The newest Goldberg family on television has a grandfather who looks like he’d be at home in Miami or Boca. George Segal plays Pops, a widower who likes to date, loves spoiling his grandkids and especially enjoys tutoring them in the ways of love. In this week’s premiere episode of “The Goldbergs,” the new ABC sitcom set in the 1980s, Pops hands over his car keys to 16-year-old Barry and teaches 12-year-old Adam to get the attention of a pretty waitress.

“The Goldbergs” kicked off Tuesday, but you may feel like you already know them. Their photo — with the parents, three children and grandfather, all in matching sweaters in splashy color — has been all over New York City buses and billboards for weeks.

This is a Jewish family whose members are loving and boisterous; they don’t hold back on yelling and screaming about not being understood. The mom, Beverly, played by Wendi McLendon-Covey, has big hair and shows her love by being very, very involved. The hot-tempered Dad is played by Jeff Garlin — Garlin and Segal are the only Jews in the cast. The 17-year-old sister Jessica, played by Hayley Orrantia, is already thinking beyond her family, and 16-year-old Barry, played by Troy Gentile, yells back. In the first episode, “Circle of Driving,” his parents won’t let him drive and then give in to teaching him, with more yelling.

When the youngest son, 12-year old Adam, played by Sam Giambrone, objects to wearing hand-me-downs his mother has selected, Beverly scolds, “One day I won’t be here to dress you.” He answers, “You keep saying that, but when?”

The young Adam is the alter ego of the show’s writer and executive producer, Adam F. Goldberg, who grew up in suburban Philadelphia. The youngest in his family, he says that he was completely ignored by his older siblings, who were already in high school when he was in fifth grade. Observing everything, he recorded his family’s antics and rare quiet moments with his video camera. The show includes original footage from those early videos. An older version of young Adam provides the voiceover.

“Absolutely,” Adam Goldberg, 37, says in an interview, when asked if Beverly and Murray are his parents. “This is like growing up in my house.”

So far, there’s no overt Jewish content. He explains that he was given 12 episodes. “In this first season, I want everyone to get to know the family. That’s what I’m focusing on right now.”

But a bar mitzvah theme isn’t out of the question for the future. In fact, he says he’d love that. His own bar mitzvah, at Beth Sholom Congregation in Elkins Park, Pa. (the landmark synagogue designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) was one of the best nights of his life.

The connection to the first Goldbergs who starred on radio and shifted to television in 1949, with Gertrude Berg playing Molly Goldberg, aka Mrs. Goldberg, in a show also called “The Goldbergs,” is coincidental. Adam Goldberg at first reluctantly agreed to name the show for his family; his original title was “How the F*** Am I Normal,” but ABC executives vetoed that.

Although there were Jews behind the scenes writing, producing and directing television shows, there weren’t overt Jewish characters on TV for five years after “The Goldbergs” went off the air in 1956. In the 1961 season of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” Morey Amsterdam played the comedy writer Buddy Sorrell, who was identified as Jewish. The next Jewish television moment happened in 1972, with the short-lived “Bridget Loves Bernie”; the show’s young intermarried couple lived above his (Jewish) parents’ delicatessen and neither the Catholic nor the Jewish parents were particularly happy with the union (nor were leaders of these real-life communities, who complained about the show). And then in 1974, Valerie Harper played television’s first single Jewish woman, Rhoda Morgenstern in “Rhoda.” More recently, there have been Seinfeld and Silverman. But Molly Goldberg remains television’s classic Jewish mother, generous, self-effacing, loving, nourishing, worrying, talking a lot.

When asked to compare the 2013 television Goldbergs with the 1949 family, filmmaker Aviva Kempner, who wrote, produced and directed the 2009 documentary film “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg,” says, “Apples and oranges.”

“If you want a loving show about what it means to be Jewish, heimish, with a warm, loving, affirmative mother, who wasn’t so much nagging as making sure everything was OK,” she directs people to the earlier Goldbergs.

