JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Reb Zalman’s Greatest Hits

By Ben Harris · March 29, 2011

I know I've been promising this for a while, and with this season's tour of duty with JTA winding down this week, it's finally done. Here in condensed form is my interview from last December with Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. It was hard to edit this down from 90 minutes to 10. Hope I did OK. 

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Judaism Without Jews

By Ben Harris · March 22, 2011

If you follow the trail of Jewish devastation across Europe, you find this phenomenon repeatedly: Well-intentioned Europeans working to reconstitute some vestige of Jewish life in places with no living Judaism.

I've met several of these people over the past few days here, and while it's hard to question their sincerity, their success -- if one can call it that -- is another issue entirely.

This morning I took the train from Madrid a half-hour south to Toledo, the medieval city that was the center of Jewish life in Spain at a time when Spain was the center of Jewish life for the whole world. The synagogue there has been transformed into a museum that, after the Prado in Madrid, is among the most visited in all of Spain. Some 300,000 visitors passed through its gates in 2010, half of them locals.

In the main hall, a beautiful vaulted ceiling shows evidence of the Jewish encounter with Islam. Ornate stonework along the walls is vaguely reminiscent of the famous Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona. The room bears the hushed quality of all sacred spaces. But beyond that there's virtually no original artifacts dating from the time when Jews actually lived and prayed here.

The same is true of the more recently established Jewish museum in Girona. A handful of ancient stones and Hebrew inscribed Jewish tombstones are all that's left.

Around the corner is another synagogue. An exhibition of Jewishly inspired atwork ringed the perimeter, and several tour groups were hearing short presentations on the history of the Jews in Spain. A cross testifying to the building's use as a church after the expulsion is set into the wall near the ceiling. This is what most of these sites have been reduced to: tourist sites, Jewish art, educational activities -- but no Jews.

At a table near the entrance I met Maria Gloria, a Catholic nun wearing a brown habit and collecting donations. Around her neck hung a wooden cross with a silver Star of David in the center. Maria Gloria is part of a peculiar Christian order, the Maria Fraternity Star of the Morning, founded by a French Jew named Abraham Korn, the artist who had done the paintings I had seen in the synagogue.

I located Korn a short while later at the order's residence on the Plaza de Santa Isabel. Korn's son, Father William, greeted me at the door wearing the same brown habit and cross with a Jewish star. In his room on the second floor, Korn told me how he was born to a French Jewish family during World War II and had grown up with largely negative feelings about Judaism. Until one day, at age 36, he discovered "Hashem."

Besides William, Korn has two daughters: a Christian living in Toledo, and a religious Jew living in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa. We conversed in Hebrew, which Korn picked up during three years that he lived in Jerusalem.

"It's crazy," Korn said of his unorthodox family. "But all stories of God are crazy."

Today, Korn and his 10 followers have taken a threefold vow: poverty, chastity, and devotion. They celebrate Shabbat and Jewish holidays. On Yom Kippur, he recites the Kol Nidre prayers in the synagogue. A Hebrew Bible and other books of Judaica, including an Artscoll translation of the Book of Esther, sit on a shelf. "I'm more Jewish since I became a Catholic," Korn said.

Here I was in what was once the most Jewish city in the world, and the only Jew I can find turns out to be a Catholic who loves Israel. "This is the story of the Jews," Korn told me. "I am a Jew. I feel like a Jew. It's a great responsibility."

The mission he believes God has charged him with is to build a bridge between the Church and the Jewish nation -- not for the purpose of conversion, he assured me, but to bring peace and redemption. "Unity is our main thing," he said. "This is God -- only one. But we need to work for this here. And the most important thing is the connection between the Church and the Jewish people. Only this can work against the Islamic invasion."

Wait -- what? Islamic invasion? I tried to probe this a little further -- but the truth is I didn't want to (and I had a train to catch). I didn't want to lure this gentle man into saying something intolerant about Muslims. But I couldn't quite resist. Why can't Islam be part of this bridge of coexistence?

"This is not the same religion," Korn said. "This is something else. For me, I can live in peace. For them, I don't know. I want peace. And also my daughter. She wants to live in peace. But they -- I don't know if they want to."

