The World's Oldest Holocaust Survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer, Dies at 110

Prague-Born Pianist Is Subject of New Documentary

POLLY HANCOCK

Alice Herz-Sommer, pictured here on her 107th birthday, is the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary.

Ofer Aderet

(Haaretz) — The world’s oldest Holocaust survivor, Alice Herz-Sommer, died Sunday at the age 110 in London. Herz-Sommer, a pianist, born in Prague, was the subject of a documentary “The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life”, Academy Award (Oscar) winner.

“Young people take everything for granted, whereas we, the elderly, understand nature, “ Herz-Sommer told Haaretz in an interview at age 106. “What I have learned, at my advanced age, is to be grateful that we have a nice life. There is electricity, cars, telegraph, telephone, Internet. We also have hot water all day long. We live like kings. I even got used to the bad weather in London,” she said.

Besides her twin sister, Mariana, she had another sister and two brothers. She discovered a love for music at the age of 3, and it has remained with her to this day. Her family home in Prague was also a cultural salon where writers, scientists, musicians and actors congregated, among them Franz Kafka, who she remembers well. He was the best friend of the journalist, author and philosopher Felix Weltsch, who married her sister Irma.

“Kafka was a slightly strange man,” Sommer recalled. “He used to come to our house, sit and talk with my mother, mainly about his writing. He did not talk a lot, but rather loved quiet and nature. We frequently went on trips together. I remember that Kafka took us to a very nice place outside Prague. We sat on a bench and he told us stories. I remember the atmosphere and his unusual stories. He was an excellent writer, with a lovely style, the kind that you read effortlessly,” she says, and then grows silent. “And now, hundreds of people all over the world research and write doctorates about him.”

When World War I broke out, she was 11. Five years later she enrolled in the German music academy in Prague, where she was the youngest pupil. Within a short time she became one of the city’s most famous pianists, and in the early 1930s was also known throughout Europe. Max Brod, the man who published Kafka’s works, recognized Sommer’s talent and reviewed several of her performances for a newspaper.

In 1931 she married Leopold Sommer, also a musician. Six years later their only son, Rafael, was born. In 1939 the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia.

This was a very difficult time for Sommer, who had stayed behind. The Nazis forbade Jews to perform in public, and so she stopped holding concerts and participating in music competitions. At first she was still able to make a living by giving piano lessons, but when the Nazis forbade Jews to teach non-Jews, she lost most of her pupils.

“Everything was forbidden. We couldn’t buy groceries, take the tram, or go to the park,” she said.

But the hardest times of all still lay ahead. In 1942 the Germans arrested her sick mother, Sophie, who was 72 at the time, and subsequently murdered her.

“That was a catastrophe,” Sommer said. The bond between a mother and her child is something special. I loved her so much. But an inner voice told me, ‘From now on you alone can help yourself. Not your husband, not the doctor, not the child.’

And at that moment I knew I had to play Frederic Chopin’s 24 etudes, which are the greatest challenge for any pianist. Like Goethe’s ‘Faust’ or Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet.’ I ran home and from that moment on I practiced for hours and hours. Until they forced us out.”

In 1943, Sommer was sent to the Terezin-Theresienstadt concentration camp, along with her husband and their son, who was then 6 years old. The Nazis allowed the Jews to maintain a cultural life there, in order to present the false impression to the world that the inmates were receiving proper treatment. Sommer thus performed there together with other musicians.

“We had to play because the Red Cross came three times a year,” she recounts. “The Germans wanted to show its representatives that the situation of the Jews in Theresienstadt was good. Whenever I knew that I had a concert, I was happy. Music is magic. We performed in the council hall before an audience of 150 old, hopeless, sick and hungry people. They lived for the music. It was like food to them. If they hadn’t come [to hear us], they would have died long before. As we would have.”

In September 1944, her husband Leopold was sent to Auschwitz. He survived his imprisonment there, but died of illness at Dachau shortly before the war ended. His departing words to her at Theresienstadt saved her life, says Sommer: “One evening he came and told me that 1,000 men would be sent on a transport the following day - himself included. He made me swear not to volunteer to follow him afterward. And a day after his transport there was another one, which people were told was a transport of ‘wives following in their husbands’ footsteps.’ Many wives volunteered to go, but they never met up with their husbands: They were murdered. If my husband hadn’t warned me, I would have gone at once.”

In May 1945, the Soviet army liberated Theresienstadt. Two years later Sommer and her son immigrated to Palestine, where they were reunited with her family: her twin Mariana, who had meanwhile married Prof. Emil Adler, one of the founders of Hadassah Medical Center (their son, Prof. Chaim Adler, is an Israel Prize laureate for education), and with Irma and her husband Felix (their grandson is actor Eli Gorenstein).

I don’t hate the Germans,” Sommer declared. “[What they did] was a terrible thing, but was Alexander the Great any better? Evil has always existed and always will. It is part of our life.”

In 1962, she added, she attended the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem: “I have to say that I had pity for him. I have pity for the entire German people. They are wonderful people, no worse than others.”

For almost 40 years Sommer lived in Israel, making a living by teaching music at a conservatory in Jerusalem. “That was the best period in my life,” she recalls. “I was happy.”

In 1986, Sommer followed her son, a cellist, and his family to London. She continued playing and teaching; to this day she devotes three hours a day to practicing. She speaks lovingly of her two grandchildren, whose father, Rafael, died of a heart attack in Israel in 2001, at the end of a concert tour. He was 64.

His birth was the happiest day of my life, and his death was the worst thing that happened to me,” she notes, but manages to find a bright spot even here. “I am grateful at least that he did not suffer when he died. And I still watch my son play, on television. He lives on. Sometimes I think it will be possible someday to postpone death through technology.”

When asked in 2006 what the secret of her longevity was, she answered: In a word: optimism. I look at the good. When you are relaxed, your body is always relaxed. When you are pessimistic, your body behaves in an unnatural way. It is up to us whether we look at the good or the bad. When you are nice to others, they are nice to you. When you give, you receive.” “My recommendation is not to eat a lot, but also not to go hungry. Fish or chicken and plenty of vegetables.”

When asked whether she was afraid of dying, she replied: “Not at all. No. I was a good person, I helped people, I was loved, I have a good feeling.”

<The Forward>

The Secret Jewish History of Don Quixote

Was Cervantes's Hero the Mensch of La Mancha?

GETTY IMAGES

Impossible Dreamers: The adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza seem to have been influenced by stories in the Zohar.

Benjamin Ivry

Was Don Quixote’s impossible dream a Yiddisher one? The French author Dominique Aubier, whose study “Don Quixote: Prophet of Israel” has just been reprinted, apparently thinks so.

Aubier’s book, which originally appeared in 1966, is based on the thesis now generally accepted by literary historians that the author of “Don Quixote,” Miguel de Cervantes, likely hailed from a family of conversos, or converts, Spanish Jews who in 1492 were faced with the choice of leaving their homeland or staying on as Christians. Extrapolating from this likelihood, Aubier advanced controversial theories, for example that “Don Quixote” contains numerous references to the Kabbalah and other Jewish themes. The protagonist’s very name, according to Aubier, is derived from the Aramaic word qeshot, meaning truth or certainty, often used in the Zohar, a key text in Kabbalah.

Critics of Aubier’s ideas are plentiful among Spanish literature experts (the Cervantes scholar Daniel Eisenberg has termed her book “highly misleading”), who point out that it is near impossible that Cervantes could have had access to Jewish mystical literature in Spain. When “Don Quixote” was originally published, from 1605 to 1610, observant Jews had long since been expelled from the country. Among Aubier’s other suggestions is one concerning Dulcinea del Toboso, Don Quixote’s ideal woman who was in reality a peasant-like “brawny girl,” as Quixote’s servant Sancho Panza described her. Aubier states that Dulcinea symbolizes the Shekhinah, which in talmudic tradition has been described as representing feminine attributes of God’s presence. “Don Quixote: Prophet of Israel” also offers an etymology for Dulcinea’s town El Toboso as deriving from the Hebrew words tov and sod, or good and hidden meaning.

