Shalom TV

That's the message Comcast digital customers will hear when a new network called Shalom TV enters the airways nationwide on Friday.

The network features Jewish foreign films — most in Hebrew with English subtitles — as well as children's shows, lectures and breaking news out of Israel. Also spotlighted are Jewish authors, poets, artists and celebrities, along with an ongoing Israeli television series.

"This is American Jewish history in the making," said Rabbi Mark Golub, the CEO of Shalom TV. "In America there has never been a Jewish television network offered by a cable provider."
Until now, Jewish programming appeared on public-access channels or when somebody "bought the time," he said.

Shalom TV made its debut in Philadelphia, parts of Delaware and the Poconos in 2006. Last year it added Washington, D.C., Baltimore and northern Virginia.

Now the station goes national. On Monday, Comcast confirmed the deal.

Golub is particularly happy that Comcast serves South Florida because it is home to about 600,000 Jews, making the region the third-largest Jewish community in the United States.
Most of the Unites States' 6.4 million Jews live in just a dozen metropolitan areas, Golub said. Among them are Boston, Detroit, San Francisco, portions of New Jersey and Chicago — all served by Comcast, the nation's biggest cable company.

Shalom TV executives, based in New Jersey, said they are in talks with Time Warner Cable, which serves New York City and parts of New Jersey, to pick up the station in February.
Programming will include the kiddie show "Adventures of Agent Emes" about a student-by-day, secret-agent-by-night male student. The youngster wears a trench coat and fedora and teaches Jewish values.

There's the grown-ups movie "Pesya's Necklace," about an 80-year-old woman who travels with her teenage granddaughter to Europe, determined to find a golden necklace she and her sister hid before they were taken to Auschwitz. Also, "Children By Remote Control," about Thai workers living on a kibbutz who maintain loving bonds with their children back home through phone calls and letters.

Golub said he expects the network will attract evangelical Christians, "an enormous non-Jewish population interested in Israel."

He said Shalom TV will not have a religious slant.

"This is a mainstream Jewish cultural channel dealing with the panorama of Jewish life," Golub said. "We represent every movement of Judaism, we are not affiliated with any movement. This is not the equivalent of a Christian evangelical channel."
http://shalomtv.org/