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So, Madrid

By Ben Harris · March 22, 2011

Its been a long day here, a whirlwind so unrelenting I'm not even sure where I am right now. Let's reconstruct ...

Spent the morning making one last run through Barcelona before catching the high-speed to Madrid at 2:00. Almost immediately, I fell into conversation with the hijab-wearing Syrian student sitting next to me. The Spanish countryside raced by, as did the time, while she disabused me of virtually everything I thought I knew about modern Syria.

I only gradually let on that she was talking a full-on representative of the international Jewish media conspiracy. Likewise, it took her an hour to disclose that her boyrfiend worked for the Syrian embassy. She invited me to visit her family's farm in Syria. I asked her if I was allowed to as a Jew. "You're Jewish?" she asked, eyes momentarily widerning.

She got on the horn to the fiancee. Then she asked if I'd ever visited Israel. I showed her the Ben Gurion entry stamps in my passport. She kept chattering away. Yes, she told me finally, you can go. You just have to apply for a visa.

A visa? I was expecting this all to end with a first class press junket.

We landed at Atocha at 5:30 and within an hour I was seated on a couch in the waiting room at Casa Sefarad Israel, a Spanish government organ trying to improve ties between Spain, Israel and the Jews. If I had a nickel for every non-Jewish European I've met working on some variation on this theme, well ...

The org's director, Diego de Ojeda, is a jumpy guy who fiddled distractedly with a pen for the whole of our 90 minute interview. When I asked him how anti-Israel the Spanish media was, it was like poking a hornet's nest. He pulled out a dossier from his desk of -- well, I don't know what exactly. There was a pamphlet in there from Stand With Us featuring a timeline of every evil Spain had ever perpetrated against the Jews. A photo of some swastika/Star of David/skull and crossbones mashup with the dates March 11th and Septmber 11th -- the former referring to the Atocha train station bombing, the latter to, well you know.

Diego talks like a freight train and it seemed he could go on forever disabusing me of every negative thing I'd ever heard about Spain and the Jews. You seeing the pattern?

By now it was coming up on 9, and I was tired and hungry and hoping someone would give it to me straight. I asked if there was a kosher place in town, maybe somewhere I could meet some real folks, not the representatives of officialdom I'd been dealing with.

I was led to a subway train, told which way to head, and somehow found myself 25 minutes later walking down a dark street towards a yellow light. Just as I got close, a woman opened the door.  

"Kosher?" she asked. I nodded.

Inside, the place was empty, but she insisted on seating me at the table closest to the door. There's no menu, so she set about describing in Hebrew the various shapes of meat I could have grilled for me.

"You want salad?" she asked. Israeli salad? No. Hummus? No.

Sure, I told her. Bring it on.

And that's where we're at -- sitting at a table, somewhere in Madrid (I literally have no idea where), eating a pile of grilled meat and some pickley-salads, and writing this.

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Purim en Barcelona

By Ben Harris · March 20, 2011

Of all the spots on the Jewish map where I could have spent Purim, I never would have chosen Barcelona. But the itinerary worked out this way and it wound up being one of those random experiences that I've come to appreciate doing this job.

The evening began at the Moroccan synagogue here, where only one person got up the gumption to talk to me in extremely broken Hebrew, the only language we shared. He was moved to say hello because I was following the megillah reading on an iPhone app and he made some joke about a guy sitting two rows away and following along in a scroll dating from the time of the Inquisition. "He has the oldest one and you have the newest," he said. Or at least I think that's what he said. We both laughed anyway.

Afterwards I hung around uncomfortably in the lobby -- again, no one wanted to chit chat -- until I heard some English. It was a family from Albany on vacation and I told them about a party happening around the corner. So we all traipsed up a hill to an Israeli-owned pizza/falafel joint only to find the party didn't start for another hour. They bailed. I sipped water and waited.

Eventually some revelers showed up in full Purim regalia and I met the most random assortment of people. A Brazilian guy who told me his grandfather had sent a helicopter to fetch his father from a Rio yeshiva and bring him home to Sao Paulo. A Barcelona native with perfectly unaccented English who actually reads TWJ and proudly told me he works just two hours a day boring holes under the city for a new metro line. An Israeli girl who wouldn't tell me anything about herself other than that she is in Barcelona "living." A fifty-something French-Italian who only dates women two decades his junior. An Argentinian Jew whose job fell through and is currently living on the streets. And of course lady Madonna (pictured), who told me she's not even Jewish but she likes to use those yarmulkes on her knees for a sex position I won't describe.

