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December 25, 2005
Dear Board Member,
A Mini-Nahum Goldmann Fellowship in Teheran
We have just learned that the Iranian alumni of the Nahum Goldmann
Fellowship organized a mini-Nahum Goldmann Fellowship in Teheran
this fall, in cooperation with the Teheran Jewish community. Twenty-five
young people from all over Iran, including Teheran, Isfahan and
Shiraz participated. The Teheran Jewish Community provided the
accommodations and kosher meals.
The main organizer of the Fellowship, Elham Abai, a twenty-eight
year old computer engineer from Teheran, advised us that the inspiration
for this incredible event came from the Nahum Goldmann Fellowship
alumni - Arash Abaie, Farjad Aframian, Marjan Yashayaei, Naghmeh
Aghel, Mahyar Cohenbash, Shahram Shahrad and Elham herself - who
participated in Nahum Goldmann Fellowships XII, XIV, and XVI in
Sweden, Uruguay and Sweden. Elham is the designer and editor of
the Teheran Jewish Community’s website and magazine.
The Iranian program followed, in an abbreviated fashion, the Nahum
Goldmann Fellowship model, consisting of lectures and workshops,
visits to local organizations and institutions, including the
Great Synagogue, and sight-seeing in the old Jewish quarter. Arash
Abaie, Marjan Yashayaei and Mahyar Cohenbash also served as faculty.
There were also meetings with the leadership of the Teheran Jewish
community, with whom the Iranian participants exchanged ideas
and discussed communal concerns.
The Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture – Iranian
Connection
The connection between the young Iranian Jewish leaders and the
Memorial Foundation is itself a remarkable story. Sometime during
the winter of 2002, after we announced our plans to organize an
International Nahum Goldmann Fellowship in Sweden in August, 2002,
we received a communication from the president of the Teheran
Jewish community expressing interest in the program, which they
learned about from our website.
They advised us that the improved relationship between the Iranian
Jewish community and governmental authorities had created conditions
that would allow them to participate in an international Jewish
cultural event outside of Teheran. They told us they were prepared
to recommend several young people as candidates for the Fellowship.
There then ensued a long correspondence mostly dealing with technical
details concerning visas and travel arrangements. It was a cliff-hanger
until the very last days before the fellowship, when we were able
to finalize all the arrangements. I vividly remember the thunderous
applause from the other fellows (who had come from nineteen countries
around the world) that greeted the three Iranian fellows when
I introduced them at the orientation session the first evening
of the seminar. The warmth of their initial welcome was maintained
throughout the seminar, despite occasional muted differences in
political outlook.
They eagerly consumed the cultural content of the program, which
like all the other Nahum Goldmann Fellowship programs, was on
the highest level, despite what we thought were their cultural
deficiencies. We were truly surprised to learn from Prof. J.J.
Schacter that at his workshop on Jewish Biblical texts when he
began quoting numerous Biblical texts, Arash Abaie, who was sitting
alongside of him, was completing them under his breath. Arash,
the cultural affairs director of the Teheran Jewish community,
is multi-talented Jewishly, teaching religious subjects in the
Jewish high school and serving as chazzan at his synagogue.
We learned from the other Iranian fellows that Arash, during Purim,
rushes from one synagogue to another in Teheran to assure that
all who are interested can hear the reading of Megillat Esther.
Arash is deeply committed to the training of Jewish educators
and leaders for the dwindling Jewish population in Iran.
Even more ardently, the Iranians sought connections with their
counterparts around the world, as well as with the faculty, who
all responded in kind. Many warm relationships were established
at this fellowship and the subsequent ones in Uruguay and Sweden
that continue to this day, sometimes accompanied by various forms
of support and assistance.
The integration of the Iranians into the Nahum Goldmann Fellowship
program has grown progressively. It is expressed in the much more
relaxed personal interchanges at subsequent fellowships that would
appear remarkable to any outsider.
Two highlights of Nahum Goldmann Fellowship XIV and XVI demonstrate
how deeply embedded in the group the Iranians became. At the pre-Shabbat
program late Friday afternoon in Uruguay, an Argentinean Ashkenazi,
Gabriel Romarowski, was joined by Naghmeh Aghel on her Iranian
drum in a moving rendition of the Yiddish folk song about the
Sabbath “Oib Ich Volt Gehat Koyach”. The closing banquet
reflected the complete fusion of the Iranians into the diverse
cultural strands present at the fellowship. Naghmeh, the Iranian
drummer, led fellows from France, Argentina and England in an
Iranian song and a dance in which a Chinese convert to Judaism,
and others joined. Naghmeh is a teacher in the Jewish kindergarten
and primary school in Teheran.
In Sweden last summer, Shahram Shahrad was the star on a panel
of outstanding Jewish scholars contemplating the role of the Sabbath
in contemporary society, with his description of how a Sabbath
is experienced in Teheran today. Both his presentation and person
were embraced with real affection by the fellows from all corners
of the Jewish globe, from Montevideo to Moscow. Shahram, who can
trace his family history to Isfahan, the predominant Jewish city
in the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great, serves as a leader
of Gisha, the Jewish youth organization in Teheran and director
of its theater group.
