KUMMUNIQUE

Shalom! We are proud to present another issue of Kummunique - full of love
of Israel and Aliyah inspiration!

In this issue you will find:

1. "Choose Life" by Malkah Fleisher
2. "Trade Center Attack Spurred Survivor To Make Aliya" by Ruth Eglash
3. "Why Are French Jews Leaving France?" by Carl Hoffman
4. "Despite turmoil, many Jewish families in America feel pull to move to Israel" By Adrienne P. Samuels

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1. "Choose Life" by Malkah Fleisher

Rabbis love parshat Nitzavim. With bittersweet whisperings of Moshe's grand finale, it's laden with biblical poetry and simple lessons - the stuff of soul-searching Torah speeches and calls for reflection. Remember the covenant! Seek the blessings! Get focused, people!

G-d gets pretty emotional in this portion – do wrong, and He'll throw every single awful thing He can conjure up at you (with the heaven and earth as witnesses!):

"… the Lord will not be willing to pardon him, but then the anger of the Lord and His jealousy shall be kindled against that man, and all the curse that is written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven; and the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that is written in this book of law…"
Ouch.

However, worship G-d and follow His Torah, and you will inherit the Land of your forefathers, G-d will curse your enemies, and you'll be overflowing with livestock, fruit, and babies (Hashem, of course, throws in to this section that this overflow will be "for the good").

It seems pretty cut and dried. Sinning = major suffering, being a good Jew = wealth and happiness. G-d urges us to choose life (the blessings), not death (the curses).

So what seems to be the problem? Not that we're not getting any blessings these days, but it also seems like we're getting some curses. Are we not choosing life?

Many of you may gesture emphatically at the sadly large number of Jews who are Torah-ignorant. Most don't understand the potential of their relationship with G-d and the unfathomable amounts of happiness that are just waiting for them. Others, scarily, know and don't care.
However, what's more frightening is that there is a pretty substantial group of Torah observant Jews who, too, don't fully choose life. How can this be?

Aside from regular Torah observance, in this parsha, G-d clues us into the secret of fully "choosing life":

"…therefore choose life, that thou mayest live, thou and thy seed; to love the Lord thy G-d, to hearken to His voice, and to cleave unto Him; for that is thy life and the length of thy days, to sit in the land which the Lord swore unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them."

Just to reinforce His point, the next Torah portion begins with Moshe's sad acceptance that he sinned and "chose death" – he will die without entering the Land of Israel.

This year, don't be content with hovering between life and death – choose life! Choose Israel!


Malkah's "Good Life" Apple-Plum Cake

1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 block of margarine (in America, use a whole stick) or butter
2 large eggs (or 3 small)
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 large apples, cored and sliced
3 plums, cored and sliced
salt
cinnamon, powdered sugar, lemon juice


Preheat oven to 350. Grease a 9-inch pan (preferably round). In a food processor, mix the margarine, sugar, and vanilla. Pour into large bowl, add flour, eggs, a couple shakes of salt, and the baking powder. Pour mixture into greased pan. Toss fruits with a little cinnamon, a little powdered sugar, and a little lemon juice. Place the fruit slices on the batter. Bake for 45 minutes – 1 hour.

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2. "Trade Center Attack Spurred Survivor To Make Aliya" by Ruth Eglash
From Jerusalem Post

While many people around the world remember watching the horrors of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on their TV screens, for Aaron Fuerte the events of that day hit closer to home. For the Brooklyn native who worked then on the 93rd floor of the World Trade Center's north tower, they were a direct catalyst for his journey to making aliya last year.

Born to an Israeli mother and a Brazilian father, Fuerte, 34, told The Jerusalem Post in an interview that he had always thought about moving to Israel but it was watching the Trade Center - where he had worked for the previous two years - crumble before his eyes and crush thousands of people that motivated him to begin the process of building a new life in the Jewish homeland.

Fuerte worked for Marsh & Mclennan, an insurance firm with offices on the 93rd to 100th floors.

"I had been voting in Democratic primaries that morning and arrived to work a little later than usual, around 8:45 a.m.," Fuerte said.

He took an express elevator up to the 78th floor and was planning to take a local elevator to the 93rd floor. He was about to step into the second elevator when hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston slammed into the tower between floors 90 and 100, 12 stories above.

"I got blown back by the blast," said Fuerte. The elevator was sent crashing down 78 floors and he was nearly thrown down the opposite elevator shaft, he said. He heard people screaming inside another elevator and, together with other survivors, attempted to pry open the doors, but to no avail. To this day he does not know what happened to those inside.

Fuerte ran to a nearby emergency exit, but it was locked. He recalls entering the offices of Korean brokerage Hyundai Securities to ask if they knew where there was another emergency exit and being asked to leave. Fuerte's last image of the people there is of them working quietly at their desks.

He managed to find the stairs and started to make his way down the 78 flights.

"The stairs were dark," Fuerte said. "Only two people could move down, side by side. By the 50th floor, there was already quite a large flow of traffic and it was starting to become crowded."

As he reached the 35th floor, at around 9:15 a.m., he began to pass firefighters coming up.

