fbpx

GET HOME DELIVERY! CLICK HERE »

ADVERTISE
pick up locations
HOME DELIVERY
donate

Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

July 8, 2014

After unity and then calls for revenge, Israelis look inward for answers

Leave a Comment / Israel /

For many Israelis, eyes are turning south watching yet another conflict unfold with Hamas. Yet thoughts are also turned inward, contemplating the sense of national solidarity occasioned by the abduction and murder of three teenagers and then shattered by the murder of a fourth.

The Israeli media — the social and conventional varieties — have exploded in recent days with recrimination and self-recrimination over the brutal murder of Muhammad Abu Khdeir, the Palestinian teenager from eastern Jerusalem who was burned alive last week. The killing was apparent retaliation for the murders of three Israeli teens — Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach — who were kidnapped while hitchhiking.

“A national struggle does not justify acts of terror,” the outgoing and incoming Israeli presidents, Shimon Peres and Reuven Rivlin, wrote Monday in a joint Op-Ed for the Israeli daily Yediot Acharonot.

“Acts of terror do not justify revenge,” they wrote. “Revenge does not justify destruction, plunder and desolation. Even in the face of the rage and frustration, the violence and the pain, things can be done differently. Things must be done differently.”

Israeli police said three Jewish youths have confessed to the Khdeir murder and three others are in custody.

Leeat Granek, a grief specialist at Ben-Gurion University’s public health department, said public displays of grief can be used to bring nations together as well as to stoke rage. In the wake of the murder of the three Israelis, both phenomena were evident in the rallying around the parents of the murdered teenagers and then in the calls for revenge.

“There was a kind of unification of the country that came together with the grieving, prayer circles,” she said. “In some ways that grief can be used to bring the country together, it can be used to escalate anger, rage.”

Yoaz Hendel, a former director of public diplomacy in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office who now heads the right-wing Institute for Zionist Strategies think tank, wrote a widely discussed Facebook post in the immediate aftermath of Khdeir’s murder, before any suspects had been apprehended. In the posting, Hendel railed against Jewish rioters inflamed by the killings of the Israeli teens who had attacked Arabs in downtown Jerusalem.

“It is unbelievable how a few hundred racist Jews can cause so much damage to an entire country,” Hendel wrote in Hebrew. “The results of the investigation into the death of the boy are already unimportant. After pictures of the mob shouting ‘Death to Arabs,’ the damage is done.”

Hendel told JTA that Israelis had to assume responsibility for the extremists among them, even if the extremists represent a marginal phenomenon.

“It’s our obligation to do ‘heshbon nefesh,’ ” Hendel said, using the Hebrew term for soul searching, “so we don’t let pass this phenomenon that we have racist Jews here acting like the Ku Klux Klan, not the Zionist dream.”

Elizabeth Tsurkov, a left-wing Israeli writer and activist, blamed politicians for stoking the flames with the rhetoric of revenge. She pointed to Netanyahu’s June 30 statement announcing the discovery of the bodies of the three kidnapped teens that quoted a poem by Hayyim Nachman Bialik written after a pogrom.

” ‘Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created,’ ” Netanyahu said, quoting the poem, before continuing in his own words: “Neither has vengeance for the blood of three pure youths, who were on their way home to meet their parents, who will not see them anymore.”

Such statements empowered anti-Arab racists, Tsurkov said.

“It’s clear how this kind of rhetoric justifies attacking people who are not involved in combat,” she said.

But Hendel rejected assertions that the broader Israeli society was guilty, noting the condemnations of Khdeir’s murder from across the political spectrum.

Hendel has had pushback from some online commenters who objected to his condemnations of anti-Arab violence. In a follow-up posted July 4, he addressed a commenter who had told Hendel, “You are not my brother, and we do not belong to the same people.”

“Believe me, I wish it were so,” Hendel replied. “I’m stuck with you.”

After unity and then calls for revenge, Israelis look inward for answers Read More »

Hamas says it fired rocket toward Haifa

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Hamas said it fired a rocket at the city of Haifa, northern Israel, on Tuesday in what would be the longest-range such Palestinian attack from the Gaza Strip.

