Jul 27
Jeanette FriedmanUncategorized
By Jeanette Friedman
Every now and again, the creation of a permanent Yom HaShoah liturgy becomes an issue some people think should be on the front burner. Some proponents of this universal service feel that is what the Holocaust Survivor Legacy must be and that everyone must have a set prayer program for Yom HaShoah. But that is not the legacy of survivors. The Legacy of the Holocaust Survivors was presented to the Jewish people in June 1981, in Jerusalem, at The Kotel, the Western Wall, in front of 15,000 people. You can read it at www.americangathering.com/legacy/
Nowhere does this legacy mention a Holocaust liturgy—and for good reason. The issue had been debated ad nauseam. The legacy mentions the importance of remembrance—and as the most studied and researched event on planet Earth, the Holocaust will certainly be remembered as a watershed event in history. Getting its lessons across is another story—though no one denies that one of those lessons is the need for tolerance, to see another person’s point of view.
The proponents of this liturgy, some of them secular, are unaware of the pitfalls and impossibilities surrounding their demands, and want to force a liturgy upon the whole of the ultra-Orthodox community in particular. Many feel the ultra-Orthodox do not remember the Holocaust. They are wrong. Most of the ultra-Orthodox in America and Israel happen to be Holocaust survivors and their descendants. I know. I began my life as such a person, in an ultra-Orthodox world. Now I am a post-denominational Jew. Some might call me secular or worse. Some might call me other things, but, in the core of my essence I am a Jew shaped by the Shoah—and Judaism.
I grew up in a Holocaust survivor community in Brooklyn, surrounded by memories of the Shoah in all its forms—from the silent ones, to those who never stopped talking, to those who abused their children, to those who overprotected them and spoiled their kids rotten. I went to Beis Yaakov in Crown Heights and Brownsville. Our teachers were survivors themselves. The Holocaust came up often, but obliquely. A play about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was our senior play in Esther Schoenfeld High School.
Growing up, the ultra-Orthodox people around me echoed the words of their rabbis, who were clueless when it came to coping with theology after the Holocaust. They claimed secular Jews and Reform Jews brought the Holocaust down on the Jews.
After all, how else do you accept a God who murders 1.5 million innocent children who did not sin? You create a punishing God, using Old Testament paternalism and imagery who gets even with the Reform Jews and Zionists. (The Minchas Elazar, Rabbi Chaim Elazar Spira, the Rov of Munkacs (a town now in Ukraine) blamed the Zionists for Hitler—instead of blaming the perpetrators for being people who were evil. The irony is that it was mostly Orthodox Jews who died in the camps. His descendants’ followers live in Borough Park. Those who survived still remember, and so do their children. When it comes to God, many suffer from cognitive dissonance. Better not to go near the subject.
As a descendant and close relative to many of the Hassidic rabbis in power today, I took every opportunity to discuss Holocaust remembrance and Holocaust liturgies with the crème de la crème of Jewish leadership in that world and the Agudah world more than 25 years ago—many of them are child survivors and survivors. And the answer was always the same: Halachically it could not be done. You cannot have a day of mourning in the month of Nissan.
They contend—and they are not wrong according to their tradition—that the liturgy of Tisha B’Av contains what needs to be said, and they give divrei Torah to that effect when reading The Book of Lamentations. Rabbi Halberstam, the old Bobover Rebbe in Brooklyn, was a survivor from Poland/Hungary who wrote a special lamentation and added it to the Book of Lamentations for his congregation. His followers remember, since his descendants have carried on the tradition. Halacha allows additions, not deletions, in liturgy. And in the machzorim and siddurim, it has taken centuries for certain poems commemorating massacres to be included in the “set tradition.”
Other Hassidic and Hareidi groups have their own way of remembering. In order to understand the diversity of Judaism, think of a circle, with a different kind of Jew standing at every nth degree. There are as many Judaisms as there are Jews. Every community creates groups that reflect the values they want to incorporate into their lives. Every siddur is different, every nussach is different. Munkacs is different than Bobov, Satmar is different from Ger, Lubavitch is different from Hareidim, and every yeshiva does its own thing—about every aspect of Jewish life, including the liturgy and remembering the Holocaust.
Depending on who you are, how you were raised, your choices range from the most contemporary and evolving segments of Judaism to the traditional denominations—up to and including Ultra-Orthodoxy in all its forms. Every Jewish denomination and groups within those denominations have points of view about who we are. From the contemporary aspects of Jewish Renewal, Reconstructionism and Reform Judaism to the Conservative movement and Modern Orthodoxy to the ultra-Orthodox, who themselves have groups with very differing points of view.