Kempner points out that there’s also a difference between a man and a woman writing the show, that Gertude Berg got the caring Jewish mother right. “I don’t know that we’ll have it this time around.

“I think that television again loses by not having a positive show about being Jewish.”

In “The Great TV Sitcom Book,” Rick Mitz wrote, “Molly [Goldberg] handled her small family crises with a ferocious ethnic energy and humor as though their lives depended on it. And perhaps they did.”

Beverly, the mom in the new version of “The Goldbergs,” is also high energy, but she’s more American suburban than ethnic. She’s driven, controlling, take-charge: Mother knows best.

Asked whether his own mother is a typical Jewish mother, Goldberg says, “My mom is not typical in any way.”

“She loves her kids and gives everything to them — I don’t know that we want it all of the time. She means well; she is very overbearing with little sense of boundaries. I don’t know if it’s Jewish or not,” he continues.

He says that his late grandfather, the basis for Pop, was the first Jew to graduate from the University of Kentucky Medical School. A Russian immigrant, he was abandoned by his family when he was four and went on to become a psychologist and the pillar of his family. At around the time that the writer was Adam’s age in the sitcom, his widowed grandfather shifted from pillar to a goofy kid who wore silk suits, gambled, dated a lot and said inappropriate things. “He was my best friend.” Segal is perfect in the role.

While New Yorkers who see the bus ads understand that the Goldbergs are Jewish, the name plays differently in other parts of the country, the writer says. Goldberg’s brother, who lives in Norfolk, Va., tells him that people there don’t recognize Goldberg as a Jewish name. “I don’t know that a lot of people will associate the name with anything,” he says.

The television show that may have influenced Goldberg the most is the award-winning “The Wonder Years, “ which ran in the late 1980s and ’90s, with an adult in his 30s looking back on his life growing up in the ’60s. Goldberg watched the show while he was growing up and while he didn’t understand the ’60s references, the growing pains and young romance spoke to him.

When he was young, he and a neighbor made films together, although he now admits that his camera work — and it’s seen on the show — was terrible. As a 12-year-old, Goldberg was obsessed with Steven Spielberg. In fact, for his bar mitzvah, he sent invitations to George Lucas, Stephen King and Spielberg. Lucas autographed the response card and sent it back; King sent a note that is framed on Goldberg’s desk, and one of Spielberg’s development people called and sent a packet of biographical materials.

At first, he was nervous about showing the trailer to his family, and they were nervous about seeing it. “They saw that it was done with love and affection. Those were embarrassing times, all of us crying and screaming.”

“Ultimately they’re really excited and want me to stay true to the characters. They don’t want me to stretch the truth for a joke,” he says.

With love, Goldberg sees the show as an homage to his late dad. His mom now splits her time between Philadelphia and Boca Raton, Fla. She sold the house where they lived for 40 years. “It was too huge, without my dad yelling there,” he says.

editor@jewishweek.org

A native of the Washington, D.C., area and a resident of Washington Heights for the last several years during his studies at the Yeshiva University rabbinical school, Rabbi Herschel Hartz became interested several months ago in reports he heard that a growing number of Jews were moving into the nearby Inwood neighborhood.

Until recently, there had been no Jewish organizations or activities in the area, which forms the northern tip of Manhattan.

Rabbi Hartz, who was ordained in May, told himself someone should do something.

That something is Inwood Jews (inwoodjews.com), an outreach organization he founded earlier this year to sponsor a series of educational and social events.

“It’s not a shul — yet,” he says. “It’s events.”

So far Inwood Jews has sponsored a Shavuot cheesecake giveaway, a Lag b’Omer barbecue and a “drum circle” get-together, all in Inwood Hill Park. This week: “quasi-davening” in the park, with lots of stories and singing, on the first day of Rosh HaShanah.

On Sukkot, he pedaled around the area with a sukkah attached to his bike.

So far, several dozen people have attended the events, attracted by an online, social media campaign orchestrated by Rabbi Hartz, and by colorful posters displayed in the windows of local stores.

