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Publisher's Notebook

Editorial

Keeping Ann Arbor Vision
As Part Of Detroit Focus

Can Medical Coaction
Help Promote Peace?

T

he energy radiating from Detroit's
Woodward Avenue corridor, rough-
ly spanning the Detroit River to the
New Center area, is beginning to transform
the way our Jewish community thinks about
the city and its possibilities. Today, we see an
array of live/work opportunities that appeal
to a growing segment of our
young adults — keeping them
home, bringing them back from
other cities and attracting non-
Detroiters who want to be play-
ers in our 21st-century urban
America laboratory.
Despite Detroit's political and
financial mess, an important
piece of our narrative — the
story we tell ourselves and oth-
ers about living Jewishly in our
metropolitan area — is changing
for the better.
My, how things have improved since 2006,
when the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan
Detroit's demographic study showed an area
largely devoid of people in their 20s. The
data supported anecdotal information par-
ents already understood ... they could count
on one hand the number of young adults
they knew still living in the Detroit area. And
parents freely admitted they were encourag-
ing their young adult children to build their
lives and careers elsewhere. No young adults,
no babies. No babies, no future for our
Jewish community.
While efforts to strengthen Detroit's
attractiveness to young adults must be
relentless and continuous, they cannot be
our sole focus. With our Detroit "beachhead"
established, it's time to broaden our horizons
and include one of America's most desirable
college towns, Ann Arbor, into our living
Jewishly narrative. Let's face it. Downtown
Detroit isn't for every young adult, especially
when they are ready to start their families.
And neither is Huntington Woods.
Though the stretch of 1-275 and M-14 that
connects our western suburbs to Ann Arbor
is comparable in length to the Northwestern
Highway-Lodge corridor that brings us to
the Joe Louis fist, we tend to view the Ann
Arbor drive differently. Once we hit the
sign that says "entering Washtenaw County:'
it's as if we are traversing no-man's land, a
space largely reserved for college students
and their parents shuttling laundry between
Maytags at home and University of Michigan
housing.
The barriers that obstruct Ann Arbor from
becoming a part of our living Jewish narra-
tive are largely artificial. The Detroit met-
ropolitan area has a Jewish Federation. So
does Ann Arbor. The Detroit metropolitan
area has a Jewish Community Center and a

Jewish Family Service. So does Ann Arbor.
The Detroit metropolitan area has an array
of Jewish day schools. Ann Arbor has one,
too.
To the Ann Arbor Jewish community, the
Detroit Federation is a ravenous 800-pound
gorilla and its Jewish community insular and
parochial. To the Detroit Jewish
community, Ann Arbor Jews
are from another planet (which
means not born and raised in
Detroit) — more loyal to their
university and the University
Musical Society than to Jewish
causes. Snobbish, too.
There are collaborations
between the Detroit and Ann
Arbor Jewish communities, nota-
bly the Jewish Community Center
of Metropolitan Detroit's Book
Fair and Marwil Film Festival. But
most efforts are ad hoc and involve occasion-
al missions to Israel and splitting the costs of
speakers barnstorming Midwest cities and
college towns. While there are many ways for
the Detroit and Ann Arbor Jewish communi-
ties to strengthen each other and our overall
Jewish narrative, no shared vision, strategy
or plan exists for doing so.
In their absence, I'd like to suggest the
communities focus on one significant oppor-
tunity that generates benefits for both while
creating a framework for future engagement.
Perhaps it can become a catalyst for further
planning. That opportunity is a regional kin-
dergarten through 12th-grade continuum of
Jewish day school education.

A Regional Day School Model
The Ann Arbor Hebrew Day School is
affiliated with the Conservative movement's
Solomon Schechter network and typically
serves between 75 and 100 children from
kindergarten through fifth grade. Graduating
fifth-grade classes typically range between
eight and 17 students. There is typically a
50:50 split between students attending public
and private middle schools. In rare circum-
stances, a family will bring their child or
children to Hillel Day School in Farmington
Hills or Frankel Jewish Academy in West
Bloomfield to continue their secular and
Judaic studies.
A kindergarten through fifth-grade-only
day school can be a liability for the Ann
Arbor Jewish community and the University
of Michigan. Attracting and retaining talent-
ed Jewish researchers, professors, physicians
and engineers — especially those currently
residing in Israel, New York, Toronto, Boston
or other areas with significant Jewish popu-
lations — requires a revised narrative that
includes a seamless kindergarten through

Focus on page 39

38

May 30 • 2013

Dr. Abdeen visits 8-year-old Sarah Ghanem, a Hadassah Hospital
hematology-oncology patient from the village of Durah, near
Hebron, in the West Bank.

D

espite the peace talks standoff between Israel and its marginal
negotiating partner, the Palestinian Authority (P.A.), which
governs part of the West Bank, the two governments continue
to work together successfully in the lifesaving arena of medical healing,
teaching and research.
Let's hope that cooperative spirit spills over and helps restart criti-
cally important negotiations over such final status issues as borders,
settlements, security, refugees, Jerusalem and water rights.
For the first time, a P.A. health minister visited Hadassah University
Hospital-Ein Kerem in west Jerusalem – Israel's largest medical facil-
ity. Israeli hospitals long have served seriously ill Palestinians, who
often have been picked up at the West Bank border or beyond, at
great peril, by Magen David Adorn, Israel's national disaster, ambu-
lance and blood service. Only in times of major fighting has such
cross-border service drawn the spotlight.
That's a shame. Israel's medical outreach has resulted, for example, in
Palestinian children comprising 30 percent of the pediatric patients at
Hadassah Hospital.
Even fewer people know P.A. medical interns and specialist physicians
do their residency training in Israel, typically 60 at any given time. Dr.
Hani Abdeen, the P.A. health minister, met some of them when his del-
egation visited Hadassah Hospital on May 5. In remarks, he identified the
specialties in which the P.A. was short on qualified doctors: anesthesiol-
ogy, interventional radiology, cardiac care and, of course, pediatrics.
Abdeen entered the hospital through the atrium of the Sarah Wetsman
Davidson Hospital Tower, which opened last year. The late William
Davidson of Bloomfield Hills and his wife, Karen, along with the business
he built, Guardian Industries Corp. of Auburn Hills, committed $75 million
toward the tower's cost in memory of his mother.
Abdeen arrived at the hospital with gifts for Palestinian patients. He
made it a point to reference the hospital's star power and to under-
score his delegation came "to find ways to further collaborate."
The visit was arranged in hopes of encouraging both Israel and
Jordan to consider hiring more Palestinian medical workers to help cut
the cost of Israeli or Jordanian hospital care for Palestinian patients.
Dr. Yuval Weiss, Hadassah Hospital's acting director general, cap-
tured the enduring value of the visit amid all the political tension
between Jerusalem and Ramallah: "Hadassah considers cooperation
with our Palestinian neighbors a top priority. Medicine is a bridge to
peace. There are no borders when it comes to treating patients."
It's well known some Palestinian leaders within Fatah encourage a
culture in which death through "martyrdom" – namely, killing Israelis
for Allah to ultimately help claim Israel as theirs – is valued more
highly than life itself. One of the great paradoxes is that while many
Palestinians, sadly, have taken to such loathing of Zionism, others
openly embrace how the Jewish state helps extend and raise their
quality of life.

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