A student in one of the two yeshiva dorm buildings. WASSUPP WITH THIS YESHIVA BOY'S FINGERS?
Three weeks after losing a $20 million sexual abuse lawsuit, Rabbi
Daniel Greer and the yeshiva he started in the Edgewood neighborhood may
have new troubles at their doorstep.
The Yeshiva of New Haven
The
yeshiva — where Greer allegedly abused minors for years, according to
testimony in the recent trial in U.S. District Court in Hartford —
remains open, allegedly under new management. Greer remains in the
building, where prayer services take place on the second floor.
Two
state regulatory agencies have now accused the yeshiva of operating a
boarding school without proper certifications. Meanwhile, the state’s
attorney’s office and local police have a file open on a possible
criminal investigation of Greer, though it is not clear how active that
investigation is. Experts said the state’s statute of limitations has
not yet expired.
The scrutiny of the Orthodox Jewish high school
ramped up in recent weeks after a federal jury sided last month with
Eliyahu Mirlis, a student at the yeshiva from 2001 to 2005. The jurors
concluded it was more likely than not — the standard used in civil cases
— that Greer had sexually assaulted the teenaged Mirlis repeatedly over
a three-year period, and that the yeshiva had demonstrated negligence
and recklessness in allowing the sexual abuse to continue. To compensate
for emotional and punitive damages, the jury awarded Mirlis a $20 million verdict
— a sum that continues to balloon with interest, by nearly $4,400 a
day. A second former student and school administrator also in a
deposition revealed allegedly being sexually abused.
Meanwhile, on
April 20, by letter, the State Department of Education informed the
yeshiva’s director that he does not possess the special exemption
required to legally operate a boarding school, violating state law.
Rabbi Daniel Greer outside federal court.
“It has come to the attention of the Connecticut State Department of
Education (CSDE) that you may be operating a boarding school for young
men in New Haven, Connecticut without proper authorization,” wrote Laura
Anastasio, an attorney who oversees the Department of Education’s legal
and governmental affairs.The letter served as an official notice
to the Department of Children and Families (DCF), which has
jurisdiction over the licensing, to review the yeshiva’s paperwork. ‘“By
means of this letter, I am informing DCF of your school’s
non-compliance with the statutory requirements for boarding facilities,”
Anastasio wrote. The Independent obtained the state letter, titled
“Notice of Violation and Opportunity for Compliance Meeting,” through a
Freedom of Information Act request last week.
Despite a month’s
time since the letter was sent by certified mail, CSDE had not heard
back from the yeshiva as of late last week, agency spokeswoman Abbe
Smith said.
DCF, which can bring a lawsuit against the yeshiva for
non-compliance, plans to send a letter of their own this week,
spokesman Gary Kleeblatt confirmed. That missive will tell the school
that they needed to apply for the proper certifications immediately, he
said.
Back In Business
The entryway to one of the dorms, littered with empty plastic bottles, cigarette butts..
Rabbi Greer created the not-for-profit in 1977 to open the yeshiva in
the former Roger Sherman School at the corner of Elm and Norton Streets,
according to a history of the institution written by Greer’s wife, Sarah Greer, in the newly published book Jews In New Haven Vol. X.
“The lion’s share of the effort from the very first parent meeting
until the present was and is expended by Rabbi Daniel Greer. His vision
and his high standards inform the entire institution,” she wrote.
“Within a few short years of the school’s founding, Daniel Greer
relinquished his private law practice to work full-time at Yeshiva.”She
described the school’s “delightfully welcoming environment”: “Eschewing
technology in the classroom and emphasiziing actual books, chalk and
blackboards, students learn much in the mode of a bygone era.”
The
school lost its students after the federal molestation case was
publicly reported in May 2016. Since then new students have arrived from
outside the state. Over two dozen students now take classes and reside
at the school’s dorms.
The Independent spoke with current students
on multiple visits to the Elm Street compound during the last two
weeks. By their account, Greer shuttered his educational operation
sometime last year. In its place, a Rabbi Avrohom Notis moved his
yeshiva (started in Lakewood, N.J., and transferred to Deal, N.J.) to
the New Haven building this academic year. Notis paid for the move, one
teenager said.
The average boarder is 18 years old, students
reported, but there are several minors on site. The youngest person
living in the dorm is Notis’s son, a 16-year-old. The adolescents hail
from Lakewood and Baltimore, Brooklyn and Monsey, N.Y., and as far
abroad as London. Most will be leaving for vacation during the latter
half of the summer, the students said.
Greer’s role in the new
administration is limited, the students said. “He doesn’t have any
power, if that’s what you mean,” one commented. “He’s kinda not
involved.” Asked if Greer plays any part in the school, the student
clarified that the rabbi often joins in prayer services. After all,
“it’s his congregation we’re at,” the student explained.
When a
reporter visited the yeshiva in person on a recent Thursday afternoon to
try to speak to Greer, the school secretary Jean Ledbury buzzed him in.
But as soon as he identified himself as a journalist, Ledbury
immediately interrupted. “Out! Out! I thought you were here for
services,” she said. “Please leave or else I’ll call the police.” She
escorted the reporter to the front door. Upon being asked further
questions in the doorway, Ledbury, now red in the face, trembled as she
yelled, “Please leave! No!” Please! Leave!”
The Independent
subsequently reached out to Greer, Notis and Greer’s lawyer William Ward
for comment, leaving voicemails for each. None responded.
Boarding School Rule
YouTube/Larry Dressler
Larry “Noodles” Dressler speaking to camera after ambushing Rabbi Daniel Greer outside the federal courthouse in Hartford.
Private schools are largely untouched by the state, outside of
submitting attendance reports once a year. (There are some exceptions
for those that voluntarily seek state approval as a nonpublic school, as such New Haven institutions as Cold Spring School, Hopkins and St. Bernadette have all done.)But
a different, complex regulatory regime exists for boarding schools.
Technically, by housing minors, the yeshiva is considered a child-care
facility, under DCF’s purview. Unless, that is, the yeshiva obtains a
pass from the State Board of Education, proving it’s an educational
institution. Without that certificate of exemption, the boarding school
must have a DCF license.
According to representatives from the two
state agencies, the yeshiva does not possess a DCF license or a
certificate of exemption, nor has the school ever applied for either. In
fact, the yeshiva hadn’t submitted any paperwork to the state since
2011, Smith said.
The yeshiva received a five-year authorization
to operate a day school back in 2001, Smith noted. After that expired in
2006, the school was expected to seek accreditation by a state-approved
agency. “The Gan School did not do that,” Smith said, using one of the
several interchangeable names for the Yeshiva of New Haven. (For years
the building’s elementary and middle school was called the Gan and its
high school the Yeshiva of New Haven.)
Additionally, the school
hasn’t submitted mandatory attendance reports since the end of the
2010-11 school year, when the school reported that seven staffers taught
62 students, according to Smith. Technically, though, state law
holds parents responsible for that oversight, not the school. The
statute indicates that parents or guardians are responsible for ensuring
their kids attend a public school “or show that the child is elsewhere
receiving equivalent instruction in the studies taught in the public
schools,” until the child receives a high school diploma or turns 18
years old.
