By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Roz Rothstein was galvanized into responding to the anti-Jewish violence of the Second Intifada and especially to the mutilation murders discovered on May 8, 2001 of teenagers Koby Mandell, 13, and Yosef Ishran, 14. The boys had hiked in the Judean Desert near their homes in Tekoa the day before, and were found in a blood-smeared cave so badly beaten and tortured that dental records were needed to confirm their identification.
Rothstein’s concern over what was happening in Israel led to the founding of StandWithUs, a Los Angeles-based, international organization that generates a “tsunami of information” about Israel and actively counteracts the “misinformation” about Israel disseminated on campuses “by anti-Israel and far leftist groups.”
“I think that being the daughter of Holocaust survivors has deeply impacted my life,” Rothstein commented during an interview with San Diego Jewish World. “Children of survivors may have a little bit more sensitivity to danger. Growing up listening to how right before the Holocaust anti-Semitism began to escalate made me more sensitive 17 years ago when we started the organization. There was too much waving aside, or turning a blind eye, to things that required attention.”
Even before Mandell and Ishran were found murdered, “I just imagined that there would be some big, huge plans and efforts by the established Jewish organizations to respond to everything that was going on—to the snipers shooting Jews in their cars, the suicide bombings, and all of it. Yet there didn’t seem to be a plan, there didn’t seem to be a voice.”
As she thought about the suicide bombings, she realized, “It’s not just one person who gets on a bus and then explodes himself. There is a whole network and plan about it. There are other people who support it. There is money. There is the building of the bombs, putting nails and rat poison in it. For me, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, thinking about a plan to kill Jews in a bus to get the maximum damage, so that if people (on the bus) don’t die, they will have ball bearings and nails, or shrapnel, in their bodies, just to imagine these plans, I was obsessed.”
The Second Intifada started in September 2000, and “it was eight months of watching and waiting for some Jewish organization” to come up with a strategy. She recalled asking herself, “’What are they going to do about it? Is there going to be a demonstration for Israel? Is there going to be some voice that will speak out?’ But it took so long, and there was no voice, and it was just so pitiful.”
And then came the murder of the two teenagers, and “the media was not normal about it; they talked about it in a strange way, Rothstein recalled. “The kids lived in Tekoa, in the West Bank, so when the media told the story, they told it in a way that almost took the burden of who is at fault here for barbarically murdering two children and placed it on the shoulders of the children who lived with their families in the West Bank.”
At the time, Rothstein had been a practicing family therapist for 20 years and her involvement in the Jewish community had been extensive. For 10 years prior to opening her practice, she had served at various times as director of the Westside Jewish Community Center’s summer day camp programs and its year-round, after school programs. After leaving the JCC’s employ, she served on its board of directors, and at different times in her three children’s lives, she also was involved with the boards of the Beth Am School, Temple Emanu-El, and Temple Isaiah.
After the murders of the two teens, Rothstein called Rabbi Steven Weil of Congregation Beth Jacob –today he is executive vice president of the Orthodox Union – and asked if anyone in the Jewish community was doing anything. Weil said he received a similar telephone call from Esther Renzer, who was a board member at Sinai Akiba Academy and Shalhevet High School. He suggested that the two of them get together. At the recommendation of Rabbi Weil, Rothstein had a separate meeting with David Suissa, a journalist. Today, Renzer is president of StandWithUs and Suissa heads the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles.
It was decided that Esther, Roz, and Roz’s husband, marketing executive Jerry Rothstein, should host a dinner meeting at their home for 50 leaders of the Los Angeles Jewish community on May 21st, 2001. “We had people from most of the Jewish professional organization, The Federation, ADL, Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Bureau of Education, Jews for Judaism, and rabbis from every denomination,” Rothstein related. “I learned that night the true meaning of the term, ‘Mission Statement.’ I learned that night that nobody had the Mission Statement to do what StandWithUs does – to educate people of all ages about Israel, that is our primary focus—and that it was nobody’s fault at all. It was just that they didn’t have the resources or the mission. They all sympathized and initially we thought we were going to be an Israel Emergency Alliance – maybe the synagogues would help get the word out, get the material out, gather people for a demonstration, show support for Israel. So, our first name was Israel Emergency Alliance; it is still our legal name, but we are doing business as StandWithUs. We switched our name to StandWithUs, we figured it would have broader reach. It would not just be something in case of an emergency.”