So far, he’s operating on a shoestring budget, with donations from sympathetic friends. “I’m getting $100 here, $100 there.”

“I think it’s important to bring some Jewish spirit to this neighborhood,” says the rabbi, who is 28 and single.

“I want to build a center for Inwood Jews so we can be a gathering point for Jewish events without traveling elsewhere,” he says in an introduction on the Inwood Jews website.

Inwood Jews has no denominational affiliation, but reflects Rabbi Hartz’s background as a YU student and a baal teshuvah who identifies with the Chabad-Lubavitch chasidic movement. “I have the Chabad spirit, but the efficiency of YU.”

Without a building of his own, Rabbi Hartz meets interested members of the community in impromptu settings like parks and cafés.

Most of Inwood Jews’ participants, like many of the Jews who have moved in recent years to that neighborhood and to Washington Heights, are young, ranging from recent college graduates to folks in their 40s.

One demographic Jewish outlier, Ann Gregory, a retired professor who recently moved back to New York after 32 years away, bought an apartment in Inwood “due to the reasonableness of the cost.”

She says she is looking forward to taking part in Inwood Jews events. “I have been hoping we could develop a Jewish community in Inwood,” Gregory says. “I am accustomed to small Jewish communities — having grown up in Lawrence, Kan., where the Jewish community consisted of around 15 families and 100 students at the university.”

Inwood, in the shadow of Washington Heights’ established Jewish community, is unlikely to develop into a major center of Jewish life, Rabbi Hartz says. But with an estimated 2,000 Jews, it is likely to be able to support the ongoing religious and cultural events he would like to lead.

Slipping into a kind of Yiddish vernacular, the rabbi says, “There is what to work with in Inwood.”

steve@jewishweek.org

William Rapfogel, the former head of one of the city’s most prominent social service agencies who was fired amid allegations of financial misconduct, surrendered to the police on Tuesday and will face charges including grand larceny and money laundering, authorities said.

The scheme ensnaring the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty may have spanned as long as two decades and involved millions of dollars, according to court papers, which also say Rapfogel kept a stash of more than $400,000 in cash. Rapfogel’s total compensation at the organization was about $417,000.

Rapfogel, 58, long one of the city’s best-known charity executives, was released from the First Precinct in Lower Manhattan after posting $100,000 in bail, according to a spokesman for state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who investigated the case. Rapfogel surrendered his passport after Judge Kevin McGrath ordered him not to leave the state.

“It’s always sad and shocking when we discover that someone used a charity as their own personal piggy bank — but even more so when that scheme involves someone well respected in government and his community,” announced Schneiderman in a statement.

The attorney general announced a long list of charges including grand larceny in the first degree, money laundering in the first degree, money laundering in the second degree, four counts of criminal tax fraud in the third degree, conspiracy in the fourth degree, five counts of falsifying business records in the first degree and three counts of offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree.

Schneiderman and state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli have been jointly investigating accusations that as leader of the Met Council, Rapfogel inflated the agency’s insurance payments in collusion with a brokerage firm, Century Coverage.

The New York Times reported that an anonymous whistleblower alerted Met Council’s board to the scheme and the board. The board on Aug. 12 announced that it had hired a law firm to investigate and relayed the findings to the attorney general.

“We take the matters involved in this investigation, and the need to correct the issues of the past, very seriously,” said Steven Goldberg, a spokesman for Met Council in a statement Tuesday afternoon.

“Under the new leadership of David Frankel, who will officially join Met Council on Monday, we will remain focused on what has been the core mission of Met Council for more than 40 years – providing essential services to thousands of New Yorkers in need. “

DiNapoli, in a statement, said “The scale and duration of this scheme are breathtaking. When individuals in the mission of helping others instead help themselves, it is particularly egregious. But eventually, fraud, no matter how cunning, unravels.”

At the time of his firing, Rapfogel admitted some unspecified wrongdoing, saying in a statement issued by his lawyer that “I deeply regret the mistakes I have made that led to my departure from the organization” after 21 years of service.

