Cause to remember
Two of Israel’s best known Holocaust survivors, Noah Klieger and former chief rabbi of Israel Yisrael Meir Lau were good friends. Lau officiated at Klieger’s wedding, and last December eulogized him at his funeral. Lau is famous for his gift of oratory, and has spoken in many parts of the world about the importance of the Shoah as one of the tragic milestones of Jewish history and heritage. While Lau spoke about the Holocaust, Klieger wrote about it in Yediot Aharonot, where he worked for the larger part of his life. For years, Lau and Klieger were together at the March of the Living. Last week, Lau became the first recipient of the ADL Israel’s Noah Klieger Memorial Award. Another recipient was social entrepreneur Adi Altschuler, the founder of Zikaron Basalon, an alternative gathering on Holocaust Remembrance Day in which groups of people gather in private homes to listen to a Holocaust survivor tell his or her story.
■ CULTURE AND Sport Minister Miri Regev should do very well in the Likud primaries this week, certainly in terms of voter support from Judea and Samaria, where 18 heads of local councils have publicly endorsed her and called on all Likudniks in Judea and Samaria to follow their lead. The council heads behind Regev are: Hananel Durani of Kedumim, David Elhiani of the Jordan Valley, Yossi Dagan of Samaria, Israel Gantz of the Binyamin region , Yohai Damari of Har Hebron, Eli Shviro of Ariel, Benny Kashriel of Ma’aleh Adumim, Assaf Mintzer of Elkana, Shlomo Neeman of Gush Etzion, Oded Revivi of Efrat, Shlomo Lalouche of Ma’aleh Ephraim, Yossi Avrahami of Givat Ze’ev, Yigal Lahav of Karnei Shomron, Eliahu Libman of Kiryat Arba, Nir Bartal of Oranit, Aryeh Cohen of the Megillot Dead Sea Regional Council, Shai Rosenzweig of Alfei Menashe, and Yehuda Elboim of Beit Aryeh–Ofarim. That’s quite a lot of electoral clout. ■ JUSTICE MINISTER Ayelet Shaked, cofounder of the New Right Party, will be the guest speaker at an English-language Q&A organized by the Tel Aviv International Salon as part of its preelection series, in which decision makers will interact with Tel Aviv young professionals.
Shaked – who set out to reform the justice system in Israel and who succeeded to some extent, even though she doesn’t have a law degree – has announced that if she is elected to the incoming Knesset in April and joins the government coalition, she intends to campaign for the opportunity to once again hold the justice portfolio. If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu manages to bypass his legal obstacles, he may decide from the viewpoint of qualifications and personal and party loyalty that Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely is a better candidate for justice minister. Hotovely has a master’s degree in law and is currently studying for her doctorate. In addition, her English is much more fluent than Shaked’s. The event with Shaked will be held on Tuesday, February 12, which happens to be the date of the Labor Party primaries. The venue is Hangar 11 on the Port of Tel Aviv. Doors open at 7 p.m.
■ FEBRUARY 12 must have some special significance other than that mentioned above and it being the peak of the sales period leading up to Valentine’s Day. It also happens to be International Darwin Day. That doesn’t go over well with the ultra-Orthodox community, which rejects Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. But that doesn’t prevent the Jerusalem-headquartered Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities from having a conference on Homo sapiens and their strange relationship to Neanderthals. The conference begins at 4 p.m. and will be chaired by Prof. Anna Belfer-Cohen of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Speakers will include Prof. Oren Herman of Bar-Ilan University, Prof. Yoel Rak of Tel Aviv University, Prof. Ilan Gronau of IDC Herzliya, and Belfer-Cohen herself. ■ IN NETANYA, members of ESRA (English-Speaking Residents Association) and spouses of diplomats are teaching English to students of the city’s Ethiopian Beta Israel community. ESRA members also teach English at one of the schools in Jerusalem. The English-language gauntlet has now been picked up in the capital by members of Emunah who coach students at Emunah College. According to data published at the end of last year by the Central Bureau of Statistics, the standard of English of Israeli high school, university and college students leaves much to be desired,
Dr. Natan Ophir, head of the English department of Emunah Appleman College in Jerusalem, contends that “The study of English is essential in the academic world. According to the requirements of the Council for Higher Education, a student who does not succeed in mastering the fundamentals of the language will not qualify for a degree, even if he or she excels in all other subjects.” Ophir notes that “Knowledge of English gives graduates a significant advantage, especially when they work outside Israel, and enables them to express themselves in meetings and presentations. In any case, it is important to us that the study of English be serious and comprehensive and extends beyond the compulsory requirements”.
The powers that be at Emunah College discovered that some of their most talented students in diverse fields of the arts were failing in their exams due to inadequate knowledge of English. An in-depth study of the problem revealed that the students did not fit into the formal study framework that had been designated for the teaching of English. Emunah decided to run its own English courses that were less formal in nature, and not regarded as compulsory.
Many of the members of Emunah Jerusalem are native English-speakers and some were qualified teachers in the countries from which they came to Israel. Two active members of Emunah, Ivy Schwartz and Brenda Coren, began connecting immigrants from English-speaking countries with the students. The response on both sides was enthusiastic, with a dramatic improvement in attitudes toward learning English. In the first week of the semester, which is coordinated by Rachel Petinkin, 10 volunteers came to the college. Since then, the number has increased. There is a teaching curriculum, but because the volunteers meet with small groups of students and have a lot of individual rapport, the lessons are more fun than they are formal for both teachers and students. It’s a two-way street. During the breaks between lessons, the students teach the teachers Hebrew slang.
It’s sad that a nation that prides itself on education and scholarship has to rely on volunteers to supplement its programs, just as it has to rely on volunteers to supplement nursing care in hospitals because overworked and underpaid professional nurses have sufficient difficulty in coping in the wards, and cannot always attend to the patients in the corridors. Despite a falloff in Israel-directed philanthropy in some quarters, there are still many philanthropists who are willing to support projects in Israel.
Surely the time has come for a national needs website in which projects are listed by category, with a description of the project and the extent of fiscal transparency, so that donors will know that their monetary gifts are not lining the pockets of some director general. The late Prof. Eliezer Jaffe, who was one of Israel’s leading experts in social work, wrote a book called Giving Wisely, in which he listed numerous causes of different kinds with thumbnail descriptions of each. The book was written 19 years ago, but some of its material is still relevant. He followed up with another publication that was essentially a guide to non-profit and volunteer organizations, and combined both books in a now-closed website – GivingWisely.org – that contained nearly 30,000 full or partial profiles of Israeli nonprofit organizations and institutions with details of transparency and accountability. Something similar is sorely needed today.
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