Lifestyle features

The Best Of Blooming Fashion

Brigit Grant — Thu, 02 May 2013 12:44:56 +0100

Just the sight of crocuses through a park railing is enough to ignite a communal sentiment of “Phew, we made it through the winter — time to store those balaclavas.”

“Don’t cast a clout till May is out,” says my mum, but with so much flirty floral fashion around, who wants to hide their blossoms under a cardi? Certainly not Gwyneth Paltrow, People magazine’s most beautiful woman in the world, who took to the red carpet in an Erdem flower power trouser suit as only the lean and lanky can do.
For us mere mortals, petal splattered tops and matching bottoms are for bedroom use only, unless of course you happen to be manning a stand at the Chelsea Flower Show (May 21-25) which is celebrating its centenary.

Alan Titchmarsh aside, fashion shoots are not only visible, but made in Chelsea, notably in the shape of stylish celebs in country garden couture. This year BrandAlley, the online specialists in affordable designer clothes, will be showcasing its wares in its own RHS garden, which will feature textiles, sculptures and water installation art pieces. Talking of art, the National Gallery has picked Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for its spring tee. When you consider that the real thing sold for $39.7million, it’s a bargain at £16.95.

Always on the lookout for new emerging talents, Comptoir des Cotonniers have collaborated with rising talent, Calla, a designer who has created a mini floral collection inspired by hydrangeas in muted green, blue, mauve and yellow.

Everywhere you look there’s another wearable bouquet, though if you’re going for separates avoid the Gwynnie combo and team it with something simple. Of course it goes without saying that where there are flowers there will be bees and Susannah Lovis’s antique bee brooches are beautiful. Yes,the price will sting, but remember you are buying an heirloom that will last long after those spring flowers have wilted and we’re all back in balaclavas.

Meet the fur fashion king with a nose for scent

Brigit Grant — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 14:49:19 +0100

I've always rather fancied the idea of living in a hotel. While others obsess about properties with multiple rooms, the notion of residing in just one has much more appeal. Room service, fresh towels, a Do Not Disturb sign on the door and a stream of new neighbours has to be the perfect domicile arrangement — particularly if that room is in Claridges.

The glorious five-star hotel on Brook Street is the “home away from home” for the style cognoscenti during London Fashion Week and Diane Von Furstenburg has even decorated 20 of its suites. Though I have only been there a handful of times they’ve all been memorable, as I met Tom Ford in the bar when he was still Gucci’s creative director and dodged Vogue’s Anna Wintour pacing the lobby in her trademark trench coat.
It was the Wintour moment that sprang to mind last week when I returned to the hotel to meet American designer Dennis Basso.

The celebrated fur fashion king, who dresses everyone from Upper East Side socialites to hip-hop artists, was in town to launch his first fragrance.Interestingly to me, he also dressed Meryl Streep for her Wintour-inspired role in The Devil Wears Prada. Spot a good fur on film and you can be certain it’s a Basso, be it the full-length white foxes draped over Catherine Zeta Jones and Renee Zellweger in Chicago or the sleek skin fur cape modelled by Charlize Theron in Snow White and The Huntsman.

Some day he will stage an exhibition of his pelts made for pictures, but right now it’s all about the fragrance. The eponymously-named scent which Basso says “comes in a bottle that looks like jewellery” is rather splendid and has top notes of bergamot, lemon and green apple, a heart of orange blossom and a base of cashmere wood.

“It was the right time to launch it,” adds Basso, who fittingly, is a big bear of a man with a deep roasted voice. “It took a whole year of testing, smelling, adding and taking away to make this happen and create a fragrance that lingers without being over-powering.” Among those currently doused in Dennis Basso is Joan Rivers, a close friend and big fur lover.

“I’ve spent many a Passover with Joan,” says DB, who goes on to say that without the American Jewish woman’s love of fashion, “I’d be standing on a street corner with a paper cup”.

He certainly has come a long way from selling pelts from the boot of a rented car. But with fur celebrity comes Peta protesters, though there is a faux range for those with a conscience or less cash. Basso also designs gowns that are so spectacular, I’m embarrassed to say I squealed when I saw them. Now available exclusively from Harrods, I have mentally circled the dresses I want, so in the unlikely event that I get rich, I’ll be able to order them over the phone from my room at Claridges. Until such time, a spritz od Dennis Basso will have to suffice.

Why your child needs an MMR jab

Ellie Cannon — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:49:11 +0100

During one of my recent TV interviews about the current measles outbreak in Wales, the presenter was shocked that GPs misdiagnose measles as a viral infection. This is not shocking at all for two reasons. Firstly, measles is a viral infection that initially looks like other standard viruses all our children get. Secondly, the younger generation of GPs such as myself thankfully haven’t seen much measles due to our successful vaccination programme so it’s not at the forefront of our minds.

In 1998 before the disastrous Lancet MMR paper was published, there were 56 cases in total in the UK. In Wales alone, there have already been 600 cases since the outbreak began this year.

For everyone in the UK it is important to know how to spot a case of measles as parents and GPs need to be vigilant at the moment.

As with other viral infections, children have a high temperature, runny nose, diarrhoea and a cough. Conjunctivitis — sore red eyes — and feeling miserable are also very typical of measles. After three days of being ill the typical measles rash develops, which is red and blotchy. It starts behind the ears, spreading down the head and neck onto the body. It normally covers the whole body and turns brownish in colour after a couple of days.

