Coping With Anti-Semitism

We live in a world in which the hatred of Jews is a growing issue. That’s a fact.

The people who commit most of the vandalism and hate speech do it to unnerve us. They know that they are pushing buttons when they draw a swastika on a wall, or say hateful things. They want to push our buttons. They want to make us feel afraid.

What can we do to fight back? Or — on a very basic level — what can we do to keep our sanity?

  • Some of us may be thinking, “I have always known about anti-Semitism. But this is hitting me very hard.”
  • Some of us may feel afraid to go in a synagogue.
  • Some of us have Gentile relatives who mean well but who do not understand why this shooting is so personal for each of us.
  1. Over the past three years we have seen more and more hate crimes. Many synagogues have suffered vandalism. Twice someone has entered a synagogue with a gun looking for Jews to kill. We remember our dead with reverence, but even those ceremonies remind us of the change in climate. Stress accumulates.
  2. The Anti-Defamation League reports that there were 3023 separate anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2017-2018. The ADL reports that online anti-Semitic threats and hate speech have increased dramatically since 2016.
  3. Some born-Jews may be experiencing anxiety from intergenerational trauma. A number of studies suggest that some extreme trauma actually affects the DNA, passing effects to future generations. If one of your parents or grandparents were on the receiving end of Anti-Semitic violence, that may figure in to your reaction now.
  4. Education about anti-Semitism often centers on the Holocaust. It is not surprising that an attack on a synagogue sets off fears of a new Holocaust. The idolization of Nazis and Hitler by many of the alt-right adds to that fear, and some anti-Semites deliberately push those buttons with symbols like swastikas.
  5. The fact that some of our non-Jewish neighbors do not understand our feeling of personal connection to these events, no matter how distant, may heighten our feelings of fear and perhaps even abandonment.

What can we Jews do about our anxiety levels? And how can our non-Jewish friends and neighbors help us?

Here are the things that help me cope:

The ADL studies reveal some very good news: the vast majority of our neighbors do not hate us. A 2017 poll revealed that the majority of Americans are concerned about violence against Jews and Muslims:

The surveys reveal that while anti-Semitic attitudes in the United States have increased slightly to 14 percent, the vast majority of Americans hold respectful opinions of their Jewish neighbors. However, for the first time ADL found a majority of Americans (52 percent) saying that they are concerned about violence in the U.S. directed at Jews, and an even a higher percentage (76 percent) concerned about violence directed at Muslims. More than eight in 10 Americans (84 percent) believe it is important for the government to play a role in combating anti-Semitism, up from 70 percent in 2014. –ADL report, 4/6/17

This is very good news. Yes, there are slightly more people reporting anti-Semitic opinions (16%.) In contrast to that, 84% of those surveyed believe it is important for the government to play a role in combating anti-Semitism, up from 70 percent in 2014.

While there have been in the past periods of anti-Semitic incidents and feelings in United States history, all of those times were followed by an improvement in relations. The General Order #11 incident in 1862 was followed by an increased understanding between General Ulysses Grant and the American Jewish community, who ultimately backed him for the presidency. The lynching of Leo Frank in 1915 led to the founding of the ADL, which from the beginning had as its mission “to put an end to the defamation of the Jewish people, and to secure justice and fair treatment for all.” Jewish participation in fighting WWII, and especially the sacrifice of the Four Chaplains changed attitudes, leading to many years of cordiality between the Jewish and Christian communities in the U.S.

Every congregational rabbi and every synagogue board in the United States is concentrating hard on security at Jewish institutions. We already had a level of security that would surprise our Christian neighbors, but every synagogue and Jewish institution now reviews their security regularly and looks for the best way to make their people safe. It is not possible to make any place in a free society perfectly safe, but I can assure you that this is a top concern for our leadership today. If you want to help with this, it’s a good time for a donation to your local synagogue – cameras and personnel do not come cheap.

