My great-grandfather’s brother, Michael Adler, was a
distinguished rabbi who in 1916 compiled the “Prayer Book for Jewish Sailors and
Soldiers” at the front during World War I. As “chaplain,” he toured battlefields
administering last rites. At the end of the war he asked if British Jews had
done their duty.
“Did those British citizens of the House of Israel to whom equality of rights
and equality of opportunity were granted by the State some sixty years ago, did
these men and women do their duty in the ordeal of battle?” he wrote. “Our
answer is a clear and unmistakable YES! English Jews have every reason to be
satisfied with the degree of their participation both at home and on the
battlefronts in the struggle for victory. Let the memory of our sacred dead —
who number over 2,300 — testify to this.”
The question for European Jewry was always the same: belonging. Be they French
or German, they worried, even in their emancipation, that the Christian
societies that had half-accepted them would turn on them. Theodor Herzl,
witnessing French anti-Semitism during the Dreyfus case, wrote “The Jewish
State” in 1896 out of the conviction that full acceptance for the Jews would
never come.
Herzl was prescient. Zionism was born of a reluctant conclusion: that Jews
needed a homeland because no other place would ever be home. Scrawny scholars
would become vigorous tillers of the soil in the Holy Land. Jews would never
again go meekly to the slaughter.
The ravages of European nonacceptance endure. I see within my own family how the
disappearance of a Jewish woman grabbed by Nazis on the streets of Krakow in
1941 can devour her descendants. I understand the rage of an Israeli, Naomi
Ragen, whose words were forwarded by a cousin: “And I think of the rest of
Europe, who rounded up our grandparents and great-grandparents, and relatives —
men, women and children — and sent them off to be gassed, no questions asked.
And I think: They are now the moral arbiters of the free world? They are telling
the descendants of the people they murdered how to behave when other
anti-Semites want to kill them?”
Those anti-Semites would be Hamas, raining terror on Israel, whose annihilation
they seek. No state, goes the Israeli case, would not respond with force to such
provocation. If there are more than 1,000 Palestinian deaths (including 200
children), and more than 50 Israeli deaths, Israel argues, it is the fault of
Hamas, for whom Palestinian victims are the most powerful anti-Israeli argument
in the court of world opinion.
I am a Zionist because the story of my forebears convinces me that Jews needed
the homeland voted into existence by United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947,
calling for the establishment of two states — one Jewish, one Arab — in Mandate
Palestine. I am a Zionist who believes in the words of Israel’s founding charter
of 1948 declaring that the nascent state would be based “on freedom, justice and
peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.”
What I cannot accept, however, is the perversion of Zionism that has seen the
inexorable growth of a Messianic Israeli nationalism claiming all the land
between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River; that has, for almost a
half-century now, produced the systematic oppression of another people in the
West Bank; that has led to the steady expansion of Israeli settlements on the
very West Bank land of any Palestinian state; that isolates moderate
Palestinians like Salam Fayyad in the name of divide-and-rule; that pursues
policies that will make it impossible to remain a Jewish and democratic state;
that seeks tactical advantage rather than the strategic breakthrough of a
two-state peace; that blockades Gaza with 1.8 million people locked in its
prison and is then surprised by the periodic eruptions of the inmates; and that
responds disproportionately to attack in a way that kills hundreds of children.
This, as a Zionist, I cannot accept. Jews, above all people, know what
oppression is. Children over millennia were the transmission belt of Jewish
survival, the object of what the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his daughter Fania
Oz-Salzberger have called “the intergenerational quizzing that ensures the
passing of the torch.” No argument, no Palestinian outrage or subterfuge, can
gloss over what Jewish failure the killing of children in such numbers
represents.
The Israeli case for the bombardment of Gaza could be foolproof. If Benjamin
Netanyahu had made a good-faith effort to find common cause with Palestinian
moderates for peace and been rebuffed, it would be. He has not. Hamas is vile. I
would happily see it destroyed. But Hamas is also the product of a situation
that Israel has reinforced rather than sought to resolve.
This corrosive Israeli exercise in the control of another people, breeding the
contempt of the powerful for the oppressed, is a betrayal of the Zionism in
which I still believe.
April 30,
2012
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Benzion
Netanyahu, a scholar of Judaic history who lobbied in the United States for the
creation of the Jewish state, wrote a revisionist account of the Spanish
Inquisition and became a behind-the-scenes adviser to his son Benjamin
Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, died on Monday at his home in Jerusalem. He
was 102.
The prime minister’s office announced the death.
The elder Mr. Netanyahu’s views were relentlessly hawkish. He argued that Jews
inevitably faced discrimination that was racial, not religious, and that
compromising with Arabs was futile.
In the 1940s, as the executive director of the New Zionist Organization in the
United States, he met with policy makers like Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and
Secretary of State Dean Acheson. He also wrote hard-hitting full-page
advertisements that appeared in The New York Times and other newspapers.
His group, which was part of the right-wing movement known as revisionist
Zionism, was originally against creating the new Israel by dividing Palestine
between Jews and Arabs. It wanted a bigger Jewish state, which would have
included present-day Jordan.
The partition was ultimately made, but Mr. Netanyahu came to support the smaller
state and was instrumental in building American support for it, according to
Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in
Washington.
Mr. Medoff, in a letter to The Jerusalem Post in 2005, said that Mr. Netanyahu
had persuaded the Republican Party to call for a Jewish state in its 1944
platform. It was the first time a major American party had done this, and the
Democrats followed suit.
As a historian, Mr. Netanyahu reinterpreted the Inquisition in “The Origins of
the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain” (1995). The predominant view had
been that Jews were persecuted for secretly practicing their religion after
pretending to convert to Roman Catholicism. Mr. Netanyahu, in 1,384 pages,
offered evidence that most Jews in Spain had willingly become Catholics and were
enthusiastic about their new religion.
Jews were persecuted, he concluded — many of them burned at the stake — for
being perceived as an evil race rather than for anything they believed or had
done. Jealousy over Jews’ success in the economy and at the royal court only
fueled the oppression, he wrote. The book traced what he called “Jew hatred” to
ancient Egypt, long before Christianity.
Though praised for its insights, the book was also criticized as having ignored
standard sources and interpretations. Not a few reviewers noted that it seemed
to look at long-ago cases of anti-Semitism through the rear-view mirror of the
Holocaust.
But to Mr. Netanyahu, “Jewish history is a history of holocausts,” as he said in
an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker in 1998. He suggested that
Hitler’s genocide was different only in scale.
Mr. Netanyahu believed that Jews remain endangered in the Middle East. A “vast
majority of Israeli Arabs would choose to exterminate us if they had the option
to do so,” he said in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv in 2009.
Arabs, he said, are “an enemy by essence” who cannot compromise and will respond
only to force.
Benjamin Netanyahu, while defending his father against accusations of extremism,
has insisted that his own views differ from his father’s. And he has dismissed
conjectures about his father’s influence on his decision making as
“psychobabble.”
In his New Yorker article, Mr. Remnick wrote that Israelis seemed in the dark
about the extent of Benzion Netanyahu’s influence on his son. Benzion Netanyahu,
he wrote, was “nearly a legend, a kind of secret.” But, he added, using the
younger Netanyahu’s nickname, “To understand Bibi, you have to understand the
father.”
Benzion Mileikowsky was born on March 25, 1910, in Warsaw, then part of the
Russian empire. His father, Nathan, was a rabbi who toured Europe and the United
States, making speeches supporting Zionism. After Nathan took the family to
Palestine in 1920, he changed the family name to Netanyahu, which means
God-given.
Benzion studied medieval history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he
became involved with the revisionist Zionists, who had split from their
mainstream counterparts, believing they were too conciliatory to the British
authorities governing Palestine.
The revisionists were led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, whose belief in the necessity
of an “iron wall” between Israel and its Arab neighbors has influenced Israeli
politics since the 1930s. Jabotinsky is the most popular street name in Israel,
and the ruling Likud party traces its roots to his movement.
In 1940, Mr. Netanyahu went to the United States to be secretary to Mr.
Jabotinsky, who was seeking to build American support for his militant New
Zionists. Mr. Jabotinsky died the same year, and Mr. Netanyahu became executive
director, a post he held until 1948.
While in the United States Mr. Netanyahu earned his Ph.D. from Dropsie College
of Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia (now the Center for Advanced
Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania). He wrote his dissertation on
Isaac Abrabanel (1437-1508), a Jewish scholar and statesman who opposed the
banishment of Jews from Spain.
Mr. Netanyahu returned to Jerusalem after Israel declared its independence in
1948. He became editor of the “Encyclopedia Hebraica,” in Hebrew. During the
1950s and ’60s, he and his family lived alternately in Israel and in the United
States, where he taught at Dropsie, the University of Denver and Cornell
University.