There was no immediate word of any impact in Haifa, on the Mediterranean coast 88 miles from Gaza. A Haifa resident said he had heard no sirens in the city.

The announcement came shortly after air raid sirens sounded in nearby Binyamina in what Israeli media subsequently said may have been a false alarm.

Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Mark Heinrich

Hamas says it fired rocket toward Haifa Read More »

In Paris, Sharansky warns of ‘beginning of end’ for European Jewry

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

On their 40th wedding anniversary, Avital and Natan Sharansky went sightseeing in the City of Light.

But the Sharanskys didn’t follow the trail of countless couples who come here to kiss at the Eiffel Tower or slip so-called love locks on bridges over the River Seine. Theirs was an itinerary that demonstrated a different kind of commitment.

“Avital is taking me to see all the places where she organized protest rallies for my release,” Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, told JTA in an interview Thursday at his organization’s Paris headquarters.

There were about a dozen such places. To Sharansky, French Jewry’s strong mobilization on his behalf 25 years ago symbolizes both what Israel stands to gain and what Europe stands to lose as French immigration to Israel reaches record levels.

Home to Europe’s largest Jewish population of 500,000, France surpassed the United States last year to become the world’s second-largest source of Jewish immigration to Israel, with 3,263 emigrants making aliyah — second only to Russia. This year, 5,000 French Jewish immigrants  are expected in Israel, well over double the 1,917 that made the move in 2012.

Such figures should be music to the ears of Sharansky, 67, a former Israeli Cabinet minister who spent nine years in a Soviet prison for his attempts to immigrate to Israel and has led the Jewish Agency — the organization principally responsible for facilitating global aliyah — for four.

Yet his happiness over his organization’s success is mixed with sadness over the vulnerability it reflects in a robust community that many fear is nearing extinction. Some, including Sharansky, believe French aliyah heralds the end of Jewish life in Europe.

“Something historic is happening,” Sharansky said. “It may be the beginning of the end of European Jewry.”

It is an observation that brings no joy to Sharansky, himself a Europe-born mathematician and chess prodigy who has revolutionized the Jewish Agency by expanding its traditional focus on aliyah to include strengthening Diaspora Jewish identity — a move he said was merely “contextualizing” aliyah but which critics feared would de-emphasize it.

“I think it’s a tragedy for Europe,” he said. “What is happening in France, the strongest of Europe’s Jewish communities, reflects processes taking place elsewhere in Europe. I keep asking people if Jews have a future in Europe.”

Sharansky was cheerful in his encounters with soon-to-be Israelis like Oury Chouchana, a 36-year-old lawyer who is preparing to leave next week to study Hebrew at Ulpan Etzion in Jerusalem — the same Hebrew immersion program where Avital Sharansky studied 40 years ago.

“It may interest you to hear that Etzion is a serious, serious shidduch scene,” said Sharansky, using the Hebrew term for a marriage match.

The mixed blessings of French aliyah were apparent at a sendoff ceremony Wednesday for several hundred emigrants at the Synagogue des Tournelles. The ceremony took place a few days after the Le Monde newspaper published an emotional plea against aliyah by the well-known Jewish author and activist Marek Halter.

“Will you cede to those seeking our disappearance? Will you leave this home of ours to jihadists and the National Front?” he wrote, referencing the rising far-right party that many French Jews believe has anti-Semitic undertones.

Halter’s piece was a rare call to arms in a community whose leaders are encouraging French Jews to leave. At the sendoff, Richard Prasquier, a former head of the CRIF French Jewish umbrella group and current president of the Jewish National Fund branch in France, shared his “intense pride” in his daughter’s successful aliyah and encouraged the new immigrants to “take away with you our culture and plant it in Israel.”

Joel Mergui, the president of the French Consistoire, the community organ responsible for religious services, spoke at the sendoff of his own “mix of joy and pain” at the fact that three of his four children live 2,000 miles away from him in Israel.

French Jewry is “unique in how leaders don’t perceive aliyah as a threat that could weaken their communities, but as the first installment in building that community’s new future in Israel,” Sharansky told JTA.