There is no specific treatment for measles: like other viral infections it is necessary to rest and let your immune system fight it itself. The reason we vaccinate is because there are some rather nasty complications of measles that happens to some children, and we can’t always predict who. One in 5,000 people who get measles will develop encephalitis — a brain inflammation which can cause brain damage.

If your children are at risk because they were not vaccinated, you can get them immunised at your local surgery or paediatrician. Having the recommended two doses of MMR is the best way to protect your children against measles, although one cannot say that immunisation is 100 per cent effective. One dose is thought to protect over 90 per cent of children. The idea of giving the second is to catch those who didn’t get immunity from the first dose.

The medical establishment and the media made a big mistake with the MMR scandal in the late 1990s and, sadly, we are still seeing the after-effects.

Making art to ease the pain in a city of sorrow

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:32:27 +0100

I first came to Dresden in 1985 as part of a family “restitution” visit to my father’s birthplace of West Berlin. It was before the re-unification, the “change” as they call it there, and we crossed the Berlin Wall into the German Democratic Republic at Friedrichstrasse.

My mother was traumatised from her encounter with the border guards, so reminiscent of her flight from Germany in 1936. The brief visit to her beloved home city of Dresden, bombed by her “saviours” the British and at the time still largely unreconstructed, was a disaster and she died the following year following a severe breakdown.

I returned briefly to the city after re-unification, and in 2001 started to consider the plethora of family photos, documents and artefacts in my possession. As a British citizen, a Jew, whose parents had fled from the Nazis, my father having lost his entire family in the Holocaust, I was more than apprehensive about exploring these issues. As an artist I found it difficult to transform this powerful material into meaningful pieces of art. It took another 12 years to find the clarity of mind to return to Dresden and make work there.

The former East Germany is the historical home of printmaking; the Dresden Grafikwerkstatt, owned by the city, is a remarkable example of how this tradition is sustained. The excellently equipped workshop is staffed by an exceptional group of men, all highly trained under the GDR as master printers. Radical in outlook, they are a fund of knowledge not only about printmaking but about the city and its history.

I am working there for four weeks, making five large lithographs about my family and their lives up to the spring of 1936, when they left for London. I am working in a demanding, unorthodox and time consuming process on a large old offset litho press, initially making monoprints which are like paintings and superimposing photo-based images.

Besides making prints, my project also includes visiting research archives and participating in the commemoration of the destruction of Dresden by Allied bombers on the February 13 1945. The anniversary is Dresden’s diem horribilem, in which the horrors of the past are exacerbated by the neo-Nazis attempts to hijack the occasion. It is a tense day of demonstrations by the right and counter-demonstrations and blockades, largely by young people. I will make this, as well as the destruction of the city, the subject of further work.

I am invited by the City of Dresden as their guest for the official commemorations. The group includes members of the Dresden Trust and John Witcombe, the new Dean of Coventry Cathedral. We are taken out of town to the wooded Heidefriedhof, the cemetery where many of the 25,000 victims of the destruction are buried. Picturesque in the deep snow this is a state occasion, with uniforms, immaculate white roses, a sole violin player and a significant police presence.

The mayor Helma Orosz is fierce in her commitment that the city reclaim this day from the neo–Nazis. This is a divisive point, for the right-wing NPD party are allowed to attend the ceremony and so it is boycotted by members of the Left and of the Jewish community. Roses are laid at the memorial and at the Rondel, where 14 pillars commemorate sites of atrocity from Coventry to Auschwitz.

By 5pm Dresden is swarming and there are 3,500 police on the streets. Orosz gives an upbeat speech and the crowds disperse to form the Menschen Kette, the symbolic human chain against extremism. I walk to the synagogue, where many of the 800-strong Jewish community are standing, including the young rabbi, Alexander Nachama. At 6pm, for 10 minutes the entire city is silent and at a standstill, blockaded by a human chain of over 10,000 men, women and children with linked arms.

At 9.45pm I stand on the Neumarkt — the New Market square — besides the rebuilt Frauenkirche, a giant candle projected on the cathedral’s baroque facade. Then every church bell in the city tolls for 15 minutes. This was the time on a warm spring-like night in 1945 when the first of 1,000 British Lancaster bombers appeared in the clear skies over the city. I feel strongly that I am not interested in apportioning blame or taking sides, only to join the vast majority of the citizens in the need to move peacefully forward.

Two days later I am invited by Rabbi Nachama for Friday evening service. The community, which had dwindled to 60 elderly members in 1989, has grown over tenfold, with most of the newcomers of Russian descent. For them, as for many Dresdners, the other significant date for commemoration is November 9 1989, the day the wall came down.

Their new synagogue is breathtakingly sparse and beautiful, the service largely sung and transliterated into German as few of the community read Hebrew. The lengthy kiddush reflects their roots, with borscht, baked potatoes, stuffed egg, herring and piroshki, a kind of Russian sandwich.

Dresden has numerous archives and quangos dedicated to its recent history and I am doing the rounds. They were largely developed since re-unification and are increasingly digitised. At every encounter my hesitant German is met with helpfulness and interest in my project. At the Saxon Memorial Foundation Gabi Atanassow, who works on the archive of Jews deported from Dresden, shows me our family files, and provides new pieces of the puzzle and leads to follow. She puts me in contact with my mother’s former school, the Gymnasium in Plauen, which would like to have copies of archive material I have to develop a project with its students. We also discuss the profound importance of I Shall Bear Witness, the three volumes of diaries by Victor Klemperer, the Jewish literature professor who chronicled events of the Nazi period in Dresden. The diaries reveal much about my grandparent’s and mother’s lives from 1933-36.

