The students at Associated Hebrew Schools of Toronto are tooting their own horns now that it looks like they have broken the world record for the largest shofar ensemble.

Last week, the school’s community gathered together to blow 1,406 shofars simultaneously, shattering the prior record of 796 set in Boston in 2006. The new record will not be official until the school submits evidence of the feat to Guinness, and it is approved.

Associated, as the school is known among Toronto Jews, was able to pull off such a stunt because it is the largest Jewish day school in the city. It has more than 1,600 students on three campuses. In addition to the students’ bringing in shofars from home, the school held shofar-making workshops so that each student in grades 1-8 could make their own from a ram’s horn.

Then, of course, came the issue of teaching all the children how to blow a shofar. Principal Eric Golombek reported that the kids were really into it. “It’s been electric. Kids have been so excited about it,” he told a local news website. The educator emphasized that the focus was not only on breaking a world record, but more importantly about doing something exciting and unifying to usher in the Jewish New Year.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

The visual metaphor in the opening scenes of “HaMorah Irena” (“Teacher Irena”), the Ophir Award-nominated documentary about a teacher in the poorest neighborhood of West Jerusalem, tells you everything you need to know about this exceptionally devoted educator. However, you don’t know that until you come to the end of the film.

In “Teacher Irena,” screening October 2 at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto, Calif., debut director Itamar Chen deftly condenses the educator’s year with her third grade class into 52 minutes. The film is short as documentary features go, but it conveys the long journey that Irena takes with her underprivileged, at-risk students.

Chen’s choice to eschew third-person narration, and never have Irena speak directly to the camera, paints a portrait of a woman who ably helps her students succeed while failing herself in important ways.

Click here to read more and view the film’s trailer.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Myriam Halberstam had very personal reasons for establishing Ariella Books, the first post-Holocaust Jewish children’s book publishing company in Germany, in the spring of 2010. The German-American documentary filmmaker and children’s book author and editor simply could not find any decent German-language Jewish children’s books for her two young daughters, who are growing up in Berlin.

“A Horse for Hanukkah,” the company’s first title, came out in German and English versions for the German market in time for the winter holiday season last year, and it sold very well.

Written by Halberstam and illustrated by American book artist Nancy Cote, it is a story about a girl who wants a horse for Hanukkah but comes to regret her wish when the Hebrew-speaking horse creates havoc during her family’s holiday celebrations. The book will be available this fall in both Germany and the U.S. A second title, a German translation of Leah Goldberg’s Israeli children’s classic “Dirah L’haskir” (Apartment For Rent) is due out in October in time for the 100th anniversary of the author’s birth.

Halberstam recently spoke with The Sisterhood about growing up in Germany, children’s book publishing, and raising Jewish children in Berlin.

Click here to read the interview.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Rabbi Amy Eilberg (photo by Rev. Steven Martin)

As the first woman to be ordained a Conservative rabbi, Amy Eilberg occupies a major place in the annals of Jewish women’s history. She has recently been squeezing her self into a very small space in the hopes of making another kind of history.

Since September 11, she and seven other interfaith clergy have been crammed into a specially decorated van traveling a large swatch of the eastern and central parts of the country. They are on the “Religious Leaders for Reconciliation Caravan,” a literal and figurative drive to “re-knit the torn fabric of American society,” as Eilberg put it in a phone interview with The Sisterhood.

The Caravan is a project of Clergy Beyond Borders, a Maryland-based conflict resolution and interfaith education organization founded two years ago by Imam Yahya Hendi, the Muslim chaplain at Georgetown University, and Rabbi Gerald Serotta, founding chair of the organization Rabbis for Human Rights.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Israeli wheelchair tennis player Noam Gershony

Serious tennis fans have likely heard of Israeli players like Shahar Peer and Andy Ram, but it’s safe to bet that most are not familiar with Noam Gershony, despite the fact that he is higher ranked than the others.

Gershony, a quadriplegic, plays wheelchair tennis. He is ranked third in the world in wheelchair quad singles, and ninth in doubles. Just this past week at the US Open Wheelchair Competition at the USTA Billie Jean King Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, N.Y., Gershony defeated David Wagner of the US, 6-3, 6-1 during a three-day round robin tournament. Wagner is the world’s No. 2 singles player and No. 1 doubles player.