This is “remarkable,” he added, “and could never come from federation heads in the United States, where community leaders are committed to ensuring a Jewish future in America.”

At the sendoff ceremony, Lionel Berros, a religious Jew who will immigrate in two weeks, was feeling a more personal version of the mix of melancholy and joy Sharansky described.

“When I was a child, I could leave home wearing my kippah,” said Berros, who is moving with his wife and daughter to Netanya. “Now I wear a baseball cap and my daughter leaves home only to go to school. I don’t want her to grow up like that. So I am sad to leave, but also happy.”

Like many French Jewish parents, Berros is never at ease when his daughter is at school — not since the 2012 murder of a rabbi and three children by a Muslim extremist at a Jewish school in Toulouse. The attack was one of 614 anti-Semitic incidents documented that year by the community’s SPCJ security unit. Of those attacks, 14 percent happened within 10 days of the Toulouse murders.

Sensitive to this sentiment, community leaders have made no secret of their concern for the community’s future.

In a recent interview about anti-Semitism levels, CRIF President Roger Cukierman described French Jews as trapped between the National Front party, which beat all other parties in the May elections for the European Parliament, a steady increase in violent hate crimes by Muslims, and secularist initiatives to ban kosher slaughter and circumcision.

“Behind the figures,” Cukierman said in reference to anti-Semitic attacks, “there is a difficult climate.”

 

 

In Paris, Sharansky warns of ‘beginning of end’ for European Jewry Read More »

Tom Hanks, Justin Bieber dance together

Leave a Comment / Hollywood /

Amidst a tumultuous world, a reminder of life’s simpler pleasures. We humbly offer you a video, shot by Justin Bieber at his manager Scooter Braun’s wedding, of Tom Hanks, resplendent in a tallis and yarmulke, singing and jiving to Montell Jordan’s 1995 dance classic, “This Is How We Do It.”

Note: Bieber, in posting this on his Instagram account, describes Hanks as “dressed like a Rabbi.” Technically, from a sartorial angle, Hanks could be any well-dressed male shul-goer. The important thing is that he brings to the role his inimitable  charm and relatability that make him one of America’s favorite actors/Jewish imitators. 500,000+ likes can’t be wrong.

 

Tom Hanks, Justin Bieber dance together Read More »

Anti-gay persecution abroad demands U.S. action

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

Every parent imagines and treasures a child’s first words, first steps, first love. Our children will graduate high school and then college, find their passion, marry their sweetheart, have children of their own.

There are also things a parent privately dreads. In 2010, 18-year-old Tyler Clementi, a first-year student at Rutgers University, jumped off the George Washington Bridge after students taunted and bullied him for being gay.

I was shocked by his suicide. Tyler went to high school with my daughter. Yet Tyler’s pain had been invisible to us. How did we fail him?

Tremendous strides have been made in ensuring the dignity of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in our nation in the last two decades. Yet prejudice and hatred still exist. In the United States, much legislation has been written to try to protect the rights of LGBT people, but our laws aren’t comprehensive, and much more needs to be done. Same-sex marriage is now legal in 19 states and counting, but in many places children like Tyler still live in fear and shame.

Internationally, the reality is even bleaker. Same-sex sexual activity is illegal in 77 countries and, shockingly, punishable by death in five of those countries.

Six months after Tyler died, I traveled with American Jewish World Service to Uganda. We had breakfast in Kampala with a man whose name could not be spoken. We were warned not to mention his name in any public forum because he was an LGBT activist. He had been arrested the previous week, and he believed he was under surveillance.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had just signed into law a new Anti-Homosexuality Act that made our new friend’s work illegal. The legislation threatened to imprison those who engage in same-sex relations and the government vowed to shut down any nonprofit organizations working with the LGBT community.

This man was educating the public about LGBT issues and planning outreach meetings to provide legal, medical and psychological support for families afflicted with HIV/AIDS. He was an outspoken opponent of the Anti-Homosexuality Act and feared for his life.

