Orthodox Jewish "Facebook" Separates Sexes

CNN

September 12th, 2011
08:34 PM ET

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish 'Facebook' separates the sexes

By Jessica Ravitz, CNN

(CNN) - Showing that modernity might, just might, find its place even in a world predisposed to the most traditional of customs, in walks FaceGlat: an ultra-Orthodox Jewish answer, at least for some, to Facebook.

Among the most conservative of Orthodox Jews, often referred to as Haredi Jews, modesty reigns. Women wear long sleeves and skirts, and they cover their hair after marriage. Men dress as their ancestors did centuries ago. The genders are separated in synagogues, on wedding dance floors and, in certain neighborhoods, on buses.

CNN reported this year on one community newspaper that went so far as to erase women from an iconic news photograph, all in an effort to uphold its values. The paper later apologized, not for its beliefs about modesty and featuring women in photographs but for how the matter was handled.

So social media – which, in the case of Facebook, invite sharing, tagging and gawking at photographs, among other interactions – may not be the most welcoming space for people with this kind of faith.

A 20-something self-taught website builder out of Israel, Yaakov Swisa, seems to be trying to change this.

Ynetnews, an English-language Israeli news site, reported in late July the establishment of FaceGlat, a Swisa-made social network that segregates men and women, blocks immodest advertisements and pictures, and uses a filter to keep language in comments and status updates clean.

“People who are God-fearing and care about their children’s education cannot tolerate the ads and pictures one sees on the regular Facebook,” Ynetnews wrote, quoting Swisa. “I personally know people who have deteriorated spiritually because of all kinds of things they were introduced to there.”

The name FaceGlat is a blending of Facebook with the word glatt, as in “glatt kosher,” the highest level of kosher when it comes to Jewish dietary laws surrounding meat. FaceGlat, Ynetnews reported Swisa as saying, is “not an alternative for Facebook” but rather “a cleaner option for those who are already there. If it encourages people to open accounts or waste their time instead of studying Torah – it’s a failure. It’s not worth a thing. I promised myself that if that happened I would close it down.”

According to a Le Monde report, posted late last week on Worldcrunch, a still-open FaceGlat has more than 2,000 users and is getting about 100 new accounts per week.

Read the full post HERE.

Punk, and Jewish: Rockers Explore Identity

NYT [see original for additional media]
June 13, 2009
Punk, and Jewish: Rockers Explore Identity
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Who knew?

Punk is Jewish.

Or, anyway, these fellows are: Tommy Ramone, Chris Stein, Lenny Kaye and Handsome Dick Manitoba, four New York godfathers of punk who packed an auditorium Thursday night at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research to excavate the unlikely roots of the rebellious and stripped-down 1970s rock genre, replete with fascist trappings.

“People don’t associate punk rock and Jews,” acknowledged Mr. Ramone, born Tamás Erdélyi in Budapest. He is the sole survivor of the Ramones, whose other members — Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee — he joined in taking the same stage name.

Yet connection there indisputably is, Steven Lee Beeber argued in his 2006 book “Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s,” subtitled “A Secret History of Jewish Punk.”

“The shpilkes, the nervous energy of punk, is Jewish,” Mr. Beeber wrote. “Punk reflects the whole Jewish history of oppression and uncertainty, flight and wandering, belonging and not belonging, always being divided, being in and out, good and bad, part and apart.”

Punk’s New York origins as a do-it-yourself, three-chorded return to music basics — and a fashion style and attitude — were no accident, said Richard Bienstock, a senior editor at Guitar World magazine who curated the forum. “It’s New York,” he said, “and anything that starts here, there’s a good chance Jews are involved.”

So there they were, onstage at 15 West 16th Street — “Loud Fast Jews,” as YIVO billed them — Mr. Ramone, 60; Mr. Stein, 59, of Blondie; Mr. Kaye, 62, of the Patti Smith Group; and Mr. Manitoba, 55, né Richard Blum, bar owner, radio host and lead singer of the Dictators.

The program raised some eyebrows at the Jewish institute, said YIVO’s cultural director, Harold Steinblatt, a former Guitar World editor.

But Mr. Manitoba dismissed concerns. “You can do what you want with your own people,” he said. “It’s the law of the playground.”

And if at times the byplay seemed to take on the zaniness of “Spinal Tap” — one questioner misheard Mr. Kaye’s reference to “the germination of punk” as “the German nation of punk” — there was also a serious issue in contention: how did Jewish punk rockers defend their use of Nazi symbols and other shock imagery?

It was a complex matter, allowed Mr. Ramone, who had family members who were killed in the Holocaust. “To bring forbidden things, horrible things, and make art of it was basically an artistic thing,” he said. “There’s an aesthetic effect when you take your deepest fears and try to get a grasp on it and try to make humor out of it.”

Mr. Manitoba conceded doubts. “I cried at ‘Schindler’s List,’ ” he said. “I don’t like to think I caused pain with ‘Master Race Rock.’ ”

“The sensitivity thing is a difficult subject,” he added. But the Dictators’ stage persona “has nothing to do with Nazis or people’s pain.” Instead, he said, it had everything to do with snotty young New Yorkers “doing it to get attention.”

