The heartbreaking testimony of a Holocaust survivor about missing Yemenite Children – by Noah Efron of “The Promised Podcast” – TLV1

14 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in Ethics, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Social Justice

Introductory Note: I am grieved to post this, but honesty in Jewish life and in democracies demand that we confront moral failures wherever and whenever they occur. It is the only way to be assured that they we don’t repeat them.

I post here what constitutes among the most heinous moral failures of the State of Israel in its history. As a Jew, I am ashamed. That being said, anyone who knows me knows that I love the State of Israel. Israel is in my DNA. I love the people and regard the Jewish State as the greatest miracle of the past 2000 years of Jewish history.

CNN covered the story about the hundreds of missing Yemenite and Arabic Jewish children in the early 1950s when they were brought by their parents to Israel and can be viewed here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp4IDws6f74

I requested the article below from my friend Noah Efron of “The Promised Podcast” (TLV1) out of Tel Aviv who reported the story this past week on the podcast. Noah had originally brought this story to light in 2014. With the recent statement of an eye-witness, the full episode of what happened to hundreds of Yemenite and Arabic Jewish babies in Israel in the early 1950s was revealed. I share Noah’s commentary on “The Promised Podcast” with his permission:

“We heard this week the remarkable and heartbreaking testimony of 85 year-old Shoshana (שחם) Shaham, a Holocaust survivor who was a student nursemaid in the transit camp, or Maabara, in Rosh Ha’Ayin through the first half of the 1950s, and only now told journalists for the first time that she saw kids of new immigrants in the camp, mostly from Yemin, being given up for unofficial adoption, without their parents knowledge, much less agreement, and of course they would never agree, and then she saw these same parents lied to, told that their kids had died and been immediately buried.

Shacham said:

“We would see cars coming, and from the cars people would emerge, dressed well, in city clothes. They spoke a foreign language. We saw these people putting babies in their cars. So I said, “What a minute, where are they taking them? So they said, ‘We are improving their circumstances. They are going to be in a different family, so they won’t get sick and dehydrated. So they won’t get dehydrated, they’ll give them liquids, they’ll give them food.”

Shaham said she knew that they were being taken from their parents, beyond a shadow of a doubt. She says that she knew, at the time, that the parents knew nothing of this. She said that when the parents came, the doctors lied to them, saying their kids died. “We were witnesses,” she said. It was one of our crimes on the way to independence.

Shaham’s testimony is among the first to come from someone who was on the side of the people in the white coats. Until now, the only reports we had of this came from heartsick parents.

Those reports — victims testimonies — have been heard by now by a succession of three official committees (one in 1967, the next in 1988, then in 1995) assembled to investigate the disappearances documented in 745 cases, although activist organizations have gathered evidence of several times as many cases, maybe as many as five thousand. The events are known here as “The Yemenite Children Affair,” although in point of fact, a third of the missing children came from Iraq and other middle eastern and north African countries.

Reading the testimonies of long-bereaved parents before one or another of the investigating committees, one learns both that each instance of loss was unique, with its own tragic circumstances, and also that the disappearances followed patterns. Most of them happened in one of two places: a ma’abara children’s house or a medical clinic. Usually, parents were told that their children were being taken for some special care of which they were in absolute need. These parents were not given an option to refuse; in some cases, a baby was pulled from the arms of a parent wailing in protest. When the parent later came to visit their kid, they were told that a tragedy had occurred: the baby died. They were never shown a body, they were not invited to participate in a funeral. They were not given a copy of a death certificate. They were not taken to a cemetery plot. Sometimes, they were told, by way of offering comfort, that they could conceive a new baby, if they wished.

Most of these parents spent the rest of their lives looking for these kids, some into their 90s, and they never found them, which is a thing of incomprehensible weight.

But, there was more. Not only did these parents and sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts have to live their entire lives in the chilled shadow of this loss and cruelty, but they also had the secondary trial of not being believed.

Each official committee concluded that, while the testimony of families were heartbreaking and they were sincere, their kids had almost surely just died, at a time when medicine was poor and disease was hearty and records were scanty. They’d lost their child, and no one doubted the depths of their suffering, but they’d lost their kid to disease, maybe the oldest, if still the saddest, story there is.