"They were sweating from [carrying] so much equipment and we had to move into single file to let them through," he said.

Fuerte made it to the ground floor in just under an hour. There were FBI agents, police and reporters outside. Fuerte just kept on running.

"I looked up quickly and there was a large ring of fire above me," said Fuerte, who headed for a hospital. "Then I heard a woman scream and saw the south tower collapse."

"It was complete bedlam, everybody was on their own," he said. "There was a stampede across the Brooklyn Bridge and no way to use cellphones."

Fuerte was treated for injuries sustained when the elevator blew up in front of him - debris in his right eye and pain in his back and knee. He was also put on oxygen for four hours.

"While I was at the hospital I found a book of psalms in my bag and said my prayers."

It was at this point that he started seriously thinking about making aliya.

"Two years prior I had thought about it," he said, "but after the World Trade Center, I started to make serious plans. It took me a few years to get my act together, but now I am here."

Fuerte arrived, with the help of Nefesh B'Nefesh and the Jewish Agency for Israel, on July 13, 2005. He married three weeks ago and will spend the fifth anniversary of 9/11 on his honeymoon.

"It brings back painful memories," said Fuerte, who worked directly with at least 70 people who were killed that day and said another 355 people from his office did not make it out alive.

As for the security problems in his new homeland, Fuerte, who works for a high-tech firm in the capital, said, "There is terror all over the place and Israel is the Jewish homeland. All Jews should think about coming here."

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3. "Why Are French Jews Leaving France?" by Carl Hoffman
From Jerusalem Post

Ask people outside the French immigrant community why the Jews are leaving their country, and the usual answer is that they are making aliya to escape the rising tide of anti-Semitism. Ask the French olim themselves, however, and the responses become more diverse and complex.

Many recent arrivals say in no uncertain terms that it was primarily anti-Semitism that brought them from France to Israel. Others acknowledge that while anti-Semitism has increased in recent years, the phenomenon has been due largely to the intifada and emanates mainly from young Muslim immigrant men, mostly from North Africa and poorly integrated into French culture and society.

Many French olim claim that fervent Zionism and a strong attachment to Israel have impelled them to leave France and establish new roots here. Others appear to be hedging their bets, making what has come to be known as "Airbus aliya," in which the family's wife and children live in Israel, while the husband keeps his job in France and commutes between the countries.

While the reasons for making aliya vary from one family to the next, no one disputes the assertion that being Jewish in France has become more difficult during the past six years. With a tradition of anti-Semitism that dates back to Medieval times and the Crusades, France became a virtual icon of anti-Semitism in the 19th century with the Dreyfus trial - often said to have been Theodor Herzl's inspiration for the creation of modern political Zionism - and the mass round-up of Jews by the Vichy government during World War II.

French intellectuals are unabashedly anti-Israel, and the French government has often displayed a pro-Arab and pro-Palestinian bias since Israel's resounding success in the 1967 Six Day War.

With the beginning of the second intifada in September 2000, French Jews began to note a sharp increase in anti-Semitism with incidents and violent attacks unlike anything seen since the 1940s. Many of these incidents have been perpetrated by Muslim immigrants.

France's National Consultative Committee on Human Rights reported a sixfold surge in acts of violence against Jewish people, property and institutions from 2001 to 2002. In 2003, a popular Jewish DJ was brutally murdered in Paris, apparently by a radical Muslim youth organization. This was followed in 2004 by incidents. For example, a Jewish school bus was set on fire in Strasbourg; a concert by an Israeli singer in Macon was repeatedly interrupted by shouts of "Death to the Jews"; a 14-year-old boy wearing a kippa was beaten near the entrance to a Paris Metro station, with bystanders refusing to intervene; a female Jewish teacher was knocked down, beaten and trampled in central Paris; a University of Saint-Antoine medical school class was interrupted by four men shouting anti-Semitic threats and beating a Jewish student, while the class and professor looked on in silence; and a 12-year-old girl leaving a Jewish school was beaten by two men who carved a swastika into her face with a box cutter. Synagogues were torched, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated, and Jewish institutions were vandalized, damaged or destroyed.

The number and virulence of these violent attacks have indeed been reflected in the number of Jews leaving France for Israel: 11,148 between 2000 and 2005, with a 35-year high of 3,300 Jewish immigrants in 2005. While statistics for 2006 are unavailable, every indication suggests another banner year for French immigration to Israel, despite the recent war in Lebanon.

On July 25, at the height of the war, no fewer than 650 Jews arrived from France - 500 from Paris and 150 from Marseille - marking the largest number of immigrants to arrive in a single day from France since 1971.

Much of the impetus to leave France for new lives in Israel has come as the result of deep internal soul-searching among French Jews. Many of them have concluded that there is simply no future for them in France.

As Simon Kohana, president of the largely Sephardic Jewish Citizens Forum said recently, "We have begun to ask ourselves if we can even stay in France. Are we really French citizens? We have the feeling that we are a people apart."

