I found myself driving around aimlessly in Albuquerque yesterday asking, “What should I do with my life.” I’ve been after that question a lot lately, so finally I also asked the universe to give me a clue — I figured that couldn’t hurt — and then, while it took a few twists and turns, I actually got an answer.

It started when I was in a parking lot when a woman on crutches approached from between the cars, and then I saw she was one-legged.  With just the right amount of anguished tearfulness, she said, “I’m not a drunk and I’m not on drugs, the homeless shelter is full, and I’m just trying to get enough for a room,” and her appeal moved me to give her some money. Whatever her story, it is just possible to end up on the streets these days.

That opened my heart up to the suffering around me. And it caused a fundamental shift in my question. Now it was “What can I do to make the world a better place?” Anyway, it was about noon, I was getting hungry and I went into the Whole Foods grocery store near the intersection of Wyoming Boulevard at Academy Road. I took a sandwich into the dining area when something fabulous on the walls caught my eye. It was a show of children’s art, and it was really good. It was beautiful. That innocent joy and energy of children’s art is just a pleasure to look at.

Picasso was onto something when he told people to appreciate children’s art. The works, about 30 pieces, were colorful and creative and free, and then I noticed some of them had unusual captions, that I would later learn from their teacher was completely of their own writing: “Nature’s Beauty,” “Love the World, Take Care of the Earth,” “Respect All Kinds of Nature, Color is Everything, “ “Make Peace,” “Peace is your only Hope”, “Balance the World.” One that gave you a spinning feeling was titled “Happy World!”

Another, where you could see the teacher had helped a bit with the printing of a long message the child had composed, said “We appreciate how nature is beauty,” and had a tree with arm-like branches and pools of water gathering from streams that ran down from mountain peaks.

All the artwork had depth, layers of drawing, with markers and crayon and collage. And it seemed like one of the children had drawn themselves at the base of the world with sunrays coming out, or maybe the figure was an angel, or maybe it was both.

I had gotten so far away from that place of appreciation, that I hadn’t remembered anymore what art is for, and that appreciating beauty actually makes a difference. The pictures reached me, and they reminded me that beauty and harmony are indeed how the universe holds together — and that is both a scientific and a spiritual reality. And I had forgotten that making art, for children, is such a spontaneous thing to do. And that disharmony and ugliness appear when things aren’t working. I tend to get so caught up in focusing on what’s wrong in the world that I’d forgotten so many things that these children‘s artwork suddenly reminded me of.

I looked at the small sign below the work. This was artwork by the students of the Jewish Academy of Arts and Sciences (located next door to the Albuquerque Jewish Community Center) about tikkun olam, which is Hebrew for repairing or healing of the world. “The children, grades K-5, were asked to artistically represent how they could make the world a better place. These are their visual answers.”

 

I called the school and I got to talk to the teacher, Celeste Boals, Apparently the show had just been put up an hour before I sat down. Boals said she teaches all the grades at the school and that everyone’s piece got to be in the show.  She said that they had been working for the last month on this theme, tikkun olam, which is a core concept in Judaism — that the world is broken and we need to repair it, or as she says she likes to say, heal it.
“Since in Judaism we can’t depict images of God,” she said, “the children talked about how they can imply the presence of God, so some of the pictures have rays of light, and eyes in the sky, and angels. This idea of tikkun olam is where we are always looking at what’s wrong in the world and what needs to be fixed, but really we have to look in ourselves, in our hearts, what can each of us do in ourselves, in our lives, to effect positive change in the world.”

I told her that the exhibit was working. It was a first step for me, an answer, the first one I’d gotten to my prayer asking the universe show me what to do with my life. There it was — it gave me a little glimpse of what it means to make the world a better place.

By popular demand, following this article the show stayed up at the Whole Foods through November, 2014. Update: Despite its many years of success, due to falling admissions and lack of funding, the school closed its doors at the end of the school year in the spring of 2015.

2015 Award, Society of Professional Journalists, Rocky Mountain Region, Second-place for Columns: Personal, as published in the Gallup Independent. For newspapers >30,000 circ.

First-place Photography, among all circulation media, American Jewish Press Association Rockower Awards, 2015. As published, April, 2014 New Mexico Jewish Link.

