Am Yisrael Chai. And the anti-Zionists Can’t Stand It
Yom Kippur 2022
Like many of you, I like to visit synagogues when I am travelling, especially on Shabbat, for all the obvious reasons. One of the benefits of going on Shabbat is that you get to learn about the community and to meet people. Occasionally I have even been invited to the homes of people I had not previously known.
I have never been to Norwich, England, but if I do ever get there, I will be sure to visit the synagogue.
The only reason I know about Norwich is because an article about bones found at a construction site a few years ago caught my attention. Analysis of the skeletal remains revealed 17 individuals murdered in the 12th century whose bodies had been unceremoniously dumped into a well. DNA testing indicated that the victims were Ashkenazic Jews – six adults, and eleven children, some as young as a few months old. The date of their deaths coincides with a well-documented and well-known anti-Semitic incident in February of 1190 when members of the Jewish community of Norwich were brutally tortured and murdered at the beginning of the Third Crusade.
I must confess, I didn’t know much about the Jewish community of Norwich, so I did a little research, which means I Googled – Norwich, England, Jewish community. I discovered that it has a synagogue and that in medieval times it was an important center of Jewish life. It was where the first blood libel accusation occurred, the malicious, slanderous accusation that Jews kill a Christian child to use his blood to make Passover matzah.
When I learned of the discovery of the Jewish victims in England, my thoughts turned to the book I recently read by Dara Horn entitled, “People Love Dead Jews”. She writes about the phenomenon of places which once had thriving Jewish communities, but which are now Judenrein, devoid of any Jews, but which nevertheless, sponsor tours to places of historic significance and interest to Jews.
Personally, I appreciate the opportunity to visit and learn about Jewish history and communities. But Horn has a somewhat cynical perspective, and comments on what she refers to as “an ingenious piece of marketing”.
She writes, “There is a tourist-industry concept, popular in places largely devoid of Jews, called ‘Jewish Heritage Sites.’ … the phrase sounds utterly benign or, to Jews, perhaps ever so slightly dutiful, suggesting a place that you surely ought to visit—after all, you came all this way, so how could you not? It is a much better name than “Property Seized from Dead or Expelled Jews.” By calling these places “Jewish Heritage Sites,” all those pesky moral concerns—about, why these “sites” exist to begin with—evaporate in a mist of goodwill.”
One such place she visited and writes about is the city of Harbin, in northeastern China, south of Siberia and north of North Korea, where 20,000 Jews once lived – (the true meaning of the Yiddish term “yennesvelt” – the other side of the world.)
In the late 1890’s Russia needed to develop the town as a railroad outpost so they lured Jews with the promise of a region where they could live freely, devoid of pogroms and anti-Semitic restrictions. Russian Jewish entrepreneurs took the bait and came and built the city’s first banks, its hotels, pharmacies, department stores, and so on. They maintained a Jewish cemetery, mikveh, schools, and a kosher butcher. The last Jewish family who lived there left for Israel in 1962. The old synagogue is now a concert hall. The remnants of the once thriving Jewish community can be seen on a tour of Jewish cultural sites.
Speaking of China, a fascinating book called, “The Last kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China” chronicles the story of the Sassoon and Kadoorie families, both of whom came to the Far East from Baghdad, Iraq. Each in their own way built powerful economic powerhouses in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 19th century that flourished and dominated aspects of the Chinese economy and made major contributions to its development.
The Sassoon family grew to become one of the mightiest and wealthiest business dynasties in all of Asia, and the financial empire the Kadoories built was not far behind. Eventually, with the rise of communism, their brand of capitalism fell in disfavor and their assets were seized and nationalized. Consistent with the thesis of Horn’s book, all that remains today of the once mighty Sassoon and Kadoorie kingdoms in Shanghai are artifacts, scattered historical plaques, some portraits in one of their fabled hotels, and the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, all of which can be taken in in a walking tour of the former Jewish Ghetto.
To me the most fascinating aspect of their story is when the two competing families set aside their differences and cooperated during World War II to save and rescue Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. Despite being ruthless, competitive and aggressive in business, both families acted magnanimously and unselfishly to care and provide for refugees escaping Nazi Germany and Austria to Shanghai, which was one of the few places in the world which did not require a visa to enter. At considerable personal expense, the Sassoon’s and Kadoorie’s provided food, shelter, clothing, education, and job training, for the 18,000 Jews who fled to China. They not only gave the refugees meals, and helped them find jobs, they used their influence to shield them from a unit of the SS dispatched from Berlin to exterminate the Jewish residents. They prevailed upon Chinese politicians to help, and prevailed upon Madame Sun Yat-sen to lead a delegation to the German consulate to protest Germany’s anti-Jewish policies.
Why did these Iraqi Jews living in the lap of luxury in China, with no familial connection to the refugees from Europe go to such lengths to rescue and help them?
