmo and the Karnofskys
By Sam Seifman
33
Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong is perhaps the most recognizable name in jazz
history. As a child, he was part of an impoverished New Orleans family. But a
Jewish family helped him along the way, cementing a lifelong bond with the
Jewish people.
By Sam Seifman
Diplomatic Luncheons
For years, B’nai B’rith has been
hosting foreign ambassadors in our
D.C. headquarters.
20 Ben-Gurion University
By Taylor Schwink
34
Over the last decade, Ben-Gurion University has done groundbreaking
research on neurological conditions like concussions, dementia and autism.
Once overlooked by many Israelis, it is now the country’s fastest growing
institution of higher learning.
By Maayan Jaffe
B’nai B’rith
Maimonides Lodge
B’nai B’rith Maimonides Lodge in
Havana, Cuba started in 1943 and
thrives today.
By Sam Seifman
26 Beersheba
Fifty years ago, Beersheba, a city in southern Israel, consisted of a few streets
and neighborhoods. Today, it features a booming business district, top-notch
medical care, a cyber-security industry and Ben-Gurion University.
By Hillel Kuttler
On the Cover: Sabrina Sojourner holds the Torah.
Photo courtesy of Charles E. Smith Life Communities
DEPARTMENTS
For additional stories, visit the magazine section of
B’nai B’rith International’s website at
www.bnaibrith.org/magazines.
From the EVP
Passover Wine
8
38
Scamming the Elderly
60
From the President
Passover: A Time for
Reflecting on Our Efforts
and Freedom’s Struggles
By Allan J. Jacobs
President, B’nai B’rith International
P
assover is a good time to reflect on
freedoms gained and freedoms yet
to be achieved.
With our longevity, B’nai B’rith is
uniquely positioned to assess both.
Our service to the Jewish community,
to Israel and to people around the world
resonates with global leaders and in local
communities.
More than two years into my presidency,
I am still humbled by the respect world
leaders pay to B’nai B’rith International.
This respect for our work, for our
analyses and our insights on critical
issues gives us our access to key officials
around the world. Our connections
to seats of government, from city to
city, nation to nation and continent to
continent, ensure that leaders heed our
concerns.
Despite this recognition, there are
freedoms for the Jewish people yet to be
attained. Israel, for instance, is not free
from harassment at global venues. B’nai
B’rith is working hard to change that.
Our work at the United Nations and
its varied agencies is tireless and fulfilling.
With representation at U.N. venues in
New York, Paris and Geneva, our expertise in the workings of the international
body is unparalleled, and we remain a
forceful presence in the defense of Israel.
This March, I, like my predecessors
as president, have done every spring,
led our delegation to Geneva, the home
of the United Nations Human Rights
6 SPRING 2015
Council, for high level diplomatic meetings to address the singular mistreatment
of Israel at this U.N. venue. The Human
Rights Council’s abuse of Israel is shameful, and B’nai B’rith works tirelessly
to get that message across to member
nations to propel them to dramatically
change a supremely flawed system.
We are adamant in condemning the
council’s inherently discriminatory “Item
7”—a permanent basket of resolutions
dedicated to scrutinizing only Israel. It
is the only ongoing item on the Human
Rights Council’s agenda that singles out
one nation. This bias aimed at Israel is
unacceptable, and that is why we attend
Human Rights Council sessions each
year—to put pressure on the council and
to shed light on the council’s biases.
We also made our voice heard at the
United Nations headquarters in New
York City, where our annual delegation
met with dozens of presidents, prime
ministers, foreign ministers and other
senior officials attending last fall’s opening sessions of the General Assembly.
Here too, our knowledge of global issues
is recognized due to our longevity and
engagement. Our presence at the United
Nations, since its inception, gives us
an authoritative voice on some of the
most pressing policy issues of the day.
These high-level meetings offer a distinct
opportunity to make our views known
and to positively impact the world body.
It is not easy to be so active in a global
venue that holds Israel to an entirely different set of standards than the rest of the
world. But we must be there. Having a
place at the table reminds U.N. member
states that someone is looking over their
shoulders and will hold them accountable for their actions.
That’s what we do. We study. We
observe. We speak out. We engage—
both privately and publicly, when appropriate. We make a difference.
Of course, our concerns and efforts
are not limited to the United Nations or
even to Israel.
We are ardent about our role in making
sure the Holocaust is never forgotten.
Within the next several weeks, as we have
for the last 25 years, we will serve as the
North American sponsor of “Unto Every
Person There is a Name.” This program
of the official Holocaust museum in
Israel guarantees that each victim of the
Holocaust will have his or her name read
aloud in a public setting. This program
offers us an indelible link to the past and a
bridge to the future.
We are honored to be trusted with
this responsibility to recognize the
victims of the Holocaust and to honor
and educate others.
We are proud of the level of programming that takes place across Latin America regarding Holocaust remembrance
and Kristallnacht commemorations. In
Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela, B’nai B’rith
B’NAI B’RITH
M A G A Z I N E
SPRING 2015
VOL 129, NO.1
Allan J. Jacobs
President
Daniel S. Mariaschin
Executive Vice President
Sharon Bender
Vice President, Communications
Eugene L. Meyer
Editor
spearheads remembrance ceremonies that
draw community leaders, government
officials and clergy of all faiths. I am so
proud of our continuing role in interfaith
events around the world.
A somewhat related event, our Jewish
Rescuers Citation, which honors Jews
who rescued fellow Jews during the
Holocaust, fills me with pride. In this
issue of the magazine, you’ll read about
Berta Davidovitz Rubinsztejn, who
received the citation a few months ago.
This unique award, launched by our
World Center in Jerusalem four years
ago, is an exceptional way we honor
extraordinary individuals.
With the Holocaust never far from
our minds, we are constantly vigilant so
that contemporary anti-Semitic activities
can never become commonplace.
Few avenues are more open to hatred
than today’s social media and online
communications. Our efforts to combat
online anti-Semitism are vigorous, as we
work diligently to report hateful facebook
pages, which are far too commonplace.
Our #EraseHateSpeech program is off to
a solid start, with scores of offensive pages
reported to Facebook and subsequently
removed. Each page removed is a victory
toward freedom from hate. We encourage our readers to help us in this effort.
If you encounter any offensive pages on
Facebook, let us know. Contact us on
Twitter at #EraseHateSpeech or email us
at erasehatespeech@bnaibrith.org.
At this time of year, I look forward
to reading the submissions to our book
writing scholarship program. The Diverse
Minds Youth Writing Challenge is a
B’nai B’rith contest where high school
students write and illustrate a children’s
book about tolerance and acceptance.
Now in its 9th year, the contest aims to
inspire and unite. Through this program,
we are charting our own course in
cementing freedom from intolerance. If
you’d like to be inspired, then read the
2014 winning books here: bnaibrith.org/
diverse-minds.html.
May the arrival of Passover and spring
inspire you as it inspires us.
Happy Passover to you and your
family.
Happy Passover from
Allan & Jodie
Jacobs
Daniel & Michal
Mariaschin
and the leadership and staff
of B’nai B’rith International
Sam Seifman
Deputy Editor
Taylor Schwink
Contributing Editor
Simeon Montesa
Art Director
Wendie Lubic
Graphic Designer
Zachary Keyser
Advertising and Production
Sharon Teitelbaum
Proofreader
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for which no responsibility is assumed.
Contents ©2015 by B’nai B’rith International.
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B’NAI B’RITH 7
From the EVP
Jews and Baseball: An American
Tradition Continues
By Daniel S. Mariaschin
Executive Vice President, B’nai B’rith International
E
ach spring, it is said, a young man’s
fancy turns to…baseball? But it’s
not just for the young. My interest
in what we still call the national pastime
continues to this day. In this nation of
immigrants, baseball has always been one
of the great common denominators. As
the son of immigrants, I—like many in
my generation—felt this connection. I
trace the beginning of my love affair with
baseball to the day that my sister, then in
the 6th grade, went on a field trip in 1954
to see a game at Yankee Stadium. I was all
of five years old.
When she returned home that day,
she brought with her a souvenir Yankee
pennant, which I quickly appropriated
as my own. I knew nothing yet of the
game, but I liked the nifty red, white and
blue logo. I was hooked.
Later that year, we moved from New
Jersey to New Hampshire, pretty much in
the heart of Red Sox nation. Not knowing
anything about team allegiance, I knew in
my heart-of-hearts that the Yankees were
my team. (I’ve also become a fan of the
Washington Nationals, now my favorite
National League team.) Within a short
span of time, I was playing in pick-up
games with the kids in my neighborhood,
the kind of four-on-four games that bend
the rules and go on until your parents call
you home for dinner.