In the 1960s, Mr. Netanyahu edited in English two more major reference books:
the “Encyclopedia Judaica” and “The World History of the Jewish People.” In
addition to Benjamin, who was Israel’s prime minister from 1996 to 1999 and was
elected again in 2009, Mr. Netanyahu is survived by another son, Iddo, a
radiologist and writer. His wife, the former Cela Segal, died in 2000.
Mr. Netanyahu’s eldest son, Jonathan, commanded the spectacular rescue of more
than 100 Jewish and Israeli hostages on board an Air France jet at Entebbe
Airport in Uganda in 1976. He was the only Israeli soldier killed.
December
17, 2011
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO
Paula E.
Hyman, a social historian who pioneered the study of women in Jewish life and
became an influential advocate for women’s equality in Jewish religious
practice, including their ordination as rabbis, died on Thursday at her home in
New Haven. She was 65.
The cause was breast cancer, said her husband, Dr. Stanley Rosenbaum.
Dr. Hyman, a professor of modern Jewish history at Yale University, wrote 10
books about the Jewish experience in Europe and the United States, many of them
focused on women’s roles in various communities before and after the immense
Jewish migrations of the 19th and 20th centuries.
She spotlighted the special stresses confronting married Jewish women from
Eastern Europe when they arrived in the United States, for instance: although
they were used to working outside the home, even as primary breadwinners in some
ultrareligious families, they were initially housebound in America, where custom
placed married women in the home.
In her books Dr. Hyman chronicled how married Jewish women from Eastern and
Western Europe overcame such customs to become full partners in family
businesses, a major part of the New York garment work force and leaders of
successful community protests like the Lower East Side kosher meat boycott of
1902 and the New York rent strike of 1907.
Her works are considered seminal in creating a new field of historical study —
part women’s history, part Jewish history, part history of immigration in
America.
“The field of American Jewish women’s history as a scholarly enterprise owes its
origins to Paula Hyman,” said Hasia R. Diner, a professor of history at New York
University and director of the university’s Goldstein-Goren Center for American
Jewish History.
Colleagues said Dr. Hyman’s work was informed by twin, deep-rooted and sometimes
conflicting bonds: to Judaism and to feminism. When she was a graduate student
at Columbia in 1972, she and a dozen other Jewish feminists delivered a historic
manifesto to hundreds of rabbis gathered for the annual meeting of the
Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly.
Titled “Jewish Women Call for Change,” it demanded full equality for women in
the practice of Conservative Judaism, one of the three major Jewish
denominations. The Conservative denomination accommodated modern culture more
than the Orthodox branch but less so than the Reform, which ordained an American
woman as a rabbi for the first time that year.
“Call for Change” addressed the Conservative leaders because they continued to
observe many Orthodox rules excluding women: denying them full participation in
rituals, denying their right to initiate religious divorces and barring them
from becoming rabbis and cantors. The bans on ordination and full participation
have since been lifted, while the right to initiate divorce is still denied.
Partly to further the cause, Dr. Hyman agreed in 1981 to become dean of
undergraduates at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Upper Manhattan, the
flagship educational institution of the Conservative movement. Hired by the
seminary’s chancellor, Rabbi Gerson D. Cohen, an outspoken supporter of women’s
equality, she was the first woman to hold the post. Rabbi Cohen ordained the
first female Conservative rabbi in 1985.
Paula Ellen Hyman was born on Sept. 30, 1946, in Boston, the oldest of three
children of Sydney and Ida Hyman. Her father was an office manager; her mother
worked as a bookkeeper. Her interest in Jewish tradition and history led her to
enroll simultaneously at Radcliffe College and the Hebrew Teachers College of
Boston, now known as Hebrew College.
After graduating in 1968 from Radcliffe, she pursued her graduate studies at
Columbia University, where she received her Ph.D. in 1975. In 1969 she married
Dr. Rosenbaum, who survives her, as do their daughters, Judith and Adina
Rosenbaum; her mother; two sisters, Toby and Merle Hyman; and two grandchildren.
Influenced by the feminist movement of the 1960s, Dr. Hyman sought to apply
“consciousness raising” principles to Jewish traditions that, in her view, made
women second-class members of their own cultural communities, said Martha
Ackelsberg, a fellow Columbia graduate student and now a professor of government
at Smith College. Dr. Hyman organized discussion groups that evolved into the
organization Ezrat Nashim (“Women’s Help”), which conceived and presented the
“Call for Change.”
Dr. Hyman’s early scholarly work focused on Jewish life in France at the turn of
the last century following the Dreyfus affair. She subsequently wrote about
Jewish assimilation in Europe during the same period.
In 1976, she and two colleagues wrote “The Jewish Woman in America,” an
unabashedly feminist view of the Jewish immigrant experience, in which Dr. Hyman
argued that Jewish women worked as hard as men, accomplished great things and
did it all while managing households single-handedly. It was, she said, “the
only book for which I received fan letters.”
The academic interest sparked by that book produced many of the 700 scholarly
articles collected in 1997 in the two-volume historical encyclopedia “Jewish
Women in America,” which Dr. Hyman and Dr. Deborah Dash Moore edited.
In an essay for the Jewish Women’s Archive, Dr. Hyman described the small dinner
party held by some of the original signers of the “Call for Change” manifesto on
Oct. 24, 1983, the day the Jewish Theological Seminary opened its rabbinical
school to women. “It seemed like a prolonged struggle,” she recalled saying at
the time.
But “in the context of Jewish history,” she added, “11 years was like the blink
of an eye.”
November
25, 2011
The New York Times
By MARK OPPENHEIMER
SAN
FRANCISCO — Growing up Jewish in North Dartmouth, Mass., Amy-Jill Levine loved
Christianity.
Her neighborhood “was almost entirely Portuguese and Roman Catholic,” Dr. Levine
said last Sunday at her book party here during the annual American Academy of
Religion conference. “My introduction to Christianity was ethnic Roman
Catholicism, and I loved it. I used to practice giving communion to Barbie.
Church was like the synagogue: guys in robes speaking languages I didn’t
understand. My favorite movie was ‘The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima.’ ”
Christianity might have stayed just a fascination, but for an unfortunate
episode in second grade: “When I was 7 years old, one girl said to me on the
school bus, ‘You killed our Lord.’ I couldn’t fathom how this religion that was
so beautiful was saying such a dreadful thing.”
That encounter with the dark side of her friends’ religion sent Dr. Levine on a
quest, one that took her to graduate school in New Testament studies and
eventually to Vanderbilt University, where she has taught since 1994. Dr. Levine
is still a committed Jew — she attends an Orthodox synagogue in Nashville — but
she is a leading New Testament scholar.
And she is not alone. The book she has just edited with a Brandeis University
professor, Marc Zvi Brettler, “The Jewish Annotated New Testament” (Oxford
University Press), is an unusual scholarly experiment: an edition of the
Christian holy book edited entirely by Jews. The volume includes notes and
explanatory essays by 50 leading Jewish scholars, including Susannah Heschel, a
historian and the daughter of the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel; the
Talmudist Daniel Boyarin; and Shaye J. D. Cohen, who teaches ancient Judaism at
Harvard.
As any visitor to the book expo at this conference discovered, there is a glut
of Bibles and Bible commentaries. One of the exhibitors, Zondervan, publishes
hundreds of different Bibles, customized for your subculture, niche or need.
Examples include a Bible for those recovering from addiction; the Pink Bible,
for women “who have been impacted by breast cancer”; and the Faithgirlz! Bible,
about which the publisher writes: “Every girl wants to know she’s totally unique
and special. This Bible says that with Faithgirlz! sparkle!”
Nearly all these Bibles are edited by and for Christians. The Christian Bible
comprises the Old and New Testaments, so editors offer a Christian perspective
on both books. For example, editors might add a footnote to the story of King
David, in the Old Testament books I and II Samuel, reminding readers that in the
New Testament, David is an ancestor of Jesus.
Jewish scholars have typically been involved only with editions of the Old
Testament, which Jews call the Hebrew Bible or, using a Hebrew acronym, the
Tanakh. Of course, many curious Jews and Christians consult all sorts of
editions, without regard to editor. But among scholars, Christians produce
editions of both sacred books, while Jewish editors generally consult only the
book that is sacred to them. What’s been left out is a Jewish perspective on the
New Testament — a book Jews do not consider holy but which, given its influence
and literary excellence, no Jew should ignore.
So what does this New Testament include that a Christian volume might not?
Consider Matthew 2, when the wise men, or magi, herald Jesus’s birth. In this
edition, Aaron M. Gale, who has edited the Book of Matthew, writes in a footnote
that “early Jewish readers may have regarded these Persian astrologers not as
wise but as foolish or evil.” He is relying on the first-century Jewish
philosopher Philo, who at one point calls Balaam, who in the Book of Numbers
talks with a donkey, a “magos.”