Similar laws criminalize homosexuality around the world. In Russia, about one year ago, President Vladimir Putin signed what has become known as the “LGBT propaganda law” that prevents “distribution of information that is aimed at the formation among minors of nontraditional sexual attitude, attractiveness of non-traditional sexual attitudes.” In nations where Sharia law is honored — including Nigeria, Yemen and Iran — homosexual acts can carry the death penalty.

For the sake of children like Tyler, who are bullied for being gay; for the sake of activists in Uganda, and couples in love in Russia, Nigeria and Yemen, we must prevent global violence against LGBT people.

Today we have an opportunity to do our part to ensure that LGBT people globally can live freely and securely by calling upon the Obama administration and Congress to strengthen international policies on LGBT rights, and to assume a leadership role here and abroad to end hate crimes against LGBT people.

Just last month, Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) introduced in Congress the International Human Rights Defense Act. This act would direct the State Department to make international LGBT human rights a foreign policy priority. It would establish a position in the department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor that would be responsible for coordinating that effort.

One year during the High Holidays, I asked congregants to raise their hands if a member of their family or a friend was LGBT. Three-quarters of those present did. LGBT people facing violence, prejudice and fear around the world are not strangers — they are our family, our friends. A sacred society is one in which no one is marginalized or enslaved; no one objectified, or invisible, or oppressed.

With the International Human Rights Defense Act, Congress has the opportunity to do the right thing for all of God’s children. Lives depend on it.

(Rabbi Elyse Frishman is spiritual leader of the Barnert Temple in Franklin Lakes, N.J. She edited “Mishkan T’filah, A Reform Siddur” and serves on the board of American Jewish World Service.)

Anti-gay persecution abroad demands U.S. action Read More »

Israel says no casualties after reported Hamas rocket fire on cities

Leave a Comment / Israel, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News /

Israel said it knew of no casualties from a long-range Palestinian rocket salvo on Tuesday that Hamas said targeted cities including central Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, as well as Haifa in the north.

“We are not getting reports of casualties from any of the impact areas,” the chief military spokesman, Brigadier-General Motti Almoz, told Israel's Channel 10 television. He did not elaborate on the locations.

Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by Mark Heinrich

Israel says no casualties after reported Hamas rocket fire on cities Read More »

For Iranian-born actors, Israel’s first Farsi movie carries echo of lost home

Leave a Comment / Culture /

An Iranian-Israeli director and a group of Iranian-born actors are making a movie in Farsi, the language of Iran.

“Baba Joon,” a story of familial conflict between three generations of Iranian Jewish men set to hit theaters next year, is the first Farsi movie ever to be made in Israel.

Set in an Israeli agricultural village settled by Iranian immigrants, the film tells the story of Yitzchak, a Persian Israeli who, like his father, tends a turkey farm in a rural village in the Negev Desert. Yitzchak’s brother, Daryush, has moved to the United States to live a freer life. Their father, Baba Joon, wants to maintain the family’s traditional values while Yitzchak’s son, Moti, struggles with his family’s religious and patriarchal limitations.

“I hope that people start putting their differences aside and accepting their differences,” said Navid Negahban, the Iranian-born American actor who portrays Yitzchak. “I think the film will help. It’s opening a window into a life that most people are unaware of.”

Director Yuval Delshad said he prioritized authenticity in casting “Baba Joon,” choosing actors whose personal stories mirror those of their characters.

David Diaan, who plays Daryush, is an Iranian-born Jew who lives in Los Angeles. Faraj Aliasi, 73, who plays Baba Joon, is a Persian Israeli who, like his character, has lived much of his life in a small Israeli agricultural village. Asher Avrahami, the 13-year-old who plays Moti, is from the same village, the largely Persian town of Zerahia in southern Israel.

“I looked for actors that would be Iranian and would share something in the characters I created,” said Delshad, who also wrote the film. “The world they come from is the world of the story.”

Diaan and Negahban, who also portrays Abu Nazir in the acclaimed Showtime series “Homeland,” worked together on “The Stoning of Soraya M.,” a 2008 film about a woman stoned to death over allegations of infidelity that turned out to be false. Both actors expressed hope that the Iran-Israel conflict would cool down and emphasized the importance of intercultural reconciliation.

