SAN FRANCISCO (j. the Jewish news weekly of Northern California) — An activist group claimed responsibility for plastering anti-Israel messages over legitimate advertisements on San Francisco billboards.

The group, calling itself the California Department of Corrections, claimed in an Internet posting to have struck billboards last week in nine city locations.

The bogus billboards, designed to resemble a Treasury note for $7 million, featured the headline “Thanks for the Blank Check, America” and an Israeli flag. It went on to excoriate Israel and to criticize the United States for its Israel aid package, purportedly costing $7 million per day.

Tony Alwin, a spokesman for Clear Channel Outdoor, which owns and manages billboards, said he knew of only one vandalized site, and that the illegal billboard would be taken down immediately. He said Clear Channel Outdoor takes the vandalism seriously.

“I talked to our management about the issue,” said Alwin, speaking Wednesday from the company’s headquarters in Phoenix, Ariz. “Everyone’s pretty upset with it, and we’ll see what we can do to prevent it in the future."

Yitzhak Santis, director of Middle East affairs for the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Relations Council, noted past incidents of anti-Israeli vandalism on billboard and bus shelter posters.

“I think they are part of the revolutionary left in the Bay Area,” Santis said of the activists. “They call it guerrilla billboarding, where they put their own billboards and ads in shelters. Obviously it’s illegal, and we’re very concerned about this.”

Santis said the incident was part of the BDS (boycott-divestment-sanctions) campaign to demonize Israel.

"Whether bus shelters or billboards, it’s all part of that campaign," he said. "The community needs to be aware of what is happening.”

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) — A group of Young Israel synagogues is challenging the control exerted by its central body.

In an Aug. 3 letter to the the National Council of Young Israel leadership, 35 of the organization’s 140 North American branch synagogues formally proposed three changes to the national body’s constitution.

One amendment would make explicit the right of Young Israel branches to resign from the organization, a right the national leadership says is prohibited. A second would repeal the clause that allows the council to seize the assets of any branch synagogue that is dissolved or expelled. The third would prevent the national body from initiating litigation against a branch, former branch or any representative of a branch without the approval of two-thirds of the members of the Delegates Assembly.

Together, the changes could significantly restrict the punitive actions the national council can take against its branches.

The ongoing battle between the national council and Shaarei Torah Orthodox Congregation of Syracuse, N.Y., a former Young Israel shul, inspired the letter.

The Syracuse synagogue says it is being forced out of the national organization because it elected a female president, which is banned by the constitution. The council’s leadership says the expulsion is being sought because the synagogue owes $20,000 in dues.

Signatories to the letter, representing 25 percent of Young Israel branch synagogues, have called for a special meeting to discuss and possibly vote on their proposed amendments no later than Sept. 30.

JERUSALEM (JTA) – A tawny sandstone sculpture of Nimrod, an ancient Hebrew warrior and hunter figure with a razor-straight back and proud stare, sits at the intersection between modern Israeli art and native art from Africa and the South Pacific at the recently renovated Israel Museum.

The 1939 sculpture by Israeli artist Yitzhak Danzinger is an example of the kind of cultural and aesthetic contextual links that James Snyder, the Israel Museum director, hopes to evoke in the reopening of the museum following a $100 million facelift he calls a “renewal.”

“It’s like a double helix,” said Snyder, who came to the Israel Museum in 1997 after 22 years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, whirling his hand in the air to mimic a double helix’s shape. “The culture of the region and the culture of the world — they wrap around each other.”

The museum now stretches out on its sprawling 20-acre hilltop campus in Jerusalem across from the Knesset as a sleek and, indeed, renewed version of its former self.

Streamlined and expanded with 204,500 square feet for its refreshed collection galleries, archeology, the fine arts, and Jewish art and life are now easily accessible in one large exhibit hall designed with the guiding theme in mind of how objects and art can resonate across time and cultures.

The archeology wing, which traces the development of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, boasts a “House of David” — an inscription from the ninth century BCE seen as part of a monumental stone. It’s considered the earliest source backing archeological evidence that there was a dynasty sprung from King David in the Land of Israel. On display for the first time anywhere is a rare Crusader-era fresco that was on the wall of a 12th century Jerusalem abbey.

