Uncategorized
Israeli tensions spill over into Berlin at summit of European Jewish leaders
BERLIN (JTA) — Novelist Ruby Namdar’s appearance at a major conference of European Jewish leaders wasn’t meant to include a speech to an empty chair. But there he was on Sunday night, addressing the chair he had thought would hold Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for Diaspora affairs.
Chikli had been scheduled to address the summit, organized by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the European Council of Jewish Communities, but arrived too late to speak and left early Monday, amid a political crisis in Israel.
“In Israel right now under this government… our house has become rotten and corrupt,” Namdar told cheering conference attendees. “We have lost all shame in Israeli politics. It must be restored.”
Namdar, an Israeli who lives in the United States, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he spoke out because he worried that others at the conference would not.
“A large part of the Jewish leaders of the world and of Europe are here, and I know that many of them, if not most, are very concerned, very worried, feel very alienated,” he said. “But they’re not able to voice it because they’re instinctively so used to supporting Israel, even though it has become harder and harder with every passing year.”
The episode reflected the degree to which Israel’s political crisis is affecting Jews abroad, even reshaping what is discussed during convenings meant to elevate Diaspora Jewish life. On Monday, the saga took a sharp turn, after a historically large protest movement forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to delay controversial proposed reforms to the country’s judicial system.
It was the fifth edition of the summit and the first one held in person since the pandemic hit three years ago. The gathering included leaders and Jewish professionals from 35 communities across Europe and covered a broad range of topics, from how to combat antisemitism to how European Jewish communities have responded to Russia’s war against Ukraine; from gender issues to the challenges of “creating Judaism with no synagogues.”
Rates of emigration to Israel from parts of Europe have been high in recent decades, in the wake of the Ukraine war, the rise of right-wing populism and several violent antisemitic attacks by Muslim extremists and neo-Nazis. But some attendees at the conference said the recent crisis there was shaking the sense of safety that many European Jews associate with Israel.
“Democracy is a very important part in our lives especially as young leaders because we have been preached that it is such an important dogma,” Joelle Abaew, a German-Jewish teenager and member of the youth group BBYO’s international board, told JTA. “When, especially as young Jews, most of us identify with our homeland in Israel and if we don’t see that [strong democracy] there, we might question: Is that even our homeland, can we even identify with what they are doing?”
Jonathan Marcus, who is active in several Jewish organizations in Berlin, said he had seen people moving back from Israel to Germany in recent months “because of the current climate,” reflecting a trend of liberal Israelis considering emigration in response to the crisis. He also said he was worried about the religious agenda that some in Israel’s right-wing government want to advance — doing so in the language most often used to describe concerns about religious law in Europe.
“I worry on a personal level: What can I do to make sure we don’t wake up in a Jewish mullah regime?” Marcus said. “Will Israel be where my family and friends live, and be a part of my life?”
Namdar was not the only one to speak out against Chikli. A protest like the ones that have taken place across Israel and the Diaspora took place outside the conference venue, the Hilton Berlin. Inside the hotel’s dining room where Chikli was due to speak, conference guests found fliers distributed clandestinely on each table announcing that hosting him was “a slap in the face of hundreds of thousands of Israelis defending democracy for us too.”
Alexander Oscar, president of Shalom, Bulgaria’s main Jewish umbrella group, said at previous conferences he has attended it would have been unheard of to aim such statements at Israeli government officials. He said that though many European leaders are not Israeli citizens, “we all have our families in Israel and consider the state of Israel our homeland.”
“This is the first time ever I have seen this in conferences with other, you know, other countries, but never for the State of Israel.” Oscar said. “And it makes me happy, because what it says is that Israel is a democracy, and that it has a strong civil society.”
The protesting dovetails with a widening gulf he says that he and other Jewish communities in Central and Eastern Europe are finding with Israel.
“Over the past several years, we are seeing how, in various ways, the State of Israel is actually more prone to supporting the individual states in Europe, sacrificing the interests of the local Jewish communities,” Oscar said. “I’m speaking, in particular, about countries like Poland, like Hungary and Bulgaria nowadays. The local Jewish community is fighting with different groups, and even with the authorities, in terms of preventing the Holocaust distortion, and also combating antisemitism.”