In an eleventh-hour meeting at the Aaron David Bram Hillel House, a tidy white house on campus, a very small, tense but determined group of students convened to find volunteers amongst themselves who would speak the next night before the University of New Mexico Student Senate (ASUNM). With less than a week’s notice, Sarah Abonyi, president of the recently formed student campus organization Lobos for Israel, had learned that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) were bringing a resolution to the UNM campus on April 2 to ask the student senate to vote to divest in multi-national corporations that contribute to human rights violations against Palestinians.
Six students agreed they would speak. Hillel director Sarah Koplik commended the students for their willingness to stand up. During the course of the meeting they also learned that each side would each be allowed ten speakers who could each speak for three minutes. The standard strategy by SJP on campuses to slip in their resolution quietly without alerting any possible organized opposition had in this one instance failed.
The UNM chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine group has been responsible for such activities as “Israel Apartheid Week,” which is taught in SJP national trainings. Their website states that in March “We hosted a day full of films, a teach-in with allies on Border Militarization, a Mock Checkpoint, and held a boycott SodaStream action!” Another event on April 7 was co-sponsored with the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice. SJP activities have contributed to creating an environment of hostility towards Jewish students.
As Rose Davenport, Hillel student president, would say the next night before the student senate, “The way this resolution reads this sends a clear message to me that I am not welcome at the University of New Mexico, a place I have called home for four years.” Hillel director Kopik has reported that UNM last year received the dubious distinction of having had more anti-Israel events than any other campus in the U.S.
The movement known as Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) is considered the “soft war” against Israel. As the BDS movement found traction through anti-Israel academic boycotts, the first SJP group was formed at the University of California at Berkeley in 2001 and was subsequently banned there the following year after disruptive activity. The movement started to grow but remained fragmented.
According to the Anti-Defamation League’s information bulletin on SJP, “SJP’s chapters, which have largely operated independently of each other, recently indicated that they plan to collaborate more closely.  To that end, representatives from more than 40 SJP chapters across the country attended the first national SJP conference from October 14-16, 2011. The conference, titled, “Students Confronting Apartheid,” was held at Columbia University in New York. A second national SJP conference took place at the University of Michigan in November 2012.
The article continued, “SJP’s “unification” efforts are a result of the influence and coordination of a national organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a group that promotes extreme anti-Israel views. In 2010, AMP decided to focus specifically on Palestinian advocacy on college campuses and targeted SJP for this effort.”
The ADL report continued, “SJP groups also plan anti-Israel events throughout the school year. These events often seek to draw attention to Israel’s alleged wrongdoings in a sensationalistic way. For example, several SJP groups have displayed props like mock “apartheid walls” and Israeli checkpoints on main areas of campus to demonize Israeli soldiers and attempt to demonstrate the travel difficulties Palestinians face in Israel and the territories. These events sometimes have the effect of intimidating or silencing Jewish students on campus.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center acknowledges, “College Campuses See Rising Anti-Semitic Sentiment” (SPLC Intelligence Report, Fall 2008), that “College campuses are particularly susceptible to anti-Semitism that originates in certain sectors of the far left.” Further, the report points out that ironically this opens the door to extremists on the right. “The Intelligence Report took an in-depth look at two different examples of modern-day anti-Semitism on college campuses (neither of which occurred in the classroom or was sanctioned in any way by university officials). In both cases, legitimate concerns about Israeli treatment of Palestinians found expression alongside anti-Jewish canards and Holocaust denial. During appearances on public university campuses in California, two Muslim clerics have espoused anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Sept. 11 and asserted that Jews control the media and other powerful institutions. Several hundred miles north, a discussion group seeking justice for Palestinians has morphed into a haven for white supremacists that’s brought a string of Holocaust deniers to speak at the University of Oregon.”
While to date SJP has not been very successful in passing their resolutions, they have succeeded in getting a fair amount of media attention. Resolutions have passed at Hampshire College (whose regents later disavowed knowledge of its intent) and at Berkeley, but have been defeated elsewhere.
One resolution that made headlines recently was passed in March at Loyola University Chicago, but was subsequently vetoed by their student senate president following a week of protests by Jewish students and a second vote. It had initially been introduced without notice and with no opportunity for pro-Israel students to respond to it.
As reported in the National Catholic Reporter by Paul DeCamp, Loyola University’s president said that the university would have completely ignored the resolution anyways.  He also was quoted as saying, “[. . .] we would not be interested in taking up this issue. It is one-sided, it is focused on one party in a complex international situation. It is felt as extremely unfair by our Jewish faculty, staff and students.”
Whether resolutions are passed or not, the issue is being brought to students’ attention on campus by pro-Palestinian groups, thereby forcing a small group of staunchly pro-Israeli students to react to these proposals.

