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Be’chol Lashon Newsletter: May 2008

• BE'CHOL LASHON EVENTS
• BE'CHOL LASHON UPDATES
• ABAYUDAYA UPDATES
• CURRENT NEWS
• IDENTITY
• COMMUNITIES AROUND THE WORLD
• ARTS & CULTURE

BE’CHOL LASHON EVENTS

Be’chol Lashon at Israel in the Gardens

Sunday, June 1, 2008
11am - 5pm
Yerba Buena Gardens

Be’chol Lashon is delighted to feature children's crafts and entertainment at Israel in the Gardens 2008 at Yerba Buena Gardens. Join the West African inspired drum circle, create Latino papel picado or Asian block printing. Appropriate for all ages!

Be a Be’chol Lashon volunteer! Contact Esther@JewishResearch.org or 415-386-2604 for more information.

Join Be'chol Lashon at DAWN 2008, an All Night Cultural Arts Festival

Saturday, June 7, 2008
Beginning at 8pm
The Contemporary Jewish Musuem
736 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

Taking place simultaneously throughout the Museum, Dawn '08 will feature a packed, late-night evening of headlining performances and events including live bands, theatrical and spoken word performances, premiere film screenings, visual arts, dancing, DJs, lectures, comedy, readings and open-space discussion forums --AND the opportunity to explore the Museum's new building and exhibitions before the doors open to the public the following morning.

For your discounted ticket, use the promo code Lashon10 at check out and we'll see you there!
https://tickets.thecjm.org/public/

BE'CHOL LASHON UPDATES

Meeting unites far-flung communities seeking place in the Jewish world

By Sue Fishkoff
May 7, 2008, JTA

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) -- Miguel Segura Aguilo’s ancestors were executed as Jews five centuries ago in Spain, but he is not welcome in his local synagogue today.

Gershom Sizomu, who will be ordained this month in Los Angeles as a Conservative rabbi, dreams of setting up the first yeshiva for African Jews in his Abayudayan village in East Uganda.

Rabbi Capers Funnye, spiritual leader of a largely African-American congregation in Chicago, is off to Nigeria to make connections with the Ibo, a community that claims Jewish heritage.

These men, and dozens of other representatives of far-flung communities seeking recognition by the Jewish mainstream, gathered this past weekend in San Francisco at a conference sponsored by Be’chol Lashon (In Every Tongue), a project of the Institute for Jewish and Community Research.

The Ibo, Lemba and Abayudaya of Africa, the anusim and xuetas of Spain and Latin America, Ethiopian Jews from Israel, Indian Jews from New York and Asian-American Jews-by-Choice spent three days networking and sharing information about their struggles to join the global Jewish family, a family that is not always eager to embrace them.

"The Jewish community keeps talking about the crisis of intermarriage and the crisis of declining numbers, but meanwhile you’ve got people with Jewish heritage, spiritual seekers, Jewish communities of historical significance, and the Jewish community is doing nothing to help them," says Gary Tobin, the institute’s president and a longtime advocate of greater openness to those outside the Ashkenazi mainstream.

According to institute research, at least 20 percent of American Jews are racially and ethnically diverse. But old stereotypes about what "real Jews" look like persist, Tobin says.

"Instead of worrying about people being ‘lost’ to intermarriage," he wonders, "why aren’t we extending our ideological borders to include all these people who are so interested in joining us?"

Some of these communities have gone through formal conversion, like the 800 Abayudaya of Uganda, who did so together in 2002. Others have not, including the Lemba of South Africa, who claim Jewish ancestry and point to the Jewish cultural practices they have maintained for centuries.

Still others languish in a gray zone, notably the anusim of Spain, Portugal and Latin America, known more popularly as the conversos -- those whose ancestors were forcibly converted to Catholicism under the Inquisition, and who now wish to reclaim their Jewish identities. Estimates of their number range from tens of thousands to more than 1 million.

Aguilo was part of a group from Mallorca, Spain that met with Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Yonah Metzger, last year, to request a mechanism for their return to the Jewish fold.

"He told us, ‘I need to find a legal tool to defend your position to the rabbinate,’" says Aguilo, a prominent journalist who writes and lectures widely about the xuetas, descendants of those conversos who recanted and reclaimed their Judaism before execution.

Aguilo and his friends are still waiting for Metzger’s reply. "Whatever happens, just don’t put a cross on my grave," he says, only half-joking.

Some of the anusim claim special status as the descendants of Jews, insisting that they don’t need formal conversion. A handful of sympathetic rabbis have held "ceremonies of return" for them, just as a growing number of Conservative rabbis describe the conversion of people with one Jewish parent as "affirmations" of a Jewish identity they were born with.

But thousands of others are willing to undergo conversion, says Cuban-born Rabbi Manny Vinas, who runs El Centro de Estudios Judios, a Spanish-language Torah center in New York that tries to guide anusim back to Judaism.

"These people want to return to Jerusalem with their heads held high," he says, arguing the need for a formal process to help them.

Those who wish their conversions to be recognized by Israel are thwarted, he asserts, by new conversion regulations worked out between Israel’s rabbinate and the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America, whereby only conversions performed by 15 Orthodox rabbinical courts in North America will be accepted in Israel.

That means, he continues, that anyone from Central or South America who wants to convert must travel to North America, a practice that favors the rich.

"The only people able to convert are those with enough money to do it in the United States," he says.

Some of the communities in Be’chol Lashon’s network are far removed from this political struggle over conversion. The Lemba of South Africa, who formed their own Lemba Cultural Association in 1948, are still at the stage of finding out who they are, and what Judaism is all about.

Be’chol Lashon is sponsoring a Lemba student in Botswana who is writing his doctoral dissertation on the history of the community. This is in line with the group’s focus on empowering local leadership, says Be'chol Lashon director Diane Tobin.

She noted that Be’chol Lashon also funded Sizomu’s five years at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies in Los Angeles, so he could return to Uganda this summer as Africa’s first native-born black rabbi.

Sizomu wonders what effect his return will have on his people's worship style, as he has now become accustomed to western Conservative norms.

"The words we use are the same," he says, explaining that the Abayudaya use prayer books donated by Conservative rabbis who have visited this past decade, "but the melodies are African."

Tobin said she hopes to fund rabbinical studies for more African Jews.

"We will work with anyone who wants to move forward toward being part of the Jewish community," she says.

Think Tank Aims to Infuse Jewish Mainstream with Dashes of Color

By Rebecca Spence, May 8, 2008, Forward.com

Go to almost any Jewish conference and you’ll likely find the ethnic makeup to be largely, and unsurprisingly, white.

But at a recent plenum in San Francisco, a group championing ethnic diversity in Jewish life turned that situation on its head, as scores of black, Latino and Asian Jews from around the world came together to grapple with the challenges they face gaining acceptance in the mainstream Jewish world.

The group of 80 Jewish leaders from 31 different countries — including Uganda, South Africa and Portugal — who gathered the first weekend this month for the Be’Chol Lashon International Think Tank had one clear message for the Jewish community: Open your doors to diversity. The sixth annual event, organized by Be’Chol Lashon — a Bay Area initiative dedicated to fostering diversity in Jewish life — and fittingly held at the Hotel Kabuki in the heart of San Francisco’s Japantown, centered this year on questions of conversion and whether Judaism might take a more proactive role in gaining adherents.

As demographic studies in recent years have shown a shrinking American Jewish population, the organized Jewish community has poured millions of dollars into strengthening identity in young Jews. But the mainstream response to the so-called population crisis, which has resulted in a slew of identity-building projects — among them, "Birthright Israel," a program that takes tens of thousands of American Jews in their teens and 20s on free trips to the Jewish state — is not the solution, according to Diane and Gary Tobin, co-founders of Be’Chol Lashon. The organization, whose name is Hebrew for "in every tongue," was established eight years ago in the wake of the Tobins’ 1997 adoption of an African American boy.

Gary Tobin, a Jewish researcher who is president of San Francisco’s Institute for Jewish & Community Research, contends that only through welcoming converts of all ethnicities and breaking down the barriers to conversion will the Jewish people be able to reverse the trend of dwindling population numbers. Tobin is referring not just to welcoming converts who are married to Jews, but also to reaching out to non-Jews generally.

"If we think that going to Jewish day school or trips to Israel are going to save the Jewish people, it’s just silly," Tobin said. "The response of the organized Jewish community has been to circle the wagons, and what this room represents is the possibility of expansion, not constriction," he said, referring to the conference participants.

The driving philosophy behind Be’Chol Lashon, Tobin added, is that Jews should, in fact, "be competing in the marketplace of world religion." If Jews began reaching out across color lines, the number of Jews in America alone could increase, over the next quarter of a century, to 12 million from 6 million, he said.

Indeed, some in the organized Jewish community take issue with Tobin’s approach. In more traditional corners, emphasizing outreach over strengthening Jewish identity from within is often met with skepticism.

"We’re worried about bringing people in, but what about people leaving?" said Rabbi Elazar Muskin of the Modern Orthodox Los Angeles synagogue Young Israel of Century City. "We have to have more money and creative efforts spent energizing those who are already within the Jewish community rather than proselytizing."

Conference participants were as diverse geographically as they were in skin color and ethnicity. Participants included Rabbi Capers Funnye of Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken, a predominantly African American Jewish congregation on Chicago’s South Side; Ishe F.C. Raulinga Hamisi, an elder of South Africa’s Lemba community, which claims Jewish roots, and Miguel Segura, who was raised in Mallorca as a Xueta, the name given to descendants of Jews from Mallorca who were forced by the Catholic Church to convert to Christianity.

