Tuesday, December 10, 2013

A00025 - Arik Einstein, Beloved Israeli Singer

Arik Einstein, 74, Beloved Israeli Singer, Dies

Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A fan in mourning for Arik Einstein, whose music crossed generations and ethnic boundaries.

By ISABEL KERSHNER
Published: November 27, 2013
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JERUSALEM — Arik Einstein, an Israeli singer and songwriter whose blend of folk and rock helped shape a new Hebrew popular culture and whose ballads became modern Israeli anthems, died on Nov. 26 in Tel Aviv. He was 74.
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Mr. Einstein, who began his recording career in the 1960s, released nearly 50 albums, sometimes in collaboration with other artists.

His death, of an aortic aneurysm, was announced by Gabriel Barbash, the director of the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, where Mr. Einstein was taken after collapsing at home.
“There will be nobody to sing for us anymore,” Professor Barbash told reporters and fans who had gathered outside the hospital the night Mr. Einstein died, setting the tone for a national outpouring of grief and nostalgia.
The next day an estimated crowd of 10,000 poured into Rabin Square, the Tel Aviv plaza named for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, where Mr. Einstein’s coffin lay in state. His rendition of a modern Israeli ballad, “Cry for You,” became one of the motifs of the period after Mr. Rabin’s assassination in 1995.
“His songs accompanied us at all the stations of our lives — in our loves and disappointments, our ups and downs,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a memorial ceremony in the square, adding that Mr. Einstein symbolized “the land of Israel that is beautiful, true and pure.”
Mr. Einstein, who began his recording career in the 1960s, released nearly 50 albums, sometimes in collaboration with other artists. While he largely retired from the stage several decades ago and was little known internationally, his popularity at home barely waned. Last year he was voted best Israeli singer of all time by readers of the popular newspaper Yediot Aharonot. Mr. Einstein helped forge an authentic Hebrew rock culture with popular songs like “Me and You” and “Fly, Baby Bird.”
“His sound was new,” Motti Regev, an Israeli sociologist specializing in popular music and culture, told Israel Radio. “Israeli music was mostly connected to military bands and ideological music. He sought how to connect to popular music in the world, to rock, and connect it to what was taking place in Israel.”
Mr. Einstein’s music, crossing generations and ethnic boundaries, was a comforting and unifying force in a diverse and often divided country, and the embodiment of an older, more genteel Israel that some say does not exist anymore. He was also known for his appearances in movies and comedy skits.
Arieh Einstein was born in Tel Aviv on Jan. 3, 1939, the only child of Yaakov and Devorah Einstein. His father was an actor. He became Israel’s high-jump champion as a boy and performed his military service as a member of an infantry brigade entertainment troupe.
He married Alona Shochet in 1963, and they had two daughters. The couple divorced, remarried and divorced again. She died in 2006. Mr. Einstein had two more children, a son and a daughter, with his second wife, Sima Eliyahu, an actress. She and his four children survive him.
Described by friends and acquaintances as modest and bashful, Mr. Einstein stopped performing for live audiences in the early 1980s after being seriously injured in a car accident. Though he continued recording, he largely retired from the public eye in recent years. But the newspaper Maariv announced last month that Mr. Einstein would write a weekly column for its weekend supplement. He put the final touches on his first — and last — column in the hours before he died.

*****

Arieh "Arik" Einstein (Hebrew: אריק איינשטיין‎, pronounced [ˈaʁik ˈaɪnʃteɪn]; 3 January 1939 – 26 November 2013) was an Israeli singer, songwriter and actor.[1] He was a pioneer of Israeli rock music[2] and considered as the greatest singer in Israeli history.
Einstein collaborated with many Israeli singers and songwriters, includingShalom Hanoch[3]and Yoni Rechter. Einstein wrote many of his own songs, He was a vocalist with The Churchills, Batzal Yarok and HaHalonot HaGvohim.

Biography[edit]


Arik Einstein performing with Shalom Hanoch
Arieh Einstein was born in Tel Aviv.[4] His father, Yaakov, was an actor with the "Ohel" Theater. Einstein was Israel's junior high jump and shot put champion.[5]His father urged him to audition for an army entertainment troupe, and he was accepted into the Nahal Brigade troupe.
In 1963, Arieh Einstein married Alona Shochat in the hall of Habima Theater(where he was onstage in a production of Irma La Douce).[6] After four years of marriage, during which their daughter Shiri was born, the couple divorced. A year later, in 1968, they remarried. Their daughter Yasmin was born in 1971.[7]They divorced again in 1972. Alona Einstein died in 2006 from cancer. Arik Einstein's second wife was Sima Eliyahu, whom he met shortly before filming the movie Metzitzim in 1972. They had a daughter and a son: Dina and Amir.[citation needed]
Despite a successful career of acting and singing, Einstein was the shy type and a homebody. In one of his songs he sang that his greatest pleasure was staying home with a cup of lemon tea and his books, and in this he was sincere.[8] In a candid interview that was shown on TV, he said that performing in front of big crowds was difficult for him (without the help of a few glugs of cognac beforehand). For this reason he ceased to perform public concerts from the year of 1981 and on, despite many attractive offers.[9] In 1982 he was hurt in a major car accident. His wife was also hurt, and another friend lost her life. Following the accident Einstein's eyesight, which was alreadymyopic, got worse and he spent less and less time in public.

