Jewish Life Winter 1979

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SHVAT 5739/WINTER1979

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Peace Tieaty/Isaac Bashevis Singer: Nobel Laineate/"Christmas in a Jewish Home"/Helping Jewish Life/Changing of the H9R _ * , Guaid/Cieeping Orthodoxy A President "Bei Yidden'VA Jewish president examines organized Jewish life Borough Park: A Jewish Settlement/A historical and contemporary overview of America's largest Orthodox community

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A Rabbi Who is a Political Leader: Chief Rabbi Rosen of Romania/A portrait of a man on a tight-rope Princeton University: /Tb Be Or Not lb Be"/On the conflict between the Phi Beta Kappa key and the key to Eternity Books in Review/The Holocaust and Halakhah/ Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest

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Mrs. Linore Ward and Family have established the Jess Ward Memorial Jewish Life Fund to assure the continued publication ofs]ewish Life in its expanded format and to continue the dissemination of Torah ideology to English-speaking Jewry throughout the world.

The Fund is a tribute to the sacred memory of jests Ward wh& in his lifetime gave o f his talents and his means to his fellow Jews.

We pray that these pages shall be a worthy memorial to his Committed life.

H Y B E R G E L ' C e n tra l C a n a d a D O N A L D

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E . D A V ID S U B A R U p p e r N e w Y d rk . .J U L I U S S A M S O N ,\ j s r a e l R A B B I P IN C H A S S T O L P E R 'R x f e e t r t j L v e V i c e P r e s i d e n t

Volum e III, N um ber 2

SHVAT 5739/WINTER1979

Contents 2 Comments: The Peace Treaty/The Changing of the Guard/ Isaac Bashevis Singer: Nobel Laureate/Christmas Comes to a Jewish Home/Creeping Orthodoxy/ Guest Comment Helping Jewish Life/Book Reviewers Wanted 16 A President "Bei \idden"/Louis Bernstein 22 Borough Park: A Jewish SetÜement/Marvin Schick 36 A Rabbi Who Is A Political Leader: Chief Rabbi Rosen of Romania/Freema Gottlieb 44 To Be Or Not To Be/Moshe Greenes 48 Hashkofoh: Creativity in Halacha/Cyril Domb 54 Books In Review: The Holocaust and Halakhah; Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest/Eliyahu Safran Because of the small staff producing Jewish Life, contributors are asked to send an inquiry before submitting manuscripts, and to be patient in waiting for a response.

We regret any inconvenience we may have caused in this regard, and we trust we will be able to increase our efficiency in the future. ®Copyright 1979 by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. Mate­ rial from JEWISH LIFE, including illustrations, may not be reproduced except by written permission from this magazine following written request. JEWISH LIFE is published quarterly. Subscription: 1 year—$10.00, 2 years—$18.00, 3 years—$25.00.

Foreign: Add $.50 per year. Single copy $2.50, Editorial & Publication Office: 116 E. 27th St., New York, N.Y. 10016. Second Class Postage Paid New York, N.Y.

The Peace Treaty "It was quite clever of you," an astute reader of Jewish Life said, "not commenting at all on Camp David in your last issue." Another astute reader pointed out how appropriate our guest comments on "Mideast Double Standards" were in light of the absurd new demands being made on Israel by Egypt and the United States. We had to decline both compli­ ments. The issue was prepared before Camp David, and the piece on double standards was selected before the peace talks broke down. Yet all this demonstrates once again the futility of trying to make sense of Mideast diplomacy on a day-to-day basis. As these words are being written-—and Heaven alone knows what the circumstances will be when they are read— Egypt, with the support of the President of the United States, is saying the following to Israel: "We areready to commit ourselves not to make war on you. But you know, of course, that we have a mutual defense treaty with other Arab states, and if they should become involved in war with you our commitment to them must take precedence over our commitment to you. You do understand that we are men of honor and must keep our word to our Arab brothers. Don't ask us to sacrifice our honor just to make peace with you. Why don't you sign a note telling us you do understand, and let's get on with Peace."

Now: at the latest count there are one hundred and fiftyone member states in the United Nations. Is it conceivable that any state other than Israel should be asked to sign a treaty renouncing its right to self-defense and national integrity with another state that reserves its right to make war?—And they get upset when we say that we are "the chosen people."

Egypt, the other Arab states, the General Assembly of the United Nations, and now the President of the United States have declared that we indeed are a singular people. Rules of logic, of international diplomacy, of fair play and decency— dare we even say "Human Rights"—are for the Goyim—not for Jews. The United Nations and the Family of Man are now restricted areas, off-limits for Jews. "Don't bother us," they are telling us, "with your causistry, with your pilpulistic talmudism. We're making the rules of the game, and if you don't like the rules, find yourself another world."

It becomes increasingly difficult to deal with the absurdities of the world we live in, with "1984" and "Newspeak" gaining fast upon us. (Wouldn't it be typical if "1984" arrived before 1984?) But how are we to deal with this mass absurdity, with

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this mass insanity; with a total eclipse of reason when our Jewish People are involved.

It would appear that not the State of Israel, and not even the People of Israel are the primary target. It is the Jewish G-d, with His insistence on justice, on compassion, on truth, who is despised by the nations of the world. And having learned from past experience that building a tower will give them no access to our Creator, they have built a Babel on the shores of New York's East River where they can shake their collective fists at the Universal G-d that the Jewish People has imposed upon them. After centuries of our protesting that our G-d is a Universal G-d, it turns out that He is indeed a Jewish G-d.

How true the old Yiddish proverb: "If G-d lived on earth, people would break His windows." If this gloomy analysis is correct, what are we to do?

I attended the first press conference of Israel's new Perma­ nent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Yehudah Blum. He was asked why Israel does not leave the United Nations in the light of the growing anti-Israel senti­ ment in the U.N., and Israel's inability to stem its growth. His answer was—I paraphrase—that Israel is committed to the noble ideals of the U.N. Charter, and one voice must continue to be heard over the din of the Babel, proclaiming the eternal truths which derive from G-d's law.

Outside the arena of international politics, our response must be an ever greater loyalty to the G-d of Israel and His Torah. Let us proclaim to the nations of the world that we intend to continue to play out our part in world history, as a singular people on the sacred soil of Eretz Yisrael. Let them know that they are rattling their sabres at the Almighty G-d, who is our G-d and who wants to be their G-d as well—if they will have Him. Above all; let us know what it is all about. Sharing with all men the divine gift of free will, the Jew too may reject the Jewish G-d and His Torah. But to do so is to reject our Peoplehood and to reject our Land.

Almost four hundred years ago the Maharal Mi'Prague proclaimed that Israel cannot prevail without Torah and with­ out our Land, and that Mankind cannot prevail without Israel.

