Jewish man from Plymouth files employment discrimination complaint with state agency

By MORDECAI SPECKTOR

A Plymouth man has filed an employment discrimination complaint with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, contending that he was fired from his job for wearing a Star of David pendant.

In the statement filed with his complaint, William E. Broze says that he worked for Cherne Industries, Inc., of Edina, as a machinist for 29 years. Problems developed when the company issued a new policy manual in August 2009, which changed the dress code for employees, according to Broze. An addendum to the policy manual spelled out restrictions on wearing jewelry.

In his statement Broze explained that the new dress code banned jewelry in the workplace, “with the exception of stud earrings and earrings which hug the ear; the only necklaces that could be worn were medical alert necklaces with a break-away chain which were worn inside the shirt. I asked if I would have to remove my necklace and I was told that I would have to.”

In a Sept. 2 meeting with the company president, Joel Statts, Broze said that he was not sure that he could comply with the policy that prohibited him from wearing a Star of David pendant (which Broze refers to as a “Mogen David”). He says that he wore the necklace and pendant inside of his shirt.

Broze says that Statts warned him that he needed to remove the necklace or face suspension.

“I again stated that I did not feel that I could remove the necklace, which as always was beneath my shirt,” Broze says in his statement. “Mr. Statts took my employee badge and told me that I was suspended, pending investigation.” Broze says that a supervisor then escorted him from the building.

On Sept. 4, Broze says that he met again with Statts, and his supervisor, Steve Carlson. “Mr. Statts read a letter to me explaining that I had been terminated for insubordination and failure to comply with company policy,” Broze says in his statement. “I shook hands with both men, thanked them and told them how much I had enjoyed working for them. I was escorted from the building.”

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Two local plays — Jack and Rochelle and A Report on the Banality of Love — offer divergent views on relationships during a cataclysmic time in Europe

By DORIS RUBENSTEIN

A Report on the Banality of Love, the current production at the Minnesota Jewish Theatre Company, is a play not for the faint of intellect, nor for the faint of tushy. The hour-and-three-quarters-long play is performed without an intermission, which is necessary so that the audience does not lose its concentration on this highly demanding script.

The play tells the story, over time, of two of the 20th century’s most admired philosophers — the Jewish Hannah Arendt (Carolyn Jenson) and the German Martin Heidegger (Dan Hopman). It is a story of courage and cowardice, of intellectual and physical passion, of truth and deception. In other words, don’t expect a chorus line or a shoot-out at the OK Corral, unless you can make the leap from bullets to words as weapons of personal destruction.

Reviewed: Jack and Rochelle and A Report on the Banality of Love

A superficial synopsis of the play boils down to professor meets student; professor seduces willing student; professor and student refuse to break it off over the course of 25 years. Across their numerous encounters, we learn the how and what of their romantic and intellectual relationship.

The playwright, Mario Diament, is liberal here in his references to persons, works and events philosophical, artistic, historical, psychological, and in his use of rhetoric. Don’t feel bad if you don’t catch all the names dropped; only college professors like Diament and his protagonists are going to have the Ph.D.s needed to recognize them all.

Diament and director Anne Byrd make clever use of a video of four “academics” (Sean Byrd, Anna Olson, Kurt Schweickhardt and MJTC’s own Artistic Director Barbara Brooks) who appear at the opening of each scene to conduct a rarified analysis of the Arendt-Heidegger relationship, and the pros and cons of one of the play’s — and history’s — questions: Was Heidegger a Nazi or not?

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Saadia Gelb, a pillar of Kibbutz Kfar Blum in Israel, was the forerunner for a generation of progressive Labor Zionist youth

By MORDECAI SPECKTOR

Many American Jews feel a strong loyalty to Israel, and some even make aliya. And then there was Saadia Gelb.

The former Minneapolis resident, by way of Borislav, Poland, was a founder of Habonim, the Labor Zionist youth movement formed in 1935. In 1947, before Israel was a state, Gelb, his wife, Helen (née Malinsky, also of Minneapolis), and their three children made aliya, and settled on Kibbutz Kfar Blum in the upper Galilee.

Gelb died on Jan. 17. He was 96.

Remembrance

A graduate of North High and the University of Minnesota, Gelb, according to a timeline on a memorial Web site (saadiagelb.com), was employed at Kfar Blum as a “fisherman, [Caterpillar] D8 operator, field worker and storekeeper.” In 1955, Gelb was appointed treasurer and vice chairman of the Upper Galilee Regional Council; and, in 1957, he was elected general secretary of Kfar Blum, and concurrently as general secretary of the Kiryat Shemona Mapai (Israeli Workers Party) branch. (Mapai, David Ben-Gurion’s party, was the dominant force in Zionist politics. It merged into the Israeli Labor Party in 1968.)