Because of that technicality, the two agencies are
focusing on whether the yeshiva has its paperwork in order to run a
boarding school.
State regulators reexamined the yeshiva’s filings
after being inadvertently tipped off to the violation by blogger
Lawrence Dressler, a former active member of the prayer community at the
school who has followed the sexual abuse suit in detail on his blog, where he has written over 185 posts about the rabbi. (Greer’s attorneys attempted to get a restraining order against Dressler
for allegedly “stalking” the rabbi.) This spring, Dressler notified the
Department of Education that he has seen drunk teens outside the
Greer-owned apartment buildings on Elm Street that house the yeshiva
students.
Based on introductory conversations with the yeshiva
over the past several weeks, Kleeblatt said he expects that the yeshiva
will comply with DCF’s demands.
“We need to determine if, in fact,
they have boarding students, and if they do, we want to see them take
one of those actions” — obtaining either of the documents, Kleeblatt
said. “That’s what the law requires, and we expect them to cooperate. If
it’s necessary, we are prepared to enforce the statute by going to
court, but we are expecting to receive cooperation.”
Criminal Prosecution Possible, Until 2020
Mirlis’s attorney Antonio Ponvert outside federal court.
Despite 15 years passing since the sexual abuse allegedly began, when
Mirlis was a sophomore at the yeshiva, the case could still be
prosecuted under Connecticut’s statute of limitations.
Both
the New Haven Police Department and the State’s Attorney’s Office
confirmed that the case file remains open but they declined to share any
further details about its progress. For a variety of reasons, no new
activity has taken place for at least months in the investigation,
according to local police, and no one has confirmed speaking with police
since Mirlis initially contacted them.
Reworked by the legislature in 2002, shortly after the Boston Globe’s explosive stories
about sexual abuse by Catholic priests, Connecticut’s revised law gives
the state’s attorney 30 years from the date a victim turns age 18 or
five years from the date a victim reports the case to authorities —
whichever comes sooner. Mirlis filed a police report in 2015, he
confirmed at last month’s trial, giving the state until 2020 to take up
his case.
Connecticut was among the earlier states to reform its
statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse, said Marci Hoffman, a
scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and research chair at Cardozo
Law School. While it hasn’t gone as far as the roughly 15 states that
have eliminated their time limits altogether, their decades-long window
is “pretty generous,” she added.
Why is such a lengthy period of time necessary? “The science of traumatology
is increasingly explaining why it is often victims need until their 40s
or 50s to come forward. Trauma affects each individual differently, but
it operates so that the victim is often disabled from either coping
with it or understanding it. It really does take someone into their
adulthood to understand that they didn’t have a childhood,” Hoffman
explained.
And just because a case is old doesn’t mean it’s no
longer a matter of public safety, she added. “One of the things that the
public doesn’t understand is that child perpetrators often attack
children well into their elderly years. Even if you identify someone in
their 60s or 70s, you may still prevent further crimes against
children,” she said.
To file a case against Greer, prosecutors
would need to feel sure they have unquestionable proof of sexual assault
— sufficient to meet the higher burden in criminal court to establish
guilt.
Procedural differences from the recent trial will affect
how easily the state can present their case to a jury. On one hand, law
enforcement has more tools to obtain evidence. Greer, for example,
refused to turn over credit card receipts for motel and hotel stays at
his October 2016 deposition. A prosecutor could likely obtain those and
other records.
On the other hand, Greer could choose to steer
clear of the witness stand this time. His invocation of the Fifth
Amendment right against self-incrimination could not be considered by
jurors — unlike in the civil courtroom, where the panel could draw an
adverse inference for every non-answer. At his recent trial Greer denied
one specific allegation of having abused Mirlis, then repeatedly
invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than respond to years’ worth of other
allegations.
The state’s attorney could go for first-degree
sexual assault charges if there’s evidence Greer plied the boy with
alcohol, as Mirlis claimed the rabbi did during the civil trial, to the
point that the teen was “mentally incapacitated to the extent that [he
was] unable to consent to such sexual intercourse.” If not, the state
could pursue second-degree sexual assault charges, which the law clearly
states apply to incidents when “the actor is a school employee and [the
victim] is a student enrolled in a school in which the actor works.”
Mirlis’s lawyer, Antonio Ponvert, declined to comment on whether his client wanted the state to pursue criminal charges.
Jewish Organizations Weigh In
Torah
Umesorah’s directory lists two schools associated with the Yeshiva of
New Haven, out of 11 Orthodox Jewish schools statewide.
Weeks after the civil case concluded, prominent Jewish organizations —
both in the Elm City and nationally — have struggled with how to
respond. What responsibilities do these organizations have to the
yeshiva’s current students or future applicants?In a statement, the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven said its supports further investigation — with some reservations.
“It
is not our role to call for a criminal investigation. However, should
the authorities deem that an investigation is warranted, we would
support it,” CEO Judy Alperin wrote in an email. She added that the
organization “abhors the allegations made in this civil suit and would
decry such allegations whether they occurred within the Jewish community
or any other community.”
Torah Umesorah, an organization that
supports Jewish education by providing in-person consultations to nearly
250 Orthodox schools in 90 cities, lists the Yeshiva of New Haven in an
online directory of schools. Asked why Torah Umesorah is still
advertising the school to students given the recent verdict, the group’s
national director Rabbi Dovid Nojowitz said he would remove the
yeshiva’s name from the site.
“The fact that it’s on the website,
we’re not like the archdiocese. We just have a directory of schools.
We
have no real relationship,” Nojowitze said. “If you’re questioning
whether we condone something, obviously not. If in fact he did what he
did, lock him up and throw away the key.” He added, “If that school is
still in existence, I would be very wary about having people attend.”
Nojowitz
said he was unsure if the Torah Umesorah had provided any resources to
the Yeshiva of New Haven.
A representative from one of the
organization’s seven Educational Resource Centers, which provide support
to principals and educators in teaching the Torah, said no one would
comment and hung up.
On Wednesday morning, the listing for the Yeshiva of New Haven was still up on Torah Umesorah’s site.
Beginning
in the 1980s, Rabbi Greer oversaw the revival of the neighborhood
around his yeshiva at the corner of Norton and Elm streets, renovating
neglected historic homes.
Over the years, Greer has also crusaded
against gay rights in Connecticut, at times played an active role in
politics and government, and advocated for keeping nuisance businesses
out of the Whalley Avenue commercial corridor. He and his family earned
national attention for exposing johns who patronized street prostitutes
in the neighborhood, for filing suit against Yale University over a
requirement that students live in coed dorms, and then in 2007 for
launching an armed neighborhood “defense” patrol and then calling in the Guardian Angels for assistance to combat crime. In the 1970s, Greer also led a successful campaign to force the United States to pressure the Soviet Union into allowing Jewish “refuseniks” to emigrate here and start new, freer lives.
