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Scholars-in-residence
program
Presentations are free; kosher meals moderately priced
● Rabbi
Yakov Horowitz, founder, Project Y.E.S. (Youth Enrichment Services)
for
Agudath Israel, Jan. 4-5
● Rabbi Ari
Kahn, director, Foreign Student Programs,
Bar Ilan University, Israel, Feb.
22-23
Call us for details at (619)
287-9890, Reserve Shabbaton meals before January 2
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THE VIEW FROM JINSA
Turkey and U.S. join to fight Kurdish terror
By Shoshana Bryen
 WASHINGTON, D.C.—For the past several days, Turkey has been conducting air strikes against the PKK in the mountains of northern Iraq, using intelligence provided by the United States. It is worth a look at the sequence of events in US-Turkey and US-Kurdish relations.
Relations between the US and Turkey have been rocky since the accession to power of the AKP government and its refusal to grant the US permission to enter Iraq from Turkish soil, complicating the early stages of the war. In addition, Turkey's decision not to join the coalition minimized its impact on political and military arrangements in the north after Saddam's fall. On the other hand, Turkey has permitted the US to resupply the troops, and is today the largest investor in Northern Iraq, wedding itself to the forces of
Shoshana Bryen
stability and free markets in the mainly-but-not-only Kurdish area. At the same time, Congressional flirtation with a resolution on Armenian history infuriated the Turks, and Iraqi Kurdish failure to deal with remnants of the PKK living in the mountains of the north - and receiving support from Iran, which holds the back end of the mountains -infuriated them more.
The PKK, the Kurds and the government of Iraq all seem to believe that the American commitment to securing Iraq's borders would ensure that Turkey would absorb cross-border PKK terrorism without response. Not so. Dozens of soldiers and civilians have been killed inside Turkey and Turkey has indeed gone after the perpetrators. The Iraqi government has pronounced itself "outraged." An adviser to Prime Minister al-Maliki, said, "We deplore the interference in our territory... we want to solve this problem through peaceful negotiations and diplomatic means."
It may, in a backhanded way, be a good thing that the Baghdad government finds itself defending, at least rhetorically, its northern province and northern citizens - the Shiites and Sunnis have had trouble figuring out where Kurds belong in the new Iraq. But the Iraqi government should first "deplore" terrorism that takes place from its territory, not Turkey's response.
The PKK is to the Kurdish people what Hamas, the PIJ and the PLO are to Palestinians. They are the terrorist wing of people who have grievances - some of which are legitimate and some of which are not; some of which can be resolved politically and some of which cannot be solved at all. Diplomacy is the art of managing what can be managed, but nothing can be managed as long as people and their representatives protect and support terrorist organizations.
The US and Turkey have fundamentally compatible interests in the broader region and American intelligence support for Turkey was right and necessary. At the same time, as Israel has learned with its Gaza experience, air strikes alone will not solve the problem. The US should be ready to step in with multiparty diplomacy, but only when the ground rules are understood - the PKK cannot be party to any talks and the talks will be for the purpose of figuring out how to close off support of the PKK and providing additional stability for the countries of the region.
THE JEWISH CITIZEN
Animals represent people at Skirball's imaginative, interactive Noah's Ark exhibit
By Donald H. Harrison
 LOS ANGELES – If you have young children or grandchildren, an excursion worth making a New Year’s resolution for is a visit to the Skirball Cultural Center’s permanent Noah’s Ark exhibit, which opened in June.
Filled with hundreds of plush puppets and imaginative, hand-crafted, life-sized animals made from recycled materials (or as Skirball personnel describe them, “re-purposed” materials —a new word for me), the 8,000-square-foot multi-room environment is a place where several themes derived
Donald H. Harrison
from the biblical tale of Noah’s Ark are taught to the young, eager, and impressionable visitors.
“We try to take the main chapters of any flood story—the storm, arks and rainbows,” educator Verno Urquiza explained to me last Friday, when Nancy and I visited the exhibit along with grandson Shor, 6; niece Caren Ford and her husband Craig, and their children Ashlee, 11, and Tyler, 9.