On the first day of the conference, Jewish legal scholars — including a Modern Orthodox rabbi, Darren Kleinberg — parsed Jewish law, or Halacha, and what it has to say about conversion. Contrary to widely held belief, the panelists agreed, Jewish law is far more open to conversion than contemporary practice would indicate.

That discussion was enough to sway at least one Korean American conference participant, Helen Kim, to reconsider her reservations about conversion. Kim, a 35-year-old sociology professor at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., is married to a Jewish man and has felt drawn to the religion ever since she first developed a grade-school crush on a Jewish boy. Kim, who has served for the past two years on the board of her local Reform synagogue, Congregation Beth Israel, said that she has long felt ambivalent about formally converting to Judaism, because of questions of bloodline. But the panel on Halacha and conversion convinced her otherwise. "This conference has made me feel less resistant to conversion and more comfortable with it," Kim said.

Another panel considered the effects of last February’s ruling by the Israeli chief rabbinate that only 15 rabbinic courts and 40 designated Orthodox rabbis in America could perform sanctioned conversions. Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, a 39-year-old leader of the Abayudaya, a group of some 800 Jews in eastern Uganda whose ancestors have practiced the religion for nearly a century, said that it was refreshing for him to understand that even among Orthodox Jews, there are conflicts over the question "Who is a Jew?"

"It has become a Jewish culture that we don’t accept each other," said Sizomu, who will return to Uganda next month, after receiving rabbinic ordination from Los Angeles’s American Jewish University. "You are frustrated with the Orthodox, and then you see they don’t even accept each other."

Reform student on Track to Become the First Black Female Rabbi

By Sue Fishkoff, May 7, 2008, JTA

SAN FRANCISCO (JTA) -- Alysa Stanton-Ogulnick isn’t particularly interested in being a standard-bearer.

She’s proud to be black, proud to be a woman and proud to be a 45-year-old single mother who raised her adopted child on her own.

And when she says that next May, following her ordination as a Reform rabbi, she will become the first black female rabbi, the huge grin on her face lets folks know she feels pretty good about that, too.

But Stanton-Ogulnick, who is studying at the Cincinnati campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, didn’t set out to be the first. It just kind of happened, like so much else in her life.

"If I were the 50,000th, I’d still be doing what I do, trying to live my life with kavanah and kedusha," she says, using the Hebrew words for intentionality and holiness. "Me being first was just the luck of the draw."

Stanton-Ogulnick -- she’s still getting used to the second part of her hyphenated last name, the product of a recent marriage -- was in this city over the weekend for a conference of ethnically and racially diverse Jews and Jewish communities sponsored by Be’chol Lashon, an organization that supports their efforts to enter the Jewish mainstream.

That’s something the future rabbi knows a great deal about -- as a woman, as a convert and as a Jew of color. She’s had to fight for success and acceptance in a world that wasn’t always welcoming.

"At this conference there are people from all over looking for their identity," Stanton-Ogulnick says. "Maybe I can help them on the path by breaking down barriers."

That’s among her goals as a rabbi, she says: breaking barriers, building bridges and giving hope.

Like many rabbinic students now, Stanton-Ogulnick is on her second career. She came to the rabbinate as a licensed psychotherapist specializing in grief and loss issues.

Stanton-Ogulnickhas worked with trauma victims in Colorado for the past 16 years, at the same time becoming more active in Denver’s Temple Emanuel. She has served the synagogue as a para-chaplain, religious-school teacher and cantorial soloist.

Raised by Pentacostal parents, Stanton-Ogulnick spent her childhood and young adulthood as a spiritual seeker, making the rounds of various Christian denominations before finding her home in Judaism. She converted more than 20 years ago.

"People look at me and ask if I was born Jewish," she says. "I say yes, but not to a Jewish womb. I believe I was at Sinai. It’s not as if one day I scratched my head and said, hmm, now how can I make my life more difficult? I know -- I’ll become Jewish!"

Stanton-Ogulnick made her choice to join the Jewish community as an adult, well aware of the difficulties that might arise. Her daughter Shana, now 13, didn’t get to choose; she was dipped in the mikveh as an infant.

The year they spent in Jerusalem, Stanton-Ogulnick’s first year as an HUC student, was the most difficult. Shana, then 7, faced daily prejudice at school.

"She was beat up, and once was literally kicked off the bus," her mother says with quiet anger. "We’d been in Israel three months and her only friend was a cat."

One day, Shana came home from camp beaming because one of the other children held her hand.

" ’Nobody ever holds my hand, Mommy,’ she said to me," Stanton-Ogulnick recounts. "I said, why? She said, ’Because I’m shochor,’ " or black.

"Ani lo tov, ani lo yafah," the little girl told her mother, using the Hebrew for "I’m no good, I’m not pretty."

Even telling the story now, six years later, Stanton-Ogulnick shakes her head.

"Sometimes I’ve been in tears with what I have put this child through," she says.

Stanton-Ogulnick relates some of the difficulties of her life’s journey in a monologue she created last fall called "Layers."

First performed at a conference of Reform religious-school educators in October, the piece opens with her standing on stage with her head in a noose, a shocking evocation of slavery. The monologue deals with her journey to Judaism and other major changes in her life, including a recent weight loss of 122 pounds.

Pulling out an old picture of herself at her former weight, Stanton-Ogulnick shakes her head again. Is she really no longer that person? Is she really about to become a rabbi?

It’s all so remarkable, she muses.

At the end of one performance, she says, a woman came up to her in tears, saying, "You told my story, thank you."

"It’s those moments," Stanton-Ogulnick says, her voice trailing off as she smiles. "Even though the journey is long and the path difficult, if I can provide someone with a little hope and a sense of purpose, it’s worthwhile."

It’s experiencing those moments that she is most looking forward to as a rabbi, whether she ends up in a pulpit, working as a chaplain or in some other position.

"That moment, that ‘a-ha, I’m not alone’ that comes when I’m talking with a congregant or an individual struggling with something and I’m helping them find a solution," she says, "that a-ha moment is what it’s about for me."

Introducing Some of the Jewish World's Newest Rabbis

By Marissa Brotstoff, Rebecca Spense and Anthony Weiss, April 17, 2008, The Forward

Like many rabbinical candidates, Sara Brandes, who is about to graduate from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, originally hadn’t planned to become a rabbi. But during a year she spent in Israel after college, she discovered that her interests — which included psychology and religion — could be combined in a single job. “I just realized that in Judaism, we call this person ‘rabbi,’” Brandes said.

Brandes, who after graduation will become a rabbi in residence at Milken Community High School, a Los Angeles day school, said she loved her time at JTS, in part because of a student movement to create what she and other students felt the school lacked: a sense of “soulfulness.” “I came to see myself as part of an incredible counterculture of students” working to reshape the seminary as a more spiritual place, she said.

Anne Brener, who will graduate this spring from the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, first entered the Reform movement-affiliated seminary in 1981 as a student in the School of Jewish Communal Service. She did not complete her degree, embarking instead on a long career as a psychotherapist and a writer. She is perhaps best known as the author of the book “Mourning and Mitzvah,” which covers Jewish approaches to grief. Brener — now 60 — gradually made her way back to HUC, this time entering the rabbinical school. But when Hurricane Katrina hit her hometown of New Orleans, she took off a semester to do relief work in Louisiana, where she served as a grief counselor. Upon her return to L.A., she was diagnosed with cancer and took off another semester. Now, 27 years after she first set foot in HUC, Brener will be ordained as a rabbi.

Jonah Feldman, a candidate for ordination at Yeshiva University, made his decision to become a rabbi in the midst of an illness. As an undergraduate at Y.U., Feldman came down with a mysterious malady that sapped his strength and left doctors baffled. During his months of struggling with the disease, Feldman resolved to become both a doctor and a rabbi — a doctor so that he could help others who were sick, and a rabbi because he craved some spiritual meaning beyond science. The disease, eventually diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome, gradually subsided, and Feldman has found the energy to complete both rabbinical school and medical studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Once he graduates, Feldman expects to enter the medical field as an oncologist. Delphine Horvilleur, who will be ordained by Hebrew Union College next month, is about to become the third woman rabbi in France. Born in the country’s Alsace-Lorraine region, Horvilleur moved to Israel at 17 to attend school. She later traveled between Israel and France as a reporter for French television. All along, she studied Jewish philosophy and theology on her own. Frustrated by the lack of Talmud study groups in France that accepted women, she went to New York, where she encountered the opposite problem: too many classes and too little time. What she thought would be a vacation has lasted through this year, and is about to culminate with a rabbinical degree from HUC.

She will then move back to Paris, where she will work as a rabbi at a Reform congregation. As a woman rabbi in France, even in liberal denominations, “you have to justify yourself,” Horvilleur said. “I expect to face a lot of resistance.”

Donna Kirshbaum will be 57 when she graduates from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College this spring, but she has felt she had a calling since the age of 8. “I read a book about George Fox, who was the first Quaker,” she explained. “And I said to my mother, ‘Someday I’m going to be a leader of my people the way George Fox was a leader of his people.’”

Kirshbaum’s path has by no means been linear. She studied ancient Greek and Latin in college and then taught those subjects at the high-school level. Later, she moved to England to play cello in a symphony orchestra for several years. Then, after co-owning a dairy farm in the Ozarks, she finally settled in Baltimore, where she helped to found the Bolton Street Synagogue. Eventually she became principal of its religious school. After all that, RRC, she said, “has been like a six-year-long Shabbat for me.”

After she is ordained, Kirshbaum will become a rabbi at a Reconstructionist congregation in Princeton, N.J., called String of Pearls.