On
Monday night, around 7 p.m., as a mist wet the city streets, students
gathered on the yeshiva’s second floor for their evening services. From
the street, their voices blended, barely audible through an open window
and a door to the fire escape left ajar. The sound of a dribbling
basketball behind the compound’s gates hinted that one or two might’ve
ditched, but the majority of the boys intoned their prayers upstairs.
At
9:10 p.m., a little over halfway through, Greer sat in a chair on the
porch outside the student dorms. (He lives a half-mile away on West Park
Avenue, according to state filings.) When a reporter walked by, Greer
hobbled to the dorm’s front door and rang the bell. By the time the
reporter circled the block, he was gone.
Child Molester Walks By Father of Victim, Gets Exactly What He Deserves
An old case of dad justice from decades ago is going viral on YouTube.
I’m rarely a fan of vigilante justice, but in this case, the courts ended up being okay with it.
Leon Gary Plauche, a Louisiana native, gained fame back in the 1980s
after taking televised justice on Jeff Doucet, a well-known karate
instructor who had abducted and molested his child.
Plauche was initially charged with second-degree murder, but ended up getting only five months probation.
Watch below (warning: some may find content disturbing):
Permanently cutting the daily
calories you consume may turn out to have a profound effect on your
future life, according to some tantalising scientific studies.
In a restaurant setting sometime in the
not-too distant future, a man and a woman are on their first date. After
the initial nerves subside, all is going well.
The man is 33, he
says, has been single for most of those years, and, although he doesn’t
mention it, knows he is looking to settle down and have a family. The
woman replies that she is 52, has been married, divorced, and has
children in their early 20s. He had no idea – she looked his age, or
younger.
This is a dream of Julie Mattison from the National
Institute on Ageing (NIA) in the United States. She envisions a time
when chronological age ticks by with every year, but biological age can
be set to a different timer, where elderly doesn’t mean what it does
now.
It sounds far-fetched, but our society has already made great
strides towards that goal, thanks to advances in medicine and
improvements in healthy living. In 2014, for instance, the United States
Health Interview Survey reported that 16% of people aged between 50 and
64 were impaired every day with chronic illness. Three decades earlier
that number was 23%. In other words, as well as benefiting from longer
lifespans, we are also experiencing longer “healthspans” – and the
latter is proving to be even more malleable. To paraphrase and update a
speech from John F Kennedy given at the first White House Conference on
Ageing in 1961, life can indeed be added to years, rather than just
years added to life.
Healthspan is proving to be even more malleable than lifespan
So, what do we need to do to enhance the length and quality of our lives even more? Researchers worldwide are pursuing various ideas,
but for Mattison and colleagues, the answer is a simple change in diet.
They believe that the key to a better old age may be to reduce the
amount of food on our plates, via an approach called “calorie
restriction”. This diet goes further than cutting back on fatty foods
from time-to-time; it’s about making gradual and careful reductions in
portion size permanently. Since the early 1930s, a 30% reduction in the
amount of food consumed per day has been linked to longer, more active
lives in worms, flies, rats, mice, and monkeys. Across the animal
kingdom, in other words, calorie restriction has proven the best remedy
for the ravages of life. And it’s possible that humans have just as much
to gain.
High calorie foods can be hard to avoid today (Credit: Getty Images)
The idea that what a person eats influences
their health no doubt predates any historical accounts that remain
today. But, as is often the case for any scientific discipline, the
first detailed accounts come from Ancient Greece. Hippocrates, one of
the first physicians to claim diseases were natural and not
supernatural, observed that many ailments were associated with gluttony;
obese Greeks tended to die younger than slim Greeks, that was clear and
written down on papyrus.
Spreading from this epicentre of
science, these ideas were adopted and adapted over the centuries. And at
the end of the 15th Century, Alvise Cornaro, an infirm aristocrat from a
small village near Venice in Italy, turned the prevailing wisdom on its
head, and on himself.
If indulgence was harmful, would dietary
asceticism be helpful? To find out, Cornaro, aged 40, ate only 350g
(12oz) of food per day, roughly 1000 calories according to recent
estimates. He ate bread, panatela or broth, and eggs. For meat he chose
veal, goat, beef, partridge, thrush, and any poultry that was available.
He bought fish caught from the local rivers.
Restricted in amount
but not variety, Cornaro claimed to have achieved “perfect health” up
until his death more than 40 years later. Although he changed his
birthdate as he aged, claiming that he had reached his 98th year, it is
thought that he was around 84 when he died – still an impressive feat in
the 16th Century, a time when 50 or 60 years old was considered
elderly. In 1591, his grandson published his posthumous three-volume
tome entitled “Discourses on the Sober Life,” pushing dietary
restriction into the mainstream, and redefining ageing itself.
With
an additional boost of health into the evening of life, the elderly, in
full possession of their mental capacities, would be able to put
decades of amassed knowledge to good use, Carnaro claimed. With his
diet, beauty became the aged, not the youthful.
Longevity trials
Cornaro
was an interesting man but his findings are not to be taken as fact by
any branch of science. Even if he was true to his word and did not
suffer ill health for nearly half a century, which seems unlikely, he
was a case study of one – not representative of humans as a whole.
But
since a foundational study in 1935 in white rats, a dietary restriction
of between 30-50% has been shown to extend lifespan, delaying death
from age-related disorders and disease. Of course, what works for a rat
or any other laboratory organism might not work for a human.
It may sound
obvious, but what you choose to put in your trolley can have a profound
effect on the length and quality of your life (Credit: Getty Images)
Long-term trials, following humans from early
adulthood to death, are a rarity. “I don’t see a human study of
longevity as something that would be a fundable research programme,”
says Mattison.
“Even if you start humans at 40 or 50 years old, you’re
still looking at potentially 40 or 50 more years [of study].” Plus, she
adds, ensuring that extraneous factors – exercise, smoking, medical
treatments, mental wellbeing – don’t influence the trial’s end results
is near impossible for our socially and culturally complex species.
That’s
why, in the late 1980s, two independent long-term trials – one at NIA
and the other at the University of Wisconsin – were set up to study
calorie restriction and ageing in Rhesus monkeys. Not only do we share
93% of our DNA with these primates, we age in the same way too.
Slowly,
after middle age (around 15 years in Rhesus monkeys) the back starts to
hunch, the skin and muscles start to sag, and, where it still grows,
hair goes from gingery brown to grey. The similarities go deeper. In
these primates, the occurrence of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease
increases in frequency and severity with age. “They’re an excellent
model to study ageing,” says Rozalyn Anderson, a gerontologist from the
University of Wisconsin.
Sherman is the oldest
Rhesus monkey ever recorded, nearly 20 years older than the average
lifespan for his species in captivity
And they’re
easy to control. Fed with specially made biscuits, the diets of the 76
monkeys at the University of Wisconsin and the 121 at NIA are tailored
to their age, weight, and natural appetite. All monkeys receive the full
complement of nutrients and minerals that their bodies crave. It’s just
that half of the monkeys, the calorie restricted (or CR) group, eat 30%
less.
