Debra Nussbaum Cohen

NEW YORK — At a meeting Sunday that was by turns tense and respectful, J Street U students met with Barry Shrage, president of the Boston Jewish Federation, trying to persuade his organization to distance itself from West Bank Jewish settlements and make clear that the occupation is an obstacle to peace with Palestinians.

At a concurrent event in New York, J Street U students met with leaders of Jewish groups from Philadelphia, part of J Street U’s campaign pushing for Jewish institutional transparency so that donors know if their money is going to support settlements beyond the Green Line.

The recent meetings are an indication of a growing dialogue between the Jewish establishment and J Street U, which many Jewish leaders view as instrumental in the fight against BDS on campus. In an exchange of sorts, the students of J Street U have been allowed to voice their objections to occupation and settlements and to present their campaign to prevent communal funds from going over the Green Line.

Two other groups, T’ruah: the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, and members of the World Zionist Congress, have also recently begun efforts to press for funding transparency on the part of Jewish groups in the U.S. and Israel.
Sunday’s meeting at Harvard Hillel, which involved about 100 J Street U members from around New England, included several respectful but tense moments between student speakers and Barry Shrage, the long-time president of the Boston Jewish federation Combined Jewish Philanthropies (or CJP).

Shrage made clear, at the meeting and in a subsequent interview with Haaretz, that he regards it as a priority to include students in conversations about Israel even if he doesn’t always agree with their thinking.

“The essence of our Federation is engagement and inclusion and we’re particularly interested in our college age students, many of whom are just back from Israel and feeling Jewish for the first time,” he told Haaretz. “We are always open to discussion with our very diverse student population of which J Street is a small part. Of course we won’t compromise our strong support for Israel and we won’t agree to anything that doesn’t make sense.”

At the Boston meeting, Shrage chastised the J Street U students several times for some of the group’s activities but also validated that they are pro-Israel and Zionist, and so deserve a place at the Jewish communal table.

Students at the Boston meeting talked about feeling alienated from the Jewish mainstream because being identified as a Zionist means being implicitly aligned with the Israeli government policy of building new housing for Jews in the West Bank — which J Street views as an obstacle to future peace with the Palestinians.

Concurrently, J Street U students from the Mid-Atlantic region met with leaders of Philadelphia’s Jewish community at Columbia University’s Hillel in New York.

“I can’t tell you how many students have approached me worried they’ll be associated with a set of political beliefs” they don’t agree with if they’re involved with Hillel, said Joanna Kramer, president of Brown University Hillel. “I have learned in my presidency that recognizing the fact that there is an occupation, speaking openly and honestly about these issues” is needed. “I’m wondering what is preventing CJP from doing the same.”

“I don’t know how somebody can feel left out if the president of Brown Hillel is involved in J Street,” said Shrage, without directly answering Kramer’s question about making CJP’s policy more explicit.

“We don’t send money over the Green Line because it’s not the way we spend money,” Shrage said. “We cut our ties with the formal Jewish Agency, we’re disentangled from the government. Most of our overseas money goes to economic development in Haifa.”

Shrage later told Haaretz that CJP shifted the way it funds projects in Israel in the early 1990s. Of the $55.7 million CJP raised last year, about $12 million went to Israel, including travel-related programs, he told Haaretz. Some $3 million went to Haifa, which is CJP’s sister city.

At the Boston meeting, a J Street U member read aloud a letter signed by 800 New England students and sent to CJP. J Street U has also solicited several hundred people, so far, at the organization’s regional meetings and at the recent Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly and the Union for Reform Judaism’s Biennial conference, to sign a postcard calling for transparency.

“While so many of our leaders understand the negative impact of Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank, the organized Jewish community rarely takes leadership on this issue as it does regarding other matters,” J Street U’s letter says.

“In making such a statement, CJP has the opportunity to establish that it is possible to both support Israel and acknowledge that the status quo in the West Bank is simply untenable. Without such a demonstration, groups that aim to delegitimize the entirety of Israel on the basis of its ongoing settlement project only become stronger. At present, settlement expansion puts the future that we strive for in danger.”

Eliana Leaderman-Bray, a senior at University of Massachussets-Amherst and vice president of J Street U’s Northeast region, explained why the group feels it necessary for Jewish federations to take clear positions opposing the Israeli government’s policy of expanding the settlements in the West Bank. “The more the community conflates being pro-Israel with being pro-settlement, sometimes with silence, it leads to some pretty serious alienation,” she told Haaretz. “Those willing to have public conversations around BDS are hesitant to identify with the label ‘pro-Israel’ because it feels like being pro-settlement.”

