About to celebrate her 91st birthday on October 9, former diplomat, former
Member of Knesset, former member of the Tel Aviv City Council, former
secretary-general of the Tel Aviv branch of Na’amat, founding director of the
Center for Volunteer Services, longtime director of the International Harp
Contest and the World Assembly of Choirs in Israel and for 25 years a member of
the Jerusalem Board of Overseers of the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of
Religion, Esther Herlitz is still very much with it and is currently focusing on
getting Israeli and Diaspora Jewish communities to know more about each
other.
She is making plans to attend the mid-October final session of
Hadassah’s centennial celebrations in Jerusalem at which Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu will be the keynote speaker. Herlitz has a big place in her heart for
Hadassah, The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, which she says has done
much more for Israel than is generally known. The feeling is apparently mutual,
because one of the prized possessions on display in Herlitz’s apartment is
Hadassah’s Woman of Distinction Award, which she received at a special event at
the Knesset in January 2003. The inscription states: “She set the standards for
serving the Jewish People.”
Herlitz has enjoyed a close relationship with
Hadassah, both in America and in Israel, for more than 60 years. She is tickled
pink that the architect for the new Sara Wetsman Davidson Tower at Hadassah
Medical Center was Arthur Spector, whose mother, Dorothy Spector of Brookline,
Massachusetts, a member of Hadassah’s National Board was a close
friend.
When Golda Meir was foreign minister, Herlitz was working as head
of the guest department at the Foreign Ministry and took care of arrangements
for the many African visitors whom Meir had invited to Israel. Among them was
the health minister of Ghana, who was a tribal chief and who came with his
secretary.
Herlitz arranged for them to spend a day at the Hadassah
medical center. At around 11 p.m., she received a phone call from the secretary
who said that the chief needs a woman. “That’s not my business,” Herlitz
replied. “But you said they are a woman’s service organization,” the secretary
protested. So much for semantics.
When Herlitz was Israel’s consul-general
in New York, there was an advertisement in The Wall Street Journal for the sale
of four of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were of enormous value to the young State
of Israel, but the state could not afford to cover the cost of purchase. Herlitz
turned to Hadassah National Board member Esther Gottesman to share with her
Israel’s concerns about the purchase and asked how she could possibly raise the
required sum.
Gottesman told her not to worry, but to come to her home
for Friday night dinner and to discuss the matter with her brother-in-law,
well-known philanthropist David Samuel Gottesman, who had just returned from
Israel. His reaction was what every fund-raiser would give an arm and a leg to
hear: “What a wonderful project. Thank you for asking me.” He subsequently
funded the construction of the Shrine of the Book, which houses the Dead Sea
Scrolls.
Before becoming consul-general, Herlitz had been first secretary
at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, which was then headed by Abba Eban. In
1952, during the extreme austerity period known as the tzena when Israel was
close to bankruptcy, Eban arranged a meeting with the Hadassah National Board
and took Herlitz with him. At that time Hadassah had amassed considerable funds
toward the construction of its medical complex in Jerusalem’s Ein Karem
neighborhood. Eban wanted to borrow a large chunk of that money to pay off
Israel’s short-term debts. The board initially denied his request, at which
point Eban asked, “What is the point of having a hospital if the country goes
broke?” That argument was not sufficiently convincing to sway the board, but
Eban’s next statement did the trick.
“If you can’t give me a positive
answer, I’ll go to you membership,” he said. Hadassah boasts the largest
membership of any Jewish organization in America. The last thing the National
Board needed was for its members to know that it had rejected a plea from
Israel. The loan was granted.
Even before that, in 1951 when the Israel
Bonds organization was established, Herlitz was at a gala launch function in
Washington that was attended by Hadassah national board member and past national
president Judith Epstein; the first United States Ambassador to Israel, James
Grover McDonald; and US vice president Alben William Barkley. McDonald, the
first speaker, said that he didn’t have to make a speech because he’d written a
book, which anyone could buy in the foyer and he would happily sign. Barkley
said he didn’t know how to write a book but that he grew apples in upstate New
York and he would be willing to sign the box for anyone who bought a
crate. When it was Epstein’s turn to speak, she said: “I sell nothing but
the State of Israel, which I ask you to support.”
