For jazz guitarist John Stein, making music is like having a conversation.
Good conversation requires listening as well as talking. Too much of one or the other knocks things out of whack and leads to a one-sided experience.
For musicians in an ensemble, that conversation starts and continues among themselves and then opens up to include their audience.
During her recent visit to the Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City’s office, 20-year-old Rachel Alemu eagerly dug through a bowl of mini candy bars. They have Twix in her home country of Israel, she said, but she’d never had a Hershey’s bar before. She bit into the chocolate, chewed and then gave a little smile.
Alemu came to Kansas City from Ramle, Kansas City’s sister city in Israel, to talk about her experience with the Ethiopian National Project (ENP), one of Jewish Federation’s overseas partner agencies. ENP’s mission is to ensure the full and successful integration of Ethiopian Jews into Israeli society.
CELEBRATING ORIGINAL JEWISH SONGS — You missed a real treat if you were not in the audience at Congregation Beth Torah’s third annual Spring Session on April 29. Directed by Beth Torah Music Director Emily Tummons, more than 100 people played roles in the day’s activities including composers, three singing rabbis and an interfaith chorus. When the concert was over, we had heard a total of 21 new compositions! The interfaith chorus was made up of singers from many faith communities and backgrounds including Jewish, Catholic, Sikh, Native American, Protestant and Buddhist. They took to heart the message of Linda Salvay’s song “The Other Side,” and as a group committed themselves to joining hand-in-hand and as the song says, “taking our sisters’ and brothers’ side.”
Two things stuck with me following the concert. The first, “Hineh ma tov uma nai’m, shevet achim gam yachad. How good and pleasant it is for brothers and sisters to sit together.” The other, as I watched the musicians collaborating with each other throughout the program, was a line you may remember by The Beatles, “I get by with a little help from my friends.” And musical friends they are, coming from almost every congregation in the area.
This event, put on by Beth Torah with help from a grant from the Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City and donations, is a beautiful and relaxing way to spend a Sunday afternoon. My suggestion is to mark your calendar as soon as next year’s date is announced. It’s a concert not to miss!
‘I’D LIKE TO THANK THE ACADEMY’ — One of the best lines from Sunday evening’s Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy Civic Service Award Celebration came from Carol Caviar, who was honored along with her husband Arnie with the 2018 Civic Service Award. In her acceptance speech, Carol said she often likes to use that line, but on this night it really had meaning! On a more serious note, she said she and Arnie “are honored and humbled to receive this award,” before wishing everyone good health, peace and happy days.
Head of School Howard Haas discussed many of the Jewish day school’s accomplishments, including the fact the 252 students this year is the largest enrollment the school has had in more than a decade. He also said his goodbyes. Haas is moving back to the West Coast following the completion of the school year after 11 years at HBHA to spend more time with family and to pursue new career opportunities. Board of Trustees President Michael Abrams thanked Haas for his years of dedication and “compassion for our children.” Haas put it best when he said, “Nothing is more important than educating our children!”
TAKING A STAB AT BDS — Even though the crowd at HBHA’s Civic Service Award Celebration was most definitely pro-Israel, Israeli entertainer Dudu Fisher, who is probably the only shomer Shabbos Broadway star who did not work on Shabbat or Jewish holidays when he was starring in “Les Misérables,” pointed out that if you want to boycott Israel, “just die!” In discussing the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, he pointed out that Israeli technology is a part of most things we use daily including our mobile phones and computers. He said if you want to boycott Israel, you’ll have to “throw your cell phones into the sea!”
HOBBY LOBBY TO FORFEIT SMUGGLED ARTIFACTS (JTA) — The United States returned some 3,800 ancient artifacts to Iraq that had been smuggled to the U.S. retailer Hobby Lobby through the United Arab Emirates and Israel.
The packages containing cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals and clay bullae, as well as other artifacts, were labeled as tile samples. Most of the artifacts originated in the ancient city of Irisagrig and date back to 2100-1600 BCE. They were intercepted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on their way to three addresses in Oklahoma City, where Hobby Lobby is headquartered.
The company agreed last year to forfeit the artifacts and pay $3 million to settle a civil lawsuit brought by the U.S. government.
A repatriation ceremony was held last week in Washington, D.C.
The objects will be turned over to Iraq’s Ministry of Culture and to museums and universities for study and exhibition, Iraq’s ambassador to the United States, Fareed Yasseen, reportedly said.
Hobby Lobby’s president, Steve Green, last year opened a Bible museum in Washington with 40,000 biblical artifacts.
In a statement several months ago, the company said it had been acquiring artifacts “consistent with the company’s mission and passion for the Bible,” with the goal of preserving them for future generations and sharing them with public institutions and museums.
