Category Archives: Jewish History

Inspiring Words and Blessings for Hanukah this Year

11 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Divrei Torah, Holidays, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Quote of the Day

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I offer these words from a variety of sources for this season of Hanukah and am grateful to the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem for providing them. I  offer my own blessings to be said before the kindling of the Hanukah lights on each night, beginning this next Tuesday evening – the first night of Hanukah.

“The glory and the educational value of the Hasmoneans is that their example revived the nation to be its own redeemer and the determiner of its own future…”
-Yitzhak Ben Zvi, 2nd President of the State of Israel

“The Hanukah lights reflect the fire within the Jewish soul, as it is written, The soul of a human being is the lamp of God.’ (Proverbs 20:27) Each person possesses this light within his body. Hanukah teaches how this light must be ignited, …renewed and increased each day. Projecting light to the world at large is the underlying intent of all the mitzvot, as it is written, ‘A mitzvah is a lamp and the Torah is light.’ (Proverbs 6:23) However, to a greater degree than in other mitzvot, this intent is reflected in the Hanukkah candles, for they produce visible light and they spread that light throughout their surroundings.”
-Rabbi Menachem Schneerson

“When reading the contemporary accounts of the Hasmonean Revolution found in the Books of the Maccabees (c. 165 BCE), the rabbis of later centuries made the observance of the commandment of “pirsum hanes – the public proclamation of this miracle” the centerpiece of the festival thereby emphasizing that the power of the spirit is enduring and not weapons of war, high finance and politics.”
-Professor Shimon Rawidowicz

“Just as the light of a lamp remains undimmed, though myriads of wicks and flames may be lit from it, so the one who gives to a worthy cause does not make a hole in his/her own pocket.”
-Midrash Exodus Rabbah 36:3

The Talmud tells of a great debate about how to light the Hanukiah. Do we start with eight and diminish until the last night. Or do we start with one and build to the eighth night. Beit Hillel says the latter. Beit Shammai says the former. The halacha (Jewish law) follows Beit Hillel. In other words, each day we build on what has taken place.  Each day we add light. Each day we are strengthened in resolve, goodness. Each day we draw closer to God. [The custom is to line up the candles from the right to the left, but to light them from the left to the right – the current day first.]
-Bavli, Shabbat 21b

The Midrash compares a mitzvah to a lamp. The increasing light kindled on Hanukah reminds us that we are not diminished when we give of ourselves to others. The opposite is true. By our kind deeds we increase light and sparks of Divinity into the world.

Suggested Blessings to Say Before Kindling the Lights of Hanukah

FIRST CANDLE: THE LIGHT OF TORAH AND BLESSING

With this candle we reaffirm our people’s commitment to the study of our sacred tradition. May the light of this flame cast its warmth and inspire us to be grateful for the blessings of life and health.

SECOND CANDLE: THE LIGHT OF LIBERATION AND HOPE

On behalf of our people dispersed in the four corners of the world who live in fear, repression and imprisonment, we stand this night in solidarity with them. Our Hanukkah flames are theirs and their hopes are ours. We are one people united by tradition, history and faith in the one God who inspires freedom and liberation.

THIRD CANDLE: THE LIGHT OF PEACE AND MEMORY

With this candle we pray that a just and lasting peace may be established between Israel and the Palestinians, between Israel and all Arab and Muslim peoples. May the memory of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and those who gave their lives for peace be a blessing for our people and all peoples of the Middle East.

FOURTH CANDLE: THE LIGHT OF TOLERANCE

With this light we pray that racism, political enmity, gender bias, homophobia, religious hatred, intolerance, and fundamentalist extremism be dispelled, and may all people recognize divinity within all of God’s children.

FIFTH CANDLE: THE LIGHT OF ECONOMIC JUSTICE

With this light we recommit ourselves to work on behalf of the poor in our communities and throughout the world. May we be inspired not only to feed the hungry and lift the fallen, but to reorder society’s priorities and  educate all children to be able to sustain themselves with dignity and hope.

SIXTH CANDLE: THE LIGHT OF CREATION

With this light may our commitment be renewed to preserve God’s creation, for as the Midrash reminds us, if we destroy it there will come no one after us to make it right.

SEVENTH CANDLE: THE LIGHT OF BLESSING

May the light of this flame cast its warmth upon us and inspire us to be ever grateful for the blessings of life, family, community, and health.

EIGHTH CANDLE: THE LIGHT OF MEMORY AND WITNESSING

May these lights inspire us always to care, love, and perform deeds of loving-kindness to others. Amen!

Kindnesses That Last Forever

08 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Ethics, Health and Well-Being, Jewish History, Quote of the Day, Tributes

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When I was in Central Europe last month with thirty of my congregants touring formerly great Jewish centers of life in Budapest, Prague and Berlin, the Holocaust was everywhere we went. Memories of the cruelty and brutality so oppressed members of our group that many of us reflected that, despite how worthwhile our tour was, we had never returned from travel feeling as demoralized, depressed and sad as we did from this trip.

Since our return I recalled an act of kindness once shown to me by one of my rabbinical school professors. It took place forty years ago, but his loving concern for me has never faded from my heart and memory. Juxtaposed to what we experienced in Central Europe, what he did for me is a stark contrast to what we witnessed in the cities of our recent travel.

One of my Talmud teachers at HUC-JIR in Los Angeles was Dr. Abraham Zygelboim (z’l). As a rabbinic student in my mid-20s, I had suffered a painful break-up with my then-girlfriend, and I was emotionally devastated. Between classes one day I needed to take a few minutes for myself, so I walked outside, sat against a wall and wept.

