Blowing shofar – in striped prison uniform

A controversy in cross-currents.com two years ago led to a remarkable interview I was privileged to record recently. Erev Rosh Hashana, Sept.10,2007 I posted my translation of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Meisels’ description of his blowing shofar in Auschwitz. Others have also translated the Hebrew description given by R. Meisels in his Mekadshei Hashem, among them R.Yosef Gavriel Bechhofer “Rosh Hashanah in Gehinnom, Auschwitz 1944,” in Artscroll’s revised A Path Through the Ashes). You can read my translation in cross-currents
“Sounding the shofar in Auschwitz”

Quite a bit of controversy and skepticism ensued, raising questions about the shofar blowing in Auschwitz. A dozen comments appeared on Sept.18,2007 – “Spiritual or physical hunger?”

Because of the doubts I decided I would try to find and record some kli rishon testimony.
Recently, I succeeded finding an eye-witness: Rav Yeshaya Glick. I persuaded him to let us video his first-person testimony. R. Glick writes about the shofar blowing in his recently published book Mamchishkim Hoshianu (available so far only in Hebrew from the author, 49 Sorotzkin St,Jer). I went to interview him and recorded him retelling the episode. He was fourteen years old. He had been taken to the camps from his home on Shavuos 1944. Rosh Hashanah found him at slave labor in Auschwitz, in different parts of the camp (therefore he knew the entire layout of camps A,B,C, D,etc.) R. Meisels came to do “shofar bluzen” (Yiddish for shofar blowing) in several places, among them in the barracks near Yeshaya Glick which held the boys who had been deemed too short and therefore not a good labor source. R. Meisels was beseeched by them to blow before they were taken to the gas chambers. Yeshaya Glick stood a meter (about a yard) from R. Meisels. The Rav’s son called out the tekiyos and not all the preliminary passages were said. In retelling this to me R. Glick stood up and demonstrated how Rav Meisels said the brachah with intensity and concentration, swaying, and shuckling. What struck young Yeshaya Glick the most was the incongruity between the outward appearance of this great Rav and the spiritual intensity with which he said the few passages he felt he had time to say. Here was a great scholar, dressed in the striped prisoner uniform, with a camp cap on his head, no beard, and no payos. And out of his mouth came the most emotionally laden prayers and blessings, not to mention the shofar bluzen.
I specifically asked the questions the skeptics legitimately raised: How did he get away with it vis-v-vis the guards? How could one obtain/conceal a shofar in Auschwitz? R. Glick said that in his immediate area there were not many guards at that moment. There was an armed guard in a distant watch tower. But he stood still, perhaps not knowing how to categorize what was taking place. R. Glick was not privy to how the shofar was obtained, but he said many contraband items were to be had. He fetched from his desk a siddur he had “bought” for two days’ bread rations. Tashmishei kedushah were often found by Jews assigned to sort out the clothes and baggage of new arrivals and they either kept and hid the finds or bartered them to others. Also, veteran prisons sometimes stood by the fence when new arrivals came and shouted to them to give them valuables for safe keeping before all their possessions were confiscated.
In Rav Meisels’ book he writes that he blew “meah kolos” [literally 100 blasts] in many places that Rosh Hashanah. I asked R. Glick whether the full one-hundred were blown. He said the minimum thirty were blown, and blown exactly (repetitions if necessary until precisely sounded). He said the phrase “meah kolos” is not to be understood literally but as an idiom referring to “shofar bluzen”.
I hope to transcribe my digital recording of my interview with R. Glick (which took place in English). Subsequently, we asked him to give a talk about this in Yiddish (with a Hebrew translator) at a Beis Yaakov seminar organized by Rabbanit Esther Farbstein this summer, and we videotaped this very moving retelling. Perhaps someone will want to bring out Rav Glick’s book in English.

“That’s a premier Israeli folksong,” claimed someone from the audience when my co-translator and I showed a video of a Sanz hassidim singing a piyut sung at Seudah Shlishit on Shabbat. I ruminated on this tune today, as I recited Psalms during the “minute of silence” on Remembrance Day for Israel’s fallen soldiers. This piyut came to my attention because it is mentioned on the last page of Rav Haim Sabato’s autobiographical novel on the Yom Kippur War, Adjusting Sights. A Yom Hazikaron radio interview with Rav Sabato is in the archives of Galey Zahal (scroll to the bottom and go to p.6), Remembrance Day, “V’Chai Bahem: Faith and Memory.”

