Avraham Infeld’s book takes the reader on a journey through Jewish Peoplehood, that powerful yet intangible idea that connects Jews together, no matter where they live or how they practice. Starting with the core components of Peoplehood, and ending with his ideas about the future of the Jewish People, the book contains powerful messages about how to achieve unity without uniformity in today’s global world. Through his trademark stories and accessible messages, Infeld offers Jewish leaders and educators – indeed any interested Jew – the opportunity to engage with ideas that can change the Jewish world.
Published:
November 2017
Paperback:
192 pages
UK Price:
£11.99
US Price:
$14.99
ISBN:
9-781911-175957
US Edition
Available from YouCaxton
$14.99 - (plus $3 postage)
AVRAHAM INFELD
Based in Jerusalem, but a tireless traveler to all parts of the globe, Avraham Infeld has dedicated his long and distinguished career to helping Jews find meaning and joy in their Jewish identities. Born in South Africa and raised in a Zionist family, Avraham made aliyah to Israel and studied Jewish History and Bible at the Hebrew University, and Law at Tel Aviv University.
Embarking thereafter on what would become a career in Jewish education, Avraham served among other roles in the following leadership positions:
• Program Director at Ulpan Akiva
• First Community Shaliach in the US, serving Baltimore and Washington
• Founder and President of Melitz Centers of Jewish Zionist Education
• Director of Shalom Hartman Institute
• Director of the Jewish Agency for Israel’s Youth Department for English-Speaking Europe
• Director of Planning Process of Taglit Birthright Israel
• International President and CEO of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life
• President of the Chais Family Foundation
• Mentor to the Reut Institute for Tikkun Olam and Jewish Peoplehood
In recognition of his contributions to Jewish education, Avraham is the recipient of the Hebrew University’s prestigious Samuel Rothberg Prize for Jewish Education, Hillel’s Renaissance Award, and honorary doctorates from Muhlenberg College and Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion.
Reviews...
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks An engaging and inspiring set of reflections by one of the master educators of today’s Jewish world – full of delightful stories, compelling analysis and generosity of spirit. Read it and your faith in the Jewish future will be renewed.
Leon Wieseltier The intensity of Avraham Infeld’s commitment to his people is matched by its intelligence and its generosity. There are stimulations on every page of this candid and ebullient book. Infeld’s soulful monument to ahavat yisrael demonstrates by example that love is best when it is not blind. I am honored to share a people with this man.
Lynn Schusterman Avraham Infeld is a giant among giants whose philosophy and teachings will shape Jewish life and learning for generations to come. I have seen firsthand how scores of young Jews have found in his personal story and in his vision a Jewish future that speaks directly to their passions and values. This book is a beautiful distillation of his life’s work to ensure the centrality of Israel, tikkun olam and pluralism to the narrative of the Jewish people. It could not come at a more crucial time, given the cultural, demographic and geopolitical shifts we are experiencing in the Jewish community, in Israel and in society more broadly.
From doomed East Prussia to Tunbridge Wells
A young boy's escape across war-torn Europe
Dieter Teubler was just nine years old when he and his family left their farm in Memelland for the last time. Along with thousands of other terrified refugees from East Prussia, their only aim was to head west as Stalin’s vengeful Red Army forces surged in from the east. The perilous journey, which included a thirty-hour trek across cracking ice on a frozen lagoon, took five months and left the young boy with horrific images of death and suffering which would haunt him for the rest of his life.
With their mother Erna, Dieter and his younger brother and three sisters eventually found refuge in the quiet seaside town of Laboe on the German Baltic Coast. But their day-to-day struggle to survive in a country still reeling from the impact of war continued long after the war ended in 1945. Food was scarce, many local people resented the huge influx of refugees and the family was almost penniless.
However the persistent dream of a fresh start in America would change the young man’s life in a way he could never have envisaged. He had intended to spend time in England simply to learn the language, but the appearance of a young national tennis player from Tunbridge Wells would turn his world upsidedown. In 1960, he and Susan Waters were married, and the country boy from East Prussia began a new life in the heart of middle England.
