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Jewish Journal

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October 14, 2004

Other People’s Problems

Leave a Comment / Elections, Politics, Power, Rob Eshman, United States, Worldwide /

If it wasn’t for the fact that America can’t chew gum and hold an election at the same time, politicians and the media would have been buzzing about what happened this week in Israel. Well, what happened? Dov Weisglass, a senior aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that Israel’s planned unilateral pullout from Gaza will put an end to new negotiations with the Palestinians.

“Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda,” he said.

In other words, that “road map” that President Bush has promoted as the singular initiative of his Israeli-Palestinian policy — forget about it.

“Dov Weisglass explained very nicely that Sharon is implementing the disengagement plan to ensure that a final, wider peace deal goes to hell,” opined Ha’aretz columnist Gideon Samet.

But did the diplomat mean exactly what he said? An American Jewish activist who opposes the prime minister’s Gaza pullout suggested to me that the Weisglass statement was a sop to the hard right. Lull your right wing into believing the withdrawal will concretize their dream of Greater Israel, suggested Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, and perhaps they will go along with it.

Then again, Weisglass might have meant it. The Gaza withdrawal and the separation barrier on the West Bank would create a de facto Palestinian territory whose configurations would render viable statehood impossible.

This solution is brilliant except for one small fact: it won’t solve the problem.

This point was made abundantly clear in a presentation retired Israeli Adm. Ami Ayalon gave last month to members of the Pacific Council on International Policy here in Los Angeles.

The problem, Ayalon reminded the group, is that between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, the Arab population will shortly outnumber the Jewish population. Sharon’s maneuvering doesn’t create a peaceful settlement between two viable states, but an imposed arrangement by one state on a hostile population. If that population demands one person, one vote — Israel is a democracy after all — the Jewish state is finished.

“Time is running out on the window of opportunity,” Ayalon said. “In a few short years, the two-state option will not exist anymore, because of demography, and violence will prevail. If we don’t withdraw, we will have to choose between Jewish apartheid and transfer.”

Ayalon is compact and muscular with a tough, impatient manner. That is to say, he is Israeli. He spent 34 years in the Israeli navy, rising to commander-in-chief, and four years as director of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service. Last year he joined with the Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh to found the People’s Voice Initiative, a grass-roots campaign for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

The initiative, according to Ayalon, has gathered 150,000 Palestinian and 200,000 Israeli signatures on a simple six-point document that outlines a two-state solution (www.mifkad.org.il/en/).

“During the 12 months before the intifada broke out in 1999, we enjoyed security,” Ayalon said. “Only one Israeli was killed as a result of terror, whereas we have lost over 1,000 Israeli lives during the last three years. What was the reason for the collapse of security? It was not because the Shin Bet was better when I was in charge.”

Israel’s security is better now, in fact. What has changed became clear to Ayalon in a conversation with a Palestinian psychologist.

“He told me the Palestinians have won,” Ayalon said. “I asked him, how come? Are you crazy? You’ve lost so many people, you are losing your freedom, you are losing your dreams. He said, ‘Ami, you don’t understand us. Victory for us means seeing you suffer. And as long as we shall suffer, you will suffer. Finally, after 55 years, we are not the only ones who suffer in the Middle East, and this is victory for us.’ For me, this was something new that I had not previously understood. As long as the Palestinians don’t have hope, we shall not have security.”

Ayalon dismissed the idea that withdrawal and a fence alone could protect Israel — the very idea that Weisglass floated this week.

“In the long-run it will not give us the security we expect,” he told the Council. “They will dig tunnels, fire rockets and later missiles. It will only postpone conflict.”

The conflict has spawned a cottage industry in peace initiatives over the past years, from Geneva to Hollywood. Ayalon believes The People’s Voice to be the most realistic, simply because of its founders’ credentials, and the popular support the petition has garnered.

Still, several of the Council members around the table were skeptical that Yasser Arafat was any more a partner for peace now than he was during Oslo.

“Arafat is not a partner,” countered Ayalon, with refreshing non-peacenik bluntness. “But there are Palestinians who are pragmatic enough. If Palestinians on the street adopt it, this will give [leaders] permission to accept. Our leaders have become followers.”

Now Israel’s leader has begun to initiate what looked like thoughtful measures to reduce terror and increase the chances of a negotiated settlement. If these measures turn out to be the end of the road, not the beginning, Ayalon’s predictions may very well come true, and the present conflict will become the nightmare of yet another generation.