The comment, “That’s a premier Israeli folksong” was made when my co-lecturer and I analyzed how Hillel Halkin handled challenges in translating into English the final passage in Adjusting Sights. (The book was also made into a movie ) In the book’s final page the aforementioned nigun to the piyut E-l Mistater is the thread that connects Rabbi Haim Halberstam of Sanz (b.1793), with his great grandson, the late Sanz-Klausenburg Rebbe during the Shoah. The tune then encompasses the yeshiva hesder soldiers in the 1973 War. R Sabato describes Shabbat during a lull in the battle on the Golan Heights

I looked back at the moon. A small cloud had drifted across it. Although it still shone, its light was no longer as bright. Shlomo put a hand on my shoulder. Softly he began to sing the hymn E-l Mistater, “O God Who Hides In Heaven’s Vaults,” which was a favorite of the Rabbi of Klausenberg. According to the rabbi’s Hasidim, he had sung it to himself every Sabbath in the death camps at the time of the Third Meal. His great grandfather, the tzaddik Rabbi Haim of Sanz, sang it then too, in that hour of grace as the Sabbath draws to a close, that hour that is the hour of all hours, his face shining like an angel’s.

We showed a video of the Klausenberger ztz”l, who survived the Shoah but lost his wife and eleven children, and went on to build Kiryat Sanz and Laniado hospital in Netanya, and Sanz branches elsewhere.

I was at a study-seminar in Nahariya when I received a phone call 1 am Friday, erev Shabbat Hagadol from New York. “We have an emergency,” said one of the editors of Mishpacha Magazine. Could I help them find an expert translator to translate from English to Hebrew the cover story of the Pesah issue, which had to go to print Motzei Shabbat. It was a cover story, an interview with the current Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Aharon Teitelbaum. After a flurry of transatlantic phone calls a translator was found – the very scholar, Rav Yitzchok Frankfurter, who conducted the interview and wrote it in English. He worked for twelve hours straight, and translated it himself. I found the interview fascinating – and you can read it in English (and in Hebrew) in the Pesah issue #254 of Mishpacha:”A Glimpse of Greatness.”
My narrow view of Satmar has completely changed after reading this cover story. Especially impressive is the fact that the Rebbe wears two streimels (streimlach?), that of Rosh Yeshiva deeply involved in teaching and learning, and that of the leader of his community. In the same issue is an article by my sister and myself: “The Rabbi’s Daughter and the Case of Coca-Cola” about the Dean of Orthodox Rabbis in southern U.S., Rabbi Tuvia Geffen, who was involved, through his daughter Helen, a chemistry student, in changing the ingredients of Coca-Cola in 1935 so it would be sans animal fat all year, and would be kosher for Pesah. I had the privilege of interviewing Helen, a”h, many years ago for the inside story. You can hear Rabbi Adam Mintz discuss this at the nextbook website and on his own website. The Teshuva on Coca-Cola itself is the most frequently downloaded item of the thousands on the HebrewBooks website
R. Geffen brought Slobodky learning to Atlanta Georgia, and refused to bend halakha for convenience or popularity.
If someone wants me to email a scanned copy of my article, indicate so in the comments below.
Hag sameah v’kasher.

Tu Bishvat,eve of Israeli elections.

About seven years ago a journalist colleague confronted me during a coffee break. “Are you a Neanderthal? How could you support the Shas party?” I invited her to come to Netanya to visit kli rishon some Shas institutions. A few weeks later she took up the gauntlet and came with a photographer to write an article (about Neanderthals?) I took her to the Beit Margolit girl’s elementary school, that had grades 1 to 5; to thriving kindergartens in deprived neighborhoods that were boosting children from the entire religious and non-religious spectrum; to the hessed store of “fellafel Yael”; to Rabbi Moshe ben Moshe’s outreach to marginal youth; to an interview with R. Ovadia Yosef’s daughter Adina BarShalom who founded the Haredi College in Jerusalem. When my journalist friend submitted her article to the Jewish Exponent, they returned it to her and said it was too positive, too glowing to be true, and asked her to rewrite it! She stood her ground and it was published. She doesn’t vote for Shas, but she did change her opinion. “Seeing is not the same as hearing” – is chazal’s phrase describing Moses’ wrath upon seeing Bnai Israel cavorting around the Golden Calf. That goes for positive as well as negative sights.

My oped “AAAs for SHAS” appeared in the Jer. Post on 14bShvat. In researching it I was surprised to discover the wide variety of Shas Members of Knesset. For example, MK Avraham Michaeli graduated a Bnei Akiva yeshiva high school, then Har Etzion (the Gush) hesder, and then Bar-Ilan Law School. He was a captain in the tank corps (most Shas MKs and voters were in the IDF).He is one of three Shas MKs who are immigrants (he is from Georgia FSU, another is from Ethiopia, and a third from Buchara FSU).