Now a father of four and with twelve grandchildren, Dieter Teubler’s dramatic story of loss and renewal continues to resound amid the human challenges of a new century.
Roger Ordish was a producer in what was then called ‘Light Entertainment’ firstly with B.B.C. Radio and then for thirty years with B.B.C. Television.
For twenty years he was the only producer of the hugely successful ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ programmes. Then in 2012 the shock revelations of Savile’s misdeeds changed everything.
The Dame Janet Smith inquiry on Savile cleared Roger of having ‘turned a blind eye’ to Savile’s paedophilia but in his own words “Despite having frequently topped the combined B.B.C/I.T.V. audience charts, the very existence of the programme has been airbrushed from the B.B.C.s Kremlin balcony”.
From memories of wartime in Kent, Roger goes on to describe working with such names as Bruce Forsyth, Kenneth Williams, Michael Parkinson, Paul Daniels, Helen Fielding,
Terry Wogan, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, with delightful anecdotes about Edith Evans, Sammy Davis Junior, Gina Lollobrigida, John McEnroe and Princess Margaret and others. In 1968 he was one of a trio of B.B.C. producers, who posed as the Albanian entrants for the Eurovision Song Contest in a hoax that dumbfounded their boss.
Roger Ordish was a television producer for thirty years, producing ‘Parkinson’, ‘Wogan’, ‘A Bit of Fry and Laurie’ ‘Paul Daniels Magic Show’ and many other successful shows.
Reviews...
Tim Waterstone, founder of Waterstone's Bookshops. If I Remember Rightly arrived yesterday, and I started reading it this morning, at 6.30 am, over my first-of-the-day mug of tea. Thereafter I couldn't put it down, effectively reading it all through at one sitting.Roger - I really loved it. And, perhaps more importantly, really admired it, and indeed, from it, you. We were such close friends as teenagers, and it is a real pleasure for me to now realise, more fully perhaps than I had before, what a wonderfully rich and rewarding career, and life, that you have led. Your description of it absolutely holds the reader. And you write so well - the 'voice' is delightful - sometimes very funny indeed - (my absolute favourite of all your wonderful anecdotes being the little Ken Dodd piece) - sometimes unexpectedly vulnerable and exposed. Ace stuff, all of it.So well done, my friend.
Peggy's Life Falls Apart when her husband, Eben, is brutally beaten to death on a winter’s night in 1932.
As he’s bleeding in the freezing mud, he beseeches her to tell everyone that he was trampled by the horse, everyone, that is, except his older brother, Larcey. With
his last words to her, Eden extracts a promise from Peggy that she will tell Larcey the name of his killer.
The killer is Rapley, the game keeper.
Left alone with only a gypsy caravan to call her own, and with three young children, Peggy seeks refuge at her brother-in-law’s small-holding.
Custom in the travelling community dictates that Larcey look after his brother’s widow and children. But because Larcey knows that his brother’s death was no accident, his grief turns to seething hatred.
The funeral provides another opportunity for him to show his generosity with the promise of free food and flowing liquer, and a large number of mourners turn up at the holding. However Peggy is shunned for ‘speaking posh’ as are her children who are teased. Danny has stayed at the small-holding to support Peggy and to help Larcey with the funeral. Whilst the funeral is in full swing, Larcey, with murder on his mind, confides to Danny that he plans to kill Rapley.
This is a story to chill the blood.
Jack Worsfold Snr. was born in Surrey in 1924, the son of a coal merchant. At nineteen years old he joined the RAF as a rear gunner on Lancasters under the command of Flight Lieutenant John Keards, flying out of Ludord Magna with 101 Squadron. On the 3rd May they were one of twenty one Lancaster bombers ordered to participate in a raid on Mailly-Le-Camp, intended to be an attack on the German depot, south of Reims in France. 340 Lancaster bombers took part in total, forty-two were shot down including Jack's. They had only bombed once when they were attacked with cannon fire. At that point the Lancaster broke up and Jack fell to earth, trapped in the tail section and with his parachute was on fire. He heard himself say; " Make it quick," and he passed out.