Aubier reads “Don Quixote” as an intentional gloss on the Zohar, claiming that if readers accept that Cervantes “proceeds from a dynamic engagement with the concepts of the Zohar, themselves resulting from a dialectic dependence on Talmudic concepts, which in turn sprang from an active engagement with the text of Moses’ book, it is then on the totality of Hebrew thought — in all its uniqueness, its unity of spirit, its inner faithfulness to principles clarified by slow and prodigious exegesis — that the attentive reader of ‘Don Quixote’ must rely in order at last to be free to release Cervantes’ meaning from the profound symbols with which it is encoded.”

Aubier’s fervent, elevated tone is also present on more recent Kabbalah-inspired video analyses posted on YouTube. In one of these, Aubier, a sturdy elderly Frenchwoman who speaks in a pronounced Provençal accent, describes what the numbers on the New York street address of the then-accused felon Dominique Strauss-Kahn signify in Kabbalah lore. Aubier was born Marie-Louise Labiste in 1922 and adopted her present name after joining the French Resistance in Grenoble. (In 1945, Aubier published a collection of stories based on her Resistance experiences that would probably also make intriguing reading today.) Aubier admits to being neither a Hebraist nor a professional scholar of Kabbalah. Yet some Cervantes specialists are taking her arguments about “Don Quixote” increasingly seriously.

“Don Quixote and Sancho Panza Were Walking on the Way,” a 2009 article by Nathan Wolski in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, denies that Cervantes had intended to hide kabbalistic references in “Quixote.” Wolski concedes that both “Quixote,” about a wandering knight, and the 13th century Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Splendor), published in Spain by Moses de León, are picaresque in that they consist of discussions sparked by events encountered on journeys. Wolski notes: “In the Zohar itself, the Kabbalists are often portrayed as knights of Torah and knights of the Shekhinah, and the Zohar frequently employs medieval military imagery to depict its wandering heroes… The Torah is compared to a beautiful maiden or princess hidden deep within her palace, while the Kabbalist is described as her lover passing by her gate constantly.”

Most of the stories in the Zohar begin by stating that two rabbis were “walking on the way.” Wolski describes the Zohar as a “proto-mystical novel recounting the adventures and expositions of Rabbi Shimon and his disciples, the Companions… For both the Zohar and Don Quixote then, walking and speaking are concurrent and constitutive activities of the journey… [T]hese correspondences derive from a shared Spanish-Jewish-converso literary legacy spanning more than three centuries.”

“Is There a Hidden Jewish Meaning in Don Quixote?” in Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America also explored the works’ shared thematics as pioneered by Aubier. The article, written by Michael McGaha, argues that Cervantes intended to depict Don Quixote as a converso, although Aubier did not establish how Cervantes might have acquired any knowledge of the Zohar. Aubier’s theses have received scant wholehearted support in academia, one exception being Ruth Reichelberg, a professor at Bar Ilan University and author of “Don Quixote, or the Novel About a Concealed Jew.”

Still, Jewish readers need no convincing of Don Quixote’s inherent Yiddishkeit, especially with regard to the modern Hebrew translation by the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934). Working from an abridged Russian translation of Cervantes’ masterpiece — Bialik could not read Spanish — he cut the novel by over one-half. In a letter to a friend, Bialik stated: “I read [“Don Quixote”] in Russian when I first came to Odessa as a teenage yeshiva boy, trying to become a poet. I was living in poverty in Odessa, and the book had enthralled me… Dostoyevsky made me weep and Cervantes made me laugh. I alternated between laughing and crying.”

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov termed “Don Quixote” a “cruel and crude old book,” an observation justified by a readily available online summary of the novel’s action: “Don Quixote promises to make a balsam to cure Sancho… Don Quixote mixes ingredients and drinks the potion. He vomits immediately and passes out… Sancho also takes the potion, and although it makes him tremendously ill, he does not vomit… Don Quixote rushes into the battle and kills seven sheep before two shepherds throw stones at him and knock out several of his teeth… Don Quixote takes more of the balsam, and as Sancho comes close to see how badly his master’s teeth have been injured, Don Quixote vomits on him. Nauseous, Sancho then vomits on Don Quixote.”

Yet in appetizing English-language versions by the acclaimed Jewish translators J. M. Cohen, Burton Raffel and Edith Grossman, “Don Quixote” is no stomach turner. The literature-obsessed knight of doleful countenance was a man of the book, simultaneously a schlemiel and schlemazel, who seems destined to remain irresistible to Jewish readers. Even Nabokov, in his “Lectures on Don Quixote,” admitted that by the novel’s end, “we do not laugh at [Don Quixote] any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish and gallant.”

Benjamin Ivry is a frequent contributor to the Forward.

<The Forward>

BERESHIT: Assumindo a Responsabilidade

Se a liderança é a solução, qual é o problema? Sobre isso, a Torá não poderia ser mais específica. É a falta de responsabilidade.

Os primeiros capítulos do Gênesis se concentram em duas histórias: Adão e Eva, e Caim e Abel. Cada uma é sobre um tipo específico de falha.

Primeiro a de Adão e Eva. Como sabemos, eles pecaram. Constrangidos e envergonhados, eles se escondem, mas apenas para descobrirem que não podem se esconder de D’us:

O Senhor D’us primeiro chamou o homem: "Onde estás?". Ele respondeu:"Ouvi teus passos no jardim e tive medo, porque estava nu, e escondi-me". E ele disse: "Quem disse que você estava nu? Você comeu da árvore de que te ordenei que não comesses? "O homem disse: "A mulher que você colocou aqui comigo, ela m e deu o fruto da árvore, e eu o comi."Então o Senhor D’us disse à mulher:"O que é isso que você fez" e a mulher disse: "A serpente me enganou, e eu comi." (Gênesis 3: 9-12).

Ambos insistem que a culpa não é deles. Adão culpa a mulher. A mulher culpa a serpente. O resultado é que ambos são punidos e exilados do Éden. Adão e Eva negam a responsabilidade pessoal. Ambos dizem "Não fui eu".

A segunda história é mais trágica. É o primeiro exemplo da rivalidade entre irmãos na Torá que leva ao primeiro assassinato:

Caim disse a seu irmão Abel. Enquanto eles estavam no campo, Caim atacou seu irmão Abel e o matou. Então o Senhor disse a Caim: "Onde está seu irmão Abel?". "Eu não sei", ele respondeu. "Sou eu o guardião do meu irmã o? "O Senhor disse: "O que você fez? Ouça! O sangue do teu irmão clama a mim vindo do chão" (Gn 4: 8-10).

Caim não nega responsabilidade pessoal. Ele não diz: "Não fui eu", ou "Não foi minha culpa." Ele nega a responsabilidade moral. Com efeito, ele questiona por que ele deveria se preocupar com o bem-estar de outra pessoa além dele mesmo. Por que não podemos fazer o que queremos e ter o poder de fazê-lo na República de Platão, Glauco argumenta que a justiça é a que é do interesse do partido do mais forte. O Poder a torna correta. Se a vida é uma luta Darwiniana para a sobrevivência, porque devemos nos restringir para o bem dos outros, se somos mais poderosos do que os outros? Se na natureza não há moralidade, então eu sou responsável apenas para comigo mesmo. Essa é a voz de Caim ao longo dos tempos.

Essas duas histórias não são apenas histórias. Elas são relat&oac ute;rios, no início da história narrativa da Torá sobre a humanidade, de falhas, a primeira moral e a outra pessoal, de assumirem a responsabilidade - e para isso é que a liderança é a resposta.

Há uma frase fascinante na história dos primeiros anos de Moisés. Ele cresce, vai para o seu povo, os israelitas, e os vê trabalhando como escravos. Ele presencia um guarda egípcio espancando um deles. O texto, então, diz: "Ele olhou para um lado e para o outro e não viu ninguém (Ex. 2: 12, vayar ki ein ish, literalmente, viu que não havia nenhum homem)".

É difícil ler isso literalmente. Um canteiro de obras não é um local isolado ou fechado. Deveria ter havido muitas outras pessoas presentes. Apenas dois versos mais tarde descobrimos que havia israelitas que sabiam exatamente o que estava acontecendo. A frase quase certamente signi fica: "Ele olhou para um lado e para o outro e viu que não havia mais ninguém disposto a intervir".