“Any dissent or criticism of Israel is totally out of the question” in spaces like Hillels, she said. “That’s led students who would potentially be fighting BDS on campus to disassociate with the issue entirely.”
Shrage told students that it is not CJP’s role to convene a community-wide discussion of settlements, though, he said, he and other CJP leaders agree they pose an impediment to peace and “regularly” communicate their perspective to Israeli leaders.

As a Jewish federation “we have a…very delicate role,” he told the students. “We need to be extremely careful about giving advice on matters of life and death and military matters. Where we have a duty to give advice is if the government is pushing Americans away from Israel…. People are worried it provides an excuse and a rationale for anti-Israel activity that perhaps is not in Israel’s interest.”

But, he said, “Israel is a democratic country and they chose their leaders. It’s their country. If they want better leadership it’s up to them to produce better leadership.”

Shrage also chastised J Street U. “J Street should have been a little more careful about the advice it gave during the Gaza War. Sderot was bombed for 8 years before Israel took action. I’m not sure bringing Breaking the Silence around then was a good idea,” he said, referring to the organization of IDF combat veterans who speak against the occupation to student and other groups.

“The world is piling on Israel and you want to be careful not to pile on the lynch mob, which is sometimes what the world looks like,” he told students.

He also criticized the letter they read aloud, noting CJP’s policy of not spending money over the Green Line except for mental health services for traumatized Israelis who live there, just as for those who live in Israel proper.
“Since we don’t currently do any of that stuff it just seems not very meaningful to get involved in that kind of discussion that all of us feel pretty similarly about,” he said.

Nevertheless Shrage, who has been CJP president for 28 years, said, “We will present it to the board for discussion. I will come back and talk to you endlessly about the specific issues that are really at stake here, what’s really going on here.”

He said, at the meeting’s end, “I think you make occasional mistakes that are pretty egregious but I know you think we make mistakes that are pretty egregious, so we can continue talking.”

After the meeting, Shrage told Haaretz, “It’s not quite as simple as what they say…It would be counter-productive to have a big discussion about something that doesn’t exist.”

“Somehow they got it into their collective minds that this has something to do with CJP’s allocation policies, and nothing we say helps them to generally change their minds,” he told Haaretz. “We do nothing that they disagree with. Why this ended up focusing on our allocation policy is sort of a mystery.”

The parallel Sunday meeting in New York included Dan Segal, chair of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Philadelphia and chair of the Philadelphia regional council of The New Israel Fund. Other participants were Rabbi David Straus of Mainline Reform Temple and Rabbi Howard Alpert, CEO of Hillel of Greater Philadelphia.

Out of that meeting came commitments to help the J Street U students secure meetings to discuss funding transparency with the heads of UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Federation of Philadelphia, said Samantha Glass, a Rutgers University Junior, who attended.

J Street U declined to discuss who from the federations would participate or when the meetings would take place.
“For a student like me, who’s grown up hearing about the federation and family members who donate, if we are going to continue to be supportive of the federation and other organizations, we want to know where the money’s going,” Glass told Haaretz.

