Students get global perspective on women's issues

Girls at the Environmental Charter Middle School in Inglewood looked puzzled when Fahmia Al-Fotih described her former days as a teacher in Yemen.

The students weren't curious so much about the visitor's hijab or the fact that she had taught more than 70 pupils in a small room. They were surprised that Al-Fotih still used chalkboards and that her female students don't have much of a voice in school.

Al-Fotih and 19 others from a variety of countries were at the school recently to talk to the girls about topics that concern women around the world. They were part of the U.S. State Department's International Visitor Leadership Program in which delegates travel around the country examining ways to cultivate leadership in young women in their home communities.

"Yemen is a male-dominated society," Al-Fotih said. "I am very impressed with the facilities and platforms in place to help [girls] out here."

Geneva Dowdy's EmpowHer class at the charter school is one such program. As part of the EmpowHer Institute, the class teaches young women in middle and high school personal, community and financial responsibility and self-reliance. In the class, girls practice what they call "elevator speeches," which train them to deliver a short resume of who they are in 30 seconds or less, getting them accustomed to public speaking.

Before the visit, Dowdy went over concerns the girls might have had in talking to such a group.

"Some of these girls have ... never met anyone from another country," she said. "This was a huge opportunity for them and we talked about how we can engage with our guests and make them feel as comfortable as possible while still learning from them."

The visit allowed them to practice asking appropriate and interesting questions and how to engage in conversation with an older person.

"It shocked the girls how much they were able to get out of the session," Dowdy said. "I don't think they realize all the things that we've been molding them to be able to do."

Poised and courteous, Dowdy's students read poems and told the international delegates about their daily struggles with bullying and "drama."

"What is drama?" one of the visitors asked, not familiar with the term used outside theatrical expression.

"It's like when someone talks bad about you behind your back," a student replied.

Keosha Taylor, 13, told the crowd that before participating in the class, she thought she was "just regular." Through EmpowHer, she felt more important and special.

"Was you guys," she started to ask the women before correcting herself. "Are you guys empowered?"

Samaher Abuthaher, who is Palestinian, said it is difficult when women can't speak freely or stand in front of a group to express themselves.

Sora Duba Dadacha, a head teacher of a nomadic all-girls school in Kenya, told the class that he loses many of his students to forced marriages and many of them have suffered genital mutilation.

"The girls see the school as a rescue center," he said. "I'm going to educate them so they get empowered like the girls here. I want to take my girls from darkness to light."

The clock marked the end of the conversation, and much to some of the delegates' surprise, the group took an impromptu vote for extra time.

The young teenagers all threw a thumbs-up sign in the air, noting their approval of the extension. Dadacha and many of the delegates did the same.

They continued.

A woman from Romania asked how the girls felt about the world's perception of young women living in Los Angeles based on such television shows as "Hannah Montana" and "Beverly Hills, 90210."

Many of the teenagers groaned and said the shows were nothing like their lives.

"It makes it seem that we all spend our days at the beach or go crazy shopping," said Diana Cervantes. "I'd rather not be known as that."

dalina.castellanos@latimes.com

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Assad Fires Scuds at Rebels, U.S. Says, Escalating War in Syria

Narciso Contreras/Associated Press

Free Syrian Army fighters with two bodies they found in the rubble during clashes with government forces in Aleppo on Monday.

WASHINGTON — President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have resorted to firing ballistic missiles at rebel fighters inside Syria, Obama administration officials said Wednesday, escalating a nearly two-year-old civil war as the government struggles to slow the momentum of a gaining insurgency.

Administration officials said that over the last week, Assad forces for the first time had fired at least six Soviet-designed Scud missiles in the latest bid to push back rebels who have consistently chipped away at the government’s military superiority.

In a conflict that has already killed more than 40,000 Syrians, the government has been forced to augment its reliance on troops with artillery, then airpower and now missiles as the rebels have taken over military bases and closed in on the capital, Damascus. The escalation has not changed Washington’s decision to avoid military intervention in Syria — as long as chemical weapons are not used — but it did prompt a rebuke.

“As the regime becomes more and more desperate, we see it resorting to increased lethality and more vicious weapons moving forward, and we have in recent days seen missiles deployed,” said Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman.

President Obama has said that the use of chemical weapons would cross a “red line,” implying that it might lead to an American military response.