Fewer holdings are now on display amid almost twice the space. And there is no more trekking up a long pathway exposed to a broiling Jerusalem sun by summer or the cold winds and rains of winter. Visitors to the country’s largest cultural institution now reach the museum through an enclosed underground passage featuring a translucent glass wall on one side.

At the highest point on the museum’s outdoor grounds is a gleaming 16-foot-tall stainless steel sculpture in the shape of an hourglass specially commissioned for the museum’s reopening. Titled “Turning the World Upside Down, Jerusalem,” the work by the renowned Indian-born artist Anish Kapoor reflects, upside down, the city’s skies and landscape.

“Jerusalem is all about a very special relationship between the ground and the sky. This work attempts to bring the two together,” Kapoor said, describing the sculpture to the Calcutta Telegraph.

Asked how he completed the massive undertaking of overhauling the museum both on schedule (three years) and on budget in a country where such feats rarely happen, Synder answered, “Singlemindedness.”

It was Teddy Kollek, also known for having a driving vision, who came up with the vision of the Israel Museum back in the 1950s. It was a time when most people in the fledgling state were focused on survival, not cultivating a world-class collection of art and archeology.

Under Kollek’s guidance, the museum was opened in 1965, the same year he became mayor of Jerusalem, with modernist architecture designed by Alfred Mansfeld and Dora Gad. Under Snyder’s direction, the original architectural sensibility was preserved as much as possible by the architects leading the projects, James Carpenter Design Associates of New York and Efrat-Kowalksy Architects of Tel Aviv.

“The point of our project is not about new architecture and re-engineering in the building,” Synder said in an interview with JTA in his sunny office. “The point wanted to be about changing the way you present content.”

“The museum’s view had been a little bit that we are many museums under one roof, and I kept saying what’s amazing about this place is to find this breadth in one museum,” said Synder, an immaculate dresser who stands out in scrappy Israel with his rounded orange glasses, tie and blazer.

Over the years the museum, which has active and generous friends associations abroad, has acquired a 500,000-piece collection. Along with its Judaica and fine arts holdings, the museum long has been known for its outstanding regional archeology holdings. A major showcase has always been the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are housed in their own building.

More than $80 million of the renewal project was raised privately in Israel and around the world through individuals, families and foundations. Another $17.5 million came from the Israeli government. 

Defending critics of the museum’s “universalist” approach, Synder says, “How can you avoid it? Look where we are — in Jerusalem, at the crossroads of the ancient world, where Europe meets Asia meets Africa and where monotheism happened. So if not here, where?”

The Jewish art and life gallery is designed to provide a view of Jewish life from the Middle Ages to the modern day showing both its secular and sacred dimensions. A highlight is a new synagogue route, which has the interiors of four synagogues, including ones from Germany, Italy and India. The most spectacular of all is a newly restored 18th synagogue from Suriname, a tiny South American country north of Brazil whose Jewish community, of Spanish and Portuguese origin, took root there a century before.

In the 1990s, with the Suriname Jewish community rapidly disappearing and the synagogue no longer functioning, the Israel Museum acquired the synagogue and brought its interior — white walls, large windows and sand-coated floor — and contents to Jerusalem.

Upstairs on the upper entrance hall of the fine arts wing, a much different image looms. It’s a towering sculpture of an African refugee boy in Israel made from Styrofoam and painted black. Israeli artist Ohad Meromi’s 2001 “The Boy from South Tel Aviv” stands in front of a painting of different colored polka dots by renowned English artist Damien Hirst.

Snyder thinks the sculpture of this underclass boy with a sense of majesty about him, as he describes it, has found its perfect home surrounded by the Hirst piece and others nearby that draw from African and European themes.

“It’s all about cultural synthesis in contemporary culture,” he said, his face breaking into a smile.

Then, adding what might be true for the renewed Israel Museum as a whole, Snyder says, “I hope we can keep it up.”

