Dr. Jason Fenton, the youngest Machalnik, will speak Feb. 16 about the volunteers who fought for Israel’s independence in 1948

By ERIN ELLIOTT BRYAN / Community News Editor

When Dr. Jason Fenton was just 16 years old, he signed up to fight in Israel’s war of independence — lying about his age and his experience as a pilot.

“In my boarding school, they trained us to be army officers and they also gave us flight training,” Fenton told the AJW. “I knew how to fly a little biplane; not very well, but just enough to convince the recruiters that maybe I could fly for Israel.”

Originally from England, Fenton, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, was raised in a family of religious Zionists. At 16, he was an orphan and made his way to Israel, where he joined the approximately 4,000 Jewish and non-Jewish volunteers from 29 countries who risked their lives to fight for the new Jewish state.

He was the youngest member of the Machal — an acronym meaning “volunteers from outside of Israel” who fought in the 1948 war of independence — and is dedicated to telling and preserving their story.

“In all the other wars after ’48-’49, the Israelis did it all themselves and very brilliantly. But in ’48, they had help; they had serious help from these Machal volunteers who made a huge difference in the outcome of the war,” Fenton said. “My mission is to tell the story that the Israelis didn’t tell.”

Fenton has written a book about his experience, Strength and Courage: The Untold Story of the Machal Volunteers Who Helped Win Israel’s War of Independence, and created a Web site, www.sabranet.com/machal. He has also developed exhibits that are currently on display at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles and at Ammunition Hill in Jerusalem.

Fenton has created a new exhibit celebrating the bravery of Machal volunteers that will be displayed at Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka. The exhibit, which includes 16 historical photographs and storyboards, will open with an event 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 16 at the synagogue.

Fenton, a professor who lives in California and the father of Adath member Tamar Fenton, will speak at the event. The exhibit will remain at Adath Jeshurun through March 14, when it will begin to travel to other synagogues and Jewish organizations around the Twin Cities.

The exhibit is sponsored by the Israel Center of the Minneapolis Jewish Federation, Adath Jeshurun Congregation, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, Minnesotans Against Terrorism, and Israel Market Place by Made in Israel.

Two other Machalniks, Leon Frankel and Bucky Bacaner, live in the Twin Cities.

“It seems to have a really strong connection to our community and it just made sense. I personally think it’s an honor for us to have it here because [the Machalniks] played an important role in [creating] the state of Israel,” said Eilat Harel, director of the Israel Center at the Minneapolis Jewish Federation. “We should be thanking them because they have a lot to do with our history.”

For Fenton, telling his own story and the story of his fellow volunteers is very important.

“If you go to Israel, very few young people know anything about the war of independence in general and even less about the Machal volunteers’ crucial support for the war,” he said. “And that’s why I do what I do and that’s why you got my exhibit.”

In recounting his own experience, Fenton says he first thought about fighting for Israel when he visited his sister, who worked for a religious Zionist organization. There, he saw “heavily suntanned” young men — “which is very strange in England,” Fenton said — who were recruiting for the Haganah, the predecessor of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

“I made a total pest of myself and kept saying, ‘I want to go, I want to do something, I want to fight,’” Fenton said. “They said, ‘There’s nothing going on,’ because it was quite illegal what they were doing, ‘and you’re too young anyway.’”

Fenton persisted and the young recruiters eventually told him how to get involved in the Machal underground. Fenton “bluffed [his] way through” British customs with a one-way ticket to the South of France and found his way to a refugee camp there, where he met survivors of the Nazi death camps.

“We were all waiting,” Fenton said. “We were waiting for the boats to take us on this long, difficult journey, to take us to Israel, and they were waiting for the same boats so that they could have a homeland where they could be free.”

Because he had flight experience, however limited, Fenton was eventually flown to Israel. But in addition to fighting for the Jewish state, he was also looking for his brother, Ivor, who had disappeared and was also believed to be fighting for Israel’s independence.