Chaim Koritzinsky, a one-time Jewish communal organizer in the former Soviet Union, is a member of the of first-ever graduating class at the Hebrew College Rabbinical School. Koritzinsky, 34, first became interested in pursuing ordination through his work in the former Soviet Union with the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Hillel. “A lot of my mentors in the field were the people who had ordination and were doing very inspiring things with their rabbinate,” he said.

Koritzinsky, who spent his undergraduate years at Vassar College, later moved to Boston and worked with teenagers at the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston. He consulted on social justice issues and also taught at Hebrew College’s high school. Koritzinsky said that Hebrew College’s trans-denominational approach was what drew him to the nascent rabbinical school. “In Russia there really weren’t any denominations,” he said. “So when I thought about going to rabbinical school, I wanted to continue serving as wide a spectrum of the Jewish community as possible.”

In keeping with his flair for international work, Koritzinsky, upon being ordained, will be taking the helm of Ruach Ami, an emerging synagogue community in Santiago, Chile.

Danya Ruttenberg, a Chicago-area native who worked as a freelance writer before attending the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, will be ordained in May. Ruttenberg, 33, first gravitated toward her study of religion as an undergraduate at Brown University. She had intended to study philosophy, but ended up in the religious studies department. After college she moved to San Francisco, where her study of Judaism intensified. Ruttenberg, a contributing editor at Lilith magazine, has published an anthology, “Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism.” Her next book, “Surprised by God: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Religion,” will be released in August.

Isaac Saposnik, who will be ordained by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in June, credits his rabbinical aspirations to a Reform Jewish summer camp. His family was active in a Reconstructionist congregation near Chicago, but because there was no summer camp affiliated with the movement, Saposnik spent his summers at the Union for Reform Judaism’s Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute, a Reform-affiliated camp in Wisconsin — and loved it. He studied philosophy at Tufts University and worked with NFTY, the Reform movement’s youth group, before starting at rabbinical school. After he is ordained, he will become director of Camp JRF, a Reconstructionist summer camp that was established in 2002.

Ben Shalva, who will graduate from the Jewish Theological Seminary this spring, grew up Jewish but became a committed student of Buddhism for several years while in his late teens and early 20s. An interest in reinvestigating his religious roots took him to Israel, and while there he became so interested in Judaism that he applied to the rabbinical school at Hebrew Union College in New York. He enrolled at the school when he returned, but ultimately felt out of place there and transferred to JTS. Through the seminary, he has interned as a chaplain at a hospital and at Rikers Island, New York City’s largest jail. After he is ordained, he plans to work as an assistant rabbi in Fairfax, Va. Asked what his relationship to Buddhism is now, Shalva said that he tries to incorporate Buddhist practices of mindfulness and meditation into Jewish worship. “Buddhism has many things to say about anxiety, and Jews are very anxious people — myself included,” he said.

The spiritual leader of Uganda’s Jewish community, Gershom Sizomu, will be ordained in May at Los Angeles’s Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies. Five years ago, Sizomu, 39, moved with his wife and two children to Los Angeles from Uganda after attending a 2002 San Francisco conference on marginal Jewish communities. At the conference, participants asked Sizomu, whose father and grandfather before him led the community of Ugandan Jews known as Abayudayah what would most help his people. Sizomu answered that they would benefit most from being integrated into the international Jewish world. Leaders of the conference suggested that he become an ordained rabbi, and they reached out to several rabbinic colleges.

Uganda’s Jews, of whom there are around 750, once numbered as many as 8,000. Legend has it that less than 100 years ago, Christian missionaries trying to convert Ugandans approached a tribal leader, Semei Kakungulu. The leader read the bible, but was reputedly so transfixed by the first five books of Moses that he circumcised himself and began observing the laws of kashrut and the Sabbath. The Jewish community that sprang from Kakungulu’s conversion dwindled in later decades, as Christian missionaries demanded that only Christian children be educated and, finally, dictator Idi Amin threatened the community.

In honor of Sizomu’s ordination, the dean of the Ziegler School, Rabbi Bradley Artson, will travel to Uganda with two other L.A.-area rabbis to officially install Sizomu as the Abayudayah’s rabbi.

In becoming an Orthodox rabbi, David Wolkenfeld, a candidate for ordination at Manhattan’s Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, is following in his father’s footsteps. The elder Wolkenfeld was ordained on the Lower East Side at the Rabbi Jacob Joseph Yeshiva but never practiced, becoming a psychotherapist instead. In fact, by the time Wolkenfeld was born, neither of his parents was an observant Jew. Wolkenfeld was 15 when his father died, and was becoming interested in Jewish observance on his own. Wolkenfeld, now 28, says that one of his great regrets was that his father died before they had spoken much about Jewish observance.

Wolkenfeld, who grew up in New York City, studied intellectual history at Harvard. Unlike his father, he does intend to enter the rabbinate, eventually planning to become a pulpit rabbi.

ABAYUDAYA UPDATE

CURRENT NEWS

Taking on the RCA

By Gary Rosenblatt, April 30, 2008, The Jewish Week

In a move certain to be seen as an effort to compete with the Rabbinical Council of America — the largest group of Orthodox rabbis — two vocal critics this week launched a clerical group called the International Rabbinic Fellowship.

But Rabbis Avi Weiss of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and Marc Angel, rabbi emeritus of Shearith Israel of New York, insist that the new fellowship, which attracted about 75 rabbis from North America, Israel and Columbia to a two-day conference in West Palm Beach, Fla., was created not to compete with the RCA but more broadly to counter what they see as a rightward shift in the Orthodox community and the centralization of the rabbinate.

They say they intend to maintain membership in the RCA — Rabbi Angel is a past president of the group. But they believe the new fellowship is filling a vacuum, as indicated by the large turnout, for rabbis who feel “claustrophobic” in their roles, according to Rabbi Angel.

“Rabbis need a place to grow, they can’t operate out of fear,” he said, predicting that the new group will soon grow to at least 150 members. (He pointed out that an additional 15 rabbis registered for the conference but were unable to attend and another 25 who could not make it to Florida said they want to be part of the fellowship.)

Attendees said the conference included young and older rabbis and reflected a wide range of viewpoints within Orthodox Judaism.

“We have created an open space where rabbis don’t have to look over their shoulders and feel intimidated” by rabbinic authorities who would marginalize them, said Rabbi Weiss. “We want to empower them to think for themselves.”

He noted that when as a young rabbi, he would ask a halachic question of his rebbe, the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik, the revered dean of Modern Orthodoxy, the response would be: “What do you think, Avraham?”

Rabbis Weiss and Angel and others believe that such autonomy has disappeared and that religious authority has increasingly become the purview of rosh yeshivas and poskim (decisors), with congregational rabbis feeling intimidated to express their own views and frustrated by the experience.

Most recently, the point of contention has been over an agreement reached by the RCA and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel over conversions performed by American rabbis. The Chief Rabbinate used to automatically accept conversions performed by RCA members, but the new agreement would only allow for conversions approved by a dozen or so religious courts in the U.S.

The RCA says this will circumvent the problem of individual rabbis whose halachic standards are lacking; Rabbis Weiss and Angel and other critics said the move weakens the standing of individual rabbis.

The new group plans to take positions on a wide range of issues, including conversion, Rabbi Weiss said, hoping to influence the Jewish community in the U.S., Israel and around the world. Other areas of concern include the plight of agunot (women unable to obtain a religious divorce), end-of-life medical issues and the environment.

Asher Lopatin, rabbi of Congregation Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel in Chicago who attended the conference in Florida this week, said he will continue to attend RCA conventions, which he described as an opportunity to hear religious authorities speak out on issues they see as most important. But he said the RCA has not been a place for open sharing among members about the doubts and conflicts they deal with in their work, and that those authorities who play a major role at RCA gatherings “probably would not be comfortable” with the kinds of issues he and others would like to see raised by the fellowship.

“I want to talk about how we relate to non-Jews and non-Orthodox Jews, how we deal with women’s issues, non-Orthodox converts, the history of halacha and other broad issues,” he said.

Rabbi Lopatin said the only group he knows of that deals with these topics openly is the Yarchei Kallah Program led by Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, senior scholar at Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future. The program, part of the Legacy Heritage Fund Rabbinic Enrichment Initiative, brings together about 30 young Orthodox rabbis (under 40) twice a year to discuss issues of importance to them in their careers and personal lives, from balancing professional and family responsibilities to delivering more effective sermons.

“Our goals are not political,” Rabbi Schacter said. “We want to deal with [rabbis’] challenges and frustrations, to make them feel appreciated and inspired. We give them, in effect, a group hug.”

Rabbi Lopatin, who has participated in the program, praised Rabbi Schacter’s work, but said he hoped the new fellowship would deal with these types of issues not only twice a year — “and then we put them back in the closet” — but on an ongoing basis.

Some leaders in the Orthodox community see the creation of the new fellowship as a political move by Rabbi Angel, and particularly Rabbi Weiss, noting that that the RCA has refused membership to graduates of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a Modern Orthodox rabbinical school founded by Rabbi Weiss in 1997.

“Avi and Marc have come to feel increasingly disenfranchised,” one rabbi said, “and the conversion issue put them over the top. Now Avi will have a place for his Chovevei graduates, as he should,” adding that it was “disgraceful” that the RCA has not accepted Chovevei rabbis, of whom there are now about 40 serving in pulpits and Hillel posts around the country.

