NJJN Israel at 70

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A SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE NEW YORK JEWISH WEEK AND NEW JERSEY JEWISH NEWS | SPRING 2018

So Near, So Far

The Israel-diaspora relationship in an age of division.

At Home in That Other Promised Land Rabbi Rick Jacobs’ Progressive Critique Is Geography Destiny for Israelis, U.S. Jews?

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Home and away

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ith Israel facing life-and-death threats from Hezbollah and Iran in the north and Hamas in the south, the issue of the eroding relationship between Israelis and American Jews remains just off the front burner. But Israel ignores it at its own peril, experts say. As we were putting the finishing touches on this special report — which takes a sustained look at the state of the Israel-diaspora bond — the actions of the IDF in the clashes with Palestinian protestors at the Gaza border were putting a strain on that connection. As the death toll in Gaza rose, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the leader of the Reform movement, Judaism’s largest by far, sought to walk a tightrope. “Israel has the right, and even the obligation, to defend herself and her borders.” But, he added, “we are alarmed, concerned, and profoundly saddened by the growing number of Gazan dead and wounded.”

The pages that follow, in a sense, stand at that “yes, but” intersection. On a whole host of issues — egalitar-

Editor’s Note

ian prayer at the Western Wall, conversion to Judaism, Israel’s treatment of African asylum seekers, the country’s commitment to democratic principles, even what to call home — many liberal Zionists in America, especially millennials, are saying to Israel: “Yes, we’re with you, but…” In the space taken up by this ellipsis, a relationship is being tested, perhaps as never before.

In a meditation on “at-homeness,” Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, wonders whether “Zionism should not have insisted, as it often still does, that the Jewish people not feel at home except” in Israel. Author and journalist Yossi Klein Halevi puts his finger on what he calls the central fault line running between a majority of Israelis and a majority of American Jews: on one side, the anguish of a still-besieged Jewish people 70 years after the Holocaust, and on the other, the anguish of an Israel, 50 years after the Six-Day War, still ruling over another people.

We look back and we look ahead in this special report. Francine Klagsbrun takes us back to Golda Meir, who artfully cultivated American Jews; there is no such Israeli prime minister today. And Jonathan Mark conjures up his grandparents’ generation — Zionists before Zionism, who lacked a “yes, but” in

their vocabulary.

But mostly we stay in the here and now. New York Jewish Week (NJJN’s sister publication) Israel correspondents Nathan Jeffay and Michele Chabin report on the gulf between young Israelis and their American-Jewish counterparts, and the insider-outsider experience of Anglo Israelis, respectively. Jewish Week staff writer Orli Santo considers the pressure the Israel-diaspora crisis is exerting on Israeli Americans in New York. NJJN managing editor Shira VickarFox reconsiders her spiritual tie to the Western Wall in light of the bitter debate over religious pluralism.

And NJJN Israel correspondent Gil Hoffman catches up with several Garden State expats to ask them what they like about living in the Jewish state. Spoiler alert: Almost everything.

Finally, Jewish Week editor and publisher Gary Rosenblatt profiles Jacobs, who has become the public face of the liberal critique of Israel. In an earlier life, the rabbi was a modern dancer. It will take a work of sublime choreography — daring, supple, tender, transcendent — to put Israelis and American Jews back on a better footing. Relationships, like dances, are built from the ground up. So, like Miriam, take up a tambourine and step lightly into the breach.

Robert Goldblum Editor, Israel at 70

NJ Jewish News ■ Israel at 70 ■ Spring 2018

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70 Contents

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Coming to the City of Gold in their golden years

By Gil Hoffman

At home in that other promised land

By Yehuda Kurtzer

Navigating contradictory geographies

By Yossi Klein Halevi

When the relationship was good

By Francine Klagsbrun

Present at the creation: Zionists before Zionism

By Jonathan Mark

There’s a wall between us

By Nathan Jeffay

Making the case for passionate, progressive Zionism

By Gary Rosenblatt

Within you and without you

By Michele Chabin

My relationship with the Kotel: it’s complicated

By Shira Vickar-Fox

Israeli Americans on a teetering bridge

By Orli Santo

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BY KEN STEPHENS Some of the best doctors in the world are injecting new life into gravely ill patients of all ages at Sheba Medical Center (also known as Tel Hashomer) in Ramat Gan, Israel, where innovation is the essence of the hospital’s daily DNA. Sheba Medical Center is the largest and most comprehensive facility of its kind in Israel and the Middle East region, as a whole. It was established 70 years ago during Israel’s War of Independence to treat wounded soldiers. As it has grown and developed with the State of Israel, Sheba Medical Center has transformed itself into an allencompassing medical city. The Center is divided into two hospitals - acute and rehabilitation - which account for over one million visits annually and offers cutting-edge, multi-faceted care in nearly every discipline of medicine.

The current edition of Forbes Magazine’s “Best Doctors in Israel” (Hebrew), named 188 medical professionals at Sheba Medical Center as the “best in their field,” which amounts to an astounding 40% of all specialists within the Israeli medical system The government of Israel also recently chose Sheba Medical Center to become the nation’s first “City of Health”, where revolutionary technological innovations will help improve the quality of life and longevity of the Jewish State’s citizens.

“Israel serves as a global incubator of innovative ideas for a variety of reasons,” said Dr. Eyal Zimlichman, Deputy Director General, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Innovation Officer at Sheba Medical Center. “First of all, it’s in our genes. Secondly, there is the military aspect, where we are taught to improvise when necessary in the field. These things allow us to be naturally innovative. This has trickled down into the medical field, where we are offering the highest level of medical care.”

Dr. Zimlichman recently unveiled Sheba’s plans for its futuristic Innovation Center at a meeting for potential donors and investors in Manhattan.

Prime examples of Sheba Medical Center’s innovative efforts revolve around combating potentially fatal diseases such as cancer with immunotherapy, oncology’s new medical “magic bullet” and targeting hemophilia with a novel drug.

Global pharmaceutical and biotech companies routinely conduct hundreds of clinical trials at Sheba during the year because of the medical center’s elite research and laboratory facilities.

Immunotherapy is a treatment that literally uses your body’s own immune system to invade and destroy cancer.

CAR-T (Chimeric Antigen Receptor) and TIL (Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes) cancer immunotherapies are not universal cancer cures at this stage. However, on-going clinical trials (conducted for major pharmaceutical companies and America’s National Institute of Health) at Sheba Medical Center’s oncology unit, where “end stage”

1 year old child injected with novel hemophiliac drug.

cancer patients are being treated with CAR-T, which specifically targets leukemia and lymphoma, and TIL that zeroes in on melanoma and ovarian cancer patients, have injected new hope into dozens of patients, who were only weeks or months away from certain death.

Seventeen cancer stricken people were treated at Sheba during an initial CAR-T trial, after all of these patients had displayed zero improvement in the wake of traditional chemotherapy treatments and bone marrow transplants. Of those seventeen, 75% had a complete response to the CAR-T treatment. One of those CAR-T patients, an 8 year-old girl from Bnei Brak, was the first child to achieve COMPLETE remission from childhood leukemia. A Sheba Medical Center oncologist boasted, “When we came to give her the CAR-T cells, she was very, very sick. She couldn’t even get out of bed. When we came back to visit her three weeks later, she was going back and forth on her rollerblades!”

There have been equally incredible results in the treatment of hemophilia.

Recently, a 1 year old boy, became the youngest patient in the world suffering from both severe Hemophilia A and an unusual allergy to be treated at Sheba Medical Center with a novel drug that only recently was approved for use in the USA. The drug developed by a biopharmaceutical company in the USA, contained a “bispecific antibody” that was injected into the child. According to clinical trial results published in the renowned New England Journal of Medicine, the new drug has shown a 90%

reduction in bleeding in children and a 70% reduction in adults.

“This is a new exciting era with many novel options for improved care and even complete cure of patients with hemophilia,” boasted Professor Gili Kenet, Director of the National Hemophilia Center at Sheba Medical Center. “The child’s mother is so happy with the new treatment. The child had experienced a head trauma, but required no further therapy at all.

Usually, this type of injury with a hemophiliac patient would involve hours in the Emergency Room ER with repeated doses of intravenous coagulation factors.

However, there were no complications as his hemostasis (blood factors) was completely normal!”

At Sheba Medical Center, a troubling diagnosis is never a reason to give up hope. With its talented doctors discovering and working with new therapies, Sheba Medical Center is providing patients with the prescriptions for long and healthy lives.

American Friends of Sheba Medical Center 575 Madison Avenue, 10th Floor New York, New York 10022-2511 Tel: (212) 605-0463

Dr. Paul Friedman, a cardiovascular specialist from the renowned Mayo Clinic in Minnesota (in jacket) consults with Sheba Medical Center cardiologists during a complicated operation.

Provided Content

NJ Jewish News ■ Israel at 70 ■ Spring 2018

INNOVATIVE DOCTORS AT SHEBA MEDICAL CENTERTEL HASHOMER ARE INJECTING NEW LIFE INTO AILING PATIENTS

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Coming to the City of Gold in their golden years

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Garden State boomers make Israel home

Gil Hoffman NJJN Israel Correspondent

hose who move to Israel are said to have made aliyah, Hebrew for going up. It’s an especially appropriate term to describe the recent trend among those who are making aliyah — they are doing so when going up in years.

According to Nefesh B’Nefesh, more and more Americans are moving to Israel when they are in their 60s and 70s, and this trend has not missed the Jews of New Jersey. Rather than opting for warm climates in Florida or Arizona, an increasing number of Jews from the Garden State have discovered that not only does the weather in the Jewish state measure up to traditional retirement spots, but there are several other good reasons to move there, as well.

“My quality of life has improved so much,” said Jean Corman, a former Jersey resident who moved to Jerusalem seven years ago with her husband, Richard. “I loved living in Westfield, too, but I had to take the car everywhere. Here I like going to lectures, movies, and seminars, and the neighborhood stores.

There is nothing I miss.”

Richard was the executive director of the JCC of Central New Jersey in Scotch Plains for 21 years and lived a comfortable life in Westfield before he and Jean made aliyah. Besides their commitment to Zionism, the Cormans also came because two sons had already moved to Israel and the births of grandchildren followed. Jean’s parents were in Jerusalem, as well, and after visiting three times a year for three years, Richard and Jean decided to leave their jobs and join their family in Israel.

Before making aliyah, Richard, 66, didn’t know what he would do in Jerusalem. Today he says that the hardest part of living in Israel is that there is just too much to do.

“I wish there were more hours in a day,” he said.

“You have to make choices. Some people my age want to golf, some want to study, some want to take it easy. I’m best when I’m busy and giving back to my community and my country.”

To that end, Corman is a development executive for the advocacy organization StandWithUs, is the vice president of the Lone Soldiers Center in Memory of Michael Levin, and the cofounder and vice chairman of the Jerusalem Green Fund. In that role, Corman goes out to the streets at dawn three times a week to pick up litter — and to educate the people who inevitably question him.

