By Patricia Rice, Special to the Beacon   

Posted Sun., 4.17.11

ST LOUIS BEACON

At Passover Seder dinners in Jewish homes across the world, the youngest child will ask “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

Then, the story is told of that spring night when, according to the Book of Exodus, God’s angel “passed over” Jewish first-born sons as the Egyptians’ first-born males died in the 10th plague. Moses then led the enslaved Jews across the parted Red Sea to freedom.

On Passover as St. Louis Jewish grandparents and elders look with loving pride at their young questioners, many will talk about the next generation. Will young American Jews have the desire and support to celebrate their Jewish faith in St. Louis?

“Our numbers in St. Louis are diminishing,” said Barry Rosenberg (right), executive director of the Jewish Federation of St. Louis, a planning and fund-raising umbrella group. It serves all Jewish denominations, including Jews who are not synagogue members. Lower numbers hurt, he said. In January the federation announced that its annual fund-raising campaign brought in less that its $10 million goal. The total of “just under” $9.95 million was the lowest campaign results in 13 years. For each of the previous three years, the total has diminished.

In response to reduced numbers – in giving and in members – the Jewish Federation, which has a $100 million endowment, developed an energetic strategic plan to streamline its resources, cut duplication and “sunset” some programs.” For a decade it has urged synagogues with declining membership and high staff and maintenance costs to merge.

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By NORMA DAVIDOFF SHULMAN
12/08/2010

Jerusalem Post

This storied city known as Vilna, Wilno, Vilne – however you spell it and say it – was a place of spirituality and learning for Jews. Amost intriguing aspect of Vilnius, Lithuania, is that it’s “first you don’t see it, then you do.” You can walk along the winding streets and past small inviting houses in its Old Town, without realizing you are in what was the Jewish ghetto. Yes, it is memorialized by a sign here and there, but unless you know what to look for, you will see nothing. And if you know what to look for, a world awaits.

Vilnius is not what it seems – even its name. This storied city known as Vilna, Wilno, Vilne – however you spell it and say it – was a place of spirituality and learning for Jews. Scholars and religious leaders were so profoundly important to Jewish life here that Vilna was known as the “Jerusalem of the North.” Taken with the city’s charm and vibrant religious life, Napoleon supposedly was the first to pay it that tribute.

Visiting Vilnius can be delightful.

Compact and stylish, it has a medieval castle, intriguing Old World architecture, high-quality concerts and ballet, a variety of restaurants and accommodations in every price range.

It earned its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and 2009 European Capital of Culture. But, as on TV’s Betipul, Vilnius has secrets. Peel back the layers, peer into the past and become inspired.

There are fascinating traces beyond the faint Yiddish letters on ghetto buildings. Starting with the Middle Ages, Jews arrived here. By the 1700s, their numbers and influence became significant. Before World War II, Jews made up more than a third of the city.

Then the whole country seemed to disappear for 50 years behind the Iron Curtain; it was the first to break away from the USSR, in 1990. By that time most of its Jews were already gone.

Some had made Aliya, like the Litvak families of Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. Shimon Peres lived 100 kilometers from Vilnius.

Before the war, there were a hundred synagogues and study houses.

Fifteen years ago Chabad opened its doors in an apartment house. The city has but one synagogue building: the Choral Synagogue in the heart of the ghetto. This Moorish-style edifice, with its blue letters in Hebrew, had a congregation with a progressive outlook when it was built in 1894. It allowed music, thus the name “choral.”

WHEN I WENT there to Shabbat services, there were initially so few people that services were to be held in a small side chapel. It seemed difficult to get a minyan. But Rabbi Chaim Burnshtein, who commutes between Vilna and Israel, told me they always have a minyan and hold services three times a day. “Vilna’s Jews don’t have strong roots,” he said, “but they have a strong sense of Jewish identity.”

Just minutes before we were to begin, the situation changed. Local tour guide Yulik Gurewich brought in a raft of young Russians to tell them about this beautiful synagogue with its domed ceiling painted with clouds.

The visitors wanted to stay for services, so the congregants switched to the main sanctuary.

As a woman, I was seated behind a lace curtain on the first floor off to the side. The young Russian women sat upstairs in the ornate balcony, also reserved for females. The Russian men prayed along with the locals on the first floor facing the ark and then turning around to face Jerusalem. Again things are not what they seem. The synagogue was used as a warehouse during the war, its contents stolen by both Germans and Lithuanians.

Today it is sparingly furnished.

Finances are a constant problem for this synagogue, as they are for the whole fragile Jewish community, which is subsidized by the Joint Distribution Committee and several other Jewish organizations. As Simonas Gurevicius, executive director of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, explained, “From more than 50 families before the [economic] crisis, now we have got more than 150 young Jewish families who are in need.”

After services, I made my way through the ghetto area. It is charm central! Cobblestone streets, smallscale buildings with folkloric motifs painted on window shutters. Store windows are full of tempting designer pastries, amber and luxury linens, mostly for visitors. Antiques and art galleries make up the rest of the shops.

Vilna’s one kosher restaurant, the Kinneret, sports white tablecloths.

Vilna’s past glories overshadow today’s luxuries. Old Town once was truly Jewish. In fact, one street is named Jew Street (Zydu Street). Another is named for the revered Vilna Gaon who lived here from 1720-1797. The Gaon’s house on Zydu Street was destroyed, along with others. Close by was the Strashun Library, renowned for Jewish scholarship. The Great Synagogue, built in 1572, was nearby. All gone, except for a few plaques! But it is what the plaques don’t say that is most important. During World War II, Jews not from this part of the city, were forced into the ghetto. People lived too many to a room, struggling to get by. The Jewish community was basically in prison, one in which contagion spread easily. These people were cut off from the rest of the city – its schools and culture. What did they do? The Jewish community started its own schools, set up medical clinics, created its own orchestra – even an active lending library. Songs of defiance, songs of hope were composed. (You can hear them once again at the city’s Holocaust museum.) The community held strong.