Several rabbis familiar with the situation said that Rabbi Hershel Schachter, a rosh yeshiva at Yeshiva University and one of the three rabbis chosen by the RCA and Israeli Chief Rabbinate to make key decisions on the conversion issue, threatened to resign from the RCA if any Chovevei Torah rabbis were admitted to the group.

Rabbi Schachter was unavailable for comment.

A number of rabbis contacted by The Jewish Week were not aware of the formation of the new fellowship. Rabbi Shlomo Hochberg, president of the RCA, said in an e-mail response:
“The RCA reserves comment at this time, as it would be inappropriate to comment on a new group based upon speculation, until and unless we are fully informed with first-hand information.  The RCA, as always, enjoys and encourages open discussion of divergent points of view amongst all of its members.”

Other members noted that while the RCA is caught between “the roshei yeshiva of Yeshiva University and the desire to be an open tent,” in the words of one rabbi, it was unfair to portray the RCA as stifling discussion. He noted that Rabbi Weiss was invited to speak at the annual RCA convention two years ago and that topics like homosexuality have been discussed openly.

Rabbi Weiss said that it is important for Chovevei rabbis to have a rabbinic organization they can belong to, and that the fellowship can be that place. But he added that the new group has broader goals and will only allow about 25 percent of its membership to be graduates of Chovevei.

Seventeen of the rabbis at the conference this week were ordained by Chovevei.

Rabbi Weiss asserted that change in the community can come either from the top down or bottom up, but that it is the latter that has the greatest impact. He noted that community rabbis are the keys to effecting change, far more so than rabbinic scholars.

Rabbi Ross Singer of the Beth Tfiloh Congregation in Baltimore said that what was unique about the fellowship and the conference, which he attended this week, was that it was “unapologetically open and modern, willing to explore the role of universal ethics in halacha and Judaism, and all with a passion and love of Torah. That just doesn’t exist out there,” he said.

Rabbinical Court Puts Thousands of Converts in Legal Limbo

By Nathan Jeffay, May 8, 2008, Forward.com

Haifa, Israel - More than 40,000 Israelis who were converted to Judaism in the past decade by the state’s official conversion courts may find their conversions annulled — rendering them non-Jewish in the eyes of the law — following a ruling last week by Israel’s Supreme Rabbinical Court.

The ruling, responding to an appeal in a local divorce case, deals a blow to religious moderates seeking to resolve the so-called “Who is a Jew?” dispute. The conversion courts were established ostensibly to ease the work burden generated by immigrants seeking to become Jewish. Most observers believe they were meant to bypass the religious hardliners who control the Chief Rabbinate and its own rabbinic courts. Questioning the courts’ authority, as the current decision does, would reopen the contentious debate over who determines Jewish identity in Israel.

The current crisis began in a disputed divorce case last year in the port city of Ashdod, south of Tel Aviv. A local rabbinical court ruled that the petitioning couple’s marriage had been religiously invalid from the outset because the woman’s conversion to Judaism 14 years earlier was inauthentic. The rabbi claimed she failed to observe Orthodox ritual law once she was declared Jewish, and that she had never intended to observe it.

The decision effectively turned the woman’s four children, all born after her conversion and raised as Jews, into non-Jews because their mother is not Jewish.

The case was heard on appeal by a three-judge panel of the Supreme Rabbinical Court, which voted last week to uphold the Ashdod rabbi’s decision. The panel’s chairman, Rabbi Avraham Sherman, used his ruling to deliver a stinging indictment to Rabbi Haim Druckman, who oversaw the woman’s conversion. Druckman is head of Israel’s Bnei Akiva schools and is the top religious authority in the conversion courts.

Druckman, one of the outstanding figures in the world of religious Zionism, has been a central figure in efforts to resolve Israel’s long-standing dispute over conversion procedures. In criticizing his conversion procedures, Sherman also attacked some basic beliefs of religious Zionism, which regards strengthening the Jewish state as a religious value. Druckman and his colleagues have sought to smooth the entry of immigrants into Israeli society in order to advance the Zionist principle of ingathering the exiles, and they have viewed the easing of conversion rules as a means to that end. Haredi leaders do not concede any religious significance in the establishment of Israel, and therefore they oppose the idea of easing any religious rules in order to strengthen the state. The dispute comes at a time when Haredi rabbis have been gaining increasing influence in state religious institutions, including rabbinical councils and courts, that traditionally have been the preserve of religious Zionists.

In the current dispute, therefore, converts have become the pawn in a “power struggle between rabbis,” said Sofa Landver, who chairs the Knesset Public Petitions Committee.

Conversion has been a political issue in Israel for decades, as Israel’s Orthodox rabbinic establishment has tussled with Diaspora-based Reform and Conservative rabbis, and with various immigrant groups, for the right to define who may claim Jewish status under the Law of Return.

The debate gained urgency in the early 1990s, as mass immigration from the collapsing Soviet Union brought hundreds of thousands of newcomers to Israel, many with only partial Jewish ancestry. The immigration helped convince Zionist rabbis that easing the path to conversion, in order to help integrate the newcomers into the Jewish state, was a task of national, and hence religious, importance.

In 1997, then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu set up a commission including Reform and Conservative rabbis and chaired by his finance minister, Ya’akov Ne’eman, to hammer out a compromise formula. Acting on the commission’s recommendations, the government in 1999 moved to create special rabbinical courts to conduct conversions. The new tribunals received little cooperation, however, from the Haredi-leaning rabbis who increasingly control the state and local rabbinates. These rabbis had little interest in easing rules to advance the Zionist goal of “ingathering the exiles.”

In 2004, after mounting complaints about the slow pace of conversion, a new Conversion Authority was created to oversee the special courts, answerable to the Prime Minister’s Office rather than Chief Rabbinate and its regional rabbinic court system. Druckman, who helped to run the conversion operation from its inception, was appointed head of the authority.

While the courts were accustomed to Haredi criticism, the authority was also dogged by questions from within about its thoroughness. In 2006, for reasons that were never explained, a backlog of 500 conversion certificates built up as Druckman refused to pass them. Press reports at the time claimed he was trying to force out Rabbi Eliyahu Maimon, head of the courts, who was said to be complaining of sloppy standards. One of his complaints reportedly was that Druckman or his proxy was using a rubber stamp for certificates instead of signing them.

Nonetheless, the contention of the Supreme Rabbinical Court that it was acting out of procedural concerns in this month’s Ashdod conversion annulment was greeted with widespread skepticism. When the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee met May 6 to discuss the current crisis, the dominant view was that the ruling was motivated by ideological and not procedural rigor. Ne’eman declared that it was “a political decision” and therefore “obviously invalid.” He called for a judicial investigation.

Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, responding to the protests, said publicly that he would reverse the decision of the Supreme Rabbinical Court, which he formally chairs. However, it remained unclear at press time whether Amar had the authority to do so.

The judges themselves all but admitted they were responding to the Kulturkampf between Haredim and religious-Zionists. In their written judgment, they charge that Conversion Authority rabbis view the promotion of conversion as a “national responsibility,” not as merely a religious one. The ruling accuses Zionist rabbis of inappropriately using conversion as a means of kiruv, or religious outreach, when it should be reserved only for pious individuals who plan to be fully observant.

The ruling goes on to accuse Conversion Authority rabbis of accepting converts who mostly “remain gentile in their behavior… [and] see themselves as belonging to the Jewish people solely in a patriotic, nationalistic way, without any religiously significant feelings of belonging.” In approving these conversions, the judges say, Conversion Authority rabbis have become “transgressors” of Halacha.

Not surprisingly, Haredi leaders have rallied to support the court ruling. Knesset member Avraham Ravitz of United Torah Judaism, a Haredi party, said that serious issues of rabbinic law have been raised that should concern all observant Jews, “whatever their views on Zionism.” The Chief Rabbinate should investigate Druckman and the Conversion Authority, he told the Forward.

A commitment to observe the commandments is as essential to conversion as circumcision or immersion in the ritual bath, Ravitz said. If a convert did not undertake a sincere commitment, then the conversion is invalid, he said. “It could be a year later, or two years, or 15, but if it is discovered, then the conversion is not complete and was not valid.” If a convert becomes nonobservant over time, he said, then that person’s Jewishness should not be challenged — but the person must have been genuine at some point.

The thousands of other converts processed through the special conversion courts should be regarded as Jewish until the performance of those courts has been investigated, Ravitz said. If the Ashdod case “happened as an exception, then fine,” he said. “But if it is found that conversions were given to people who were not committed to keeping commandments, there is a problem.”

Less predictably, the court ruling has prompted a rare wave of angry protests from religious Zionist and Modern Orthodox leaders, including unprecedented threats of a rift within Orthodoxy.

Knesset member Zevulun Orlev, chairman of the National Religious Party, warned this week that the behavior of the rabbinical court could force Israel to strip the Chief Rabbinate of its authority over personal-status issues such as marriage and divorce.

In America, the main body of Modern Orthodox rabbis, the Rabbinical Council of America, which traditionally views the Israeli Chief Rabbinate as a definitive religious authority, issued a rare rebuke of the rabbinate’s religious court, saying in a formal statement that the court’s ruling and tone were “beyond the pale,” “create a massive desecration of God’s name” and “are a reprehensible cause of widespread conflict and animosity within the Jewish people in Israel and abroad.”

IDENTITY

J.A.C.K.: Jewish-American-Chinese Kid

By Jonathan Chao Burnston, February 2008, InterfaithFamily.com

My mother is 100 percent Chinese. Raised in Taiwan, she came to America as an adult. My father is 100 percent Brooklyn. They met at an English-as-a-second-language class, my father the teacher, my mother a student. I guess opposites really do attract, for somehow two entirely different people came together and married.