“When people tell me ‘kol hakavod!’ (well done) or ask if I work for the city, it sparks an educational conversation in which I say that I am a volunteer and that they should join me, because we have a collective responsibility to work for our community,” he said. “A year ago, I was buying fish in the Mahane

Yehuda shuk (market), and a guy put his arm on my shoulders and screamed at everyone that I am a tzadik, because he saw me on the Hebron Road at 5:30 a.m. picking up trash. For those few minutes, I was the star of the shuk. But no, I didn’t get a discount.”

Jean volunteers her time, as well, running a program for women 85 and up at a community center in a poor neighborhood. They come for arts and crafts and to sing songs, and they only speak Hebrew, which Jean said has effectively provided her with a “free ulpan,” an intensive Hebrew language course.

The Cormans are among several later-in-life couples interviewed by NJJN who decided to forego Florida and retire in the other Jewish state. NJJN asked them about their motivation and the unique challenges and benefits of moving to Israel.

A respected author who wrote the New York Times bestselling “Chicken Soup for the Jewish Soul,” Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins was the rabbi of the Conservative Princeton Jewish Center between 1992 and 2005. He and his wife, Maxine, made aliyah three years ago when he was 77 for several reasons.

“My wife said we say ‘L’Shana Haba b’Yerushalayim’ (Next year in Jerusalem) at the Passover seder every year, and it was time to take it seriously,” Elkins said. “We made 45 trips to Israel before making aliyah. Every time we went, we said, ‘Why don’t we just stay?’”

Now the Elkins live on the 21st floor of a Jerusalem luxury apartment complex with an incredible view of the Old City from their living room, and two of their six children are also in the country. The transition was relatively seamless, according to the rabbi.

“It’s pretty comfortable,” he said. “We tell everyone we know in New Jersey to come on over, and many people have. My wife raised generations of students for 20 years at the synagogue religious school, many of whom made aliyah. It’s a great place to live, and we feel safer here than anywhere in the U.S., even safer than in Princeton.”

It hasn’t been as simple for Ricki Haber, who worked for Educational Testing in Princeton. She and her husband, Larry, made aliyah from East Brunswick in 2008 when she was 63 and he was 66. Some of Ricki’s challenges stemmed from her having a disability, but she said the adjustment became easier once she figured out how to handle her adopted home. She described Jerusalem as “disabled friendly,” with curbs, bus stops, and buses that are handicapped accessible; medical services that are excellent; and beneficial government stipends.

“Once we learned the system, there haven’t been too many problems,” she said. “Living in a community with other English speakers has been helpful,” especially another wheelchair-bound English speaker who showed the Habers how to navigate Israel and its bureaucracy. They also have two kids

Richard Corman, former executive director of the JCC of Central New Jersey in Scotch Plains, now lives in Jerusalem. in Israel to help.

“I moved here because we belong here,” Larry said. “No one is going to advocate for you. You have to advocate for yourself. The more of us that come, the better it will be for all of us.”

Anne Homa, who moved to Israel from Livingston in 2013 with her husband, Jonathan, also had to learn her way around medical system when she fell on a slippery sidewalk three months ago and broke her leg. Despite the bureaucracy, she said that due to Israel’s socialized medicine system, she has not had to pay a penny for treatment. She was operated on the day after the accident and she has been going to physical therapy ever since.

When Jonathan was offered a good job in Petach Tikvah, Anne, 60, packed up and moved to Jerusalem in only three months, leaving a position as a senior accountant in N.J. for a lesser role in Israel.

She has no regrets, she said, and was surprised by her new colleagues’ reaction to her injury.

“Here people were fine with me missing work,” she said. “In the U.S., eyes would have rolled.”

The Homas have one child living in Israel and two in the U.S. Their neighbors in Jerusalem, Mark and Carol Goldberg, made aliyah in 2014 from West Orange at ages 65 and 62, respectively, after all three of their children moved to Israel. Mark was most wistful for the Costco on Route 10, and Carol said she misses her West Orange community, though they have become part of a new one in Jerusalem.

The Goldbergs said they were inspired by an underground seder they attended in 1976 with aliyah activists in Soviet Russia. Financial considerations delayed their aliyah for decades, but their children, raised as Zionists, ended up showing their parents the way.

During Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Mark hurt his back running to a safe shelter as a siren wailed. Even so, he said, his main memory from that was how nice people were to him.

Lily and Irv Cantor also made aliyah from West Orange in October 2012 after they lived in Highland Park and Edison for 30 years. They were preceded by their daughter Shaena, who is a bride-to-be, though their other children and grandchildren remained in the U.S. Lily’s mother, Sophie Lubka, a 95-year-

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Israel’s 70th anniversary by ut 70 new ambulances on its streets.

Celebrate Israel’s 70th anniversary by putting 70 new ambulances on its streets.

NJ Jewish News ■ Israel at 70 ■ Spring 2018

We join in celebrating Israel’s 70 years.

And Magen David Adom is proud to have saved lives for every one of them.

NJ Jewish News ■ Israel at 70 ■ Spring 2018

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At home in that other Promised Land Does Zionism ask too much of the American Jewish community?

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Yehuda Kurtzer Special To NJJN

am blessed to be a Jew who feels deeply at home in two places. I count my blessings to be both authentically American and also to feel at home in the state of Israel, where I have family, friends, and an office with my name on it. I’ve roughly divided my upbringing, my formative teen, and college years, and now my professional life between the two places, such that I have the fluency to understand two cultures. I resent when taxi drivers in Israel won’t speak to me in Hebrew; they are telling me I am a visitor. And don’t get me started on when my fellow Americans assume I am Israeli because I wear a kipa in public.

Israelis love talking about how “at

home” they are, and they often want other Jews to be at home in Israel or at least to treat it with both the comfort and reverence that you would treat the home of your relatives. But many American Jews are still superstitiously uncomfortable with talking about how comfortable we are here. I think we remain surprised at the speed with which we assimilated, accommodated, and acculturated to this environment, at the influence and affluence we acquired, and we are scared that it will somehow disappear. I suppose that’s always the case; the privileged fear losing what they have, especially if they remember, or they can imagine, how terrible they once had it. In hushed tones: Didn’t German Jews think similarly of their world, until it shattered?

You can own real estate as a Jew, but

The power of place: A feeling of “at-homeness” in America.

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there’s always a chance it’s a short-term investment.

Maybe I just have an acquired aversion to the crisis narrative, but I like being at home, and I like talking about it, and I think American Jews need to embrace being at home as part of their Zionism, and not as a rejection of it. If you are actually at home but refuse to admit it, you start taking less responsibility for your own environment. People do terrible things to rental cars. I like feeling at home because it is empowering, because

it makes me responsible; wherever you are at home, you have a responsibility to agitate, and to clean up.

If 2018 marks the anniversary of Jewish at-homeness in Israel, American Jews don’t have a neat parallel. Jews have been in America a long time, but none of the major inflection points in our “arrival” — waves of immigration, the first seminaries, Jews in elected office, Thanksgivvukah — have the same force of a holiday of international recognition.

I am fourth-generation American, and

70 YEARS OF INDEPENDENCE, PERSEVERANCE, AND DISCOVERY W E I Z M A N N - U S A . O R G

The pioneering spirit of Israel shines brightly at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where leading researchers collaborate to help solve humanity’s greatest challenges.

The Weizmann Institute’s passion for discovery has sparked breakthroughs in science and technology that helped fuel 70 years of Israel’s economic growth and world prestige. We’ve shaped leaders of industry and government, and educated and inspired a new generation of scientists.

Happy Independence Day, Israel!

of Zion — we were, in the words of the Psalmist, “like dreamers.” That was the story we heard from those who actually went. But there were also a lot of Babylonian Jews who stuck it out in Babylonia. These Jews might be lost to biblical history, but we find them later on. The Judean legacy continued in Babylonia and morphed into Jewishness with the company of other returnees and exiles, and migrants in search of opportunity, and eventually the massive Jewish population center in Babylonia would bequeath us some of our most cherished cultural and literary legacies. There have been times throughout our history when our exilic experience has felt extremely — well, exilic: coercive, dangerous, scary. Other times, such as when Babylonian Jews elected to stay, and in the thriving Jewish metropolis of Alexandria in the first century, and many other times with or without the availability of sovereignty, exile has just been an address somewhere in the world not between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Most American Jews are by now those Babylonians who stayed, with little to no recollection of that breathless, unexpected possibility of leaving. And now, why leave one comfortable home for another?

Continued on page 27

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7 NJ Jewish News ■ Israel at 70 ■ Spring 2018

though I know I feel differently about my Americanness than my grandparents, I can’t point exactly to the milestone events in American history when the conditions for Jews changed to what we enjoy today.

So let’s use 1948 as the homecoming birthday for American Jews as well, on the logic that the birth of Jewish sovereignty also brings with it the formal birth of voluntary diasporism, the choice — and let’s please call it a choice — by American Jews to fulfill their destiny at home but not in the homeland. If American Jews wanted Israeli citizenship, most could get it at the airport. The fact that we don’t is a product of pronounced alternative choices. In 2018, we mark both 70 years of the miraculous, dream-like state that is the state; and we mark the coming of age of a people that has decided to stay on the lush banks of the Jordan and not to cross over. And then if the central project of the 20th century for the Jewish people was in relocating, let’s make the central project of the 21st century into making sense of being at home.

We have good company in Jewish history and Jewish memory. The first Babylonian exile lasted 70 years, according to the traditional chronology; and at its end — when the Lord, through the edict of Cyrus, restored the restoration

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Navigating contradictory geographies Welcome to the dysfunctional relationship between Israelis and American Jews

A

Yossi Klein Halevi Special to NJJN

merican Jews to Israelis: What exactly about shooting unarmed Palestinian demonstrators on the Gaza border don’t you understand is wrong?

Israelis to American Jews: What exactly about preventing a mass Hamas breach of our security fence don’t you understand is essential?

The mutual exasperation between liberal American Jews and Israelis over the weekly demonstrations at the Gaza border — which led up to the May 15 commemoration of what the Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, marking Israel’s independence — is only the latest expression of our increasingly dysfunctional relationship. To some extent, the drift is

an unavoidable consequence of living in radically different geographies. American Jews live in the safest and most accepting diaspora Jews have known; Israelis live in the most dangerous region on the planet.

The divide is intensified by the very different ways in which each community understands and experiences its Jewish identity. According to polls, American Jews regard tikkun olam as one of the main components of their Jewishness. But ask Israelis about the essential elements of their Jewish identity, and tikkun olam would probably not even appear on the list. Many Israelis are, of course, committed to tikkun olam, but tend to think of social justice as a human imperative. What, Israelis might wonder, is particularly Jewish about tikkun olam?

The Gaza border clashes last month, and the IDF’s response, brought the Israel-diaspora relationship into sharp relief. GET T Y I MAGES Instead, Israelis would likely define their core Jewish commitments as protecting Israel and the Jewish people and maintaining some relationship with Jewish tradition.

