Published Articles

Original Article Published on The New York Jewish Week

Timed to coincide with February’s JDAIM, the international group will trek Africa’s tallest mountain using Israeli designed special assistance technology.

This year, I will not be spending Jewish Disability Awareness, Acceptance & Inclusion Month (JDAIM) with my colleagues and friends at 10th annual Jewish Disability Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill (February 4th).  And I won’t be teaching about disability inclusion at synagogues or college campuses across the country.  While I will “miss” the more traditional marking of JDAIM, I will have the once in a lifetime opportunity to experience Jewish disabilities inclusion in a very unconventional setting—Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania!

I will attempt to trek up the 19,341 foot mountain, through five ecosystems and vast game preserves, with 27 hikers from Texas, Montana, New York, and New Jersey, as well as with participants from Israel.  The delegation includes a twice paralyzed Utah athlete and her husband, a Peruvian born cyclist and skier who is also an amputee with paraplegia, an Israeli army veteran who is paralyzed, a 9/11 first responder who experienced PTSD, a local Tanzanian man with paraplegia and others who believe in the mission of FAISR—Friends of Access Israel.

FAISR, started only several months ago, and Access Israel, founded just over 20 years ago in Israel, is an organization which uses education, advocacy and technology to promote accessibility, inclusion, respect, removal of actual and perceived barriers, and an equitable environment for people of all abilities around the world.

The trekkers will ascend the Marangu route, also known as the Coca Cola trail, to reach the peak.  In accordance with best practices and Tanzanian law which assures the safety of hikers with and without disabilities, the delegation will be accompanied by three cooks, 11 guides, and 70 porters.  Daily mileage will range from 3.1 miles on the acclimation days, to a grueling 13.7 miles during the final ascent, setting out just before midnight Saturday night with the goal of reaching the summit at sunrise.

The group should be well-rested for the final, all-night Saturday night ascent.  We will be spending a relaxing Shabbat at 15,420 feet and will enjoy vegan kosher Shabbat meals, prayer services (including Shabbat morning where we will read the Song of the Sea from a torah scroll (yes, we are carrying a kosher torah scroll up the mountain!). And I will have the privilege of teaching a favorite JDAIM Talmud text on inclusion!

The climb up Kilimanjaro is believed to be the largest delegation of hikers with disabilities.  Starla Hilliard-Barnes, who was selected as Ms. Wheelchair Montana in 2014, became the first wheelchair-user to compete in the Mrs. Montana pageant in 2016.   She is founder of Moving Forward Adaptive Sports and the charity, Gifts of Love, and will be accompanied by husband, Shannon Barnes.  Hillard-Barnes will use a specialized wheelchair, known as a Paratrek, as she ascends Kilimanjaro.  “I’ve dreamed since I was a little girl to go climb Mount Kilimanjaro,” reports Starla.  She has been hearing about Africa and Kilimanjaro her whole life from her grandparents, who were missionaries there.

In a phone interview three weeks before the trip, Hillard-Barnes concedes that she has “never sat on a Paratrek” and “never even touched one!”  The good natured Hillard-Barnes playfully reports, “It will be interesting.”  The experienced hand-cyclist, who has a great deal of hiking and camping experience feels her biggest challenge will be “giving up my independence and letting someone else be in control.”   Unlike with hand cycling, which she does on her own, she will need to rely on others when she uses the Paratrek.

Omer Zur, founder and CEO of Paratrek, the Israeli company that specializes in finding solutions for people with disabilities to enable them to enjoy nature with groups of people with and without disabilities, is very aware of the need to find the right balance between assuring the independence of the trekker, and offering assistance as needed.  He designed the first Paratrek to enable his fiercely independent father who was paralyzed 35 years ago during the Yom Kippur War to climb mountains and go camping.  “My parents wanted us to be the best version of ourselves and to go out in nature and be comfortable.”  On a three-year post-army trek, Zur realized that his father never had this opportunity.  He set out to design an apparatus for his dad.  His father was not pleased with the initial concept—a stretcher carried by Omer’s friends.  Zur then created the Paratrek, and he and his father set out on a 33-day journey.