Intergenerational trauma is real. PTSD from other traumas in our lives is real. If you are suffering from anxiety or other symptoms, I encourage you to seek a sympathetic therapist. There are new treatments for these sorts of anxieties all the time and not all of them are drug therapies. However, as the saying goes, “Doesn’t ask, doesn’t get.” or as Hillel put it, “A person prone to being ashamed cannot learn.” (Avot 2:5To get help with anxiety, you have to seek it out.

One of the most effective ways to deal with our feelings after news of an anti-Semitic attack is to come together with other Jews. Many Jewish institutions will be offer opportunities to come together – take advantage of those, whether they are services or educational programs. Your presence at those events helps comfort others, too! You do not have to believe in God. You don’t have to belong to the synagogue. You can just show up for services, although as a colleague of mine pointed out, these days it might be good to call ahead and get instructions. Many synagogues have security procedures in place.

Look for ways to increase your Jewish engagement. This may seem counterintuitive, but most of us find that doing things that affirm our Judaism gives us more solace than hiding could ever give. Join that synagogue, or join a Jewish book club. Find a Torah study group, or begin having Shabbat dinners with friends. Take a class and learn more about the Jewish people. These are classic Jewish approaches to healing and strengthening ourselves. Especially if your Jewish education focussed on the Holocaust and not much else, this is the time to learn more about Judaism – to learn about our rich civilization and our strengths.

If Gentile relatives or friends do not understand your upset, you can offer them resources to educate themselves. They do not have a frame of reference for this, other than perhaps Holocaust movies. Send them a link to my article, A Message to My Non-Jewish Readers after Pittsburgh. Also, a more general article like Where Did Anti-Semitism Come From? may give them a better context than pop culture offers.

Fight anti-Semitism and other hatreds. Join ADL, or the Southern Poverty Law Center. For more ideas, read 9 Ways to Fight Anti-SemitismTen Things We Can Do to Fight Hate and Ten Ways to Fight Hate: A Community Resource Guide by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Fighting back in constructive ways will make the world safer for all minorities. We are not alone in this fight, but we need to build our alliances by supporting the struggles of other minority groups in respectful ways.

Our tradition is strong and it has survived troubled times before. Judaism is thousands of years old: we have outlived the Babylonians, the Romans, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Third Reich. We will survive this, too.

The Eternal Light: A Sermon on Survival

Image: Bimah of Temple Ner Tamid, Bloomfield, NJ. (Photo: http://www.nertamid.org)

This is a sermon by Rabbi Marc Katz, given on Rosh HaShanah 5779 at Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield, NJ. He posted it on his Facebook page, and I asked for his permission to repost it here. – Rabbi Ruth Adar

In 1937, Walter Heilbronner climbed the steps of the bima at the Memmingen Synagogue as he prepared to become Bar Mitzvah. Looking out at the congregation, numbering around 150 members, Walter saw assembled a throng of textile manufactures and livestock merchants who for that day could forget about the hardships of Nazi boycotts and celebrate a new milestone in their community’s history. Walter’s father, the then president of the synagogue beamed with pride as he wore his signature top hat. Lit by a beautiful eight-pronged candelabra nearby, Walter began to read Torah.

Little did he know that in one year, his community would be destroyed. Kristallnacht would come, his beloved Temple would be raised, his Bar Mitzvah tutor, Emil Liffgens would be deported to Auchwitz, his uncle, Irwin and his father, Alfred to Dachau. And that lamp that lit up his day…it would wander beside him across time and country and eventually find its way to become our TNT chapel’s Ner Tamid, our eternal light.

In a way, there is no reminder of the Jewish people’s story more fitting than that lamp that shines down the hall. Its story is our story and this morning, I want to reflect a bit about what it symbolizes for each of us here.

It’s no accident that our congregation takes its name from the Ner Tamid, the eternal light that shines in every synagogue. I remember being a child and staring with wonder at mine. It was a lightbulb obscured by a plastic covering in the shape of a shell. Casting a crooked light on the wall above the ark, it swayed in my drafty congregation, housed in a converted schoolhouse. I remember being a young kid, a future Rabbi fascinated by all things Jewish and wondering how this light would stay on through power-outages. In fact, I distinctly recall asking my parents during Hurricane Bob in 1991 whether they thought the lamp was still shining.