Music career[edit]

In 1959, after his release from the IDF, Einstein joined the Green Onion band and the Sambation theatre. In 1960, he released his first solo album. He sang in a band under the pseudonym "Ari Goren". In the Yarkon Bridge Trio, he performed with Yehoram Gaon, Benny Amdursky and later Israel Gurion. In 1964, he played in the comedy film Sallah Shabbati, along withChaim Topol, who was also from the Green Onion band. In 1966, Einstein joined The High Windows with Shmulik Kraus andJosie Katz. Their first album went on sale in April 1967, six weeks before the Six-Day War, signaling a new direction in Israeli rock and pop. Einstein left the group after one year in the wake of a disagreement with Kraus.[10]
Two years later, Einstein released the album Mazal Gdi (Capricorn), which was not very successful. He therefore looked for a new sound and went on to produce the album Puzi with the Churchills, considered the first Israeli rock album. He stopped performing live in the early 1980s. He said: "I performed from the age of 18 until I was 42...I wasn't exactly a stage animal. I was held back by the embarrassment, the bashfulness, and it became more evident as the years went by... By the way, when I say bashfulness, I'm not proud of it... I wish I could grab a microphone and sing like a Sinatra, but I don't have what it takes, and a person should adapt to his capabilities. On the other hand, in the studio, I blossom. That's my natural habitat, where I'm not bashful. The problem is that this profession has its field mines: success is accompanied by fame and a form of adoration, and I really don't get along with that. That's where I draw the line. It's pleasant to be loved, but not more." [11]
In 2004, Einstein released Shtei Gitarot Bas Tupim (Two Guitars, Bass, Drums).[12] He sang a duet with David D'Or on D'Or's CD, Kmo HaRuach ("Like the Wind") released on 27 March 2006.[13][14] In 2010, Einstein was the most played artist on radio stations in Israel, according to Israeli Musical artist organisation, ACUM (אקו"ם).[15] In 2011, he released a new song in honor of the return of abducted IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. "You'll always be a hero,” Einstein sings. "You are allowed to cry. It's not simple at all, to forgive fate."[16]

Acting career[edit]

Einstein was part of the early 1970s TV series Lool (Chicken Coop),[17] a sketch-and-song show with an original format and cast. Lool featured songs written by prominent poets performed by some of the best singers Israel has ever produced. In spite of the fact that it had only four episodes, it remains a cult show to this day.[18] Lool, as well as movies such as Shablool (Snail), showcased Einstein as both a top-of-the-line singer and comedian.[19]

Critical acclaim[edit]

In 2005, he was voted the 22nd-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.[20]
In 2009, Haaretz columnist Ariel Hirschfeld wrote: "Arik Einstein's well-known reclusiveness, his ordinariness, his averseness to pomposity and grandiosity, his modest way of belonging to this place – these should not hide from those living here the fact that he is a very great and profound artist, with an acute artistic conscience, perfect and totally unique."[21]

Death[edit]

On 26 November 2013, Einstein died age 74 after a ruptured thoracic aortic aneurysm. At the news of Einstein's death, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement describing his songs as the "soundtrack of Israel."[22] PresidentShimon Peres stated that he was beloved for his voice that "came from the depths" and his songs would "continue playing life and hope" long after him.[23] He was buried in Trumpeldor Cemetery in Tel Aviv. Prior to the funeral, his body lay in state inRabin Square, where thousands gathered to pay their respects.[24]

Discography[edit]

