Vlady Rosenbaum Joins the PERF Board of Directors

Zawsze zaangażowany odszedł od nas kolega, znajomy, przyjaciel… Vlady (Włodek) Rozenbaum

Włodek Rozenbaum, zmarł w czasie snu w nocy z 16-ego na 17-ego pazdziernika. Miał 75 lat.

Dr. Tom Petty and Vlady at the 6th Oxygen
Consensus Conference in Denver, Colorado.

Have you noticed the new name added to our list of Board of Directors? Vlady Rozenbaum is well known in the pulmonary community, among professionals as well as patients. Vlady is himself an activist COPD patient on oxygen. While all of us on the PERF Board of Directors are patient advocates Vlady, and all the patients that he represents from COPD-ALERT, can help us do an even better job to understand your every day problems. But I will let Vlady himself tell you more about who he is. We think you will agree with us that he is a valuable addition to our Board!

In his own words

I was born in the Soviet Union and spent the war years there. Then I lived in Poland, where I was diagnosed with bronchiectasis and underwent a lobectomy on my right lung in 1952. My condition improved markedly. I studied English and Linguistics at the Warsaw University and later worked as editor of technical translations into English for the U.S. Department of Commerce. I married my wife, a physicist, and in 1969 we came as political refugees to the U.S. I pursued graduate studies in history and political science, ending up with a Ph.D. After teaching college in Virginia and Indiana for a while I joined the civil service. I held a variety of positions: equal opportunity specialist; Soviet/East European geographer for the Defense Department; regional expert for the U.S. Board of Geographic Names; foreign languages instructor; and intelligence analyst. In 2000 I retired on disability due to very severe COPD (diagnosed around 1980). This prompted me to get involved in patient support and advocacy activities.

I established an online group, COPD-ALERT, national in scope, but allowing foreign members as well. We also have as members leaders of some other support groups. We joined various COPD coalition organizations and established strong ties with the NHLBI, PERF, Alpha-1, AARC, NECA, CHASM, and the Congressional COPD Caucus. I have attended many conferences, symposia, and workshops and spoke at the FDA hearings and on the Capitol Hill.

Membership in COPD-ALERT is free. The group has two websites on Yahoo: One is for members only (with messages, photos, links, articles, and archives) and a second is for public access (http://www.copd-alert.com). The only requirement for approval is that the applicant sends me his/her full name, address, and telephone number (the address and telephone are waived for foreign applicants). I introduced this policy three years ago when we inadvertently admitted persons whose aim was to disrupt our group and harass individual members. Despite this restriction we have some 400 members and are getting new ones all the time.

Vlady editing the COPD-Alert website

Our membership forum is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week and there is always somebody to talk to. The forum focuses on daily living with COPD including advances in COPD treatment (the latest medical and technological news from medical journals and manufacturers), information about medications and medical procedures (COPD and COPD-related – cardiovascular, GERD, anxiety/depression, smoking cessation, obesity, etc.), advocacy issues (information about pending legislation and federal regulations – CMS policies, oxygen use, reimbursements, funding for research, etc.) Members’ posts describe their experiences, ask questions, and offer tips. We have notifications of patient and medical meetings around the country, and provide links to valuable sites. We also enlist comments from experts, some of whom are members of our group. Since a number of our members get involved in advocacy and participate in many activities on national and local levels, our members get first-hand information from them, not just summaries from the media or medical sites. I personally have attended many conferences, symposia, and workshops and spoke at the FDA hearings and on the Capitol Hill and shared my experiences with the group. COPD-ALERT has its logo (we have a lapel pin) and a mascot, which can be seen on our website. COPD-ALERT has been featured in a number of publications and our website has links to some of them.

While I am more than busy with COPD-ALERT and COPD advocacy (hardly any time left for my doctors), my interests go beyond COPD. For many years I have been involved in research on Russian and East European history with some publications to my credit. I am on the board of directors of an international genealogical organization and of the Computer Center in my retirement community. In my “spare” time I go to pulmonary rehab three times a week and test new ambulatory oxygen systems developed for COPD patients.

Vlady testing the new Eclipse oxygen concentrator on a train in Poland.

Everyone on the PERF Board is impressed with Vlady’s COPD-Alert website and the enormous amount of work he puts into keeping it current. We are now also members of COPD-Alert and feel free to recommend it to all of you. Take a look and send us your opinion.

The Paranoid, Supremacist Roots of the Stabbing Intifada

The Paranoid, Supremacist Roots of the Stabbing Intifada

Knife attacks on Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere are not based on Palestinian frustration over settlements, but on something deeper.

In September of 1928, a group of Jewish residents of Jerusalem placed a bench in front of the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, for the comfort of elderly worshipers. They also brought with them a wooden partition, to separate the sexes during prayer. Jerusalem’s Muslim leaders treated the introduction of furniture into the alleyway in front of the Wall as a provocation, part of a Jewish conspiracy to slowly take control of the entire Temple Mount.

Many of the leaders of Palestine’s Muslims believed—or claimed to believe—that Jews had manufactured a set of historical and theological connections to the Western Wall and to the Mount, the site of the al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, in order to advance the Zionist project. This belief defied Muslim history—the Dome of the Rock was built by Jerusalem’s Arab conquerors on the site of the Second Jewish Temple in order to venerate its memory (the site had previously been defiled by Jerusalem’s Christian rulers as a kind of rebuke to Judaism, the despised mother religion of Christianity). Jews themselves consider the Mount itself to be the holiest site in their faith. The Western Wall, a large retaining wall from the Second Temple period, is sacred only by proxy.