I wrote…

5 b Kislev. Today the funerals were held for the kedoshim murdered in Mumbai. I happen to be staying at the Jerusalem home of my brother who is very active in Chabad. We came from assimilated Jewish American homes. He affiliated himself with Chabad in his Austin college days, and raised his seven children to aspire to be “shluchim” and live lives of noble service, as exemplified so beautifully by R. Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, Hy”d. My brother and I listened to a derasha by R. Gavriel that is now on the internet and which R. Gavriel gave exactly 4 years ago when he spoke at the Conference of Shluchim in Brooklyn in 5765 (2004). R.Kotlarsky introduces him in Yiddish, and R.Gavriel himself speaks in Hebrew. It was around the time of parashas Toldos/Vayetze as it is now, and R. Gavriel cited the Rebbe who pointed out that at the end of Toldos Jacob is sent on “shlichus.” In the first verse of Vayetze (Gen.28:10) Jacob goes “Harona” (to Haron) and the midrash and Zohar point out that he is sent out of the Holy Land to a place that is “haron apo shel HaShem” – a spiritually challenged venue.

Similarly shluchim must leave their own holy environs and go out, sometimes to a “haron apo” place. R. Gavriel then describes the beginning of their stay in Mumbai where the religious philosophy was so problematic, and was so different from what he had known that he decided to review thoroughly the tractate Avoda Zara in order to know how to cope spiritually in India. He relates some anecdotes about the challenges faced by him and his wife to build their home and Beit Chabad surrounded by a weltanschauung so contrary to their beliefs. The spiritual and physical difficulties in such a place would discourage all but the most idealistic and motivated.

I got to understand this idealism by observing my brother’s children over the years. It wasn’t easy for him to be associated with Chabad in Bayit vGan, a bastion of modern haredi life, but he succeeded. His oldest daughter and her husband are shluchim in a difficult area of the Ukraine, where water and electricity are sporadic during the day. They just had a baby girl after 7 boys, the oldest being eleven -years-old. They run a shul, school, Shabbatonim, etc. My brother’s eldest son went out there also, with his wife and four little ones, under five. I mention all this because although I did not know R. Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg, Hy”d, through my nieces and nephews I can understand from where they are coming spiritually. Despite my reservations about some aspects of the Chabad approach, I have the utmost respect for and envy of their idealism.

I was curious to see how the tragedy would be portrayed in the Litvishe Yated Neeman newspaper, which years ago was strongly opposed to some facets of Chabad. You can see on the internet that Yated devoted extensive front-page coverage to the tragic news on Sunday (3bKislev) of the murderous outcome in Mumbai.

Ever change your mind after reading something? In the course of translating an essay I was stimulated to rethink a principle I once held dearly: suspicion and avoidance of large crowds. I believed that babies and small children had no place in crowds since they don’t understand what is going on and may disturb. And we know how mass gatherings can be used for nefarious as well as efficacious purposes.
But while translating an essay on Hakhel by Rabbi Haim Sabato from Hebrew to English, I reevaluated my opposition to crowds. (BTW two ceremonies in remembrance of the Hakhel took place during Hol Hamoed Sukkot). I changed my mind on the issue of crowds due to an insight of the Malbim that R. Sabato cites in his essay on Hakhel…

The place:Liberated Theresienstadt. Date: May 1945. Hanna, a survivor, recalls:

“I thought to myself: ‘I am now free. I am actually free to do whatever I want.’ But I had nowhere to go. I had no one. Where could I go? There was no one to guide me. I was completely detached. I belonged to no one. I had just turned 13. At that moment I decided to come to Eretz Israel. I wrote to the uncle, Yitzhak Rosner, who had come on aliya before the War, asking if he would take me in, as my family no longer existed. I wanted to belong to someone. I wanted to belong to my nation.”

These words were narrated by Hanna Rosner Bar-Yesha in a new film that can be purchased online in Hebrew or English from Yad Vashem (by contacting Naama Shik naama.shik@yadvashem.org.il tel.011-972-2-6443654).
I saw a preview of “She Was There and She Told Me:the Story of Hanna Bar-Yesha” at a summer study session initiated by the Zachor Holocaust Education Center of the Michlala, in Bayit vGan, under the direction of historian Esther Farbstein and coordinated with Yad Vashem International School head Shulamit Imber.