According to a report by Howard Blas in the Jerusalem Post, Gershony, a 24-year-old from Kfar Sava, took his first ever tennis lessons just shortly before being paralyzed in a crash of the Apache helicopter he was flying during the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

The signature inside a children's school book that led Rosenberg to discover that it had belonged to his own Hebrew teacher.

Before and during World War II, between 30,000 and 40,000 Jewish books ended up in the hands of Julius Streicher, the infamous Nazi and editor of the anti-Semitic propaganda newspaper Der Sturmer. Today, German-Jewish community leader and former journalist Leibl Rosenberg is working to return 10,000 of them to their rightful owners.

The task is far from easy, given that few, if any, of the people from whom these books were stolen are still alive. To make matters even more difficult, only one-third of the books have stamps, signatures, ex-libris plates or bookmarks to indicate to whom they belonged.

But that has not deterred Rosenberg, who turned himself into a librarian, a Jewish and German historian, and a genealogist to catalog the collection and track down descendants and heirs of the books’ owners. He’s been at the task since 1997, and so far he has successfully restored 200 of the 10,000 books. “I don’t think we will even return more than 500,” he admits.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon

Israel will be trying to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records next week. Of course, Israel is often seen as a place of extremes, but this attempt at record-breaking has nothing to do with the usual political headlines or social disagreements.

As a nice distraction to what many fear will be a rough few days next week as the Palestinians seek statehood recognition at the United Nations, hundreds of Israelis will gather at various universities, science institutions and museums around the country September 22 to simultaneously conduct a science experiment that the late Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon did in space. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where the Ilan Ramon Youth Physics Center is located, is spearheading the project.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Just before the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I noticed that a new blog called “SheAnswersAbraham” went live on the Web. The timing was not coincidental, as it is a deliberate effort by a group of three women – a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim – to put an interfaith conversation about sacred texts out into the world with positive energy.

Each Friday, a different sacred text will be the subject of commentary and personal reflection from each of the three faith perspectives. The sources of the texts will follow a rotation through the different traditions. The first text discussed was “And God said, ‘Let us make a human in our image, according to our likeness….’”from Genesis 1:26.

The authors of the blog want to be known only by the pseudonyms “Tziporah,” “Grace,” and “Yasmina.” Readers can glean some basic information about their backgrounds from the short bios posted on the blog.

A little sleuthing led me to the Jewish member of the trio, who is currently the one taking care of the blog’s publishing logistics. She told me that the three women met through local interfaith programming in their Southern state, but that at this point they all feel strongly about keeping their identities anonymous.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Naftali Moed (photo by Bruce Higgins)

There could be no better place for the garden at Oceana High School in Pacifica, Calif., than where it is located — just outside the cafeteria. The 8,400-square-foot garden is a concrete reminder to the 600 students and 35 faculty members of the unique opportunity they have to personally engage in sustainable agriculture and learn about environmentalism and healthy eating.

The garden is there thanks to the vision and initiative of Naftali Moed, one of the school’s students. The 17-year-old senior recently won a $36,000 Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Award, given by the Helen Diller Family Foundation, a supporting foundation of San Francisco’s Jewish Community Endowment Fund, for his exceptional leadership in turning a gravel lot into a thriving mini-farm and site for environmental education.

The wiry, yarmulke-wearing Moed lives in Pacifica with his two mothers and his sister, Shoshana, who is a freshman at Oceana. The family are active members of the Coastside Jewish Community, an inclusive, nondenominational community of 80 families living in Pacifica, Half Moon Bay and the other coastal communities south of San Francisco.

A half-hour conversation with Moed makes abundantly clear the reason that he was singled out as a remarkable teen role model. Moed’s poise and ability to articulate a clear explanation of his project, his expert knowledge on and passion for gardening, and his evident concern for those around him make it more than likely we will be hearing much more about him and his contributions to Jewish environmentalism in the future.