I was surprised by the youth and the vibrancy. After visiting more small and dying Jewish communities than any person ought to, I didn't expect to see so many 20-somethings. But there they were.

It was doubly a shock because I've been musing a lot on the loss of Spanish Judaism. I say lost because while there's a small community living here today, there's virtually nothing remaining from the hundreds of years of Jewish history preceeding the expulsion in 1492, the so-called Golden Age of Spanish Jewry.

And not only are the Jews long gone, but the physical remnants of their history are few and far between. In Barcelona, I visited a synagogue dating from the third century (consider that for a moment) and believed to be the oldest in all of Europe. It required navigating a maze of claustrophobic alleyways that are among the most byzantine of any ancient quarter I've visited. I was helped along by a hotel concierge who had to draw me a map on the back of a business card. 

In the Belly of the Beast

By Ben Harris · March 17, 2011

The headquarters of France's National Front party is located in Nanterre, a middle class suburb in the west of Paris. It was cold and overcast when I arrived there in mid-afternoon, the coldest and grayest day all week, and it gave the neighborhood a bleaker quality than it probably deserves.

On a quiet residential street of two-story homes and neatly tended gardens, the National Front building stands out. It's a cold, modern office building amid the area's century-old architecture. Le Corbusier might have liked it, but I found it soulless and conspicuous. It was the only building around with an enormous French flag hanging from the facade.

Inside, Marine Le Pen, the party leader and youngest daughter of the notorious Jean-Marie Le Pen, was due to hold a press conference at 5:00 p.m. I signed in (no ID check necessary) and took my place among the journalists milling about. At the stroke of the hour, Marine entered.

Her father famously described her as "a big, healthy, blonde girl, an ideal physical specimen," and I can vouch that at least half that statement is true. Marine is tall and stocky, her face framed by cascades of golden hair. Healthy? Her teeth are dark, most likely from the cigarettes she was quick to remove from her desk when we sat down later for an interview. And ideal? Well, that's a matter of taste.

The occasion for the presser was the release last week of 2010 earnings reports for the companies in the CAC40, France's benchmark stock index. Suprise! The companies did rather well, which presented Le Pen the opportunity to assail them for making obscene profits, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy for allowing them to do so. She invoked themes of social justice and fairness that, taken together, amount to a textbook example of the link between economic crisis and the rise of extreme parties.

When it was over, Le Pen took a few questions and hammed it up for the cameras. An Australian reporter asked her for a private audience, which she declined. Then her press secretary led me up two flights of stairs to Le Pen's office on the top floor. It was gently lit by a lamp. A flat screen monitor and an ashtray with several butts sat on a wooden desk. On the wall was a blue painting that Le Pen told me was done by an Israeli artist.

La Manifestation

By Ben Harris · March 16, 2011

On Monday night, a crowd of about 250 packed into a hall on the second floor of the mairie du 3 arrondissement, the town hall of Paris' third municipal district. Like all officialdom in France, the mairie has the stately bearing of something from a different time.

Up a marble staircase and down a red-carpeted corridor I found myself in a room with an ornate ceiling and peeling paint. A heavy red curtain hung behind the stage. The wooden floor was badly scuffed. As in much of Paris, this was beauty covered by a layer of grime.

The same could be said of the rally's subject that evening: Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front party whose invitation to a Jewish radio program -- followed by a disinvitation amid broad communal outrage -- precipitated the rally.

Le Pen has much in common with conservatives the world over -- a desire for a return to traditional (often religious) values, a longing for a time before globalization and mass immigration diluted the national identity, skepticism of international institutions deemed to be undermining national sovereignty. But her party has been saddled with accusations of anti-Semitism due largely to statements minimizing the Holocaust and making light of Jewish suffering during World War II by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. And it's that layer of filth that the younger Le Pen has been trying to excise in her attempt to sanitize the party's image.

For most French Jews, this formulation gets it precisely backwards: It's not that the National Front is a values-based party with an anti-Semitism problem. It is a structurally anti-Semitic entity now headed by a brilliant communicator who, they fear, is savvier than her father and threatens to seduce -- that word was used several times -- Jewish voters fearful of France's Muslim community.