This then we share in common with the Family of Man. We may choose G-d and His Torah and His Land, which is to choose Life, or we may reject all three and choose oblivion.

The nations may choose Life at peace with Israel, or they may choose oblivion. We have the promise of our prophets that they will choose Life. In G-d's good time it will come to pass.

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The Changing of the Guard Jewish Life is published by the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. At the eightieth anniversary con­ vention of the Union held in Washington, D.C. last November, Harold M. Jacobs, Chairman of New York City's Board of Higher Education, completed his term of office as President of the Union. He was succeeded as President by Julius Berman, a prominent attorney who is a Past-President of COLPA (Orthodoxy's National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs) and has long been active in the Union and in other Jewish communal affairs.

It was under the administration of Harold Jacobs that Jewish Life, which had lost ground after four decades of pub­ lication, was revived and brought to its present position as a respected and responsible journal of Orthodox comment and opinion. We are grateful to Mr. Jacobs for his faith in Jewish Life and for this support. We look forward to meriting the continued support of the new administration.

(This is as good a time as any to note that while Mr. Jacobs and the editor of this journal share the same family name, are both of Hungarian extraction, and have been friends for many years—they are not in fact related.)

Isaac Bashevis Singer: Nobel Laureate This has been the year of the Nobel Prize for Polish Jews: the prize for peace to Menachem Begin; the prize for literature to Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer, cynic that he is, boasted that Begin and Sadat won their prizes for something they were yet to do, while he won a prize for what he has already done.

Singer has always been brash in his public statements— even before he won the Prize. He enjoys startling his public and his interviewers. Winning the Prize has made him more brash, and his press coverage has given him ample opportun­ ity to repeat many of his old chestnuts. He has been criticized over the years by his own colleagues—Yiddish writers whose works have not been translated, and he has been called to task for not writing about socialism, the Holocaust, and the re­ volutionary concerns which have been the hallmark of secular Yiddish writers. He has been criticized by the Orthodox for writing about devils and spooks, and the seamier side of Jewish life. It is intriguing to note that the British writer, Graham Greene, who was Singer's competitor for the Prize, and who as a Catholic writes about unsavory Catholics, has

been criticized in the same manner.

Apart from the absurdity of asking a writer to write about people and circumstances he does not feel compelled to deal with, the criticism of Singer has largely been founded on a complete mis-reading of his work and what emerges from his work. But before taking up the cudgels for Bashevis Singer, I must make a confession. A number of years ago, under the pressure of qualifying for an academic degree, I spent a good deal of time reading Singer's works in Yiddish, and compar­ ing them to their translations into English, and more recently into Hebrew. Among the many writing projects I contemplate for these pages, which time has forced me to delay, is an extensive study of the religious aspect of Singer's writing. «! can share with you here, in several paragraphs, only some of my observations and discoveries, with the hope that at some future date, I will be able to substantiate them. I realize this is a backwards approach, but life often causes us these days to do things in seemingly strange ways. (I will spare you a recita­ tion on the anguish of carrying about so many un-finished and un-done writing projects.)

Isaac Bashevis Singer is pne of the greatest geniuses in the world of literature today. It is paradoxical—and surely the paradox is not lost on Singer—that it took the Swedish Academy to "discover" him. He is a Jew with a deep under­ standing of what it means to struggle to remain a Jew in an insane world. His observations on writing, on Zionism, on the Jewish State, on Jewish identity, on the temptations which draw Jews like himself away from Torah, are virtually unknowri to his English readers. They have appeared in the Forward, but are rarely translated. His finest book, Teshuva—he has himself so described it—will likely never be read by his readers in the many languages that his other works have been translated into, because it remains hidden in the original Yiddish, and he himself has said it would never be translated. The book is the clearest statement, so far, of what is Singer's overriding literary and personal concern: when he left his father's house and in effect turned his back on Torah as his rabbinic forebears knew it, did he strike as good a bargain as he thought he had?

DerBaal Teshuva is a dialogue between himself and an American Jew he meets at the Wall in Yerushalayim, who has renounced his garment-tycoon way of life on New York's Seventh Avenue, and now lives as a Torah Jew in Meah Shearim. The theme is not new for Singer. In The Magician of Lublin, his hero is a Polish Jew who lives a sleazy life as a thief, charlatan, and womanizer, and ends up locking himself in a walled-in room where he does teshuva, and leads the Jewish life he feels incapable of living in the outside world.

Singer's The Slave is a poem of praise to a Jew struggling to 5

remain a Jew against all odds. He is the slave of a Polish peasant, with not another Jew for hundreds of miles, mutter­ ing those prayers that he can recall from memory each day; fighting off the advances of his owner's daughter, whom he ultimately converts to Judaism after which they struggle to­ gether to live as full Torah personalities.

Listen to Singer's Baal Teshuva as he explains to the nar­ rator of the book his new way of life. Having fled from his unfaithful wife, his nagging mistress, and her money-sucking daughter, and having spent some time in Tel Aviv, where he found himself berated for being an American worshipper of the Golden Calf, he finds himself in a shteibel in Meah Shearim.

I walked into the Sandzer shteibel thinking that there I will feel even more estranged than elsewhere. I wear conventional , have no beard or peos.For such Jews I am no more than a sinner. what happened was the exact opposite. I walk in and I feel that my younger years have come back. Jews like my zeide ... approach me with "SholomAleichem." Their eyes tell me: you're very far removed from us, but you're a Jew - our brother. I see in their eyes something I had never seen among secular Jews: Ahavas Yisrael, love for a fellow Jew, even if he is a sinner ...

The secular Jews want to sell me but these Jews want to take care of my body, not my soul.

Learning that he has no place to stay they invite him to their homes.

Earlier, the potential Baal Teshuva is torn by opposing forces within him, as he contemplates becoming a Jew again.

Don't be a fool, one voice says, you'll never be a real Jew. You'll be like actors on a stage who put on talis and tephilin and speak "frum," and then go home to live like goyim. But another voice speaks a refrain that appears throughout Sing­ er's works.

All other ways except Yiddishkeit will only take you back to sheker, the falsehood which you despise. If you don't believe in Shulchan Aruch, then you have to believe in Stalin, in all kinds of vacuous theories which lead to nothingness ... You saw with your own eyes what throwing off the yoke leads to: to the KGB, to the Gestapo. If you don't want to be a Nazi, you'll have to become the opposite. It's no accident that Hitler and his theoreticians mounted such a hysteri­ cal attack against the Talmud, and the "Talmud Jude." Those de­ spicable people knew that the Talmud and the "Talmud Jude" were their worst enemies. A Jew without G-d can easily be convinced that Lenin, Trotsky, or Stalin will bring the Geula. Jews without G-d can believe that the apostate Karl Marx was a messiah. Jews without belief not only grasp at straws, they grasp at burned straws. Every few months they have a new god, a new illusion, a new style, a new meshugas ... The "Talmud Jude" doesn't kill people ... You needn't be frightened of him if you meet him ... on a deserted street.