A call to the attorney, Paul Shechtman, was not answered on Tuesday afternoon, and a recording said his voicemail was too full to record messages.

The Daily News said Rapfogel’s case was adjourned for a Jan. 24 hearing, and quoted Shechtman as saying, “Mr. Rapfogel hopes for a fair resolution of this case and will continue to make amends to Met Council. It’s a sad day, but happily people who know Willie well are still in his corner.”

According to Schneiderman, Rapfogel stole $5 million from the organization over a 20-year period, including keeping about $1 million for himself (and sharing the rest with co-conspirators).

In his role at Met Council, Rapfogel presided over its growth from a small beneficiary of UJA-Federation of New York to a network of programs that serve 100,000 needy New Yorkers each year; he utilized strong connections with local elected officials — including Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whose chief of staff is Rapfogel’s wife, Judy — to win state and city grants. The organization’s mission has been not only to serve the needy but also to break the stereotype that most Jews are wealthy.

The organization’s annual legislative breakfast, usually held immediately prior to the Celebrate Israel Parade, draws scores of elected officials and honors their work on behalf of the Jewish poor, and the annual Builder’s Lunch honors developers who construct low-income housing.

A spokeswoman for Silver said Tuesday the speaker would have no comment beyond the statement he issued in August, in which he said, “I am stunned and deeply saddened by this news. While there is still much that we don’t know, we do know that the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty has given tens of thousands of New Yorkers of all faiths and backgrounds lifesaving help over the past four decades.”

Met Council reportedly has about $15 million in active state contracts from the state and receives millions more from New York City funding, as well as philanthropic funds. The funding from the city has been frozen since immediately after the scam was first reported.

Gabriela Geselowitz, Steve Lipman and Adam Dickter contributed to this report.

Current and past geopolitics pulled the race for City Hall away from stop-and-frisk and tax-the-rich toward insights about the candidates’ worldviews early this week.

After speaking out on Monday about the need for continued vigilance against Iran, Republican Joseph Lhota declared that he and Democrat Bill de Blasio “think very differently about how the governments of the world should work and how we should interact with our government.”

The two candidates were largely in accord when it comes to U.S. policy toward Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the need to continue sanctions as they each spoke at a rally Monday near the United Nations timed to the start of the General Assembly this week.

But Lhota later seized an opportunity to criticize his rival for events in another part of the world a quarter-century ago after a New York Times report analyzed de Blasio’s little-known travels to Nicaragua and Cuba.

“Actions taken with the Sandinistas, who were fighting Americans as well as capitalism, [were] absolutely not the right thing to do during the Cold War,” Lhota told reporters. “Going to Cuba illegally is never a good thing in this country. His point of view in the world and my point of view in the world are contrasting and different.”

The Times reported that de Blasio visited Nicaragua in 1988 as a young leftist activist with the intention of distributing food and medicine during the socialist Central American country’s conflict with the U.S.-backed Contra rebels, and came away with an admiration for the Sandinista government. He also honeymooned with his wife, Chirlane McRay in Cuba, in 1994, violating a U.S. travel ban, the report said.

De Blasio hurried away from the UN rally Monday morning rather than answer questions from a large scrum of reporters trailing him. And the Times reported Tuesday that he later in the day denied describing himself as a “democratic socialist” in notes that the paper’s reporters found in a New York University archive.

“The bottom line is the values that I have put forward I think have been consistent over the last quarter-century or more,” he said in front of Queens Borough Hall. “I believe in a more just society. I believe government has to be a tool for a more just society. And I think it’s that simple.”

In a 1990 interview, de Blasio, then a volunteer with the Nicaragua Solidarity Network, told the Times the Sandinistas “gave a new definition to democracy. They built a democracy that was striving to be economic and political, that pervaded all levels of society.”

His activism on behalf of Nicaragua continued into his days as a young aide in the Dinkins administration but ceased around 1992, the Times said.

