Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Dear Reader,
Israel is reeling from the fatal stabbing of a teenage girl at the Jerusalem gay pride parade by a charedi zealot and the firebombing of a Palestinian home in the West Bank that killed an 18-month-old baby and severely burned his parents and brother, believed to be the act of Jewish militants. Staff Writer Stewart Ain reports on whether Israeli outrage will be translated into action to prevent future crimes. And our Editorial examines Jewish terrorism.Israel News
Twin Cases Of Extremism Spark Calls For Crackdown
Jewish leaders here want end to ‘hate crimes’ in wake of West Bank firebombing, stabbing at gay pride parade.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
An anti-settler rally in Tel Aviv after attack in Duma reportedly carried out by Jewish extremists. Getty Images
Last week’s firebombing by suspected Jewish settlers of a Palestinian home in the West Bank killing a toddler, and the stabbing of six people — one of them fatally — at the Jerusalem gay pride parade by a charedi extremist may be a game changer for Israel.
For Rabbi Aaron Panken, president of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, it is further evidence that “the situation in Israel has taken a deeply troubling turn.”
The country, he said in a JTA op-ed, now faces the choice of becoming a “haven for fundamentalists intent on attacking those who differ, or it can step into a profound role of Jewish leadership as a country that embraces ideological difference as an essential strength.”
Former Israeli President Shimon Peres reportedly warned last Saturday night that “dark, extremist forces” are threatening to destroy Israel and called on all Israelis to rebuff them.
“Those who incite against Arab citizens of Israel should not be surprised when mosques and churches are set alight or even when a baby is burned alive in the night,” he said, according to The Times of Israel.
Israeli leaders from across the political spectrum vigorously denounced both attacks and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the Israeli hospital where the toddler’s mother was fighting for her life with burns over 90 percent of her body. Her other son, 4, is being treated there for severe burns of his own, and her husband is recovering from burns in another hospital.
But more needs to be done, according to the New Israel Fund, which said the “elegant words” of Israeli leaders “are not enough.”
“Many Israelis want to see a different type of leadership — leadership that will set an example of courage and tolerance, that doesn’t speak in racist terms, that acts swiftly to end hate crimes,” said the group, which promotes social justice and equality for all Jews.
“One cannot say, year after year, that Israel exists only for its Jewish citizens, or only for the Jewish citizens who comply with a narrow, right-wing interpretation of Zionism, and then be shocked when extremists feel free to express hatred and do violence and innocent children are murdered.”
Asked if Israel’s decision last Sunday to permit administrative detention for suspected Jewish terrorists — allowing their detention without charge as it is reportedly doing to 370 suspected Palestinian terrorists — NIF spokesperson Naomi Paiss said: “Abrogating civil liberties for the sake of security is always problematic and needs to be carefully considered.”
But Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, doesn’t believe that anti-Arab rhetoric caused last week’s attacks. He said the two events, which came within 24 hours of each other, were rightly condemned by Israeli leaders and that is “inappropriate and in many ways offensive” to see the arson attack “in broader terms.”
“It is very important in a democracy to allow the system to do its job,” Rabbi Cooper said. “Whoever perpetrated that horrible crime must be brought to justice. If he is part of a movement, there is talk of additional administrative moves that will be taken to co-opt further activity in that direction. … The full weight of the state must make sure it never happens again.”
And he challenged the NIF’s attack on the “right wing,” noting that the “majority of Israelis are center and center-right.” To suggest, Rabbi Cooper said, that they “are affiliated with terrorism and hate is damaging to the fabric” of the country.
On the other hand, Americans for Peace Now President and CEO Debra DeLee said in a statement that more is needed than just the arrest of the perpetrators. She said steps must be taken — “particularly among the nationalist right — to stop inciting actions and hate-speech.” And she called on the Israeli government to fight the environment of lawlessness that Jewish settlers have spawned in the West Bank.”
Ori Nir, the group’s spokesman, stressed that this was a “price tag” attack because the arsonists scrawled in Hebrew on a wall near the torched home the words “revenge” and “long live the king Messiah” next to a Star of David.
“Price tag is a campaign in which the victims almost always are Palestinians and the target of the campaign is the Israeli government,” he explained. “People think it is just Jewish versus Arab violence, but there is a political objective as stated explicitly by leaders of the settler movement — to try to deter the Israeli government from applying the law and removing illegal outposts … .”
Two days before the pre-dawn Friday attack, two apartment buildings in the Israeli settlement of Beit El, just north of Ramallah, were torn down in compliance with a High Court ruling, which found that they were built on private Palestinian land. The demolition came after several days of clashes between protestors and police. Later, Netanyahu announced the approval of 300 new housing units in Beit El, fulfilling a 3-year-old government promise to provide alternative housing for those moved from the apartment buildings.
Referring to the decision to build 300 new housing units in Beit El, DeLee complained that the government’s policies simply “reward settler lawlessness.”
Observers noted that Netanyahu heads a narrow right-wing government and must tread carefully when dealing with settlers.
Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party and Israel’s minister of the economy, wrote last week that he would “not under any circumstances accept the attempt to vilify the 430,000 wonderful Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria, those who are known as ‘settlers.’ There is such a foolish attempt at the moment. It will not succeed. Whoever engages in such action is guilty of the same sin of prejudice and incitement.”
Ethan Felson, senior vice president and acting CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said the arsonists “must be punished the same as any other terrorists,” and that the sentence must be strong enough to serve as a “deterrent to others.”
“Right now, we’re broken hearted for the families that are in mourning,” he added. “But when our tears dry, the soul searching will continue.”
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, welcomed the government’s decision to “apply anti-terrorism laws” to Jewish terrorists, saying: “Those who commit these crimes should be held to account.”
He said questions are being raised about why Yishai Schlissel, the man suspected in the fatal stabbing of high school student Shira Banki, was permitted anywhere near the gay pride parade. He had just been released after serving a 10-year sentence for knifing three people at the same parade in 2005 and openly threatened to repeat his crime.
“Acts like these can in a moment do more damage than BDS [the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign] does in months,” Hoenlein said.
The arson attack “hurts the settlers in general,” he continued. “It creates the image that many have tried to paint of lawlessness and extremism, which is not really characteristic of most settlers. In fact, many of them have spoken out in condemnation of the attack.”
On Monday, the Palestinian Authority renewed its call for the International Criminal Court to investigate the Israeli “occupation,” and presented it a file containing details of the arson attack and what it described as other “settler terrorism.”
Although no arrest was made in the arson attack in the days following the incident, Hoenlein said authorities “are throwing immense resources into this, but they [the perpetrators] are not known criminals and not necessarily part of an organized effort. It could have been a spontaneous act of revenge by young people. … One person throwing a Molotov cocktail does terrific damage.”
In May, the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din issued a report that examined the success of law enforcement against Israelis who harm Palestinians in the West Bank. It said only 7.4 percent of investigations resulted in indictments of suspects, and that 85.3 percent of investigations were ended because of an inability to locate suspects or gather sufficient evidence for an indictment.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin acknowledged the problem last Friday. I24News quoted him as saying, “To my great sorrow, until now it seems we have been lax in our treatment of the phenomena of Jewish terrorism.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, who is in Israel for his first visit as the new national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said it was “important” that Israeli leaders “came out unambiguously and called this a heinous attack and have taken steps to apprehend the perpetrators.”
He added that the incidents “highlight a real tension in society” and the “need to focus on civil rights issues in Israel” and that he finds it “encouraging that leaders are prepared to deal with it.”
Hoenlein said the government would also be going after those who “incite and facilitate such acts.”
That promised crackdown appeared to begin this week with the arrest of Meir Ettinger, 23, the suspected head of an extremist settler group that was allegedly planning a series of attacks against Palestinians. He is the grandson of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the American-born rabbi who founded an Israeli party that was labeled racist and banned for advocating the forced expulsion of all Arabs from Israel. Kahane was assassinated by an Arab gunman in New York in 1990.
On Monday evening, in an all-too-familiar pattern of attack and counter-attack, a suspected Palestinian terrorist hurled a Molotov cocktail at a car in east Jerusalem, setting it ablaze and seriously burning a 27-year-old woman and slightly injuring two others in the car. The vehicle, which was engulfed in flames, then rolled into the path of another car, slightly injuring the driver.
Former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was quoted as saying that the attack is a reminder that “the exception is Jews who attack Arabs, and the routine is Arab terrorism against Jews.”
stewart@jewishweek.orgEditorial
Alas, Jewish Terrorism
Meir Ettinger, pictured here in the Israeli Justice Court, was arrested on inciting 'nationalistic crimes' this week. Getty
Israel’s time of mourning and introspection did not end with Tisha b’Av this summer. It was extended when, within 24 hours last week, two murderous acts of Jewish violence took place. On Thursday a charedi zealot, recently released from prison after 10 years for attacking participants at a 2005 gay pride parade, stabbed six people at this year’s annual parade in downtown Jerusalem. A teenage girl watching the festivities later died from her wounds.
On Friday a firebomb thrown into a home in the West Bank town of Duma burned an 18-month-old baby, killing him, and seriously wounded his parents and brother. Jews were suspected of perpetrating the crime because the word “nekamah” (Hebrew for revenge) was spray-painted at the scene.
A wide range of Israel’s political and religious leaders spoke out firmly against these heinous acts. President Reuven Rivlin acknowledged, “We have been lax in tackling Jewish terrorism.” And Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid Party, asserted, “We are at war with the enemy within.”
Are Israelis prepared to do more than express their outrage? Last summer Israelis were shocked when a Palestinian teenage boy was burned to death by several Jewish extremists. In that case the perpetrators were arrested, but statistics show that it is extremely rare for Jews to be caught and punished for terror crimes against Arabs. In time, the horror fades.
This week the 23-year-old grandson of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League and symbol of religious Jewish extremism, was arrested, said to be the leading Jewish target of the Shin Bet for nationalist crimes. His grandfather no doubt would be proud.
And Israel’s cabinet this week approved the use of administrative detention, no doubt seeking to prove that Jews as well as Arabs may be held in prison for long periods of time without formal charges. But some liberals condemned such detention as unfair to anyone, Jew or Arab.
There is a growing sense in Israeli society that more needs to be done to counter the spike in Jewish terror, often by religious militants who show no respect for the laws of the state. That’s why statements by respected rabbis condemning violence as against Jewish law are particularly important. Rabbi Yehuda Gilad of Yeshivat Maale Gilboa in Israel wrote this week that “religiously motivated murder distorts the very notion of morality” and that a “literal interpretation of the Bible,” in terms of killing, is “simplistic … and extremely dangerous.”
Still, the reality is that a significant and growing minority of Israelis, including many ultra-Orthodox Jews and Israeli Arabs, do not adhere to Zionist and/or democratic values. This puts a strain on the society, complicated by the alienating factor it has on the majority of diaspora Jews who worry about the fundamentalist impulse in Israel today.
The mood of indignation must not be allowed to fade this time. It must be translated into acts that prevent future crimes and indicate society’s red-line intolerance of Jewish terror.
editor@jewishweek.orgAssociate Editor Jonathan Mark talks to three mainstream local rabbis on how they talk about the Iran agreement with their congregants. And my column takes a detailed look at Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein and the successful - but controversial - work he does in raising huge funds from American evangelical Christians for Israel and Jewish causes.New York
Iran Deal Testing City’s Rabbis
As Elul approaches, ‘life and death’ on the pulpit, columnist Jonathan Mark writes.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Rabbis Gerald Skolnik, Robert Levine and Haskel Lookstein.
‘We’re not a Democratic shul, we’re not a Republican shul,” Rabbi Joseph Lookstein often said of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, home to that iconic Modern Orthodox leader for more than 40 years. It was one of the many lessons learned by his son, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, who leads the prominent Upper East Side shul today: “My politics remain with me. But there are exceptions,” he says of the nuclear agreement with Iran, a deal he opposes, “and this is that exception. This is life and death for Israel.”
Just across Central Park, Rabbi Robert Levine of Congregation Rodeph Sholom, the landmark Reform temple, holds a diametrically opposite, but equally passionate, view on the Iranian deal. Not only does he enthusiastically support it, but “I don’t even understand the arguments on the other side.”
Across the city, across the years, no one, it seems, can remember another political issue that had American rabbinic opinion ranging from apocalyptic to optimistic, with both sides finding the other unfathomable.
The political tempest has taken place in summer’s slow season for synagogues, but with the coming of Elul (Aug. 15), the traditional kick-off to the High Holiday season, rabbis have started crafting sermons regarding Iran, while considering the question of how to be a rabbi to congregants who may disagree, though almost all rabbis we spoke to report remarkable support from congregants, leaning to rejection of the deal among the mostly conservative Orthodox, and support for the deal among the mostly liberal Reform. There is more fluctuation within the Conservative movement, with support for President Obama tempered by apprehension about the deal.
The movement’s Rabbinical Assembly stated: “We recognize the hard work by the Obama administration … notwithstanding our reservations about the deal as it is currently being reported. … [We] turn to Congress to carefully review and assess this proposed agreement … .”
The Orthodox Union and the Rabbinical Council of America were more forceful. “We will mobilize our member rabbis and synagogues throughout the nation to urge Congress to fulfill their mandate and disapprove the agreement.”
The Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, and affiliated groups, called for “carefully considered approaches before rushing to conclusions. As the Congress moves forward, we will share our opinion on the viability of this agreement to achieve our goals,” preventing a nuclear Iran and protecting American and Israeli security.
Rabbi Gerald Skolnik, spiritual leader of the Forest Hills Jewish Center (Conservative) and a Jewish Week blogger, said he told his congregation, “I am against the deal. I have been very involved with AIPAC, with lobbying.” Nevertheless, “I have, as many rabbis have, a difficult job in speaking about [the deal] because I have the responsibility to be the rabbi to those whose opinions I don’t share. I’m never out to make someone feel that if they disagree with me then there’s something wrong with them, or that they’re less loving of Israel. But I have very strong feelings.”
His congregants have strong feelings, too, volleying opinions on the shul’s listserve. “I let them go at it,” said Rabbi Skolnik, “until I finally said, ‘You’re not going to convince each other. Let’s just agree that there are multiple opinions.’ I had one or two people who wrote to me after I spoke [on the deal] and said, ‘I really think you’re wrong.’ That’s fine. I try to lead by teaching what the issues are, based on my own reading of Jewish history and the situation, and framing it in ways that I hope will resonate.”
Rabbi Skolnik is cognizant of the well-publicized issues (religious pluralism, for one, an issue the rabbi has fought for) that have alienated some of his congregants from Israel “and complicate all other issues,” such as Iran. For one of his High Holiday sermons, Rabbi Skolnik, a passionate Zionist, said, “I’m thinking of using Natan Alterman’s poem, ‘Magash HaKesef,’ [‘The Silver Platter’]. Chaim Weizman once said [in 1947], the State of Israel will not be given to the Jews on a silver platter. And Alterman wrote this powerful poem about a battle-weary boy and girl emerging from [the smoke] as the people were beginning to celebrate the state. The people look at them — filthy, exhausted, barely standing — and don’t know what to make of them. The people ask, ‘Who are you.’ And they answer, ‘We’re the silver platter.’
“You know,” said Rabbi Skolnik, “Israel is always going to be about struggle. It’s not going to be given on a silver platter to Israelis or to American Jews.”
He said that if he speaks on these issues during the Days of Awe, he intends to be “meta-political,” beyond party or politics. “That’s the great challenge.