My father used to buy the New York
Herald Tribune every day at the bus
depot (it came up overnight on the
8 SPRING 2015
Vermont Transit Lines from New York).
And, by the end of the 1957 baseball season, I was studiously reading the sports
section and following my team, starstudded with the likes of Mickey Mantle,
Yogi Berra, Hank Bauer and Bob Turley,
then in the World Series against the Milwaukee Braves featuring Hank Aaron,
Eddie Matthews and Warren Spahn.
Every year since, you could describe
my attraction to Major League Baseball
as nothing short of avid. I’d work our old
GE kitchen radio on hot summer nights,
trying to bring in the Yankee games as
static-free as possible on WMGM from
New York. I played four years of Little
League baseball for the Swanzey Dodgers, but was proud that I was wearing
Mantle’s No. 7. The Yankees in those
days were perennial winners, and the
Red Sox, also-rans, so there were no real
arguments with my friends about which
team was best.
Much of what I learned about baseball
came around the High Holidays. The
ante room in our small synagogue was a
Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin shows his support for his new favorite
National League team, the Washington Nationals.
Jews of Color
Courtesy of “Little White Lie.”
Lacey Schwartz holds the
Torah at her bat mitzvah.
10 SPRING 2015
In America, a Growing
Minority Within a Minority
ameron Jackson is 23, KoreanAmerican—and Jewish.
“My religion is very shocking to
others,” says Cameron. “It is something I always
feel like I have to explain. I was always kind of a
novelty to my Jewish friends, all white. I am their
Asian-Jewish friend. I was kind of like a toy.”
Cameron and Isaac, her 26-year old brother
who was also born in Korea, were adopted by an
intermarried white American couple—a Jewish
mother and a Christian father—who chose to
raise them as Jews in the Washington, D.C., area,
where they had their bat and bar mitzvahs.
As Jews of color in the United States, they are
hardly unique. A 2011 survey by UJA-Federation
of New York found that 12 percent of Jewish
households—perhaps as many as 87,000 households and 400,000 people—in New York City
and its environs identified themselves as nonwhite. The data were culled from findings that
there are Jewish households with black, Asian,
Hispanic and racially mixed residents in this most
Jewish of American cities. (A separate study in the
East Bay area of northern California the same year
produced similar results.)
Last July, Angela Warnick Buchdahl, daughter
of a Korean Buddhist mother and Jewish father,
became the senior rabbi of the Central Synagogue
in midtown Manhattan. Brought up Jewish, she
became the first ordained Asian-American rabbi
in 2001. Newsweek magazine cited her as one of
the country’s 50 most influential rabbis in 2012.
Rapper Aubrey Drake Graham, better known
as Drake, is biracial, of African-American and
Caucasian parentage, and Jewish. He rapped
about it on a Saturday Night Live skit that went
viral. Muhammad Ali has a Jewish grandson,
whose 2012 bar mitzvah he attended. Fox News
personality and newsman Geraldo Rivera is
the son of a Jewish mother and Catholic father.
Rivera had a bar mitzvah and identifies as Jewish.
“I’ve often felt the need to remind people that I
was Jewish,” he was quoted as telling the Jewish
Federation of Northern New Jersey last year. “I
always tell people that Jews are tough and you
never know where we’ll turn up.”
Indeed, while there are stereotypical views of
what a Jew looks like—in the United States that
stereotype is white—many in the Jewish community worldwide would say that the phrase
“Jews of color” is actually redundant. There are
groups in Africa, such as the Lemba, whose DNA
seems to offer proof that they are part of the Jewish community. In 2013, Israel crowned its first
black Miss Israel, Yityish “Titi” Aynaw, who is of
Ethiopian descent.
Carolivia Herron, author
of the children’s book,
“Always an Olivia.”
Courtesy of Carolivia Herron.
C
By Miranda S.
Spivack
B’NAI B’RITH 11
predominantly Anglo-Saxon ruling class as a
racial group apart as they struggled for acceptance
into the mainstream of American life.
Victor Appell, a Reform rabbi and congregational
marketing director for the Union for Reform Judaism, says it was not until well into the 20th century
that gentile Americans began to consider Jews as
white. “Even Jews who appeared white were not
always accepted as white people,” he says.
Courtesy of Camp Be’chol Lashon.
Shabbat at Camp
Be’chol Lashon, with
Ethiopian-Israeli
counselor Maor
Sanbata (holding
the Torah).
12 SPRING 2015
There are dark-skinned Jews from Jamaica, in
Spain, North Africa and Israel. There are Asian
Jews, Yemeni Jews and others who are non-white
Jews by birth. And there are Jews by choice—converts who are brown, white, black and Asian.
Michael Twitty, a Jewish-African-American,
culinary historian and teacher in several Hebrew
schools in the Washington area, underwent an
Orthodox conversion in 2002 after being raised
in a Christian family that lived near an Orthodox
community in suburban Maryland. But, he
says his DNA has shown that his family has
multiple Jewish roots. “Middle Eastern, Eastern
European, Iberian, they are all in there,” he says.
A motivation for his conversion, he says, was that
“I never wanted to have the argument ‘Are you
really Jewish?’ ever again.”
There are also groups of Jews of color that have
teetered on the edge of organized Judaism in the
United States. In Philadelphia, a group of black
Jewish synagogues has been acknowledged by the
Israeli government. In 2011, Michael Oren, the
Israeli ambassador to the United States, visited that
city’s Congregation Temple Bethel, which considers
itself one of the oldest black Jewish synagogues in the
United States and was formed by a group of Christians who led the congregation to embrace Judaism.
First Lady Michelle Obama’s cousin Capers Funnye
is chief rabbi of Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian
Hebrew Congregation in South Chicago.
Indeed, it was not that long ago that Jews,
in the United States and elsewhere, were
not considered white but viewed by the
A Multiracial Jewish Stew
David Nakamura, a White House
correspondent for The Washington Post, grew
up in a mixed household, with a Jewish mother
of Ashkenazi descent and a Japanese-American
father whose religious background was Christian.
Nakamura says that he feels closer to Judaism,
partly because it is “the quieter faith.”
“We talk about being Jewpanese,” Nakamura
says. “We use it fondly. Not many people
recognize that I am half-Jewish when they look
at me and at my name until I recite what little
Hebrew I knew. It blows people away.”
Nakamura and his wife Kris Schenck, whose
family background is Christian, have discussed
what to do about religion and mark both
Chanukah and Christmas with their two-yearold daughter. He says he and his wife will try
to explain their diverse backgrounds inside the
family and let the children decide for themselves
“when they are ready.”
Born in Jamaica, Lewis Gordon is a black Jew
whose family descends on his mother’s side from
Irish Jews who came to the Caribbean island
in the 19th century and were themselves of
Sephardic and Mizrahi origins. But, as Ashkenazi
Jews from Eastern Europe became the majority in
the United States, they defined the norm, he says.
“I am a very interesting case,” says Gordon,
a philosophy professor at the University of
Connecticut. “We know I am not white. I am
so racially ambiguous in other ways, which is
the Jewish story. There are people who see me
as Ethiopian. I am [also] a Tamil Indian. My
great-great-grandmother married a man who was
Scottish and Tamil,” a minority group in India.
Carolivia Herron can trace her ancestry to
Jews who landed on one of the South Carolina
“I always tell people that Jews are tough and you never know
where we’ll turn up.”
—Geraldo Rivera, FOX News correspondent
Praying Across Racial Lines
It is Friday afternoon at the Wasserman
Residence, part of the Hebrew Home of Greater
Washington and the Charles E. Smith Life
Communities, a retirement and assisted living
complex in Rockville, Md., and time for services.
The spiritual leader of this group of retirees is
Sabrina Sojourner, an African-American convert
to Judaism brought up in a Christian household
in Washington. A convert to Judaism when
she was in her 40s she belongs to Adas Israel, a
large conservative synagogue in Washington,
and is hoping to attend rabbinical school. At
Wasserman, she leads a dozen or so retirees in
prayer. The only other black person in the room is
a health aide assisting one of the residents to turn
pages and find his place in the prayer book.
Rabbi James R. Michaels, director of pastoral care
in the Charles E. Smith Life Communities, is sitting
in on the service, helping lend his voice to some of
the prayers, which Sojourner chants flawlessly in her
soothing alto voice. “The people here love her,” says
Michaels. “They speak about her as the ‘lady with
the white hair.’ They don’t see color.”
But that is not always the experience of Jews
who don’t fit the Ashkenazi white stereotype.