In a world where most of the Bible speaks about long forgotten rituals of sacrifice, there are few ritual items as old as the Ner Tamid. Three thousand years ago, the Jewish people were commanded to keep a flame forever burning on the ancient Menorah or lamp. We don’t know why this command is given. I learned that the light remains lit to symbolize the fact that God is always around us. But we can just as easily say the Ner Tamid symbolizes the undying spirit of the Jewish people. Or perhaps the fact that when we do good in the world, a piece of our kindness manifests forever. (Shemot Rabbah 36:3)

What we do know, thanks to a close reading by the medieval commentator Don Isaac Abarbanel (Abarbanel on Exodus 27:20) is that God gave the commandment for the Ner Tamid before the Jewish people had finalized the design for the building it would go in, the Mishkan or Tabernacle, almost like picking a rug and then designing the room around it. (I’ve recently learned a lot about decorating a house…)

So when our forebearers, some of whom are sitting here, chose Ner Tamid as our name, we set for ourselves a goal: We would be a community where our lights always shine. Where the presence of the Divine would pervade all we did, where the Jewish spirit would forever burn, where our deeds would echo out of these wall and color the world for the better.

All we needed was a Ner Tamid to match our aspirations.

Memmingen, in Bavaria, Germany, has an interesting history. Though we have records of Jews there since the 13th century, for generations Jews were not welcome there, though many merchants passed through and engaged in business. Eventually some stayed and in 1862 the first Jew received citizenship in Memmingen. Then in 1909 the community finally got their synagogue hitting its peak in 1931 with 165 families.

No one knows exactly what purpose our lamp served. Perhaps it was simply for light or maybe it was the community’s Ner Tamid, but whatever the reason, at the very time that Alfred Heilbronner was being arrested and deported to Dachau and the synagogue was burning during Kristalnacht someone ran in and saved it. And when Alfred, a WW1 War hero used his standing to gain his freedom from the concentration camp, the lamp found its way into his possession and began to wander beside him.

He brought it with him out of Germany to Switzerland, barely before Germany sealed their borders, and then to England where it was in his possession where he picked up his son Walter from the orphanage that had saved his life. Eventually they found their way to Detroit, where Walter got possession of it and held it until after his father’s death.

In those years of wandering, the lamp became a symbol for them of their very faith. Homeless and even hopeless at times, it became a grounding force. It was for them the essence of what living a Jewish life means.

I’ve always found the parable contained in Steve Stern’s magnificent book, the Frozen Rabbi to be troubling. In it a nineteenth-century rabbi from a small Polish town one day freezes in a block of ice. He gets dragged, begrudgingly from city to city until he ends up stored in a freezer in suburban Memphis.

But that’s not the case with our lamp. Where the Frozen Rabbi sees Judaism as a burden, lugged around because we are unable to part with it, I can’t imagine that was how Alfred Heilbronner felt. This lamp was his Jewish past, waiting for the right place to be mounted and to shine forth. It was a symbol of hope. His home was destroyed but in this lamp was the seeds of his future. Like it was for our Biblical ancestors his Judaism would be rebuilt around this lamp. When he found a home, he was ready to let it shine.

But when Heilbronner got to America no one wanted his lamp. He tried to donate it to his synagogue in Detroit and they turned him down. He attempted to give it the Jewish Museum in New York but they already had one like it. So, it ended up in a box, in his basement in Detroit, collecting dust.

And this is the true tragedy of Jewish living in the modern world. Our ancestors carried though history this rich and wonderful tradition. They passed it lovingly on through time and place in the hope that it would be alive and shine forth one day. But too often it feels that there is no place in our lives for it. So we put it away. We too box it up, until we can figure out where it goes.

The reason we can’t figure out what to do with our tradition is because we look at it and realize that as it stands it does not fit our needs. The problem with the lamp was that it was lit with oil, and honestly, who needs an oil lamp today? It’s cumbersome to refill it. It’s messy. It’s a fire hazard.