“I have people in my shul, people that I know love Israel, who challenged me after I spoke against the deal. A past president of my shul who was in the [IDF] unit that ... [liberated] the Old City in 1967 came up to me and said, ‘I couldn’t disagree with you more.’ I couldn’t challenge him. He put his life on the line.”
The rabbi added, “Mixed up with all of this this is people’s [negative] feelings about [Prime Minister] Netanyahu, but I wouldn’t want to sleep with his responsibility. I’m not a Bibi fan, but on Iran I think he’s right. That’s my problem. I think he’s right.” (The prime minister said Tuesday, in a speech organized by the Jewish Federations of North America, that “this deal will bring war.”)
The day after the Iran agreement was announced, Rabbi Levine of Rodeph Sholom posted his support for the deal on the temple’s website. “I didn’t want people to have to wait until the High Holidays to know how I felt.” He deliberately did not mention either Obama or Netanyahu in his online essay. “I wanted to deal with the issue itself, beyond politics,” he told us.
“I never had such a response to anything I’ve written, 85 to 90 percent positive,” said Rabbi Levine. “I did get some negative reaction, some of it ferocious, from staunch right-wing Republicans and from Israelis.
“There has been a monolithic response from the Israeli political establishment that I do not understand,” said the rabbi.
“Yes,” he added, “there are aspects of the deal that I’m sure we all would craft differently.” As for the $150 billion going to Iran as part of the deal, with some of that likely going to Hezbollah and Hamas? “Well, it’s Iran’s money. It will be a very interesting thing whether they use that money to better their society. There is a side of Iranian society that hungers for normalcy. Let’s see what can come out of this.”
He wrote on the website, “Trust me, I have no illusions that Iran will curb its virulent anti-Semitism or hatred of Israel. But I do believe that this agreement further opens the path for Iran’s leaders to focus their energies on building a viable economic and social structure and less time supporting Shiite aggression.”
Rabbi Lookstein was only 6 years old in 1938, the year of the Munich appeasement when Nazi aggression was the threat of the day, but he remembers the chilling spectacle of the German-American Bund, supporters of Hitler, marching through the Upper East Side. He fears, “This is 1938 all over again.” Iran vows to annihilate Israel’s 6 million Jews, only it took Hitler several years to do that, says Rabbi Lookstein. “It will take Iran only one bomb. You have to take people at their word when they say they want to destroy you.”
He, too, has been using the Internet to inform and alert his congregants that the deal was “fundamentally flawed.” He sent out articles on the Iran agreement by Leon Wieseltier and Jeffrey Goldberg, and urged congregants to call their senators and representatives to “oppose the Iran nuclear deal because it will not block Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. No deal is better than a bad deal, and this is a bad deal.”
Rabbi Lookstein said he rarely gives sermons or promotes political issues, but “in this case I have to lead; this is maybe the most critical moment since the Shoah. We’re putting billions of dollars in the hands of murderers. The Iranians are not just people with whom we politely disagree. They support Hezbollah, Hamas and terrorism around the world.”
One congregant emailed Rabbi Lookstein, “‘Would you send out articles with which you do not agree?’ My answer is, ‘Not really. I don’t usually send out any articles of a political nature, except now, because I believe this is life or death.”
jonathan@jewishweek.orgGary Rosenblatt
Sacred Mission Or Ego Trip — Or Both?
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein raises huge funds from U.S. Christians for Israel and Jewish causes. As he brings more Jews on aliyah, now targeting France, questions linger over his tactics.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Since last Dec. 23, about 150 Ukrainian Jews each month have boarded a flight in Kiev and been brought to Israel to begin new lives in the Jewish state. They are fleeing the fighting in eastern Ukraine between government forces and pro-Russian separatists that has turned the area into a dangerous no-man’s land.
The travel arrangements have not been made by the Jewish Agency for Israel, the traditional organization for aliyah from the diaspora, but rather through an American-based philanthropic organization funded by evangelical Christians.
This month, the group, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, reached the 1,000 mark for Ukrainian Jews making aliyah, a landmark achievement according to its founder and president, Yechiel Eckstein, sometimes referred to as the rabbi with the largest gentile following since Jesus.
His fellowship, founded in 1983, seeks to express Christian love for Israel by supporting projects that ensure the safety and security of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. Bringing Jews from countries in distress to Zion is just the latest of many such projects. Besides the transports from war-torn Ukraine, where Jews are caught in the civil conflict, the fellowship is, according to Eckstein, quietly bringing Jews to Israel from a country in the Arab world. And it plans to introduce flights by the end of the year for Jews emigrating from France, the country with the highest aliyah rate last year due to increased anti-Semitic violence.
To date these ventures are in direct competition with the work of the Jewish Agency, a quasi-government agency in Israel. Officials there, and a number of leaders in the American Jewish establishment, privately assert that Eckstein undermines the agency’s mission and that he is “on an ego trip that knows no bounds,” according to someone with intimate knowledge of the agency. The rabbi, who made aliyah 15 years ago, counters that his group is doing mitzvah work and filling a vacuum. He says that as a longtime lay leader of the Jewish Agency he saw first-hand that its aliyah work in Ukraine was lacking, so he decided to do a better job himself.
“After years of working with the Israeli government and putting all of our funds in establishment organizations — including $177 million over 15 years in the Jewish Agency — I learned the government wasn’t doing its job sufficiently,” Eckstein told me in one of a recent series of interviews. “Every time I turned over a stone I found a snake, a void. So I decided to fill the voids and not wait for the government.”
Not surprisingly, Eckstein, who had been directing about $12 million a year of fellowship funds to the agency, was forced off the executive board earlier this year.
Agency officials can hardly contain their exasperation in describing Eckstein and his demands. “His appetite for publicity is obsessive, and whatever recognition we gave him was never enough,” said one person who, like others at the charity, insisted on anonymity, perhaps because the fellowship still donated $500,000 this year to the agency.
“The loss of the fellowship’s major donation left a big hole in the budget, but there was a huge sigh of relief” throughout the agency, the insider said.
The rift is described on the last page of a just-released biography of the Canadian-born Orthodox rabbi, 64, titled “The Bridge Builder: The Life and Continuing Legacy of Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein” (Penguin Random House). Author Zev Chafets writes that although the Jewish Agency is “a pillar of the Israeli establishment,” Eckstein, who has worked closely with Israeli prime ministers and Jewish Agency chair Natan Sharansky, “no longer looked up to the leaders of Israel or put absolute trust in their judgment and competence. Time and exposure had made him a realist. He had built the fellowship by taking on conventional wisdom and overcoming entrenched establishments. Here was another hurdle. He had no doubt he could clear it.”
The rabbi also had no doubt that his actions would lead to condemnation, which he attributes in large part to jealousy of his success. But as Chafets and others have noted, Eckstein, a tireless worker, seems to thrive on countering outspoken critics who question his motives and disparage his work.
“That’s his emotional fuel,” says someone who has worked with him but preferred to remain nameless so as not to offend him. “His energy and his accomplishments are amazing.”
Candid Biography
Chafets offers a fascinating and remarkably candid (particularly for an authorized biography) look at Eckstein as a complex figure who has worked tirelessly for more than 30 years to strengthen Christian bonds to Jews. His book pulls no punches in describing a rabbi whose compulsive interfaith work has led to his alienation from his family and community, and whose maverick ideas and have been praised, envied and reviled.
All agree, though, that Eckstein has a genius for fundraising, has been uniquely successful in convincing millions of evangelical Christians to support his efforts, and that he has achieved enormous influence by raising billions of dollars for Israel. The fellowship expects to raise $150 million this year from 1.5 million donors who in large part allow him to decide how and where to distribute the funds.
Eckstein is not shy about defining his role, describing himself as “like a potter, shaping” the emerging bonds between Evangelicals and Jews.
“Historically, it’s not too grandiose to note that for 2,000 years we have not seen the phenomenon of millions of Christians” professing their love and support “for Israel and Jews, and giving so generously” on their behalf, he said.
“I gave Christians a framework to help Israel and the Jewish people. Until then the only framework was Christian missionizing to the Jews. That was the only way they could relate to the Jewish people. I was there to meet them half-way and give them an alternative, and they grabbed it.”
The Chafets biography describes how Eckstein, at 25, took a job in Christian-Jewish relations for the Anti-Defamation League in Chicago, and found the most interest among Evangelicals, tens of millions of whom take the words of Genesis 12:3 literally: “I will bless those who bless you,” God says to Abraham, “and those who curse you I will curse.”
The young rabbi, who was ordained at Yeshiva University, wanted to work most closely with evangelical leaders. But ADL officials balked, given the perception that these Christians sought to missionize to Jews and held parochial political views and cultural values at odds with the majority of American Jews. (A decade later the ADL published a report called “The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America.”)
In 1983 Eckstein left the ADL and launched the fellowship, originally a one-man operation called the Holyland Fellowship of Christians and Jews. He established strong relationships with prominent ministers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. But he was ostracized in his Orthodox community, distrusted by a number of mainstream Christians and Jews, and maligned by charedim as a secret missionary and by Jews For Jesus as a fraud.
Chafets details the setbacks and successes over the years as Eckstein grew his operation, inspiring working-class American Evangelicals who tithe their modest salaries for charity to bless and support Israel and Jewish causes. Through the rabbi’s many appearances on major evangelical television programs as well as TV ads featuring his on-camera appeals for support for Russian Jews seeking to move to Israel, the fellowship’s coffers began to overflow with cash.
The television spots, which now feature Eckstein encountering impoverished Jews in the former Soviet Union or Israel, offend critics who describe the commercials as demeaning to the government of Israel and to Jewish organizations tasked with caring for the poor. “He [Eckstein] makes us out to be uncaring or incompetent or both,” said one national Jewish organization CEO referring to the tragic circumstances depicted in the videos.
A spokesman for the fellowship acknowledged that “the videos make these poor Israelis look like nebichs [pitiable], but there are people in Israel who are poor and needy. And keep in mind that we are appealing to our average donors, like a checkout cashier at the A&P, so these TV spots are not nuanced. But they get the message across.”
Proof of their effectiveness is that the Fellowship’s American office, based in Chicago, receives as many as 7,000 checks a day, almost all from American Evangelicals whose donations average about $70, according to Eckstein.
“About one-third of the checks are made out to ‘Rabbi Eckstein,’” the rabbi said. “I’m the brand.”
Another 40 percent of the donations are designated to “where needed most.”
“Those funds give me latitude,” he noted. He has a seemingly endless list of ideas and projects, often based on reading newspapers and seeing where his work is needed. For instance, after learning that Israeli hospitals in the north lack MRI equipment, he provided them each with an MRI.
In return, Eckstein insists on recipient groups publicly acknowledging the generosity of the Fellowship, through plaques, press releases and other means of publicity. “It’s not about me,” he said. “It’s about letting the public know who is making it all possible.”
But there is still a hesitancy to specify who those donors are. Much of the fellowship’s publicity speaks of donations from “non-Jews” rather than using the word “Christians.”
“Frankly I was afraid of playing it up,” Eckstein admits. But he says he is getting more comfortable with citing “Christians” as the major source of funding. “Only about half of the Israeli population knows that our funds come from Christians. We need to do a better job” of getting the word out, he said.
Among the many fellowship programs, Eckstein cited donating funds to more than 100 charitable organizations; sponsoring summer camps for poor children; building fallout shelters in the south; providing educational scholarships for Druze men and women who serve in the IDF; holding conferences for professionals in the social service field; creating homeless shelters in Jerusalem; offering pre-army preparatory programs for young people from various ethnic minorities; and, by year’s end, launching a national emergency hotline that will make referrals to scores of organizations.
(The fellowship is “neutral” on the issue of Israel’s West Bank policies, a spokesperson said. Jews in the settlements are eligible for fellowship services by coming into Israel proper to receive them; the fellowship has no presence across the Green Line.)
Shouldn’t the government be initiating and funding all of these projects?
“I have a choice,” Eckstein explained. “I can let people go without food or bomb shelters and blame the government for it, or I can choose to feed” and protect people. “I have this amazing gift no one else has — the ability to not just complain about what’s lacking but do something about it.”
He likes to quote the passage from the “Ethics of the Fathers”: “Where there is no man, be that man.”
He said that five years ago he sought to create a national food program together with the Israeli government to provide a safety net for the poor. The fellowship and the government would each put up $30 million. But after the government lagged, he said, “we changed our strategy from being a foundation that gives money to others to do the work. Two years ago we decided to do it on our own.” The fellowship now spends $29 million a year for basic food needs for the elderly.
‘God Will Provide’
Eckstein is proud that the fellowship has no endowment. It spends all the money it takes in each year and starts fundraising from scratch the next year. And each year for more than three decades it has raised more than the year before, Eckstein said. (In 2014, it raised $136 million.)
The fellowship’s board, comprised of both Jews and Christians, believes that “God will provide,” he explained. “We’re blessed,” said Eckstein, adding that the Fellowship is better at raising money than distributing it.
In bringing Jews from the Ukraine on aliyah, the fellowship provides each adult $1,000, plus $500 per child, which the Jewish Agency does not do. The fellowship also seeks to house the new immigrants near each other in Israel and has a staffer or volunteer assigned to each family for six months, starting from Day One, to ease the transition.
Jewish Agency officials say the fellowship’s venture into aliyah, particularly from the former Soviet Union (FSU), is unnecessary competition and confusing to the local communities. The agency closed its formal aliyah department when it restructured the organization and made its primary focus Jewish identity several years ago. But it still handles aliyah and says the number of emigrants from the Ukraine has tripled in the last few years, and the number of French Jews coming to Israel, via the Jewish Agency, increased from 500 five years ago to an expected 7,500 this year — “with no help from Yechiel,” the Agency insider emphasized. The increase in France is tied to rising levels of Muslim anti-Semitism, which culminated in the murder of four Jews in January in the attack on a kosher market in Paris. Eckstein’s next target is France, though Nathalie Garson, a consultant on French aliyah who is managing the project, known as “Together Israel,” describes the effort as complementing the work of the Jewish Agency rather than competing with it.
She said that while the Jewish Agency seeks to promote aliyah and motivate people to emigrate, the fellowship plans to work with French families already committed to aliyah but lacking the financial comfort level to make the big move.
“We have different goals and a different target audience,” said Garson, who is a native of France living in Israel. “We are looking to the 1,500 to 2,000 French Jews we believe would make aliyah now if they had the kind of additional support we can provide.”
That includes financial help for the first six months of rent (to supplement the 1,500 shekels [about $400] a month all new olim receive from the Ministry of Absorption), personalized help in finding a job, and afternoon day care for children.
Garson has met with French Jewish communal leaders and explained the project. Eckstein plans to attend the “Together Israel” launch this fall, with a major event including French Jewish leadership and press coverage. The first group of families on the program will come to Israel in December and settle in Haifa, the lead municipality among several working with the Fellowship.
Garson said the goal is to have about 80 families settle in Israel in the first six months of 2016, and progress from there.
“We are not measuring success by numbers,” she said, but in the quality of the absorption process.
‘The Real Deal’
Several national Jewish leaders, including federation executives, echoed the complaints that Eckstein is driven by ego and self-glorification. But he has his prominent defenders who speak of the generosity of the fellowship and Eckstein’s sincere commitment to do good deeds.