Recently I wrote an op-ed defending Israel’s military policies to protect its Gaza border. In response, an American Jew tweeted his shame with a Jewish state that substitutes geopolitical considerations for morality. Reading his anguished cry, I wondered: What other state would be faulted for placing its security needs ahead of other values?

What, then, is the primary purpose

of a Jewish state? Israelis would argue: to protect the Jewish people in its land and offer refuge to diaspora Jews when necessary. Many American Jews would argue: to uphold Jewish values and be an exemplary society.

In truth, Zionism promised to fulfill both visions. The future Jewish state was to normalize the Jewish people and restore us to the international community as a nation among nations. At the same time, it would be a light unto the nations, a secular version of the messianic kingdom.

How would Israel simultaneously be

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When the relationship was good Golda Meir’s artful cultivation of American Jewry

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Francine Klagsbrun Special to NJJN

ack in the day when Israel was young, Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish Committee, struck a deal with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. In essence, Israel was not to interfere in any way in American Jewish life. Fearful at the time of having American Jews accused of “dual loyalty,” Blaustein wanted a clear separation between the Zionist state and Jews in the United States, including references to Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people.

Those concerns seem almost quaint today, when ties between American and Israeli Jews have frayed and surveys showNJ_ad_8.5X5.625_PRINT.pdf that young American Jews1

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are less likely than their parents, and certainly their grandparents, to regard Israel as central to their lives. For their part, Israelis, with their strong economy and enviable technology, no longer feel themselves dependent on American-Jewish support as that nation once did.

But in Blaustein’s time, links between the two communities were tight.

The United States had emerged from World War II with the strongest and wealthiest Jewish population on the globe, and Israeli leaders relied on it for funding and resources. American Jews, in turn, took pride in the courageous little nation that had fought off a pack of enemies and whose pioneers were devoting themselves to building 5/15/18 1:18InPMtheir admiration, also, a new land.

Jews in the United States lionized the state’s early leaders.

Of those leaders, Golda Meir held a special place in the hearts of American Jews. Although born in Kiev in 1898, she lived in the United States from the time she was 8 until she left for Palestine at 23. She had a deep knowledge of American ways, and with that know-how she strengthened the bonds between Israel and the United States during her years in government more than any leader before her.

But long before that, she had begun strengthening bonds between Jews in both lands. As early as the 1930s, when she headed the Pioneer Women in the United States, she instilled a sense of camaraderie in the American women for their counterpart, the Women Workers’ Council in “Eretz-Yisrael.”

She taught them pioneer songs and dances, and inspired them with stories of the brave women who had left their homes to join the Zionist enterprise.

In 1950, she helped found the Israel Bonds organization that encouraged American Jews not simply to donate to

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Golda Meir at United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York Inaugural Dinner in 1959. WI KI M EDIA COM MON S

Israel, but to invest in that country so that they, too, had a share in it.

Throughout her career, she traveled to the States almost every year to attend Jewish organizational meetings and speak at hundreds of lunches and dinners for the UJA or Bonds or Hadassah.

Ignoring the Blaustein deal, she

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Present at the creation: Zionists before Zionism An older generation knew the 70 years before ’48

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CIE emphasizes the importance of content knowledge about modern Israel. Audiences include teens, college students, summer camp staff, Jewish educators and professionals, Spanish readers, and the general public.

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Center for Israel Education P.O. Box 15129 Atlanta, GA 30333 www.israeled.org | info@israeled.org

Jonathan Mark Special to NJJN

n the 70th birthday of Israel’s Third Commonwealth, as the state was quaintly known in 1948, looking back 70 years prior to 1948 is as startling as looking at stiffly posed daguerreotypes of ancestors, recognizable as family and yet, was that us?

In 1878, Tel Aviv was barren, a sand dune. Hebrew, the mother tongue, was extinct, hardly heard except in study or prayer. It would be another three years before Eliezer Perelman disembarked in the Holy Land, changed his surname to BenYehuda, and began Hebrew’s revival, refusing to speak anything but Hebrew to anyone, not even to his son, who became the first Hebrewspeaking child that anyone could remember. Meanwhile, no Jew ever spoke of being a “Zionist” or “Zionism” until an Austrian Jew, Nathan Birnbaum, coined those words in 1890, linking the biblical to the modern longing to return. The words so naturally fit, they ricocheted like a Jewish “midnight howl” across continents and oceans.

No one remains alive from those days, but we’re only one degree of separation away. Even in the 21st century, we could talk with Rabbi David Eliach, former principal of the Yeshivah of Flatbush, famous for its meticulous Hebrew linguistics; Eliach was a child in Jerusalem when Ben-Yehuda still walked its streets.

Jacob Birnbaum, the Soviet Jewry leader, often told me about how his grandfather, Nathan Birnbaum, came up with the word “Zionist” years before Theodor Herzl became a Zionist. In 1940, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s father, Rabbi Shlomo Telushkin, worked for, and then officiated at the New York funeral of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, one of the pre-eminent Zionist leaders, as 25,000 lined his funeral procession through the Lower East Side.

In 1898, though Jabotinsky was

only 18, a teenager, he stood up at a Zionist gathering in Warsaw, warning that European Jewry was doomed.

Escaping from exile, evacuating the diaspora, he said, was our “only hope of avoiding a Bartholomew’s Night,” referring to a long-ago French massacre of Huguenots that left thousands of murdered men, women, and children floating in the River Seine.

Jabotinsky’s warning, and others like it, galloped like Paul Revere through every shtetl and town, including Ciechanow, my grandfather’s village in rural Poland. Zionism began peppering conversations around Shabbos tables, and after morning minyan, and all the more after the Kishinev pogrom of 1903.

Chaim Nachman Bialek’s widely published poem, “City of Slaughter,” mocked the passivity, the cowardice of these “sons of Maccabees,” the Jewish men who couldn’t fight.

“Crushed in their shame, they saw it all; they did not stir nor move,” wrote Bialek, “peering from the cracks,” while Jewish women were raped and Jewish children were killed.

Zionists began talking about the need for a Jewish militia, even if many considered armed Jews on horseback to be quite un-Jewish.

As one Jewish Zionist leader said, “Some shout that we want only others to fight. Some whisper that a Jew only makes a good soldier when squeezed in between gentile comrades. I challenge the Jewish youth to give them the lie.” In World War I, Joseph Trumpeldor, a young Russian Zionist, organized the allJewish, 650-man Zion Mule Corps (“the first Jewish army since the Maccabees,” many said) to fight in the Gallipoli campaign alongside the British. Post-war, the Zion Mule Corps led directly to the 1921 founding of the Haganah (the Jewish militia in the British Mandate), and in 1948 the Haganah became the IDF, Israel’s army.

In the village of Mlawa, where my great-grandmother Chana grew up, shtetl Jews purchased “shares”

Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s warnings of the threat Eastern European Jews faced galloped like Paul Revere through every shtetl and town. KN ESSET.GOV.I L in the “Jewish Colonial Trust,” supporting Zionist settlements. The Mlawa Yizkor book notes that in those early years, “young Yeshiva students appeared in the shtiebels [the small shuls] to collect money for the Land of Israel. The elder chasidim, in anger, broke dishes, tore up lottery tickets and confiscated the collected funds.”

Talk of a Jewish state became so commonplace that a local Russian official would tease the Zionists in the Mlawa street. “Well,” he would laugh, “do you already have a king for your country?”

Zionists would gather at the home of Chana’s uncle and aunt, Feivel and his wife, also named Chanah, for tea and Hebrew conversation, to the extent that anyone had a Hebrew vocabulary in those days. When fiery Zionist conversation softened to embers, Feivel asked his guests to sing a new song or tell an old story.

My great-grandmother Chana married Simcha, from Ciechanow, where they settled. In 1915, Ciechanow established its first Zionist Hebrewlanguage school for girls. Warsaw’s “Lovers of Hebrew” group sent Ciechanow a Hebrew teacher.

The school had a Hebrew drama club and literary evenings. The Yizkor book remembered that when the Zionist girls held their events, “Boys from important Jewish families came forward, [even] from families for whom Zionism was out of the question.”

My grandfather, Chana’s son, moved to New York and created a storefront shul, Knesset Israel Nusach Sfard, in the South Bronx, but a Nusach Sfard shul, in those days, tended to attract non-Zionists. My grandfather encouraged his daughters to attend the local Young Israel, a place without rabbis or cantors, in the 1930s, but led by young Orthodox Zionists. In the evenings, these men and

However, Jabotinsky promised, “Whoever of you will escape from the catastrophe, he or she will live to see the exalted moment of a great Jewish wedding: The rebirth and rise of a Jewish state.”

In Ciechanow, one teenaged girl, Roza Robota, joined HaShomer Ha’Zair (The Young Guard), a socialist-secular Zionist youth group. Then, in September 1939, the “volcano spit its lava.” Roza was sent to Auschwitz, assigned to sorting the clothes of the dead. With other young people from Ciechanow, she joined the camp’s Jewish underground. Even dead Jews were given jobs. When Roza found useful items in the pockets of the dead, any-

Continued on page 20

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women would climb the neighborhood walk-ups, knocking on apartment doors, collecting money for Zionist projects. The Young Israel “kids” loved everything about Israel, the songs, the pride, the geography they could only imagine; they loved even the politics, the cacophony of Jewish voices committed to the holy cause. As they grew older, they may have disagreed with prime ministers, but they loved each one.

In 1938, Warsaw’s Tisha b’Av was somber. On the day commemorating destruction and exile, Jabotinsky offered yet another warning, chilling listeners and readers of Yiddish papers everywhere: “I am calling upon you, Polish Jewry, the crown of world Jewry … a catastrophe is coming closer … [a] volcano will soon spit its all-consuming lava.”

NJ Jewish News ■ Israel at 70 ■ Spring 2018

12

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Timeless Travels:

70

ISRAELat

Tales of Mystery, Intrigue, Humor and Enchantment

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A 2017 Best Fiction Title as Selected by Indie Reader / Hufngton Post Rotenberg displays that rare skill of being able to write convincingly in first and third person and avoids the temptation of showing off such skill to the detriment of the stories; instead the reader benefits from his examining ethnic identity from a variety of angles.

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vels:

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Nathan Jeffay Special to NJJN

erusalem — It’s hard to step around the oversized American cultural footprint in Israel: baseball, burgers, mega malls, and soft ice cream, all of which are a part of everyday life here. What’s not part of everyday life, though, is a discussion about American Jews.

Throughout Israel’s existence, its leaders have constantly stressed the state’s importance to Jews everywhere. But after having seven decades to get to know American Jewry — the diaspora’s largest and most influential segment — the nation still hasn’t got very far. And among young Israelis, despite being more connected than ever to the outside world, their knowledge and interest about the issues that animate American Jewry are still low.

“You can seem to be a perfect Zionist here without having to think about world Jewry once in your life,” said Naama Klar, author of a major report on Israeli-American relations.

Yoad Shirazi, a 22-year-old from Jerusalem, lets me interrupt his shopping in a mall in Modiin, a city between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to ask him about American Jews. “There are maximum a million,” he said, hazarding a guess about the United States’ Jewish population (he was only off by 4.5 million). What does he know about them? “Not too much, I don’t know too much.”

