Small step for the court, large step for converts
The ultra-Orthodox monopoly in Israel regularly generates injustice in the lives of the country’s citizens. One example among many is the harm it causes to the freedom of religion and the freedom of choice of Israelis who cannot marry in Israel or are forced to marry in a way that does not reflect their beliefs or their lifestyle. Attempts by ultra-Orthodox leaders to extend this monopoly to conversion affects a smaller number of Israelis, but brings this injustice to an absurd height. The sages already said that “there is no joy like the resolution of doubts,” and thus the Supreme Court’s decree removed one additional stone from the wall of the monopoly and granted justice to converts.
The Law of Return is one of the central pillars of the State of Israel, which determines that among those who converted are eligible to make aliyah, the law doesn’t exclude any type of conversion. Since most Jews around the world belong to the progressive movements, it is natural that a large number of those who choose to tie their fate to the Jewish people in the Diaspora would convert through the progressive movements.
Despite the clear definition in the law, the ultra-Orthodox monopoly seeks to expand and intensify its control: the Chief Rabbinate’s rabbinical court for conversion uses the conversion process to try to impose an Orthodox lifestyle on converts, secular adoptive parents who convert their children are required to send their children to the Orthodox school system, converts are required to be Sabbath observant and other ridiculous demands that are contrary to democratic principles. Thus, in reality, many converts begin their Jewish lives with a lie to the rabbinical court with the hope, which often fails, that they can uphold the required Orthodox standard. In this way, as in many other ways, the monopoly distances Jews from Judaism.
The Reform Movement believes that there is more than one way to be Jewish. It is a great privilege for us to guide and assist converts as they join our people. At the rabbinical court, converts express
their identity and their commitment to Judaism in a variety of ways. After long and comprehensive study, each convert brings their belief, their deep and authentic connection to Judaism, and their desire to join the Jewish people to the rabbinical court. Converts describe their connection to holidays and life cycle events, how they decide to observe Shabbat and the religious texts to which they feel a connection.
Since the 1980s, there has been a legal battle for the State of Israel’s recognition of Reform and Conservative converts. This battle has been accompanied by political storms, and by difficult and dramatic crises with Diaspora Jewry, which emphasize the widening rift between Israel and world Jewry. The stance of the state over the years has been characterized
by intimidation and fake news about the mass conversion of asylum seekers and migrant workers, and disregard for the Reform and Conservative movement’s conversion process.
Following repeated Supreme Court decisions for the recognition of Reform and Conservative conversions performed outside of Israel (1989), conversions performed in Israel for the purposes of registering as Jewish (2002) and of private Orthodox conversions performed in Israel (2016), the most recent ruling on this topic was issued this month. The ruling concerns a small and weak group of converts (people who are not citizens of the State of Israel but converted in Israel), and determines that they – like other Reform and Conservative converts from outside Israel – are eligible for aliyah and
Israeli citizenship. This decision changes the reality, and grants citizenship to dozens of petitioners, all Jews by choice who have been waiting upwards of 15 years on a grueling and sometimes humiliating journey, that the State of Israel will recognize their Judaism.
This victory, although symbolic, finally ends the court discussion on conversion in Israel and establishes the decision made decades ago that there is more than one way to convert. This decision can serve as the first step in healing the rift between Israel and Diaspora Jewry on conversion, and is an additional step toward dismantling the corrupt and harmful ultra-Orthodox monopoly in Israel.
the jerusalem post
on january 27th, 2020, in his speech during the ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of the liberation of auschwitz, 94-year-old marian turski, poland’s best known living holocaust survivor and – like many survivors in their own countries, states or cities – the moral conscience of poland’s jewish community, spoke these chilling words:
“auschwitz did not fall from the sky. It began with small forms of persecution of jews. It happened; it means it can happen anywhere. that is why human rights and democratic constitutions must be defended. the eleventh commandment is important: don’t be indifferent. do not be indifferent when you see historical lies. do not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated against. do not be indifferent when power violates a social contract.”
We all know at least one survivor; we either grew up with her in our home, perhaps she was our grandmother (or mother), or at the very least we encountered them in our community at various stages. We, the next generations, have been privileged to meet these remarkable individuals and have tried to make sure they are taken care of in our family, our synagogues, our community centers. But as a society we must ask ourselves one question: have we done enough?
have we treated this heroic, aging community with the respect it deserves, with the support it urgently needs? sadly, we have all heard of tragic stories where these courageous personalities ended their lives destitute, lonely or simply in anonymity. shockingly, inexcusably, there are reports of more than 100,000 holocaust survivors living in poverty.