Mr. Assad’s decision to fire Scuds — not known for their precision — inside his own country appears directly related to the rebel ability to take command of military bases and seize antiaircraft weapons. The Scuds have been fired since Monday from the An Nasiriyah Air Base, north of Damascus, according to American officials familiar with the classified intelligence reports about the attacks. The target was the Sheikh Suleiman base north of Aleppo that rebel forces had occupied.

The development may also represent a calculation by the Syrian leadership that it can resort to such lethal weapons without the fear of international intervention, partly because Washington had set its tolerance threshold at the use of chemical weapons. Mr. Obama has never suggested that the United States would take action to stop attacks against Syrian rebels and civilians with conventional weapons, no matter how severe.

“This may be another example of the unintended consequence of the red line the administration has drawn with regard to chemical weapons,” said Joseph Holliday, a former Army intelligence officer and a senior analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, a nongovernmental research group. “Assad views every weapon short of chemicals as fair game.”

The disclosure about the Scuds came as representatives of more than 100 nations gathered in Marrakesh, Morocco, for a conference intended to give a political lift to the Syrian opposition, which is formally known as the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. And it came amid an increase in violence in Syria, including reports of a new massacre of about 100 Alawites, Mr. Assad’s sect, and a large bombing in the capital.

Mr. Obama, in an interview on Tuesday with ABC News, formally recognized the coalition as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

William Burns, the deputy secretary of state who led the American team to the Morocco gathering, said Wednesday that he had invited opposition leaders to Washington, including Sheik Ahmad Moaz al-Khatib, the coalition leader.

Mr. Khatib, however, took issue with a decision by the Obama administration to classify Al Nusra Front — one of several armed groups fighting Mr. Assad — as a foreign terrorist organization.

“The logic under which we consider one of the parts that fights against the Assad regime as a terrorist organization is a logic one must reconsider,” Mr. Khatib said. “We can differ with parties that adopt political ideas and visions different from ours. But we ensure that the goal of all rebels is the fall of the regime.”

Obama administration officials have said that the Nusra Front is an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group that has sought to foment sectarian violence there and topple the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.

Reporting was contributed by Mark Landler from Washington; Aida Alami from Marrakesh, Morocco; Alan Cowell from London; Anne Barnard, Hwaida Saad and Hania Mourtada from Beirut, Lebanon; and Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

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‘Dishonored’ tops a diverse year in video games

The video game universe in 2012 is a study in extremes.

At one end, you have the old guard striving to produce mass-appeal blockbusters. At the other end, you have a thriving community of independent game developers scrambling to find an audience for their idiosyncratic visions. Can’t we all just get along?

Turns out, we can. For while some industry leaders are worried (and not without cause) about “disruptive” trends — social-media games, free-to-play models, the switch from disc-based media to digital delivery — video games are blossoming creatively. This fall, during the height of the pre-holiday game release calendar, I found myself bouncing among games as diverse as the bombastic “Halo 4,” the artsy “The Unfinished Swan” and the quick-hit trivia game “SongPop.”

Some of my favorite games this year have benefited from both sides working together. The smaller studios get exposure on huge platforms like Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network. The big publishers seem more willing to invite a little quirkiness into their big-budget behemoths. Gamers win.

1. “Dishonored” (Bethesda Softworks, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC): Arkane Studios’ revenge drama combined a witty plot, crisp gameplay and an uncommonly distinctive milieu, setting a supernaturally gifted assassin loose in a gloriously decadent, steampunk-influenced city.

2. “Mass Effect 3″ (Electronic Arts, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, PC): No 2012 game was more ambitious than BioWare’s sweeping space opera. Yes, the ending was a little bumpy, but the fearless Commander Shepard’s last journey across the cosmos provided dozens of thrilling moments.

3. “The Walking Dead” (Telltale Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, iOS): This moving adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s comics dodged the predictable zombie bloodbath in favor of a finely tuned character study of two survivors: Lee, an escaped convict, and Clementine, the 8-year-old girl he’s committed to protect.

4. “Journey” (Thatgamecompany, for the PlayStation 3): A nameless figure trudges across a desert toward a glowing light. Simple enough, but gorgeous visuals, haunting music and the need to communicate, wordlessly, with companions you meet along the way translate into something that’s almost profound.

5. “Borderlands 2″ (2K Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC): Gearbox Software’s gleeful mash-up of first-person shooting, role-playing and loot-collecting conventions gets bigger and badder, but what stuck with me most were the often hilarious encounters with the damaged citizens of the godforsaken planet Pandora.