“So we are ending up when the State of Israel is not defending the Jewish communities, in areas where until five, six years ago, it would have been impossible even to think of,” he added.
—
The post Israeli tensions spill over into Berlin at summit of European Jewish leaders appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Israelis pause for a different kind of siren: the one marking Holocaust memorial day
(JTA) — For the last six weeks, whenever Israelis have heard a siren, they were instructed to run to their nearest bomb shelter. On Tuesday, a siren instead brought them to a halt.
The two-minute siren was the one sounded annually on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust memorial day. In keeping with a national tradition, Israelis stopped whatever they were doing for a moment of silence to remember the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Drivers exited their cars on the streets; shoppers froze in grocery store aisles; and people strolling the streets paused where they were.
Even for seasoned Israelis, the dissonance was strong this year. Hillel Fuld, an Israeli influencer, wrote that he was initially unnerved to see so many people failing to follow the guidance about what to do when a missile is incoming.
“I exited my car and was about to lie down when I realized, that’s not a siren warning of a missile. That’s a siren remembering the six million!” he wrote.
“I felt that emotional confusion that every Israeli knows too well. Sadness. Devastation. Hopelessness,” Fuld continued. “And at the same time, tremendous pride, optimism, and unity.”
This year’s Yom HaShoah is the first since all Israeli hostages taken on Oct. 7, 2023, were freed from Gaza. Some of the freed hostages, including Eli Sharabi, participated in small remembrance gatherings known as Zikaron Basalon. Others posted symbols of Jewish survival, including Sagui Dekel-Chen, whose wife posted pictures of him alongside his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, and Elkana Bohbot, who with his wife announced that he is expecting a child.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israelis pause for a different kind of siren: the one marking Holocaust memorial day appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Many children killed in the Holocaust had no one to say Kaddish for them. These Jews have stepped up.
(JTA) — As each week’s Shabbat morning service comes to a close at Temple Beth El in West Palm Beach, Florida, an unusual tradition unfolds as the congregation prepares to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish.
Rabbi Alan Bell asks to stand all those reciting the prayer on the anniversary of the death of a loved one. He also asks other congregants to stand, too: those who have taken it upon themselves to recite Kaddish for a child up to the age of 17 who was murdered in the Holocaust and for whom there are no living relatives to recite it.
The Conservative synagogue calls the program Remember a Child, and at least a third of members in the 150-family congregation participate. Most recite the mourner’s prayer on the date of the child’s burial as well as on Yizkor, the special memorial prayer for the departed recited in the synagogue four times a year.
But some recite the Mourner’s Kaddish far more often.
Bell and his wife Susan have “adopted” a girl named Renee Albersheim who was born in 1930 in Berlin. They do not know when she died, only that it was in the Kovno Ghetto in German-occupied Lithuania. As a result, Susan Bell said, they recite Kaddish for her each time Kaddish is recited — multiple times a day and sometimes multiple times in a single service.
It’s become a family tradition. “When each of our granddaughters became bat mitzvah we got each a child to show them that children their age were dying [in the Holocaust],” Susan Bell said.
“They were girls from different places in the world — one was from Greece and the other from Romania — and they had the same first name as my granddaughters,” she continued. “I wanted to show the girls how widespread the Holocaust was; it was a learning experience for them.”
The Nazis murdered an estimated 1.5 million Jewish children during the Holocaust, many of whom died alongside everyone else in their family. That left no one traditionally assumed by Jewish law to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish on their behalf — siblings, parents or, for adults, children and spouses.
Rabbi Alan Bell and his wife Susan Bell lead a Holocaust remembrance initiative at Temple Beth El in West Palm Beach, Florida. (Courtesy)
At Beth El, those who participate in Remember a Child think of themselves as having “adopted” a child who was murdered more than eight decades ago. Cheryl Finkelstein, who helmed the project for many years since it launched as a Men’s Club initiative about 40 years ago, said she found those who opted in tended to “take this very seriously” and grow deeply connected to the child they have committed to remembering.
“When I sent one woman a photo of the child she had ‘adopted,’ she wrapped her arms around it and waited until the paper was warm,” Finkelstein recalled. “It breaks your heart.”
