Jewish World Review May 17, 1999 /2 Sivan, 5759
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| Boxer |
Tim Boxer
ALTHOUGH ROCK SINGER Peter Himmelman attained cult status among a
multitude of devoted followers, he has yet to achieve popular acclaim with a
Top 100 album.
He's worked for 18 years but is not a household name, yet. That could
be because he refuses to play in clubs on Friday, the biggest night of the
week for showbiz artists.
I recently received his latest album, "Love Thinketh No Evil" on the
Six Degrees label. I was so taken by his sound and lyrics, which he wrote
himself. He says he was influenced by Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, Bob Dylan
and a Chassidic leader.
I had to meet him. It wasn't easy. He was touring the country.
At a late afternoon rehearsal I was a rapt audience of one. On stage
he was rocking away with a band of five musicians.
Garbed in nondescript black turtleneck sweater, brown pants, and
woven cap, he was a picture of your typical rock 'n roller.
Except for the tzitzis!
As Peter swayed his guitar, shuffling from end of the stage to the
other, his tzitzis were flapping in the air.
After rehearsal I went to his dressingroom.
"You gotta wait five minutes," the manager said. "He's doing mincha," the afternoon prayers.
After the afternoon prayer, Peter ushered me into the room which
barely contained a cot and mirrored table. The only item on the table was a
siddur, prayer book.
He was born 39 years ago in Minneapolis and grew up in a secular
home. Religion seemed irrelevant, he says, till he met a Hasid in
Manhattan.
He lives with his wife Maria and four children in Santa Monica, Calif.
Himmelman, whose name means means "man of heaven" in Yiddish, says
his religious observance is breaking new ground in the rock world.
Bob Dylan must be proud. After all, he's not only Peter's idol but
father-in-law too.
You can say one thing about Germany's ethnic cleansing during the
Holocaust.
"It brought Henry Kissinger to our shores," said Rabbi Arthur
Schneier, president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation. He presented the
former secretary of state with the World Statesman Award at the New York
Hilton.
Schneier, the rabbi of Manhattan's prestigious Park East Synagogue,
created the foundation in 1965 to promote religious freedom around the world.
Schneier, himself a survivor from Vienna, said his mother always said
he'd become president of the U.S. some day.
"Ma," he'd tell her, "that's impossible. I'm not native born."
The day John F. Kennedy was assassinated she called her son
fearfully: "Arthur, you must promise me never to become president of the
United States."
Percy Barnevik of Sweden, a top business leader in Europe who
accepted the Appeal of Conscience Award, was convulsed with laughter along
with such guests as Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert, Abba Eban, Dr. Ruth
Westheimer, Carroll Petrie, Howard Rubenstein, Mortimer Zuckerman, Joseph and
Leonard Wilf, and Farah Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran's widow.
This being close to Mother's Day, Kissinger offered his own story.
Five years before she died his mother, Paula, suffered a stroke. He
brought her to the hospital where she lay unconscious for three days.
Then she opened her eyes, but she couldn't talk.
Kissinger, the former secretary of state, observed that America is a
strange country to conduct foreign policy. "This is the only country in the
world populated by immigrants." (I'll have to remind him about my native
land, Canada.)
Alluding to Clinton's past efforts to resolve the Balkan crisis
peacefully, Kissinger said, "It's an American thing. You take the Serbs and
the Muslims, hand them an 80-page document, and tell them this is the final
solution to your 400-year problem. Only in America can this happen."
He recalled the time he was trying to mediate between the Turks and
the Greeks over the Cyprus crisis. The Turks proposed an idea which sounded
workable.
Kissinger delivered the proposal to the Greeks as his own brilliant
idea, and they readily accepted it.
Then he went back to the Turks with the proposal, and they promptly
rejected it.
"It was their own idea!" Kissinger exclaimed.
Kissinger questioned the notion of a just war, remarking that
theologians have wrestled with it for a long time.
"More lives have been lost in crusades than in the national interest."
John Whitehead, former deputy secretary of state and former
co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, said he heard Kissinger speak three times this
week and he didn't contradict himself once.
"If he did, I doubt we'd know the difference," said Whitehead, who
presided over the awards dinner.