Se isto é assim, então temos aqui o primeiro exemplo do que veio a ser conhecido como a Síndrome Genovese, ou "o efeito espectador", assim chamado depois de um caso em que uma mulher foi atacada em Nova York na presença de um grande número de pessoas que sabiam que ela estava sendo agredida, mas não vieram em seu socorro.

Os cientistas sociais têm realizado muitas experiências para tentar determinar o que acontece em situações como esta. Alguns argumentam que a presença de outros espectadores afeta a interpretação de um indivíduo do que está acontecendo. Quando ninguém tem a iniciativa de ajudar, eles concluem que o que está acontecendo não é uma emergência.

Outros, porém, argumentam que o fator fundamental é a responsabilidade difusa. As pessoas assumem que quando existem muitas pessoas outro vai se apresentar e agir. Essa parece ser a interpretação correta do que aconteceu no caso de Moisés. Ninguém mais estava preparado para vir para ajudar. Quem neste caso iria fazê-lo? Os egípcios eram os feitores dos escravos. Por que eles deveriam correr o risco de salvar um israelita? Os israelitas eram os escravos. Por que eles deveriam socorrer um de seus companheiros, se, ao fazê-lo, estariam colocando a sua própria vida em risco?

Mas Moisés agiu. Mas isso é o que faz um líder. Um líder é aquele que assume a responsabilidade. A liderança nasce quando alguém se torna ativo e não passivo, quando não se espera por alguém para agir, porque talvez não haja mais ninguém, pelo menos não neste lugar, não n este momento. Quando coisas ruins acontecem, alguns olham para o outro ladoOutros esperam pelos outros para que ajam. Alguns culpam os outros por não fazerem nada. Outros simplesmente reclamam. Mas há alguns que dizem: "Se algo está errado, deixe-me ser um dos primeiros a fazê-lo correto". Estes são os líderes. Eles são aqueles que fazem a diferença em suas vidas. Eles são os únicos que fazem o nosso um mundo melhor.

Muitas das grandes religiões e civilizações são baseadas na aceitação. Se há violência, sofrimento, pobreza e dor no mundo, esta é a forma de como o mundo é. Ou, que é a vontade de Deus. Ou, essa é a natureza da própria natureza. E que tudo vai ficar bem num mundo vindouro.

Judaísmo era e continua sendo a grande religião de protesto do mundo. Os heróis da f&eacute ; não aceitaram, eles protestaram. Eles estavam dispostos a confrontar o próprio D’us. Abraão disse: "O Juiz de toda a terra não fará justiça?" (Gênesis 18: 25). Moisés disse: "Por que fizeste mal a este povo?" (Ex. 5: 22). Jeremias disse: "Por que os ímpiosestão à vontade?" (Jeremias 12: 1). É assim que D’us nos quer que respondamos. O judaísmo é o chamado de D’us para a responsabilidade humana. A maior conquista é a de se tornar um parceiro de D’us na obra da criação .

Quando Adão e Eva pecaram, D’us chamou " Onde está você? " Como o rabino Shneur Zalman de Liadi, o primeiro Rebe, destacou, esta chamada não foi direcionada apenas para os primeiros seres humanos. Ecoa em cada geração. D’us nos deu a liberdade, mas com a liberdade vem a responsabilidade. D’us nos ens ina o que devemos fazer, mas ele não faz isso por nós. Com raras exceções, Deus não intervém na história. Ele age através de nós, e não para nós. Sua é a voz que nos diz como Ele disse a Caim antes que ele cometeu seu crime, que podemos resistir ao mal dentro de nós, assim como ao mal que nos rodeia.

Uma vida responsável é a que responde. A palavra hebraica para responsabilidade, achrayut, vem da palavra acher, ou seja, ao "outro“. “Nosso grande Outro é o próprio D’us, conclamando-nos a usar a liberdade que Ele nos deu, para tornar o mundo mais parecido com o mundo que deveria ser”. A grande questão para a qual a vida que levamos é a resposta, é qual é a voz que devamos ouvir? A voz do desejo, como no caso de Adão e Eva? A voz de raiva, como no caso de Caim? Ou a voz de D& rsquo;us conclamando-nos para tornarmos este mundo um mundo mais justo e gracioso?

Bereshit - 28 de setembro 2013/24 Tishrei 5774

(Rua Judaica)

Lou Reed: The Punk Soul of an Underground Jew

J.J. Goldberg

Of all the tributes following the death this week of Lou Reed, the transgressive, subversive bard of the street-wild and deviant, one of the strangest is this celebration by British journalist Tom Gross, which appeared online in the National Review. Yes, that National Review—the conservative journal founded by the high priest of upper-crust propriety, William F. Buckley.

Perhaps even more than other American-Jewish rock stars such as Billy Joel and Bob Dylan, Lou Reed was fiercely proud of being Jewish — and included lyrics on behalf of Israel and against anti-Semitism in some of his songs.

I mention Reed’s Jewishness because not a single obituary I have read of him in the mainstream press mentions it, when for Reed it was an important factor.

The evidence Gross offers consists mainly of the mockingly bitter song “Good Evening, Mr. Waldheim,” from Reed’s 1989 album New York (video below, lyrics after the jump). But that’s actually plenty—only a handful of major American rockers have recorded even a single statement as proudly Jewish. (I think of Paul Simon’s “Silent Eyes,” Randy Newman’s “Dixie Flyer,” Bob Dylan’s “Neighborhood Bully” — and, arguably, “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Father of Night.” Others?)

At the same time, Gross is right to note that Reed appeared in Israel several times. He wasn’t quite the “frequent visitor to the country” that Gross makes him out to be, but he performed there repeatedly: he gave concerts in 1994 and 2000 and joined his wife Laurie Anderson on stage for a few numbers during her Tel Aviv concerts in 2008 (video after the jump). Not many American pop stars have appeared in Israel so frequently (though Dylan matched him—concerts in 1987, 1993 and 2011—and several private visits).

And though Gross doesn’t mention it, Reed involved himself in a public way in recent years in New York’s emerging downtown Jewish culture. That’s described lovingly in this appreciation in The Jewish Week by Reed’s friend, impresario Michael Dorf. Among other things, Dorf describes Reed’s appearances as the Wise Son at Dorf’s annual Passover Seder at the Knitting Factory.

What’s most curious about the National Review piece is how it’s captured imaginations on the right with its image of Reed the defiant battler against anti-Semitism. It’s been cited by several right-wing blogs, including the Breitbart-linked Big Hollywood and Islam-bashing arch-conservative Debbie Schlussel. Schlussel’s piece is particularly wacky — she seems delighted that Reed “defied” the boycotters to play Israel, though she’s dubious of what she presumes are his leftie leanings, wary of his countercultural ethos and judges him.

Lou Reed, 1976 

Forward.com

Rabbi Abraham Skorka's Dialogue With Future Pope Francis Started With Soccer

Pontiff-to-Be Forged Close Bond With Argentine Cleric

By Anne Cohen

A rabbi and a priest walk into an independence day celebration….

That, literally, is how one the most high-profile interfaith friendships in the world today started. More specifically, the bond that Rabbi Abraham Skorka of Argentina cemented with the man who would become Pope Francis began as so many male friendships do: over sports.

It was in the late 1990s, that Skorka, rector of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano Marshall T. Meyer in Buenos Aires, was invited to attend the Te Deum, celebrated by the Archbishop of Buenos Aires on the anniversary of Argentina’s May Revolution. Skorka went as a representative of the Jewish community. When Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio — now known as Pope Francis — asked the faith leaders present about their favorite soccer teams to lighten the mood, Skorka replied honestly, “My team is River Plate” — one of the more hopeless athletic causes in Argentina.

“Their fans are called ‘chickens,’” Skorka related during an October 28 interview with the Forward while on a visit to New York. As each cleric rose to shake hands with the archbishop at the ceremony’s conclusion, Bergoglio, a San Lorenzo fan, looked straight at the rabbi when he congratulated the Catholic leader on his speech. “I guess this year,” the future pope kidded him, “we are going to eat chicken soup.”

