Michael Douglas Heads to Israel for Bar Mitzvah

 Michael Douglas Heads to Israel for Bar Mitzvah. HT: Forward.

Ynet reports that Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones are in Jerusalem with their children as part of the bar mitzvah celebration of their son Dylan.

Douglas is the son of Kirk Douglas, who was born Issur Danielovitch (early in childhood he became Issur “Izzy” Demsky) and his first wife, Diana Dill. The elder Douglas started exploring religion under the influence of Aish HaTorah after narrowly escaping death in a 1991 helicopter crash, and since then he’s expressed regret on several occasions that he neglected his Jewish identity for so many years and never raised his sons as Jews. It’s a bit odd, considering that he filmed two movies in Israel before it became fashionable post-1967, at a time when hardly anyone was visiting Israel, much less promoting it.

The first one, the critically acclaimed 1953 “The Juggler), about a Holocaust survivor who comes to Israel, struggles with his past and finally comes to terms with it on a kibbutz, was the first Hollywood feature film to be made in Israel. The second, the 1966 war pic “Cast a Giant Shadow, is a biopic about Colonel David “Mickey” Marcus, the American World War II military hero who volunteered to fight in Israel’s war of independence and ended up accidentally getting shot by an Israeli sentry because he didn’t understand the Hebrew warnings. We should all be so assimilated. Read the full Story here