“There are storms in our lives. We weather those storms, and the way we weather those storms is how we get our fulfillment and learn new things. And there is a rainbow when the storm is over and there is a new beginning, another chance…. We hope by the end of the journey they have learned about team work, cooperating and recycling perhaps.”
 
Some of the animals are kinetic—you can twirl the hind-quarter of the zebra, for example, so it looks like a chunky black and white barber pole. Pull a rope on the catwalk and an elephant hanging above lifts its trunk and issues a trumpeting sound. Find some plastic fruit, and you can put it into a pouch and by using a pulley raise the meal to the animal figures above. Or, if you’re more adventurous, you can climb up the Burmese Ascent of the ropes and challenge course to visit the animals in the upper perch.
The exhibit is conceptualized for children between the ages of 4 to 8, which put Shor right in his element. Tyler and Ashlee were technically a little old for Noah’s Ark, but they enjoyed being “big siblings” to Shor, re-living the younger years of their childhood by participating with him in the activities. Their reactions, according to Noah’s Ark project director Sheri L. Bernstein, was fairly typical. In fact, not only do older children enjoy coming but often adults without children like to come as well, drawn by the craftsmanship that went into the ark and the animals and the happy effect it has on the children.
Tickets to the exhibit range in price from $5 to $10 depending on age and are timed for two-hour visits, with the first slot of noon ending at 2 p.m. People are let into the ark every half hour, each wearing a quite visible time tag. If you have a 12:00 p.m. tag, you’d be quite conspicuous at 2:30 p.m., so social convention keeps the flow self-policing.
 After allowing perhaps a half hour for the group to explore, Urquiza and other educators announced there would be a special activity on the deck of the ark—a lesson in rhythm. Neither Noah nor his wife, sons and daughters-in-law are within view on this ark; instead the educators anthropomorphize the animals. “When it was music time, do you know what the animals did?” Urquiza asked the children. “They put on their animal ears (colleagues cupped their ears to indicate that they were listening). Can you put on your animal ears? We are in the ark, where all the activity is calming down. Everybody is creating a big space by putting on their ears and taking a deep breath. Can you take a deep breath? Everybody ready? 1-2-3. Ahhhh. Okay one more deep breath: Ahhhh. That’s the best note of all, the silent note, if you want to start to make music.”
The children remarkably became calm, the educators began passing out percussion instruments. First, they distributed scratchers, then bells, then shakers, and then drums. The educators smiled at the inevitable cacophony, then had the children put their animal ears back on. Instruction began. “So why
don’t we start off with what is called ‘Call and Response?” he said. “First I will play something and then you will repeat it. “ He hit his drum in a two-note, three note pattern. The children got right into the groove.
“What is a different rhythm we hear every day?” Urquiza asked. None of the children ventured a guess. “How about a heart beat?” he suggested. “Can you do a heart beat? Lub-dub, lub-dub.” The children imitated heart beats on their instruments.
Later in the lesson, Urquiza suggested that names also have rhythms. He asked one girl her name. “Eve,” she said. (She must have stayed beyond her own parsha, I thought to myself). Urquiza pointed to a boy eagerly raising his hand. “What’s your name?” “Shor.” And then to another boy: “Duran.”
Okay, he said, “Eve-Shor-Duran; Eve-Shor-Duran, do you hear the rhythm?” 1; 1; 1-2, the kids pounded it out.
In one of the last activities, Urquiza pointed to an imaginary hole in the ceiling of the ark, where the rain was getting in and causing a puddle on the lower deck. (This could have been a major problem for Noah and his wards, I thought). “What do we want to do every time we step in a puddle of water?” Urquiza asked the children. “Splash!” they replied correctly. “Splash, that’s right, so that’s what we will call this game.” Urquiza got up and balanced on one leg. “Every time I take a step, you play a note on your instrument.” He put his other leg down to a chorus of percussion instruments. “Bam, bam, bam, bam,” sounds accompanied his next four steps.
