The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 192

SL THE PALM BEACH POST FRIDAY, AUGUST 12, 1988 9D Religion News New rabbi comes to Royal Palm r. By KEN PELLIS Palm Beach Post Staff Writer ROYAL PALM BEACH When Rabbi Stefan Weinberg was a boy, he and his family rode 60 miles to the nearest synagogue, in Bay City, Mich. Except for the Weinbergs, no other Jewish families lived in their hometown of West Branch, about 150 miles north of Detroit. At 33, Weinberg is taking untrav-eled roads again this time as the first full-time rabbi of Temple Beth Zion in Royal Palm Beach. Synagogue officials expect the hiring of Weinberg to attract unaffiliated Jews in the growing area and bring added exposure to the synagogue.

"One of the functions of the rabbi is to represent the synagogue in the community, and not having a full-time rabbi, it's a little tougher to get well-known," said synagogue first vice president Brian Schwartz, a founding member of the 8-year-old Conservative con Weinberg said that committee took the lead in organizing a citywide Jewish coalition, which arranged child care for homeless parents trying to get back on their feet. Weinberg said he is interested in bringing programs from the Dallas synagogue to Royal Palm Beach, but he will meet first with the congregation to establish priorities. One thing he has in mind is an education program to train people to assist the synagogue's designated Torah reader. "The overall goal of my career in the rabbinate is to return Judaism back to the people," he said. "Over the past few centuries, the rabbinical leaders of communities have taken on more and more responsibilities which traditionally resided with the congregations." But for a while, at least, Weinberg will be taking on greater duties.

He plans to double as cantor, the clergy member who leads the nai, 2475 W. Atlantic Avenue, Del-ray Beach, will hold its Sunday Night Series of Musical Revues for the fourth consecutive year this season. On Nov 20, Captivating Rhythm, a musical revue by The Showtime Band will be presented. On Jan. 22, Shajar and a musical group from Argentina that blends Brazilian and traditional Hebrew music in a range of styles from folk to latin, will perform.

On Feb. 26, the Gold Coast Opera will perform highlights from Showboat, The Man of La Mancha, The Mikado, My Fair Lady and the best of Cole Porter. On March 26, Standing Ovation, an all-new musical revue, will be presented. All performances begin at 8 p.m. and all seats are reserved.

Tickets are $25 for the series and may be bought at the Temple Sinai. For more information, call 276-6161. Temple Beth David gets a new Torah The Beth David Congregation of Palm Beach Gardens, 4657 Hood Road, received a new Torah this month. It was presented by Judge and Mrs. Abraham D.

Levy of Singer Island, in memory of their son, Roger Marc Levine. Judge Levy is a native of New York City, former Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York and Public Administrator of Bronx County. He was given the Torah by Congregation Hope of Israel and its Sisterhood. A celebration is being planned by Temple Beth David in honor of the Levy family and the new Torah. For more information, call 694-2350.

Musical revues set The Brotherhood of Temple Si Lucasfilm's Strike Fleet has feel of real warfare Cheever's wish 'Inferior work' blocked if By JONATHAN YARDLEY Washington Post News Service WASHINGTON If you've been sitting around all summer awaiting The Uncollected Stories of John Cheever an unlikely thought to be sure, but people get their jollies in strange ways then you'd just as well get off the pins and needles. An injunction against publication of the book has been issued by a federal judge in New York, a separate case involving it may be heard in Chicago in September, and all in all the chances that the book will ever see the light of day are not unduly bright. This is not bad news, except for Cheever collectors and for those who hope to make a profit off such bits of his literary remains as the collection would contain. Though it might be nice to have in a single volume all of those stories that Cheever himself chose not to include among the 61 in The Stories of John Cheever, published in 1978, such a collection is deemed undesirable by the author's heirs, and for reasons that are entirely legitimate. "-The Uncollected Stories of John Cheever, as envisioned by its publisher and editor, is essentially a literary scavenger job.