PART TWO – A Tense and Contentious ASUNM meeting.

The Debate
The room on the top floor at the Student Union Building filled up quickly. Of the hundred and fifty or so spectators lining the walls around the room, about 75% appeared to be there to support the Palestinian resolution, drafted by Students for Justice in Palestine (SPJ), and co-signed by seven other UNM student organizations including Dreamers in Action and the Arabic Club. Brittany Arneson, a tall young woman with a bright turquoise streak of bangs across red hair dressed in a tight black dress and tights, called out to the audience, “Raise your hands if you are in favor” of the resolution. A forest of hands went up around the room, surrounding the small pro-Israel group.

Ten speakers on each side were each given 3 minutes to speak. The SJP students spoke first. Palestinian student Danya Mustafa, SJP co-chair, stated their group had been working hard for four years towards this moment, attending national conferences and drafting their resolution. Others from SJP who spoke included their faculty advisor Les Field, UNM Professor of Anthropology and director of the Peace Studies program, who introduced himself as a Jewish son of Hungarian Holocaust survivors who has been unfairly called an anti-Semite by The New Mexico Jewish Link. Additionally two of the SJP student members also identified themselves as Jewish.
Then students from Hillel and Lobos for Israel and other members of the Jewish community, including Executive Director of the Jewish Federation president Sam Sokolove, Rabbi Paul Citrin, and Robert Efroymson of the New Mexico-Israel Business Exchange, spoke from various angles against the resolution.
A lengthy debate ensued between the senators and with further questions to the speakers. However, when it became clear that the senate was not likely to pass the resolution, a new strategy was floated by SJP. A motion was made to amend the resolution to take out any specific mention targeting Israel and to pass an amended resolution that would still ask for transparency and responsible investing by the university.
Small groups broke up to strike the clauses about Israel from the resolution. It was a tense period where it seemed to spectators that it would be hard to reason out of why to reject such a resolution that sounded reasonable on its face. Finally when the senate reconvened, this amended resolution did not pass, over the strenuous objections of student senator Ayham Maadi, sponsor of the original resolution. In rejecting the amended resolution, another student senator pointed out it only contained strike-outs, and did not contain any additional clauses from the opposing group who might want to add clauses.
Finally, after an almost four-hour debate, marked by deliberate and well-modulated speeches, and an audience that was almost entirely well-behaved and respectful, except for a few brief passionate outbursts from some of the older adults on both sides of the aisle who were quickly hushed up, the original resolution was defeated at approximately 10 pm, with a final vote of 12 against, 7 for, with one abstention.
The student senate requested that a new resolution be presented at their next meeting that would be drafted by all groups present, that would be more representative of the student body, and that would address transparency by the university about all its investments.
After the final vote was tallied, Danya Mustafa of SJP repeated loudly, “This is just the beginning,” and in a challenging manner loudly said that she had their email and would be in contact immediately with the Lobos for Israel group. But in the ensuing week, she would refuse to speak directly to Sarah Abonyi in meetings, and would not meet with UNM administrators at all.
When the meeting broke up SJP supporters and pro-Israel students mingled and talked with one another. Hillel member Ezra Rubinsky, who has family members living in Israel, and senator Ayham Maadi talked at length, and as they parted, Rubinsky said, “You seem like a cool guy,” and they shook hands. It seemed a hopeful moment, that some real dialogue could take place, beyond positions.
As the room emptied out finally it was after 10:30 pm.  This reporter left alongside a group of Hillel students, one of the last groups to leave. As they approached the double doors to leave the building, a tall white-haired lady suddenly approached me who must have been waiting by the exit door. In a friendly manner she began in a normal tone by relating that she was at Washington University in St. Louis in the 1970’s, active in a divestment movement there against corporations that polluted. Her voice rose as she saw she had gotten the attention of the others who had turned to see what she was saying, and then her lips contorted as she suddenly spat, “You people make this (divestment) all about you.”
It was such a confoundingly irrational and frightening statement that I found I had no response except to walk on, but it served as a reminder that there is a long road ahead and that it will take new generations for the scars to fade that have for some turned into only bitterness and hatred.
New Mexico Jewish Link Editor’s Note and Update April 30:
On April 26, a resolution against Israeli companies passed through the Graduate and Professional Student Association’s Council (GPSA). It is very similar to the resolution that SJP tried to pass through the undergraduate ASUNM Senate. This resolution may be discussed at the next UNM Boad of Regent’s meeting on Friday, May 9 at 10:00 am.
On April 30, a new resolution authored by undergraduate Senator Earl Shank to encourage socially responsible investments was unanimously approved by the ASUNM student senate. This resolution did not castigate Israel or Israeli companies, and was a rare occasion where Students for Justice in Palestine worked hand-in-hand with Lobos for Israel. This is particularly unusual, as frequently, SJP chapters will lose funding if they coordinate activities with Zionist groups.
UPDATE: On May 10 after a five-hour meeting the GPSA voted to rescind the SJP resolution that had previously been passed on April 26. Because there had been no notification on the agenda and the SJP had claimed there was no opposition, the Hillel and Lobos for Israel students were allowed to address the GPSA.  The final vote was tied ten to ten, and was broken by the chair in favor of rescinding the resolution. It is expected that SJP will appeal this vote and continue to press their resolutions and activities on campus. A full report on that meeting wil be posted soon. Read post at  UNM’s Graduate Student Association votes to rescind anti-Israel resolution.