Alan Gill, CEO of the Joint Distribution Committee, says Eckstein is “the real deal — he has been a life raft for many of the 200,000 elderly Jews living in deplorable conditions [in the FSU], and that to me is the issue. Measure the deeds.”
Gill said the fellowship support is “absolutely essential to the work we do,” contributing “well over $100 million as a partner in our programs to give people something to eat, and medicine, and home care. This is avodat kodesh [holy work] at its finest.”
He said he is pleased to have Eckstein on the JDC executive committee, and has no problem “recognizing our donors. That’s part of what we do.”
Shlomi Peles of the Leviev Foundation, which was created by and is led by Russian billionaire Lev Leviev, and which provides a range of social services to Jews in the FSU through the Federation of Jewish Communities there, has known Eckstein for about 10 years. He said that what makes the rabbi unique among major funders is that he “shows up himself to meet not only with the Jewish leaders in Ukraine but with Jews on the street, in their homes.”
Also, when war in the Ukraine broke out, Peles said that Eckstein called him “to ask how he could help, and he came the next week.” A number of Jewish organizations “like to send press releases” about their activities, Peles said, “but Yechiel does the work.” He noted that he has donors “who give less money and want more kavod [honor]. I pray to God for more donors like Yechiel.”
Officials of World ORT have similar praise for Eckstein and the Fellowship as their major source of funding for educational programs around the globe. And Haim Saban, the Israeli-American philanthropist and Hollywood producer, has become a friend of Eckstein in recent years. “I was blown away by Yechiel’s commitment and his level of dedication to the Jewish people.” Eckstein is a major supporter of Saban’s primary cause, the Friends of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces).
As for the criticism that Eckstein is a publicity-hound for his fellowship, Saban said he was unaware of the controversy. But “from what you describe,” he said in an interview, “if there are those who have a complaint, let them go on the record and share that complaint. As far as I am concerned, he is doing holy work, and if he seeks recognition for his Christian donors, that’s a good thing. They love the Jewish people. Let them be recognized. They deserve it.”
Is it that simple? It seems so, though some of the most respected Jewish professionals in the field who have worked with him become enraged at the mention of Eckstein’s name.
Over the course of extended conversations with him I have observed Eckstein as an open, compassionate and sincere shaliach (or, messenger) of Christian generosity on a sacred mission. “Our goal is not to give away money,” he told me at one point, “but to strengthen Jewish bonds to Jews and Israel and give them tangible ways to express that love. And hopefully the Jewish community will begin to trust Christians more.”
I’ve also seen indications of his craving for attention, demanding style and sense of supremacy in the world of charity, all of which are covered in Zev Chafets’ biography.
Chafets, who is now working on a screenplay about Theodor Herzl, sees a number of striking parallels between the State of Israel’s founder and Eckstein.
Brilliant men, visionaries and dreamers, mocked by their contemporaries, paranoid about criticism but thriving on it, tireless travelers despite health problems, difficult to work with, irrepressibly optimistic in pursuing their goals and succeeding in the end.
“It’s that strange combination of purity and chutzpah,” Chafets says, noting that “not that many people really know Yechiel. People seem to love him or hate him.”
Gary@jewishweek.orgAlso this week, American and Israeli war veterans share experiences of post-traumatic stress; our travel writer visits Cambridge, Ontario; and columnist Erica Brown asks, "what are you waiting for?"New York
American, Israeli Vets Face Trauma Through Film
First-of-its-kind seminar helps soldiers from two countries cope with the shared experience of PTSD.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Ben Patton, left, executive director of the “I Was There” film workshops. Courtesy of Belev Echad
Dan Meir was on his way to buy ice cream with his family in Haifa when a terrorist threw a grenade. He was 9.
“The memory is a blur — just a loud noise and then black. Both of my legs were covered with metal, and I still have a scar on my forehead,” Meir said during a phone interview from his home in Tel Aviv. He lost his left leg. His 1-year-old brother, 6-year-old sister and grandparents were also injured.
For Meir, 36, a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and graduate student in psychodrama at Kibbutzim College in Tel Aviv, film has been one way to deal with the trauma of his past. Two weeks ago he participated in an interactive film workshop that brought together 15 American and Israeli veterans to write, shoot and edit original movies about their experiences. Belev Echad, a Manhattan-based nonprofit that runs programs to honor and aid wounded Israeli veterans, partnered with the Patton Veterans Project, which runs “I Was There” film workshops for veterans struggling with post traumatic stress disorder.
“Unpacking and repacking memories is similar to the process of making a film. It gives sense and order to the images and memories that plague many veterans,” said Ben Patton, who founded the Patton Veterans Project in 2011. The organization has worked with more than 600 U.S. veterans to date.
The four-day workshop, believed to be the first intercultural seminar of its kind, led to a fruitful dialogue about differences, along with an underlying recognition of similarity, said Patton, who is the grandson of World War II hero Gen. George S. Patton.
Participant Matthew Pennington, an American veteran from Maine, was surprised to discover the parallels between himself and his Israeli counterparts.
“Regardless of where you come from, the human experience of trauma is very similar,” said Pennington, who lost his left leg and severely injured his right in a 2006 roadside bombing in Iraq during his third deployment to the Mideast. The two groups of soldiers “keyed in” on sharing common goals — and a common enemy, he said. “We’re all fighting against regimes who instill fear and oppression.”
Pennington found film therapy to be particularly effective because of its “non-confrontational” nature. “When you deal with vets, you’re dealing with very masculine personality types. Accepting that you need formal therapy is very hard,” he said. “When you approach film as a job, you lose sight of the fact that it’s therapy.”
Still, with or without with the support of therapy, the return to civilian life can be grueling. In his short film, “PTSD Sounds,” Israeli veteran Yoav Gelband partnered with one Israeli and two American veterans to tell the story of re-integrating into the bustle of city life. Shot in Times Square, the five-minute film communicates how even the most commonplace sounds — a drill at a construction site or and ambulance siren — can bring back a host of unwanted memories.
“The film’s about the journey to find peace in our daily lives, and in our own minds,” said Gelband, 23, who was injured last summer in a shootout in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge. “We all fought in different places, under different circumstances, but we’re haunted by the same sounds.”
Dr. Rachel Yehuda, director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a leading expert in PTSD, said that aside from dealing with the normal difficulties that occur post-trauma, soldiers have the added weight of dealing with judgment from others.
“There are things you do in combat that people have a lot of judgment about,” said Yehuda, adding that comments from those who have not been in combat but think they would have acted differently are exceedingly unhelpful. “Decisions are made under intense pressure and at great personal risk. Soldiers aren’t as free to make decisions. It is very difficult to describe that mindset to someone who has never been in battle.”
Guilt also plagues some veterans, particularly with regard to not being able to protect a fellow combatant, said Yehuda. “It’s the painful doubt of ‘could I have prevented it?’”
Dani Tenenbaum, one of the film instructors who facilitated the workshop, said he’s noticed that American and Israeli soldiers have very different coping mechanisms: Israeli soldiers often use humor, while the Americans focus on honor.
“Israelis are more cynical about their injuries — they share a dark sense of humor, while the Americans speak about it less,” said Tenenbaum, who has led six workshops for American veterans. He said the casual attitude among Israelis veterans stems from many of the volatile realities of living in the Middle East. “People get used to terror attacks and war — you can’t just not talk about it,” he said. “You have to find ways to deal with it.”
The workshop also highlighted the differences in how people responded to soldiers when they returned home.“American soldiers are saluted at baseball games! In Israel, we drop the formal stuff really quickly,” Gelband said. Still, he felt that he and his fellow Israeli soldiers were more appreciated than his American counterparts. “Our country is small, everybody either serves or knows someone who served, and everyone is related to soldiers who were killed or injured in combat or a terror attack,” he said. “In America, no one knows what their soldiers have been through.”
Film instructor Boaz Shahak, 43, also saw a “huge difference” between how the two cultures were greeted when they returned. He said many of the American soldiers talked about being “alone in the street,” while Israeli veterans are “hugged by society.”The element of choice that accompanies an American soldier’s decision to join the army also magnifies the difference in reception, he said. “It’s seen as a professional move, so sometimes people aren’t as quick to sympathize.”
Still, the ease with which the two cultures connected was “surprising,” even for Shahak, a documentary filmmaker for the past 20 years.
“Both sides went into this not fully believing what they’d gain, and both sides left sharing in someone else’s heartache and healing,” he said. “That’s the beauty of film. It’s not just about telling one story. It’s telling the story of thousands, through one person’s eyes.”
editor@jewishweek.orgTravel
A Real-Life Downton
08/04/15
Hilary Danailova
Travel Writer
The grounds around the Federal Revival-style Langdon Hall. Courtesy of Langdon Hall
It was while waiting for the dumbwaiter elevator that I noticed the small, merry line of bells above the foyer doorway. With a spark of recognition, I realized where I’d seen them before: Downton Abbey!
As fans of the British period soap all know, the opening credits of “Downton Abbey” roll over a wall of vintage bells identical to the ones I was now studying. If I hadn’t been waiting for a creaky centenarian contraption, I would never have paused long enough to look up, and I would never have seen those bells. Or realized that the house I was staying in — the Langdon Hall Country House Hotel and Spa — was, essentially, a real-life Downton.
I was in the Canadian woods of Cambridge, Ontario, an hour west of Toronto. The wide-open fields and thick green forests are pleasant enough, but nothing on the ride from the airport prepared me for the transporting graciousness of Langdon Hall. Surrounded by 200 acres of Carolinian forest on the Grand River, Langdon Hall’s centerpiece is a sprawling, 32-room brick-and-column manse in the Federal Revival style — aristocratic in a very New World idiom, yet brimming with the pride of place that animates old English estates.
Built in 1902 as the Canadian retreat of Eugene Langdon Wilks — a great-grandson of the New York financier John Jacob Astor — Langdon Hall remained in the peripatetic Wilks family for eight decades. It served as a refuge for European family members during World War II, and housed several generations before its sale in the 1980s and rebirth as part of the Relais & Châteaux luxury hotel empire.
As I studied a wall of sepia-toned family portraits in the Langdon bar room — which, like everything at Langdon Hall, feels at once exquisitely formal and instantly comfortable — I realized there was yet another Downton parallel: Just as Downton’s fictional Crawley clan has rarely mentioned Jewish ties, the Astor family has also been linked to German-Jewish lineage several centuries back.
Regardless of bloodline, Langdon’s wood-burning fireplaces, fluffy duvets and private dressing rooms could make anybody feel like lord of the manor, I reflected as I sank into a cloud of feather-down pillows.
I was in Cambridge to check out luxury, Ontario style, en route to the nearby Stratford Festival — the Canadian summer mecca for Shakespeare and other serious theater. But Langdon Hall is less a resort than an enchanted world unto itself. I could easily have lost hours happily wandering the myriad rooms of Wilks’ mansion, taking in the meticulously conserved period details, or exploring the miles of trails through the surrounding forests.
In the morning, I strolled past sunlit lily ponds to a patio under the shady green canopy of a century-old tree, savoring brunch in a setting reminiscent of Monet’s garden. A chef in starched whites scurried to and from the lavish buffet table, explaining how the ingredients for his preserves, quiches and tarts are sourced right from the Langdon gardens.
After brunch, I strolled past the croquet lawns and toured those gardens with head gardener Mario, who oversees the heirloom beets, pea shoots, lavender and wild gooseberries that — along with dozens of other crops — inform the ever-changing menu at Langdon’s award-winning restaurant.
Amid all the exquisitely conserved period details, that ethos of local, seasonal and sustainable is decidedly contemporary. It extends, Mario explained, beyond the spring-pea salad and pasta I ate for lunch to the spa itself, where the scrumptious-smelling massage oils are crafted from garden herbs.
Langdon Hall may have typified the estates favored by well-to-do New Yorkers a hundred years ago — but today, it sets the standard for the kind of luxury accommodations increasingly favored by weekend tourists, for whom featherbeds, dual-head showers and sommeliers in the hotel dining room are de rigueur. And more and more, these luxury spots are popping up in the easy-to-reach, cheap-for-Americans countryside west of Toronto.
About an hour west of Langdon in Stratford proper, the first serious luxury hotel and restaurant — the Bruce — recently opened to offer an option for upscale culture-vultures. Traditionally, the half-million annual visitors who pack into the Stratford theaters have eschewed pampering in favor of no-frills lodgings; the area is known for its low-key, unpretentious culture.
But the strong U.S. dollar has made Canada a serious bargain for Yankees, and the Stratford-Cambridge area already has the elements many New Yorkers look for in a rural getaway: a tradition of gracious living in the British vein, a picturesque setting and a vibrant farm-to-table culinary scene. Both the Bruce — which offers a modern, in-town take on the Langdon luxe tradition — and the Wilks estate itself can be booked for less than $300 a night, far less than their American counterparts.
And as I tucked into a fluffy robe, gazed out over a field of wildflowers and nibbled on a tray of freshly picked cherries, I was sure that even a Crawley lady couldn’t have it any better.
editor@jewishweek.orgJew By Voice
What Are You Waiting For?
Erica Brown
Special To The Jewish Week
Erica Brown
What are you waiting for right now? About this time of the year, a whole lot of parents are waiting for school to start. A whole lot of kids aren’t. We might be waiting for the exact right time to start a project, start a diet, get really serious about dating, moving, finding a job — the list goes on. Voltaire once said, “We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.”
There seem to be two kinds of waiting: waiting as a condition of in-between-ness and waiting as an active state of anticipation. The first category is the pause between events or activities. We wait in airports. We wait for buses. We wait for good news. We wait in lines. If you grew up in Russia, waiting was a cultural phenomenon. Even the most impatient of us expects to spend a lot of time in this life waiting.
The Norwegian philosopher, Lars Svendsen, describes this kind of waiting as a state of modern boredom in his book “A Philosophy of Boredom.” Today many wait stations — airports, bus stops and even gas stations — try to minimize the boredom associated with waiting with TV screens and stores. Although these may prove distracting, no one is going to an airport to watch TV or go shopping.
Then there’s the kind of waiting that involves non-activity but is soaked in positive or negative anticipation because at the end of this wait lies transformation or redemption of some kind. We wait for an acceptance letter, for a job offer, for a doctor to share the results of a biopsy, for someone to say yes. This kind of waiting is usually harder because it involves tension and may not result in the desired outcome. We’re waiting for something to happen. It might not happen. But it just might.
Sometimes we can’t wait fast enough.
In this modern age, we have lost the art of waiting, waiting in both senses of the word. Collectors used to wait years, sometimes decades, in anticipation of locating a special book, piece of art or object. Now it’s a search engine click away. Waiting was part of the hunt. It was its own pleasure, and it made the outcome that much more tantalizing and fulfilling.
Today, we get impatient when computers take a few extra seconds to follow a cue. We get worried or angry when someone doesn’t respond to an e-mail fast enough. Everything from ERs to mail delivery is about reducing wait times, which has made our wait muscles flabbier than ever.
Here’s a great illustration. I asked my sister-in-law in Israel what to buy for my nephew’s wedding. After investigating, she e-mailed me with what they still needed. I got the e-mail, went online and found the gift — with two-day shipping. Perfect. I wrote back to her in under five minutes. It was a one-word e-mail and one I send frequently when completing tasks because it makes me happy. Done.
This was speed-dating for wedding registries, and it was highly satisfying. She wrote right back. “Done?” It seemed impossible. “Can you get moshiah [the messiah] to come this quickly?”