Because the rationalist Philo uses the Greek word “magos” derisively — less a
wise man than a donkey-whisperer — we might infer that at least some educated
Jewish readers, like Philo, took a dim view of magi. This context helps explain
some Jewish skepticism toward the Gospel of Matthew, but it could also attest to
how charismatic Jesus must have been, to overcome such skepticism.
This volume is thus for anybody interested in a Bible more attuned to Jewish
sources. But it is of special interest to Jews who “may believe that any
annotated New Testament is aimed at persuasion, if not conversion,” Drs. Levine
and Brettler write in their preface. “This volume, edited and written by Jewish
scholars, should not raise that suspicion.”
Jews who peek inside these forbidding covers will also find essays anticipating
the arguments of Christian evangelists. Confronted by Christians who extol their
religion’s conceptions of neighbor love or the afterlife, for example, many Jews
do not know their own tradition’s teachings. So “The Jewish Annotated New
Testament” includes essays like “The Concept of Neighbor in Jewish and Christian
Ethics” and “Afterlife and Resurrection.”
At a panel discussion before the book party, Drs. Brettler and Levine conceded
that the New Testament’s moments of anti-Semitism would be too much for some to
overlook (especially protective Jewish mothers).
“I told one woman I knew that her son might really like this book,” Dr. Brettler
said. “She said, ‘If he wants it, he can buy it for himself.’ ”
Thirty years ago, when Dr. Levine was starting graduate school, an aunt asked
her why she was reading the New Testament. “I said, ‘Have you read it?’ and she
said, ‘No, why would I read that hateful, anti-Semitic disgusting book?’ ”
But Dr. Levine insists her aunt, like other Jews, had nothing to fear. “The more
I study New Testament,” Dr. Levine said, “the better Jew I become.”
IN his novel “Deception,” Philip Roth has the American protagonist say to his
British mistress: “In England, whenever I’m in a public place, a restaurant, a
party, the theater, and someone happens to mention the word ‘Jew,’ I notice that
the voice always drops just a little.”
She challenges him on this observation, prompting the American, a middle-aged
writer, to say, yes, that’s how “you all say ‘Jew.’ Jews included.”
This prompted a memory: sitting with my mother in an Italian restaurant in the
upscale London neighborhood of St. John’s Wood circa 1970 and asking her, after
she had pointed to a family in the opposite corner and said they were Jewish,
why her voice dropped to a whisper when she said the J word.
“I’m not whispering,” Mom said and went on cutting up her spaghetti so it would
fit snugly on a fork.
But she was — in that subliminal, awkward, half-apologetic way of many English
Jews. My parents were South African immigrants. Their priority was assimilation.
They were not about to change their name but nor were they about to rock the
boat. I never thought much about why I left the country they adopted and became
an American. It happened. One thing in life leads to another. But then, a year
ago, I returned.
I was at my sister’s place and a lodger of hers, seeing I had a BlackBerry,
said, “Oh, you’ve got a JewBerry.” Huh? “Yeah, a JewBerry.” I asked him what he
meant. “Well,” he shrugged, “BBM — BlackBerry Messenger.” I still didn’t get it.
“You know, it’s free!”
Right.
None of this carried malice as far I could see. It was just flotsam carried on
the tide of an old anti-Semitism. The affable, insidious English anti-Semitism
that stereotypes and snubs, as in the judgment of some gent at the Athenaeum on
a Jew’s promotion to the House of Lords: “Well, these people are very clever.”
Or, as Jonathan Margolis noted in The Guardian, the tipsy country squire
commenting on how much he likes the Jewish family who just moved into the
village before adding, “Of course, everybody else hates them.”
Of course.
Jewish identity is an intricate subject and quest. In America, because I’ve
criticized Israel and particularly its self-defeating expansion of settlements
in the West Bank, I was, to self-styled “real Jews,” not Jewish enough, or even
— join the club — a self-hating Jew. In Britain I find myself exasperated by the
muted, muffled way of being a Jew. Get some pride, an inner voice says, speak
up!
But it’s complicated. Britain, with its almost 300,000 Jews and more than two
million Muslims, is caught in wider currents — of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and political Islam. Traditionally, England’s genteel anti-Semitism has
been more of the British establishment than the British working class, whereas
anti-Muslim sentiment has been more working-class than establishment.
Now a ferocious anti-Zionism of the left — the kind that has called for academic
boycotts of Israel — has joined the mix, as has some Muslim anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile Islamophobia has been fanned by the rightist fabrication of the
“Eurabia” specter — the fantasy of a Muslim takeover that sent Anders Breivik on
his Norwegian killing spree and feeds far-right European and American bigotry.
Where then should a Jew in Britain who wants to speak up stand? Not with the
Knesset members who have met in Israel with European rightists like Filip
Dewinter of Belgium in the grotesque belief that they are Israel’s allies
because they hate Muslims. Not with the likes of the Jewish writer Melanie
Phillips, whose book “Londonistan” is a reference for the Islamophobes. Nor with
those who, ignoring sinister historical echoes, propose ostracizing Israeli
academics and embrace an anti-Zionism that flirts with anti-Semitism.
Perhaps a good starting point is a parallel pointed out to me by Maleiha Malik,
a professor of law at King’s College London. A century ago, during the Sidney
Street siege of 1911, it was the Jews of London’s East End who, cast as
Bolsheviks, were said to be “alien extremists.” Winston Churchill, no less,
argued in 1920 that Jews were part of a “worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow
of civilization and the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested
development.”
The lesson is clear: Jews, with their history, cannot become the systematic
oppressors of another people. They must be vociferous in their insistence that
continued colonization of Palestinians in the West Bank will increase Israel’s
isolation and ultimately its vulnerability.
That — not fanning Islamophobia — is the task before diaspora Jews. To speak up
in Britain also means confronting the lingering, voice-lowering anti-Semitism.
When Roth’s hero returns to New York, he finds he’s been missing something. His
lover, now distant, asks what.
“Jews.”
“We’ve got some of them in England, you know.”
“Jews with force, I’m talking about. Jews with appetite. Jews without shame.”
The Jewish
custom of shiva, the seven days of intense mourning, often has its spirited
aspects.
Despite the prevailing sorrow, visitors might gather around platters of food in
a bereaved family’s home and celebrate a long life, or remember foibles with
affectionate laughter.
But not after the death of a child, particularly one who died in such chilling
fashion as Leiby Kletzky, the 8-year-old Brooklyn boy who was kidnapped and
killed this week.
Throughout the morning and afternoon on Friday, a stream of visitors entered the
Kletzky family’s brick apartment building on 15th Avenue in Borough Park. Almost
all were somber, as if on a mission they did not relish.
Shoeless and sitting on a low chair, Leiby’s father, Nachman, received the
visitors alone in a narrow dining room while his wife, Itta, and their four
daughters clustered in a bedroom off the kitchen.
Around the apartment, there were so many gifts of fruit and cakes that the
family had been forced to send some back. But these were no consolation,
visitors said.
“They’re trying to cope,” said Jonathan Schwartz, 42, a close friend. “They keep
on saying that God gave them the privilege to raise this child for nine years.”
Though most visitors had attended shivas before, several observed that no
gathering had approached the shock and deep grief of Leiby’s.
“If you had a dad go, 90 years old, it’s understandable,” said one family
friend, who asked that his name not be used. “This is harder to comprehend, the
worst of the worst.”
Mr. Schwartz told of how his 9-year-old son, Shimmy, had often sat beside Leiby
in synagogue and recently asked his father why he kept seeing his friend’s
picture in the newspapers. “He can’t stop thinking about it,” Mr. Schwartz said.
“He asks me if God just takes away kids at the age of 9.”
With the beginning of Sabbath approaching — a night and day when even shiva is
interrupted — Mr. Schwartz and other visitors grasped at the thought that the
usually joyous observance would provide a respite. “It’s the day of peace,” Mr.
Schwartz said. “It will affect us for the better.”
Still, it was hard to escape reminders of Leiby’s ordeal. Outside the building,
neighbors had posted a sign that said: “Please be sensitive to the family. DO
NOT share rumors, stories and information you have heard — at all!!” Leiby was
suffocated and his body was dismembered, but people close to the Kletzkys say
they have tried to spare the family the details.
There was also a note from Leiby’s parents posted in the building entryway,
thanking those “who assisted us above and beyond physically, emotionally and
spiritually — and to all from around the world, who had us in their thoughts and
prayers.”
In a contrasting tableau in the adjoining neighborhood of Kensington, two police
vans marked Crime Scene Unit were parked in front of a house whose resident had
been Levi Aron, the 35-year-old hardware store clerk charged with murdering
Leiby after the boy got lost while walking home alone from his day camp on
Monday. Knots of onlookers gathered behind barricades to glimpse investigators
removing brown cardboard boxes of evidence.