With Susanne Ritschel I discuss the Stolpersteine-Project, a European-wide effort to place small commemorative stones in pavements to commemorate victims of the Nazis. I am interested to have a “stumbling block” — for that is what it means — in front of my grandparents’ and mother’s last home in Dresden. Neither the street nor the house exists, but the archives show where it stood.

Dresden is full of ghosts for me and a palpable sense of tragedy seems to permeate the city. It is my hope that the artwork which will emerge from this visit will help to exorcise some of those ghosts.

Chim: Photography's forgotten hero

Melanie Abrams — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 17:30:33 +0100

Dawid Szymin was destined to run his family’s Yiddish and Hebrew publishing house in Warsaw — until he discovered photography.

In truth, he had already strayed from the path mapped out for him by his parents, having opted to study graphic arts in Leipzig and then at the Sorbonne in Paris.

It was in order to fund those studies that he turned to taking pictures. The excitement of capturing workers’s strikes and the rallies of the new left-wing Popular Front in 1930s France proved too much, and all thoughts of the family business were forgotten.

Under the shorter, easier to pronounce name, Chim, he went on to cover the Spanish Civil War, and the rebuilding of post-war Europe and early Israel, in the process helping to shape the golden era of photo-journalism.

His images became famous, emblematic. According to Cynthia Young, curator of the current exhibition of his work at New York’s International Centre of Photography: “Chim was one of the major photo-journalists contributing to political, leftist imagery from the 1930s to ’50s.”

He captured the most prestigious events and people, including French Prime Minister Léon Blum, the writer André Malraux and Pablo Picasso standing proudly in front of his famous painting, Guernica.

Chim was on assignment in Mexico when the Nazis occupied Paris in 1940. Knowing it was too dangerous to return, he headed for New York, became an American citizen and changed his name again — to David Robert Seymour.

It was in America, that he made perhaps his most important contribution. In 1947, alongside his close friends from Paris, Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson, he founded the still prestigious Magnum photo agency, the first co-operative for independent photographers.

At the time, Chim was the most established of the three, yet while Capa and Cartier-Bresson are regarded as superstars of photo-journalism, his reputation has declined over the years.

“He didn’t live as long as Cartier-Bresson — Chim was killed on assignment, while covering the Suez crisis in 1956 — and nor did he have the glamorous life of Capa. So he fell through the cracks of international recognition,” says Young.

Being a modest sort did not help, either. According to his niece, Helen Sarid: “Chim was a quiet intellectual who went about his work equally quietly.’’

Carole Naggar, historian and author of the book Chim’s Children of War, agrees. “Cartier-Bresson did things quickly — he took his subjects by surprise. Capa was more interested in action pictures. Chim stepped back and studied the causes and consequences of war and how life went on. Cartier-Bresson and Capa are at the front. Chim is behind the scenes.”

But this more reflective way of working brought benefits. Chim’s pictures are subtler, says Paul Lowe, photographer and senior lecturer at the London College of Communication. “He has enormous humanity and softness of spirit — and got a little closer to what the everyday person would see in a scene. It is rare that you see a photographer of war being so gentle and concentrating on these quieter moments.”

According to Young, being Jewish was fundamental to Chim’s work. He left Poland because of the rise in anti-semitism and his commitment to socialist politics was drawn from the rise in fascism. He understood what it was like to be a refugee, an orphan [he discovered after the war that his parents had been killed] — and how people survived in a new land.”

With a family home always full of visitors such as Isaac Bashevis Singer and the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, culture was important to him. “It’s how he got close to the celebrities he met and photographed. You can see what interested him — people who were involved in that cultural world like Ernest Hemingway and the art historian, Bernard Berenson,” says Sarid.

Celebrities trusted him. He even took rare shots of Ingrid Bergman relaxing at home with her family. “People felt comfortable with him so he got their best side. His sitters opened themselves up to him,” says Sarid.
Chim’s nephew and executor of his estate, Ben Shneiderman, believes the secret was in the way he established eye contact with his subjects. “He treated them with respect and attention and showed he wanted to tell their story — and they responded.” Shneiderman cites the 1949 image of the man in the Alma settlement in Israel showing off his baby to Chim’s camera as an example of his ability to connect with people.

Chim’s pictures elegantly capture the complexities behind his stories, whether it be French politics or the nascent state of Israel. Take one of his most famous images — a kibbutz wedding where the chupah is held up by pitchforks and guns, symbolising the pioneer spirit of the new Israelis.

Chim’s aesthetic carries all the hallmarks of Bauhaus and constructivism that he would have been exposed to in his early days in Leipzig. There are bird’s eye views of scenes like the funeral procession of the French Communist politician, Henri Barbusse; tilted perspectives; carefully composed shapes, such as the sea of umbrellas held aloft by spectators listening to a political speech, and the poetic play of light and shadow in the Republican trenches in the Spanish Civil War.

After year’s of neglect, interest is growing in Chim’s work, not just because of its quality and importance — nostalgia is playing a role too. As Naggar says: “People are looking back at images of a time when things were simpler and everyone was working towards a common goal.”

Revealed: the inside story of the prison rabbis

Anna Sheinman — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:15:00 +0000

When a non-Jew in prison wants to claim they are Jewish, as apparently happens “all the time”, one of the first things they do is ask for a Torah.

