FOR LOVE OF ISRAEL, LOST JEWISH CITIES AND THE MIRACLE OF CULTURAL RENAISSANCE

Contents:

We must rediscover our love of Israel;

Jewish Aleppo, lost forever;

The Center of Jewish Culture is Already in Israel;

Chain of miracles;

On Topic Links

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WE MUST REDISCOVER OUR LOVE OF ISRAEL

Stu Krantz

Washington Jewish Week, July 5, 2012

When our forefathers (for Ashkenazim) were living in shtetls in Poland, Russia, or wherever, Israel was seen as the true homeland where one day we would end up. This idea has largely disintegrated from the modern American Jewish community and has resulted in a conundrum: are we Jewish Americans or American Jews?

I go to a Jewish day school, and I can guarantee you that I'm in the minority when I declare that I am, without question, an American Jew. For me, it's all about pride in being Jewish. When I went to a 4-day event a couple months ago where I was one of maybe 5 Jews out of the 240 kids that were there, I felt something that I had never really felt before: pride in being Jewish. I really liked being part of such a small minority.

Ever since the first destruction of the temple in 586 BCE and through today, people have sought to annihilate the Jewish people at every turn….As a kid growing up in a "secular" American Jewish household (as most of my friends are), it's very easy to see our life as the "ideal" situation and forget how ridiculously lucky we are to live in this day and age. The notion that we can live our lives experiencing hardly any real anti-Semitism only arose in the middle of last century, less than 100 years ago.

OK, cool, but where does Israel fit in? It all goes back to Jewish American vs. American Jew. If we live in America, we're bound to assimilate. We can't just be Jewish in America; we must also be American. And don't get me wrong, because I love America and think America is the greatest country in the world, but the only place we can really just be Jews is in Israel.

That's why Israel is important to me. There's no Jewish Israeli vs. Israeli Jew. Sure, there may be secular and religious, but everyone is Jewish. After having no place to be for 3000 years, we finally have a place that is our own. How fitting it is that a nation of people, considered the scum of the earth for so long, has risen to the upper classes of society and has been able to build a beautiful, gleaming country out of a patch of desert land. Israel will always be ours.

As Israeli rapper Subliminal (a personal favorite of mine) says in his song "The Light and the Shadow, "האר מציון יותר מחבר חי מים ליום ואף פעם לא מוות"  In English: the light from Tzion (Israel) is more than a friend, it lives every day and never gives up. (It sounds a lot better in Hebrew.)

Israel makes me proud to be Jewish. I'm not very religious, but Israel is a source of pride for me, as is my Jewish identity. We've been persecuted for 2000 years, and now we have our own country that protects minorities, in addition to Jews. After merely surviving for so long, we can now affirmatively say, "We are here!"

And we have our own country to prove it.  (Top)

[Stu Krantz is a 15 year old  intern for the Washington Jewish Week and grandson of CIJR Director Prof. Fred Krantz.]

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JEWISH ALEPPO, LOST FOREVER

Joseph Dana

Tablet, August 23, 2012

The northern Syrian city of Aleppo, once a pillar of Jewish existence worldwide, is slowly being destroyed by the fighting that has engulfed Syria for the past 17 months. Last week, a Free Syrian Army rebel warned that soon “there will be nothing left to destroy in Aleppo.” Imagine Rome or Paris destroyed by civil war in the social media age.…

What made Jewish existence in Aleppo so unique and vibrant? For thousands of years, Aleppo was an unofficial capital of the Sephardic Jewish world. Fuelled by wealth from international trade and waves of Jewish immigration, the city’s Jews sustained a pious community revered for educational excellence and as a guardian of traditions with roots in ancient Israel. Aleppine folklore—some even say that one of Kind David’s generals personally laid the foundation for its great synagogue, now located at the heart of fighting—hints at the prestige of the city in Jewish history.

But the city is lost, and Jewish existence has been all but erased from its cobbled streets. Remarkably, what has not disappeared is the Aleppine way of life in diaspora communities spanning the globe.

“I would say without any hesitation that the [community of Jews from Aleppo] is the strongest Jewish community in the world in the sense of solidarity,” Yom Tov Assis, a professor of medieval history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told me in his book-saturated office. Assis was born in Aleppo and briefly experienced the violence in the city that accompanied Israel’s independence. He recently founded the center for the study of Aleppine Jewry at the Hebrew University in an effort to preserve and study the traditions of his vibrant community. “There is hardly any Jewish community apart from the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox, that is so strongly attached to its past and traditions,” he said.