It would include 68 stories that were described by U.S. District Judge Gerard L. Goettel, in his ruling last week, as work that "had never been published in book form, albeit most of them were the early works of Cheever (pre-1947), which both he and his family viewed as being inferior to his subsequent works." Apprentice work, that is to say, and work that Cheever himself had chosen not to include in his definitive story collection. Of this his widow, Mary Cheever, was well aware when she was approached by a small Midwestern press, Academy Chicago, with a proposal to collect the uncollected. She agreed to it, but on terms de- FILE PHOTO John Cheever chose not to include the disputed work in 'The Stories of John published in 1978.

Rabbi Weinberg left Dallas. Jewish congregation in song. "I won't be modest," Weinberg said. "I'm not an opera singer, but I have a nice voice." His wife, Wende, will serve as principal of the synagogue's religious school. Mary Cheever, publication is justified.

Should that happen, Cheever's clear wishes, as understood by those closest to him, would be violated. It can be argued that Cheever should have taken care of the issue by covering it in his will. This isn't to suggest that Academy Chicago acted in bad faith; quite to the contrary, its initial announcements of the collection were proud but modest, and its initial expectations seem to have been reasonable. 1 Was Academy Chicago somehow evil in attempting to make the most of its investment? Of course not. But by the same token, is Mary Cheever justified in fearing that her husband's wishes are being repudiated? Of course she is, and thus she is to be applauded for trying, however belatedly, to honor them.

babble" a decade ago in his book by that title. "People began believing that expressing a problem was tantamount to curing it. Npw they can't stop talking." Still, it seems likely that confessional talk will thrive as long as there are people like Nedra Weston. Weston, who owns a home-cleaning business in Los Altos, told Geraldo's audience that she is so afraid of becoming pregnant that she and her husband have intercourse only during her period. On the plane home after taping "Women Who Don't Want Sex," Weston began having misgivings.

"I mentioned on the show that I had two abortions during my first marriage," she says. "When I was flying back, I realized that my ex-husband's family never knew about that. I forgot it was supposed to be secret." Copyright The Boston Globe. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate gregation. The congregation leased space for six years in the Lion's Club building before moving two years ago into its own building, at 129 Sparrow Drive.

Schwartz said it was only a matter of time before the growing congregation, now with 340 families, would need the services of a full-time rabbi. Rabbi Seymour Freed-man, a Miami stockbroker, had commuted for Sabbath and holiday services on a part-time basis. Weinberg, an associate rabbi at the Congregation Shearith Israel in Dallas, will take over Aug. 18 at Temple Beth Zion, giving him some time to settle in before the Jewish High Holidays next month. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Jewish Theological Seminary.

At the Dallas synagogue, Weinberg's duties included direction of outreach programs and the synagogue's social action committee. Commentary scribed by Judge Goettel: "She envisioned a rather modest work containing only a limited number of stories with a small printing. She believed that, as the author who was supposed to deliver a manuscript, she would have control over which works would be included. She was aware that her husband considered his early stories inferior and did not want his literary reputation sullied by their collected publication." But what Mary Cheever saw as a "modest work" gradually became something altogether different: a volume every bit as fat as The Stories of John Cheever, one edited by Franklin H. Dennis and with an introduction by Scott Donaldson, whose biography of Cheever was published in June.

A large first printing was ordered for the book's debut in September, and it was put up for paperback reprint rights; when Dell weighed in with an offer of $225,000 for those rights, it became evident a little publishing house in Chicago previously noted primarily for whodunits could well have a hit on its hands. That, in the judgment of Mary Cheever and her three children, was a far remove from what they thought they'd agreed to originally. So Mrs. Cheever, as holder of her husband's copyright, sued in federal court to assure her control over that copyright; meanwhile, Academy Chicago, claiming it had a binding legal agreement with the Cheever estate, sued in Cook County court to assure the validity of that contract. The first of these cases has now been disposed in favor of the Cheever family; the second may or may not, such are the ways of the law come to trial in Chicago next month.

These are matters for the courts, and I do not presume to pass judg- those same guests use the shows to attract publishers or recruit for advocacy groups. Although most guests aren't paid, some hanker for the free trip to the big city and the limo ride to the studio. Whatever their motives, they have no shame. The lure of fame Stephen Goldin and Mary Mason, both science fiction writers, were honeymooning in Knoxville, when Jack Jardine called them and asked, "How would you like to be on Geraldo!" Jardine, the third member of their menage a trois, had learned from a publicist that a threesome scheduled to appear on a program about "Love Triangles" had backed out. The next morning, Rivera told America that Goldin, Mason and Jardine were a trio.

