mishkan shalom in the news

This story made me proud to be a member of Mishkan Shalom and of the human race...
Isn't this what it is all about?


Back to New Orleans for a Restored Gabriel
From: The Philadelphia Inquirer Date: 5/20/2007

May 20--Strangest of all was the silence.
"No people. No dogs. Not even birds," the Rev. Doug Doussan recalled the other day. "Just gray mud, everywhere."
The floods of Hurricane Katrina had destroyed the interior of his New Orleans church, buried his parishioners' homes under water, and claimed little Gabriel, their angelic trumpet player.
Doussan, a Catholic priest, found Gabriel facedown in the sanctuary, swollen and discolored after weeks floating in the floodwater.
But thanks to the members of a Manayunk synagogue and their friends who took him under their wing -- and then lost his wings -- Gabriel is on his feet again.
Trumpet in hands, new wings in place, he's cleaned up and heading home to New Orleans.
"This statue was a treasure to us," said Doussan, pastor of St. Gabriel the Archangel parish in that city's devastated Ninth Ward.
Today, Doussan is due to step before Congregation Mishkan Shalom at 4101 Freeland St. to see for the first time what his Philadelphia friends have wrought on his young trumpeter, the herald of good news.
"The statue coming back to us restored is like the parish being restored, like the homes and the lives of our people being restored," Doussan said.
"That's the good news."
Today's 1 p.m. event is open to the public and will solicit funds for home repairs in and around St. Gabriel's parish. Doussan will also deliver today's homily at St. Vincent's 9 a.m. Mass.
Gabriel's improbable journey began last summer, a few weeks after 27 volunteers from Philadelphia's Interfaith Community Building Group headed south to clean out the rot and mold left by Katrina (no saint, she) and hang doors and install drywall in New Orleans' middle-class, African American neighborhood of Gentilly.
A volunteer force formed in 1996 to rebuild arson-damaged churches in Mississippi, ICBG's members hail largely from Mishkan Shalom and St. Vincent's R.C. parish in Germantown. They have been doing summer construction projects for worthy causes ever since.
On arriving in Gentilly in July, some congregants began cleaning and restoring houses. Others turned their attention to St. Gabriel's church, and by week's end had restored much of its sanctuary walls.
That should have been the end of it: a farewell supper, hugs and handshakes, and home to Philadelphia.
But no.
"Do you think you could fix Gabriel?" asked Doussan.
Carved 40 years ago in Ortesi, Italy, Gabriel's serene, adolescent face and slender torso showed half-inch splits along multiple joints. His hands were separated from his wrists. His trumpet was broken and copper-green. Paint was faded and flaked across the front.
It was a sorry state for the divine messenger, who in Jewish tradition told Daniel of a coming messiah, in Christian lore told Mary she was pregnant with Jesus, and in Islamic tradition dictated the Koran to Muhammad.
"We had no idea what it would take," recalled furniture-maker Peter Handler, a member of Mishkan Shalom and builder of the synagogue's Torah ark. "But we said, 'If you can get him up to us, we'll restore it.' "
Hugs and handshakes followed, the ICBG people headed home, and a month later the parish handed five-foot Gabriel over to a moving truck bound, they thought, for Philadelphia.
But the truck turned west, stopping many times before lumbering into Dallas. Then, Handler got "the call."
"It was the trucking company, very embarrassed, saying they had lost the wings," he recalled last week.
Arched dramatically above the shoulders and flaring out at the waist, each wing was removable and had been packed separately from the torso.
Handler, who had recommended the movers, was aghast, but told them to ship the statue to Philadelphia anyway. After the insurance claim settled in December, he called on Leon Zakurdayev, a Russian-born (and Russian Orthodox) sculptor and antiques restorer in the Northeast, to return their saint to glory.
Zakurdayev showed Handler and Brenman how to fill Gabriel's cracks with basswood strips and sawdust glue, and then turned to making new wings.
It would take two months.
"Each wing has to have its own personality," he explained last week. "If you make them mirrorlike, it would appear like machine work."
Working with color photos and an angel statuette, he and his wife, Svetlana, modeled the new wings on the originals while adding much more detail, carving hundreds of individual feathers and making the effect "more feminine," like the long-haired archangel.
After Haddonfield woodworker Philip Hauser made them a new trumpet, Handler and Brenman reattached the hands, and on April 20 turned young Gabriel over to Chestnut Hill artist Kathy Winter for painting.
"He looked like he had scars on him" from the filled-in cracks, Winter said last week, as she stepped into her studio on West Meade Lane. There, on a cream-colored cloud, stood the chestnut-haired angel, gazing Earthward, horn to lips, wings flared.
Winter chose a reddish ochre for the wings "for a stained-wood look," she said, and olive-gold for the robe "to harmonize with the horn."
Her husband, Joseph Winter, a retired sculptor-engraver for the U.S. Mint, had leafed the new trumpet in 24-karat gold.
"It's going to be hard to give him back," said Handler, who retrieved Gabriel from the Winters' studio Thursday.
"But we have a shared community now, relationships that will endure" across the 1,200 miles separating Manayunk from Chantilly.
"We're even thinking of asking Father Doug," he joked, "to be our rabbi."
Contact staff writer David O'Reilly at 215-854-5723 or doreilly@phillynews.com.
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Jewish Studies at City College of New York