“They say: ‘I wanna Taawrah’,” explains Rabbi Michael Binstock, director of Jewish Prison Chaplaincy, who has been working as a prison rabbi in England and Wales for over 40 years.

“They don’t pronounce it ‘Toirah, Towrah, Tawruh’, all acceptable Jewish ways of pronouncing it. They say: ‘I wanna Taawrah’. Now of course, a Jew won’t ask for that, they would ask for a Chumash,” he chuckles gleefully.

Rabbi Binstock is one of 40 Jewish chaplains who provide support for around 200 Jewish prisoners across England and Wales. The problem is, first you have to work out which prisoners are actually Jewish.

“Prisoners have the right to change their registered religion,” he explains. “They can be Jewish this week, Muslim the next, and Buddhist the week after, that’s their right.”

In turn Rabbi Binstock has the right to confirm or deny that Jewish status — and over the years he has developed different tactics to establish the truth.

“Normally I say: ‘Which shul were you barmitzvah?’,” he explains. “And if they haven’t got a clue what I’m talking about, that’s a fairly good indication.”

Sometimes, however, it is more complicated. “I had a non-Jewish guy a few weeks ago; he wanted a copy of the Talmud. Now, the Talmud is bigger than the Encyclopaedia Britannica, so I went to see him but he wasn’t around. So I just scribbled on his application form: ‘As you are aware’ (I was being sarcastic) ‘the Talmud is vast, so please indicate which particular tractate you want’.”

He draws breath: “I haven’t heard another thing!”

The rabbi has learned to treat these false claims with equanimity. “It is a time waster, it can be problematic, but by and large we treat it with a certain amount of amusement,” he says.

He suggests that, since the kosher food is not much better than regular prison fare, the reason prisoners may try to pretend to be Jewish is just to feel they can beat the system. But perhaps he is being modest when he says this. The extra lengths he and his fellow chaplains go to to support genuinely Jewish inmates would be reason enough for any prisoner to try to join their congregation.

The chaplaincy is run under the auspices of the United Synagogue but is truly cross-communal — Rabbi Michael Binstock is Orthodox, Rabbi Shmuel Arkush is Lubavitch, Rabbi Cliff Cohen is Reform and Rabbi Rebecca Birk is Progressive. Each manages to achieve a remarkable level of Jewish tradition and observance among their prisoners.

Rabbi Birk has just held a Seder in Holloway women’s prison, as she does every year. “We have a shortened Haggadah and I bring in food and we do it during the day. It’s truly extraordinary doing a Seder about freedom behind the bars of a prison.”

Passover is not the only festival celebrated under lock and key. Rabbi Cohen remembers how he began his work in four Kent prisons. “I started five years ago when there was a Jewish prisoner in Canterbury for the first time in anyone’s memory. It was Chanucah, so I spoke to the catering department, explained what it was all about. They looked up some recipes and made some latkes and bought in some doughnuts.”

Observance of Chanucah poses a very particular problem — lighting the menorah. Rabbi Arkush, who is based at Chabad Birmingham and ministers to more than a dozen prisons across the Midlands, has found a surprising, inter-faith solution. “I can’t be everywhere to light Chanucah candles, so the imams do it for me. The imams are extremely helpful.”

Rosh Hashanah has proved more challenging for Rabbi Cohen, who works in Swaleside, a category B prison in Kent that houses long-term inmates.

“I take in a shofar. I have to explain to security that the warden does know about it and that it’s nothing to do with drugs. Then I have to explain to the guards that it is going to make a loud noise but no one has to press any alarms.”

Rabbi Binstock has not only negotiated ways for prisoners to light Chanucah candles in their cells, but has also facilitated Shabbat candle-lighting in a women’s prison and even the building of a succah. “We got one of those pop-up succahs to put in the exercise yard,” he says.

As the Jewish faith adviser to the Prison Service, he deals with all the unusual requests that staff do not know what to do with, because, as Rabbi Arkush puts it, “Jews turn up in funny places”.

Some of those requests are more genuine than others. Rabbi Binstock says: “I got a call from a prison about a guy who said he’s got to have a free phone call every Friday to speak to his mother in order to know what time Shabbos comes in and goes out. I said tell him to ask his mother to send him a luach. He must have loved me.”

It is the more observant Jews who create the greatest logistical challenges. One episode that went down in chaplaincy history was the case of the shomer Shabbat prisoner who was due to be released on Succot. Given that release dates are non-negotiable and prisoners must sign official papers, there was a dilemma — the prison staff had to let him out, but the prisoner did not want to go. Rabbi Arkush says: “I said to them: ‘You’re putting him in a situation where he’s going to be illegal’. After a great deal of work, the chaplaincy managed to arrange an unprecedented release on temporary licence for the prisoner’s final day in jail, essentially releasing him a day early.

For Rabbi Arkush, however, there was an even more memorable event. “I had a murderer, a very high profile case, a foreign national. One of the first times I met him was when his wife had died and he obviously couldn’t attend the funeral. So I conducted a full Jewish funeral service in the prison, just me, him and two other Jewish prisoners I pulled in. It was very emotional. It’s five years ago now and we still talk about.”

When Rabbi Binstock began work, even a brit milah could be performed in prison. Now, with stricter rules on blades, it is more difficult. He describes his disappointment that one of his Chasidic prisoners missed his son’s brit.