  • 1966 – Shar bishvileh (Singing for you)
  • 1968 – Yashan vegamHadash" (Old and also New)
  • 1968 – Mazal Gdi (Capricorn)
  • 1969 – Puzi
  • 1970 – Shablul (Snail)
  • 1970 – Plastelina (Plasticine)
  • 1971 – Shirey Yeladim (Kids' Songs)
  • 1971 – Badeshe etzel Avigdor (At Avigdor's on the Grass)
  • 1972 – Yasmin (Jasmine)
  • 1973 – Hashanim Harishonot (The First Years)
  • 1973 – Eretz Yisrael Hayeshana veHatova (Good Old Land of Israel)
  • 1974 – Sa leat (Drive slowly)
  • 1975 – Shirim (Songs)
  • 1976 – Eretz Yisrael Hayeshana veHatova bet (Good Old Land of Israel part 2)
  • 1976 – Yeladim (Kids)
  • 1976 – Haahava panim rabot la (Love Has Many Faces)
  • 1977 – Eretz Yisrael Hayeshana veHatova Gimel (Good Old Land of Israel part 3)
  • 1978 – Leket (Medley)
  • 1978 – Yeladudes (Kiddos)
  • 1980 – Eretz Yisrael Hayeshana veHatova-MeshireySasha Argov (Good Old Land of Israel-Sasha Argov's Songs)
  • 1980 – Hamush Bemishkafaim (Armed With Glasses)
  • 1981 – Leket Leyladim (Collection for Kids)
  • 1982 – Yoshev Al Hagader (Sitting on the Fence)
  • 1983 – Shavir (Fragile)
  • 1984 – Pesek Zman (Time Out)
  • 1984 – Nostalgia-Eretz Yisrael Hayeshana veHatova(Nostalgia-Good Old Land of Israel)
  • 1985 – Totzeret Haaretz (Made in Israel)
  • 1986 – Ohev Lihiyot Babait (Love Being Home)
  • 1987 – Al Gvul Haor (On the Boundary of Light)
  • 1988 – Meshirey Avraham Halfi (Avraham Halfi's Songs)
  • 1989 – Hashanim Harishonot (The First Years)
  • 1989 – Haiti Paam Yeled (I was a Boy Once)
  • 1992 – Nostalgia-Eretz Yisrael Hayeshana veHatova(Nostalgia-Good Old Land of Israel)
  • 1992 – Haarye, Hayona, veTarnegolet Kchula (The Lion, The Dove, and a Blue Chicken)
  • 1995 – Yesh bi Ahava (Got Love in Me)
  • 1996 – Ktzat lakahat Hazara (Take Back a Little)
  • 1997 – Lean Parchu Haparparim (Where Have the Butterflies Gone)
  • 1999 – Muscat
  • 2002 – Yashan vegam Hadash-remastered (Old and also New)
  • 2002 – Shemesh Retuva (Wet Sun)
  • 2004 – Shablool-remastered (Snail)
  • 2004 – Shtei Gitarot, Bass, Tupim (Two Guitars, Bass, Drums)
  • 2006 – Rega'im (Moments)
  • 2007 – Kol Ha Tov Shebaolam (All the Good Things in the World)
With the High Windows:
  • 1966 – Hahalonot hagvohim (The High Windows)

Songbooks[edit]

  • 1981 – Arik Einstein: Songbook (edited by Arik Einstein and Michael Tapuach)
  • 1989 – Lool (edited by Arik Einstein and Zvi Shisel)
  • 1991 – Arik Einstein: Second Songbook (edited by Arik Einstein and Michael Tapuach; music editor: Bart Berman)
  • 2006 – Arik Enstein: Zo Ota Ha-ahava (edited by Ali Mohar)
***

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Sunday, December 8, 2013

A00024 - Paul Mayer, Jewish Born Roman Catholic Priest and Peace Activist

Paul Mayer, 82, Ex-Priest and Peace Activist, Dies


Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

The Rev. Paul Mayer speaking on behalf of dissidents in 1969.
By 
Published: November 29, 2013
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Paul Mayer, a Jewish-born former Roman Catholic priest who was at the forefront of peace and social justice campaigns for five decades, for a time working closely with the radical pacifist priests Philip and Daniel Berrigan, died on Nov. 22 at his home in East Orange, N.J. He was 82.

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His son, Peter, said the cause was brain cancer.
Mr. Mayer converted to Catholicism as a teenager and gave up the priesthood in 1968 to marry a former nun. But he said he still considered himself a priest — just as he still considered himself a Jew.
“Jesus never stopped being a Jew, and frankly I don’t think I could stop being a Jew even if I wanted to,” he told the psychotherapist Alan Levin in an interview for a forthcoming book, “Crossing the Boundary.”
He wore the priest’s collar for the rest of his life. He also became a devotee of Navajo religious tradition and the philosophy and practice of yoga.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Mayer helped the Berrigan brothers plan some of their highly publicized antiwar sorties, including the 1968 raid on a draft board office in Catonsville, Md., to remove and burn draft files in the parking lot outside. He also coordinated underground support for the Berrigans when they went into hiding, hunted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as among its 10 most wanted fugitives.
In 1971, Mr. Mayer was named an unindicted co-conspirator in an alleged plot to kidnap Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, supposedly to ransom him in exchange for an end to the war in Vietnam. The defendants contended that the F.B.I. had fabricated the plot with the help of a paid informer. Mr. Mayer headed the defense committee for those charged in the case, known as the Harrisburg Seven. While awaiting trial, Mr. Mayer officiated at the wedding of two of the defendants, the Rev. Philip Berrigan and an activist nun, Elizabeth McAlister, at the federal detention center in Danbury, Conn.
The trial, in 1972, ended in a hung jury, after which the government dropped all but minor charges against Father Berrigan and Sister Elizabeth.
Mr. Mayer was a Benedictine monk for 18 years at St. Paul’s Abbey in Newton, N.J., before being ordained a Catholic priest in the mid-1960s. In 1966 he met Naomi Lambert, a nun at the time with the order of Medical Mission Sisters, while traveling in Mexico. They married two years later. By the time the Vatican relieved him of his priestly duties in 1971, they had had the first of their two children.
The couple established a commune of sorts, called Project Share, in East Orange, where they and a group of families lived together and supported one another in two adjacent six-unit apartment buildings.
His marriage ended in divorce in the 1970s. Besides his son, he is survived by a daughter, Maria.
Mr. Mayer continued a life of extravagant disregard for conventions. In 1972 he toured villages in North Vietnam that the Communist authorities said had been carpet-bombed by American planes. He visited Cuba many times to deliver medical supplies, in defiance of the United States trade embargo.
In 1973, while heading an American delegation to the World Peace Congress in Moscow, he caused a stir by criticizing the meeting’s sponsor, the Soviet Union, saying it was waging “a campaign to silence” any of its citizens “who seek to express their rights.” In response, his own delegation of activists stripped him of his leadership role.
Paul Michael Mayer was born in Frankfurt on Feb. 24, 1931, to Ernst and Berthel Mayer. After Paul and a younger brother, Franz, were expelled from school as Jews under Nazi decrees, their father, a concert pianist who worked as a salesman, and their mother, a nurse, immigrated to the United States with their children in 1938.
Mr. Mayer lived in an orphanage while his parents and younger brother stayed with relatives for about a year, until they could afford to rent an apartment in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.
His decision to convert to Catholicism at 16, he said, reflected a “driving adolescent drive to belong.” The writings of Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and Christian mystic, cemented his commitment, he said. After being ordained, he was a parish priest in Panama.
He took up the cause of social justice when he joined the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965. Almost 50 years later the passion had not subsided.
In an unpublished memoir he completed shortly before his death, he recalled his arrest in December 2011 during the Occupy Wall Street protest: “I found myself climbing a 15-foot linked iron fence to cast my lot with this visionary youth movement that was sweeping the planet.”
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Friday, November 1, 2013