And as I ask more young Israelis about the Jews of America, there’s a common refrain: America means soft ice cream out of a machine, not hand-scooped; multiple-choice test questions (so you don’t need to think too much); and seemingly endless hot showers (drought-conscious Israelis shut off the water when soaping).

But when it comes to the subject of American Jews and their attitudes toward their religion and identity, Israelis have very limited knowledge.

What’s more, for many young Israelis, formal education about diaspora

current charedi-dominated situation at the Kotel and “ When my mother founded the company, her phi the request for change, he said: “If it’s worked well he said. offer the most experience Part of the dissonance here is enriching more basic than possible. To until now, we don’t need to change it.” Gavriel, also this wonderful tradition.” a symbol, the Kotel is less Marilyn Ziemke secular, has difficulty with the idea of change at the religious ideology. Ascontinue Kotel, saying that while the Wall is “everyone’s,” central to many Israelis, who live every day in this country,tours than toinclude Americans, whowith spendlocal less time mixed prayer seems to be “against CRUISES the religion- at All cruise visits Jewish com here and are more likely to make connections to the end of the day.”

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Jews fits into a single category: history.

“We learned in history about Jews in the diaspora,” Yaniv Gavriel, a 26-year-old cellphone salesman, told me in Jerusalem, estimating American Jewry today at 500,000 people. Natan Ventura tells me in Modiin that he learned about the history of the diaspora “but not in the modern era.”

Doron Cohen, a 31-year-old from Haifa, said that in his Zionist schooling, the contemporary diaspora was never featured. “Studying World War II, we learned about Jews in Europe, but we never learned about Jews today in the U.S.” He feels “no connection” with Jews living in America now — around six million people, he estimates — and says they have a “totally different life.”

Even in the hothouse of Israeli Zionist idealism, the youth movements’ — groups like Hashomer Hatzair, Habonim Dror, or Bnei Akiva — emphasis on Jewish peoplehood has been limited.

“The Israeli youth movements never taught about the Jewish People,” said Klar, managing director of the Reut Institute think tank, adding that while there were connections between members and foreign movements, formal programming didn’t include the issue of the Jewish People. This has changed recently, with the Youth Movement Council, a group instituting a new curriculum and new staff for a project meant to bring young Israelis and American Jews into closer contact.

Klar, whose organization has an advisory role in the project, told NJJN: “Now, every youth movement has someone responsible for this field, and they are starting to create content on this subject; for example, what [young people] should know about other Jews living outside of Israel.”

In practical terms, when Israeli youth meet in their movement chapters across the country, in addition to playing games, hooking up, and having the usual discussions about Israel and life as Generation Z, from now on they will also be finding out about diaspora Jews.

But the challenge is great, and at least for now.

As Adam Ferziger, head of Israel’s newest think tank on Israel-diaspora relations puts it, “Most Israelis just do not ‘get’ the idea of religious identity, as it is in America.”

Nor do they get the idea of the fight over prayer at the Western Wall. I get blank looks from young Israelis when I broach the subject, on Jerusalem Day, of all days, when newspapers and TV are full of coverage of Jerusalem, the city’s past, and what its future holds. They say they have no idea what I’m talking about.

For many American Jews, the fight for more egalitarian prayer rights at the Kotel is the hot-button issue when it comes to Jerusalem. Here, many are oblivious to the row, and when people have heard about it, accounts can be garbled.

Gavriel, the Jerusalem cellphone salesman, thinks that American Jews want the whole Kotel to be mixed, not just the limited section that is actually under discussion. The only young Israeli I encounter who can give me an accurate account of the controversy is Doron Cohen. He is secular and lives in the city that takes the strongest stances against ultra-Orthodox power, Haifa, even running public transportation on Shabbat. But after outlining the

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NJ Jewish News ■ Israel at 70 ■ Spring 2018

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Making the case for passionate, progressive Zionism

As Israel-diaspora rift grows, Reform leader Rabbi Rick Jacobs plays a key role in seeking to engage disengaged young Jews

I

Rabbi Rick Jacobs speaking at the 2015 Reform biennial in Orlando: “I can distinguish between being upset at the government and being in touch with the people and with Jewish ideals.” U R J

Gary Rosenblatt Special to NJJN

want our young people to fall in love with Israel,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the leader of the Reform movement, American Judaism’s largest denomination. “I want them to stand up and fight out of love, not out of anger,” he insists.

The young people he speaks of — large numbers of millennial and Generation Z Jews who appear to be decidedly more distanced from the Jewish state and Jewish life than their elders — are a key target for Jacobs and the organized Jewish community. Whether or not this cohort can be engaged Jewishly is critical to the future of American-Jewish life as we know it.

With his charismatic style and passionate commitment to Israel, Jewish tradition, and progressive ideals, the 62-year-old Reform leader plays a pivotal and delicate role these days. He

promotes serious encounters with things Jewish to liberal constituents, but is not averse to criticizing some of Jerusalem’s controversial actions. Those include its treatment of Palestinians, expansion of settlements, criticism of the judiciary and the press, and efforts to deport illegal African migrants.

Most recently, Jacobs sought to walk a rhetorical tightrope by celebrating the opening of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem while calling out the Trump administration for “lack of progress toward a long-term just solution for Israelis and Palestinians.” The rabbi also pointed out that “Israel has the right, and even the obligation, to defend herself and her borders,” but added that “we are alarmed, concerned and profoundly saddened by the growing number of Gazan dead and wounded.” His statement

Continued on page 21

There’s a wall between us Continued from page 13 ing in Israel as Disneyland, and they imply: ‘You’re so lucky to live there, you are so lucky to live near the Kotel.’ There’s a sense that we live in Disneyland, but we don’t.”

U.S.-born Michael Underberg, Jerusalem U’s senior Israel educator, recalled going to a bar mitzvah at the Kotel for the son of a U.S.-based friend. “He asked: ‘You guys don’t do bar mitzvahs at the Kotel?’ And I looked him thinking: ‘Why would I do a bar mitzvah at the Kotel?’”

When you explain to young Israelis the depth of U.S. Jews’ connections to the Kotel and why they see prayer practices as such a big deal, even people who are sympathetic are often skeptical that change can happen. “I’m personally in favor, but I don’t think this will be allowed by the traditionalists,” said Yarden Damari, a 20-yearold student from Modiin.

To many young Israelis, this kind of reality is all part of Israeli democracy. Said Klar: “In the Israeli mindset the Kotel is something here that needs to be managed here, and if it’s something that needs giving up to maintain support of charedim [in the ruling coalition] that’s legitimate.”

Roi Rubinstein, a 25-year-old Orthodox man from the settlement of Elazar, told me: “We’re one people, but what goes on here is our decision.” Gavriel agreed, saying that Israelis should listen to Americans “but they need to live here — at least for a time — to feel what we’re like for us to act on their opinions.” Natan Ventura said that Israelis should listen to American Jews “but limit the extent we accept [their views] because they don’t feel the impact and aren’t involved in life here.”

The general question of how seriously American Jews can be taken when they voice opinions on Israeli affairs is an explosive one. Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely ignited outrage in December by questioning whether “people that never send their children to fight for their country” could understand the “complexity of the Middle East.” But here in Israel, the view is commonplace.

Moran Landman, a 34-year-old jeweler, values U.S. Jewry — 2 million people in her estimate — for its “economic strength” and its ability to state Israel’s case to American politicians. But she also considers its input on Israeli affairs a “risk” because of the “influence on democracy you can have when you don’t live here.”

Landman thinks that Israel “always needs to listen” to the diaspora, but also feels that it can be “problematic” when you have a “foreign actor” influencing decisions made here.

But perhaps a growing common ground

between Israelis and American Jews is taking shape. Young Israelis are more likely than ever to find themselves interacting with young Americans through school twinning via the Jewish Agency’s massive Partnership2Gether operation, and a new forum is connecting university students.

Given the reach of social media and the emergence of these partnership projects, will a younger generation of Israelis follow their counterparts’ lives more fully and end up more familiar with their issues?

Netta Asner is a 22-year-old Israeli who last year started Siach, a dialogue forum for students from America and Israel to better understand each other. She says she is slowly seeing changes.

“Young Israelis are more and more aware of what [kind of] Judaism Americans are practicing,” she said. “It’s globalization and Facebook posts from connections they are making.”

There are no walls in cyberspace.

Nathan Jeffay writes the Letter From Israel column for The New York Jewish Week, NJJN’s sister publication.

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Within you and without you

For ‘Anglos’ in Israel, who are responsible for much social change, foreignness and belonging exist side by side

J

Michele Chabin Special to NJJN

erusalem — On the eve of Israeli Memorial Day, my husband and I joined thousands of other Israelis at a Jerusalem memorial service — in English.

We stood at attention as the memorial siren wailed, and then listened to the testimony of bereaved families.

Sherri and Seth Mandell spoke about their son Koby, who was murdered by terrorists in 2001, at the age of 13, along with a friend. Twelve-yearold Nava Kramer paid tribute to her cousin Nava Applebaum, 20, and her

father, Dr. David Applebaum, who were murdered the night before the older Nava’s wedding in 2003.

The ceremony, which was organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh and the Jewish National Fund/Keren Kayemet LeIsrael, was a somber tribute to the IDF soldiers and victims of terror.

It was also a moving reminder that many “Anglos” (immigrants from English-speaking countries) have made the ultimate sacrifice for Israel.

Yet 70 years after Israel was created, many Israelis can’t understand why we Anglos, especially those of us from safe, secure North America, immigrated to Israel and continue to

A gathering of Anglo-Israelis on Israel’s Memorial Day: A foot in two worlds. M ICH ELE CHAB I N/JW live here.

Nor do they grasp just how much Anglo immigrants have contributed to Israel, from its founding till today.

Few realize that from 1947 to 1949, more than 4,000 volunteers from 56 countries — many of them World War II vets from the U.S. — fought in Israel’s War of Independence via a program called Machal.

Vidal Sassoon, the famed British

hair cutting mogul, fought in the war, and David “Micky” Marcus, a Jewish U.S. Army colonel immortalized by Kirk Douglas in the film “Cast a Giant Shadow,” trained Israel’s ragtag army before being killed by friendly fire just hours before the war ended.

Though few in number (of Israel’s 8.8 million citizens, fewer than 500,000 are native English speakers), Anglos are responsible for much of

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Americans of “being behind” the Reform and “Conservative” movements in Israel, as if nonOrthodox Judaism were an unwelcome import.

“There’s a lot of push back and accusations of Americans interfering, even though we’re Israeli too,” Yael Levy, an olah from the U.S., told me.

While I think our activism is vital, I’m sure other Israelis are fed up with our griping about government bureaucracy and the national penchant for taking shortcuts. But many seem to share our angst at the uniquely Israeli practice of suddenly rushing to the front of a long line at the supermarket or bank (cappuccino in hand) as if those of us who have been waiting patiently for 20 minutes shouldn’t care.

