Panel Mulls Public School Issues

Three weeks after moving from Long Island, N.Y., to Lovettsville, Va., in northern Loudon County, Jarred Silverman learned a painful lesson in his second-grade public school classroom.

"[Jarred] was humming a song, a Hebrew tune," recalls his mother, Deanna, 39. "And another little boy -- his first new friend and the son of the soccer coach -- said he wasn't allowed to sit with Jewish children. And that's how our school year began."

In the four and a half years since that incident, Silverman has worked to ensure that the rude awakening her son experienced would ultimately turn out to be an isolated event.

Tattoos to self-portraits

His body is nearly fully covered with tattoos, and he's often inked hamsas and Stars of David for others.

Yet, Israeli-born tattoo artist Ami James, star of TLC's reality TV show "Miami Ink" says he is uncomfortable with Jewish-themed body art.

James discussed his childhood in Israel -- "when no one had tattoos" -- his Jewish mother's outrage at his first tattoo at age 15, his aversion to drawing biblical ink, and stated that, for him, tattoos are an expression of art, not Jewish identity.

"If I could carry a painting on my back all day, I would," he said.

Gaza new venue for 'never again'

Classrooms in strife-torn Gaza may be the site of a controversial experiment in teaching about human rights, a program that includes a section on the lessons of the Holocaust and on the immorality of purposely firing rockets into civilian areas.

Those classrooms will be one of the only places in the Arab world where a Shoah-related curriculum is being taught, according to John Ging, director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which developed the initiative.

"If you're going to teach human rights in a very intensive way, you cannot but teach the Holocaust and all that goes with that," Ging explained.

Synagogue Hosts Interfaith Iftar

Pakistani-born business executive Muslim Lakhani remembers fondly the Jewish classmates from his Karachi primary school, but prior to last week, he had never stepped foot in a synagogue.

Yet the reason for his visit on Thursday evening of last week -- an iftar, the traditional meal that ends the daily fast during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan -- has an irony not lost on the 50-something chair and CEO of ML Resources, a Washington, D.C., investment firm.

"This was always a dream of mine, to come to a synagogue -- and to come on Ramadan with my Christian brothers," Lakhani said with a smile as he stood in the stairwell of the District's Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, with Maj. Steve Morris, area commander for The Salvation Army, an evangelical Christian charitable organization.

Zeide wasn't meshugana - family has Sephardic roots

Despite leaving behind a Yiddish-speaking home in Latvia when he came to America in 1909, Sam Gold always told his children and grandchildren that they were Sephardic Jews.

Many decades later his granddaughter Judy Simon, 60, would finally confirm her grandfather was not meshugana.

In 2004, after genetic testing became widely available for genealogists, Simon took a cheek swab from a male cousin and had his Y chromosome DNA tested.

Food for thought -- and justice

Barbecues at the Silver Spring Moishe House are nothing unusual. The five 20-something Moishe House residents regularly host friends, neighbors and others throughout the cookout season for get-togethers that are more than just gorge-athons. Each is also a Jewish-themed presentation with an important lesson to teach.

On this steamy Sunday afternoon, the theme was social justice -- at least as it applies to food. More than 70 guests filled the front and backyard of the four-story Mississippi Avenue home, to enjoy a side order of gastronomic stewardship with their hamburgers, peaches and corn-on-the-cob. Moishe House residents dubbed it a "food justice" barbecue.

Below the equator

For the past seven summers, Aliza Esenstad, 16, has looked forward to her Jewish sleep-away camp in the Catoctin Mountains of Pennsylvania. But this summer, she traveled much farther -- to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

As part of Capital Camps' four-week counselor-in-training (CIT) program, Esenstad, a rising high school senior from Rockville, and 17 other teens -- most from the Washington metro area -- traveled to the South American city earlier this month for an intensive week of community service and Jewish communal exchange.