Within a matter of days after that meeting, an Israel Independence Day Festival was held in the San Fernando Valley, a festival drawing thousands of celebrants. On the suggestion of Rabbi Bentzion Kravitz of Jews for Judaism, an airplane was hired to drag a sign that said, “Israel, We Stand With You” and “Everyone was so emotional when they saw the airplane. ‘Finally, somebody is doing something!’ We didn’t do that much actually, we just flew a plane, but it was a defining moment, and it said, ‘We are here. Israel, we stand with you,’ a very simple concept. And from that, we got tremendous numbers of people who came over to our booth, and they signed up for our newsletters.”
Following the outdoor festival, an emergency town hall meeting held at the Westside JCC, at which journalist Suissa was the main speaker, attracted 500 supporters of Israel, further expanding StandWithUs’s email list. Among the people attracted to the effort was Newton Becker, the developer of the Becker CPA Review Course, which has been used as a study guide by thousands of people taking the examination to become certified public accountants. Becker, who also was a passionate advocate for alternative energy, was a committed Zionist. “He fell in love with StandWithUs and pushed me to incorporate,” Rothstein said. “He said, ‘I will give you your first check,” which was $5,000.”
Initially started as a volunteer organization, Rothstein soon found that she could not simultaneously keep up her practice and lead StandWithUs. So, she ended her practice and became the chief executive officer of StandWithUs. Years later, her husband Jerry – who had met her in the late 70’s as a result of playing basketball at the Westside JCC during her tenure there – left his marketing firm of Rothstein and Memsic to take a full time position helping StandWithUs develop its identity and become a stronger, well-recognized force in the pro-Israel community.
Today, StandWithUs, with a $13 million budget and 120 employees, has 1.2 million followers on Social Media, “the largest reach out there of any Jewish organization like this,” and has chapters stretching across the United States from San Diego to Boston, as well as in Israel, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Recently, it opened another chapter in Brazil. “Last year we had over 100,000 college students engaged with our campus programs, and between 50,000 and 60,000 high school students, and now we have a curriculum in 100 private middle schools,” Rothstein said. “Additionally, we have a legal department with 150 pro bono attorneys across the country who are standing ready to help students, or faculty, or community activists who have problems as a result of BDS or other anti-Semitic bullying.”
She said that “each department that we have opened, each front that we have opened, has been extremely successful. For example, we talk about social media. We have it in 18 languages now. Our second biggest language is Arabic, and they are reading it, arguing it, and learning. A significant chunk of the Arabs who go to the Arabic Facebook page are Palestinian, so we are making strides, building bridges, educating people who care about Israel, who want to have more information so they can go viral themselves. It is really gratifying to see the numbers, because they are very high and they speak of success.”
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I was interested to learn more about the experiences of Rothstein’s parents as well as the career path that had led to her becoming such an important force within the Jewish community.
She told me that her mother, Ann Lautenberg, had grown up in Konstantin, near Lodz, and was nine years old when the Holocaust came to Poland. “Her father had the wherewithal to run. He picked up my mother and grandmother, just the three of them, and somehow, they made their way to Siberia. So, my mother spent the years of the war in a freezing icebox, Siberia. They say that one of three Jews died there from the weather, the disease, not being properly clothed, the starvation, and it was true for the three of them too. My grandfather never came back. My mother and grandmother [Helen Lautenberg] survived. After the war, my mother and grandmother were in the DP camp in Italy for five years, waiting for permission to immigrate to the United States. That is where she met my father, Abraham Kreiner, who was born and raised in Romania. About 50 percent of Romanian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. For some lucky reason, he and his brothers and sisters all survived. They all went to the same DP camp in Milan, Italy, where my mother was.”