Israel continues to infuriate native-born and

Yesterday.

Herbert Ross Founder

immigrants alike, but 70 years after its founding, it is home.

At the Memorial Day Service, Seth Mandell, Koby’s father, recalled that right after his son’s murder, “I wanted to take my wife and kids to the airport and never see Israel again.”

What stopped him?

“We realized we weren’t going to allow the people who had killed Koby to destroy our other children’s lives,” he said.

Koby, who loved baseball, “was proud of being an American,” his mother, Sherri, said, “but was prouder of being an Israeli.”

Michele Chabin is staff writer at The New York Jewish Week, NJJN’s sister publication.

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17 NJ Jewish News ■ Israel at 70 ■ Spring 2018

the social change in Israel. Yet native Israelis who aren’t employed in public service or the not-forprofit sector probably don’t know this.

It was Anglo olim who spearheaded legislation against smoking in public places and for improved road safety and consumer protection. Anglo olim are at the forefront of inclusion and accessibility for disabled people, programs for teens at risk, and the fight for women’s equality, for agunot, and, most recently, mamzerim.

Anglos, particularly American immigrants, “are disproportionately represented in the world of social activism in Jerusalem,” Rachel Stomel, herself an American olah involved in social justice and women’s rights advocacy, notes in a Times of Israel blog.

At every event Stomel attends, whether a proceeding at the Knesset, a conference, or protest, “I can always pick out quite a few directors of NGOs or other prominent activists who are originally from the U.S. This is true on both right and left ends of the spectrum. Why is that?” she wonders.

Stomel ponders whether these immigrants are raised on more liberal values than Israelis in general, and therefore more attuned to social injustice.

“Are the type of people who make aliyah a self-selecting group of ideologically driven people who are more likely to engage in activism and work at nonprofits? Have Americans just been conditioned to waltz into other countries and tell everyone how to run things better? Is there some sort of ideal combination of feeling simultaneously foreign while belonging that enables olim to have enough of a sense of detachment to notice a socially embedded injustice, but enough of a sense of identification to feel responsible for making it better?”

This drive to make a difference has drawn Anglo olim not only to social causes, but also to the settler movement.

In her 2017 book, “City on a Hilltop: JewishAmerican Settlers in the Occupied Territories,” Sara Hirschhorn notes that an estimated 60,000 of Israel’s 399,000 settlers living on the West Bank (according to Peace Now) are American citizens.

Contrary to the prevailing Israeli stereotype of American settlers as religious and political extremists, those who came in the aftermath of the 1967 war “were mostly young, single, highly educated, upwardly mobile, traditional but not necessarily Orthodox in religious practice,” Hirschhorn told USA Today. “They were people involved and sympathetic to leftist social movements such as the U.S. civil rights struggle.”

While some of the settlement movement’s most extreme members, such as Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 murdered 29 Muslims in Hebron, were born and raised in the U.S., other, more moderate settlers like Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of Efrat, have been at the forefront of Palestinian-Israeli dialog, interfaith coexistence, and religious moderation.

Israelis seem to have forgotten that Americans and other Anglos were also among the founders of Peace Now. Yet they are quick to accuse

NJ Jewish News ■ Israel at 70 ■ Spring 2018

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My relationship with the Kotel: It’s complicated Ancient stones, modern politics, and the very personal Israel-diaspora relationship

W

Shira Vickar-Fox

hy do they get to have all the fun?” “Aren’t we people too?” were some of the questions from Sofi, my friend’s 10-year-old daughter, during her first Friday night at the Kotel. She stood on a bench alongside the divider between the men’s and women’s sections and, through the narrow cut-outs, peered at the numerous prayer groups and small circles of dancing men.

We were in Israel in April to celebrate my youngest son’s bar mitzvah, having planned our trip to coincide with the week marking Israel’s 70th year of independence. I had hired a guard to chaperone our group from the hotel before Shabbat, and left enough time to arrive before the yeshiva boys dressed in their white shirts, or, if we were lucky, a group of uniformed soldiers, danced into the Western Wall plaza.

I had mixed feelings about bringing my group there to witness the arrival of Shabbat in Jerusalem. On the one hand, spending Friday evening

First Person

Struggling with a spiritual connection to the Kotel, given recent events.

WI KI M EDIA COM MON S

at the Kotel ought to be a memorable experience, as one is about to enter the holiest day of the week in, arguably, one of the holiest places in the world. On previous visits I felt buoyed by the excitement. Hearing visitors sing prayers in Hebrew accented by their native languages felt like a collective welcoming of the day of rest.

On the other hand, during this most recent trip I was struggling with my spiritual connection to the Kotel. Months before, I realized my bond

During this most recent trip I was struggling with my

— were protesting the ultra-Orthodox monopoly over religious practices and defying the rabbis who require proof of Jewish lineage, demand couples take specific courses on family purity and more. The young Jerusalemite couple made a beautiful Jewish wedding in Jaffa, officiated by the groom’s brother-in-law, who happened to be an Orthodox rabbi; however, this religious ceremony is not recognized by the Jewish state.

It saddened me that a young couple, so devoted to Israel and to their faith, preferred to marry outside of the country, and when I came to the Kotel the morning after the wedding for my friend’s bar mitzvah celebration, I carried this baggage with me.

With new clarity I saw the discrepancy of

the space allotted for men and for women as the men’s prayer space is noticeably larger than the women’s. As a newbie Torah reader, I felt anger for being prohibited from conducting a ritual I value, one that allows me to celebrate my heritage and publicly express my devotion to God. I felt my irrelevance intensify when a downpour forced the service indoors to protect the delicate Torah scrolls. I’d never been to the indoor Kotel space, which for the women meant cramming into a packed balcony with a oneway mirror obstructing the view from the men’s section. Women angled toward the front of the balcony to catch a glimpse of their young family members layning from multiple Torah scrolls

Continued on next page

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spiritual connection to the Kotel. Months before, I realized my bond with the holy place had changed. ity of the Kotel. I loved hopping into a cab at random hours — especially late at night — for what I considered my private communion with God. The quiet of an empty Kotel plaza at night soothed me.

And so the Kotel remained for me for many years: the place where I would rest my forehead against the bumpy stones, close my eyes and ask for God’s good graces; where I was teary-eyed watching my mom’s first visit to the Wall with her oldest grandson; where I’d beam with pride watching three generations of my family — fathers, sons and grandsons — pray.

Until this past fall when, for the first time, I viewed the Western Wall through a lens clouded by the orchestrations of the Chief Rabbinate.

We were in Israel for a bar mitzvah and a symbolic wedding. I say symbolic because the legal ceremony took place in a courthouse in Illinois, beyond the reach of the ultra-Orthodox Rabbinate’s jurisdiction.

My nephew and his bride — American olim

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19 NJ Jewish News ■ Israel at 70 ■ Spring 2018

with the holy place had changed. Nonetheless, I put this singular event on our bar mitzvah itinerary selfishly hoping that a positive Shabbat eve experience would rekindle my affections.

My relationship with the Kotel began during my high school teen tour when I observed, “It’s just a bunch of rocks.” My comment sounded flippant and was a source of endless teasing by my peers, but my intention was not to be callous. Rather, I meant to state my amazement that these rocks, having survived a violent and turbulent history of more than 2,000 years, remains a wellspring of religious devotion.

Fast-forward several years later when I returned to Israel for my junior year of college at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During that time in my life I relished the accessibil-

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The Kotel

Continued from previous page set up on tables below. They listened through headsets linked to a mic worn by their bar mitzvah boy, but it was difficult to hear and there were not enough headsets to accommodate every guest. My status as an observer, rather than an active participant, was sealed.

Don’t get me wrong: It was a joyous celebration and one of the highlights of our November

trip. Yet I didn’t touch the stones nor did I regret my missed opportunity.

Now back to April, with Sofi’s observations on my mind, we returned to the Kotel on the subsequent Tuesday evening for the state ceremony marking the start of Yom HaZikaron, the day honoring Israel’s fallen soldiers. The prayer space was emptied and in the plaza was a speaker’s podium, memorial flame guarded by four soldiers, and a flag flying at half-mast.

We stood in silence during the 8 p.m. siren marking the start of the national day of mourning, and carefully listened to the words of President Reuven Rivlin and other dignitaries trying to comfort a grieving nation.

The backdrop — my “bunch of rocks” — was not lost on me. I considered the symbol-

ism of military ceremonies at the Kotel and the powerful image of strength, longevity and endurance born from the last remaining wall that surrounded our holy temple.

In my Israel, Judaism and history are intertwined and it’s difficult for me to separate one from the other. I remain awestruck by the site of the Western Wall — there’s an inherent energy to the site, something I ascribe to the duality of being the heart of the Jewish people while remaining a hotbed for political and religious tensions.

I hope to always feel excitement when I walk down the stairs from the Jewish Quarter and the Kotel, with its tufts of greenery, pops into view.

But I’ve come to understand that my awe comes not from feeling the Divine’s presence, but from a deep appreciation for the historic significance of the Western Wall. For it is in my Zionism that I find God. svickarfox@njjewishnews.com

Present at the creation: Zionists before Zionism Continued from page 11

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thing that could be used to make gunpowder, she placed the contraband into the clenched hands or mouths of dead women who were taken each night to the ovens in the men’s camp, where the items were taken by the underground.

On Oct. 7, explosions destroyed the crematoria, tearing apart the ovens, killing Nazi guards. An informant snitched on Roza. She was put into a solitary torture chamber for three months, her bones broken, her face beaten to a pulp, she was crumpled on the floor like a heap of rags, said a Ciechanow friend in the underground who saw her. When she was taken to the gallows, witnesses remembered her shouting, “chazak v’amatz” (“be strong and brave”), Moses’ last words to Joshua before crossing into the Land of Israel. Moses never entered Israel; neither would she. Roza, with the noose around her neck, started singing “Hatikvah,” the Zionist anthem that three years later would be Israel’s.

In 1960, my grandparents boarded an Israeli ocean liner, sailing away into their Zionist imaginations. They never got to see the Kotel or the Temple Mount, because Jordan’s army occupied the Old City, no Jews allowed.

Jews were also not allowed to go to Rachel’s Tomb, nor Abraham and Sarah’s. My grandparents stood on an Israeli elevation near the Old City, from where they could glimpse the Temple Mount and a bit of the Western Wall. Denied access to holy sites, they instead went to Haifa and the Negev, enjoying the Hebrew signs and slang, the soldiers and kibbutzniks.

In the many years since, our family has walked on the Temple Mount, visited Mother Rachel, married Ethiopians, served in the Israeli army, and stayed awake on mountains until daybreak. My grandparents, Zionists before the word existed, would have been delighted.

Jonathan Mark is associate editor at The New York Jewish Week, NJJN’s sister publication.

