[ Sari Nusseibeh ] [ Sosua ] [ Sherry Britton ] [ Charlton Heston ]

Dr. Sari Nusseibeh and AFHU president George A. Schieren

Struggle For Decent Life

HEN Sari Nusseibeh was studying for his PhD at Harvard, he was invited to join an Israeli student for a discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli situation.

"I met this student for the first time," he related. "A lot of students were at each others throats. But this student and I discovered we have a lot in common. We’re from Jerusalem and we share a love of the country. So a relationship developed. Today he is a professor at Hebrew University. He invited me to offer a course in Islamic philosophy."

Nusseibeh said he faced a lot of opposition from his friends in the PLO. He lasted only a year and a half during which time he was personally conflicted: "Facing young Israelis at the university and then facing Israeli soldiers at the road blocks pointing their guns at me was something I could not understand."

Speaking at a recent Bridges for Peace Dinner of American Friends of the Hebrew University (AFHU) at New York’s Pierre Hotel, Nusseibeh, who’s been president of Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem since 1995, said that Israelis and Palestinians, despite shooting at each other, have a shared interest – make compromises that will lead to a two-state solution.

"At the end of the day we must come together. From the Palestinian perspective, it comes down to a struggle for a decent life."

Dr. Allen Finkelstein, chief dental officer at AmeriChoice, a United Health Group company, announced that he will donate a Tree of Peace, Etz Shalom, at the Hebrew University School of Dental Medicine in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem.

The Tree of Peace is a majestic bronze sculpture by Israeli artist Hedva Ser.

"We hope this tree will grow into a forest, with trees at every dental school in the Middle East," Finkelstein said.

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N 1938, on the eve of the Holocaust, when the entire world abandoned the Jews of Europe to their fate in the Nazi death camps, only one country agreed to open its borders to admit a handful of the hapless refugees. The Dominican Republic, under the brutal dictatorship of Gen. Rafael Trujillo, offered to resettle some 1,000 German-speaking Jews in Sosua, an abandoned banana plantation.

While welcoming this safe haven, these immigrants were totally unfamiliar with the necessities of an agricultural society. One Viennese urbanite wrote, "So we stared at the cows. What happens next? Does one get a hold of the tail and pump until somehow milk comes out?"

Tim at Sosua synagogue

Sosua street scene

No wonder that, eventually, most of the settlers, especially their grown children, left this rural area for the culture and opportunities of urban life, many opting to make their home in the United States where they could pursue their pre-war professions.

I visited Sosua to see what remains of the original Jewish settlement. Not much, other than a synagogue and an adjacent museum, Museo Judio de Sosua.

To see more, visit the extraordinary exhibition, Sosua: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic, on view until August 5 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Place, in downtown Manhattan. www.mjhnyc.org.

The museum has published Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua, 1940-1945 (soft cover, 255 pages, $19.95 Amazon.com Price: $17.59 ), with many original photos. The book, by Marion A. Kaplan, a professor of modern Jewish history at New York University, is a fascinating account of the Sosua experiment.

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Sherry Britton in 1983 Photo by Tim Boxer

Queen Of Broadway Burlesque

HERRY BRITTON, a red-hot burlesque star since she was 13, entertained the troops during the Second World War. She was such a big pinup girl that returning soldiers named a lot of their babies after her. "Any Sherry born after 1945, I feel responsible," she said.

Actually Sherry had ardent fans on both sides of the war. A GI Joe sent her a photo of herself that he had taken off a dead German soldier.

"If the German had known that he was carrying around a picture of a Jewish girl," Sherry said, "he wouldn’t have had to be killed. He would have committed suicide."

No one in show business knew she was Jewish. There was prejudice against Jews during the 30s and 40s. People in Hollywood changed their names to conceal their roots.

Prejudice can work both ways. In 1946, when Luther Adler was casting the Broadway play, A Flag Is Born, about a nascent Jewish state, he hired Marlon Brando as narrator but turned down Sherry because she didn’t look Jewish. "I was so hurt," she told me.

The boss of a Dallas nightclub introduced her to an underworld hit man. He was vilifying Jews, and she told him to stop as she was a Jew. Nobody believed her. He said, "Sherry, you have a marvelous sense of humor."

The voluptuous black-haired stripper was born Edith Zack in New Brunswick, N.J.

Her father, Charles Zack, born in Dublin and raised in Liverpool, changed his name to Britton and became a violinist. In New York he worked as a foreman on a construction project that built Fordham University. Her mother, Esther Dansky, came from Grodno Gubernia, on the Russian-Polish border. She was abused by her husband and left home, leaving little Sherry to be brought up in foster homes.

Later in life Sherry, who never attended high school, earned a pre-law degree at Fordham. When she wed businessman Robert Gross, she invited me to photograph the occasion.

"I tried to instill some Jewish pride in my husband’s two children, Ricky and Robert," she said. "When he was nine Ricky told me, ‘If we’re so great why is everybody always trying to knock us off?’ Can anyone give me an answer?"

Sherry, who raised millions for Israel and accumulated a wall full of plaques, still had no answer when she died at age 89 on April 1.

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ERHAPS best known for his Jewish roles in such biblical epics as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments (1956) and the Oscar-winning Ben-Hur in 1959, Charlton Heston portrayed the ultimate Aryanized Jewish image.

Heston was "a strong supporter of Israel," said Raphael Rothstein, national director of marketing/communications for Israel Bonds. "He always understood the necessity of a Jewish state."

His support for Israel was long standing. In 1954 he appeared in a 30-minute film that Dore Schary produced for UJA fundraising events. Titled Now As Then, Then As Now, the docudrama focused on the rebirth of the Jewish nation, co-starring Edward G. Robinson, Lloyd Nolan, Joseph Cotton and Agnes Moorehead.

A staunch conservative, Heston supported Martin Luther King Jr. as "a 20^th century Moses for his people,"

Rabbi David Baron, of the Temple of the Arts Synagogue in Los Angeles, interviewed prominent corporate moguls for his book, Moses on Management, (Simon & Schuster, 2001). Naturally he had to consult Heston who presided over the National Rifle Association (NRA) and reigned in Hollywood as president of the Screen Actors Guild, a job "that required tender loving care as well as a strong hand," Baron said.

Heston told the rabbi that the scene of Moses confronting the Israelites in an orgiastic ritual around the golden calf was difficult to film. After eight takes the director was finally satisfied, but some of the actors protested, "Let’s do it again!"

The man who got to play Moses, because DeMille perceived an uncanny resemblance to Michelangelo’s famed statue, died at age 84 on April 5 at his home in Beverly Hills.

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