Jewish History

Shouts of "Buy a vowel!" and "We're playing for the big money!" filled the auditorium of the Tifereth Israel Synagogue in Bensalem last Sunday morning, as more than 70 members of the congregation gathered to play a Jewish version of Wheel of Fortune. Jerry Orodenker, 46, of Feasterville, came up with the idea for "Wheel of Mazel" (which means luck). "I wanted to try to get a lot of the people (in the congregation) involved," he said. The goal of the game was to celebrate, educate and have fun. The audience was divided into the Likud, Labor, Gush Emunim and Agudat Yisrael sections, symbolizing four political parties in Israel.

The scholars approached their topic with considerable nervousness, and that was before the Wall Street meltdown, before Bernard L. Madoff. Would a series of lectures at a premier business school on the history of Jews making money feed negative stereotypes? In the end, the Wharton School and the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies decided to go ahead and tackle a topic that has gotten short shrift from academics until recently. The goal, said the center's director, David Ruderman, is to understand Jewish economic history "more profoundly, which is what a university does.

It's cultural bedrock for American children: School just isn't cool. They'd rather be anywhere but. So what are the students at Gratz College's Jewish Community High School (JCHS) doing, taking extra classes on evenings and weekends? "I'm getting a teaching certificate (for Jewish studies), so when I leave Gratz, I can work and earn extra money," said Joshua Van Naarden, 16, of Huntingdon Valley. "And it gives you a basis for your Jewishness. You pass this on to your kids.

The two dozen distinguished scholars who assembled last week here for a conference celebrating the "Centenary of Political Zionism" disputed many things, but did agree on one thing. It was that Zionism, which, against enormous odds, created a thriving, democratic nation in the ancestral homeland of the Jews and brought millions of Jews from all over the world to it, transformed the self-image of the Jewish people, as well as their image in the mind of the Gentile world. As Ruth R. Wisse, director of the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard University, summarized it: "Israel is the greatest miracle of the 20th century.

To mark the second anniversary of the march for Soviet Jewry in Washington, a Cherry Hill synagogue congregation last week heard a succession of speakers grapple with the implications of perestroika for Soviet Jews. Two years ago, the cry of the 250,000 people on the Washington Mall was "let our people go. " The question addressed by American and Soviet Jews last week was whether Mikhail S. Gorbachev's reforms have muted the calls for free emigration as an international human rights issue.

THROUGH the ritual of the Seder, Passover tells the story of the Pharaoh's oppression of the Jews in ancient Egypt and their eventual emancipation from slavery. It's a time of reflection, and after the recent war in Gaza, many Jews are asking: Who are the slaves and who is the Pharaoh? The war saw more than 1,417 Palestinians killed, more than 900 of them civilians, as opposed to 13 Israelis. The war was not only a devastating event for Palestinians but also the moral challenge of our time to the American Jewish community whose communal leadership supported the onslaught publicly and loudly.

Selma Demchick Ellis Fishman, 84, of Merion, a designer of custom invitations and a community activist, died of heart failure Monday, April 26, at her home. Mrs. Fishman graduated from Simon Gratz High School. After earning a bachelor's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, she joined the Center City architectural firm of her father, Israel Demchick. In the late 1950s, while raising a family, she established Selma Ellis Originals to create party invitations.

Few cities in America have as many survivors of the Holocaust as ours does. For many years large numbers have volunteered to speak in our schools and houses of worship, often despite the pain of recall, about their experiences in concentration camps, ghettos, forest hideaways, underground cells and the like. Youngsters have learned that people can commit almost unspeakable crimes, and that we must prevent and/or end genocidal crimes anywhere, anytime, by any people. Philadelphia's survivors could help show the way by pioneering a new emphasis in telling about their Holocaust lives.

One afternoon last week, Jonathan C. Friedman was standing in Room 308 of the West Chester University library and showing some of its holdings, such as 70-year-old Jewish newspapers from Leipzig and socialist newspapers from Strassburg. Only on microfilm are there copies of their vilest counterpart - the Voelkische Beobachter, the Nazi newspaper. "This whole room is an incredible resource," Friedman said, waving an arm around what is the WCU Holocaust and Genocide Education Center.

American society, says author and musician James McBride, sees him as a black man. But when he looks in the mirror, he sees only himself. "If I grew up in a truly color-blind society, I would not be a black American," McBride said. "I wrote this book [The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother] because I wanted people to see that our community is more than our differences. I've talked about this book to people around the world, black, white, Asian, short, tall, and literally I've met people who have had the same experiences growing up. " McBride, 41, the son of a white Jewish mother and a black Baptist minister, spoke this week to ninth through 12th grade students at the private, all-female Baldwin School.