Out of nowhere Dr. Zygelboim approached me quietly and kissed my forehead without ever saying a word. His sweetness stays with me and will all the days of my life.

Dr. Zygelboim was a gentle man, a Polish Holocaust survivor whose brother, Szmul Zygelboim, was a political leader in the Jewish community of Warsaw before the Nazi occupation. Szmul managed to escape Poland and advocated on behalf of the persecuted Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe as powerfully as he could in the United States and Great Britain. Deeply frustrated that the allies were neglecting to stop the slaughter of the Jewish people, and as a public act of protest, Szmul set himself on fire in front of the Parliament in London on May 12, 1943.

Szmul’s brother, my teacher, never spoke to us, his students, of his experience in the Shoah or of his brother’s ultimate and courageous act of protest. But we knew of it.

Dr. Zygelboim knew Talmud, and I was lucky to learn with him. But frankly, I do not remember the specifics of any particular lesson he taught me forty years ago, though I remember the sections of Talmud we learned with him – but I do remember his kiss on my forehead.

We are, each of us, powerful beings, and we often underestimate our capacity to touch others. Indeed, how we treat others and the way we speak to them defines not only our relationships with them, but our nature and the measure of our character.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said towards the end of his life: “When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”

It is, of course, not always easy to be kind – especially when confronted by obstinate, difficult and offensive individuals. The moralist and essayist Joseph Joubert offered this in such circumstances, “Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.”

Leo Buscaglia offers this certain truth: “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”

An Open Letter to Young American Jewish Liberals About Israel

28 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice, Women's Rights

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This past month I exchanged emails with a bright, Jewish American rabbinical student living in Jerusalem who grew up in my congregation, whose family are life-long Zionists, and who has become disheartened by recent events and trends in the state.

She rightly perceives a growing corruption of classic liberal Zionist principles, is shocked by growing racism in Israeli society, dismayed by the Israeli government’s conceptualization of the situation with the Palestinians, befuddled by ongoing settlement building and home demolition in East Jerusalem, and horrified that a liberal democracy can tell Israeli Arab citizens that they can no longer work in Israeli Jewish communities because they pose a “security threat.”

She is fearful that demagogic and oppressive forces are gaining popular currency in Israel and that the Israeli government is increasingly intransigent in dealing effectively with its many challenges.

She is disheartened, as well, that the chief rabbinate maintains coercive hegemonic control over religious life in the state, and she wonders whether it would be preferable to give up Israel’s Jewish character for the sake of preserving Israel’s progressive democracy.

All these trends have caused her to emotionally disengage from Israel, and she confides that she feels like a heretic and does not know what to do or how to think about Israel going forward.

In response I am writing this open letter not only to her, but to all American Jewish liberal young people who are feeling this disconnect with the state of Israel.

First, I want you to know that I am proud of you, of your critical thinking, of your commitment to live an enriched Jewish religious and ethical life, to be a learned Jew, and that you yearn to make sense of what Israel means to you.

Second, you are not alone. Shabtai Shavit, a former director general of Mossad, recently wrote about his similar concerns about the “future of the Zionist project” and the threats against it in the region and international community. Shavit harshly criticized Israel’s political leadership’s “…haughtiness and arrogance, together with more than a bit of the messianic thinking that rushes to turn the conflict [Israel-Palestinian] into a holy war.”

Shavit worries that “…large segments of the nation…have forgotten…the original vision of Zionism: to establish a Jewish and democratic state for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel…” and that “the current defiant policy [of settlement building] is working against [this vision].”

He called upon Israel to enter into conversation with moderate Arab nations (i.e. Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia) and negotiate, based on the Saudi Peace Plan of 2002, a two-states for two peoples resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that will augur, as promised in the plan, the complete normalization of relations between Israel and the moderate Arab and Muslim world.

Shavit concluded soberly: “I wrote the above statements because I feel that I owe them to my parents, who devoted their lives to the fulfillment of Zionism; to my children, my grandchildren and to the nation of Israel, which I served for decades.” (Former Mossad Chief: For the first time, I fear for the future of Zionism – Haaretz, November 24, 2014 – http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.628038)

As a rabbi who has served American congregants for 35 years and been an active Reform Zionist all that time, I wish to offer ten additional thoughts to our young liberal American Jewish community, as well as others, if this applies:

1. You are not alone in your worry about the dangers to the Zionist dream;

2. You are not alone in your concerns about the unequal treatment of Arab citizens of Israel;

3. You are not alone in your anger about the hegemony of the chief rabbinate over the lives of all Israelis;

4. Israel is far more than Jerusalem which is becoming increasingly more ultra-Orthodox and right-wing. It is also Tel Aviv, a society that represents modern Israel that can inspire you anew about Israel’s past, present and future;

5. Israel is not a “racist society” though there are Israeli racists, a distinction with a significant difference;

6. Remember to appreciate that Israel remains a vital democracy despite its flaws and its current (but resolvable) status as an occupying force in the West Bank;

7. Don’t be cavalier about Israel’s real security threats, but do not accept at face value that those threats necessarily legitimate every policy executed by this government as smart, right, democratic, and moral;

8. Don’t forget that many Israeli liberal organizations monitor and fight injustice in Israel and the West Bank;

9. You must be able to hold at once your conflicting thoughts and feelings about Israel while maintaining your active engagement with her;

10. Despite your disappointment, anger and frustration, we cannot afford for you to disengage from Israel. Though we are not Israelis and only Israelis can make the decisions vital to their lives and security, we liberal lovers of Israel need you to become our next generation’s leaders in American Zionist organizations that advocate for the democratic, pluralistic, nation state of the entire Jewish people.

