1- 14 'Friday, :holy 16 1976 THE DETROIT 'JEWISH NEWS Did You Hear About the Women Rabbis? BY DAVID SCHWARTZ (Copyright 1976, JTA, Inc.) So now we hear one rab- binical college has three women students. Perhaps the libbers will be demand- ing that we stop saying Amen and say A-woman. There is another problem? If the woman becomes a rabbi, will her husband be a rebitzin? Probably a lot of men would not object. The rebitzen was highly re- garded. The idea of women minis- ters is not so new really. It goes back to the days of Moses. The Midrash says . that when the Jews came out of Egypt, Moses first ad- dressed the women regard- ing them as the real teach- ers of the faith, since they would have the main care of the spiritual rearing of the children. In Talmud days, rabbis were just workmen. Hillel was a woodchopper; Joshua, a shoe maker, another Joshua, a black- smith; Hosia, a laundry man; Yehuda, an apothe- car y. Maybe the reason women were not rabbis, was the same reason women were PERMANENT HAIR REMOVAL Licensed Electrologist FREE Consultation private and confidential by appointment 358:5493 0.1W1 • Ft 1 *0 BUICK Order Your 1977 BUICK Now at lowest competitive prices See MORT FELDSTEIN or ROSEMARY HARLING MORRIS BUICK 14500 W. 7 Mlle Rd. at the Lodge X-Way OPEN 'TM 9:00 MON. and THURS. 342-7100 not blacksmiths. Perhaps, if there had been Day Care Centers, they might have been rabbis. In Talmud days, rabbis received no pay. They usually worked at some sec- ular occupation for their sustenance. It was said of one rabbi, if it weren't for the many fast days, he would have starved to death. The Chafetz Chayim, one of the great Or- thodox pillars of the laSt century, ran a little store, but when business got good — he closed it. Some were patronizing it because he was a rabbi — and he thought this was unfair to his competitor. The position of rabbi is different from that of the clergymen of other faiths. The rabbi has no special function at the service. He can deliver a sermon but that is not a requisite. He is simply available at the Orthodox service, if any- one has a religious prob- lem. There was for instance, the fellow who left Judaism but later sought to return. He asked the rabbi. "I will look it up in the Gem Ge- mara. Come back at the end of the month," said the rabbi. At the end of the month the fellow is back. The rabbi says it is okay — he can start going to the synagogue again. But now the fellow asks if his rein- statement can be delayed for a month. His wife has a jug of pickled ham and they would like to finish it off first. Among Hasidim, the rebbe, may on occasion do a little miracle to help along a member. A woman once told her rebbe that she suc- ceeded in giving birth to a son without rabinical inte- recession. "Sometimes," the rabbi explained, "God wants to show He can do a miracle just like the rabbi." In the more assimilated environment of today, there have been more marked changes in the service. Dr. Abraham Feldman writing of the changes in the rabbinate tells of the boy who ex- plained the difference be- tween the rabbi and the cantor. "The cantor sings and the rabbi tells what page to turn to." "Rabbi," said a member of a congregation, "I heard your sermon yesterday and lay awake all night." "Well," said the rabbi, "my sermon must have given you food for thought." "It is not that," said the member. "You see when I sleep during the day, I can't sleep at night." At one modern congrega- tion, it is said, they have a wonderful set of buttons. You press one button, and a prayer book appears, press another button and you get a talith. One time a member pressed the wrong button and the rabbi disappeared • Ex-JDC Leader Pleads Innocent WASHINGTON (JTA) — Dr. William Perl, the 70-year-old former national chairman of the Jewish De- fense League, pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court in Baltimore to charges of "conspiracy to fire shots at the apartment" of two So- viet Embassy officials. A pre-trial hearing was set for Aug. 10 for lawyers to file motions in the case. Perl was arrested June 29 by FBI agents in connection with allegations that shots were fired May 23 at an apartment occupied by two Soviet second secretaries here. He is free on $20,000 bail. • No matter how you •••••••• $ • turn the globe The Jewish News keeps you posted on Je wish happenings ••••• i everywhere! • Soviets Punish Jewish Activist Call 424-8833 4 • TODAY and order your subscription. 