But the parents, and in time their surviving kids, and then grandkids, knew that they knew what they knew. And for years, they insisted, and they cajoled, and they protested, and they organized. And for years, they were not believed. For years, people said, “Then why doesn’t some nursemaid come forward and say, I saw this with my own eyes. If it really happened, there would be a nursemaid who would say that.”

Well, now one has.

And I … and the podcast … are implicated in this, too, in the following way. When I introduced the subject for discussion three years ago, I said this:

Now, there are some persuasive reasons to believe that no babies were kidnapped and given to more presentable – that is, Ashkenazi – families to raise. Shifra Shvarts, the leading historian of health care in Israel, says that she’s examined 30,000-40,000 files form that time, and never seen a clue of kidnapping. And then there were those expert commissions. At the same time, if the babies just died, how did they not let the parents see them, mourn them, bury them? I mean, who does that?

So my questions for you mooks are these. If all the evidence says that no kids were kidnapped, and no direct evidence says they were, then why does the belief that they were persist?

And then the discussion pretty much ended with Don [Futterman] saying this:

It’s not the Israel of today, and I think it’s not correct to go back and judge the way the way people behaved then. I’m not talking about the prejudices, but what they were able to do with their limited capacities. Thinking about Israel today, these are two very different countries and times in history.

Which are not the most benighted things to say, but still, you can feel that I’m saying, like so many other well-fed, self-satisfied, dicks over the past 70 years: “Well, surely, something terrible happened to you all those years ago, and I know you think you know what it was, but I’ll tell you that it wasn’t what you think, and the people you blame weren’t really to blame, and it was a long time ago, after all.”

And reading and listening to Shoshana Shaham’s witness this past week, I felt so sad and so terrible, first about what she described, and second about the 70 years of awful denial. And about how easy I found it to join that legacy of denial.

There is so much pain in this world and it takes vigilance, constant vigilance, to not let your heart go hard. And here, yet again, I failed. There’s no one to apologize to, but having put those words out there.”

A sign – A midrash on the rainbow – 2018

11 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in Art, Divrei Torah, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life

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God looked upon creation and saw violence, chaos and mean-spirited self-centeredness engulfing every heart. There was neither kindness nor justice in the world. Empathy had ceased. Fear and hatred had replaced peace and love. In an instant God determined to destroy the world and return existence to primordial darkness.

The Eternal God mourned and recalled how great was the effort to create the heavens and earth, give life to growing things, design and fashion the birds, sea creatures and animals in their variety, shape, color, function, and form. That thought grew within the Divine mind. The Creator hesitated and thought thinking how great the tragedy to destroy that which God had called “good.”

God wondered ‘Is there one human on earth, different from the rest, who fathoms Me, who hasn’t been consumed by the sitra achra, the evil that brought darkness to My creation.’

In a blink of the Divine eye, God peered into every human soul seeking that one, better than the rest, who though not yet a complete tzadik might be good enough and able to hear the Divine voice and save what could be saved.

God found Noah and plucked him out and instructed him to build an ark, to save his family and two of every creature that all might not be lost and the world might begin anew.

As God contemplated the potential devastation Divine tears fell heavily to earth in a torrential downpour that lasted forty days and nights.

When finally God’s tear ducts were dry the waters receded, dry land appeared, and the ark docked. The Eternal God spoke to Noah:

“I am God, Noah, Who created you and brought you into this new land. Look around you and see the cleansed earth. The world is once again new. There is no longer rage nor hatred, violence nor hubris in the human heart. I will make with you a covenant marked by a sign that will remind us both how I created the world in peace, then destroyed it allowing it to begin anew that it should be a place of peace for all time.

And the sign of this covenant will be a radiant smile stretching across the heavens and filling the sky, an arc of light shining through the flood waters, a vision of loveliness inspiring love for and awe of Me.

This promise, Noah, shall be called the ‘rainbow,’ and this bow in the sky will remind you, your progeny and Me that I will never again bring such devastation to the earth.

Your duty and the duty of your children and children’s children must be to protect My creation, to preserve and nurture it, for there will come no one after you to set it right if you destroy it.”

God bent towards the earth and stretched the Divine arm across the sky and created an arc. Where God’s hand had been appeared a sheltering bow of every color spread across the blue canvas of sky.