They are far from malnourished or starving. Take Sherman, a
43-year-old monkey from NIA. Mattison says that since being placed on
the CR diet in 1987, aged 16, Sherman hasn’t shown any overt signs of
hunger that are well characterised in his species.
Rhesus monkeys given a stricter, low calorie diet lived longer (Credit: Getty Images)
Sherman is the oldest Rhesus monkey ever
recorded, nearly 20 years older than the average lifespan for his
species in captivity. As younger monkeys were developing diseases and
dying, he seemed to be immune to ageing. Even into his 30s he would have
been considered an old monkey, but he didn’t look or act like one.
The
same is true, to varying extents, for the rest of his experimental
troop at NIA. “We have a lower incidence of diabetes, and lower
incidence of cancer in the CR groups,” says Mattison. In 2009, the
University of Wisconsin trial published similarly spectacular results.
Not
only did their CR monkeys look remarkably younger – with more hair, less sag, and brown instead of grey – than monkeys that were fed a
standard diet, they were healthier on the inside too, free from
pathology. Cancers, such as the common intestinal adenocarcinoma, were
reduced by over 50%. The risk of heart disease was similarly halved. And
while 11 of the ad libitum (“at one’s pleasure,” in Latin)
monkeys developed diabetes and five exhibited signs that they were
pre-diabetic, the blood glucose regulation seemed healthy in all CR
monkeys. For them, diabetes wasn’t a thing.
Overall, only 13% of the monkeys in the CR group had died of age-related causes in 20 years. In the ad libitum
group, 37% had died, nearly three times as many. In an update study
from the University of Wisconsin in 2014, this percentage remained
stable.
The results show that ageing itself is a
reasonable target for clinical intervention and medical treatment –
Rozalyn Anderson
“We have demonstrated that ageing
can be manipulated in primates,” says Anderson. “It kind of gets
glossed over because it’s obvious, but conceptually that’s hugely
important; it means that ageing itself is a reasonable target for
clinical intervention and medical treatment.”
If ageing can be
delayed, in other words, all of the diseases associated with it will
follow suit. “Going after each disease one at a time isn’t going to
significantly extend lifespan for people because they’ll die of
something else,” says Anderson. “If you cured all cancers, you wouldn’t
offset death due to cardiovascular disease, or dementia, or
diabetes-associated disorders. Whereas if you go after ageing you can
offset the lot in one go.”
Calorie restriction involves a permanent reduction in a diet (Credit: Getty Images)
Eating less certainly seemed to help the
monkeys, but calorie restriction is much tougher for people out in the
real world. For one, our access to regular, high-calorie meals is now
easier than ever; with companies like Deliveroo and UberEats, there is
no longer a need to walk to the restaurant anymore. And two, gaining
weight simply comes more naturally to some people.
“There’s a huge
genetic component to all of this and its much harder work for some
people than it is for others to stay trim,” says Anderson. “We all know
someone who can eat an entire cake and nothing happens, they look the
exact same. And then someone else walks past a table with a cake on it and they have to go up a pant size.”
Ideally,
the amount and types of food we eat should be tailored to who we are –
our genetic predisposition to gaining weight, how we metabolise sugars,
how we store fat, and other physiological fluxes that are beyond the
scope of scientific instruction at the moment, and perhaps forever.
But
a predisposition to obesity can be used as a guide to life choices
rather than an inevitability. “I personally have a genetic history of
obesity running through my family, and I practice a flexible form of
caloric restriction,” says Susan Roberts
a dietary scientist at Tufts University in Boston. “I keep my BMI at
22, and [have calculated] that that requires eating 80% of what I would
eat if my BMI was at 30 like every other member of my family.” Roberts
stresses that it isn’t hard – she follows her own weight management
programme using a tool called iDiet
to help her eat less but avoid feeling hungry or deprived of enjoyment.
If this wasn’t possible, she adds, she wouldn’t practise calorie
restriction.
Not only has Roberts seen the problems of obesity
first-hand in her family, she knows the benefits of CR better than most.
For over 10 years she has been a leading scientist in the Comprehensive
Assessment of Long-Term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy trial,
also known as Calerie. Over two years, 218 healthy men and women aged
between 21 and 50 years were split into two groups. In one, people were
allowed to eat as they normally would (ad libitum), while the other ate 25% less (CR). Both had health checks every six months.
Unlike
in the Rhesus monkey trials, tests over two years can’t determine
whether CR reduces or delays age-related diseases. There simply isn’t
enough time for their development. But the Calerie trials tested for the
next best thing: the early biological signs of heart disease, cancer,
and diabetes.
Published in 2015, the results after two years were
very positive. In the blood of calorie-restricted people, the ratio of
“good” cholesterol to “bad” cholesterol had increased, molecules
associated with tumour formation – called tumour necrosis factors (TNFs)
– were reduced by around 25%, and levels of insulin resistance, a sure
sign of diabetes, fell by nearly 40% compared to people who ate their
normal diets. Overall, the blood’s pressure was lower.
Significant health benefits may be garnered in an already healthy body, but further trials are needed
Admittedly,
some benefits may come from weight-loss. Earlier trials from Calerie
had included people that were obese as well as those with a healthy body
mass index (BMI) of 25 or below, and slimming down would have certainly
improved the welfare of the heavier participants. “One thing that’s
been very clear for a long time is that being overweight or obese is bad
for you,” says Roberts. Diseases and disorders previously thought to be
age-associated diseases are now popping up in the obese population, she
adds.
But the latest results suggested that significant health
benefits can be garnered in an already healthy body – a person who isn’t
underweight or obese. That is, someone whose BMI lies between 18.5 and
25.
Despite these results, evidence from further trials will be
needed before someone with an already healthy BMI should be advised to
reduce their calorie intake. (And anyone wanting to change their diet
would be advised to consult a medical professional beforehand.)
Elderly life need not be one of disease and illness (Credit: Getty Images)
In the meantime, the scientists will be hoping
that their rhesus macaques may help us to understand exactly why
calories restriction may have these effects. With nearly 30 years of
data on lives and deaths, and blood and tissue samples, from nearly 200
monkeys, the work at NIA and the University of Wisconsin aim to shine a
light into the black box of calorie restriction, illuminating just how
it delays ageing.
With less food, is the metabolism forced to be
more efficient with what it has? Is there a common molecular switch
regulating ageing that is turned on (or off) with fewer calories? Or is
there an as of yet unknown mechanism underpinning our lives and deaths?
The importance of monkeys like Sherman far outspans their lives.
Calorie restriction may be one of the most promising avenues for improving health and how long it lasts in our lives
Answers
to such questions might be long in coming. “If I cloned 10 of myself
and we all worked furiously, I don’t think we’d have it solved,” says
Anderson. “The biology is inordinately complicated.” It’s a worthwhile
undertaking – understand how CR works and other treatments could then be
used to target that specific part of our biology. Ageing could be
treated directly, that is, without the need of calorie restriction. “And
I think that’s really the golden ticket,” says Anderson.