6. “XCOM: Enemy Unknown” (2K Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC): A strategy classic returns, as the forces of Earth fight back against an extraterrestrial invasion. It’s a battle of wits rather than reflexes, a stimulating change of pace from the typical alien gorefest.

7. “Fez” (Polytron, for the Xbox 360): A two-dimensional dude named Gomez finds his world has suddenly burst into a third dimension in this gem from indie developer Phil Fish. As Gomez explores, the world of “Fez” continually deepens, opening up mysteries that only the most dedicated players will be able to solve.

8. “Spec Ops: The Line” (2K Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC): This harrowing tale from German studio Yager Development transplants “Apocalypse Now” to a war-torn Dubai. It’s a bracing critique, not just of war but of the rah-rah jingoism of contemporary military shooters.

9. “Assassin’s Creed III” (Ubisoft, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, PC): A centuries-old conspiracy takes root in Colonial America in this beautifully realized, refreshingly irreverent installment of Ubisoft’s alternate history franchise.

10. “ZombiU” (Ubisoft, for the Wii U): The best launch game for Nintendo’s new console turns the Wii U’s GamePad into an effective tool for finding and hunting down the undead.

Runners-up: “Call of Duty: Black Ops II,” ”Darksiders II,” ”Dust: An Elysian Tail,” ”Far Cry 3,” ”Halo 4,” ”Mark of the Ninja,” ”Need for Speed: Most Wanted,” ”Paper Mario: Sticker Star,” ”Papo & Yo,” ”The Unfinished Swan.”

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Tevin Hunte Is 'So Happy' After His Voice Elimination

TV Watch

The Voice

By Jessica Herndon and Julia Haskins

12/12/2012 at 07:45 PM EST

Team Cee Lo's Trevin Hunte was eliminated on Tuesday's episode of The Voice, but the soulful singer isn't letting the end of this journey hold him back.

"I feel like the best person on the planet Earth. I am so happy and excited to be honest," Hunte told PEOPLE after the show. I feel like a weight has been lifted. Being away from family and friends and what you're used to was definitely a hard thing for me."

Hunte is looking forward to his mom's cooking and seeing his friends back home, and he won't waste a second wondering what if he'd made it further.

"I have no regrets. I am glad that I took a leap of faith and auditioned," he said. "I auditioned for American Idol and told my family I didn't have the strength to do it again. But I am definitely happy and excited that I made it this far."

And he still has a long way to go. "I'm only 18," he said. "I'm just really excited."

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Congress examines science behind HGH test for NFL

WASHINGTON (AP) — A congressional committee has opened a hearing to examine the science behind a human growth hormone test the NFL wants to start using on its players.

Nearly two full seasons have passed since the league and the players' union signed a labor deal that set the stage for HGH testing.

The NFL Players Association won't concede the validity of a test that's used by Olympic sports and Major League Baseball, and the sides haven't been able to agree on a scientist to help resolve that impasse.

Among the witnesses before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Wednesday is Pro Football Hall of Fame member Dick Butkus. In his prepared statement, Butkus writes: "Now, let's get on with it. The HGH testing process is proven to be reliable."

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Bid to put bamboo garden on billboard meets funding goal

Over the last seven weeks, artist Stephen Glassman asked people to think outside the billboard. Re-imagine them, he urged, as floating bamboo gardens.`

More than 1,500 people did just that, donating money to the project dubbed "Urban Air." By Tuesday afternoon, the entire $100,000 budget and more had been raised via Kickstarter, an online public funding platform.

"I feel a real kind of freedom in the world in a more powerful, creative way," Glassman said after learning that the project had met its financial goal. "It feels like a whole new territory. I mean the sky's the limit, literally. What's so great is this was a vote for something green and beautiful and ridiculous in the world."

Glassman, known for his free-form bamboo installations in the 1990s, had spent the day at his Topanga home nervously eyeing the Kickstarter website. If projects are not funded by the cutoff deadline, then all donations are forfeited.

Just a couple hours shy of the deadline, emails of congratulation began pouring in. Urban Air was fully funded.

"It was kind of amazing; you could just feel everybody looking at the screen and checking in," Glassman said. "There was a huge feeling of community. One woman wrote 'I'm so glad this happened. I know this is your project, but it felt like my project.' "

The total of $100,772 raised will go toward retrofitting the first billboard. Glassman sees it as a prototype that could be re-created around the world and reinterpreted with different plants and billboard shapes. He plans for this first one to be placed near a Los Angeles freeway or busy thoroughfare. The billboard garden would grow bamboo — chosen because it takes up relatively little root space but attains great height.