And God spoke of the colors and the rainbow sign:

“First comes red to stand for the blood pulsing through human veins that carries My Godly soul and makes all things live; orange is for the comforting warmth of fire and its potential to create, build and improve upon what I created; yellow is for the glory of the sun that lights the earth and gives vision to earthly souls that they might see Me in all things and live; green is for the grass and the leaves of trees and their fruit, that all creatures might be sustained in life; blue is for the sky, sea and rivers that joins air and ground and makes clear that all is One, divinely linked and a reflection of Me; indigo appears each day at dusk and dawn to signal evening and morning, the passage of time and the seasons, the ever renewing life force that is intrinsic to all things; violet is for the coming of night when the world rests and is renewed, and it carries the hope that all might awake in the morning and utter words of thanksgiving and praise.”

God explained to Noah that the rainbow appears to the human eye as a half circle:

“Do not be fooled, my most righteous one! There is more to life than what the eye can see. There is both the revealed and the hidden, and the hidden half of the bow reaches deep into earth that you and those who yearn after Me might come and discover Truth, and reveal and make whole the revealed and the hidden in My world.”

Remember this blessing, My child, and you will remember My promise – Baruch Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, zocheir habrit v’neeman biv’rito v’kayam b’maamaro – Praised are You, Eternal God, Sovereign of the revealed and the hidden, Who remembers, is faithful to and fulfills the Divine covenant and promise.”

Written by Rabbi John Rosove and inspired by classic Midrashim

“The Chosen Wars – How Judaism Became an American Religion” by Steven R. Weisman – A Review

08 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in American Jewish Life, Book Recommendations, Ethics, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice

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Steven R. Weisman does the American Jewish community and anyone interested in who we are and how we came to be who we are a deep favor. His history of the American Jewish experience (publ. 2018 – 266 pages) is a wonderful read. He covers the beginning of our history in the new world when Jews first arrived on American shores in New Amsterdam in 1654, spends much time on the dynamic 19^th century, and brings it all into the present.

Weisman’s readable narrative is comprehensive. His nuanced discussion of events and trends as they reflect the influences of the American experience on our community gives insight into how we evolved from before the American Revolution through the Civil War into the industrial age and twentieth century as we strove to be at once American and Jewish.

He describes how we acclimated to the new world in every generation without losing a sense of Jewish meaning. He discusses radical and conservative religious, ideological, and practical responses to the myriad of challenges Jews encountered coming from Central Europe, Germany, Russia, and Sefardic lands over a period of two centuries.

Weisman discusses at some length the emergence of the American Reform movement, the founding of the Conservative movement, and how orthodoxy struggled to survive and then staked its ground as immigrant waves from Eastern Europe arrived during the twentieth century.

The title of the book (“The Chosen Wars”) is Weisman’s thesis. So often, there is a tendency to look back with nostalgia on our history and smooth the edges of controversy. To do so, however, is to mischaracterize history itself and especially Jewish history. He shows that we Jews were and continue to be argumentative and rarely unified even as we have aspired for unity.

He writes in the epilogue:

“Judaism’s flourishing in America was not foreordained or inevitable. Neither was it free from conflict and animosity. On the contrary, the disputes among Jews in America were emotional and personal. They were also very American…The Jews shaped their experience in America, and they were shaped by the America they found. The push and pull for Jews followed a historic tension.”

Steven R. Weisman is vice president for publications and communications at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He previously served as a correspondent, editor and editorial board member of The New York Times. He is the author of “The Great Tax Wars: How the Income Tax Transformed America.”

I recommend this volume highly. If you want deeper understanding about who we are as an American Jewish community, how we got here, and what contemporary challenges we face, this book will not only frame it all for you but inspire you with the hope that, indeed, we are NOT the ever-dying people.

What makes a strong and weak person and nation?

01 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in American Politics and Life, Ethics, Quote of the Day, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

“A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.”

-Jimmy Carter, 39th US President, Nobel laureate (b. 1 Oct 1924)

When prayer is projected onto large screens in place of using prayer books

30 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in American Jewish Life, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life

≈ 6 Comments

Several years ago I attended a session at the Biennial Conference of the Reform movement (the Union for Reform Judaism) on the visual benefits of projecting the prayer book and the weekly Torah portion onto large screens in place of prayer books. It was at the time a new way to draw a congregation together while freeing the pews of books and papers. Though I understood the benefit of having the text available in plain sight to everyone present, especially in a large congregation, and the ability to add new songs and poetry that are not contained already in prayer books, I was uncomfortable with it and preferred then and still prefer to have an actual prayer book in my hands.