A00023 - Hans Ephraimson-Abt, Air-Crash Victims' Crusader

Hans Ephraimson-Abt, Air-Crash Victims’ Crusader, Dies at 91


Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times
Hans Ephraimson-Abt in New York in 1997.

By
Published: October 26, 2013

Hans Ephraimson-Abt, who became an internationally known advocate for families of air-crash victims after the death of his daughter on Korean Air Lines Flight 007, shot down by Soviet fighter planes in 1983, died on Oct. 18 in Short Hills, N.J. He was 91.


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The cause was heart failure, his son, Hans, said.
A commercial 747 bound from New York to Seoul, South Korea, KAL 007 was shot down near Sakhalin Island, off the coast of Siberia, on Sept. 1, 1983, after straying accidentally into Soviet air space. All 269 people aboard were killed.
The Soviet Union long maintained that the flight was a spy plane sent by the United States, and the attack endures in public memory as one of the last, bitterest engagements of the cold war.
Afterward, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt was in the vanguard of establishing a unified movement to aid air-crash victims’ families. In work that occupied him to the end of his life, he traveled the world, testifying, lobbying and meeting with government officials, airline executives and bereaved families.
“Hans fought for people who didn’t have a voice and didn’t know that they needed a voice,” Deborah A. P. Hersman, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said in a telephone interview. “He turned his own tragedy into advocating for all air travelers, to make sure that their families were taken care of and treated with respect after an accident.”
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt, who was fluent in a string of European languages, assisted not only the families of KAL 007 passengers, but also those of victims of many later crashes, including Pan Am Flight 103, which was destroyed by a bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, he advised relatives of passengers aboard the hijacked planes, in particular the families of passengers from Germany, where he was born and brought up.
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt was the longtime chairman of what was known early on as the American Association for Families of KAL 007 Victims; reflecting its expanded purview, the association more recently became the Air Crash Victims Families Group, of which he was the spokesman.
In 1983, when KAL 007 families chose to band together after the crash, there were few avenues for obtaining support. Responding to air crashes — from notifying relatives and keeping them abreast of recovery efforts to providing emotional assistance — was then the duty of the airlines, a state of affairs that in the view of Mr. Ephraimson-Abt and his colleagues needed to be remedied.
In the 30 years since, as a result of their work, significant advances on behalf of victims’ families have been made.
In 1996, Congress passed the Aviation Disaster Family Assistance Act, which empowered the National Transportation Safety Board to notify the families and the Red Cross to help care for them.
The next year, a new international aviation agreement raised the amount for which an air carrier was liable when an international flight crashed. The previous limit, set in 1966, capped carriers’ liability at $75,000 per passenger, except in rare cases where families could prove the airline guilty of willful misconduct.
The 1997 agreement, which Mr. Ephraimson-Abt helped broker, raised the cap to $139,000. For families seeking greater damages, the new agreement also relieved them of the burden of proving willful misconduct.
Near midnight on Aug. 30, 1983, a 23-year-old Alice Ephraimson-Abt boarded KAL Flight 007 at John F. Kennedy International Airport. A recent graduate of Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, where she had majored in East Asian studies, she was headed, via Seoul and then Hong Kong, to Beijing. In China, she planned to teach English and study Mandarin.
After a refueling stop in Alaska on Aug. 31, Flight 007 took off for Seoul. By the time it was spotted by the Soviets on Sept. 1, it had deviated hundreds of miles off course.
After the plane was shot down, many victims’ families were not notified directly. Mr. Ephraimson-Abt heard about the crash from a hotel manager in Hong Kong, whom he had enlisted to look after his daughter on her arrival there.
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt immediately phoned Korean Air Lines. The airline, he said afterward, hung up on him.
“To this day,” he said in 1996, testifying before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, “Korean Air Lines has not informed me of the death of my daughter.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt’s son said that to his knowledge, the airline had still not communicated with the family.