“Israel, Iran, Arabs and Jews, Sunni and Shiite [say,] ‘We don’t get along, let’s fight,’ ” Diaan said. “Today it’s a different time. It’s a different age. I’m a good person, you’re a good person, let’s party.”

No one involved with the production admitted to being concerned that tensions between Israel and Iran might affect the movie. Producer David Silber, who worked on the Oscar-nominated 2007 film “Beaufort,” says the film is meant for a wide audience and could even reach Iranian viewers illegally should the regime ban it.

“Like a Greek myth, it’s relevant to every culture,” Silber said. “Maybe there will be a way for [Iranians] to see it. The second it gets to a streaming site they’ll see it, unless the site is blocked.”

Despite being of different religions, generations and nationalities, the actors said they connected with each other over their common Iranian heritage. When Delshad put on a cassette of an Iranian folk song during filming, actors said several members of the cast began crying.

“There is a deep connection that you don’t lose,” Negahban said. “It’s not that you’re still connected 100 percent to where you came from, but you have the place you came from in your heart.”

Negahban and Diaan appear alongside Aliasi and Avrahami, neither of whom had acted before joining “Baba Joon.” Delshad said neither had trouble on the set because the film is set in a village meant to mirror Zerahia.

Much of the movie is now being filmed at Ayanot, a youth village a half-hour north of Zerahia. It’s a tawdry place, with faded brown stucco buildings and patchy grass. Aliasi said the film gets the details of life in Zerahia “exactly” right.

For the actors, many of whom left Iran at a young age, working on the film has been an opportunity to reconnect to their homeland and portray Iranian culture in a warm, if complex, light.

“I grew up in America, but when I do something in Farsi it’s so natural and so second nature to me,” Diaan said. “I lived in Iran until I was 16. We still keep the language alive. It’s still my first language.”

For Iranian-born actors, Israel’s first Farsi movie carries echo of lost home Read More »

Jewish summer camps grappling with murders of Israeli teens

Leave a Comment / United States /

On the morning of June 30, the children began arriving at Camp Solomon Schechter in Olympia, Wash., ready for a fun-filled summer.

But shortly before the first little feet descended the bus steps, the sleepaway camp’s Israeli counselors learned from back home about the discovery of the bodies of three teens kidnapped in the West Bank 18 days earlier.

The news about the teens’ fate challenged administrators at Jewish camps like the Conservative movement-affiliated Schechter to deal with the tragedy: what information to present, how to tailor their words to campers’ varied maturity levels and how to mourn the youthful victims while not alarming children for whom camp represents happiness and escape.

Then there was tending to Israeli campers and counselors, for whom the trauma was more personal.

At Schechter, the dilemma for administrators was compounded by the campers being so young — second- through seventh-graders. The teenage cohort wasn’t due until later in the summer.

So nothing was announced that day and no mention appeared on the camp’s website.

“It’s not really a great topic for kicking off camp and having a great summer,” said the camp’s executive director, Sam Perlin. “Getting off to a good start is extremely important.”

Only at the next morning’s daily assembly at the flagpole to sing “Hatikvah,” Israel’s national anthem, did Perlin tell campers that the three missing yeshiva students had lost their lives.

“I didn’t say ‘murdered’ or ‘killed,’ ” he related. “I didn’t say how or why.”

Across the country, Camp Moshava, a Modern Orthodox overnight camp in Honesdale, Pa., took a different approach.

Campers arriving on June 24 were greeted at the front gate with placards hung by Israeli counselors featuring the faces of the kidnapped boys and a message in Hebrew praying for their safe return.

The news of their deaths broke nearly a week later at lunchtime, when each shift of children finishing the meal headed to another building for the daily afternoon prayers, youngest group to oldest. At the Mincha service, the fact of the boys’ death was conveyed at an age-appropriate level.

Moshava’s website the next morning showed images of three Israeli flags arrayed horizontally across the screen above the words “Baruch Dayan Ha’Emet,” the traditional utterance upon learning of a Jewish person’s death. The left column presented news of the deaths of Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach.