NEW YORK (JTA) — During his recent visit to Croatia, Shimon Peres said he believed the Nazis directed Croatian guards at Europe’s most sadistic concentration camp complex, Jasenovac, to be brutal.

“I think they wanted them to have a demonstration of sheer sadism,” Peres said.

But Croatia was uniquely entrusted to run its own concentration camps for a reason: Croatian violence needed no urging. It had no parallel in modern history, nor in modern horror cinema.

While the Nazi manner of killing emphasized sterility and efficiency, the Croatian killing (with enthusiastic assistance from Bosnian Muslims) was slow, messy and savored. The character of the violence under the Hitler-allied Ustasha regime shocked even the Nazis, who wrote protest letters to their superiors — because of revulsion, because of Serbian revolts and because the Ustashas’ conduct was souring Axis-friendly peoples on Germany.  Berlin never reined in the Croats, but the Italians did disband at least one Ustasha unit.

Meanwhile, Croatian fuehrer Ante Pavelic boasted that in contrast to Hitler’s early deportation methods, “in Croatia we have almost completely solved the Jewish question.” Yet exterminating 80 percent of Croatia’s Jews was mere garnish to the main dish that an alliance with Germany promised: eradicating the Serbs. “Kill a third, deport a third, and convert a third” was official policy. 

Peres’ error wasn’t a mistake but politics. Israel and Croatia have been improving relations, and Peres is sensitive to Croatia’s being in the midst of European Union accession. So he put the onus of guilt on safe German shoulders. But while Germany has admitted a thousand times to its Nazi past, Croatia still has not come to terms with its World War II crimes — and with world powers continuing to whitewash them it never will.

Thus it is that Croatia tried to sue Serbia for events in a much more recent war, which Croatia itself began, without ever answering for its own incomparably bloody, more vast and less mutual crimes of WWII. Because Croatia was never made to admit, apologize or de-Nazify, it enjoyed a Nazi revival in the 1990s at which time Israel declined friendship.

News reports now finally mention Croatia’s ’90s Nazi rebirth, along with the fact that only since 2000 have Croatian governments denounced fascism. The Associated Press, for instance, in reports covering the Peres trip stated that 1990s Croatia was “sympathetic to the WWII regime and its late president, Franjo Tudjman, had downplayed the fascists’ crimes.”

Leaving aside that these well-hidden ’90s facts are being presented suddenly as common knowledge by the same media that suppressed them, one must point out the irony of Peres inviting Holocaust deniers such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit Jasenovac. After all, Croatia continues to downplay its own Holocaust, with the Jasenovac memorial neglecting to name a single culprit. The memorial also minimizes the number killed there to 85,000, a Tudjman-era concoction — some estimates say that as many as 700,000 were killed at the camp.

Acknowledging one’s bloody past is certainly easier when it’s on one’s own terms. Adding insult to injury, the revisionist figure is cited by world dignitaries and Holocaust museums that deign to mention the genocide of Serbs at all. Yet if one looks at the WWII timeline, the genocide in Croatia, which had the earliest functioning death camp, set a precedent. If a genocide had been carried out successfully in Catholic Croatia, with the Vatican silent, how hard was it to repeat the model in the rest of Europe?

If Peres thinks Israel will be rewarded for helping Croatia downplay its under-recorded WWII crimes, he might recall how well Croatian Jews’ loyalty to secessionist Croatia against their country of citizenship, Yugoslavia, served them in the ’90s.

From the Nov. 18, 1993 UK Guardian: “Among the most vocal campaigners for international recognition of Croatia two years ago, Jewish leaders are distressed by ‘extensive’ condonation of the Quisling Ustashe state, which slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies. [S]treets, squares and schools dedicated to anti-fascist fighters have been renamed and a monument in memory of 1,500 Jews executed at the Jadovno concentration camp has been demolished. President Tudjman has proposed that the remains of Croats executed by the partisans should be transferred to Jasenovac. The prospect of fascists being buried side by side with their victims sickened Croatian Jews.

” ‘Our lobbying gave them moral credibility at a time when they were often depicted as anti-Semitic or neo-fascist,’ ” said [Zagreb Jewish community leader Srdjan] Matic.