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This article and photos by Diane J. Schmidt appeared as a special report for the New Mexico Jewish Link, front page, May, 2014. First-place, Photos, American Jewish Press Association Rockower Awards, 2015,  all circ.

 

 

“Healing the Wounds of History, The Long Walk and the Holocaust” received First-place for Reporting: Education Reporting, Society of Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies, 2015 as published in the Gallup Independent newspaper Oct. 25, 2014, and third-place for Specialty Articles: History in the New Mexico Press Women Communications contest, as published in the New Mexico Jewish Link, November 2014.

“Healing the Wounds of History, The Long Walk and the Holocaust.” By Diane J. Schmidt  

The Third Navajo/Jewish Dialogue, “Healing the Wounds of History, The Long Walk and the Holocaust.” took place on October 12 in Albuquerque between Navajo educator Frank Morgan and Rabbi Harry Rosenfeld at Congregation Albert, an event organized by Gordon Bronitsky.

Finding myself in the odd position of being assigned by the newspaper to cover a talk that my partner Frank Morgan would be giving, I watched him preparing to navigate the treacherous shoals of cross-cultural language and dialectics to communicate the essence of the Navajo perspective of resilience and balance, in order to explain indirectly the survival of the Navajo people and culture after centuries of shocks and of insults from Northern European immigrants.

When I first heard what the selected topic would be, The Long Walk and the Holocaust, I thought it unwise. I frankly I didn’t expect my fellow Jewish congregants to be receptive to hearing about the suffering the Navajo people had endured by comparison with their own.

My concerns dissolved entirely when Frank told me what he had chosen to talk about, he said it would be “the Navajo perspective on healing, rebalancing, rather than focusing so much on the process of damage and destruction, the endemic problems of what trauma does to the psychological self.” His framework, the Navajo perspective on healing, suddenly shifted the entire conversation, and I understood that his emphasis on healing comes out of his years of teaching about the Blessing Way teachings that reverse the effects of trauma.

That sunny Sunday afternoon some fifty people gathered in the synagogue’s sanctuary. There were Navajos, Jews, Christians, children of mixed marriages, and children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of survivors of the Long Walk and of the Holocaust.

After Frank’s presentation, then Rabbi Rosenfeld went on to talk about some of the reasons why the Jewish people’s healing from the wounds of the Holocaust has been a slow process, and then they both addressed what it means to go forward from that place.

The audience remained attentive through two hours – twice as long as was originally planned, and many stayed plying Frank with questions afterwards.

Healing traditions beginning from the Creation Stories

Frank Morgan’s presentation began as an acknowledgement that there have been wounds dating back even before human history, as told in the Creation Stories, when everything began to be formed into what it is today, and how there were frequent conflicts among the Holy People. “Adultery was the most severe of these,” he said, “and caused a separation of female and male entities. In order to have life, the Holy People had to get back together and heal to make everything better, more harmonious.” He explained that to do this “They created different healing methods. Today we know them as Chantways, such as the Night Way. Some of them have become extinct.”

