It is told…

Dur­ing the ear­ly 1970s I worked as a “Part Time Pro­gram Coor­di­na­tor of the Ombuds­man Project of the Jew­ish Youth and Young Adults Coun­cil of the Jew­ish Fed­er­a­tion-Coun­cil of Greater Los Ange­les”. I’m lucky I did not need to say that very often.

Among my respon­si­bil­i­ties (which were bare­ly defined) was to spread good feel­ings about the JFC among the Jew­ish youth of Los Ange­les. I was giv­en no bud­get to speak of, but I was giv­en pret­ty free reign to use my time as I saw fit. We did pro­duce a month­ly cal­en­dar. It was designed as a wall poster, fold­ed into an octa­vo. These list­ed as many events and as much con­tact infor­ma­tion about the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty as we could gather.

In addi­tion, some­time around 1970 I pro­duced a lit­tle square with a sto­ry about the Ba’al Shem Tov. There were approx­i­mate­ly 100 copies print­ed which I tacked to tele­phone poles and oth­er “pub­lic” areas in the Fair­fax area of Los Ange­les as a “con­scious­ness rais­ing” tool. I thought that the eye-catch­ing col­ors and design as well as the tale it told might be intrigu­ing enough to cause some­one read­ing it to feel good about Jew­ish life and the “orga­nized Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty”. No stud­ies were ever done.

I scanned the image in 1997 hop­ing to make an ani­mat­ed gif file of it to share at my Web site. I did not have the skills to accom­plish the task then. I do not have the skills to accom­plish the task now, either. How­ev­er, I have the help of a skilled com­put­er graph­ics artist who has gra­cious­ly updat­ed the logo that appears here at the top of the page. Isaac Bryn­je­gard-Bia­lik kind­ly cre­at­ed the flash graph­ic you clicked to get to this page where that peri­od­i­cal­ly appears in one of the side­bars of this site. Here I have a larg­er ver­sion of that flash graph­ic and the orig­i­nal scan.

the (green) text reads:

It is told: The sum­mits of the moun­tains on whose gen­tle slopes Israel ben Eliez­er lived are straight and steep. In hours of med­i­ta­tion he liked to climb these peaks and stay at the very top for a time. Once he was so deep in ecsta­sy, he failed to notice that he was at the edge of an abyss, and calm­ly lift­ed his feet to walk on. Instant­ly a neigh­bor­ing moun­tain leaped to the spot, pressed itself close to the oth­er and the Baal Shem pursed his way.

the (red) text says:

Sur­vival Sac­ri­fice (“Sur­vival means Sac­ri­fice” was the slo­gan of the UJA-Fed­er­a­tion at the time) and has the (then) phone num­ber and address of the Federation.