Although he declined to run for a seat in the Knesset, preferring life on the kibbutz, Gelb was a friend of such legendary Israeli figures as David Ben-Gurion, the Jewish state’s first prime minister, and Golda Meir. He met Meir, who lived for a time in Milwaukee, Wisc., in 1932, and they stayed in touch over the years.

Gil Mann, a Golden Valley resident and Gelb’s nephew, recalls that one of his cousins in Israel received a wedding gift from Golda Meir. He told the Jewish World last week that he visited his uncle many times at Kfar Blum, most recently in 2008.

“He was a hero to me, in so many ways…. I’ve always been moved by his idealism, by the sacrifices he made to live his dream, by his devotion to his Judaism, to the Jewish people — to all people,” said Mann. “He cared about injustice wherever he saw it, whether it was to an Arab or to a non-Jew or a Jew.”

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In Jewish homes around the world on the evening of March 29, the 14th of Nisan, families will sit around the seder table and recount the story of the liberation of our people from cruel bondage in Egypt. We are commanded to refrain from eating leavened bread during the eight-day holiday; also, we are commanded to tell the Passover story to our children: “And you shall explain to your [child] on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went free from Egypt.’”

As the Haggada instructs us: “If the Holy One of Blessing had not brought our ancestors out of Egypt, then we and our descendants would still be enslaved in Egypt. Even if we were all wise, or all full of understanding, or we were all elders who had told the story numerous times, or all Torah scholars, it is still our duty to tell the story. The more we expand upon the story, the more we are to be praised.”

So, Passover provides a time for all of us — no one is to be excluded from participating in the seder — to reflect on our liberation from slavery, and the birth of the Jewish people. And Passover’s liberation story has a universal quality that has been embraced by people suffering repression in various lands over the ages.

The Haggada for Jewish Community Action’s Immigrant Rights Freedom Seder last year, which was hosted by Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul, explained that Passover “stresses the three central themes of the Passover story: to welcome the stranger, to treat the worker with dignity, and to act as if we ourselves were once freed from slavery. Our story joins the stories of all people who have ever been in bondage, and our story compels us to work toward freedom for those who remain physically, spiritually or economically enslaved.”

In the same vein, the story in Exodus was embraced by African-American slaves in the South. The exodus of the Jews from Egypt became a parable for their freedom struggle. The analogy between the Jewish enslavement in Mitzraim (Egypt) and black slavery in the Old South is expressed in the spiritual “Go Down, Moses”: “Go down, Moses, Way down in Egypt’s land. Tell ol’ Pharoah, Let my people go.”

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It was media preview day today for the extensively publicized new exhibit, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Words That Changed the World, at the Science Museum of Minnesota. The exhibit of the earliest version of the Hebrew Bible opens tomorrow at the museum in downtown St. Paul opens and runs through Oct. 24.

The Israel Antiquities Authority has provided artifacts and five scroll fragments for this show, which is seven years in the making. Because the ancient scroll fragments are extremely fragile, the five scrolls on exhibit will be displayed for 90 days, then they will be replaced by five other scrolls; a third set of five scroll fragments will conclude the exhibit.

From the Science Museum’s press release:

The scrolls, which are approximately 2,000 years old, include fragments of the earliest known texts of the Bible and are regarded as one of the most significant archaeological finds of the 20th century. After their initial discovery, archaeologists have excavated and pieced together tens of thousands of scroll fragments into more than 900 separate documents — from biblical manuscripts and commentary to religious legal writings. These ancient Hebrew writing fragments are now archived and conserved by the Israel Antiquities Authority and, on rare occasion, are put on public display at world-class museums.

The question posed by the Star Tribune coverage was: “Can Dead Sea Scrolls live up to hype?”

Religion writer Jeff Strickler quoted Michael Wise, professor of Hebrew Bible and ancient languages at Northwestern College in Roseville: ”We are a culture that revolves around hype. Every time I stand in the line at the grocery store I see huge headlines about Brad and Angelina. We use these words so much that they no longer mean anything.”

The words we see in the Dead Sea Scrolls have come down to us through the ages and influenced the course of Western civilization. Families — Jewish, Christian and of other faiths — likely will be fascinated by this exhibit.

Apart from ancient Indian burial mounds, and some artifacts in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Judean Desert scrolls are among the most ancient items now in Minnesota. At the media preview, Alex Jassen, professor of early Jewish history at the University of Minnesota, told me that the Dead Sea Scrolls were the literature of their day, a time before the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, had been completed in more or less the form that we know today.