We can do better. the jewish community in Israel and the diaspora understood the enormity of the holocaust and that there needed to be a shift in our lives as a reaction to this loss – at the very least, a day. eventually two would be added to memorialize european jewry, and the six million jews, among them oneand-a-half million children; the horrors of auschwitz/Birkenau, Belzec, majdanek, chelmno and the tens of other camps.
holocaust remembrance day and International holocaust remembrance day are fitting memorials to those cherished souls, focusing on the lives, families and communities that were murdered and destroyed, with the goal of educating all to the dangers of prejudice, hatred and intolerance and where, unchecked, they can lead.
But these days are mainly directed at the tragedy. What about the survivors? What about their uncanny capacity to live on,
their intensely jewish attitude of life affirmation, their superhuman strength to engage in what holocaust survivor and academy award Winner Gerda Klein called “a boring evening at home”? they were able to do this while always keeping the monsters hidden inside their consciousness.
For holocaust survivors, the survival of the jewish people became paramount. to them, and by example to so many of us, the ultimate lesson of jewish history and jewish memory must be about affirming life and not about dwelling on death and loss no matter how pervasive they may be.
surVIVors eXemplIFy resilience. most have refused to let their victimization define who they are and what they sought to become as they rebuilt their lives. many journeyed from the lands of their birth to countries that offered freedom and opportunity, a different path, a new kind of hope, and they cherished their freedom in ways that those who had been deprived of it could not. many became quite successful in creating new families, finding joy and prosperity due to hard work, perseverance and luck; others, however, were not as lucky. they are often nameless, faceless, living alone, barely able to make ends meet. they still need our help. there are numerous organizations doing significant work caring for holocaust survivors, and we applaud them. the claims
conference has created an International holocaust survivors night during hanukkah, where survivors are honored at a beautiful menorah-lighting ceremony at the Western Wall as well as other satellite ceremonies around the world. Initiatives such as theirs are a valuable and meaningful step in the right direction; yet we must step up as a people and wholeheartedly commit to doing all we can for the survivors.
What if we instituted a special day dedicated to these unique souls? a global day in which each community would recognize those survivors living amongst them and find ways to enhance their lives? a day of lectures, symposia, and multi-generational experiences when these heroes can pass on their message of hope and resilience to the next generation as well as an opportunity to simply honor those tender souls who have withstood the worst humankind is capable of?
they deserve a day of joy, a day of celebration; not a day to share with condemnation of the nazis, but a day to celebrate their lives they built in response to the holocaust, to celebrate what they have given and continue to give us: a day for them and a day for us.
historians can answer the question how; theologians, writers, poets and philosophers have not answered the question why. yet survivors have taught us how to answer the question of what to do with this catastrophic history.
embrace it, study it, wrestle with it, teach it to your children and theirs and ultimately transform it into a weapon for the human spirit to enlarge our sense of responsibility, to alleviate human suffering and strengthen our moral resolve. holocaust survivors represent the best in all of us, the best of the human spirit. they are our treasure and our light and we must shine that light into every dark corner of our world.
It is for this reason that we must honor them with a day of their own.
We call on the world to join us and celebrate the inaugural holocaust survivor day on june 26th, marian turski’s 95th birthday. Holocaustsurvivorday.com Michael Berenbaum is a professor of Jewish studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. He has been working with survivors for 40 years, first as project director overseeing the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and later as president and CEO of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
Jonathan Ornstein is the founding executive director of JCC Krakow, an organization devoted to caring for local Holocaust survivors and rebuilding Jewish life in Krakow. He is a board member of the Krakow Association of Child Survivors of the Holocaust. A native New Yorker, Jonathan immigrated to Israel and served in an IDF combat unit before moving to Poland in 2001.
Members of the International Women’s Club will one morning this week congregate at the residence of Thai Ambassador Pannabha Chandraramya to watch a cooking demonstration by the ambassador’s chef and to try their own hands at Thai cuisine. Anyone who has sampled traditional Thai dishes at Thai food festivals or at some of the Thai restaurants in the country, and has been itching to try making some of those culinary delights at home, will now have the opportunity if they belong to the IWC.