This fall I will be teaching a course in the Jewish Studies Department of CCNY, a department with a large number of majors, the majority not Jewish! Here's an article from the Times documenting this phenomenon. I am looking forward to teaching Interreligious Dialogue to students of many different religious backgrounds, most of them first generation Americans.

Classes in Judaic Studies, Drawing a Non-Jewish Class
The New York Times, Nov. 3, 2004
by Samuel G. Freedman

For Shivani Subryan, the whole thing started with a wig. There was this guidance counselor at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, a woman named Kornhaber, and she wore a blond wig. And when Shivani was a junior or senior there in the late 1990's, she heard all the whispers from her classmates about the reason. Mrs. Kornhaber was bald. No, Mrs. Kornhaber had cancer.

The counselor looked pretty healthy and normal to Shivani, though. She had a different idea, a vague sense that the wig had something to do with the fact Mrs. Kornhaber was Jewish. Not that Shivani knew much about Jews. She was as an immigrant from Guyana of Indian ancestry, a resident of a mostly Latino neighborhood along the Grand Concourse, a neighborhood that hadn't been Jewish for 40 years, more than twice as long as Shivani had been alive.

That question about the wig, that stray bit of curiosity, kept rattling around Shivani's brain as she entered City College and took up a major in psychology. So last winter, having finished most of her required classes, she finally indulged the wonderment and registered for a course in Jewish studies on films about the Holocaust.

Intrigued and affected by that introduction, she interned for academic credit over the summer with the Jewish Community Relations Council. Then, this fall, she signed up for classes in Holocaust history and Jewish life in New York. There she learned that Mrs. Kornhaber wore the wig in compliance with Jewish religious law instructing that a married woman not show her real hair to any man except her husband.

Along the way, Shivani declared a second major in Jewish studies. To fulfill it, she will take no less than four Jewish studies classes next spring, her final semester. ''People ask me all the time: 'Are you Jewish? Where are you from?''' she said after class one day last week. ''And I tell them it's not about being Jewish. It's about exploration.''

Her exploration typifies a striking trend at City College and in Jewish studies nationally--its appeal to gentiles. Of the 250 students enrolled in Jewish studies classes at City College, 26 of them majoring and 160 minoring in the field, some 95 percent are not Jewish, according to Prof. Roy Mittelman, the director of the program. The more than 100 colleges and universities offering Jewish studies include such Catholic institutions as Fordham and Scranton, the Quaker-based Earlham College in Indiana, and public ones like the University of Kentucky and Portland State in Oregon that are far from any sizable Jewish community.