Hans Ephraimson-Abt, Air-Crash Victims’ Crusader, Dies at 91

Published: October 26, 2013
(Page 2 of 2)
In an e-mail on Friday, a spokeswoman for the airline, now known as Korean Air, wrote, “Unfortunately, people who were at the airline in 1983-84 have retired, and no one in the present administration has any recollection of events then.”


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Hans Eduard Ephraimson-Abt was born in Berlin on March 7, 1922, to a Jewish family. When World War II broke out, he was studying hotel management in Switzerland; he remained there, in a series of refugee camps, until the end of the war. After moving to the United States in 1950, he was reunited with his parents, who had managed to evade the Nazis.
In New York, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt spent several years directing the press department of the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany. He later worked as an international business consultant.
After his marriage to Christine Anger ended in divorce in the early 1970s, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt reared Alice and her two younger siblings in Saddle River, N.J.
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, many Soviet documents became public for the first time. Among them was the transcript of Flight 007’s cockpit recorder, which had been retrieved by Soviet divers in October 1983. The Soviet Union had long denied the recorder’s existence.
In 1992, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt led a delegation of victims’ families to Moscow, where the Russian president, Boris N. Yeltsin, gave them the transcript.
The transcript, which captured KAL 007’s last moments, made it clear that the plane did not explode immediately after it was hit by two Soviet air-to-air missiles, as had been generally supposed. Instead, it remained aloft for some minutes before plunging into the sea.
“We have been struggling for years to know what happened to our loved ones,” Mr. Ephraimson-Abt told The New York Times after receiving the transcript. “Now we face the agonizing recognition that their death was neither painless nor instant.”
In 1997, a federal jury awarded Alice Ephraimson-Abt’s survivors $2.1 million in compensation for her death. Out-of-court settlements by families of other KAL 007 passengers had ranged from $75,000 to $10 million, The Associated Press reported that year.
For his work on behalf of crash victims’ families, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt received the Order of Merit from Germany last June.
Besides his son, Hans, Mr. Ephraimson-Abt, who lived most recently in Ridgewood, N.J., is survived by a daughter, Viviane Ephraimson-Abt, and three grandchildren.
Mr. Ephraimson-Abt was sometimes asked why he chose to become involved in air disasters beyond the one that took his daughter’s life. His response was simple.
“No one looked after our families,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2000. “We decided it would be a good idea if we looked after families in other crashes.”
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Tuesday, October 29, 2013

A00022 - Paul Reichmann, World Financial Center Developer

Paul Reichmann, Who Helped Develop the World Financial Center, Dies at 83

Peter Redman/Financial Post
Paul Reichmann, in 1990, made and lost billions of dollars.

By JONATHAN KANDELL

Published: October 25, 2013
Paul Reichmann, the Canadian real estate developer who made and lost billions of dollars while transforming the skylines of Toronto, New York and London, died on Friday in Toronto. He was 83.

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Ed Quinn
In 1980, Mr. Reichmann's firm won the right to build the World Financial Center in Manhattan.
His death was announced by a spokeswoman for ReichmannHauer Capital Partners, an investment firm.
Mr. Reichmann and his brothers, Albert and Ralph, led Olympia & York, their family’s real estate development firm, which counted among its greatest projects the World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan and Canary Wharf in London’s East End. At their apex in 1990, the Reichmanns held about 8 percent of New York City’s commercial office space, more than twice as much as their closest rival, the Rockefellers.
In all, Olympia & York owned 40 major office towers in a dozen cities on both sides of the Atlantic and controlled $20 billion in assets. The net personal worth of the Reichmanns reached $10 billion, making them at one point among the 10 wealthiest families in the world. But in 1992, they ran out of cash while building Canary Wharf, and their real estate business quickly collapsed.
Paul Reichmann, a tall, soft-spoken man who dressed in black suits, white shirts and dark ties, was clearly the family business strategist and chief decision-maker. He and his family were lavish contributors, mostly to Orthodox Jewish causes; they donated up to $50 million a year to yeshivas, synagogues and hospitals around the world.
Despite his austere demeanor, Mr. Reichmann took enormous business risks. He bet that each new development project could exceed the size of the previous one and still attract enough tenants to produce a windfall.
“For Paul, it is like being a gambler, like being a heroin addict — he cannot stop,” Andrew Sarlos, a prominent Toronto investment banker and Reichmann family friend, said in a 1988 article in Maclean’s, the Canadian weekly.
Mr. Reichmann scoffed at that sort of criticism. “You don’t get the returns if you don’t take the risk,” he said in an interview with Institutional Investor magazine in 2000.
For years, Mr. Reichmann’s track record was so impressive that his creditors did not seem to mind his high-roller approach. His sense of timing in the notoriously cyclical real estate market seemed infallible, and he was viewed as a master negotiator with an uncanny understanding of financing techniques.
But the Reichmann empire crumbled in 1992. The immediate cause was the Canary Wharf project in London. With real estate prices plunging around the world, other major Reichmann properties were also in the red, and the family’s stock market investments soured.
Crushed under debts of more than $20 billion, Olympia & York went bankrupt. The Reichmanns were left with a net worth of less than $100 million — one of the most astonishing financial collapses in history.
Paul Reichmann blamed his own overconfidence. “The fact that I had never been wrong created character flaws that caused me to make mistakes,” he said in 1997.
Mr. Reichmann and his family partly rebuilt their fortune. In a personal triumph, he recovered control of Canary Wharf in 1995, as a minority partner and chairman of an investment group that included George Soros and Laurence Tisch, and then pushed ahead with the completion of the project. He retired in 2005 after an alliance of developers led by Morgan Stanley acquired Canary Wharf.
The strains of commerce and religious orthodoxy were often inseparable in the family’s ventures. For example, Olympia & York closed its construction sites on the Jewish Sabbath, paying overtime for Sunday labor, and during the Jewish religious holidays, as well as Christian ones.
At the height of his business career, Mr. Reichmann sometimes spoke wistfully of the Talmudic studies and religious school building projects he undertook as a young man.
“I think that what I did in those years was a greater achievement than what I’ve done since,” he was quoted as saying in a 1996 biography of his family, “The Reichmanns,” by Anthony Bianco. Paul Reichmann was born in Vienna on Sept. 27, 1930, the fifth of six siblings. His parents, Samuel and Rene, were Orthodox Jews who had moved from rural Hungary to Vienna, where they owned a prosperous egg export business. But Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 forced the family to flee to Paris.
Two years later, when the Nazis overran France, the Reichmanns fled to Tangier, Morocco, where Samuel Reichmann became a successful currency trader.