The Paratrek has a rickshaw-style bar in the front that fits around another hiker’s waist and handlebars in the back that a second person can use to stabilize or push the trekker with paraplegia, if needed. Zur will be traveling from Israel to Tanzania with five Paratreks, extra shock absorbers, wheels and other supplies.  On the trip, Zur will make sure the Paratreks are in proper working order, and he will be there to help assure the comfort and safety of each participant.

Hillard-Barnes initially learned of the Kilimanjaro hike from Facebook friend and fellow paraplegic, Marcela Maranon.  Peruvian-born Maranon, who lives in Dallas, Texas, lost her left leg and became paralyzed from the waist down in a car crash at age 19.  Following what she described as a “very dark period” of several years, she entered rehab in Baltimore, Maryland.  Her experiences with ReWalk, an Israeli-made, FDA approved wearable robotic exoskeleton that provides powered hip and knee motion to enable individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) to stand upright, walk, turn, and climb and descend stairs attracted a great deal of attention in the United States, Israel and around the world.  She went on to be the public face of Rewalk. She playfully notes, “I am the girl in the brochures!”  She has also fallen in love with Israel, reporting, “When I went to Israel, I felt Israel was my second home—it is so beautiful, the food is fantastic, they have the best beaches…”  Maranon and Hillard-Barnes will get to meet in person in Tanzania on February 2nd as they get acquainted with their fellow climbers and the Paratrek.

James Lassner, executive director of Friends of Access Israel, is inspired by the unique stories of each of the participants.  “With our collective physical strengths, mental toughness, and diverse abilities, we are all looking forward to joining together to conquer Kilimanjaro as a team.  Our goal is to unite as one, laugh together, cry together, trek together, and celebrate together at 19,341 feet.”

When the delegation gathers at JFK airport in New York on February 2nd, they will be one step closer to reaching the summit of Kilimanjaro, and spreading the word for inclusion.

Please follow the expedition’s updates on Facebook and Instagram.

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Original Article Published on The chabad.ORG

The 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics are still more than six months away (July 24-Aug. 9), but the team at Chabad-Lubavitch of Tokyo is already hard at work. Rabbi Mendi Sudakevich, who arrived in Tokyo 20 years ago from his native Kfar Chabad, Israel, is gregarious and creative—and has plenty of ideas for serving Jews who will be playing in, watching or otherwise involved with the Olympics.

The Games come in addition to a booming surge of interest in Japan. While 8 million people visited the island nation in 2010, nearly 40 million came in 2019—exceeding Japan’s own goal by 15 million. This partially accounts for why it had been so hard for the rabbi to find available event space this summer so he can meet the needs of Jewish athletes and guests.

Sudakevich and his wife, Chana, will be creating a temporary Jewish center in the Olympic Village that will have a full schedule of Shabbat and weekday services, kosher-food offerings and meals, and more. “We will have parallel activities going on at the Chabad House at the same time,” explains the rabbi, who notes that the center has a mikvah as well. Similar to the Chabad presence at previous Olympic Games—from Athens to Rio de Janeiro and Sochi to South Korea—Sudakevich will be flying out a full crew of rabbinical students to staff the various Jewish pop-up stations around the massive capital.

The rabbi says that he has been in touch with various Olympic delegations from Israel and around the world. For the first time ever, in September, Team Israel’s baseball team qualified for one of the six berths to compete in the Olympic finals. However, this won’t be Team Israel’s first trip to Japan. Sudakevich fondly recalls the baseball team’s last visit in March, when one of their games coincided with the holiday of Purim. “We read Megillah for the whole team,” Sudakevich tells Chabad.org.

One member of Team Israel’s baseball team is Danny Valencia, who has racked up impressive credentials while playing on eight Major League baseball teams. “I had a normal Jewish upbringing. I went to Hebrew school and celebrated my bar mitzvah,” says the infielder, whose mother is Jewish. “We went to synagogue on the High Holidays; my mother fasted on Yom Kippur. I was around Judaism.”