Outside of Israel, few cities in the Middle East have a richer history of Jewish cultural activity, education, and trade than Aleppo. Legend has it that the city, which is referred to as Haleb in both Hebrew and Arabic, derives its name from a story of Abraham guiding a flock of sheep through the fleecy shrubbery of the surrounding mountains. He is said to have distributed his sheep’s milk (halev in Hebrew) to the local residents of the city, nestled in Northern Syria’s rolling hills, which thereby was known as Haleb.

Starting in the late 10th century, Aleppo grew to serve as a passageway between the Jewish communities of the Babylonian center and Israel. Its geographic position and impressive sphere of influence bridged the divide from Persia to the lucrative markets of southern Europe. The city held an almost mythic or legendary status among Jews worldwide. Visiting the city in the late 16th century, Italian monk Pietro Della Valle observed in a travel journal that, “Here, in one district [in Aleppo], converges all the Orient, with its jewels, silks, drugs, and cloths; and it is also joined by the Occident, namely France (in force), Venice, Holland, and England.” Aleppine Jews also used their wealth to establish prominent educational institutions and were recognized for their carefully kept traditions in line with the biblical practices of ancient Jews. In a letter to the Jewish community of Lunel in Southern France, Maimonides noted that “in all the Holy Land and in Syria, there is one city alone and it is Halab in which there are those who are truly devoted to the Jewish religion and the study of Torah.”

Historically, Aleppo found itself at the crossroads of two of Jewish history’s major developments: the expulsion of Jews from Spain and the rise of the Zionist movement. As refugees from Iberia flooded the Eastern Mediterranean in the early part of the 16th century, Aleppo became one of the most important centers of absorption. When Aleppo fell under Ottoman rule in the 16th century, the Caliphate maintained a relatively warm relationship with the Jewish community. Provisions ensuring that synagogues were not built taller than mosques and that Jewish religious behavior was performed quietly—part of their status as Dhimmis—meant that Jews found a fragile entente.

In 1948, after the United Nations voted to implement a two-state solution in Palestine, anti-Jewish riots broke out in Aleppo. False rumors spread that the codex had been destroyed in an attack. From this point until the late 1980s, the community dismantled itself, and the Aleppine Jewish diaspora began to take shape—mainly in Israel, Brooklyn, and South America. “We used to summer in Lebanon near Beirut,” Assis told me. “One summer my parents rented a large bus with other Jews from Aleppo, and only after we crossed into Lebanon did they inform us that we would never return to Aleppo.”…

What, then, is the best way to remember Jewish life under Muslim rule in the Middle East? It’s a question that has floated through the halls of Jewish academia for at least 30 years, alternately provoking idealized versions of peaceful life in the Arab world and dramatic tales of persecution. Especially among those dedicated to European Jewish history, which still struggles to understand the tragedy that befell European Jewry in the 20th century, there is a tendency to view life under Muslim rule as exceedingly peaceful, marked by co-existence and even mutual respect. Outside of academia, the question tends to adopt political contours, with people seeking to place blame either on the Zionist movement or the Arab populations that expelled their ancient Jewish communities after the creation of the state of Israel.

Whichever side one falls on politically, it is clear that, for Jews, Aleppo was lost in 1948. The recent destruction of the city’s ancient monuments is merely a reminder of what had already been lost. While the Aleppine community in Israel is not nearly as numerous or powerful as their brethren in Brooklyn—the largest Aleppine Jewish community in the world, covered widely for their financial success and excess—their proximity to Syria and relationship with Jews from other Arab countries give the events in their lost city a more immediate feel.

Like for the Aleppine community in Brooklyn, the idea of Aleppo lives on in schools and synagogues in the exile community in Israel. During our conversation, Assis relayed stories of his adolescence moving around the Middle East. “When I arrived in Beirut and Istanbul, I found myself far more learned than any other kid my age,” he said. “We had a very strong Jewish education, we used to read the Bible and translate it on the spot to the astonishment of our teachers.”…

For people like Assis, maintaining this tradition in the face of the winds of history is nothing short of an obligation. “The Jewish world under Islam has vanished,” he said. “You can mourn the whole Jewish world under Islam, there is nothing left. What happens to the cemeteries, to the synagogues, to the books, to everything? Well, God knows.”  (Top)

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THE CENTER OF JEWISH CULTURE IS ALREADY IN ISRAEL

Vic Rosenthal

Jewish Press, August 20th, 2012

A particularly pessimistic article about the future of France’s Jews — that is to say, about the lack of one — has prompted me to think about the future of the Jewish people everywhere.