He invited another boy up; I think his name was Robert. The youngster had a wonderful sense of rhythm and soon was doing a lively dance on the ark’s lower deck as the percussion section tried to follow along. His dancing and their enthusiastic rhythm keeping were exhilarating. I half expected “Robert” to do a break dance, but he contented himself with what we might consider an animated rain dance. It was a fitting finale for a lesson that the educators suggest went far beyond the rhythm.
Shor, Eve, Duran, Robert, were children of different ethnic backgrounds. Although the Skirball is a Jewish museum, its purpose is to celebrate the diversity of which Jews are a part. It intends to teach children that like the animals, we are all in the same ark together, and that if we are to weather the storm, we must cooperate with each other—even as the children cooperated to make music.
Bernstein, a former San Diegan (Patrick Henry High School, Class of 1983), went to Yale for her bachelor’s degree and to Harvard for her master’s degree and doctoral work in art history. She worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) before joining the Noah’s Ark development team in 2001. The Skirball Cultural Center had been open since 1996.
She said that when Uri D. Herscher, the Skirball Cultural Center’s founding president and CEO, “was envisioning what it would be , he thought of having it primarily for children. He wanted a place that would be a gathering space, a safe haven. He thought that the Jewish people are not safe and at home unless everyone is. So he felt he wanted it to be a place that always welcomed people from across different cultures and communities. He felt that children were a great place to start in terms of uniting people.”
Herscher, exhibit developer Marni Gittleman, and others in the team “seized on the idea of Noah’s Ark as being a perfect vehicle, a thematic unifier, given that Uri knew he wanted it to be about community… and the idea of how you bring together people of different places and experiences and of how we all have to survive together,” Bernstein said.
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“What he liked about it too was that it was a story in the Hebrew Bible, yet it was a story that preceded Abraham, so it was not only for Jews. Noah was not a Jew, and so he could be universal, everyman…. What we learned was that there were flood stories, numerous flood stories in other cultures, ancient narratives, so again there was that kind of appeal that seemed to have general human interest. A huge flood takes place and people survive. Also, kids know the story and like it. We did a lot of front-end testing to see how many people knew the Noah’s Ark story. We went to schools, talked to family groups.
“After the decision was made to go with Noah’s Ark, we were gifted a collection of folk-art Noah’s Arks from all over the world—a selection of which is on view, and so we had this treasure too. All those things pointed to Noah’s Ark; all roads led to Ararat.”
Once the idea crystallized, development took five years. The world-famous architect Moshe Safdie, who designed the Skirball Cultural Center, participated in the selection of the team for Noah’s Ark, the people who would put a ship in his bottle. The Seattle firm of Olson Sunderg Kundig Allen was selected even though “they never had designed for children before. They didn’t even specialize in interactive (exhibits), yet they blew us away with their submittal,” Bernstein said.
 The firm’s proposal “had a lot of the feeling of this place as it is today,” Bernstein continued. “We used a lot of natural materials, organic materials, with some of the wood for the puppet animals being Forest-Council-certified wood, meaning it has been harvested according to sustainable practices. The re-purposed objects presented figures that were amalgams of all different things, but we thought it was so whimsical. They just seemed to grasp the spirit of the whole project, and they loved the iconic element. They liked the idea of the massive ark, the storm. They understood the power of the story for us, and we knew it would be a priority project for them.”
Jim Olsen of that firm designed the ark, and his partner Alan Maskin designed most of the exhibits. Puppeteer Chris M. Green of New York built the large sculptures and kinetic and semi-kinetic animal puppets.
“There are a number of reasons that we use recycled materials, the most obvious of which, particularly in today’s culture, given contemporary concerns, was that we wanted to show the re-purposing of things within the context of caring for the environment. “ Given that animals are stand-ins for people, “we wanted to show them as whimsical, vulnerable, diverse, and all these different objects, put together, brought them to life….They have faces and there is an emotive thing that happens, an affective response in visitors which we wanted. They are not meant to be artsy sculptures; they are really meant to come to life, but not in a way that pretends they’re real. The idea is to bring the spirit of the animals to show them in their whimsy. They are each a combination of so many things: just like each of us is the product of so many different influences.”
