Thanks to his dedication to his art and a good word from a friend, ceramic artist and Kansas City-area native Shane Lutzk was recently invited to visit Savona, Italy, to create artworks for the Savona Ceramics Museum’s permanent collection.
The opportunity arose, Lutzk said, after his friend Sandro Lorenzini, a famous Italian ceramic artist who lives in Savona, contacted the museum (in Italian called Museo della Ceramica di Savona) a few months ago. Lorenzini told museum officials that he and Lutzk should work on a project together. Museum officials agreed and invited Lutzk to come. He traveled to Italy on July 1 with plans to stay for three weeks.
Sam Matier is one of three candidates running in Ward 4 of the Merriam City Council. The primary is Aug. 6 and will narrow the field down to two for the Nov. 8 election. Mail-in voting begins July 17. His opponents are incumbent Councilmember Bob Pape and Staci Chivetta.
Matier, 77, has been attending Merriam’s city council meetings for four years and said he sees “fraud, waste and corruption” in the city. He said taxpayer money is not paying for essential needs like street maintenance and police and fire protection. Instead, according to Matier, the city council budgeted $565,000 over a five-year period, or an average of $113,000 per year, for five art sculptures.
RABBI GOLDBERG’S NEW PULPIT — Rabbi Edwin C. Goldberg, D.H.L., who grew up in our Jewish community as a member of The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah, where he became a Bar Mitzvah and was confirmed, has a new pulpit.
On July 1 he became the rabbi of Congregation Beth Shalom of The Woodlands in Texas. Rabbi Goldberg received his rabbinic ordination in 1989 and earned a doctorate in Hebrew literature from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1994. He enjoys a full spectrum of rabbinic activities, including teaching, pastoral care and creating opportunities for deep spiritual engagement.
He promised his new congregants he was showing up with his “A game” and felt blessed to be at the congregation.Before moving to Texas, he spent six years as the senior rabbi at Temple Sholom in Chicago and 17 years at a congregation in Coral Gables, Florida.
Class of 2018 students in The J’s after-school program, Miles Tarjan (from left), Noah Tarjan, Kemper Komm and Shaefer Spizman, create a sukkah village.
CALLING ALL SUKKAH DWELLERS — The J wants your Sukkot pics. This year, Sukkot begins Oct. 14, but it’s already on the minds of staff at The J. They’re creating an interactive inside installation showing celebrations all over the city.
To be included in the fun, send The J your photos from previous Sukkots. Consider sending photos of building your sukkah, decorating your sukkah, waving the lulav in your sukkah, standing on the ladder putting the s’chach (roof covering) on your sukkah, eating in your sukkah, teaching in your sukkah, wearing coats because it’s cold in your sukkah or anything else you can think of that took place in your sukkah.
Email photos from homes and organizations to from now until Sept. 30. A teaser list of participants will be featured on The J’s website, TheJKC.org, along with upcoming details about the installation, which is made possible by a contribution from the Dora and Louis Fox Charitable Trust.
For more information, contact Jill Maidhof at or 913-327-8077.
JOKE OF THE WEEK — Reader Marvin Fremerman recently sent me this joke and wonders if anyone knows its origin. If you know where it came from, email me at and we’ll share the information in a future Listening Post column.
Here’s the joke:
A beggar knocks on the door of a little old Jewish lady. She opens the door.
Little old Jewish lady: “Yes. Vot is it?”
Beggar, with hand stretched out: “Please lady, I haven’t eaten in three days.”
Little old Jewish lady: “You should force yourself.”
Rabbi Doug Alpert, spiritual leader of Congregation Kol Ami, will serve a second term as president of the Rabbinical Association of Greater Kansas City. Rabbi Javier Cattapan of Congregation Beth Torah was also elected to serve a second term as vice president. Newly elected to the office of secretary-treasurer is Rabbi Sarah Smiley of The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah. Rabbi David Glickman is immediate past president.
The Rabbinical Association of Greater Kansas City includes Orthodox, Reconstructionist, Conservative and Reform rabbis and serves as the rabbinic voice in and for the Jewish community and the larger Greater Kansas City community. It guides the community in making religious decisions for community events, supports the rabbis in their personal and professional growth and develops and nourishes collegial relationships within the Association.