Paul Reichmann, Who Helped Develop the World Financial Center, Dies at 83

Published: October 25, 2013
(Page 2 of 2)
When anti-Jewish riots broke out across the Middle East after the 1956 Arab-Israeli War, the Reichmanns uprooted themselves again, this time going to Canada. The family settled in North York, a suburb of Toronto, where Samuel and his sons, Paul, Albert and Ralph, started a small company producing tiles and other building material, which they called Olympia Tile. In 1958, it became the springboard for Olympia & York, which would erect close to 100 buildings in the Toronto area over the next 15 years.
The most notable of these projects was First Canadian Place, a 72-story office tower in downtown Toronto that was the country’s tallest building. Completed in 1973 after only 16 months and using vast quantities of magnificent white marble, the tower gained the Reichmanns a reputation for quality projects delivered at an accelerated pace.
The success of First Canadian Place also encouraged Paul Reichmann to venture into the United States real estate market. His first foray involved the purchase of eight prime Manhattan office buildings from the Uris Corporation in 1977 for $325 million. At the time, New York City seemed on the verge of bankruptcy, and its office vacancy rates were soaring. But a decade later, the same properties were valued around $3 billion.
By then, Mr. Reichmann and his brothers were heavily involved in their most heralded project, the World Financial Center. In 1980, the still relatively unknown Olympia & York won out over a dozen other developers, most of them local firms, to build six million square feet of office and retail space near Battery Park on land reclaimed from the Hudson River.
The project’s design, by the Argentine-born architect Cesar Pelli, featured four office towers ranging up to 51 stories, on top of a huge base devoted to luxury stores. The centerpiece of the complex, the Winter Garden, was a 130-foot-high, glass-vaulted pavilion landscaped with palms. When the design for the World Financial Center was unveiled in 1981, it was hailed as “the finest group of skyscrapers since Rockefeller Center,” by Paul Goldberger, The New York Times’s architecture critic.
By the end of the 1980s, the Reichmanns were the seventh-richest family in the world, according to Fortune magazine. But they still lived relatively modestly in the same upper-middle-class homes they had built for themselves in their Toronto suburb a generation before.
Paul Reichmann’s wife, Lea, occasionally complained that her husband was too involved in his business and not spending enough time with his children, Barry, Henry, Vivian, Rachel and Libby. But he was home every Sabbath and holiday, joining his family and neighbors as they walked to the nearby temple for services.
In 1988, Mr. Reichmann took the greatest gamble of his life by committing Olympia & York to build Canary Wharf. The completed project was supposed to have 24 buildings and 12.5 million square feet of office space at an estimated construction cost of $8 billion.
Despite generous subsidies and rent cutbacks, only a fraction of the commercial space was occupied. By late 1991, Canary Wharf was paralyzed by a lack of further financing. And early the next year, Olympia & York announced that it had run out of cash.
Many of the family’s other real estate holdings were also in trouble because of high office vacancy rates in a number of North American cities. The Reichmanns filed for bankruptcy protection in London, Toronto and New York simultaneously.
Only three years later, Mr. Reichmann regained the helm at Canary Wharf, which finally gained nearly full occupancy in 2000 thanks to a booming real estate market in London. By 2000, the Reichmann family’s net worth reached $1 billion. But in an interview with Institutional Investor that year, Mr. Reichmann said his business accomplishments had never given him the sense of fulfillment he experienced as a youthful religious social worker and teacher in North Africa. But “what could have been is a silly way to look at things,” he said. “You are what you are.”