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Lenin, Meet Noah

Leave a Comment / Education, Judaism, Opinion, Torah, Wandering Jew, Worldwide /

Fall was just beginning to turn the Moscow air crispy when the lot of us — 10 high school seniors and three faculty members of Yeshiva University Los Angeles Girls’ School — trudged down the stairs of our Intourist Hotel in the late ’80s, and began our walk of several miles, not to the better-known Chabad Lubavitch Synagogue or to the Moscow Choral Synagogue, but to another shul in the city’s north.

Marina Roscha was discreetly tucked away, just out of view from the street it shared with a major hospital. Its old frame building was as unobtrusive as its beginnings. It had been built in those first few years of post-Revolution confusion, when it was still possible to act without Big Brother noticing. (Although it had withstood decades of Communist rule, it was firebombed — twice — since our visit, and only recently rebuilt as a Jewish community center.)

The minimum mandatory age for the local attendees appeared to be 85. Besides us, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, the famed Israeli thinker, davened there that Shabbat morning. After services, many of the men gathered around a table to study Mishnah. The class had invited Steinsaltz to speak, so I listened in as he addressed them in Yiddish.

“Yidden, this morning we read the portion about Noah. Do you know what the lesson of this portion is in a nutshell?” Not waiting for a response, he continued: “There are two lessons. One is that it is possible that a person can wake up and find that the entire world has gone mad, that he is the last sane person to survive. Two is what you should do when this happens.

“Let me tell you a story. After World War II, I returned to Paris to look for family. The last thing I expected to find was a shul to pray in on Shabbat. In fact, there was such a shul, and I joined a handful of old, broken survivors for davening. Ten years later, I returned, and sought out the same shul. Certainly, I thought, all the old ones would have passed on, and the shul would have closed. Instead, I found more people than a decade before. There were some middle-aged people, and even a few children.

“Another decade or so passed. How delighted I was to find that the shul was now bustling with people of all ages, with children running everywhere.

“A week ago, I visited again, and found fewer congregants than before. They told me that the shul had become so big that it had spawned two breakaway shuls, and siphoned off many people! Those few beaten-down survivors had succeeded in creating a vital community!”

He looked hard at the faces of the men who had known nothing but communist oppression for the last 70 years.

“What do you do when you are the only sane person left, when there is nothing but madness around?” he asked. “You keep to your principles. You keep doing what you know God wants you to do. You may discover one day that you have triumphed, and single-handedly rebuilt a better new world.”

Although these old men were hardened by adversity, there was hardly a dry eye among them. They recognized the message as the summation of their lives. To Lenin goes much of the “credit” for inventing state-controlled terror as an instrument of imposing the government’s will. Individuals simply did not matter. And religion had to be crushed to make way for more progressive ideas.

Many of us find ourselves crushed under the weight of a world burdened with a new variety of madness. At the same time, the principles and practices that offered Jews dignity and purpose in other stormy times are often attacked as outdated and insufficiently progressive.

Noah showed that tenaciously clinging to the truth can be profoundly lonely, but crucially effective. Ultimately, he got the best of Lenin. It just took a while to find out.

This column originally appeared in The Journal on Oct. 19, 2001.

Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein directs Project Next Step for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and holds the Sydney M. Irmas Chair in Jewish law and ethics at Loyola Law School.

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Briefs

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film, News, United States, Worldwide /

Christopher Reeve, ‘Superman’ Star and Hero in Israel, Dies

With his death Sunday night, actor Christopher Reeve of “Superman” fame ended his valiant fight against paralysis at the age of 52.

Reeve, who became a hero to Israelis during a visit last year, fell into a coma at his New York home after going into cardiac arrest Saturday night and never regained consciousness.

After starring in four “Superman” blockbuster movies in the 1970s and ’80s, Reeve was paralyzed from the neck down in a horse riding accident in 1995. Refusing to give in, Reeve became a powerful advocate and fundraiser for medical research to aid the disabled.

His courage found a special echo in Israel, when he undertook a five-day visit to Israeli hospitals and research centers in late July and early August last year.

Coming at a time when most American celebrities avoided trips to Israel, Reeve’s visit raised the spirit of the country, especially among thousands injured and paralyzed in terrorist attacks.

“Israel is one of the leading countries in the world that is most progressive and the most compassionate about people like us,” he told injured and paralyzed patients at Tel Hashomer hospital, The Jewish Journal’s Gaby Wenig reported from Israel at the time.