Mr. Aron was taken from Rikers Island to Bellevue Hospital Center, in Manhattan,
about 8 p.m. on Thursday after jail officials conducted an intake examination
and decided he required further psychiatric evaluation, said Sharman Stein, the
chief spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Correction. She said he was in
the Bellevue prison ward and “under very close watch.”
Shiva, prescribed for the death of a parent, child, sibling or spouse, harks
back to the Bible’s tale of the seven days that Joseph mourned his father, the
patriarch Jacob. The ritual has since been layered over with dozens of customs
observed differently by various Jewish communities. It generally begins the day
of the funeral, and in Orthodox circles it lasts to the morning of the seventh
day.
Close relatives do not work, cook or run errands. They spurn shoes, refrain from
showers and shaves, do not wear fresh clothes and sit in low chairs. Mirrors are
covered, and a candle burns round the clock.
The object is to concentrate on grieving. Visitors are to stay attuned to the
mourners’ feelings and not bombard them with remarks. They generally greet a
mourner with the words, “May God comfort you among the other mourners of Zion
and Jerusalem.”
But shiva can be a surprisingly busy time. Synagogues dispatch volunteers three
times a day to set up minyans, quorums of 10 for prayer, and often send along a
Torah, said Menashe Silber, a Hasidic community organizer.
Bereavement organizations like Chesed Shel Emes provide such necessities as the
low chairs and prayer books, according to Rabbi Mayer Berger, a director of
Chesed.
Samuel C. Heilman, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York
who wrote “When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son,” predicted that
for much of the shiva period at the Kletzky home there would be “a lot of
sitting in silence.”
“How do you explain such evil?” he said. “You can’t say God has done something
evil.”
Al Baker and
Matt Flegenheimer contributed reporting.
September 8, 2010
The New York Times
By MILES HOFFMAN
TODAY is the first day of Rosh Hashana, the holiday that marks the beginning
of the Jewish new year. For the next 10 days, through Yom Kippur, the Day of
Atonement, Jews around the world will gather to chant the prayers of the High
Holy Days to melodies that have been used for generations.
Some of the melodies will be simple and some complex, and some will be
particularly beautiful. What almost none of them will be is “classical”: Western
classical composition, the dominant feature of Christian sacred music for more
than a millennium, remains mostly absent from Jewish liturgical music. Given the
number of extraordinary Jewish classical composers over the last two centuries,
this absence is particularly striking.
But it’s not surprising. The reasons for the dearth of classical music in the
synagogue may be tangled, but they all lie in the familiar ground of Jewish
history and experience: religious observance, rabbinic law, social and legal
exclusion, systematic persecution, love of tradition — and the complicated
psychology of being Jewish in a largely gentile world.
Western classical music has various ancient antecedents, including,
interestingly, the early music of the Jewish liturgy. But its modern history
begins in the Middle Ages with music written for the Roman Catholic Church. And
to a large extent it owes its subsequent evolution to the work of musicians
trained and employed by the church, the great patron not just of musicians but
of artists, scribes and scholars.
It’s true that secular musical forms, training and traditions developed along
the way, and throughout history one finds great contrasts in style and emphasis
between sacred and secular forms in classical music.
But in terms of classical music’s basic principles, the similarities outweigh
the differences: Bach is still Bach and Mozart is still Mozart, whether in
Masses or sonatas. The language of classical music, in other words, is the
language of Christian church music.
Jews, however, were long excluded from the practice of Western classical music.
Jews were barred from church schools, of course, but until the Italian
Renaissance, and the later Enlightenment in other parts of Europe, they were
likewise forbidden from public academies, organizations and functions.
As a result, Jews were for the most part limited to cultivating and preserving
their own liturgical music, music for the synagogue and home prayer based on
ancient chants and motifs — and enriched over the centuries of the diaspora by
borrowing from the folk music of local cultures. From the 12th century to the
14th century, for example, elements of German, Spanish and French folk tunes all
found their way, modified and adapted, into Jewish liturgical melodies.
Rabbinic law tightened the limits still further by banning musical instruments
in the synagogue — and outside the synagogue, except during weddings. This
prohibition dated from the destruction of the Second Temple, in A.D. 70, after
which rabbis decided that the playing of musical instruments was inappropriate
for a people in mourning.
But explanations based on historical exclusion and rabbinic law go only so far.
What kept emancipated Jewish “classical” composers of the modern era from
writing music for the synagogue, as their Christian colleagues wrote for the
church? Where are the liturgical contributions of Salomone Rossi, Giacomo
Meyerbeer, Jacques Offenbach, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Erich Korngold
and Aaron Copland, to name just a few?
The answers rest in the eternal dual longings of the Jewish people: the longing,
on the one hand, for distinction, separateness and “chosenness,” and on the
other for acceptance and belonging.
These forces are always in conflict, but in the field of music, when Jewish
composers were finally free from prohibitions and persecution and began to
develop their talents within the cultural mainstream, their longing for
acceptance triumphed.
In a way, they were still able to remain separate, or “chosen,” if only by
becoming musicians, members of a rarified profession. But in the thrill of their
new freedom they sought the broadest possible citizenship, eagerly choosing to
write for their countries, or for the whole world, rather than for the much
narrower world of their co-religionists, and to define themselves by their
secular accomplishments.
Rossi, for example, did publish a collection of settings of Hebrew texts, but
he’s better known, and plays a more important role in music history, as an
innovator in early Baroque instrumental music and violin technique.
Meyerbeer and Offenbach, both German Jews, became more French than the French —
Meyerbeer as the king of French grand opera, Offenbach as the champion of
operetta. Mahler, who went so far as to convert to Catholicism, was a giant of
the symphony, and Korngold held similar sway over film music. Copland came to
define American classical music and Schoenberg, although he did write works on
Jewish subjects, including a setting for the Kol Nidre, the opening prayer
recitation for the Yom Kippur service, will forever be identified with his
internationally influential system of twelve-tone music.
It’s certainly strange that their very liberation as Jews led to composers’
leaving the substance of Judaism behind, at least artistically. But is it
realistic to expect brilliant Jewish composers, exposed to some of the most
magnificent artistic creations of Western civilization and struck by the
universal impact and appeal of those creations, to be satisfied setting Hebrew
texts for their local congregations?
Yes, it’s possible that if some of these great composers had written monumental
works for the synagogue, those works might eventually have found a broad public.
And some have: Ernest Bloch’s “Avodath Hakodesh” (“Sacred Service”), for
example, is widely performed — in concert halls more than synagogues — and
Leonard Bernstein’s settings of Hebrew texts have not lacked for mixed
audiences.
More recently, contemporary Jewish composers like Paul Schoenfield, Osvaldo
Golijov and Max Raimi have made compelling use of traditional Jewish tunes and
styles in music for the concert hall and found a sizeable audience.
But historically speaking, many Jewish composers simply felt compelled to strike
out well beyond their parochial origins, and to avoid at all costs the
possibility of being pigeon-holed as composers of “Jewish music.”
STILL, the interests of Jewish musicians are only a part of the story. Perhaps
even more important, many Jewish congregations over the years weren’t
particularly interested in changing their traditional musical practices in any
fundamental way — and in most cases still aren’t.
Under the pressures of the diaspora and persecution, “home” has often been a
fluid and elusive concept for Jews, a dream more than a reality. But if the
forms of worship remain the same, if the music remains the same, then any
synagogue anywhere can still feel like home.
This isn’t to say that musical beauty in the synagogue is not highly prized. The
Jews tend to have a deep appreciation, for example, for great cantorial singing,
and many synagogues have fine choirs. It’s also true that many distinguished
Jewish composers have set liturgical texts to music — the names Darius Milhaud,
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Hugo Weisgall come quickly to mind — and there’s
no diminishing their accomplishments or contributions.
Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that despite its undeniable artistic quality,
most of this music hasn’t caught on in any widespread way in Jewish liturgical
practice, and certainly hasn’t replaced the age-old chants as the most
comfortable and familiar way for most observant Jews to communicate with the
Almighty.
When it comes to music for the synagogue, invention and innovation have simply
not proved as important to the Jewish community as tradition and continuity.
Whether this is a good thing is an open question. But if nothing else, it’s a
testament to the enduring power of music itself, and to the role it has played
in sustaining a faith and a people.
December 5,
2008
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Emanuel
Rackman, the spiritual leader of the prominent Fifth Avenue Synagogue in
Manhattan and an outspoken advocate of a more inclusive, intellectually open
Orthodox Judaism, died Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.
The death was confirmed by his granddaughter Jessica Rackman.
A lawyer and a Talmudist by training, Rabbi Rackman argued for a more flexible
interpretation of Orthodoxy and the relevance of traditional Jewish law to
modern life.