On Tuesday morning, Lhota extended his attack a second day saying, “Mr. de Blasio’s class-warfare strategy in New York City is directly out of the Marxist playbook. Now we know why.”

Lhota, who trails de Blasio in two recent general election polls by about 40 points, clearly hopes to gain ground by painting his rival as a left-wing radical in moderate clothes and with a shorter haircut.

And the Sandinistas story seemed on Monday to eclipse the emphatic endorsement of de Blasio by President Barack Obama. In making the endorsement, Obama said: “Bill’s agenda for New York is marked by bold, courageous ideas that address the great challenges of our time.”

But political commentator Henry Stern, founder of New York Civic, said it was unlikely that de Blasio’s past activism (unmentioned in his campaign biography) would play a key role in the race.

“The guy’s a radical, but the question is how much most people care about these things,” said Stern. “He’s not Patty Hearst. He didn’t blow anything up or commit any crime. If Israel was involved somehow, it would be different.”

Intensive discussion in the race about the Sandinistas and his support could put de Blasio in a bind, however, as the candidates head into debate season.

The party, which held power from 1979 to 1990, was accused of anti-Semitism by a group of Nicaraguan Jews who came to Washington in 1985 — three years before de Blasio’s visit — in support of U.S. aid to the Contras.

According to a Washington Post report at the time, the group lobbied Jewish members of Congress and Jewish organizations to stop opposing CIA support for the rebels.

The record on the subject is somewhat murky, however. JTA reported in April 1986 that a group of Jews who fled Nicaragua said at a Capitol Hill press conference that the Sandinista government was anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. But Rabbi Balfour Brickner, then leader of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue (who died in 2005) rebutted the charge, saying at the time that those Jews had left for political reasons, not because of persecution. The human rights activist rabbi told JTA that despite ties to the PLO, the government under President Daniel Ortega was neither anti-Semitic nor anti-Israel, producing a letter to that effect by Nicaragua’s foreign minister.

Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the conservative Council on Foreign Relations, who was an assistant secretary of state charged with monitoring human rights at the time the Sandinistas seized power, recalls receiving news that a synagogue in Managua was set abalze by the group while worshipers were inside.

He was told by higher-ups that the act was considered political, not anti-Semitic.

“I had read a great deal about the indifference toward the plight of Jews in the 20s and 30s,” he said. “But I never understood it until I read that cable.”

Abrams noted that antipathy toward Jews and Israel by the Sandinistas “shouldn’t be surprising” given the politics of the time. “It was the height of the Cold War, and they felt an affinity toward the Soviet Union, Cuba, the PLO, Libya … this was their crowd.”

De Blasio’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment about the alleged anti-Semitism of the Sandinistas.

Ezra Friedlander, a consultant who previously helped Christine Quinn gather Jewish votes and now backs de Blasio, said the issue likely wouldn’t gain much traction.

“Most voters don’t even remember that era and have no inkling about that whole time period,” he said. “It would be different if he were running for president, but to discern what his foreign policy was has nothing to do with delivering city services.”

Stern added that the pilgrimage to Central America seemed intended as something akin to liberals going to the South to support civil rights in the 1960s, when de Blasio was a child. “If you want to be in a revolution, you find the nearest one,” he said.

While there was no daylight between the contenders’ stated view on U.S. policy toward Iran, Lhota came across as more skeptical of diplomacy, while de Blasio on Monday afternoon praised the administration’s handling of the issue.

“The Obama administration deserves tremendous credit for putting sustained and growing pressure on the Iranian regime, and the reason you’re seeing this sudden change of tone [from Tehran] is because these sanctions are working,” de Blasio said at the press conference in Queens.

He was responding to a question from John Kenny of the website New York True about diplomacy with Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani, which is being received warily in Israel.

De Blasio added, “We’ll only believe it when we see tangible results. … We need to see them renounce nuclear weapons.”

Lhota told reporters at the rally “diplomacy is only one aspect of the type of negotiations and pressure that we need to put on Iran. … We still need to be as vigilant as we possible can to protect the State of Israel.”