Theodor Herzl’s famous statement is still true and instructive – “If you will it, it is no dream.”

We need you to keep the faith, and become the advocates that Israel deserves and we and the Jewish people need.

Note: There is something that you can do from the States to help make the change that we want to see in Israel. We are approaching elections for the World Zionist Congress which is Diaspora Jewry’s only democratic mouthpiece to directly affect what happens in Israel. These elections help fund our movement in Israel, and have significant political and institutional repercussions. This is one easy way to have our voices heard. Go to www.reformjews4israel.org

What Really Happened at Lydda in 1948? Ari Shavit and His Critics

23 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in Book Recommendations, Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Stories

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Ari Shavit’s “My Promised Land” is arguably the most important book to come out of Israel in the last twenty-five years (see my review from January 14, 2014 – https://rabbijohnrosove.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/the-most-important-book-to-come-out-of-israel-in-years-my-promised-land-the-triumph-and-tragedy-of-israel-by-ari-shavit/.

A number of Israeli scholars, however, have questioned Shavit’s characterization of what happened at Lydda during the 1948 War of Independence. Based on interviews Shavit conducted with the brigade commander and other eye-witnesses, the author concludes that the killing of 250 Palestinian men, women and children by Zionist troops was a necessary tragedy in the young state of Israel’s history:

“Lydda is our black box. In it lies the dark secret of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lydda. From the very beginning there was a substantial contact between Zionism and Lydda. If Zionism was to be, Lydda could not be. If Lydda was to be, Zionism could not be.” (p. 108)

Many of Shavit’s critics disagree. After reading the articles below (I am grateful to my friend Rabbi Uri Regev in Jerusalem for forwarding them to me), I am left with significant questions: Was Lydda really a “massacre” or a tragedy of war?” Were there 250 dead, or was the number closer to 100, or even less? What actually happened at Lydda and why?

The historian Benny Morris says that many Arabs were compelled by Israeli troops to flee their homes and villages, and many others fled from fear of what their own leaders claimed would happen to them should Jews take over their villages. He says that the evidence does not show the intentional creation of a massive refugee problem designed ahead of time by Israeli leadership, but rather a spontaneous response to military conditions by low-level commanders in the field.

The massive flight of Arabs from Jerusalem, Haifa, Jaffa, the Jewish Coastal Plain, and the Upper Jordan Valley began even before a formal outbreak of war, soon after the 1947 UN Partition plan (1948, by Benny Morris, p. 94). He writes that Ben Gurion considered Ramle and Lydda in particular as dangerous “thorns” in Israel’s side  threatening Tel Aviv. He called for them to be “destroyed” (Ibid. p. 286).

The Israeli poet Natan Alterman published his poem “Al Zot” (Davar, November 1948) describing the Lydda battle soon after the event occurred thus providing context and a sense of immediacy after the fact.

The discussion among Israeli critics raises a number of questions that have special resonance today: What should be the status of Israel’s Arab citizens? Are Arab citizens of Israel treated equally to Israeli Jews as Israel’s Declaration of Independence promised? What is the future of Arab-Jewish co-existence in Israel in light of our seminal sacred moral texts:

“The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens. You shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am Adonai your God.” (Leviticus 19:34)

The following link will take you to the articles listed below. It is a lengthy read (40-50 pages) but for those seriously interested in the meaning of Lydda in the history of the War of Independence, it is a necessary read – http://njbrepository.blogspot.co.il/2014/08/what-happened-at-lydda-by-martin-kramer.html

What Happened at Lydda. By Martin Kramer. Mosaic, July 2014. In his celebrated new book, Ari Shavit claims that “Zionism” committed a massacre in July 1948. Can the claim withstand scrutiny?

The Meaning of “Massacre.” By Benny Morris and Martin Kramer. Mosaic, July 2014. The debate between Benny Morris and Martin Kramer over Israel’s wartime conduct enters its second round.

Distortion and Defamation. By Martin Kramer. Mosaic, July 2014. The treatment of Lydda by Ari Shavit and my respondent Benny Morris has consequences even they didn’t intend.

Zionism’s Black Boxes. By Benny Morris. Mosaic, July 2014. Martin Kramer shows how Ari Shavit manipulates and distorts Israeli history; but Kramer has an agenda of his own. 

The Uses of Lydda. By Efraim Karsh. Mosaic, July 2014. How a confusing urban battle between two sides was transformed into a one-sided massacre of helpless victims.

Lydda, 1948: A City, a Massacre, and the Middle East Today. By Ari Shavit. The New Yorker, October 21, 2013.

What Primary Sources Tell Us About Lydda 1948. By Naomi Friedman. NJBR, February 19, 2014.

Myths and Historiography of the 1948 Palestine War Revisited: The Case of Lydda. By Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela. The Middle East Journal, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Autumn 2005).

Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948. By Benny Morris. The Middle East Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter 1986).

Ari Shavit with David Remnick: The Tragedy and Triumph of Israel. Video. 92nd Street Y, November 26, 2013. YouTube. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#inbox/14986978be7120d8?projector=1

 

Jewish Prague is Now Little More Than Memory – Last in a Series

21 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by in Jewish History, Jewish Identity

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If there is to be any renewal of Jewish life in Prague today, according to Prague’s Chief Rabbi Karol Sidon of the Beit Praha (“House of Prague”) congregation, it will be due to foreign expatriates (“The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe,” by Eli Valley, p. 278).

