David J. Litvak

Bellingham’s new shul

Rabbi Joshua Samuels holds thecongregation’s Torah from Lithuania. (photo by David J. Litvak)

Congregation Beth Israel in Bellingham, Wash.,started out its life as a Lithuanian Orthodox shul in 1908. Today, thecongregation is housed in a stunning building in the woods, on 20 acres ofland.

The newly constructed synagogue opened its doors in March of this year to serve the spiritual and cultural needs of Reform and Conservative Jews of Bellingham and Whatcom County, Mount Vernon and the Skagit Valley, the San Juan Islands and even Jews from Metro Vancouver.

Several weeks ago, for instance, the congregation hosted a screening of a film about Israel, The Original Promise, which was produced by Fraser Valley resident Bill Iny (who is a member of Vancouver’s Congregation Beth Hamidrash) in conjunction with the Northwest chapter of StandWithUs, an advocacy group for Israel that has chapters in the United States, Canada and Israel. The screening, which attracted more than 100 Jewish and non-Jewish attendees, featured a panel discussion moderated by Beth Israel’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Joshua Samuels.

This event is one of many that the Pacific Northwest synagogue has hosted since relocating. However, while the synagogue building may be new, it houses a nearly 300-year-old miniature Torah from Lithuania that was commissioned in the mid-1700s by a czar of Russia.

Samuels said the czar gave the Torah to his doctor, one of Samuels’ Lithuanian ancestors, and the Torah has remained in his family ever since. His great-grandmother – hiding the Torah in a big coat – fled Lithuania with her children to the United States, joining her husband in Fargo, N.D., where he had found work.

The tiny Torah, said Samuels, has “lived in Fargo, Long Beach, California, San Francisco (I read from it for my bar mitzvah) and then it followed me after my ordination to Los Angeles and now is with me here in Bellingham.”

A Torah is meant to be chanted and studied, he noted. And, in Bellingham, he has used it on special occasions, such as on the second day of Rosh Hashanah and for the Shabbat of Bereishit (his Torah portion), as well as for b’nai mitvzah studies, and he has taken it to Bellingham high schools and to Western Washington University. He wants students “to see the beauty of a Torah scroll and to hear it chanted.”

“It’s the highlight of any visit,” he added.

Samuels also took the Torah to a cousin’s bar mitzvah in California and will take it to Jerusalem next month for his niece’s bat mitzvah, he said, “so that she can read from as it as her mother did 33 years ago.”

When he travels with the Torah, said Samuels, “I feel like I am a concert musician traveling with a Stradivarius – I think about it all the time, even if it is in a cushy case right above my seat.”

Bellingham’s Congregation Beth Israel. *(photo by David J. Litvak)*

Samuels, who is a fifth-generation San Franciscan – his family arrived in San Francisco during the gold rush – worked in the stock brokerage business in Los Angeles and San Francisco before deciding to make a major life change. “I felt a gentle nudging to take another path in life and, after some soul-searching for about three years, I applied to rabbinical school at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion,” he said.

After studying in Jerusalem and Los Angeles for five years, Samuels was ordained in 2010. He began his new career at Temple Beth Hillel in Valley Village, Calif., before coming to Bellingham to become Beth Israel’s spiritual leader in July 2012.

Congregation Beth Israel was established in 1908 with 30 families, including Jews from Germany and Lithuania. The synagogue was Orthodox until 1986, when it became a Reform shul and joined the Union for Reform Judaism, which, at that time, was called the Union of American Hebrew Congregations.

The congregation has grown to include 275 families and moved to its new building from a synagogue on Broadway that was built in 1925 (and was recently sold). The new building was built to accommodate the congregation’s growing community, drawing worshippers throughout the region and from as far away as Surrey, White Rock and Chilliwack, to attend services and the Sunday school. (For the Canadian congregants, there is the added bonus of being able to shop at Trader Joe’s after Sunday school.) The synagogue also hosts a Conservative minyan on the fourth Saturday of every month.

While the new synagogue opened its doors in March, Samuels said the construction began after he arrived in Bellingham in 2012. “The reason it took so long to build was to avoid incurring any debt,” he said. “Just as the early Bellingham Jews bought the Broadway building outright, we wanted to do the same with the new space.

“The state-of-the-art facility that we built can accommodate our needs for at least the next 100 years.”