For those less traditional than the ultra-Orthodox to attempt to force a set liturgy on a set date unto any community and then to say, “This is the legacy of the survivors,” is arrogant and shows a lack of understanding of how the Jewish community operates. Each community does its own thing. In New York City, even ultra-Orthodox Jews have been to Temple Emanuel on Fifth Avenue to attend WAGRO commemorations. One such woman, wearing a sheitel, escaped that ghetto and had a Hasidic brother who died in the uprising. As she sat in a synagogue that looks like a Christian cathedral, she reminded herself that the Torah Scrolls in the Holy Ark were exactly like the Torah Scrolls in the shteibel where she davened every Shabbos.
In Teaneck, NJ, on Yom Hashoah, there is a community ceremony in the high school auditorium. It nominally follows what has become a set liturgy of its own. It’s usually a 90-minute ceremony. Many of the synagogues and schools hold their own ceremonies as well. These generally include a procession, a candle-lighting ceremony, a key note address by a scholar or survivor, the chanting of El Molei Rachamim, the Holocaust Kaddish and the singing of The Partisaner Hymn. Other groups add a reading of specific Psalms or poetry written by someone in the community. These ceremonies take place in every state capitol and in the Rotunda on Capitol Hill. They vary, but one thing is clear. When you look at who attends these events on Yom HaShoah, you will find Jews in black frock coats and Jews in black hats, Jews in black velvet yarmulkes, Jews in kippot srugot, women in sheitels and women in snoods, as well as people who wear no head covering at all. In Israel, when the sirens go off on Yom HaShoah, everyone stops. Everyone.
That is, after all, the point. The enemies of the Jews did not care about a Jew’s denomination, and when it comes to remembering the Holocaust, it is each to his or her own.
Oct 15
Jeanette FriedmanUncategorized
This quote came from a blogger in Israel who is popular with the right-wing. Sometimes we agree, especially on issues of domestic violence, sometime we don’t. When she added this quote to her criticism of a friend who is founding a Jewish/Chrisitian political party, she got me going.
>>>There were a handful of us, students in Great Neck North, who went to the Free Soviet Jewry demonstrations of SSSJ, rather than demonstrating for “negro” civil rights, the Biaferans or against the Vietnam War. The war that ignited us was the Six Days War and the liberation of our Jewish Historical Lands.<<<
These are not mutually exclusive protests, and I took part in SSSJ AND protesting the Vietnam War AND supporting the Biafrans AND being a Zionist–and other causes, too. Including civil rights and Women’s Liberation.
Was my husband–a son of Holocaust Survivors and a draftee in Vietnam–not worth a protest to save his life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who were there to fight a war that was created to prop up the dollar against the pound sterling?
Are Biafrans less than human? And were the “Negroes” supposed to remain slaves forever without civil rights?
What are the lessons we pull out of what the Nazis and their collaborators did to the Jews? That only Jews count? Did you know that a huge number of those that survived the Holocaust survived because a non-Jew, somewhere along the line, helped them, even if infinitesmally?
Where did you learn that only Jews matter and that human decency doesn’t go beyond the Jews?
At least you admit publicly that you have no moral compass. So let me bring this to a different level.
How many Holocaust survivors did YOU allow your government to murder this week with their neglect?
Did you know the Israeli government, from 1948 on, stole the victims’ money and land? Did you know the majority of Israelis have a culture that denigrates Holocaust survivors and sees them as a black mark on Jewish history? Did you know the consensus is that they need to die as quickly as possible and not be a drain on the Israeli economy? Did you know that your compatriots still call the survivors Sabon and Sabonit (cakes of soap)? That the surviving orphans were slaves in the Kibbutzim and cannon fodder as soon as they got off the boats that brought them to the Holy Land? That many girls were raped, that many orphans were robbed and killed?
Thanks to the new disclosures, and the current government’s behavior (too little too late) and the apathy of the Israelis for the people who are responsible for creating a State of Israel in the first place, I find it hard to be a Zionist, but not a Jew.
Without Holocaust money, Israel would still be nothing but a pile of sand and swamps. But then, aren’t solopsistic Israelis following in the footsteps of history? Isn’t patently clear to those who choose not to twist the words in the Torah. …where mothers kill sons and husbands, husbands kill mothers and sons and daughters, there’s child sacrifice and incest, murder for sex, we have it all–that our ancestors set a bad example? But they also knew repentance.