It kept its humanity and its desire to live. This besieged Jewish community created, lived, studied, taught, and survived– up to a point.

Statues of significant Jewish citizens erected in the last few years can be found throughout the area. One statue is of Dr. Tzemah Shabad, the community leader who, among other contributions, created TOZ, providing much-needed medical services for the poor. Another sculpture honors novelist Romain Gary, who lived here before moving to France. (Strangely enough, there is a statue of rock star Frank Zappa, who has no connection to the city. Citizens liked him so much they honored him.) At the Little Green House in town, more comes into perspective. This unassuming place is a Holocaust museum with a profound impact. Photos on the wall remind us of the talented and famous of Vilna: violinist Jascha Heifetz, painter Chaim Soutine and sculptor Jacques Lifschitz. Prominent artist Samuel Bak was just a boy in the ghetto.

This is where YIVO, the repository of East European Jewish culture and history, now based in New York, started.

Documents present straightforward facts. They are staggering. A German report lists the number of Jews killed in each country: 220,000 Jews were in Lithuania before the war, 3,500 after.

Today, according to the Jewish Community, there are 5,000 in the whole country – 3,500 in Vilnius.

Equally meaningful in the ghetto area is the Tolerance Museum, also known as the Museum of the Vilna Gaon. This building survived from the 1800s. Its incarnations reflect some history of Jewish life here. Early on, it was a soup kitchen for the poor – as the Jewish community always looked after its own. Then it became a small exquisite concert hall – concerts can still be held here. It has been beautifully restored in the last 20 years.

Today its glass and its gleaming floors help create an aesthetic setting for a museum of Jewish culture. You can’t help feeling proud to see what Jews created for their spiritual and daily life.

Strikingly crafted are sterling Torah pointers, colorful painted wooden plaques, memorabilia of the great Romm publishing family – numerous reminders of the rich center of Jewish learning and spirituality that typified Vilna for 600 years. Not just artifacts, but people and ideas, of course, made Vilna great.

SADLY, THE many deaths in this ghetto area was only phase one. One of Vilnius’s beautiful aspects became its ugliest.

Pine forests surround much of the city, peaceful, quiet, lush – so attractive that feature film producers use them for location shoots. But it was to one of these forests, Panaerai, also called Ponar, that the Jews were transported by the Nazis. Some were killed immediately and thrown into death pits. Others were forced to clear the bodies. More than 70,000 Jews were murdered. Large marble monuments attest to those atrocities.

Right by the monuments is a small museum. The exhibits are both edifying and horrific; victims’ shoes, photos, clothing, tefillin, remnants of papers and identification are on display. One story about forced laborers tells how they dug a tunnel to escape from their German captors. Chilling, remarkable accounts, like this one, known as the escape of the burner’s brigade, are still being researched and revealed.

The history of Vilna is sobering, heartbreaking and heartening all at the same time. Although much has been lost, if you go to the “Jerusalem of the North,” there is still much to be found.

By PETE YOST (Associated Press) – 10 hours ago

WASHINGTON — A federal judge has issued a judgment against the Russian government for its refusal to return a library of historic books and documents to a Jewish group.

Royce Lamberth, the chief judge of U.S. District Court in Washington, ruled that taking the material was discriminatory, not for a public purpose and occurred without just compensation to the Jewish religious organization that is suing, Chabad-Lubavitch.

At issue are 12,000 religious books and manuscripts seized during the Bolshevik revolution and the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1925 and 25,000 pages of handwritten teachings and other writings of religious leaders stolen by Nazi Germany during World War II.

The documents seized by the Nazis were transferred by the Soviet Red Army as trophy documents and war booty to the Russian State Military Archive.

Last year, lawyers for the Russian government argued that judges have no authority to tell the country how to handle the sacred Jewish documents.

Under the U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, a sovereign nation is not immune to lawsuits in cases where property is taken in violation of international law.

Lamberth found that the religious group had established its claim to the material, which he said is “unlawfully” possessed by the Russian State Library and the Russian military archive.

According to court papers reciting the history behind the case, Russian President Boris Yeltsin once gave an explicit assurance to President George H.W. Bush’s emissary, Secretary of State James Baker, that the Russian government would return the library of religious books and manuscripts to Chabad-Lubavitch.

Lamberth issued his decision on Friday.

Nathan Lewin, a longtime Washington lawyer representing the religious group, said that the U.S. government “has always supported the return of these materials. I would hope that the State Department would not interfere with enforcement of this order.”

The State Department declined to comment because the issue involves an ongoing legal case.

By JIM HEINTZ (AP) – 13 hours ago

Then, tendrils of the acrid smoke from the peat-bog fires surrounding the city wafted in, bringing nausea and dry-mouth.

The recommendation of Russia’s top doctor to hang wet sheets at the windows to block the smoke just makes the rooms more stifling. With no end in sight to the misery, another doctor’s advice may be the only one thing that brings relief — think as little as possible.

In my 11 years in Moscow, the most frequent question from friends abroad has been “Aren’t the winters tough?” Maybe so. But Russians handle winter with aplomb — fur hats, afternoons in steamy bathhouses, long evenings gulping warming vodka around the table in toasty kitchens.

The country’s not geared for summer, however.

Air conditioning is rare, many apartments are laid out in a way that discourages air circulation, and their brick and concrete walls tend to hold heat like a pottery kiln.

Even appliances aren’t up to coping with heat: a colleague complained with amused outrage that the ice in her freezer was melting.