“It was on Christmas day of all days. We tried very hard to get permission for him to be allowed out, but because of the nature of his offences, the co-ordinating chaplain said to me: ‘Michael, the deputy governor has said no and it’s non-negotiable’. If it’s no, you have to accept that sometimes. In the end they gave him a long phone call. I was at the brit, he spoke for at least half an hour on speaker-phone and I took photographs to show him the next day. That was the best we could do.”

That particular prisoner, who was Israeli and spoke no English, and whose cell was described as “like a mini Beit Midrash”, tested the system to its limits. “One day,” Rabbi Binstock says, “he told me, with a twinkle in his eye, that he had a problem learning because he had no chavrutah, no learning partner. He was sort of challenging me.

“The education department didn’t want to know. I went to the diversity officer and I said: ‘It’s an unusual request, but let me tell you a little bit about the Jewish community: one of the ways we learn and study is with a partner’. ‘Ooh’, she said, ‘that’s wonderful’. She facilitated one of his chavrutah from his Stamford Hill to come in every week with his gemorah.”

Despite many triumphs, each of the chaplains occasionally finds the demands of the role difficult to handle.

Rabbi Arkush describes some of his prisoners as “people who are aspiring to be Orthodox”, because their crime and their Orthodoxy “would normally be seen as a contradiction”.

Rabbi Birk, is deeply affected by the women she works with, some of whom she says “are ashamed to meet a rabbi”.

Even Rabbi Binstock says working with one particular “revolving door” prisoner, now in his late 40s, is depressing. “He is a very sad case — he’s had gambling and drug addictions. He does house burglaries to fund his addictions and he’s not very good at it because he keeps getting caught. He has major hearing loss, he can’t work, he goes to hospitals, he can’t get on with the people. He’s a neb.”

Difficulties are not always emotional ones. Rabbi Cohen says: “I had one prisoner who was on a dirty protest about six months ago so he was in the segregation unit. He was so mucky I couldn’t see if he was Jewish or not.”

However, each chaplain is clear that their work makes a difference. One convicted murderer who had been released on licence from a psychiatric prison, wrote to Rabbi Binstock to say that the hours they spent talking together were the only reason he had not committed suicide.

One misconception about Jewish prisoners that the chaplains can set right, is that the vast majority are guilty of white-collar crimes. Far from it.

“You name it and they’ve done it,” Rabbi Binstock says. “The myth that they’re all in there for fraud is just that, a myth. In fact, at one stage the majority of prisoners I had were sex offenders.”

Swaleside, where Rabbi Cohen works, is, he says, “mostly murder”. “The prisoners have been in gangs and often killed more than once. They do talk about it — I have to kind of ignore the fact that some of them have a lot less remorse than others.”

If the crimes are more serious than is commonly thought, then at least there is good news when it comes to the number of Jews inside. With a population hovering consistently around 200 inmates, Jews are under-represented by a rate of 50 per cent. Rabbi Birk feels this may have a lot to do with attitudes to drugs.

“Most women are in prison because of drugs and the Jewish community is relatively good at helping our young people keep clear of that. There is also something about familial values and being cared for — often the women that end up in Holloway don’t have that.”

The lack of antisemitism is also noted by all. Indeed, Rabbi Cohen recalls how one of his Chasidic prisoners shared a cell with a Muslim from the West Indies. “They got on like a house on fire. They were just guys who got on with each other.”

Day to day, one of the bigger issues to deal with is educating prison staff. A couple of weeks ago, a prison catering department emailed Rabbi Arkush for advice, because a large group of “Russian Orthodox” prisoners had arrived. “I had to explain that Jews are not the only religion to have an Orthodoxy,” he smiles.

But the greatest challenges come once the prisoners have been released. First, there is the issue of keeping in touch. Rabbi Arkush warns. “Prisoners collect information, trade information — you have to be careful what you give away.”

But, second, and much worse, is the lack of communal support for ex-convicts. “There needs to be a sensitivity about aiding them to reintergrate.” Rabbi Arkush says.

“If the community could be helpful in finding jobs, places to live, just not shunning then, that would be great.”

I didn't want a traditional headstone for my father's grave. But what was the alternative?

Stephen Games — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 12:58:10 +0000

The United Synagogue licenses only three firms of stone-masons to work in its cemeteries. Each has its own catalogue of headstones, but there is little to choose between them. You get single or double stones, mostly three or four feet high, in shiny Italian white marble or shiny Italian black granite, with either a flat plinth on the ground in the same material, or curbstones filled with coloured chippings.

Aesthetically, the designs seem unchanged since the 1930s. The favoured style is art deco, with stepped tops and cutaway corners, as if every monument had a secret wish to be not a gravestone but a Gaumont cinema.

The letters, sand-blasted through a plastic template and filled with lead (on the white marble stones) or gold paint (on the black granite), resemble the rolling credits of an MGM blockbuster.

After my father’s death a year ago, I struggled to accept what was on offer. It is true that art deco, at its birth, was good for the Jews: it embodied the novel idea that simple geometric shapes, easily tooled by machines, could be artistic.

It was symbolic, also, of modernity and freedom. Scan the furniture advertisements in the JC of the time — zig-zaggy cocktail cabinets and wardrobes with angular sunbursts — and you see how very much art deco meant to us then. Scan the acres of art deco slabs in our cemeteries and you see how much it means to us still.

The trouble is that art deco, however popular it may be, is a vulgar style. I happen not to like ornament and symbol, and nor did my father.

In addition, my father, who studied farming at Reading University after the war, was passionate about environmental responsibility. The idea that his remains should be marked by stone brought from half-way round the world, when we have perfectly good stone in this country, would have appalled him.