The spiritual leader of Palestine’s Muslims, the mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, incited Arabs in Palestine against their Jewish neighbors by arguing that Islam itself was under threat. (Husseini would later become one of Hitler’s most important Muslim allies.) Jews in British-occupied Palestine responded to Muslim invective by demanding more access to the Wall, sometimes holding demonstrations at the holy site. By the next year, violence directed against Jews by their neighbors had become more common: Arab rioters took the lives of 133 Jews that summer; British forces killed 116 Arabs in their attempt to subdue the riots. In Hebron, a devastating pogrom was launched against the city’s ancient Jewish community after Muslim officials distributed fabricated photographs of a damaged Dome of the Rock, and spread the rumor that Jews had attacked the shrine.

The current “stabbing Intifada” now taking place in Israel—a quasi-uprising in which young Palestinians have been trying, and occasionally succeeding, to kill Jews with knives—is prompted in good part by the same set of manipulated emotions that sparked the anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s: a deeply felt desire on the part of Palestinians to “protect” the Temple Mount from Jews.

When Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem in June of 1967 in response to a Jordanian attack, the first impulse of some Israelis was to assert Jewish rights atop the Mount. Between 1948, the year Israel achieved independence, and 1967, Jordan, then the occupying power in Jerusalem, banned Jews not only from the 35-acre Mount—which is known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, the noble sanctuary—but also from the Western Wall below. When paratroopers took the Old City, they raised the Israeli flag atop the Dome of the Rock, but the Israeli defense minister, Moshe Dayan, ordered it taken down, and soon after promised leaders of the Muslim Waqf, the trust that controlled the mosque and the shrine, that Israel would not interfere in its activities. Since then, successive Israeli governments have maintained the status quo established by Dayan.

There is another status quo associated with the Temple Mount, however, that has been showing signs of weakening. This is a religious status quo. The mainstream rabbinical view for many years has been that Jews should not walk atop the Mount for fear of treading on the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum of the Temple that, according to tradition, housed the Ark of the Covenant. The Holy of Holies is the room in which the Jewish high priest spoke the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God, on Yom Kippur.

The exact location of the Holy of Holies is not known, and Muslim authorities have prevented archeologists from conducting any excavations on the Mount, in part out of fear that such explorations will uncover further evidence of a pre-Islamic Jewish presence. This mainstream rabbinical view concerning the Mount—that it should be the direction of Jewish prayer, rather than a place of Jewish prayer—has made the lives of Jerusalem’s temporal authorities easier, by keeping Muslim and Jewish worshippers separated.

In recent years, however, small groups of radical religious innovators who oppose the mainstream rabbinical view have sought to make the Mount, once again, a site of Jewish prayer. (Here is a New York Times Magazine story I wrote about these radical groups.) These activists have gained sympathizers among some far-right political figures in Israel, though the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not altered the separation-of-religions status quo.

Convincing Palestinians that the Israeli government is not trying to alter the status quo on the Mount has been difficult because many of today’s Palestinian leaders, in the manner of the Palestinian leadership of the 1920s, actively market rumors that the Israeli government is seeking to establish atop the Mount a permanent Jewish presence.

The comments of the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas—by general consensus the most moderate leader in the brief history of the Palestinian national movement—have been particularly harsh. Though Abbas has authorized Palestinian security services to work with their Israeli counterparts to combat extremist violence, his rhetoric has inflamed tensions. “Every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure, every martyr will reach paradise, and every injured person will be rewarded by God,” he said last month, as rumors about the Temple Mount swirled. He went on to say that Jews “have no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet.” Taleb Abu Arrar, an Israeli Arab member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, argued publicly that Jews “desecrate” the Temple Mount by their presence. (Fourteen years ago, Yasser Arafat, then the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told me that “Jewish authorities are forging history by saying the Temple stood on the Haram al-Sharif. Their temple was somewhere else.”)

Read more here: The Paranoid, Supremacist Roots…

Milion złotych na dawną synagogę w Koronowie

Krzysztof Bielawski

Władze Koronowa podpisały umowę z firmą, która ma dokończyć remont miejscowej synagogi. Prace przy renowacji dawnej, XIX-wiecznej synagogi trwają od kilku lat. Budynek jest własnością miasta. Władze Koronowa zamierzają urządzić w nim dom kultury i punkt informacji turystycznej.

Budynek dawnej synagogi w Koronowie (foto: uczestnicy projektu edukacyjno-artystycznego ‘Śladami przeszłości’) 14 września 2015 r. udało się rozstrzygnąć przetarg na całkowite zakończenie robót związanych z rekonstrukcją i przebudową obiektu. Zlecenie wykona miejscowe przedsiębiorstwo „Kordbud”. Prace obejmą m. in. odnowienie elewacji, wygipsowanie i pomalowanie wnętrza, remont schodów i położenie nowej posadzki, wykonanie instalacji wodociągowej, kanalizacyjnej i elektrycznej. Powstanie także zaplecze socjalno-sanitarne. Inwestycję sfinansuje Miasto i Gmina Koronowo. Część funduszy będzie pochodzić z dotacji konserwatora zabytków oraz Urzędu Marszałkowskiego. Łącznie prace pochłoną ponad 1 mln zł.
Zakończenie prac przewidywane jest na maj 2016 roku.

Dawna synagoga w Koronowie, używana przez klub Sokol. Foto: Wirtualny Sztetl

Źródło: Jakubowski J., Umowa o remont synagogi podpisana, „Express Bydgoski” z 23.09.2015.