Bellingham’s Congregation Beth Israel is set on 20 acres. *(photo by David J. Litvak)*

The sanctuary can seat more than 500 congregants, and there is an outdoor patio overlooking the woods that can accommodate almost as many. The building has 10 classrooms, two kitchens, a preschool, library, study space and tons of storage.

Since March, the congregation has hosted a variety of activities, including several StandWithUs events, a concert featuring Seattle musician Chava Mirel and one with Bellingham klezmer band What the Chelm (who performed at the synagogue’s grand opening in August), a Purim party and a second-night Passover seder. In addition to being able to host holiday parties, Samuels said, “We were finally able to host the High Holy Days in our own shul after years of renting space around the city.”

And the congregation continues “to look for opportunities to host events, speaker series, movies, classes, etc.,” he added. As well, they would like to participate in more cross-border collaborations, he said.

Samuels believes that his Lithuanian ancestors would be happy to see their tiny Torah in its new Bellingham home, at the shul in the woods. He said the Torah reminds him of his grandfather Jack (Yaacov), a real mensch who died when Samuels was 7. His grandfather – whose mother had brought the Torah to the United States – helped build a synagogue in Fargo.

“He is present every time I see the Torah,” said Samuels. “I wish I could travel back and meet my family and tell them that everything is going to turn out just fine. Their legacy is alive and well.”

David J. Litvak is a prairie refugee from the North End of Winnipeg who is a freelance writer, former Voice of Peace and Co-op Radio broadcaster and an “accidental publicist.” His articles have been published in the Forward, Globe and Mail and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. His website is cascadiapublicity.com.

Israel has some allies

In a wide-ranging lecture addressing Israel’s place in a rapidly changing Middle East, Prof. Asher Susser claimed that, without a continued focus on cutting-edge technology and modernization, Israel will not survive in the long run.

Susser, who is a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, spoke at the Ohel Ya’akov Community Kollel in Vancouver on Aug. 9. The event was presented by the Kollel, Canadian Friends of Tel Aviv University, Congregation Schara Tzedeck and Vancouver Hebrew Academy.

The professor believes that the key to Israel’s survival is its universities, which he described as the “powerhouses of Israel’s future.”

“Without that basic education, we will not have the wherewithal to withstand the absurdity of the neighbourhood,” he said.

In opening the evening, Kollel director Rabbi Shmulik Yeshayahu noted the “tough neighbourhood” in which Israel lived.

Stephen J. Adler, executive director of the Canadian Friends of Tel Aviv University’s Ontario and Western Canadian division, said that TAU is not only the largest educational institution in Israel, with more than 33,000 students, but that it also houses the largest research centre in the country. He highlighted the university’s affiliations with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and also with the Sackler School of Medicine in New York. Adler said TAU alumni have created, among other things, technological innovations like the Iron Dome and the navigation app Waze. Adler invited members of the Vancouver Jewish community to come visit the TAU campus, then introduced Susser, “one of our treasures.”

Susser has taught at TAU for more than 35 years and was director of the Moshe Dayan Centre for Middle Eastern and African Studies for 12 years. In addition to various visiting professorships in the United States over the years, he teaches an online course on the Middle East that has been taken by more than 85,000 students in more than 160 countries, including attendees of the Vancouver event. He is the author of several books, including Israel, Jordan and Palestine: The Two-State Imperative, On Both Banks of the Jordan: A Political Biography of Wasfi al-Tall and The Rise of Hamas in Palestine and the Crisis of Secularism in the Arab World.

Susser discussed the root causes of some of Israel’s past successes – including its ability to modernize and the Arabs’ failure to do so – and remaining challenges. One of those challenges, he noted, is the conflicting narrative regarding the establishment of the state of Israel.

“These narratives are not just slightly different between Israel and the Palestinians, but they are completely contradictory and have virtually nothing in common,” he said. “I would say that this is one of the major reasons why Israel and the Palestinians have such great difficulty coming to terms with each other and the difficulties remain.

“Our narrative,” he continued, “is a heroic story of the self-defence of the Jewish people,” which represents “literally rising from the ashes of Auschwitz to sovereignty and independence from 1945 to 1948, in three very short years.” This was viewed, he said, as “a miraculous redemption and justice for the Jewish people” but is viewed by Palestinians as “the epitome of injustice.”