My response: “If moshiah were available on Amazon Prime, believe me, I would put in an order right away.”
Speaking of moshiah, many of us are acquainted with a song about waiting built on one of Maimonides’ 13 principles: “I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he may tarry, I will wait every day for his arrival.” The waiting itself is holy.
My grandfather taught me a maudlin tune to this song that he heard repeatedly in Auschwitz as people were marched to their deaths. There are groups today that are told to stop singing this song on visits to concentration camps. One tour leader was fined 100 zlotys (about $350) because he didn’t restrain his group from singing this song about our ultimate waiting.
We don’t know who composed the sad tune. Legend has it that Rabbi Azriel David Fastag was inspired with the tune on a train to Treblinka. A person who escaped that train taught it to his rebbe, and the tune stuck.
Perhaps we have to re-learn how to wait. We have to acquire the difficult wisdom to know when to wait with active anticipation and make the future happen and when to have the patience to sit back and allow life to unfold. Patience does not mean that we are doing nothing. Waiting is power when it helps us understand when to act on our beliefs and when to hold back. Too early, and we may lose it all. Too late, and we may have lost it already. One day we may just figure it out. I can’t wait.
Erica Brown’s column appears the first week of the month.
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/jew-voice/what-are-you-waiting#bYK9by0QEougXbyZ.99
Enjoy the read,
Gary Rosenblatt
P.S. Our website is always available to you. Check it out for breaking news and exclusive videos, blogs, opinion essays, advice columns, and more.
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BETWEEN THE LINES Gary Rosenblatt
Sacred Mission Or Ego Trip — Or Both?
Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein raises huge funds from U.S. Christians for Israel and Jewish causes. As he brings more Jews on aliyah, now targeting France, questions linger over his tactics.
Gary Rosenblatt
Editor and Publisher
Gary Rosenblatt
Since last Dec. 23, about 150 Ukrainian Jews each month have boarded a flight in Kiev and been brought to Israel to begin new lives in the Jewish state. They are fleeing the fighting in eastern Ukraine between government forces and pro-Russian separatists that has turned the area into a dangerous no-man’s land.
The travel arrangements have not been made by the Jewish Agency for Israel, the traditional organization for aliyah from the diaspora, but rather through an American-based philanthropic organization funded by evangelical Christians.
This month, the group, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, reached the 1,000 mark for Ukrainian Jews making aliyah, a landmark achievement according to its founder and president, Yechiel Eckstein, sometimes referred to as the rabbi with the largest gentile following since Jesus.
His fellowship, founded in 1983, seeks to express Christian love for Israel by supporting projects that ensure the safety and security of the Jewish state and the Jewish people. Bringing Jews from countries in distress to Zion is just the latest of many such projects. Besides the transports from war-torn Ukraine, where Jews are caught in the civil conflict, the fellowship is, according to Eckstein, quietly bringing Jews to Israel from a country in the Arab world. And it plans to introduce flights by the end of the year for Jews emigrating from France, the country with the highest aliyah rate last year due to increased anti-Semitic violence.
To date these ventures are in direct competition with the work of the Jewish Agency, a quasi-government agency in Israel. Officials there, and a number of leaders in the American Jewish establishment, privately assert that Eckstein undermines the agency’s mission and that he is “on an ego trip that knows no bounds,” according to someone with intimate knowledge of the agency. The rabbi, who made aliyah 15 years ago, counters that his group is doing mitzvah work and filling a vacuum. He says that as a longtime lay leader of the Jewish Agency he saw first-hand that its aliyah work in Ukraine was lacking, so he decided to do a better job himself.
“After years of working with the Israeli government and putting all of our funds in establishment organizations — including $177 million over 15 years in the Jewish Agency — I learned the government wasn’t doing its job sufficiently,” Eckstein told me in one of a recent series of interviews. “Every time I turned over a stone I found a snake, a void. So I decided to fill the voids and not wait for the government.”
Not surprisingly, Eckstein, who had been directing about $12 million a year of fellowship funds to the agency, was forced off the executive board earlier this year.
Agency officials can hardly contain their exasperation in describing Eckstein and his demands. “His appetite for publicity is obsessive, and whatever recognition we gave him was never enough,” said one person who, like others at the charity, insisted on anonymity, perhaps because the fellowship still donated $500,000 this year to the agency.
“The loss of the fellowship’s major donation left a big hole in the budget, but there was a huge sigh of relief” throughout the agency, the insider said.
The rift is described on the last page of a just-released biography of the Canadian-born Orthodox rabbi, 64, titled “The Bridge Builder: The Life and Continuing Legacy of Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein” (Penguin Random House). Author Zev Chafets writes that although the Jewish Agency is “a pillar of the Israeli establishment,” Eckstein, who has worked closely with Israeli prime ministers and Jewish Agency chair Natan Sharansky, “no longer looked up to the leaders of Israel or put absolute trust in their judgment and competence. Time and exposure had made him a realist. He had built the fellowship by taking on conventional wisdom and overcoming entrenched establishments. Here was another hurdle. He had no doubt he could clear it.”
The rabbi also had no doubt that his actions would lead to condemnation, which he attributes in large part to jealousy of his success. But as Chafets and others have noted, Eckstein, a tireless worker, seems to thrive on countering outspoken critics who question his motives and disparage his work.
“That’s his emotional fuel,” says someone who has worked with him but preferred to remain nameless so as not to offend him. “His energy and his accomplishments are amazing.”
Candid Biography
Chafets offers a fascinating and remarkably candid (particularly for an authorized biography) look at Eckstein as a complex figure who has worked tirelessly for more than 30 years to strengthen Christian bonds to Jews. His book pulls no punches in describing a rabbi whose compulsive interfaith work has led to his alienation from his family and community, and whose maverick ideas and have been praised, envied and reviled.
All agree, though, that Eckstein has a genius for fundraising, has been uniquely successful in convincing millions of evangelical Christians to support his efforts, and that he has achieved enormous influence by raising billions of dollars for Israel. The fellowship expects to raise $150 million this year from 1.5 million donors who in large part allow him to decide how and where to distribute the funds.
Eckstein is not shy about defining his role, describing himself as “like a potter, shaping” the emerging bonds between Evangelicals and Jews.
“Historically, it’s not too grandiose to note that for 2,000 years we have not seen the phenomenon of millions of Christians” professing their love and support “for Israel and Jews, and giving so generously” on their behalf, he said.
“I gave Christians a framework to help Israel and the Jewish people. Until then the only framework was Christian missionizing to the Jews. That was the only way they could relate to the Jewish people. I was there to meet them half-way and give them an alternative, and they grabbed it.”
The Chafets biography describes how Eckstein, at 25, took a job in Christian-Jewish relations for the Anti-Defamation League in Chicago, and found the most interest among Evangelicals, tens of millions of whom take the words of Genesis 12:3 literally: “I will bless those who bless you,” God says to Abraham, “and those who curse you I will curse.”
The young rabbi, who was ordained at Yeshiva University, wanted to work most closely with evangelical leaders. But ADL officials balked, given the perception that these Christians sought to missionize to Jews and held parochial political views and cultural values at odds with the majority of American Jews. (A decade later the ADL published a report called “The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism in America.”)
In 1983 Eckstein left the ADL and launched the fellowship, originally a one-man operation called the Holyland Fellowship of Christians and Jews. He established strong relationships with prominent ministers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. But he was ostracized in his Orthodox community, distrusted by a number of mainstream Christians and Jews, and maligned by charedim as a secret missionary and by Jews For Jesus as a fraud.
Chafets details the setbacks and successes over the years as Eckstein grew his operation, inspiring working-class American Evangelicals who tithe their modest salaries for charity to bless and support Israel and Jewish causes. Through the rabbi’s many appearances on major evangelical television programs as well as TV ads featuring his on-camera appeals for support for Russian Jews seeking to move to Israel, the fellowship’s coffers began to overflow with cash.
The television spots, which now feature Eckstein encountering impoverished Jews in the former Soviet Union or Israel, offend critics who describe the commercials as demeaning to the government of Israel and to Jewish organizations tasked with caring for the poor. “He [Eckstein] makes us out to be uncaring or incompetent or both,” said one national Jewish organization CEO referring to the tragic circumstances depicted in the videos.
A spokesman for the fellowship acknowledged that “the videos make these poor Israelis look like nebichs [pitiable], but there are people in Israel who are poor and needy. And keep in mind that we are appealing to our average donors, like a checkout cashier at the A&P, so these TV spots are not nuanced. But they get the message across.”
Proof of their effectiveness is that the Fellowship’s American office, based in Chicago, receives as many as 7,000 checks a day, almost all from American Evangelicals whose donations average about $70, according to Eckstein.
“About one-third of the checks are made out to ‘Rabbi Eckstein,’” the rabbi said. “I’m the brand.”
Another 40 percent of the donations are designated to “where needed most.”
“Those funds give me latitude,” he noted. He has a seemingly endless list of ideas and projects, often based on reading newspapers and seeing where his work is needed. For instance, after learning that Israeli hospitals in the north lack MRI equipment, he provided them each with an MRI.
In return, Eckstein insists on recipient groups publicly acknowledging the generosity of the Fellowship, through plaques, press releases and other means of publicity. “It’s not about me,” he said. “It’s about letting the public know who is making it all possible.”
But there is still a hesitancy to specify who those donors are. Much of the fellowship’s publicity speaks of donations from “non-Jews” rather than using the word “Christians.”
“Frankly I was afraid of playing it up,” Eckstein admits. But he says he is getting more comfortable with citing “Christians” as the major source of funding. “Only about half of the Israeli population knows that our funds come from Christians. We need to do a better job” of getting the word out, he said.
Among the many fellowship programs, Eckstein cited donating funds to more than 100 charitable organizations; sponsoring summer camps for poor children; building fallout shelters in the south; providing educational scholarships for Druze men and women who serve in the IDF; holding conferences for professionals in the social service field; creating homeless shelters in Jerusalem; offering pre-army preparatory programs for young people from various ethnic minorities; and, by year’s end, launching a national emergency hotline that will make referrals to scores of organizations.
(The fellowship is “neutral” on the issue of Israel’s West Bank policies, a spokesperson said. Jews in the settlements are eligible for fellowship services by coming into Israel proper to receive them; the fellowship has no presence across the Green Line.)
Shouldn’t the government be initiating and funding all of these projects?
“I have a choice,” Eckstein explained. “I can let people go without food or bomb shelters and blame the government for it, or I can choose to feed” and protect people. “I have this amazing gift no one else has — the ability to not just complain about what’s lacking but do something about it.”
He likes to quote the passage from the “Ethics of the Fathers”: “Where there is no man, be that man.”
He said that five years ago he sought to create a national food program together with the Israeli government to provide a safety net for the poor. The fellowship and the government would each put up $30 million. But after the government lagged, he said, “we changed our strategy from being a foundation that gives money to others to do the work. Two years ago we decided to do it on our own.” The fellowship now spends $29 million a year for basic food needs for the elderly.
‘God Will Provide’
Eckstein is proud that the fellowship has no endowment. It spends all the money it takes in each year and starts fundraising from scratch the next year. And each year for more than three decades it has raised more than the year before, Eckstein said. (In 2014, it raised $136 million.)
The fellowship’s board, comprised of both Jews and Christians, believes that “God will provide,” he explained. “We’re blessed,” said Eckstein, adding that the Fellowship is better at raising money than distributing it.
In bringing Jews from the Ukraine on aliyah, the fellowship provides each adult $1,000, plus $500 per child, which the Jewish Agency does not do. The fellowship also seeks to house the new immigrants near each other in Israel and has a staffer or volunteer assigned to each family for six months, starting from Day One, to ease the transition.
Jewish Agency officials say the fellowship’s venture into aliyah, particularly from the former Soviet Union (FSU), is unnecessary competition and confusing to the local communities. The agency closed its formal aliyah department when it restructured the organization and made its primary focus Jewish identity several years ago. But it still handles aliyah and says the number of emigrants from the Ukraine has tripled in the last few years, and the number of French Jews coming to Israel, via the Jewish Agency, increased from 500 five years ago to an expected 7,500 this year — “with no help from Yechiel,” the Agency insider emphasized. The increase in France is tied to rising levels of Muslim anti-Semitism, which culminated in the murder of four Jews in January in the attack on a kosher market in Paris. Eckstein’s next target is France, though Nathalie Garson, a consultant on French aliyah who is managing the project, known as “Together Israel,” describes the effort as complementing the work of the Jewish Agency rather than competing with it.
She said that while the Jewish Agency seeks to promote aliyah and motivate people to emigrate, the fellowship plans to work with French families already committed to aliyah but lacking the financial comfort level to make the big move.
“We have different goals and a different target audience,” said Garson, who is a native of France living in Israel. “We are looking to the 1,500 to 2,000 French Jews we believe would make aliyah now if they had the kind of additional support we can provide.”
That includes financial help for the first six months of rent (to supplement the 1,500 shekels [about $400] a month all new olim receive from the Ministry of Absorption), personalized help in finding a job, and afternoon day care for children.
Garson has met with French Jewish communal leaders and explained the project. Eckstein plans to attend the “Together Israel” launch this fall, with a major event including French Jewish leadership and press coverage. The first group of families on the program will come to Israel in December and settle in Haifa, the lead municipality among several working with the Fellowship.
Garson said the goal is to have about 80 families settle in Israel in the first six months of 2016, and progress from there.
“We are not measuring success by numbers,” she said, but in the quality of the absorption process.
‘The Real Deal’
Several national Jewish leaders, including federation executives, echoed the complaints that Eckstein is driven by ego and self-glorification. But he has his prominent defenders who speak of the generosity of the fellowship and Eckstein’s sincere commitment to do good deeds.
Alan Gill, CEO of the Joint Distribution Committee, says Eckstein is “the real deal — he has been a life raft for many of the 200,000 elderly Jews living in deplorable conditions [in the FSU], and that to me is the issue. Measure the deeds.”
Gill said the fellowship support is “absolutely essential to the work we do,” contributing “well over $100 million as a partner in our programs to give people something to eat, and medicine, and home care. This is avodat kodesh [holy work] at its finest.”
He said he is pleased to have Eckstein on the JDC executive committee, and has no problem “recognizing our donors. That’s part of what we do.”
Shlomi Peles of the Leviev Foundation, which was created by and is led by Russian billionaire Lev Leviev, and which provides a range of social services to Jews in the FSU through the Federation of Jewish Communities there, has known Eckstein for about 10 years. He said that what makes the rabbi unique among major funders is that he “shows up himself to meet not only with the Jewish leaders in Ukraine but with Jews on the street, in their homes.”
Also, when war in the Ukraine broke out, Peles said that Eckstein called him “to ask how he could help, and he came the next week.” A number of Jewish organizations “like to send press releases” about their activities, Peles said, “but Yechiel does the work.” He noted that he has donors “who give less money and want more kavod [honor]. I pray to God for more donors like Yechiel.”
Officials of World ORT have similar praise for Eckstein and the Fellowship as their major source of funding for educational programs around the globe. And Haim Saban, the Israeli-American philanthropist and Hollywood producer, has become a friend of Eckstein in recent years. “I was blown away by Yechiel’s commitment and his level of dedication to the Jewish people.” Eckstein is a major supporter of Saban’s primary cause, the Friends of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces).