This is not to say that some young Czech Jews are not trying to create community. Those who remain in Prague – a small number – have divided into two congregations, Beit Praha (Orthodox) and Beit Simcha (“House of Joy” – Reform/Conservative) and are doing the very best they can.

Prague is an exciting city by any standard. A feast for the eyes, the city’s multiple architectural styles and beautiful buildings, narrow streets, restaurants, shops, and magnificent churches, its burgeoning economy, and the past 25 years of Czech freedom make it a welcome residence and an exciting destination for visitors.

For the Jewish traveler there are many sites of interest including the Altneuschul (“The Old New”), Spanish, and Pinchas Synagogues, several Jewish museums, the Holocaust Memorial, and the Jewish quarter’s cemetery with graves of significant rabbis including Rabbi Judah Loew (the MAHARAL) of Golem fame.

Despite the long and rich history of the Prague Jewish community, it has suffered a fate similar to that of other Central European Jewish communities decimated by genocide, assimilation and immigration.

Over the last 800 years, the fate of the Moravian and Bohemian Jewish communities in this region was dependent on the largess of the king, and though at times Jews thrived, Prague suffered the entire list of classic anti-Semitic decrees at one time or another, including the prohibition against Jews owning land, living among Christians, belonging to guilds, and holding public office. At times Jews were forced to wear identification marks on their clothing, were restricted to peddling or money lending, paid high taxes, and were compelled to make “loans” to the royal treasury.

In good times, Jews held the status of “servi camerae – servants of the king” in which they were defended against pogroms provoked by the infamous blood libel accusation.

By the beginning of World War I, Jewish assimilation was so widespread that Judaism was all but gone from Prague though such luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler and Franz Kafka were born and raised there. By 1940, the Prague Jewish population had swelled to 55,000 to include refugees escaping the Nazis from the Sudetenland, Austria and elsewhere. After the Germans occupied Prague on March 15, 1939, Jews were expelled from all facets of the economy. Their property and belongings were stolen, and they were excluded from schools, trams, parks, and restaurants. Most of Prague’s Jews were eventually deported to Terezin, of which only 7500 survived.

After WWII, 20,000 Jews moved to Prague from the east thus making it a center of Jewish life in central Europe for a brief while. In 1948, large numbers made aliyah to Israel. After the communists came to power in 1950, 26,000 more Jews left as life became precipitously worse for those who remained.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989, Judaism experienced a kind of revival and became fashionable for the small remnant of young Jews whose survivor parents had remained, but assimilation and intermarriage had a continuing deleterious effect.

Today, Prague claims only 1350 registered Jews, half of whom are over the age of 70, though unofficial estimates range from between 5,000 and 20,000 of Jewish lineage.

The chronicler of Central European Jewish history, Eli Valley, blames the current Jewish leadership of Prague for its lack of organized, serious and sustained outreach to those of Jewish heritage living in the city, and he despairs of Prague’s Jewish future (Ibid, p. 26-27).

My synagogue group celebrated Kabbalat Shabbat with the Reform Beit Simcha in the magnificent Spanish Synagogue. Beit Simcha has no rabbi, and so services that evening were led by a brilliant young woman who works as a professional translator. Our group of 30 dwarfed the number of locals present. The prayer leader and the Orthodox son of the Executive Director of the organized Prague Jewish community joined us later for dinner and conversation.

Though these two young Jews were upbeat about what is happening in their respective congregations, I was not persuaded that the seeds for renewal were there. Though there is a kosher restaurant in the city, the Jewish communal organization oversees and maintains all Jewish sites, and Shabbat and holiday services are held, little else seems to be going on.

My own sense of this very small community is that it will remain small. Anti-Semitism in Prague is currently insignificant, but the history and state of the community does not suggest that a large scale revival is imminent. Indeed, despite the magnificence of Prague, the rich history of Jewish life there reaching back a millennium, the beauty of its synagogues, and the material wealth of many Prague Jews, Judaism in Prague is now little more than memory.

This is the fourth and last in a series of blogs on Central European Jewish communities – see:

Only the Guilty are Guilty – Reflections About Germany Then and Now on Kristallnacht – Sunday, November 9, 2014

A Dark and Heavy Cloud of Memory Hovering Over Budapest’s Jews – Sunday, November 16, 2014

Pavel Stransky – Terezin, Auschwitz and the Death March of a Survivor – Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Pavel Stransky – Terezin, Auschwitz and the Death March of a Survivor

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Musings about God/Faith/Religious life, Stories

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As we drove into Terezin where 33,000 Jews died and from which 88,000 were deported to Auschwitz, the place appeared as a charming medieval walled-town graced with a central square beneath gentle-leaved trees.

Terezin, a medieval town constructed by Joseph II for Maria Teresa, was established by the Nazis in 1940 to be a model camp used to persuade the International Red Cross that Jews were there for their protection and led a normal life.

The camp would receive 150,000 Jews including 15,000 children from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Most Jews stayed 6 months before being transported to Auschwitz. The camp crammed 80,000 souls together. Today, 1000 people live there.

Pavel Stransky was one of only 17,247 survivors. At 93, this warm-hearted, articulate and loving grandfather guided us through the camp and shared his story.