That was the moment Skorka realized he was looking at someone special. “Behind this joke,” he recalled, “I realized that Bergoglio was saying, ‘The door is open.’ And so that was the beginning.”

More than a decade later, Skorka finds himself in the position of offering his fellow Jews a lens through which to understand the new leader of the Catholic faith. His own close-up view has continued since Bergoglio’s ascension to the Holy See last March. This spring, Skorka will even join Pope Francis on his inaugural papal trip to Israel.

“As pilgrims to Israel, we are dreaming of certain moments,” Skorka related. Among the things he and Pope Francis look forward to is “to pray together in front of the Kotel,” he said, referring to the remnant of the ancient Temple’s Western Wall, a Jewish holy site. Skorka plans also to accompany the Pope to Bethlehem, to show respect for the role of Christian history in the Holy Land.

Their friendship-based interfaith dialogue will be the theme of an October 29 talk Skorka will give at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York called “Pope Francis and the Jews.” In his presentation, Skorka will discuss how the newly elected Pontiff relates to the Chosen people.

According to Skorka, he does. A lot. “In the few months that he is already Pope we heard, we saw, we witnessed very strong declarations against anti-Semitism,” said Skorka. “He is also stressing the deep relationship between Judaism and Christianity.”

Privately, Skorka added, the two are trying to come up with a theological definition of what a Christian means to a Jew — and vice versa — as well as what the state of Israel means to Catholics, all from a spiritual point of view.

Unbeknown to a public hungry for information about the new Pope’s worldview from the moment of his election by fellow Cardinals, many of Francis’ views were out there even before white smoke billowed up from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, announcing they had chosen. In 2010, Bergoglio and Skorka co-authored the book, “On Heaven and Earth,” a collection of the two clerics’ discussions over the years on hot-button issues ranging from the Arab-Israeli conflict to fundamentalism, to abortion and gay marriage to the Vatican’s role in the preventing the Holocaust.

The last topic, said Skorka, is an issue that weighs heavily on the Pope’s mind. In “On Heaven and Earth” Francis agrees wholeheartedly with Skorka’s suggestion that Pope Pius XII’s personal archives — often referred to as the Vatican’s Secret Archives — be fully opened so that historians can objectively determine if Pius and the Church could have done more to save Europe’s Jews.

“What you say about the archives relating to the Shoah seems perfect to me,” Bergoglio says in the book. “They should open them and clarify everything.”

Since ascending to the papacy, Francis has hinted of his continued wish for transparency on Pius XII, but no concrete actions have yet followed. Skorka is unfazed. “Pope Francis is a coherent person,” he said. “Everything he says, he does.”

In fact, Skorka added, Francis reiterated his convictions during their last conversation, only a couple of weeks ago. “He told me, we have to search them,” said Skorka. “But,” the Pope added, “when we analyze Pope Pius XII’s behavior, we must also analyze the behavior of the occidental leaders who forsook the Jewish people.”

Skorka respects his friend’s struggle with this issue. But the rabbi is concerned about the possible canonization of Pope Pius as a saint of the Church. Pius, who led the Church from 1939 to 1958, has been the subject of a furious debate spanning decades regarding the actions he took — or failed to take — to save Jewish lives during World War II and oppose the Nazis’ campaign of mass extermination against Europe’s Jews. Individual Catholics and Jews are partisans on both sides of this debate.

In 2009 Pope Benedict XVI declared Pius XII to be “venerable,” the second of four steps on the path to sainthood. And an August 1 article in the National Catholic Register, citing an anonymous source in the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints, reported that Pope Francis was considering invoking a procedure by which he could, on his own authority, leapfrog Pius XII over the other steps and make him a saint.

Skorka appears to be no fan of this prospect. “I cannot accept from Pius XII his silence during the Shoah,” he said.

In September, the Pope raised eyebrows among Conservative Catholics when he declared that the Church should move away from its single-minded emphasis on issues like gay marriage and abortion, and focus instead on spiritual healing through wider dialogue with both Church faithful and the rest of the word. It was a clear break with the approach taken by his immediate predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI and even his predecessor, Pope John Paul II.

“Pope Francis, as far as I know him, will go ahead with what he considers he must do,” said Skorka. “He is a very traditional Catholic leader, but at the same time, what he does is try to maintain a dialogue, to build a bridge across to all Catholics, all the nations and all the peoples. The keyword in his ideology is dialogue.”

Contact Anne Cohen at cohen@forward.com

(Forward.com)

O enterro do Cabalista Rav Berg

por Billy Phillips

Que dia! Absolutamente surreal. Eu estava convencido, por diversos momentos, que eu acordaria de um sonho ruim a qualquer minuto.

Eu nunca vivenciei algo tão transcendental; tão físico e tão cru na dor; tão espiritual e absolutamente bíblico em seu significado para as nossas almas e para este mundo (e eu não estou dizendo “bíblico” no sentido metafórico da palavra). O efeito que surtiu sobre cada um de nós de pé, sob um sol escaldante, vivenciando o impensável, era indescritível e, no entanto, provavelmente único para cada pessoa. O ar nos arredores do túmulo do Rav exalava uma fragrância que eu acho que deve ser do Jardim do Éden. Achei aquele ar inebriante e ficava perguntando para os meus dois filhos se eles podiam sentir aquele cheiro.

Tudo começou para mim na quinta-feira, antes de Yom Kippur. Eu visitei o Rav no hospital. O Rav estremecia de dor e enrijecia todo o seu corpo, gemendo e se contorcendo em uma batalha que está além do poder das palavras. O Rav estava delirando e realmente não me notou. Depois de algum tempo, chegou minha hora de ir embora. Eu me despedi do Rav e o Rav parou de estremecer e de se contorcer de dor, e de repente ficou em estado alerta. Ele parou, olhou para mim, feliz, e me deu aquele sorriso que é a marca do Rav, com um conhecido brilho nos olhos. Literalmente!

Então, o Rav voltou para a batalha. Essa foi a última vez que eu vi o Rav neste mundo físico.

Eu tive o mérito de ver o Rav no quarto do hospital, depois que o Rav deixou nosso mundo. O Rav estava brilhando e deitado em paz com a família ao seu lado. Ficou claro para mim que a Karen não era apenas a matriarca do nosso mundo, assim como Rachel, mas Karen também era nossa Rainha Esther, Sarah e todas as grandes carruagens femininas da Bíblia. Mas nenhuma delas é tão grande quanto a Karen, pois cada uma delas é uma parte de Karen.

Enquanto o Rav era sepultado, os gritos de Michael e Yehuda sacudiram as montanhas da Galiléia e cortaram a todos. Deixando Safed, eu estava ainda entorpecido e confuso, mas tranquilo, com uma certeza no meu coração que arde mais forte do que 400 milhões de sóis. Eu tive muitas conversas com o Rav nos últimos 25 anos, e apenas uma das quais eu vou compartilhar agora.

Há 15 anos atrás, o Rav me disse que ele estava com medo de dizer a Karen o que seria necessário para trazer o fim da dor, do sofrimento e da morte. Agora eu sei o porquê. A outra razão para minha certeza foram o choro e as súplicas dos dois santificados e amados filhos do Rav e da Karen, Yehuda e Michael. Eles deixaram bem claro, suplicaram e exigiram do mais profundo da alma humana, para que o seu pai continue a nos ajudar a concluir isto de uma vez por todas.

Iremos ver os resultados de suas orações ainda neste tempo, em nossas vidas. Porque se há um portão para o céu, os choros penetrantes de Yehuda e Michael acabaram de abrir esse portão como nunca antes na história humana. E assim, este não é o fim. Este é o início.

(Pletz.com)

Should Men Thank God They Were Not Born Women?

Some Want To Change Orthodox Prayer's 'Sexist Language'

By Josh Halpern

Late this spring, my sister asked the administration at her Modern Orthodox high school if it would consider instituting a change to the morning prayer service. Instead of the usual practice of hurrying through the morning blessings, she wanted the male hazan to pause after reciting the blessing of “Shelo Asani Isha” (“Blessed are you Lord… for not making me a woman”) aloud so that the female students could reply by reciting “Sheasani Kirtzono” (“Blessed are you Lord… for making me according to Your will”) aloud.

