ISRAEL
BONDS
Playing
the Numbers Game
At
Israel Bonds in Palm Beach
By
Tim Boxer
abbi Reuven Bulka of
Ottawa, Israel Bonds rabbinic cabinet chairman, saw the 25th
anniversary of the organization’s Prime Ministers Club as a propitious
event.
He pointed to the dais and said,
“Add up the numerical equivalent of Israel Bonds president Gideon
Patt, Israeli Ambassador David Ivry and Sen. Joseph
Lieberman and you get 2000.”
|
Israel Bonds chairman Burton Resnick
(right) presents award to
Sen. Joseph
Lieberman at Palm Beach dinner
|
He added, “What does that mean?
Frankly, nothing.”
In order to emphasize the point,
he said that 613 is also the Ottawa area code.
That did not restrain Lieberman
one bit. He’s a politician, you know, so he jumped right in.
“Speaking of gematria,” the
senator from Connecticut said, “add up 5760 and you get 18. So this will
be a year of life and hope.”
Ivry,
Israel’s new ambassador to the U.S., made his first public address to a
Jewish group at this dinner at the Ritz-Carlton in Palm Beach, Fla.
Ivry, Ehud Barak’s
appointee who replaced Likud’s Zalman Shoval, says that diplomats
“usually say a lot, do nothing, and achieve even less.”
The
former commander of the Israel Air Force promised to work on his
diplomatic skills: “I’ll speak little, do more, and achieve much.”
Israel Bonds board chairman Burton
Resnick presented awards to some members of the Prime Ministers Club,
composed of individuals in North America who invest more than $25,000 in
bonds every year.
James Emden,
a New York realtor, and Barbara and Jay Rosenberg of Dix
Hills, Long Island, were in the group of 32 honorees.
Lieberman still remembers the day
in 1989 when he was sworn in. After the ceremony, Sen. Paul Simon
of Illinois told him, “I just had a conversation with your
mother-in-law. She reminds me what Sen. Hubert Humphrey once said:
Behind every successful man there is a surprised mother-in-law.”
Lieberman, the lone Orthodox Jew
in the senate, said the Israelis must wage peace on two fronts – with
the Arabs and with themselves.
“The reason Barak reopened
peace negotiations with Syria,” he said, “was because it’s easier to
talk peace with Assad than with the Orthodox rabbis.
“We can
teach Israel brotherhood,” he added. “A nation that is divided will
not long stand, no matter how strong.”
Marlene
Post, the Prime Ministers
Club chairman, served as the vivacious emcee of the program. When she
announced that the dinner had raised $71 million in bond sales, Lieberman
was astonished.
“In
one night,” he marveled, “you raised more money than George W. Bush
raised all last year!” 
|