He was born in Prague and met the love of his life, Vera, as a young Jewish girl in 1938. They became engaged but before the marriage could occur he was taken to Terezin in 1941. By chance, Vera and her parents were on the next transport.

Vera and Pavel married in Terezin on December 16, 1943 in a non-Jewish ceremony one day before he would be transported to Auschwitz. Not knowing what would meet them there, Vera and her mother (her father had already died) voluntarily joined him. Upon arrival, Vera’s mother was gassed. Pavel and Vera were selected for work and separated.

Pavel lost half his weight by the time he was liberated. At 70 pounds and starving, he was forced on a 150-mile death march from Auschwitz and back to Terezin before Soviet troops liberated him.

Of Auschwitz, Pavel wrote:

“Had Dante Alighieri seen the ramp in Auschwitz-Birkenau at the end of the night of December 20, 1943, he probably would have been ashamed of his sober description of Hell.” (Pavel Stransky – “As Messengers for the Victims”, publ. 2000, p. 14).

Before being deported from Prague at the beginning of the war, Pavel had fortuitously taken a teacher training seminar, a role he credits with saving his life.

“The Children’s Block [at Auschwitz] was conceived by Fredy Hirsch, a handsome man who … could have been a model in ancient Greece… Fredy loved children and they …worshipped him.”

In October 1943, Fredy asked Dr. Mengele to make a children’s block out of one of the barracks, and Pavel became one of the coordinators.

The Czech Israeli writer, Otto B. Kraus, tells the story of the 500 Jewish children who lived in the Czech Family Camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau in which Fredy and Pavel worked. The children’s instructors organized clandestine lessons, sing-alongs and staged plays and charades (all described in Kraus’ novel “The Painted Wall”).

Mengele sustained The Children’s Block to provide the Nazis with an alibi to refute the rumors of the Final Solution. It became a shelter and haven for the children, who would all eventually perish in the gas chambers. 83% of the 50 Children’s Block coordinators, however, were still alive in May 1945 because they had spent days inside and out of the bad weather. The coordinators’ mission to create a make-believe world for the children, humanize and bring happiness into the last days of life for the most innocent victims also helped sustain them. (Ibid., Stransky, pps. 44-45)

Upon liberation, Pavel returned to Prague and advertised in local papers with the hope that Vera survived. One day she knocked on his door. Ecstatic, they married a second time under a chupah with real wine and a glass for breaking, and they bore and raised four children and six grandchildren. Vera died fifteen years ago.

As we toured Terezin, Pavel told us that the Nazis’ intention wasn’t just to murder Jews, but

“…to systematically humiliate people’s human dignity …, until the person had been transformed into a starving skeleton that for days and nights without end longs only for a piece of bread… in order [for the Nazis] to hate and despise the product of their own perversion …No one who has not gone through it … can imagine how hours, days, weeks, and months of an empty stomach can hurt; how it can dominate all the thoughts of someone who is eternally hungry, and how it focuses those thoughts on only one thing: just once to eat one’s fill!” (ibid. p. 37)

Pavel showed us a most remarkable synagogue in the camp, one that was hidden from the Nazis and that he (Pavel) did not know existed when he lived there, a windowless 20 X 20 feet room at the end of a drive. Its interior was painted in beautiful Hebrew calligraphy with passages inscribed from Tanakh and Tahanun prayers. Here is but one inscription from the Shacharit service:

“Concerning our brethren from the house of Israel, who in sorrow and in bondage, who between the sea and dry land – May God be merciful to them and deliver them from hardship to ease, from darkness to light, from slavery to redemption, and let it happen speedily.”

A Dark and Heavy Cloud of Memory Hovering Over Budapest’s Jews

16 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Book Recommendations, Jewish History, Jewish Identity

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I have been acutely aware of the Holocaust since I was a young child in the mid-1950s and first saw on my parents’ bookshelf a copy of Life Magazine’s photo display of the liberated death camps.

When I became a young adult I read and studied everything I could get my hands on about the Shoah, and over the decades I have seen countless documentaries and feature films on that singular tragedy in Jewish history.

However, when my synagogue group recently visited Central Europe, I felt overwhelmed in a completely new way by the dark clouds of memory that hovered everywhere we visited. I have found myself rethinking what it means to be Jew even now after all these years. Our journey to those places where Jewish communities once thrived but are no more, standing on the streets and in the plazas where Nazis deported and murdered Jews, where Hitler screamed at the masses and brown shirts burned books, where magnificent synagogues are now empty or were destroyed, and stood in the room where the Nazis decided on the Final Solution changed me. It will take some time, I suspect, for me to understand fully how.

Of the three major cities we visited – Budapest, Prague and Berlin (we also spent time in Bratislava and the Terrezin Concentration Camp), I was most depressed by what we found in Hungary. Despite its rich Jewish history dating back 1800 years and its once large Jewish population in Budapest and the surrounding country-side, today only 80,000 Jews remain in the city, and most are highly assimilated and elderly.

The Jewish community estimates that there are today only 8000 members of Jewish communal organizations, and only 500 Jews are active and regularly attend synagogue. There are, however, 1000 Jewish students attending Jewish schools. It is those children who offer the only real hope of any kind of Hungarian Jewish revival – such that it is.

Modern Hungarian Jewish history is well-known. Once the Germans invaded Hungary on March 19, 1944, Adolph Eichmann quickly and efficiently coordinated the liquidation of all the Jews in the Hungarian countryside. Within a year the Nazis, in alliance with Hungarian anti-Semites, murdered 700,000 of Hungary’s 800,000 Jewish population. Indeed, between May and July, 1944, the Nazis sent 12,000 Jews daily to the gas chambers all but extinguishing what had been the largest Jewish community in Central Europe.