That makes Chabad an important stop for him on his baseball journey, especially when he’s with an entire team of Jewish ballplayers. Valencia particularly enjoys the Jewish rituals he has shared with fellow Team Israel players. “On Friday nights, we had Shabbat dinner with prayers, toasts and breaking bread with the boys.”

Japan's State Minister for Foreign Affairs Yasuhide Nakayama and family with Chabad of Japan emissaries at a Chanukah event last month at the Israeli embassy in Tokyo. L to R, Rachel Vaisfiche, Batya Vishedsky, Chana Sudakevich, Rabbi Shmuel Vishedsky, the Nakayamas, Rabbi Mendi Sudakevich, Rabbi Shalom Vaisfiche.
Japan’s State Minister for Foreign Affairs Yasuhide Nakayama and family with Chabad of Japan emissaries at a Chanukah event last month at the Israeli embassy in Tokyo. L to R, Rachel Vaisfiche, Batya Vishedsky, Chana Sudakevich, Rabbi Shmuel Vishedsky, the Nakayamas, Rabbi Mendi Sudakevich, Rabbi Shalom Vaisfiche.

An Opportunity for Japan to Learn About Judaism

Sudakevich says Jewish tourism in Japan will continue to rise once El Al begins direct service from Tel Aviv to Tokyo in March. Despite the rising numbers, however, most Japanese people, he notes, know little about Judaism or the Jewish people, and he hopes that the influx of Jewish tourists this year will help change that.

The Sudakeviches are one of four Chabad-Lubavitch emissary couples serving Japan. “There is one Chabad center in Kobe (a 264-mile drive or three-plus hours on the bullet train from Tokyo) and two new ones: in Kyoto, which is Japan’s No. 1 tourist destination (a six-hour drive from Tokyo), and in Takayama, Japan’s Alps (two-and-a-half hours west of Tokyo). Many tourists go there to see the real Japan.”

But Sudakevich reports that “we all work together” with a common goal of meeting the Jewish needs of their various communities. “Japan’s Jewish community is unique in that it is mostly a community of people who come to work here for a few years—bankers, lawyers, those in high-tech.” He notes that most are in their 20s and 30s, and are transient, eventually returning home to their countries of origin. “There is no second generation,” he notes.

As far as the Olympics go, locals and tourists will be able to enjoy kosher meals at Chabad of Tokyo. While Sudakevich says the community imports some kosher products from the United States, he is proud that shechitah is performed in the city of Kobe by Rabbi Dovid Posner, the Chabad rabbi of Kyoto.

Rabbi Dovid Posner will be performing shechita to help provide kosher meat for visitors. He and his wife, Chaya Mushka, arrived in Japan last year just as the island erupted with pink cherry blossoms.
Rabbi Dovid Posner will be performing shechita to help provide kosher meat for visitors. He and his wife, Chaya Mushka, arrived in Japan last year just as the island erupted with pink cherry blossoms.

Sudakevich and Chabad have experience serving larger crowds. “We hosted the Rugby World Cup over the recent High Holidays. It was a big thing. We had many visitors—Jews from South Africa, Australia and England. It was a little taste of the Olympics.”

Sudakevich expects even more visitors to the Olympics, and he says he will be ready for them. “The biggest challenge was finding an appropriate place to host the activities,” he acknowledges.

Nevertheless, he remained undaunted and finally found the perfect place. “Tourism to Japan is increasing a lot; we need a bigger Chabad House,” he says.

Reflecting on the upcoming games, the rabbi recognizes the amount of work ahead.

“It is going to be a crazy month,” he says good-naturedly. “Good, but crazy.”

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Original Article Published On the Jerusalem Post

A new exhibit at the New-York Historical Society brings the famous writer’s journey back to life.

NEW YORK – In 1867, future Zionist leader Theodor Herzl was seven years old, and the Civil War in the United States had ended two short years ago. That same year, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known to fans of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn books as “Mark Twain,” did what a handful of Protestant lovers of the bible did in those days – he set off for the Holy Land.

