THIS PASSOVER—LET US REMEMBER THOSE WHO SUFFERED IN EXILE & OPPRESSION—& CONTINUE TO FIGHT FOR DIGNITY & FREEDOM

We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication. Please address your response to:  Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, PO Box 175, Station  H, Montreal QC H3G 2K7 – Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284; E-mail: rob@isranet.wpsitie.com

The Holiday of Freedom: Passover 5774: Baruch Cohen, Apr. 11, 2014— The Passover story as told in the Haggadah recounts how Israel moved from darkness into light; from ignorance and a history of idolatry into freedom and glory.

What We Can’t Learn From the Passover Story: Yair Rosenberg, Tablet, Apr. 11, 2014 — There are many distinctive colors which Jews encounter at the Passover seder. There is red for wine and blood, green for the plague of frogs, and black for that of darkness.

People of the Word: The Story of the Jews, by Simon Schama (Book Review): Judith Shulevitz, New York Times, Mar. 28, 2014 — From generation to generation — l’dor va dor, as the Good Book says (in Hebrew) — there arises a historian who bequeaths unto the world yet another door-stopping history of the Jews.

Ancient Jewish Community in China to Hold Traditional Passover Seder for First Time: Anav Silverman, Algemeiner, Apr. 10, 2014 — In the Chinese city of Kaifeng, members of the ancient Jewish community were recently heard singing in Hebrew as they prepared for their first Passover seder.

On Topic Links

Pesach Message from Calgary United with Israel Founder: Sarah Bernamoff, Calgary United With Israel, Apr. 11, 2014

MKs Hold Model Seder With Seat Set Aside For Jailed Spy Jonathan Pollard: Gil Hoffman, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 9, 2014

3,300-Year-Old Egyptian Coffin Found in Jezreel Valley: Daniel K. Eisenbud, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 9, 2014  

Excavators Discover 3,800-Year-Old Biblical Fortress in City of David: Reenat Sinay, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 2, 2014

THE HOLIDAY OF FREEDOM: PASSOVER 5774                

Baruch Cohen                      

Apr. 11, 2014

In Loving Memory of Malca z”l

The Passover story as told in the Haggadah recounts how Israel moved from darkness into light; from ignorance and a history of idolatry into freedom and glory. A permanent and a continuing saga, Passover is an event which eternally calls people of all generations to hope and anticipation of a new dawn. Indeed, the springtime festival of Passover represents a new life for all who suffered during the long years of exile and oppression. Celebrating the joyful festival at the Seder table, we remember our long and stormy history.

The Passover story is living drama, a script involving Israel's children of all generations: a story of a fight for freedom, for human dignity, and for a permanent home for all the children of Israel. Passover is a democratic struggle for human dignity. From generation to generation one must picture oneself as having been freed from Egypt. The ongoing struggle for dignity and freedom has given the Jewish people the will, the power, and the determination to fight on.

Today, Passover’s legacy sustains the Jewish people's struggle against terrorism and global antisemitism. We learned from history and gained faith and the confidence to continue our struggle against all present enemies – toward the ultimate victory.

The story of Passover enjoins all men and women to join in brotherhood, to join in the building of Jerusalem and Israel and, by that very fact in the rebuilding of the world! This festival is the festival of human freedom, a fascinating miracle by which human dignity is restored to all generations.

Hag Pesach Sameah! To all CIJR’s friends and to the entire am Israel, the Jewish people, and to all men and women of good will.

(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research,

And a member of the Holocaust Memorial Center)

Contents
                                  

WHAT WE CAN’T LEARN FROM THE PASSOVER STORY

Yair Rosenberg

Tablet, Apr. 11, 2014

There are many distinctive colors which Jews encounter at the Passover seder. There is red for wine and blood, green for the plague of frogs, and black for that of darkness. But there are no shades of grey. Nuance is a scarce commodity in the Passover account. In fact, the story of the Exodus is the prototypical black-and-white moral narrative. There are the innocent and enslaved Israelites, and then there are the cruel and literally baby-killing Egyptians. There are not two sides to this story. There is no “Egyptian narrative.” Though Jews do briefly note the tragedy of the loss of human life during the seder, pouring out drops of wine for each plague inflicted on their tormenters, this commemoration in no way excuses or sympathizes with the biblical Egyptians themselves. We are presented with an oppressed and an oppressor—a right and a wrong.