They will also learn about authentic Thai ingredients, most of which are available in Asian food shops in different parts of Israel, but primarily in Tel Aviv. The IWC supports various charities, and proceeds from this event will go to No2Violence, a help organization available to women who suffer from domestic violence.
■ WHILE STILL on the subject of food, Adi Strauss, chairman of the Friends of the IDF Disabled Veterans; Edan Kleiman, chairman of the IDF Disabled Veterans Association, and Eran Weintrob, CEO of Latet – a humanitarian aid organization – have joined forces to package and distribute food parcels to needy disabled veterans and their families in time for Passover.
The escalation of unemployment and unpaid leave from work during the worst of the coronavirus period has led to a substantial increase in the number of needy families and individuals, including among disabled army veterans.
“Only when we see the huge stack of boxes of food items do we begin to understand the magnitude of what we’re doing,” said Kleiman.
If someone is in need, regardless of his social status or religious or ethnic background, he must be helped, and if he’s an army veteran, even more so, said Strauss.
One of the important core values of Latet, said Weintrob, is to give help universally and equally to all sectors of Israeli society. Latet has witnessed an increase in domestic tensions and a change of status resulting from the economic crisis. People who used to donate to worthy causes, are now on the receiving end of charity, and some find it humiliating to have to ask for help for the first time in their lives. Army veterans are among the first time applicants for food parcels and other assistance, he said.
■ WHEN LIFE deals you a lemon, make lemonade, goes the sage piece of advice. It didn’t quite work out that way for pastry chef Vered Lifshitz, who worked for many years as a coordinator of community resources. According to a story that appeared last week in Yediot Aharonot, Lifshitz left her job as a pastry chef just before the outbreak of the pandemic and then discovered that even if she wanted to work there were very few jobs, if any, in her field. With time on her hands, and her skills as a pastry chef intact, she decided to keep baking, but not from a commercial standpoint. Her aim was to give a treat to the homeless who would rarely if ever, spend what little money they had on the luxury of a cake, or even a Danish pastry.
Initially, she started working with an organization that has a van that is driven around the streets of south Tel Aviv. Whoever accompanied the driver distributed sandwiches to homeless and hungry people on the streets. Lifshitz thought it was sad that their diet consisted solely of sandwiches, and set about supplementing it with cake to sweeten their lives.
More than that, she created mouthwatering desserts of the kind served in restaurants and brought them to the homeless, for whom this was a real luxury. Lifshitz took it a step further by giving the homeless choices from a range of desserts with which she tours south Tel Aviv every week. Aside from anything else, the sweet desserts reduce the need for drug addicts to indulge their habit. The street people have learned to appreciate the quality of her desserts, and eagerly await her arrival. Now Lifshitz is ready to take the next step. She has taken the initiative to work on a food track project whereby people at risk will learn how to operate a commercial kitchen. The work will contribute to their rehabilitation and their ability to find a job in a restaurant a hotel, a hospital kitchen or a factory with a cafeteria.
Good deeds day, which is part of a global effort, and this year takes place on April 11, was launched in
Israel in 2007 with 7,000 participants. Now, there are in excess of two million participants, just looking for an opportunity to do something by way of a good deed for someone. For Lifshitz, good deed day is every day.
■ ONE OF the most heart-warming stories about South Africa’s Jewish community, goes back more than 100 years to the 1918-1919 civil war raging across Poland, Galica, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine – areas in which most South African Jews or their parents had been born. Many had come to South Africa, leaving their parents and other family members behind. Communication in that period was not what it is today and the Jews of South Africa worried about may have become of their close relatives, and hungered for news. Thousands of Jews had died or been killed on the battlefields, and even more had been displaced.
Of the survivors, many died in the famine of 1919 and others of the severe influenza epidemic that continued well into 1920. Bits and pieces of news filtered through to South Africa, but not enough to quell the anxieties of those who had no word from their families.
Equally disturbing was the news that literally tens of thousands of Jewish children had been orphaned. The estimate of the American Joint Distribution Committee was that the numbers ranged between 30,000 and 40,000.