“Perhaps, like Socrates, I corrupt youth, but I do teach that Judaism encourages
doubt, even as it enjoins faith and commitment,” he wrote in Commentary in 1966.
“A Jew dare not live with absolute certainty not only because certainty is the
hallmark of the fanatic and Judaism abhors fanaticism, but also because doubt is
good for the human soul, its humility, and consequently its greater potential
ultimately to discover its Creator.”
Rabbi Rackman was born in Albany, the son of a businessman and Talmudist who was
descended from six generations of rabbis. He studied at the Talmudical Academy
in New York, the high school affiliate of Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological
Seminary, where he continued his Talmudic studies while attending Columbia
University, which awarded him a law degree in 1933 and a doctorate in public law
in 1952. In 1934 he was ordained a rabbi.
He practiced law for nine years and was a weekend rabbi on Long Island. In
accordance with family tradition, he planned to earn his living as a lawyer
rather than as a rabbi, but on entering the Air Force in 1943, he was made a
chaplain. While in Germany, where he was military aide to the European Theater
commander’s special adviser on Jewish affairs, his encounters with Holocaust
victims caused him to reconsider his career.
In 1951, he was called up for active duty from the Air Force Reserve, but found
that his security clearance had been revoked because of his outspoken opposition
to the death penalties handed down in the Rosenberg spying case and his support
for the radical singer Paul Robeson.
Given the choice between accepting an honorable discharge or facing a military
trial, he opted for a trial. He not only won acquittal but earned a promotion
from major to lieutenant-colonel.
After the war, Rabbi Rackman became spiritual leader of Congregation Shaaray
Tefila in Far Rockaway, Queens. He also taught political science at Yeshiva
College and helped edit the journal Tradition. In the 1950s, he was president of
the New York Board of Rabbis and of the Rabbinical Council of America.
He quickly emerged as an important voice for modern Orthodoxy. Shocking
traditionalists, he made common cause with Reform and Conservative rabbis,
notably on the issue of Jewish family law and the plight of women denied a
religious divorce by their husbands.
He presented his case for modern Orthodoxy in “One Man’s Judaism” (1970) and
“Modern Halakhah for Our Time” (1995). Halakhah is the set of rules and
practices governing Jewish life.
In 1967, he became the rabbi of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue and soon after was
named provost of Yeshiva University. In 1971 he became the head of Jewish
Studies at the City University of New York. In 1977, he became the first
American president of Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
Rabbi Rackman is survived by a sister, Bess Falkow of Tucson, Ariz.; three sons,
Michael, of Brooklyn, Bennett, of Queens, and Joseph, of Scarsdale, N.Y.; eight
grandchildren; and 14 great-grandchildren.
November
29, 2008
Filed at 2:32 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK
(AP) -- A New York couple who recognized the threat of terrorism in India but
believed their mission of spreading Jewish pride was greater than the potential
danger were slain in a series of attacks across Mumbai that have killed at least
five Americans.
Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and his wife, Rivkah, 28, died in the attack
on the ultra-Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch movement's center in Mumbai, Rabbi Zalman
Shmotkin said in New York. Elite commandos who stormed the center found six
hostages dead.
The group said three other victims in the building apparently had been visiting
there. Shmotkin said the dead included Bentzion Chroman, an Israeli with dual
U.S. citizenship; Rabbi Leibish Teitlebaum, an American from Brooklyn; and an
Israeli woman whose name was not released. The Israeli Foreign Ministry said the
body of a sixth victim, an unidentified woman, was also found inside the
five-story building.
Some of the victims had been bound.
The Holtzbergs' toddler son, Moshe, was rescued by an employee and taken to his
grandparents.
More than 150 people had been killed since gunmen attacked 10 sites across
India's financial capital, Mumbai, also known as Bombay, starting Wednesday
night, officials said.
Also killed were a man and his teenage daughter from a Virginia community that
promotes a form of meditation, a colleague said Friday. Alan Scherr, 58, and
daughter Naomi, 13, died in a cafe Wednesday night, said Bobbie Garvey, a
spokeswoman for the Synchronicity Foundation.
The U.S. State Department confirmed their deaths.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the deaths of the three victims from New York were
''tragic losses'' for the city. He said Teitlebaum, a Brooklyn native who moved
to Jerusalem several years ago, was a kosher food supervisor.
''Our hearts go out to these families and to the many New Yorkers of all
different religions and ethnicities who have been affected by the attacks,''
Bloomberg said.
Members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement gathered at the group's headquarters
Friday to pray for the families of the dead.
''Gabi and Rivky Holtzberg made the ultimate sacrifice,'' said Rabbi Moshe
Kotlarsky, vice chairman of the educational arm of Chabad-Lubavitch.
''As emissaries to Mumbai, Gabi and Rivky gave up the comforts of the West in
order to spread Jewish pride in a corner of the world that was a frequent stop
for throngs of Israeli tourists,'' he said.
Shmotkin said at least three of the victims at the center held U.S. citizenship:
Teitlebaum was an American from Brooklyn, while the Israeli-born rabbi, who
moved to the U.S. as a child, and Chroman both had dual Israeli-U.S.
citizenship. Officials were not sure whether Rivkah Holtzberg, also born in
Israel, had obtained dual citizenship.
Twelve hours after gunmen stormed the center Wednesday, Sandra Samuel, a cook at
the center, heard little Moshe's cries outside the room in which she had
barricaded herself. She opened the door, grabbed the toddler and ran outside
with another center worker. The little boy's pants were soaked with blood, and
Samuel said she saw four people lying on the floor as she fled.
Kotlarsky said Holtzberg's last known call was to the Israeli consulate. He said
that ''the situation is not good'' before the phone went dead, according to
Kotlarsky.
The Holtzbergs arrived in Mumbai in 2003 to run a synagogue, provide religious
instruction and help people dealing with drug addiction and poverty, Kotlarsky
said.
Hillary Lewin, a New Yorker met the Holtzbergs last summer at the center in
India, said both the rabbi and his wife were aware of possible terrorism, but
believed their mission was greater than the potential danger.
Their attitude was ''If I don't do it, who's going to do it?'', Lewin said.
Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky said Moshe will turn 2 on Saturday. ''Today, he became an
orphan,'' he said. A second son, who has been ailing, was with relatives in
Israel when the attack happened. A third child died earlier this year of a
genetic disease, the group said.
The Scherrs were among 25 foundation participants in a spiritual program in
Mumbai. Four others on the mission were injured in the cafe attack in the luxury
Oberoi hotel, Garvey said, including two women from Tennessee.
''I would call them bright stars,'' Garvey said of the Scherrs. ''Extraordinary,
bright, very positive -- examples to the world.''
Scherr was a former college professor who lived at the Synchronicity sanctuary
about 15 miles southwest of Charlottesville. His wife, Kia, and her two sons did
not travel with them to India.
According to the foundation's Web site, the community is led by Master Charles,
a former leading disciple of Swami Paramahansa Muktananda. He is described as
''one of the most popular spiritual teachers from India to build a following the
West in the 1970s.'' He taught a form of yoga.
Garvey identified the Synchronicity injured as Helen Connolly of Toronto, who
was grazed by a bullet; Rudrani Devi and Linda Ragsdale, both of Nashville, who
both underwent surgery for bullet wounds; and Michael Rudder of Montreal, who
remains in intensive care after being shot three times. Other members of the
mission narrowly escaped the attack.
------
Associated Press writers Steve Szkotak in Richmond, Va., Tom Hays
in New York
and Ravi Nessman in Mumbai, India, contributed to this report.
September
29, 2008
The New York Times
By ETHAN BRONNER
JERUSALEM —
Jews are not quiet in prayer. Even when focused on the most personal of quests,
as they are this season — asking God for forgiveness for dark thoughts and
unkind deeds in the past year — they take comfort in community, chanting and
swaying and dancing in circles, blowing the trumpet-like shofar, a ram’s horn.
These are the days of the Jewish month of Elul, leading up to Rosh Hashana and
Yom Kippur, when tradition says that God determines who will live and die in the
coming year, and the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem’s Old City is a festival of
piety that runs from midnight till dawn. Tens of thousands roll in and out
during the night reciting the special penitential prayers called Slihot.
Coincidentally — the Muslim calendar shifts every year — it is also Ramadan, the
month when the faithful believe that God gave the Koran to the Prophet Muhammad,
a time of fasting, self-reflection and extra prayer, when being at Al Aksa
Mosque here is even more important than usual. At night, when the fasting is
over, the celebrating begins. The ancient stone alleyways of the Old City are
lit up with strings of colored lights, special foods are prepared, and
Palestinian Muslims come and go by the thousands.
