December 4, 2009

The presidents of Costa Rica and Israel, both Nobel Peace Prize winners, celebrated together the anniversary of the partition of Palestine.

President Oscar Arias was hosted by President Shimon Peres at a Nov. 29 luncheon in Jerusalem to celebrate the 62nd anniversary of the fateful United Nations resolution 181 on the partition of Palestine. Peres described his Central American counterpart as “a personal friend and a man of peace.”

Costa Rica was one of the 33 countries that voted “yes” in 1947, and less than a year later, in 1948, was among the first countries to recognize the nascent State of Israel. Until 2006, Costa Rica was one of only two countries, along with El Salvador, that maintained an embassy in Jerusalem, but both eventually yielded to political pressures and joined the other countries that maintain embassies on Israel’s coastal plain.

Both Arias and Peres have authored several books and both are Nobel laureates. Arias was awarded in 1987 in recognition of his work for peace in Central America. Peres, together with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 in recognition of concluding and following up the Oslo Accords.

Peres also commended Costa Rica for having an educational focus rather than a military force.

“The future does not depend on soldiers but on teachers,” he added.

President Arias planted an olive tree at the Grove of Nations overlooking Mount Herzl and Yad Vashem.

“I plant this tree to share the hope of my people in Costa Rica for the Middle East. We will energize its roots, we will dream of its branches, we will dream that the children playing in its shade know harmony and reap peace. It will be a tree of hope,” Arias said.

During the ceremony, Israel’s ambassador to Costa Rica, Ehud Eitan and the Costa Rican minister of external relations, Bruno Stagno read the planter’s prayer in Hebrew and Spanish.

It’s a cliche, OK, so sue me. It was also the first thing for sale when I emerged from the bowels of the Brussels train station, having not eaten since a pathetic hotel breakfast in Copenhagen some hours before. And the Belgian waffles were delicious. It didn’t hurt that the sky was blue, the temperature mild, and I had spent nearly two weeks under the unrelentingly gray skies of Denmark and Poland. For a moment, all was right in the world.

I was in Belgium for two reasons.

The European Center for Jewish Students was hosting its annual Brussels weekend, Party Like a Jew, which attracts young Jews from across Europe for a restful Shabbat followed by a huge Saturday night “ball” at a nearby club. Shabbat attracts 400 people, and the number doubles on Saturday night, as partygoers come by car and train from as far as Paris and London just to party like Jews in the Belgian capital.
After that, it was an hourlong train ride to Antwerp, where I’m going to see how the city’s unique Jewish community is faring in the wake of far-reaching changes to the global diamond trade.

‘Party Like a Jew’
Something felt distinct about PLAJ—and it wasn’t only the intense concentration of impossibly high heels and rectangular eyeglasses in shades that would make Tom Daschle blush.

For one, the event was transnational, drawing participants from dozens of countries (though the UK and France seemed to have the strongest contingent. Represent). Several participants said they came mostly to see friends;  a number dwarfed only by those who said they were looking for their significant other. In New York, one gets the feeling that everyone has been there before.

In Brussels, everyone—or most everyone—seemed genuinely happy, if not relieved, to be in a comfortable Jewish space. In the States, the opposite is often the case: Being in a Jewish space is a necessary evil, to be endured only in the quest—antiquated, ill understood and yet enduringly strong—to find a Jewish mate. But here people were unabashed about their desire to socialize, and more, with other Jews.

On the way to the Saturday night ball, held in the cavernous and terribly named Event Lounge, the boys on the bus, many already well on their way to hammered, broke into spontaneous choruses of “Am Yisrael Chai” and Chasidic melodies. That would neeeeeeevvver happen back home.

Some of this is probably due to cultural differences between American and European Jews that I’m vaguely beginning to understand. And some is probably due to persistent European anti-Semitism, which to my horror I’m fast discovering may be the best predictor of the intensity of Jewish identification in a given country.

Again I heard stories about the fear of openly wearing Jewish symbols in supposedly liberal, democratic Europe, and the security over the weekend was modest but palpable. I swear, the only physical human contact I experienced amid the lip-locked couples on the dance floor Saturday was the near strip search performed on me and my video equipment by the security guys at the door.

Form and function
The Brussels Central Station is so unremarkable you could miss it. Even inside I wasn’t sure I had found the right place.

Two hours later I was in Antwerp, and the difference couldn’t be starker. Four levels of subterranean platforms emerge into a soaring atrium covering a station built in the typical European style. Above an ornate facade, “Antwerpen” is engraved in gold letters, evoking nothing so much as a cathedral of transportation.

I thought, Brussels is function, Antwerp is form. Whole sections of Brussels, the capital of the European Union, are dominated by the soulless, totemic architecture of the nascent European supra-state. Antwerp is the home of something far more passion-inducing: the diamond trade. One is the capital of bureaucracy, the other of romance.

But the metaphor falls away fast. The narrow tributaries around the station drain into the Jewish quarter, a drab hodgepodge of buildings creeping up on tiny sidewalks. Bearded Chasidim scurry about on bicycles, apparently oblivious to the opposition their comrades in Brooklyn mounted to a bike lane through their neighborhood.

Many of Antwerp’s Jews still derive their income from diamonds, but in defiance of the magnificence of the station, their dwellings betray little of the bling they are responsible for polishing and shipping off to adorn the bodies of the wealthy.