After their marriage, the Kreiners moved first to Denver, and later to Los Angeles. “When I was 11, my mother and father divorced, which was very unusual in those years,” Rothstein said. “My mother was a very brave soul, partially because she was a survivor, very resilient, very optimistic, and just a wonderful, wonderful mother. She left my father when I was 11 and then she was remarried when I was 19,” to Jay Shalmoni, who had survived Auschwitz, but who had lost every single member of his family.
Rothstein said her mother “somehow gave me so much confidence about who I am. Watching her, oh my God can you imagine, at the time I was 11 and she got divorced, there were no single-family parents. There was no divorce in the Modern Orthodox community. I was so mortified to even tell my friends that my mother got a divorce. But looking back, how incredible was this decision in her life, that she was going to take care of me and my one-year-old brother, and her aging mother, and go it alone, and get away from a man who was making her miserable. It was incredible for the time [the mid-1960s].
Rothstein’s mother had lost 80 members of her extended Hassidic family in the Holocaust. Most of them “got stuck in Lodz, got transported, and everybody was murdered. …” After they got to Siberia, “my grandmother survived only because of my mother’s resilience. Somehow, at the end of the war, there was a knock on the door, and they were smuggled out of Russia, across Europe, and made it all the way to Italy.”
Rothstein went to Jewish day schools through most of her schooling, although she went to Fairfax High School in Los Angeles’s “borscht belt” for her junior and senior years. Day school and B’nai Akiva, the Zionist youth movement, were major influences in her life. “B’nai Akiva sent shlichim (emissaries) to Los Angeles, as it sent them around the world, and it just goes to show you how important it is for a young person who thinks she loves Israel to actually meet someone and have a friendship with someone who is Israeli.”
In B’nai Akiva, Rothstein became a madrikha (counselor), and later became the head of the chapter or snif. “I became the rosh snif. It was a big chapter, with 150-180 kids who came every Saturday, every Shabbat afternoon, and we had 12 to 14 madrikhim, and I was the head of all this, at 17 years old. It was the first time that I cut my teeth a little bit on supervision, administration, making sure everything was in its place, making sure people didn’t’ get hurt, and that the program went on. We had a tremendous amount of spirit, and the kids learned songs, and everyone was part of this pro-Israel movement and excitement.”
Scholarships were necessary for Rothstein to go to the B’nai Akiva camp and to Jewish day schools because her mother and grandmother lived under constrained financial circumstances. In fact, Rothstein never went to Israel while a youngster, it was not until much later in her life, after she and Jerry were married, that her stepfather and mother presented them with tickets for an Isram Tour of Israel.
The leadership that Rothstein exercised with B’nai Akiva led to a position with the Westside JCC even while she was attending Pepperdine College at the downtown Los Angeles campus. “I became a counselor, and the same thing happened to me that had happened at B’nai Akiva. Soon they asked me would I please become a unit head, which in that hierarchy was an associate director. The JCC had Camp Adventure and Camp Rancho and they were going to do a merger, and at age 23, I became the director of the overall camp—the youngest director of any camp in the JCC system.” After a year, the westside JCC asked Rothstein to become director of its year-round after-school program, all while she was working for a master’s degree in psychology.
“I had to supervise counselors, train them, deal with children who were misbehaving, do scholarship interviews, keep all the records straight, do the financials,” Rothstein said. “I had every component of administration under my belt by the time I reached 25. It was miraculous training.”
When she began with the after-school program it had 50 children and 5 staff members. “By the time I left, we had 180 kids and a staff of about 15, she said. “There was busing involved—it was like a behemoth.” Meanwhile the day camp under her supervision had 200 campers and 60 staff members.
“I love building teams,” Rothstein reflected. “I think if people understand the mission and they work with one another and are not back-biting but instead put their energy into growth, they can really create an environment so the kids and staff can thrive. Instead of putting your energy into something negative, put your energy into building, which is what StandWithUs is doing. The team building model is something that I really love.”
At the Westside JCC, she added, “I thought it was really important to build. I realized there were a lot of children from single parent families – like me. I didn’t put it together at first, but that was why it was so important to me. As a child of a single mother, I knew it was important for others in that circumstance to be with each other, so a child can feel that there is a community out there. The families know each other and were friends; they even went camping together and had classes together.”