Usually these summer snags are little more than a brief irritation; a few days of 30 C (85 F) heat, followed by rains that cool things off to around 23 (75 F). This year is different — several unbroken weeks of temperatures as high as 38 (100 F).

Moscow, a city that has beaten back huge military assaults and survived horrifying terrorist attacks, is under a quiet siege that it seems helpless to repel.

Moscow’s aggressive and autocratic mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, in the past has made headlines by claiming the ability to control the weather, seeding clouds on the city’s outskirts to ensure that rain doesn’t spoil parades and ceremonies. He can’t be a rainmaker this summer — climate scientists say there isn’t enough moisture in the air to create rain artificially.

Subway riders, generally docile even in the system’s appalling crowds, have suddenly grown restive, demanding that authorities start putting air conditioning on the trains. Each day the rides become worse, as trains acting like giant pistons suck smoke from the outskirts’ fires into center-city stations.

The official response hasn’t brought peace of mind. The Emergencies Ministry announced it was buying more firefighting planes — Russian-made Be-200s that the ministry touts as the best in the world for the job — but they won’t be ready for years.

State-controlled television news shows plodding footage of leaders meeting with officials and telling them to work diligently. President Dmitry Medvedev this week pointedly told the country that even though he was in the resort city of Sochi, he wasn’t on vacation.

Relentless heat, thickening smoke, dubious officialdom — it’s a lot to have on one’s mind, and a prominent Russian physician warns that worrying about it all could be dangerous.

“It’s been shown that mental activity in the heat unfavorably affects the nervous system,” Igor Stupakov, deputy director of the Russian Academy of Medicine’s Bakulev heart surgery center, was quoted as saying by the ITAR-Tass news agency.

But it’s hard not to think about it. The usual Russian strategies for escape are dachas and drinking, but neither seem attractive this summer. Dachas can be lovely, but only if the forests around them aren’t on fire. Personal experience suggests that the morning-after effects of a few drinks are significantly aggravated by a night of breathing in peat smoke.

And thinking actually can help Muscovites get through the heat, at least in the cold-comfort sense of realizing that much of the country has it worse. The city’s not in flames. Residents are trudging and griping, but not yet fleeing and weeping like thousands of people in the fire zones.

That point came home this week in the office, when I was sweating and griping after a 10-minute walk from the grocery store. A colleague who had spent the day amid fires about 150 kilometers (100 miles) outside the city came in and exclaimed:

“Moscow smells great!”

Reuters

12 Hours Ago

The summer heat set a new all-time temperature record in Moscow on Thursday, a leading forecaster said, adding that the unprecedentedly long heat wave could be interrupted already on Friday.

Temperatures hit 37.7 degrees Celsius, beating the previous record set Monday, said the Fobos forecasting center, which provides weather data to the country’s top media outlets.

At Domodedovo Airport outside Moscow, temperatures soared to 38.7 Celsius, Fobos said.

The adverse effects of the severe heat, which has been menacing Muscovites since late June, are aggravated by heavy smog that has blanketed the city and is caused mostly by burning peat in forests surrounding Moscow.

Russia’s chief lung doctor, Alexander Chuchalin, warned on Wednesday that walking in the streets of Moscow is like smoking two packs of cigarettes every few hours because of the large concentration of toxins in the air.

Mineral water and soft drinks are selling like hot cakes in Moscow, while many pharmacies have run out of oxygen sprays.

Elsewhere in Russia, a drought unseen for all 130 years of weather observation has killed crops on an area the size of Hungary, leading the government to impose a state of emergency in 23 regions.

But after suffering from the suffocating heat for nearly six weeks, Muscovites may finally get a breather on Friday when a cold atmospheric front is expected to bring extreme temperatures down to about 30 degrees Celsius, Fobos said.

The fall in temperatures will be accompanied by heavy rainshowers and thunderstorms that are expected to reduce smog.

In Finland, a record temperature of 37 C was measured on Thursday, the Finnish Meteorological Institute said.

“According to preliminary observations, the highest-ever temperature record has been measured today, when the temperature at Joensuu Airport rose at 4 p.m. to 37 Celsius,” the institute said on its web site.

Joensuu is located in eastern Finland, 437 kilometers northeast of Helsinki.

The previous temperature record was 35.9 C from July 1914, in the western coastal city of Turku.

Huffington Post
David Shasha
Director, Center for Sephardic Heritage July 1, 2010 

In the wake of an Israeli court ruling confirming anti-Sephardi bias in the case of the Beis Yaakov girls’ school in Immanuel, many have scrutinized the Shas party leadership’s bizarre response of defending the Ashkenazim.

The Shas party is the most prominent political representative of Sephardic Jews in Israel, so its support for the Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox rabbinic leadership of Immanuel has baffled many.

In order to fully grasp the Shas leadership’s apparent acceptance of the Ultra-Orthodox racism, we need to examine how Sephardic citizens were treated in Israel’s early days.

One of the most prominent Sephardic Zionist leaders was Elie Eliachar (1899-1981). Eliachar understood that Sephardim were being kept out of the political leadership cadre because of Ashkenazi racial prejudice.

In the posthumously-published English translation of his book Living with Jews he makes the point explicit:

This phenomenon — the exclusion of Sephardim from decision-making levels — became particularly conspicuous in the process of building a civic bureaucracy after independence. Despite the fact that Sephardim had comprised the great majority in the Mandate civil service, the new government offices were staffed almost entirely without them. Not one Sephardi was found in any position of influence in the political, economic or cultural ministries. The new law courts too were established on a political basis. No Sephardi judges were appointed to the Supreme Court, and only a few of the distinguished group of Sephardi judges from Mandate times were given posts in the lower courts.

