Annual Yom HaMorim dinner, which is open to the public, will recognize long service of Rabbi Avraham Ettedgui and Mary Baumgarten

By ERIN ELLIOTT BRYAN / Community News Editor

[You must] appoint teachers in each and every city, and a city that does not have a teacher is to be excommunicated until it appoints a teacher. — Shulchan Aruch

The Talmud Torah of Minneapolis hosts the annual Yom HaMorim dinner to celebrate its teachers and mark the significant milestones reached by individual educators. It’s the highlight of the year for the teachers, according to Head of School Susie Chalom.

The event, sponsored by the Rabbi Marc and Dr. Henia Liebhaber Family Yom HaMorim Fund, will honor Rabbi Avraham Ettedgui for 50 years and Mary Baumgarten for 40 years of service to the school and its students. The fund was established in the 1970s, and endowed several years later, by former AJW publisher Rabbi Liebhaber, who started his career in Minneapolis as a teacher at the Talmud Torah.

“This year, because it’s Rabbi Ettedgui’s 50th year, which is so unique, and Mary Baumgarten’s 40th, we decided to open up the dinner to the community,” Chalom told the AJW. “It’s somewhat of a small fundraiser that will go towards teacher recognition and teacher enrichment at the school.”

The dinner and program will take place at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 12 at Beth El Synagogue in St. Louis Park. All are welcome to attend or send a tribute to Ettedgui and Baumgarten.

“I know the impact that they have had on the lives of so many people in this community,” Chalom said. “When you have a teacher who has been very impactful on your life, and you feel thankful and you feel gratitude toward them, you don’t always get a chance to express it.”

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When the Jewish World publishes a “Celebrations” special section, it is our custom to move the social notices (B’nai Mitzva, engagements and weddings) from the front of the paper to the section. With Minnesota becoming the 12th marriage equality state in the nation on May 14, we are looking forward to publishing a number of engagement notices in our June 21 “Celebrations” section. We assume that families will want to shep naches, share their joy, with the Jewish community. (Please send your photos and notices to Erin Elliott Bryan at: community@ajwnews.com. The deadline for submissions is Wednesday, June 12. There is a $10 charge for processing the photo.)

In August, we will watch for your wedding notices.

It has been a weird and finally exhilarating path to the passage of the same-sex marriage bill, which Gov. Mark Dayton signed into law, in a ceremony staged in front of the Capitol last week and watched by a throng numbering in the thousands. The word “inclusion” is bandied about in various contexts; but the scene at the Capitol was truly inclusive for thousands of Minnesotans who heretofore had been treated as second-class citizens vis-à-vis the state’s marriage laws.

Discrimination against LGBT people is still a sort of final frontier in civil rights activism; and there is still more to be done on the federal level — specifically, overturning the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and passing the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would prohibit employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Readers will recall that the organized Jewish community came together in an overwhelming way last year in opposition to the ballot initiative that would have amended the state Constitution with the definition of marriage as being between one man and one woman. The ballot measure was forthrightly opposed by the Minnesota Rabbinical Association, Jewish Community Action, Conservative and Reform congregations, and many of the major Jewish agencies.

Although public opinion polls in the run-up to the general election showed that both the marriage amendment and the photo ID (voter suppression) amendments would likely pass, the final poll, the actual voting on election day, delivered different results. And the movement to defeat the marriage amendment continued rolling, as the DFL also regained control of both houses in the Legislature. Many, if not most, Minnesotans were thrilled to see the House and then the Senate pass the bill to legalize same-sex marriage in Minnesota. I want to give a special shout-out to Sen. Branden Petersen, R-Andover (who is about the same age as my eldest son), who was one of the Senate authors of the marriage equality bill, and stuck to his guns in the face of staunch opposition from his fellow Republican caucus members. And, of course, we will miss Vikings punter Chris Kluwe, who was a wonderful straight ally for gay rights. Best of luck in Oakland, Chris.

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Augie’s Secrets: The Minneapolis Mob and the King of the Hennepin Strip, by Neal Karlen, Minnesota Historical Society, 232 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by NEAL GENDLER

It’s a shame Neal Karlen called his 2004 autobiography Shanda, because if ever a book deserved that title, it’s this one.

Not that it’s bad; on the contrary, it’s deliciously snappy, as usual from this son of Minneapolis who writes for big-name East Coast publications. But Jewish gangsters! Of this we should be reminding people?

Augie’s Secrets tells of the 30 or so years when Jews ran a busy Minneapolis criminal underworld — indeed a shanda fur di goyim, which Karlen defines as “a scandal perpetrated by a Jew that makes all Jews look bad in the eyes of non-Jews.”

Jewish gangsters and racketeers must have been especially mortifying in what was then one of the nation’s most anti-Semitic cities. And a gangster in the family? Double shanda.

Augie Ratner, Karlen’s great-uncle, ran a speakeasy called the White Swan, and in 1943 opened Augie’s Theater Lounge, a bar with comics and strippers at 424 Hennepin Avenue — where it remains, its name amended, one of the few remnants of the Gateway clearing project that demolished downtown’s Skid Row.