Although
lacking a neat explanation, calorie restriction is one of the most
promising avenues for improving health and how long it lasts in our
lives. “There was nothing in what we saw that made us think caloric
restriction doesn’t work in people,” says Roberts, from the Calerie
trial. And, unlike drug-based treatments, it doesn’t come with a long
list of possible side effects. “Our people were not hungrier, their mood
was fine, their sexual function was fine. We looked pretty hard for bad
things and didn’t find them,” says Roberts.
One expected issue
was a slight decrease in bone density that is often tied to gradual
weight loss, says Roberts. But as a precaution, volunteers were provided
with small calcium supplements throughout the trial.
Even with
such promising findings, “this [the Calerie trial] is the first study of
its kind, and I don’t think that any of us would feel confident in
saying, ‘okay, we’re going to recommend this to everyone in the world,’”
says Roberts. “But it’s a really exciting prospect. I think that
delaying the progression of chronic diseases is something that everyone
can get behind and get excited about, because nobody wants to live life
with one of those.”
Ben Zion Shenker: The Unsung Composer of the Songs We All Sing
Ben Zion Shenker, z”l, 1925-2016
By David Olivestone
This past November, on the Friday evening of the week in which Ben Zion Shenker, z”l,
passed away, my wife and I were guests in the home of a Sephardi
family. Expecting a different type of Shabbat experience, I was taken by
surprise when the host led us in singing Eshet Chayil to the melody with which we are all so familiar. He dedicated it to two kallot
(new brides) who were present. I made another suggestion: “Let’s also
dedicate it to the memory of Ben Zion Shenker, who composed that melody
and who died this week.” But it turned out that neither our host nor
anyone else around the table had ever heard of Ben Zion Shenker. “I
assumed that niggun was a hundred years old or more,” said our
host. And, of course, when I told him that Shenker was also the composer
of the most familiar tunes we sing for Mizmor leDavid and Yassis Alayich, besides more than five hundred other niggunim, he was amazed.
I only met Ben Zion Shenker once, at a presentation he gave about his
work, but you could not but be struck by his modesty, even though he
was revered in Jewish musical circles as the leading contemporary
exponent of Chassidic music. Having been an avid Shenker fan for many
years, I asked him for an autograph, and he was clearly taken aback.
Given this humility, perhaps his anonymity among the larger Jewish
community is unsurprising.
Unlike most other singers, chazzanim, and even many
composers, Shenker could not be classified as a “performer,” apart from
on his recordings. His appearances on the concert stage were extremely
rare, though he was unstinting in giving of himself to lead hours of
singing at Chassidic events. And when you listen to any of the many
albums he recorded, or watch him in action on YouTube videos, it is
evident that he was never simply trying to show off his warm and vibrant
voice (what the New York Times, in its obituary, described as a
“reedy tenor”). His concern was with how the melody could convey the
message contained in the words, how one’s deveikut (attachment
to God) could be intensified through the song. Famed Chassidic
entertainer Avraham Fried says there was “a soulful transcendental
feeling of prayer” in Shenker’s singing.
Even in a professional environment, he never stepped out of
character. Veteran Jewish music publisher and historian Velvel
Pasternak, who produced many of the early Chassidic albums, once told me
about the difference between Shenker and other Chassidic singers. “When
the others walk into the studio,” Pasternak related, “they bring throat
sprays and inhalers, and all sorts of props. First they do their vocal
exercises and warm-ups, and only then are they ready. Ben Zion comes in
with a siddur, and simply starts to sing.”
Shenker was born in Brooklyn in 1925. Music was his passion since
childhood. In a 2011 interview, he told Charlie Bernhaut, longtime host
of a weekly online program of chazzanut and other Jewish music,
that his mother never had to give him toys to play with. “She would put
me down next to the phonograph with a pile of Yossele Rosenblatt
records,” he recalled, “and I would sit there entranced for hours on
end.”
He joined the choir of Cantor Joshua Weisser at twelve years old, and
soon began studying with the well-known Jewish music teacher and
conductor Seymour Silbermintz. When he was about fifteen, his father
took him along to a tisch of the second Modzitzer rebbe, Reb Shaul, himself a prolific composer, who had just arrived in America. Picking up a book of music notes of niggunim that happened to be there, Shenker began humming the songs. The rebbe
was amazed that the young boy could read music and thus began a
lifelong relationship, with Shenker acting as musical secretary to the rebbe. To make a living, even though he had semichah, Shenker was involved in his family’s sweater business, and later in a diamond company, but music was his real occupation.
Shenker’s creativity and influence spanned many decades. He composed the tunes for Mizmor leDavid and Eshet Chayil in 1946 and 1953 respectively, sang in the first-ever album of Chassidic niggunim
in 1956, and was still composing, and even recording his latest
compositions, together with klezmer musician Andy Statman, in his
nineties. He inspired several generations of Jewish singers and
musicians, including Shlomo Carlebach, who became a close friend.
There is a sophistication to Shenker’s compositions that is a
substantive cut above the popular run-of-the-mill neo-Chassidic music of
today. Often relatively simple, at other times complex in the Modzitz
tradition, his compositions touch every emotion, with joy being by far
the most common. He loved to sing marches, his right fist banging
unceasingly on the table to the tempo. Prayerful pesukim from
Tehillim or the Prophets inspired him to compose tender, poignant
melodies that touch the recesses of the heart. Not infrequently, he
would transform into a traditional chazzan, mining the depths of his soul for plaintive musical phrases that would uplift and inspire.
According to Yossi Green, also a leading contemporary composer of niggunim, “Ben Zion Shenker was the trailblazer of a new genre of Jewish music—the American niggun,
with a modern syncopated rhythm, a low first part, and a high, exciting
second part.” Pasternak points to one quality of Shenker’s compositions
that characterizes them all. “He had a great ability to write a melody
that people can sing.”
That is so true. Is there any shul anywhere at which his Mizmor leDavid is not sung during seudah shlishit? But besides his own compositions, he popularized dozens of Modzitz niggunim, such as Lo Tevoshi that enlivens our Kabbalat Shabbat, Ein Kitzva that energizes our Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Mussaf, and Shoshanat Ya’akov
that entertains us on Purim. Melodies like these have become so much a
part of our lives that it is hard to imagine a Shabbat or yom tovdavening, or a wedding, without them. Shimon Cramer, popular singer and chazzan
of the Riverdale Jewish Center in New York, grew up on Shenker’s music
in London. “Everyone was using his melodies for parts of the davening,” Cramer recalls. “I’m sure that still today there are some tunes that I sing that I don’t even realize are his.”
Pasternak has taken on the huge task of notating, and ultimately
publishing, all of Ben Zion Shenker’s songs, so that his genius will
live on and can reach ever wider circles. Yet how will their composer be
remembered? Like Carlebach and some others, perhaps his reputation will
become that much greater after his passing. But surely he himself would
want his legacy to be measured only by how much his music continues to
inspire us in our prayers and to uplift us in our celebrations of life.
