Law

Just days before the two countries were to participate in a NATO military exercise this week, Turkish officials informed Israel that it would not be allowed to participate. The U.S., the Netherlands and Italy then withdrew in protest and the exercise was canceled.

Turkey, one of the few Muslim nations to have diplomatic relations with Israel, has had a testy relationship with the Jewish state since January.

Delegates to the upcoming national conference by J Street, the group that has become the favorite target of a furious pro-Israel establishment, will face both their organization’s exhilarating rise — and eroding commitment to Israel-related issues by the very Jews it hopes to attract to its ranks.

The Westchester Jewish community this week praised a $100,000 settlement between a New Jersey real estate developer and the state attorney general that will create a memorial in Yonkers at the site of a shopping center garage built over an abandoned Jewish cemetery.
According to the agreement announced Monday by Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, the state will use the settlement to erect a memorial to the Congregation of the People of Righteousness cemetery near the Costco and Home Depot along the state Thruway.

If you go to your local Jewish community center, the employees you meet there are more involved in Jewish life and more likely to stay at their job than their counterparts in recent decades.
But if the employee you meet is a woman, she probably earns a smaller salary than a man in a comparable position.
Those are among the findings of “Centering on Professionals: The 2001 Study of JCC Personnel in North America,” a study of some 1,800 JCC staffers released this week by the Florence G. Heller-JCC Association Research Center.

When Israel finally flatlines, don’t say The Atlantic didn’t warn you.
In May 2005, Atlantic published a lengthy speculation, “Will Israel Live to 100?” The answer suggested that the Zionist house was built more of twigs than of bricks. Now that Israel is hitting 60, the Atlantic asks again, more ominously and more immediately: “Is Israel Finished?”

It is Poland, the winter of 1941-42. Some four dozen Jews from a labor camp are herded one day to an isolated ravine about 20 miles east-southeast of Lublin, where they are shot to death by SS guards stationed at a nearby training base. After the executions, a high-ranking guard appears at the mass grave. Walking on a wooden plank that spans the bulldozed gully, he notices one man 15 feet beneath him moving, still barely alive, point-ing to his head. The guard aims his rifle at the man and shoots. The man stops moving.

Her two small children in tow, a 30-ish mother walked out of the Central Queens Y and down the front stairs this week.
A few steps away on 108th Street, her children, who had spent the morning at the Forest Hills Y’s nursery program, announced that they were hungry. Mom gave them a few dollar bills to buy snacks from a machine in the Y front lobby.
The kids raced back up the stairs; their mother trailed behind, watching them the whole way.
“I never let them out of my sight — always,” she declared.

With John Paul II’s departure, Israel’s attention turned this week to Bibi, Yossi and Yosef. Following the historic Holy Land pilgrimage of the Pope, which dominated the country’s headlines for a week, two political scandals took center stage — pending corruption charges against former Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, and a possible investigation of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef for an “incitement” attack on Education Minister Yossi Sarid.

Repairing A House Divided
Called too pluralistic by the right and too Jewish by the left, Rabbi Mordechai Gafni carries on his crusade to get the secular and religious talking to one another.

Steve Lipman
Staff Writer

David Rosenn did not intend to become a rabbi. After graduating college with a philosophy degree, he spent three years — in Israel and the United States — finding an answer to one question: “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?”
He took a variety of jobs, for anti-poverty and civil rights organizations. Later Rosenn heard about a Christian group that recruited young volunteers to work in poor neighborhoods. Where was the Jewish version, he wondered. “There was no Jewish version,” he says.