In concert with the marginalization of the Sephardi elite class was the concomitant attempt to resocialize the Sephardim. Guided by the implicitly racist assumption that Sephardim were less capable than their Ashkenazi brethren, most Israelis saw them as culturally and intellectually “backward,” like the Arabs in whose countries they once lived. The Israeli political system forced many Sephardim to live at the margins of society, where they often found themselves caught between the warring forces of religious extremism and imposed secularization.

It should be remembered that one of the most important Israeli cultural products of the early 1960s, Ephraim Kishon’s “Sallah Shabbati” — a deeply misguided and racist portrayal of bumbling Sephardi immigrants cast in the most offensive terms possible — was produced in this racially charged climate. Its assertions of Sephardi barbarity and incompetence permeated all levels of Israeli society.

NYU scholar Ella Shohat looks at Sephardi marginalization from the religious standpoint in her seminal 1988 article “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims”:

Those Sephardim who came under the control of Ashkenazi religious authorities, meanwhile, were obliged to send their children to Ashkenazi religious schools, where they learned the ‘correct’ Ashkenazi forms of practicing Judaism, including Yiddish-accented praying, liturgical-gestural norms and sartorial codes favoring the dark color of centuries-ago Poland. Some Oriental Jews, then, were forced into the Orthodox mold.

This same point is reinforced by Norman Stillman in his 1995 study “Sephardi Religious Responses to Modernity”:

At first, the Sephardi newcomers were so-to-speak ‘religiously invisible.’ As with so much else in the early days of Israeli statehood, the new Sephardi immigrants were dependent upon establishment institutions even in matters of religion. The Ministry of Religious Affairs provided houses of worship, prayer books, and an official state-salaried rabbinate. The Ministry of Education provided religiously-oriented public schools. And the religious political parties offered various forms of patronage. Some of the traditional spiritual leaders who came to Israel with their communities experienced a loss of their authority. Young Sephardim who entered the religious youth movements or went on to higher religious education usually found themselves in an Ashkenazi environment. Since most of the rabbinical colleges were also European-founded, new Sephardi rabbis were often trained in the Ashkenazi orthodox fashion with its different world outlook, its very distinct approach to piety, and even its own distinctive dress code.

The negative outcome of this troubling socio-religious process has been marked by the Bar-Ilan University scholar Zvi Zohar in his 2006 article “Aspects of Halakhic Identity: On European Jewish Orthodoxy, Sephardic Tradition and the Shas Movement”:

In more general terms, there exists a deep gap between the education and halakhic identity of the Shas cadres, and the cultural ideal they seek to represent. Focusing on the slogan ‘To Return the Crown to its Ancient Glory,’ the party advocates leading the Oriental-Sephardic sector of Israeli Jews back to religious observance, i.e., to the religion, Torah and cultural heritage of their forefathers. However, the European ultra-Orthodox halakhic identity and ethos that the movement’s cadres internalized, are radically different from the halakhic identity and traditions of the Sephardic-Oriental Torah sages in the Middle East and North Africa - characterized by openness to general education, Zionism, new political trends, etc.

The emergence of the Shas party must then be understood in the larger context of Sephardi disenfranchisement in Israel and the ascendance of Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox religious hegemony.

In his 1989 book “Israel: The Oriental Majority”, the Israeli sociologist Shlomo Swirski presented the political weakness of the Sephardi political movements:

In fact, demands for improved and expanded welfare measures have made up the major part of the platforms of most Oriental slates in elections to the Knesset. The most recent example was provided by Tami, a party formed by young Orientals who split from the National Religious Party. It gained the support of many young activists who saw in it a means of expressing an independent Oriental consciousness. After a year and a half of very passive participation in the [Menachem] Begin cabinet (Tami obtained three Knesset seats in the 1981 elections and was assigned one cabinet post in the governing coalition), the party’s leaders threatened to walk out of the coalition if the government failed to pass a law providing special benefits to families with many children. The government accommodated them - and Tami returned to its political and social passivity.

The Shas approach has evolved from a moderate political position to an extreme one on the contentious issues of religion, the Palestinians, and the settlements; as this move has occured, the demands of the Sephardi political leaders have shifted from social justice to the flow of government money into a network of Sephardi communal institutions. The great success of Shas in getting a nice chunk of the government budget for their institutions has permitted it to relinquish the primary raison d’etre of their movement.

As the journalist Rachel Shabi states in her landmark 2008 book “We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands”:

SHAS is concerned more with religion than ethnicity or social justice - as shown by its use of the religious term ‘Sephardi’ and not the sociopolitical appellation ‘Mizrahi.’ Its solutions were religious first and social as a byproduct if at all.

The flood of statements from the Shas leadership in the wake of the Immanuel affair reflect the close ties that the party now has with the Ashkenazi Haredi leadership and its institutional cadre. The Shas rank-and-file often send their children to Ashkenazi schools — hence the problem raised in Immanuel, where Sephardi parents are fighting to have their children accepted as equals in the Ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi Yeshiva — and are often beholden to that leadership in religious affairs.

Shas has not sought to effectively redress the secular-political problems of the Israeli Sephardim, but has relentlessly pursued its own parochial interests as an Ultra-Orthodox party in the Ashkenazi mold.

The spiritual leader of Shas, former Israeli Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, is well known for his voluminous legal output; he has written scores of books that deal with the minutiae of Jewish ritual law, on which he is considered one of the most important experts of his generation. What often gets overlooked is how his ritual-centered approach to Judaism tends to exclude the wider humanistic learning of the classical Sephardic tradition.

While Rabbi Yosef vigorously asserts Sephardic custom in his legal rulings, his exclusive focus on the details of Jewish ritual often obscures the fact that unlike many of his Sephardic predecessors — who buttressed their legal writings with studies of philosophy, the social sciences, the literary arts, mathematics, and science — Rabbi Yosef remains almost completely oblivious to the world outside the confines of Jewish ritual. With government control of civil society, the traditional place of the rabbinical court in the everyday lives of Sephardic Jews has been blunted and left the rabbinical leadership with little to do but to focus on ritual matters, just as in the case of the Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox rabbis.