Mr. Kaye said, “Sometimes, using forbidden imagery makes it your own.”

He added, “Punk rock really took a lot of symbols and turned them on their back.”

Either way, the uglier trappings were not to be taken seriously, Mr. Kaye said. “The Dictators were humorous in some ways.”

Mr. Manitoba rose up in mock protest. “What do you mean ‘in some ways’?” he said.

Like Jews elsewhere, the four represented varying degrees of Jewishness. Mr. Manitoba recalled losing his place reading his portion of the Torah at his bar mitzvah. “After the bar mitzvah?” he said. “I bought a pound of pot.”

Mr. Ramone said he attended a yeshiva of the Lubavitch Hasidim in Brooklyn, “but I really didn’t fit in — there were no girls in the class.”

Mr. Stein, who grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, said: “Religious affiliation didn’t mean anything to me and my friends. I’d be hard pressed to think ethnicity has something to do with my music.”

Mr. Kaye said he was “raised traditional,” but later went to synagogue only on the holidays.

“Actually,” interjected Mr. Manitoba in a burst of clarity, “several pounds of pot.”

Many of the 250 in the audience thronged the foursome afterward, soliciting autographs. “This was fantastic,” said Fritz Freidenberg, 49, a musician from Los Angeles wearing the T-shirt of his band, the Bloody Brains. Before the show Mr. Freidenberg had not known of the group’s collective heritage.

“I knew that Tommy was Jewish, that’s all,” he said.

Shari Saffioti, 52, a graphic designer who worked at Max’s Kansas City in the early days of punk, said she was thrilled to learn of the Jewish roots of punk. “Nobody really knew other of us were around,” she said. “We felt like oddballs. It turns out there are so many.”

Music in the WWII Concentration Camps

A 2007 article translated from German in the online journal Music and Politics.

Music in Concentration Camps 1933–1945

GUIDO FACKLER

Translated from the German by Peter Logan (Würzburg).

It would be wrong to reduce the “Music of the Shoah” (Holocaust/ churbn) to the Yiddish songs from the ghetto camps of Eastern Europe or to the multiple activities in the realm of classical or Jewish music found in the ghetto camp at Theresienstadt (Terezín), which of course enjoyed a special status as a model camp. It would be equally wrong to restrict our view of music in concentration camps to the “Moorsoldatenlied” (“The Peat Bog Soldiers”), the “Buchenwald Song,” the “Dachau Song,” or the so-called “Girls’ Orchestra in Auschwitz,” described by Fania Fénelon – also the subject of the Hollywood film entitled “Playing for Time”.[1] Instead of this, I wish to address the topic of musical activities in general in the concentration camps.[2] Thus this chapter is about those camps that the Nazi regime started to erect just a few weeks after Hitler’s assumption of power; these camps formed the seed from which the entire system of Nazi camps grew, and which eventually consisted of over 10,000 camps of various kinds.[3]

In fact music was an integral part of camp life in almost all the Nazi-run camps. The questions covered by my research include: how was it possible to play music in these camps? What musical forms developed there? What, under these circumstances was the function, the effect and the significance of music for both the suffering inmates and the guards who inflicted the suffering? And how was the extent of musical activities affected by the development of the concentration camp system? My research is based on extensive archive work, the study of memoirs and literature, and interviews with witnesses. In the first part of this essay I describe the various forms of music performed at the behest of the SS in the camps. In the second part I analyze the very different question of the musical activities initiated by the inmates themselves.

Read the article here.

Ilyas Malayev, 72, Uzbek Musician and Poet, Dies

New York Times
May 7, 2008
Ilyas Malayev, 72, Uzbek Musician and Poet, Dies
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Ilyas Malayev, a musician and poet renowned in Uzbekistan and transplanted to Queens, where he was a legend among fellow Bukharan Jews, died on Friday in Flushing. He was 72 and lived in Forest Hills.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Lana Levitin, his manager.

Before emigrating from his native land in Central Asia, Mr. Malayev won fame and official plaudits in the former Soviet Union for his interpretation of the shash maqam, a body of folk melodies and songs that originated as the court music of feudal Bukhara. He also performed his own songs, and wrote lyric poetry in several languages, which he published in the United States under the titles “Milk and Sugar” and “Devon.” Still, he struggled to build a new creative life after immigrating to America in 1992.

“He’s one of maybe half a dozen people in the world who has such a deep knowledge of the shash maqam,” said Walter Z. Feldman, an expert on Ottoman Turkish music, told a reporter for The New York Times in 1997. “What Malayev knows almost nobody knows.”

Mr. Malayev was born in Mary and grew up in Kattakurgan, a small town near Bukhara, where he learned to play the tar and the tambur, string instruments similar to the lute, as well as the violin. He also applied himself to the shash maqam, studying with local teachers and listening to recordings made in the time of the last emir of Bukhara.