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—No: this does riot make Isaac Bashevis Singer an Or­ thodox Jew; nor am I suggesting that his works become re­ quired reading in yeshiva high schools—though they can— and often do—do a lot worse in their choices for classes in literature. But this is an aspect of Singer which has been kept from the public; which the critics have not dealt with; and which Singer himself has yet to work out in his own mind and neshama.

I risk the charge of heresy: Isaac Bashevis Singer has a great deal to tell us about Jews and the “Talmud Jude." He surely has much to say to the non-Jewish world, and he did it in Stockholm when he told the Swedish Academy in the pre­ sence of their king: The truth is that what the great religions preached, the Yiddish­ speaking people of the ghettos practiced day in and day out.

"Christmas Comes to a Jewish Home" It was under this title that The New York Times, last De­ cember, published an article by Anne Roiphe explaining how and why she celebrates Christmas in her home. Mrs. Roiphe, a writer, argued her case eloquently, and in a sense the Times performed a service to its readers by airing the issue. They were also most generous in printing virtually a full page of responses from readers, some of which may have been too harsh on a Jewish woman who was obviously not strong enough to withstand the annual Christmas barrage, and whose mah-jong-playing and Chinese-food-loving mother did nothing to prepare her for. Mrs. Roiphe's description of her mother's yahrtzeit observance was most poignant: “She ... lit a memorial candle for her parents and its light burned on her dressing table (where it sat among the cosme­ tics, the perfume, the bits of jewelry) mysteriously, a sad sac­ red light." Good writing: but sad indeed.

One observation which the letters failed to make. “Should mass persecutions start again," Mrs. Roiphe concluded, “I would wear the yellow star of David ...” Should such a dark day ever, Chas V'Sholom, come upon us, and should Mrs. Roiphe be lead away with other Jews, it may very well be that one of her children, who listened so attentively and so joy­ ously to the “stories of St. Nicholas, 'The Night Before Christmas' ... which are all about good triumphing against evil," will have turned her in to the secret police.

Mrs. Roiphe: it's not too late for you or your children. Don't wait for the yellow badge. Seek out a warm, sympathetic Or­ thodox person, and talk it out. We can recommend a few.

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Creeping Orthodoxy "One of the puzzlements of recent American Jewish history is the growing strength of Orthodox Judaism. Who would have supposed, back in the 1950's, that Orthodoxy was here not only to stay, but to grow? A generation ago, the assumption ... was that Orthodoxy was a quaint vestige of earlier times ...

The process .. was inexorable: the tradition would weaken, crumble, change. Orthodox Judaism was doomed."

—So writes Leonard Fein, editor of Moment, in his Prologue to a special section on Orthodox Judaism. And he continues: "Look around. Look at the Lubavitch movement. More impor­ tant, look at the modem (sic) Orthodox congregations, the ones with substantial numbers of members who teach physics at distinguished institutions, who are psychiatrists, corporate lawyers, business tycoons. Look at the Talmud classes attended by government officials ... And look also at the degree to which the rest of us have become defensive in the presence of the Orthodox.

"For now that we see that Orthodoxy cannot only make its peace with modernity, but actually thrive in the modem world, we are bound to confront the obvious question: is not the Orthodox way the authentic way?"

Fein's prologue is followed by three responses to the ques­ tions he raises, and they in turn raise other questions which cannot be light dismissed. Unfortunately, this symposium came to our attention when this issue was ready for the press, and we feel it is deserving of thorough reaction which will appear in our next issue. But Professor Fein seems oblivious to one major force which has been operating since "back in the 50's, " when all looked so bleak for Orthodoxy. Yeshivos have blossomed: in the 50's I could easily tick off the names of the few yeshivos that existed then, and those of us who were in yeshivos then, or were going into rabbonus, were so small a group that we all knew each other by our first names. As an academic and as an editor, Professor Fein, you should know the power of literacy, and "literacy" is what has beeen happening.

Reform and Conserative Judaism made its peace with illiteracy: Orthodoxy fought it.

The type-setter presses; the presses stand waiting. More about "creeping Orthodoxy" in our next issue.

Israel: America's Best Bargain Does President Carter understand Israel's key role in assur­ ing vital support for America's strategic interests? Does he 8

appreciate what America has obtained from Israel in the past and what it may need from Israel in the future? Has America ever made as good an investment for our country's own sec­ urity as it has in supporting Israel?

The Myth of Israel as a "Burden" Some anti-Israel commentators (including members of the Carter Administration) have complained about the "burden" of America's generosity to Israel. This myth of U.S.-Israel relations has hurt our country by painting a distorted picture of what Israel means to America.

Of many services rendered by Israel, just one is worthy many more times more than all the help we have given Israel in all its 30 years. Our oil situation would be infinitely worse if Israel had not prevented Egypt's Nasser (a willing dupe of Soviet Russia) from muscling in on Saudi Arabia's oilfields by attempting to conquer neighboring Yemen. Worried about Is­ rael's reaction, Nasser quit Yemen, then attempted to choke Israel by blockading the Straits of Tiran. The resulting Six-Day War, which cost so much in lives and treasure, prevented the Kremlin from attaining control of Middle East oil! Not all the foreign-aid billions spent on many other nations over the years returned as much service to the U.S.!

What Happened in Two Wars . . .

In the Jordan-PLO was of 1970, Syria (Russia's ally) tried to rescue the PLO but pulled back when Israel signaled it would intervene. So great was the threat of a PLO takeover of Jordan to U.S. interests that the U.S. Navy was prepared to land supplies at Haifa to insure Jordan's victory. Expelled from Jordan, PLO sought to take over Lebanon. Operating from U.S.-supported refugee camps, the terrorists plunged Leba­ non into civil war. Syria was deterrred from annexing Leba­ non by Israel's warning. How much was it worth to the U.S. (which sent its Navy into Lebanon 20 years earlier to stop a civil war that threatened Syrian annexation) to have Israel perform this furiction? Israel saved thousands of Lebanese Christians from extermination by Moslem terrorists. Medical and economic aid still continues. Thus Christian nations are indebted to Israel for sacrifices in behalf of their fellow Christ­ ians. U.S. aid to developing countries is diminished because 80 countries are serviced by 500 agricultural experts from Is­ rael.