During this onslaught some Jews escaped the terror in the country-side by flooding into Budapest, thus swelling that population to between 250,000 and 280,000 Jews. Though a few famous statesmen tried to save Hungary’s Jews (e.g. Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, Charles Lutz of Switzerland, and the Italian businessman Giorgio Perlasco – along with the Jewish attorney Rudolph Kastner), Hungarian Jews were essentially doomed.

The Hungarians were among the most vicious anti-Semites in Europe. In Budapest, the Nazis stepped aside and allowed the fascist Hungarian Arrow Cross militiamen to do much of their dirty work. The Arrow Cross shot ten to fifteen thousand Jews in the ghetto and marched hundreds to the Danube River where they ordered the Jews to remove their shoes and then shot them into the waters that turned blood-red.

The “Shoe Memorial” of 50 bronze shoes, conceived by film director Can Togay and the sculptor Gyula Pauer, marks the place at the river’s edge just three hundred meters from the ornate Hungarian Parliament building where the crime was done (for photos, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoes_on_the_Danube_Bank). It is noteworthy, as well, reflective of Hungary’s refusal to take responsibility for its role in the Holocaust, that the plaque at this site mentions only “victims,” not “Jewish victims” of the Arrow Cross militia.

At the end of the war only 100,000 Jews were left alive in Hungary and only because the Nazis took over Hungary so late and didn’t have time to finish what they set out to do before the allies won the war. The Soviet Communists promised an end to all forms of discrimination thus giving Jews a measure of hope, but the persistence of Hungarian anti-Semitism resulted in 20,000 Jews (one fifth of the city’s Jewish population) fleeing Hungary during the 1956 uprising.

Today, the Hungarian government is right-wing and authoritarian. Though it officially condemns anti-Semitism, it has done little to stop anti-Semitic skinhead activity and the publication of anti-Semitic books and periodicals. Hungary has not at all processed the past and takes no responsibility for the crimes it committed, as has Germany. Nonetheless, the writer Eli Valley (see below) notes that since the end of the Communist era in 1989 all religious groups, including Hungary’s Jews, have experienced a kind of revival.

There are two small Progressive Reform Jewish communities in Budapest (see http://www.reformjudaism.org/budapest-culture-community) and there is a Jewish Studies program at the Central European University in Budapest that has taken on an important role in revitalizing Jewish studies in the former Soviet bloc (http://web.ceu.hu/jewishstudies/).

For those who remain, there are only a few options to live a Jewish live in Budapest. However, most Hungarian Jews now wonder whether, indeed, they even belong in Hungary. Our Jewish guide told us that if conditions worsen she, her teen-age son and husband (a journalist who was fired when he reported candidly on the government’s right-wing authoritarian policies) will certainly, despite generations of their family having lived in Hungary, leave.

For a detailed description of the Hungarian Jewish community and its history, see the excellent work The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe: A Travel Guide and Resource Book to Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, and Budapest, by Eli Valley (publ. Aaronson, 2005). It is out of print, but can be purchased through Amazon.

President Ruvi Rivlin’s Remarkable Speech to the Israeli Arabs of Kafr Qasim

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Ethics, Israel and Palestine, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish-Christian Relations, Jewish-Islamic Relations

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The new President of the State of Israel, Ruvi Rivlin (my cousin), makes me enormously proud of him and his Presidency, now just several months old. He was invited to visit an Israeli Palestinian village that had suffered a massacre on October 26th, 1956, perpetrated by Israeli Border Police.

My colleague, Rabbi Ron Kronish, the Director of the Interreligious Coordinating Council of Israel, recently wrote in The Huffington Post of both the Israeli crime and the invitation given to President by the village’s mayor to speak there (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ron-kronish/the-president-of-israel-r_b_6120054.html). Recalling the crime Ron wrote that Israeli police

“…killed 48 Arab civilians who had violated a curfew (that they had not heard about in time). The border policemen who were involved in the shooting were brought to trial and found guilty and sentenced to prison terms (but all received pardons and were released within a year)”

President Rivlin’s speech may go down in Israeli history as one of the most important speeches ever delivered by a sitting Israeli President promoting mutual respect between Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians. He delivered it at the Israeli Arab town of Kafr Qasim in the Israeli “Triangle” in central Israel near the “green line” where the massacre took place.

Ruvi notes that his visit is not the first time in our family when efforts were made to make peace between Arabs and Jews in that location. His uncle, and my great-great uncle, Avram Shapira, came to Kafr Qasim in 1957 after the massacre to try and restore peace between its town’s Israeli Arabs and Israelis Jews.

President Shimon Peres had already apologized on behalf of the people and State of Israel for this  crime against the Kafr Qasim population, and this past month President Rivlin went further still in this speech.

You can read the entirety of the speech – see link below. Though Ruvi is against a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he has based his presidency in part on promoting democracy and equal rights for all Israeli citizens, including the 20% (1.5 million Israeli citizens) that is Arab Palestinian. He acknowledges in this speech that Arab Israelis have and continue to suffer second class citizenship status and that this must change.

President Rivlin’s outreach to the Arab community of Israel, which began last month in a video in which he sat silently with a ten-year old Arab boy from Jaffa calling out for an end to bullying, racism and discrimination. (see http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4577276,00.html) have had in this short time a profound impact upon the Arab citizens of Israel and Israelis who are fearful of the rise of racism and intolerance in Israeli society.