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Making the case for passionate, progressive Zionism Continued from page 15

Jacobs at the Kotel: Many young Jews are “disillusioned” about Israel. “We have to talk about the occupation, about pluralism as a right of a democracy, all the issues.” U R J

When push comes to shove: Rabbi Rick Jacobs, center, and other non-Orthodox Jews clashing with security guards last November at the entrance to the Western Wall plaza in Jerusalem. NOAM R IVKI N F ENTON/F L ASH 90 condemned Hamas for “encouraging incitement,” demanded that the Palestinian Authority help end the violence, “not inflame it,” and urged Israel to “take all precautions to minimize civilian casualties.”

Such statements, for all their attempts at even-handedness, have prompted strong criticism, including from liberal Jewish activists in Israel. Alan Edelstein, a former Conservative congregational president in the U.S., and Martin Karp, who worked for a large federation for many years in Israel, issued a public call in April for Jacobs to refrain from speaking out on Israeli policies regarding the Palestinian conflict.

“Enough, already,” they wrote, especially offended by the rabbi calling for the IDF to use more precaution in confronting militant protesters. The implication, Edelstein and Karp wrote, was that Israelis need to be told to try not to harm innocent civilians. Their letter asserted that it is especially important for Conservative and Reform leaders not to offend the Israeli

public and damage “the effort to make progress on the issues that are directly relevant to our movements.” They were referring to advocacy for full egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall and easing fundamentalist restrictions on conversion.

Jacobs has been at the forefront of the effort for religious equality in Israel. He and other liberal rabbis and leaders, male and female, were physically confronted at a prayer service at the Western Wall last November, threatened by security guards for carrying Torah scrolls in an area slotted for maleonly prayer.

Later, when asked by reporters if he was angered by the rough treatment, “I told them I felt betrayed [by the Netanyahu government that reneged on an agreement that would have expanded egalitarian prayer at the holy site] but delighted to be in Israel,” the rabbi said in a recent interview at his Midtown office. “I can distinguish

Continued on page 24

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HADASSAH CELEBRATES ISRAEL@70 Celebrate Hadassah’s Milestone Anniversaries

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Israeli Americans on a teetering bridge

The crisis in Israel-diaspora relations has put new pressure on a group that could help mind the gap

Y

Orli Santo Special to NJJN

oav Gal does not fit in. An Israeli-American composer and musician living in the progressive stronghold of Park Slope, Brooklyn, Gal’s outspoken support for Israel’s hard-right government often puts him at odds with his own circle of largely artistic, largely left-leaning Israeli-American friends. His support for President Donald Trump (if only on his Israel-related policies) puts him at odds with just about everyone else.

If that weren’t enough, the marked deterioration in Israel-diaspora relations in 2017 — Haaretz called it “the worst year ever for relations between Israel and the Jewish world” — has opened up new fronts with American Jewish acquaintances. “This is not at all something abstract for me, I feel it all around me,” Gal told NJJN in a recent phone interview. “Whether it’s in the Jewish school my girls go to, or at the neighborhood food co-op, or in my own projects to bring the [Israeli and Jewish American] communities closer to-

gether — as a pro-Israel Israeli-American it has made my life here harder.”

Since their remarkable makeover from “yordim” — Israel’s old, semi-derogatory term for Israeli emigrants, translating as “those who go down [from Israel]” — to the forward-looking “Israeli Americans,” the community of Israeli expats living in the U.S. has taken up some lofty aspirations. One of the primary ones is to serve as “a living bridge” between the Jewish-American community and the state of IsExperience History. rael. “We’re a living human Discover Beyond The Classroom. tissue connecting the two worlds,” Shoham Nicolet, The World At Your Fingertips. co-founder and CEO of IAC (Israeli American Council), explained in an interview with NJJN last year. “We are both Israelis and American Jews, part of both cultures. … We bridge the culture gaps just by the nature of who we are.” But now that these two worlds appear to be pulling apart, how fares the living connective tissue?

As the leading national Israeli-American umbrella organization, IAC has taken up the role of mediating between its Israeli American constituents, the larger Jewish American community and the state of Israel. The rift that followed the Kotel crisis and the conversions bill — with Israel first reneging on the agreement to implement a long-anticipated egalitarian prayer-space in the Kotel, and then passing a bill that granted Israel’s

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Chief Rabbinate a monopoly over Jewish conversion — had placed the organization in a tough place, forcing it to choose sides in what was supposed to be an equilateral triangle. In a July 2017 statement circulated among its members, IAC “acknowledged the concerns and frustrations” of Jewish-American partners and reaffirmed their commitment “to be a ‘living bridge’ which fosters a united Jewish community in America.” But ultimately, the group avoided taking any position on either the Kotel or the conversions issue, deferring this or any matter of Israeli public policy to “Israel’s democratically elected institutions and leaders.”

This response angered some Jewish-American partners. Among the first New York shuls to launch programs geared for Israelis, the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue is a longtime partner of the IAC, and hosts several of its flagship programs. Ammiel Hirsch, Stephen Wise’s senior rabbi, referred to IAC’s statement as “woefully lacking.”

“Not to take a stand here IS to take a stand — for the status-quo,” he told NJJN in a phone interview.

“The status quo is distorted, and is ruining the relationship between Israel and American Jews. Here is my question to the IAC: If you agree that this is a crisis of unprecedented proportions — and as far as I know it’s never been this bad — and that if left unattended it will only get worse, then how could you have no position?”

Asked for a response, Nicolet said in an email statement, “For the IAC to take positions on issues of internal Israeli politics would be divisive for our community, which includes a wide range of views that span the ideological spectrum. It would also be counterproductive for the relationship between Israel and American Jewry. Instead of focusing on criticizing Israel, the IAC looks for opportunities to build vehicles for meaningful collaboration and thoughtful

Continued on page 25

ISRAEL

When the relationship was good

Continued from page 9 perfected the art of making American Jews feel included in Israel’s challenges and successes. She never spoke down to them. “Friends,” she would begin her talks to American-Jewish audiences, and pepper her messages with references to the partnership between Jews in the two countries. In one of her most crucial speeches, when she came to the States to raise money before Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, she assured her audiences that “we are not

ers every day, then their rebellion demands that a shower is something forbidden,” she reported to Israelis, and emphasized the need to shield Israeli youth from such deleterious American influences. More than anything, she was profoundly disappointed in American Jews for not immigrating to Israel, once labeling that lack of immigration a tragedy equal almost to the tragedy of the Holocaust. “I simply cannot understand the instinctive lack of responsiveness when we speak of aliyah,” she scolded a group of American-Jewish leaders.

Nevertheless, she spoke frequently of the need for dialogue between the two Jewish communities, no matter their differences. To be sure, the differences now are greater than they were then. Although there were strong disagreements about how to handle the territories captured in 1967, today’s extreme polarization did not exist either among Israelis or American Jews.

Only a small number of settlements had been built in the West Bank, and while the religious right had grown, ultraOrthodox groups had not attained the power they hold today.

We cannot turn back the clock. But Golda Meir’s emphasis on dialogue and partnership between Israeli and diaspora Jews still applies, perhaps today more than ever.

After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, she told a group of soldiers that if they had fought only for Israel, their struggles might not have been worth it. But if they recognized that fighting for Israel meant fighting for Jews everywhere, then “no sacrifice is too great.” It would be an irony — and a great tragedy — if Jacob Blaustein’s old, narrow-minded separation between Jews in Israel and the United States won out after all. Golda’s broad vision, emphasizing the centrality of Israel for Jews everywhere, is so much more rewarding.

We cannot turn back the clock. But Golda Meir’s

emphasis on dialogue and

partnership between Israeli and diaspora Jews still

applies, perhaps today more than ever. a better breed. … I am certain that if you were in Palestine and we were in the United States, you would be doing what we are doing there.” Much later, in 1970, as prime minister, she accepted an honorary degree from the Hebrew Union College in Israel, the seminary of Reform Judaism. She did this even though the Orthodox National Religious Party, which bitterly opposed the liberal religious movements, was a member of her government’s coalition. “I am just daring enough to presume to say in the name of the whole government that we are happy you are here,” she stated, cementing Israel’s relationship with that major American-Jewish institution.

All this is not to say that she completely approved of American Jews.

She was horrified in the 1960s by the young American hippies she saw on her visits. “If their parents take show-

Francine Klagsbrun’s new book, “Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel” (Schocken), was named the 2017 Book of the Year by the National Jewish Book Awards.

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HADASSAH WISHES ISRAEL A HAPPY 70TH ANNIVERSARY

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Carol and Mark Goldberg followed their three children from West Orange to Jerusalem.

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Making the case for passionate, progressive Zionism

City of Gold Continued from page 4

Continued from page 21 English-speaking neighbors in Jerusalem have helped Larry and Ricki Haber of East Brunswick, left, adjust to their new home. old Holocaust survivor who still lives in West Orange, encouraged them to make aliyah.

“It was hard to leave her, but coming to Israel to live was her idea,” Lily recalled. “When Irv proposed 47 years ago, I said only if we live in Israel. It took a little longer than we thought.”

Moving when they were 68 and 69, Lily and Irv left behind successful careers: Lily was principal of Shalom Torah Academy in Mercer County and Yeshiva Spring Valley in Monsey, N.Y., while Irv was in charge of computer technology at Johnson & Johnson’s new drug development

department. In Jerusalem they work part time in their respective fields, volunteer, and go to plays, lectures, and classes.

The Cantors said they see the challenges of living in Jerusalem as a blessing. One example, they said, was having to join a private health care group that has American-trained doctors because some Israeli doctors don’t speak English.

“You feel like you’re part of a very large family here, because people genuinely care about each other,” Irv said. “It’s the best decision we ever made.”

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between being upset at the government and being in touch with the people and with Jewish ideals.”

Jacobs said his response is based on “years of connection to Israel.”

(He and his wife own a home there.) “It’s about loving and embracing Israel while standing up against” positions that he views as harmful to world Jewry and the concept of Clal Yisrael, one people.

The rabbi acknowledges that his approach may be overly nuanced for some young people w h o s e Western core values clash with a range of Israeli policies and who are increasingly uncomfortable to see Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump aligned in policies perceived as leaning toward authoritarian. “ R i c k h a s a real voice with progressive Jews who feel Israel doesn’t care about them,” a colleague of the rabbis said. “They trust him.”

Jacobs is outspoken in his support for more open immigration here and in Israel, gun control legislation — three of the students killed in the Parkland school in Florida were connected to the Reform community — and he criticized Trump’s “moral equivalence” after the Charlottesville march last year. “If our leaders can’t call out this virulent strand of hate,” he wrote, “we will surely fail to stop it.”

I n o u r i n t e r v i e w, t h e r a b b i emphasized that “Israel engagement is a huge priority” for the Reform movement, and he cited

the growth of overnight summer camps (17) where the staff has the opportunity to “go deeper than the headlines” in connecting youngsters to Israel.

He also emphasized the Reform movement’s “open, joyful approach to Judaism,” fueled by what he calls “audacious hospitality” that he said is appealing to the next generation, including interfaith families.

Raised on liberal values, many young Jews are “disillusioned” about Israel, Jacobs notes, “and the progressive case has to be made.

We have to talk about occupation, about pluralism as a right of a democracy, all the issues.”