Mason and Jardine clasped hands while Rivera cooed, "Look at them. She's married to one, and she's holding hands with the other." Crystal I -ry5Fai By JACK WARNER Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service ATLANTA Creating a computer simulation portraying modern tactical warfare with a live-action feel is difficult. The only real success I know is Strike Fleet, from Lucasfilm Games by way of Electronic Arts. Strike Fleet, billed as a naval task force simulator for Apple II, puts the player in command of a squadron that can range from one destroyer to 16 ships of different classes, depending on the scenario. The scenarios include reality-based Persian Gulf and Falkland Islands episodes, gradually blending into a hypothetical World War III situation.

The game provides a realistic feel, despite the fact that the naval commander is omniscient. There are two basic screens: the map view, which is used for navigation, and the tactical view, which is basically the view from the bridge of the flagship, plus the essential instrumentation, radar-sonar screens, weapon-selection menus and other in-formation essential to decision-making. The commander can transfer his view to the bridge of any other ship in the squadron, or to any LAMPS helicopters airborne at the moment. The simpler scenarios involving command of one to three ships are not too difficult; the more complicated, in which the player must issue orders for a great many ships in extremely hectic circumstances, require the player to learn quite thoroughly the capabilities of the different classes of ships and the command structure of the game. Pegasus battle disk Strike Fleet is built on the same principles as PHM Pegasus, Lucasfilm's earlier, and to me much less successful, hydrofoil combat simulator.

However, devotees of that game will be interested to know that Lucas-film is selling by direct mail only an Advanced Battle Disk for Pegasus. For information, write to the company at Box 20009, San Rafael, Calif. 94912. DataSoft's The Hunt For Red October, available for IBM and Amiga, is the first to reach the market of the many games being based upon Tom Clancy's gripping military books. It makes a noble attempt to simulate the tribulations of a defecting Russian submarine, but I cannot say it entirely succeeds.

It is simply too difficult; the player is dropped into the middle of a highly technical and chancy situation without the information he needs to have a hope of success. You have to learn from your mistakes, which is tedious. The program expects confirmation of most commands, but doesn't ask for it; if you don't ment upon them. Certainly it is entirely possible that the Cheever heirs are looking at their contract with Academy Chicago with 20-20 hindsight, and that the Cook County court will permit the publisher to proceed with its plans. Should that come to pass, it presumably would be up to Judge Goettel to decide whether to lift his injunction or to keep it in effect.

Mary Cheever obviously has scruples; her husband's reputation seems to mean more to her than whatever income she might realize should The Uncollected Stories of John Cheever prove profitable, and evidently it is for this reason that she is now opposing the book. But should it ever come to that, a court might well find that since Cheever included no prohibition against collection of these stories in his will, and since a valid contract exists between Academy Chicago and TV guests confess what they wouldn't tell mom The Personal Computer provide confirmation, it just doesn't happen. Often it just doesn't happen anyway, because the system is crankyabout accepting selections. Spectrum Holobyte's PT-109, available first for Macintosh, is a companion game to its classic Gato, which introduced submarine simulation to the personal computer. PT-109 puts you in charge of a frail little plywood PT boat in the Pacific during World War II.

PT-109, of course, was John F. Kennedy's boat. This is a much handsomer game than Gato; solid modeling on everything rather than wireframe ships. It allows you to play single patrols or an entire campaign. PT-109 has problems ZZ.

PT-109, however, seems ton have a major problem. In the campaign scenario, the enemyH destroyers and escorts are so3j torpid they might as well not be there. The folks at Spectrum Ho- lobyte insist this doesn't happen when they play the game, but I've tried two different game disks with the same results. I have, for instance, just finished running in a tight circle around a Japanese escort, peppering it with machine-gun fire after sinking the barge it was escorting. It acted as though I wasn't there.