It is a travesty that Ruvi’s open-hearted and supportive outreach to Israeli Arab citizens is not being repeated by some members of the Israeli government of PM Netanyahu, who are calling instead for Israeli Arab citizens who don’t like current Israeli policies towards their communities to be transferred to the West Bank and to live under the Palestinian Authority (e.g. PM Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman).

And it is a calumny that Israeli right-wing fanatics have branded President Ruvy Rivlin a traitor to Israel. In the last two months, like the assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin before him who sought an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these right-wing fanatic Jews have dressed Ruvi in a kafiya and sent it streaming everywhere over the internet.

I pray for Ruvi’s good health and for his success. He represents the very best of Israel. Like President Shimon Peres before him, President Ruvi Rivlin is lifting the nation beyond politics that the state of Israel may fulfill its destiny as a democratic society for all its citizens.

He said in his speech:

“We have to find a path. This path it seems will not be laid on the foundations of love, but it can and must be built with an objective perspective, and with mutual respect and commitment.”

President Rivlin’s speech at Kfar Qasim – http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/PressRoom/2014/Pages/President-Rivlin-addresses-Kafr-Qasim-memorial-ceremony-26-Oct-2014.aspx

Only the Guilty are Guilty – Reflections About Germany Then and Now on Kristallnacht

09 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, Jewish History

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Only the guilty are guilty.

I am not one who accepts the Biblical transference of guilt from one generation to the next (i.e. “…punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” Exodus 20:5, 34:7, and Numbers 14:18).

Innocent children should not have to suffer punishment for the evil deeds of their parents.

My predecessor at Temple Israel of Hollywood, Rabbi Max Nussbaum (z’l), who served the liberal Jewish community of Berlin from 1936-40, would often travel the Jewish world and report back to our community about what he learned.

Max had become an international Zionist leader, and one year the West German government invited him to visit Germany. He returned and told our community, “It is not yet time for us to buy Volkswagens.”

My trip two weeks ago with 30 congregants to Budapest, Prague, Terrezin, and Bratislava was deeply moving and disturbing, yet in some respects also hopeful. (In future blogs I will offer more reflections).

I had visited Germany for the first time in 1969. As a college student, I crossed by train from Austria through East Germany into West Berlin, and then I walked through Check-Point Charlie into East Berlin and back. Thirty years later, in 1999, I visited yet again.

In each of the first two trips, I suspected any German over the age of 40 in 1969 and 70 in 1999 of being implicit in the murder of 6 million Jews and millions of others (e.g. Romas, homosexuals, Catholics, communists, the elderly, children, disabled, and infirm). I felt exceptionally uncomfortable spending any money in Germany at that time.

This time, I saw few people walking the streets over the age of 85 who might have been suspect, though the elderly I did see may have been Russian Jews who settled in Berlin in the last 25 years since the FSU’s dissolution.

This time as well, I was struck by how deeply Germany has taken responsibility for the crimes against Jews and humanity perpetrated by the Nazi generation. Memorials to the victims and museums commemorating those events are everywhere. The large Holocaust Memorial and museum, designed by architect Peter Eisenman and engineer Buro Happold, and located walking distance from the Brandenburg Gate, is a powerful statement of memory in the very heart of Berlin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_the_Murdered_Jews_of_Europe).

The Berlin Jewish Museum, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind (http://www.jmberlin.de/main/EN/04-About-The-Museum/00-about-the-museum.php) is also a moving record of past and present Jewish life in Germany.

And there are other museums that highlight Nazi terror and former Jewish life. We visited the Wannsee Conference Center (now a memorial) where Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich and the top leadership of the SS formalized plans to murder all Jews in German-occupied territory and beyond (the total was 11 million).

We visited the Berlin-Gruenwald Train Station (“Track 17 Memorial”) which between 1941 and 1945 was one of the major sites of deportation of the Berlin Jews to the ghettos of Lizmannstadt and Warsaw, and the camps at Terrezin and Auschwitz.

Of all the memorials in Berlin, however, the most powerful to me are the more than 40,000 brass-topped cobblestones (stolperstein – from the German “stumbling blocks”) created by German artist Gunter Demnig, who has installed these small memorials at the front entrance of the residence where a Holocaust victim last lived or worked before being deported. On each cobblestone Demnig stamps the details of the individual – the name, year of birth, the fate, the dates of deportation and death, if known. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein).

German school children visit all these sites as part of their curriculum and learn of Nazi crimes. Indeed, today Germany is the hope of Europe. Jews are more welcome there than in most other European countries.

US Ambassador to Germany John Emerson (friends to a number of us from his years living in Los Angeles) met with us at the American Embassy just meters from the Brandenburg Gate for more than 80 minutes. He described candidly a Germany that is not only a very close ally to the United States despite NSA eaves-dropping on German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but of Israel as well. He affirmed that there is little if any significant anti-Semitism in Germany, but cautioned against becoming complacent.

Despite this, I felt everywhere the ghosts of murdered Jews. On this anniversary of Kristallnacht 76 years ago today, I am grateful to the people and government of Germany for the t’shuvah they have sought to make.

I am grateful, as well, to the state of Israel for being our people’s refuge and strongest defense.

And I am grateful to the United States for being a nation where Jews and every other minority and religious community can live and thrive unfettered.