He did not care that there must be economies of scale in importing rock in huge quantities from abroad, any more than he approved of supermarkets importing vegetables out of season. He believed that resources should be sourced locally, no matter how much that limited one’s choice.

White marble and black granite are, in any case, alien to our landscape. Graves in the most beautiful country churchyards in England are of limestone and Welsh slate, which our masons no longer supply. And the most beautiful carving is done with a hammer and chisel, which the approved masons cannot do, which is why our lettering is sand-blasted, which then has to be coloured, because it is not deep enough to show up on its own.

For a while, I tried going along with the conventions. At the same time, I kept trying to compose a clever inscription and laying it out like a piece of graphic design. Then I realised what I was doing wrong: I was treating the design as if it was a page of text. It is not. A headstone is a marker in the ground, perhaps the earliest form of human announcement. It should not resemble a book. It should be what it is — a megalith or menhir. And the lettering should not resemble calligraphy or typography but something more primitive.

At that point, I stopped trying to love art deco and started looking for a sculptor. “Don’t waste your time,” people said. “The United Synagogue is immovable on things like this.” They were wrong.

I contacted the US Burial Society and asked exactly what they wanted. Four things, they said. The initials pay nun (for “here lies”), the name of the deceased in Hebrew, the Hebrew date of death, and either the five-letter acronym taf nun tsadiy bet hay (“may his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life”) or the word shalom. That was it.

I then contacted the very excellent head of burials, Melvyn Hartog, for technical details on how headstones are installed, and to ask whether there were any halachic objections to doing without a ledger at the base and to employing an independent sculptor.

He was neutral about who cut the stone as long as the sculptor worked alongside one of the three licensed firms, and raised no objection to the area above the grave being marked just by curbstones.

What followed was exhausting but relatively straightforward: finding the right artist, selecting a suitable stone, deciding what shape the stone should be, reducing the number of words to a minimum, and determining an appropriate style of lettering.

Luckily I discovered the wonderful Lois Anderson, a Scottish sculptor working in London. She recommended a grey Caithness sandstone, which looks very much like slate, and we agreed that the face should be rough and not polished.

I then researched simple, gestural English and Hebrew letter-forms. I wanted shapes that matched each other, were suited to the movement of the chisel, and did not have the flavour of fonts designed for print.

Lois responded brilliantly. In spite of having never carved Hebrew before, she loved learning the nuances of our writing and got results that are almost biblical.

I am delighted. As for my father, he would have been glad we did not have to pillage the Apennines and that the amount of stone laid on top of him was minimal. Instead of a plinth, the space inside the curbstones has been filled with loose earth, on which we scattered wildflower seeds after the consecration.

Having said that the United Synagogue’s approved firms were limited in their choice of designs, I wish to pay tribute to the two I initially went to for help and the one I eventually worked with to get the stone set. They were wonderfully supportive throughout.

Only one thing worried them about the design — that rabbits, the plague of British cemeteries, might burrow into the soil inside the curbstones and colonise it.

At first, I suggested laying a metal mesh below the soil, then decided to let nature take its course. The idea of his grave becoming a warren to little bunnies would have pleased my father no end. And so, after so much art deco, we’ve ended up with “art eco”. It’s a step back and a step forward all at the same time.

Log off and still click: A guide to dating off-line

Anna Sheinman — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:44:22 +0000

Online dating sucks. It’s exhausting, it’s demoralising and the people you date have invariably lied about their height. For young people it is even harder because it is still considered embarrassing to have to resort to looking for love online. This means there are many thousands of young Jews asking what are the alternatives? Here are five ways to log off and still click with someone:

Holidays
A trip provides a long period of time in a relaxed environment to get to know the people you’re travelling with.

Sarah Pilchick, a 23-year-old Master’s student who lives in London, met her boyfriend Joel through a holiday run by Taglit-Birthright (www.ujia.org/israel-experience), which organises free group trips to Israel for young people.

She says: “Spending 10 days together makes it easy for a relationship to blossom. Joel and I met before the trip through the Facebook group for our bus and we got together on day two in Israel. I knew it was love when he held my hand as I cried all the way down Masada because I’m scared of heights. We’ve been together now for 18 months.

“A lot of people hook up with the Israeli soldiers who join the trip too — they’re very pretty to look at. I’d definitely recommend Birthright to my single friends, not just as a dating tool, but being split up into age groups and all being from similar, pretty secular backgrounds, does help.”

Cassie Matus, UJIA Birthright Coordinator, says: “We are proud of the love we nurture for Israel, but we also have a good track record of creating love among our participants. There have been a number of Birthright relationships and even a few weddings.”

Also try: Trips abroad organised by JLE or Aish.

Talks and events
Organised by Jewish organisations, these attract an engaged, intellectual audience and provide an obvious topic of conversation over nibbles afterwards.

Elizabeth Harris-Sawczenko, public affairs and policy director at the Board of Deputies, met her husband Andrew at the UK’s ultimate talk/event — Limmud (www.limmud.org).
They first set eyes on each other while Andrew was on a blind date with someone else at the Limmud bar.

Elizabeth says: “I was sitting on the other side of him, catching up with a distant relative, but Andrew kept breaking off his conversation to talk to me.”

They hit it off. “After that, according to his friends, he followed me around Limmud trying to find a way to talk to me, which he eventually did,” Elizabeth says.