Summit Media has agreed to donate a billboard. As for permits, "there isn't a check-the-box building permit for putting bamboo trees on a billboard," said Alex Kouba, the founder of Summit. "There's a lot of controversy swirling around billboards, but I think if city leaders appreciate the cultural impact of this and look at it from an artistic angle they'll have the foresight to support it."

A spokesman for the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety has said the agency would need to consult with the city attorney's office before approving a permit for the unprecedented project.

If things go as hoped, Glassman thinks Urban Air could be completed as early as February.

The hundreds of people who contributed to the campaign around the world are eager to see the project take root.

Casey Rocke, who donated $30, said she hopes updates are posted as the project gets underway. "I'd like to see … how they're making this happen and how other people can make something similar happen," she said.

The 25-year-old Miracle Mile resident has contributed to Kickstarter projects in the past, but said she feels a sense of ownership when it comes to Urban Air.

"It was a really cool idea — that nature is taking back urban spaces," she said.

corina.knoll@latimes.com

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Herat Journal: Afghan Museum Recalls a Previous War

Bryan Denton for The New York Times

A groundskeeper at the Jihad Museum in Herat, Afghanistan, and a helicopter that was left behind from the Soviet Union’s occupation of the country.

HERAT, Afghanistan — For a country disfigured by decades of conflict, it seems fitting that Afghanistan should have a place set aside for reflecting on war.

The Jihad Museum on a forested hillside in the western provincial capital of Herat is many things: a temple to the mujahedeen heroes who battled the Soviets in the 1970s and ’80s, and a memorial for the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who were slaughtered or fled the fighting.

It is also, for many Afghans, a not-so-veiled portrayal of a likely future: they review the museum’s dioramas of historical violence with clenching knots in their stomachs, fearing that the scenes may play out again soon, after the end of the NATO combat mission here in 2014.

“I think the worst days are yet to come,” said Obaidullah Esar, 51, a former fighter, who was touring the museum one recent afternoon.

The museum is a blue, green and white rotunda covered on the outside with the names of hundreds of victims from the war, all set in a watered garden of flower beds and fountains.

It boasts captured Soviet weaponry like tanks, a MIG fighter jet and helicopters. It has a portrait hall of fame of mujahedeen commanders.

The star attraction is a graphic diorama showing models of Afghan villagers rising up in a hellish wartime landscape to cudgel the heads of Soviet oppressors, in a triumphant if rather rosy narrative arc: Soviets commit heinous acts against poor villagers, farmers besiege Soviet tanks with sticks, Soviet soldiers are throttled, Soviet soldiers are shot. At the end, the army of the mujahedeen marches home victorious.

Still, if its view is more triumphal than strictly historical, it is one of the few accounts of the era that is easily accessible here.

“Since most Afghans are uneducated and we don’t have good historians to write our histories, our children don’t know who the Russians were, why the Afghans fought against them and what was the result of their resistance,” said Sayed Wahid Qattali, a prosperous 28-year-old politician and businessman who is the son of a former jihadi commander. Mr. Qattali’s father established the museum with the help of Ismail Khan, a mujahedeen warlord and former governor of Herat.

Mr. Qattali says one of the motivations for building the museum is the reluctance of the country’s official history books to address the painful events of the past four decades. In an attempt to depoliticize the history of a country pulled in so many different ways by ethnic tensions, school textbooks tell Afghanistan’s history in depth only up until about the 1970s, skipping over major events since then like the Soviet invasion, civil war, the Taliban’s reign and the American-led invasion and military presence.

Mr. Qattali wants the museum to fill that void, in particular telling his version of the mujahedeen’s exploits — before time moves on and the next chapter of history is inevitably written.

His family has profited during the relative calm of the past 10 years, with interests from chicken farms to a security firm that guards NATO fuel convoys, and he runs his own television station.

Recently, he toured the garden of the museum, showing off the mujahedeen’s trophies, like the MIG jet.

“Afghans have very bad memories of this,” he said, shaking his head, before strolling past an 82-millimeter light-rocket launcher perched in the grass. Near a Soviet helicopter, behind some bushes, Mr. Qattali hunched his shoulders and grew even more morose. “A lot of people were killed by this kind of helicopter,” he said. “We lost a lot of relatives and loved ones. Of course, we fought to the end.”