The inadequacy of this foundational Jewish narrative to address certain fundamental Jewish questions today was brought home to me as a college student several years ago. Mere hours before the onset of Passover, an email was sent to my school’s Progressive Jewish Alliance listserv with a link to the news that the Israeli government would be closing off the West Bank border for the duration of the holiday. The author of the email appended one question: “What does it mean if on Passover, the celebration of freedom, we lock in the people living under our control?”

From the perspective of the moral lesson of the Exodus, this is indeed a tremendous tragedy. To internalize the message of Passover is to recoil viscerally from all forms of oppression and control over other human beings. Herein lies the Jewish tradition’s sharp critique of power and slavery, and from this sprung the ideals which motivated rabbis like Abraham Joshua Heschel and Joachim Prinz to march arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights struggle. And it is also the Passover message which leads so many Jews today to criticize the policies of an Israeli government whose actions can sometimes seem difficult to reconcile with this central Jewish teaching. In this way, the plaintive question of the email reflects a most important Jewish value. It is a question we are right to ask.

But, just as importantly, the simple implied answer to the question—that Jews must not cordon off Palestinians on our own festival of freedom—is wrong. Because in the modern situation in which we Jews find ourselves in Israel, the black-and-white Passover narrative of yesteryear cannot help us. Why does the Israeli government close off the West Bank for Passover? Because there is a terrible and sordid history of violence originating from there on the Jewish holiday. In 2002, to take one example, in what has become known as the “Passover Massacre,” terrorists attacked a seder in Netanya, killing 30 civilians and injuring 140 others–including Holocaust survivors. With Jews gathering in large groups and the state security apparatus whittled down to a skeleton crew, Passover presents a tempting target for violent extremists.

Is the Israeli government right to act as it does? Is its tactic effective? Is it being unfair to a majority of Palestinians? These are valid questions. But what is abundantly clear is that there are two sides to this story. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unlike the Israelite-Egyptian one, is not reducible to an oppressed and an oppressor. Today, unlike in the Bible, the question is of drawing the tenuous line between defense of one’s self and respect for the other. To take the simple lesson of the Passover story and apply it here would be to impose a black-and-white moral paradigm upon a situation which is colored by greys. Mature moral thinking must be undergirded by the basic ideals of the Exodus, but cannot end with them, because reality rarely conforms to such a superficial reckoning.

But if the biblical Exodus presents us with only moral building blocks, but not their correct configuration, the rabbinic interpretation of the story in the form of Haggadah does point us in the right direction. For the rabbis, and the numerous anonymous contributors to the traditional Haggadah over the centuries, there is a clear telos to the Passover story: The Holy One, Blessed be He, did not only redeem our forefathers, but also redeemed us along with them, as it says: “It was us whom he took out, so that he might bring us to the Promised Land…” For God, it was not enough to take the Jewish people out of Egypt. To be Jewish is not merely to be outside of another’s control—it is to take control and responsibility for one’s self and for one’s nation, in one’s own land. Jews are called upon by tradition to make our best values manifest on the world stage. This is an ideal that could not be more relevant today.

When confronted with the difficult, painful moral choices we must make in Israel—both for the sake of peace and the sake of security—many Jews are tempted to give up on the messy business of nation-building and the exercise of power. Some on the right choose to deny the religious and national value of the state, waiting in their cloistered spiritual enclaves for the Messiah and the advent of the perfect Jewish polity. Others on the left advise washing our hands of the Israel project, and leaving a single, bi-national, non-Jewish state in our wake. The Haggadah, and the Jews who read and augmented it throughout the centuries, reminds us that to be Jewish is to do neither of these. Rather, as Michael Oren, Israel’s former Ambassador to the United States, has written:

    Our responsibility today is to prove to ourselves, and the world, that the phrase “Jewish state” is not in fact a contradiction in terms. Let us remain cognizant not only of our great achievements … but also of the weighty responsibilities we bear: the responsibilities of reconciling our heritage with our sovereignty, our strength with our com­passion, and our will to survive with our desire to inspire others.