Twain found a clever way to get himself aboard a luxury cruise trip of a lifetime. He arranged to write a series of newspaper columns for a California newspaper and set off from New York’s harbor on the steamship Quaker City. The five-and-a-half-month excursion featured stops in Europe, the Mediterranean and the Holy Land.

An impressive collection of maps, documents, costumes and photographs – mostly from the Shapell Manuscript Foundation – and the only known film clip of Mark Twain, shot in 1909 (incorporated in to the 2017 documentary Dreamland: Mark Twain’s Journey to Jerusalem, narrated by Martin Sheen), are on display in the Mark Twain and the Holy Land exhibit, through February 2 at the New-York Historical Society’s museum and library in New York City.

The exhibit, which occupies a very small, narrow room on the second floor of the impressive museum, was packed on a recent Friday on the day after American Thanksgiving.

“You don’t usually associate Mark Twain with Israel,” observes Jody Friedman of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “It is cool to see Israel through his eyes.” Friedman was here with sons Ethan, 9, and Caleb, 6, and enjoyed showing them such familiar scenes as the Western Wall and the Damascus Gate as they appeared in photos from Twain’s trip more than 150 years ago. Friedman plans to go back for a guided tour of the exhibit with her congregational rabbi, Dr. Meir Soloveichik of Congregation Shearith Israel. Soloveichik is also the director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.

Another visitor, Eric Douglas, learned of the exhibit when in Manhattan from Sacramento, California, six weeks ago visiting his daughter. He was looking forward to visiting the Twain exhibit on his Thanksgiving trip to New York.

“I love Mark Twain and am a lifelong student,” he says. “I read Innocents Abroad, and I am a lover of travel and travel writing.” Douglas is referring to Twain’s 1869 travel book entitled, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress, which chronicles his half-year journey in a humorous, irreverent, incisive fashion. The book sold more than 70,000 copies in its first year and remained the best-selling of Twain’s books throughout his lifetime – outselling his better known classics, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (published in 1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). “In a way, he is the funniest and most engaging travel writer of all time,” says Douglas.

Douglas observes, “The exhibit is very compact and packs a wallop!” He enjoyed the “interactive case” with maps, photos and narrations. Visitors can view “Follow the Journey at Sea,” “Explore Maps from Twain’s Time,” and “Meet the Photographers,” including Francis Frith, Felix Bonfils and William E James. Douglas’s favorite object on display was the Parker Brothers board game, The Amusing Game of the Innocents Abroad. Douglas remarks with a smile, “I would love to rip it out of the case and take it home!”

TOVA WARREN, in town from Hampton, Virginia, with her husband to spend Thanksgiving with her daughter, son in law and granddaughter, also enjoyed seeing familiar scenes. “I lived and worked in Israel for three years,” she reports. “We go back five generations in Jerusalem!”

Warren was especially impressed with the large map tracing Twain’s travels – by ship and train – from New York City on June 8, 1867, via Marseilles, Paris, Milan, Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples, Athens, Constantinople, Odessa, Smyrna, Beirut, Damascus, before arriving in Jerusalem on September 23. He arrived back in New York on November 19, 1867, after stops in Cairo, Alexandria, Tangiers and Bermuda. “Now that I am 70, I don’t take planes anymore,” says Warren. She can relate to Twain’s boat travels, as she and her husband recently returned from a trip they took in May on the cruise ship Queen Mary from the United States to the UK and Ireland and back to the US.

When Twain read an advertisement for a voyage to Europe and the Holy Land, he sensed a golden opportunity. He persuaded the Alta California newspaper to cover the $1,250 cost of the trip in return for weekly columns. Twain next convinced the captain to give him a spot on this high-end steamship, which featured a library, printing press, piano and pipe organ.