Who Can We Really Depend Upon America needs reliable naval bases in the eastern Mediter­ ranean. Greece and Turkey are unfriendly to U.S. and are at loggerheads with one another. There is only one secure base 9

available, Haifa—without payment. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt commented that the U.S. is incapable of successful military activity in Mideast without Israeli support. General Keegan, former head of U.S. Air Force Intelligence said: “The Israeli Air Force, equipped with F15's remains the best protection against an incursion from the Soviet Union into Mideast and can provide the U.S. Sixth Fleet with its best protection." It's reported the Israeli airfield at Etzion in the Sinai is being used without charge by U.S. planes to patrol the Red Sea and In­ dian Ocean.

The Priceless Information We Got America acquired vital Soviet secrets when a Russian MIG plane was captured by Israel — along with intelligence infor­ mation concerning Soviet clandestine activities in Mideast and Africa. Soviet material captured from the Arabs was studied by our Pentagon. (The U.S. is now emphasizing chemical warfare. In 1973, Israel revealed the secret of Soviet nerve gas.) Israeli scientists continue to transmit much useful data to U.S. sources. Gen. Keegan assessed Israel's contribution to the U.S. was worth $1000 for every dollar's worth of aid we have granted her — adding that “five intelligence agencies could not equal military information we get from Israelis — it's worth billions."

How Not to Reward Loyalty At a time when democracy and freedom are under increas­ ing attack worldwide, petrodollar pressures are shaping America's foreign policy and betraying its credibility. Since Washington's retreat on its September 1975 commitment to Israel, the world reexamines the reliability of America's prom­ ises. Sadat breaks off peace negotiatons — and is rewarded with 50 F5's. Saudi Arabia still vows to recapture Jerusalem for Islam, still is PLO's paymaster — is to get our most lethal F15's and may have contracted with France for billions in Mir­ age 2000 jets, missiles, tanks.

Dangers to Our Long-range Interests . . .

Arming Israel's enemies harms America's self interests.

How reliable are such allies as Saudi Arabia whose ruling family may at any moment be toppled out of power? Why risk letting the F15 fall into Soviet hands (as Gen. Keegan fears)?

How “moderate" is Egypt? Its people have just given Sadat the right to abridge the little freedom that existed before and to jail his opponents. Are these worthy allies of America?

Challenge to Movement Towards Peace . . .

Now that the Congress has bowed to Presidential pressure to supply Egypt and Saudi Arabia with fighter bombers, Pres­ ident Carter has one clear responsibility: to insist that the Arab states more without further delay to the negotiating table and work out a mutually-agreeable settlement based on U.N. Re­ solution 242 wording: "Secure and recognized boundaries."

There mustbe no imposed peace, no additional Arab state in the Middle East, No negotiation with the murderous PLO, no further pressure on Israel to accept terms which will lead to its destruction.

Only then will there be peace.

— S. Norman Gourse

Helping Jewish Life In his lifetime, Reuben Gross ("A Soldier Falls," Summer/ Winter 1978) was wont to combine his dabblings in real estate with building yeshivos. He managed to make his "tzedakah dollar" go a long way, and to go on working. His last such venture—at least the last I knew of—provided the facilities for the American branch of Ohr Someach in Yonkers, New York.

Knowing of his late father's interest in Jewish Life, his son Avery Gross has made a significant contribution to our sup­ port in a manner which he hopes others will emulate. He has purchased a one-year subscription for each of the members of his congregation, Young Israel of Staten Island. As a result, hundred^ of new people join the Jewish Life readership, as a tribute to Reuben Gross' love for the printed word and his own skills in the written word. This opens up several pos­ sibilities.

Reuben started to write for me when I was editor of View­ point, followed me to The Jewish Observer, and then to Jewish Life. Yet it was many years ago in Jewish Life, under the editorship of Saul Bernstein, that he first started to share his stimulating ideas about Orthodox Jewish life with people who came to look forward to reading him, whether they agreed with his point of view or not. His admirers were many, and if you are one of them, you may want to give ten, fifty, a hundred or more subscriptions to the members of your con­ gregation, yeshiva or day-school parent body, board of direc­ tors; or you may want to endow subscriptions to public and university libraries in your region, thereby broadening our readership, and helping our financial situation at the same time. You may want to do this as a tribute to someone you know—or knew—and your gift will be acknowledged in these pages.

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If you believe in what we are doing with Jewish Life, help us reach more and more readers. After all: that's what we're all about. , POST SCRIPT: Many American olim in Israel thirst for English-language publications such as ours, but find the cost of subscriptions beyond their limited means. We also receive requests from people in out-lying areas of the world who have seen Jewish Life in libraries, requesting complimentary sub­ scriptions, which they cannot afford to pay for, to keep them in touch with American Orthodoxy. Your gift of multiples of ten dollars, undesignated, will enable us to respond to these requests.

In this issue...

About three decades ago, a group of major Jewish organiza­ tions commissioned an outstanding non-Jewish scholar from Columbia University, to prepare an objective study of Jewish communal life. His findings, which became known as the "Maclver Report," were devastating. Among his recommen­ dations he urged the consolidation of several organizations which were performing similar tasks, the elimination of others. The report was debated, castigated, and then con­ signed to oblivion. It is difficult to find a copy today. Rabbi Louis Bernstein, has, for several decades, been an astute and sometimes caustic observer of the American Jewish scene since his days as editor of Commentator, Yeshiva University's undergraduate newspaper, while at the same time being in the thick of Jewish life. He reports to us in this issue of his observations on organized Jewish life. His "A President 'Bei Yidden' " is a humorous treatment of the subject—but it's dead serious. Read it.

The recent incident in Borough Park, bringing several thousand Orthodox residents of that area into confrontation with members of New York's Police Department, has drawn more than its share of comment in the press. Objective obser­ vers found a failure of leadership on both sides. Marvin Schick's "Borough Park: A Jewish Settlement," provides the kind of sober understanding of the rise of this significant community which is vital to the evaluation of eruptions which are symptomatic of its strengths and weaknesses. We con­ sider it a major contribution to inter-group understanding and are pleased to be able to bring it to you in this issue.

New political alignments and realities are popping up all over the globe. In the heat of the "Cold War," only the most daring would have prophesied that the United States and Red China would be aligned, while the U.S. is still talking détente 12

with the Soviet Union. For the Jew, these changes come more slowly. Being a chief rabbi in a nation aligned with the Soviet Union is still—at best—a delicate situation, And Chief Rabbi Moshe Rosen of Roumania still walks a thin-line in holding his people together. In "A Rabbi Who Is a Political Leader: Chief Rabbi Rosen of Roumania” Freema Gottlieb, in her first contribution to these pages, gives us a portrait of the Chief Rabbi.

On the theory that a bad pun is excusable if it is so desig­ nated, it would appear that the debate over higher secular education for students of yeshivos is now becoming academic.

