Published Articles

Original Article Published On The Jerusalem Post

Also read it in Spanish On Enlance Judio

Until her death Monday at age 85, Buxton was still waiting for her August 1958 application for membership in the All-England Lawn Tennis Club to be approved.

Sandra Harwitt – my seatmate on the free bus which takes US Open credentialed media, umpires, coaches and players from Manhattan to the US Tennis Center in Queens – playfully asked if I recognized the 80-year-old woman in front of us.

Harwitt, a tennis writer and author of The Greatest Jewish Tennis Players of All Time, clearly did. It was Angela Buxton, the feisty 1956 Wimbledon women’s doubles championship from England, best known for befriending and teaming up with African-American Althea Gibson.

Why would a Liverpool-born Jewish woman, who spent World War II in South Africa, and spent significant time in the US, India, and Israel, break the color barrier in tennis? Quite simply, Buxton saw herself and Gibson as outsiders.
Until her death Monday at age 85, Buxton was still waiting for her August 1958 application for membership in the All-England Lawn Tennis Club to be approved.
“I think the reason is quite clear,” the feisty, straight-talking Buxton told me in her English accent in a 90-minute interview in the media dining room at the 2014 US Open.

“I can only assume it is because I am a Jew.”

Buxton always spoke candidly. She was delighted that I write about tennis for Israeli and other topics for Israeli publications. We became friends and stayed in contact over the years. Buxton would call, send her tennis articles—or a DVD of the movie, Althea and Angela: A Perfect Match, and she insisted I read the book, The Match: Althea Gibson & Angela Buxton: How Two Outsiders – One Black, the Other Jewish – Forged a Friendship and Made Sports History. I last saw Buxton at the 2019 US Open – this time in a wheelchair – at the dedication of the Althea Gibson statu

Buxton experienced racism for the first time as an 8-year-old in South Africa, when friends and neighbors disapproved of a friendship with a black girl her age. Buxton’s first encounter with antisemitism also occurred in South Africa when a man remarked, “You Jews are all the same. You think you own the world!”

As a teenager she applied to join the Cumberland Club, the top tennis facility in North London. Coach Bill Blake reportedly rejected Buxton, saying “You’re perfectly good, but you’re Jewish. We don’t take Jews here.”
Instead, she practiced on the private tennis court of Simon Marks, the Jewish owner of the department store Marks & Spencer.
As a pro, Buxton’s first encounter with antisemitism in the tennis world occurred at the Los Angeles Tennis Club in 1952. She was denied membership because she was Jewish.

Buxton’s first encounter with antisemitism in the tennis world occurred at the Los Angeles Tennis Club in 1952. She was denied membership because she was Jewish.

In 1953, Buxton had a very positive Jewish experience. She traveled to the Maccabiah Games from England to Israel – by boat, on a ship called “Artza,” – with 100 Jewish fellow athletes.

In 1956, Buxton asked Gibson to be her doubles partner at the French Championships and Wimbledon. After the pair won Wimbledon, a British newspaper headlined a report, “Minorities Win.” Buxton injured her wrist at an August 1956 tennis tournament in New Jersey and her tennis career soon came to an end.

Buxton’s colorful post tennis-playing life included teaching and coaching tennis, starting the Buxton Tennis Center in North London, sports writing and volunteering with her three children – then-ages 6, 4, and 18 months – on Kibbutz Amiad during the Six Day War.

Buxton returned to Israel many times over the years and helped found Israel Tennis Centers.

Buxton was inducted into the Black Tennis Hall of Fame in 2015 for her relationship with Gibson and the International Jewish Sports Hall in Israel in 1981.

I will miss seeing Angela schlepping her big “wheely” suitcase through the grounds of the US Open, and her calling me at random times to share a story or article. The world has lost a legend – one with a real Jewish soul!

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Original Article Published On The Jewish Philanthropy

The light bulb went off in the final minutes of the Zoom discussion of the movie “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution” with disability rights pioneer and icon, Judith Heumann. In the Q&A for members of the Ramah camping community, one participant asked, “How do we give the typical campers a Tikvah experience if there is no camp this summer?” He was acknowledging the important reality that campers and staff would be denied the important opportunity to meaningfully interact in person with campers with disabilities from the Tikvah inclusion program.

Without missing a beat, Judy suggested that our synagogues and Jewish communal institutions mark the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which coincides with the same year we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Tikvah.