“Many people who are Jews of color have
very painful stories to tell about having not been
accepted in their congregations and having the
Lacey Schwartz with
her mother Peggy in
her award-winning
documentary, “Little
White Lie.”
Courtesy of “Little White Lie.”
coastal islands with the help of the U.S. Marines
returning from Tripoli in the early 19th century.
Her personal history is described in detail in her
children’s book, “Always an Olivia,” and in the
recently published “Asenath and the Origin of
Nappy Hair,” both works of fiction based on her
relatives’ journeys.
Herron discovered that she is descended from
Sarah Shulamit, born in Venice and kidnapped by
pirates hoping to ransom her to Jews in Libya. A
young man, also a captive, was on the ship, and
he and Shulamit escaped in Tripoli, where they
were aided by Jews who sent them to the U.S.
Marines for protection. Together, they sailed to
the United States and disembarked in 1805 in
the Georgia Sea Islands, where they married and
raised a family. Their children intermarried with
the local Geechee population and succeeding
generations were of a darker skin color.
Sarah began using her middle name—translated as Olivia—because of fears that, if people
knew she was Jewish, she would come to harm,
Herron says. When Herron was nine, she met
her 103-year-old great-grandmother Olivia, who
recounts a story to Herron that Olivia’s greatgrandmother told her: “We had to leave a lot of
countries quick. It’s because we’re Jews and some
folks don’t like Jews, so we had to flee. That’s how
we came to the United States.”
Herron was raised as an African-American
Christian in Washington. Even before hearing her
great-grandmother’s account of the family history,
she felt a connection with Jews and Judaism. As
a 5-year-old, she says she felt transported to Sinai
during a church service in which congregants
were acting out the story of Moses.
“If Jews had proselytized, I would have converted
when I was 20 or 21,” she says. Instead, while in her
40s, and a professor at Mount Holyoke College,
in South Hadley, Mass., she converted. Now, she
writes about her family history, she tutors students
in Hebrew and Latin and is publishing books by
African Jews. It’s a full—and very Jewish—life that
she observes at the conservative Tifereth Israel Congregation in Washington.
“I always wanted to be Jewish,” she says,
pointing to a theology that allows questioning,
contemplation and faith to be joined together.
B’NAI B’RITH 13
Courtesy of UJA Federation, NY.
est from mainstream
Jewish organizations in
promoting multiculturalism.
“10 years ago we
were brushed off a
little,” she says. “The
issue was seen as not
important. Now this
is really starting to be
appreciated. There is
interest in who Jews
are, and the realization that you need to be able
to address the needs of Jews of color.” Organized
Judaism, she says, is beginning to say, “This is
something we need to pay attention to. It is a Jewish communal issue, if you’re interested in Jewish
continuity.”
From left to right: Lacey
Schwartz, moderator;
Tamara Fish; Siona
Benjamin; and Rabbi
Rigoberto Emmanuel
Viñas speak at UJA’s
“Racial and Ethnic
Diversity: We Talk the
Talk, Now Let’s Walk
the Walk” conference in
New York City.
14 SPRING 2015
veracity of their Jewishness questioned,” says
Rabbi Appell, of the URJ. “Some tell of being
shown the kitchen because someone assumed that
they worked there.”
Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb of Adat Shalom,
a Reconstructionist synagogue in suburban
Bethesda, Md., who is also the father of two
adopted African-American sons, is emphatic that
this mindset must change: “We must create the
norm where we assume that people belong, and
never inadvertently ostracize someone whom you
may think ‘doesn’t look Jewish.’ Anyone looks
Jewish, potentially.”
David Mallach, managing director of the
Commission for the Jewish People of the UJA
Federation of New York, says the results of
the organization’s seminal racial survey of area
Jews were eye-opening, and they have led the
organization to help Jewish organizations become
more inclusive and aware of the diversity in the
Jewish community.
“It is a slow process, it is an evolution of our
understanding of what is the Jewish community,”
Mallach says. The federation is making grants
to several groups to promote greater sensitivity
about the diverse communities within the larger
Jewish community. Adds Mallach: “Basically,
what we are trying to do is to develop an
awareness of the diversity of the New York Jewish
community, and what the various established
organizations can do to be a welcoming and
engaging presence for diverse Jews.”
Chava Shervington, who is African-American
and president of the Jewish Multiracial Network,
a national volunteer organization with about
3,000 members, says she is seeing more inter-
In Every Tongue
Diane Tobin and her late husband Gary Tobin,
a Jewish scholar, adopted an African-American
son whom they raised in their Jewish faith. They
soon decided that they needed to help create a
more welcoming environment for their multiracial family.
“People felt a sense of isolation,” says Tobin,
who formed Be’chol Lashon (In Every Tongue) in
2000. Despite estimates that suggest the nonwhite Jewish population in the United States is
growing, Tobin says, “People were not seeing it.”
Be’chol Lashon, based in California’s San
Francisco Bay Area (with a New York branch),
describes itself as the “advocate for the diversity
that has characterized the Jewish people
throughout history…” The group’s aim is to
“foster an expanding Jewish community that
embraces its differences.”
Denise Davis, a physician in San Francisco, has
participated for several years in the organization’s
family camp. When the group founded an
overnight camp, she was its first physician. Davis
converted to Judaism when she was 30; a move
she says was long in coming. Growing up in
Missouri as an African American whose family
was politically liberal and attended the humanist
Unitarian Universalist Church, Davis says she
always felt an affinity for Jews and Judaism.
“We all have our histories and our multiple identities . . .
We are all mutts.”
—Rabbi Fred Dobb
“My mom was a Christian, but I knew very
early on that was not my path,” says Davis.
As a youngster, she felt the tug of Judaism,
finding Jewish friends at the Girl Scout camp
she attended, and together, seeing themselves as
outsiders. “To be a political progressive in a small
town in Missouri, that is being an outsider,” she
recalled.
The Jews she knew, she says, “were our
landsmen. I felt much more comfortable in
that milieu than I did in the dominant milieu,
black or white. Those were my beginnings.
There was never a ‘moment.’ It has always been a
progression.”
For her biracial daughter, Aviva, 15, being
Jewish always has been part of her identity,
even though she has stood out as one of the few
African-American Jews in her group of friends
(her father is Ashkenazi). “It just so happens
that her core group of girlfriends are Jewish,”
Davis says.
Aviva describes herself as black, white
and Jewish. She says that skin color has
played a lesser role in her Jewish life
than the simple fact of being Jewish. She
recalled a time in kindergarten, when a
girl in her class pressed her about why
she could believe in God but not in Jesus.
Race did not enter into the discussion.
“Years later, I did get a skin color thing,”
she says. She was then in fifth grade, and
a Christian classmate told her “she didn’t
look Jewish.” “Maybe she thought because
I had a darker skin tone I would somehow
belong to a church,” Aviva mused.
Lacey Schwartz, who heads Be’chol
Lachon’s New York branch, says being
Jewish is a key part of her identity, as is her
black heritage.
Schwartz recently produced “Little
White Lie,” a documentary film about
her discovery that her biological father
was black, a fact that her parents hid from
her for decades. Mainstream Judaism in
the United States, she says, needs to think
about how to become more inclusive.
“We strive to change the conversation,”
she says, “from ‘we are going to recognize
diversity ... to making it a more central part of the
values of the organization that will make it more
comfortable for diverse Jews to participate in all
aspects of communal life.”
Rabbi Dobb, of Adat Shalom, says Jews in the
United States and globally are often descended
from diverse races and ethnicities. “It is a grave
injustice to budding five- or nine-year old Jews”
to focus on their race, he says. “You may think
they look different. They need and deserve to feel
completely at home in the Jewish community.
I am the proud rabbi of a community that is
intentional about being inclusive and welcoming,
and a proud member of a family which includes
Jews of color.
“I look forward to the day when everyone
understands themselves as a Jew of color,” he
adds. “We all have our histories and our multiple
identities, and we all have multiple inputs into
our gene pool. We are all mutts.”
B’NAI B’RITH 15
B’NAI B’RITH INTERNATIONAL: THE GLOBAL VOICE OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY
“My Time Here
Has Mattered”
B
’nai B’rith International
will serve the Jewish
community for years to
come due in large part to the
generosity of those who believe
that Jewish continuity is of
the utmost importance as they
enrich the world today and
make a difference for tomorrow.
The following individuals
are members of the 1843
Society of B’nai B’rith. They
have made planned gifts to the
B’nai B’rith Foundation of the
United States. On behalf of
B’nai B’rith International, my
heartfelt thanks to all of those
listed for their commitment to
a strong Jewish future.
Sincerely,
Allan J. Jacobs
President, B’nai B’rith International
*May their memory serve as a blessing.