The result has been a kind of monotheistic traffic jam in September along the
paths of the tiny walled Old City, especially as dawn approaches each day. The
Muslims and Jews walk past one another, often intersecting just at the Via
Dolorosa of Christian sanctity, as they hurry to their separate prayer sessions:
the Muslims above at the Dome of the Rock, the Jews just below at the Western
Wall.
It would be wrong to call these tense encounters, because there are essentially
no encounters at all. Words are not exchanged. Religious women in both groups —
head, arms and legs covered in subtly distinct fashion — look past one another
as if they took no notice. Like parallel universes with different names for
every place and moment they both claim as their own, the groups pass in the
night.
But there is palpable tension. Israeli soldiers walk in small packs to ward off
trouble. Security cameras bristle from most walls and intersections.
Commemorative stone plaques mark past acts of terrorism (“On this spot Elhanan
Aharon was killed. From his blood we will live and build Jerusalem.”) while
Palestinians complain that they are losing the competition for control of these
ancient byways and that those in the occupied West Bank are barred from coming
without special permission.
“I don’t believe the Jews and Muslims can ever have peace here,” Said Abed said
on his way to dawn prayers at Al Aksa when asked his view of the unusual
intersection of Slihot and Ramadan. “The Jews are trying to control Jerusalem by
deciding who can stay here.”
Some Muslims defy archaeology and history by saying that Jews have no link to
the site and that it is purely Muslim sacred territory. The same problem exists
on the other side as well — some Jews believe that the holiness here is theirs
alone.
Inside a closed-off area of the Western Wall plaza a few hours earlier, four
young men were studying Talmud, reading to one another rabbinic commentary about
a prayer for rain that is said as the new year starts. What did they think of
the coincidence of Jewish and Muslim prayers only yards from each other during
these days?
“The Muslims shouldn’t even be there,” offered Haim Ben Dalak, 18, of Petah
Tikvah, who just started a year at a Jerusalem religious seminary before his
army service. “There should be a Jewish temple there. That’s what we believe.”
Thirty years ago, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, who knew this city as few
others have, wrote:
The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams like the air over
industrial cities.
It’s hard to breathe.
The Hebrew name for the city, Yerushalayim, ends with “-ayim,” a grammatical
construction used for pairs of things. The device, known as a dual, exists in
Hebrew and Arabic but few other languages. Which duality is being invoked has
been lost to history, but it would not be hard to imagine that it is the one of
heaven and earth, of holy and profane, and the difficulty of their coexisting.
But of course everyone tends to focus on the holy.
Called Al Quds (the Holy One) in Arabic, Jerusalem is the city that Mohammad
visited on his night journey to heaven. Just as Jews pray facing Jerusalem from
anywhere in the world, Muslims did so originally as well, until the site was
moved to Mecca. Jerusalem remains for Muslims the third holiest city after Mecca
and Medina.
Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, rabbi of the Western Wall for the past 12 years, goes
every midnight during this period to Slihot at the wall.
“Night is a special time for spiritual reflection and this wall makes even those
with hearts of stone shed a tear,” Rabbi Rabinowitz said after his half-hour
Slihot prayer next to the wall, its crevices revealing the imploring notes to
God stuffed there by visitors.
Above his voice can be heard scores of groups — some large, some small, all of
slightly different tradition — praying in a mix of Hebrew and Aramaic,
acknowledging sin, seeking redemption.
Most are devout, but some are secular Jews who come here for Slihot season, a
growing trend.
“We love coming to Jerusalem at this time of year,” said Ada Lugati, a
hairdresser from the northern city of Afula, who was dressed in distinctly
nonobservant manner, in slacks with a uncovered head and bare midriff.
“It feels here as if the heavens are open to our prayer,” she said as she looked
up at the clear night sky. Avi Kenig, 17, starting a year of religious study at
an institute just across from the wall, put it this way: “We have been taught
that here we are at the center of the world. These are the gates to heaven.”
JERUSALEM —
A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates
from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in
biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a
messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.
If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a
developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it
suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of
a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.
The tablet, probably found near the Dead Sea in Jordan according to some
scholars who have studied it, is a rare example of a stone with ink writings
from that era — in essence, a Dead Sea Scroll on stone.
It is written, not engraved, across two neat columns, similar to columns in a
Torah. But the stone is broken, and some of the text is faded, meaning that much
of what it says is open to debate.
Still, its authenticity has so far faced no challenge, so its role in helping to
understand the roots of Christianity in the devastating political crisis faced
by the Jews of the time seems likely to increase.
Daniel Boyarin, a professor of Talmudic culture at the University of California
at Berkeley, said that the stone was part of a growing body of evidence
suggesting that Jesus could be best understood through a close reading of the
Jewish history of his day.
“Some Christians will find it shocking — a challenge to the uniqueness of their
theology — while others will be comforted by the idea of it being a traditional
part of Judaism,” Mr. Boyarin said.
Given the highly charged atmosphere surrounding all Jesus-era artifacts and
writings, both in the general public and in the fractured and fiercely
competitive scholarly community, as well as the concern over forgery and
charlatanism, it will probably be some time before the tablet’s contribution is
fully assessed. It has been around 60 years since the Dead Sea Scrolls were
uncovered, and they continue to generate enormous controversy regarding their
authors and meaning.
The scrolls, documents found in the Qumran caves of the West Bank, contain some
of the only known surviving copies of biblical writings from before the first
century A.D. In addition to quoting from key books of the Bible, the scrolls
describe a variety of practices and beliefs of a Jewish sect at the time of
Jesus.
How representative the descriptions are and what they tell us about the era are
still strongly debated. For example, a question that arises is whether the
authors of the scrolls were members of a monastic sect or in fact mainstream. A
conference marking 60 years since the discovery of the scrolls will begin on
Sunday at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where the stone, and the debate over
whether it speaks of a resurrected messiah, as one iconoclastic scholar
believes, also will be discussed.
Oddly, the stone is not really a new discovery. It was found about a decade ago
and bought from a Jordanian antiquities dealer by an Israeli-Swiss collector who
kept it in his Zurich home. When an Israeli scholar examined it closely a few
years ago and wrote a paper on it last year, interest began to rise. There is
now a spate of scholarly articles on the stone, with several due to be published
in the coming months.
“I couldn’t make much out of it when I got it,” said David Jeselsohn, the owner,
who is himself an expert in antiquities. “I didn’t realize how significant it
was until I showed it to Ada Yardeni, who specializes in Hebrew writing, a few
years ago. She was overwhelmed. ‘You have got a Dead Sea Scroll on stone,’ she
told me.”
Much of the text, a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel,
draws on the Old Testament, especially the prophets Daniel, Zechariah and
Haggai.
Ms. Yardeni, who analyzed the stone along with Binyamin Elitzur, is an expert on
Hebrew script, especially of the era of King Herod, who died in 4 B.C. The two
of them published a long analysis of the stone more than a year ago in Cathedra,
a Hebrew-language quarterly devoted to the history and archaeology of Israel,
and said that, based on the shape of the script and the language, the text dated
from the late first century B.C.
A chemical examination by Yuval Goren, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv
University who specializes in the verification of ancient artifacts, has been
submitted to a peer-review journal. He declined to give details of his analysis
until publication, but he said that he knew of no reason to doubt the stone’s
authenticity.
It was in Cathedra that Israel Knohl, an iconoclastic professor of Bible studies
at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, first heard of the stone, which Ms. Yardeni
and Mr. Elitzur dubbed “Gabriel’s Revelation,” also the title of their article.
Mr. Knohl posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah
before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as
well as the Dead Sea Scrolls. But his theory did not shake the world of
Christology as he had hoped, partly because he had no textual evidence from
before Jesus.
When he read “Gabriel’s Revelation,” he said, he believed he saw what he needed
to solidify his thesis, and he has published his argument in the latest issue of
The Journal of Religion.
Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political
atmosphere in Jesus’ day as an important explanation of that era’s messianic
spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off
the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish
independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.
In Mr. Knohl’s interpretation, the specific messianic figure embodied on the
stone could be a man named Simon who was slain by a commander in the Herodian
army, according to the first-century historian Josephus. The writers of the
stone’s passages were probably Simon’s followers, Mr. Knohl contends.
The slaying of Simon, or any case of the suffering messiah, is seen as a
necessary step toward national salvation, he says, pointing to lines 19 through
21 of the tablet — “In three days you will know that evil will be defeated by
justice” — and other lines that speak of blood and slaughter as pathways to
justice.
To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially
on line 80, which begins clearly with the words “L’shloshet yamin,” meaning “in
three days.” The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms.
Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the
Bible and Talmud, says the word is “hayeh,” or “live” in the imperative. It has
an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.
Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he
had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, “In three days you shall
live, I, Gabriel, command you.”