She has a clear view on why Limmud works as a place to meet a potential partner. “It’s inclusive, people are passionate about their Judaism and there’s such a huge range of people. It’s also less embarrassing than online dating and there’s no pressure. For many people, it’s the best opportunity of the year to meet someone.”

Co-chair of Limmud Conference 2013 Richard Verber points out that, although “Limmud isn’t a dating event, people-meeting is often a happy side product. In a piece of research by Limmud International eight per cent of the people asked said that Limmud participation helped them find a spouse or partner. Volunteering to help run Limmud is an even better way to meet people because you work together and there are specific sessions for young volunteers and a great after-party.”

Also try: Events organised by the JLE, Moishe House, Israeli Dance Institute.

Parties
Admittedly it’s old school, but parties are an upbeat way to meet people. There are a variety hosted by community groups, mostly in London and Manchester.

Mia Serra, from Queen’s Park, who is a committee member of the Saatchi Synagogue (www.saatchishul.org), met her future husband, Elliott, at Saatchi’s Purim party in 2008 when they were in their early 30s.

She says: “Purim at Saatchi is always magical. I turned up on my own with trepidation, but found myself talking to people all evening. Not the usual suspects — many of them wouldn’t normally go to a Jewish event.

“It was 1920s themed, my husband was dressed as a gangster. I gave him my number and the rest is history.

“These events have a really friendly vibe — no one ends up standing on their own.”

Rabbi Mendel Cohen, rabbi of Saatchi Synagogue, says Mia’s story is hardly unique: “A lot of phone numbers are swapped, there’s a lot of dating — how many get married, I don’t know. But with 700 guests, there’s bound to be someone new to meet.”

Also try: Parties hosted by youth committees of Jewish charities, Nana Events.

Friday night dinners
If good conversation is what you are after, a Shabbat dinner is an easy and low-key way to get it.

Josh Kendall, 27, from West Hampstead, went to a New North London Synagogue young adult’s dinner (search ‘Young Adults’ Dinners @ NNLS’ on Facebook), hosted by Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg and his wife Nicki at their home.

He says: “Everyone brought a vegetarian dish — the food was excellent. There were about 40 people there but I was told there are often double that number. It was very welcoming.”

The regular dinners are not just for NNLS members and are preceded by a service. “There were some really interesting people there, from all over the world,” Josh says. “I didn’t meet anyone, but I’m sure if I went again and got to know more people, I could,” Josh says.

The meals, which are held every six weeks, attract young adults, both singles and married couples alike

Also try: US Young Professionals dinners, Jewish Vegetarian Society Friday night meals.

Dating specific
There are, of course, plenty of events aimed specifically at singles.

Twenty-six-year-old Eva Topp, from Leeds, attended the first Young Jewish Singles weekend (www.youngjewishsingles.co.uk) in Cheshire in October. For her, it was an immensely practical option.

“I don’t have time for online dating. You can get a better measure of someone over a weekend without spending time on dates,” she says.

Although she did not meet anyone on that occasion, she says she would certainly go again.

“I think these kinds of weekends are better for shy people. I’m quite shy and I don’t always go out of my way to talk to people, but the organisers worked really hard to make sure everyone met each other.

“There was speed dating, a date auction and at meal times the guys were asked to move places between courses.”

Charles Simmons, founder of YJS, says: “A lot of people feel they know all the single young Jews in their area, so this is an opportunity to meet people from all over the country. And having that extended period of time gives you the opportunity to get to know someone.

“Some people really don’t like online dating. We are providing another option.”

Also try: Speed dating at Gilgamesh, Date on a Plate.

Susie Essman: the woman Larry David asked to be the wife from hell

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:37:42 +0000

If, as a respectable, suburban Jewish mother of four grown-up children, men regularly came up to you in the street and begged you to scream at them, “Go f*** yourself”, would you feel like you had made it as a international icon of Jewish womanhood?

Susie Essman does, and she is not wrong. Her towering, terrifying portrayal of the — how shall I put it? — somewhat combative Susie Greene in the Larry David sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm has taken her — relatively late in life — from jobbing New York stand-up comedian to a star of world standing.

Essman has played the ball-breaking, foul-mouthed but much-loved Yiddishe momma in eight series of Curb, with rumours always bubbling of a ninth to come. Her bullying of both her fat TV husband, talent manager Jeff (played by Jeff Garlin) and of his fictional client, Larry David (who confusingly kind of plays himself) amuses and embarrasses men, especially Jewish men.

In Susie, I always imagine, at least 50 per cent of us see our wives, while even more see our own klutz-ishness in the blundering of Jeff and Larry, who invariably deserve what they get from Susie, if not in quite such strong measure.

Susie Greene is a glorious comedy creation. There is rarely seen pilot of Curb without her and it does not quite work — almost like Fawlty Towers would be without Sybil Fawlty. It is remarkable how a great comedy can often hinge on a relatively minor character.

The first thing I learned when I had lunch with Essman in New York recently – the excuse being that she is doing a one-off corporate gig in London next week — was that the Gorgon that is Susie Greene was her invention rather than Larry David’s.

She explains the genesis of the show, and with it the role. She had known Larry David since they were stand-ups on the New York circuit in the 1980s, but had heard little from him since he went to Los Angeles to create Seinfeld and then Curb. She did read for the role of Elaine in Seinfeld but felt that David’s choice, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, was always more suited to the part.