Reeve’s trip to Israel was in response to an invitation by Yuval Rotem, then Israel’s consul general in Los Angeles, and was sponsored by The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and private Hollywood donors. – Tom Tugend, Contributing Editor

Lawyer Battling ADL on Christian Quote at Courthouse

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is being sued by a Christian lawyer seeking to stop its efforts to cover up a Christian quote on a wall in a Riverside County Superior Court.

Temecula attorney Richard D. Ackerman’s Oct. 1 lawsuit against the ADL, Riverside County and Riverside County Presiding Judge Douglas Miller temporarily has stopped plans to cover over Theodore Roosevelt’s quote – “The true Christian is the true citizen” – with a mahogany panel while court is in session. The quote is engraved on a courtroom wall at the century-old landmark courthouse in Riverside.

“If it [the Roosevelt quote] was in the negative, I would agree [to cover it up],” said Ackerman, who attends an Assembly of God church and runs the conservative, Christian-oriented Pro-Family Law Center. “But this happens to be a presidential quote affirming his particular world view among other presidential views.”

In July, the ADL’s Pacific Southwest office in Los Angeles received a complaint about the quote. An Oct. 5 letter sent by the ADL to its members stated, “Because the quote is presented outside of the context in which the quotation was delivered and continues to appear on the wall of a public courthouse in 2004, we were concerned that it could be seen as an express endorsement by the government of Christianity.”

It is one of several presidential wall quotes, with Roosevelt’s words excerpted from a 1900 speech he made at a YMCA convention when he was New York’s governor. Ackerman said the quote has been on the courthouse wall for decades, “with little or no dispute,” and that the ADL has not criticized as exclusionary the smaller county courthouse in Temecula and its photo collage, including a photo of Orthodox Jews – “it doesn’t show Reform Jews” – or Thomas Jefferson’s quote, “The God who gave us liberty gave us life,” being in the same courtroom as the Roosevelt quote.

The ADL declined comment on the lawsuit. After a Sept. 1 meeting with ADL officials, Miller on Sept. 29 agreed to cover over the quote. Two days later, Ackerman’s lawsuit prompted county officials to suspend those plans until a resolution of the case, which last week was moved to a San Bernardino County courtroom in Rancho Cucamonga, because Miller recused all Riverside County judges from hearing the case. No court date has been set.

Ackerman filed the lawsuit in state court, because he believed any ADL lawsuit would be filed in federal court, and that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has a liberal reputation often at odds with conservative litigators. – David Finnigan, Contributing Writer

Congress Passes Bill on Monitoring Anti-Semitism

Californians were instrumental in Congress’ passing a bill to create a State Department office to monitor international anti-Semitism.

The bill, known as the Global Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (H.R. 4230), was introduced by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) in response to the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe and the Middle East.

The act, which awaits President Bush’s approval, requires the State Department to create an office to monitor and combat anti-Semitism and to file a report on anti-Semitic incidents around the world. The State Department also would be required to include information about anti-Semitic acts in its annual reports on human rights practices and international religious freedom.

Of the 108 signatories on a letter in support of the bill, were three prominent Southern Californians: professor Michael Berenbaum of the University of Judaism; Pierre Sauvage, president of the Chambon Foundation; and Dr. John Eibner of Christian Solidarity International in Westlake Village.

The State Department opposed the legislation, suggesting it would show favoritism toward the Jewish community in human rights reporting. – Staff Report

Two Conferences to Focus on Anti-Semitism Issues

Dueling conversations on anti-Semitism will take place at the University of Judaism in Bel Air and at Pasadena’s Fuller Theological Seminary.

Fuller will host an Oct. 18 evening dialogue on anti-Semitism between Rabbi Elliot Dorff, University of Judaism rector, and Richard Mouw, Fuller president.

The Fuller event is scheduled one year after the Protestant seminary hosted an all-day, Palestinian-driven “Peacemaking in the Middle East” conference for about 200 mainline Protestants. The conference had Palestinian flags, buttons and literature but no Israeli-branded items.

Some Fuller students were concerned enough about the event’s heavy Palestinian emphasis to host a separate screening of a pro-Israel film that same day.

Mouw said Monday night’s event was arranged partly because “many of us have been critical of some of the policies of the present Israeli government, and this is legitimate. But it is also important that we distinguish between legitimate political critique and a hatred of Jews.”

At the University of Judaism, Holocaust scholar and museum consultant Michael Berenbaum will host “Anti-Semitism and the Contemporary Jewish Condition” running Sunday through Tuesday.