I came across a moving poem by Kenn Allan remembering Kristallnacht (a term, by the way, that was coined by the Nazis – lit. “Night of Broken Glass” – and not by Jews. Jews call November 9, 1938 “The Day of the Pogrom”). See – http://kennallan.com/poems/time/kristallnacht.html

Zichronam livracha. May the memory of the righteous be remembered for a blessing.

Congressman Henry Waxman – An American Hero

09 Sunday Nov 2014

Posted by in American Jewish Life, American Politics and Life, Ethics, Health and Well-Being, Israel/Zionism, Jewish History, Jewish Identity, Social Justice

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Few in the history of the United States Congress have so positively impacted the lives of millions of Americans and changed the way the US does business as has Congressman Henry Waxman, who leaves office January 2nd after serving in the House of Representatives for forty years.

Henry has served the district of my congregation for most of that time, and this past Shabbat evening hundreds in our community came to honor him and express our collective gratitude for his life-time of service not just to us here in Los Angeles, but to the nation as a whole.

Henry is a strong and principled man. His Jewish values have guided him from his earliest years growing up in Boyle Heights, and he believes that good government can overcome any entrenched power that eclipses the public’s interest and bring important benefits to people all over the country.

One must wonder, however, in light of the current dysfunction of our federal government, how he has been able to be so remarkably prolific as a legislator. I believe he has succeeded for many reasons. Henry is legally and politically skillful, keenly intelligent, moral, savvy, patient, persistent, perseverent, and blessed with a quick wit and disarming sense of humor.

When Henry entered the California legislature as a young man, and then Congress in the post-Watergate years (1974), he also took seriously the challenge of mastering the legislative process. He became an expert in the health care system and the science of the environment, as well as a thoughtful advocate of the American-Israel strategic relationship. Henry also mastered the budgetary process and devoted himself as both a majority leader and then minority leader to government oversight. He reached out across the aisle and successfully included Republican co-sponsors in all legislation he authored (one of the secrets to his legislative success), except one, the Affordable Care Act, which frustrated him because so many of the ideas incorporated in the bill had been suggested by Republicans.

Five years ago Henry gave me a copy of his memoir The Waxman Report, (still available from his local office) a title drawn from his family’s early east Los Angeles newspaper called “The Waxman Reporter.” His book is a chronicle of the challenges, successes and failures that he faced in his 40-year congressional career and in the California legislature, and is a veritable guide in how to be effective as elected public servants.

Most members of Congress would be thrilled to claim success in shepherding one or two bills into law. Henry’s record of accomplishment is one of the most expansive and distinguished in the history of the House of Representatives. Here is a partial list of what he has succeeded in bringing into law:

• He challenged Big Tobacco, forced a showdown with the CEOs of all the major tobacco companies, shined a light on the threats to the health and well-being of millions of Americans by emphasizing the addictive character of nicotine and its many health risks, the tobacco companies’ deliberate marketing of cigarettes to children, their manipulation of the nicotine level in their products, the number of consequent deaths, and the drain on the America’s health care system;
• He passed bills to ban smoking in restaurants and on domestic airplanes;
• He passed the Clean Air Act limiting toxic air emissions thereby protecting the ozone layer of the atmosphere, limiting the release of cancer-causing toxic emissions and other hazardous air pollutants thus saving tens of thousands of lives;
• He expanded Medicaid coverage for the poor and elderly;
• He funded the first government-sponsored HIV/AIDS research;
• He passed bills lowering drug prices through generic alternatives thus saving the American taxpayer trillions of dollars;
• He fostered the development of hundreds of new drugs to treat rare diseases (Orphan Drug Act);
• He got nutritional labels placed on food packaging (Nutrition Labeling and Education Act; Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act);
• He passed laws to keep food free of pesticides (Food Quality Protection Act);
• He cleaned up the nation’s water supplies (Safe Drinking Water Act);
• He held hearings on steroid use in Major League Baseball resulting in the Clean Sports Act;
• He established federal standards for nursing homes to protect the elderly from abuse and neglect;
• He sought to stop taxpayer waste, fraud and abuse in areas from Wall Street to Hurricane Katrina clean-up, and to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Henry Waxman has been as effective as any legislator in the last century of the American Congress. He succeeded because he and his staff were always prepared, always smarter and more skillful than his opposition and the most powerful special interests. No one ever intimidated him.

All the while, Henry attended to his district. Recently, a woman told me that she had approached Henry after her husband got sick as a consequence of his army service in the first Gulf War. He had lost his health insurance, the family had gone bankrupt and was on the verge of losing their home. He eventually died, but Henry saved this woman’s home from dispossession.

His support for the security of the state of Israel and for the liberation of Soviet and Syrian Jewry, distinguishes Henry as well in late 20th century Jewish history.

Henry is blessed with an extraordinary wife and life-partner, Janet, who is as smart, sophisticated, insightful, astute, refined, and decent as he. Her support, counsel and partnership with Henry have not only served him well, but also our nation. Together, they have a wonderful family and are deeply committed and educated Jews.

My wife Barbara and I consider Henry and Janet Waxman as dear friends. As they begin a new stage of their lives together, I wish them good health, joy with their children and grandchildren (note: Henry is the only sitting member of Congress who has three sabra grandchildren), and their many friends.

Despite Henry’s retirement from Congress, something tells me that America has not heard the last of Henry Waxman. He has still much to contribute to the nation, and I suspect he will do so with his characteristic intelligence, passion and skill.

May Henry Waxman’s legacy of service to our nation be the standard against which all current and future members of Congress be evaluated.