To whom is the archangel speaking? The next line says “Sar hasarin,” or prince
of princes. Since the Book of Daniel, one of the primary sources for the Gabriel
text, speaks of Gabriel and of “a prince of princes,” Mr. Knohl contends that
the stone’s writings are about the death of a leader of the Jews who will be
resurrected in three days.
He says further that such a suffering messiah is very different from the
traditional Jewish image of the messiah as a triumphal, powerful descendant of
King David.
“This should shake our basic view of Christianity,” he said as he sat in his
office of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where he is a senior fellow
in addition to being the Yehezkel Kaufman Professor of Biblical Studies at
Hebrew University. “Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed
before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the
New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah
story.”
Ms. Yardeni said she was impressed with the reading and considered it indeed
likely that the key illegible word was “hayeh,” or “live.” Whether that means
Simon is the messiah under discussion, she is less sure.
Moshe Bar-Asher, president of the Israeli Academy of Hebrew Language and
emeritus professor of Hebrew and Aramaic at the Hebrew University, said he spent
a long time studying the text and considered it authentic, dating from no later
than the first century B.C. His 25-page paper on the stone will be published in
the coming months.
Regarding Mr. Knohl’s thesis, Mr. Bar-Asher is also respectful but cautious.
“There is one problem,” he said. “In crucial places of the text there is lack of
text. I understand Knohl’s tendency to find there keys to the pre-Christian
period, but in two to three crucial lines of text there are a lot of missing
words.”
Moshe Idel, a professor of Jewish thought at Hebrew University, said that given
the way every tiny fragment from that era yielded scores of articles and books,
“Gabriel’s Revelation” and Mr. Knohl’s analysis deserved serious attention.
“Here we have a real stone with a real text,” he said. “This is truly
significant.”
Mr. Knohl said that it was less important whether Simon was the messiah of the
stone than the fact that it strongly suggested that a savior who died and rose
after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus. He notes that
in the Gospels, Jesus makes numerous predictions of his suffering and New
Testament scholars say such predictions must have been written in by later
followers because there was no such idea present in his day.
But there was, he said, and “Gabriel’s Revelation” shows it.
“His mission is that he has to be put to death by the Romans to suffer so his
blood will be the sign for redemption to come,” Mr. Knohl said. “This is the
sign of the son of Joseph. This is the conscious view of Jesus himself. This
gives the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for
the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel.”
Saturday,
17 May 2008
The Independent
By Emily Dugan
The number
of anti-Semitic attacks in Britain has reached its second-highest level ever,
MPs have been told. Figures from a charity show 547 such incidents were recorded
last year, of which a record 114 were violent assaults.
The Community Security Trust (CST), which works to protect the Jewish community
from persecution, collated the figures by counting every recorded anti-Semitic
assault, threat, act of abuse, mass-produced literature and damage and
desecration of Jewish property across the country.
Just this week, anti-Semitic graffiti was daubed across the pavements and walls
of the orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Stamford Hill in north London. CST say
similar incidents happen in Britain every day.
Mark Gardner, a spokesman for CST, said: "We have over twice as many incidents
being reported to us per annum now than in the 1990s. We're concerned that what
we're seeing is not merely because of a difficult time internationally and in
the Middle East, but that it's becoming more endemic and we're really, really
concerned about that."
Mr Gardner said the usual allies of British Jews fear showing support would
further the Zionist cause. "In the 1990s, when Jews faced attacks from the far
right there was a lot of sympathy from the liberal left establishments, but
today the same voices simply see anti-Semitism as something useful to Zionists.
"Jewish people are feeling increasingly isolated in this struggle as far as
traditional allies are concerned. It's disappointing that people who accept
fears expressed by other minority groups are so quick to slap down fears
expressed by the Jewish community." In a Commons debate on the issue this week,
the Cohesion minister Parmjit Dhanda said the number of incidents of
anti-Semitism was worryingly high, and called on the Government to continue to
bear down on the problem. "We do recognise that there is no room for
complacency," said Mr Dhanda. "The number of such incidences in the UK remains
far too high. The Community Security Trust recorded 547 incidents during the
course of 2007. Although this represents an 8 per cent fall over the previous
year, it is still the second-worst actually on record."
Jon Benjamin, the chief executive of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, said
they were "extremely encouraged" by the Government's response. He said
anti-Semitism had been a reality in the Jewish community for years in Britain,
but there had been further signs it was getting worse.
"We know our community buildings have to be secure, and our schools need
security," he said. "The quality of life for Jews here is good, but there are
perceptible changes, such as the graffiti this week. People wearing head
coverings to synagogue on a Saturday morning can feel somewhat vulnerable."
The total of incidents is slightly down on last year's record, but the most
alarming change is the number of these that were violent assaults. This figure
has risen to 114, the highest since CST records began in 1984.
The Conservative MP Paul Goodman said that while many places of worship were
targets for hate crime, synagogues were becoming singularly dangerous. "Only one
religious institution in Britain is under threat to such a degree that those who
attend are advised not to linger outside after worship, namely the synagogue,"
he said.
The back story of how a Torah got from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to the
ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street is one the
pastor of the Lutheran church down the street sums up as simply “miraculous.”
It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim who
buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed in and later renamed
the city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewish prisoners who sneaked the rest of
it — four carefully chosen panels — into the concentration camp.
It is the story of a Polish Catholic priest to whom they entrusted the four
panels before their deaths. It is the story of a Maryland rabbi who went looking
for it with a metal detector. And it is the story of how a hunch by the rabbi’s
13-year-old son helped lead him to it.
This Torah, more than most, “is such an extraordinary symbol of rebirth,” said
Peter J. Rubinstein, the rabbi of Central Synagogue. “As one who has gone to the
camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the Holocaust, this gives
meaning to Jewish survival.”
On Wednesday, the restored Torah will be rededicated in honor of Holocaust
Remembrance Day, which for more than 20 years the congregation of Central
Synagogue has observed in conjunction with its neighbor, St. Peter’s Lutheran
Church, at Lexington Avenue and 54th Street. The senior pastor, the Rev. Amandus
J. Derr, said that next to Easter, the Holocaust memorial is “the most important
service I attend every year.”
The Torah from Auschwitz “is a very concrete, tactile piece of that remembrance
— of what people, some of whom did it in the name of Christ, did to people who
were Jewish,” Pastor Derr said, “and the remembrance itself enables us to be
prepared to prevent that from happening again.”
A Torah scroll contains the five books of Moses, and observant Jews read a
portion from it at services. Its ornate Hebrew must be hand-lettered by
specially trained scribes, and it is considered unacceptable if any part is
marred or incomplete. For years, Jews around the world have worked to recover
and rehabilitate Torahs that disappeared or were destroyed during the Holocaust,
returning them to use in synagogues.
This Torah remained hidden for more than 60 years, buried where the sexton had
put it, until Rabbi Menachem Youlus, who lives in Wheaton, Md., and runs the
nonprofit Save a Torah foundation, began looking for it about eight years ago.
Over two decades, Rabbi Youlus said, the foundation has found more than 1,000
desecrated Torahs and restored them, a painstaking and expensive process. This
one was elusive. But Rabbi Youlus was determined.
He had heard a story told by Auschwitz survivors: Three nights before the
Germans arrived, the synagogue sexton put the Torah scrolls in a metal box and
buried them. The sexton knew that the Nazis were bent on destroying Judaism as
well as killing Jews.
But the survivors did not know where the sexton had buried the Torah. Others
interested in rescuing the Torah after the war had not found it.
As for what happened during the war, “I personally felt the last place the Nazis
would look would be in the cemetery,” Rabbi Youlus said in a telephone interview
Tuesday, recalling his pilgrimage to Auschwitz, in late 2000 or early 2001, in
search of the missing Torah. “So that was the first place I looked.”
With a metal detector, because, if the story was correct, he was hunting for a
metal box in a cemetery in which all the caskets were made of wood, according to
Jewish laws of burial. The metal detector did not beep. “Nothing,” the rabbi
said. “I was discouraged.”
He went home to Maryland. One of his sons, Yitzchok, then 13, wondered if the
cemetery was the same size as in 1939. They went online and found land records
that showed that the present-day cemetery was far smaller than the original one.
Rabbi Youlus went back in 2004 with his metal detector, aiming it at the spot
where the g’neeza — a burial plot for damaged Torahs, prayer books or other
papers containing God’s name — had been. It beeped as he passed a house that had
been built after World War II.
He dug near the house and found the metal box. But when he opened it, he
discovered the Torah was incomplete. “It was missing four panels,” he said. “The
obvious question was, why would the sexton bury a scroll that’s missing four
panels? I was convinced those four panels had a story themselves.”
They did, as he learned when he placed an ad in a Polish newspaper in the area
“asking if anyone had parchment with Hebrew letters.”