4 9, Study Shows Israel Students' View of U.S. Jews Is Slanted NEW YORK (JTA) — Is- raeli students receive a skimpy and unbalanced view of the history and ac- complishments of American Jewry in their high school studies, due primarily to the inadequate material on the subject found in Israeli his- tory texts. This finding was reported by the Israel office of the American Jewish Commit- tee, which recently released a two-year study on "Teaching About American Jewry in Israeli High Schools." The study, which was fi- nanced by a grant from the AJCommittee's Jacob Blau- stein Institute for the Ad- vancement of Human Rights, was conducted by Reuven Surkis, director of the Historical Society of Is- rael. - In an introduction to the study, Dr. M. Bernard Res- nikoff, director of the AJCommittee's Israel of- fice, pointed out that the poor information that Is- raeli students have about Jews in the United States, as revealed in the study, adversely affects the under- standing of the Jewish com- munity in the U.S. by Is- raeli Jews and therefore makes their compatability more difficult. He expressed the hope that the study "will sensi- tize teachers, curriculum planners and others to the need for concerted im- provement in this crucial area of education." Analyzing the textbook materials used, Surkis found specific deficiencies. These included: key con- cerns of American Jews, American pluralism, the pervasiveness of the general culture, and church-state separation are inadequately discussed. Some texts relate the history of American Je- wry completely separa from the life of other Jewi communities, and make nu comparisons. The relation- ships between American Jews and other ethnic groups in the U.S. are neg- lected. The texts generally question the viability of pluralism in the U.S. and question whether it is possi- ble to cultivate Jewish life in America. An undue empha- sis is given to anti-Semitism in the U.S. In his interviews with the 212 Israeli high school his- tory teachers, about 10 per- cent of the total number in the country, Surkis found that only two teachers had taken a course on American Jewry in university studies. Jewish Doctors Studied Warsaw Ghetto Starvation In the middle of the War- saw Ghetto tragedy a deter- mined group of Jewish physicians, forced into the situation by circumstance, undertook a study of the ef- fects of starvation on hu- man beings. Their 265-page book was entitled "Charobo Glodowa," and according to an Aug. 1975 review in The New England Journal of Medicine by Doctors Fran- cis Moore and Jan Dmo- chowski, it was smuggled out of the ghetto in 1943 and published in Polish in 1946 through the aid of the "American Joint Commit- tee." The studies were con- ducted in 1942 when hospi- tals still had limited facili- ties. The study was terminated abruptly when the hospital was liquidated by the Nazis. The average daily intake of the starving was 600 to 800 calories. The cases stud- ied were selected by Jewish physicians from the pa- tients sent to the hospitals. Those with signs of ad- vanced starvation, but with- out complicating diseases, were placed in separate wards to avoid disease infec- tion. Treatment was limited because of severe shortages of food in the hospitals. The results of the study were surprising. The usual diseases associated NEW YORK — After 23 year-old Leonid Kovner told authorities it would be senseless to carry out their punitive army draft against him because he wished to go to Israel, he was taken to the military registration office, where 50 war veter- ans had assembled. The surprise "court" de- clared he should be stripped of his university degree and reserve officer's rank and that he should be guilty of a criminal offense for refus- ing conscription. with over-crowding; ty- phoid, typhus, meningitis and tuberculosis were not particularly common in the victims studied. Crush the head of the best serpent. —The Talmud The doctors reported, "The ability to fight was fin- ally demonstrated in this starved population, who fought with great vigor and determination, despite their certain knowledge of hope- lessness. This finding dem- onstrated that in semi-star- vation, not only is immunology given a high priority in the bodily econ- omy, but likewise the pres- ervation of muscle protein and of cerebral function." The study, said the re- viewers, despite the fact that it records a tragedy, fills a needed place in the literature on the subject and on the Warsaw Ghetto. The 21 physicians who took part in the study themselves died in the holocaust. Industrial Plant Built in Israel NEW YORK — REFAC Technology Development Corporation, an interna- tional technology transfer company, has announced the completion of its first manufacturing plant to b. built in Israel. The plant, I cated near Haifa, has bee initially set up to product: "Heli-Coil" screw thread fasteners, which are widely employed as original design components of aircraft, electronic instrumentation, and industrial equipment in general. After immediate "Heli- Coil" objectives are accom- plished, the company in- tends to manufacture other specialty mechanical and electro-mechanical compo- nents for Israeli industries as well as for export mar-. kets.