Inside the hushed museum, shoeless feet — visitors are required to remove their shoes — shuffled past glass cabinets of centuries-old rifles seized from British soldiers in earlier conflicts. The British were repelled, too, and the guns were used against the Soviets, showing an Afghan knack for taking whatever weapons invaders bring and turning them to their advantage.

A museum visitor might reflect that the arsenal of weaponry currently being supplied to Afghanistan by the American-led coalition could one day be piled here, too.

After the guns, a long corridor is lined with more than 60 iconic portraits of mujahedeen commanders who made their names during the fighting against the Soviets and, later, the Taliban: men like Ahmed Shah Massoud and Abdul Haq.

Though they share a hallway, the warlords hardly were united.

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Hugh Hefner's Engagement Ring to Crystal Harris Revealed

By Mike Fleeman

12/11/2012 at 07:00 PM EST

The wedding's back on – though it may be a good idea to save that gift receipt.

Hugh Hefner, 86, officially confirms that he is once again engaged to Crystal Harris, 26, telling his Twitter followers, "I've given Crystal Harris a ring. I love the girl."

And to prove it, Harris posted photos of the big diamond sparkler, calling it "my beautiful ring."

Neither announced a wedding date, though sources tell PEOPLE they're planning to tie the knot at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles on New Year's Eve.

Whether that still happens remains to be seen.

This is the plan they had in 2011 – a wedding at the mansion – except that Harris called it off just days before the nuptials were scheduled to happen in front of 300 invited guests.

Hugh Hefner and Crystal Harris

David Livingston / Getty

The onetime Playmate of the Month then ripped Hef's bedroom skills, calling him a two-second man, to which Hefner replied, "I missed a bullet" by not marrying her.

A year later, Hefner's "runaway bunny" bounded back to him.

• Reporting by JENNIFER GARCIA

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DA investigating Texas' troubled $3B cancer agency

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Turmoil surrounding an unprecedented $3 billion cancer-fighting effort in Texas worsened Tuesday when its executive director offered his resignation and the state's chief public corruption prosecutor announced an investigation into the beleaguered agency.

No specific criminal allegations are driving the latest probe into the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, said Gregg Cox, director of the Travis County district attorney's public integrity unit. But his influential office opened a case only weeks after the embattled agency disclosed that an $11 million grant to a private company bypassed review.

That award is the latest trouble in a tumultuous year for CPRIT, which controls the nation's second-largest pot of cancer research dollars. Amid the mounting problems, the agency announced Tuesday that Executive Director Bill Gimson had submitted his letter of resignation.

"Unfortunately, I have also been placed in a situation where I feel I can no longer be effective," Gimson wrote in a letter dated Monday.

Gimson said the troubles have resulted in "wasted efforts expended in low value activities" at the agency, instead of a focused fight against cancer. Gimson offered to stay on until January, and the agency's board must still approve his request to step down.

His departure would complete a remarkable house-cleaning at CPRIT in a span of just eight months. It began in May, when Dr. Alfred Gilman resigned as chief science officer in protest over a different grant that the Nobel laureate wanted approved by a panel of scientists. He warned it would be "the bomb that destroys CPRIT."

Gilman was followed by Chief Commercialization Officer Jerry Cobbs, whose resignation in November came after an internal audit showed Cobbs included an $11 million proposal in a funding slate without a required outside review of the project's merits. The lucrative grant was given to Dallas-based Peloton Therapeutics, a biomedical startup.

Gimson chalked up Peloton's award to an honest mistake and has said that, to his knowledge, no one associated with CPRIT stood to benefit financially from the company receiving the taxpayer funds. That hasn't satisfied some members of the agency's governing board, who called last week for more assurances that no one personally profited.

Cox said he has been following the agency's problems and his office received a number of concerned phone calls. His department in Austin is charged with prosecuting crimes related to government officials; his most famous cases include winning a conviction against former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2010 on money laundering charges.

"We have to gather the facts and figure what, if any, crime occurred so that (the investigation) can be focused more," Cox said.

Gimson's resignation letter was dated the same day the Texas attorney general's office also announced its investigation of the agency. Cox said his department would work cooperatively with state investigators, but he made clear the probes would be separate.