Why are Noah and God absent from the exhibit, I asked Bernstein.
“The focus of the Skirball as a Jewish cultural institution is more cultural than it is theological, and sort of more humanistic in its orientation,” she replied. “We did our own midrash, so to speak, on the Noah’s Ark biblical story, interpreting it to be about how we survive in the world. It is taking a more horizontal approach than a vertical one, looking not at the relationship of man to God, but at the relationship of humans (as represented by the animals) to each other.”
I am Resolving to Be More Resolute
By Sheila Orysiek
 SAN DIEGO—‘Tis the season for invoking new resolutions, resurrecting some which failed, re-affirming ongoing resolutions and dumping others.
Therefore I resolve:
To buy grapes whatever they cost….I’ve spent my money on less deserving items. It’s not the cosmic “principle of the thing” - it’s about eating some grapes. Leave cosmic principles to cosmic causes.
Resist adopting a new kitten. The pain of losing two long time feline friends (19 and 16 yrs respectively) is simply too sharp to contemplate again. Conversely, at my age the cat might very well outlive me and thereby perhaps end up in a less than happy situation. This is a difficult resolution to keep - I need a cat around to keep my manners honed and my priorities in
Sheila Orysiek
perspective. Cats insist upon both perspective and proprieties and without one I tend to get sloppy.
Ever since fourth grade I’ve been making yearly resolutions to improve my deplorable handwriting. But now I’ve resolved to end this obviously unproductive use of my time - that’s why keyboards exist.
Continue my lifelong pursuit of reading history but remember to enjoy each day as I inhabit it.
Try to forgive our educational system for not teaching enough history which leads me to……….
Be more understanding (or less shocked) when a forty-five year old 4.0 university master’s degree candidate doesn’t know on which day Washington’s Birthday really occurs. Or doesn’t know where Columbus landed because she doesn’t know where the Caribbean Sea is. Or that California was not among the original thirteen states.
Remember to listen more than I speak - this is truly difficult for me. It’s definitely a work in progress - ok - well, more like an inchworm progressing along. But, inchworms eventually get where they are going. So, there’s hope.
Continue heeding the Rabbi’s sermon from the Torah against gossip. I’ve seen the positive fruits of this and want to continue and expand it. To be seen by my friends as a gossip-free zone.
Turn off the TV news every time a pop culture item comes on (who’s sleeping/break up with who or which sports thug is going to prison) parading as important national news.
Don’t talk back to the TV - it can’t hear me - and doesn’t care what I say if it could. (And, throwing something would be more efficacious anyway.)
Keep in mind that what happens on the national or international scene is not something for which I am personally responsible or can change in any way. It is my concern, but not within my power.
Continue to be very careful never to interfere in my son’s family life. When they come they come, when they call they call. This is working - they come and call very frequently - to my delight. When they ask for my advice, I offer it. When they want me to know something, they’ll tell me. Otherwise it’s none of my business.
Listen to more Klezmer music - really speeds up the housekeeping. (A small chocolate reward helps too.) (A large chocolate reward helps even more.)
Smile inwardly when contumely as a response to my views comes my way - and then quietly go on and enjoy my day with a prayer for the person who has felt the need to assault me.
Stop bragging about my huge, wonderful, unique, ingenious, inventive, exquisite, witty, beautiful, totally handmade (no kits allowed) eight room doll house with parquet, carpeted, hardwood, pegged broad plank and tiled floors, hand painted wall paper, mullioned windows, slatted shutters, draperies, crystal chandelier, wainscoting, furnishings, including a miniature menorah, piano, harp, library and game room, complete kitchen down to the apple pie ingredients, etc. And continue to enjoy all my other craft projects.