At the same time, however, critics charge that much of the motivation to leave France can be attributed to a concerted effort by the Israeli government to lure French Jews to Israel. With Jewish immigration from the former Soviet Union having apparently dried up for the moment and the long dreamt-of influx of immigrants from English-speaking countries yet to materialize, Israel is looking to France's Jewish community - the second largest in Europe - to provide a fertile source of "warm bodies" to settle here and add weight to the demographic balance of Jews and Arabs.

Former prime minister Ariel Sharon angered the French government in 2004 by urging French Jews to immigrate to Israel for their own safety, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently reminded French Jews of the anti-Semitism in their country and urged them to send their children to Israel.

Jewish Agency president Sallai Meridor said last April that Israel has a "national duty" to bring French Jews to Israel for their safety and security as the Agency stepped up its activities in France.

Yet not all French Jews are heeding the call to aliya or feel particularly receptive to the Israeli government's efforts to induce them to emigrate.

"France is not an anti-Semitic country," said Roger Cukierman, president of an umbrella group of Jewish organizations in France, in April 2005. "Out of a population of about 600,000, some 2,400 people making aliya is not very many, in spite of all the talk about leaving."

Other community leaders accuse the Jewish Agency of playing on French Jews' fears of anti-Semitism while knowing that there will simply not be enough jobs or employment opportunities waiting when they arrive in Israel.

Finally, many left-wing French Jews accuse the Jewish Agency of focusing their efforts on religious families while ignoring the secular members of the community, a charge that Meridor denies.

While the debate over why French Jews are leaving France may not be resolved any time soon, one thing remains certain: French Jews are leaving in steadily rising numbers, and most of them are coming to Israel.

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4. "Despite turmoil, many Jewish families in America feel pull to move to Israel" By Adrienne P. Samuels
From the Sun-Sentinal

NEWTON, Mass. · He's the founder of a nonprofit Jewish agency. She's a well-respected rabbi and author. They live with their five children in a big house in a beautiful neighborhood.

But they are leaving for a new life in Israel, where they will face the risks of a region in upheaval.

The Abramowitz-Silverman family, like thousands of American Jews, are making aliyah -- or going to Israel -- despite tensions in the Middle East and the country's recent uneasy cease-fire agreement with Lebanon. The family of seven is moving to a communal-living town on a spit of desert wedged between Egypt and Jordan in southern Israel. Still, the constant threat of war and the ongoing worldwide argument over Israel's right to exist doesn't deter them.

"I think this is the right thing to do," said Yosef Abramowitz, 42, who recently stepped down as chief executive of Jewish Family and Life, a nonprofit publisher. "Not going is giving in to terror. It's also taking away our own dreams as a family. Why would we let that weaken the Jewish spirit and our own family's dream?"

Before year's end, about 3,000 North American Jews will emigrate to Israel, up slightly over last year despite regional uncertainties.

Far from being a cause for fear, the current issues between Lebanon and Israel seem to attract Jews, said Michael Landsberg, who heads the Israel Aliyah Center in New York.
"No one cancels aliyah," said Landsberg, who regularly accompanies immigrants to the airport in New York. "That's amazing, right? In fact, I see more people, especially young people, applying for an express aliyah."

Abramowitz and his wife, Susan Silverman, will be downsizing their lives in moving to Israel, living in a three-bedroom space in Kibbutz Ketura. They'll be required to pull their weight to keep the kibbutz running smoothly. Each dweller there has a job, from cooking a community dinner to washing the laundry.

Because the adults aren't taking on specific chores, they have agreed to give the kibbutz $35,000 a year. Silverman, 43, a Reform rabbi, said she wants to spend more time with her children and help improve the state of Israel.

"I'm not feeling like God wants me to go, but there is this sense of wanting to go and build the Jewish state," she said. "There are some things Israel is doing that I'm not proud of. ... I want to be a part of building that social justice."

The family's current furniture, many of their books, all of their winter clothing, and most of their nonessential possessions will be donated or given away, though a few prized possessions are going into storage. Then they'll head to New York with one-way tickets to Israel.

The move is intended to steep the children in their Jewishness and help establish them as insiders, not outsiders, the parents said, while their two adopted children, born in Ethiopia, might feel more at home in a place with many Ethiopian Jews, they said.

Abramowitz lived in Israel as a child from 1969 to 1972 and is a dual Israeli-US citizen. He was on the Israeli ballot earlier this year, as one-third of the Atid Echad political party, which lost an election bid for a seat in the parliament.

On the kibbutz, Abramowitz plans to continue writing for his organization and updating his blog, www.peoplehood.org . Silverman wants to complete her book on the relationship between adoption, her family, and God. The family will keep their vegetarian kosher lifestyle and hope that their new culture will drown the clutter of American life.

"When my 7-year-old said to me, `Mommy, I want an iPod,' I knew we had to leave," Silverman joked.

Though their children's music classes could be held in bomb shelters, the Abramowitz-Silvermans look forward to the transition.

"We're going from a very blessed, suburban, individualistic existence, and we're going to the opposite extreme of communal and nonmaterialistic," Abramowitz said. "We're going to focus on our family and our work."