Larger numbers of such students are more and more visible in schools from the City University in New York to the ivyleague schools throughout the nation. The first wave of the kipah-wearing students has, predictably, been followed by the second wave of "black-hatters,” and students from the many "yeshiva” high-schools for girls. In "Princeton: To Be, or Not to Be,” Rabbi Moshe Greenes, examines the social and spiritual consequences of the new college scene.

The Dubnef Maggid was once asked how he always man­ ages to come up with a mosholthat so aptly describes the point he is trying to make. Characteristically he said: "Chil eich geben a moshol.” "There are two ways to send an arrow into the center of a target. The one is obvious. What I do, he said, is to fire the arrow first, and then draw the target around it."

Recent commentators on halacha have proposed such an ap­ proach to "creative halachag&setting out a desirable conclu­ sion, and then looking for halachic underpinnings. In "Creativity in Halacha," Cyril Domb describes another ap­ proach to halacha.

Book Reviewers Wanted Several years ago, this writer responded to such a notice in a journal and I still write reviews for them from time to time.

We are pleased to resume our Books section in this issue with two reviews by Rabbi Eliyahu Safran of Congregation Poale Zedeck in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

We have recently received scores of excellent works from trade publishers, and such houses as Phillip Feldheim, Sanhedria Press (the new imprint of the Hebrew Publishing Company), KTAV—in conjunction with Yeshiva University Press, and Sepher-Hermon Press. (Sanhedria has re-issued several titles from the East-West Library, an excellent series originally published in London.) Some of these titles have been given out for review, and others will be treated in a

forthcoming annual book round-up.

If you are interested in contributing reviews, send us a brief resume of your background and literary interests, with a list of subjects you are interested in. If you are interested in review­ ing a specific title, let us know.

A NOTE TO CONTRIBUTORS: If we have a manuscript you have submitted for publication and not heard from us yet, please be patient. We still have a large back-log, but we are working on a new arrangement to make the response process more rapid. It is still wise to inquire before sending your man­ uscript to determine if we are interested in your proposed article.

In forthcoming issues Some More Books of Jewish Interest Coming to Grips With Disbelief Franz Kafka as Baal Teshuva Coming soon: A special issue of Jewish Life dedicated to the Teshuva M ovem ent w ith first-h a n d rep orts of the Teshuva Yeshivos in Eretz Yisrael.________________ ■

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NEWS RELEASE FROM: NATIONAL COUNCIL OF JEWISH WOMEN One West Forty-Seventh Street, New York, N.Y. 1 0036-(212) 246-3175 New York, N.Y.—The National Council of Jew ish Women, oldest major American Jewish Women’s organization, today announce '

16

Louis Bernstein

A President "Bei Yidden" When one is elected president of a major Jewish organization, he is presented with an invisible card making him or her a member of an elite group entitled to attend lunches and din­ ners, and during an election campaign to breakfast with the candidates seeking the Jewish vote. An aspiring president shouldn't find it too difficult to locate a major Jewish organiza­ tion. At last count, there were over thirty-two with at least another ten clamoring for recognition. Anyone willing to un­ derwrite a deficit budget will be a welcome candidate in most of these organizations. In fact in many, even the rumor that one can make or obtain a sizable contribution, can suddenly catapult the most non-committed Jew into a presidential seat.

A good part of a president's time is involved in roof organi­ zations, giving him the opportunity to become president of two organizations at the same time. Every president needs, as an emblem of office, an updated dictionary of Jewish ac­ ronyms. Jewish organizations have their own jargon, much like CB radio-operators. Upon second thought, every presi­ dential candidate should take a test administered by one of the national testing organizations. A sample question for all presidential aspirants might be, "Identify the JAC of the SCA and the NCRAC." Or, "How many organizations are know as the AJC?" Or "What is Itchkick"?

The aspiring president should be able to doze off at any given time, and be a man of independent means. Being able to be in two places at once is indispensable. A president who can cat-nap at any one of the half-dozen meetings that often occur on a single day really makes the most of his time. He must be prepared to attend l'urgent" meetings not only of his own organization, but the Presidents' Conference, the Synagogue Council of America, the United Jewish Appeal, Israel Bonds, the American Zionist Federation, the National Council for Soviet Jewry, or the New York Council of Soviet Jewry, usu­ ally held between the hours of nine to five. After all, it is the executive directors of these organizations who really run them, and staff people just have to "make the 5:10" to Scarsdale or Stamford. In the opinion of executive directors who work with many presidents, the best presidents are those who sign checks with their eyes closed; agree to any press release as long as their names are included; and report at board meetings on all that is happening in the other organiza­ tions.

In addition to all other qualifications, a good president must

Jewish organizations have their own jargon, much like CB radio-operators.

He must be prepared to atttend "urgent" meetings usually held between the hours of nine to five. After all, it is the executive directors o f these organizations who really run them, and staff people just have to "make the 5:10" to Scarsdale or Stamford.

Rabbi Bernstein is the spiritual leader o f Young Israel ofBayside, and a Rosh Yeshiva at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Talmudical Semi­ nary of Yeshiva University. He has served as president o f the Rabbini­ cal Council of America, arid has edited the R.C.A. Record for many years. He now serves as president o f the Religious Zionists of America (Mizrachi).

17

be a speed reader. I confess that it takes me a month to go through my weekly mail. Prior to the Senate vote on the F15's, I received mail saying exactly the same thing—to write my congressman—from nineteen different organizations, sixteen of which I am a member of or on their mailing list because I am and was a national president. On that one issue alone, dupli­ cate mailings sent to me could have paid the tuition of a child in a Jewish day-school. Elimination of duplication of mailings alone' in Jewish life could possibly cover the deficits of our day-schools in the immediate future. There seems to be an unwritten law that the numbers of mailings increase in direct proportion to the cost of first-class postage. Of coursé, this would entail cooperation between organizations, which par­ ticularly in our Orthodox world, is a utopian dream.

Prior to the Senate vote on the F15's, I received mail saying exactly the same thing-from nineteen different organizations. On that one issue alone, duplicate mailings sent to me could have paid the tuition o f a child in a Jewish day-school.

In the not too distant future, we can anticipate increased pressures to excuse or radically alter the fourth of the morning blessings. Only the presidents of the Orthodox rabbinic group are relatively secure from the threat—although one never knows. It is the very threat of domination by feminists that is responsible for Orthodox opposition to the ERA. In fact, many of the male presidents, in a secret meeting in the office of an Israeli bank on Fifth Avenue, have decided to ask for a court ruling to decide whether they had equal rights in the Jewish community. As the men rush to their offices and jobs between the breakfast meeting for a G.O.P. candidate for the City Council, and lunch with the distinguished secretary to the third deputy minister of transportation in Israel, their wives are able to entertain, be entertained, and establish non­ political organizations which are as sophisticated and genteel as the old Tammany Hall. American Jewish women, with their own time and their husband's money, are gradually be­ coming the dominant force in American Jewish life. At that secret meeting, the male presidents appointed a special com­ mittee to meet with President Carter and urge him to provide more careers for women and more working opportunities.