The Jewish presence here is palpable. After spending a weekend with young, mostly secular Jews, seeing so many Jews walking the streets without a second thought is an important corrective. Is there anti-Semitism in Europe? Of course. But Antwerp suggests there’s more to it.

This article was adapted from Ben Harris’ blog (blogs.jta.org/wanderingjew).

Some years ago, Benjamin Lubelsky’s son asked him for help fixing his bicycle, a preferred mode of transport here among Jews and gentiles.

Lubelsky, a Bobover Chasid, acquired the necessary parts and soon was fielding requests from neighbors for similar services. Seeing the potential for a business, he acquired training in bicycle mechanics and opened his own shop, Gal Gal—Hebrew for wheel—in the heart of this city’s Jewish quarter.

A generation ago it would have been unheard of for a Jew in Antwerp to get his hands dirty as a mechanic. Jobs in the city’s Jewish-dominated diamond industry were abundant, lucrative and required little training. Upwards of three-quarters of Antwerp Jews relied on them for their livelihoods.

“When I was a child,” Lubelsky said, “most of the Yiddin were in diamonds.”

Those days are a memory now.

Most of the low-skilled diamond cleaving jobs have been shipped off to India and elsewhere. In their wake, international businessmen have gained a foothold in the diamond trade, relieving Jews of their once commanding position in the market.

The change has resulted in an enormous loss of Jewish wealth and vastly enlarged the rolls of Jewish welfare recipients. It also has forced Jews to seek out new means of livelihood—as taxi drivers and shopkeepers, in real estate.

Perhaps most significant, it has brought to a close decades of job security during which virtually anyone could, after a few months of training, acquire work that reliably provided the means to support a vital Jewish life.

“It’s pure Darwinism,” said Alexander Zanzer, director of the Royal Society for Jewish Welfare, commonly known as the Centrale. “The Jewish community has to adapt or die.”

The Darwinian analogy is sounded frequently these days among the Jews of Antwerp, who still rank among the most unique Jewish communities in the world.

Approximately half of the community is Orthodox or Chasidic—an astonishingly high figure by the standards of the Jewish world—and it is among the last in Europe whose members live, work and worship within a defined Jewish quarter in the city center.

The neighborhood has the feel of a modern shtetl.

Black-hatted Chasidim hurry about along narrow lanes, their sidelocks trailing in the wind. Children and adults cycle along Antwerp’s extensive network of bike lanes. Along the Schupstraat, the pedestrian street in the Jewish quarter that is ground zero for the global diamond trade, yarmulke-wearing men cut business deals with partners from around the world.

“Antwerp is the last Jewish ghetto of Europe,” said Shmulie Markowitz, a local travel agent. “Religious or not, everyone speaks heimishe Yiddish. Even by the non-Jews, the code word for closing a deal is ‘mazel.’ “

That kind of insularity was enabled by easy diamond jobs that obviated the need to acquire higher education and even fluency in the local languages.

“Why would they?” asked Rabbi Aharon Kohen, a Belzer Chasid and the spiritual leader of the Moriah synagogue. “They go into diamonds, they make double, triple the amount. There was no good reason to do anything else.”

Today the reasons are mounting.

At the Antwerp Diamond Symposium in November, an annual event that attracts the leading figures of the diamond world, the talk was of a “new normal” for the industry. The global financial crisis is rewriting the rules for a trade that given the particularities of trafficking in precious gems, relies significantly on trust and longtime business relationships.

The symposium once was a lavish affair; former President Bill Clinton was a special guest in 2003. This year’s event, held in the functional confines of a conference center, felt more like an academic conclave. But the changing face of the industry could be read elsewhere, too: in the audience, where a smattering of yarmulkes and black fedoras were swamped by a sea of Indian and Asian businessmen.

“The Jewish community lost its identity with the diamond industry,” said Ari Epstein, the deputy CEO of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre, the industry group that organizes the symposium.

It also lost vast personal fortunes.

According to Zanzer, the community has seen a tenfold loss of wealth that has sent the ranks of Jewish needy soaring. The Centrale is spending some $2.3 million per year to support more than 700 Jewish families—up from 100 families a decade ago.

“We have seen the poverty go up exponentially over the last five years,” Zanzer said.

The numbers only tell part of the story. In the past, families may have needed temporary assistance to manage tough times. Today they need help keeping their children fed.

“The gravity is totally different,” Zanzer said.

Beyond the rising poverty statistics, a shifting economic landscape is likely to effect deeper psychic changes among the Jews of Antwerp.

Moving into other professions will require training and interactions with wider Belgian society that mostly had been unnecessary. It also may provide the final impetus for those who have long chafed at the community’s conservatism to seek new opportunities abroad.

“I’m fed up being the only religious Jew that goes into a bar,” said Barry Mellinger, a marketing executive hoping to relocate to New York.

People will have to adapt, Epstein said.

“The recycling from the diamond business to other businesses is a transition which is very painful,” he said. “It was easy money. It was a good living. It was security. You knew when you were born what you were going to do.”

That kind of security was particularly appealing for the more religious elements of a community that skews toward the traditional, enabling them to lead lives marked by minimal interaction with the wider world. For the same reasons, the fervently Orthodox from New York to Tel Aviv have gone into the diamond trade.

“It’s not a problem of the Antwerp diamond community,” Epstein said. “It’s a question of how do religious people make a living in today’s world. That is the question.”