There is one reason to explain their feelings and actions.
It is the same reason, that when Peter Stuyvesant wrote in September of 1654 to the Directors of the Dutch West India Company requesting permission to evict the 24 Jews who had recently arrived on a boat from Recife, Brazil, and whom he had incarcerated, the message he got back from the Board of Directors was, in the immortal words of Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles, “loz im geyn: Let them go, ” meaning – release them from their cells and let them stay in America.
Stuyvesant wrote to his employer that the Jews who had just landed in New Amsterdam, “were very repugnant to the inferior magistrates” and described them as, “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ” who should not be allowed to settle in New Amsterdam. What the anti-Semitic governor did not realize was that many of the investors in the Dutch West India Company, and most of the people who sat on its board of directors were Jews.
Why would Jews sitting in Amsterdam care about the fate of people halfway across the world, who they didn’t know and who were described in derogatory terms, as vagrants?
It is the same reason that the Sassoons and Kadoories did what they did.
Whether these Jews were familiar or not with the Talmudic dictum, Kol Yisrael arevin zeh l’zeh: which I like to translate as – “All Jews have a responsibility to each other and for each other”, I do not know. But what is certain is that they lived by this principle and that it guided their decisions and actions.
Although separated by continents and centuries, in both instances they instinctively understood what Jews have known ever since we stood at Mt. Sinai and became a people, bound to God, Torah and each other by an eternal covenant.
I think I first learned and imbibed this concept from my grandmother of blessed memory. I used to read selections to her translated from the original Yiddish from The Bintel Brief. The Bintel Brief was the precursor to Dear Abby, Ann Landers, and other modern advice columns. Written by Abe Cahan, the editor of the Jewish Forward, it was the most popular feature of what at the time was the most widely circulated newspaper in America.
When I read the agonizing and difficult personal challenges and family problems encountered by the “greenhorns”, the new immigrants who came to America in the early 1900’s to my grandmother, she would get upset and worry about them. I would have to remind her and reassure her, “Grandma, you don’t need to worry about these people. These things all happened over 70 years ago.”
But she identified personally with them — Their joy was her joy. Their suffering and problems were her problems. She truly felt their pain. They were her people. It was as if they were mishpocha, family. In a way they were — which is one of the reasons we take an interest in places where Jews once lived.
The sense of peoplehood and connection is one of our defining characteristics and is what often drives and motivates some of our altruistic acts.
It explains why Israel, since its founding, has gone to such great lengths and expense to clandestinely rescue Jews from distant lands, sometimes at great cost and risk, from Arab countries, the countries that constituted the former Soviet Union, and as recently as this past month from Ethiopia, Ukraine and Russia. There are times when Israel even negotiated a cease fire with warring sides to allow the airlift of Jews out of a war zone to safely bring them to Israel.
At a wedding celebration earlier this summer, Natan Sharansky, former Soviet prisoner of conscience, leader of Soviet Jews, Israeli minister and former head of the Jewish Agency, spoke at a Sheva Berachot celebration of the wedding of Benaya Dickstein, whose parents, were both murdered by Arab terrorists when he was seven years old.
Sharansky told the assembled guests, that when he was growing up in Donestsk, Ukraine, everyone had identity papers that indicated their nationality. It didn’t matter what nationality was on the papers, unless it said you were a Jew, and that it was as if you had a disease.
“We (Soviet Jews) knew nothing about Judaism…or our Jewish identity other than the anti-Semitism, hatred, and discriminatory treatment we experienced because of it. When it came to a university application, no one tried to change his designation from ‘Russian‘ to ‘Ukrainian’ because it did not matter. However, if you could change your designation from ‘Jew’, (to something else) it substantially improved your chances of being admitted to a university.
Then he said, “This week I saw thousands of people standing day and night at the borders of Ukraine trying to escape, and the only word on their identity papers that can help them get out is: ‘Jew’ because if you are a Jew, there are Jews outside who care about and are waiting for you. There is someone on the other side of the border who is searching for you.” He concluded, “… When I was a child…. no one envied us. But today on the Ukrainian border, identifying as a Jew … describes those who have a place to go, where their family, an entire nation, is waiting for them.”
This is what it means to be a Jew in the 21st century! To be a part of a people who have a homeland, a nation founded upon the principle stated in its Declaration of Independence, that it is “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations.”
The Declaration further states that the Land of Israel is where “our spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped”, which is why Zionism and Israel are essential and integral elements of Jewish identity.
Which brings me to the problem with those who are anti-Zionist or non-Zionist, who deny or oppose the existence of the State of Israel. In so doing, they reject the notion that we are a people. What they are actually saying, whether they realize it or not is – is that Judaism is just a religion, not a people. Not only are they blatantly mistaken, but they have no right to define who we are.