And likewise, Judaism is filled with many old rituals that too feel out of place in our modern world. Most of us pray in a language we don’t understand. We sing melodies that sound different than anything we would hear on the radio. Judaism can be mysterious and beautiful, or it can be out of touch and alienating. I remember talking to a conversion student who went to a Tisha B’av service a few summers ago, commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples. She told me that attending it felt like walking into a foreign country and being forced to sit through a funeral for someone she’d never met.

But that doesn’t mean that with a little work we can’t modify it and make it work for us. No one wanted Heilbronner’s lamp, until someone had the insight to update it for the 21st century. Alfred had passed away and bequeathed it to his son Walter. Like it did before, the lamp made a cross country trip to his home in Upper Montclair and after his death, his wife Florence offered it to Temple Ner Tamid in 2004.

For a minute it looked like it too might languish again in a basement box. Our past president Harvey Morginstin first took it to a lamp repair shop to refused to touch it. It was too old, and they didn’t feel that they had the expertise to make modifications. But Harvey persevered. Eventually, Harvey had the idea to the modify the lamp. He carefully snaked a thin wire down the chain so it would remain hidden and he replaced the oil with LED lights. Now the lamp could work with our existing circuitry and perhaps more importantly, the lamp would last. Since LED lights burn for about 100,000 hours before they need to be replaced he could be confident that the lamp would remain shining for at least the next thirty years. He polished the lamp, famously quipping that he was disappointed that no genie appeared, and it was dedicated on March 19, 2004.

When I was first hired, Harvey took me aside and told me the history of the lamp and since then I’ve been wondering how we might take this religion, shepherded so carefully by so many of our ancestors and make it vibrant and shining in our day as well. For too many of us, we remain Jewish simply because it has been handed down to us. We keep it because we should. I often ask couples that I’m about to marry why it is important to them that they their children are Jewish. More often than not, they answer some derivative of “Because I don’t want to be the generation that kills it…”

If that’s the case, we should throw it out. It’s taking up too much space in the basement. Just because it has been passed down to us, does not make it of value.

Our goal, to use the words of the first chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, Avraham Isaac haKohen Cook, should be to make the “old, new…and the new, holy.”

Harvey made the old new when he turned the oil lamp into a modern electrical one. Did we lose something in the process? Of course! Change always necessitates a loss. The lamp was now usable but not as exotic and foreign as it once was.

Yet, what we got was better. Once we can mourn what was, we can open our eyes to the possibilities of the future.

I’m sure everyone here is thinking about change. How can you not with a new Rabbi. But this community is extraordinary at change and will continue to be in the future. We let go of the traditional reading of the Megilah and created our own tradition – the most produced, professional, and rehersed Purim Sheipell in the histroy of the Reform Movement. We let go of many of our treasured melodies and embraced the spiritual, learning to chant and to let the drum guide our heartbeats. This past summer, we took our pre-High Holy Day reflections out of the walls of TNT and came together on Facebook to discussion our hopes, regrets, brokenness, and aspirations.

We are experts and making the “old, new…and the new, holy” and I hope to only continue the process.

There is an old joke about the sacred cows of Jewish life, those things passed down through the ages that seem untouchable:

A new rabbi comes to town and notices that every time someone walked up to the Bima, they ducked low, shuffling a few steps until they got to the ark. When he inquired why they did that, no one could answer him. So he went to the Rabbi Emeratus and asked but he had an answer. The older rabbi had heard that once upon a time, there were a number of Jews from Persia who joined the community enmass, so maybe it was one of those rituals? Unable to confidently answer him, he directed him to the founding Rabbi who was in a nursing home about an hour away. The young Rabbi show up expectantly and asked, “so why do people shuffle low coming up to the ark? What’s the reasoning?”

The old Rabbi smiled and exclaimed, “They finally moved the chandelier!”

Our chapel is better because we moved our chandelier and now our lamp, our eternal light, our Ner Tamid shines forth. If something doesn’t work, I promise you, we will change it. Often, like the lamp in the joke, the reason it’s there is not what it we think.