My sister hoped that the female students’ recitation of “Sheasani Kirtzono” would serve as a sort of rebuttal to what they considered to be the hazan’s sexist declaration. By finding their voice in the male-dominated service, the female students would straddle the line between dignity and degradation and inspire reflection among their male peers about equality and the lack of a female voice in communal prayer.
Although fascinated by my sister’s explanation, I objected to her proposal on the grounds that, first, it didn’t push the envelope far enough. “If the blessing is morally objectionable and Halacha permits its omission, why not remove it from prayer entirely?” I asked her. And second, it seemed a little dramatic: People are simply too tired to lend much significance to the potential theatrics of a morning blessing. Still, she and I agreed that the blessing presented a moral problem that demanded a change in ritual.

Others, however, completely rejected our shared condemnation of the blessing. Shortly after my sister’s proposal was shot down, we started a Facebook group — “Say Lo!” [Hebrew for “no!”] to “Shelo Asani Isha” — that attracted an array of such apologists. Despite providing a variety of interpretations of the blessing, they all maintained that the correct interpretation in no way degraded women. For example, popular among the apologists in the group was the view that men recite the blessing thanking God not because men are intrinsically superior to women but because they are obligated in a greater number of commandments and are grateful for this sacred duty. From positions like these they argued that the tradition of reciting the blessing ought to be respected and kept in place.

But the apologists failed to recognize what motivated my sister’s desire to change the liturgy. Law and ritual can either reinforce or combat our prevailing attitudes about gender. By restructuring the service ever so slightly, my sister believed (perhaps incorrectly) that she could dramatically alter the gender messages expressed by the morning blessings. The main point here is that even if we grant the apologists’ claim that the blessing is not intrinsically sexist, it may still promote sexist attitudes that engender inequality and should therefore be removed.

Yet, one might wonder whether something as minor as a single blessing at the beginning of the morning service can seriously impact the way in which Modern Orthodox Jews think about gender. Does anyone really care or think about “Shelo Asani Isha”? Is it really worth the trouble to fight it? One member of the group asked me exactly that question in a Facebook message.

To this, I would reply that the effects of the blessing (and any seemingly sexist law or ritual) can’t be scrutinized in a vacuum. The blessing of “Shelo Asani Isha” is simply one thread of a broader social fabric in which men are the primary spiritual leaders and women the spiritual spectators. To change that landscape and the inherent sexism it is both formed from and perpetuates, Orthodox feminists must promote gender equality whenever it is halachically sanctioned. Because law and ritual give voice to communal attitudes, every detail of communal halachic practice (including the morning blessings) can affect our preconceptions about gender.

The apologists, though aiming to reconcile their feminist and Orthodox commitments, simply end up sacrificing the former at the altar of the latter. Many 21st-century women feel degraded by the blessing and find little solace in rabbinic speculation about its “deeper meaning.” At the same time, feminists who aim to un-pluck Judaism’s misogynistic threads inevitably run the opposite risk of unraveling the entire cloth of Orthodoxy. In other words, they must question whether the conflicts between their feminist and their Orthodox commitments are ultimately intractable ones. For as long as this question remains an open one, Orthodox feminists will and should continue to push the boundaries of socially accepted halachic practice in pursuit of a religious life in which they can participate in good faith.
 
Josh Halpern is a student at Yeshiva University.

<The Forward> 

What Soccer Gave the Jews

By Liam Hoare

Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?: The Story of English Football’s Forgotten Tribe
By Anthony Clavane
Quercus Publishing, 304 Pages

Anthony Clavane’s accomplished and engaging work “Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?” now out in paperback, is not about what Jews have given to English soccer, so much as what soccer has given to English Jews.

This is not to minimize the contribution Jews have made to the game, particularly off-the-field. Clavane highlights the role of Willy Meisl, an Austrian sports journalist who not only bequeathed new ideas and tactics to the stodgy, long-ball English soccer of the 1950s, but also imparted a more cerebral, less oafish manner of discussing and analysing the game. Meisl spoke eloquently about soccer from the perspective “of the discerning outsider looking in, expressing a passion for, but still not quite becoming part of, English soccer.”

In the boardroom, during the 1980s and ‘90s, Irving Scholar of Tottenham Hotspur and David Dein at Arsenal imported ideas from the United States about match days being an experience of their own. They sought to improve stadia to make them more family-friendly and to appeal to the middle class, as well as to exploit revenue streams such as merchandising. In laying the groundwork for what would become the Premier League, Scholar and Dein helped revolutionize English soccer by turning it into a product.

But for English Jewry as a community, these accomplishments are representative of the opportunities soccer has presented to become part of the whole. Clavane writes:

English football has, for the past century, been a vehicle for Anglicisation, a space where ethnic identity has connected, even become intertwined, with national identity; an arena where Jews have fought the notion that they were invaders who needed to be fended off, newcomers who did not belong.

The foundation and emergence of soccer in England at the end of the 19th century coincided with a great wave of Jewish immigration from Russia, which increased the Anglo-Jewish population from 46,000 in 1880 to around 250,000 by 1919. Contrasting with the assimilated, bourgeois ways of the Jewish establishment, these Yiddish-speaking Ostjuden were perceived as a threat to the order of things, a kind of embarrassment:

The middle-class leaders were horrified by the old-world religious practices of the new arrivals. Having intensely pursued Englishness for the best part of two centuries, they suddenly saw all their good work being undermined by this invasion of ill-kempt foreigners, who were both conspicuous in their appearance and indecorous in their worship.

The answer of Jewish leaders to this mass immigration was “to adopt a policy of radical assimilation,” to erase the “foreignness of the newcomers.” At Jewish schools where “children were taught English literature, the glories of the Empire, and songs celebrating the bulldog spirit,” they were also encouraged to play English sports. The Jewish establishment wanted to produce, to use Colonel Albert Goldsmid’s words, good “Englishmen of the Mosaic persuasion” — Englishmen more English than the English:

The sight of a sturdy, athletic footballer heading a football into a net world, it was argued, go a long way to undermining the image of the devout, long-bearded ghetto-dweller draped in a yarmulke and prayer shawl.

And yet such was the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in English society — from the sort one would “catch on the edge of a remark,” as Harold Abrahams said in “Chariots of Fire” to Oswald Mosley’s violent black-shirted thugs — that players would be forced to conceal or discard their Judaism altogether, changing their names and playing on Yom Kippur. To the general public, they were not so much Englishmen of the Mosaic persuasion as Englishmen with something to hide.

This total erasure of Judaism would produce a counter-cultural backlash within the Jewish community in the 1960s, just as Englishmen like Mark Lazarus and David Pleat and Israeli talent such as Avi Cohen were coming to the fore. As part of an anti-integrationist backlash, playing soccer was viewed as equivalent to out-marriage or eating treyf — “dangerous signs of secularisation” that would end with the Diaspora being “assimilated to the point of non-existence.”

“Does Your Rabbi Know You’re Here?” illuminates this conflict between assimilation and integration on the one hand, and staying Jewish on the other, as much through history as memoir. Clavane grew up in Leeds during the “Golden Age,” when upward social mobility meant that going to Elland Road on a Saturday afternoon was as important (if not more important) as shul in the morning. Prominent Jewish footballers were idolised in the manner of biblical heroes by boys in the playground, QPR’s League Cup final hero Lazarus as Judah Maccabee.

Yet at the Selig Brodetsky Jewish Day School, Clavane and his friends had their football confiscated by the headmaster, Mr. Abrahamson. Once an advocate for integration and playing English games as a way of fitting in, Abrahamson told the boys that “football is not for a Yiddisher boy,” that “the English game” would eventually swallow them up. Clavane and his friends tried to carry on playing with apples cores or orange peel, though that practice was stamped out too.