He spiralled to the ground 7.500 feet, crashing through a power line and fir trees before coming to rest in gorse near the village of Aubeterre, ten miles south Mailly. Jack was too badly injured to escape but was rescued by the French resistance. They put him in the woods but were rumbled by the Germans which actually turned out to be fortunate because he was taken off to Paris where his broken leg was expertly fixed by a German doctor. He was then transported to a pow camp in Poland and held for one year until the war had finished. The rest of Jack's crew mates died in the crash.
Mary Queen of Scots in Staffordshire
This is a local history with national and international dimensions. It has always been known that Queen Mary was imprisoned in Staffordshire, and other Midlands counties, but the crucial role of this county in the many plots launched around the captive Queen has been underestimated. The times when the Queen was put in Staffordshire always meant that the plots and plotting which followed her had reached crisis proportions. Staffordshire was a highly secure backwater, but her jailers could not isolate herf - until the very end, and then with unexpected consequences.
At first the government of Elizabeth, her cousin, knew she was plotting but not how. In the first year of her captivity she sought a court intrigue to marry a Duke - and was caught up in the Earls revolt. In the final eighteen months in the county the spymaster Francis Walsingham organised a ground-breaking counter plot to find out what was going on. But was his counter plot a trap? This was an illegal captivity - but was Mary making political choices which triggered her downfall? Staffordshire was the crucial stage for the key developments in her English captivity, explored here for the first time in unique detail.
In the summer of 1936 a young Englishman is sitting in a Siena café when he is approached by a stranger. It is an uncomfortable encounter but the man’s words draw him inexorably into the lives of a writer, his wife and their immediate friends. Eventually their identities become clear to him but he keeps this to himself at further, seemingly chance, meetings. Overtaken by events in Europe and the war that is to come he can eventually return to his notes.
After the success of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence is able to travel from Italy to France no longer beset by a lack of money. His friendships and the relationship with his wife are tested as, increasingly constrained by ill-health, he is beset with reminiscences, regrets, and contradictory emotions about his past and present life.
With thanks to John Farrington for the cover image.
The author was born into a Fife mining community in 1938. After Grammar School he worked briefly in banking until joining the Royal Air Force and subsequently entering college. Following a short teaching career and a post-graduate course at Reading University he again changed course to gain a Masters degree, lead an economic research team in the Midlands and was invited to the Triplex Lloyd Chair of Management in Brno a few months after the 1989 Czechoslovak revolution.
Now retired, he lives in Shrophire and walks, writes and plays golf, both at Crail Golfing Society on the banks of the Firth of Forth and at Ludlow. He also travels frequently through central Europe by car and is familiar with some of the locations in which the Ashes of D.H. Lawrence is set..
Reader Reviews
Amazon Reader Lovely read, heard about the book thanks to local newspaper.
Read in a day - could not put it down.
Characters were believable. Liked the time hopping element.
The Untimely Demise of Friday the Pig
Irish Tales from Coolshannagh
Coolshannagh is an ordinary Irish village situated on the coast halfway between Dublin and Belfast.
The villagers are pretty ordinary too; Father Joe, a clubfooted priest who likes to dance; Duffy the bar owner who runs a great pub; Stochelo a Gypsy bandolier and his mighty son Miquel; Eamonn McGarvey who loved his pet pig; Ludmilla the one handed Ukrainian Headmistress who escaped the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1881; Mary-Ellen the village elder, wise-woman, and nurse in the Crimean War; Vincenti Quilto the Italian Matchmaker and teller of unlikely fables; Father Dan, a guilt ridden whiskey priest decorated for bravery in the First World war and The Diabhal (Devil) also comes calling intent upon mischief.
So, just an unremarkable Irish village going about its daily business; hum-drum times punctuated by birth, death, love, not much hate (except the Devil for whom hate is his only purpose).
And every word is true…
at least according to my father who came from Coolshannagh and passed these tales on!
Reviews...
Debbie Turfrey - Authorised buyer
5 out of 5 stars Beautifully written Irish tale This is a wonderful book, a whimsical yarn which flows beautifully!
In true Irish story teller style, the author weaves the threads of the story together.
I would highly recommend it to anyone!
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