This explosion in Jewish studies, a discipline that barely existed 35 years ago, reflects a confluence of forces: the roots-consciousness that gave rise to all sorts of ethnic studies programs in the late 1960's; the emergence of Jewish family foundations eager to endow the programs; and the growing popularity of Jewish parochial schools covering the elementary and secondary grades. At the outset, at least, Jewish studies was by Jews, about Jews, for Jews.

''No. 1 was the desire to reach Jewish kids,'' said Judith Baskin, the president of the Association for Jewish Studies, which has 1,500 professors and graduate students as members. ''No. 2 was to demonstrate that Jewish studies has a place in the academic curriculum as part of Western civilization. No. 3 was that it would increase tolerance if non-Jewish students learn about the Jewish experience.''

The recent fascination of gentiles with Jewish studies, then, arrived as a pleasant, and wholly unexpected, shock. Nowhere does this phenomenon carry greater historical resonance than at City College, an institution deeply intertwined with the history of American Jewry.

In the decades before World War II, when many elite universities held quotas on Jewish students, City became known as ''the poor man's Harvard,'' the launching pad for intellectuals like Irving Howe and Irving Kristol. By the 1980 's, with Jews now flocking to the colleges that formerly had barred them and City College a predominantly nonwhite school, it suffered national notoriety for the anti-Semitic diatribes of Leonard Jeffries, a tenured professor of black studies.

THE success of Professor Mittelman's program represents a third wave, part of the overall resurgence of City College. While the Jewish studies courses do attract a few Jews, most of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union, they overwhelmingly draw those self-described explorers like Shivani Subryan.

ALONGSIDE her in Rabbi Bob Kaplan's class on Jewish life in New York on a recent morning sat immigrants from Colombia, Slovakia, South Korea and the Dominican Republic. As they discussed Jewish poverty on the Lower East Side, Jewish disapproval of interfaith marriage and the struggle to learn English, as depicted in Leo Rosten's novel ''The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N,'' they were by inference learning about their own generation of new Americans.

''The kids see Jews as a successful immigrant group and are interested in what happened,'' Rabbi Kaplan said. ''I always get asked, 'How did you guys do it?'''

More than pragmatism alone, though, has brought non-Jews into the classes, which range in content from theology to history to film and literature. Ardent Christians such as Jichan Kim, an immigrant from South Korea, and Jameelah Lewis, an African-American raised in Ohio, came seeking the Judaic roots of their faith and their savior. Kebba Jallow, an immigrant from Gambia, was motivated paradoxically by having heard so many anti-Jewish slurs in America.

''I had a weird curiosity because I'd accepted all those ideas—Jews are cheap, Jews are always whining about the Holocaust,'' he recalled. ''I didn't have the knowledge to contest it. The classes redefined the stereotypes for me. They were just an eye-opener.''

Sinia Randolph, a history major from Harlem, interviewed an aging survivor as part of her research for Professor Mittelman's class in the Holocaust. The experience changed her way of viewing the tragedies of Jews and African-Americans, which all too often have served as the basis of an invidious game of genocide one-upmanship.


''I know that a lot of time African-Americans think slavery was worst, and maybe deep down I did,'' she said. ''I mean I knew of Hitler and the six million, but that was as far as it went. Coming into this class, I've realized that the suffering is the same. The same inhumanity. The same cruelty.''