David Olivestone, formerly senior communications officer of the Orthodox Union, lives in Jerusalem and is a member of the Jewish Action Editorial Committee. His most recent contribution to the magazine was a tribute to Cantor Sherwood Goffin.
Uncovering ancient Ashkenaz – the birthplace of Yiddish speakers
Did Ashkenazi Jews descend from ancient Turkey?
At 1,000 years, the search for the location of Ashkenaz
– thought to be the birthplace of Ashkanazic Jews and the Yiddish
language – is one of the longest quests in human history. It is perhaps
second only in length to the search for Noah’s Ark which began in the
3rd century AD.
The place name Ashkenaz occurs three times in the Bible, but by the
Middle Ages the exact origin of Ashkenaz was forgotten. Because of the
migration of the Ashkenazic Jews it later became associated with Germany.
This led to all German Jews being considered “Ashkenazic”, a term which
was then applied to central and eastern European Jews who follow Ashkenazic religious customs and who speak Yiddish.
The Yiddish language – which consists of Hebrew, German, Slavic
elements and is written in Aramaic – has been spoken at least since the
9th century AD, but its origins have been debated by linguists for
several centuries. While some have suggested a German origin, others believe a more complex beginning for the language,
starting in Slavic lands in Khazaria – the Middle Age Khazar Empire
that covered present-day southern Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and parts
of the Caucasus – and followed by Ukraine, and finally Germany.
Although the language adopted a German vocabulary it retained its Slavic
grammar – which is why Yiddish is often referred to as “bad German”.
In the largest genomic study of Ashkenazic Jews,
and the first one to study Yiddish speakers, we applied our Geographic
Population Structure (GPS) tool – which operates in a similar way to the
sat nav in your car – to the genomes of more than 360 Yiddish and
non-Yiddish speaking Ashkenazic Jews.
DNA of Yiddish speakers could have originated from four ancient villages in north-west Turkey.
Surprisingly, our GPS honed in on north-east Turkey, where we found four primeval villages, one of which was abandoned in the mid-7th century AD.
These ancient villages identified by the GPS tool are clustered close to the Silk Road
– the ancient network of trade routes – and are named Iskenaz,
Eskenaz, Ashanaz, and Ashkuz. And it is likely that these are the
villages that mark the location of the lost lands of Ashkenaz.
The history of a people
Located on the cross roads of ancient trade routes, this region
suggests that the Yiddish language was developed by Iranian and
Ashkenazic Jews as they traded on the Silk Road from the first centuries
AD to around the 9th century when they arrived in Slavic lands.
Putting together evidence from linguistic, history, and genetics, we
concluded that the ancient Ashkenazic Jews were merchants who developed Yiddish as a secret language – with 251 words for “buy” and “sell” – to maintain their monopoly. They were known to trade in everything from fur to slaves.
By the 8th century the words “Jew” and “merchant” were practically synonymous,
and it was around this time that Ashkenazic Jews began relocating from
ancient Ashkenaz to the Khazar Empire to expand their mercantile
operations.
Two Jewish merchants in medieval dress
This Jewish migration led to some of the Turkic Khazar rulers and
numerous eastern Slavs living within the Khazar Empire to convert to
Judaism so they didn’t miss out on the lucrative Silk Road trade between
Germany and China.
But the demise of Khazaria due to continued invasions and finally the Black Death devastated this last Jewish Empire of Khazaria.
This led to the Ashkenazic Jews splitting into two groups – some
remaining in the Caucasus and others migrating into eastern Europe and
Germany.
The two groups still called themselves Ashkenazic Jews, however the
name Ashkenaz became more strongly associated with Germany and the the
European group – for whom Yiddish became their primary language.
A secret language
Since north-east Turkey is the only place in the world where the
place names of Iskenaz, Eskenaz, Ashanaz, and Ashkuz exist this strongly
implies that Yiddish was established around the first millennium at a
time when Jewish traders moved goods from Asia to Europe. This was done
by developing the language of Yiddish, which very few can speak or
understand other than Jews.
Further evidence to the origin of Ashkenazic Jews can be found in
many customs – such as the breaking of a glass at a wedding ceremony and
placing stones over tombstones, which were probably introduced by
Slavic converts to Judaism.
By studying the origin of Yiddish using our GPS technology, combined
with a citizen science approach, we were able to shed light on one of
the most forgotten chapters of history and demonstrate the use of
bio-geographical genetic tools to study the origin of languages. For
Ashkanazic Jews these are the ties that bind their history, culture,
behaviour, and identity.
Jihadi terrorists shouting 'this is for Allah' kill
seven in knife frenzy at 'FIVE' locations in the capital: Hunt for men
with 12in blades who began the rampage by mowing down revellers on
London Bridge
The men, described as being 'of Mediterranean origin', reportedly drove the van at 50mph across the bridge
One horrified woman said she saw three people with what appeared to be their throats cut at London Bridge
The gang had metal canisters strapped to their chests and two were reportedly shot dead by armed police
They also tried to storm into pub in nearby Borough Market, where a man was reportedly stabbed five times
Also unconfirmed reports of gunfire on Southwark Street amid the 'utter chaos' of attack on Saturday night
A bomb squad has attended and boats are searching the Thames amid reports people were pushed in water
Jared & Ivanka: An Embarrassment to "Judaism" - (And The Corrupt Rabbis That Conducted This Hoax ...)
THE MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS FRAUDULENT CONVERSION
by Sherwin Pomerantz is a native New Yorker, who lived and worked in Chicago for 20 years before coming to Israel
… [More]
Last weekend in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump demonstrated for all of us the real meaning of chillul haShem, desecrating God’s name.
The
first instance was the trumped up story that some rabbi gave them
permission to travel with President Trump on his flight from Washington
which left there on Friday and arrived in Riyadh on Shabbat. The
phantom rabbi has not been identified but, presumably, it was the same
person who gave them permission to ride around Washington on January
20th to attend the inauguration balls that evening.
The second instance was in Riyadh itself on
Shabbat, where video records of the President’s meetings there showed
Jared and Ivanka getting in and out of vehicles to attend those very
same meetings.
Now one might ask what the big deal is. They
are not the first Jews in politics who were or are seen not observing
the Sabbath. That, of course, is true and while it may bother us from
time to time, we know that not every Jew observes all of the strictures
of Jewish law.
But in their case they trumpet their orthodoxy
to the world and wear it as a badge of honor. When politicians choose
to do that they perforce take on themselves an obligation not to break
the Sabbath and do whatever they can to ensure that they are shomre Shabbat, that
is Sabbath observers as Jewish law dictates. Everyone knows that there
is no orthodox Rabbi who would give permission to ride on the Sabbath
except in circumstances of pikuach nefesh, such as the need to save a life or some similar emergency such as defending oneself from imminent attack.