Next year in Jerusalem.

Contents
                                  

PEOPLE OF THE WORD: ‘THE STORY OF THE JEWS,’

 BY SIMON SCHAMA (BOOK REVIEW)                                                                                      

Judith Shulevitz

New York Times, Mar. 28, 2014

From generation to generation — l’dor va dor, as the Good Book says (in Hebrew) — there arises a historian who bequeaths unto the world yet another door-stopping history of the Jews. Forty-one years ago, a young history professor at Cambridge named Simon Schama agreed to complete one such work, left unfinished by the great British Jewish historian Cecil Roth when he died. Schama tried to do the job, he really did, but “for whatever reasons the graft wouldn’t take,” as he writes in the foreword of his own “The Story of the Jews.” Now we know why. Roth was a splendid writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of his field, and Schama is a splendid writer with an encyclopedic acquaintance with a wide range of fields. But Roth wrote history from above, chronicling the doings of great men entangled in great events, whereas Schama writes history from below, and from the middle and from other unexpected angles, resurrecting the unrecorded and long-­forgotten, and analyzing the social and cultural forces that shaped his subjects’ lives. Roth’s and Schama’s approaches to history are at least two generations apart, and Schama’s is the more user-friendly (to this reader, anyway). Although his book, which ends in the 15th century, is destined to become part of a two-volume set big enough to prop anything open, there’s nothing thudding about it.

In both “The Story of the Jews” and the BBC documentary now airing on PBS, Schama wisely avoids the grand narrative arc and homes in instead on the artifacts — the papyrus fragment, the synagogue mosaic, the illuminated atlas of the world — that yield telling vignettes. We start two and a half millenniums ago with Shelomam, a Judean mercenary in the service of the Persian king garrisoned in a Jewish colony on Elephantine, an island in the upper Nile, whose father writes to advise him about getting hold of some overdue pay; we end around 1500 with Abraham Zacuto, a rabbi-astronomer whose uncommonly accurate “Perpetual Almanach for the Movement of Celestial Bodies” guided Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama on their voyages of discovery. Zacuto himself, however, is adrift at sea, along with some of the tens of thousands of Spanish and Portuguese Jews forced off the Iberian Peninsula by the expulsion of the Jews that began in 1492. After being captured twice by pirates, Zacuto finds his way to Tunis. There he writes, naturally, his own history of the Jews. Zacuto’s is a strange book, a mishmash of truth and legend about patriarchs and sages and his own contemporaries that is less a history than one lost Jewish soul’s “encounter with the teeming generations,” as Schama puts it. Though Schama is writing history, you can tell that he identifies.

Most of the book celebrates Schama’s main thesis: that Jews were not the rigidly pious and self-segregating people Christian invective as well as the theologically dominated research of the late 19th and early 20th centuries made them out to be. On the contrary. From the beginning of their known history and for centuries thereafter, Jews commingled with Canaanites, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, pre-Muslim Arabs, Muslim Arabs and Christian Europeans. It was only when the Christians and Muslims turned on the Jews, singling them out for humiliation and, in the case of the Christians, grotesque insult and slaughter, that Jews began to withdraw or be pushed into their own separate spheres.

During the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., for instance, Jewish colonists on Elephantine flourished in the company of their Egyptian neighbors. The Elephantine Jews built their temple of Yahu across the street from the Egyptian temple of ­Khnum — even though, technically, the Bible forbade Jews to build a temple outside Jerusalem. The Jewish soldiers and their families were chided by their betters in Jerusalem, who disapproved of the Elephantines’ high rate of intermarriage and their lax standards of Passover observance, but Schama is charmed by their easy­going urbanity. Like “so many other Jewish societies, planted among the Gentiles,” he writes, Elephantine was “worldly, cosmopolitan, vernacular (Aramaic) not Hebrew, obsessed with law and property, money-minded, fashion-conscious, much concerned with the making and breaking of marriages, providing for the children, the niceties of the social pecking order and both the delights and the burdens of the Jewish ritual calendar. And it doesn’t seem to have been especially bookish.”