The Planned Giving Department strives to keep
our lists as accurate as possible. Please let us know
of any corrections at 800-656-5561 or
foundation@bnaibrith.org.
Lester Abeloff*
David* and Hilde Abraham
Saul and Rae Adelman
Irving Adler
Morris Adler*
Minette Alpern
Arnold and Andrea Alpert
Joseph* and Debora* Alstater
Harry and Ruth* Altschuler
Jackie H. Alvy
ANONYMOUS
Natalie Anger
Anne Atlas
Hannah L. Aurbach
Danielle Avidan
Jacob Axelrod*
Paul L. Backman
Sheldon Badzin
Max* and Gertrude Baer
Tommy P. Baer
Marvin K. Bailin
Joey and Millie Baker
Walter Bakovsky*
Leslie and Frances M. Balter*
J. Leiter Bamberger
Richard F. Barak
Lewis and Lauri Barbanel
Charles and Ruth Barbash*
Seymour Bard
Louis H. Barnett
Gerald M. Barsha
Ira A. Bartfield
Solomon Bass
Gerald J. Batt
Max and Elaine Baverman*
Joel Beck
Henry and May Becker
Sol D. Becker*
Benjamin Bendat*
Gilbert and Lynne Benjamin
Howard and Dorothy Berger
Joseph and Gertrude Berger
Erna Berid*
Sally Berkove*
Lillian Berlinger*
Herman Berman*
Ray Berman*
Bert* and Alice Bernd
Bradley Bernstein
Rubin Binder*
Rose Bisno*
David L. Bittker*
Burt Black
Robert Blake*
Betsy Blake-Thrasher
Shirley Blank*
ANONYMOUS
Ethel Blitzstein*
ANONYMOUS
Paul R. Bloomberg
James R. Blumberg*
Bert Bornblum
Floyd A. Bornstein
Donald and Sally Braman*
Irvin Bregman*
Seymour and Ruth Brick*
Audrey Y. Brooks
Lou and Natalie Brott*
Aaron and Belle Brown*
Alvin I. Brown*
Alvin Brown
Bernard Sam Brown*
Bert Brown*
Alfred Brownstein*
Richard J. Brownstein*
Irving Brucker*
Irwin Burack*
Sam Burnes
George Bursak*
Felice F. Caspar
Myra Canelli
Rea Chaban*
Herman Chadacoff
Ronald B. Chaffin
Philip Chanen
Robert A. Christenstein
Bret Cipes*
Sidney M. Clearfield
Sidney H.* and Rose Closter
Milton J. and Molly Cobert*
Alex Cohen*
Sheldon S. Cohen
Anne Cohn
Stanley Coira
Miriam Rosenblatt Comenetz
Alice Confortes*
Kathryn Cooper
Ned Cooper
David Coplan*
Steven B. Crystal
Joseph Daniels
Harold Davis
Murray Davis*
Sylvia B. Denbo
Rhoda Denney
Bernard Derow*
Hannah Deutch
Henry X. and Shirley Dietch*
Renee Dobshutz*
Harlan G. Dolgin
Al Dolin*
Joseph H. Domberger*
Ralph H. and Bertha Dorn*
Barbara Douglas
Alina Dovin*
Donal Dreifus*
Samuel Drogy
Jack and Miriam Dubit*
Rose Dubrow*
Abe Dubrowsky
Alan Dworkin*
Michael L. Easley
Kurt Easton*
Betty Edelman
Edith Eichenbaum
David and Belle Eiten*
Robert H. Elkes*
Jacob Epstein
Michael J. Epstein
Sidney Faber*
Melvin Farber*
Joel D. Fedder
Stanley M. Feldman
Russell G. Feran
Gertrude Fertig*
Jules and Lillian Fields
Harold M. Fienberg
Herman Fineberg*
Cecil Finegold*
E. David First
Susan Fischel
Helen Fisherman
Jacob Fishkin
Jack Fleischer
Jenny Flink*
Jerome G.* and Marlene Z. Franklin
Julius Freilich*
Edward I. Fried
Bernard L. Friedman
Harriet Friedman
Norbert Friedman
Hanlin A. Fritz
Fred B. Fruchthendler
Frieda Furman*
Sam Furshpan*
David and Penelope Gallo
Stanley Ganer
David Garrick*
Priscilla Gelber
Shirley C. Geller
Herta Gertler*
Barney Gertner*
Aaron Gilman
Alfred Ginepra*
Al and Betty Gitelman
Marvin Glyder
Yale* and Pauline Goldberg
Billy and Rosalie Goldberg*
Kurt and Margarete Goldberger
Alfred Golden*
Max Goldfield*
Stuart I. Goldman
David C. Goldstein
Fannie Goldstein
Irene Saunders Goldstein
Henry Good*
Joseph Goodfriend*
Mal* and Beatrice Goodman
Matilda Goodman*
Lillian Gorodess
Siegard and Roslyn Gottlieb
Robert E. and Bette S. Green
Leonard Greenberg*
Sue Greenberg*
Sylvia Greenberg
Eli Greenblatt
Milton H. Greenfield
William Greenfield*
Mae Greenhut*
Aaron Grossman*
Leo and Rosalind Grossman*
Cy Gruberg
Doris Siegel Halper
Joan Halpern*
Abby Halpert*
R. A. Hankin*
Emile Harrosh
Michelle Hartman
Daniel Heckelman
Richard D. and Phyllis G. Heideman
Florence Heimlich*
Al and Miriam Herman*
Marty Herman
Stephen Hersh
Erwin and Corrine Hesser*
Ralph and Magdalena Heymann
Harvey and Terry Hieken
Pearl Hill
Jack and Betty Hoffenberg*
Emily P. Hoffman
Henrietta Hoffman
Irvin Hoffman*
Ricardo Holzer
David Hoppenstein*
Richard and Nancy Horowitz
Nathan and Ruth Horwitz*
Steven Horowitz
Rose Hourwitz
Jack Howards
Gertrude Hulbert
Anna Huscher*
Simon and Dorothy Indenbaum*
Barbara D. Isaacson
Allan J. Jacobs
Jules Jacobsen*
Ilse Jacobson*
David and Sheri Jaffa
Harold S. and Ellen Jaffa*
Melvin Janowitz
Katie Jordan*
ANONYMOUS
Rick Kahn
Ruth Kahn
Sylvia Kamen
Philip Kaminer*
Beverly Kanfer*
Aaron and Selma Kaplan*
Abe Kaplan*
Edward H. Kaplan
Harry* and Muriel Kaplan
Elliot C. Kaplan
Leo Kaplan
Nathan Karchmer*
Michael B. Kates
Blanche C. Katz
Edward Katz
Charles O. Kaufman
Saul Kaufman
Myron Kaufmann*
Saul Kay
Zoltan Kellner*
Frances Kemp*
Greta Kende*
Philip and Essie Kershner
Harold Kleid*
Harris Klein
Harold J.* and Vivian Klein
Howard and Rosalind Klein
Wellington Kohl*
Stewart L.* and Estelle Kohn
Clifford and Selma Komins
A. George Koplow*
Reti Kornfeld*
Herman Kosovitz*
Gerald and Adele Kraft
Sidney Krakower*
Anita Kramer
Phillip Kraus*
A. J. Kravtin
Myer S. Kripke*
Harvey E. Kronick
Lillian N. Kronstadt
William Krugman
Hannah Krumholz
Moe and Bertha Kudler*
Irving Kumin*
Norma Kurtz
Theresa Lackenbach
Richard Landau
Ted Landau
Myrna S. Lane
Walter B. LaRaus
Richard and Audrey* Lasday
Reta Lasky*
Walter Lasky
Frank Lauer*
Burton Lazarow
Andrew Lebwohl*
Ruth Leder*
Debra Leeds
Seymour Leslie*
Edward Lesok
Alan L. Lessack
Curt M. and Lillian Levi*
Herbert Levi*
Kurt Levi*
Theodore Levi
Bernard Levicoff
Joseph Y. Levin*
Jules Levin
Stanley M. Levin
Marcia Levinsohn
Harry Levitch*
Martin A. Levitin
Jack E. Levitt
Charles Levy
Hyam A. and Ida L. Libby*
Ira Lipman
Sanford William Lipson*
Donald Lisner
Aaron Liverant
Helen Galland Loewus*
Ray Lourie*
Ben Lubel *
Alan Ludwig*
Pamela Lynch
Edmund Lynn
Lester Macktez*
Roman Mager*
Morton M. Malis*
Jeffrey H. Mandel
Jerome B. and Lillian Mann
ANONYMOUS
Eugene Margolis*
Gertrude Margolis
Harriet Margolis
Wayne A. Martin
Rebecca J. Max
Paul May*
Beatrice Mayer
Wayne Meisels
Eva Mela*
Thomas Melvin*
Oscar Merber*
Allen Meyer*
Rita Meyer
William* and Frances Meyer
Norman Michlin*
Ruth Mikola
Bob Miller
Harold Miller
Jerrald Miller
Mitchell W. and Shirley Miller
Samuel Miller*
Tillie Millman*