Despite former Croatian President Stipe Mesic’s proclamations that modern Croatia was built on anti-fascism, the open secret is that it was “liberated” under the same banner as Nazism, with help from a newly reunified Germany, the Vatican and the United States whose for-hire generals helped plan 1995’s Operation Storm, which cleansed 250,000 Serbs.

Despite Croatia’s large banners for EU consumption reading “Welcome Home, Serbs!” Operation Storm is still celebrated as a national holiday on Aug. 5.

Yet Peres suffers comparisons by Croatian leaders between Israel’s struggle for independence and Croatia’s kampf for independence. That the Jewish state would join the long list of Croatia’s enablers foretells of dark days.

A Croatia that was never made to admit its crimes nor exposed to the world public is to be the EU’s newest member. The new Europe is shaping up to look much like the old one.

(Julia Gorin specializes in Balkans issues and is an unpaid advisory board member of the American Council for Kosovo.)

 

JERUSALEM (JTA) — The United Nations confirmed that Israeli troops were working on their side of the border when Lebanese troops fired on them, killing one Israeli officer.

Officials of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon said Wednesday that they would continue their investigation of the previous day’s incident.

President Obama on Tuesday night conveyed his condolences through Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to the family of Lt.-Col. Dov Harari, who was killed in the Tuesday afternoon exchange of fire between Israeli and Lebanese troops. Another Israeli soldier was seriously injured. Lebanon said that four Lebanese were killed, including a journalist.

According to Israel Radio, the Israeli military told UNIFIL early Tuesday morning that it planned to trim the foliage in the area; UNIFIL asked the army to delay the activity until later in the day in order to prepare for the Israeli  presence. The delay gave the Lebanese army time to arrange the ambush, an Israeli official told Army Radio, pointing out that journalists and photographers had gathered at the site before the incident occurred.

"The U.N. announcement today clearly corroborates the Israeli version of events," Israeli spokesman Mark Regev said in a statement issued Wednesday. "Our routine activity yesterday was conducted entirely SOUTH of the frontier — on the Israeli side — and that the Lebanese Army opened fire without any provocation or justification whatsoever."

Israeli troops returned to the site and cut the trees and bushes on Wednesday morning.

Israel filed a letter of complaint with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and the U.N. Security Council following the incident Tuesday afternoon. 

"These attacks threaten stability, peace, and security in our region," Israeli Ambassador Daniel Carmon said in the letter. "In response to this grave incident that constitutes a blatant violation of UN Security Council resolution 1701, Israel exercised its right of self-defense, responding with the appropriate measures on LAF positions in the area.

"Israel holds the Government of Lebanon responsible for these attacks and all actions conducted from Lebanese territory. Israel calls upon the international community to exert its influence and to take the necessary measures with the Lebanese authorities to ensure that such provocative violations will not be repeated."

(JTA) — Jewish groups on opposite sides of the same-sex marriage debate reacted to a federal court’s decision to repeal California’s Proposition 8.

Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker on Wednesday overturned Proposition 8, which defines marriage under state law as only between a man and woman, ruling that the law is unconstitutional.

He stated that the freedom to marry is recognized as a fundamental right protected by the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution.

"Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriage on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional," the judge said in his ruling.

In a statement issued Wednesday afternoon, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America stated that "Traditional Jewish values recognize marriage as being only between a man and woman."

"In addition to our religious values – which we do not seek to impose on anyone – we fear legal recognition of same-sex “marriage” poses a grave threat to the fundamental civil right of religious freedom," the statement continued.

"Forcing a choice between faith and the law benefits no one," the statement added, concluding that it looked forward to the appeals process.

The Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism welcomed the judge’s ruling, a decision which "reaffirms the strong commitment to equality upon which our nation is built, " Mark J. Pelavin, associate director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

"We know, of course, that this decision will be reviewed by other Courts, including in all likelihood, the U.S. Supreme Court. And we know that long march to full marriage equality will not be uninterrupted; there will be victories such as we celebrate today as well as setbacks. But it becomes clearer every day that we are now, finally and blessedly, on a road that is destined to end with justice for gay and lesbian Americans," he said.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — A U.S. court ruled that the Russian Federation must return sacred documents to the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

Last week’s ruling by the Washington, D.C., District Court, which was filed Wednesday, came after over 5 1/2 years of legal proceedings to recover documents seized by the Russian government during World War II.