The rabbi pointed out that AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, has come to recognize the importance of progressive Zionists on campus and brought large numbers of them to its most recent annual policy conference in Washington, D.C. “I make a passionate Zionist case as a progressive, and when I’m asked on campus if I’m proIsrael, I say ‘yes — and I’m proPalestinian.” Jacobs wants young people to see Israel for themselves in all of its beauty and complexity.

“I don’t want to give them the cartoon version but the full narrative.

It’s complicated and it’s flawed, and infinitely challenging. But in the end, it inspires.”

Gary Rosenblatt is the editor and publisher of The New York Jewish Week, NJJN’s sister publication. He can be reached at Gary@jewishweek.org.

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Israeli Americans on a teetering bridge Continued from page 22

dialogue between Jews in America and Jews in Israel.”

The perceived right-of-center affiliation of the Israeli-American establishment, in both Israeli and American politics, has also contributed to invisible tensions with progressive JewishAmerican partners. Congregation Beth Elohim (CBE), a prominent Reform synagogue in Brooklyn, was the original home of Keshet, Keshatot, and Shishi Israeli, Hebrew programs for IsraeliAmerican families that today are run by the IAC. Once IAC took them over, CBE quietly opted out of hosting them.

Alex Ben-Abba, CBE’s associate director of Hebrew-language and Israel programs, is a former IAC employee herself. “I didn’t quit IAC because of politics; I did it because I was skipped over for promotion,” she clarified, “But it is definitely a relief to not be involved with a group I’m politically opposed to.”

Gal is a former member of CBE, where his daughters attend Hebrew school, and a current member of the IAC. He is an alumnus of the IAC leadership program Gvanim, which combines fostering community initiatives with study of Jewish history in the diaspora, heritage and Talmud. CBE formerly hosted Gal’s biweekly discussion group, The Room, about Israel-related topics, but the group fizzled out. When he started it, he said, “There was this feeling that now we, Israeli Americans, are coming together to really bridge the [Israeli and AmericanJewish] communities, to work out an understanding.” But after the elections and Kotel crises, he continued, “The [CBE] community became so devoted to the antiTrump ‘resistance’ that I felt like the rug was pulled from under our feet.”

For some, though, the rent in Israel-diaspora relations appears to have opened “an opportunity to critically re-engage.” Gili Getz is the IsraeliAmerican director of “The Forbidden Conversation,” a one-man autobiographical show “exploring the difficulty of having a conversation about Israel in the American Jewish community. Meant to facilitate the type of no-holds-barred conversation about Israel which Israelis find very natural but American Jews find very difficult,” said Getz, the halfhour show is followed by an hour-long open conversation.

“When I started this project, I

thought the debate would be between left and right, regarding the role of the Jewish-American community in the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict,” Getz told NJJN in a phone interview. “But I found that the most dominant position in Jewish spaces is ‘we do not talk about Israel.’ The topic is so toxic that the conversation about it is broken.”

Following the elections and Kotel crisis, said Getz, he could see a change in that attitude. “People were really upset with Israel, so much that they started to open up, to talk about their rage …

That’s when I can encourage them to get engaged, to go to Israel to see and to talk with real people on the ground, to experience firsthand the issues they are dealing with.”

Getz noted that the Kotel crisis in particular appears to have shifted his audience’s demographics: Before, it was booked primarily by Hillels on college campuses, but after the crisis he began receiving invites from non-Orthodox synagogues across the country.

For Misha Shulman, the Israeldiaspora crisis touched upon heart of what he does, with both negative and positive implications. Shulman is the founder and director of the School for Creative Judaism, an after-school program in Brooklyn geared for children ages 3-13, of mostly unaffiliated or Reform Jews. The staff is composed of 11 teachers, Shulman included, and all of them are Israeli-American artists from various disciplines. For the older kids, who are gearing toward their bar/ bat-mitzvah, the curriculum contains a small but crucial segment about Israel.

“We teach them about Israel’s history, including Jerusalem — everything from the ancient history through the Six-Day War to the Women of the Wall. When the Western Wall deal was signed, we taught about that as a sign of progress and an example of social growth; now that it’s been canceled, we teach about that too, and what it means.”

Assuring that “the connection to Israel remains an integral part of the Jewish American identity” — whether one agrees with the state’s actions or not — had been one of Shulman’s primary goals in creating the program. Post-Kotel crisis, Shulman feels the need for this far more dire. “Every year, more and more parents ask: ‘Can we just not talk

about Israel?’ This [Kotel crisis] makes things worse. It makes it just too much for the kids. They hear that Israel is the Jewish country but it doesn’t recognize them as Jewish. So they say ‘Fine, if Israel doesn’t care about me I’m going to not care about Israel.”

The silver lining Shulman sees in the Israel-diaspora rent is that it helped create a distinction between “the story of Israel, the concept of Israel, the ongoing dream of Israel,” and the policies of the current government of Israel. “This helps show the two are not the same, and you can still be connected to Israel without agreeing with the government.”

Israeli American Asaf Kalderon, 27, is an activist in Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP,) an advocacy group that is seen in communal circles as anti-Israel for its support of the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement against Israel. In Kalderon’s eyes, the worsening in Israel-diaspora relations has brought a much-needed awakening.

“The attention to Israel’s transgressions should have been about the occupation, not about inter-Jewish relations, but this is a gateway,” he noted. “Israel’s rejection of its own people, of the Jewish people who love and support it, helped shed a light on the exclusionist undercurrent that drives the Israeli govern-

ment…. ultimately, it conflates with the narrative of the occupation.”

Not surprisingly, Leore Ben David, the Zionist Organization of America’s Israeli-American managing director of the campus department and West Coast campus coordinator, sees things differently.

“I don’t see a growing rift; I really don’t see disengagement. … From where I stand, I see engagement at an all-time high,” she notes. “I see events fully booked. … I see Jewish students who are interested in Israel, believe in Israel, and will stand up for Israel, now perhaps more than ever before.”

While reactions vary widely, the Israeli Americans interviewed for this piece largely agreed on one thing: “It’s a relief to finally be able to argue for real,” said Gal. “With my Israeli friends, we can fight about Israel, we can go hard at each other for hours, but we stay friends. American Jews are so averse to conflict they would rather not talk about Israel at all than argue. But now they are angry, they are all riled up, so they are willing to start talking honestly. For me, that’s a good thing.”

Orli Santo is a staff writer at The New York Jewish Week, NJJN’s sister publication.

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Contradictory geographies Continued from page 8 both normal and exceptional? David BenGurion tried to resolve the paradox by imagining a state that would be externally normal in its relations with other nations and internally exceptional, an exemplary socialist society that would be a model for the world.

In a sense, many Israelis and American Jews have torn apart BenGurion’s vision, with each community appropriating either the longing for normalcy and security or the longing for ethical greatness.

My nightmare vision of a dysfunctional Israeli-American Jewish relationship is that each community takes on the attributes of its geography. Israelis become increasingly brutal, while American Jews come to resemble what my father, a Holocaust survivor, called “stupid Jews” — Jews who can no longer recognize existential threats and have lost the instinct of self-preservation. Such a dichotomy would mark the

end of our relationship: There can be no shared language or moral sensibility between brutes and fools.

Jews today are divided between very different kinds of anguish over Israel. The first is a sense of outrage that, barely 70 years after the Holocaust, the Jewish people is still besieged, still defending its legitimacy and right to exist, still the eternal other. The second is that, 50 years after the Six-Day War, Israel shows no sign of lessening its rule over another people, and worse, many Israelis have come to accept this anomaly of Jewish history as normal.

Those two expressions of anguish increasingly define the fault line separating the Israeli majority from the liberal American Jewish majority. A healthy Jewish people would recognize that both forms of anguish are essential parts of our being.

We need each other as correc-

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We need each other as correctives. The diaspora-Israel relationship should be the checks and balances of the Jewish people. tives. The diaspora-Israel relationship should be the checks and balances of the Jewish people.

When the Jewish state turns its back on desperate African asylum seekers, American Jews need to remind us that we were strangers in the land of Egypt, that we are forbidden to be hard-hearted. And when an American administration implements a deal that leaves Iran on the nuclear threshold while empowering it as the regional bully, Israelis need to remind American Jews that we live in a world where genocide against the Jewish people is still possible, that we are forbidden to be naïve.

At the same time, our increasingly harsh judgments of each other need to be tempered by an awareness of

the other community’s unique circumstances.

Israelis must appreciate how profoundly accepted American Jews are in their geographical space — and respect the choices they have made in trying to balance commitment to Jewish identity with openness to their welcoming environment.

And American Jews must appreciate how profoundly insecure Israelis are in their geographical space.

Each community has devised strategies that are appropriate responses to its geography. American Jews are open and flexible; Israelis, tough and security-minded. The Jewish people needs both those responses to effectively cope in a world where we are at once threatened and accepted, empowered yet still vulnerable.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His latest book, “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor,” has just been published by HarperCollins.

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At home

Continued from page 7 Israelis are the inheritors of the myths and realities of dispossession that dictated their ancestors’ choices to leave diaspora and come to the Promised Land, and therefore many still adhere to an ideology — seared deeply in their memory — that there is only one place where the Jewish people can be home. As real as these twin and simultaneous stories of homecoming are, they are categorically incomprehensible to each other. I suppose there are a fortunate few of us who like to think we can be at home in both places, though as a visitor and a non-citizen the rules of belonging are different for me when I’m there in Israel than when I’m here; and if I’m being really honest, I pay more for my mortgage in the Bronx than I do in my philanthropy to Israel, and our choices say more about where we really live than our feelings.

I fear that Zionism demands too much. It was sufficient for this movement to insist on the importance of a Jewish homeland, in the face of the irreconcilability of the Jews with the exclusionary ethos of European ethnic exceptionalism. It was legitimate for Zionism to demand of Jews their support in its vulnerable nascent moments, to invite or even demand that world Jewry aid in the project of building the state and the nation for it simply could not have been done by the first immigrants alone. It is still fair game of Zionism to ask of us that we continue to identify with the nation at the heart of this nation-state, to claim that Jewish peoplehood — the religious principle upon which this secular national entity relies — continues to claim us, and that it obligates us in return.

But Zionism should not have insisted, as it often still does, that the Jewish people not feel at home except in the state of Israel. This is too much to ask of an AmericanJewish community that remembers our downtroddenness and dispossession and based on those memories, is also desperate for a place to call our own. Worse, it forces, or enables, American Jews into claiming that they are Other in America when they are actually Us, to continue to fantasize about pristine Jewish moral values as divorced from the business of statecraft, and even to abdicate moral responsibility for taking care of this

home by allowing people to claim temporary tenancy.

The ethics of statelessness, to borrow a term from my colleague Tamara Tweel, unhelpfully idealize our value — divorcing them from the world in which we live — and degrade our actual surroundings, because we are not responsible for them. The ethics of at-homeness, however, are both far more prosaic and far more real.

They make us responsible.