The ADA, a civil rights law prohibiting discrimination based on disability, was signed in 1990 by President Bush. The law requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities and imposes accessibility requirements on public transportation. Ironically, religious entities like synagogues are completely exempt from portions of the ADA. All of their facilities, programs, and activities, whether they are religious or secular in nature, are exempt.

The ADA became a law twenty years after the Ramah camping movement started including campers with disabilities. In the early years, inclusion in Jewish summer camps was not a “given”. It required the persistence of passionate visionaries.

In the late 1960s, two special education teachers, Herb and Barbara Greenberg, proposed that Jewish children and young adults with disabilities be included in Jewish summer camps. Despite opposition by people claiming it would bankrupt the camps, disrupt the structure of the camps, lower the level of Hebrew and cause the “normal” campers to leave, the Greenbergs persisted. One Ramah director, Donny Adelman, said, “Why should Ramah exist if not for this reason?” He agreed to have Tikvah at his camp in Glen Spey, New York. In 1970, the camp welcomed eight young adults with disabilities. The camp soon moved to Camp Ramah in New England in Palmer, MA.

At around the time of Tikvah’s founding, Judy Heumann, a young camper with polio, was attending Camp Jened in upstate New York. “Crip Camp” profiles a group of teens with disabilities, including Judy, who attended Camp Jened during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Judy went on to become one of the most important and influential voices in the disability rights movement. Crip Camp won the Sundance Audience Award for US Documentary earlier this year.

Heumann personifies the history of disability rights in American. She fought to be included in the NYC public school system, took on the Board of Education in New York for the right to obtain a teaching license, founded Disabled in Action, and organized over 100 activists with disabilities to stage sit-ins in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The sit-ins laid the groundwork for the ADA.

Heumann’s years of activism include serving in the Clinton and Obama Administrations. Judy has a new memoir, Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist, and she is a proud and involved Jew and member of Adas Israel in Washington, DC.

Camp Ramah and the National Ramah Tikvah Network’s growth and development parallel Heumann’s lifetime of activism. We have continued to expand the inclusion of campers with disabilities in our camps in North America, and in our Israel programs.

I worked as a Tikvah counselor in 1984 at Camp Ramah in New England, served for many years as a division head and Tikvah director, and currently serve as the director of our National Ramah Tikvah Network and of the Tikvah Program at Ramah Galim in Northern California. In 2015, when Ramah Galim was about to open its doors, director Rabbi Sarah Shulman and her board of directors insisted they open for all campers only once a Tikvah program was in place.

Tikvah programs have served several thousand campers with disabilities, and dozens of our staff members have gone on to work in fields related to disabilities inclusion. Most importantly, perhaps, is the shaping of attitudes for thousands of campers, staff members, families, and Israeli staff members.

The Ramah Camping Movement is not offering in-person camp programs this summer, and we will reschedule some of our “Tikvah at 50” festivities. However, we continue to offer robust programming to all of our Ramah campers online. Each day, our campers, with and without disabilities, participate in various Ramah-style programs virtually. Tikvah vocational program participants are engaged in a 12-session virtual vocational training program.

Thanks to Judy’s suggestion, Ramah will jointly celebrate “Tikvah at 50” and “ADA at 30.” Activities will include a panel discussion entitled “Jewish Journeys: Tikvah’s Role in the Jewish Disability Narrative” and staff/parent movie nights featuring clips on the theme of disabilities inclusion, singing and dancing, prayer services and more.

We greatly appreciate Judy continuing to encourage us at Ramah to do more to be inclusive and aware of the needs of people with disabilities. Here are other ways Judy suggests the Jewish community mark ADA at 30:

  • Share sermons or divrei torah (from the bima or in writing) about ADA
  • Screen and discuss “Crip Camp” and other ReelAbilities movies which show the many abilities of people with disabilities
  • Make concrete strides to go beyond ADA to be more inclusive in our shuls
  • Review what has been done thus far for disabilities inclusion and establish objectives for between now and February (Jewish Disabilities Awareness, Acceptance, and Inclusion Month).
  • Engage disabled and non-disabled people from your community – if not already doing so. (Many have already established task forces and working groups.)

Thousands of Jews have grown up at Jewish camps that include people with disabilities. They have seen first-hand how important it is for everyone to feel included. Let’s celebrate ADA at 30 with a renewed commitment to including everyone!