Finally, Some Good News

The Jewish school where half the pupils are Muslim
The Independent
http://education.independent.co.uk/schools/article2201860.ece
King David, in Birmingham, is a state primary where the children learn Hebrew, recite Jewish prayers, eat kosher food and wave Israeli flags. So how come the majority of pupils are followers of Islam? Jonathan Margolis investigates
Published: 01 February 2007
The Jewish school where half the pupils are Muslim
It's infant prize day at King David School, a state primary in Moseley, Birmingham. The children sit cross-legged on the floor, their parents fiddling with their video cameras. The head, Steve Langford, is wearing a Sesame Street tie.
A typical end-of-term school event, then. But at King David there's a twist that gives it a claim to be one of the most extraordinary schools in the country: King David is a strictly Jewish school. Judaism is the only religion taught. There's a synagogue on site. The children learn modern Hebrew - Ivrit - the language of Israel. And they celebrate Israeli independence day.
But half the 247 pupils at the 40-year-old local authority-supported school are Muslim, and apparently the Muslim parents go through all sorts of hoops, including moving into the school's catchment area, to get their children into King David to learn Hebrew, wave Israeli flags on independence day and hang out with the people some would have us believe that they hate more than anyone in the world.
The Muslim parents, mostly devout and many of the women wearing the hijab, say they love the ethos of the school, and even the kosher school lunches, which are suitable because halal and kosher dietary rules are virtually identical. The school is also respectful to Islam, setting aside a prayer room for the children and supplying Muslim teachers during Ramadan. At Eid, the Muslim children are wished Eid Mubarak in assembly, and all year round, if they wish, can wear a kufi (hat). Amazingly, dozens of the Muslim children choose instead to wear the Jewish kipah.
At the prize morning Carol Cooper, the RE teacher, says: "Boker tov," (Ivrit for "Good morning").
"Good morning Mrs Cooper," the children chant in reply. The entire school, Muslims, Jews, plus the handful of Christians and Sikhs then say the Shema, the holiest Jewish prayer, all together.
The Year Four violin club (five Muslims, two Jews) play "Little Bird, I Have Heard". Just as many prizes are being distributed to Hussains and Hassans and Shabinas as there are to Sauls and Rebeccas and Ruths. In fact, if anything, the Muslim children have beaten the Jewish ones. Thus does the Elsie Davis Prize for Progress go to a beaming little lad called Walid, the religious studies prize to a boy called Imran wearing a kipah and the progress prizes for Hebrew, to a boy called Habib and a girl called Alia.
Times being as they are, King David doesn't advertise its presence in a city where its pioneering multiculturalism could raise all kinds of unwelcome attention. There's a discreet signboard outside that reveals little about the school's unique nature. There are watchful video cameras high up on the walls, plus two electronic gates to pass through. Sadly, it is, to a significant extent, says Laurence Sharman, the (Christian) chairman of the PTA, "an undercover school".
The Muslim parents, however, are only too keen to talk in the playground about what might be seen by some in their communities as a controversial schooling decision.
"We actually bought a flat in the catchment area for the children to come here," says Nahid Shafiq, the mother of Zainah, four, and Hamza, nine, and wife of Mohammed, a taxi driver. "We were attracted by the high moral values of the school, and that's what we wanted our kids to have. None of us has any problem with it being a Jewish school. Why on earth should we? Our similarities as religions and cultures are far greater and more important than our differences. It's not even an issue.
"At the mosque, occasionally, people ask why we send the children here, but there is no antagonism whatsoever, and neither is there from anyone in our family. In fact, it was a big family decision to try and get them into King David. This is the real world. This is the way real people do things in the real world. All the violence and prejudice and problems - that's not real, that's just what you see on the news."
Fawzia Ismail (the mother of Aly-Raza, nine, and Aliah, six) is equally positive. "My nephew came here and my brother showed me the school, so it's a bit of a family tradition now. We're very, very pleased with the school. It's so friendly. All the kids mix and go to one another's parties and are in and out of each other's houses. They teach a bit about Israel, but we don't have any problem with that. There are such similarities between our people and our societies."