“I said I would pay top dollar,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The response came the next
day from a priest. He said, ‘I know exactly what you’re looking for, four panels
of a Torah.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
He compared the lettering and the pagination, and paid the priest. (How much, he
would not say. The project was underwritten by David M. Rubenstein, a co-founder
of the Carlyle Group. Mr. Rubenstein was tied at No. 165 on the Forbes 400 last
year with a reported fortune of $2.5 billion; in December, he paid $21.3 million
for a 710-year-old copy of the Magna Carta, a British declaration of human
rights that served as the foundation for the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution.)
The priest “told me the panels were taken into Auschwitz by four different
people,” Rabbi Youlus said. “I believe they were folded and hidden.” One of the
panels contained the Ten Commandments from Exodus, a portion that, when chanted
aloud each year, the congregation stands to hear. Another contained a similar
passage from Deuteronomy.
The priest, who was born Jewish, was himself an Auschwitz survivor. He told
Rabbi Youlus that the people with the four sections of the Torah gave them to
him before they were put to death.
“He kept all four pieces until I put that ad in the paper,” Rabbi Youlus said.
“As soon as I put that ad in the paper, he knew I must be the one with the rest
of the Torah scroll.” (Rabbi Youlus said that the priest has since died.)
Rabbi Youlus said that nearly half the Torah’s lettering needed repair, work
that the foundation has done over the past few years. Thirty-seven letters were
left unfinished: 36, or twice the number that symbolizes “life” in Hebrew, will
be filled in by members of the congregation before the service on Wednesday, the
37th at the ceremony.
Rabbi Youlus called it “a good sturdy Torah, even if it hasn’t been used in 65
years.” The plan is to make it available every other year to the March of the
Living, an international educational program that arranges for Jewish teenagers
to go to Poland on Holocaust Remembrance Day, to march from Auschwitz to its
companion death camp, Birkenau.
“This really is an opportunity to look up to the heavens and say, he who laughs
last, laughs best,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The Nazis really thought they had wiped
Jews off the face of the earth, and Judaism. Here we are taking the ultimate
symbol of hope and of Judaism and rededicating it and using it in a synagogue.
And we’ll take it to Auschwitz. You can’t beat that.”
JERUSALEM — Israel’s public debate shifted this week from Hamas to hametz.
But it remained no less heated.
Hametz is bread and other leavened products that many Jews do not eat for the
eight days of Passover, which starts Saturday night. The Bible says that when
God freed the Jews from enslavement in Egypt, they left in such a hurry that
there was no time for their bread to rise, and to mark that circumstance,
consuming leavened bread during the holiday is forbidden.
The focus of the debate here is a ruling by a Jerusalem municipal judge
overturning the convictions of four shops and restaurants for having sold pizzas
and rolls during the holiday last year despite a law that many thought
prohibited businesses from doing so. The judge said the law barred only the
public display of hametz, not its sale inside shops.
While most debates about the painstakingly negotiated public role of religion in
Israel line up along predictable lines of observant versus secular, this
discussion has been different. And it speaks to a palpable anxiety over the need
to define and defend the Jewish nature of the state, even as Israel’s 60th
anniversary approaches next month.
In opinion articles and informal conversations, some nonreligious Israelis said
that they liked the eight-day absence of hametz, and that it was a small but
potent symbol of a unique collective identity.
The most prominent advocate of this point of view was Foreign Minister Tzipi
Livni, a thoroughly secular woman, who wrote in the newspaper Maariv that she
regretted the judge’s decision.
“Ostensibly, the ban on the public display or sale of bread on Passover is a
minor and marginal issue, but I believe that this is not the case,” she wrote.
“In my view, this prohibition is part of the substantive question of how we wish
to characterize our identity in the national home for the Jewish people.”
Many agreed with her and contended, as she did, that since Israel’s Palestinian
negotiating partners and their supporters rejected defining Israel as “a Jewish
state,” it was more important than ever to do so.
“The further we allow ourselves to go from Jewish tradition, the easier it will
be for those who reject our legitimacy as a Jewish state,” said Sharona
Mazalian, who lives outside Tel Aviv, works for a secular, conservative
legislator and wants hametz banned during Passover. “We call ourselves a Jewish,
democratic state. But the less Jewish we are the easier it will be for others to
say, ‘Why not just be a democratic state for Jews and Arabs to live in
together?’ ”
Amnon Rubinstein, a secular and liberal former minister of education and a
former dean of Tel Aviv University’s law school, said the Jerusalem judge was
right in her ruling because the intent of the law was to avoid offending
religious sensibilities by publicly displaying hametz, not to end the sale of
hametz entirely.
But he noted: “There is this mood now that we must remain Jewish somehow, some
way. Tzipi Livni represents that — a secular hankering for Jewish ambience.”
That seems especially true at Passover. In recent polls, 65 to 70 percent of
Israeli Jews say they will avoid hametz next week, although most are not
generally religiously observant.
There is something especially meaningful about Passover in Israel. As Liat
Collins, a columnist, wrote in The Jerusalem Post, Passover, the festival of
freedom, “represents everything we are proud of: survival against the odds;
national identity; and a return to the Promised Land. All the things for which
we have been admired — and reviled — over thousands of years.”
But just as many Israeli Jews seek a Jewish feeling from Israel’s public life —
they like the way the country slows down on Friday afternoon for Sabbath, the
way it follows the Jewish calendar — they resent the fact that religiously
defined parties are the ones setting the agenda.
After the judge handed down her decision, several Orthodox parties declared it a
calamity and vowed to pass a law barring all sales of hametz during Passover.
When the cabinet declined to take up the issue, the Shas Party threatened a
governmental crisis but backed down, saying it would take its case to
Parliament.
Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University here,
said: “What I see going on is a sense of a search for Jewish identity, which I
really appreciate. But I think it is wrong to do so through the legal system.”
He said his model for Jewish public expression was the way Israel marked Yom
Kippur, when, through unwritten convention, no one drives. “There is no law
about driving on Yom Kippur, yet everyone respects it,” he said.
But Yair Sheleg, an observant Jew who writes for the newspaper Haaretz, made the
opposite case in a recent column that supported banning the display and sale of
hametz during Passover.
He said a society should use its laws regarding public space to help shape its
core values, “and in this regard prohibiting the public display of hametz on
Passover is no different in principle from legislating the closure of
restaurants and movie theaters on Holocaust Remembrance Day or on Memorial Day.”
He noted that some years ago Parliament passed a law to destroy a monument to
Baruch Goldstein, the Brooklyn-born Jewish settler who killed 29 Muslims praying
in Hebron in 1994. Mr. Sheleg noted that it was hidden from public view and
caused little evident harm, but that eliminating it was an appropriate
expression of core public values.
Nahum Barnea, a columnist for Yediot Aharonot, said the dispute made him realize
how Israel, even as it approached its 60th anniversary, “is still trying to
define itself, something most states don’t have to do.”
“We are still debating our existence, not only in terms of policy but in terms
of ideology,” he said. “What is Israel? What is a Jewish state? And how can
hametz help us find the answer?”
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Ultra-Orthodox Jews burned bread and other
leavened foods in communal bonfires Monday, completing preparations for
Passover.
The weeklong holiday commemorates the flight of the ancient Israelites from
bondage in Egypt, as described in the Old Testament.
Observant Jews eat matzoh, unleavened bread, to illustrate how their ancestors
had no time to let their bread rise as they fled.
Even the normally unobservant scour their homes to get rid of any particle of
food that contains, or may have touched, leavening.
The army sealed off the West Bank early Sunday as a precaution against
Palestinian attacks. The closure will last through the holiday, affecting some
50,000 Palestinian who cross into Israel every day to work.
Exceptions would be made for humanitarian cases and for Christians visiting
family inside Israel for Easter, the army said.
Police were on high alert, putting reinforcements on the streets. A suicide
attack on Passover diners at a hotel in the Israeli city of Netanya killed 30
Israelis in 2002.
Israel's chief rabbis instructed believers to add a holiday prayer for the safe
return of three Israeli soldiers abducted last summer by Palestinians from the
Gaza Strip and by Lebanese Hezbollah militiamen.
The Supreme Court Sunday blocked plans by Jewish fundamentalists to sacrifice a
sheep at the site of the biblical Jewish temples, as was the practice at major
festivals in ancient times. The rock platform where the temples built by Solomon
and Herod once stood, now houses the Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock.
The site, known as the Temple Mount to Jews and the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims,
is holy to both faiths and has been a frequent flashpoint. In February, Israeli
work on a ramp leading up to the hilltop site touched off clashes between police
and local Muslims and brought howls of protest from around the Islamic world.
The Haaretz daily said the Supreme Court denied the Jews permission to carry out
animal sacrifice at the site, fearing it might provoke Muslims.
''The rights of the petitioners to practice their faith are outweighed by other
considerations, such as public order and safety,'' Haaretz quoted the court
ruling as saying.