I used to be enamored by the idea that the twin Jewish projects of at-homeness in diaspora and at-homeness in Israel provided competing “laboratories” for Jewish identity and creativity, one rooted in minority culture and private institutions, and the other playing out in sovereignty and the public square. I am now not so sure. American Jews live Jewishly with extraordinary comfort, confidence, and fluidity in the public square; the story of the privatization of identity, the fantasy of the Jew at home, and the American in the street, tells an antiquated story of American Jews that has been supplanted by an American-Jewish performance of public Jewish identity that is at times recognizably Israel. And some of the most interesting and important projects in the remaking of Jewishness in Israel are aimed precisely at re-privatizing Jewish identity, away from the government structures which tend to, pace Buber, transform the dynamism of Jewish religiosity into static religion.

The creative religious forces in American-Jewish and Israeli-Jewish life increasingly parallel one another, more than they provide useful contrast.

And then there is politics, the principal theater of Jewish at-homeness. I met with an Israeli government official recently who tried to persuade me that American Jews should still maintain the old divide between “legitimate” criticism of Israel (issues of religious pluralism), and “illegitimate” criticism (issues of security and politics). He argued that the religious leaders of American Judaism should effectively stick to religion.

This struck me as avowedly and paradoxically antiZionist. The dramatic turn of Zionism was not merely in the political project of sovereignty or the relocation of Jews to Israel; it was the ideological reshaping of the parameters of what we consider to be the stuff of Jewish concern. In David Hartman’s words, “Zionism transformed Jewish self-understanding,” and reshaped the agenda of Jewish religious life to be passionately concerned with the affairs of statecraft, policy, and economy. Zionism ruptures the clean divide between Jewish religious concerns and political concerns, and

27

both in Israel and America creates a Judaism in which the two are inextricably wedded.

Sometimes, as in the case of government bureaucracies in Israel, this is catastrophic to religion. Here in America, too, there is confusion and frustration about what it means for the religious and the political to be interwoven as part of our “common Judaism.” It frustrates Jews on the left that Zionism, peoplehood, and Jewish survival — Jewish political concerns — have replaced God and Torah as the source of meaning for many American Jews. But at the same time, many of those same Jews consider their political activism part and parcel of their religious identities, arguing for the fundamentally political nature of Torah and the urgency of acting politically in fulfillment of the legacy of the prophets. The successes and struggles are both legacies of Zionism: the fierce refusal to allow Judaism to be the parochial stuff of bookshelves, and the conviction that it constitutes a relevant discourse that shapes who we are not just “religiously,” but politically and otherwise humanly. The clean divide between the categories of Jewishness — between religion and ethnicity, between theology and politics — is the detritus of an exilic consciousness. Both American Jews and Israeli Jews are living in more complex and more interesting admixtures.

The urgent project of the day of Jewish peoplehood is to try to reconnect between these two extraordinary success stories. It is objectively good news that American and Israeli Jews are thriving in their respective at-homeness, even as it is painful to see all the ways that we seem to need each other a lot less; and worse, the ways that we are missing out on the richness and resources of how the gifts of each community could help the other navigate its most pressing challenges. But let’s never solve for such needs by making one project overly dependent on the other, and not by delegitimizing either hard-earned at-homeness. Let’s own our homes that we’ve rightfully acquired, as responsible homeowners and better landlords, better guests in our friends’ homes, and better neighbors. My dream for Israel as it marks 70 is the same for American Jews marking the parallel milestones of our at-homeness, and they are the gifts of the household: to feel comfortable, to feel proud, and to feel responsible.

Yehuda Kurtzer is the president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America.

Temple Emanu-El of Edison celebrates Israel at 70 Celebrating 70 special years of Israel and looking forward to many more!

“Am Yisrael Chai!”

Rabbi Howard Tilman Cantor Matt Axelrod

Davida Berkowitz ~ Executive Director Gail Buchbinder ~ Education Director

18 Shalom Way, Scotch Plains, NJ 07076 www.cbinj.org 908-889-1830

Temple Emanu-El

100 James Street Edison, NJ 08820 732-549-4442 www.edisontemple.org templeemanuel@edisontemple.org Rabbi: David Vaisberg Cantor: Aviva Marer Principal: Jill Santoni Presidents: Colin Hogan and Barbara Kline Shapiro Rabbi Emeritus: Alfred Landsberg

NJ Jewish News ■ Israel at 70 ■ Spring 2018

70

ISRAEL at

NJ Jewish News ■ Israel at 70 ■ Spring 2018

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70 YEARS

CELEBRATING TEMPLE BETH SHALOM

Congratulations toWe Israel Bring Good Things to LIGHT! on its 70th from Rabbi Cy Stanway 5ll Ryders Lane and Your Friends at East Brunswick, NJ 08816 5ll 5llRyders RydersLane Lane Temple Beth Miriam 732-257-7070 East Brunswick, NJ 08816

CELEBRATES ISRAEL AT 70

732-257-7070 Www.ebjc.org East Brunswick, NJ 08816 www.ebjc.org

732-257-7070

Www.ebjc.org 180 Lincoln Avenue Elberon, NJ 07740 732-222-3754 TEMPLE BETH SHALOM 108 Freehold Road, Manalapan, NJ 07726 tbmoffice@bethmiriam.org CELEBRATING ISRAEL AT 70!

732-446-1200 • templebeth@aol.com • www. tbshalom.com www.templebethmiriam.org Rabbi JeffCantor PivoEmerita Rabbi Ira Rothstein • Cantor Jason Rosenman • Ruth Katz Green, ISRAEL AT 70!

Karen Ross, Executive Director • NancyCELEBRATING Director facebook.com/templebethmiriam DeenaShechter, Oren,Education Eric Pelofsky—Co-Presidents

108 Freehold Road, Manalapan, NJ 07726 732-446-1200 • templebeth@aol.com www. tbshalom.com AC

ENTER

OF JEWISH L IFE

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Rabbi Ira Rothstein Cantor Summer Greenwald Gonella Karen Ross, Executive Director Nancy Shechter, Education Director

Rabbi Jeff Pivo

The Jewish Community Center of Middlesex County

Celebrates Israel at 70 Dorothy Rubinstein Chief Executive Officer

Barbara Muhlgeier President

1775 Oak Tree Road Edison, NJ 08820 732.494.3232 www.jccmc.org

Happy 70th

Deena Oren, Eric Pelofsky—Co-Presidents

Temple B’nai Shalom

Proudly Celebrates Israel’s CELEBRATING ISRAEL AT 70!

70th Year Rabbi Jeff Pivo

Rabbi Eric Eisenkramer, Deena Oren, Eric Pelofsky—Co-Presidents Rabbi Eric Milgrim, Cantor Andrew Edison, Cantorial Soloist, Robyn Streitman, The Board of Trustees, Congregation and Staff of

Temple B’nai Shalom East Brunswick, NJ 732-251-4300 www.bnaishalom.com

From Strength

Adath Israel Congregation 1958 Lawrenceville Road Lawrenceville, NJ 08648 609-896-4977 www.adathisraelnj.org A Home for Every Jewish Family

103 School Road West, Marlboro, NJ 07746 732-536-2300, www.mjcnj.com

Celebrates Israel’s 70th and our 50th Marlboro Jewish Center Congregation Ohev Shalom 103 School Road West Marlboro, NJ 07746 732-536-2300 www.mjcnj.com

Rabbi Michael Pont • Cantor Wayne Krieger Rabbi Michael Pont • Cantor Wayne Krieger Associate Rabbi RonKoas Koas Associate Rabbi Ron • Rhonda Eigar, President Bonnie Komito, Exec. Director President Rhonda Eiger Executive Director Bonnie Komito

Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Monmouth County Celebrates Israel at 70

!!!

to Strength

Marlboro Jewish Center Congregation Ohev Shalom

Celebrating Israel at 70 Stein Assisted Living Wilentz Senior Residence Stein Hospice Wilf Transport The Foundation

coming soon: The Education and Resource Center

350 DeMott Lane, Somerset, NJ 08873 • (732)568-1155 • www.wilfcampus.org

Yoti Golan, Head of School Maxine Macnow, President of the Board 22 School Road East Marlboro, NJ 07746 732-431-5525 • www.ssgmc.com

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT

FORMER UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF STATE

DICK CHENEY

FORMER VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16 AT 8:00 PM

CONVERSATIONS THE TEMPLE 212.507.9580 EMANU-EL EMANUELSTREICKERNYC.ORG STREICKER I do solemnly swear that CENTER I will faithfully execute

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the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States MODERATED BY

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8 AT 8:00 PM PRESIDENT

BILL CLINTON

42ND PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES JW_conversations_special.indd 5

PRESIDENT

GEORGE W. BUSH

43RD PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES 5/14/18 10:13 AM

Declaration of the Jewish Diaspora’s Commitment to the State of Israel on the Occasion of the 70th Anniversary of the Establishment of the State of Israel On this, the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the modern State of Israel in the ancestral

homeland of the Jewish people, we, the undersigned leaders of the World Jewish Congress, representing the Jewish communities in more than 100 countries around the world, thank G-d for enabling the Jewish people to witness the miraculous rebirth of the State of Israel, in our time.

Driven by our immense pride and admiration for Israel’s remarkable and inspiring achievements over the course of the past seven decades, and mindful of our enduring commitment to its wellbeing, security, and rights among the nations, we solemnly reiterate and declare: Our steadfast and unwavering support for Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people and its centrality to the Jewish people; Our heartfelt yearning for peace and security for the State of Israel and its people; Our abiding and unbreakable link with Jerusalem, Israel’s ancient and eternal capital; Our happiness in witnessing the modern-day ingathering of the exiles in Israel’s absorption of

millions of Jewish immigrants from all corners of the Diaspora;

Our joy in experiencing the revival of our ancient language Hebrew, as a modern language and the first official language of the State of Israel; Our esteem for the State of Israel in ensuring that Jews, Christians, Muslims, and peoples of other faiths have always enjoyed freedom of religion in Israel, and access to their respective holy sites in Jerusalem since its reunification in 1967, and elsewhere;

Our proud acknowledgement of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East that upholds the human rights of all its citizens, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation; Our celebration of the State of Israel’s astonishing achievements in so many fields of human endeavor,

including science, medicine, agriculture, water technology, economics, literature and the arts and high-tech;

Our great admiration for the State of Israel’s demonstration of the spirit of ‘tikkun olam’ repairing the world in its provision of humanitarian aid and personnel to other nations in times of crisis, and its willingness to assist victims of war and other tragedies, even from enemy countries, through medical and other assistance, in Israel; Our unconditional and unflinching commitment to upholding Israel’s inalienable right to defend itself against all threats and acts of force.

We recall the words of hope - to be a free people in our land - in Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem, and pray for peace. We ask G-d to continue to bless the people and the State of Israel and to guide us in our efforts.

Signed by presidents representing 83 Jewish communities worldwide and by the WJC Steering Committee Yom Ha’atzmaout, 5th Day of Iyar, 5778

Ronald S. Lauder President

David de Rothschild Chairman Chella Safra Treasurer Robert Singer CEO & EVP

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