Try that in the single-patrol scenario, and you won't last five seconds. The only way to be certain the enemy will deign to notice you in a nighttime scenario is to fire a flare. This severely handicaps what otherwise would be an outstanding simulation. There are two new flight simulators on the market: Minds-cape's Harrier Combat Simulator for IBM and Amiga and Electronic Arts' FA-18 Interceptor for Amiga. The latter is a pretty successful game; it has an interesting feature you can control your plane while viewing it externally from any angle.

Amazing how easy this makes landing. Harrier would have been a pretty impressive simulator a couple of years ago. But Spectrum Holobyte's Falcon, Bull-seye's Fokker Triplane, Micro-prose's Gunship and FA-18 make it seem primitive and its hypothetical scenario rather sil- DefCon 5, from Cosmi for IBM and compatibles, suffers from the same problem as Red October. This attempt to hypo-thetically simulate the Strategic Defense Initiative space-based satellite killer system is absurdly difficult. It has a good feel of realism, but it does not provide enough information to deal with the largely intellectual problems, and the arcadelike sequences are much too delicate for my elderly synapses.

call 694-2350 Randall J. Konigtburg Rabbi Earl J. Rackoff Cantor Linda Manko Marcy Marcun Co-Preiidentt of America Later, asked why he interrupted his honeymoon to reveal his unusual lifestyle to millions of Americans, Goldin said, "It was a little national exposure to plug any of my books in the future." In a society where presidential candidates are measured by sexual fidelity and baseball stars are equally renowned for their batting averages and their palimony suits, confessional talk shows have capitalized on the virtual obliteration of the distinction between what is public and what is private. These shows reflect the breakup of social taboos that has accompanied the maturing of the baby-boom generation through the "let it all hang out" phrase of the 1960s and the talk therapy of the 1970s. "Somewhere down the line, the whole gospel of confession got perverted," says writer Richard Rosen, who coined the term "psycho TALKfrom ID shows on atheists and homosexuals pale before the contemporary parade of self-mutilators, multiple personalities, and people who think Elvis is alive and shopping in their grocery store.

At their best, these shows illuminate festering social problems, instill tolerance for alternative lifestyles, and comfort lonely viewers with the knowledge that other Americans are even more miserable than they are. But at their worst they become little more than freak shows or village carnivals featuring the modern equivalent of the fire-swallower or bearded lady. Can we talk? Although Donahue often leans toward politics, Oprah Winfrey features Barbara Walters-esque chitchat with Hollywood celebrities. The Sally Jessy Raphael Show concentrates on ailments of the female mind and body and Geraldo explores the sinister worlds of drugs and murder, the four shows overlap considerably. They play the same exotic riffs on the eternal chords of sex, death, religion and cosmetic surgery.

Guests on all four shows are identified by captions that rival any tabloid headlines: "TRIED TO WILL HERSELF TO DEATH," "SLEPT WITH TWO GAY MEN TO CONCEIVE BABY," "SUED EX-LOVER FOR CONTRACTING GENITAL HERPES." Geraldo recently featured Siamese twins who are connected at the head. The twins women in their 30s patiently answered Rivera's question about their diet. "She likes kumquats and I don't," one said. "If you don't want to listen, turn down the volume," Sally Jessy Raphael recently warned before one juicy tidbit. Many viewers, presumably, turned the volume up.

But if this is exploitation, it plays both ways. If the shows use bizarre guests to boost ratings, many of THE THREE R'S WEREN'T ENOUGH. Of course we wanted our children to have the finest secular education, but we wanted to teach our children spiritual values as well. We wanted our children to learn kindness, concern for others and most of all, how to he a "Mensch" BETH DAVID IS OUR SYNAGOGUE REGISTER NOW FOR SEPTEMBER, 1988 Hebrew School Grades K-7 Pre-School Ages Lie. 0083-05-010 r-TJ toft For information and registration i ree i i Tree 1 ii Temple Beth David 4657 Hood Road Palm Beach Gardens 1201 US Hwy.

1 North Palm Beach 622-7940 Monday-Saturday 1 0am-6pm J.G. Hook lam Segrets Berle David Brooks Cambridge Pappagallo and Accessories an affiliate of the United Synagogue the conservative congregation of the Northern Palm Reachei 4j.