Of his own experience, Clavane reflects:

For me, football was a way of transcending the claustrophobic confines of my Jewish suburban existence. It enabled me to become who I wanted to be, to think of myself as English as well as Jewish; to think of my football-mad family as rooted in the life of the country rather than tossed on to its shores by circumstance.

In spite of this balance between Englishness and Jewishness, of being an ‘Englishman of the Mosaic persuasion,” Clavane can neither suppress the guilt nor “erase that eternal voice in my head,” that asks him every Saturday: “Does your rabbi know you’re here?”

<The Forward>

Meet the No. 2 Israeli on Facebook

By Anne Cohen

 
For her 30th birthday, Meytal Cohen is achieving every struggling artist’s dream — she’s sticking it to her family.

On August 9th, Cohen’s Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for an original album will come to a close. With only three days to go, she has almost doubled her $60,000 goal and has 2,519 backers.
But Meytal Cohen isn’t just anyone. With 391,953 fans as of this morning, the Israeli transplant to the U.S. has more Facebook likes than both President Shimon Peres (162, 625) and model Bar Refaeli (203,642), and trailing only slightly behind Benjamin Netanyahu (460,756), making her what newspaper Yediot Aharonot called “the second most liked Israeli on the Internet.”

For this heavy metal drummer who rose to fame on Youtube — her videos have been viewed over 65,000,000 times — it’s a dream come true.

“It’s very humbling, I don’t know how [it] really happened. I’ve been shooting and uploading, note for note drum covers of my favorite songs/drummers for the last 3 years now,” she told the Forward in an interview. “I feel I have this huge data base of drum grooves and fills, and now it’s time for me to take all that I’ve learned from my favorite drummers and create something new.”

Excitement over her upcoming project aside, Cohen’s enthusiasm stems from newly found support from family members, impressed that she is achieving her dream on her terms.

This wasn’t always the case.

“My dad was killed by a drunk driver while he was standing on the sidewalk when I was in second grade, and my mom raised us all by herself,” she explained. “It was very important to her that we all go study and have a ‘serious profession that you can actually make a living of off’ so she wasn’t happy with[my decision to be a musician]. My entire family consists of lawyers, and doctors and I would get calls on a daily basis asking me if “’I’ve made it yet.’

Their attitudes changed after Cohen made it onto a front page spread in Yehidot Aharonot, one of Israel’s largest newspapers.

“It definitely helped me with my family. Suddenly I was in the newspaper and my mom was [talking about my number of followers] like it was the first time she ever heard it,” Cohen laughed. She said ‘Do you get how much that is? ‘ Like, she’s telling me.“

Cohen first got into metal in high school, when her first boyfriend gave her a mixtape (Aw…). But being a female heavy metal drummer has its ups and downs. On the one hand, the surprising combination is part of Cohen’s appeal to viewers, who see a feisty woman playing an instrument traditionally associated with the John Bonhams of the world. On the other, she often has to push against stereotypes.

“Before I did Youtube I would go to audition and I felt like there was a lot of pressure for me, almost like I was representing the female gender,” she said. “It stressed me out. I didn’t want to play the stereotype and I felt that if I wasn’t good enough I was ruining it for women everywhere. “

As an Israeli, Cohen must also walk a thin line. Though she gets positive comments from fan all over the world, from Europe to South America, she also deals with haters who tell her to “go back to Auschwitz.”

Nevertheless, Cohen says she will push forward and remain vocal about her identity. “I’m proud and always very public about being an Israeli and the fact I served two years in the IDF, she said. “I am who I am, and
I’m not trying to hide it. From 3 years of reading YouTube comments, I can guarantee that you can never make everybody happy…so I try to focus on the people that are.”

We would expect nothing less from the second most liked Israeli on the Internet. Bibi better watch out — Meytal Cohen is gaining on him. Fast.

 <The Forward>

500-Year-Old Jewish Skeleton Found in Brazil

16th Century Man Buried in Shroud With Arms at Side

 New World: Sephardic Jews fleeing the Portuguese inquisition founded this synagogue in Recife, where archeologists have unearthed a 500-year-old Jewish skeleton.

By JTA

Brazilian archaeologists unearthed what they said are the 500-year-old remains of a Jewish man in Recife.
A report Thursday in the online edition of the Rio de Janeiro-based O Globo described the discovery earlier this month as a perfectly-preserved skeleton of a male adult. The skeleton was found during earthwork in Recife in northern Brazil, where Portuguese Jews in 1636 built the first known synagogue in the New World.

Marcos Albuquerque of the Federal University of Pernambuco, who oversaw the dig around the skeleton, told O Globo he had no doubt the man was Jewish and that he was buried sometime in the 16th century.

“In Christian tradition, it is customary to bury the dead with their hands crossed over their chest, but this man was buried with hands laid alongside his body before rigor mortis set in,” Albuquerque said. “Furthermore, the body was buried in simple shroud without jewellery or any other private belonging and without casket.”

The body was found five feet underground, O Globo reported, during the construction of a tunnel, Tunel da Abolição, in Recife’s central neighborhood of Madalena. The tomb is situated approximately 1.5 miles east of the Kahal Zur synagogue, which Jews who fled the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions built in Recife, which was then still a Dutch colony.

Determining exactly when the man was buried would require the removal of a piece of the skeleton for carbon dating. “But out of respect to the religious issue, we left the body where it was found,” Albuquerque said.

<The Forward>

Lipa Speaks Out

By Frimet Goldberger

Hasidic singer Lipa Schmeltzer is a true exception in the Haredi world, both because of his music and because of his personality. Frimet Goldberger lives a few blocks away from Schmeltzer in the community of Airmont, N.Y., and she and her family are members of his shul. In this exclusive interview with the Forverts, Schmeltzer discussed the community he grew up in, the people who rejected him, and how the experience changed him. Listen to the whole interview in Yiddish here.

Lipa Schmeltzer: I was raised in the town of New Square, which is a small ultra-Orthodox community, and a significant part of my popularity happened because I am a strong critic. My reputation came to be that Lipa Schmeltzer is talented, but shunned by many. And this happened in part because I grew up in [New] Square. They contributed to this rejection, because they were hurt by the mere fact that I became a singer.

To them, singing is a problem — and the genre is irrelevant. An artist who will perform at concerts; a singer who will go out in the world and fans will clap with their hands and cheer loudly; they despise this.
But my talents prevailed and I continued on my way. I grew stronger within as a result of this, and I also healed a lot from my music. And all the pain, shame, and humiliation that I endured only served to strengthen me.

I had a very difficult childhood. I could not concentrate in heder [Hasidic boys’ school], I was spanked, and I was given nicknames — things I was never willing to discuss, until recently. But I am more willing now to go back to this pain, to look in the mirror and see what I have endured, and how I have to thank Hashem that I arrived to where I am now.

The most difficult time in my life was when 33 so-called rabbis signed a petition against me. Five or six called to apologize, and a few I recorded on paper saying that they were fooled. It’s interesting to note that on the signed rejection letter, you only see their printed signatures. But I do have the authentic signatures on paper from the few who said they were duped. But they did not allow me to publish it in the newspapers.
Today, if 500 rabbis come out against me, perhaps it will be uncomfortable, but that is where it will end. I will go on the radio to talk about it, I’ll write about it in the newspaper and on blogs, but I won’t run and hide in a hole the way I did back then.

Burekh Hashem, [thank God], God gave us a gift called the Internet. If I wanted to pay $10,000 back then for a Haredi publication to publish my side of the story, I couldn’t, because a rabbi warned them not to accept my story. These days I am able to express my opinions in different places. So it is a little easier now. But I still have endured a lot — and this was one of my most difficult periods.

Many of these trying times were when I lived in New Square. I wanted so badly to have the honor, the opportunity to sing for the Rebbe. This was my dream. They said they would allow it, but only if I commit to five conditions. After I signed their commitment paper, they canceled on me at the last minute, citing one dayan [a judge of Jewish legal matters] who said I am not yet 100% kosher. It really stung. I stayed home and hid for a few days.

I was once publicly thrown out of a wedding — off a stage; I was once thrown out of a sheva brokhes [post-wedding meals] where I was a guest; all because I sing with a wilder beat. And I have to believe God is bothered by all this. It’s silly to even talk about it.