"If the Jews host her," said Richard Prasquier, the president of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions, "she is respectable."

The word Prasquier used was "frequentable," a tasty bit of French etymology I picked up this week. Like a bar that you frequent -- and is, therefore, implicitly kosher -- Le Pen's apearance on Jewish radio would make her "frequentable," someone you can do business with.

I was struck by the repeated invocations of World War II. Collaborationist is still an adjective with some bite in France. One speaker described Le Pen as bringing a "brown wave" over France, a reference to the shirts of Nazi paramilitaries. Le Pen's comparison of Islamic prayer in the streets of Paris to an "occupation" was noted several times.

The irony, if you can call it that, is that Le Pen's chances of actually winning the French presidency -- despite recent polls showing her outpacing Nicolas Sarkozy and the Socialist candidate Martine Aubry -- is universally regarded to be zero. The danger is a symbolic one, I was told repeatedly.

Over lunch today with a woman who spent several years researching the National Front, sometimes covertly, I asked her to imagine a hypothetical in which Le Pen did win. The Jews would leave, she told me, out of fear that they wouldn't be able to later if it became truly necessary. "Either they leave the country right away, or they take the risk to be stuck," she told me. "We have history here, you know."

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At the Quai d’Orsay

By Ben Harris · March 15, 2011

Valerie Hoffenberg is the kind of Jew I was told did not exist in France. A former director of the American Jewish Committee field office in Paris, and a bigwig at the CRIF (the rough -- and I stress rough -- equivalent of the Conference of Presidents), Hoffenberg has been serving for over a year as Nicolas Sarkozy's special representative for the economic, cultural, commercial, educational and environmental dimensions of the Middle East peace process.

This in a country where, I'm often told, Jews feel they shouldn't advertise their identity too much, where wearing a yarmulke to work or asking for time off for religious holidays just isn't done. All these things runs afoul of France's commitment to secularism -- or less charitably, of its seething underbelly of anti-Semitism.

Hoffenberg was all too happy to disabuse me of that notion, and to reassure me that she does, in fact, exist.

“It's not easy,” she said. “There are not so many people like me. It's true that there are many people who are Jewish who try not to say it openly, or not to mention it too much. But that was not my case.”

I met Hoffenberg Monday afternoon in her high-ceilinged office on the second floor at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a sprawling fortress of a building along the Seine. After passing through security, I was led down a dimly lit hallway lined with high resolution photos of French diplomacy in action, including one section detailing the Ministry's efforts in the Palestinian territories.

My escort was a stern woman in a fitted white jacket who clearly didn't abide pleasantries. I trailed three feet behind her except when we reached a door, whereupon she'd hold it open for me to walk through before scurrying back in front. She led me up a flight of winding carpeted stairs, through a glass door inscribed "Secretariat d'Etat aux Affaires Etrangeres Cabinet," and deposited me on a low couch. She never once looked back.

Generation Limmud

By Ben Harris · March 14, 2011

I feel like I have to start this post with a confession: Before this weekend, I'd never been to Limmud. Ever. There must be others like me, so if you have no idea what I'm talking about, see here.

I'd first heard of this thing when i was a grad student in London in 2003 and my English friends were talking about how instead of going to the beach over Christmas, or to the Phish show at MSG, they shacked up in dormitories at a university in Warwick and spent the week studying Judaism. I found this baffling. Why on earth would anyone want to do that?

Limmud now exists in more than 30 countries around the world and, as several of my colleagues have shown (see here and here), after three decades is a full blown phenomenon. But despite a half-decade covering the Jewish world, I've never managed to get myself to one of these gatherings. Until now.

Based on my experience, Limmud -- or Limoud, as they call it in France -- is a place of abundant wine (but only during meals, and beyond that little alcohol), exceptional food (unless you're a vegetarian, in which case, vous n'avez pas de chance), early bed times, and a surprising number of sessions dealing with the intersection of Judaism and two subjects: pschoanalysis and pop music.