Peloton's award marks the second time this year that a lucrative taxpayer-funded grant authorized by CPRIT instigated backlash and raised questions about oversight. The first involved the $20 million grant to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston that Gilman described as a thin proposal that should have first been scrutinized by an outside panel of scientific peer-reviewers, even though none was required under the agency's rules.

Dozens of the nation's top scientists agreed. They resigned en masse from the agency's peer-review panels along with Gilman. Some accused the agency of "hucksterism" and charting a politically-driven path that was putting commercial product-development above science.

The latest shake-up at CPRIT caught Gilman's successor off-guard. Dr. Margaret Kripke, who was introduced to reporters Tuesday, acknowledged that she wasn't even sure who she would be answering to now that Gimson was stepping down. She said that although she wasn't with the agency when her predecessor announced his resignation, she was aware of the concerns and allegations.

"I don't think people would resign frivolously, so there must be some substance to those concerns," Kripke said.

Kripke also acknowledged the challenge of restocking the peer-review panels after the agency's credibility was so publicly smeared by some of the country's top scientists. She said she took the job because she felt the agency's mission and potential was too important to lose.

Only the National Institutes of Health doles out more cancer research dollars than CPRIT, which has awarded more than $700 million so far.

Gov. Rick Perry told reporters in Houston on Tuesday that he wasn't previously aware of the resignation but said Gimson's decision to step down was his own.

Joining the mounting criticism of CPRIT is the woman credited with brainstorming the idea for the agency in the first place. Cathy Bonner, who served under former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, teamed with cancer survivor Lance Armstrong in selling Texas voters in 2007 on a constitutional amendment to create an unprecedented state-run effort to finance a war on disease.

Now Bonner says politics have sullied an agency that she said was built to fund research, not subsidize private companies.

"There appears to be a cover-up going on," Bonner said.

Peloton has declined comment about its award and has referred questions to CPRIT. The agency has said the company wasn't aware that its application was never scrutinized by an outside panel, as required under agency rules.

___

Follow Paul J. Weber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/pauljweber

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At this Hanukkah party, a special zest for life

The dancing broke out spontaneously.

One moment, a guitarist was performing before more than 200 elderly Jewish people, most of whom looked content to remain in their seats and let the latkes settle. The next, the onlookers were on their feet, clapping to traditional Yiddish songs and forming a human chain that whipped around the tables.

An elderly woman in a sparkling black dress swung her hips in the corner of the room. Eyes closed, she was doing the polka, no partner required. Canes were left hooked on the backs of chairs, and walkers were pushed aside along the wall.

Such was the scene near the end of the Cafe Europa Hanukkah party on Tuesday afternoon. It was a jubilant two hours, full of hugs and kisses between longtime friends. There was next to no mention of what they had in common: They are all Holocaust survivors.

"Every day is a holiday if we are still here," said Sophie Hamburger, 93, after unrolling her sleeve to show the number 74428 tattooed on her left arm.

Officials with the Jewish Family Service and party volunteers said they are in awe of the survivors' zest for life. The service organization's Cafe Europa program serves as a social support group for survivors, who get together monthly for plays, outings, dinner or educational sessions. They usually meet in two groups, but on Tuesday, all members congregated at Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills. They had a kosher lunch, saw a children's musical performance and danced.

"Holidays are a great time to celebrate life, and these are the people who know how," said Susie Forer-Dehrey, chief operating officer of the organization. "Many of them grew up without parents. Many lost children. The fact that they can come together and celebrate Hanukkah is truly a miracle, and Hanukkah is about miracles."

Though many of the survivors said they prefer to think about the present, the future was not lost on Dorothy Greenstein, 82. She said at least two of her friends have died recently. When one survivor passes away, the person never gets replaced, Greenstein said. Each passing holiday, she added, is one to relish.

"We are an endangered species," Greenstein said, then demanded more fried jelly doughnuts for her table.

Though the party was no place to dig up old, horrific memories, some remain etched in the mind: Eva Brettler, a child survivor, now 76, still remembers the smell of her grandmother's bread, which wafted in the air before the first loud knock at the door. She remembers being separated from her mother, then hearing gunshots. She still sees the "mountain of corpses" she witnessed when she was about 8 years old.

She went for a hike Monday morning, and to the gym hours before the party. She applauded loudly for the singing children and swayed to the music in her seat.

Then, like so many of her fellow survivors, she stood up and danced.

She finished, beaming. "Wasn't that fun?" she said.

matt.stevens@latimes.com

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