We Jews do good things too, but why don’t other people matter? What happens to the “little people?” There is only lip service for Akiva’s dictum: Love your neighbor for s/he is like you.
Are we all children of Adam and Eve? Do we share the same DNA or not?
Why do many Israelis silently agree to the killing of a few survivors each week? Why is the government permitted to withold their meds, starve them and let them boil or freeze? Why does the Israeli government keep what they stole from the survivors’ parents?
Then, if Holocaust survivors count for nothing in Israel, what happens to innocent Palestinians who are caught in the middle of a war they really didn’t want? Why does the Israeli government cater to extremists? The moderate innocent and the Arab Christians are now caught between Hamas, Fatah, Israel, Sunnis, Shiites, extremists of all sorts. They are treated like the garbage of the universe. Are they by your lights, as expendable as the Holocaust survivors? Less? More? How much can each group be exploited? Why stop the exploitation of those who are politically expendable?
If you think black people are expendable, that Asians in dire straits are expendable, that the boys who died in Vietnam were expendable, and that everyone who is dying in Mess-o-Potamia (Iraq) is expendable, and that Holocaust survivors are a drain on the Israeli economy, why shouldn’t your friend hook up with folks who think Jews are expendable?
What makes you think Jews are the only people who need to survive?
Thanks to comments like yours, we Jews are especially expendable.
Jan 14
Jeanette Friedmanagunot/chained women, domestic violence, Uncategorized
Today is the 40th anniversary of the day that I learned that when a woman steps under the chuppah, she takes her life and the lives of her children in her hands, and does so without informed consent or any form of real protection.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the day my life changed dramatically.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the day I married a man who beat me up and turned me into an agunah.
So today, indulge me, and read on.
> However, as the building companies started selling apts. to other groups, they have
> been trying to FORCE (emphasis mine, jf) the buses to be segretated.
Allow me to use some exegetical thinking here. It may be a stretch but – he says Charedim are FORCING the issues, some of them with the use of violence against women in public, so let’s talk a little bit about the use of force to create change–war is supposed to create peace–isn’t it?
Anyway, let’s give this a shot.
THE USE OF FORCE. let’s see what the Torah and Talmud say about using force.I can give you chapter and verse on this beginning with Devorim 20, Sotah 8, Sotah 42, etc.Rambam, hilchos melachim, peace above all. PEACE.
Last I heard, whether it’s real war, when you are dealing with your enemies first you must try to make peace, then you must exempt anyone who ever committed an aveyrah from going to war (r’ jose). Then when you lay a siege, you leave one side of the city open, and you aren’t allowed to chop down trees, rape or pillage, loot or anything else.
SO unless it’s self defense, forget it. No violence is allowed to force your enemies to do what you want.
Now then, based on how you are supposed to treat your ENEMIES with respect and practically pacifism, explain how you can force a woman, a fellow Jew, who is minding her own business in a public environment to go to the back of the bus or you will beat her and you will spit in her face
Why is it a woman’s obligation to be a trained warrior to face these people? Why does she have to go thru the basic training of a soldier in a conventional war to deal with people who don’t want to look at her or have her sit on a public bus? Chihal, why does Shoni Thon get advice to buy a can of mace, instead of decent Jewish men and Jewish society and the Jewish community dealing with the violent, coercive behavior that amounts to a state of war against women? (Chihal says until that happens she needs to protect herself NOW–ok)
Where is the exegesis on that? Where is the halacha? Other than Russell Hendel, who tries valiantly, where are you all to stop this violence halachically and force people to pay the price via derech eretz? This behavior is criminal behavior by anyone’s standards. (OTOH, Russell’s post on the halachic penalty of kicking/grabbing is enlightening indeed. So considering the situation on the bus, killing her on the spot for kicking would have been ok?)
The day the Kolko story broke I spoke to a Charedi friend from Brooklyn who said to me, “I warned my boys never to go near him 30 years ago.” Everybody knows–and nobody knows. No one does anything, and then Matisyahu Solomon, at the Agudah Convention, in the name of Halacha, blames the bloggers, and essentially says sweep it under the rug for the sake of the respect of the rabbanim.
If the rabbanim want respect, let them earn it. Starting with R’ Eliashiv, who canceled the agunah conference, does not speak out against the violence against women and children, sexually or otherwise. Not one word. Ever. Reb David Feinstein doesn’t speak about Shalom Bayis from the pulpit. Why not? His father was a pioneer in these issues and sent me to civil court to get my get. His father made the Silver Get Law. What gives here? The get ultimately cost almost half a mil. Where normal people come from that’s the crime of extortion. Criminal behavior.