Rhoda Minowitz
Esther Molat*
Stanley and Grace Morgenstein
Steven H. Morrison
Harry and Ann* Moskowitz
Lena Moszkowski*
Alfred Muchin
Irving H. Myers
Ken and Ruth Nathanson
Anita Nelkin*
Etta Nemser*
Sylvia G. Neuman
Daniel Nidess*
Leo J. and Sylvia Novarr
Warner Bein Oberndoerfer
Lee Offutt
Mark D. Olshan
Jack and Rose Orloff*
Alexander T. and Harriet Ornstein*
Louis Osofsky
Shirley Partoll
S. Bruce Pascal
Fred Pasternack
Michael S. Paul
Meyer Pearlman*
Murray Pell
Oscar Peretz*
Rose Perlman*
Murray Pfeffer*
Bernard and Judith Platt
Edwin and Frieda Podell*
Munio Podhorzer
Laurence Poisner
Ruth Polen*
Raymond Pollack
Robert Pollack*
Raymond Pollock
Morris Polsky*
Sidney Possner*
Bernard Potts*
Marian Rahm*
Jack Rapoport
Jack L. Rappoport
ANONYMOUS
Milton Recht*
Elaine Rees
Seymour D. Reich
Richard B. Reinman
Milton* and Annette Reiter
Ruth Resnikoff
Harold Richards*
Eli Robins
Roberta Robins
Richard Rogow
Sharon Metro Roll
Harriett A. Rose
Dave Roseman
Roselle Roseman*
Frank Rosen
Fred Rosenau*
Rose Rosenbaum*
Solomon and Gertrude Rosenbaum*
Gertrude Rosenbluth*
Robert Rosenfield*
Carter M. Rosenthal
Martin Rosenthal
Elinor Ross
Harvey Roth
Max Roth*
Melvin Roth
Nathaniel H. Roth
Sheila Roth
Sophie Rothberg*
Howard E. Rothman
Sharen Rozen*
Harold Rubin
Terry Rubin
Norman Rubinstein*
Stephen D. Rudman*
Charlene Russo
James Rutlader
Israel Sack*
Lilly Salcman
Charles Saltzman*
Gary P. Saltzman
Rebecca Saltzman
Mollie Samson*
William and Lillian Sandler
Alexander C. Sands
Sue Saperstein
Henry J. Satsky*
Jack Sayre
Sophie Schall*
Seymour L. Scharf
Abe Schein*
Ilse Schiff*
Jack and Isabel Schiff*
Kent E. Schiner
Ariane Schlomy
Eugene Schneck
George Schneider*
Morton M. and Mary Schneider
Sidney* and Mary P. Schochet
Marna Schoen
Meryl Schorr
Arthur C. Schott
Zelig Schrager
Harvey J. Schramm
A. Harvey Schreter*
Sidney Schulman
Lila Schultz
Marilyn Schultz
Dave Schumann
Carl and Lillian Schustak*
Jonathan and Roberta Schwartz
Sidney and Marrian Schwartz*
Barbara Schwartz
Hugh Schwartzberg
Bernard Schwarz
Samuel Schweid*
Jacob Scovronek
Peter Seadle
Jerry Seigel*
Dorothy Selik*
Harry Shafer*
Louis Shane*
Bernard Shapiro*
Faye Shapiro*
Sherman E. and Rita Shapiro*
Sylvia Shapiro
Florence Sharenow*
Harry Shechtman*
Edythe Sheinbaum
Gerald M. and Reva Sherman
Samuel Sherwood*
Harold Shulman
Sherwood Shulman*
Bernard Shultz*
Max Shustek*
Murray H. Shusterman
Henry Sians*
Norman and Helen* Sider
Irving Siegel
Moses Siegel*
Otmar and Natasha Silberstein
Irving and Frances Silver
Jules* and Lucy Silver
Abraham Simcovitz*
Sylvia Simmons*
Bernard* and Dorothy Simon
Edward and Sylvia Simon
Helen Simon*
Horace Simon*
Kurt and Tessye Simon*
Rosaline Simon*
Sidney & Elaine Simon
Walter E. Simon
Alvin Singer
Edward Singer*
Philip Siragher*
Alvin L. Sitomer*
Trudy Sivick
Arnold C. Small
Steven Smiga
Emanuel and Zelda Smith
Milton and Helen Smith*
Moishe Smith
William Snyder*
Phyllis Solof
Al Solomon*
Norman M. Some
Harold B. and Diane* Sparr
Benjamin Spector*
Robert A. Speert
Leonard B. Spiegel
Jack J. and Charlotte Spitzer*
Robert B. Spitzer
Larry Stahl
Jorge Stainfeld
Betty Starkman
Deborah Stein
Walter and Katie Stein*
Harold I. Steinberg
Norman Steinberg
Sidney and Jeanne Steinberg
Joseph Sterling*
Horace A. Stern*
Joseph* and Rosamond Stern
Julius and Elinore Stern*
Lynn Leb Stern*
Martin Sternstein
Judith Stevens*
Evelyn Stieber-Bernstein*
Michael R. Stoler
Sam and Elaine Stone*
Gerd Strauss*
Murray Sudakow*
Frieda Susskind*
Hilda Sussman*
Charles Swartz*
Charles Synes*
ANONYMOUS
Dan Tartakovski
Arthur Taub
ANONYMOUS
Daniel* and Hadassah Thursz
Nancy Tobin
Hannah Traube
Irma Turetsky*
Leslie H. Tye
Anne Umansky
Hannah Unger*
Carl M. and Rose Valen
Florence A. Wallis
Mark Wancket
Harold L. Warren
Arnold Wasserman
ANONYMOUS
Edward D. Weberman
Joseph Wechsler
Marilyn Weigen
M. Sanford Weil*
Herbert Weinberg
Arthur Weinberger*
Jacob Weinberger
Josef and Bernice Weinstein
Phyllis Weinstein
Harvey and Lucille* Weisberg
Burton and Sylvia Weisfeld
Gisele Weisman*
Joseph* and Helen Weisman
Elias Weiss*
Lillian Weiss*
Morton Weiss
Richard Weiss*
Edythe Weitzman
Gerald Westheimer
Dorothy Whitman
Robert Wiener*
Stephen Wiener
Joyce L. Winfield
Al E. Witten
Irwin Wolfe*
Samuel Wolfe*
Hans Wolff*
Thomas Wolff
Frances Yasney
Abraham Yormack*
Jerome L. Yudkoff
Lowell Zeleznick*
Philip and Rose Ziffer
Satchmo and the Karnofskys:
Louie Armstrong’s Deep Jewish
Connection
By Sam Seifman
Photos courtesy of Jacob Karno.
Morris Karnofsky was close
friends with Louis
Armstrong and
lent him $2 for
his first cornet.
Myer Karnofsky,
met Louis
Armstrong and
together they sold
coal and matches
in the Red Light
District and the
Irish Channel
neighborhoods.
18 SPRING 2015
I
n 1949, Marion Karnofsky
(now Karno), stood on Rampart Street in New Orleans
with his father, Myer, outside their
family’s HK Department Store.
There they watched the Zulu
parade—a mostly African-American procession held every year on
Mardi Gras. There were four floats,
each with a big band between them.
On one stood Louis Armstrong, by
then among the most famous jazz
musicians in America and king of
the parade. Armstrong recognized
Myer immediately and quickly
jumped off his float to greet him.
Everyone in the parade yelled at
him to get back on the float, but
it didn’t matter.
“It’s not like they’ll leave
without me!” Armstrong said.
The two men ran off to the back
of the store, drank Jax Beer and
reminisced. Armstrong would, of
course, later hop back on his float.
At the time, Marion didn’t
know who this man was—he was
10 years old and had only heard
about him from his father. But
today, this moment sticks in his
memory. It brought to life the
stories he’d heard about the man,
Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong,
his family helped raise—
unknowingly affecting the course
of jazz history.
Louis Armstrong, the grandson
of slaves, was born into poverty in
New Orleans. His father, William, abandoned the family when
Louis was young, and his mother,
Mary, worked as a prostitute to
support her family. Louis, when
he was 7 years old, had to find
work, too.