As the free museum pamphlet outlining the five parts to the exhibit notes, “For American Protestants, the Holy Land conjured up awe, reverence and mystery. Their visions were shaped by romantic travel literature that described Palestine as majestic and grand. In reality, this area, known as Palestine, was a province of Syria and an impoverished backwater of the declining Ottoman Empire.”

Visitors to the exhibit were similarly impressed in a nostalgic kind of way by the maps and photos of the Holy Land, and by the fact that Twain had ventured there so many years before such travel was in vogue. Twain, however, found the Holy Land disappointing. Israel was not all what he had expected.

Benjamin Shapell, president of the Shapell Manuscript Foundation, observes, “Musing about the voyage in a passage later published in Innocents Abroad, Twain so aptly noted: ‘Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.’”

“That his travelogue espoused such a liberal sentiment while at the very same time also exposing the deep closed-mindedness of his fellow shipmates is the very reason why Twain’s biting perspective comes across as so fresh to us even today,” Shapell says.

Twain was not the only famous person of his time to visit the Holy Land in the 1800s. Author Herman Melville traveled there in 1857. The exhibit features letters by such notable fellow travelers to Palestine as President Ulysses S. Grant, Gen. William T. Sherman and Theodore Roosevelt.

A lithograph by David Roberts, the first professional artist to visit the Near East without a patron or a connection to a military expedition or missionary group, is also on display. Roberts sailed to Alexandria in 1838 and for 11 months traveled up the Nile River, across deserts and mountains, through Egypt and the Holy Land. He arrived in Jerusalem on Easter 1839 – almost 30 years before Twain’s arrival. His sketches and paintings provided the basis for the 247 lithographs published with text between 1842 and 1849.

Shapell notes, “We are pleased that the New-York Historical Society has brought together these rare manuscripts and artifacts, bringing Twain’s lively, influential, and singular experience to life.” The exhibit also provides useful backdrop and insight for students of Middle East history as they continue to discuss and debate various narratives about Palestine (the Land of Israel) in the 1800s.

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The original Article Published On The Jerusalem Post

Cohen’s father and great grandfather both served as president the Orthodox synagogue which Zelermyer affectionately refers to as “The Shaar.”

NEW YORK – “Hallelujah! I’m your man!”

That’s how Cantor Gideon Zelermyer responded to Leonard Cohen when the famed Canadian singer/songwriter asked him in 2015 to collaborate with him on a song.

Zelermyer, cantor for the past 16 years of Montreal’s Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Westmount, Quebec, had a unique and unusual professional and personal relationship with the late Cohen. The two corresponded by email for 10 years before the request for a musical collaboration emerged, which wound up being “You Want it Darker,” the title song of Cohen’s Grammy Award-winning final album released in 2016.

“When I got the email from Cohen at six o’clock in the morning [to work on the album], I shouted, woke up my family and wrote him back: ‘Hallelujah! I’m your man!’” recalled Zelermyer in an interview with The Jerusalem Post, marking the third anniversary of Cohen’s death.

Zelermyer is a man of many talents and interests. He is a skilled musician, a self-described “serious opera lover” and the father of sons aged eight and 11. He is also affable, funny, well-connected in the Montreal cultural community and a huge sports fan. The Rhode Island-born and Connecticut-raised tenor still roots for the Boston Red Sox, the Celtics and the New England Patriots. However, Zelermyer proudly roots for the hometown hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens. His wife is from Montreal, and he recently became a Canadian citizen after living there for 18 years.Cohen’s father and great grandfather both served as president the Orthodox synagogue which Zelermyer affectionately refers to as “The Shaar.”

Zelermyer and his Shaar musical team didn’t know at first what Cohen expected of them. They received a rough track from Los Angeles of what would become “You Want it Darker” – with just Cohen’s voice. They sent back a few options of how the track might sound, recorded with his music director, Roï Azoulay, and the synagogue’s all-male choir. Zelermyer and Azoulay recorded different musical options to complement Cohen’s vocal track. After the songs were produced, Cohen thoughtfully sent Zelermyer a thank you note – and a self-portrait.