Amazingly, Fenton found his brother in a hospital, where he had been taken after being seriously wounded in the Negev Desert. Shortly after Fenton explained his plans to receive further flight training in Czechoslovakia, he was curiously reassigned to his brother’s unit: the Fourth Troop, First Antitank Regiment in the Negev.

“I told my brother, ‘I’m sure you saved my life,’” Fenton said. “I never would have survived trying to fly one of these dreadful so-called Messerschmitt 109s or any other planes that the Czechs were selling at that time… A lot of our pilots were killed.”

In total, 122 Machalniks lost their lives, including four women.

Both Fenton and his brother survived and are recognized on the Machal Wall of Honor at Ammunition Hill. Fenton eventually made his way back to England to finish his schooling and later immigrated to the United States, where he studied French and history at UCLA.

Now 80 years old, he is a professor of English at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, Calif. Ivor Fenton is an accountant in England and still has a bullet lodged in his chest — a “strange memento,” according to Fenton.

In addition to his daughter, Tamar, Fenton has two other daughters, Suzanne Fenton-Lieberman, also of the Twin Cities, and Mina Rush, of Los Angeles. He has 11 grandchildren and will celebrate the Bar Mitzva of his grandson, Ronen Pink, while he’s visiting Minnesota.

“I want the story to be known by young Jews so the story can live on, as it should, as a very important part of modern Jewish history,” Fenton said. “In a certain sense, we were part of that miracle that happened in 1948-1949, and of that we’re immensely proud.”

***

Dr. Jason Fenton will speak about his experiences as a Machal volunteer at the opening event for his exhibit 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 16 at Adath Jeshurun Congregation, 10500 Hillside Ln. W., Minnetonka. The exhibit will be displayed through March 14 at Adath before traveling throughout the Twin Cities.

For information, contact Eilat Harel at 952-417-2321 or: eharel@mplsfed.org.

(American Jewish World, 2.3.12)

Fred Schlomka’s business, Green Olive Tours, provides tourists with an intimate experience of Israel — and the Palestinian territories

By MORDECAI SPECKTOR

Fred Schlomka is in the travel business. If you’re visiting Israel, he can provide a licensed tour guide to show you the major attractions.

And he also can provide an English-speaking Palestinian guide to escort you around the West Bank — Bethlehem, Nablus, Jenin, Jericho and Hebron. Schlomka’s Green Olive Tours specializes in tours of the Palestinian territories — from day trips to the 10-day Palestine Immersion, which includes being “embedded” in a village.

A native of Edinburgh, Schlomka has operated Green Olive Tours for the past five years. Schlomka and his wife, Sunita Staneslow, an accomplished harpist, lived in the Twin Cities from 1990-2000, prior to making aliya.

During a recent visit to the AJW offices, Schlomka talked about his tourism business, Green Olive Tours, and the conversation inevitably touched on the complicated Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For most American Jews who have participated in a federation-sponsored mission to Israel, or visited the Jewish state as a tourist, the idea of crossing the Green Line — venturing into the Palestinian territories — likely provokes some anxious thoughts.

An American Jew might imagine that a trip to the West Bank would culminate in a robbery or murder.

“I would just refer them to the American urban crime statistics, and compare that with any city in Palestine or Israel,” Schlomka responds. “Because we have a very low incidence of violent crime in the streets — it almost doesn’t exist. And that’s true anywhere in the West Bank or Israel.”

Schlomka adds, “Tourists are valued. They bring money, and they are kind of a window to the outside world for people living in remote areas. Tourists have generally always been safe, even at the height of the Intifada. You have to be really unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But tourists are never targeted.”

In any case, Schlomka monitors the security situation on a daily basis. He said that only one tour was canceled; Jewish settlers were rioting in Hebron, so a trip to the area did not seem prudent.

Schlomka and Green Olive Tours have received some prominent press coverage recently. The Forward published a feature story about Schlomka in the Dec. 23 edition. And Green Olive Tours hosted an Al Jazeera TV news crew during an early January tour to Bethlehem and Hebron.