Click here to read the interview.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Keshet, an organization that works for the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Jews in Jewish life, has issued its first three “Jewish LGBT Change Makers” posters through its Hineini Education Project. When I took a look at them online, I was immediately reminded of the Jewish Women’s Archive’s “History Makers” (formerly “Women of Valor”) posters.

The similarity is both good and bad. It’s a good thing because I have always loved the JWA posters. They began being published when I was early in my teaching career, and were a great educational resource. “What an attractive and attention-grabbing way to introduce students to historical figures like Glikl of Hameln, Rebecca Gratz, Molly Picon and Emma Lazarus,” I thought.

Indeed, some people agreed with me. I have seen the posters hanging, laminated or framed, in a number of Jewish community and educational institutions. But for the most part, when I have seen them, they were not so well taken care of. And therein lies the bad thing.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

If it could work for the Holocaust, an Algerian rabbi’s cat, and a Birthright Israel trip, then it could also work for a Jewish day school governance and administration case study. So thought Ken Gordon, social media manager at the Boston-based Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, and he was right.

Looking for a way to re-imagine “A Case Study of Jewish Day School Leadership: How Way Leads on to Way” written by Professor Alex Pomson of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Gordon turned to author and graphic novelist Steve Sheinkin, author of the Rabbi Harvey series, asking him to use his graphic storytelling skills to give the 50-page case study a second life on PEJE’s webzine, “Sustained!”

Click here to read more and see the entire comic.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

This post first appeared on The Shmooze blog of the Forward.

Liza Minelli is squeezing into her busy concert schedule this fall a special one-off performance at the White Rose Charity Ball in London on September 25. The event will be a fundraiser for the Holocaust Centre.

The Holocaust Centre, established in 1995, is Britain’s first dedicated Holocaust memorial and education center. It is located on the grounds of a former farmhouse on the edge of the Sherwood Forest and houses a permanent exhibition, research and seminar facilities, and a rose garden for personal reflection.

The White Rose Ball is named for White Rose Group, a non-violent, intellectual resistance group against the Nazis made up initially of students and professors from the University of Munich. It eventually expanded to include students from Hamburg, Freiburg, Berlin and Vienna. Six core members of the group were executed by the Nazis in 1943.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Dust off those rams’ horns and keep checking your Facebook updates and Twitter feeds. There’s going to be a worldwide shofar flash mob on September 18 and you are not going to want to miss it.

Art Kibbutz NYC is hosting “the greatest Shofar-blowing event since Sinai” as a massive call for teshuvah during the month of Elul. To the extent possible, the flash mobs will be coordinated across various global locations. All the flash mobs will be recorded and combined by a composer into an electronic Rosh Hashanah greeting card.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

“Everything is back to normal today” at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City at the lower tip of Manhattan, according to Associate Director Abby Spilka.

Spilka was afraid this was not going to be the case when she left the Museum late Friday, after taking precautions against the possible effects of Hurricane Irene. “Currently, we are all feeling the 10th anniversary of 9/11, and there are things that will put us back to that morning. When I was told to evacuate and pack up, not knowing what I would return to, it was harder than I was expected it would be. We were all so relieved that the Museum fared well and we couldn’t wait to get back to work this morning,” Spilka said.

Despite the evacuation orders issued by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, four members of the Museum’s security and operations staff hunkered down on site for the duration of the hurricane. Spilka and other senior staff were in touch with them throughout, checking in for regular updates.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Some "Kids of Courage" enjoying San Francisco with their counsellors, despite the chilly summer weather.

Festive balloons and round tables with colorful covers decorated the outdoor courtyard at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto. Buffet tables were piled high with barbecue-style food, and others overflowed with candy — from Red Vines to Lemonheads to giant lollipops. Adrenalin-pumping pop music punctuated the lively environment.

It was a typical JCC kids’ party, and yet it wasn’t.

Over half of the guests were in wheelchairs, and several were on ventilators. Some sported bald heads, while others were missing limbs. One boy was born without a face. Each was attended by at least one specially trained counselor. Some had two or three chaperones.