Schama is a mostly secular Jew who has devoted the bulk of his career to non-Jewish history, which may be why he enjoys flaunting the evidence that Jews were heterodox and syncretistic and embraced the foreign cultures (Persian, Hellenist, Andalusian) that absorbed them through conquest or exile or just by luring them to their thriving cities. He writes most ebulliently about the hybridism that resulted. “Houses and villas of surprising size and splendor” from the Hellenistic Hasmonean era were built in and around Jerusalem, Schama says, “boasting spacious rooms with fresco-decorated walls. Vines curl, lilies unfurl, pomegranates press against the calyx.”…

You can’t dismiss Schama’s account of Jewish pluralism as anachronistic or tendentious. It draws on scholarship going back half a century, which has demolished the stereotype of the postexilic Jew cut off from the poetry, art and mores of his — and her — place and time. Still, a synoptic historian of the Jews has no choice but to address the age-old question of how they managed to keep their religion and identity intact through the destructions of two temples, multiple exiles, repeated attempts at conversion and extermination, and the sheer passage of time. Schama has a theory about that, too. It’s more familiar than some of his other ones, but he brings to it his considerable powers of cultural appreciation. The answer is the Word. By the Word he means, as you might expect, the Book, or Torah, which began to be read aloud every week after the return from the Babylonian Exile in the sixth century B.C., functioning as a “compact, transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and self-strengthening counsel.”

But Schama also has in mind the words that unusually widespread literacy kept at the center of Jewish life, possibly as early as the 10th century B.C. In the ninth century B.C., a farmer south of Jerusalem is known to have consulted his almanac. A century and a half after that, any Jerusalemite willing to crawl underground could read the inscription memorializing the engineering feat that is King Hezekiah’s water tunnel, designed to keep his desert city drinking if it came under siege. Amulets stuffed with little prayer scrolls could be hung on the body. Around the first or second century of the Christian Era, readers could entertain themselves with Greco-Judaic novels. The history-minded could turn to the account of the Roman-Jewish wars written by the Jewish general turned Roman accomplice, Josephus.

And then there’s the “oral law,” the dynamic interpretation and reinterpretation of the Torah begun by the Pharisees more than 2,000 years ago that to this day unites learned Jews across time and space in an unstoppable flow of argument, sarcasm and raconteurship. (The Talmud and subsequent commentaries contain nearly as much parable as legal discussion, also much arch rabbinical wit.) For the record, Schama does not subscribe to the “minimalist” school of archaeology that considers the Torah entirely fictitious. Recent analyses of Biblical Hebrew and new archaeological findings bolster the likelihood that, though the Bible is by no means a history, it has credible history in it.

In the four decades since Schama first tried his hand at Jewish history, its study has burst out of seminaries and tiny, marginalized departments and become an extraordinarily fertile collective endeavor, in part because there were so many religiously tinged or frankly anti-Semitic misconceptions about Jews on hand for debunking. You’d think that the task of synthesizing the available information would be harder today than it was back then. But Schama has pulled it off with opinionated flair and literary grace, thereby discharging his debt to Roth and taking his own place among the generations.