This is how Myer and Louis
met. Myer, then 18 and the son of
Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants, sold
coal and matches in the Red Light
District and the Irish Channel—
Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum.
both dicey neighborhoods. The fact
that Myer was white and Armstrong
black was considered mutually
beneficial—depending on which
neighborhood they were traveling
through. Still, at that time, their
partnership was unusual.
This is not to say that the
Jewish and African-American
communities didn’t have a
relationship. Because of the
proximity of their neighborhoods
and the level of discrimination they
both faced, there was a working
relationship. But it wasn’t just
about work. Armstrong’s close
personal connection with the
Karnofskys was atypical.
“His relationship with them
was kind of special,” says Bruce
Raeburn, a Tulane University professor and author of New Orleans
Style and the Writing of American
Jazz History. “[The Karnofskys]
didn’t just work with him, they
took interest in him.”
Race was secondary. Especially
in those days, Jews weren’t generally considered “white.”
“They were Jews,” says Marion’s
brother, Jacob, of his family’s
involvement with Armstrong.
“They didn’t really feel the need to
discriminate.”
As time went on, Armstrong
not only became close with Myer
but with his whole family. He
eventually ended up staying at the
Karnofsky house and later recalled
singing a song called “Russian Lullaby” with the family and feeling
very connected to Jewish music
and the Jewish experience. In
1950, he recorded a song with the
same name—his own riff on the
childhood lullaby.
Because they were closer in age,
Armstrong became very close with
Myer’s brother Morris, who was
known as a bit of a troublemaker.
A few times, Morris Karnofsky and
Armstrong got in trouble with the
police for shooting off fireworks.
Armstrong nearly drowned trying
to retrieve Morris’ father’s horse
from the middle of a river.
But Morris had a positive
influence on Armstrong as well.
They drove a cart around together,
and the two of them would
collect junk to either keep or sell
to earn money. A few years later,
Morris lent Armstrong $2 to buy
his first cornet—launching him
on his fated career path. Morris’
life was affected as well, and
he later opened Morris Music,
a record and instrument store
located on Rampart Street. It had
a reputation for having the best
music and was also a place where
musicians (including Armstrong)
would hang out and jam.
“It wasn’t thought of as part
of jazz history when it came to
[Louis] working with my family,”
said Jacob Karno. “Louis was just
trying to make ends meet.”
Armstrong’s Jewish connection
would stay with him until his
death in 1971. As a sign of respect
to his adopted Jewish family, he
wore a Star of David around his
neck. He also had a mezuzah,
spoke fluent Yiddish and was said
to have loved matzah.
The Karnofskys had a lasting
influence on him. In 1969,
Armstrong wrote a long essay
detailing his Jewish connection. It
was called “Louis Armstrong + the
Jewish Family in New Orleans,
La., the Year of 1907.” He wrote
of his admiration for the family’s
work ethic, which he felt was
representative of Jewish culture.
This admiration carried over to
Armstrong’s relationship with Jews
in general. Not only did he have a
close relationship with Joe Glaser,
his Jewish manager and later his
business partner, but in that same
essay, he wrote, “I will love the
Jewish people, all of my life.”
Louis Armstrong,
in July 1954 in
Chicago, wearing
a Star of David
around his neck
while recording
one of his most
famous albums,
“Louis Armstrong
Plays W. C.
Handy.”
B’NAI B’RITH 19
Ben-Gurion University:
Brain of the Negev
By Maayan
Jaffe
20 SPRING 2015
F
ounded 46 years ago, BenGurion University of the
Negev is Israel’s youngest
university. Located in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba in
the Negev desert, BGU also plays
a role as Israel’s leading center
for medical and neuroscience
research.
Over the last decade, especially,
BGU has become the center
for cutting-edge exploration of
the brain and how it relates to
everything from sports-related
concussions to dementia to
autism. Its doctors and scientists
have been making discoveries
outside the classroom that hold
out hope for millions who suffer
from brain disorders.
“Despite our youth in
comparison with leading
universities in Israel and abroad,
we are very much present on the
international academic stage,” says
BGU President Rivka Carmi. BGU
is the country’s fourth-ranked and
is 292 worldwide, according to the
QS World University Rankings,
which rates 800 such institutions
around the globe.
For years, BGU was overlooked by young Israelis enrolling for a university degree.
Those who did choose BGU
were likely to leave Beersheba
upon graduation. Today, however, BGU is Israel’s fastestgrowing institution of higher
learning. It has also developed
an international reputation for
multidisciplinary research.
In the last 10 years, its student
population has tripled to more
than 20,000 on three Beersheba
campuses. Its students come from
all over Israel and include native
born Israelis, Jews and Arabs,
including Bedouins, and new
immigrants from Ethiopia, the
former Soviet Union and other
countries. In a recent survey of
280,000 Israeli students, BGU
ranked number one in the country for its ambience and individual attention.
BGU scientists and doctors
work together at the adjacent
Soroka Medical Center. Affiliated with the university, it serves
residents of southern Israel, as well
as Palestinians who come for treat-
ment from the Gaza Strip, a mere
28 miles from Beersheba.
“We really live on the border,
with this tension,” said Dr. Opher
Donchin of BGU’s Zlotowski
Center for Neuroscience. The
tension, he said, drives faculty to
undertake deeper analysis of their
work, balancing basic research
with the applied and clinical
needs of the area’s diverse population. “That is how we teach our
students: to examine all projects
in a scientific and clinical light,”
Donchin said.
On a tour of the neuroscience
and neurotechnology facilities at
BGU, Donchin’s shows labs that
do low-tech brain mappings and
three-dimensional plastic renderings, and also machines that
conduct some of the most sophisticated and expensive magnetic
resonance imaging (MRI). It is
here that graduate students, scientists, doctors and behavioral health
clinicians work to determine the
roots of some of the most traumatizing brain disorders: Alzheimer’s,
schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy
and traumatic brain injury.
Breakthrough Israeli
Brain-Mapping Technology
Courtesy of Dani Machlis
“Looking at the structure of
the brain is like looking at [a]
Google map,” says Ronen Gadot,
CEO of a new Israeli company,
ElMindA, which is powered by
a technology developed by BGU
professor Amir Geva. Gadot
explains that a basic MRI examines a brain’s biology. To understand brain disorders, he says, one
has to look at a brain’s diseased
nervous system tissue.
“Brain disorders cause a change
in traffic, in flow of information,”
explains Gadot. ElMindA “is
looking at the traffic.”
A simple helmet with dozens of
tiny plastic receptors smothered
in sonogram jelly, ElMindA’s
octopus-like headgear provides a
comprehensive look at the brain.
The technology—trademarked
as BNA, for Brain Network
Activation—helps clinicians
understand and visualize the
complexity of the brain’s function,
dysfunction, disease progression
and response to therapies.
Geva, whose background is in
computer engineering, said he
became interested in the brain
when he realized it was operating
like the central processing unit of a
computer, via billions of neurons,
organized into complicated
interconnecting neural networks.
“I realized that you cannot
study the brain only by looking at
its biology,” Geva explained. “The
only way to understand brain
functionality is to measure these
electrical fields. I threw myself
into understanding the sources of
our brain activity, and this [led to]
with ElMindA.”
ElMindA has focused on
trauma-induced concussions.
Gadot explained that before
ElMindA, when athletes were
diagnosed with concussions, their
readiness to return to the field was
based on subjective testing. These
tests are affected by environmental
factors such as fatigue, hunger
or other distractions and can be
“gamed” by the athlete taking
them.
“Sometimes, while the
symptoms would get better, the
brain was not fully recovered.
Growing evidence shows that
going back to play or hitting the
head before full brain recovery can
cause permanent brain damage,”
said Gadot.
Simona
Bar-Haim,
head of BGU’s
Laboratory for
Rehabilitation
and Motor Control of Walking
observes a
subject on a
treadmill.
B’NAI B’RITH 21
Courtesy of Dani Machlis
Dr. Ilan Dinstein,
a member
of Zlotowski
Neuroscience
Center, is
searching
for objective
measures that
would allow
clinicians to
identify toddlers
who will later
develop autism.
22 SPRING 2015
ElMindA, in contrast, measures
brain changes during the sports
season in both athletes who suffer
concussions and those who don’t.
This ensures players stay on the
field when they can and keeps
them safe until full recovery.
Geva said the company has
conducted thousands of baseline
tests of athletes who haven’t
suffered concussions, which can
be compared to those who later
suffer injuries.
What’s next? Geva is using the
mapping technology to learn more
about the brain activity in people
who suffer from depression and
attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder. “It sounds like science
fiction,” says Geva, “but it’s not.”