Hanna came to pre-State Israel on the rickety aliya bet ship, the Amiran Shochet, commanded by Yonatan Kinnereti that brought her and 182 other “illegal” immigrants here. Narrowly escaping British Mandate patrols, they arrived on a Friday in the summer of 1946 to the Caesaria beach and were hidden in the religious moshav Kfar HaRoeh, not far from Kiryat Sanz, Netanya, where I live. Hanna described to me her first Shabbat in Eretz Israel, when I interviewed her in her home in the south of Israel:

29 b Iyyar
For several years I was a part-time, self-appointed, undercover agent, infiltrating the Shinui party organization in Netanya. I thought about this on Sunday, 27 bIyyar, when during a two-hour drive south I listened to several radio programs devoted to the Shinui party head, Yosef Tommy Lapid, who had passed away that morning and whose funeral was to be the following day. There were interviews with those who knew the late Tommy Lapid including R.Arye Deri, R. Israel Eichler, and Ruth Sirkis (who collaborated with him on Paprika, a [kosher!] cook book of Hungarian dishes.)

Back in the 2003 election, when Lapid’s Shinui party garnered 15 Knesset seats on an anti-clerical platform, I had become curious, and wanted to understand what were the main beefs that Shinui voters had against religious Jews. So I began attending the local party meetings, incognito. I discovered that …..

11 bNissan
I have been searching the internet for the prayer to say upon eating bread on Pessah, and I found it by Googling “zachor Michlalah movies.” There you can see/hear the late Reb Yonah Emanuel who was a teenage inmate in Bergen-Belsen during the Passover of 1944 when the prayer over bread was recited. He reads the entire prayer (it is not a bracha) over bread and describes Pessah in that death camp in this 3 minute segment of a longer DVD. The reason for my search: The recent controversy over selling hametz in the public square during Passover in Israel.
I translated the prayer for bread during Passover into English at the end of this posting.

The controversy and court decision (by a national religious judge!) that permits selling bread in Israel during Passover reminded me of two Seder meals sixty-something years ago.

Passover 1943, Konin Concentration Camp

Before describing Pessah of 1943 in the Konin concentration camp in Poland, Rabbi Yehoshua Aronson gives us, in his memoirs, this startling description of a new arrival, one Dr. Hans Knopf.

He entered the lioness’s den and came out unscathed.

Rabbi Yerachmiel Weiss of Merkaz HaRav Kook, Rosh Yeshiva L’Tzeirim was interviewed by Ilana Dayan three days after the terror attack, on her regular Sunday TV program. Secular Ilana Dayan usually plays hardball so it was surprising that Rav Weiss agreed. He displayed the sterling qualities that make him a leader: sensitivity, deep faith despite grief, patience and complexity. Parts of the interview were broadcast the next day on a haredi radio station. R. Hillel Fendel translated the interview into English “Faith Through Tears.” It is a good idea to skim the English translation first, the better to understand the Hebrew of Rav Weiss.

The interview, in Hebrew, can be seen and heard.. If you read some of the 150 comments posted beside the interview, you will see what a Kiddush Hashem this was.

“What makes Merkaz Harav unique?” was the question posed to me by several American Beis Yaakov seminary girls here for their gap year as we stood on the sidewalk outside of Merkaz HaRav. On the seventh day of the shiva for the eight precious masmidim of Yeshivat HaRav Kook, there was an evening of eulogies at the Yeshiva. Knowing there would be an overflow crowd the yeshiva set up screens in the street so those of us who could not get inside could watch/listen. The previous writers have expressed eloquently what all segments of the Orthodox world have in common with Merkaz HaRav. I think it is also important to touch on what makes Merkaz HaRav unique.

10th of Tevet

“Those who say that suffering such as this has never befallen the Jewish people are mistaken. There was torture comparable to ours at the destruction of the Temple and at Beitar….”

As we approached the fast of the Tenth of Tevet, I reread some of the writings of Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, the Piaseczner Rebbe (pronounced Pia-sech-ner) who made the above observation in 1942 in Warsaw.

How many of us are able to rethink and reevaluate our positions? The Piaseczer did. The historian Esther Farbstein devotes a full chapter to the Rebbe in her comprehensive book Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah, and Leadership During the Holocaust.

Would you like to be a fly on the wall while a battery of secular and modern Orthodox academic experts are discussing the dynamics of change in the haredi world?
If so, then today Tuesday 3 bKislev you can view and listen to the conference (live in Hebrew) taking place at this link for the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem at their website

Here are some highlights for Tuesday, Israel-time. 9-11 am Changes in the public sphere; Consumerism as a political strategy;Limits to consumerism:the case of wigs; The eruv in a multi-cultural society;Chareidim from the ghetto to the Israeli suburbs
11:30am to 1:30pm Volunterrism and medical help (Zaka, genetic testing, philanthropy)
2:30 to 4 pm Education and communication; “An orphaned generation seeks a mother: The mesoret of Sarah Schenirer as a means of post-Holocaust rehabilitation”;
Children’s heroes; Forbidden and permitted media among haredi women/
Final session 4:30 to 6:30pm Halacha, Theology and Education; lectures on Rav Eliashiv shlita, R Shlomo Volbe ztzl; haredi girls’ educaiton between opennessa nd conservation;
theological discussion in popular literature.
Even if you don’t get to view the conference, just reading the list of topics (there is another list for Monday’s sessions) gives you an idea of just how dynamic and varied are the chareidi sectors (plural, there is no one sector) .