The group of 150 young visitors — with 50 complicated medical conditions, chronic and life-shortening diseases — came from all over the world for a weeklong, whirlwind Bay Area tour with Kids of Courage, a N.Y.-based not-for-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of children and young adults with serious illness and disabilities.

Accompanied by 250 volunteer counselors and medical staff, the youths experienced the rare opportunity to live it up far away from home after flying to San Francisco from 16 locations, including Israel, Canada and England.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

A student pointing to a Yiddish alphabet chart at the Sholem Aleichem College in Melbourne, Australia

For some Jewish day schools, there is no teaching Yiddishkeit without Yiddish. Buoyed by the Yiddish renaissance of the past two decades, which has produced an increased interest in university Yiddish programs, a renewed interest in Yiddish theater and even the advent of Yiddish heavy metal bands, these schools have held steadfast to their Yiddishist roots and missions.

“We are a Yiddish school,” principal Helen Greenberg said proudly of the Sholem Aleichem College in Melbourne, Australia.

But Greenberg’s school is one of only a handful like it around the world. Despite its global resurgence, Yiddish is part of the core curriculum of just a few non-Orthodox day schools in far-flung locations around the globe.

Hipsters may be reciting Yiddish poetry in coffee houses in Tel Aviv and New York, but not many day schools are making room in their packed class schedules for the mameloshn.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Well, it’s not quite in the same vein or of the same tone as Judd Apatow’s public service announcement for the American Jewish World Service, but it does feature a few celebrities.

The Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation’s brand new PSA has Liev Schreiber, Larry King and Edward Zwick — along with a former partisan and her granddaughter — inviting the public to JPEF’s tribute dinner scheduled for November 7 in New York. In particular, these celebrities are asking the public to spread the word about the tribute to any partisans who are still alive and to their families and friends. JPEF hopes to have as many former partisans as possible attend the dinner to be honored, along with all partisans who fought the Nazis and their collaborators in WWII.

Click here to read more and view the PSA.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Though the recent purchaser of the diaries of the notorious Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele wishes to remain anonymous, he also wants Dr. Mengele’s artifacts to be available for all to see.

Haaretz reports that the purchaser, a modern-Orthodox physician from the U.S. Midwest who bought the diaries and related materials at auction for $245,000, told the newspaper that he believes that his motives have been misunderstood. He, the son of Holocaust survivors, says he is interested in turning Nazi items not into commodities, but rather into educational tools against evil.

Aware that Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Jerusalem had initially expressed interest in the 3,000 pages that Mengele wrote while in South America between 1960 and 1975, the new owner of the diaries has begun communicating with the museum about the possibility of a loan.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Chen Efrat, who died of an allergic reaction to nuts

Headlines about a 26-year-old woman with a nut allergy recently dying from eating Nutella at a Tel Aviv restaurant have been a popular topic of conversation over the past couple of weeks in Israel.

Chen Efrat’s death has been a stark reminder to Israelis of the gravity — and sometimes, fatal nature — of food allergies. Health authorities have begun to raise awarenessof the prevalence of food allergies and to try to get people to take the issue more seriously. Efrat had reportedly asked the restaurant’s waitress repeatedly to check whether the chocolate spread in the Belgian waffle desert she had ordered was Nutella or not, and she was assured that it was not — when, in fact, it was. After being rushed to a hospital, she died several days later. Her parents have just filed a NIS 5.5 million suit against the restaurant.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Ivy Barsky (photo by Scott Weiner)

Ivy L. Barsky is changing museums, cities and American Jewish culture. As deputy director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, located on Battery Place in Lower Manhattan, Barsky worked to convey the Jewish experience through the stories of survivors. Now, as she becomes the director and chief operating officer of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, she will be interpreting it through the story of this country’s Jewish community. Barsky spoke to The Arty Semite on July 1, her first day at the NMAJH, about her work at these two cultural institutions and the role of museums in American Jewish culture.

Renee Ghert-Zand: What do you see as the role of museums in the American Jewish landscape?