This, they felt, would give them at least equal opportunity to retain their own presidencies.

That brings me to the committees which are an integral part of every organization. Most chairmen are slighted if the presi­ dent doesn't attend his committe meeting and make the deci­ sions for him. Some chairmen are slighted if the president does come and voices an opinion. And then there may be subcom­ mittees but we won't belabor that point.

At the end of a president's term in office, he should be eminently qualified to write a dissertation on "How to Lose Friends and Disenchant People." Not even a Solomonic deci­ sion to cut the baby in half can be of any value. Let me cite a recent example from my own experience. The Mizrachi was

At the end o f a president's term in office, he should be eminently qualified to write a dissertation on "How to Lose Friends and Disenchant People

18

entitled to send a specific number of delegates to the World Zionist Congress. I decided that there must be easier ways to induce coronary arrest and referred the matter to the execu­ tive committee which in turn> of course, voted to have me appoint another committee which I did.

Then the phone calls began. I put the Talmud Bavli under my right hand and the Yerushalmi under my left and swore to all callers that I was not making the selections. It didn't help much. The first calls usually came in at 6:00 a.m. with the mumbled apology for waking the family—which had fallen asleep only after the last call at 12:50 a.m.—and the same question, “Are you awake?" Then began a listing of contribu­ tions to Israeli institutions made by a grandfather which qual­ ified the caller for a seat at the Congress. Usually, I would point out that more than half the contributions were to Histadrut, Agudah, Hashomer Hatzair, and The Red Crescent— but to no avail.

Finally, our committee reduced the number of available candidates to just a little more than twice the number of seats allocated to us. Then with the wisdom of Solomon, the chair­ man said, "let's divide each seat in half." But that still left two people who had promised their wives and friends they would be delegates, for whom there weren't even half-mandates.

Fortunately, one found his name on another slate and the second's wife won a free weekend in Tahiti in a coupon con­ test, and after six months of deliberations, seventeen meet­ ings, and eight hundred and forty- two phone calls, our prob­ lem was solved.

Or was it? More than half of the designees who arrived in Yerushalayim thought they should attend the first half of the Congress, though the slate was printed in 16,000,000 copies.

(Some people received four hundred and thirteen ballots for the elections to the last Zionist Congress). There were elec­ tions for the Actions Committe with eleven and a quarter candidates for two and a half seats, with nine and one eighth coming to you with letters of credit, real and imagined, for immediate redemption. You endorse " A " for a high position—your colleagues reject him and designate you de­ spite all your efforts. You consult your colleagues in other organizations and behold—they have the same problems. The Congress proceedings generally deserve the undivided atten­ tion of Ephraim Kishon, Hershele Ostropoler and Ephraim Greudeger, who would have a field day. Fortunately, the Congress comes only every four or five years.

There is a caveat to these remarks: they apply to unpaid presidents. There is a breed of presidents of Jewish organiza­ tions who are elected for long terms and are salaried. (Ale­ xander Schindler is one example). They have a higher degree 19

Some people received four hundred and thirteen ballots for the elections to the last Zionist Congress.

of immunity and greater latitude in action. In such organiza­ tions where the president's term is for a year with automatic re-election, he spends the first year acclimatizing to his roles and functions and the second year tapering off by reading the press releases as the successor apparent chafes at the bit.

The observant reader, at this point, may suspect that some element of exaggeration and irony have crept into these lines.

He is, of course, correct. But there one conclusion.

American Jewish communal life is over-organized, with mas­ sive duplication, gigantic waste of human talent and financial resources, and is frequently unable to respond with dispatch and with sufficient strength to the challenges that a be­ leaguered minority faces abroad and—unfortunately—ever more so at home. There is no other solution but an elimination and consolidation of roof organizations, and a definition of specific roles for others. But fewer organizations must neces­ sarily mean fewer presidents. Which president or aspiring president would support such a change?

20

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Photos reprinted from Spring 3100, The M agazine for Policem en, Published by the Police Department of the City of New York.

Marvin Schick

Borough Park: A Jewish Settlement If neighborhoods could be measured for charisma, Borough Park would rank near the bottom. It does not have the historic flavor of the Lower East Side or the exotic, Chassidic chic of Williamsburg and Crown Heights, although more Chassidim live today in Borough Park than in either of these attentiongrabbing areas. Borough Park is drab, it is nondescript, and—despite its name—it has no parks to speak of. The exor­ bitant cost of homes in the area is more a tribute to the con­ tinuing efficacy of the law of supply and demand, than to the esthetics of the neighborhood's housing. In Borough Park, $200,000 now fetches a semi-detached, plain brick, rather un­ attractive house on a plot measuring about 20 x 100.

Yet Borough Park has an extraordinary concentration of Or­ thodox Jews and institutions, truly one of the more remarka­ ble settlements of Jewish people in their wanderings in the Diaspora. American Jewry has never known a neighborhood like it. It is the home of three .hundred or more synagogues, Borough Park is the home of and several dozen yeshivas and day-schools. It is a neighbor­ three hundred or more hood where public schools barely function, and where, except synagogues, and several dozen yeshivas and day-schools. It is for the requisite police and fire stations and public library, a neighborhood where there is there is hardly a New York City or public presence. What hardly a New York City or communal life there is, is almost all Jewish and, with little public presence. exception, of the Orthodox variety. Borough Park can there­ fore be thought of as a ghetto, or at least the closest thing that modem American Jewish life has to a ghetto. What is remark­ able about this is that it is essentially a middle-class ghetto, with a closed society fostered mostly by choice rather than by poverty or discrimination. While most residents are obviously happy about living in such an intensively Jewish section, out­ Dr. Schick has joined the worlds of siders often poke fun at the ghetto, pointing to it as a place academia and political activism, for virtually every cause where they would not want to live. Among more modem working related to Orthodox Judaism on the Orthodox Jews, the talk about Borough Park at times is American scene. He served as a mean-spirited and derisive, and the neighborhood and its mayoral assistant in the New York City administration o f John V. Jews are characterized as decadent and wasteful. People poke Lindsay. He is president o f the fun at the interiors of the private homes (chandeliers and Yeshiva Rabbi Jacob Joseph which is currently enjoying a revival in wall-to-wall carpeting), of the way Orthodox women dress Staten Island, New York's newly(très chic) and of the baby carriages and children's clothing discovered borough. Professor (imported and expensive). There is much distortion in this Schick is on the Graduate Faculty o f the New School for Social Re­ characterization and much misunderstanding, as well; but search where h e teaches political Borough Park is, in any case, much different than the ghetto it science. He is the author o f a defini­ tive work on the United States is cracked up to be. Beneath a street scene and atmosphere Supreme Court: The Learned which promote the impression of an overwhelmingly Or- Hand Court.