I was terribly saddened by the memoir of R.Tzvi Meisels, ztz”l describing his blowing shofar in Auschwitz in 1944. I have, however, questions which really bother me.

So began a challenge from Dr.Tzvia Greenfield, who lives in the HarNof haredi neighborhood of Jerusalem (and ran on the Meretz ticket in the last election). I translated the episode into English (it turns out there are other translations) from the hundred Rabbinic Memoirs edited by Esther Farbstein.

Tzvia Greenfield continues her questioning:

The description of the Shofar blowing of Rabbi Meisels is undoubtedly heartbreaking. But why do you, Esther Farbstein or even (if I may say so) Rabbi Meisels himself assume that the weeping, shouts and begging of the young prisoners on the block awaiting their imminent execution had anything to do at all with his shofar blowing or with Rosh-Hashana in general?
Don’t you think that their heartbreaking crying and yelling was the natural result of their horrible fear from their imminent demise rather than from the sound of the shofar? Did they even HEAR the shofar?? Why attribute their behavior to the shofar blowing rather than simply to their incredible anxiety from death? Isn’t Rabbi Meisels (together with Esther Farbstein) a bit too presumptuous here?
Likewise with the bread for these poor youngsters destined to death: why assume that they begged so bitterly for a piece of bread for the purpose of “mitzva of the holiday meal” when it is so clear that they were simply dying of starvation?
Why assume that they clung to Rabbi Meisels because of his holiness rather
than simply because he was an adult who could perhaps save their lives – so they deluded themselves in their utter desperation? In short – why assume that the whole terrible scene described so touchingly by Rabbi Meisels had anything to do with Rosh Hashana or with any Jewish value?
To me the whole terrible event seems like a natural reaction to the immense fear of death and it has absolutely nothing to do with Yirat Shamayim or kiddush Hashem . I find it rather annoying or at least very problematic (and certainly not professional historically speaking) to attribute this whole experience to Jewish reasons. The poor young people were about to die, and they did not want to. So they cried. This is all. Horrible in its simplicity.
To start talking here of Rosh-Hashana and Shofar blowing seems to me to be not only
misconstrued but actually complacent and even distasteful, if you know what I mean.
Unfortunately these young victims fretted not about Yiddishkeit, but about the loss of their lives. Understanding them now as part of a religious narrative amounts – so I feel – to a betrayal of them.
It’s hard to explain, but I hope you’ll understand.
Tzvia Greenfield sums up:

From the memoirs of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Meisels, ztz”l describing Rosh Hashanah 1944:

“The experience of one transport that left Auschwitz is seared in my memory. With the grace of HASHEM I was miraculously able to bring a shofar into the camp. On the first day of Rosh Hashanah I went from block to block, shofar in hand, to sound the tekiyot. This put my life in danger and I had to avoid the Nazis and malevolent Kapos. I thank HASHEM that due to His mercy and compassion I was privileged to sound the shofar that Rosh Hashanah some twenty times, coming to a hundred blasts en toto. This revived the spirits of the shattered camp inmates and gave them some peace of mind knowing that at least they could observe one mitzvah in Auschwitz – that of shofar on Rosh Hashanah.”

This begins the four chapters describing Rosh Hashanah in Auschwitz that I just translated into English from the preface to R. Meisels’ book, Mekadshey Hashem. The preface is included in the Hebrew CD-ROM Rabbinic Prefaces put out this year by the Michlalah-Jerusalem containing memoirs collected by the historian Esther Farbstein (who also authored Hidden in Thunder). She discovered over 100 prefaces by Holocaust-surviving rabbis. While the memoir is tragic, it is also moving and hopeful. Anything I could add is superfluous, so I will bring the entire description below, highlighting the paragraph in chapter 9 that made me cry.

Chapter 6 Blowing the Shofar in Auschwitz

21bEllul “Tsunami of porn” is the colorful phrase the Shmuley Boteach coined to describe the skimpy clothing and other phenomena that characterize much of modern behavior.