The Nahum Goldmann Fellowship has emerged as a small, but critical
bridge between young Iranian Jews and the larger global Jewish
community.
Most remarkable of all to us is that the mini-Nahum Goldmann Fellowship
in Teheran was the first spontaneous effort by Fellowship alumni
in a Diaspora community to replicate what they experienced in
their home community. We are working to multiply such similar
events in other Jewish communities with Nahum Goldmann Fellowship
alumni.
The Iranian mini-Nahum Goldmann Fellowship is the best demonstration
of the potential impact of determined and inspired young Jews
and the power that inheres in the Nahum Goldmann Fellowship program.
Robert Berman
Another example of the impact of an inspired alumnus of the Nahum
Goldmann Fellowship is Robert Berman, an American who participated
in the 10th International Nahum Goldmann Fellowship in Glamsta,
Sweden in August 2001.
A young man with a broad and eclectic range of talents, Robert
Berman has been a social activist for many Jewish causes. His
most meaningful accomplishment, reflecting his dedication to Jewish
values, humanitarianism and social justice, has been as founder
and director of the Halachic Organ Donor Society (HODS).
Robert Berman became aware of the vital need for Jews to volunteer
as organ donors in the late 1990s while working as a freelance
journalist in Jerusalem. While researching an article about organ
donation in Israel, he learned that in one 12-month period over
100 Israelis died while waiting for organ transplants. In the
United States in a comparable year, over 7,000 people died while
on the waiting list for organs. He learned very quickly that many
Israelis and diaspora Jews were opposed to organ donations because
of a traditional Jewish aversion to the procedure, sometimes on
halachic grounds.
When he returned to the United States, he enlisted the help of
Stephen Flatow, whose twenty year old daughter Alisa had been
murdered in a 1995 Palestinian terrorist bombing in the Gaza Strip.
Her parents decided to donate her organs while she was brainstem
dead and on a respirator, ultimately saving the lives of three
people.
Realizing he had to overcome widespread reluctance among Jews
generally and Orthodox Jews in particular, Robert solicited the
opinions of important rabbis and Halachic authorities in the United
States and Israel. As Robert explains, while Jewish law prohibits
any derivation of benefit from a corpse, most rabbinic authorities
agree that pikuah nefesh, the saving of a human life, overrides
most other halachic restrictions.
The halachic dispute with regard to organ transplants revolves
mainly around the definition of death, since the optimal time
to harvest organs for transplant occurs after brain death, while
blood may still be circulating through the body. Once the heart
stops beating and blood stops circulating, tissue degeneration
often renders organs unfit for transplant. Robert Berman does
acknowledge that other respected halachic authorities assert that
death occurs only once the heart stops beating.
The Halachic Organ Donor Society, which Mr. Berman established,
allows potential organ donors to choose when they would allow
their organs to be removed for transplant - after brainstem death,
or once the heart irreversibly stops functioning.
Robert Berman, devotes most of his time and energy nowadays to
advocating support for organ donation and disseminating information
on the religious issues involved. He has truly given expression
to the Biblical imperative “Vchay Bahem”, to give
life through Torah.
Robby, as he is affectionately known, also deserves a mazal
tov on his recent engagement to Miriam Moschytz.
Helmbrecht’s Walk
On April 13, 1945, five hundred and eighty Jewish women were forced
to march two hundred twenty five miles in twenty-two days from
the Helmbrecht’s Labor Camp in Germany to the Czech city
of Volary, during which many of them died. Susan Silas, an artist,
was able to re-construct the march route with the help of a court
transcript of the 1969 trial in Germany of Alois Dorr, a former
camp commandant.
On the fifty-third anniversary of this event in 1998, Susan Silas
walked the route of the Helmbrecht death march and produced, with
the support of the Memorial Foundation, a visual representation,
consisting of haunting photos that tell the painful story of a
landscape that has forgotten this part of its past. No memorials
have been erected along the route of the death march. Helmbrecht’s
Walk was exhibited this past November and December at the Kofler
Gallery in Toronto.
Susan Silas contends that her work, a visual representation retracing
the steps of victims, performed by a secondary witness, can serve
as a portable memorial that avoids the problems of large public
memorials. The latter allow a certain forgetfulness by becoming
repositories for memory that displace the actual memory sites.
In Memory Affects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary
Witnessing, a book dealing with artists born after the second
World War who are working in the field of the Holocaust, Dora
Apel, its author, believes that Silas' type of conceptual art
may be more adequate to the complex task of the presentation of
the Nazi genocide, given the post-modernist mistrust of art’s
ability to describe the indescribable.
In addition to this exhibit, Susan Silas has also produced, with
Foundation support, a CD and Artist’s book dealing with
the Helmbrecht’s death march.
Best wishes for a joyous Chanuka.
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Jerry Hochbaum,
Executive Vice-President
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