“We’re a religious Zionist camp. This is what we’re all about,” the camp’s director, Alan Silverman, said when asked about his guiding principles for handling the situation.

Upon hearing the news, he said, “we and the camp psychologists made a plan for each group” that included telling Israeli staffers and campers first. Others were dispatched to share the news with two groups of adolescent campers off site on organized hikes.

Moshava campers of all ages are learning sections of Mishnah in memory of the slain teens. Three eighth-grade girls initiated a project to collect campers’ letters, poems and drawings for albums to be sent to the grieving parents.

“They should feel we are connected, even though we are thousands of miles away,” said Davida Krauss, one of the girls, who is from the Bronx, N.Y. “We wanted to do something for them.”

Krauss said she and two friends came up with the idea because “we saw everyone so sad that they can’t do something — but we really can do something.”

The campers were offered the opportunity during their mid-afternoon free period to gather on the grass outside the dining hall to speak with mental health professionals or with each other, which some did.

Otherwise, swimming, ballgames and the rest of the recreational schedule carried on normally, Silverman said.

After hearing of the deaths of the Jewish teens, several former staff members drove to Moshava in solidarity.

“In a sense, [the camp] is the best place you could possibly be,” said Silverman, who lives most of the year just a few miles from where the Israeli boys were kidnapped in the West Bank’s Gush Etzion settlement bloc and has run the camp for 29 years. “Here you’re with a large community that is grieving together.”

The same impulse hit Israeli staffers at the Schechter camp.

Bar Bamani, a counselor who had flown in recently from his Tel Aviv-area hometown of Tel Mond to work at the camp, said his mother texted him the news just as some of the other Israeli staffers were hearing what had happened.

One of the Israelis began crying, “so we sat together and talked a bit about it, to make sure everything was OK,” said Bamani, 21. “Campers were coming, so there wasn’t much time to sit and breathe and digest the situation.”

During crises, “we feel united and close to Israel,” he said. “That’s the safe place, the family. You can feel the mourning of everyone.”

Bamani expected campers to raise the subject of the tragedy, but said he won’t initiate such conversations.

The camp’s rabbi, Yohanna Kinberg, is helping to launch conversation on the topic. She laminated a photograph of the Israeli victims for display in the synagogue alongside battery-operated memorial candles.

Someone moved the photo to a central walkway outside, where it has prompted discussions among campers and staff, she said.

“This is real, and it’s important to talk about if it’s framed in a thoughtful way,” she said, “not a terrifying way.”

Days after the discovery of the Israeli teens’ bodies came news of the murder of a Palestinian teenager from eastern Jerusalem, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, and later of Israel’s arrest of six Jewish suspects in connection with his slaying.

The killing of Khdeir came up at Moshava in discussions among the high school-age campers, Silverman said. At the Schechter camp, staff members spoke about it informally over Shabbat, Perlin said.

Referring to the aftermath of the killings, along with the rocket attacks launched on Israel from the Gaza Strip, Kinberg said the situation is “spiraling and it’s scary, and it’s very upsetting.”

“I think we’ll have a lot of discussions with the teens on what’s happening in Israel,” the rabbi said. “Since we have so many Israelis here, it’ll be a much richer conversation.”

 

Jewish summer camps grappling with murders of Israeli teens Read More »

What women know of war

Leave a Comment / Danielle Berrin, Opinion /

I was 15 the first time I saw a mother grieve for her son.

It was my freshman year of high school, just after the homecoming dance, when our community was rocked by the death of 18-year-old Alan Epstein, a heartthrob jock who coached girls’ basketball, mentored his younger siblings and had breakfast with his mother before climbing into his Jeep for the last time.

Never have I seen a more wrenching scene than his funeral. In the hushed sea of sobs, among the thousand mourning bodies clinging together in black clusters, and the choking atmosphere of agony and anguish, I mainly remember one thing: When his mother entered.