See his Jerusalem Post Sept.2 oped “Why women dress skimpily in the cold,” After exposing the problem of attire, or lack thereof, he writes:

And the most astonishing thing as all this takes place is the deafening silence. I do not know of a single important female voice decrying the tsunami of porn and the denigration of women in our time.

Well, there has been a voice, and that voice is speaking again.

11 b Menahem-Av

Formerly Orthodox Professor Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine , “Orthodox Paradox,” July 22 two days before Tisha B’Av, complains that the Jewish Day School he attended (Maimonides of Boston) does not accept with equanimity his marriage to a non-Jew.

R Shmuley Boteah defends his friend, Noah Feldman, in his Jerusalem Post oped “Stop Ostracizing the Intermarried” .(There are 224 talkbacks so far!)

An astute comment was made on Feldman’s NYTimes piece by a friend of ours who is an Orthodox rabbi, a Harvard graduate who lives deep in the haredi city of Bene Brak, is a professor of Greek and Classics at Bar Ilan, teaches daf yomi, and keeps abreast of current issues. Our friend himself is a person who embodies and personifies the ability to live in several worlds that Feldman describes as the goal of his Maimonides’ education. Apropos Tisha B’Av and commenting on Feldman’s piece, he quoted Midrash Rabba on Eicha, Ptichta 22.

See my comment at the end of this posting for an update on the actual fining of stores that opened on Shabbat.

3 bMenahemAv
Only in Israel would the hourly news report a storm brewing over whether book stores will indeed violate the Shabbat closing laws and open for sale late Friday night. The cause celebre is the world launching of the final Harry Potter book at 12:01 am July 21 British time, which comes out in Israel on the morning of Shabbat Hazon, at 02:01 am. Eli Yishai, the haredi Shas minister for the Ministry of Industry and Labor, “warns stores over Harry Potter book launch.”
It is within Yishai’s purview to send out non-Jewish (usually Druze) inspectors to fine, indict, and possibly imprison Jewish store owners who open on Shabbat in contravention of the law. (There is a dual prohibition: against opening stores, and against employing Jews on Shabbat).
This led me to ruminate on the subject of religious coercion, a topic treated soberly this week in the Jerusalem Post by YU mashgiach (spiritual guidance counselor) Rabbi Yosef Blau in his op ed “Separation of state and religion? A bad idea.”

I personally opt for educating people about Shabbat, but I can understand the case for “coercion” of Shabbat laws. [In democratic Switzerland, the law forbids you to hang laundry and wash your car in public on Sundays].

When we will read the “curses” in Ki Tavo a few weeks hence, the very last curse is unusual: “Aror asher lo yakim et divrey hatorah Hazot la’asot otam…” (Devarim 27:26). Artscroll: “Accursed is one who will not uphold the words of this Torah, to perform them.” One kushiya is in the term lo yakim (literally one who will not uphold) – the verse could have said lo yishmor, lo y’kayaim, lo yishma [will not keep, will not observe, will not listen to]. Why the unusual term (causitive,hif’il ) lo yakim meaning “one who does not make the law stand up”? Ramban takes this to mean to enforce or coerce study/observance. Ramban:

3 b Menahem Av
Remember the party-crashing in the Kamtza and Bar-Kamtza episode? Well, I had my own experience last week.
Jonathan Rosenblum describes below what he would have told the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI).
In a quixotic gesture to share some insights from the haredi sector, I actually went there. I traveled from the hassidic neighborhood where I live in Netanya to the conference in Jerusalem. I sat quietly through two workshops, and then asked the organizers formally to participate in the conference. I was politely and firmly asked to leave -they claimed that this was only for professional planners. Even my informing them that I had a Master’s degree in Planning from the Technion did not sway them and I understood that they were not interested in hearing from that sector (the haredim) that arguably has had the most success in fighting assimilation.
If I could have stayed, I would have made four points. 1) Practice what you preach. If Jewish tradition is so precious, begin every session at such a conference with some relevant text from Jewish tradition. I brought with me the text of the midrash that I discussed below on July 10 (“People Population Policy Planning Palaver”) on the copper mirrors and their role in the Temple and post-Destruction era. (I even brought some actually copper mirrors!) 2) Use a business model. If I were a business owner and wanted to expand my business, I would emulate other businesses that are thriving. If I were a Martian and I were asked how to ensure the future of the Jews, I would examine closely what the centrist and haredi Orthodox have done and are doing, since it is there that we find negligible intermarriage, early marriage, large families, low divorce. 3) Use the ripple-and-trickle-down model. Allocate scarce resources to the involved core of Orthodox and committed non-Orthodox to increase their effectiveness rather than spreading resources on the indifferent periphery a mile wide and an inch deep. An empowered core will attract some of the assimilating periphery. Make Jewish day schools the highest priority of the Jewish community. 4) Go see what works. At the time the JPPPI was meeting there were at least two other conferences taking place in Jerusalem, both of Orthodox women — Binyan Shalem (4000 haredi dati leumi, hardal women) in Binyanei Haooma and Soferet (Orthodox women writers) in Har Nof.