I also was interested in writings from the scrolls that did not make the final cut in the Bible. Jassen discussed the Book of Enoch, for example, which was a popular text of the ancient Aramaic-speaking Jews. Enoch is quoted in the New Testament, but is not found in the Tanach.

Hava Katz, chief curator of the “National Treasures” for the Israel Antiquities Authority, also was on hand today. She told me that her agency was pleased to be collaborating with the Science Museum. And she mentioned that the Dead Sea Scrolls have been exhibited throughout North American, Europe and Japan, since they were discovered in 1947, by a Bedouin shepherd in the famed Qumran caves by the shore of the Dead Sea.

Two of the scrolls now on exhibit in St. Paul — the Genesis and Temple scrolls — have never been on public display, neither at the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem or anywhere else, according to Katz.

***

The scroll fragment from the book of Genesis pictured here  will be part of the third set of five scrolls. It depicts Genesis 48: 8-10, which describes the patriarch Jacob and his blessing of Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. Below is a translation of an excerpt of this fragment:

And Israel beheld Joseph’s sons, and said, “Who are these?” And Joseph said unto his father, “They are my sons, whom God hath given me here.” And he said, “Bring them, I pray thee, unto me, and I will bless them.”

— Mordecai Specktor

Dr. Sabina Zimering’s story of masquerade and survival is again brought to life at History Theatre through March 21

By DORIS RUBENSTEIN

It’s always hard to do a good job when your boss is looking over your shoulder. For the actors in Hiding in the Open, which premiered Feb. 25 at the History Theatre in St. Paul, it’s even harder to perform well with the real-life protagonist of your play sitting in the audience.

Hiding in the Open, directed by Hayley Finn, tells the survival story of St. Louis Park resident Dr. Sabina Schwartz Zimering and her sister Helka. It is based on Zimering’s memoir of the same name and adapted for the stage by Kira Obolensky.

A Theater Review

The play has yet deeper roots in Minnesota because it owes its genesis to a Star Tribune article written by Peg Meier, also in the audience on opening night — another reason for an actor to be jittery.

Despite all these pressures, the cast of Hiding in the Open does an admirable job of bringing Zimering’s story of masquerade, deception, intrigue, loyalty, altruism and hope to the stage.

American Jewish World readers know that one way for Jews to survive the Holocaust was to take on Christian identities, and this was the survival method of Sabina (Elise Langer) and Helka (Devon Solorow), who are mere teenagers when the story begins in 1939 Poland.

Their family is forced to leave their comfortable, middle-class home to share an apartment for three years with grudging strangers in the ghetto. Scenic designer Erica Zaffarano does an excellent job of creating a sense of imprisonment for the family with her use of sparse props of metal and metallic gray to enclose the family’s room and the ghetto outside their window in Act One.

At their mother’s urging, and with the help of their caring Polish teacher (Laura Esping), the sisters obtain false identification papers and start their journey across Poland and Germany. This is the first, but not the last time that they encounter and are helped by Righteous Gentiles whose memories are planted at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

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In a world premiere, choreographer Stuart Pimsler adapts an evocative children’s book for the stage

By MORDECAI SPECKTOR

In the first collaboration between Stuart Pimsler Dance and Theater and SteppingStone Theatre, choreographer and dancer Stuart Pimsler chose to adapt the children’s book Tales of a Gambling Grandma by Dayal Kaur Khalsa.

Pimsler says that “as a rookie father,” he read the book to his daughter, “when she was quite young. I became fond of [Khalsa’s] work. My Grandmother’s Tsotchkes: Tales of a Gambling Grandma, which will have its world premiere March 12-28 at the theater in St. Paul’s Historic Hill District, stays true to the book and adds some new elements.

Khalsa, a New York City native, told the story of an immigrant woman who embodied “a combination of street smarts and old-world superstition,” according to Pimsler. In adapting the work of the illustrator turned author, Pimsler weaved in stories and life lessons passed on by his own grandmother in New York — along with her treasured keepsakes from the Old World, hertsotchkes.

During a conversation with the Jewish World last week, Pimsler discussed the creative process for his latest work — the first stage adaptation of a book by Khalsa — and how his cast of mainly non-Jewish young actors approached the material.

My Grandmother’s Tsotchkes tells the story of a Jewish Russian immigrant and her American granddaughter, May, through dance and movement. The grandmother offers such pearls of advice as, “Always keep borscht in the refrigerator in case the Cossacks come to your house in Queens!”

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