The project has gained attention far beyond the synagogue’s walls, and elicited a range of mourning practices that go beyond reciting the traditional prayer.
“We had a number of people who are not Jewish who felt strongly that they wanted to be engaged in this,” Finkelstein added. “One of those women wrote a poem about her ‘child,’ imagining her as a little girl who chased butterflies, living in a world of innocence. And another woman purchased aging software and used it on a photo of the child she had adopted to see what the child would have looked like as an adult.”
Having taken over the initiative from Finkelstein, Susan Bell has sought to gather as much information as she can about roughly 15 of the children whom congregants have “adopted,” starting with a page of testimony assembled by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel.
Ari Rabinovitch, head of Yad Vashem’s international media section, said the names of the children murdered in the Holocaust and for whom there is no one to say Kaddish are kept in the organization’s online names database, which has 587,226 names of children up to and including age 17.
Rabinovitch noted that Yad Vashem has prepared a list of names — both children and adults — with details about them for use in Holocaust name reading ceremonies. “It is not uncommon for groups to access lists of names on their own for memorial services,” he said. But the memorial does not track how they are used, or how many synagogues may have adopted a practice like Beth El’s.
Bell believes at least some have. A Beth El member promoted the project on business trips, she said.
“Several of those synagogues picked it up but I don’t know if any have continued it,” she said. “It takes a toll on you when you do the research and learn what happened to each of these children.”
Menachem Rosensaft, general counsel emeritus to the World Jewish Congress who was born in 1948 to survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, is an outspoken advocate for such a commemoration. He believes every synagogue should incorporate some mention of the Holocaust during Shabbat services, to ensure that its legacy is woven into the ongoing fabric of Jewish life — and he sees the Kaddish for child victims at Beth El as one powerful way to do that.
“It’s important in whatever way to bring into our consciousness that we are not letting it become just another event in Jewish history, just another occurrence, just another tragedy, just another pogrom,” Rosensaft added. “Because if that happens, in another generation the Holocaust will be a statistic and basically a catchphrase for people to throw around.”
As Holocaust memory is increasingly contested in the public sphere and the trauma of the Holocaust is joined by other tragedies for the Jews, Rosensaft’s vision has grown uncertain. But Finkelstein said she knew of at least one case where Remember a Child is likely to have impact into the next generation.
One Beth El congregant who “adopted” a child murdered by the Nazis “put in his will that his son was to say Kaddish for the child after he dies,” she said. “He put the instructions in his safe deposit box so that his son would take them out along with the keys to his house.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Many children killed in the Holocaust had no one to say Kaddish for them. These Jews have stepped up. appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
VIDEO: ’Love was there too:’ A Yom Hashoah commemoration in Yiddish
די פֿאַרגאַנגענע וואָך האָט דער „ייִדישפּיל“־טעאַטער אין תּל־אָבֿיבֿ אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ פֿון אַ „יום־השואה“־אַקאַדעמיע וואָס די טרופּע האָט דורכגעפֿירט אין 2022. די טעמע פֿון דער פּראָגראַם איז געווען מאָמענטן פֿון ליבע בײַ ייִדן אין די געטאָס און קאָנצענטראַציע־לאַגערן.
אינעם ווידעאָ לייענען די אַקטיאָרן פֿאָר זכרונות פֿון לעבן געבליבענע ווי אויך ייִדישע לידער אָנגעשריבן בשעת דעם חורבן. זיי באַשרײַבן ווי אַזוי געליבטע פּאָרלעך האָבן זיך געטראָפֿן בשתּיקה; רירנדיקע מאָמענטן פֿון געזעגענען זיך און ווי די לעבן געבליבענע האָבן זיך באַמיט מיט אַלע כּוחות צו געפֿינען די געליבטע נאָך דער באַפֿרײַונג.
דער ווידעאָ הייבט זיך אָן מיט אַ באַגריסונג פֿונעם תּל־אָבֿיבֿער בירגערמײַסטער, רון חולדאי, אויף העברעיִש, אָבער די פּראָגראַם גופֿא איז אין גאַנצן אויף ייִדיש.
The post VIDEO: ’Love was there too:’ A Yom Hashoah commemoration in Yiddish appeared first on The Forward.