And the same, I hope, will be true of your own Jewish practice. Take any Jewish ritual. Shabbat, for example, may not work for your family. You might be too busy, or it might not seem meaningful. But does that mean the candlestick should stay in the cabinet? Allow yourself to change your practice and make it work for you. If you can’t seem to find the time to buy a Challah for Friday, order in Pizza and bless that bread. Go out to dinner and order wine. Plenty of people toast at their table. Make Kiddush into that moment. If saying the Hebrew is hard, play the prayer from YouTube and try to sing along…you’ll learn it before you know it.

It’s 1937 again and Walter Heilbronner is walking up to the Torah. Little does he know that in his lifetime he will see the decimation of European Jewry, the birth of the State of Israel, the rise of the iron curtain and the campaign for Russian Jewry. He would never imagine that Western Wall in the old city of Jerusalem that he now faces will have a twenty-four-hour camera broadcasting it and a website to which that we can email our prayers. He would be shocked to learn that on September 5, 1977 a spacecraft named voyager would be launched that would leave our solar system with a golden record containing among another things a sample of Hebrew in case it were to encounter intelligent life.

But I think he would be proud of what has become of his synagogue’s lamp.

None of us knows what the future will hold for our people, our community, or our family. But what I do know is that when we build our future atop our past, our future shines much brighter. Open your hearts and let change in. Add your own adornments, your own trimmings to the holy legacy that your ancestors have given you. There is little that cannot work in our world, if we only allow ourselves to wonder “What old can be made new? And how can I make what is new, holy?”

More of Rabbi Katz’ writing may be found here

Elie Weisel z”l

Elie Weisel survived the Shoah. More than surviving, he insisted that we talk about it. He insisted that our talk not be an exercise in self-pity, but that we cultivate a willingness to put ourselves on the line for any group of people denied the dignity of their own humanity. He did so himself, time and again.

Now he is gone, but his words remain.

If you have not yet had a chance to read one of Mr. Weisel’s books, start with Night. It is one of the world’s great books.

Why Call It The Shoah?

Image: Barbed wire fence at Majdanek concentration camp in Poland. Photo by Barak Broitman via pixabay.com. Public domain.

The murder of six million Jews and many others (Roma, homosexuals, disabled persons, and others) in the 1930’s and 40’s in Europe are often referred to in English as “the Holocaust.” Some Jews, myself included, prefer the Hebrew word “Shoah.” Here’s why:

The word “holocaust” is the Anglicization of a Greek word, ολοκαύτωμα [complete combustion.] It appears in some English Bibles (for instance, the Douai – Rheims Catholic translation) as the translation for עֹלָה [oh-LAH, meaning offering that will be completely burnt.] An example:

Isaac said to his father: My father. And he answered: What wilt thou, son? Behold, saith he, fire and wood: where is the victim for the holocaust? – Genesis 22:7, Douay-Rheims translation)

Here is the same verse, in the Jewish Publication Society translation:

Isaac then said to Abraham his father, “Father!” He answered: “Here I am, my son.” And Isaac said, “Here is the firestone and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt-offering?” – Genesis 22:7, JPS translation

Later, the word “holocaust” was adopted by English writers to mean “complete destruction by fire.” It first appeared in reference to the treatment of the Jews by the Nazis in a British newspaper, the News Chronicle of December 5, 1942. From there the use spread until today, when that has become the primary definition of the word.

So why use “Shoah” instead?

“Holocaust” entered the English language as a term for a sacrifice, specifically for the sacrifices asked of the Jews by God. For anyone who grew up using a Douai-Rheims Bible, that still is a primary meaning of the word. It therefore implies a particular understanding of the events in Europe: that the murder of the Jews was a sacrifice acceptable to God. For many of us, this is a blasphemous implication.

That’s why I always use “Shoah” unless I am talking or writing to someone who is likely not to know the word. Even though “Holocaust” is generally in use as a term for the Nazi “Final Solution,” it still has the power to suggest that there was something acceptable to God in those events.