One prominent speaker at the JPPPI conference engaged in verbal haredi bashing and spouted the usual canards about haredim. I am trying to locate him now and tell them that (a)although I disagree with him, I admire his passion, and (b) I would like to send a driver to bring him for a visit to Laniado hospital medical center founded and run by hard-working Sanz hassidim for the benefit of everyone in Netanya.

To paraphrase commentor #3 (Garnel Ironheart) on Jonathan’s posting below, the essential difference is that the JPPPI participants whom I knowhave discussions, while the Orthodox women I know have babies.

25 bTammuz
The future of the Jewish people is in copper mirrors!

That is what I would tell several dozen world Jewish leaders who are convening right now in Jerusalem in order to figure out how the Jewish people can survive and thrive. Under the aegis of the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, dozens of top Jewish leaders are meeting now to figure out how to keep the Jewish people from shrinking/disappearing through intermarriage and low birth rates. You can follow the schedule and see some sessions on video.
To use an Israeli expression, Orthodox women “hayu kvar b’seret hazeh” – they have been in this movie before. The future of the Jewish people was hanging by a thread during the enslavement in Egypt. Orthodox women today uphold as their role models those Israelite women during the Egyptian enslavement who represent female empowerment. The midrash Tanhuma explains that when the men were distanced from marital life, the women went into the fields where their exhaused husbands were laboring and enticed the men using their copper mirrors, fried fish & chips, and enough wine to arouse the spouse’s desire. Rashi comments that this assertiveness was Divinely rewarded and the women were blessed with super-fecundity, expressed in the hyperbole “shisha b’keres echad” – that they gave birth to six at a time. The copper mirrors were subsequently incorporated into the basin in the Tabernacle and Temple: “Moses made the basin and its stand from the copper mirrors of the women who raised crowds” of chidren. (Rashi on Ex.1:7 and 38:8).

If I were invited to explain at this conference what would ensure our future, I would give a lecture centered around this midrash. What puzzles me is how the leaders, bright and analytical, can miss the answer that is staring them in the face: give every encouragement to those women, mostly in the Orthodox sector, who want to raise large families. Give them the modern equivalent of copper mirrors.

To see a graphic explanation of what the future has in store, see the website “Will your grandchildren be Jews?” The chart there shows that 100 haredi Jews today will become 3401 Jews four generations from now, while 100 Reform Jews will become 10 in that same time span.

I asked a group of American Yeshiva boys who were our Shabbat guests how they would respond to the accusation by Israel Prize laureate Professor Alice Shalvi that in Jewish marriage the woman is the property of her husband. They reacted with consternation and chuckled, “What does she mean? It’s the opposite. The men are the property of their wives!”

Alice Shalvi, professor of English literature and Shakespeare scholar, detracts from her signal achievements which earned her the Prize on Yom Atzmaut (Jerusalem Post “A woman’s work,” April 20) when she allows herself to hold forth on Halacha and Jewish law. Some of her painfully erroneous statements are particularly egregious.

(1) Professor Shalvi objects to the use of the word “ba’al” for husband, saying:

“Well, “ba’al” means owner. A lot of women who use the term don’t realize that if the husband’s the ba’al, the wife is his property. In fact, the whole marriage ceremony is one of purchasing the wife.”

3 bNissan

I heard this question this week at all-day conference at Bar Ilan University on “Tefillat Nashim” – issues realted to women’s prayer. There were over a dozen lectures and workshops, many of them discussing the history and halakha of the relationship of women to prayer and how this changed over the centuries. For example, several lecturers cited material that seems to show that centuries ago European Jewish women were the sondaks or godmothers at the brit mila circumcision ceremonies held in synagogues,but that the Maharam of Rotenberg ruled to discontinue this practice this because of the problems arising in mixing men and women. Others discussed how synagogue architecture and design reflect how women have sometimes been less welcomed and other times more welcomed in public prayer as there were fluctuations in the halakha and planning of women’s sections, Ezrat nashim. During the question period, one woman stood up and asked, “Why do the men hate us so much?” I was taken aback. It seems to me that the main reason for separating men and women in prayer is that the men like women so much!
I thought of this as I read the talkbacks (62 so far) on my current Jerusalem Post op ed (March 21, 2bNissan), “Black hats in the front of the bus.”