One could argue, for example, that given the
fact that the inauguration parade in January ran into the Sabbath, it
would not have been safe for them to have walked home and, as such, it
was permissible to ride. But to go to the inauguration balls that
followed on Friday night? To ride around Riyadh on the Sabbath to
attend meetings with the Saudi king? Do they not realize the shame they
brought on the Jewish people for not being observant of their own
faith? Does anyone think for a moment that the Saudis would have
scheduled such meetings on Friday? Or that this message of chillul haShem was lost on the Saudis?
Yet, even more critical is the message that
this sends to the luckless Jew working in a business in Little Rock,
Arkansas, for example, who tells his boss that in the winter he needs to
leave work early to be home for Shabbat. And his boss’ answer? “I
really don’t understand, the president’s daughter and son in law are
observant and they get permission to work on the Sabbath, why can’t
you?”
When I was going through officer training in
the US Army so many years ago, Jewish officers had to attend a special
session with the Jewish chaplain. One of the lessons he taught (at that
time they were all “he’s”) was that whether or not we were personally
observant we needed to be careful what we did and did not do on Shabbat
because our conduct could negatively influence how a religious enlisted
person would be treated by his superior when a request came up not to
work on Shabbat.
Regardless of our individual observance levels once we
thought about it we knew that the advice was spot on.
Jared and Ivanka can choose to be
non-observant and do whatever they want to do vis-à-vis Jewish practices
and, while I wish it would be otherwise, I can live with that. Or, as
they claim to do, they can choose to be compliant with Jewish law as the
Orthodox interpret it, but then they have to stick by it. No phantom
dispensations, no mockery of the faith and no shortcuts. It is their
choice but, once they make it and brag about it, their choices are
limited to what is generally accepted as permitted.
Roy Disney once said “When your values are
clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.” It is an axiom that the
Kushners would do well to learn so that they don’t continue to be an
embarrassment to those who try to live their Jewish values truthfully
every day.
Rabbi Moshe Feinstein
states the very marriage of a gentile woman to a non observant Jew, is
equivalent to an open declaration that she will not observe the
precepts. This is so, because it is highly unlikely that the gentile
member of such a union, will be more committed to Judaism than her
remiss Jewish husband...
When Rabbis Become
Prostitutes - The Redefining of an Orthodox Jew - "Jared every year
sends a $500 check before Passover to one of his former day school
teachers “as a gesture of appreciation... "
Jared Kushner &
Ivanka Trump In Church on Friday and Shabbos! Trump's Conversion Farce
Must Be Repudiated, Rebuked & Delegitimized by Every Orthodox Rabbi!
Kabbalat Shabbos With Jared & Ivanka! Israel & The Jewish
People Have Every Reason To Be Concerned About Kushner's Total Rejection
of Core Jewish Values (מומר להכעיס) , and In Essence, Contemptuous
Conduct.
US said pushing Israel to transfer parts of West Bank to PA administrative rule
Economic incentives insufficient; Americans reportedly want Netanyahu to do more to revive peace talks; PMO denies TV report
A
red sign on the side of a road warns Israeli citizens from entering the
West Bank city of Nablus on July 29, 2015.
The administration of US
President Donald Trump is said to be pressing Israel to transfer parts
of the West Bank to Palestinian administrative control as a goodwill
gesture to help revive peace talks between the two sides.
Despite a series of economic incentives approved on Sunday
by the Israeli cabinet, the US wants to see greater concessions to the
Palestinian Authority and views the recent measures as insufficient,
Channel 10 reported Wednesday.
Specifically they have asked for areas in the
northern West Bank to be transferred from Area C to Area B, according to
the report.
Under the Oslo Accords, Area C of the West
Bank (60%, where most of the settlements are located, and some 150,000
Palestinians live) is under full Israeli administrative and military
control, while in Area B (22%), administrative control is the
responsibility of the PA while the IDF is in charge of security. Area A
(18%, encompassing the major Palestinian cities) is under the full
administrative and military control of the Palestinian Authority.
The Prime Minister’s Office later denied the Channel 10 report.
President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
It was not immediately clear when the US supposedly made these demands, but US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters on Wednesday
aboard Air Force One that Trump “pressured” both Netanyahu and PA
President Mahmoud Abbas during his meeting with the two leaders this
week to return to the negotiating table.
It was also not known what concessions the US
sought from the Palestinians during Trump’s trip to help restart the
peace process.
During his visit to Israel and the West Bank
on Monday-Tuesday, Trump repeatedly emphasized his desire to help broker
a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, but offered little
in how he would encourage the two sides to revive peace talks.
Trump has repeatedly said he was looking to
broker the “ultimate deal” with Israelis and Palestinians and is
convinced he could do so. Trump has tasked his son-in-law Jared Kushner,
and former real estate lawyer Jason Greenblatt with charting a course
forward. Still, White House officials had downplayed the prospects for a
breakthrough on this trip, saying it was important to manage their
ambitions as they wade into terrain that has tripped up more experienced
diplomats.
US President Donald Trump delivers a speech at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on May 23, 2017. (AFP Photo/Menahem Kahana)
In a speech Tuesday at the Israel Museum, the
president heaped praise on Israel, while calling on both sides to make
compromises toward peace. He urged them to put aside the “pain and
disagreements of the past” and declared that both sides were ready to
move forward.
The president notably avoided all of the
thorny issues that have stymied peace efforts for decades. He did not
mention Israeli settlements, the status of Jerusalem or even whether the
US would continue to insist on a two-state solution giving the
Palestinians sovereign territory.
In a meeting with opposition leader Isaac
Herzog on Tuesday, Kushner said Washington intended to move fast to
advance a renewal of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, a
spokesman for Herzog said, with Trump’s envoy Jason Greenblatt
reportedly set to return next week so as not to leave a “diplomatic
vacuum.”
In a separate report Wednesday, Channel 10
said that Israel’s National Security Council is currently considering a
plan to transfer control of two East Jerusalem neighborhoods from the
Jerusalem Municipality to a yet-to-be established local council.
President Donald Trump has come and
gone from his trip to the Middle East, his first foreign excursion
since taking office earlier this year. He arrived — first in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia, then Jerusalem and Bethlehem in Israel — with strong words
about Iran as the neighborhood bully and, like so many American
presidents before him, buoyant words for the Israeli and Palestinian
people.
Optimistic words. Hopeful words. They all
conveyed a vision and new possibility for peace in the region, a
prospect “I’ve heard,” he said, that is “one of the toughest deals of
all. But I have a feeling we will get there eventually, I hope.”
Good for Trump. A new American president. A new chance for a solution. A new team to get it done.
But where were the new ideas Israeli
leaders are so certain he has? What is the new approach? How does he
propose to untangle the thorny issues on the ground — boundaries,
settlers, Jerusalem, etc. — that have left so many presidents before him
bloody with failure?
Peace between Israelis and Palestinians
was a topic of much discussion when Trump visited Jerusalem and
Bethlehem. It was front and center, but not necessarily the first item
on the agenda. In his speech to the Arab world in Riyadh days before, in
his unscripted photo-op with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his
later remarks in the prime minister’s house, Trump was more focused on
Iran as the source of menace in the region. He and Netanyahu suggested
that there are new opportunities in the region. Countries must unite
against a common threat — Iran. That’s an opening that can be explored.