Advances in Alzheimer’s
Research
In another area, Alon Friedman,
head of the university’s Laboratory
for Experimental Neurosurgery,
is focusing on injury-related
epilepsy and neuro-degeneration
in animals and humans. His
latest experiments point to the
possibility that brain diseases and
injuries could be treated through
the blood-brain barrier, a filtering
mechanism of the capillaries
that carry blood to the brain and
spinal cord tissue. When intact,
the blood-brain barrier prevents
damaging chemicals or bacteria
from leaking from the blood
stream into the brain.
In contrast, “once the barrier
is abnormal, diseased, ‘leaky,’
there’s a tendency for seizures and
epilepsy and eventually cell death,”
explained Friedman.
The professor believes some
untimely deaths of professional
football players in recent years
could be linked to concussions,
which led to leaky blood-brain
barriers and ultimately vascular
disease that the players didn’t
know about.
This research could also have
an impact on the diagnosis
of and eventual prevention of
Alzheimer’s, which, according to
the National Institute of Health,
plagues as many as 5 million
Americans age 65 and older.
Friedman found the hypertension
drug losartan prevents a majority
of cases of post-traumatic epilepsy,
when tested on diseased rodents.
Losartan was found to block the
protein called albumin from leaking
through the barrier and leading
to inflammation, which appears
to permanently alter the brain’s
wiring. Friedman also worked
with scientists from Soroka’s Brain
Imaging Group. Together, the
group discovered an advanced MRI
imaging technique to diagnose
whether the blood-brain barrier has
been breached—after trauma, or
sometimes simply from age.
If clinicians can see the leak,
Friedman explained, they could
administer losartan to slow or stop
the damage.
“Today, it is difficult to
identify those patients at risk for
dementia,” said Friedman. “Once
we can diagnose it, we can develop
a way to protect them from it,
repair [the brain damage causing
it] and even prevent it.”
Tackling Autism from All
Angles
One in 68 children is on the
autism spectrum, according to the
U.S. Center for Disease Control.
Despite these numbers, there are
currently no objective biological
measures to identify autism; it
is diagnosed predominantly by
behavior—language dysfunction,
social difficulties—which can be
subjective.
Dr. Ilan Dinstein, a member of
BGU’s Zlotowski Neuroscience
Center, is searching for objective
measures to identify toddlers who
will later develop autism, based on
Courtesy of Mayan Jaffe
MRI scans and/or electroencephalography
(EEG) exams conducted as early as age 1.
Dinstein has been using sophisticated
imaging to look at the brain structure and
function of toddlers with and without
autism. He recently found that 2-to-3-yearold toddlers with autism exhibit reduced
synchronization of the left and right sides
of the brain.
In a separate but related study, he found
that autistic individuals have “noisy” or
inconsistent brain activity.
Dinstein said that those with noisier
brains have a harder time making the subtle
associations necessary for proper social
interactions.
Idan Menashe, a senior lecturer in BGU’s
public health department, has been studying the genetics of autism. He has managed
to identify seven “hotspots,” duplication
of a particular gene in a human’s genetic
makeup, which he believes are linked to
autism.
“Our study helped prioritize these
regions, so doctors know where to look
for [these genetic variations] that might
be associated with autism,” Menashe said.
Combining this new tool with psychiatry,
the diagnosis becomes more reliable.
Dinstein and Menashe are part of a BGU
team opening a first-ever multidisciplinary
center in Israel for autism. It will bring
together neuroscientists, geneticists, clinicians and biologists to look at the disorder
from different angles, using the Negev
population to examine any possible ethnic
link to autism.
“Sometimes it seems that when it comes to
autism there is nothing promising, no known
A patient at the
ElMindA headquarters in Herzylia
undergoes Brain
Network Activation
analysis, a system
founded by BenGurion University.
Memories that last a lifetime.
Traveling University Tours
Israel Tours for all ages!
The Baltics with Prof. Natan Meir
Regular Departures All Year Long
June 21–July 3, 2015
(with St. Petersburg extension)
Insider’s Poland with Rabbi Haim Beliak
July 2–14, 2015
Personalized itineraries and private tours available
B’nai Mitzvah & Family Tours
Depart: Feb, June, July, Aug & Dec 2015 & 2016
Honoring the Kindertransport
with Prof. Jeremy Leigh
Adventures for Jewish Singles
July 4–17, 2015
Journey to Israel with Bill Cartiff
Italy with Prof. Stephen Berk
April 25–May 6, 2015
July 5–16, 2015
Eastern Europe with Prof. Stephen Berk
June 2015 & June 2016
(with Petra, Jordan & Eilat extension)
Alaska with Bill Cartiff
July 3–15, 2015
China with Prof. Fred Lazin
October 18–30, 2015
South America Cruise
with Rabbi Sam Kieffer
January 3-18, 2016
www.ayelet.com
The Ashkenazi Story
with Prof. Jeremy Leigh
800-237- 1517
July 11-25, 2016
Connect to the Jewish World today!
B’NAI B’RITH 23
Courtesy of Dani Machlis
Professor Alon
Friedman’s
revolutionary
research may
help prevent
Alzheimer’s and
other forms of
dementia.
24 SPRING 2015
cause and no effective treatment,”
said Menashe. “When we join
forces, the possibilities are endless.”
Stepping Up to Assist Teens
with Cerebral Palsy
Simona Bar-Haim, head of
BGU’s Laboratory for Rehabilitation and Motor Control of Walking, combines math, neuroscience
and physical
therapy in her
work with teenagers with cerebral
palsy. She found
that the brain of a
healthy person is
flexible and adaptable, enabling
the individual to
walk on uneven ground. Using
a combination of tactics, including a split treadmill, where right
and left treads operate at different
speeds, Bar-Haim believes she
can increase the plasticity of her
patients’ brains.
“The challenge is to find a way
to train a damaged brain,” said
Bar-Haim.
Bar-Haim has been conducting
her study with partners in Jordan,
Morocco, Hebron and East
Jerusalem, and comparing results
among teenagers from those areas
with Israeli teens. The results have
been consistent.
Bar-Haim said her work
is equally about science and
humanity, women’s empowerment and peace. Her vision of
“universal design” is a hope that
there will be scientific solutions
that allow people with disabilities
to accomplish everyday tasks.
“There’s a huge amount of
peace and good will here,” she
said of BGU and her work at
the university. “We are all very
motivated.”
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/yadsarahfriends/
hen Philadelphia native Ethelea
Katzenell settled in Beersheba in 1972,
the southern Israeli city consisted
of a modest grid of streets and a handful of
neighborhoods. A job awaited her as a librarian in
Beersheba’s brand-new university.
On a more recent sunny winter’s day, Katzenell
stepped outside the original library building, its
white peaks symbolizing the giving of the Ten
Commandments at Mount Sinai. She pointed to
what constituted the rest of the campus then.
It was a bush—that’s it. Katzenell recalled
the grounds being so desolate that camels
wandered right up to the front door, the library so
incomplete that employees had to use a hospital’s
restrooms across the street.
Now, that hospital, Soroka University Medical
Center, is one of Israel’s great institutions, as
26 SPRING 2015
is Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where
Katzenell still works. Today’s BGU is bursting
at the seams, and the construction proceeding
across the 2½-square-mile campus is trying to
keep pace with an expected 25 percent increase
in enrollment to 25,000 students. BGU is even
expanding beyond its fences onto a plot that will
double the university’s size.
The school’s growth is a microcosm of today’s
Beersheba, which is experiencing a construction
and attitudinal revolution that’s reshaping the
city. Cranes swing in one neighborhood after
another, transportation systems are burgeoning,
morning commuters no longer head only
outbound, cultural centers rise and the military is
erecting nearby a new town from scratch.
The total investment in capital projects is $9.3
billion, says Fani Bahous, director of business
promotion for Ye’adim, a city-run businessdevelopment company.
“I feel like we’re starting to live—that I’m in an
area that’s nice to live in,” Aviad Belilah, 38, a taxi
driver raised in Beersheba, tells a passenger. “It’s
not like before, when it was a sleepy city, when
it’d be just work and home, and there was no life,
as there is in Tel Aviv.”
Belilah and other residents credit Mayor Ruvik
Danilovitch, 44, for injecting an energy that has
shaken Beersheba out of a century-long lethargy
and fused it onto modern Israel. Danilovitch’s
success is so striking that he won re-election to a
second term in 2013 with 92 percent of the vote.