Twice Saved
Israeli Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau has yet to see Life Is
Beautiful, but his own Holocaust story in one sense parallels that of the the
Oscar winning movie - a child survives the concentration camp.
However it isn't the father who saves the boy as in the film; it's
the brother.
Lau, who spent a weekend at Young Israel of Hillcrest inQueens in
behalf of Israel Bonds, told me how his brother, Naphtali Lavie, saved him
twice in Buchenwald. (Naphtali became a distinguished Israeli diplomat who
served as consul general in New York.)
In Pietrkow, Poland, the Nazis sent the old men, including Lau's
father, the town's chief rabbi, to the Treblinka death camp. They sent the
women and children to another death camp.
Everyone was ordered to disrobe and throw all their bags and clothes
into the fiery ovens as a precaution against disease.
So now Yisrael was out of the bag. A scrawny child, but with blond
hair he didn't look Jewish. They thought he was a Pole. Before being sent to
a separate barracks with Soviet prisoners of war, he had to be inoculated
with the rest.
The doctor, a Czech POW, looked at little Yisrael and asked, "How old
are you?"
Warned never to reveal how young he is, Yisrael said 15.
The doctor turned to Naphtal. "Tell me the truth, how old is he?"
"Look, if I give him this injection he will die on the spot. This
dose is not for a child. You want to kill him or you want him to survive?"
Naphtali admitted his brother was only 7.
The Czech doctor turned to the left, then to the right, and when no
one was looking he squeezed out half the injection on the ground.
Fare Enough for a Film
Isaac Agami says filmmaking is not a hobby for normal people. "It's a
total meshugas."
Take it from a man who knows. His first movie, "Fare Games," which he
wrote and produced, is being screened at Manhattan's Quad Theater.
He's not giving up his day job, though. He owns a fleet of taxis in
New York. In fact, his day job gave him the material - the crazy adventures
of a cab driver - which is the essential plot line of his movie.
Isaac was born in Mea Shearim in Jerusalem, where his father ran a
grocery store. His father died and left 8 children with Isaac the youngest at
13. His mother raised the family on her own by cleaning houses.
"I saw all the movies for nothing," he said over a pastrami sandwich
at the Second Ave. Deli.
"In school I appeared in all the plays, usually as the narrator. I
had the best voice in school."
The Edison closed in the late '80s, a victim to the arrival of the
multiplexes.
"They're not building single theaters anymore," Isaac said, "only
multiplexes where they can show 7 or 8 films at a time."
Every time he went back to Jerusalem - he goes at least once a year -
he'd visit the Edison.
"The first time I saw it closed, I had tears in my eyes. That was
like home."
He has since named his production company the Edison Agami.
The House Wit
Milton Berle describes visiting Mama: All the kids come over to her
house. They get together to make a great meal. After the meal they go into
the kitchen, wash all the dishes and put everything away. A little later,
they leave. As soon as she's sure they're gone, Mama washes all the dishes
Rock and Religion
When he came to the East Village for a one-night stand at the Bottom
Line, I was there.
Himmelman
"Ever since that encounter 15 years ago," he says, "I've
been putting on tefilin, davening (praying) three times a day, keeping kosher and
observing Shabbat. I'm raising an Orthodox family."
They Remember Mama
That didn't stop her. She continued to encourage him to set his
sights on the White House.
Kissinger
She wrote: What day is this? He said Thursday.
She wrote: What time is it? He said 9 a.m.
She wrote: "I have a dentist appointment at 10. If you don't cancel
it I'll have to pay."
"But Greece would never accept it coming from Turkey," he said. "So I
told the Turks to let me propose the idea as originating from the U.S. and
they agreed.
The able bodied were rounded up for work. Naphtali, 18, snatched
7-year-old Yisrael, put him in a sack on his back and marched with a group of
slave labor to Buchenwald. That was the first time he saved his brother. The
second time happened inside the concentration camp.
Lau
"He told you, 15."
Isaac never had money for the movies. So he worked after school
selling ice cream at the local movie house, the Edison. That was the
beginning of a love affair with the silver screen.
JWR contributor Tim Boxer is the celebrity columnist of the
New York Jewish
Week and author
of Jewish Celebrity Hall of Fame and Jewish Celebrity
Anecdotes. Send your comments to him by clicking here.