In a direct way, Frank was able to convey the most basic of Navajo fundamental principles. He said, “When they were creating these harmonious conditions, they found two ways that everything moves, one that is consistent with the journey of the sun and then the reverse, going the other way. To reestablish everything so that it goes in the sun-wise direction, shábik’ehgo, according to the journey of the sun, is a way to create harmony because all that is good and beneficial moves in this positive direction.

He continued, “We rely on relationships in the universe, how things relate to each other, where things are compatible with each other, hózhó. All relationships are based upon principles that maintain order and natural growth and development of all that exists.” So in this way, he explained the Navajo foundations of the restoration of wholeness, grounded in the natural world.

Then shift happened.

Frank sketched the events leading up to the Long Walk in 1864, and the effects of those events. “The Mexicans were okay, we got along. But then came the American settlers, we couldn’t establish relations with them because they brought soldiers, weapons and war, and they wanted everything. They used biological warfare, like smallpox. Then, there was scorched earth. They sent the ‘esteemed’ Kit Carson, a small man, a trapper, to invade and force The People out to Fort Wingate, which is a place known as Bear Springs in Navajo, and from there the army marched them by gunpoint over 300 miles to Bosque Redondo at Fort Sumner, southeast of Santa Rosa, near Clovis, NM.”

“We had established our whole being, our life on our homeland and when we were removed from that land, that was a huge, huge wound. In Navajo practices, we take a child’s umbilical cord, where they want their child or grandchild to be psychologically oriented, and place it in the ground. The particular place where a child’s umbilical cord is placed, that is the entire environment where the mind, thought, and psyche are embedded or imprinted. If you remove the person, you’re breaking that umbilical cord like it’s still in the womb. People who were later were removed off their land to make room for coalmines for example, but their whole life diminished.

“The Earth is my mother, my umbilical cord is in the earth, feeling us, like we’re feeling we’re still in the womb. We still feel we’re in the womb of earth. Sky and earth relate in harmony.”

A collective sigh rose up from the audience hearing Frank talk about what it was to be like to uprooted from their land. It brought out the poignancy of what it means to be uprooted from one’s land.

And it acknowledged the trauma of the long history of my people, the Jewish people, our diaspora of being forced to move from place to place across the earth, and shed light on why perhaps I have always felt a sense of impermanence, a faint undercurrent of alienation that never leaves me except when I am in nature. And since I had never fully known what it was to be nurtured by a place, the way he spoke about being mothered by the earth, I felt almost envy in hearing of his loss, an envy that I might have been covering over for years with the superficial annoyed impatience of an urbanite.

He went on with a clear voice, “We were exiled, alienated, just so they could take that land to be settled by immigrants from the East. We were marched and many died along the way, to the Pecos river, which was salty water, and told to grow crops, but the insects there destroyed the crops, many got sick, many died.” Finally after four years the government acknowledged it was a failed experiment and allowed the Navajo people to return to their homeland, and they walked back.

Recognizing the wounds as the first step towards healing

“Today, we are walking with our wounds. Much as an injured person or animal that moves or limps in pain. This is how we are right now, they say. So this wound, in the Navajo perspective, affects us in a certain way. Its effect is subtle and unseen and we are not aware that we feel hopeless or that we don’t have the strength to get up. It is like a cliff that does not allow us to go forward. That’s the way it is.”

“How do we go to the next place, where things are better? We cannot remain where we were harmed. It affects the mind. The mind gets all distraught and disordered. There’s internal confusion, shock, your thinking has been impacted. Here you don’t feel good about yourself, you are angry, and even suicidal. The effects of this wounding are inside people.”

Prescriptions for healing a nation, and challenges to be faced

When Frank met with the rabbi at his office two days before the dialogue the question came up around how does a entire people heal? Frank said, “It has been shown that trauma can affect people as a whole group, as a whole nation. It has to be reversed.

“Therapy is available to reverse the negative effects. Relationships are re-established and re-connected to their normal state. Everything in life is able to work toward harmony and balance. The essence of kinship repairs our relations.

“To rebalance and reestablish k’é relations, begin by understanding how a problem affects the k’é relationship and by taking responsibility for your part in that problem. Most important, without blaming the other; talk over how this is not the way it should be, and talk about the ways that you have practiced k’é before and how good it was and express your desire to return to that kinship. You may determine what exchange you will give each other to satisfy the mind.