As for the criticism that Eckstein is a publicity-hound for his fellowship, Saban said he was unaware of the controversy. But “from what you describe,” he said in an interview, “if there are those who have a complaint, let them go on the record and share that complaint. As far as I am concerned, he is doing holy work, and if he seeks recognition for his Christian donors, that’s a good thing. They love the Jewish people. Let them be recognized. They deserve it.”
Is it that simple? It seems so, though some of the most respected Jewish professionals in the field who have worked with him become enraged at the mention of Eckstein’s name.
Over the course of extended conversations with him I have observed Eckstein as an open, compassionate and sincere shaliach (or, messenger) of Christian generosity on a sacred mission. “Our goal is not to give away money,” he told me at one point, “but to strengthen Jewish bonds to Jews and Israel and give them tangible ways to express that love. And hopefully the Jewish community will begin to trust Christians more.”
I’ve also seen indications of his craving for attention, demanding style and sense of supremacy in the world of charity, all of which are covered in Zev Chafets’ biography.
Chafets, who is now working on a screenplay about Theodor Herzl, sees a number of striking parallels between the State of Israel’s founder and Eckstein.
Brilliant men, visionaries and dreamers, mocked by their contemporaries, paranoid about criticism but thriving on it, tireless travelers despite health problems, difficult to work with, irrepressibly optimistic in pursuing their goals and succeeding in the end.
“It’s that strange combination of purity and chutzpah,” Chafets says, noting that “not that many people really know Yechiel. People seem to love him or hate him.”
Gary@jewishweek.org
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MUSINGS
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rock Steady
In my years in the rabbinate I have seen repeatedly that there is nothing that can replace the certainty in a child’s life that her parents love her and are there for her. Those children deprived of parental love and support feel the lack forever, even though they often compensate in powerful and beautiful ways. Those who are lucky enough to have such parents, as I was, carry a golden legacy all their days.
Raising a child is like learning to play an instrument, except that practice and performance are the same and everything counts. We will all make a thousand mistakes. But deep love and genuine support can move the rock and lift the child.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book, “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press), has recently been published.
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/musings/rock-steady#apZtlBxYDmczflUs.99Read More
Rabbi David Wolpe
Rock Steady
Rabbi David Wolpe
Special to the Jewish Week
When I was young my father told me a story about a boy and his father who were walking along a road. The boy spotted a large rock. “Do you think I can move that rock?” the boy asked his father. His father answered, “I’m sure you can, if you use all your strength.” The boy walked over to the rock and pushed and pushed, but the rock didn’t budge. “You were wrong,” he said. “I tried as hard as I could, and I failed.”
“No,” said his father. “You didn’t use all your strength. You didn’t ask me to help.”In my years in the rabbinate I have seen repeatedly that there is nothing that can replace the certainty in a child’s life that her parents love her and are there for her. Those children deprived of parental love and support feel the lack forever, even though they often compensate in powerful and beautiful ways. Those who are lucky enough to have such parents, as I was, carry a golden legacy all their days.
Raising a child is like learning to play an instrument, except that practice and performance are the same and everything counts. We will all make a thousand mistakes. But deep love and genuine support can move the rock and lift the child.
Rabbi David Wolpe is spiritual leader of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @RabbiWolpe. His latest book, “David: The Divided Heart” (Yale University Press), has recently been published.
Read more at http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial-opinion/musings/rock-steady#apZtlBxYDmczflUs.99Read More
TRAVEL
The grounds around the Federal Revival-style Langdon Hall. Courtesy of Langdon Hall.
TRAVEL
A Real-Life Downton
Hilary Danailova
Travel WriterIt was while waiting for the dumbwaiter elevator that I noticed the small, merry line of bells above the foyer doorway. With a spark of recognition, I realized where I’d seen them before: Downton Abbey!
As fans of the British period soap all know, the opening credits of “Downton Abbey” roll over a wall of vintage bells identical to the ones I was now studying. If I hadn’t been waiting for a creaky centenarian contraption, I would never have paused long enough to look up, and I would never have seen those bells. Or realized that the house I was staying in — the Langdon Hall Country House Hotel and Spa — was, essentially, a real-life Downton.
I was in the Canadian woods of Cambridge, Ontario, an hour west of Toronto. The wide-open fields and thick green forests are pleasant enough, but nothing on the ride from the airport prepared me for the transporting graciousness of Langdon Hall. Surrounded by 200 acres of Carolinian forest on the Grand River, Langdon Hall’s centerpiece is a sprawling, 32-room brick-and-column manse in the Federal Revival style — aristocratic in a very New World idiom, yet brimming with the pride of place that animates old English estates.
Built in 1902 as the Canadian retreat of Eugene Langdon Wilks — a great-grandson of the New York financier John Jacob Astor — Langdon Hall remained in the peripatetic Wilks family for eight decades. It served as a refuge for European family members during World War II, and housed several generations before its sale in the 1980s and rebirth as part of the Relais & Châteaux luxury hotel empire.
As I studied a wall of sepia-toned family portraits in the Langdon bar room — which, like everything at Langdon Hall, feels at once exquisitely formal and instantly comfortable — I realized there was yet another Downton parallel: Just as Downton’s fictional Crawley clan has rarely mentioned Jewish ties, the Astor family has also been linked to German-Jewish lineage several centuries back.
Regardless of bloodline, Langdon’s wood-burning fireplaces, fluffy duvets and private dressing rooms could make anybody feel like lord of the manor, I reflected as I sank into a cloud of feather-down pillows.
I was in Cambridge to check out luxury, Ontario style, en route to the nearby Stratford Festival — the Canadian summer mecca for Shakespeare and other serious theater. But Langdon Hall is less a resort than an enchanted world unto itself. I could easily have lost hours happily wandering the myriad rooms of Wilks’ mansion, taking in the meticulously conserved period details, or exploring the miles of trails through the surrounding forests.
In the morning, I strolled past sunlit lily ponds to a patio under the shady green canopy of a century-old tree, savoring brunch in a setting reminiscent of Monet’s garden. A chef in starched whites scurried to and from the lavish buffet table, explaining how the ingredients for his preserves, quiches and tarts are sourced right from the Langdon gardens.
After brunch, I strolled past the croquet lawns and toured those gardens with head gardener Mario, who oversees the heirloom beets, pea shoots, lavender and wild gooseberries that — along with dozens of other crops — inform the ever-changing menu at Langdon’s award-winning restaurant.
Amid all the exquisitely conserved period details, that ethos of local, seasonal and sustainable is decidedly contemporary. It extends, Mario explained, beyond the spring-pea salad and pasta I ate for lunch to the spa itself, where the scrumptious-smelling massage oils are crafted from garden herbs.
Langdon Hall may have typified the estates favored by well-to-do New Yorkers a hundred years ago — but today, it sets the standard for the kind of luxury accommodations increasingly favored by weekend tourists, for whom featherbeds, dual-head showers and sommeliers in the hotel dining room are de rigueur. And more and more, these luxury spots are popping up in the easy-to-reach, cheap-for-Americans countryside west of Toronto.
About an hour west of Langdon in Stratford proper, the first serious luxury hotel and restaurant — the Bruce — recently opened to offer an option for upscale culture-vultures. Traditionally, the half-million annual visitors who pack into the Stratford theaters have eschewed pampering in favor of no-frills lodgings; the area is known for its low-key, unpretentious culture.
But the strong U.S. dollar has made Canada a serious bargain for Yankees, and the Stratford-Cambridge area already has the elements many New Yorkers look for in a rural getaway: a tradition of gracious living in the British vein, a picturesque setting and a vibrant farm-to-table culinary scene. Both the Bruce — which offers a modern, in-town take on the Langdon luxe tradition — and the Wilks estate itself can be booked for less than $300 a night, far less than their American counterparts.
And as I tucked into a fluffy robe, gazed out over a field of wildflowers and nibbled on a tray of freshly picked cherries, I was sure that even a Crawley lady couldn’t have it any better.
editor@jewishweek.org
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Kanye West performing at Lollapalooza in 2011. C/o Wikimedia Commons
Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
Kanye West Is Going To The Middle East
Maya Klausner
Editor
The Konman will be performing in the Holy Land in the fall according to JTA.
The Kardashains and friends can't seem to stop milking the land of milk and honey. In January the famed triumvirate of Kim, Khloe and Kourtney announced they would be purchasing two luxury apartments in an exclusive beachfront building in Tel Aviv.Yeezy and the Kardashians have a serious taste for hummus
Maya Klausner | Editor | Music
The Konman will be performing in the Holy Land in the fall according to JTA.
The Kardashains and friends can’t seem to stop milking the land of milk and honey. In January the famed triumvirate of Kim, Khloe and Kourtney announced they would be purchasing two luxury apartments in an exclusive beachfront building in Tel Aviv.
Then, four months ago, West visited Israel with an unknown woman. Well, not really. The mystery lady in question is the most famous human being on the planet; his wife Kim Kardashian. However, a charedi publication decided that she should be neither heard nor seen, cropping her out of a photo in a non-kosher restaurant where she was dining with the mayor of Jerusalem and her man.
But the Louis Vuitton Don seems to have a forgiving side and plans to return to perform in Tel Aviv on September 30 to give the chosen people a much-anticipated show. During his last visit, there was buzz West would perform an impromptu concert in Jerusalem, but like his wife’s face, it remains to be seen.
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TOP STORIES
Twin Cases Of Extremism Spark Calls For Crackdown
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Last week's firebombing by suspected Jewish settlers of a Palestinian home in the West Bank killing a toddler, and the stabbing of six people - one of them fatally - at the Jerusalem gay pride parade by a charedi extremist may be a game changer for Israel.Israel News
Twin Cases Of Extremism Spark Calls For Crackdown
Jewish leaders here want end to ‘hate crimes’ in wake of West Bank firebombing, stabbing at gay pride parade.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
An anti-settler rally in Tel Aviv after attack in Duma reportedly carried out by Jewish extremists. Getty Images
Last week’s firebombing by suspected Jewish settlers of a Palestinian home in the West Bank killing a toddler, and the stabbing of six people — one of them fatally — at the Jerusalem gay pride parade by a charedi extremist may be a game changer for Israel.
For Rabbi Aaron Panken, president of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, it is further evidence that “the situation in Israel has taken a deeply troubling turn.”
The country, he said in a JTA op-ed, now faces the choice of becoming a “haven for fundamentalists intent on attacking those who differ, or it can step into a profound role of Jewish leadership as a country that embraces ideological difference as an essential strength.”
Former Israeli President Shimon Peres reportedly warned last Saturday night that “dark, extremist forces” are threatening to destroy Israel and called on all Israelis to rebuff them.
“Those who incite against Arab citizens of Israel should not be surprised when mosques and churches are set alight or even when a baby is burned alive in the night,” he said, according to The Times of Israel.
Israeli leaders from across the political spectrum vigorously denounced both attacks and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the Israeli hospital where the toddler’s mother was fighting for her life with burns over 90 percent of her body. Her other son, 4, is being treated there for severe burns of his own, and her husband is recovering from burns in another hospital.
But more needs to be done, according to the New Israel Fund, which said the “elegant words” of Israeli leaders “are not enough.”
“Many Israelis want to see a different type of leadership — leadership that will set an example of courage and tolerance, that doesn’t speak in racist terms, that acts swiftly to end hate crimes,” said the group, which promotes social justice and equality for all Jews.
“One cannot say, year after year, that Israel exists only for its Jewish citizens, or only for the Jewish citizens who comply with a narrow, right-wing interpretation of Zionism, and then be shocked when extremists feel free to express hatred and do violence and innocent children are murdered.”
Asked if Israel’s decision last Sunday to permit administrative detention for suspected Jewish terrorists — allowing their detention without charge as it is reportedly doing to 370 suspected Palestinian terrorists — NIF spokesperson Naomi Paiss said: “Abrogating civil liberties for the sake of security is always problematic and needs to be carefully considered.”
But Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, doesn’t believe that anti-Arab rhetoric caused last week’s attacks. He said the two events, which came within 24 hours of each other, were rightly condemned by Israeli leaders and that is “inappropriate and in many ways offensive” to see the arson attack “in broader terms.”
“It is very important in a democracy to allow the system to do its job,” Rabbi Cooper said. “Whoever perpetrated that horrible crime must be brought to justice. If he is part of a movement, there is talk of additional administrative moves that will be taken to co-opt further activity in that direction. … The full weight of the state must make sure it never happens again.”
And he challenged the NIF’s attack on the “right wing,” noting that the “majority of Israelis are center and center-right.” To suggest, Rabbi Cooper said, that they “are affiliated with terrorism and hate is damaging to the fabric” of the country.
On the other hand, Americans for Peace Now President and CEO Debra DeLee said in a statement that more is needed than just the arrest of the perpetrators. She said steps must be taken — “particularly among the nationalist right — to stop inciting actions and hate-speech.” And she called on the Israeli government to fight the environment of lawlessness that Jewish settlers have spawned in the West Bank.”
Ori Nir, the group’s spokesman, stressed that this was a “price tag” attack because the arsonists scrawled in Hebrew on a wall near the torched home the words “revenge” and “long live the king Messiah” next to a Star of David.
“Price tag is a campaign in which the victims almost always are Palestinians and the target of the campaign is the Israeli government,” he explained. “People think it is just Jewish versus Arab violence, but there is a political objective as stated explicitly by leaders of the settler movement — to try to deter the Israeli government from applying the law and removing illegal outposts … .”
Two days before the pre-dawn Friday attack, two apartment buildings in the Israeli settlement of Beit El, just north of Ramallah, were torn down in compliance with a High Court ruling, which found that they were built on private Palestinian land. The demolition came after several days of clashes between protestors and police. Later, Netanyahu announced the approval of 300 new housing units in Beit El, fulfilling a 3-year-old government promise to provide alternative housing for those moved from the apartment buildings.
Referring to the decision to build 300 new housing units in Beit El, DeLee complained that the government’s policies simply “reward settler lawlessness.”
Observers noted that Netanyahu heads a narrow right-wing government and must tread carefully when dealing with settlers.
Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party and Israel’s minister of the economy, wrote last week that he would “not under any circumstances accept the attempt to vilify the 430,000 wonderful Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria, those who are known as ‘settlers.’ There is such a foolish attempt at the moment. It will not succeed. Whoever engages in such action is guilty of the same sin of prejudice and incitement.”
Ethan Felson, senior vice president and acting CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said the arsonists “must be punished the same as any other terrorists,” and that the sentence must be strong enough to serve as a “deterrent to others.”
“Right now, we’re broken hearted for the families that are in mourning,” he added. “But when our tears dry, the soul searching will continue.”
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, welcomed the government’s decision to “apply anti-terrorism laws” to Jewish terrorists, saying: “Those who commit these crimes should be held to account.”
He said questions are being raised about why Yishai Schlissel, the man suspected in the fatal stabbing of high school student Shira Banki, was permitted anywhere near the gay pride parade. He had just been released after serving a 10-year sentence for knifing three people at the same parade in 2005 and openly threatened to repeat his crime.
“Acts like these can in a moment do more damage than BDS [the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign] does in months,” Hoenlein said.
The arson attack “hurts the settlers in general,” he continued. “It creates the image that many have tried to paint of lawlessness and extremism, which is not really characteristic of most settlers. In fact, many of them have spoken out in condemnation of the attack.”
On Monday, the Palestinian Authority renewed its call for the International Criminal Court to investigate the Israeli “occupation,” and presented it a file containing details of the arson attack and what it described as other “settler terrorism.”
