OLITZKY

National briefs

By JTA

Inclusive Judaism campaign launched

NEW YORK (JTA)—Those committed to a more inclusive Judaism can join a new coalition. Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, executive director of the Jewish Outreach Institute, announced the new outreach advocacy campaign Oct. 14 in Washington at the group’s third annual conference.

Individuals and institutions interested in joining the coalition can sign up online, he said, and will receive free outreach consultation, training and other resources. Member organizations will be posted in an online directory of “welcoming Jewish organizations, to help newcomers find you,” he said. More than 250 rabbis, lay leaders and Jewish professionals attended the three-day conference to share ideas and practices for making their institutions more welcoming to interfaith families and unaffiliated Jews. Urging attendees to be more inviting to the intermarried in particular, philanthropist and conference co-chair Adam Bronfman noted that his children, who were raised Jewish by himself and his non-Jewish wife, are sometimes told they are not Jewish. Bronfman’s wife has converted. “Rejection has unintended consequences,” Bronfman warned. “I think anyone who identifies as a Jew is a Jew.” Speaking of the American Jewish community as a whole, he said, “Our best days are ahead of us if we open our doors and don’t create a litmus test.”

Oldest Nobelist Jewish

JERUSALEM (JTA)—Leonid Hurwicz, 90, became the oldest recipient of a Nobel Prize. Hurwicz, professor emeritus of the University of Minnesota, will share the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science with economists Roger Myerson, a professor at the University of Chicago, and Eric Maskin, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., both 56. They were awarded the prize Oct. 15 for their work in mechanism design theory, a field initiated by Hurwicz and developed further by his co-honorees. Hurwicz was born in Russia and grew up in Poland, where his parents fled after the outbreak of World War I. He was studying in Geneva when World War II broke out and was forced to move to Portugual. His parents and brother were interned in Soviet labor camps.

Most U.S. Jews never visit Israel

JERUSALEM (JTA)—Sixty percent of American Jews have never visited Israel, according to the Jewish Agency. In a report to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Cabinet, Jewish Agency head Ze’ev Bielski is reported to have stressed the challenge of strengthening Jewish identity and the connection to Israel among Jews of the Diaspora, noting that 60 percent of North American Jews have never been to Israel. The statement also noted the very limited relationship of hundreds of thousands of young Jews in the former Soviet Union with Israel.

Congress scrutinizes survivor funds issue

WASHINGTON (JTA)—A U.S. Congressional hearing has drawn attention to the dearth of funds awarded to Holocaust survivors. Florida Congressman Robert Wexler (D-Fl.) led a hearing on Oct. 3 on Capitol Hill to show how few funds the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims awarded to Holocaust survivors between 1998 and the time it closed its doors this spring. Wexler has drafted The Holocaust Insurance Equitability Act (H.R. 1746) to seek an opening of insurance company records in Europe and grant American survivors the ability to have their claims addressed in United States Federal Court.

Wexler, who heads the Subcommittee on Europe of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, heard testimony from survivors who’d been denied their insurance claims by the international Holocaust commission. Alex Moskovic, a Boca Raton resident who at the age of 14 was the only member of his family to survive the Auschwitz-Birkenau and Buchenwald concentration camps, told the committee that he’d found evidence of his relatives’ life insurance policies on the commission’s Web site, but had received only a $1,000 humanitarian award, as did 31,000 of the 48,000 survivors who received restitution through the program. Wexler estimates that only 3 to 5 percent of Holocaust survivors’ insurance policies have been paid. No one from the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims testified during the hearing, but the commission’s director, Lawrence Eagleburger, said last month in a letter to New York Governor Eliot Spitzer that he firmly believed “that our efforts brought some measure of justice to the lives of thousands of survivors.”

Steinhardt hosts birthright alumni

NEW YORK (JTA)—Philanthropist Michael Steinhardt hosted some 800 alumni of birthright Israel at his estate. Steinhardt, who initiated the birthright program and is among its primary funders, brought in U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Newark Mayor Cory Booker to address the crowd. The event was one of a growing number of follow-up activities for the 144,000 Jews aged 18 to 26 who have taken the free trips to Israel since they were first offered in 2000. “The hope is that you will all become proud Jews,” Steinhardt, a former hedge fund mogul, told the crowd. “The hope is that you will be proud to take one of the many Jewish paths, and only you can decide what is the right path for you.”

Vandals strike sukkah

NEW YORK (JTA)—Police are investigating the vandalism of an off-campus Chabad House sukkah at a California university. Anti-Israel statements including “End Israeli Occupation” and “Free Palestine” were spray-painted on the inside of the sukkah at the University of California, Davis. Rabbi Shmary Brownstein, co-director of the Chabad House, said it was the first time in more than four years on campus that he’s had to deal with sukkah vandals. “This is a sukkah,” he said. “The existence of it is a religious requirement and not a political statement in any way.”

Karsenty visits U.S.

NEW YORK (JTA)—The activist sued for claiming that French TV faked the murder of a Palestinian child visited the United States. Philippe Karsenty, director of the media watchdog group Media Ratings, was invited to discuss European-U.S. relations at an Oct. 2 forum sponsored by the Heritage Foundation in Washington. Karsenty was found guilty of defamation for claiming that a French television station faked the murder of Mohammed al-Dura, a Palestinian boy whose apparent death at the hands of Israeli soldiers in 2000 was caught on video and instantly became an icon of the Palestinian struggle. Last month, an appeals court ordered the station to show the court 25 minutes of raw footage that is said to reveal the killing as a hoax. Karsenty told JTA his story has received virtually no coverage in France and that he is in the United States to raise awareness. “France is a little USSR,” he said.