This is the article that appeared last month on the JTA website. I discussed it here in cross-currents on Feb. 18 in “The Kidnapping of Rosa Parks.” At one point I wrote about women sitting in a separate section at the back of some buses in Israel:

Why women in the back? It isn’t strictly required, but in the Shema prayer we are warned not to follow our roving eyes [“lo tasuru”] and some haredi men take an extra stringency upon themselves to minimize such opportunities. This gift from God – that women nicely distract men – belongs in the privacy of the home…. It’s the men who are disadvantaged because Jewish law imposes more limits on their visual freedom…While self-control is an admirable quality, you shouldn’t put stumbling blocks before the blind… or the sighted.[“lifne iver lo sasim michshol”]

8 b Adar

Two years ago the publisher of Haaretz, Amos Schocken, published an op ed in his own paper extoling the virtues of intermarriage, as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian and Jewish-Muslim conflict. The Hebrew is still available on the Haaretz website May 8,2005 Ha-im Israel rotzei shalom? It has 400 talkbacks.
The English version of Schocken’s op ed is can be read on the “kibush” website (I couldn’t access it on the Haaretz website).
“Does Israel Want Peace?” dated May 6,2005.

What greater peace can there be between the peoples than thousands of Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian students at universities in Israel, and thousands of Israeli students at universities in the Arab states and in Palestine? And what greater peace can there be between the peoples than what is likely to ensue from this: marriages between young Israelis, both Jewish and Arab, and young people from the neighboring countries and from Palestine?

Embedded in the aspiration for peace is a real interest that the Israeli Arabs become an integral and involved part of Israeli society (and not a `sector`), and that Palestinians, Egyptians and Jordanians live in Israel. This can be within Arab families, but even mixed families (one partner Jewish and one partner Arab) should not be ruled out…

Rosh Hodesh Adar.
Sometimes I go to great lengths for the sake of the Cross-currents blog…. Last week I rode the length and breadth of the Land of Israel on the mehadrin buses in order to provide readers with a state-of-the-art summary of the controversial Egged bus lines.

I spent a few hours updating myself on the gender-separate seating. If you have been reading the media reports, you would have suggested I go in full battle gear, perchance I would be accosted by the 300-pound haredi who resembled a Sumo wrestler and commanded Naomi Ragen to move to the back, as she recounts in her interview on National Public Radio. Go to the NPR website and seach for “Jerusalem’s Rosa Parks Fights Modesty Patrols.” You can listen to and/or read the report. Listening is great because you can hear the derision in the speakers’ voices. I am so used to the haredi sector getting short shrift and unequal time that I don’t even mind that the anti-mehadrin side got most of the report, while my pro-mehadrin viewpoint was drastically abridged.

In contrast, the JTA (Jewish Telegraph Agency) was meticulously evenhanded. They had pro and con opeds. Phyllis Snyder, viewing things from her American perch, had written a blistering attack on the Israeli mehadrin buses. But the JTA held up publishing it until they had an oped of equal length defending the buses (by yours truly). They published them simultaneously on their website currently. Go to the JTA website . In the Mid East section you’ll find my “In defense of separate but equal” and Phyllis Snyder’s “Women Don’t belong at back of bus.”

One thing I regret is that in the JTA oped they had to cut, due to word count limits, a passage I quoted from a Naomi Ragen novel. Naomi is acutely aware of the problem of putting temptation in front of someone, so I am surprised she underestimates the attraction women sometimes present to men. This is the passage that was cut:

For those in Jerualem or for those who have friends who can get to Jerusalem this Sunday, Jan. 28 (9b’Shvat). I described the launching of a most unusual Holocaust project in my Jerusalem Post article Thursday 6 b’Shvat (25 Jan) titled The Day the Rabbi Ate Grass,

I describe a new collection of Holocaust memoirs that give us an unmediated glimpse into the world of rabbinic scholars who wrote about their experiences during the Hurban. These autobiographies appear not qua autobiography in the traditional sense, but in prefaces to the scholars’ rabbinic works.

I wrote:

Whereas a rabbinic scholar will write in a more guarded manner in the body of a work, in the preface he can “let his hair down.”
Take for example the preface to an important book by Rabbi Yitzhak Yaakov Weiss, who was well known after the war as a fierce opponent of Zionism. When he comes to write the preface, he drops his political persona.

20 bTevet

R. Avraham Ibn Ezra complained in a poem (all translations below are mine, SLS):

“If I were a candle maker, the sun would never leave the sky.
If I were a shroud maker, not a single person would die.”

He concluded his poem in resignation: