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Village View: Amazed by Tunisia-Israel-LM Connection

Village View: Amazed by Tunisia-Israel-LM Connection

April 16, 2010

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Tom Friedman was right — the world is flat. And getting flatter every day. The most recent example for me is my trip to Tunisia. When I arrived on the island of Djerba last month, I sent an e-mail to a friend, Jerry Sorkin, whose Radnor-based TunisUSA travel agency arranges dozens of group visits to this beautiful North African country at the northernmost tip of the African continent.

I had no idea that Jerry was already back in Tunisia, as my husband and I had just had dinner with him in Bala Cynwyd a few weeks earlier. But he responded instantly, and he was installed with his large group at a nearby hotel in Djerba, getting ready to go to the ancient synagogue of La Ghriba for the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer, for the ceremonies and festival.

So I took a taxi over to see him, where he was traveling with 45 members of the American Associates of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev as part of their celebration of the 40th anniversary of the founding of the university. The president of Ben-Gurion University, Rivka Carmi, M.D., a noted geneticist, was with them, as she was going to deliver a lecture on Djerban Jews and the research she has been doing on the recessive gene which causes Fragile X Syndrome, a kind of mental retardation.

President Carmi is the first female president of an Israeli university, and before that she was the first dean of an Israeli medical school.

I suddenly recalled a conversation I had had a few months ago at a family birthday party. Ira Ingerman of Penn Valley, married to my former sister-in-law, Eileen, had told me that he and his longtime business partner, Stanley Ginsburg of Bala Cynwyd, had recently endowed the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Overseas Student Program, which offers scholarships to American college students to spend either a semester or a year at Ben Gurion. And the university, in gratitude, had renamed the program to honor the donors.

Ira and Eileen had taken 24 members of their family to Israel recently to attend the dedication of the Ginsburg-Ingerman Overseas Student Program, to visit the home of the late Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion and to have several meetings with President Carmi.

As soon as I mentioned my connection with the Ingermans, President Carmi was delighted and invited me to stay for her lecture.

As a geneticist, Dr. Carmi has studied the Tunisian Jews of Djerba who have migrated to Israel and settled in a moshav in the Negev. She calls this very close-knit community “genetic isolates” and says they have been able to trace back the Djerban Jewish genomes thousands of years. Because of inbreeding, however, concentrating the recessive gene which causes Fragile X Syndrome, the Djerban Jews, who only represent 2 to 3 percent of the world’s Jewish population, have 26 percent of the Fragile X Syndrome children.

And Dr. Carmi also pointed out that, unlike other recessive genes which are exactly the same from generation to generation, the Fragile X Syndrome gene changes with each succeeding transmission and becomes stronger and thus more damaging.

Israel has created a genetic test for Fragile X Syndrome which is offered free to Tunisian Jews now living in Israel, and the incidence of the condition has been reduced radically. Dr. Carmi is trying to make inroads with the Jewish community remaining in Djerba, but they are even more insular than the ones who migrated to Israel.

Proving again how small the world is, there were two women from the Philadelphia suburbs traveling with the Ben-Gurion group. Harriet Soffa even lives near me in Wynnewood, although I had not met her before. And Aileen Whitman, from Chester County, looked familiar, as our paths must have crossed some time before.

Both women serve on the board of governors of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and that is where the group was headed after its Tunisian journey. But the group had decided to visit Tunisia and then participate in the religious festival in Djerba before going on to Israel.

With the annual arrival of 5,000 to 6,000 Jewish Tunisian pilgrims on the island of Djerba for the festival of Lag B’Omer at the ancient synagogue La Ghriba, the Tunisian government welcomes them with open arms.

To make sure that peace and security reign during the weeks of the festival, the Tunisian government has 3,000 police and security officers on duty in Djerba and around the country. The cost of the security operation probably exceeds the income generated by the thousands of former Tunisian residents who stay at hotels, eat at restaurants and shop in Houmt Souk, the huge shopping area on the island.

At the actual Lag B’Omer procession, the chief rabbi of Tunisia, plus visiting chief rabbis from other countries (this year’s group included the chief rabbis of France, Portugal and England), plus the governor of Djerba and various officials from the Tunisian government in Tunis, visit the synagogue to exchange proclamations, pledges of friendship and praise for Ben Ali, the president of Tunisia.

This past weekend I caught up with the Ingermans again at a family baby-naming ceremony, and Ira said his connection with Ben-Gurion University goes back to 1983. We both thought it remarkable that this international connection tied together Israel, Tunisia and Lower Merion!

Bonnie Squires writes weekly for the Main Line Times and can be reached at www.bonniesquires.com. She hosts the weekly radio show “The Marketing of Business” on WWDB-AM.