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Group sells Sh'ma magazine for $1
DEBRA N. COHEN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
NEW YORK - How many significant business deals conclude with the buyer handing over a $1 bill and both sides reciting unusual Hebrew blessings?
Not many. But when it came to Yossi Abramowitz purchasing the publication Sh'ma from CLAL: The National Center for Learning and Leadership, that's how the deal was done.
Abramowitz closed the deal here Sept. 11 by reciting a prayer describing God as the one who can raise the dead, since CLAL, long losing money on the periodical, had planned to shut it down. Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of CLAL, then said a prayer thanking God for being the increaser of wisdom.
Sh'ma is called a magazine but, printed in black ink on eight white pages, looks more like a newsletter. It was created in 1970 by Rabbi Eugene Borowitz as a forum in which Jews with controversial points of view could debate ethical matters as they related to the world at large.
Many articles sparked controversy. In the years immediately after the 1967 Six-Day War, it was virtually heretical to criticize Israel, but one article in Sh'ma's pages said that even if Israel ceased to exist, Judaism would be just fine.
Another piece, which generated more criticism than any other in Sh'ma's pages, recalled Borowitz, was by a Christian cleric who wrote that his co-religionists were repenting for their role during the Holocaust, and that it was time for the Jewish community to forgive them.
By the time he handed Sh'ma over to CLAL in 1993, the Jewish community had turned to more internal matters, said Borowitz in an interview, and so Sh'ma's focus followed suit. In the meantime, with concise but challenging articles, Sh'ma had become "must reading" for the Jewish community's spiritual and institutional leaders.
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