Schlomka told the Al Jazeera reporter what he told me about the importance of tourism, and mentioned that “Palestinians generally are more than happy to sit down with tourists, tell them their stories and have a good time with them.”

The Al Jazeera report also featured comments by Amy Cohen, obviously an American Jew, who was traveling with Schlomka’s group. “Most of the tours you do, as a Jew, are only one side,” commented Cohen, who was standing with her daughter near the 25-foot security wall separating Bethlehem from Israel. “I did that one when I was 13, a very Zionist tour; and I think it’s very important to see both sides.”

The Forward story delved into Schlomka’s biography. His father, a Communist activist in Germany, was tortured by the Nazis, and fled to Palestine in 1936. Fearing for his family’s safety in the unsettled Middle East, the Schlomkas moved to Scotland in 1948. Apparently suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, he died when Schlomka was three. Schlomka’s mother suffered a nervous breakdown and was put in an asylum. Young Schlomka and his two elder siblings were put in the care of a series of housekeepers, some of whom seriously abused the children.

Returning home from school when he was eight years old, Schlomka was told that his brother had died. He and his sister were not allowed to attend the funeral, and eventually learned that their brother had committed suicide, according to the Forward.

Schlomka was packed off to a boarding school for problem kids in the Scottish Highlands. He and a teenage friend left the country and ended up in the south of Spain, where they hit on a moneymaking scheme, selling handmade macramé jewelry. Their creations became popular, allowing the young Scots to stay in hotels.

“Schlomka has been an entrepreneur ever since,” the Forward noted.

In the early 1980s, Schlomka began visiting Israel and seeking out his mother’s family in Tel Aviv. During one of these trips he met Sunita Staneslow, who was playing harp with an Israeli orchestra. Within three months of meeting they were married. The couple have two children, a daughter who is doing a one-year stint of volunteer national service in Israel, and a son attending Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. The family lives in Kfar Saba, north of Tel Aviv.

The tourism industry in Israel has been booming in recent years, and Schlomka apparently has developed a profitable and personally rewarding niche business. He has built relationships with Palestinians “layer upon layer throughout the years.”

He mentioned that his contacts in the West Bank started with his political contacts — “the work I do for peace and justice.” Schlomka was operations manager of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions for two years. The group’s co-founder and director, Jeff Halper, is a native of Hibbing; Schlomka commented that Halper is his “oldest friend in Israel.”

Schlomka said Green Olive Tours has become well known in the West Bank, so now “Palestinian tour guides looking for work” and families eager to open their homes to tourists contact him.

The tours — which also include Jerusalem’s Old City, Masada and the Dead Sea, and Jewish settlements in the West Bank — are reasonably priced, according to Schlomka, who said that Christians outnumber Jews as his customers.

Perhaps Minnesota Jews would like to experience Palestinian reality at ground level — to see the other side.

“It’s important to hear the message of the other side, whether one agrees or not,” Schlomka replies. “And we do get a lot of people on our tours who are Zionists, who are very pro-Israel, but they are willing to come and listen, even if they don’t agree. That’s always the first step to any kind of understanding… That’s the main thing that an American Jew can get out of [visiting the West Bank] — just to come, to listen, to see. And then to take the experience and process it, because it’s usually quite an intense experience for most people who’ve never been out there before.”

And Schlomka adds, “Our guides are very friendly, and the people you’ll meet will be most welcoming, and there’s never any question about the safety.”

(American Jewish World, 2.3.12)

Far to Go, by Alison Pick, Harper Perennial, 308 pages, paperback, $14.99.

Reviewed by ROBIN DOROSHOW

Following the dedication page and before the beginning of the first chapter, Alison Pick’s Far to Go lists a dozen names of people and their years of birth and death. The first eight individuals on the list have dates of death from 1942 to 1944.