The lack of a more worldly perspective from Rabbi Yosef and the Shas rabbinate has led to a more intimate entente with the Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox. And it has found a set of common interests in the Immanuel case despite the ethnic divide. Shas leaders are equally disdainful of life outside the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community and have largely ignored the traditions of Sephardic Rabbinic Humanism that were passed down to us from Moses Maimonides in his great intellectual synthesis. Such learning is alien to the Shas faithful.

In their vocal support for the Ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi leaders, the Shas figures, led by Rabbi Yosef and his disciple Eli Yishai, have shown the myriad ways in which they have not only abandoned the classical Sephardic tradition, but have forsaken the Sephardic community in Israel in its struggle to achieve social justice and dignity in its battle against Ashkenazi prejudice. As a political party originally designed to serve the interests of the Sephardic community, Shas has now thrown in its lot with those who would continue to denigrate Sephardim.

New York Times

By Dennis Overbye

The reclusive Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, aka Grisha, gained worldwide fame by claiming to have solved one of the world’s most intractable mathematical problems, the Poincaré conjecture, and then disappearing in St. Petersburg. On Thursday he said he had rejected a $1 million prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass., for the feat.

“I have refused,” Interfax, a Russian news agency, quoted him as saying. “You know, I had quite a lot of reasons both for and against. That is why I took so long to make up my mind.”

James Carlson, president of the Clay institute, said he had spoken with Dr. Perelman by phone. “He was, as usual, quite pleasant, though quite firm in his decision,” Dr. Carlson said.

The problem, named after the great French polymath Henri Poincaré, has led mathematicians on a frustrating chase for a century. It hypothesizes that any three-dimensional space without holes is essentially a sphere.

In 2003, Dr. Perelman posted a series of papers on the Internet claiming to have proved the conjecture, and a deeper problem by the Cornell mathematician William Thurston, building on work by Richard Hamilton, a Columbia University mathematician.

After a brief barnstorming tour in the United States, during which he refused interviews, Dr. Perelman returned to Russia, leaving the world’s mathematicians to pick up the pieces and decide whether he had really done it.

A worldwide race to retrace, explicate and check Dr. Perelman’s proof ensued. In the meantime, Dr. Perelman quit his post at the Steklov Mathematical Institute, moved in with his mother and ceased communicating with the outside world.

By 2006, as learned papers totaling more than a thousand pages of dense mathematics slouched toward publication, it was becoming apparent that Dr. Perelman had indeed solved the conjecture, and he was awarded a Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid.

Dr. Perelman, who already had a history of declining awards, did not show.

So when the Clay institute announced in March that he had won the big prize, many doubted that he would accept. In June, a three-day symposium in Paris celebrating the proof of the conjecture went on without him.

Dr. Perelman said Dr. Hamilton deserved as much credit as he did, Interfax reported. “To put it short,” he said, “the main reason is my disagreement with the organized mathematical community. I don’t like their decisions; I consider them unjust.”

The Clay institute said it would announce this fall how it would spend the award money.

There may be no way to overlook the thriving, insular community of 50,000 Bukharian Jews from Central Asia now settled in Forest Hills and Rego Park, but there is a way to look in. Last Tuesday, journalist Sergey Kadinsky of Forest Hills presented an eyeful in his lecture on Bukharian history and culture at the Central Queens YM & YWCA.

In a neighborhood of smaller houses, the architecture of Bukharian buildings, including the walled, brick mansions on 110th and 112th Streets, has provoked antipathy among locals.

Kadinsky — who first began investigating the Bukharians’ past when Rego Park resident and retired urologist Robert Pinkhasov asked the Latvian native to translate his Bukharian encyclopedia from Russian to English — said the community’s intentions have been misunderstood. While many Bukharians are employed as white-collar workers, they build large houses to accomodate their multi-generational families, rather than showcase their salaries.

Most emigrated here from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where it is believed their ancestors, possibly one of the Lost Tribes, first settled under the Persian Empire in the 6th century BCE. Their unique dialect, influenced by Farsi and Hebrew, became known as Bukhori. In cities like Bukhara, from which the Jews took their name, and Samarkand near the Silk Road, their merchants prospered and their communities flourished undisturbed.

Before Muslim Arabs conquered the region, Central Asia was a melting pot of different faiths: Buddhism, Zoroastrism, Christianity and Judaism. Bukharian Jews still celebrate what was originally a Zoroastrian festival, Persian New Year or Nowruz, on March 21; they are, in their everyday lives, more secular than Conservative Jews, but, in observance of traditional holidays, just as devout as the Orthodox.

When the Muslims came, the Jews were the only religious minority to evade forced conversion. Essentially cut off from the rest of the Jewish world for more than 2,000 years, they managed to survive and preserve their Jewish identity and unique heritage despite waves of Muslim, Uzbeki and Russian invaders. With a knowledge of the Bukharian’s past, it’s not surprising their community should be so tightly knit.

Of Pinkhasov’s apartment, which revealed itself as a metaphor for the Bukharian community itself, Kadinsky said, “On the outside, it looks like a catalogue,” assimilated just enough. “On the inside” of the residence, the walls of which are covered in carpets and portraits, “it takes you back in time.”

Kadinsky conveyed a message of tolerance for one’s neighbors, Bukharian or otherwise. “We have way too many differences, on religion, on the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Let’s start with the easier things, like music,” he suggested to his elderly, non-Bukaharian audience, illuminating the geneology of Jewish court singers. “When it comes to music, we all play the same tune.”