I asked what were some of the ways she developed teams.
“If your goal is success,” she said, “you must build the team. You have to keep bringing people together. You have to communicate a lot. You have to discuss the problems. You have to problem-solve together. You have to set goals together. You have to have respect for people’s ideas. Even if you don’t do everybody’s ideas every single time, you can still respect and make a space for ideas and creativity. That is really one of the reasons why I feel StandWithUs has experienced so much success. There is room for ideas. There is room for creativity.”
An essential part of building a team is “making sure that you hire right,” Rothstein stressed. At StandWithUs, “we look for people who love Israel, who are creative, who are competent, who have great referrals,” she said. “They come to me after they have begun their journey as leaders. They have already been camp counselors. They have already been to Israel multiple times. They have ‘creds’ [credits] because they already have been living it. “
For students who want to become active in the high school internship program, “I wish I had unlimited funds to take every single kid, but we don’t,” she said. “So, who do we focus on? Those kids who are already Zionists, who already show credibility in their leadership, who have already been presidents of their Israel Clubs, or want to start Israel Clubs, or have been presidents of their youth groups. They come to us as people already on the road, not at the beginning of the road.”
Rothstein cited the careers of Miri Kornfeld, director of StandWithUs’s high school department, and Ron Krudo, director of its college department, as examples. Kornfeld had been “president of the Bruins for Israel club at UCLA, and I knew that she was already a Zionist, that she is motivated, that she has a great dynamic personality, and that she can organize.” Likewise, Krudo, “did an extraordinary thing at Florida State University. He organized something called “FLI” for “Florida Loves Israel” and put together a conference of students. We didn’t know him then, but back in the day we knew what he was trying to achieve and we helped him with money to achieve it. We kept our eye on him because he seemed to be a very good leader, someone we would want on our team. He was working for Hillel for a while, and when he came to me for a job, what do you think I said? He is a great fit, because he was already in motion.”
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After 10 years with the Westside JCC, and prior to the 17 years that she, up to now, has spent running StandWithUs, Rothstein practiced for 20 years as a licensed family therapist, all the while raising with husband Jerry a family of three children. “I was minding my own business, and everyone else’s as a therapist, and they started killing Jews in Israel,” she said.
I got a sense of her family practice background after I asked her a series of questions about Israel and the Palestinians. For example, did she believe that “settlements” on the West Bank (or Judea and Samaria) are obstacles to peace as they often are characterized by the international community?
“If settlements were the problem, then we would probably have peace with Gaza, because Israel pulled out of Gaza in August 2005 and it hasn’t led to anything good,” she responded. “The settlements should not be an obstacle to peace. First, come to the table and talk about everything. Why not talk about everything and then see where it leads? Everyone knows there is going to be some sort of separation, a border. It’s like a divorce: you always know that there is going to be an end to this thing; the question is where is the boundary going to be. The only way you can figure out where that will be is if you sit down and negotiate it.”
Does she believe that peace with the Palestinians is possible?
“Right now, I don’t feel optimistic,” she said. “What I would wish, what I would dream about, is very different from what we are seeing right now with the violent riots at the Gaza-Israel border, and with a real lack of leadership of Mahmoud Abbas [the President of the Palestine Authority.] I think the turning point was in September 2015 when Mahmoud Abbas started talking about Jews having filthy feet going up on the Temple Mount and jihadists are going to heaven. Then, all of a sudden, you saw 34 human beings murdered with knife attacks. I think he did what [Yasser] Arafat always did. He had a change in the way he spoke about things, and he became a very dangerous person. So, do I think there can be peace with him? He is not even cooperating. He does not want to cooperate on any level. And what about Hamas [in Gaza]? I think there has to be a change in Gaza. Hamas kills people who even dream about peace. They’ll kill you for collaboration, they throw people off buildings. This is not a group that you can work with.”
Is there anything that Israel can do to advance peace?