Susser also noted that the establishment of Israel, wherein “the few against the many” prevailed, is, ultimately, “a monument to Arab failure.” He said, “For the Arabs, when they look at us every day for the last 70 years, it is to look at the monument [of] their failure to modernize successfully.”

He pointed to the Six Day War as a turning point that “proved that Arabism is an empty vessel.” And he listed three reasons why Arab states have failed to advance: a lack of political freedom, a lack of first world education systems and a lack of economic equality and inclusion of women in the workforce.

These weaknesses in Arab civil society, he said, have led to “a human disaster” that has “prevented Arab countries from advancing,” and is worsened by the sectarian divisions that exist in Arab countries. The one exception, he said, is Jordan, which is a stable state in large part due to the fact that its Jordanian and Palestinian citizens are Sunni Muslims.

“Israel’s major challenges now come not from the strength of the Arab states but the weakness of the Arab states,” said Susser. Unlike the period between 1948 and 1967, when Israel was threatened by Arab states like Egypt, Israel is now threatened by non-Arab states like Iran and non-state actors like Hezbollah, Hamas and ISIS. The problem, according to Susser, is that, “You can’t destroy Hamas or Hezbollah in six days.”

“Fighting the non-state actors is a much more difficult prospect,” he said. “These non-state actors are less of a threat to Israel but ending the conflict with them is a lot more difficult.”

The threat from Iran – which he considers to be one of the three principal non-Arab Middle Eastern powers (along with Turkey and Israel) – is “not necessarily that the Iranians will drop a bomb on Israel,” he said. The main problem is “the constraints that a nuclear Iran will pose to Israeli conventional use of military force.”

“If Israel is attacked by Hamas from Gaza or by Hezbollah from Lebanon, or by both of them together, and Israel wishes to retaliate by conventional means against these two Iranian proxies with a nuclear umbrella provided by Iran, will Israel have the freedom of operation to do it?” he asked.

One other challenge Israel faces, said Susser, is demography. He noted there are six million Israeli Jews and an equivalent number of Arabs residing in the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, including the West Bank and the Palestinian citizens of Israel. “Can Israel remain a Jewish democracy with these demographic realities?” he wondered.

Susser concluded on a somewhat optimistic note. The conflict between the Shiites and Sunnis, he said, has allowed Israel to forge alliances with Sunni Arab nations like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, all of which, he said, “have common cause with Israel to block Iranian regional hegemonic design.” In addition, he noted, “We have cooperation with Jordan against ISIS and its allies, so the idea that Israel is against everyone in the Middle East is not the reality.”

An accidental journey

Salvador Litvak was in Vancouver for a Shabbaton at the Kollel last month. (photo from Salvador Litvak)

At a Kollel Shabbaton last month featuring Accidental Talmudist and filmmaker Salvador Litvak, no one was asking that age-old Jewish question, “When do we eat?” In fact, on the night of June 23, during the first of three sessions with Litvak, more than 100 attendees sat spellbound as he shared the love story of his Hungarian grandmother Magda, who survived the Holocaust in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Litvak, who was born in Chile and now lives in Los Angeles, recalled his grandparents’ story and how Magda’s death led to an epiphany that jump-started his spiritual journey. According to Litvak, witnessing his grandmother passing to the next world, where she was welcomed by his grandfather Imre (who was murdered in the Holocaust), was one of the seminal experiences of his life and it eventually resulted in his becoming an “accidental Talmudist,” with many detours along the way.

Litvak revealed his story in stages over the next two days at the Kollel, which brought him to Vancouver as part of its “focus on creating and promoting exciting and meaningful, social, cultural and educational programs that invite people to experience Judaism … in an inclusive, comfortable, joyful and nonjudgmental environment,” said Kollel director Rabbi Shmuel Yeshayahu.

Over the course of the weekend, Litvak shared a drash about the Torah portion, led an interactive workshop on Sunday about discovering one’s life’s mission and traced the stages in his life that led him to create the Accidental Talmudist blog, which attracts more than one million readers (Jews and non-Jews). He also spoke about how he came to embrace his Jewish and Hispanic roots.

Litvak’s journey has been an unconventional one. In fact, during the Sunday workshop, he jokingly claimed that “smoking pot got him into Harvard” because, after the incident, his father forced him to become a runner, which led to his becoming a champion cyclist. These extracurricular activities, said Litvak, helped him get into Harvard, where he took pre-med courses but ended up at New York University Law School. When he wasn’t in the classroom, he spent time in Greenwich Village. “I was a law student by day and a poet warrior by night,” he said.