“Beersheba, in my eyes, is the real Israeli city,”
says Sondra Lev-HaAri, a retired dietician who’s
lived in the area since 1976 and is the sister of
B’nai B’rith International Executive Vice Presi-
Courtesy of the Avraham’s Well International Visitor’s Center
By Hillel Kuttler
dent Daniel S. Mariaschin. “Beersheba has really
blossomed into what Ben-Gurion imagined,” she
added, referring to Israel’s first prime minister,
who settled on a Negev kibbutz, Sde Boker, to
help attract pioneers to the area.
All was not rosy last summer, however. Dozens
of Hamas-launched rockets from Gaza, struck
Beersheba before and during Operation Protective
Edge, Israel’s response to the attacks. The rocket
attacks shut down the university for nearly all of July
and August. Exams were canceled, and as many as
2,000 students, faculty and staff were deployed as
reservists in and around Gaza.
Long known as the capital of the Negev,
Beersheba is rebranding itself as Israel’s capital of
opportunity.
While Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are hardly
in danger of ceding their roles as Israel’s
governmental and commercial hubs, respectively,
Beersheba is becoming a far more substantial city.
This is occurring on multiple geographic and
municipal fronts simultaneously.
On the city’s eastern edge, the 100-acre GavYam Negev Advanced Technologies Park is rising.
Tenants occupying the initial, 200,000-square-foot
building, which opened in July 2013, include
such international and Israeli giants as IBM,
Lockheed Martin, Hewlett Packard, Oracle,
Elbit Systems, Cisco, EMC International and
Deutsche Telekom—the only research center the
German firm has established abroad. The second
(containing 120,000 square feet of office space)
opened in January of this year in what will be a
20-building complex.
An initiative called CyberSpark, announced
last year by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,
will harness some of those firms’ cybersecurity
expertise—and that of BGU academicians and
national government agencies. CyberSpark’s
coordinating office is in Beersheba.
“In L.A. you have Silicon Valley. In Berlin,
Silicon Allee. In Beersheba, you will have Silicon
Wadi,” says Professor Dan Blumberg, head of the
homeland security institute at BGU.
At Beersheba’s western end, plain white lettering adorns a red façade fronting David Tuviyahu
Street. “Grand Canyon,” it reads. Though hardly
evocative of the iconic American national park,
The Abraham’s Well
International Visitors’
Center, located in
Beersheba, uses different technologies to tell
the story of the prophet
Abraham—including a
3D presentation.
B’NAI B’RITH 27
Courtesy of Beersheba’s Old City and Tourism Administration
Courtesy of the Negev Museum of Art
Courtesy of Beersheba’s Old City and Tourism Administration
Top: The amphitheater of Beersheba River Park can seat
up to 4,000 people.
MIddle: The Negev Museum of Art, once home to the
Turkish governor during the Ottoman Empire, was
renovated in 2004 to become, mostly, a museum of Israeli
modern art.
Bottom: The Pipes Bridge spans the Beersheba River.
28 SPRING 2015
the Israeli version does suggest heft.
The Grand Canyon, a play on the
Hebrew “kenion,” for “shopping
mall,” opened in April 2013 and is,
indeed, vast; its 1.5 million square
feet and 250 stores make it the largest shopping mall in Israel.
Along five miles of the Beersheba
River that flow through the city’s
southern sector, a 1,300-acre development is taking shape, melding the
recreational, historic and natural.
There, a 4,000-seat amphitheater
and a sports and fitness compound
have opened, and a man-made body
of water will constitute the country’s
largest lake after the Sea of Galilee.
Seemingly in the middle of
nowhere, on a freshly paved, dark
desert highway south of the city,
a new town rises. Its nickname, Ir
Habahadim (Training-base City),
refers to the multiple army headquarters that are relocating from
ultra-congested Tel Aviv; its official
name is the Ariel Sharon IDF
Combined Instructional Center.
The base is a harbinger of even
greater things to come for Beersheba
and the region. The relocation of
10,000 soldiers is expected to have
enormous ripple effects, extending
to nearby Negev towns like
Yeroham, Ofakim and Dimona.
“It’s good for Beersheba, it’s
good for Yeroham, it’s good for
the whole area,” Jeff Green, BGU’s
chief financial and information
officer, says of Ir Habahadim.
“Who needs permanent
housing? Officers. They come with
higher salaries and they expect
a higher quality of life,” Green
says. “Everything rises with the
higher population orientation. It
means that Yeroham will add more
culture. The level of the schools
and the quality of education will
go up. The army has tremendous
resources, and they take care of
their officers. They’re going to all
be looking to buy nice houses.”
As with Katzenell and Lev-HaAri,
Beersheba is the only Israeli home
Green has known. From 1988 to
1990, Green worked in B’nai B’rith
International’s Washington, D.C.,
headquarters, not far from where
he grew up. He moved to Israel,
entered a master’s program at BGU
and stayed in Beersheba when he
landed a job at the university.
The city’s sense of remoteness
from the bulk of Israel’s population,
which is concentrated on the coastal
plain near Tel Aviv and east to
Jerusalem, is palpable even today.
That is changing, though. Many
Israelis in those metropolises and
other points north, Green says,
incorrectly think of Beersheba as
lying in Israel’s south, when it’s really
near dead-center on the vertical axis.
Beersheba is just 60 miles or so
from both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv,
and it will feel even closer. Planned
high-speed rail lines will rush trains to
and from Tel Aviv in 40 minutes, 15
minutes faster than now. (Trains do
not run at all to Jerusalem, although
an enormous station is under construction in Israel’s capital.) Those
lines are seen as crucial to drawing
commuters to jobs in the hi-tech park
and further, connecting Beersheba
and its 195,000 residents with Tel
Aviv, which is home to 403,000
people in fewer square miles. Trains, running in each
direction, already are key to drawing Tel Aviv students
and professors who commute to classes at BGU,
which has its own rail station.
Many of those work and study commuters
might decide to stay. A 2013 Israeli newspaper
article that charted various cities put the average
price of a new four-room apartment in Beersheba
at $257,000, compared to $324,000 in Israel
overall and $361,111 in Tel Aviv.
Amos Shavit is considering just such a move.
Shavit, who runs the city government’s communications, public relations and marketing department,
commutes more than an hour by car from his rented
apartment in Modiin—itself a booming city situated
midway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
“To buy [a home] in Modiin is very expensive.
I work here, and I see the potential for myself, my
wife and our kids,” Shavit says one morning, as three
middle-school children visited his city hall office to
learn how municipalities function. “There’s good
education, good momentum. And when a place has
good momentum, you want to be a part of it.”
Alysia Sagi-Dolev also is drawn to Beersheba
with different financial motivations. She is the
founder and chief executive officer of Qylur Security Systems, based in Palo Alto, Calif. Sagi-Dolev
grew up just west of Beersheba, at the Hatzerim
Air Force Base, where her father was serving.
The company now has a small office in the
Tel Aviv-area town of Beerot Yitzhak, and as its
Israeli operation grows, Sagi-Dolev plans to open
a larger one in Beersheba’s hi-tech park. She hopes
to ultimately employ more than 100 people there
for a Qylur spin-off company and an academy
specializing in artificial intelligence.
“I immediately understood how this clever
combination can drive huge high-quality hi-tech
growth,” Sagi-Dolev explains. “I believe that
if correctly and professionally managed and if
enough big and small innovative companies come
there, this could easily be an oasis of technology
on a global scale. There is no reason why not.”
Meanwhile, Beersheba’s downtown is developing
apace. A new soccer stadium and basketball arena
are being built on the north side. The Ottomanera section, known as the Old City, is undergoing a $15 million cultural-tourism facelift that
includes a new science park with
an interactive museum housing a scale-model of a nuclear
reactor. The abandoned Turkish
railway station was renovated as a
museum, complete with a period
steam engine that was imported
and restored. A tourist center was
built at Abraham’s Well, where
the Jewish patriarch and Avimelech, the king of
Gerar, reached a pact that gave the city its name.
There are new fountains, many illuminated at
night. Meanwhile, streets are being reconstructed
and new parking lots built at an accelerating pace.
All of which leave Katzenell even more in love
with her adopted hometown.
“I have seen this wonderful metropolis grow over
40 years. There are now 15 or 16 neighborhoods,
the boulevards are large and the horizons are open,”
Katzenell says of Beersheba’s evolution.
A visitor remarked on Katzenell’s necklace. Its
charm spelled “chai,” the Jewish word for life. It
was shaped to resemble a camel.
“For me, my camel is my ‘chai’—the ultimate
symbol of survival in the desert,” says Katzenell.
“The city and I and the university all grew up
together. Everything I’ve invested here has come
to fruition.”
B’NAI B’RITH 29