South African Jews acted spontaneously. Isaac Ochberg, who was among the leaders of the Capetown Jewish community, got in touch with the Federation of Ukrainian Jews in London to ask how South Africa could help. He also contacted Jan Smuts, who was then prime minister of South Africa, and asked whether some of these children could be brought to South Africa and hopefully adopted. Smuts was amenable on condition that none of the children suffered from physical or mental disabilities, were no older than 16, and had lost both parents. The number permitted was 200 and an orphan fund was set up to pay for the costs involved. It was such a humane enterprise that even non-Jews contributed to the fund.
Moreover, the South African government provided matching funds to the amount raised. The other condition stipulated by Smuts was
that these children would be solely the responsibility of the South African Jewish community.
In March 1921, Ochberg who was originally from Ukraine, traveled via London to Eastern Europe, visiting synagogues where large groups of orphan children had gathered. Selecting children to take to South Africa was a heartbreaking task because there were so many whom he could not take and whose future remained uncertain. In the final analysis, he took 187 children to South Africa.
The journey, by truck and ship, with stops on the way, was not without hazard, and took several weeks, but eventually Ochberg and his orphans arrived to a tumultuous welcome. The children had grown to love Ochberg and called him Daddy. Initially they were placed in the Jewish orphanage, but before long each had a new family and a new home, and grew up to become productive citizens.
In 2011, members of Ochberg’s family, along with descendants of his orphans, plus a large representation of the South African community in Israel, came together in Megiddo for the grand opening of the Ochberg Memorial Park and Promenade. The coronavirus pandemic has prevented another such gathering for the centenary celebration commemorating the warmth with which South African Jewry took in Ochberg’s orphans. But they will at least come together for a live webinar reunion on March 14, at 7 p.m. Israel and South African time. The event will also be broadcast to the US, the UK and Australia where there are large pockets of South African Jewish communities. Isaac Ochberg Heritage Committees for the event were established in Israel and South Africa. Members of
the Israel committee include Peter Bailey, Joel Klotnick, Rob Hyde, Ian Rogow, Benny Penzik, Hertzel Katz and Leon Segal. Registration for the webinar is at http://bit.ly/ sajr82 and further information is available by contacting hildav@ gmail.com
■ THE CURTAIN went up again on Jerusalem’s Khan Theater on February 23, and President Reuven Rivlin – a former board member of the theater’s directorate – was all set to attend after not having seen a play for more than a year. But then at the last minute, he learned that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to make an appearance, and fearing that Netanyahu might make a political statement, Rivlin canceled. But he is compensating himself on the eve of International Women’s Day by turning the President’s Residence into a theater for one night only on March 7. In a joint Habimah Theater and Haifa Theater production, “Women Create Israeli Theater.” Rivlin will have a closer than usual front row seat for a musical event of songs written by women and sung by women. Performers will include Sandra Sade, Ruby Porat-Shoval, Miki Kam and Roni Dalumi, who collectively represent the diversity in Israel’s demographic mosaic. Sade was born in Romania, Porat-Shoval in Morocco, Kam on Kibbutz Manara near the Lebanese border and Dalumi in Omer, near Beersheba. Although the public will not be included in the live audience at the President’s Residence, anyone who wants to see the show can do so. It will be broadcast on the president’s social media platforms at 5:30 p.m.
■ WHILE INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day is primarily a celebration of women attaining rights that to a large extent were not available to them as recently as a century ago, there is also a downside. Women have broken through the glass ceiling in many areas of endeavor, but there are still various professions in which women continue to strive for equality. Although women in general enjoy a far greater degree of independence than did their great grandmothers, they are still subjected to sexual harassment and violence, a theme that will come up at many International Women’s Day events in Israel this week. The urgent need to deal with domestic violence has been prompted by the fact that more than 25 women have been murdered by a spouse, partner or family member over the past 18 months, coupled with the high incidence of rape and pedophilia. In the latter case, both boys and girls are victims – but girls more so. The woman who has worked tirelessly to promote awareness in these areas, and who has advocated for education and therapy with a view to protecting women and children from such dangers, is Lili Ben Ami, who has received an award for her efforts from the Israel Marketing Association. Ben Ami is the sister of Michal Sela who was stabbed to death by her husband, Eliran Malul, in October 2019. Ben Ami founded the Michal Sela Forum in her sister’s memory.
The purpose of the forum is to recognize domestic abuse and violence, and to provide necessary help in order to save lives. The forum works closely with women’s organizations and with staff in women’s shelters. Ben Ami is frequently interviewed on radio and television, and has also appeared at Knesset committee meetings.