The most recent example of too many, comes from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. Prodded to act by an anti-Israel pro-Palestinian hate group, nine student groups adopted a bylaw prohibiting pro-Israel speakers at events.
In response to the action, civil rights attorney Kenneth Marcus wrote, “Like other forms of Judeophobia, it (anti-Zionism) is an ideology of hate, treating Israel as the “collective Jew” and smearing the Jewish state with defamations similar to those used for centuries to vilify individual Jews.” He points out substituting the word “Zionist” for Jew is a convenient euphemism and attempt to give cover to their anti-semitism.
Ruth Wisse has written, “the worst anti-Semitic attacks in America are the apartheid weeks on campus, subsidized by university administrations on the grounds that they are a form of self-expression. Such events may kill fewer Jews—now. But blaming Israel consolidates and promotes the malicious inversion that holds Jews responsible for aggression against them.”
Excluding students from participating in various groups and making the cost of admission for Jews opposition to the Jewish state as has happened on other campuses is not protected free speech. There is a word to describe what this is — It is discrimination. And it is repugnant, offensive, immoral and illegal.
Hostility to Jews and Israel is rampant on college campuses across the country today. We must be vigilant because this ugly hatred can seep and spill over into other parts of our society and body politic, as it did in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in England, and is beginning to happen here.
The time has come for us to be more assertive with those who deny us our rights to free expression, with those who seek to undermine support for Israel and who intimidate and attempt to silence its supporters or exclude them from certain activities. It is time to make it clear that this is not acceptable, for they are, in effect violating our civil rights.
Any parent sending their child to a college has a right to demand, for the amount of money you are paying, that your child not be harassed and subjected to hateful anti-Semitic actions, masquerading under the thin veneer of anti-Zionism. And any adult who is a graduate of a college where this happens must express concern to their alma mater if things are allowed to be said or done about Jews and supporters of Israel which are not tolerated when done to any other minority.
The irony is that the concentrated, concerted effort to portray Israel as a pariah nation is very different from the reality of what Israel is — the first to mobilize and send humanitarian aid when disaster strikes anywhere in the world.
When I was in Israel this past summer I witnessed first-hand its ethnic diversity and tolerance more than ever before and couldn’t help but think about the absurdity of the attempt to label the country as practicing apartheid. Perhaps since I spent most of my time not in one of the major cities, which is where I usually go, I heard all kinds of languages and was attuned to the diversity and inclusiveness of Israeli society. I saw it in the shopping center where Arabs and Jews of all kinds worked and shopped without any distinction or discrimination. The gym I joined had Jews from Russia working out alongside Jews from Ethiopia and Israeli Arabs.
I couldn’t help by wonder why there so little tension between various Jewish ethnic groups? People from different countries of origin, like Poland get along with people from Yemen or other Arab countries. How to explain and understand this phenomenon which isn’t found in most other countries where people of different ethnic backgrounds and origins often clash and fight and do not get along. I am not saying that there aren’t any problems, and that there aren’t snide comments and jokes told by one group stereotyping another, but relatively speaking, it is much less than in most mixed societies, including America.
Being surrounded by enemies who want to destroy you can help unite people and bring them together. But even more than that, or perhaps related to it, is the recognition that wherever we have lived, we share a common fate and destiny. Despite being spread out across the globe, we have had similar experiences, and been exposed to similar forces of hatred.
This brings me back to the point I stated at the outset — that we are a people, and we have an obligation to stand up and help and support each other.
This point may seem obvious to all of us here today, and it pains me to say this, but unfortunately there are Jews, and even some with the title Rabbi and would-be rabbis who do not understand or accept this.
They do not recognize that Zionism is the fulfillment of 2,000 years of longing and is the most important enterprise of the Jewish people in our time. Having a connection to the people, land and state of Israel is an integral part of Jewish identity, of what it means to be a Jew.
The national rabbinic organization which I founded, the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition, (www.zionistrabbis.org) has responded to those who deny that we have a connection or responsibility to each other and to the well-being of the Jewish state, by calling on rabbinic seminaries not to accept individuals who hold these beliefs as candidates for the rabbinate.
Recognizing that Jews have a wide range of opinions on Israeli policy and “that criticism of Israel (including on the topic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians) is legitimate and necessary,” nevertheless, we make a distinction between legitimate criticism and outright opposition to the Jewish state. We pointed out the long-term danger of ordaining “rabbis who harbor anti-Zionist views, for it contributes to the distancing of Jews not just from Israel, but from the Jewish people and Judaism.” We concluded that, “Those who lack ahavat Yisrael, (love of Israel and the Jewish people), of which anti-Zionism is a manifestation, cross a line and should not be leaders of the Jewish people.”