Being bi-cultural has been the foundation of most aspects of my life. It is the source of my greatest pride and my greatest shame, the origin of extreme happiness and deep pain.

My father's family is spread out along the East Coast and I have, therefore, lived my life more tightly connected to my mother's family members who live in the immediate area. However, having a half-white immediate family did not allow me the same chance to master my mother's native language as a completely Chinese family would have, since English was the language spoken in my house.

As a kid, my Chinese grandparents basically brought me up, acting as a second set of parents. While Mom was at work, I spent my elementary school afternoons at my grandparents' house. This was never a problem, for though I spoke broken Chinese, I was still a child, and most interactions I had with them did not involve words. When necessary, I was able to get my point across using simple terms and hand gestures. Since I was just a child, I was not about to spend time sitting and learning Chinese from my grandparents. The repercussions of not utilizing this opportunity never occurred to me or to them. Unfortunately, the blissful unawareness of the language barrier between me and my grandparents did not last.

Maturity brought the death of innocence. As when Adam and Eve realized they were standing naked before God, I realized that I was very poorly equipped to interact with my mother's parents. To avoid such an awkward encounter as a conversation, I stopped speaking to them except in short, direct statements. However, without the practice I so desperately needed, my Chinese grew worse and worse, to the point where even answering simple questions became an ordeal. When I was ten, my grandmother, my "second" mother only because I came from her daughter's womb instead of hers, died after a long battle with diabetes. By that time, I could barely talk to her and was afraid to try.

Ever since then, I've had a gaping hole in my heart. I know that I squandered the time I had with my grandma because I could not talk to her. This knowledge has eaten away at me for six years and caused me to grow tense and nervous whenever I am in a situation where I must use Chinese. My relationship with my still-healthy grandfather has all but ended. It brings tears to my eyes when I think of how depressed he must feel when he spends any time with his grandson, the boy he spoiled like a prince, who cannot even talk to him.

Still, my ethnicity has brought so much good to my life that it overshadows the pain I have felt as a result of my multi-cultural background. As a child, I always knew I was different, but never placed any emphasis on it. Yes, I grew up speaking more than one language, but then again, so did most of the kids who lived on my block. It never struck me as odd that one half of my family had literally no cultural similarity to the other half. I assumed it was supposed to be that way and accepted it with a child's innocence, as did my friends when they were introduced to my unique family environment.

Actually, it was my own family that first made me conscious of my different ethnicities. Around my fifth year my father playfully labeled me "JACK," for Jewish-American-Chinese Kid. He had me tell people I was "half Chinese, half Jewish, and all American." This was met with a chuckle, followed by compliments to my cleverness. Happy with the response, I grew to love my self-categorization, a love which quickly grew to encompass my ethnicity itself.

This love of my multi-cultural background only deepened as I grew older. It was what defined me, what made me different from everyone else. I fully appreciated the Chinese calendar on the wall and the authentically furnished Chinese room of my house. I never thought to question the different holidays that none of my friends celebrated. Even if they were Chinese, they had never heard of Passover or Hanukkah; even if they were Jewish, Moon Festival and Chinese New Year meant nothing to them. I accepted and embraced the two cultures without hesitation. Because of the diversity of my personal identity and the varying viewpoints embodied within me, I was allowed, in fact forced, to keep an open mind in situations where other kids may have been unable to do so. For instance, my childhood friends came from social groups of varying races; it never crossed my mind that perhaps I should hesitate to cross my racial boundaries in meeting people. Of course, these boundaries encompassed a rather large area, and so remaining within my ethnic borders was not particularly difficult.

One might think that being of two different cultures would alienate me from both. On the contrary, it allowed me to feel at home with both races. My self-esteem, which I could originally trace to the pride characteristic of both my American and Chinese nationalities, has been enhanced by the pride I have discovered in my unique diversity.

How Many Pieces Does it Take to Make a Person?

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett, May 2008, Interfaith Family

Review of The Mistress's Daughter by A.M. Homes (Penguin Group, 2007)

"I am an amalgam. I will always be something glued together, something slightly broken." So writes A.M. Homes, not long after her first contact with her birthmother, as Homes begins the process of putting together the pieces of who she is.

In this memoir, Homes tells with raw, honest emotion the story of uncovering the mosaic that is her identity after being contacted by her birthparents for the first time when she was 31. Her tale is, first and foremost, an adoptee's quest. Within her mosaic, however, lie multiple tiles of Judaism, passed down to her from both her biological and adoptive ancestors, revealing to her a world where Judaism is sometimes welcomed, sometimes rejected, but always part of her.

Religious identity was at times confusing for Homes, even in her Jewish adoptive family. For years, the family celebrated Christmas; then, when Homes was 9, her mother abruptly pulled the holiday from their repertoire, saying only "we're Jewish" by way of explanation. Like any reasonable 9-year-old, Homes protested the sudden loss of Christmas stockings and the thrill of leaving cookies for Santa, particularly objectionable because her family did not celebrate Hanukkah either. As an adult the December holidays simply feel barren to her, which makes them all the more ripe to be injected with emotion when she discovers that her biological roots are not only Jewish, but interfaith.

Often a difficult time for any adoptee, Homes's birthday also happens to fall in December. "[M]y birthday is in the middle of the holiday season; it features not only all the standard natal elements, but also the ongoing and age-old battle of the Christians versus the Jews, which oddly turns out to be among the battles of my biological origins." Homes discovers that her birthparents are each half Catholic, half Jewish; her birthmother considers herself to be Jewish, while her birthfather identifies more with his Catholic side.

As Homes gets to know her birthparents, their sometimes shocking, inappropriate behavior plays out in part against their religious backgrounds. For example, one of the first things Homes's birthfather says to her when they meet is, "I'm not circumcised." From this announcement, Homes deduces that what he wants her to know about himself "is that he's distanced himself from his Jewishness and that he's obsessed with his penis." The reader has no trouble sympathizing with Homes's bewilderment about her origins.

Homes's interaction with her birthmother, Ellen, is no more soothing to her than that with her birthfather. Ellen soon becomes Homes's virtual stalker, making demands and accusations and strongly implying that somehow, Homes has an obligation to "take care of" her. Homes expresses a sense of relief as she gets to know Ellen: "the more Ellen and I talk, the happier I am that she gave me up. I can't imagine having grown up with her. I would not have survived." Yet she is still drawn to learning more about her birthmother as a critical component in her desire to understand herself.

Homes learns early on that Ellen wanted Homes to be placed in "a very special home--a Jewish home." Even though Judaism is clearly important to Ellen, Homes is confronted by a measure of religious ambiguity when she goes through her birthmother's belongings after Ellen dies: "In a corner of the kitchen there is a menorah and then, just behind it, a crucifix, and in front a framed photograph of a dog." Just which object is the most important of the three serves as a singular example of the myriad mysteries Homes is left to unravel.

Homes eventually does find a degree of clarity about her identity, though she leaves unanswered many questions about Judaism, her religious heritage and what of this background she now values for herself and her young daughter. Many years after beginning her exhausting emotional journey--a journey which includes a dizzying genealogical research project delving back many generations into both her biological and adoptive families' histories--she comes to realize that she is "a product of each of my family's narratives," of all of the biological and adoptive threads of her lineage.

Though she begins the book with her frustration with her adoptive parents' failure to share all they knew with her at an earlier time, Homes's link to her adoptive family and their roots seems to be strengthened through her process of discovery. She concludes her story with a discussion of her adoptive grandmother, to whom she dedicated this book. This woman was the matriarch of her family and a figure of primary importance to the author; a woman who was once told, early in the twentieth century, that she would never obtain a teaching job because she was a Jew. Homes's grandmother ultimately becomes the inspiration for Homes' own desire to have a child, and it is around her grandmother's ancestral solid wooden table that Homes now sits with her daughter, a biological confirmation of all of the varied threads that weave and twist together to make up a person.

The story Homes tells in her memoir is an adoption story, a story of a person broken into pieces at the time of her birth who must then discover those pieces and learn how to put them together. But it is also an interfaith story, and I couldn't help but wonder as I finished the book how many people who grow up in interfaith households also feel splintered to some degree, even without experiencing the sense of loss of history that burdens so many adoptees. For individuals who are searching for any measure of their fractured identities, Homes offers a hopeful resolution in what is, for the most part, an artfully told story.

COMMUNITIES AROUND THE WORLD

The Transformation of Israeli Food -- From Falafel to Fennel

By Judy Nathan, May 16, 2008, JewishJournal.com

The 60th anniversary of the State of Israel is a good time to reflect on how this young country has progressed during its mere six decades of existence. Its economic growth, its leading role in technological advances and its presence in world affairs are all impressive, but most notable to me is the transformation of Israeli food from mundane and unknown to cutting edge and creative. Modern-day Israeli cuisine reflects ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity.

I have always thought of Israel as a microcosm of the world, blending three major world religions and countless nationalities, each with their own palates and flavors. What has resulted is an amalgamation of the best of all culinary worlds. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

When I lived in Jerusalem in the early 1970s, only tourists, diplomats or foreign journalists ate in restaurants. Grabbing hummus and falafel at a fast food stand or dropping into a cafe for coffee and cake was the Israeli idea of "dining out." Food was scarce and wasting time on such a bourgeois matter seemed contrary to the pioneering spirit of the country. In fact, the restaurants were so bad in those days that Henry Kissinger, engaging in his Middle East "shuttle diplomacy," once moaned, "Why can't a country with 2 1/2 million Jewish mothers have better food?"

Recently, Henry Kissinger told me that that lament is a thing of the past.