CONSIDERING THAT he’s
67 years old, it’s hard to believe that Mike Burstyn has been appearing on stage
and screen for more than 60 years. But that’s what often happens to children
whose parents are both entertainers and work together. Burstyn wandered out on
stage when he three years old and upstaged his father. He was seven when he and
his twin sister Susan started their careers on the Yiddish stage in New York
with their parents, Lillian Lux and Pesach Burstein. The twins subsequently went
on tour with their parents, arriving in Israel for the first time in 1954. Much
of their childhood was spent in Israel, but Susan left the stage at age 18 when
she got married and moved back to the US. In recent years she has devoted her
energies to the study of the Davidic dynasty and the creation in Tel Aviv of the
King David Museum and Research Center.
Mike Burstyn, who also lives in
the US, is a fairly frequent visitor to Israel. He performs in several
languages. He is fluent in eight languages and is learning his ninth –
Russian. He mastered Dutch many years ago, but is in Israel to perform in
Yiddish with Yaakov Bodo in the Yiddishpiel production of Hershele Ostropolyer,
which opened last night in Tel Aviv. Further performances will be held in Tel
Aviv, Haifa, Herzliya, Beersheba, Kiryat Motzkin, Jerusalem, Rehovot, Ashkelon,
Kiryat Yam, Ness Ziona, Petah Tikva and Ashdod. The performances run through
November 6.
FOLLOWING THE assassination last year of Juliano Mer
Khamis, the son of a Jewish mother and a Christian Arab father, there were
doubts whether the Freedom Theater he had founded in Jenin would continue to
function. Mer Khamis, a noted actor, director and film maker, was also a
political activist, as were his parents, who were among the leadership of
Israel’s Communist Party. One of his mother’s big dreams was to establish a
children’s theater group in Jenin, which to some extent she succeeded in doing
in the 1980s. Seven years after her death, Mer Khamis, who was a complex
character with one foot in the Israeli camp and the other in the Palestinian,
decided to complete his mother’s project.
Mer Khamis went to Jenin to
interview the participants in the original group, who by then were no longer
children. Some had become militants and some could not be interviewed because
they had been killed. In 2006, together with former al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade
leader Zakaria Zubeidi, Swedish Israeli political activist Jonatan Stanczak and
controversial Swedish-Israeli artist Dror Feiler, he established the Freedom
Theater. Because of his own background, Mer Khamis was able to gravitate freely
between Israelis and Palestinians and to identify with both. Notwithstanding his
deep-seated pro Palestinian views, he had been a paratrooper in the IDF, had
performed on stage with the Beit Lessin and Habima theaters and had appeared in
both Israeli and Palestinian films. His assassination in Jenin was condemned by
both Israelis and Palestinians.
A Palestinian suspect was detained and
eventually released, and Mer-Khamis’s unidentified killer remains at
large.
Stanczak continued as managing director of the Freedom Theater,
but he and most others associated with it are under constant surveillance by the
IDF and are frequently pulled in for questioning. That’s what happened to Nabil
al-Raee, the theater’s artistic director, who was taken from his home in the
predawn hours in the first week of June this year. Zubeidi had been arrested a
month earlier, but in his case it was by the Palestinian Authority, which
incarcerated him in Jericho.
In July, Raee was brought before an Israeli
military court and accused of the illegal possession of arms.
Eventually
both Zubeidi and Raee went on a hunger strike and Raee was released on bail. The
opening of the Freedom Theater’s in-house production of Harold Pinter’s The
Caretaker, which had been scheduled for June but was delayed due to Raee’s
imprisonment, finally eventuated on September 23.and played to a full
house.
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