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Jewish World Review Feb. 8, 2000 /2 Adar I, 5760
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
JEWISH HISTORY is replete with episodes in which enemies of the Jews
circulated, and often acted upon, canards fabricated from whole cloth
against the Jews in their midst.
Those who follow current Jewish events have just witnessed the latest
appearance of a pernicious, contemporary libel, in, of all places, federal
district court in Brooklyn.
The World Union for Progressive Judaism, the international body of the
Reform and Reconstructionist movements, like many other organizations, has
put forth a claim for a share of restitution monies soon to be paid by a
consortium of Swiss banks.
In its official submission to the special master in the case, however, the
World Union rests its claim, in part, on the fact that those Holocaust
victims who were Liberal Jews "would certainly have been appalled to see
funds deriving from their losses given to institutions who question their
Jewishness or that of their descendants ..." [emphasis mine]. The
unambiguous import of that statement is that Orthodox Jews and Judaism write
Reform and Reconstructionist Jews out of the Jewish people.
Leaders of the liberal movements have had great success with this accusation
in recent years, with hardly a month going by without a letter-writer or
columnist in one or another Jewish newspaper inveighing against the Orthodox
for delegitimizing some, or all, other Jews. And so, these leaders have
decided to employ this falsehood to support their claim to part of the
Holocaust restitution pie, roiling the until-now admirably civil tone of the
restitution negotiations.
To understand why it is not hyperbole to characterize this claim about the
Orthodox view as a true libel in its historical sense, one need only
consider the three elements of classical anti-Jewish libels.
First, such canards were utterly, demonstrably, false. It is nonsense, for
example, to assert that Jews would ever use human blood, or any blood, as an
ingredient in their matzot. And it's no less farcical to suggest that
Orthodox Jews, from the most "modern" to the most haredi, regard their
fellow Jews, those either born to a Jewish mother or converted halachically,
as anything other than fully Jewish.
Rabbi Yaakov Perlow, head of the grassroots haredi organization Agudath
Israel, pleaded with the press at the group's annual convention to "please
print that the following words were heard at the convention of Agudath
Israel: It is an absolute falsehood that Orthodox Judaism and its Beyond the stated positions of Orthodox leaders, can there be a more
eloquent testimonial to how the Orthodox view their Jewish brethren than the
millions of dollars and tens of thousands of hours that Orthodox groups and
individuals spend each year to better the physical and spiritual wellbeing
of Jews of every conceivable stripe around the globe?
A second feature of the historical libel is that its propagators,
ironically, were often themselves guilty of the very crime of which they
accused the Jews.
In the contemporary context too, this aspect is glaring. Non-Orthodox Jewish
leaders have impugned the very Jewishness of the Orthodox - while no
Orthodox leader has or ever would do the converse regarding non-Orthodox
Jews. There was no uproar, for instance, when in 1996, Simeon Maslin, then
president of Reform's Central Conference of American Rabbis, said the
following at the annual meeting of America's Reform rabbis: "Let me make it
clear that when I say we, as 'we are the authentic Jews', I refer to the two
great non-Orthodox synagogue movements of America, Reform and Conservative.
My we . . . does not include those who act and think today as the Sadducees
acted and thought 20 centuries ago."
The final component of the age-old libel is that it was designed to
capitalize on deep-seated emotions; in the past, the fear and loathing that
a thousand years of anti-Jewish teachings had planted in the hearts of
Europe's Christians.
There is a good deal of Jewish self-doubt among the Reform, Conservative and
Reconstructionist laities, born of rising assimilation and dwindling levels
of religious observance in those communities. As a result, though Orthodox
Jews do not equate minimal or even total non-observance with forfeiture of
Jewish status, some non-Orthodox Jews may be all too willing to believe this
to be the Orthodox position.
And so, some members of the heterodox leaderships portray the Orthodox as
self-consumed, hateful caricatures who actually say about Reform and
Conservative Jews the things the latter fear most to hear. This enables
these leaders to energize an otherwise disinterested laity into supporting
their own anti-Orthodox agenda.
Despite all the similarities between the more recent lies and the calumnies
of yesteryear, however, there is one important difference, and it is a
tragic one: whereas the libels of yore were the work of visceral enemies of
the Jewish people, the contemporary slander is being perpetrated, sadly, by
fellow Jews.
And that is something that should sadden us
Of libels and labels
By Eytan Kobre
standardbearers seek to delegitimize other Jews. Every Jew, whatever his or
her persuasion, deserves the love, the respect and the concern he or she is
entitled to as a human being and as a member of our holy people. No Jew is a
second-class Jew, in Israel or anywhere." Unfortunately, his words were
largely ignored.
And the Reform movement has not limited its delegitimization of other Jews
to mere verbiage; since 1983, it has denied the Jewish status of any Jew
born of a Jewish mother who did not receive a Jewish upbringing.
Eytan Kobre is a lawyer residing in Queens and part of Am Echad's pool of
writers. You may contact him by clicking here.