Despite having no direct impact on foreign policy, New York mayors have a long history of staking out positions on international affairs, particularly regarding the Middle East.

“We are the capital of the world, the headquarters of the United Nations,” Lhota said. “The mayor of New York has always been asked about issues around the world.”

When a TV reporter asked if Lhota favored keeping Iran’s leader out of New York, noting the antipathy of Lhota’s former boss, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, toward Palestinian Authority President Yasir Arafat, the candidate said, “There is a world of difference between heads of state and Yasir Arafat, who was a murderer. … He was a murderer, end of sentence.”

At the rally outside the United Nations, speakers convened by the Jewish Community Relations Council here expressed concern that a war-weary Obama administration would succumb to the softer tone presented by Rouhani and compromise on curbing the country’s nuclear ambitions.

“[Rouhani] has changed the tone and tenor of Iran’s message to the world,” said JCRC executive Vice President Michael Miller. “But as Americans and as New Yorkers, as political and faith leaders we have to say clearly and unequivocally that we will not be taken in by his soothing rhetoric and newfound charm offensive without seeing tangible and meaningful actions.”

adam@jewishweek.org

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as president of Iran, would invite leaders of the Iranian Jewish community in the U.S. to meet with him when he was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, the answer was a definitive “no.”

After all, he was a Holocaust denier whose stated goal was to wipe Israel off the map.

But in recent days, when the new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, issued a similar invitation, there was considerable discussion among the leadership of the Iranian Jewish community here and in Los Angeles as to the appropriate response. Unlike his predecessor, Rouhani has been on a one-man public relations campaign, seeking to soften his country’s image in the hopes of easing tough economic sanctions and countering talk of military action against Iran.

In the end, though, after much late-night discussion over the weekend between the New York and Los Angeles groups, the answer was “no,” based in part on a recent statement — or perhaps non-statement — on Rouhani’s part.

“The impetus of our decision,” explained a leader of the Iranian American Jewish Federation here, “was that when the president had a chance to redeem himself on the question of the Holocaust, he did not do that.”

He was referring to Rouhani’s response, when asked by an American journalist whether he believed the Holocaust was a historical fact. The president chose to avoid a direct reply, saying he was a politician, not a historian.

In addition, Sam Kermanian, senior adviser to the Iranian American Jewish Federation in Los Angeles, noted that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, when asked a similar question about the authenticity of the Holocaust, said Iran condemns all murders, including the murder of Palestinians by Israelis.

“To compare accidental deaths to systematic murder shows that they don’t understand the world’s sensitivities to such a horrific event,” Kermanian said.

The New York and Los Angeles groups, made up primarily of prominent businessmen, are separate but seek consensus on major issues.

A third factor, Kermanian added, was Rouhani choosing to bring to the U.S. with him Iran’s only Jewish member of parliament, Siamak Moreh Sedgh, a 48-year-old doctor who has been an outspoken critic of Israel.

The concern was that Sedgh would be used as a propaganda tool, castigating Zionism and Israel’s policies toward Palestinians.

American-Jewish Iranians are in a delicate position, deeply concerned about the fate of the 20,000 Jews still in their homeland. The leaders here do not want to offend Tehran by rejecting the meeting with Rouhani. But they are unwilling to hold a meeting with him for fear that it would be misinterpreted and actually used to mislead the Obama administration and U.S. public into thinking the Iranian Jewish community here has fallen for Rouh..ani’s charm initiative.

The Iranian Jewish leaders said they had hoped Rouhani would offer some specific proposals or expand the freedom of the Iranian people.

“But we have not seen anything yet,” a local leader said.

The decision not to meet with Rouhani was endorsed by Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who told The Jewish Week that Rouhani was “a master of charm and deception.

“He had an opportunity to send a strong signal simply by answering [the Holocaust question] in a different way. The fact that he wouldn’t say it was an historical fact sends a clear signal to everybody.”