OK, so that might not be typical. But in one respect, the young French Limoudniks I spoke to -- and let's call a croissant a croissant here, shall we? most French Limoudniks are young -- are indistinguishable from their counterparts around the world: they've got a serious bone to pick with the community leadership. In France, it's about their lack of support for new projects, their disinterest in strong ties with the wider Jewish world, the lack of innovative youth programming, their refusal to offer free packs of Galouoises in exchange for donations. (OK, I made that last one up, but still.)

This is hardly a French phenomenon. Even in New York, with its abundance of creative Jewish expression, the establishment is often deemed insufficiently supportive of new initiatives. Even where there's a lot, it seems there isn't enough.

But there is something unique about the French experience. France is the largest Diaspora community in the world after the United States, yet more Limmud events have been organized by the 40,000 Jews of the Netherlands. According to the recent Jumpstart survey, Hungary, with one-tenth the population of Jews, has more Jewish startup organizations. Between 2000-10, only about 5,000 Birthright participants have been French -- compared to Canada (22,720), Argentina (9.865), Russia (13,512), and Ukraine (7.252), all of which have smaller Jewish populations.

"In France, there is the already existing Jewish community and institutions that were great innovations when they were founded, [but] more and more we realize that what they're doing is very much often some management of the already existing activities, and not about the vision, and about a new future, and about helping innovations," said Ruth Ouazana, the honorary president of Limoud France, at a session about UK-French collaboration. "It's very difficult to move."

This has led to some dire predictions, which I don't quite buy. Read my story last year from Vienna, or from Copenhagen. Both countries have Jewish populations far smaller than France and have been warning of their imminent disappearance for a century. So far the worst hasn't come to pass. It's impossible to imagine a half-million French Jews assimilating into oblivion.

But there's clearly something locking French Jewry into old patterns that other communities are managing to break out of. I'll be writing more about this as the week goes on. But this is an issue of degree not kind, quantity not quality. Every community I've visited is experiencing this sort of tension, between an establishment more focused on social welfare, Israel, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and a younger generation more digitally plugged-in, less deferential to intercommunal barriers (real and percieved), less reflexively supportive of Israel, more concerned with meaning over obligation. In a word, more open, like the world they've created.

'Generation Limmud' was the term I heard a few times this weekend to describe these folks. I hesitate to use it because it implies a breadth that simply isn't there. Plenty of Jews are checked out entirely and wouldn't know a Limmud conference if it bit them on the nose. Many others see their Judaism primarily through the lens of private religious devotion and don't much care what the machers are up to.

But neither are these concerns easily dismissed. The checked-out aren't going to assume leadership positions any time soon. And as the closing session at the recent OU convention demonstrates, it takes some doing to get Orthodox kids involved in broad-based community organizations. For better or worse, Generation Limmud is either going to inherit the establishment, or create its own.

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Remembering the Holocaust in Sofia

By Ben Harris · March 10, 2011

Today is the Day of the Salvation of the Bulgarian Jews and of the Victims of the Holocaust and of the Crimes Against Humanity. Under a bright cloudless sky, a crowd of about 150 gathered this morning opposite the National Assembly building in Sofia for a memorial ceremony.

It was a highly choreographed affair: After a brief speech and the national anthem, each of the gathered dignitaries were invited to lay a wreath on a tiny stone monument as two girls banged a somber rhythm on silver drums. Each official carefully laid a wreath then paused for a moment to solemnly bow the head before moving on.

The procession was a study in stereotypes. The chairwoman of the National Assembly, the unforgettably named Tzetzka Tzacheva, was looking stern and solemn in all black. Russia's ambassador was red-faced and jowly. The Italian came wrapped in soft brown leather. And the American, in something of a reproach to his secular European counterparts, made the only religious gesture, crossing himself during the head-bowing section of the program.

After that were the musical selections. The first, following the tried and true roadmap for Holocaust memorials the world over, featured a youth choir doing Hannah Senesh's "Eli, Eli." The second one caught me off-guard. To a tinny, surprisingly upbeat soundtrack, the choir launched into Oseh Shalom. Two elderly women draped in fur coats sang their hearts out for the TV cameras.

Though less celebrated than the dramatic nighttime rescue of Denmark's Jews in 1943, Bulgaria saved nearly 50,000 of its Jewish citizens. The episode is rightly a mark of Bulgarian pride, as evidenced by the broad assemblage of dignitaries. But the truth, as it often is, is more complex. Bulgaria's Jews were subjected to a law, adopted in 1941, that limited their property and civil rights. Tens of thousands were sent from Sofia to the countryside. Able-bodied men were sent to forced labor camps.