Karlen’s grandmother referred to her brother Augie as a “geng-stuh,” but Karlen insists he was just a mensch who knew gangsters, even John Dillinger. They drank at his saloons — after checking their guns at the door — and they were fond of him.

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The Missing File, by D.A. Mishani, HarperCollins, 290 pages, $25.99

Reviewed by DR. MORTON I. TEICHER

In the days after Israel was founded in 1948, mysteries and crime fiction were considered to be rather flimsy and petty — particularly in a society that was busy putting together its Zionist ideology with values that would contribute to solidifying the status of a new state.

Some American and British writers were translated into Hebrew, but crime fiction was considered appropriate only for youngsters and did not appeal to readers of serious Hebrew literature.

This situation changed in the 1980s as the state matured and mysteries began to appear. For the most part, they were not translated into English. An exception was Batya Gur, several of whose excellent detective stories appeared in English before she died at the age of 57.

D.A. Mishani is editor of fiction at Keter Books, an Israeli publishing house, and a literary scholar specializing in the history of detective literature. He has decided that the best way to spread recognition of Israeli crime fiction is to write novels himself, and to make sure that they are translated into English and other languages.

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Rabbi Julie Gordon, a Minnesota native, found herself in the midst of a threatening mob of ultra-Orthodox Jews

AJW Staff Report

Early in the morning on Friday, May 10, thousands of haredi Orthodox youths gathered at the Kotel, the Western Wall plaza, to protest Women of the Wall as they held their Rosh Chodesh prayer service.

As Women of the Wall (WOW), a women’s prayer group that holds monthly services at the site, began praying, the crowd of young haredim began to raise a ruckus. The protesters shouted obscenities, spit, and tossed bottles and rocks at the mostly female prayer group, which had been forced to the back of the plaza after haredi Orthodox women had packed the women’s section by the Wall earlier in the morning.

In an e-mail to the Jewish World this week, Rabbi Julie K. Gordon, formerly of Temple of Aaron Synagogue and the Talmud Torah of St. Paul, described how she prepared to lay tefillin — a ritual item handed down to her by her zayde — with the Women of the Wall group. May 10 also happened to be Gordon’s 56th birthday.

Davening with tefillin is something the rabbi does on a regular basis; however, “for the first time, I felt afraid,” she wrote.

Gordon described the scene at the Kotel: “It was painful to see some men throw rocks and hatefully yell, ‘Whore!’ and ‘Nazi’ and ‘You’re going to give us all cancer!’ and some women spit globs upon us, misunderstanding our sincerity.”

She added, “I made my way into the center of my women’s prayer group, WOW, wrapped myself in my brightly colored silk tallit that depicts the walls of the old city of Jerusalem, and laid my tefillin. Soon my fear melted with the rising joyous song and spirited Hallel prayers — psalms welcoming the month that brings Shavuot — our celebration of receiving the Torah at Sinai where we stood together as one people before God, each according to our own strengths and abilities. And limitations, I supposed, as the loud whistles and screams and obscenities meant to drown out our prayer rained upon us, harsher even than the rocks, coffee, trash and spit. The police were professional and effective, enforcing the court verdict allowing us to pray according to our pluralistic, feminist, and egalitarian customs, keeping the violence mostly at bay.”

Israeli riot police scuffle with haredi Orthodox Jews at the Western Wall plaza in a bid to keep them away from Women of the Wall’s monthly prayer service at the holy site in Jerusalem on May 10. (Photo: Flash90)

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The AJW’s Wayback Machine has been set for 1939. Click on the link below to see who had guests for the weekend, who got engaged and who was born (PDF might take a few seconds to load): AJW Social page 2.10.39

Love it or hate it, you can’t avoid ‘Hava Nagila,’ part of the soundtrack of our Jewish lives

By MORDECAI SPECKTOR

Hava nagila, hava nagila (Let us rejoice, let us rejoice) / Hava nagila ve-nismecha (Let us rejoice and be glad)

Hava neranena, hava neranena (Let us sing, let us sing) / Hava neranena ve-nismecha (Let us sing and be glad)

Uru, uru achim (Awake, awake, brothers) / Uru achim be-lev sameach! (Awake, brothers, with a joyful heart!)

As surely as the Federation will call for an annual donation, every Jewish wedding reception and Bar/Bat Mitzva celebration involves a rendition of “Hava Nagila” and dancing the hora.

But did you know that two families are still contending over which of their ancestors composed the most famous Jewish song? And are you aware of the fact that country music star Glen Campbell recorded an instrumental version of “Hava Nagila” on the B-side of his Oscar-nominated single for the movie True Grit?

These and other questions are examined by a host of scholars and musical stars in Hava Nagila (The Movie), a greatly entertaining 73-minute documentary, which will have its regional premiere on Thursday, May 23 at the Riverview Theater in Minneapolis. The event will feature a Q&A after the screening with the film’s director, Roberta Grossman, and live music by Eisner’s Klezmorim.

I’m thinking that they may play “Hava Nagila.” Hora dancing could break out.

Director Roberta Grossman (Photo: Robert Zuckerman)

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