Rejection is a very difficult feeling, and I suffered from it a lot in my life. So I will hopefully never do this to others — no matter what happens. Each week I receive calls here at my shul, sometimes from a dayan, a rabbi or just congregants: I shouldn’t allow this, I should tell him that, etc., and I never pass along the message. Because I know what it feels like to face a closed door and not to be accepted. I will never do this to others.

Sometimes I have to attend family occasions, or go back to places where they look at me with contempt. But instead of getting upset, I pity them, because I know that they don‘t know any better; it is not their fault. And maybe, one day, they will change, too.

We are one nation. Hitler did not differentiate between those [women] who did not cover their hair and those who did; Hitler did not differentiate between those who dressed in black and white or those who dressed in blue; Hitler did not differentiate between those who were Jewish or those whose grandfathers were Jewish; he wanted us all out. We need to come together. Am Yisroel Chai.

<The Forward>

Brazil Grapples With Crisis of Expectations

By Andrea Palatnik

 

getty images

Peering in from the outside, it may be tricky to understand what’s going on in Brazil right now
Unlike Tunisians and Egyptians, Brazilians did not take to the streets in historic demonstrations last week to overthrow an authoritarian government. After enduring a two-decade-long dictatorship, we’ve been living under democratic rule since the mid-1980s, and those who still carry the wounds of the dark days are the first to say: never again.
Nor, like many Europeans, are we reacting to an economic crisis per se, even though most reports in the international press about our economic boom are rather far-fetched, and the cost of living has risen sharply in the past 10 years

The generation behind the mass protests that took place in over a hundred Brazilian cities this month never knew the pains of hyperinflation or the fear of political prisons. What they know very well is the corruption that plagues every level of government; the chronic lack of investment in education; the lavish spending of public funds to build soccer stadiums for the World Cup while hospitals and roads crumble away.
So now this generation is saying: enough is enough.

At first, those trying to belittle the protests ridiculed its initial complaint — a ten-cent raise in the bus fares in Sao Paulo. But it takes a great dose of cynicism to believe this is all people are fed up with.
Tens of billions of dollars are being spent to host the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 summer Olympics, but not much of it is going to improve actual urban infrastructure. Hundreds of millions more were involved in the great corruption scandal known as the “Mensalao” the main culprits in which were never actually imprisoned, despite having been tried and convicted earlier this year.




Brazilians are subjected to one of the highest tax rates in the world, paying 36 percent of GDP to municipal, state and federal governments, but getting little in return for their effort. Our senators make more money than those working in the British or Canadian congresses, while our teachers are among the worst-paid workers in the nation.


It’s with a resigned grin that Brazilians usually joke about being the “eternal country of the future,” about the unfulfilled promises of development and prominence that always seem so close and yet so hard to grasp despite all we have to our advantage. Brazil, with its lush forests and endless rivers; its warm climate and its peaceful, optimistic people. A country of plenty, of myriad resources, and no earthquakes. But there’s always something holding us back.

The voices who demand to make themselves heard in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and everywhere else (leave it to social media to have a faceless social movement cross the borders of Brazil’s two biggest cities, home to the country’s political and intellectual elite–a rare feat) are tired of being ignored. They struggle because those who are supposed to represent them and look after their interests are not quite cutting it. They are frustrated with a political system derailed from its purpose by the greedy priorities of political leaders, and they can take no more of their own money being wasted by an inefficient state. Above all, they are impatient to see the trumpeted miracle become a reality they can finally benefit from.

Brazilian Jews Take to Streets To Join Massive Push for Change

Youth Inspired by Jewish Values — and Israeli Protests

By Andrea Palatnik

Rio de Janeiro — When Alan Rochlin joined hundreds of thousands of Israelis who took to the streets in 2011 to protest skyrocketing living costs, he never imagined he would be doing the same in his native Brazil just two years later.

But as Brazilians made international headlines in late June with massive anti-government protests, Rochlin, a 21-year-old marketing student and leader of the Jewish youth movement Chazit Hanoar Hadrom Americait (Youth Front of South America), was one of many Jews among them.
For Rochlin, the connection was obvious.

“Israeli society took to the streets in order to have a debate and start a dialogue,” he said, recalling his experience during an extended stay in Israel. Similarly in Brazil now, “we are debating, questioning and demanding change, and we’ll follow through to make sure [changes] are really going to materialize.”

Rochlin, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, is far from alone. Jewish movements such as Hillel, Habonim Dror and Chazit Hanoar, and their members, have joined the wide cross-section of Brazilians now rocking the country with their protests. But while the Jewish protesters’ sentiments are part and parcel of the feelings sweeping across Brazilian society, many cite their identity as Jews as a primary wellspring of their activism.

“I believe the highest call of my Jewish identity is to change the world. I hold tikkun olam [repair of the world] as the most coherent expression of Jewish values,” said Bruno Cintra, a blogger well known in the Jewish community for his writing on Brazilian culture and politics.

Cintra spoke to the Forward while sitting on a plastic chair in the middle of Delfim Moreira Avenue, one of Rio de Janeiro’s most expensive and exclusive beachside roads. After participating in many of the protests,
Cintra decided to join a movement called Ocupa Cabral (Occupy Cabral), which set up camp with a dozen tents and pan-drumming demonstrators in front of the building of Rio de Janeiro Governor Sergio Cabral on this tony street. Police evicted Cintra’s group on the night of July 1, the 11th day of its sit-in. But the group is already planning a reoccupation.

“After so many years of crime, robbery and massacres, the people took to the streets and erupted in peaceful protests,” Cintro said, alluding to the corruption that protesters cite as one of the main targets of their ire.

The protests peaked most recently on June 20, when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators filled the streets of downtown Rio in a peaceful demonstration; it was the largest protest in the country since the pro-democracy rallies of 1984. The show of people power came after a week of demonstrations, held in more than 100 cities in nearly every state of the nation. Protesters, many of whom come from the middle and upper-middle class, cited a panoply of long-standing discontents, including corruption, skyrocketing living costs and what they see as the refusal of the political class to even hear their complaints. Still, the true meaning of what’s going on remains hard to grasp.

 

The demonstrations were not connected to any parties. Indeed, whenever members of political movements showed up, they were asked (with varying degrees of courtesy) to put down their flags and banners. Federal, state and local governments were caught off guard, which prompted many to react with violence against unarmed protesters. Political leaders from all sides — who at first scrambled to hijack the movement —became scared and silent as they quickly realized they were not welcome to join, and rather were seen as part of the problem.
Social media played a huge part as a mobilization tool; most demonstrations were organized via Facebook, and the word spread thanks to Twitter. Still, no one expected the huge response, not even the Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare Movement) group from São Paulo, which launched the protests to complain about public transportation price hikes. And no one has come forward as a leader of the masses. This spontaneity attests to a general sense of irritation but has failed to produce a focused set of demands for the movement.

It is, perhaps, not surprising that Jews have joined in these demonstrations readily. Like most of the protesters, the Jews of Brazil, who number more than 107,000, are largely members of the middle and upper-middle-classes, and are highly integrated into Brazilian society. As a group, they stand mostly behind liberal values. Indeed, it’s nearly impossible to find members of Brazil’s Jewish community who will agree to make comments against the movement. Efforts to reach Paul Israel Singer, one of the founding fathers of the leftist Workers Party now ruling Brazil, were unsuccessful. Leaders of Brazil’s culturally conservative Chabad-Lubavitch community also declined to comment, as they consider themselves apolitical.

First established during the 16th century by Jews fleeing the Inquisition, Brazil’s Jewish community is today mostly Ashkenazi. Synagogues and organizations, including Zionist groups, operate without interference, and episodes of anti-Semitism, though they occur, are not common.

So far, the government has responded to the waves of protest by, among other things, canceling the scheduled bus fare price hikes in many cities. A widely criticized constitutional amendment designed to limit the investigative powers of public anti-corruption watchdogs has also been overturned.

But at this stage the protesters are seeking much more, however ill defined. Despite government concessions and an effort to appear supportive of the demonstrations, President Dilma Rousseff has suffered a significant dip in popularity, which in June slid to 30% from 65% in March, according to a recent poll.