The single “You Want It Darker” was released on September 21, 2016. The album came out one month later. Sadly, Cohen died a few weeks later on November 7. Zelermyer officiated at a mainly secretive, private family funeral in Montreal. A month later, Cohen’s family brought Zelermyer and the Shaar choir to Los Angeles to sing at a memorial service.

While Cohen never spoke of death with Zelermyer, or indicated a sense that death was imminent, the cantor noted “He was talking about it his whole life.” Zelermyer felt the album “makes sense – to work through his feelings. The tone of the record didn’t surprise me – with the echoes of kaddish, and the words of Hineni. You see he is placing his destiny in the hands of something higher.”

Zelermyer did not have many in-person meetings with Cohen. The cantor reflects “I was physically in the same room with Leonard three times: once at a concert in Ottawa, in Los Angeles for the 2016 record release, and at his burial.”

The cantor recalled having “very brief conversations.” He fondly recalls their in person meeting in Los Angeles. “I brought him a gift – a Yom Kippur machzor [prayer book], which I found at Shaar, given to his late sister at her Hebrew school graduation.”

ZELERMYER WAS HONORED to attend the 2017 Grammy Awards Ceremony at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden, where Cohen, Zelermyer and the synagogue choir were awarded a Grammy Award posthumously. Perhaps somewhat ironically, Cohen’s Grammy, and the accompanying “certificate of participation” awarded to the cantor and his team as vocal soloists, is in the Best Rock Performance category. The award is for “You Want It Darker,” the first track on Cohen’s 14th and final album of the same name.

“It’s an amazing, loving, beautiful tribute to an amazing life in music,” observed Zelermyer. “It is such a bittersweet closure that the first solo acknowledgment of an artistic statement of his by the Academy and at the same time he’s not around to enjoy it. But it’s a tremendous honor to his legacy, and certainly, for our city.”

At the 50th Grammy Awards in 2007, Cohen received his first career Grammy for Album Of The Year, as a featured artist on Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters. In 2010, Cohen received a lifetime achievement award from the Grammy academy. In 2017, Cohen’s You Want It Darker won the Canadian Juno Award for Album of the Year.

“It is still a tremendous source of honor for me and the Shaar, to play a small but significant role,” explained Zelermyer. “It is wonderful validation of why we maintain the tradition.” Zelermyer recalled an interview Cohen gave not long before his death where he explained why he wanted to work with a cantor and choir.

Cohen told the publication Le Dernier Empereur in an October 19, 2016, interview, “Even as a boy I loved their singing. It is what made compulsory synagogue attendance enjoyable. I’ve wanted to work with the cantor and the choir for a long time. The touring years interrupted this intention. On a secondary but still urgent note, there are times when you want to show the flag, when you want to indicate that there is nourishment to be had from this culture, that it is not entirely irrelevant to the present situation, that it does not serve a nation’s best interests to reject and despise it. This is more important in some countries than in others.”

Zelermyer added, “This is really unbelievable. It is such a special statement of validation—that there is something to be gleaned from this tradition.” He noted nostalgically that there are very few synagogue choirs in the world which meet weekly. The Shaar has proudly featured a weekly choir since 1887.

Zelermyer regularly shares Cohen’s kind words about cantors and choirs with young cantors. “I tell young cantors – when you read something like Cohen’s quote, it should be an inspiration to take what you do seriously – you never know how it will impact others.”

The cantor reflected on Cohen’s legacy, and on why he is loved and admired by people worldwide. “He appealed to the searcher. He appealed to the everyman type of dynamic.” Zelermyer noted that Cohen went through many phases in his spiritual life – “he was interested in Scientology, Eastern religions, but he always gravitated to the religion of his childhood, he was always interested in Judaism.”

His devoted fans continue to come to Montreal to get to know and experience Leonard Cohen. “There is a steady stream of people at Shaar on Saturdays-from Europe and all over – to see where he is from and what he is like. They want to see his house, and where he ate bagels. They are so respectful and so deferential. They want to understand. They continue to search, as Leonard did.”

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