Paul Reichmann

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Paul Reichmann
Born(1930-09-27)27 September 1930
Vienna, Austria
Died25 October 2013(2013-10-25) (aged 83)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupationbusinessman
Known forfounder of Olympia & York
RelativesReichmann family
Paul Reichmann (Hebrew: משה יוסף רייכמן‎‎; 27 September 1930 – 25 October 2013) was a Canadian businessman and member of the Reichmann family. He is best known for his leadership of the Olympia & York a real estate development company.

Formative years[edit]

Reichmann was born in Vienna in 1930[1] to Samuel Reichmann, a wealthy egg merchant and his wife René. His parents were Orthodox Jews from a small town in Hungary, but his father had risen to prominence in Vienna as a successful merchant.
The family escaped the Nazi occupation of Austria by sheer chance, as they happened to leave the country on the day of Anschluss, to visit Paul's grandfather in Hungary who had suffered a stroke. Abandoning their lives in Vienna, they made their way from Hungary to Paris, where they settled. The Reichmann family fled when France fell to the Germans, eventually making their way to the neutral city of Tangier.
In Tangier, the family prospered as Samuel became a major currency trader.[2] After the war Paul left home to study religion first in Britain and then in Israel, and became a Rabbi. In 1953 he returned to Morocco to become a shirt retailer, and that same year he married Lea Feldman.

Rising success[edit]

Three years later Paul left Morocco to join his elder brother Edward in Canada. Edward had established Olympia Flooring and Tile, a successful flooring and tile company in Montreal. Paul, along with his brothers Albert and Ralph, moved to Toronto to set up a branch of the flooring and tile company in that city.
Unsatisfied with the local builders, Paul Reichmann decided the company would construct its own warehouses and offices. Soon the company was building such facilities for others. In 1964, Olympia and York was founded as a separate building and property development firm.
The firm was soon profitable, and expanded rapidly. It also accepted difficult projects, including the construction of First Canadian Place, Canada's tallest building, in 1976. The company expanded to New York and Tokyo and by the mid-1980s it was the largest developer in the world, and the Reichmanns were one of the world's richest families.
His success had little impact on Paul Reichmann's lifestyle. He remained very private and unwilling to talk to the press. He retained his strong religious views, and used much of his fortune to support his religion. In Toronto he built a number of schools and synagogues which became the centre of a thriving Orthodox community. Shunning most luxuries, his one personal indulgence was collecting rare and valuable Jewish texts. Pursuant to Jewish law, all of Olympia and York's construction projects halted on the Jewish Sabbath and all holy days.

Troubles[edit]

The company ran into severe trouble in the early 1990s. It was due in part to a general decline in the world economy, but the company was truly brought low by the Canary Wharf project. It was the world's largest property development, but remained half empty. Reichmann had taken the project as a major gamble. He had been impressed by Margaret Thatcher's reforms and obtained a personal promise from her that she would help the project, most importantly by extending the London Underground to reach it.
In Canada, Reichmann's once sterling reputation also began to suffer. In 1985 the company had bought Gulf Canada in a deal that included some $300 million in tax breaks. Many Canadians were infuriated that a massive corporation had been given such a lucrative deal. Toronto Life magazine also published a highly critical article on the Reichmanns. The family took offence at allegations that Samuel Reichmann had aided the Nazis with illegal smuggling operations during the Second World War. The family sued the magazine for an unprecedented $109 million. They were successful, and Toronto Life published a full retraction, but their heavy fisted response soured Toronto Life magazine to the Reichmanns[citation needed].
In 1992, as Olympia and York collapsed under some $20 billion in debt, Paul Reichmann lost most of his family fortune.

Recovery and retirement[edit]

Despite these setbacks, Reichmann successfully rebuilt a small portion of his empire. This included setting up a partnership with George Soros, Lawrence Tisch and Michael Price along with investors such as Saudi Prince Al-Waleed to purchase a controlling stake in the Canary Wharf from the banks that made the original construction loans to Reichmann and which had taken control of the development. Reichmann became Chairman of Canary Wharf again and remained so until 2004.
During 2004 a takeover battle began for the Canary Wharf Group in which Reichmann eventually sided with Canadian developer Brascan to attempt a purchase of the company. During this process he resigned his position on the Board. In March, 2005 a consortium of investors led by Morgan Stanley under the banner of Songbird Estates purchased Canary Wharf Group, and Reichmann was therefore no longer involved with Canary Wharf on a day to day basis. Reichmann, at the time 75, announced that he intended to retire from business and sold many of his property holdings.

Recent activity[edit]

In September 2006, Reichmann announced that he was bored with retirement and that he would be setting up a new $4 billion fund, based in Toronto, with offices in Great Britain and the Netherlands.