Whenever I go to Israel, I am constantly transporting myself, like a child playing make believe, back to my ancestry. The first time this happened was during a wonderful week spent in the sand dunes of the Sinai many years ago, where Bedouins continue to live much as the nomadic Israelites did when they were wandering the desert. I couldn't help imagining myself as part of that ancient culture, sharing the stew -- perhaps with lamb and chickpeas -- that Sarah prepared for Abraham or the pottage of lentils that Jacob gave to his brother Esau.

As I returned to Jerusalem after that week, layers of civilization and thousands of years unwound before me like a newsreel at each fork in the road.

Through culinary haunts one can uncover the enormously exciting story of how these pioneers transformed a harsh, arid land to one bursting with new produce and culture. Some of the dishes that we find in Israel today are as old as the land; others are quite modern; and still others mix the old and the new.

Since I left Israel, I have been back every year or so, and the transformation from the 1970s to now is enormous. Israelis, like Americans, are taking food more seriously. It is no longer shameful in Israel to enjoy the luxury of eating well. Since Israel is at the crossroads of so many cultures, both the ones that surround it as well as the ones that have immigrated to it, cooking there today reflects the fresh globalism that we are encountering everywhere. Just look at the fruits and vegetables coming out of Israel: various kinds of kiwis and avocadoes, persimmons, pomelos, pomegranates. Some of these fruits and vegetables are biblical. Some are brand new, brought to the country with immigrants or agronomists who have gone all over the world.

But what is Israeli cuisine? A cuisine is usually defined as cooking which derives from a particular culture. Since the Jewish population has essentially been dispersed throughout the world, Jewish food, and by extension that of Israel, while centered in the Jewish dietary laws, subsumes the cuisines of countries throughout most of the globe. Unlike in France and Italy, for example, where cooking has been grounded in the same soil for thousands of years, in Israel the "new food" is a hybrid, inspired by every corner of the world, but with an increasing emphasis on native ingredients.

The original ingredients used by cooks in the land of Israel included the seven biblical foods mentioned in Deuteronomy: barley , wheat, figs, dates, pomegranates, olives and grapes. Mizrachi or "Oriental" Jews -- those who left Palestine for Babylonia at the time of the destruction of the First Temple, or those who stayed in the Middle Eastâ?? have always maintained a cuisine more rooted in the original biblical ingredients. After the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., the Jews who migrated to Spain and Portugal adapted the new local foods to their dietary laws. These people became known as "Sephardic" Jews following the Inquisition, and their cuisine took on the tone of their new homelands like Greece, Morocco, and Turkey. So, too, "Ashkenazic" cooking developed, as other Jews made their journeys to Central and Eastern Europe. Today, all these foods are being embraced by many of the Jews returning from afar to the "land of milk and honey." Christian and Muslim cultures of the region have also contributed their own customs to Israeli cooking, so that today Israel's emerging cuisine is global in scope.

The food of modern Israel began, really, with the first aliyah, the immigration that came in the late 19th century mainly composed of Eastern European Jews. It also included 5,000 Jews from Yemen, who made up 6 percent of the new Jewish population. Unlike the Eastern European immigrants of this period, the Yemenites were motivated by the biblical commandment to return to Jerusalem. The men often found work in kitchens and as waiters, and were most likely the first Jews to make falafel in the country. The women, mostly illiterate, hired out as domestics, which provided a meager subsistence.

Although they were not educated or sophisticated by European standards, they set an example of meticulousness in all aspects of housework, including the religious obligations taught by word of mouth: dietary laws, separation of challah, salting and koshering meat, the ritual immersion of utensils, blessings for meals and candlelighting. They would rise before dawn to fetch water and to prepare the gisher (Yemenite coffee), grind flour, bake and have breakfast ready when the men returned at sunrise from the prayer service in the synagogue.

Little by little, Yemenites and other Middle Eastern Jews started influencing the eating habits of the immigrants from Eastern Europe, and different tastes and traditions began to coexist. For some, like those from Eastern Europe, the idea of raw vegetables fresh from the soil seemed unhealthy. But their sense of curiosity prevailed: Yemenite soup with spicy sauces and the buttery layered bread called malouach may very well have been one of the exotic meals eaten by a group of well-heeled British Jews, organized by the Jewish industrialist Herbert Bentwich, who came to visit Palestine in 1897.

Life was tough. The settlers were lonely for their homelands and afraid of contracting the malaria that was so prevalent. They had no money and couldn't invest in improving their farms, so they were reliant on local Arab produce for consumption at home.

The halutzim were a new breed of Palestinian Jew. Even in the kitchen, they shied away from the elaborate, table-centered habits of their predecessors from Russia, eating in a much more casual way, often with elbows on the table and a big bowl of whole vegetables that they would cut themselves.

By the end of World War I, Tnuva, the agricultural arm of the increasingly powerful labor movement, began marketing the produce of all collective and cooperative settlements (kibbutzim and moshavim). It was Tnuva, for example, that started selling carp from the fish ponds in the Galilee and exporting bananas after World War II. Eventually, kibbutzim were producing so many chickens, ducks and turkeys that Tnuva had them preserved in cans, and Israelis learned to prepare schnitzel with turkey instead of veal.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Jewish Palestinians tried to recreate the pageantry of the biblical festivals, in which the first fruits of the harvest were brought to Jerusalem. One of the goals of these modern day pageants, still celebrated at many kibbutzim today, was to show the superiority of Jewish products. Despite Herman Melville's prediction to the contrary, the Jews were slowly becoming farmers. Jaffa oranges, as well as Israeli grapefruits and lemons, became renowned for their quality and flavor.

By 1945, with the influx of survivors of World War II, the Jewish population had swelled to more than 450,000. Despite the growing British opposition to new immigration, the country was flooded with the bedraggled victims of the Holocaust, often arriving illegally on the only soil that would welcome them. Between 1946 and 1953 the Jewish population doubled again with more survivors as well as immigrants from Romania and North Africa. No one thought about a "cuisine" in those days, nor were they concerned with the niceties of the table. They just thought about having enough to feed the poverty-stricken from the concentration camps.

One of the many issues to be resolved in this new Jewish country was the official position on the dietary laws. David Ben-Gurion decided to remain with the "status quo" agreement, maintaining rabbinical supervision of kashrut in all government organizations, military service, schools and hospitals.

The massive immigration was also a strain on the economy, so the period from 1948 to 1958 was a time of government regulated tzena (food rationing.) Stories abound of women cooking with khubeiza (wild greens) from the fields. The creation of new foods like the internationally popular "Israeli couscous" satisfied the needs of the rice-loving and couscous-loving immigrants who could not have that in this poor country, and surplus vegetables, like eggplant, were ingeniously used to simulate meat. Israel's canning industry increased production, supplying canned tomato paste and puree, hummus, tahina and mayonnaise in tubes.

It must be remembered that Israeli cuisine reflects not only the varied influences of a Jewish population coming from 90 different countries, but also the Christian and Muslim traditions from throughout the Middle East. Israel is a land that transcends ethnic identity, where an immigrant's native tongue might be Russian or Farsi, Polish or Ladino, where some Jews came knowing how to bless bread in classical Hebrew but could not use modern Hebrew to buy bread and cheese.

Whenever I walk down Jerusalem's Jaffa Road to Mahane Yehuda, the Jewish marketplace, I always see hundreds of tiny stalls filled with fresh spices and vegetables, some dating back to the biblical period and others as modern and sophisticated as anything in New York's gourmet markets. In some shops, expert hands mold and bake ornate artisan pita bread, called aish tanoor. In others, women sift couscous through their fingers, as they did in their native villages in Morocco or Tunisia. As I observe each ingredient, I play that same game I played in the Sinai, imagining the layers of history behind the foods. Which plants are native to the land and which came with conquerors or new immigrants? Did the sugar beet come with English Crusaders? Did the Turks bring green peppers?

A typical Israeli main meal, as codified in the Israel Defense Force Cookbook, includes a Middle Eastern hummus or tahina, a Central European turkey schnitzel with a Turkish eggplant salad, or a Hungarian goulash-type stew, with fresh native fruit for dessert. Over the years I have noticed that most tourists to Israel, when asked to name a local dish, usually mention only street food -- hummus, shwarma (spicy rotisserie-grilled meat in a pita) and falafel, or the addictive sunflower and pumpkin seeds whose shells carpet some city sidewalks. In fact, few of these dishes can be identified solely as "Israeli"; hummus and falafel, for example, are certainly not "Israeli," but are adapted from local Arab foods. While these street foods are indeed popular, it is important to consider also the multinational dishes that are so common in Israeli homes.

Sabbath and holiday recipes increasingly reflect the diverse heritage of Jews from many parts of the world who have brought their dishes and customs back to their ancestral land. But there is a noticeable gap between generations: a Czech survivor of the Holocaust, for example, may make for her children a stuffed chicken from Prague as a kind of tribute to a community that exists now only in her memory. But her children, who have grown up in Israel, have less of an emotional connection to their Czech heritage and more of a willingness to cook and eat foods native to Israel. Thus, traditional food is yielding both to the more modern everyday convenience food -- frozen schnitzel, packaged hummus and prepared soup -- and to today's sophisticated restaurant cuisine, which increasingly plays with the bounty of the global market, resulting in a distinctly cross-cultural eating experience.