The gathering will feature about 20 speakers, including several staffers from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Auschwitz survivor and “Schindler’s List” producer Branko Lustig and Commentary magazine senior editor Gabriel Schoenfeld. Topics will include Hollywood’s Holocaust imagery and the question, “Is there a ‘New’ Anti-Semitism?”

For more information on the free events go to www.fuller.edu. For more information on the UJ conference,visit www.uj.edu. Organizers ask people to preregister for each event by calling (310) 440-1534 or e-mailing rsmall@uj.edu.

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Local Team Solves Ancient Mystery

Leave a Comment / Community, Israel, Opinion, Science & Technology, Worldwide /

In 1979 two tiny pieces of cracked and deteriorated silver found in a tomb outside of the Old City of Jerusalem proved to be one of the most important archeological discoveries of the century.

The silver strips had Hebrew writing on them — albeit a very different-looking Hebrew to the one we know today — and the words spelled out the priestly blessing: “May the Lord bless you and guard you. May the Lord make his countenance shine on you and be gracious to you. May the Lord turn his countenance to you and grant you peace.”

The strips, which were initially dated from the seventh or sixth century B.C.E., contained the earliest known citation of a text that is also found in the Bible (in this case, Numbers 6: 24-26).

But for years, researchers doubted whether the “Ketef Hinnom amulets” — named for the place where they were discovered — were actually from that period, which would make them 400 years older than the Dead Sea Scrolls. They believed that the silver strips could have been written not in an archaic script, but an archaistic script — in other words, written in a way that made them look older than they actually were. The rest of the writing on the strips had corroded away with the silver, so scholars couldn’t read it clearly. And they weren’t even sure if the strips were amulets, which were usually worn as a sort of spiritual protection, or something else. Those scholars dated the silver as coming from the third or fourth century B.C.E. If that were the case, the strips would have been a less-important discovery in establishing the ancientness of the Bible’s language.

Recently, a team of Southern California researchers from the USC School of Religion-affiliated West Semitic Research Project (WSRP), an organization that photographs ancient artifacts so that scholars all over the world can study them, rephotographed the amulets using innovative lighting techniques that revealed more of the writing on them. Then, using computer imagery to analyze the writing on the strips and compare it with other writings of the period, proved that they are archaic, not archaistic, and the oldest-known citation of a biblical text. The scholars dated the strips as coming from the period just before the destruction of the first temple in 586 B.C.E., reestablishing the strips as, in words of one scholar, the “heavyweight champions of the [archeological] world.”

“We initially tried to photograph the objects conventionally, but it was clear that it was not going to work,” said Dr. Bruce Zuckerman, a professor of Semitic languages at USC, who is the project leader at WSRP.

Zuckerman explained that markings on the amulets were too small too be decipherable to the naked eye, which is why many photographs taken from different angles were needed to properly study them.

“We took picture in contrasting lights, then we would match them and superimpose them one on top of the other,” he said, referring to the way that some of the letters were visible from one angle, but not from another.

Zuckerman and his colleagues, Dr. Marilyn Lundberg of the WSRP and Dr. Andrew Vaughn, a biblical historian at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, also used a computer imaging technique they called “patching,” which took a piece of the writing that had been misaligned by the cracked silver and “patched” it into the place it was meant to be. They also studied similar writings from the period, which enabled them to recognize letters that were no longer whole, due to the age of the silver.

The team was able to decipher the preamble to the priestly blessing on the amulets, which read: “May he [or she] be blessed by God, the rescuer and the rebuker of evil.”

“It tells you without question that you are dealing with an amulet,” Zuckerman said. “And we were able to do a close comparison with equivalent inscriptions from that period and from the later periods. Basically, we believe that we decisively proved that what had originally been proposed was correct, these are the earliest citation of a biblical text. It reestablishes them as the heavyweight champions of the world.”

The scholars also worked with Dr. Gabriel Barkay, the archeologist at Bar Ilan University in Israel who discovered the amulets. Together they published their research in a CD form, in The Bulletin of American Schools of Oriental Research. Academic articles are traditionally published in paper journals, but the CD, which was published with the assistance of the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC, enabled the scholars to publish the photographs they took, as well as the digital imaging techniques, so that other scholars could assess them.

“It is really important to me that our common Jewish heritage is more fully explored — and when I say our common Jewish heritage, I don’t mean just for Jews,” Zuckerman said. “The Jewish heritage lies at the base of the great religions, and when one makes a small discovery like this, we’re doing something to further clarify the origins of the great religions.”

For more information on the project, visit www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/wsrp.

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