Although no arrest was made in the arson attack in the days following the incident, Hoenlein said authorities “are throwing immense resources into this, but they [the perpetrators] are not known criminals and not necessarily part of an organized effort. It could have been a spontaneous act of revenge by young people. … One person throwing a Molotov cocktail does terrific damage.”
In May, the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din issued a report that examined the success of law enforcement against Israelis who harm Palestinians in the West Bank. It said only 7.4 percent of investigations resulted in indictments of suspects, and that 85.3 percent of investigations were ended because of an inability to locate suspects or gather sufficient evidence for an indictment.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin acknowledged the problem last Friday. I24News quoted him as saying, “To my great sorrow, until now it seems we have been lax in our treatment of the phenomena of Jewish terrorism.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, who is in Israel for his first visit as the new national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said it was “important” that Israeli leaders “came out unambiguously and called this a heinous attack and have taken steps to apprehend the perpetrators.”
He added that the incidents “highlight a real tension in society” and the “need to focus on civil rights issues in Israel” and that he finds it “encouraging that leaders are prepared to deal with it.”
Hoenlein said the government would also be going after those who “incite and facilitate such acts.”
That promised crackdown appeared to begin this week with the arrest of Meir Ettinger, 23, the suspected head of an extremist settler group that was allegedly planning a series of attacks against Palestinians. He is the grandson of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the American-born rabbi who founded an Israeli party that was labeled racist and banned for advocating the forced expulsion of all Arabs from Israel. Kahane was assassinated by an Arab gunman in New York in 1990.
On Monday evening, in an all-too-familiar pattern of attack and counter-attack, a suspected Palestinian terrorist hurled a Molotov cocktail at a car in east Jerusalem, setting it ablaze and seriously burning a 27-year-old woman and slightly injuring two others in the car. The vehicle, which was engulfed in flames, then rolled into the path of another car, slightly injuring the driver.
Former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was quoted as saying that the attack is a reminder that “the exception is Jews who attack Arabs, and the routine is Arab terrorism against Jews.”
stewart@jewishweek.orgRead More New York
American, Israeli Vets Face Trauma Through Film
First-of-its-kind seminar helps soldiers from two countries cope with the shared experience of PTSD.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Ben Patton, left, executive director of the “I Was There” film workshops. Courtesy of Belev Echad
Dan Meir was on his way to buy ice cream with his family in Haifa when a terrorist threw a grenade. He was 9.
“The memory is a blur — just a loud noise and then black. Both of my legs were covered with metal, and I still have a scar on my forehead,” Meir said during a phone interview from his home in Tel Aviv. He lost his left leg. His 1-year-old brother, 6-year-old sister and grandparents were also injured.
For Meir, 36, a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and graduate student in psychodrama at Kibbutzim College in Tel Aviv, film has been one way to deal with the trauma of his past. Two weeks ago he participated in an interactive film workshop that brought together 15 American and Israeli veterans to write, shoot and edit original movies about their experiences. Belev Echad, a Manhattan-based nonprofit that runs programs to honor and aid wounded Israeli veterans, partnered with the Patton Veterans Project, which runs “I Was There” film workshops for veterans struggling with post traumatic stress disorder.
“Unpacking and repacking memories is similar to the process of making a film. It gives sense and order to the images and memories that plague many veterans,” said Ben Patton, who founded the Patton Veterans Project in 2011. The organization has worked with more than 600 U.S. veterans to date.
The four-day workshop, believed to be the first intercultural seminar of its kind, led to a fruitful dialogue about differences, along with an underlying recognition of similarity, said Patton, who is the grandson of World War II hero Gen. George S. Patton.
Participant Matthew Pennington, an American veteran from Maine, was surprised to discover the parallels between himself and his Israeli counterparts.
“Regardless of where you come from, the human experience of trauma is very similar,” said Pennington, who lost his left leg and severely injured his right in a 2006 roadside bombing in Iraq during his third deployment to the Mideast. The two groups of soldiers “keyed in” on sharing common goals — and a common enemy, he said. “We’re all fighting against regimes who instill fear and oppression.”
Pennington found film therapy to be particularly effective because of its “non-confrontational” nature. “When you deal with vets, you’re dealing with very masculine personality types. Accepting that you need formal therapy is very hard,” he said. “When you approach film as a job, you lose sight of the fact that it’s therapy.”
Still, with or without with the support of therapy, the return to civilian life can be grueling. In his short film, “PTSD Sounds,” Israeli veteran Yoav Gelband partnered with one Israeli and two American veterans to tell the story of re-integrating into the bustle of city life. Shot in Times Square, the five-minute film communicates how even the most commonplace sounds — a drill at a construction site or and ambulance siren — can bring back a host of unwanted memories.
“The film’s about the journey to find peace in our daily lives, and in our own minds,” said Gelband, 23, who was injured last summer in a shootout in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge. “We all fought in different places, under different circumstances, but we’re haunted by the same sounds.”
Dr. Rachel Yehuda, director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a leading expert in PTSD, said that aside from dealing with the normal difficulties that occur post-trauma, soldiers have the added weight of dealing with judgment from others.
“There are things you do in combat that people have a lot of judgment about,” said Yehuda, adding that comments from those who have not been in combat but think they would have acted differently are exceedingly unhelpful. “Decisions are made under intense pressure and at great personal risk. Soldiers aren’t as free to make decisions. It is very difficult to describe that mindset to someone who has never been in battle.”
Guilt also plagues some veterans, particularly with regard to not being able to protect a fellow combatant, said Yehuda. “It’s the painful doubt of ‘could I have prevented it?’”
Dani Tenenbaum, one of the film instructors who facilitated the workshop, said he’s noticed that American and Israeli soldiers have very different coping mechanisms: Israeli soldiers often use humor, while the Americans focus on honor.
“Israelis are more cynical about their injuries — they share a dark sense of humor, while the Americans speak about it less,” said Tenenbaum, who has led six workshops for American veterans. He said the casual attitude among Israelis veterans stems from many of the volatile realities of living in the Middle East. “People get used to terror attacks and war — you can’t just not talk about it,” he said. “You have to find ways to deal with it.”
The element of choice that accompanies an American soldier’s decision to join the army also magnifies the difference in reception, he said. “It’s seen as a professional move, so sometimes people aren’t as quick to sympathize.”
Still, the ease with which the two cultures connected was “surprising,” even for Shahak, a documentary filmmaker for the past 20 years.
“Both sides went into this not fully believing what they’d gain, and both sides left sharing in someone else’s heartache and healing,” he said. “That’s the beauty of film. It’s not just about telling one story. It’s telling the story of thousands, through one person’s eyes.”
editor@jewishweek.orgRead More New York
Iran Deal Testing City’s Rabbis
As Elul approaches, ‘life and death’ on the pulpit, columnist Jonathan Mark writes.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Rabbis Gerald Skolnik, Robert Levine and Haskel Lookstein.
‘We’re not a Democratic shul, we’re not a Republican shul,” Rabbi Joseph Lookstein often said of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, home to that iconic Modern Orthodox leader for more than 40 years. It was one of the many lessons learned by his son, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, who leads the prominent Upper East Side shul today: “My politics remain with me. But there are exceptions,” he says of the nuclear agreement with Iran, a deal he opposes, “and this is that exception. This is life and death for Israel.”
Just across Central Park, Rabbi Robert Levine of Congregation Rodeph Sholom, the landmark Reform temple, holds a diametrically opposite, but equally passionate, view on the Iranian deal. Not only does he enthusiastically support it, but “I don’t even understand the arguments on the other side.”
Across the city, across the years, no one, it seems, can remember another political issue that had American rabbinic opinion ranging from apocalyptic to optimistic, with both sides finding the other unfathomable.
The political tempest has taken place in summer’s slow season for synagogues, but with the coming of Elul (Aug. 15), the traditional kick-off to the High Holiday season, rabbis have started crafting sermons regarding Iran, while considering the question of how to be a rabbi to congregants who may disagree, though almost all rabbis we spoke to report remarkable support from congregants, leaning to rejection of the deal among the mostly conservative Orthodox, and support for the deal among the mostly liberal Reform. There is more fluctuation within the Conservative movement, with support for President Obama tempered by apprehension about the deal.
The movement’s Rabbinical Assembly stated: “We recognize the hard work by the Obama administration … notwithstanding our reservations about the deal as it is currently being reported. … [We] turn to Congress to carefully review and assess this proposed agreement … .”
The Orthodox Union and the Rabbinical Council of America were more forceful. “We will mobilize our member rabbis and synagogues throughout the nation to urge Congress to fulfill their mandate and disapprove the agreement.”
The Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, and affiliated groups, called for “carefully considered approaches before rushing to conclusions. As the Congress moves forward, we will share our opinion on the viability of this agreement to achieve our goals,” preventing a nuclear Iran and protecting American and Israeli security.
Rabbi Gerald Skolnik, spiritual leader of the Forest Hills Jewish Center (Conservative) and a Jewish Week blogger, said he told his congregation, “I am against the deal. I have been very involved with AIPAC, with lobbying.” Nevertheless, “I have, as many rabbis have, a difficult job in speaking about [the deal] because I have the responsibility to be the rabbi to those whose opinions I don’t share. I’m never out to make someone feel that if they disagree with me then there’s something wrong with them, or that they’re less loving of Israel. But I have very strong feelings.”
His congregants have strong feelings, too, volleying opinions on the shul’s listserve. “I let them go at it,” said Rabbi Skolnik, “until I finally said, ‘You’re not going to convince each other. Let’s just agree that there are multiple opinions.’ I had one or two people who wrote to me after I spoke [on the deal] and said, ‘I really think you’re wrong.’ That’s fine. I try to lead by teaching what the issues are, based on my own reading of Jewish history and the situation, and framing it in ways that I hope will resonate.”
Rabbi Skolnik is cognizant of the well-publicized issues (religious pluralism, for one, an issue the rabbi has fought for) that have alienated some of his congregants from Israel “and complicate all other issues,” such as Iran. For one of his High Holiday sermons, Rabbi Skolnik, a passionate Zionist, said, “I’m thinking of using Natan Alterman’s poem, ‘Magash HaKesef,’ [‘The Silver Platter’]. Chaim Weizman once said [in 1947], the State of Israel will not be given to the Jews on a silver platter. And Alterman wrote this powerful poem about a battle-weary boy and girl emerging from [the smoke] as the people were beginning to celebrate the state. The people look at them — filthy, exhausted, barely standing — and don’t know what to make of them. The people ask, ‘Who are you.’ And they answer, ‘We’re the silver platter.’
“You know,” said Rabbi Skolnik, “Israel is always going to be about struggle. It’s not going to be given on a silver platter to Israelis or to American Jews.”
He said that if he speaks on these issues during the Days of Awe, he intends to be “meta-political,” beyond party or politics. “That’s the great challenge.
“I have people in my shul, people that I know love Israel, who challenged me after I spoke against the deal. A past president of my shul who was in the [IDF] unit that ... [liberated] the Old City in 1967 came up to me and said, ‘I couldn’t disagree with you more.’ I couldn’t challenge him. He put his life on the line.”
The rabbi added, “Mixed up with all of this this is people’s [negative] feelings about [Prime Minister] Netanyahu, but I wouldn’t want to sleep with his responsibility. I’m not a Bibi fan, but on Iran I think he’s right. That’s my problem. I think he’s right.” (The prime minister said Tuesday, in a speech organized by the Jewish Federations of North America, that “this deal will bring war.”)
The day after the Iran agreement was announced, Rabbi Levine of Rodeph Sholom posted his support for the deal on the temple’s website. “I didn’t want people to have to wait until the High Holidays to know how I felt.” He deliberately did not mention either Obama or Netanyahu in his online essay. “I wanted to deal with the issue itself, beyond politics,” he told us.
“I never had such a response to anything I’ve written, 85 to 90 percent positive,” said Rabbi Levine. “I did get some negative reaction, some of it ferocious, from staunch right-wing Republicans and from Israelis.
“There has been a monolithic response from the Israeli political establishment that I do not understand,” said the rabbi.
“Yes,” he added, “there are aspects of the deal that I’m sure we all would craft differently.” As for the $150 billion going to Iran as part of the deal, with some of that likely going to Hezbollah and Hamas? “Well, it’s Iran’s money. It will be a very interesting thing whether they use that money to better their society. There is a side of Iranian society that hungers for normalcy. Let’s see what can come out of this.”
He wrote on the website, “Trust me, I have no illusions that Iran will curb its virulent anti-Semitism or hatred of Israel. But I do believe that this agreement further opens the path for Iran’s leaders to focus their energies on building a viable economic and social structure and less time supporting Shiite aggression.”
Rabbi Lookstein was only 6 years old in 1938, the year of the Munich appeasement when Nazi aggression was the threat of the day, but he remembers the chilling spectacle of the German-American Bund, supporters of Hitler, marching through the Upper East Side. He fears, “This is 1938 all over again.” Iran vows to annihilate Israel’s 6 million Jews, only it took Hitler several years to do that, says Rabbi Lookstein. “It will take Iran only one bomb. You have to take people at their word when they say they want to destroy you.”
He, too, has been using the Internet to inform and alert his congregants that the deal was “fundamentally flawed.” He sent out articles on the Iran agreement by Leon Wieseltier and Jeffrey Goldberg, and urged congregants to call their senators and representatives to “oppose the Iran nuclear deal because it will not block Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. No deal is better than a bad deal, and this is a bad deal.”
Rabbi Lookstein said he rarely gives sermons or promotes political issues, but “in this case I have to lead; this is maybe the most critical moment since the Shoah. We’re putting billions of dollars in the hands of murderers. The Iranians are not just people with whom we politely disagree. They support Hezbollah, Hamas and terrorism around the world.”
One congregant emailed Rabbi Lookstein, “‘Would you send out articles with which you do not agree?’ My answer is, ‘Not really. I don’t usually send out any articles of a political nature, except now, because I believe this is life or death.”
jonathan@jewishweek.orgRead More Editorial
Alas, Jewish Terrorism
Meir Ettinger, pictured here in the Israeli Justice Court, was arrested on inciting 'nationalistic crimes' this week. Getty
Israel’s time of mourning and introspection did not end with Tisha b’Av this summer. It was extended when, within 24 hours last week, two murderous acts of Jewish violence took place. On Thursday a charedi zealot, recently released from prison after 10 years for attacking participants at a 2005 gay pride parade, stabbed six people at this year’s annual parade in downtown Jerusalem. A teenage girl watching the festivities later died from her wounds.
On Friday a firebomb thrown into a home in the West Bank town of Duma burned an 18-month-old baby, killing him, and seriously wounded his parents and brother. Jews were suspected of perpetrating the crime because the word “nekamah” (Hebrew for revenge) was spray-painted at the scene.
A wide range of Israel’s political and religious leaders spoke out firmly against these heinous acts. President Reuven Rivlin acknowledged, “We have been lax in tackling Jewish terrorism.” And Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid Party, asserted, “We are at war with the enemy within.”
Are Israelis prepared to do more than express their outrage? Last summer Israelis were shocked when a Palestinian teenage boy was burned to death by several Jewish extremists. In that case the perpetrators were arrested, but statistics show that it is extremely rare for Jews to be caught and punished for terror crimes against Arabs. In time, the horror fades.
This week the 23-year-old grandson of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League and symbol of religious Jewish extremism, was arrested, said to be the leading Jewish target of the Shin Bet for nationalist crimes. His grandfather no doubt would be proud.