Two major centers of Jewish culture disappeared during the 20th century, in Eastern Europe and the Muslim Middle East. Now there is pressure on what is left of the Jewish populations of Western Europe.

A general explanation for this phenomenon can and does fill books, but a quick summary is that traditional forms of antisemitism that developed in the Christian and Muslim worlds came together and exchanged DNA during the Nazi period, making both strains more virulent. Then, after 1948 and in the cauldron of the Cold War, political anti-Zionism combined with simple Jew-hatred to produce today’s particularly dangerous pathogen, which is as deadly as Nazism and as easily transmissible as left-wing politics.

Jews today are concentrated in Israel and in the US. There’s no need to discuss yet again the external and internal threats Israel faces (although I’m confident that it will prevail in the current confrontation with Iran). What about the Jewish population of the US?

America is different from Europe or the Muslim world. America defines itself as a nation of immigrants, so the Jew is not automatically an ‘other’ as in France, for example. America has an aggressive tradition of institutionalized religious tolerance which is unmatched anywhere else in the world.

The influence of Muslims is less of a problem than in Europe. American Muslims are a much smaller percentage of the population than in Europe, and they tend to be more educated, assimilated and likely to accept Western values.

That is not to say that there isn’t a certain amount of Jew-hatred here, either the more traditional “paleo” kind represented by Pat Buchanan or David Duke, or the so-called “new antisemitism” that hides behind an anti-Zionist political facade. But the great majority of Americans find these attitudes offensive. While ugly stereotypes about Jews are common, they rarely result in overt behavior. All this could change, but not easily and not quickly.

But there are other factors at work that will reduce the importance of American Jews. The Jewish community in the US is shrinking (by 5% since the 1990′s) because of a low birth rate and high degree of intermarriage among secular and Reform or Conservative Jews, who are close to 80% of the total. It is much harder for secular or liberal Jewish families to maintain Jewish cultural identity in the majority non-Jewish US than in Israel.

Orthodox Jews, on the other hand, are increasing numerically and as a percentage of the Jewish population. At least half of those are considered Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”), which is the fastest growing subgroup.

I think that these trends will gradually result in less Jewish influence on American culture and politics because of smaller numbers and the tendency of the more observant Jews — especially Haredim –  to participate less in the public sphere. While I don’t think we will see a surge of antisemitism here, I expect that the Jewish community will become smaller proportionally and less involved in American life and politics.

The center of Jewish culture — spiritual, scientific, entrepreneurial, artistic — is today, as it should be, Israel. This was not the case in 1948 or 1967, but it is true now, and I can only expect it to become more true as time goes by. Which means that the future of the Jewish people depends on the survival and prosperity of the Jewish state. (Top)

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CHAIN OF MIRACLES

Robert M. Goldberg

Weekly Standard, May 28, 2012

There are many remarkable episodes in this compelling autobiography of Israel Meir Lau, the former chief rabbi of Israel. One in particular captures Lau’s character and shapes his future. Lulek (as he was called) was 5 years old in 1942 when he saw his father, Moshe, also a rabbi, beaten and deported to Treblinka, and only 6 when his mother, Chaya, was taken from him and murdered at Ravensbruck. Thereafter, he and his older brother Naphtali were—after working in a glass factory near the Piotrków ghetto—shipped to the Czestochowa labor camp in Poland.

The defining episode occured when the labor camp’s commandant had lined up the 10 children in Czestochowa and told them that they would be slaughtered because they were “useless.” The 7-year-old Lulek imagined he had “formed a small mound from the mud and stood on top of it in order to make myself taller.” From that imaginary mound, Lau relates, “I gave the first speech I had ever given in my life, which was also the speech of my life, in the battle for my life. I have delivered thousands of speeches [since], but none has been comparable to this speech”:

Why does the commandant say such things about us? That we are useless? That we are incapable? For twelve hours a day in Hortensia, the glass factory in Piotrków, I pushed a cart with sixty bottles of water among the furnaces of the glassblowers. Fill, empty, fill—and that was already a year ago. Now I’m older and I can do more. I, the youngest, and my friends who are older than I am—we have a right to live, too.                                                                (Top)

∙       Israel National News, August 24, 2012
Elad Benari

∙       Jerusalem Post, August 24, 2012
Jeremy Sharon

∙       Canadian Jewish News, August 23, 2012
Rabbi Dow Marmur

∙       Jewish Press, August 24th, 2012
Lori Lowenthal Marcus