Why is this criminal and not civil? If a woman is pious and takes Judaism seriously, her life is ruined if she can never remarry. She IS chained to a dead future. Because of the “separation” of church and state in a state where she DOES have the right to a divorce, a right guaranteed to every human being on the planet, even in the UN charter, she does not have that right. If her husband says, “I can get married again, you never will unless you give me what I want,” that’s extortion. “Give me what I want or you will suffer.” That’s criminal behavior.
So again, all of these things, the beating of the woman on the bus or Blimi Zitrenbaum in Monsey and any other child or woman, Kolko’s behavior, what the NK did, and the threats against Shani Thon, are CRIMES. CRIMES that in any other society, except some Islamic ones, would be punished in courts of law where people would pay fines, go to jail or suffer some consequence, not the least of which is a public shaming. At least that way everyone knows that these people committed evil against innocent people and shun them. In the real world, if you do the Crime you do the Time (not always, but at least THEY try. WE don’t even bother!)
The silence from R’ Eliashiv and others, and only prove my points. Frank Silberman’s post is a clear indication of why we are in the state we are in. His attitude perfectly reflects why it is that no gives a hoot or a holler about the status of women. This can be summed up this way: “I don’t read it, I don’t see it, I don’t know it, I don’t want to know it, therefore the problem doesn’t exist and I don’t have anything to do with it–even if it does exist–so leave me alone.”
A careful reading of Eeyov (Job) makes it very, very clear that if we are good people who understand what our place is in the world, then we must work to make society and humanity better than it is. This is our obligation to and understanding of Hashem. This is burdensome and can cause suffering among the righteous, but it brings us closer to Hashem, unlike the friends and the evil ones, who may be rewarded in this life with sleekness and easy words that fall from their lips as if they mean something. But empty words are just that empty and don’t bring us closer to Hashem.
We all have to face the fact that if we aren’t working toward stopping this–and it is 30% across the board, in all societies and in all religions, and you can go online and gets the stats all over the place–we aren’t really acting the way any Jew of any denomination is required to act, ethically and halachically, since what is involved here is clearly pikuach nefesh–literally and figuratively.
And everyone knows the halacha on that.
So why is it not being applied?
Jan 03
Jeanette FriedmanUncategorized
Save Two Lives
As many of you know, Rick Hodes is a (Modern Orthodox) Jewish doctor who lives and works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He heads the JDC’s operations there and also serves as attending physician (without pay) at Sister Theresa’s Orphanage. He’s saved many lives and been written about extensively.
Dr. Rick does much of his work without pay. He begs for medicines and plane tickets, imports his own medicines, and relies on the kindness of others to help him succeed.
I propose that we, the readers of this blog and JBloggers in general, adopt Dr. Rick and raise some money to help him. $1400 will provide anti-cancer drugs for two children (he has 25 now waiting for treatment) and $400 will pay for one year of school for each of them. A total of $1800 will save two children.
All donations are tax deductible in the U.S.
Click here.
Dec 16
Jeanette FriedmanUncategorized
sraeli proposal ignores survivors’ needs
By Jeanette Friedman | Published 12/14/2006 | Opinion |
Jeanette Friedman
View all articles by Jeanette Friedman
Last month the Jewish Agency, speaking for a coalition of the Israeli government, Yad Vashem, and the Holocaust survivors’ organizations in Israel, demanded that the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) cede control of negotiations and allocations of Holocaust survivors’ assets to the Israeli government and move its headquarters to Israel because it’s the central address for Jews worldwide. While the centrality of Jerusalem and the allure of its sacred soil are not in dispute, this proposal is a pure power play that ignores survivors and their needs.
Behind the nobility of sentiments, what is at stake and in dispute is money — lots of it. In addition to the annual allocations, there is an estimated $1.7 billion in the Claims Conference kitty, a reserve established to care for Holocaust survivors in their old age.
This attempt to dominate the Claims Conference is not new. Three years ago, the then minister of finance, Benjamin Netanyahu, made the point more bluntly. In a meeting attended by Julius Berman, Israel Singer, Moshe Sanbar, Roman Kent, and Gideon Taylor, all of the Claims Conference, Netanyahu pointed his finger at Singer and reportedly said, “If you do not give Israel complete control of the Claims Conference, I will destroy you. And if I say I will destroy you, you know I will.”