Lilianna Zulunova, a Bukharian Jew born in Uzbekistan who teaches English as a Second Language at LaGuardia Community College, believed Kadinsky “did a fabulous job presenting [her people’s history and culture] to the non-Bukharian audience. I think that the young Bukharian generation would definitely benfit from this because I think they are forgetting the core of their history.” Zulunova, now 27, wasn’t interested in her heritage, besides the music and food, until her early 20s.

This past spring, Queens College offered a course on the history of Bukharian Jews taught by Imanuel Rybakov, a member of the Bukharian Jewish Congress. Pinkhasov’s self-published book was the text for the class.

Clearly, it’s not just Kadinsky who’s curious.

A traditional Bukharian teacher instructs students. Photo courtesy of Central Queens YM & YWHA

YourNabe.com

By Anna Gustafson
Monday, June 28, 2010 1:13 PM

Forest Hills and Rego Park are home to one of the largest populations of Bukharian Jews in the world, but not many of their neighbors know much about the religious group that hails mainly from Central Asia — something Forest Hills resident Sergey Kadinsky said he hopes to change.

Kadinsky will speak about the history and culture of the Bukharian Jewish community at the Central Queens YM & YWHA in Forest Hills at 1:30 p.m. June 29.

“I’ve noticed many don’t know much about Bukharians besides the fact they have big fences and houses,” said Kadinsky, 25. “I want them to see the culture that resides in these homes.”

Tensions have surfaced between Bukharians and non-Bukharians in recent years, predominantly because Forest Hills residents have said they were resentful that some Bukharians would tear down smaller homes in the neighborhood and build larger ones.

In response to complaints about over-development in the Cord Meyer area of Forest Hills, the City Council passed a rezoning plan last year that limits a house’s height.

“By learning about their history and culture, you’ll appreciate their ideas,” Kadinsky said. “For example, why do they like to build large homes? Because they like to have grandparents and grandchildren in the same home.”

Kadinsky, a Latvian native, is not Bukharian but has spent years researching Bukharian culture after Robert Pinkhasov, a retired urologist from Rego Park, asked Kadinsky, who speaks fluent Russian, to help translate a book he was writing about Bukharians.

Bukharian Jews, who primarily come from Central Asia, faced economic decline and civil unrest following the breakup of the former Soviet Union. Many of the world’s 250,000 Bukharian Jews left Central Asia for places like Israel and the United States, with some 50,000 now living in Forest Hills and Rego Park, according to the United Jewish Appeal Federation of New York.

Pinkhasov’s book, “Bukharian Jews: An Encyclopaedic Reference,” was published by the author and may be used in a recently launched Queens College course on Bukharian Jews taught by Rego Park resident Imanuel Rybakov.

The Bukharian community has become increasingly involved in area politics, and Kew Gardens resident Albert Cohen was the first Bukharian Jew to run for citywide office last year. Cohen, originally from Tajikistan who became known to some as the “Bukharian Barack Obama,” ultimately lost the Democratic primary for the 29th Council District to present Councilwoman Karen Koslowitz (D-Forest Hills), but many Bukharians saw it as an important first political step for their community.

The Central Queens Y is at 67-09 108 St. in Forest Hills. The June 29 event is open to the public and a $5 donation is suggested. For more information, call 718-268-5011, Ext. 151 or visit cqyjcc.org.

Reach reporter Anna Gustafson by e-mail at agustafson@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4574.

By TOM HAYS and CRISTIAN SALAZAR (AP) – 1 hour ago

NEW YORK — Anna Chapman has been called the femme fatale of a spy case with Cold War-style intrigue — a striking redhead and self-styled entrepreneur who dabbled in real estate and mused on her Facebook page, “if you can dream, you can become it.”

Chapman’s American dream, U.S. authorities say, was a ruse.

The 28-year-old Chapman, they say, was a savvy Russian secret agent who worked with a network of other operatives before an FBI undercover agent lured her into an elaborate trap at a coffee shop in lower Manhattan.

Though the U.S. has branded the operatives as living covertly, at least in Chapman’s case, she had taken care to brand herself publicly as a striver of the digital age, passionately embracing online social networking by posting information and images of herself for the world to see.

Prosecutors have charged Chapman and 10 other suspects with following orders by Russian intelligence to become “Americanized” enough to infiltrate “policymaking circles” and feed information back to Moscow.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Farbiarz has called evidence against Chapman “devastating.” She is “someone who has extraordinary training, who is a sophisticated agent of Russia,” he said.

Chapman and nine others accused of being ring members were arrested across the Northeast and charged with failing to register as foreign agents, a crime that is less serious than espionage and carries up to five years in prison. Some also face money laundering charges. An 11th suspect was arrested in Cyprus, accused of passing money to the other 10 over several years.

Prosecutors said several of the defendants were Russians living in the U.S. under assumed names and posing as Canadian or American citizens. It was unclear how and where they were recruited, but court papers said the operation went as far back as the 1990s. Exactly what sort of information the agents are alleged to have provided to their Russian handlers — and how valuable it may have been — was not disclosed.

The FBI finally moved in to break up the ring because one of the suspects — apparently Chapman, who was bound for Moscow, according to court papers — was going to leave the country, the Department of Justice said Tuesday.

The court papers allege that some of the ring’s members were husband and wife and that they used invisible ink, coded radio transmissions and encrypted data and employed methods such as swapping bags in passing at a train station.

Farbiarz called the arrests “the tip of the iceberg” of a conspiracy by Russia’s intelligence service, the SVR, to collect information inside the U.S. The arrests raised fears that Moscow has planted other couples.

Such deep-cover agents are known as “illegals” in the intelligence world because they take civilian jobs instead of operating inside Russian embassies and military missions.