She dragged herself down the synagogue aisle, screaming with every dreaded step, her arms locked like steel over her two younger children, who held her up as the power of her rage made her legs go limp. I remember how they moved, the three of them in rock formation as if a single organism, striving against an irresistible force, as if the casket of her oldest son was a raging fire that would scorch and then consume them.

A grieving mother is not an image one easily forgets. Horrible and haunting, a mother losing her child is the single greatest injustice inflicted upon the possibilities of nature. And yet, here and elsewhere, it is a common fact.

Last week in Israel, we watched once again as men killed men and women grieved. While their children were still missing, and the Israeli government ravaged its way through the West Bank, the mothers of Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Frenkel traveled to the United Nations to plead for their sons’ return.

“Every mother’s nightmare is waiting and waiting endlessly for her child to come home,” an impassioned Rachel Frenkel told the president of the U.N. Human Rights Council. Her anguish was obvious, but her message was neither emotional nor political. With the moral clarity of a prophet, she sat before the entire assembly and declared: “It is wrong to take children, innocent boys and girls, and use them as instruments of any struggle,” she said. “It is cruel.”

Not two weeks later, Suha Khdeir, the mother of murdered Palestinian teen Muhammad Abu Khdeir, who was burned alive, would come to experience that same calculated cruelty. While Palestinian-led riots broke out all over East Jerusalem, demolishing light-rail stops and inciting clashes with Israeli police, the Journal’s Simone Wilson reported that Suha Khdeir sat in mourning on her porch, surrounded by female relatives; she barely had the strength to eat. “I can't swallow from the pain,” she said as her cousin lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips. Even at protestations that she could die of dehydration, she answered, “I want to die. I want to follow my son.”

In the adjacent men’s mourning tent, Mahmoud Odeh, 46, a physical therapist who rents an apartment from the Khdeir family, had the sense to recognize who is hurt most by these losses. “If European people and Americans and Israel think we raise our kids to be killed, they are making a big mistake,” Odeh said. “A cat does not allow you to take her son. And we as a people, we value life. This mother sitting here and that mother sitting in Gush Etzion, they lost their sons. It's not political.”

In the Torah, Judaism’s first matriarch dies immediately after her husband nearly sacrifices their son for God. According to one midrash, Sarah’s death is the work of Satan, who visits her and tells her of Abraham’s plan to ascend the mountain and kill their child. Almost at once, Sarah dies from grief. And we are left with a sobering question: How often in our tradition, and in our world, is it men who take action and women who suffer the consequences?  

Sherri Mandell, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her 2003 memoir “The Blessing of a Broken Heart” is another Jewish mother who has endured the unendurable. In 2001, her 13-year-old Israeli-American son Koby and his friend Yosef Ish Ran were abducted and then “bound, stabbed and beaten to death with rocks,” according to reports. Their blood was smeared all over the walls of the cave they were left in, and their bodies were so badly mutilated and disfigured, that dental samples were the only means of identifying them.

  

Mandell has reason to want revenge. But in an Op-Ed for The Times of Israel last week, she wrote instead of human dignity. “I always speak about the way that the Jewish people seek justice, but leave vengeance to G-d,” she wrote. “My mother always told me: the best revenge is a good life and I have always followed her teaching, never allowing the murder of my son to fill me or my family or children with a rage for vengeance.”

How many of us who have not suffered her loss still secretly wish or openly call for the destruction of our enemies?

How much longer will we silence and ignore the wisdom of women while men wield swords and throw stones?

Of the stunningly few women actually named in the Talmud, the sage Bruriah offers some of the most vital and humane counsel in the entire Jewish tradition. When her husband, the 2nd century Talmudic scholar Rebbe Meir is repeatedly harassed by a band of neighborhood thugs, he decides to pray for the death of those that disturb him. Bruriah reminds him of a line from Psalms: “Let sins be uprooted from the earth, and the wicked will be no more.”

It does not say, “Let sinners be uprooted from the earth,” she tells him. “It says ‘sins.’” Her teaching is clear: A Jew should never wish for the death of sinners, but for the death of sin.

A lesson that perhaps only a mother could teach.

What women know of war Read More »