Hoenlein noted that despite Rouhani’s more benign rhetoric, asserting that he seeks dialogue with the U.S. and a peaceful resolution to the confrontation with Washington, “he and his officials have said they are not going to stop their nuclear program.”

The Iranians have long insisted that their race to develop nuclear capability is for peaceful means, while the U.S., Israel and other Western countries believe the goal is to produce nuclear arms.

Some Israeli officials and American Jewish leaders have expressed deep, if private, concern that the administration is being outsmarted by the Rouhani diplomatic campaign and that his motivation is to continue to stall while the nuclear efforts continue.

One of the issues the American-Jewish Iranians would like to raise with Tehran’s leaders is mandatory attendance on Shabbat at the Jewish schools in Iran.

The local Iranian Jewish leaders said that if invited, they might, under certain conditions, agree to meet with Sedgh, the Jewish parliament member, but as one said, “We are hoping he won’t ask.”

gary@jewishweek.org

An 84-year-old Orthodox synagogue on Ocean Parkway is one of three Brooklyn sites recommended by the New York State Board for Historic Preservation for U.S. landmark status, the Associated Press reported.

The former Jewish Center of Coney Island, now known as the Jewish Center of Brighton Beach has been in continuous use since its construction in 1929, according to its application with the Department of Interior’s National Register of Historic Places.

The brick, concrete and terra cotta, renaissance rival structure has been renovated over the years but “in general retains its integrity to a high degree,” says the application prepared by architect Anna Broverman. She adds that the building is significant due to its “association with the Jewish Community Center movement of the late 1910s and 1920s and as an indication of the development of Brighton Beach, at the southern end of Brooklyn, as a new, middle-class residential neighborhood with a substantial Jewish population in the 1920s.”

The other sites are the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Kismet Temple in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

adam@jewishweek.org

A Jewish couple and their 4-year-old son barely escaped being killed by an Arab lynch mob that had attacked the family’s vehicle near Jerusalem’s A-Tur neighborhood.

“We were on our way to an event in the new ‘Kedmat Tzion’ neighborhood, on the way to A-Tur,” said Asaf Bruchi, who was traveling with his wife Naama near the neighborhood, close to the road leading from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives, according to Israel National News.

“We got caught in traffic and there was no police presence. We found ourselves in the middle of a lynch mob—huge rocks were thrown at the car, and the Arabs were physically hitting and slashing it,” he said.

Bruchi added, “My wife was struck by a rock on her head and her hand, I got hit in the head by a rock. My four year-old son was sitting behind me and got hit by a rock in his back… if they would have had a gun we would have left there dead.”

editor@jewishweek.org

Yankee great Babe Ruth was many things — prodigious slugger, as well as prodigious drinker and carouser.

But humanitarian and early Hitler critic?

After the U.S. and British governments verified in late 1942 the Nazi’s mass murders of European Jews, little else was said. But Ruth, who was more known for his hot dog binges and women friends, helped change that.

A two-hour documentary that tells of Ruth’s little-known humanitarian side, “Universal Babe,” by Byron C. Hunter, focuses on Ruth’s outreach to minorities and his effort to help Jews by signing a full-page ad that appeared Dec. 27, 1942, in The New York Times. The ad denounced the “Hitler policy of coldblooded extermination of the Jews” and expressed “faith that millions of Germans in the Third Reich are stirred to the depths of their souls by these crimes and will, when the hour comes, join with us to end them.”

Ruth was the most prominent of the 50 Americans of German decent to sign the ad, which featured a famous carving of Jesus. Titled a “Christmas Declaration,” it said the signatories “utterly repudiate every thought and deed of Hitler and his Nazis. Other Americans must know where we, and you, stand. … These horrors are but a prelude to further infamies by the doomed Nazi system of government.”

Rafael Medoff, founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, D.C., said in the documentary that it was “very rare for prominent athletes to lend their names to something like this.”

He told The Jewish Week that the ad, which also appeared in nine other newspapers and was reported on by newspapers and radio stations worldwide, “was the first attempt by concerned Americans to cry out on this issue.