23

thodox community, there is a far more varied society. As a ghetto, Borough Park is, in a fact, a pretty heterogeneous place.

As a ghetto, Borough Park is, in a fact, a pretty heterogeneous place.

The Neighborhood Nestled among the much larger and perhaps more impor­ tant Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bay Ridge, Bensonhurst and Flatbush, Borough Park runs about a mile in length and a mile and a half in width, from Thirty-Ninth Street to Sixtieth Street and from Eighth Avenue to Eighteenth Avenue. Jews live throughout the neighborhood, though the heart of the Jewish settlement is an enclave which can be said to go from Twelfth Avenue to Eighteenth Avenue and from Forty-Fifth Street to Fifty-Eighth Street.

Along the periphery the housing is cheaper and generally in poorer shape, and a majority of the residents are not Jewish.

How and why Borough Park emerged as an intensive Jewish section is an interesting question, one that cannot be answered fully, no more than the ethnic development of many other New York neighborhoods can be explained. Like other parts of Brooklyn, it used to be predominantly farm­ land, with its rural character challenged and eroded by the spread of the city. These days there is hardly a vacant lot and even driveways have beeen converted into housing sites.

Homes in Borough Park Much of the physical character of Borough Park was set in the second and third decades of this century when hundreds of private homes were mostly stuccoed affairs, luxurious for their day but certainly not built to endure for ages to come.

The floors in the old homes absolutely require carpeting and this is also true, though for different reasons, of the newer homes. As for the chandeliers, they are a matter of style or ostentation.

All of the large synagogues and communal institutions—the YM-YWHA and Maimonides Hospital (formerly Israel Zion), for instance—were built during this period. Also built then were the two elevated subway lines which served the de­ veloping neighborhood and helped to attract new residents.

The settlers who came were mostly middle-class, perhaps even upper-middle-class by 1920 standards. Ethnically, they were a mixed lot. There was a goodly number of Italians, stopping short of Bensonhurst which is perhaps the premier Italian neighborhood in the dty. From the look of the housing they have occupied during the past generation, it is certain that the Italians purchased the cheaper homes which were being built.

24

Jews predominated among the newcomers, buying and building new homes and living in the elevator-apartment-, houses. They came from the Lower East Side which was rapidly losing population or from places like Brownsville and Williamsburg which had been their first stop after the Lower East Side. In either case, they were upwardly mobile and acculturated, the new wave of Jews in the "promised land."

They had come a long way in a short period of time and they were convinced that American life was wholly compatible with Jewish life.

The Jew ish Population One estimate is that there were nearly 50,000 Jews living in Borough Park in the mid-1920's, which like other estimates of New York's Jewish population may be high. Certainly the majority were Orthodox, at least by definitions which pre­ vailed at the time. Then, as now, there was but one Conserva­ tive Synagogue and one Reform Temple. Famous cantors per­ formed at the large Orthodox synagogues; Yossele Rosenblatt, probably the most noted cantor in the world, was associated with the First Congregation Anshe Sfard.

Although they would not have considered their Orthodoxy to be modem, the behavior of Borough Park's Orthodox Jews of the 1920's and 1930's was in some respects quite different from the behavior of the Jews who have come more recently.

Jewish education is one index. Overwhelmingly, Jewish chil­ dren went to the local public schools, with the afternoon Tal­ mud Torahs serving as the main vehicles for religious instruc­ tion. There were only two Jewish parochial schools, Etz Chaim for boys and Shulamith for girls, and significantly both employed Hebrew, rather than Yiddish, as the language for religious teaching.

Famous cantors performed at the large Orthodox synagogues; Yossele Rosenblatt, probably the most noted cantor in the world, was associated with the First Congregation Anshe Sfard.

Post-W ar Borough Park Like much of urban America, Borough Park changed little in the 1930's. There was a great depression and little building, with most people staying where they were—although some of the original residents suffered serious financial losses and lost their homes. During the 1930's comfortable two- and threefamily homes were being sold by banks for $5,000. Towards the end of the decade there was a small influx of German Jews, the first refugees from Nazism. There also was a barely perceptible movement to the right among some of the Or­ thodox. A few shtiblach—essentially small synagogues lo­ cated in private homes or store fronts—were established, as was Yeshiva Toras Ernes, one of the few yeshivas organized in the United States during the depression years.

25

The 1940's saw a continuation of the same trend. There was an incremental growth in Orthodoxy, with a moderate number of immigrants and Orthodox Jews from other neighborhoods moving in, replacing the children of the 1920 generation who were seeking fulfillment for their version of the American middle-class dream in Queens and the suburbs.

Overall, the ambience of the section was hardly altered: the shops on Thirteenth Avenue were open on Saturday, which happened to be the main business day .

The shops on Thirteenth Avenue were open on Saturday, which happened to be the main business day.

Communal life developed slowly. Attendance at the public schools slackened greatly, though the picture of Jewish im­ migrants determined to learn English coming home at night from a neighborhood junior high school remains in the mind.

Curiously, well into the 1950's, Borough Park was an exporter of yeshiva students to schools in other neighborhoods. The local yeshivas were limited to the elementary-school level partly because a rabbinical court had ruled that Yeshiva Torah Vodaath, then located in Williamsburg and the largest yeshiva in America, could not establish a branch in Borough Park.

Back then, anyway, parents were not averse to letting their sons and daughters travel by subway to school.

More shtiblach and several yeshivas were established in the 1950's and Borough Park emerged as the area of great strength for Agudath Israel. The large synagogues continued to domi­ nate; Moshe Kousiwitzky was the cantor of Temple Beth El, Borough Park's largest and most elegant synagogue, and Friday-night-forums conducted by the rabbis attracted large audiences.

By the mid-1950's more than two-thirds of Borough Park was Jewish, with the steady but unspectacular Jewish growth coming largely at the expense of the Italian population which was slowly decreasing. The Italian decline was modest— something like a steady drip. Since the neighborhood was strong there was little incentive for Italians to move away.

And then there was the extended family style of living, pecul­ iar to the Italian people, which served to keep young Italians bom and raised in Borough Park in the neighborhood as they married and started their own families.

But throughout there was a soft undercurrent of anti-Jewish resentment, some of it no more than the usual antipathy so often found when ethnic groups co-exist in a limited territory.

Yet there was anti-semitism as well, as this writer well re­ members from his youth. There were anti-semitic epithets and very minor physical incidents. No one thought much of it and, besides, Orthodox Jews tend to take it for granted that goyim won't like them.

O rthodox Jew s tend to take it fo r granted that goyim won't like them.