I regret to inform you that here in Montgomery County, where over 80% of religiously biased hate crimes are against Jews, there are rabbis who, like the Council of American Islamic Relations, oppose the efforts of the American Jewish Committee and our local Jewish Community Relations Council to adopt the widely accepted International Holocaust Resolution on Anti-Semitism for fear that it would limit legitimate criticism of Israel. As I wrote to my colleagues, “the last thing we Jews need to worry about is that there isn’t enough criticism of Israel.”
Our sacred texts and sages teach, “Im ein ani li, mee li: If we are not for ourselves, who will be for us?”
Our history has shown, and our enemies throughout the ages have reminded us — regardless of the nature or extent of our religious practice or beliefs we are a people, with a common shared fate and destiny.
The opening story in Yaffa Eliach’s book, “Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust” is told by the Grand Rabbi of Bluzhov, Rabbi Israel Spira, of a dark, cold night in the Janowska concentration camp in Ukraine when suddenly, a stentorian shout pierced the air: “You are all to evacuate the barracks immediately and report to the vacant lot. Anyone remaining inside will be shot on the spot!”
The SS soldiers ordered the Jews to march. Many died along the way. When they came to a large pit, the sadistic soldiers ordered the prisoners to jump over it. Those who fell in and did not make it to the other side would be shot.
The saintly pious Rabbi Spira had befriended a freethinker, a secular Jew who did not believe in God or Judaism. When they got to the edge of the pit, the young man told the rabbi there was no point in even trying to jump since they were so weak and malnourished. But the rabbi encouraged him and insisted that they must try.
Although the pit was filled with bodies that didn’t make it, they closed their eyes, and jumped. Much to their surprise, they both miraculously found themselves standing on the other side of the pit. The man was incredulous. He hugged the rabbi and exclaimed, “We are alive! Maybe there is a God after all.” Then he asked the elderly, frail rabbi how he managed to do the impossible, to jump across an enormous pit and land safely on the other side, without falling to his death.
The rabbi explained, “When I jumped, I held onto zechus avos, the merit of my ancestors, the coattails of my father and mother, my grandfathers and grandmothers of blessed memory and all the mitzvos they had performed.”
The rabbi then asked his companion, the non-religious secular Jew he had befriended, “What about you? How did you reach the other side of the pit? What were you holding onto?”
The young man said, “Rabbi, I was holding on to you.”
One held onto tradition, mitzvot, and the heritage of his ancestors. The other held onto his fellow Jew. And together, they survived, by holding onto each other. The point is – we are a people, and we need each other to survive.
Dara Horn feels the interest in dead Jews is misplaced. She would prefer if there were greater interest in Jews who are alive and in Jewish life. She points out that most people have no trouble naming three death camps where Jews died during the Holocaust but have difficulty naming three Yiddish authors.
As she writes, “thousands of Holocaust books and movies and TV shows and lectures and courses and museums and mandatory school curricula” attest to the popularity of dead Jews. But she questions how effective such efforts and expenditures are, as they have not led to a reduction in Jew hatred or violent acts against Jews.
In 1983 Ofra Haza represented Israel and performed the song, entitled “Hai” at the annual Eurovision Song Contest in Germany where the song took second place.
Singing in Munich, Germany in 1983, less than forty years after the Holocaust, and nine years after the massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes by Palestinian terrorists in Munich, the song had special meaning and significance. A proud expression of defiance, the symbolism was subtle, but powerful. Poignantly and not unitentional, their costumes were yellow, to evoke and remind people of the yellow stars Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust. Appearing on the stage with the singer were five other singer/dancers – six Israelis performing on a stage in Germany, a number which clearly was not coincidental.
The song’s refrain boldly proclaims, “Zeh hashir shel saba, shar etmol l’abba: This is the song which my grandfather sang yesterday to my father. Vehayom Ani: And now, today I [sing it].
Hai, Hai, Hai, Od Aveenu Hai: I am still alive! Am Yisrael Hai: The people of Israel lives.”
Yes, as the song exclaims, lamrot hakol, despite everything, we are alive.
We must reject the path of those who seek to divide and distance us from our fellow Jews and the land, people and state of Israel.
Instead, let us do what we have always done — hold onto and embrace and support each other — like the rabbi and his friend; like the Sassoons and Kadoories; like the Jews in Amsterdam and countless other times elsewhere throughout the ages. This is the essence of what it means to be a Jew.
Let us preserve and keep alive the song of our people, the song that is both ancient and modern, that celebrates our past and the vitality of our present and our future, the song of Judaism. To do so we must learn the melody and the words, the rich and beautiful heritage bequeathed to us, so we can pass it on to the next generation.
As its refrain proclaims – “Vehayom, ani: Today, me”, — meaning now it is ours. Now the song of our ancestors, the song of our parents and grandparents is our song. Let us proudly sing it.
Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt
Potomac, MD
October 5, 2022