A few weeks later, his supporter, Isi Leibler, the former vice president of the World Jewish Congress, went to Eliot Spitzer, then attorney general of the State of New York. Soon after that, a major investigation of the World Jewish Congress and Israel Singer, who is the chief negotiator for the Claims Conference, was launched with a boom and ended last year with a whimper. Now Liebler is again nibbling at Singer, just as the Israeli government is again demanding complete control of the Holocaust survivors’ funds‚ only this time in public.
Why not give them control? The reasons are compelling:
Sadly, Israel has no power to negotiate for the survivors. Her standing in Europe is weak, and European governments and their populations would not consent to give money to the Israeli government or government-sponsored institutions. And Israel has government interests — legitimate and important — that override her concern for justice and even for support.
The moral standing for negotiations belongs to survivors, but even survivors cannot be effective alone. The only reason negotiations have been successful to date is precisely that the Claims Conference is an American organization that still has the backing of the American executive branch, the State Department, and Congress.
Secondly, and again sadly, Israel and the Jewish Agency have proven, through the years, that they are less than worthy caretakers, so that even Israeli survivors stand to gain more under the Claims Conference than they do from the Jewish Agency or their own government.
In 2003, according to Hebrew University demographer Sergio della Pergola, there were 1,092,000 Holocaust survivors — by the broadest definition of the term — worldwide. Most lived in Israel (511,000), followed by Western Europe (197,000), the United States (174,000), and the former Soviet Union (146,000).
In Israel alone, 2006 figures estimate that 90,000 survivors live in poverty — but these are the same survivors who signed over their restitution payments to the Israeli government in the 1950s because it was promised they would be cared for! In the United States, there are at least 70,000 at or below the poverty line, and according to the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 125,000 live in destitution in the former Soviet Union.
The treatment of the Holocaust survivors trapped in northern Israel during the recent war was practically non-existent. (It was little better for non-survivor Israelis.) The trauma made them relive their Holocaust experience. Only a non-government institution‚ Amcha‚ directly provided for their special needs. As one woman said as she put her children and grandchildren on a train to the south, “Now I know what it felt like for my mother to put me in a Kindertransport.”
The Claims Conference was not innocent in this matter. It did not respond to the crisis. It got bogged down in process. When Claims Conference treasurer Roman Kent asked for a $5 million emergency fund — the sum that Israeli experts indicated was needed — no action was taken for weeks and only a piddling sum was finally released. By then the war had ended.
Let’s consider some figures: Between 2006-08, with the Claims Conference partial allocations (including lump sum payments to certain organizations and agencies from the Swiss Looted Assets Funds, ICHEIC [the insurance company settlements], and the German In-Home Services Fund), Israel gets about $90 million for humanitarian aid and about $6 million for Holocaust education. That includes approximately $2 million to Yad Vashem, which just completed a major overhaul and last month got $25 million from Miriam and Sheldon Adelson of Las Vegas. American survivors get $33 million in humanitarian aid and about $2 million for Holocaust-related education. Europe, Canada, Australia — the rest of the world — get about $86 million for humanitarian aid and $5 million for Holocaust education.
In other words, Israel already gets the largest piece of the pie. And much of that is not being used to benefit survivors.
Major Israeli hospitals like Sheba, Siroka, Sourasky, and Hadassah, with multi-hundred-million dollar budgets, got survivor funds to pay for refurbishing and equipping oncology departments, nursing departments, and ophthalmology departments. Money went to social clubs around Israel with small percentages of survivors, while Amcha, the survivors’ main lifeline, got only $2 million. Air-conditioned bomb shelters are being built at old-age homes whose residents include some survivors, but if it’s home care a Holocaust survivor needs from Kupat Cholim, the Israeli government’s answer is “Sorry. No money available.”
Meanwhile, in the United States there are more than 25,000 Holocaust survivors in poverty in the New York area alone, another 25,000 in Florida with no safety net, and thousands of others across America falling through the cracks or at high risk. The Israelis become apoplectic when you talk about the “Nazi victims” in Europe — especially in Eastern Europe — who require support and have few resources of their own to survive. The battle between the Jewish Agency and the JDC, the organization that cares for those elderly in Europe, is horrendous to behold.
That does not mean the Claims Conference gets off blame-free. It has its own problems to solve with the Holocaust survivors, who are grossly underrepresented and whose voices are stifled by the American Jewish organizations that seek the lion’s share of those funds.
What is needed is a good hard look at the Claims Conference by-laws, at the allocations themselves. The only perspective allowed should be to address what benefits poor Holocaust survivors the most — everywhere in this world — which was what the Claims Conference was created to do in the first place. The rest can wait. Unfortunately, it will not be long, since survivors are dying day by day.
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