Russian officials initially denounced the arrests as “Cold War-era spy stories” and accused elements of the U.S. government of trying to undermine the improving relationship between Moscow and Washington. But the White House and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin expressed confidence that the arrests would not damage ties between the two nations.

At a court hearing Monday in federal court in Manhattan, where Chapman was jailed without bail, her attorney called the case against her weak. He said she had visited the United States on and off since 2005 before settling in Manhattan to start a business.

Chapman took an apartment a block from Wall Street and began using online social networks, including LinkedIn and Facebook, to develop business contacts and to market her skills. On her LinkedIn page, Chapman is listed as the chief executive officer of PropertyFinder Ltd., which maintains a website featuring real estate listings in Moscow, Spain, Bulgaria and other countries.

“Love launching innovative high-tech startups and building passionate teams to bring value into market,” Chapman’s LinkedIn summary says.

She lists previous jobs at an investment company and a hedge fund in London. The summary also says she earned a master’s degree in economics at a Russian university in 2005.

In more than 90 photos posted to Facebook, Chapman is pictured in various countries, including Turkey, where she is in one of the rooms of the luxurious Hotel Les Ottoman, in Istanbul. There are also what look like family photographs from Russia and photographs of her dressed in a student uniform.

Her Internet footprints also include a photo of her posing with a glass of wine between two men at the Global Technology Symposium at Stanford University in March — it cost more than $1,000 to attend — and video clips, speaking in Russian about the economic opportunities in her adopted home.

Media reports quickly branded her a femme fatale, and tabloids splashed her photos on their front pages.

An acquaintance, David Hartman, owner of a New York real estate company, described Chapman as “pleasant, very professional, friendly.”

“There’s nothing too crazy about her that I knew of,” he said.

A criminal complaint alleges that, unbeknownst to her business contacts such as Hartman, Chapman was using a specially configured laptop computer to transmit messages to another computer of an unnamed Russian official — a handler who was under surveillance by the FBI.

The laptop exchanges occurred 10 times, always on Wednesdays, until June, when an undercover FBI agent got involved, prosecutors said. The agent, posing as a Russian consulate employee and wearing a wire, arranged a meeting with Chapman at a Manhattan coffee shop, they said.

During the meeting, they initially spoke in Russian but then agreed to switch to English to draw less attention to themselves, the complaint says in recounting their recorded conversation.

“I need more information about you before I can talk.”

“OK. My name is Roman. … I work in the consulate.”

The undercover said he knew she was headed to Moscow in two weeks “to talk officially about your work,” but before that, “I have a task for you to do tomorrow.”

The task: To deliver a fraudulent passport to another woman working as a spy.

“Are you ready for this step?” he asked.

“S—-, of course,” she responded.

The undercover gave her a location and told her to hold a magazine a certain way — that way, she would be recognized by a Russian agent, who would in turn confirm her identity by saying to her, “Excuse me, but haven’t we met in California last summer?”

But Chapman was leery, prosecutors said.

“You’re positive no one is watching?” they say she told the undercover agent after being given the instructions.

Afterward, authorities say, she was concerned enough to buy a cell phone and make a “flurry of calls” to Russia. In one of the intercepted calls, a man advised her she may have been uncovered, should turn in the passport to police and get out of the country.

She was arrested at a New York Police Department precinct after following that advice, authorities said.

Authorities say the undercover’s parting words to her had been, “Your colleagues in Moscow, they know you’re doing a good job. So keep it up.”

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Pete Yost in Washington, D.C., and David Caruso and Eva Dou in New York.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

NEW YORK (JTA) — Jews from more than 15 countries will compete in a “Jewish World Cup” in New York on June 27. 

The soccer tournament, hosted by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, will take place on Randall’s Island, between Manhattan and the Bronx. The tournament is for adults; soccer clinics are planned for children.

The tournament is part of JCRC’s effort to reach out to overseas Jews living in New York and integrate them into the American Jewish community.

“There are many different groups of international Jews in New York who are not connected to each other as a community, nor are they connected to the broader community of New York Jews,” said Hindy Poupko, director of Israel and international affairs at the JCRC. “Our goal is to bring these groups together as international Jews and as a part of the broader Jewish community.”

Kyrgyzstan interim leader Roza Otunbayeva has arrived in Osh in the south of the country after the worst ethnic violence in two decades.

BBC NEWS

At least 191 people were killed in fighting between Kyrgyz and ethnic Uzbeks around Osh and Jalalabad.

About 400,000 people have been displaced by the unrest, with many Uzbeks fleeing into Uzbekistan.

The Red Cross (ICRC) has described the situation as an “immense crisis” with shortages of basic necessities.

Ms Otunbayeva said in the main square of Osh: “I came here to see, to speak with the people and hear first hand what happened here. We will do everything to rebuild this city.”

Ms Otunbayeva is scheduled to meet local leaders and visit hospitals during the trip.

The unrest comes two months after the country’s former president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was forced out of office in April.

Ms Otunbayeva’s government has blamed the former leader for stoking the conflict.

Makeshift camps

About 300,000 people have fled their homes, while another 75,000-100,000 people - not counting children - are thought to have taken refuge in Uzbekistan.

Some aid has begun to arrive in the region, but the ICRC says refugees are running short of basic supplies. At least 40,000 refugees are without shelter.

Some observers have said the death toll could be higher.

Over the border in Uzbekistan, many of the displaced - mostly women and children - are in makeshift camps.

Many report instances of rape and severe beatings.

“We need clothes and medical supplies, especially for the children, because when we fled our homes we just ran away and couldn’t take anything with us,” said Halima Otajonova, a 41-year-old mother of two, at a refugee centre at a stadium in the Uzbek town of Khanabad.