50 KANSANS YOU SHOULD KNOW — At least two members of the Jewish community are among those recognized in the June edition of Ingram’s Magazine as “50 Kansans You Should Know: Blossoms in the Sunflower State.” They are “high achievers who help define business, civic, school and community life in Kansas.” Those recognized who are not Jewish include big names such as Gov. Laura Kelly and University of Kansas Chancellor Doug Girod.
At the Jerusalem-based Lightricks, a producer of image and video editing apps, the company has integrated design elements at all levels of product development, with a tech lead and a design lead working on every product the company makes. (Courtesy of Lightricks)
Last year, a group of students at Jerusalem’s renowned Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design set to work imagining the future.
Their specific goal was to envision the next generation of wearable devices for the blind. Working in collaboration with the technology company Orcam, a Jerusalem-based producer of devices that help the visually impaired read text and recognize objects, the students came up with a number of innovative designs, from devices that embed within a user’s glasses to one hidden in a hairpiece.
Dr. Yuval Tal, director of the allergy and clinical immunology unit at Jerusalem’s Hadassah hospital, helped find a novel treatment for a boy who had a rare allergy to sunlight. (Larry Luxner)
JERUSALEM — A few months ago, 12-year-old A. happily posed for pictures atop a camel in the Judean Desert. He was shirtless under the midday sun.
For nearly any other Israeli boy, this may have been nothing more than a fun little episode on a family trip. But for A., the very fact that he was outside — bathed in bright sunshine and not protected by dark clothing — represented nothing short of a medical miracle.
At the Jerusalem-based Lightricks, a producer of image and video editing apps, the company has integrated design elements at all levels of product development, with a tech lead and a design lead working on every product the company makes. (Courtesy of Lightricks)
Last year, a group of students at Jerusalem’s renowned Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design set to work imagining the future.
Their specific goal was to envision the next generation of wearable devices for the blind. Working in collaboration with the technology company Orcam, a Jerusalem-based producer of devices that help the visually impaired read text and recognize objects, the students came up with a number of innovative designs, from devices that embed within a user’s glasses to one hidden in a hairpiece.
Most of the products will never actually be made.
Safi Hefetz, the head of Bezalel’s department of industrial design, likened the endeavor to automobile companies that produce “concept cars” — futuristic prototypes that may never come to market but help the company imagine where the industry is headed and showcase new technologies.
It’s the kind of project that would barely raise an eyebrow in other countries. But the idea of using visionary design to drive technological innovation is unusual in Israel, according to Hefetz.
“There are almost no technology companies that use designers to bring them the new vision of the next-generation product,” Hefetz said. “The technology companies are really practical in their vision. Most of the people who are running the companies are people who came from R&D or came from business, and they are still seeing designers as the aesthetic side of the product.”
Israel is globally renowned for its technological prowess, responsible for such breakthrough innovations as the first global instant messenger platform (ICQ, later bought by AOL) and the navigation app Waze (bought by Google in 2013).
But industry insiders say Israeli tech companies often are stuck in a mindset that sees design merely as a way to beautify a product whose development lies mostly in the hands of computer scientists.
“Despite Israel’s foundation in design and creativity, these elements are too often unconnected to its world-class tech sector,” said Inbal Gottesman, the Jerusalem ecosystem manager for Start-Up Nation Central, a nonprofit that works to strengthen Israel’s innovation sector.
Gottesman’s group has put on a series of events over the last year and a half highlighting the importance of design in the tech sector, with a special focus on Jerusalem. The idea is to make Israel’s capital city a national model for bringing together tech and design.
Jerusalem is particularly well-suited to the endeavor. In recent years, the city’s startup scene has grown dramatically, from about 200 companies in 2012 to nearly 500 today.
The Start-Up Nation Central events, known as Tech Meets Design, feature content designed to appeal to both communities. At the last one, a former NASA administrator talked about the challenges of designing a spaceship. The next one, at the Israel Museum in June, is titled Designing | Engineering The Future and will include segments on the future of mobility, food and home, and education and health, as well as ample time for mingling and networking.
