Who is like your people?

By Barbara Sofer
May. 22, 2003

Shabbat breakfast at a London hotel. Around me, sharing the coffee and kosher pastries, are Jews from a mix of mostly European countries. J., mid-50s, has come by train from Paris for this meeting of Hadassah-International. In the not-so-small talk at the table she reports that the life she's built there over the past 30 years since leaving Algeria is coming to an end.
In recent years, J. was satisfied that she'd successfully established a comfortable French-Jewish home, and that her children were strongly identified Jews. Now she finds herself quarreling with her son over his insistence on wearing a kippa. She's constantly afraid he'll be attacked or even killed walking on the streets of Paris.
G., 31, emigrated from Argentina to Spain, where he won a scholarship to graduate school. He has quit because he couldn't tolerate the anti-Jewish, anti-Israel bias on the university campus.
D. from England tells of the hate calls he gets at his business. He tries to shrug them off as cranks. But 380 Jewish graves were desecrated the day before in a London cemetery. That's harder to shrug off. Swapping stories of anti-Semitism may be an old Jewish custom on this continent, but it's a first for me. I'm used to hearing about the proliferation of kosher restaurants, departments of Jewish studies being opened on so many campuses, klezmer concerts drawing record crowds in the Diaspora. We are members of a generation that we thought would escape the anti-Semitism our ancestors knew. When we read the dire statistics of assimilation, certain experts reminded us that it was simply the down side of the happy disappearance of anti-Semitism. Intermarriage rates reflect the increased willingness of non-Jews to have Jews in their families. Anti-Semitism, we assumed, was ready to be consigned to history courses in all those departments of Jewish studies of which we were so proud. Somehow, we wound up with both assimilation and anti-Semitism. Talk about disappointment.
THE MOST revolting reports at the London conference came from Israel's UN representative in Geneva. A hall in that city of peace will no longer allow evening fundraisers for wounded Israeli soldiers because such an evening is "one-sided," not showing the Palestinian side of the Middle Eastern conflict.
At the UN none of the voting blocs will accept the pariah Jewish state as a member. We endure constant attacks on our lack of respect for human rights on a committee chaired by Libya. A widespread European joint research program might discontinue projects with Israeli scientists, warns Ambassador Ya'acov Levy.
Oddly, we are even condemned for our policy toward the Lebanese, as if the UN has somehow missed our withdrawal of forces there. To top it off, Levy explains that the anti-globalization movement that vociferously demonstrates against the World Bank is also anti-Jewish. They see globalization as a plot hatched by a fantasized Jewish cabal, those same Elders, still orchestrating an international takeover.
What would Theodor Herzl, who believed that the existence of the Jewish state would solve the problem of anti-Semitism, say now? He might not be all that displeased.
The most remarkable part of the conference is that despite the disappointment and reported woes from nearly all of the 16 countries, the atmosphere isn't gloomy. Rising like a vapor above the stories of personal and national troubles is a mood of optimism. Ironically, that buoyancy is provided by the representatives from Israel. The raison d'etre of the conference is to report on medical and scientific progress in Israel, and for our brethren abroad to find opportunities to help, both financially and by fostering ties with institutions in their own countries.
On Sunday the men and women don their multi-language earphones. The accounts from Jerusalem are far from rosy. Resources for research and development are being diverted to metal detectors and additional guards for hospital security. Hadassah Hospital, despite its equal treatment of Israelis and Palestinians, is a possible target.
Reported innovations in patient therapies and protocols relate to treating the physical and emotional damage of terrorism. The funds raised here are urgently dedicated to tripling the space for emergencies in a new center equipped for nonconventional warfare as well as conventional terror. Nonetheless, the Israelis, who have seen the blood and gore of terrorism up close and personal, bring a contagious hopefulness, resilience and national pride with them to London. Somehow they transmit a vision of getting beyond the terror, and of the potential for healing.
One speaker is Dr. Rackel Pickard, a senior obstetrician at Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem. Her son, Eran, was murdered by terrorists. She rejects the Palestinians' excuse of desperation as a motive for terror, and speaks of maintaining her own humanity as she brings new children, Jewish and Palestinian, into the world.
"In each of their faces," she says, "I see my beloved Eran, as a baby, as a child, and as a teenager. He couldn't tolerate anything less than equal and respectful treatment of all."
Jerusalemite Shoshana Gottlieb lives in a wheelchair because of a terrorist's bullet that shattered her spine. The terrorist who shot her was hoping to collect $500 for killing a Jew. At his trial, he complained that he didn't get his money.
"After all, he didn't finish the job," Shoshana says with an ironic smile. Shoshana brings 600 people surging to their feet, applauding as she defines herself, like her parents who were in Auschwitz, not as a victim, but as a survivor. At that moment we are one heart beating in unison.
Our enemies, who build their demonic fantasies on their misunderstanding of the ties that bind us as a people, are correct about one thing: When we stand together we are infused with strength, determination and courage. In these days between Pessah and Shavuot, we count the Omer, moving from the degradation of slavery to the heights of Sinai. The process formed us into a single determined people. That's a lesson for today, as it was 3,000 years ago.
"Who is like your people Israel, one nation on earth?" (Chronicles I, 17:21) Who indeed?