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PALESTINIAN
Dry Bones ;AIRY
TALE

[ GRANDMA' ABBAS
ANO THE BIG SAO
NAMAS WOLF

Editorial

Political Overdose

T

he anti-Semitism of Henry
Ford is hardly a matter for seri-
ous debate. The evidence in
the yellowing pages of the Dearborn
Independent and the history of his sup-
port for various unsavory hate groups is
all too clear.
Still, the attack on Mitt Romney by
the National Jewish Democratic Council
(NJDC) for opening his presidential cam-
paign on the grounds of the Henry Ford
Museum in Dearborn is way over the top.
It was a clumsy attempt to politicize the
historical record and smear a great cul-
tural institution in order to play "Gotcha"
with a candidate with whom it disagrees.
More than that, it was a gratuitous slap
at the Ford family, which has forged links
with the Jewish community and worked
closely with it for several decades.
The NJDC said that this episode "raises
serious questions about ... (Romney's)
understanding of basic American history:'
It raises more questions, however, about
the NJDC's understanding of these same
issues.
The museum was never, as the NJDC
stated, the Ford estate. That was Fairlane,
located a mile or so away in Dearborn.
Along with its sister institution, Greenfield
Village, the museum, instead, is a price-
less reservoir of American history — not

tinged by any hint of anti-Semitism in its
displays or operation.
The NJDC also accused Romney,
the former Republican governor of
Massachusetts, of reducing funds to make
kosher meals available to Jewish residents
of his state who were on Medicaid. It men-
tions only in passing that this was part of
an overall veto of the 2003 state budget
and did not directly target the dietary
laws.
Apparently, it is the view of NJDC
Executive Director Ira Forman that by
launching his candidacy at the Henry
Ford Museum, Romney somehow is wrap-
ping himself in its founder's philosophy
or at least overlooking it. Romney was
born in Michigan and his father, former
Gov. George Romney, was an automo-
tive executive of some prominence. If the
younger Romney was wrapping himself in
anyone's philosophy, it seems to be that of
his father.
Henry Ford II, grandson of the muse-
um's founder, was a friend and close
business associate of Max Fisher, the
Detroit-based global Jewish leader and
philanthropist. The succeeding generation
of Fords has built on that legacy. Their
ongoing relationship with the Jewish com-
munity is marked by amity and good will.
It has been stated on many occasions

THEY RETURNED
MORE UNITED THAN
NAD BEEN EXPECTED.

N ANO

REALLY?!

WENT DOWN TO

MECCA TOGETHER
TO SET UP A UNITY
GOVERNMENT

r

FOR GRANDMA'
ABBAS WAS NOW
INSIDE THE BELLY
OF THE WOLF!

DryBonesBlog.com

that the air of incivility and intemper-
ate remarks that have come to mark
American politics is a deeply unhealthy
phenomenon. This is an especially unfor-
tunate example.

E-mail letters of no more than 150 words to:

decipher the let-
ters, and, once I
did, I figured out
the translation
because I was also
a Spanish lan-
guage major.
"Then I was
doing some vol-
unteer work at the
National Holocaust
Museum in
Washington, D.C., and came across all
these documents from Salonika, the
Jewish community in Greece that was
wiped out by the Nazis.
"It had been a center of Sephardic
culture, and these were important docu-
ments. But they were written in Solitreo,
and not many people could understand
them."
Another of Berman's interests is Web
programming and he decided to create
a way for Ladino speakers to write in
Solitreo on computers. It took him two

years and involved 250 steps. Since no
type fonts existed for this ancient script,
the problem was tremendously compli-
cated.
But the system he built,
V, Tww.ladinotype.com , allows Ladino to
be typed using standard Roman letters
and emerge as Solitreo. Berman hopes
that Ladino speakers can use it as a way
to communicate with each other and
learn to read Solitreo. The system is also
set up to compile a vocabulary of all the
words that are used to build an entire
Ladino lexicon.
"I know the pool of potential users is
small," said Berman.
"But if even a handful of people end
up using it, I'll be very happy. I just want
as many people as possible to know that
it's there."

letters@thejewishnews.com .

Reality Check

Rescuing Ladino

I

t was not

too long ago that Yiddish
seemed to be poised at the edge
of its grave. As more of its elderly
speakers went to their eternal rest, the
language appeared destined to follow.
But heroic efforts on the part of its
devotees, those who admired the supple-
ness of a tongue that expressed things
that were inexpressible in any other
words, pulled it back.
While it may never again func-
tion as everyday speech as it did in
the Ashkenazi world of a century ago,
Yiddish has been preserved in class-
rooms, libraries and by a few active writ-
ers.
Now the same sort of rescue mission is
being directed at Ladino. Far less famil-
iar to American Jews, it was the language
of the Sephardim in Asia and North
Africa, as well as in pockets of Europe. It
bears the same relation to Spanish that
Yiddish does to German.
Many linguists claim, in fact, that it
preserves the way Spanish was actu-

ally spoken until the 16th century
and is close to the language Miguel de
Cervantes used to write Don Quixote.
Aside from the Jewish community in
Turkey, however, Ladino is rapidly fad-
ing from use and becoming the province
only of scholars and archivists.
That's what makes Brian Berman's fix-
ation on Ladino so unusual. He grew up
in West Bloomfield, attended Washington
University in St. Louis and is now going
to law school in Los Angeles. Along the
way he became fascinated by this lan-
guage.
"A college roommate who was work-
ing on some family genealogy brought in
a document that puzzled us both:' says
Berman.
"It was obviously of Jewish origin,
and I thought it was an unusual form of
Hebrew. I'd never even heard of Ladino
before.
"I found it was actually a form of
Hebrew cursive writing called Solitreo,
the written form of Ladino. I began to

George Cantor's e-mail address is

gcantor614@aol.com.

February 22 2007

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