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Original Article Published on The Flyer Blog

My colleague and friend Jamie Lassner, executive director of Friends of Access Israel (FAISR), recently heard a number of people using the phrase, “I feel paralysed” as they cope with trying times posed by COVID-19. Lassner’s lifelong friend, Alan T. Brown, who has been a wheelchair user since he became paralysed as a teenager 33 years ago – and who has an incredible sense of humor – remarked, “Welcome to my life!

In fairness, what can people without paraplegia or quadriplegia possibly know about day-to-day life for a person who is paralysed? After nearly two weeks of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, the famed 19,341-foot mountain in Tanzania – an experience that included not showering or using flush toilets, and hiking through the night in the cold and snow to reach the summit on the final ascent – 23 hikers came to know their four fellow climbers living with paralysis very well.

This past February, about a month before Covid-19 changed the lives of so many, a delegation of 27 climbers with different abilities from across the United States, Israel and Tanzania participated in the strenuous, multi-day, heavily-supported climb to benefit Friends of Access Israel (FAISR). FAISR is an organisation that promotes accessibility, inclusion and respect for people of all abilities around the world. FAISR’s collaborative partner, Access Israel, was founded just over 20 years ago in Israel.

Climbing Kilimanjaro is no walk in the park. It is a bucket list item for many people. Friends wondered how my fellow hikers and I were training – especially since many of us live in New York City, with little access to high elevations for training. They wondered, though they may have been shy to ask, how people who cannot walk could possibly climb Africa’s highest mountain.

To start, never tell a woman who travels the world alone, dressed in her signature “The Journey of a Brave Woman” jean jacket, that something is impossible. Marcella Marañon, a Peruvian-born woman with paraplegia and who has an amputated foot, is simultaneously gentle and tough. She regularly shares experiences with accessibility, from Peru to India to Israel, on her very active social media sites.  

Starla Hilliard-Barnes, a twice-paralysed participant (yes, you read that right!), also refuses to be defined by her disabilities. She was selected as Ms. Wheelchair Montana in 2014 and became the first wheelchair user to compete in the Mrs. Montana pageant in 2016. She is also the founder of Moving Forward Adaptive Sports (an organisation that enables differently abled individuals to engage in adaptive recreational activities) and the charity, Gifts of Love (which brings holiday presents to individuals with disabilities, veterans, individuals in hospital and families in need). Starla was accompanied by her husband, Shannon Barnes, on the expedition. “The last day I was in pain but just tried to smile. I just tried to stay positive. That was me, happy and smiling the whole time.”

“[Friends] wondered, though they may have been shy to ask, how people who cannot walk could possibly climb Africa’s highest mountain.”

Arnon Amit was paralysed in a car accident during his Israel Defense Forces (IDF) army service. Arnon flew to Tanzania with fellow Israeli, Omer Zur, founder of Paratrek – the company that created the durable ‘Trekker’ chair used by the paralysed participants and their extensive support teams to ascend the mountain. Arnon’s next challenge is riding on horseback with two friends from Israel’s southernmost to northernmost points. The journey was scheduled for April but will be rescheduled due to Covid-19.  

Arnold John had spent his life watching others in his Tanzanian village ascend and even serve as porters on Kilimanjaro expeditions. This gentle 44-year-old paralysed father of three finally received the opportunity to climb the famed mountain himself with the FAISR delegation.

The group of climbers were supported throughout the journey by three cooks, 11 guides and 70 porters.  Porters carry all participant clothing and sleeping bags, as well as food, water and cooking supplies. Cooks provided kosher meals both at the huts and along the route. Daily mileage ranged from 3.1 miles on the acclimation days to 13.7 miles during the final midnight-to-sunrise ascent to the summit.  

Paratrek’s founder, Zur, summed up what I suspect the entire group felt during this experience: “ascending the peak of Kilimanjaro is a dream come true, not because of the mountain … The dream that we fulfilled is to see this group – people with and without disabilities, and major ones – climbing up together as a group; as people who see each other as equals.”  

Everyone returned home as friends and equals, with countless memories, dozens of photos and videos, strong bonds and an appreciation that we all have abilities beyond our disabilities. None of the trip participants speak of feeling paralysed; they speak very fondly of their new friends who happen to be paralysed. 

Thank you Marcela, Starla, Arnon and Arnold for being such great teachers!

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