“Ruth spoke out at a time when no one else spoke out,” Medoff continued. “It was not a popular thing when the ad came out. These were the first concerned non-Jewish Americans to raise their voices in a public way. In a sense, they were pioneers.

“It marked the beginning of a year of protests and ads by other groups. It became such a political headache for [President Franklin] Roosevelt that he gave in and created the War Refugee Board in January 1944,” which is credited with saving the lives of about 200,000 Jews.

Linda Ruth Tosetti of Durham, Conn., Ruth’s granddaughter, told The Jewish Week that she got behind the making of the documentary in order to tell about a side of her grandfather that few people know.

“All the authors who wrote about Babe knew it, but all they wrote about was his drinking and carousing,” she said. “My mother said he wouldn’t have been able to pick up a bat if he had had as many women as the books reported. It was said that he had a cigar every time he had another conquest.”

The documentary will be shown Sunday, Oct. 6 at 1:15 p.m. at the Suffolk Y JCC at 74 Hauppauge Rd., Commack. It will be followed by a discussion with Ruth’s granddaughter and Medoff. $10.

stewart@jewishweek.org

The Hester, an underground kosher supper club, is about to see the light of day as a brick-and-mortar restaurant: a kosher small-plates bar on Washington Avenue in the Prospect Heights section of Brooklyn, which is seeing a spike in Jewish residents who have been priced out of neighboring Park Slope.

The restaurant, tentatively named Mason And Mug, is the joint project of Hester founder Itta Werdiger Roth, a chef who has worked in both restaurants and for private clients, and Sasha Chack, who in a 10-year restaurant career worked his way up from dishwashing to the head of food and beverage at the recently shuttered 92Y Tribeca.

The name’s nod to Mason jars, the jam-making gear favored by the locavore Brooklyn set as glassware, sets the tone for the place, which is scheduled to open at 708 Washington St. in late October or early November.

“We’re definitely going for that DIY Brooklyn aesthetic,” Chack, 29, said, adding that he wants to distinguish his place from the typical kosher restaurant that has formal table service and prices to match. “It will be very accessible, very casual and all kosher.”

The Hester, run by Roth, 31, on a roughly monthly basis out of her Ditmas Park Victorian, had a similar vibe. It managed to steer clear of zoning violations by stating in fine print that the charge for the food was actually a suggested donation. The snarkily-named, often-organic treats — like Vegan Shmegan pizza and cantaloupe basil ice cream — drew a funky crowd of artsy chasids and earnest foodies.

Mason And Mug will not serve meat, but the focus will be more on fish and vegetables than on dairy in the restaurant, which will seat about 35 people inside and also has a 10-person garden space. Chack and Roth are still shopping around for the right kosher supervisor.

As for the Hester, Roth doesn’t want to say it will never happen again. But she is shifting her focus to the restaurant. “We will definitely try to keep that Hester energy alive,” she said, “but we’re still in the early stages.

helenatjewishweek@gmail.com; @thesimplechild

The Birthright Alumni Community has announced that it will be offering tickets to “Soul Doctor” to past participants of its program. Over 5,000 Birthright alumni will be able to attend the biographical musical of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach for free. Michael Steinhardt, co-founder of Birthright, is underwriting the new initiative, that also includes talkbacks of the show and exclusive receptions.

Ms. Sugar continued, “Birthright Israel alumni celebrate Shabbat together, study Hebrew together, travel to Poland and Prague together, and discuss critical issues facing modern Israel together,” said Executive Director of The Alumni Community Rebecca Sugar in a statement. “They meet with Wall Street executives and deliver food packages to the elderly for the holidays… The gift of tickets to Soul Doctor is the gift of connection to our community and its cultural history.”

“We are thrilled that because of his support, thousands of students and young adults will be able to experience one of the most uplifting and joyous shows ever on Broadway,” added Soul Doctor producer Jeremy Chess in the statement.