For the past 30 or so years, an excitement inspired by this multiculturalism has been building in Israel's culinary community. The country has become an increasing presence in the international food world, contributing new and unusual products made from native ingredients. Fifteen years ago, there was little good local olive oil. Today, Jewish and Arab farmers are pressing extra virgin olive oil in small, rural villages. With boutique cheeses being made throughout the country, kosher wines from the Golan Heights and throughout the country winning first-class competitions worldwide and more cookbooks being written per capita than in almost any other country, Israel is bursting with culinary creativity. The interplay of cultures and cuisines has made eating an art such as it has never been in Israel before.

Increasingly, due to a general rise in income and the elimination of travel taxes, Israelis have become open to new experiences in travel and food. Many young Israeli soldiers, after their two-year mandatory service, go abroad, most frequently to travel in East Asia or Latin America and to spend some time working in the United States. Many of these young people return home with new culinary tastes, as did American Peace Corps volunteers in the 1960s. A number of them have become chefs, schooled in international cuisine and influential in the development of modern Israeli cooking.

Despite their global lifestyles, the new Israeli chefs still cultivate a link to the foods of the Old Testament. Grapes, dates, lentils and chickpeas are but a few of the ancient ingredients that have captured their imaginations in producing their signature dishes. And, with constant waves of immigration, Israel is rapidly incorporating the native cuisines of its new populations. The story of Israeli food is not just a Jewish story -- its recipes cross borders more easily than people do. It is the story of a land that has overcome harsh natural deprivation to bring forth new agricultural produce. Because it constantly incorporates so much from the rest of the world, Israel may never boast of one "cuisine," but it will always retain a rich mixture of fine tastes. It reflects the modern mosaic of the country, embracing the culinary influences of its Arab neighbors and gathering in the varying ingredients and dishes of world Jewry. I can only begin to imagine what the next 60 years will taste like.

My Favorite Falafel
Adapted from "The Foods of Israel Today" by Joan Nathan

1 cup dried chickpeas
1/2 large onion, roughly chopped (about 1 cup)
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh cilantro
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 -- 1 teaspoon dried hot red pepper
4 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons fine bulgur
Soybean or vegetable oil for frying
Pita bread
Chopped tomato for garnish
Diced onion for garnish
Diced green pepper for garnish
Pickled turnips for garnish
Tahina Sauce
1. Put the chickpeas in a large bowl and add enough cold water to cover them by at least 2 inches. Let soak overnight, then drain.
2. The next day place the drained, uncooked chickpeas and the onion in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Add the parsley, cilantro, salt, hot pepper, garlic, and cumin. Process until blended but not pureed.
3. Dissolve the baking soda in cold water and add to the chickpeas. Then add the bulgur and pulse. You want to add enough bulgur so that the dough forms a small ball and no longer sticks to your hands. Turn into a bowl and refrigerate, covered, for several hours.
4. Form the chickpea mixture into balls about the size of walnuts, or use a falafel scoop, available in Middle Eastern markets.
5. Heat 3 inches of oil to 375 F in a deep pot or wok and fry about a half dozen at once for a few minutes on each side or until golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Stuff half a pita with falafel balls, chopped tomatoes, onion, green pepper, and pickled turnips. Drizzle with tahina thinned with water.
Makes about 25 balls.

Roast Chicken With Fennel, Garlic And Currants
Adapted from "The Foods of Israel Today" by Joan Nathan

1 4-pound chicken, cut into 8 pieces
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
3 garlic cloves, crushed, plus 2 whole heads garlic, separated into unpeeled cloves
10 brine-cured green olives, pitted and crushed
1 teaspoon salt, or to taste
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper, or to taste
1/2 cup dry white wine
4 fennel bulbs, cored and quartered lengthwise
1/4 cup dried currants
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 large pita or 4 8-inch pitas
5 sprigs fresh oregano or parsley, cut to about 3 inches long

1. Wash the chicken well and pat dry. Place in a large bowl.
2. To make the marinade, put the vinegar, brown sugar, oil, crushed garlic, and olives in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade, and pulse to a coarse paste.
3. Place the chicken pieces in one layer in a flame-proof baking dish. Sprinkle salt and pepper over them and pour the marinade on top, rubbing it in well. Add the wine and 1/2 cup water. Cover the dish with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least two hours, or overnight.
4. Preheat the oven to 400 F.
5. Drain off most of the marinade from the chicken and reserve. Scatter the fennel and the whole cloves of garlic around the chicken.
6. Roast the chicken, uncovered, on the top rack of the oven for 20 minutes. Reduce the temperature to 375 F, turn the fennel, and bake for 20-25 minutes longer, or until the chicken is thoroughly cooked. Transfer the chicken pieces, fennel and whole pieces of garlic to a serving platter, reserving the pan juices.
7. Add the currants, soy sauce, and the reserved marinade to the pan and cook for about five minutes on the stove over medium heat to reduce.
8. When ready to serve, heat the pita and place it on a large platter. Spoon on the chicken, fennel and garlic. Pour the currant sauce over the dish, garnish with the fresh oregano or parsley, and serve.
Makes six to eight servings.


Joan Nathan, the doyenne of Jewish cooking in America, lived in Israel in the 1970s and has written two books on Israeli food: "The Flavor of Jerusalem" (Little, Brown, 1975) and "The Foods of Israel Today" (Knopf, 2001).

Yemen: Empty Jewish Homes Destroyed

By Haviv Rettig, April 7, 2008, Jerusalem Post

In the latest attack targeting Yemen's few remaining Jews, rebel Houthi militiamen destroyed several homes that had belonged to the now-absent Jewish community in the northwestern Saada province.

"The Houthis destroyed part of my house and looted it," Rabbi Yehia Youssuf told Reuters in the capital, San'a.

All 67 members of Saada's Jewish community fled following threats from the Houthis, the rabbi says. Some locals say the Jews were threatened because they had been selling wine to Muslims - an accusation the Jews deny, according to Reuters.

A local said the Shi'ite rebels attacked the houses of other Jews after looting the rabbi's.

Around 400 Jews remain in the majority Sunni state, the remnant of an ancient, close-knit community that, while remaining connected to Jewish intellectual and legal developments outside Yemen, managed to insulate itself culturally until the 20th century.

According to Dr. Dov Levitan, a scholar of Yemenite Jewry at Bar-Ilan University and the Academic College of Ashkelon, the Houthi clan targets Jews to embarrass the government internationally.

Apparently unrelated intertribal fighting in the province killed at least 15 people in recent days as the Houthi tribe continued its intermittent violence, begun in June 2004, against the central government and its allies.

Since the early 1990s, the Yemeni government "has been very conscious of its international image," explains Levitan. "So important is the country's image to its government that the Jews have excellent government protection."

When their situation in Saada became precarious about a year ago, "they were flown out in a government plane to San'a. They receive a small stipend and live in a compound protected by state security forces. This kind of concern would have been unimaginable just 15 years ago," he says.

The government's concern for its image, together with pressure from American Jewish groups and US legislators, led Yemen in the early 1990s to permit most of the remaining 2,000 Jews to emigrate to Israel and elsewhere, continuing a centuries-long trickle of aliya from the country. At the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, around 35,000 Yemenite Jews lived in Israel. Another 50,000 came in the immediate aftermath of the War of Independence.

Most of the 1,600 Jews who left Yemen during the 1990s now live in Rehovot.

The question of why Jews remain in Yemen remains.

"We have contact with these Jews. They're not the Jews who came 60 years ago," the large wave of poor refugees who fled pogroms in Operation Magic Carpet, Levitan says. "They're more educated, they're better dressed, they wear watches and drive cars. Some of them have traveled overseas. They have property there, and they are connected historically. They don't want to leave a place that has been their natural environment for generations."

The Yemenite Jewish community claims to have existed since the time of the First Temple, 2,600 years ago. While this claim has not been verified, "we know with certainty that they were there for at least 1,500 years," says Levitan.

Despite its unique customs and liturgy, Yemenite Jewry was never disconnected from the broader Jewish world. "For example, we know that the letters of the [medieval Jewish philosopher and legalist] Maimonides arrived in Yemen. We know from the 14th to the 16th centuries they were connected enough to receive the Shulchan Aruch [halachic codex]. And in the 18th and 19th centuries they received printed Jewish prayer books and Talmuds from abroad when there was no Jewish press in Yemen," he said.

Other pressures also affect the decision of Jews to remain. The anti-Zionist Satmar hassidim work to persuade the community not to move to Israel. "They give the remaining Jews money and holy books, take them to New York and London - anything to keep them from going to Israel," says Levitan.

Also, the government's concern and protection are seen as complete and genuine by the community, he says.

ARTS & CULTURE

French Bred

By Eli Rosenblatt, April 16, 2008, Forward.com

In the summer of 2005, the suburbs of Paris went up in flames. Television screens and newspapers were filled with images of frustrated Arab and African youths, most often the unemployed children or grandchildren of immigrants, burning and slashing the already dour infrastructure around them. It was a sight that many observers thought mirrored the frustration seen throughout the Middle East. In any case, the riots in the French suburbs were the sign of a vexing European crisis.

By that time, the work of Alexis Peskine, a French-born visual artist of Afro-Brazilian and Lithuanian Jewish heritage, was becoming one unlikely way for the American public to interpret the images of France’s suburban unrest. The 29-year-old Peskine was born and grew up in a middle-class community near Paris, spent a childhood summer in the States, and eventually attended Howard University and the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2004, he was awarded a Fulbright to work and study here.

Peskine’s journey to America stretches far beyond his lifetime. His paternal great-grandfather Joachim Peskine, a Vilnius-born Jewish woodworker, had a son who was sent by the Russians on a trip to America to obtain machine tools. As conditions for Jews became more unbearable in Eastern Europe in the interwar period, Peskine’s grandfather moved to France. He eventually survived Dachau and raised Alexis Peskine’s father, an architect who met and married an Afro-Brazilian woman while on the job in Bahia, a coastal area of Brazil. Growing up as a multiracial half-Jewish resident of the French capital, Peskine embarked on an artistic path that eventually would bring him to our shores.