Irum Rashid (mother of Hanan, nine, and Maryam, four) says that a lot of people in Small Heath are considering moving to Moseley because of King David. "It's a very happy school, the behaviour is fantastic, the food is great - because it's kosher - and so are the SATs results."
But what about learning Hebrew and the Jewish prayers? "I think it's great. The more knowledge, the more understanding," says one of the mothers. "They learn all they need about Islam at mosque school. Actually, the kids often sing Hebrew songs in the bath, which is a bit confusing because we speak Gujarati at home, but I think it's great."
The Jewish parents and teachers I speak to are just as enthusiastic. "You know, in these difficult times in the world, I think we show how things should be done. It's really a bit of a beacon," says one teacher, whose three children all went to King David and ended up at Oxford University.
Parent Trevor Aremband is from South Africa. "In Johannesburg, we have Jewish schools, but they're 100 per cent Jewish, so we were a bit shocked when we first came here. But the integration works so well. It's clearly the way to go in today's world. My son is eight and has loads of Muslim friends."
The most important thing, I am told repeatedly, is that the cross-cultural friendships forged at King David last a lifetime. I hear a conversation about how a Rebecca is going to fly over from the States for a Fatima's wedding. I am told about a pair of lads, one Jewish, one Muslim, who became friends the day they started in the nursery, went to senior school together as well as to university and are now living close to one another with their wives and families and are currently on holiday together.
King David was not designed to be such a beacon of inter-faith cooperation and friendship. Founded in 1865 as The Hebrew School, it was 100 per cent Jewish until the late 1950s.
Then two things began to happen: there was a growth in the Muslim population in middle-income areas such as Moseley, and a shrinking of Britain's Jewish community, especially outside the main centres of London and Manchester. Muslim children started coming to the school in the early 1960s, but the current position, in which they are in the majority (Jewish children comprise 35 per cent, Muslims 50 per cent, Christians, Sikhs and other, 15 per cent) is very new.
"One of the things that surprises people about this school," says Langford, "is that it's not an especially privileged intake. Half of our kids have English as an additional language. But the amazing thing is how well it all works. We have a new little boy here from China, whose only English a few weeks ago was to ask for the toilet. He now speaks English - and can say the Shema perfectly.
"If you gauge success, for instance, by racial incidents, which schools always have to report to the LEA, we have at the most one a term. And that can just mean some harsh words with a racial slant used in the playground. At multicultural inner city schools where I've taught, there will be far, far more than that, possibly one or more a week."
In terms of SATs and Ofsted inspections, King David has also shone. It is rated as good - the second highest possible ranking - in all areas, and Ofsted made a special mention at the last inspection of the integration between children of different faiths and races. In the recent SATs results, the school also came in well above the national average in all subjects.
Steve Langford, a Warwick University economics graduate, is himself a bit of a paradox. He is Church of England on both parental sides and only became interested in Judaism when he worked in a Jewish summer camp in Massachusetts in his gap year. His interest paid off when he got a teaching job a King David. Now he is learning Ivrit at evening classes and goes to Israel for holidays.
The Rabbi of Birmingham's Singers Hill Synagogue, one of the financial backers of King David, is proud of Steve Langford and of the school's extraordinary interfaith record.
"King David School is amazing," says Rabbi Tann. "The reason I think it works well is that racism is engendered entirely by adults. Children don't have it within themselves. Their natural mode is to play happily with everyone. It's only when adults say, 'Don't play with him, he's black, or don't have anything to do with him, he's Muslim, that troubles begin.'
"We never have any racial or inter-faith problems at all. Not ever. In 20 years here, it's simply never happened in any significant way. We teach that if you don't like someone, you avoid them. Don't play with them. Go to the other side of the playground. I believe that if more people followed the lead of King David School, we'd have a much more peaceful world."

Philadelphia Peace Walk 2007

This is a 30 minute video of the Third Annual Philadelphia Interfaith Walk for Peace and Reconciliation. I have been involved with the group that plans this walk for the last two years.

Little Mosque on the Prairie - Season 1 Episode 1

A small prairie Muslim community butts heads with locals when their new spiritual leader arrives.