Given the Holocaust theme of the book and their relative youth at their dates of death, I assumed that they were the characters we would meet in the story — individuals who were murdered by the Nazis. The other four on the list, who live well beyond the end of World War II, I guessed to be survivors or children of those killed during the war.

Once I got involved in the story, I forgot all about this list of 12 people.

Immediately following the final page of the book appears another list, this one with 14 names, also with years of birth and death. All but the final two died between 1941 and 1943.

The second list of names is familiar — these names belong to the people who populate the pages of Far to Go. This list of people, coming as it does immediately following the story’s conclusion, seems quite real, despite the fact that this is a work of fiction.

Far to Go tells the story of the Bauer family, wealthy Jews who were passionately secular and patriotic to their native Czechoslovakia, who lost everything as the Sudetenland was relinquished to the Nazis.

The novel opens in the parlor of Pavel and Annaliese Bauer’s home, with Marta, Pepik’s nanny, listening as her employer, Pavel, tells her about the humiliation of his older brother, Misha, who lived with his wife and child in Vienna. Misha had stopped to buy flowers on his way home from work on a late Friday afternoon, when he was approached by a group of young men, who beat him, smashed his car and left him for dead on the street.

Marta couldn’t believe this was possible, but then Misha and his family lived in Vienna, not Czechoslovakia, which was free. And of course, Misha and his family were observant Jews. When Misha was beaten he had been buying flowers to take to his wife for Shabbat. Pavel and Annaliese were completely secular, even celebrating Christmas with a tree and presents for their young son. And Pavel owned a factory; he was an important man in their community.

But we soon learn that this is a delusion, and the Bauers would not be spared despite their wealth, position and disassociation from Judaism. In the end, it is the family’s young son, Pepik, who survives the war only because, after denying the reality of their situation, they are able to secure a spot for him on a Kindertransport. The Kindertransport was a series of trains that left Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, taking young Jewish children away from the clutches of the Nazis.

Far to Go provides an intimate look into the lives of the Bauer family and their nanny. Their lives are intertwined in surprising and not so surprising ways. They are bound together by fear, secrets, loss, love and betrayal. While Pavel, Annaliese and Marta do not survive the war, their children live and try to piece together their histories.

This work of fiction has an authentic feel, and we learn at its conclusion that it is loosely based on the author’s own family history. Pick’s paternal grandparents got out of Czechoslovakia with great difficulty, eventually settling in Quebec in 1941, where they lived and raised their children as Christians. The dozen names that appear at the beginning of the book are members of her own family — those who perished in Europe and her paternal grandparents, uncle and father, who survived.

In 2009, Alison Pick completed both this novel and her conversion to Judaism. Far to Go won the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction in 2011. Pick lives with her husband and daughter in Toronto.

(American Jewish World, 2.3.12)

In one of the more bizarre stories of recent years, the owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times — a small Anglo-Jewish newspaper like this one — wrote an editorial in the paper’s Jan. 13 edition promulgating the Israeli assassination of President Barack Obama.

A JTA story, which appears on Page 3 of this week’s print edition, outlines Adler’s incredibly stupid column, which was titled “What would you do?” The most grossly offensive part of the piece, which deals with three possible scenarios for dealing with Iran, suggests that Israeli leaders could “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place, and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”

Lest anyone misunderstand Adler’s premise, he clarified his third point: “Yes, you read ‘three’ correctly. Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If I have thought of this Tom Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?”

As you might expect, Adler was widely denounced by the organized Jewish community. The Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta announced that it would cut its ties with the Atlanta Jewish Times. Adler expressed regret for his editorial, and went on the Atlanta Interfaith Broadcasting network’s cable TV show, where he tearfully apologized to the wide circle of those he had offended. (You can see the interview on the AJW Web site here.)

Then, on Jan. 23, Adler announced that he would resign as publisher of the Jewish community newspaper. The AJT’s Web site features a prominent apology note from Adler on its homepage. The former publisher writes that he never advocated the assassination of the president, or wished for “the death of any individual.”