But most of those companies have failed to fully exploit the design talent coming out of Bezalel and similar institutions in the city. Start-Up Nation Central’s efforts in Jerusalem were born initially of a desire to grow the city’s creative class and keep those graduates from seeking opportunities elsewhere.
“We believe that Jerusalem is the ideal city for driving a global discussion about the necessary clash point between these two worlds,” Gottesman said. “Its growing tech ecosystem, combined with its dynamic design community, make it a great test bed for projects like Tech Meets Design.”
Start-Up Nation Central isn’t the only group that sees the need for a shift in the tech sector.
In 2013, Bezalel added a new track to its master’s program in industrial design focusing on design and technology, partly in response to demand from companies seeking new ways of implementing emerging technologies that place the user experience at the center.
“We do that extremely well,” said Eyal Fried, the founding director of the design and technology track. “Not just because we are empathic, and not because we can design beautiful things, but because we can methodically understand people and analyze how people behave and react to things, and then implement it very effectively into the product and the technology.”
One Jerusalem company that has integrated design elements at all levels of product development is Lightricks, a producer of image and video editing apps whose CEO, Zeev Farbman, is presenting at the Designing | Engineering The Future conference. One out of every five Lightricks employees is a designer — three-quarters of them Bezalel graduates — and a tech lead and a design lead work on every product made by the company.
“There’s always that sort of healthy tension between how good it looks and how well it works,” said Stav Tishler, Lightricks’ director of marketing communications. “We have a really good balance there.”
Aharon Horowitz, the co-founder and CEO of a Jerusalem company that makes a software marketing suite for the automotive industry, said design was very much an afterthought in the early stages of building the firm. Both his co-founders are scientists, and design generally was farmed out to freelancers.
But the importance of design was brought home in a conversation two years ago with one of the company’s biggest customers, a major car dealership in the Midwest. The CEO recognized the value of the data from Horowitz’s company, AutoLeadStar, but it wasn’t being presented in a way that was particularly useful. That led to a significant redesign of the interface.
“I wouldn’t go back to the freelance approach where design was a bolt-on,” Horowitz said. “I believe that having design as a more central part of how we do things on the whole has benefited our product performance. You want your products to really center themselves around a customer need, and the best way to get it there is through design.”
This article was sponsored by and produced in partnership with Start-Up Nation Central, an Israel-based nonprofit that provides a gateway to the Israeli innovation ecosystem and strengthens Israel’s tech economy by convening government, industry, academia and NGOs to help shape policies that support Israel as a thriving innovation nation. This article was produced by JTA’s native content team.
Todd Stettner was a panelist for the discussion ‘Managing the Fallout,’ part of the ‘Building Resilience in the New Threat Paradigm: Targeted Violence Against People of Faith,’ conference that brought together almost 200 representatives from law enforcement and faith-based groups from Europe and across the U.S.
Stay alert and practice responses.
That’s the main advice from Todd Stettner to Kansas City-area residents to prepare for the possibility of and respond to the occurrence of violence against people of faith.
Stettner took part in a panel discussion titled “Managing the Fallout” at a summit called “Building Resilience in the New Threat Paradigm: Targeting Violence Against People of Faith,” held in Atlantic City, New Jersey, June 11 and 12. The summit was sponsored by Rutgers University and Stockton University in partnership with the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness. It drew nearly 200 representatives from law enforcement agencies and faith-based groups across the United States and in Europe.
President Harry S. Truman met on May 8, 1951, with Prime Minister David Ben Gurion of Israel and Abba Eban. They presented a menorah as a token of esteem for President Truman’s timely recognition of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. (Photo courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library & Museum)
The Harry S. Truman Library and Museum is slated for a $25 million renovation, including expanded exhibits about President Harry S. Truman’s historic and controversial recognition of the then-new State of Israel on May 14, 1948.
The project is planned to coincide with the 75th anniversary in 2020 of the start of Truman’s presidency, according to a news release from the Truman Library Institute (trumanlibraryinstitute.org). Starting July 23, the library will close for about a year during the renovation. Its archives and research room will remain open to the public during the renovation. The library’s website address,trumanlibrary.org, will change to trumanlibrary.gov starting June 28.