The Russian government was ordered to hand over the documents to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow or to Chabad officials.

"This victory is a triumph for justice for the Jewish people and others who abhor the Nazi and Soviet exploitation of victims of genocide, and the unlawful and immoral suppression of religious faith by the current Russian government,” Seth Gerber, an attorney representing Chabad, said in a statement.

The religious books, manuscripts and other documents fell into Russian hands when the previous Lubavitcher rebbe, Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, fled Poland during World War II. The Russian government said last year that they do not particularly care about the documents, but that a lawsuit is not the right way to determine ownership and a U.S. court should not have jurisdiction over the case.

(JTA) — Elana Kagan became the third Jewish justice on the current U.S. Supreme Court with her confirmation by the U.S. Senate.

The Senate approved the nomination of Kagan, the U.S. solicitor general, in a 63-37 vote Thursday.

Kagan, 50, joins Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer as Jewish justices on the high court. She becomes the court’s 112th justice and the fourth woman to serve, including Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor on the current panel.

Kagan, a New York City native, was an attorney and policy adviser in the Clinton White House for four years. She is a former dean of the Harvard Law School.

President Obama nominated Kagan in May to replace Justice John Paul Stevens, who served on the court for 35 years. Kagan is expected to support the court’s more liberal wing, which Stevens led during his time on the court.

The Senate has been debating Kagan’s nomination for the past three days ahead of a monthlong recess. Its Judiciary Committee had approved Kagan two weeks ago by a 13-6 vote mostly on party lines.

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Rabbi Bruce Cohen, founder of the Arab-Israeli coexistence group Interns for Peace, has died.

Cohen, who had been fighting bone cancer in his sternum for a year, died Tuesday in his New York home. He was 65.

He founded Interns for Peace in 1976 to push coexistence between Israelis and Arabs by having them work together on projects such as road safety, gardening and festivals. The projects highlighted similarities between the two cultures and avoided politics.

Interns for Peace has trained about 250 interns, mostly Arab Israelis, who work across Israel.

"Wherever you go in the Arab sector, Rabbi Bruce and Interns for Peace are there and have left a mark," said Farhat Agbaria, an Israeli Arab who worked with Cohen at an Interns for Peace board meeting three weeks ago.

Cohen and his wife adopted two Muslim children from Bosnia, a Jewish boy from Florida and a Chinese girl whom they raised Jewish. They later took in someone from Zimbabwe.

A Reform rabbi from Buffalo, N.Y., he received his doctorate in Hebrew letters from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1998.

A memorial service will be held Nov. 7 at Congregation Kol Ami in White Plains, N.Y.
  

The initial list of those who have accepted “The Giving Pledge” challenge issued by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet earlier this year was made public Wednesday.

In June, Gates and Buffet issued to the world’s richest families a challenge to give away half of their fortunes in what is an unprecedented push to increase philanthropic giving.

The move was put in motion in 2009, when the two richest Americans presided over a secret meeting of billionaires in New York. Some 40 philanthropists are among the early acceptors of the challenge, according to a website established Thursday.

Among them, at least 11 are Jewish, and several, such as Lorry Lokey, Bernie Marcus and Sanford Weill, have given huge dollars to overtly Jewish causes in the past.

Here is a list of the Jews on the list. A number of the philanthropists who have accepted the challenge published letters about their giving. Links have been provided when available:

• Michael Bloomberg 
• Eli and Edith Broad
• Barry Diller and Diane Von Furstenberg
• Larry Ellison
• Joan and Irwin Jacobs
• Lorry Lokey
• Bernie and Millie Marcus
• Bernard and Barbro Osher
• David M. Rubenstein
• Herb and Marion Sandler
• Jeff Skoll
• Sanford and Joan Weill