“What can they possibly do with this group?” Rothstein responded. “People who are launching rockets into your nursery schools are not particularly open to having a serious discussion about peace. So, I’m not sure what Israel can do on the Gaza front. What could they do on the West Bank front? They are cooperating with water, and so much else but I don’t know what they can do to make it better unless there are negotiations and change. Abbas has been so impossible; I don’t know what you can do.”
Rothstein illustrated the situation by telling of a trip that she made in 2007 to Dheisheh, a refugee camp, more like a town, near Bethlehem. “An Arab friend of mine took me. He wanted to show me the cultural center in Dheisheh. His whole point was how can you have peace with this going on? So, he takes me into this cultural center and we walk up the stairs, and lining the stairway was a [photo-shopped] picture of the Al Aqsa Mosque on fire; children throwing Molotov cocktails, and women throwing rocks. These are the pictures that line the stairway of a cultural center that is supposed to be a place of relaxation for children and for people to go have lunch, where computers have been donated along with all kinds of funding from the world community. This is how they decorated it, to incite hatred. Then he showed me other things like floor-to-rooftop pictures of suicide bombers, and all over the place, pictures of Yasser Arafat. “
I noted that some Israelis and some Arabs believe that the two-state solution is dead; that for better or worse, there will be a single state solution.
“I think people on the far right on the Palestinian side and the Israeli side might be talking about the same thing, one state with everybody in one big ‘happy’ family. I’m not sure that it would be happy. Most Israelis don’t see that as a solution. I think what most Israelis see is a status quo solution, just coping with what there is right now, based on the threat, based on Abbas’s lack of leadership and lack of credibility, and based on what they see about Hamas in Gaza. Israelis basically are for the status quo right now, which seems to make some sort of sense.”
Does it concern her that a growing segment of the Democratic party seems increasingly less inclined to support Israel?
“The far left and the far right have an unholy alliance, it’s crazy,” she responded. “Bernie Sanders is obviously strange. He has turned out numbers and said things that are not anywhere near accurate. But I always have to look at the person as a person; it can’t be for me a Democrat-Republican issue. I always look at a person and say, ‘Wow, that guy is off, off the grid.’ Bernie is just off on Israel, way off on Israel.”
She stressed: “We don’t look at it from a partisan point of view, because we are not partisan. Like the way AIPAC doesn’t get partisanly involved, if we have a Democrat or a Republican speaker, we always have the other one, so we will have both. From our perspective, Israel cannot be a partisan issue. We can’t allow it. Whenever people try to do that, we have to make that correction. Sometimes people will say, ‘Oh, supporting Israel is conservative, it is a conservative issue’ or ‘If you support Israel, you are a right-wing whacko.’ That is what they are trying to pin on us, but the truth of the matter is that supporting Israel cannot be partisan. It cannot be Labor or Likud. It must be both.”
Does she ever cringe when the Israeli government announces policies that are sure to be criticized by fellow Jews in the United States? For example, does the controversy over access of non-Orthodox worshippers to the Kotel, cause her to wince?
She responded that StandWithUs does not tell people to support all the policies of the Israeli government. “We are saying support Israel’s security, its borders, its existence, that is basically all. The policies have to be decided by the people, and they elect their representatives. They can change their representatives and thereby impact their policies. “
She said a major difference in the approaches toward Israel of StandWithUs and J Street is that StandWithUs believes “because we are not living in Israel, for us to tell Israel about their policies and what they should be doing, is a bit ridiculous. If I wanted to influence the country, I’d go live there, be a citizen, become a voter.”
The great sage Hillel once was asked to describe Judaism while standing on one foot. Could she similarly boil down the mission of StandWithUs?
Rothstein remained seated comfortably across the dinner table at the Purple Mint vegetarian restaurant in San Diego, but her answer was fairly concise. “There are two major components of StandWithUs,” she said. “One is pushing out an ocean of information, a tsunami of information, whether it is on our social media, or through materials, or through students getting involved. That is about 75 percent of what we do: educate, educate, educate. The other thing we do is correct misinformation whenever there is a divestment campaign, such as at the Presbyterian General Assembly, or a BDS drive on campus.”
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com