And Israel’s cabinet this week approved the use of administrative detention, no doubt seeking to prove that Jews as well as Arabs may be held in prison for long periods of time without formal charges. But some liberals condemned such detention as unfair to anyone, Jew or Arab.
There is a growing sense in Israeli society that more needs to be done to counter the spike in Jewish terror, often by religious militants who show no respect for the laws of the state. That’s why statements by respected rabbis condemning violence as against Jewish law are particularly important. Rabbi Yehuda Gilad of Yeshivat Maale Gilboa in Israel wrote this week that “religiously motivated murder distorts the very notion of morality” and that a “literal interpretation of the Bible,” in terms of killing, is “simplistic … and extremely dangerous.”
Still, the reality is that a significant and growing minority of Israelis, including many ultra-Orthodox Jews and Israeli Arabs, do not adhere to Zionist and/or democratic values. This puts a strain on the society, complicated by the alienating factor it has on the majority of diaspora Jews who worry about the fundamentalist impulse in Israel today.
The mood of indignation must not be allowed to fade this time. It must be translated into acts that prevent future crimes and indicate society’s red-line intolerance of Jewish terror.
editor@jewishweek.orgRead More
The Jewish Week
The grounds around the Federal Revival-style Langdon Hall. Courtesy of Langdon Hall.
TRAVEL
A Real-Life Downton
Hilary Danailova
Travel WriterIt was while waiting for the dumbwaiter elevator that I noticed the small, merry line of bells above the foyer doorway. With a spark of recognition, I realized where I’d seen them before: Downton Abbey!
As fans of the British period soap all know, the opening credits of “Downton Abbey” roll over a wall of vintage bells identical to the ones I was now studying. If I hadn’t been waiting for a creaky centenarian contraption, I would never have paused long enough to look up, and I would never have seen those bells. Or realized that the house I was staying in — the Langdon Hall Country House Hotel and Spa — was, essentially, a real-life Downton.
I was in the Canadian woods of Cambridge, Ontario, an hour west of Toronto. The wide-open fields and thick green forests are pleasant enough, but nothing on the ride from the airport prepared me for the transporting graciousness of Langdon Hall. Surrounded by 200 acres of Carolinian forest on the Grand River, Langdon Hall’s centerpiece is a sprawling, 32-room brick-and-column manse in the Federal Revival style — aristocratic in a very New World idiom, yet brimming with the pride of place that animates old English estates.
Built in 1902 as the Canadian retreat of Eugene Langdon Wilks — a great-grandson of the New York financier John Jacob Astor — Langdon Hall remained in the peripatetic Wilks family for eight decades. It served as a refuge for European family members during World War II, and housed several generations before its sale in the 1980s and rebirth as part of the Relais & Châteaux luxury hotel empire.
As I studied a wall of sepia-toned family portraits in the Langdon bar room — which, like everything at Langdon Hall, feels at once exquisitely formal and instantly comfortable — I realized there was yet another Downton parallel: Just as Downton’s fictional Crawley clan has rarely mentioned Jewish ties, the Astor family has also been linked to German-Jewish lineage several centuries back.
Regardless of bloodline, Langdon’s wood-burning fireplaces, fluffy duvets and private dressing rooms could make anybody feel like lord of the manor, I reflected as I sank into a cloud of feather-down pillows.
I was in Cambridge to check out luxury, Ontario style, en route to the nearby Stratford Festival — the Canadian summer mecca for Shakespeare and other serious theater. But Langdon Hall is less a resort than an enchanted world unto itself. I could easily have lost hours happily wandering the myriad rooms of Wilks’ mansion, taking in the meticulously conserved period details, or exploring the miles of trails through the surrounding forests.
In the morning, I strolled past sunlit lily ponds to a patio under the shady green canopy of a century-old tree, savoring brunch in a setting reminiscent of Monet’s garden. A chef in starched whites scurried to and from the lavish buffet table, explaining how the ingredients for his preserves, quiches and tarts are sourced right from the Langdon gardens.
After brunch, I strolled past the croquet lawns and toured those gardens with head gardener Mario, who oversees the heirloom beets, pea shoots, lavender and wild gooseberries that — along with dozens of other crops — inform the ever-changing menu at Langdon’s award-winning restaurant.
Amid all the exquisitely conserved period details, that ethos of local, seasonal and sustainable is decidedly contemporary. It extends, Mario explained, beyond the spring-pea salad and pasta I ate for lunch to the spa itself, where the scrumptious-smelling massage oils are crafted from garden herbs.
Langdon Hall may have typified the estates favored by well-to-do New Yorkers a hundred years ago — but today, it sets the standard for the kind of luxury accommodations increasingly favored by weekend tourists, for whom featherbeds, dual-head showers and sommeliers in the hotel dining room are de rigueur. And more and more, these luxury spots are popping up in the easy-to-reach, cheap-for-Americans countryside west of Toronto.
About an hour west of Langdon in Stratford proper, the first serious luxury hotel and restaurant — the Bruce — recently opened to offer an option for upscale culture-vultures. Traditionally, the half-million annual visitors who pack into the Stratford theaters have eschewed pampering in favor of no-frills lodgings; the area is known for its low-key, unpretentious culture.
But the strong U.S. dollar has made Canada a serious bargain for Yankees, and the Stratford-Cambridge area already has the elements many New Yorkers look for in a rural getaway: a tradition of gracious living in the British vein, a picturesque setting and a vibrant farm-to-table culinary scene. Both the Bruce — which offers a modern, in-town take on the Langdon luxe tradition — and the Wilks estate itself can be booked for less than $300 a night, far less than their American counterparts.
And as I tucked into a fluffy robe, gazed out over a field of wildflowers and nibbled on a tray of freshly picked cherries, I was sure that even a Crawley lady couldn’t have it any better.
editor@jewishweek.org
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Kanye West performing at Lollapalooza in 2011. C/o Wikimedia Commons
Featured on NYBLUEPRINT
Kanye West Is Going To The Middle East
Maya Klausner
Editor
The Konman will be performing in the Holy Land in the fall according to JTA.
The Kardashains and friends can't seem to stop milking the land of milk and honey. In January the famed triumvirate of Kim, Khloe and Kourtney announced they would be purchasing two luxury apartments in an exclusive beachfront building in Tel Aviv.Yeezy and the Kardashians have a serious taste for hummus
Maya Klausner | Editor | Music
The Konman will be performing in the Holy Land in the fall according to JTA.
The Kardashains and friends can’t seem to stop milking the land of milk and honey. In January the famed triumvirate of Kim, Khloe and Kourtney announced they would be purchasing two luxury apartments in an exclusive beachfront building in Tel Aviv.
Then, four months ago, West visited Israel with an unknown woman. Well, not really. The mystery lady in question is the most famous human being on the planet; his wife Kim Kardashian. However, a charedi publication decided that she should be neither heard nor seen, cropping her out of a photo in a non-kosher restaurant where she was dining with the mayor of Jerusalem and her man.
But the Louis Vuitton Don seems to have a forgiving side and plans to return to perform in Tel Aviv on September 30 to give the chosen people a much-anticipated show. During his last visit, there was buzz West would perform an impromptu concert in Jerusalem, but like his wife’s face, it remains to be seen.
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Twin Cases Of Extremism Spark Calls For Crackdown
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
Last week's firebombing by suspected Jewish settlers of a Palestinian home in the West Bank killing a toddler, and the stabbing of six people - one of them fatally - at the Jerusalem gay pride parade by a charedi extremist may be a game changer for Israel.Israel News
Twin Cases Of Extremism Spark Calls For Crackdown
Jewish leaders here want end to ‘hate crimes’ in wake of West Bank firebombing, stabbing at gay pride parade.
Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
An anti-settler rally in Tel Aviv after attack in Duma reportedly carried out by Jewish extremists. Getty Images
Last week’s firebombing by suspected Jewish settlers of a Palestinian home in the West Bank killing a toddler, and the stabbing of six people — one of them fatally — at the Jerusalem gay pride parade by a charedi extremist may be a game changer for Israel.
For Rabbi Aaron Panken, president of the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, it is further evidence that “the situation in Israel has taken a deeply troubling turn.”
The country, he said in a JTA op-ed, now faces the choice of becoming a “haven for fundamentalists intent on attacking those who differ, or it can step into a profound role of Jewish leadership as a country that embraces ideological difference as an essential strength.”
Former Israeli President Shimon Peres reportedly warned last Saturday night that “dark, extremist forces” are threatening to destroy Israel and called on all Israelis to rebuff them.
“Those who incite against Arab citizens of Israel should not be surprised when mosques and churches are set alight or even when a baby is burned alive in the night,” he said, according to The Times of Israel.
Israeli leaders from across the political spectrum vigorously denounced both attacks and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the Israeli hospital where the toddler’s mother was fighting for her life with burns over 90 percent of her body. Her other son, 4, is being treated there for severe burns of his own, and her husband is recovering from burns in another hospital.
But more needs to be done, according to the New Israel Fund, which said the “elegant words” of Israeli leaders “are not enough.”
“Many Israelis want to see a different type of leadership — leadership that will set an example of courage and tolerance, that doesn’t speak in racist terms, that acts swiftly to end hate crimes,” said the group, which promotes social justice and equality for all Jews.
“One cannot say, year after year, that Israel exists only for its Jewish citizens, or only for the Jewish citizens who comply with a narrow, right-wing interpretation of Zionism, and then be shocked when extremists feel free to express hatred and do violence and innocent children are murdered.”
Asked if Israel’s decision last Sunday to permit administrative detention for suspected Jewish terrorists — allowing their detention without charge as it is reportedly doing to 370 suspected Palestinian terrorists — NIF spokesperson Naomi Paiss said: “Abrogating civil liberties for the sake of security is always problematic and needs to be carefully considered.”
But Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, doesn’t believe that anti-Arab rhetoric caused last week’s attacks. He said the two events, which came within 24 hours of each other, were rightly condemned by Israeli leaders and that is “inappropriate and in many ways offensive” to see the arson attack “in broader terms.”
“It is very important in a democracy to allow the system to do its job,” Rabbi Cooper said. “Whoever perpetrated that horrible crime must be brought to justice. If he is part of a movement, there is talk of additional administrative moves that will be taken to co-opt further activity in that direction. … The full weight of the state must make sure it never happens again.”
And he challenged the NIF’s attack on the “right wing,” noting that the “majority of Israelis are center and center-right.” To suggest, Rabbi Cooper said, that they “are affiliated with terrorism and hate is damaging to the fabric” of the country.
On the other hand, Americans for Peace Now President and CEO Debra DeLee said in a statement that more is needed than just the arrest of the perpetrators. She said steps must be taken — “particularly among the nationalist right — to stop inciting actions and hate-speech.” And she called on the Israeli government to fight the environment of lawlessness that Jewish settlers have spawned in the West Bank.”
Ori Nir, the group’s spokesman, stressed that this was a “price tag” attack because the arsonists scrawled in Hebrew on a wall near the torched home the words “revenge” and “long live the king Messiah” next to a Star of David.
“Price tag is a campaign in which the victims almost always are Palestinians and the target of the campaign is the Israeli government,” he explained. “People think it is just Jewish versus Arab violence, but there is a political objective as stated explicitly by leaders of the settler movement — to try to deter the Israeli government from applying the law and removing illegal outposts … .”
Two days before the pre-dawn Friday attack, two apartment buildings in the Israeli settlement of Beit El, just north of Ramallah, were torn down in compliance with a High Court ruling, which found that they were built on private Palestinian land. The demolition came after several days of clashes between protestors and police. Later, Netanyahu announced the approval of 300 new housing units in Beit El, fulfilling a 3-year-old government promise to provide alternative housing for those moved from the apartment buildings.
Referring to the decision to build 300 new housing units in Beit El, DeLee complained that the government’s policies simply “reward settler lawlessness.”
Observers noted that Netanyahu heads a narrow right-wing government and must tread carefully when dealing with settlers.
Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party and Israel’s minister of the economy, wrote last week that he would “not under any circumstances accept the attempt to vilify the 430,000 wonderful Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria, those who are known as ‘settlers.’ There is such a foolish attempt at the moment. It will not succeed. Whoever engages in such action is guilty of the same sin of prejudice and incitement.”
Ethan Felson, senior vice president and acting CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said the arsonists “must be punished the same as any other terrorists,” and that the sentence must be strong enough to serve as a “deterrent to others.”
“Right now, we’re broken hearted for the families that are in mourning,” he added. “But when our tears dry, the soul searching will continue.”
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, welcomed the government’s decision to “apply anti-terrorism laws” to Jewish terrorists, saying: “Those who commit these crimes should be held to account.”
He said questions are being raised about why Yishai Schlissel, the man suspected in the fatal stabbing of high school student Shira Banki, was permitted anywhere near the gay pride parade. He had just been released after serving a 10-year sentence for knifing three people at the same parade in 2005 and openly threatened to repeat his crime.
“Acts like these can in a moment do more damage than BDS [the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign] does in months,” Hoenlein said.
The arson attack “hurts the settlers in general,” he continued. “It creates the image that many have tried to paint of lawlessness and extremism, which is not really characteristic of most settlers. In fact, many of them have spoken out in condemnation of the attack.”
On Monday, the Palestinian Authority renewed its call for the International Criminal Court to investigate the Israeli “occupation,” and presented it a file containing details of the arson attack and what it described as other “settler terrorism.”
Although no arrest was made in the arson attack in the days following the incident, Hoenlein said authorities “are throwing immense resources into this, but they [the perpetrators] are not known criminals and not necessarily part of an organized effort. It could have been a spontaneous act of revenge by young people. … One person throwing a Molotov cocktail does terrific damage.”
In May, the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din issued a report that examined the success of law enforcement against Israelis who harm Palestinians in the West Bank. It said only 7.4 percent of investigations resulted in indictments of suspects, and that 85.3 percent of investigations were ended because of an inability to locate suspects or gather sufficient evidence for an indictment.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin acknowledged the problem last Friday. I24News quoted him as saying, “To my great sorrow, until now it seems we have been lax in our treatment of the phenomena of Jewish terrorism.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, who is in Israel for his first visit as the new national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said it was “important” that Israeli leaders “came out unambiguously and called this a heinous attack and have taken steps to apprehend the perpetrators.”
He added that the incidents “highlight a real tension in society” and the “need to focus on civil rights issues in Israel” and that he finds it “encouraging that leaders are prepared to deal with it.”
Hoenlein said the government would also be going after those who “incite and facilitate such acts.”
That promised crackdown appeared to begin this week with the arrest of Meir Ettinger, 23, the suspected head of an extremist settler group that was allegedly planning a series of attacks against Palestinians. He is the grandson of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the American-born rabbi who founded an Israeli party that was labeled racist and banned for advocating the forced expulsion of all Arabs from Israel. Kahane was assassinated by an Arab gunman in New York in 1990.
On Monday evening, in an all-too-familiar pattern of attack and counter-attack, a suspected Palestinian terrorist hurled a Molotov cocktail at a car in east Jerusalem, setting it ablaze and seriously burning a 27-year-old woman and slightly injuring two others in the car. The vehicle, which was engulfed in flames, then rolled into the path of another car, slightly injuring the driver.
Former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was quoted as saying that the attack is a reminder that “the exception is Jews who attack Arabs, and the routine is Arab terrorism against Jews.”
stewart@jewishweek.orgRead More
New YorkAmerican, Israeli Vets Face Trauma Through Film
First-of-its-kind seminar helps soldiers from two countries cope with the shared experience of PTSD.