Death[edit]

Paul Reichmann died at the age of 83 in Toronto on 25 October 2013.[3][4][1]

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Sunday, September 29, 2013

A00021 - Philip Berg, Rabbi Who Updated Jewish Mysticism

Rabbi Philip Berg, Who Updated Jewish Mysticism, Dies at 86

Theo Wargo/WireImage
Rabbi Philip Berg of the Kabbalah Center International sounding a shofar for Rosh Hashana.
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Published: September 20, 2013
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Rabbi Philip Berg, whose Kabbalah Center International put a modern spin on an ancient Jewish mystical tradition, attracting celebrities like Madonna, Demi Moore and Britney Spears but also incurring criticism on spiritual and financial matters, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 86, according to the center, although some news reports put his age at 84.
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His death, from respiratory failure and pneumonia, was announced by the center.
A former insurance salesman, Rabbi Berg established the center in Queens with his second wife, Karen, in the early 1980s. The Los Angeles branch, now its headquarters, opened in the mid-1980s, and there are now branches in some 40 cities worldwide.
The rabbi suffered a stroke in 2004, and since then the organization has been led by Mrs. Berg and the couple’s sons, Yehuda and Michael.
In an e-mail message to The New York Times on Thursday, Madonna wrote of Rabbi Berg, “I learned more from him than any human I have ever met.”
She added: “This one concept that he taught me, and that kabbalah teaches, is that you have to take responsibility for your life. You can’t blame other people for what happens. You are in charge of your destiny.”
Kabbalah, which means tradition in Hebrew, arose in the 12th century among rabbinic sages in Spain and France. A body of commentary on sacred Hebrew writings, primarily the Torah but also early mystical texts, it aims to discern and illuminate hidden meanings within those works.
Rabbi Berg recast kabbalah in a late-20th-century light by combining it with a New Age focus on self-actualization. Classes offered at the center’s New York branch, for instance, include Power of Kabbalah 1, 2 and 3 and Creating Your Relationships.
Many mainstream Jewish leaders condemned Rabbi Berg as purveying a diluted version of kabbalah, which was historically considered so complex and powerful that only married men 40 and older who already possessed a deep knowledge of the Torah were allowed to study it.
But his admirers praise him as having made kabbalah far more widely accessible than it had ever been — to women, young people and even gentiles.
“It’s a mixed legacy,” Rabbi Arthur Green, rector of the rabbinical school at Hebrew College in Newton Centre, Mass., said on Wednesday.
On the one hand, Rabbi Green said: “Both Orthodox and liberal Jews accused him of charlatanism and hucksterism. He sold bottles of supposedly blessed water called Kabbalah Water and charged hefty fees to people taking his classes and certainly became quite wealthy, unlike any prior teacher of kabbalah in history.”
On the other, he said, “There were people who derived great benefit from his teachings, who found their way back to Judaism through him.”
Besides Kabbalah Water, the center’s most emblematic product is a length of red string($26); worn around the wrist, the string is said to ward off the evil eye. In 2003, Ms. Spears, wearing the string and a white bustier, appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly.
A major component of the Kabbalah Center is its book-publishing arm, which has released many works by Rabbi Berg, including “The Wheels of a Soul: Reincarnation, Your Life Today — and Tomorrow” (1984) and “Kabbalah: The Star Connection — the Science of Judaic Astrology” (1992).
“In medieval kabbalah, there’s definitely reincarnation and astrology,” Jody Myers, a professor of religious studies at California State University, Northridge, and the author of “Kabbalah and the Spiritual Quest,” a 2007 book about the center, explained Wednesday. “But Berg gave it central billing.”
The center’s assets, The Los Angeles Times wrote this week, “are now believed to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Philip Berg was born Shraga Feivel Gruberger in Brooklyn on Aug. 20, 1927, according to the Kabbalah Center; some sources give the year as 1929. The son of an Orthodox Jewish family, he received rabbinic ordination in 1951 from what is now the Lakewood Yeshiva in Lakewood Township, N.J.
But before long, wanting to steer a less traditional course, he Americanized his name and became a salesman with the New York Life Insurance Company. He became entranced by kabbalah in the 1960s, on a visit to Israel.
In 1971, after divorcing his first wife, with whom he had eight children, he married Karen Mulnick. Together they undertook a deep study of kabbalah, living in Israel for much of the 1970s before returning to the United States, where they started a modest incarnation of the center in their home in Queens.
The Kabbalah Centers functioned fairly quietly until 1996, when Madonna began attending the Los Angeles branch. Over time, they have been patronized by Elizabeth Taylor, Roseanne Barr, Monica Lewinsky and other celebrities as well as many ordinary men and women.
In 2006, the center became a partner in a charitable project of Madonna’s that sought to build a school in Malawi, in southeast Africa. But as Newsweek reported in 2011, “only $850,000 of the $3.8 million spent on the academy was paid out in Malawi.”
“The lion’s share, almost $3 million, was spent by the Kabbalah Center’s office in L.A.,” the magazine said.
In 2010, the Internal Revenue Service began an investigation of the Kabbalah Center’s finances; its scope included the center’s role in the Madonna project, Raising Malawi. An I.R.S. spokesman said the agency could not discuss the status of the investigation.
Madonna has continued the Raising Malawi project but no longer involves the Kabbalah Center in it.
Information on Rabbi Berg’s survivors besides Karen Berg and their two sons could not be confirmed.
In founding the Kabbalah Center, Rabbi Berg appears to have put his finger on a primal longing that is present in even contemporary sophisticates.
“He tapped into the fact that modern educated people can still be superstitious and still have insecurities and still have needs that were once filled by people who wrote amulets and gave blessings,” Rabbi Green said Wednesday. “And he was willing to do that for people in the modern world.”
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