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Rabbi Rachel Timoner

Rabbi Stefanie Kolin

Being a rabbi in New York City has its perks: Walking to your synagogue, for one thing, instead of sitting in a car commuting two hours a day, as Rabbi Rachel Timoner used to do when she lived in Los Angeles.
Timoner, her wife and their two young sons moved to Brooklyn’s Congregation Beth Elohim this summer from L.A., where she served as associate rabbi at Leo Baeck Temple following her ordination in 2009.
Now Timoner walks her family’s two dogs in leafy Prospect Park before heading a few blocks down brownstone-lined streets to the office. It’s a change she appreciates for multiple reasons.
“You can’t underestimate the significance of being a walking community for synagogue life,” Timoner, a rising star in the Reform movement rabbinate, told Haaretz. Beth Elohim has about 1,000 member households.
“It means that hundreds, if not thousands, of people are in the building every day. It’s actually a lived community center in a way that doesn’t happen in L.A. because you can’t convene as easily. Here I walk down the street and run into congregants everywhere. In a cafe, in the park walking my dogs. It connects us to each other organically. In L.A. the only connections you have [with fellow congregants] are on Friday nights or Saturday mornings,” she says.
Timoner isn’t the only rabbi to move from L.A. to New York over the summer. Central Synagogue, a large Reform congregation in midtown Manhattan, brought in two new rabbis: Stephanie Kolin and Rebecca Rosenthal.
Though both Kolin and Rosenthal are Manhattan natives who spent a few years sojourning in California, all three rabbis bring an L.A.-ish-ness that is equal parts commitment to social justice and openness to the new and experimental, say those who know them.
“In L.A. I learned creativity and flexibility,” Kolin tells Haaretz. “Congregations, rabbis and lay leaders there are open to trying new things.”
One example: A dozen Jewish congregations groups gathered together last Tisha B’Av “to learn, to pray and to strategize on social justice action,” says Kolin, who is also viewed as a rising star of the Reform rabbinate.
“Tisha B’Av is definitely a minor day in most Reform communities,” she notes. “It’s not your usual Reform gathering day.” While traditionally the holiday recalls the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, “we reinterpreted it as the modern destruction of our cities, as a way to grieve for what’s broken and hope for what can be built,” says Kolin. “It is an ‘out the box’ way of thinking.”
In L.A. “there’s a large spirit of experimentation and alternate pathways into Jewish connection,” says Esther Kustanowitz, a New York-area native who moved to L.A. in 2008 and is a close friend of Kolin’s. “The pace of life out here is very different,” Kustanowitz, a writer and editorial director of Mayim Bialik’s new website GrokNation says.
“There’s a lot more contemplative, meditative value given to stretching, to silence, to music, that doesn’t always work its way into the frenetic pace of New York City.”
Kolin moved to New York with her wife of one year and is now Central Synagogue’s associate rabbi. In L.A. she was co-director of the Reform movement’s Just Congregations community organizing initiative, and with Timoner founded Reform CA, which brings together 120 Reform rabbis throughout the state to work jointly on matters of common civic concern.
Reform CA had a big recent win, says Timoner. After conducting extensive one-on-one interviews with rabbis and congregants about the California they envision, Reform CA decided to focus on getting a train built to transport people from one end of L.A.’s urban sprawl to the other.
A train would allow both the rich and the poor to cross their city more efficiently, permit domestic and other workers to more easily get to their jobs, get 10,000 cars off the road and reduce pollution, Timoner told Haaretz. Reform CA got major civic stakeholders to sign on, and now a measure to approve the train will be on the city’s 2016 election ballot.
That and other issues addressed by Reform CA, including affordable housing and ending racial profiling by police, “were big successes,” says Timoner. “Reform CA is going strong.”
That social justice focus is part of what both Timoner and Kolin plan to bring to their new congregations.
Rabbi Rebecca Rosenthal, an ordained Conservative rabbi, is Central Synagogue’s new director of youth and family education. She was the director of education at Ikar, the innovative L.A. congregation run by Rabbi Sharon Brous. Rosenthal grew up on the Upper West Side and is glad to be back with her husband and their three young children.
Central has 2,300 member households and a waiting list of those wanting to join.
There are definite differences in approach between synagogues in the two cities, Rosenthal says. “In L.A. people focus a lot on immersive experiences, retreats, doing things with the whole family,” she says. “Maybe it has to do with the weather, but that particular approach hasn’t come to NY quite yet. It feels different here. It feels more chill out in L.A., NY feels more formal, but it’s not just Judaism, it’s everything.”
“There’s a lot of interesting, creative things happening in L.A., and I’m trying to bring some of them to the East Coast. There’s a concentrated Jewish vibe in NY that doesn’t exist in L.A., and I want to take advantage of that,” said Rosenthal. “This is such a Jewish hub.”
“Stephanie and Rebecca actually brought us the best of both coasts since they’ve worked effectively in L.A., with its sense of reinvention and imagination, but both grew up in New York City, with its sense of history and concreteness,” Angela Buchdahl, Central Synagogue’s senior rabbi, tells Haaretz.  “Their transition has been unusually seamless and exciting.”
While she misses her L.A. community, “New York is the place where I understand the rhythm best,” says Kolin, who grew up in Stuyvesant Town on Manhattan’s East side. “My heart beats at the same rhythm the city moves.”
But moving here has brought one new challenge: figuring out what to do with her car now that she no longer needs it.

Debra Nussbaum Cohen
Haaretz Contributor

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