My own understanding of the Shoah is that it was the culmination of centuries of antisemitism in Europe, purely the actions and intentions of human beings, not anything wanted by the Holy One. That’s why I and many others prefer the term “Shoah.”

A Visit to the Anne Frank House

Whenever Linda or I told anyone we were going to Amsterdam, the first question was usually, “Are you going to get stoned?” (No.) The second question was, “Are you going to the Anne Frank House?”

The Anne Frank Huis (its Dutch name) is the third largest tourist attraction in the city, after the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum. It is the building where eight Jews hid from the Nazis for two years during WWII, only to be ratted out by an unknown person near the end of the war. Only one of the eight survived, Otto Frank. After the Nazi raid on the house, a friend found a collection of books and papers that she recognized to be the diary of Anne Frank, Otto’s teenaged daughter. The Diary of a Young Girl became a bestseller, a play, and has been made into a movie as well.

To get a sense of the popularity of this museum, look at the photo above. This is the line of people waiting to buy a ticket early on a weekday morning. We’d been told it was best to get tickets online before we even left home, but there were already no tickets available for the dates when we’d be there. At our hotel, we were assured that the best thing to do was get over there and wait in line before the doors opened.

I had visited the “Secret Annexe” in the summer of 1973, and I knew that it was not accessible for a person on wheels. A quick check of the website told me that that was still the case. So that day we split up: Linda went to visit the Anne Frank House and I had other adventures. She arrived at 8 a.m. to find the line in the photograph above. I don’t know how long those people had been waiting, but it was a long line even so early.

Linda tells me that the museum and the hiding place itself were very educational and very moving. Certainly the hiding place had made a huge impression on me when I visited there at age 18. Anne’s diary comes to life there, when the reader can feel how cramped the rooms are, and how careful one must be to be utterly quiet when anyone else in on the premises. As an American kid used to moving about at will, I remember marveling that the eight people hiding there for over two years managed to hang onto their sanity. It is unbearably sad to know that they went to the camps, after all they’d been through, so near to the liberation of Holland.

If you wish to get a sense of the Anne Frank House, the museum website has an excellent online exhibit complete with a virtual tour.  I know that Linda’s glad she went; I’m glad I saw it when I could climb all those stairs.

Where is Auschwitz?

Image: Barbed Wire by Tante Tati

In the words of Primo Levi:

Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea. –If This Is A Man / The Truce

What is Yom HaShoah?

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Yom HaShoah (Yohm Hah-show-AH or Yohm Hah-SHOW-ah) is Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was established in Israel as Yom HaZikaron LaShoah v’LaGevurah, Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day.

Yom = Day
Zikaron = Remembrance
Shoah = Catastrophe (refers now to the atrocities against the Jewish People in WWII.)
Gevurah = Heroism.

It began in 1953 as Israel’s day for remembrance of the 6,000,000 Jewish men, women and children who were murdered in the 1940’s in Europe, established by Israeli law as a Memorial Day. Increasingly it has been adopted as a day for remembrance by Jews the U.S. as well. It is a memorial for our dead and for the heroes among them.

The originators proposed the date for the 14th of Nisan, which was the date of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, to underline the fact that there was also Gevurah (heroism) involved, to counter the myth that Jews were passive victims.  However, that is also the day immediately before Passover, so that was impractical. Instead, it was set for the 27th of Nisan, except when that day falls immediately adjacent to Shabbat, in which case it is moved by one day, forward or back as appropriate.

Like all Jewish days, it begins at sundown and ends at sundown. In Israel, it is marked with solemn assemblies and flags at half mast. TV and radio stations play classical music and documentaries. At noon, everything stops in the country: people even stop their cars on the street, and get out of them, to stand for a moment of silence.

In the United States, Yom HaShoah is marked with community memorial ceremonies and educational programs. If survivors of the Holocaust are available as speakers, they tell their stories. With the passage of time, that is more and more rare.

Not all Jews observe 27 Nisan as Holocaust Remembrance Day. Some Orthodox and Hasidic groups include Holocaust remembrance in the Tisha B’Av memorial of the disasters to the Jewish People.