In 1951 he moved to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where he performed in various state-supported ensembles. He appeared with the Uzbek Song and Dance Ensemble from 1952 to 1960, the Ensemble of Singers and Dancers of the Peoples of the World from 1953 to 1956, and the Folk and Variety Orchestras of Uzbekistan Radio from 1956 to 1962. From 1962 to 1992 he performed with the Symphonic Variety Orchestra of Uzbekistan Radio.

Mr. Malayev achieved great popularity as a variety performer and wedding entertainer, combining comedy routines, poetry recitations, excerpts from the shash maqam and his own songs. His performances in stadiums drew tens of thousands of Uzbeks, and his appeal reached beyond his native republic.

“No occasion would be complete without Malayev,” he told a reporter for The New York Times in 1997. “When Brezhnev came to visit, my wife and I always sang.”

Despite his reputation, Mr. Malayev was unable to publish his poetry in the Soviet Union. He attributed this to anti-Semitism. He belonged to a small Jewish minority in a predominantly Muslim (although officially atheist) society. Traditionally, Jews performed as musicians at the court of the Bukharan emirs.

After emigrating, Mr. Malayev found his way to Queens, where an enclave of Bukharan Jews was developing in Rego Park and Forest Hills. He became a central figure in the area’s cultural life, organizing local musicians and singers into an ensemble, Maqam, for which he was an instrumentalist and music director. As the Ilyas Malayev Ensemble, the group released a compact disc on the Shanachie label in 1997 called “At the Bazaar of Love.” After Mr. Malayev’s death, the group was renamed the Ilyas Malayev Ensemble Maqam.

Besides his wife, Muhabbat Shamayeva, a vocalist with the ensemble, Mr. Malayev is survived by two sons, Radj, of Forest Hills, and Gera, of Leonia, N.J.; three daughters, Nargis and Viola, both of Forest Hills, and Bella, of Tel Aviv; 15 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

“While other Central Asian émigré musicians plugged in and sang pop songs in the hope of appealing to a younger crowd, Malayev never abandoned his belief in the power of traditional music and poetry to stir the spirit,” said Theodore Levin, whose book “The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York)” includes an affectionate portrait of Mr. Malayev. “A listener didn’t need to understand Uzbek or Tajik to feel the power of his songs and poetry.”

Judy Frankel, 65; singer recorded centuries-old Sephardic music

Los Angeles Times
Judy Frankel, 65; singer recorded centuries-old Sephardic music
By Mary Rourke
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

April 13, 2008

Judy frankel, a classical musician who performed and recorded long-forgotten songs that originated with Sephardic Jews living in Spain in the 15th century, has died. She was 65.

Frankel died March 20 at her San Francisco home after a long illness, said her friend Anne Treseder.

Folk songs written in Ladino, a language that mixes Spanish and Hebrew, first caught Frankel's attention in the early 1960s when she heard folk singer Theodore Bikel perform one in a concert. Over the next 40 years, she came to be known as one of the leading interpreters of traditional Sephardic music.

Frankel's interest led her to Turkey, Greece, Morocco and other countries where Sephardic Jews resettled after being expelled from Spain in 1492 when Christianity was declared the official religion.

She built a repertoire by gathering songs remembered by the descendants of Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Many had been passed down orally.

"Ladino was the language spoken at home, sung to the children while sweeping or cooking," Frankel said in a 1998 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. She believed that many of the songs were created by women.

"The scholarly language was Hebrew," Frankel said. "Men were in charge of teaching their children Hebrew."

Born Judith Bradbury on Aug. 12, 1942, and raised in Boston, Frankel was an Ashkenazi Jew, with family roots in Eastern Europe. She studied music at Boston University and graduated in 1965. She sang in classical ensembles from the start of her career but also performed folk music.

In 1969, she moved to San Francisco, where she sang with the San Francisco Symphony Chorus for 10 years starting in the early 1970s and was a soloist in the San Francisco Consort, an early music group she helped to form in 1980.

She sang and played guitar at concerts featuring Ladino songs around the world, including in Portugal and Spain.

In 1995, she performed in Lisbon at a ceremony in honor of the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who helped thousands of European Jews escape the Nazis during World War II.

"The sweet irony is that the music was driven out of Spain and now it is being performed there," Treseder, a member of the Society for Crypto-Judaic Studies, said in an interview last week.

It was not unusual for people in Frankel's audiences to tell her about their Sephardic roots. Some had ancestors who were "conversos," Jews in 15th century Spain who converted to Christianity to save their lives but kept up their Jewish traditions.

"Judy saw herself as a vehicle for keeping the Judeo-Spanish culture alive and vibrant," Treseder wrote in e-mail.

"I sing what I love," Frankel told The Times in 1998, "and I happen to love this."

Frankel recorded four solo CDs, including "Stairway of Gold" and "Sephardic Songs of Love and Hope." She also published a songbook, "Sephardic Songs in Judeo-Spanish." She and her music are included in "Trees Cry for Rain: A Sephardic Journey," a documentary by Bonnie Burt.

Her marriage to musician Ken Frankel ended in divorce. She had no immediate survivors.

mary.rourke@latimes.com