The 5400 block of East 27th Terrace in Kansas City, Missouri, is considered among the worst in its neighborhood located just east of Van Brunt. Few of the houses are occupied. Most bear the city’s stamp that identifies them as dangerous properties awaiting demolition. Lots where houses once stood were filled with rodents and tons of trash that attracted additional dumping.
LOCAL RABBIS DON’T WANT THE HOLOCAUST COMPARED TO ABORTION — The local daily newspaper as well as other Jewish newspapers across the country picked up a story last week that The Rabbinical Association of Greater Kansas City is urging a Republican politician from Kansas City to stop comparing abortion to the Holocaust.
The Rabbinical Association of Greater Kansas City wrote a letter to State Sen. Steve Fitzgerald saying his words “abuse the memory of the murdered victims of the Nazi regime,” The Kansas City Star reported last week. (See the entire text of the letter on Page 21.)
Fitzgerald, who is running to be the Republican nominee for a U.S. House of Representatives seat from Kansas’ 2nd District, has compared Planned Parenthood to a Nazi concentration camp and brought up infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele in a Kansas Senate debate over an amendment involving aborted fetal tissue.
Fitzgerald made the Planned Parenthood comments last year after he was informed someone made a donation to the organization in his name. In a contentious debate last month Fitzgerald compared the logic of a moderate Republican colleague to that of Mengele.
The conservative Republican from Leavenworth said he would take the rabbis’ words “into consideration and under advisement” but would not commit to stop bringing up Holocaust topics during abortion debates.
“I don’t think anybody should accept arbitrary limits placed upon the exercise of their freedoms,” Fitzgerald told The Star.
The Rabbinical Association is not the only local Jewish organization to register concerns regarding Fitzgerald’s comparison of abortion to the Holocaust. In early April the JCRB|AJC sent the senator a letter urging “caution in drawing any analogy to the Nazis and their genocidal persecution of the Jews. The Holocaust was a singular, horrific event that to this day defies comparison. Surely, the notorious Dr. Mengele, whose very role at Auschwitz came to personify this evil, remains in a category by himself.”
(Portions of this story were supplied by JTA News & Features.)
MISSY’S WAY — Every day during the school year, Melissa “Missy” Palan Goldenberg would stand in the circle drive and welcome students to the Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy. She did it regardless of the weather – wind, rain, sleet, snow and most definitely sunshine. So, it is fitting the clouds started to part Tuesday morning just in time for the outdoor ceremony dedicating the circle drive as Missy’s Way in memory of Goldenberg, who passed away in September 2017 after battling cancer.
“No one I knew was more dear to us,” said Rabbi Avi Weinstein, head of Jewish studies. “This sign will remind all of us who we should be because that’s Missy’s way.”
“Missy’s way was seeing the best in all of us,” added HBHA Head of School Howard Haas.
Goldenberg worked as a resource teacher at HBHA for nine years. Because Goldenberg used to wear a red coat during cold weather, HBHA staff wore red shirts with Missy’s Way printed on them at Tuesday’s dedication ceremony. Students also wore red shirts in her honor.
“Missy was an absolute inspiration to students, staff and the community,” Haas told Chronicle Contributing Writer Jerry LaMartina. “She had a loving, compassionate, wonderful heart. She was kind and strove every moment to make the world a better place, and that’s what we teach our students to do. The reason we called it Missy’s Way is that Missy had a way about her.”
Goldenberg was loved by HBHA staff and students alike because of “the light in her eyes, the warmth in her heart and the loving kindness that just exuded from her being,” Haas said. “No one could not love Missy.”
Besides teaching at HBHA, Goldenberg was also an adjunct professor at the University of Saint Mary, where she taught in the graduate school of education. Goldenberg was active in numerous community organizations and served on the boards of Congregation Beth Shalom and the National Council of Jewish Women. Missy and her husband Jeff Goldenberg have three daughters, Elana, Kayla and Mirra. Kayla will graduate later this month from HBHA, Elana graduated in 2016 and Mirra is a sophomore at the school.
MILES FOR MISSY BIKE CHALLENGE — Carol Pfau says biking is in her blood, so what better way to honor the memory of her friend Missy Goldenberg than riding 500 miles to raise funds for STAND UP TO CANCER from June 1 through July 31. Pfau, who is executive assistant to Howard Haas and Dr. Jessica Kyanka-Maggart at HBHA, will be doing so with an e-bike, a bicycle that can be run on electric power as well as by pedaling. For the most part Pfau can be found “out on the streets or trails every day during the nice weather.”