Peskine’s inspiration is drawn from what he regards as an overarching paradox in French society that symbolically awards French identity to all those who accept its norms while at the same time harboring prejudice toward immigrants from France’s former colonies. “It is illegal in France to perform a census that collects ethnic information,” Peskine said during an interview in his studio in Hoboken, N.J. “This idea came from long before immigrants ever arrived in France. There is a denial that there is ethnicity and race within Frenchness.” According to Peskine, this denial is what jabs at the root of the recent unrest in France. “[French society] created a universal system of education that stressed a broad French identity. There was no talk of the colonial legacy,” he said. “I see this as them telling us that within this common culture is French superiority. We are supposed to be proud to be French. But with the racism and ethnic discrimination, we are not.”

In a recent group show at Manhattan’s Rush Arts Gallery, Peskine exhibited a new piece containing three bars of black soap inscribed with three different terms that denote people of African descent. Each soap box is inscribed with a racist term for blacks. By evoking the African body with bars of soap, he suggests to the viewer the liminal connection between the trauma of the Holocaust and the plight of former French colonial subjects. In a previous piece, he also uses bars of soap, each inscribed with “Sale Noir” (“Dirty Black”), “Sale Blanc” (“Dirty White”), “Sale Arabe” (“Dirty Arab”), “Sale Jaune” (“Dirty Asian”) and “Sale Juif” (“Dirty Jew”).

“The problem is one of exclusion,” Peskine remarked as he showed me around his studio, which also serves as a furniture- and piano-restoration workshop. “People of African descent, whether they are African or Arab, feel abandoned by the larger society. The projects they live in are in concentrated areas where the condition of buildings and the lack of employment opportunity make you feel trapped.”

The housing blocks that Peskine describes were not built yesterday. In the aftermath of World War II, when cities in France struggled to accommodate a booming, homeless population in the aftermath of war, shantytowns were erected. In 1962, the Algerian War ended and waves of immigrants from France’s former colonies arrived in the country to fill labor shortages. By 1963, 43% of French Algerians lived in these shantytowns until the government moved to erect massive suburban housing projects to replace them. It was to these projects that working-class citizens first moved. In the coming decades, many of the factories closed and struggling residents began to fill the housing projects, transforming many French suburbs into massive ghettoes where the predominant residents were the formerly colonized, francophone poor — Muslim Arabs and Africans, Maghrebi Jews and ethnic Frenchmen.

Following Peskine’s move to the United States, he began to visually explore the tensions, ills and questions that color the situation in France today. In the painting “Motif,” an image of the 1987 movie character Robocop holding a baguette goofily illuminates the tension between a feisty French police force and a bready symbol of French refinement.

In a bright painting titled “Tintin and Your Kids,” Peskine investigates Tintin, a comic book character whose Belgian creator openly held Nazi views. In the piece, Tintin is recast as a swastika-clad skinhead. In the background, a Congolese flag is minimally visible on a pile of tires.

“I consider myself culturally Jewish,” Peskine remarked. “I come from a long line of Jewish agnostics, and my father has told me tons of stories about my Jewish side, which was closely connected to revolutionary ideas.” When asked about the tensions between Arabs and Jews in France, Peskine responded: “I think there is a lot of resentment and confusion, because the media goes crazy anytime there is an antisemitic incident. If there is a racist incident, there is little to no attention. I think [Arab-Jewish tension] comes in part from jealousy: Jews in France know how to pull heartstrings and Arabs in the suburbs do not. Arabs and blacks see that French society can disrespect them. I understand people’s frustrations, but there is an image of Jewish control in the suburbs that shouldn’t fly.”

His new work is exploring the Arab and African face in the French imagination. He will be using large square wood panels painted with the images of Arab and African women. Their skin will be portrayed by a bed of nails, each at different levels, in order to accentuate texture. An image of Asterix, a French cartoon character, will be drawn around the faces.

Peskine’s career has grown in recent months. He is currently lecturing at universities across the country, was recently represented at the National Black Fine Art Show by two galleries and has work currently on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn., and at the G.R. N’Namdi Gallery in Detroit. Next month, he will have a solo show in New York at the Essie Green Galleries and H&F Fine Arts in Mount Rainier, Md. With the exposure, however, comes the challenge of staying laying down roots. Peskine is currently waiting for a visa extension from the American government. “Some people look to France and see great social benefits — like universal health care, for example,” Peskine remarked. “But if you have ambition, America is where it’s at.”

Chinua Achebe: The Eagle on the Iroko

By Olu Obafemi, April 23, 2008, The Sun News Online

When the elephant passes, knives of myriad shapes and sizes slash away their chunks from it’s mammoth sides. When a great hero is celebrated. various sages offer a festival of encomiums of his great exploits. When the maiden product of the literary Iroko turns golden, the literary kids come to perch and to sing. For, it is impossible to separate the man from his art, especially when that artistic product has become a world classic, the exponent of the quintessential African fiction and the trail-blazer and prototype of the post colonial novel.

We celebrate 50 years of Things Fall Apart and we celebrate the creator of Things Fall Apart. Albert Chinualumogu Achebe. The story of this great and universal man of letters; this master of story-telling; this frontliner teacher of African values. lores and mores; has been told and re-told, leaving even much yet to be told. Every new and sharp knife finds fresh and lean meat to cut in great chunks.

Chinua Achebe as he later preferred and is known, was born into an emerging world of cultural syncretism-an age in which colonialism was taking its firm root and the indigenous culture was being greatly assailed to the extent that things began to fall apart-things are stiIl (prophetically and uneanningly falling apart) in Nigeria, in Africa and in the globe. Thus, Isaiah Okafor and Janet N Achebe, who fetched Chinua to the world on November 16. 1930 in Ogidi, Anambra State, Nigeria, were both devout Christians-the father is an evangelist.

But the environment to which he was born was a thriving cauldron of indigenous Igbo culture, where the masquerade cults were irritant and where proverbs provide the tasty oil with which yams of words arc eaten. Thirty-one years later, in 1961, he married Christie Chinwe Okoli. who bore him 'God's bits of wood' Chinelo, Ikechukwu, Chidi and Nwando. Chinua Achebe attended Government College, Umuahia between 1944 and 1947 recievcd the Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of London in 1953, having studied English, History and Religion at the University College Ibadan. where his peers of the literary fraternity, Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark. Christopher Okigbo, also studied.

We celebrate Achebe because he cleared the path and carved a canon for the germination and blossoming of Modern African fiction. He is not the first Nigerian novelist. Cyprian Ekwensi and Amos Tutuola wrote their first novels before him. But it was Things Fall Apart that provided the counter-factual response to the colonialist paternalistic perception of Africa-as we found in the racist fiction of Joyce Carry in Mister Johnson and Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness.

The novel was regarded as aclassic-one of the half-dozen best European novels, and it gave the imperialist perspective or Africa. Things Fall Apart, is the classic African novel which gave a fitting reconstruction of that pejoration. He reconstructed and transmuted the conventions, cannons and aesthetics of the novel, a European art into African Literature which carries African thought. African message, African rhythm and flow, while profoundly enriching that language in a way no English man could ever do with his own language.

We serenade Achebe today because he gave the pristine form and essence to post-colonial literature. In Things Fall Apart, all the post-colonial nations found a mirror into their own history, life and culture before and around colonialism. As Maya Angelou aptly asserts, in Things Fall Apart, 'All readers meet their brothers, sisters, parents, friends and themselves along Nigerian roads'.

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart is one of the few novels, which have been translated into about fifty other languages across the world, with many more to come. But the novel is, essentially, the proponent of the many great works of fiction, poetry, polemics and scholarship that have emitted from the pen or this partraich of African fiction and a 'magical writcr who has been correctly described as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and I dare say of all times.

Peruse and ponder this staggering output: Things Fall Apart, 1958. No Longer at Ease, 1960, The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories, 1962, Arrow of God, 1964, A Man of the People, 1966, Chike and the River, 1966, Beware, Soul-Brother and Other Poems, 1971, How the Leopard Got His Claws (with John Iroaganachi), 1972, Girls at War, 1973, Christmas at Biafra and Other Poems, 1973, Morning Yet on Creation Day, 1975, The Flute, 1975, The Drum, 1978, Don't Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christopher Okigbo (edited with Dubem Okafor), 1978, Aka Weta: An Anthology of Igbo Poetry (co-editor), 1982, The Trouble With Nigeria, 1984, African Short Stories, 1984, Anthills of the Savannah 1988, Hopes and Impediments, 1988. In spite of this prodigious volumes for Chinua Achebe, it is certainly not yet morning on creation day, as we may yet be feasted with his ultimate masterpiece.

Is it therefore any wonder that, the great artificer whom the feminist scholar Elaine Showalter referred to in her citation on the occasion of the award of the “ Man Booker Prize as the man who ' illuminated the path for writers around the world seeking words and forms for new realities and societies' has been decorated with thirty honorary degrees from across world universities. The Nobel Prize may yet come, but Achebe is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including the Commonwealth Prize for Literature, the Honorary Fellowship of American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Man Booker Prize, and very significantly from the home front, the maiden issue of the Nigerian National Order of Merit Award.

Ladies and gentlemen, the greatest masquerade dances last in the African performance tradition. Madiba Mandela, must offer the last word in this citation when he defined Achebe as the 'writer in whose company the prison walls fall down'.