“This mobilization was necessary, and it still is,” said Evelyn Silva, 39, a Portuguese and English teacher and a former member of the Zionist group Habonim Dror. “All of a sudden, people who had so much choked up their throats decided to grab a piece of cardboard and a Sharpie and go outside to speak their minds and make their demands.”

Silva, who has participated in all but two of the demonstrations held in Rio de Janeiro, saw Judaism as a strong influence in her decision to join the protests; she hailed the concept of tzedakah, the obligation to aid the needy, as a great example, as well as the teachings in the Pirkei Avot, or The Ethics of the Fathers, that are part of the Talmud.

“Jewish ethics has a lot to do with my identification with socialism,” said Silva, who is a member of a socialist opposition party the Party of Socialism and Liberty. “The saying ‘two Jews, three opinions’ shows to what extent questioning the status quo and critical analysis are milestones of our culture.”
 
Contact Andrea Palatnik at palatnik@forward.com 

Putin: Jews Ruined Russia – But Now We're Pals, Eh?

By J.J. Goldberg

Getty Images

 

Commissars Vladimir Lenin (left) and Leon Trotsky (saluting)

 

If you’ve been following Vladimir Putin’s image troubles over the Schneerson Library, the priceless Chabad literary trove that the Bolsheviks seized, Russia held and Crown Heights wants, you may have heard about his weird remarks last Thursday (June 13) when he handed over a batch of the treasure to the new Chabad-run museum in Moscow: “The decision to nationalize this library was made by the first Soviet government, whose composition was 80-85 percent Jewish.” He added that those Jews were blinded by “false ideological considerations,” from which we have thankfully recovered.

His point, apparently, was to explain whose fault it was that this Jewish treasure ended up in Soviet vaults. What’s scary is that he thinks he’s stating an obvious truth that nobody would object to. His appearance was meant as a friendly gesture. Why would anybody be offended if he reminded them that it was the Jews who ruined Russia? That was then. Now we’re all friends, right?

You might be tempted to think his remarks have just enough ring of truth to sound plausible. After all, weren’t the Jews in Russia back then fiercely opposed to the oppressive, pogromist tsarist regime? (Well, yeah.) Weren’t they the ones who brought all those radical ideas about socialism and trade unions to America? (Uh, sort of.) On the other hand, you might have been thinking that he was spouting some nasty conspiracy theories from the annals of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Isn’t this Jewish-reds-take-over-Mother-Russia precisely what the Protocols say? (Bingo.)

Well, it’s easy enough to check: the names of the members of the first Soviet government are quite readily available, and the individual biographies are easy enough to check. But you needn’t go the trouble: Yori Yanover over at the Jewish Press has done the job for you. He’s gone through the 16 names on the first Council of People’s Commissars under the Bolsheviks, and found precisely one Jew among them, Leon Trotsky. I trust Yori—we frequently disagree on issues, but he’s an excellent reporter (and an exceptionally fine writer). Still, I went and checked all the biographies myself, and he’s right. The proportion of Jewish members of the first Soviet government was not 85% or even 80% but 6.25%.

The photo below is of an earlier Council of People’s Commissars in the short-lived coalition government between Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries, which lasted from December 1917 until March 1918 when the Bolsheviks pushed out the SRs and took sole power. Note that it too includes a single Jewish member (out of 17 total) — though not Trotsky, interestingly. It’s Isaac Nachman Steinberg, an SR leader who served as commissar of justice. He’s the gent sitting at far left. For the full list of names, check out the photo caption here. It’s not clear whether Putin was thinking of the pre- or post-March council, assuming he’s even aware of the history, which seems dicey considering what else comes out of his mouth.

The facts here jibe with research I did for a paper in college years ago, when I sat in the McGill library stacks and went through the minutes of dozens of meetings that took place during the years just before and after the 1917 revolutions and counted names. I found that there were many Jews in leadership roles in the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, but very few among the Bolsheviks. (Trotsky himself was a Menshevik until he switched sides in April 1917.)

If memory serves (we’re going back four decades here) the numbers something like under 10% Jews in the top & middle tiers of Bolshevik leadership, around 25% or 30% among the SRs and close to 40% among the Mensheviks. What all three had in common was that they weren’t the tsars, but it appears that for most Jews the Bolsheviks and their “dictatorship of the proletariat” stuff were a bit too close for comfort to what they’d just gotten rid of.

As for Putin, beyond the ignorance of his remarks, there’s a certain blithe naivete combined with a sublime lack of self-awareness in his comments. It looks like he thought he was being friendly and riffing off an obvious fact that everyone knows, namely that the Jews cooked up the revolution and all that, and wanted to note that we’ve all gotten over it. As the JTA reported them (without, alas, questioning the veracity of the “predominantly Jewish Soviet government” meme),

According to the official transcription of Putin’s speech at the museum, he went on to say that the politicians on the predominantly Jewish Soviet government “were guided by false ideological considerations and supported the arrest and repression of Jews, Russian Orthodox Christians, Muslims and members of other faiths. They grouped everyone into the same category.

“Thankfully, those ideological goggles and faulty ideological perceptions collapsed. And today, we are essentially returning these books to the Jewish community with a happy smile.”

This from a guy who spent 16 years of his life serving in the KGB under the communists. On the plus side, he was speaking from a career’s worth of rich professional experience in the “arrest and repression” of all those folks. He may not know how to tell myth and slander from truth, but he’s got the arrest and repression part down cold.

Wikimedia Commons

 

(Click to enlarge) Council of People’s Commissars, Bolshevik-Socialist Revolutionary coalition government, December 1917-March 1918. isaac Steinberg, far left; Vladimir Lenin, 8th from left; Joseph Stalin, standing to Lenin’s right.

 

The Forward

Michael Applebaum, First Jewish Mayor of Montreal, Resigns Under Fire

Vows To Fight Corruption Charges

Reuters

Michael Applebaum, the first Jewish mayor of Montreal, resigned on Tuesday, a day after he was charged with fraud and corruption in the latest major Canadian municipal scandal.

“I am going to put my energies into my defense and into my family,” said Applebaum, who had promised to clean up Canada’s second-largest city when he was named to the post in November.

Declaring his innocence, he added in a statement to reporters: “This is why I am resigning as mayor of Montreal - it is the responsible thing to do.”

His departure will do little to help the reputation of Quebec, where a two-year public inquiry led by Judge France Charbonneau is unearthing almost daily allegations of contract rigging, kickbacks and fraud going back many years.

Harout Chitilian, speaker of Montreal’s city council, said corruption did not occur overnight.

“It’s a systemic issue, and we realize from the Charbonneau inquiry that, over the past two decades, perhaps even the past three decades, the system was infiltrated by dark forces,” he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Applebaum, a former real estate agent, was appointed after predecessor Gérald Tremblay stepped down amid allegations he had ignored corruption and illegal spending by his political party. Tremblay also denies wrongdoing.

Montreal, a city of 1.7 million, must find another interim mayor ahead of a municipal election due on November 3.

Further west, in the province of Ontario, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is resisting calls to quit as leader of Canada’s largest city after two media outlets said they viewed a video that appeared to show him smoking crack cocaine.

Ford says he does not use crack cocaine, and Reuters has not been able to verify the existence of the video.
Applebaum faces 14 charges linked to two real estate deals from 2006 to 2011, when he was mayor in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough.

He is charged with fraud, breach of trust, conspiracy, municipal corruption and secret payments involving tens of thousands of dollars. Police have not said who they suspect handed over the money.

“I have never taken a penny from anybody … the accusations against me are unfounded,” Applebaum said.

Michael Nadeau, executive manager of the Institute for Governance of Public and Private Organizations, said the city could struggle to find a qualified interim mayor.

“This is quite a challenge right now, to attract experienced and competent candidates,” he told CBC.

The mayor of Laval, a Montreal suburb, resigned in 2012, but denied allegations of corruption. Gilles Vaillancourt was arrested last month and charged with gangsterism, fraud and corruption. Laval has since been placed under trusteeship.