Michael Oren, historian, former
Israeli ambassador to the United States and currently Israel’s deputy
minister for diplomacy, said he believes that this new reality is a
conduit of a “tremendous” shift. If once it was assumed that a peace
with the Palestinians could lead to reconciliation of Israel with the
rest of the Arab world — the situations is now reversed: A peace with
the Arab world could lead to a deal with the Palestinians. If the Saudis
come on board, if other Gulf states come on board, if the Arab world
realizes that fighting against Israel makes no sense in this era of
radicalism, the Palestinians might realize that the train of peace is
leaving the station and that they’d better hurry so they don’t miss it.
Maybe this is what Israeli leaders mean
when they constantly talk about “new ideas.” Trump is a devotee of “new”
ideas, “bold” ideas, “different” ideas. For Israel, to resist his push
for a deal would be a mistake. But it might be able to convince him that
his predecessors failed because of their conventional thinking — and
that he, a man bold enough, ought to reformulate the meaning of the
ultimate deal. The “two-state solution” is old, tired — and it is so
Clinton and Obama. Trump could make his mark by thinking outside of the
box, that is, by dropping old ideas and replacing them with new ideas.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin sang the
praises of new ideas after his meeting with Trump: “Our destiny —
Palestinians and Jews — is to live together in this land,” he said. “In
order to achieve this, we need new ideas, new energy that will help us
move forward, together.”
But move where? Rivlin has his new ideas;
he supports one state, or a confederation of Israelis and Palestinians.
Naftali Bennett, the head of the Jewish Home Party and the leader most
forthright in attempting to directly tell Trump what needs to be done
(“We expect you to be the first president to recognize a united
Jerusalem,” he said, to which Trump responded, “That’s an idea!”), has
different new ideas. He supports an autonomy for Palestinians and
annexation of the rest. Other leaders also have new ideas, including the
oldest “new” idea of sticking to an improved status quo.
Does Trump have new ideas? If he does, we
were still waiting to hear what they are as he departed for Europe. It
was worth noting that Trump refrained from using the term “two-state
solution” during his visit. It is possible that he is more open than his
predecessors to considering alternative ideas, assuming he has them. In
Saudi Arabia, in Jerusalem and in Bethlehem, he kept hinting that his
deal is partially built on the goodwill of the conservative Arab regimes
of Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Former President Bill Clinton failed
to get them on board at Camp David. He was disappointed by their
refusal to help him push the late Yasser Arafat, chairman of the
Palestine Liberation Organization, toward accepting the deal that was
offered to him. Trump and some of his top advisers believe circumstances
have changed in a way that could make such a push more realistic today.
His brief trip was barely a beginning of a
long process of exploration of these assumptions and ideas. Although it
sent a symbolic message of involvement and new energy, it did little to
advance a detailed vision of a peace process. And of course,
involvement is crucial, as both Arab and Israeli leaders made clear in
their remarks, taking a swipe at the Barack Obama administration.
“We are happy to see that America is
back,” said Rivlin, usually not the type to bash the former president.
Netanyahu, not surprisingly, was more direct: “I want to tell you also
how much we appreciate the reassertion of American leadership in the
Middle East.”
The new American president ought to
know that there is no correlation between the number of visits to the
Middle East and the level of success in handling Middle East affairs.
Yes, Trump made “history” — a word used much too often to describe
routine events — in going to Israel and Saudi Arabia earlier in his term
than any other president. He made “history” again by being the first
sitting American president to visit the Western Wall. So what? Nixon
made history by being the first president to travel to Israel. Shortly
afterward, he was forced out of office. Clinton made history by coming
to Israel more than all other presidents, four times. It did not
guarantee his success.
The only presidential visit that really
made a change was Jimmy Carter’s in 1979. That was a dramatic visit,
with ups, downs and crises. It was a make-or-break visit: Carter
traveled to Egypt, then to Israel, and forced the hand of the late
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to accept the peace deal that was
proposed to him. A few years ago, Israel’s state archives released
documents from that visit, including a cable that was sent from Zvi
Rafiah, Israel’s then-liaison to the U.S. Congress. Carter briefed
congressional leaders when he was back in Washington, D.C., and Rafiah
reported to his superiors in Jerusalem that during this meeting, Carter
described his meeting with the Israeli cabinet as “terrible.”
“Terrible” and “horrible” are two of
Trump’s favorite words. So maybe he will also describe parts of his
visit as terrible. Maybe he did not appreciate the food, or the heat, or
the forced selfie with Knesset Member Oren Hazan. But as far as we
know, by the end of his visit on May 23, nothing truly “terrible”
happened. Everybody was nice to him. Everybody agreed with him.
Everybody encouraged him to keep doing what he is doing, whatever that
is.
A time for confrontation might still
come, when a more detailed plan emerges, and a real price is demanded of
the parties. Already, Israel and the Palestinians got a taste of the
future. Israel watched reluctantly, yet silently, as the Saudis bought
weapons in quantities that might put Israel’s military edge at risk. The
Palestinians witnessed an American president visiting the Kotel. They
heard an American president, not for the first time, raise the issue of
terrorism as an obstacle they need to overcome to achieve their
objectives. They heard him say “peace” but not “a Palestinian state.”
And so. There was a visit and it went
smoothly. For Trump, that is certainly an achievement. Everybody was
trying to convince everybody that the visit was successful and that
Trump is exactly what they expected him to be.
But there was reason for caution. On the
evening of May 22, about an hour before Trump and Netanyahu made their
joint statement in Jerusalem, I was sitting in a radio studio in the
city of Modi’in. The interviewee on the line was Member of Knesset Ahmad
Tibi, an Arab legislator, an articulate critic of Israel’s policies,
and a frequent visitor at the offices of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian
president.
He was cautious. Very cautious. Wisely
cautious. Tibi has hopes, but he isn’t letting them get too high. He
knows Trump changes his mind, he said. He knows it is not yet clear what
Trump wants, beyond the generalities of having a “deal” and brokering
“peace.” He knows Trump won’t always have the patience necessary to see a
bumpy peace process through. And so Tibi’s message was simple: I’ll
believe him about his Israeli-Palestinian peace effort when I see it.
When I asked Tzachi Hanegbi, Israel’s
communications minister, about Trump reportedly walking back on his
campaign promise to move the American embassy to Jerusalem, Hanegbi
didn’t even blink before explaining that a visit to the Western Wall is
much more important than moving the embassy. And when Tibi was asked if
he was annoyed by Trump’s visit to the Kotel, Tibi didn’t even blink
before explaining that it was an insignificant event that reinforced the
fact that the U.S. does not recognize the site as Israeli.
Despite what did and didn’t happen, give
Trump credit for this: He was polite, almost gaffe free and vague enough
to keep the valuable posture of a Rorschach test: for now, all
interpretation of his actions and intentions are still in the eye of the
beholder.