But helped in large part by broad opposition to their deportation from all sectors of Bulgarian society -- including politicians and church leaders -- none were sent to the death camps in Poland. They were, as one person said, raped, but not killed.

In Thrace and Macedonia, territories then administered by Bulgaria, the situation was less fortunate. Some 11,000 Jews were deported, and virtually all of them killed.

So the day has a kind of bittersweet quality to it. The ceremony is conducted in the sober manner of all such ceremonies, and Alek Oscar, the president of the Sofia Jewish community, in his speech, addressed the mixed record of Bulgaria with respect to its Jews in an effort to remind Bulgarians of their history.

"We do not want to be radically changing the whole perspective," he told me after. "Slowly, slowly we are doing it."

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Blessed Hands

By Ben Harris · March 9, 2011

Sorry for the lack of preamble, but here's the deal: For the next two weeks or so I'll be traipsing around Europe for JTA, my last jaunt before I sign off for the season (And no, I haven't forgotten the R. Zalman video. Bear with me people.)

I'm in Bulgaria. It wasn't easy getting here. Took three planes and nearly a full day, then another one to recover. But today I got the grand tour of Jewish Sofia. I went to the community center, then the other community center, the Jewish school (where they interviewed me under blazing studio lights), and the 102-year-old synagogue with a gorgeous interior where my camera lens conveniently gave out, necessitating an unexpected cash advance to a helpful photo retailer.

I struggled to stifle a grin watching a roomful of elderly Jews go through their morning constitutional, a scene that reminded me vaguely of Gung Ho, when George Wendt and Michael Keaton find themselves with no choice other than to join the morning calisthenics at a Japenese auto plant. By the end of the afternoon, I found myself in the company of three middle aged women -- part of a group called Manos Bendichas, Ladino for "Blessed Hands" -- who scurried around showing off the crocheted kippas they sell, sometimes by the hundreds, for American bar-mitzvahs.

Jewish Sofia has all the trappings of a vibrant community, a testament no doubt to the consistent work done here over the last two decades by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Ronald Lauder Foundation. But it's the texture of community life that's a little harder to capture.

In other countries in this part of the world, I've detected a subtle discontent particularly among the young, who came of age in a time of turbulent political change, were primed for success in large part by their exposure to Jewish organizational culture, and are now facing the prospect that their countries may fail to deliver on their promise. Though now firmly oriented Westward, corruption remains rife in the new Bulgaria. The recession has hit hard.

Yet within the confines of communal life lies this strange oasis where the non-profit vernacular of mission statements and community building and organizational transparency is spoken. 

A pretty young woman with impeccable English who works for the community told me of the contacts she is able to make with local dignitaries through her job. The Lauder school, to which local Jewish kids are accepted automatically and yet constitute less than a third of the student body, is said to be among the best in the city. And after seeing its banks of computer equipment and pro-quality television production studio, I'm inclined to believe it.

As it often does in less fortunate parts of the world, the Jewish community here offers a layer of insulation against the harsheness beyond. In Romania, I once saw a blue-blazered community leader doling out prescription meds to a handful of elderly Jewish men, a cross between Santa and the Godfather dispensing live-saving elixirs.

I saw nothing so desperate today. Though I had to ask, What of the masses of Bulgarian elderly who don't enjoy funny group excercise classes, subsidized lunches, summer camps and -- maybe most importantly -- consistent social outlets?

"They're home," I was told. "Dying."

Tomorrow morning at the parliament building, in another sign of the double-edged quality of Jewish life here, Bulgaria will commemorate the saving of the country's Jews during the Holocaust. Though less talked about than the better-known (though much smaller) resuce of Danish Jewry, Bulgaria saved nearly 50,000 Jews during World War II. But the country also sacrificed more than 10,000 Jews then living in Thrace and Macedonia, territories administered from Sofia but whose Jews were not considerd Bulgarians worthy of protection.

The Sofia Jewish community's 32-year-old president, Alec Oscar, will speak. And I'll be there too -- with my spanking new camera lens.

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