“This is similar to reparations after a war. You don’t have to say “I forgive you’ or ‘you are forgiven’ because that’s already done when you took responsibility and owned up to what you did and that has the effect of asking for forgiveness.”

As to whether the wounds of history will ever be properly addressed for the Navajo is not known. He pointed out that the treaties that were signed were not favorable for them. “We ended up with limited resources, and a system of three branch government that we don’t know to make work (a member of the audience called out, “We don’t either!” and everyone laughed).

“Who’s going to do this for us, re-establish k’é and find a better life for the People? Our leaders have to lead us there.” To move forward and have a better life is an enormous challenge that will take a long time but we have to reach for it.”

Frank Morgan and Rabbi Harry Rosenfeld

Then Rabbi Rosenfeld spoke about how reluctant the Jewish people have been to move on from the Holocaust, it’s not something you get over. Also, he pointed out, today we are living much longer lives. In Babylonian times, a lifespan was 40 years, and history might be remembered by seeing a sculpted stone carving. Today we are living twice as long, and the TV history channel is a constant reminder of what happened during World War II.

But, Rabbi Rosenfeld said, that we must carry on as Jews and maintain our Jewish identity to show that Hitler couldn’t destroy us, doesn’t resonate anymore with a younger generation, who want positives to embrace for maintaining a Jewish identity. He said this is a major challenge facing the Jewish people going forward.

Again, I thought about the terrifying stories I had unearthed recently about what had happened to my relatives still living in Poland when the Germans came in 1939, the women and girls were forced to strip naked and, beaten with whips, dance in a circle inside the synagogue, while outside, the men had to crawl on the cobblestones in piggyback races carrying heavier men while the Poles laughed, before they were taken away in the trains.

I think it was wise that I was shielded from the knowledge of this insanity when I was younger, I’m not sure what good it does to know about it now, when I am haunted by these images, but as Jewish people we say we will never forget, so that it does not happen again.

I try to learn from Frank’s words, and while I often think the Navajo might learn something from the Jews about maintaining one’s culture through the written word, I think more, that the Jews could learn something from the Navajo, for who it is a custom and an admonition not to speak so much of the dead and the wounds of the past.

I ask Frank if what I wrote about my relatives, if going back over historical trauma, was okay from the Navajo perspective, and Frank replied, “Begin with a positive story. What the older people say, what they tell us that we need to know, are the stories from the time of when the first Hogan was made.”

That sounds like a whole other story I will have to wait for him to tell.

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“Healing the Wounds of History, The Long Walk and the Holocaust” received first-place for Education Reporting, Society of Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies, 2015 as published in the Gallup Independent newspaper Oct. 25, 2014.

 

 

Getting to Know Federation Director Zach Benjamin
Story and photos by Diane Joy Schmidt
Published October 27, 2015 at the New Mexico Jewish eLink

Getting up close and personal, a little, with Zach Benjamin, as he presented himself to about 60 people at the Congregation Albert Brotherhood Sunday breakfast on October 19, Zach, age 32, came across as personable, thoughtful, and able – as yet unscarred by the challenges of leading the Jewish Federation of New Mexico.

He is eager to get things right and to get a message out there that reaches the Jewish community and the larger community. So far, he’s doing well. He presented fresh ideas about rebranding the Federation to the community – heck, just hearing the words rebranding and Federation in the same sentence sounded fresh.
Best of all, he brought his young wife, Taina, also 32, who was in fact his high school sweetheart, to meet the folks, that is, the brotherhood breakfast group.

Zach explained that he was born in Chicago into a Reform Jewish household, moved to Los Angeles and then to Florida, and then back to Chicago to go to Northwestern. After attending graduate school in New York, he returned to Chicago to begin his career working for large trade organizations.

He explained that “Judaism was always central to my identity, but it was only when Taina got serious about converting to Judaism that I began to realize that my calling was to serve Judaism – both professionally and personally.” Zach said that he began commuting from Chicago to Tampa once a month “to attend minyan with my now-wife, who at the time lived there with her family.”
He started making annual trips to Israel, and to think about how his extensive background in nonprofit work could be put to good use in a meaningful way in the Jewish community.  And voilà, here he is. He thanked the community for giving them such an overwhelmingly warm welcome, and says he now has about twelve Jewish mothers here, and can assure his actual mother he is getting enough to eat.