From my perspective, which I assume is shared by many in my peculiar journalistic niche, it is baffling to see a colleague do himself in, in a professional sense, by publishing one singularly idiotic piece of writing. As the JTA story notes, Obama is not universally beloved among Jews in the United States; many of our coreligionists, and their non-Jewish compatriots on the political right wing, are fixed on the idea that the president has it in for Israel.

So, Adler’s benighted column, which is preposterous from many angles — after the Jewish state assassinates the president, the vice president would feel friendlier toward Israel? — can be seen as symptomatic of an illness in the civic discourse. We are now in the 2012 election season, if you haven’t noticed somehow, and the mud is furiously flying. And the volume of attack ads this year is being buoyed by hundreds of millions of dollars in Super PAC money.

As regards Obama, the 2008 political season, in which an ascendant Tea Party movement figured prominently, was characterized by an ugly current of racism and xenophobia. I had the opportunity to ask presidential candidate Obama a question during a teleconference with Jewish newspaper editors. The then U.S. senator from Illinois was eager to speak with the Jewish press, because of the scurrilous lies — that the president was a Muslim, an anti-Semite — that had gained credence among Jews.

Before closing the book on Andy Adler, who obviously rose to his level of journalistic incompetence at the Atlanta Jewish Times, I want to amplify one strand of comments by Alana Newhouse, the editor-in-chief of Tablet, the excellent online magazine of Jewish arts, culture and politics. Newhouse took on the nature of the criticism, the online sniping from Gawker and other bloggers and trolls that met the blunder by Adler (“clearly no great thinker and no skilled journalist”).

“These people, one presumes, want to be spoken for by more responsible, thoughtful journalists, and yet not enough of them have been interested in actually paying for this expertise,” wrote Newhouse. “Barely a year goes by without news of yet another Jewish newspaper folding — the most recent of which, in Portland, actually died as the community itself grew. How loudly can I scream this from a rooftop? Journalism is hard and expensive, and communities that don’t pony up adequate resources for this privilege have only themselves to blame when they find unskilled men and women making un-thought-through comments ostensibly in their name.”

In this vein, I will briefly add that the newspaper you are holding in your hands exists because subscription and advertising revenue pays the bills. If you value having an independent Jewish newspaper in Minnesota, please encourage your friends and relatives to subscribe, and please let our advertisers know that your patronage came about because of their ad in the Jewish World.

We will get past the sorry Adler affair — worse calamities have befallen the Jewish people — and we will concentrate on how to shape a more respectful communal dialogue about Israel. It has been getting better; and another community forum — “Is a Two-State Solution Still Possible?” is the topic — will take place 10 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 5 at Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul. I hope to see you there.

— Mordecai Specktor / editor@ajwnews.com

(American Jewish World, 2.3.12)

“I think everybody should be able to marry the person they love,” says Franken:

The video appears on the Web site of the Human Rights Campaign.

Abbas, following a fifth meeting between the sides, met Wednesday with Jordan’s King Abdullah before announcing that the exploratory talks were concluded.

He said he would discuss Feb. 4 with the Arab League whether or not to hold additional talks.

The Palestinians had said that they would not meet past Thursday, the date of a deadline set months ago by the Mideast Quartet of the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations for the resumption of direct peace talks, without more concessions from Israel.

Direct peace talks stopped in late 2010 after Israel refused to extend a 10-month freeze on building in the settlements.

Abbas said that the Palestinians would be willing to return to negotiations if Israel agrees to demarcate the borders between Israel and a future Palestinian state. The Palestinians also are demanding an end to building in the settlements.

The Palestinians say they have submitted their proposals on borders and security arrangements, but that Israel has not, according to The Associated Press.

Meanwhile, the pan-Arabic Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper based in London reported Wednesday that Abdullah is considering several kinds of diplomatic sanctions in order to prod the Israeli government to make “significant concessions” that would allow the Palestinian leadership to “justify” returning to negotiations, Ynet reported.