“So I hadn’t seen him in years,” Essman explains. “Then he called me up and said: ‘I have a part for you in this new HBO series’. I said: “Great — you want to send me a script?’ He said: ‘There’s no script. You’re going to play Jeff Garlin’s wife’. I said: ‘OK, Jeff’s a friend of mine’. Then he said: ‘There’s also no money’. So I thought: ‘OK, I’ll do it for whatever the minimum day rate is. Larry’s a genius — there’s nobody with a better comedy brain. It’ll be good’, and I flew to LA and did it.”

Playing the part without a script did not trouble her. “We’re comedians — we can work it out as we go along.” And being told little other than the story outline and that she was Jeff’s wife gave her a chance to make her own monster.

“We never once discussed the character of Susie Greene. Not once, ever. The only thing he said in the first scene we did, where I had to shout at Jeff was: “I want you to rip Jeff a new a**hole’. And I thought: ‘OK, I’ve been in relationships before — I could do this’.

“We did a run-through, and Larry kept pulling me aside and saying: ‘Go bigger, go bigger’. Eventually I was going bigger and bigger, but he wanted more and he said: ‘Make fun of Jeff’s fat’. I said: ‘I don’t want to make fun of what people look like. It’s not Jeff’s fault — he’s my friend’, and Larry said: ‘He knows you’re acting, try it’. So that’s when I first called him a fat f*** , and the genie was out of the bottle.”

How did her friend react? “There was a flicker in his eyes, and I felt bad. And even now, people ask Jeff how he feels when my character calls him that and he says: ‘No, Susie Essman doesn’t treat me that way. We’re all very close friends’.”

The rest of the Susie Greene character, she says, “just came out” as, with series after series, the show got more popular.

“I just got this idea of Susie and I saw how the first house we happened to be using was decorated and imagined how she’d dress and how she’d have this whole sense of herself, how she’d be so secure in her opinions. I’m not, I’m totally insecure and I question everything. But I don’t want to play myself, I want to play a character. So I created this character that dresses outlandishly but thinks she has the greatest taste in the world.

“Larry got what I was doing and then he started writing around what had developed. It was a dialogue of the unconscious and he started writing me in more and more. And the only direction I ever get from Larry is ‘turn it up’ or, ‘turn it down’. It usually takes six to seven takes to get a scene right. Then we’ll do it again, and sometimes I’ll save a little morsel in my head to throw to them, but we never plan ahead what we’re going to say.”

Curb, as she recounts, was never anything like the well-oiled — and accordingly bland — machine that is the average American network sitcom. “It was all quite slapdash. There was no contract, no security, no trailers and the sets kept changing — we just did it in people’s houses where we could. Larry doesn’t care about continuity as long as it’s funny.” But she recognises that it was the greatest break anyone could have in their career — to go, as she says, straight into “the funniest comedy ever”.

So which relative, I had to wonder, was Susie based on, since Essman is manifestly a good-natured, thoughtful woman who says she has only ever had one “Susie Greene moment” with each of her four step-children when they were teenagers? (She lives in upstate New York with her husband of 10 years, Jimmy Harder, who is in commercial real estate, and his kids.)

This daughter of academics — father a doctor, mother, a professor of Russian — who was destined to be an urban planner says Susie Greene was an amalgam of several of her childhood friends’ mothers, plus an adored grandmother in the Bronx and her card-playing cronies.

“But she’s also original,” Essman adds. “She’s complex. She’s very loyal — you don’t do anything against her daughter. But she’s also loyal to Larry. She always forgives him for ruining her dinner parties and invites him back the next week in hope. That dynamic has just grown between us. We’re family.

“The thing about Susie Greene is that she’s so universal. I travel all over the world and so many people relate to her. Men say she’s exactly like their wives, whether they are black women, Hispanic women, Midwestern goyim. I just tell the men: ‘I’m so sorry’.

Fitness: Go on, stretch yourself

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:38:51 +0000

The benefits of stretching may not be as familiar to us as aerobics or weight training, which we know burn calories and strengthen muscles. But as we age, our lean muscle mass declines and we become less flexible, so the rewards of stretching become more apparent.

Commonly, sports and weight training cause muscles to shorten, which can make them feel tight and sometimes sore. A sedentary lifestyle and poor posture also contribute to inflexibility that a regular stretching routine helps counteract. Flexibility allows us to exercise freely and without injury.

Stretches are designed to apply tension to the muscle and its tendon and to put joints through their full range of motion, thereby increasing suppleness and reducing the risk of repetitive sports injuries. In addition, they prepare your body pre-exercise and, during the cool-down, help decrease blood flow and lengthen tight muscles — and they have a meditative quality that promotes relaxation.

There are three different types of stretches: static, dynamic and ballistic. Dynamic stretches are slow and controlled, used in preparation for sport-specific exercise and should raise your heart rate and warm muscles and mobilise joints by gradually increasing repetitions. When stretching as part of your warm-up, concentrate on the muscles you will be using during your main workout — so if you are about to run, prepare with arm swings, hip circles, half squats and leg swings, between 10-20 repetitions.

Static stretches are considered maintenance or developmental and are best included in your cool-down as they help in lowering your core temperature and heart rate. Maintenance stretches are held for 10-20 seconds and should include all major muscle groups. Always ease gently into a static stretch, feel your muscle lengthen until you meet resistance that feels mildly uncomfortable, then stop and hold the position. Use developmental stretching for tight muscles. Gently increasing the static stretch a fraction further until you feel mild tension and hold position for further 30 seconds.

Ballistic (bouncing) stretches are best reserved for well-conditioned athletes as they are performed at speed and carry a higher risk of injury by forcing the body to extend its natural range of motion.