“Cancer is a devastating disease that affects millions of people.” Pfau said. “I’m sure it has touched each and every one of your lives in very similar ways. I have set an initial goal to raise $1,000 to help STAND UP TO CANCER fight this terrible disease.”
To donate, write a check to STAND UP TO CANCER, write Miles for Missy in the memo and mail or deliver it to HBHA, Attn: Carol Pfau, 5801 W. 115th St., Overland Park, KS 66211.
Donations can also be made online through Pfau’s Facebook page. For more information email her at .
GREENBERG AND KC TORNADOS HEAD TO THE PLAYOFFS — Grant Greenberg has completed his rookie season with the playoffs-bound Kansas City Tornados of the North American Premier Basketball League.
This was the Tornados’ first season in the league and they finished with 15 wins and 15 losses. Greenberg played the entire season and will be on the roster for the first playoff game, Friday, May 4, at Avila University against the first-place Yakima Sunkings in a best-of-three series.
Greenberg’s first season with the Tornadoes went pretty well, he told Chronicle Contributing Writer Jerry LaMartina.
“It was a learning experience at first, and I’m just trying to build on this year going into year two, work on my game and get better,” he said. “It definitely was a great experience.”
He has not yet signed with the Tornados for another season.
Greenberg is Jewish and lives in Leavenworth, Kan. He was invited to the Tornados three-day training camp last December and then was invited to join the 10-man team. The Tornados play home games at Municipal Auditorium in downtown Kansas City.
Greenberg holds the record for points scored in collegiate men’s basketball career in the state of Kansas – 3,330 points for the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth. He also achieved another goal last year: he played on Team USA’s men’s basketball team in the 20th Maccabiah Games (commonly known as the Jewish Olympics) from July 4-18 in Israel. The team won the event’s gold medal.
JFS’ GENIUS IDEA — Last week I had the honor of attending Jewish Family Services’ annual Friends of the Family Breakfast Event with a large crowd in the Social Hall of the Jewish Community Campus. That same day JFS hosted an even bigger crowd for lunch. We learned all about the new You Be You mental health program for youth that is already impacting thousands of high school youth in the metro area. You Be You is led by the Greater Kansas City Mental Health Coalition, of which JFS is the founding organization and leader of its core programs. We heard a very moving story from one of the agency’s clients about how it kept her from “dropping down the cracks.”
“Because of this organization, I didn’t get put in a nursing home and it helped me learn to make good decisions,” the client said. “I learned to make good decisions and they helped me make simple choices and my whole life has changed.”
That tugged at the heartstrings. Financially and philanthropically I was drawn the JFS’s new Dip Jar. The “genius” idea is the brainchild of JFS Executive Director and CEO Don Goldman. Now, if invited to an event where you were asked to bring food or toiletries for the JFS Food Pantry and forgot, instead of kicking yourself for being forgetful you can make a small donation to JFS at the event. The Dip Jar is set to a small amount, usually $1 or $2 as is noted on the front of the little electronic collection machine. Just take out your credit or debit card and – even though you left at home those cans you bought for the event – you can still make a small donation and help the JFS pantry feed hundreds of families.
Some introductions are more significant than others. In the mid-1990s the Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City helped connect the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) with Lenexa-based Heart to Heart International (HHI). The matching up of the two international humanitarian organizations ultimately resulted in disaster relief efforts that otherwise may not have been as effective or have happened at all.
Kansas City native Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg has devoted much of his life to making sure the horrors of the Holocaust will not be forgotten. The rabbi also wants to make Holocaust history easier to learn and to remember.
About six years ago, Dr. Nate Bergman started losing his memory, and it shook him.
He was buying new tires for his wife’s car one day, and the attendant asked him for his home address. Despite having lived there for a couple of years, he couldn’t remember it.
This would unnerve most anyone, but Bergman is an osteopathic physician, and at that time he was doing a residency in functional medicine at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, so he was particularly unnerved.
The Jewish Community Center (“The J”) announces the public launch of a community art installation entitled “The Wall of Respect,” with a public painting event at Union Station on Monday April 30 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. The event, for individuals and families, is free and open to the public. Pre-registration is requested at 913-327-8077. Participants, who must be at least 9 years of age, are instructed to wear painting clothes.
The art installation was inspired by a mural created in 1967 by a group of Chicago artists, which gave birth to a national community mural movement.
Building upon the spirit of the work in Chicago, the local project (“The Wall) celebrates Native American, Asian American, Jewish, African American and Latino/Hispanic communities. Unlike the original painting, it is portable, designed to travel to audiences throughout the metro area; organically evolving, inviting audiences to manipulate and add elements; and a portal for deeper understanding and appreciation of cultural diversity.