Contents
                                  

ANCIENT JEWISH COMMUNITY IN CHINA TO HOLD

TRADITIONAL PASSOVER SEDER FOR FIRST TIME                                                                        

Anav Silverman                                             

Algemeiner, Apr. 10, 2014

In the Chinese city of Kaifeng, members of the ancient Jewish community were recently heard singing in Hebrew as they prepared for their first Passover seder. They were singing the traditional song from the Passover hagaddah, V’hi She’amda, led by the Kaifeng community cantor. Nearly 100 members of the ancient Jewish community of Kaifeng, China, are expected to attend a first-of-its-kind traditional Passover seder on Monday, April 14. The seder, which is being sponsored by the Jerusalem-based Shavei Israel organization, will be conducted for the first time by 28-year-old Tzuri (Heng) Shi, who made aliyah to Israel from Kaifeng a few years ago with the help of Shavei Israel, and completed his formal return to Judaism last year.‎

Tzuri came to Kaifeng with all of the traditional Passover items including matzah, Passover wine, traditional charoset and horseradish, as well as Passover haggadahs. The haggadahs were prepared especially in Hebrew and Chinese.‎ “We are proud and excited to organize this historic event,” said Shavei Israel Chairman and Founder Michael Freund. “Kaifeng’s Jewish descendants are a living link between China and the Jewish people, and it is very moving to see the remnants of this community returning to their Jewish roots as they prepare for Passover,” he added.‎

Scholars believe the first Jews settled in Kaifeng, which was one of China’s imperial capitals, during the 8th or 9th Century. They are said to have been Sephardic Jewish merchants from Persia or Iraq who made their way eastward along the Silk Route and established themselves in the city with the blessing of the Chinese emperor.‎ Kaifeng also houses China’s oldest known synagogue. In 1163, Kaifeng’s Jews built a large and beautiful synagogue, which was subsequently renovated and rebuilt on numerous occasions throughout the centuries. At its peak, during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), the Kaifeng Jewish community reached its height of 5,000 people with rabbis, synagogues, and Jewish institutions. But widespread intermarriage and assimilation, as well as the death of the community’s last rabbi two centuries ago, brought about its demise by the middle of the 19th century.

‎The community was then forced to sell the synagogue and Torah scrolls, according to Shavei Israel’s website.‎ Nevertheless, many of the families sought to preserve their Jewish identity and pass it down to their descendants, who continued to observe various Jewish customs. Currently, there are estimated to be between 500 to 1,000 identifiable Jewish descendants in Kaifeng.‎ “In recent years, many members of the community have begun to explore their heritage – thanks in part to the Internet, which opened up new worlds for them and provided access to information about Judaism and Israel that was previously inaccessible to them,” Freund noted.‎

Freund is the founder of Shavei Israel, a non-profit organization that aims to reconnect descendants of Jews from around the world with the people and State of Israel. The organization provides assistance and Jewish outreach programs to a wide range of communities including the Bnei Menashe of India, Bnei Anousim in Spain, communities in Portugal and South America, the Subbotnik Jews of Russia, as well as the Jewish community in China.‎

Contents

CIJR wishes all its friends and supporters:

Hag Pesach Sameach – Happy Passover

Pesach Message from Calgary United with Israel Founder: Sarah Bernamoff, Calgary United With Israel, Apr. 11, 2014 —

 With Pesach quickly approaching, I wanted to wish Pesach Sameach – a Happy Passover – on behalf of Calgary United with Israel (CUWI) and myself, to everyone.

MKs Hold Model Seder With Seat Set Aside For Jailed Spy Jonathan Pollard: Gil Hoffman, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 9, 2014—Why was this meal at the Knesset different from other meals? There were 10 MKs, matza, grape juice and bitter herbs. And an empty seat for Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard.

3,300-Year-Old Egyptian Coffin Found in Jezreel Valley: Daniel K. Eisenbud, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 9, 2014 — A routine salvage excavation in the northern Jezreel Valley unearthed a rare and well-preserved coffin, as well as numerous bronze and clay artifacts, dating to the 13th century BCE, the Antiquities Authority announced on Wednesday.

Excavators Discover 3,800-Year-Old Biblical Fortress in City of David: Reenat Sinay, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 2, 2014—After a 15-year-long excavation defined as one of the most complex ever conducted in Israel, archeologists have finished uncovering a massive Canaanite fortress dating back to the time of Kings David and Solomon.

Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research/ L'institut Canadien de recherches sur le Judaïsme, www.isranet.org

Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284 ; ber@isranet.wpsitie.com