Upcoming Dates of Observance in the Gregorian calendar:

2014 April 27

2015 April 16

2016 May 5

2017 April 24

2018 April 12

Image: Abel Francés Quesada, some rights reserved.

Part Jewish?

Black and White Cookie @ Martha's Vineyard Gou...
(Photo credit: David Berkowitz)

“When I told the rabbi I was half-Jewish, he was not very friendly.”

The young man who said that to me had recently discovered that his father was a Holocaust survivor. His dad had felt it was not safe to be a Jew, so after the war he hid his Jewish identity, and only revealed it on his deathbed. Joe (not his real name) had been raised without religion, had become a Christian in college, and now was trying to deal with this new information about his family. He was also still grieving for his father, and exploring Judaism was one way to feel connected to his dad. He went to a synagogue (I do not know what synagogue, or which movement it was) and when he approached the rabbi after services and introduced himself with, “I’m half Jewish” the rabbi said, “That’s not possible.”

Joe was baffled and hurt. “What did I do?” he said.

Sometimes I hear people say, “I’m half-Jewish” or “I’m one-quarter Jewish.” That reflects their self understanding. What they need to know, though, is that in the rabbinic Jewish universe, there are categories labeled “Jewish” and “not-Jewish,” but that there is no “part Jewish.” An analogy: it’s like sitting in a poker game and suddenly yelling “GIN!” You know that the hand you hold looks like “gin” (and it does!) but that’s not a hand in the game of poker. “Part Jewish” may be accurate genealogy but Judaism isn’t genealogy.

Why is this? Go back in time, not even very far. Jews were despised by Christians, and not very well-thought-of by most Muslims. Being “half-Jewish” meant having the worst of both worlds: membership in a despised group, and outsider status within that group. Jews decided, sometime about two thousand years ago, to define any person who had a Jewish mother as a Jew, no matter who the father was. That way a child would not be labeled “half-Gentile” and suffer for it. Children with Jewish fathers and Gentile mothers would not be living in the Jewish community. They would be in the Gentile community with their mothers, so they were beyond the boundaries of the Jewish world, hence, not Jewish.

So if you have described yourself to someone as “half-Jewish” or “part Jewish” and gotten a strange reaction or a lecture about Jewish law, that’s what was going on. If you want to bypass the semantics, try saying that you have a “Jewish heritage.” That may make for an easier conversation.

And Joe? We talked at length. It turned out that he was a devout Christian. Ultimately he decided to say he was a believing Christian with a Jewish heritage. I was able to put him in touch with a program for children of Holocaust survivors, because he certainly qualified as a member there.

To my Jewish readers: we need to be careful in speaking to people who identify as part-Jewish, remembering that unkindness is never OK. And if you are a person who has Jews in the family tree, I hope that you will find friendly people with whom to explore as much as you wish.

We are in a time of changes for the Jewish community in the United States. I have a feeling that while traditional categories are not going to change, the number of people who identify as “part Jewish” will grow. It’s going to be an interesting millennium.

 

Five Needles

FiveNeedles

As a student rabbi I had the privilege of serving Temple Beth Solomon of the Deaf in the San Fernando Valley of California.  Today I received the current newsletter and learned about a new film based on the experiences of a Deaf Holocaust survivor.

Five Needles offers an unusual angle on Shoah history. It tells the story of a small group of Deaf women caught in the Shoah. The survival of any of these women was remarkable, since the Nazis were thorough in murdering anyone (Jewish or not) with a disability. However, some women were able to hide their deafness and still find one another in the camp. A very few of them survived.

You can see the film at BSL Zone, a website of the The British Sign Language Broadcasting Trust (BSLBT). It commissions television programs made in British Sign Language by Deaf people for Deaf people.

The true story behind the film may be found in an issue of the newsletter of the Jewish Deaf Community Center of Los Angeles. If you read the true story, you will see that the filmmaker has combined a couple of different stories. Five Needles is a fictionalized account of the story of real Deaf Jews.

While this film has some rough edges, and I could quibble about some historical details, the story and acting and the mood they evoke are well worth the viewing time.