Stop worrying about what other people are thinking when I walk around in the supermarket muttering out loud “do I need bread?” - because everyone else is talking to themselves, too. (Of course, they have cell phones - which I don’t.) No matter. How do I know they are REALY talking to someone on those phones?
Try to remember that when a sock disappears in one day’s wash it will turn up again in the next wash - it isn’t an international conspiracy of socks versus humans.
Stop sighing when I see young dancers doing what I once was able to do. It’s their turn - my time is done. And be happy I can still do a double pirouette.
Ask myself at the end of each day if I was a force for good that day - or just a force. And, try again tomorrow.
Continue to make cookies for my seven month old grandson (wanna see pictures?) even though he has no teeth yet.
Resist the toy/clothes section in the children’s department of every store I pass. (On second thought - why should I resist?) And better yet….
Go into every children’s department of every store I pass.
Pray for courage rather than cure - not many people die of good health.
Stop arguing with TurboTax.
Eat a few less (just a very few less) of Tim’s low fat/low salt potato chips.
Enjoy the fact that in retirement Monday is as wonderful as Saturday and Sunday.
Ask for pizza with more sauce and less cheese (to keep my scale happy).
Don’t complain when I hear noisy sirens and just pray for those for whom they sound.
Be an oasis of peace for the people around me. (This will take work)
Stop spending time wondering how the necklace chains in my jewelry box got mixed up - and that it probably wasn’t an orgy.
Keep clipping grocery coupons for the Navy Marine Relief so our military families can save some of their money.
Buy stocks in a particular famous candy company in Southern California so I will have a very good reason to eat more of their dark chocolates.
Continue my Yiddish studies - which I’m enjoying hugely - so this is an
easy one.
Try not to love beautiful clothes so much (this ain’t gonna happen).
And, no, just one more dress isn’t going to somehow fit into the five closets (one of which is an 8 X 10 ft. double stacked room) already filled (this goes along with the resolution above). Ditto shoes, purses and see below…..
Convince myself that six drawers stuffed with beautiful shawls is enough (one can never be too rich or have too many shawls).
Stop expecting my husband to fix things he isn’t qualified to fix: plumbing, carpentry, roofing, siding, painting, refinishing, wiring, appliances, cars, pouring cement, major tree trimming, landscaping, tiling, laying carpets, three room house addition, pulling out tree stumps, installing new windows, restringing drapes, grouting, re-stuccoing the house and other small jobs.
Remember to appreciate the things he is able to fix - like this computer.
Keep looking up when I walk. If I look down I may find a penny, but if I look up I’ll see the sky. I don’t need any more pennies; I’ll never have enough sky.
Continue to write about the things that interest me - but not necessarily more resolutions.
And last but not least - keep in mind that it doesn’t have to be eternal to be immortal which is a good reason to stop right here.
SAN DIEGO JEWISH WORLD THE WEEK IN REVIEW
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 30
Shoshana Bryen in Washington, D.C.: Bhutto assassination proves that turmoil in Muslim world is not about the Jews
Rabbi Baruch Lederman in San Diego: The spouse who is waiting just for you
Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal in San Diego: Any Jew can grow up to be a leader of our people
Ira Sharkansky in Jerusalem: Palestinians' violence threatens the establishment of their state, not Israel
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 28
Donald H. Harrison in Simi Valley, California: Nostalgia: Key ingredient at Reagan library
Dorothea Shefer-Vanson in Mevasseret Zion, Israel: Elementary students demonstrate their new-found knowledge of the Torah
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27
Donald H. Harrison in Anaheim, California: Disneyland on one foot
Dorothea Shefer-Vanson in Mevasseret Zion, Israel: A young man scouts way to girl's heart
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 26
Garry Fabian in Melbourne, Australia: Jews support increased aid to Palestinians ... A battle over the fairness of the beth din
Donald H. Harrison in Ventura, California: A Jewish lad experiences Christmas up close
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 25
Donald H. Harrison in Los Angeles: Pulling up the sticky vestiges of the past
Bruce Kesler in Encinitas, California: Those Jews and their Christmas songs
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