Having said this, at my congregation we use large screens for prayer twice a year, on the mornings of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur at our family services with pre-school age through first grade children, their parents and grandparents. All the 700 in attendance need to do do is look forward towards the bimah and there they can read/sing the blessings and view colorful illustrations and photographs. For this particular population, projected prayer works well.

It’s one thing, however, to use projected prayer and illustrations/photographs for small children and their parents, and it’s quite another to use it in place of prayer books at Shabbat services for elementary school-age students, teens, and adults.

In recent days on the private Reform Rabbi List-Serve called RAVKAV where rabbis talk to each other about anything and everything of current concern, there has been a thoughtful discussion about the benefits and deficits of projected prayer in place of using actual siddurim. I found the discussion provocative and engaging, and so I shared some of the posts (I removed the writers’ names to maintain confidentiality) with my fellow clergy in my congregation. I received the following statement from our cantorial soloist and music director, Shelly Fox. Shelly is a 2^nd year cantorial student at the Academy for Jewish Religion (AJR) here in Los Angeles. She is a world class singer and a thoughtful, evocative and sensitive Jew and prayer leader. I share her words with her permission:

“It’s one thing to project the words to prayers and enable people to follow along and lift their faces out of a book and sing together, but once we start talking about projecting imagery and then taking it further and using a large screen LED TV for clear, bright images, now we’re getting into the territory of another screen to watch.

I think that when people see a TV screen they shut off their brains. They get lulled into watching, not doing. I also think that prayer is both communal and personal and to give everyone imagery to watch takes them out of their own heads. It’s my same argument to musical settings of prayers in what I call “interpretive English.” I am not opposed to singing prayers in English but it bothers me when a prayer isn’t a direct translation[i.e. from the Hebrew, Ladino, or Yiddish] but is the songwriter’s impression of the prayer. I want the freedom to interpret a prayer how I feel it, which can change on any given day or at different times in my life. Giving someone a specific image to look at while praying cuts them off from their own inner dialog. …I think this is part of a larger trend of the dumbing down of our society. The less people think for themselves, the less they engage in critical thinking. We will have a nation of people plugged into (lulled by) screens and that leaves them vulnerable to whoever wants to control them, be it for good or for ill.”

I agree with Shelly. After all, we Jews are Am haSefer – The People of the Book. I always prefer holding a book in my hands. I don’t read books on Kindle and though it’s more convenient to download books especially when traveling instead of carrying them in my luggage, I prefer the latter to the former.

A colleague wrote to me after I posted Shelly’s response on RAVKAV. He agreed with her saying: “We are a book culture — which means that we should be able to browse through a book and study it. The last thing we need is to strengthen our addiction to screens.”

High Holiday Sermons 2018-5779 – Temple Israel of Hollywood, Los Angeles

20 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in American Jewish Life, Ethics, Holidays, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Jewish-Christian Relations, Jewish-Islamic Relations, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Social Justice

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The following are my farewell sermons after serving Temple Israel of Hollywood for 30 years. This is my last High Holiday season before my retirement at the end of June, 2019. These are highly personal sermons, but they reflect the greater themes and challenges that Judaism presents us during the High Holidays, and were the best personal reflections on a forty-year rabbinate and thirty years at my home congregation.

For all TIOH Rabbis’ Sermons in 2018, go to

https://www.tioh.org/worship/rabbis/clergystudy These include sermons by Rabbi John Rosove, Rabbi Michelle Missaghieh, and Rabbi Jocee Hudson

The following are the sermons I delivered, the final High Holiday sermons I am ever likely to deliver:

Rosh Hashanah 5779 – “Carrying forward the Life of Our People”

Video Direct Link – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqcY1nwo0tc

Text – https://www.tioh.org/images/Worship/ClergyStudy/HH_Sermons/John_Rosove/5779/Carrying_Forward_the_Life_of_Our_People-RH2018.pdf

Kol Nidre 5779 – “What I Wish for You”

Video Direct Link – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPHP_ui4YQ4

Text – https://www.tioh.org/images/Worship/ClergyStudy/HH_Sermons/John_Rosove/5779/What-I-wish-for-you-RJohn-KN-2018.pdf

Yom Kippur Yizkor 5779 – “Midrash on the Death of Moses”

Text only – https://www.tioh.org/images/Worship/ClergyStudy/HH_Sermons/John_Rosove/5779/Midrash-on-the-Death-of-Moses-RJohn-YK-2018.pdf