Going back to his childhood, he said, “I was born in Santiago, Chile, that’s how I ended up with such a crazy name as Salvador Litvak, which is very similar to Jesus Goldberg.”

Like most kids, he was concerned about fitting in, despite several disadvantages. “I already had foreign parents, I was too tall, my hair was bright red, unruly, a mop, and there was no way I was going to fit in,” he said. So, while he agreed with his parents’ plan for him to go to Harvard to become a doctor, he made a decision in Grade 3 to use his middle name Alex instead of Salvador because “it made him feel more American.” It wasn’t until attending a Latino Students Association annual black tie gala at NYU that he would reclaim his Latino heritage.

Litvak had not attended any of the organization’s prior events because he had only felt nominally Hispanic. He attended this one with his girlfriend on a lark because he could wear his tux and get a free meal. When he found out, to his horror, that he would have to make a speech at the gala, he thought of leaving, but then realized that “all of the events of my life had actually coalesced into this moment for a reason.”

He seized the moment and shared with the audience how he’d been passing for 17 years as a white-bread American, and vowed to use his Spanish name, Salvador, from that day forward. Even though he wasn’t plugged into Judaism during his NYU days, this reclamation would be the first step for him to also reclaim his Jewish identity. “I let that moment be a key moment in my life,” he said, “because I knew that G-d was speaking to me and was saying to me, be who you are; you can’t do anything in this world if you aren’t who you really are.”

Litvak graduated, and practised corporate law for a short time before abandoning that career (much to the chagrin of his father) to become a filmmaker. This led to another milestone in his Jewish journey – producing and directing what is now a holiday comedy classic, the story of a Passover seder gone awry entitled When Do We Eat?, starring the late Jack Klugman in his final film role, as well as Lesley Ann Warren, Max Greenfield and Ben Feldman.

By his own admission, When Do We Eat? – which was realized with the help of his wife Nina and his Vancouver cousin Horatio – is a “very irreverent and raucous movie.” Even though the movie, which is about the “fastest seder in the West,” had a deep Jewish message based on sparks of kabbalah and Chassidut, it was panned by major media like the New York Times and Roger Ebert as being anti-Jewish. Nonetheless, word-of-mouth led to the film becoming a cult classic and a Passover tradition for many Jews around the world.

While Litvak had a bar mitzvah, he wasn’t particularly connected to his Jewish roots until the day he walked into a bookstore called 613 – The Mitzvah Store in the Pico Robertson district of Los Angeles and picked up a book called Berachos. It led him on the next leg of the spiritual journey that had begun with the passing of his grandmother.

He learned from the clerk at the bookstore that he had picked up the first book of the Talmud on a special day. The Talmud is read by many Jews all over the world as part of a worldwide program called Daf Yomi (literally, “Page of the Day”). It takes seven-and-a-half years to read the whole Talmud and Litvak had bought Book One on Day One of the program. He decided that this was not a coincidence and embarked on a seven-and-a-half-year talmudic journey, which led to one of his most memorable spiritual experiences: participating in a siyum (or concluding ceremony) at MetLife Stadium in New York with 93,000 Jews.

So, picking up that book of Talmud “accidentally” at a bookstore in Los Angeles set Litvak on a journey that inspired him to establish the Accidental Talmudist blog, which features Jewish wisdom and humour, and music from Jewish artists like Matisyahu, Peter Himmelman and the Moshav Band, as well as a live weekly show that is seen in more than 70 countries. Aside from connecting Jewish souls, the blog has introduced new fans to When Do We Eat? and there are plans for an Accidental Talmudist book and movie.

As we continue to ask that vital question, “When do we eat?”, Litvak will continue to connect Jewish souls one matzah ball and one page at a time.

For more information about the Accidental Talmudist, visit accidentaltalmudist.org. For information on the new Daf Yomi class at the Kollel, led by Asaf Cohen daily, at 8 p.m., visit thekollel.com.

David J. Litvak is a prairie refugee from the North End of Winnipeg who is a freelance writer, former Voice of Peace and Co-op Radio broadcaster and an “accidental publicist.” His articles have been published in the Forward, Globe and Mail and Seattle Post Intelligencer. His website is cascadiapublicity.com. He is not related to Salvador Litvak.