I didn’t give Zach the third-degree about his mastery of Hebrew – we’ll give him a few years.  Taina has a degree in math, worked for the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and looks forward to working here and earning an advanced degree. And, Zach in his introduction mentioned that she has just joined Hadassah as a life-member.

Zach has a conciliatory manner but is no pushover. His position is clearly defined regarding the Federation’s position here on Israel. The Federation “will not give safe harbor to the BDS movement,” meaning Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, which is “both anti-Israel and anti-Semitic.” He has no problem with J Street, while acknowledging there are the occasional “little land-mines” that can turn up.

He’s met quite a bit with Rabbi Brin of Nahalat Shalom, and at the breakfast announced a joint Federation-Nahalat Shalom fund-raising campaign for Syrian refugees. He says yes, he’s old friends by now with Rabbi Rosenfeld, and that he has met a couple of times with Sam Sokolove.
Quoting JFNM Community Outreach Director Sara Koplik that we have to improve “how we tell our story,” he has been learning about Jewish communities throughout the state. He pointed to Taos and Los Alamos as examples of smaller communities which have well-defined Jewish life. He was also impressed by the concerns of the close-knit but shrinking Jewish communities in places like Roswell and Las Vegas, New Mexico, and how Federation can be a life-line for these outlying communities.

He stressed that he wants Federation to be a partner to the community, and “re-set the narrative” by actively engaging with the community and letting people know about the programs JFNM supports. Zach outlined a bit of the new campaign they will be rolling out at the first of the year. He talked about how Federation will be empowering AbqTribe – a Young Adult program first started at B’nai Israel, with professional development and mentoring support. Federation president Sabra Minkus added that JFNM supports the Jewish Care Program for seniors, which also includes special funding for the Holocaust survivors here.

Comments from the audience were primarily of the take-a-hint variety. Sisterhood member Evie Zlotkin was pleased to announce that the food bank is back up and running; another suggested Federation might want to play a role in the annual Maimouna women’s Seder; and a third asked why the Jewish community doesn’t do anything for disabled members of the community who are not seniors.
George Skadron asked rhetorically, “To what extent should Federation be a spokesperson to the outside community. Anita Miller, Anti-Defamation League board member, mentioned how terrific it was that Suki Halevi, ADL regional director is located within the office space of JFNM and is a great resource for them.

Harvey and Rachel Sternheim are recent arrivals from Los Angeles and Rachel’s mother Beverly White is a long-time involved member here, so Harvey introduced himself and asked if we have a genocide walk here like they do in LA, and also mentioned that in LA they regularly did a “Big Sunday” of community work out in the community. Pictured here are Beverly White, Zach and Taina Benjamin, Harvey and Rachel Sternheim, and Jenny Moran.

This reporter remarked that the Jewish community here recently lost its school, its printed newspaper, and the Jewish Family Service (JFS), and that now Rabbi Min Kantrowitz, who spearheaded so much outreach and chaplaincy work, has just retired, leaving a big vacuum. Zach responded that, while he’s not making any promises, there is talk of bringing back a quarterly printed New Mexico Jewish Link, to which the room broke out in spontaneous applause, and that they are looking at “how to replace the irreplaceable Rabbi Min.”

Meryl Manning Segel, a past president of the Federation and of Jewish Family Service and a busy realtor, added in an aside to this reporter afterwards that the reason Jewish Family Service closed was, in her view, because they were overextended – they were doing too much. They got federal grants to do programs, she explained, but because these were federal grants they couldn’t just be for the Jewish community, and that as these grants dried up, the board would not cut the programs, which, she said, was irresponsible. Now, she said, the Jewish Care Program is focused on the Jewish community. However, she agreed that Rabbi Kantrowitz’s retirement is leaving a big vacuum, and said that she practically cried at the announcement.

Rabbi Kantrowitz, who since JFS closed in January 2013 was left with only a 5-hour-a-week paid position, said in a separate interview that, when JFS, and her position with them as rabbi to the Jewish community at large were funded, she used to visit many homebound elderly Jewish people throughout the state, and that they are not being served now.

Our new New Mexico Jewish Federation Executive Director Zach Benjamin concluded by stressing that he wants the Federation to be a big tent, and by saying that his door is open, that people should come and see him, and that he wants to hear from the community. Everyone clapped loudly and long.