Click here to read the interview.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Urban Adamah fellows. From left: Robin, Aliza, Talia and Eric. (photo by Adam Berman)

Many people believe that there is no place better to live than a big city, but Adam Berman, Executive Director of Urban Adamah in Berkeley, California, thinks so for different reasons than most. Following his dream to take Adamah: The Jewish Environmental Fellowship “to the next level,” Berman has gathered a dozen like-minded young fellows to help him get the first independent Jewish community urban farm off the ground — literally.

Berman, who founded Adamah in 2003, during his seven years directing the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut, felt it was important to establish a farming and social justice fellowship in an inner-city setting, where more people would have access to the farm’s produce and programs. The fellows, too, would have greater and more direct access to social justice initiatives addressing what Berman refers to as the “dysfunctional ago-economic system” and related issues of poverty and food security.

Click here to read more and view a video of Urban Adamah staff and fellows demonstrating how they grow food in an urban area.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

“If I could know that my daughters were the last sacrifice on the road to peace between Palestinians and Israelis, then I would accept their loss,” wrote Izzeldin Abuelaish, the Gazan obstetrician-gynecologist specializing in infertility following the killing of three of his daughters and a niece by an IDF tank shell that hit his family’s home in the Jabalia refugee camp in the final days of Operation Cast Lead in 2009. The tragic incident took place while Abuelaish was reporting live from Gaza by telephone for an Israeli news broadcast.

Despite knowing that his daughters have not been and will not be the last sacrifice, Abuelaish has nonetheless been able to forge ahead on that road better than most. “Urged on by the spirits of those he lost, his belief in medicine and his deep faith in Islam, Abuelaish offers practical ways of bridging the gaps between two peoples he believes have more similarities than differences,” wrote Canadian author Jonathan Garfinkel in his review of the doctor’s book, “I Shall Not Hate,” in The Globe and Mail last year.

One major way in which Abuelaish, 57, is bridging the gaps and working toward a more peaceful Middle East is through his Daughters for Life Foundation, which he has established in memory of his late daughters. This year the foundation is distributing its inaugural set of awards, 35 of them at 10 universities in Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. In Israel, the awards will go to students at Haifa University and Ben-Gurion University, where the first three awards were presented earlier this month.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

A just-released study on young Jews and volunteerism reveals that, although young Jews are committed to community service and volunteering, they tend not to associate that interest with their Jewish identities. This is the case despite the fact that commitment to volunteerism increases with a young Jew’s level of religious involvement. The study also found that most service work is locally based, and that Israel is not a focus for young Jews’ volunteer efforts.

The study, called “Volunteering + Values: A Repair the World Report on Jewish Young Adults” was commissioned by the service organization Repair the World and was conducted as a collaborative effort between the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University and Gerstein | Agne Strategic Communications. It used a sample of young Jewish adults, ages 18-35, from among the 300,000 diverse applicants to the Taglit-Birthright Israel program. Some survey respondents were alumni of the program, while others were not. Additional respondents were chosen through Knowledge Networks, which provides a representative sample of the U.S. population using probability-based sampling techniques.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Purse made from upcycled soda can pull-tabs

Long before anyone started using terms like “recycling,” “repurposing,” and “upcycling” (turning a disposable item like a soda can pull-tab into something intrinsically useful and longer lasting, like a handbag), our grandmothers and great-grandmothers knew a thing or two about “reusing” food packaging.

They lived in a world in which food did not come excessively shrink-wrapped or in boxes designed to scream at you from supermarket shelves, and in which “disposable” was not a term they applied to either income or things that they bought. Balebustas stored leftovers in used plastic margarine, cottage cheese and ice cream containers, reused paper grocery bags to wrap parcels and line garbage bins, and never considered putting fruits and vegetables in plastic bags before placing them in their shopping bag. So they would probably find the current dilemma of what to do with all this food packaging a bit ridiculous.

They would also probably be surprised, but pleased, to see the creative, artistic and useful products that green-conscious entrepreneurs are making today out of things like discarded yogurt containers, milk jugs, soda pop bottles, can pull-tabs and cereal boxes.

Click here to read more.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

I noticed that the inclusion of this video in today’s Jewniverse newsletter has significantly boosted its viewing stats in mere hours, as my posting it here will too. It tells a small story that is worth knowing.

© 2011 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.