“Some of us even ran away in bare feet, without shoes,” she told the AFP news agency.

Eyewitnesses say Kyrgyz mobs began attacking people in Uzbek areas of Osh and another southern city, Jalalabad, in the early hours of Friday last week.

The city of Osh, which saw most of the violence, is being patrolled by Kyrgyz troops, amid an uneasy calm.

However, there have been reports of soldiers taking part in looting, and refugees allege that troops had supported mobs during the fighting.

Washington’s top Central Asia diplomat, Robert Blake, is to tour refugee camps in the Uzbek border city of Andizhan on Friday before talks with Uzbek officials in Bishkek.

‘Bloodcurdling’

The ICRC says its workers have reached refugees in the areas around Osh.

“We’ve seen for ourselves and also heard about pockets of displaced people ranging from several hundred to several thousand in number,” said the ICRC’s Severine Chappaz.

The organisation said insecurity and fear, combined with shortages of basic necessities like food, water, shelter and medicine, were putting a tremendous strain on communities, hospitals and families.

Paul Quinn-Judge, Central Asia project director at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based security think tank, said the situation was likely to get worse.

“We’re going to have an increasingly serious humanitarian problem which is going to affect both the Kyrgyz and the Uzbek communities in southern Kyrgyzstan,” he told the BBC from the capital, Bishkek.The BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes.

“The reports from the Uzbek communities in Osh and in Jalalabad are so bloodcurdling that I doubt whether anybody will want to go back in the near future.”

In an Uzbek district of Osh, a baker who had fled to the border with his wife and five children on Sunday said his family had lost hope after supplies on the border ran out, and returned out of desperation.

“Is there any difference where to die? There is no food, no water, no humanitarian aid,” Melis Kamilov told the Associated Press news agency.

Referendum

Kyrgyzstan’s interim leaders have been struggling to impose their authority since coming to power after President Bakiyev was overthrown in April.

The government believes allies of Mr Bakiyev, who now lives in exile in Belarus, want to derail a national referendum on constitutional reform scheduled for 27 June.

But the government has said it will go ahead with the referendum despite the clashes.

Ethnic Uzbeks have largely supported the interim government, but Mr Bakiyev remains popular with many Kyrgyz in the south.

A Kyrgyz government appeal for Russia to send in peacekeeping troops was rejected by Moscow.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has now said his country will provide technical assistance to Kyrgyzstan to help it track down those behind the clashes.

The clashes are the worst ethnic violence to hit southern Kyrgyzstan since 1990, when deadly clashes were suppressed by the Soviet authorities.

AFP

JERUSALEM — An Israeli man arrested in Poland who is believed to be a Mossad agent linked to the January killing of a Hamas chief in Dubai must be brought home and not extradited to Germany, ministers said on Sunday.

According to German weekly Der Spiegel, which broke the story on its website on Saturday, Uri Brodsky was arrested at Warsaw airport on June 4 on suspicion of obtaining a German passport by fraudulent means — a passport used by one of the killers involved in the assassination of a top Hamas official.

Germany issued an international arrest warrant for Brodsky several weeks ago and prosecutors are pushing for Warsaw to extradite him.

But it was unclear whether Poland — one of Israel’s closest allies — would agree to a German request to extradite Brodsky.

“Poland needs to tell Germany that it is sending an Israeli citizen to Israel and if there is some complaint against him, we have legal procedures (that) have great credibility with the international legal system,” Tourism Minister Stas Misezhnikov told reporters in Jerusalem.

“First they have to prove that he has done what he is accused of,” he said. “(But) for the time being, we are talking about an Israeli citizen. We are obliged to bring him home and this is what we shall do.”

Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz also voiced opposition to any attempt to extradite Brodsky to Germany for prosecution.

“Israel should oppose the extradition of any Israeli citizen to another country and act to bring him back to this country,” he said.

The Dubai hit has sparked a diplomatic crisis for Israel after the team of assassins — widely believed to be from the Israeli spy agency Mossad — was found to have used 26 forged passports from Britain, France, Germany, Ireland and Australia.

Der Spiegel was on Monday to publish a fuller article on the incident, which reportedly ties Brodsky to the team involved in the January 20 killing of Mahmud al-Mabhuh, a founder of Hamas’ military wing, at a luxury Dubai hotel.

Dubai police have released extensive surveillance footage which they say shows suspects from the hit squad who drugged and then suffocated Mabhuh.

Twelve British, six Irish, four French, one German and three Australian passports were used by 26 people who are believed to be linked to the murder, according to Dubai police.

In many cases, the travel documents appeared either to have been faked or obtained illegally.

The issue caused a huge diplomatic row, with London and Canberra both expelling an Israeli diplomat over the passport scandal.

Jewish Autonomous Region or Birobidzhan , autonomous region (1995 pop. 211,900), c.13,800 sq mi (35,700 sq km), Khabarovsk Territory, Russian Far East, in the basins of the Biro and Bidzhan rivers, tributaries of the Amur. The capital is Birobidzhan. The region is bounded on the south by China (Heilongjinag prov.) and on the north by the Bureya and Hinggan (Khingan) mts., which yield gold, tin, iron ore, and graphite. Mining, agriculture (chiefly on the Amur plain), lumbering, and light manufacturing are the major economic activities.

Formed in 1928 to give Soviet Jews a home territory and to increase settlement along the vulnerable borders of the Soviet Far East, the area was raised to the status of an autonomous region in 1934. The Jewish population peaked in 1948 at about 30,000 (one fourth of the total population). Despite some remaining Yiddish influences—including a Yiddish newspaper—Jewish cultural activity in the region has declined enormously since Stalin’s anticosmopolitanism campaigns and since the liberalization of Jewish emigration in the 1970s. Jews now make up less than 2% of the region’s population.