Ha’azinu – A World with Teshuvah and Messianic Expectancy

20 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by rabbijohnrosove in Divrei Torah, Ethics, Health and Well-Being, Holidays, Inuyim - Prayer reflections and ruminations, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Uncategorized

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“Give ear, O heavens, that I may speak, / Hear, O Earth, the utterance of my mouth. / Let my teaching drip like rain, / Let my words flow like dew, ‘ Like droplets on new growth, / Like showers on grass.” (Deuteronomy 32:1-2)

“Like an eagle protecting its nest / Over its young-birds hovering, / He spread out his wings, he took him, / Bearing him on his pinions.” (Deuteronomy 32:11)

“See now that I, am he / I myself bring-death, bestow-life / I wound and I myself heal, / And there is from my hand no rescuing! / For I lift up my hand to the heavens, / And say: As I live, for the ages.” (Deuteronomy 32:40)

These are among the fifty-two verses in this week’s Torah portion Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 32), one of the shortest portions in the annual Torah reading cycle.

Though these verses are magnificent poetry, the Torah isn’t largely a poetic text. Rather, it’s a series of legal texts set in a narrative context. For poetry we have to search elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible – the soaring visions of the prophets, the yearnings of the Psalms, the saga of Job, and the eroticism of the Song of Songs.

Despite the Torah’s narrative and legal style, this portion closes in a burst of poetry as Moses nears the end of his life.

Essentially, Parashat Ha’azinu is a poetic meditation on the covenantal relationship between God and Israel. It’s graphic and written from the prospective of God, not Moses. Its themes dwell not upon the strength of the divine-human bond, but upon its weakness. Israel is characterized not as a covenantal lover, but as a treacherous adversary prepared to smash the covenant and cavort with other gods.

Towards the end of the poem, Moses shifts suddenly from speaking as a third-person narrator into the first person as God’s prophet. We envision an enraged God Who intends to hand Israel over to its most vicious enemies and its ultimate devastation. Fearing Israel’s demise to polytheism and oblivion, God reverses the divine decree, vanquishes Israel’s enemies and renews the covenant.

One scholar suggested that this poem is a CAT scan of God’s mind embracing the totality of divine rage, longing and love. Though God did indeed reverse the divine decree, it wasn’t because of divine compassion; rather, it was the consequence of divine pride.

There is something especially shocking about this poem, and that it’s missing utterly the idea of Teshuvah.

One would think that at the end of the annual Torah reading cycle that coincides each year with the close of the Yamim Noraim that Torah would affirm the covenantal bond between God and Israel as a consequence of Israel’s Teshuvah and return to God. But, the poem ignores the possibility of Israel’s repentance and presents a world devoid of the capacity of the people to alter God’s will through its contrition and Teshuvah.

It’s difficult to imagine living our lives without Teshuvah. Perhaps, that’s the point of the poem, to show us what such a world would be like without the possibility of our return, without the life-sustaining value of hope.

Judaism understands that Teshuvah is so indispensable for human welfare that the Talmudic sage Resh Lakish insisted that God conceived of Teshuvah before creating the world and wove Teshuvah into the fabric of creation itself.

The prophetic and rabbinic concept of repentance is among Judaism’s most ennobling and inspiring affirmations. Judaism rejects a fatalistic world, one in which what was will always be without the possibility of personal and communal evolution. Judaism affirms that we do indeed have a measure of control over our lives, that we can improve ourselves and be better morally and spiritually than we were. Though perfection isn’t the goal of the Yamim Noraim, self-improvement is.

Since our beginnings as a people we Jews have been buoyed by hope and messianic expectancy, all made possible by Teshuvah.

And so, perhaps, Ha’azinu is a warning about what our lives really would be like without the covenant and without our capacity to be better than we were.

Shabbat Shalom.

Note: Translation of the Hebrew are from “The Schocken Bible: Volume 1 – The Five Books of Moses” with a new translation and Introductions, Commentary, and Notes by Everett Fox

Rabbi John Rosove's Blog

Author Archives: rabbijohnrosove

A sign – A midrash on the rainbow – 2018

What makes a strong and weak person and nation?

When prayer is projected onto large screens in place of using prayer books

Ha’azinu – A World with Teshuvah and Messianic Expectancy

Susan Collins’s Declaration of Cowardice – By Dana Milbank – Washington Post