Hannah Dreyfus
Staff Writer
Ben Patton, left, executive director of the “I Was There” film workshops. Courtesy of Belev Echad
Dan Meir was on his way to buy ice cream with his family in Haifa when a terrorist threw a grenade. He was 9.
“The memory is a blur — just a loud noise and then black. Both of my legs were covered with metal, and I still have a scar on my forehead,” Meir said during a phone interview from his home in Tel Aviv. He lost his left leg. His 1-year-old brother, 6-year-old sister and grandparents were also injured.
For Meir, 36, a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces and graduate student in psychodrama at Kibbutzim College in Tel Aviv, film has been one way to deal with the trauma of his past. Two weeks ago he participated in an interactive film workshop that brought together 15 American and Israeli veterans to write, shoot and edit original movies about their experiences. Belev Echad, a Manhattan-based nonprofit that runs programs to honor and aid wounded Israeli veterans, partnered with the Patton Veterans Project, which runs “I Was There” film workshops for veterans struggling with post traumatic stress disorder.
“Unpacking and repacking memories is similar to the process of making a film. It gives sense and order to the images and memories that plague many veterans,” said Ben Patton, who founded the Patton Veterans Project in 2011. The organization has worked with more than 600 U.S. veterans to date.
The four-day workshop, believed to be the first intercultural seminar of its kind, led to a fruitful dialogue about differences, along with an underlying recognition of similarity, said Patton, who is the grandson of World War II hero Gen. George S. Patton.
Participant Matthew Pennington, an American veteran from Maine, was surprised to discover the parallels between himself and his Israeli counterparts.
“Regardless of where you come from, the human experience of trauma is very similar,” said Pennington, who lost his left leg and severely injured his right in a 2006 roadside bombing in Iraq during his third deployment to the Mideast. The two groups of soldiers “keyed in” on sharing common goals — and a common enemy, he said. “We’re all fighting against regimes who instill fear and oppression.”
Pennington found film therapy to be particularly effective because of its “non-confrontational” nature. “When you deal with vets, you’re dealing with very masculine personality types. Accepting that you need formal therapy is very hard,” he said. “When you approach film as a job, you lose sight of the fact that it’s therapy.”
Still, with or without with the support of therapy, the return to civilian life can be grueling. In his short film, “PTSD Sounds,” Israeli veteran Yoav Gelband partnered with one Israeli and two American veterans to tell the story of re-integrating into the bustle of city life. Shot in Times Square, the five-minute film communicates how even the most commonplace sounds — a drill at a construction site or and ambulance siren — can bring back a host of unwanted memories.
“The film’s about the journey to find peace in our daily lives, and in our own minds,” said Gelband, 23, who was injured last summer in a shootout in Gaza during Operation Protective Edge. “We all fought in different places, under different circumstances, but we’re haunted by the same sounds.”
Dr. Rachel Yehuda, director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a leading expert in PTSD, said that aside from dealing with the normal difficulties that occur post-trauma, soldiers have the added weight of dealing with judgment from others.
“There are things you do in combat that people have a lot of judgment about,” said Yehuda, adding that comments from those who have not been in combat but think they would have acted differently are exceedingly unhelpful. “Decisions are made under intense pressure and at great personal risk. Soldiers aren’t as free to make decisions. It is very difficult to describe that mindset to someone who has never been in battle.”
Guilt also plagues some veterans, particularly with regard to not being able to protect a fellow combatant, said Yehuda. “It’s the painful doubt of ‘could I have prevented it?’”
Dani Tenenbaum, one of the film instructors who facilitated the workshop, said he’s noticed that American and Israeli soldiers have very different coping mechanisms: Israeli soldiers often use humor, while the Americans focus on honor.
“Israelis are more cynical about their injuries — they share a dark sense of humor, while the Americans speak about it less,” said Tenenbaum, who has led six workshops for American veterans. He said the casual attitude among Israelis veterans stems from many of the volatile realities of living in the Middle East. “People get used to terror attacks and war — you can’t just not talk about it,” he said. “You have to find ways to deal with it.”
The workshop also highlighted the differences in how people responded to soldiers when they returned home.“American soldiers are saluted at baseball games! In Israel, we drop the formal stuff really quickly,” Gelband said. Still, he felt that he and his fellow Israeli soldiers were more appreciated than his American counterparts. “Our country is small, everybody either serves or knows someone who served, and everyone is related to soldiers who were killed or injured in combat or a terror attack,” he said. “In America, no one knows what their soldiers have been through.”
Film instructor Boaz Shahak, 43, also saw a “huge difference” between how the two cultures were greeted when they returned. He said many of the American soldiers talked about being “alone in the street,” while Israeli veterans are “hugged by society.”The element of choice that accompanies an American soldier’s decision to join the army also magnifies the difference in reception, he said. “It’s seen as a professional move, so sometimes people aren’t as quick to sympathize.”
Still, the ease with which the two cultures connected was “surprising,” even for Shahak, a documentary filmmaker for the past 20 years.
“Both sides went into this not fully believing what they’d gain, and both sides left sharing in someone else’s heartache and healing,” he said. “That’s the beauty of film. It’s not just about telling one story. It’s telling the story of thousands, through one person’s eyes.”
editor@jewishweek.orgRead More
New YorkIran Deal Testing City’s Rabbis
As Elul approaches, ‘life and death’ on the pulpit, columnist Jonathan Mark writes.
Jonathan Mark
Associate Editor
Rabbis Gerald Skolnik, Robert Levine and Haskel Lookstein.
‘We’re not a Democratic shul, we’re not a Republican shul,” Rabbi Joseph Lookstein often said of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, home to that iconic Modern Orthodox leader for more than 40 years. It was one of the many lessons learned by his son, Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, who leads the prominent Upper East Side shul today: “My politics remain with me. But there are exceptions,” he says of the nuclear agreement with Iran, a deal he opposes, “and this is that exception. This is life and death for Israel.”
Just across Central Park, Rabbi Robert Levine of Congregation Rodeph Sholom, the landmark Reform temple, holds a diametrically opposite, but equally passionate, view on the Iranian deal. Not only does he enthusiastically support it, but “I don’t even understand the arguments on the other side.”
Across the city, across the years, no one, it seems, can remember another political issue that had American rabbinic opinion ranging from apocalyptic to optimistic, with both sides finding the other unfathomable.
The political tempest has taken place in summer’s slow season for synagogues, but with the coming of Elul (Aug. 15), the traditional kick-off to the High Holiday season, rabbis have started crafting sermons regarding Iran, while considering the question of how to be a rabbi to congregants who may disagree, though almost all rabbis we spoke to report remarkable support from congregants, leaning to rejection of the deal among the mostly conservative Orthodox, and support for the deal among the mostly liberal Reform. There is more fluctuation within the Conservative movement, with support for President Obama tempered by apprehension about the deal.
The movement’s Rabbinical Assembly stated: “We recognize the hard work by the Obama administration … notwithstanding our reservations about the deal as it is currently being reported. … [We] turn to Congress to carefully review and assess this proposed agreement … .”
The Orthodox Union and the Rabbinical Council of America were more forceful. “We will mobilize our member rabbis and synagogues throughout the nation to urge Congress to fulfill their mandate and disapprove the agreement.”
The Reform movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, and affiliated groups, called for “carefully considered approaches before rushing to conclusions. As the Congress moves forward, we will share our opinion on the viability of this agreement to achieve our goals,” preventing a nuclear Iran and protecting American and Israeli security.
Rabbi Gerald Skolnik, spiritual leader of the Forest Hills Jewish Center (Conservative) and a Jewish Week blogger, said he told his congregation, “I am against the deal. I have been very involved with AIPAC, with lobbying.” Nevertheless, “I have, as many rabbis have, a difficult job in speaking about [the deal] because I have the responsibility to be the rabbi to those whose opinions I don’t share. I’m never out to make someone feel that if they disagree with me then there’s something wrong with them, or that they’re less loving of Israel. But I have very strong feelings.”
His congregants have strong feelings, too, volleying opinions on the shul’s listserve. “I let them go at it,” said Rabbi Skolnik, “until I finally said, ‘You’re not going to convince each other. Let’s just agree that there are multiple opinions.’ I had one or two people who wrote to me after I spoke [on the deal] and said, ‘I really think you’re wrong.’ That’s fine. I try to lead by teaching what the issues are, based on my own reading of Jewish history and the situation, and framing it in ways that I hope will resonate.”
Rabbi Skolnik is cognizant of the well-publicized issues (religious pluralism, for one, an issue the rabbi has fought for) that have alienated some of his congregants from Israel “and complicate all other issues,” such as Iran. For one of his High Holiday sermons, Rabbi Skolnik, a passionate Zionist, said, “I’m thinking of using Natan Alterman’s poem, ‘Magash HaKesef,’ [‘The Silver Platter’]. Chaim Weizman once said [in 1947], the State of Israel will not be given to the Jews on a silver platter. And Alterman wrote this powerful poem about a battle-weary boy and girl emerging from [the smoke] as the people were beginning to celebrate the state. The people look at them — filthy, exhausted, barely standing — and don’t know what to make of them. The people ask, ‘Who are you.’ And they answer, ‘We’re the silver platter.’
“You know,” said Rabbi Skolnik, “Israel is always going to be about struggle. It’s not going to be given on a silver platter to Israelis or to American Jews.”
He said that if he speaks on these issues during the Days of Awe, he intends to be “meta-political,” beyond party or politics. “That’s the great challenge.
“I have people in my shul, people that I know love Israel, who challenged me after I spoke against the deal. A past president of my shul who was in the [IDF] unit that ... [liberated] the Old City in 1967 came up to me and said, ‘I couldn’t disagree with you more.’ I couldn’t challenge him. He put his life on the line.”
The rabbi added, “Mixed up with all of this this is people’s [negative] feelings about [Prime Minister] Netanyahu, but I wouldn’t want to sleep with his responsibility. I’m not a Bibi fan, but on Iran I think he’s right. That’s my problem. I think he’s right.” (The prime minister said Tuesday, in a speech organized by the Jewish Federations of North America, that “this deal will bring war.”)
The day after the Iran agreement was announced, Rabbi Levine of Rodeph Sholom posted his support for the deal on the temple’s website. “I didn’t want people to have to wait until the High Holidays to know how I felt.” He deliberately did not mention either Obama or Netanyahu in his online essay. “I wanted to deal with the issue itself, beyond politics,” he told us.
“I never had such a response to anything I’ve written, 85 to 90 percent positive,” said Rabbi Levine. “I did get some negative reaction, some of it ferocious, from staunch right-wing Republicans and from Israelis.
“There has been a monolithic response from the Israeli political establishment that I do not understand,” said the rabbi.
“Yes,” he added, “there are aspects of the deal that I’m sure we all would craft differently.” As for the $150 billion going to Iran as part of the deal, with some of that likely going to Hezbollah and Hamas? “Well, it’s Iran’s money. It will be a very interesting thing whether they use that money to better their society. There is a side of Iranian society that hungers for normalcy. Let’s see what can come out of this.”
He wrote on the website, “Trust me, I have no illusions that Iran will curb its virulent anti-Semitism or hatred of Israel. But I do believe that this agreement further opens the path for Iran’s leaders to focus their energies on building a viable economic and social structure and less time supporting Shiite aggression.”
Rabbi Lookstein was only 6 years old in 1938, the year of the Munich appeasement when Nazi aggression was the threat of the day, but he remembers the chilling spectacle of the German-American Bund, supporters of Hitler, marching through the Upper East Side. He fears, “This is 1938 all over again.” Iran vows to annihilate Israel’s 6 million Jews, only it took Hitler several years to do that, says Rabbi Lookstein. “It will take Iran only one bomb. You have to take people at their word when they say they want to destroy you.”
He, too, has been using the Internet to inform and alert his congregants that the deal was “fundamentally flawed.” He sent out articles on the Iran agreement by Leon Wieseltier and Jeffrey Goldberg, and urged congregants to call their senators and representatives to “oppose the Iran nuclear deal because it will not block Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. No deal is better than a bad deal, and this is a bad deal.”
Rabbi Lookstein said he rarely gives sermons or promotes political issues, but “in this case I have to lead; this is maybe the most critical moment since the Shoah. We’re putting billions of dollars in the hands of murderers. The Iranians are not just people with whom we politely disagree. They support Hezbollah, Hamas and terrorism around the world.”
One congregant emailed Rabbi Lookstein, “‘Would you send out articles with which you do not agree?’ My answer is, ‘Not really. I don’t usually send out any articles of a political nature, except now, because I believe this is life or death.”
jonathan@jewishweek.orgRead More
EditorialAlas, Jewish Terrorism
Meir Ettinger, pictured here in the Israeli Justice Court, was arrested on inciting 'nationalistic crimes' this week. Getty
Israel’s time of mourning and introspection did not end with Tisha b’Av this summer. It was extended when, within 24 hours last week, two murderous acts of Jewish violence took place. On Thursday a charedi zealot, recently released from prison after 10 years for attacking participants at a 2005 gay pride parade, stabbed six people at this year’s annual parade in downtown Jerusalem. A teenage girl watching the festivities later died from her wounds.
On Friday a firebomb thrown into a home in the West Bank town of Duma burned an 18-month-old baby, killing him, and seriously wounded his parents and brother. Jews were suspected of perpetrating the crime because the word “nekamah” (Hebrew for revenge) was spray-painted at the scene.
A wide range of Israel’s political and religious leaders spoke out firmly against these heinous acts. President Reuven Rivlin acknowledged, “We have been lax in tackling Jewish terrorism.” And Yair Lapid, leader of the Yesh Atid Party, asserted, “We are at war with the enemy within.”
Are Israelis prepared to do more than express their outrage? Last summer Israelis were shocked when a Palestinian teenage boy was burned to death by several Jewish extremists. In that case the perpetrators were arrested, but statistics show that it is extremely rare for Jews to be caught and punished for terror crimes against Arabs. In time, the horror fades.
This week the 23-year-old grandson of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League and symbol of religious Jewish extremism, was arrested, said to be the leading Jewish target of the Shin Bet for nationalist crimes. His grandfather no doubt would be proud.
And Israel’s cabinet this week approved the use of administrative detention, no doubt seeking to prove that Jews as well as Arabs may be held in prison for long periods of time without formal charges. But some liberals condemned such detention as unfair to anyone, Jew or Arab.
There is a growing sense in Israeli society that more needs to be done to counter the spike in Jewish terror, often by religious militants who show no respect for the laws of the state. That’s why statements by respected rabbis condemning violence as against Jewish law are particularly important. Rabbi Yehuda Gilad of Yeshivat Maale Gilboa in Israel wrote this week that “religiously motivated murder distorts the very notion of morality” and that a “literal interpretation of the Bible,” in terms of killing, is “simplistic … and extremely dangerous.”
Still, the reality is that a significant and growing minority of Israelis, including many ultra-Orthodox Jews and Israeli Arabs, do not adhere to Zionist and/or democratic values. This puts a strain on the society, complicated by the alienating factor it has on the majority of diaspora Jews who worry about the fundamentalist impulse in Israel today.
The mood of indignation must not be allowed to fade this time. It must be translated into acts that prevent future crimes and indicate society’s red-line intolerance of Jewish terror.
editor@jewishweek.orgRead More
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