26

The Turning Point The 1960's were a turning point for Orthodox Jewry in the United States, the years when this distinctly minority portion of American Jewry developed its own style and program, be­ came much more assertive and self-confident, as well as more public. It was also the time when the Orthodox imprint on Borough Park became much deeper and sharper, when the section emerged as the crucial Orthodox neighborhood in New York.

Not all Orthodox Jews look alike. Except for a yarmulka on his head, the jeans-wearing young Orthodox man looks much the same as Americans who happen not to be Jewish. Even the more Orthodox man wearing a business suit and a hat, and the Orthodox woman with a well-groomed sheitel on her head, are not all that distinctively dressed. But Chassidic Jews do stand out: their religious and ethnic identity is apparent from their physical appearance.

Chassidim are much like blacks in this regard and, as with blacks, a few members of the group on a block or in a neighborhood appear to be more numerous than their true numbers. Skin color and dress are physical factors which to a considerable extent determine a neighborhood's ambience.

This is more so, of course, in the case of color where racism is likely to be a factor. But since Chassidic dress also generates hostility, there is a tendency for Chassidim to shape the look of a neighborhood wherever they are present-—a fact illus­ trated in Philip Roth's famous story, "Eli the Fanatic."

The early steady trickle of Chassidim into Borough Park grew into a stream which has continued to tins day. The rapid decline of Crown Heights in the 1960's contributed to this population shift especially when towards the end of the decade the Bobover Rebbe moved his entire community to Borough Park. Satmar Chassidim came from Williamsburg where they faced an acute shortage of housing for their com­ munity which, according to a story a few years back in the Washington Post, has doubled in size every five years. Al­ though Borough Park is a sort of satellite neighborhood for the Satmars, it is probable that Satmars now outnumber the Bobovers.

A third factor in the spread of Chassidism in Borough Park is what can be termed the "Chassidification" of Americanborn Orthodox Jews. This is a fascinating subject, that cannot be examined here, except to define it: American Orthodox Jews from relatively "modem" homes (which means, among other things, a positive attitude toward college and secular education) have adopted Chassidic dress and life styles.

"Chassidification " o f Am erican-born O rthodox Jew s: American O rthodox Jew s from relatively "m odem " hom es have adopted Chasidic dress and life styles.

27

Nearly one out o f five yeshiva students in the United States attends a Borough Park school

On Thirteenth Avenue most stores are now closed on Saturday, while on Sunday the streets are jammed with shoppers, many traveling large distances to purchase the special wares available in Jewish stores.

As Borough Park became more Chassidic, there were other developments. There was an enormous increase in the number of shtiblach and yeshivas, with some of the shtiblach large enough to hold several hundred people. There are four Gerer, three Satmar and two Bobov. Agudath Israel has four separate shuls and alumni of Mir, Lakewood, Telshe and Torah Vodaath have established their own places of worship.

Nearly one out of five yeshiva students in the United States attends a Borough Park school, with many coming from other areas. Curiously, Borough Park continues to be an exporter of yeshiva students, particularly at the boys' high-school level.

While many yeshivas in other neighborhoods and around the country have empty seats, the Borough Park institutions are by and large over-crowded and the situation is certain to be­ come worse. Right now there is a bitter battle in Borough Park between two Chassidic groups which are contending for use of an abandoned public-school building.

Chassidic (and some ordinary Orthodox) parents insist on door-to-door bus service for their children, something which cannot be provided by Board of Education buses, and so every morning dozens of buses operated by the yeshivas criss-cross the neighborhood. This is about the only area where what can be termed the Orthodox establishment of Borough Park es­ chews what government offers. Chassidic Jews, in common with what society has labeled "minority groups,'' have a strong yen for governmental largesse, mostly the programs created under "the Great Society." The Chassidic-dominated Borough Park Jewish Community Council functions largely as a recipient of public funds.

Chassidim do not attend college, which naturally has the effect of excluding them from most of the professions. This has led to the creation, in Borough Park as elsewhere, of an underclass of un-employed and under-employed Chassidim who must rely on public assistance, usually in the form of medicaid and food stamps, but including welfare payments and housing subsidies.

Among the more enterprising Chassidim there is a ten­ dency to go into small business and a steadily growing number of local shops are Chassidic-owned. On Thirteenth Avenue—the major shopping artery—most stores are now closed on Saturday, while on Sunday the streets are jammed with shoppers, many traveling large distances to purchase the special wares available in Jewish stores. Chassidic merchants have been clamoring for the City to provide parking areas, and it now looks like they will succeed. A million dollars has been set aside for this purpose and it will apparently be used to purchase the Thirteenth Avenue facility of Yeshiva Etz Chaim. After more than sixty years, the oldest yeshiva in 28

Borough Park cannot attract more than a handful of students.

It is too modern.

Touches of Class Between the 1960 and 1970 censuses Borough Park suffered a population loss of 3,600, going down from 92,000 to about 88,400. The greatest part of this decline occurred in the peripheral areas where the Jewish population is smaller and where there has been some loss in housing stock. Even within the more Orthodox enclave, there was some decline, which is surprising. Since the start of the Chassidic influx, there has been a building boom, with every available lot being built on, and older homes being torn down to make way for two, some­ times three, new homes. Since Chassidic and more Orthodox families tend to be large—zero population growth is unheard of in these circles—presumably Borough Park's population should have grown in the 1960's.

Borough Park's elderly population was, without a doubt, the major reason for the 1960's population decline. During that decade there was a marked increase in the number of elderly residents, especially in the Orthodox enclave. But something else may have been at work. The Orthodox enclave happens also to be the most distinctly middle-class section of Borough Park, the area of the nicest homes. It may not be more than an impresssion—there are no data to back it up—but there is a feeling that middle-class Chassidic families, including the Satmars, have fewer children than the less middle-class Satmars of Williamsburg. Although the families still are much larger than the typical American Jewish family, it seems that even Chassidim are not immune to the almost inviolable rules of class behavior which govern so much of modern life.

The influence of class is evident in dress and housing pat­ terns. It has been remarked that Chassidic women often ap­ pear well-groomed and well-dressed, as are their children, and that even while doing the ordinary chores, such as shop­ ping, Chassidic women wear their finest clothing—to the amusement of some. The snickerers do not appreciate that there are few overt ways for middle-class Chassidim to enjoy the benefits of their class position. They do not go out on the town or engage in trendy middle-class activities. They do not jog, play tennis, or join health clubs. Vacation opportunities are severely limited, usually to a bungalow in the Catskills.

They do not go to the movies or have television sets at home, nor do they go to libraries or museums, or in any way partake of the general culture fare. Even outside reading is limited.

The result is that clothing for women and their younger chil29

After more than sixty years, the oldest yeshiva in Borough Park cannot attract more than a handful of students. It is too modem.

There are few overt ways for middle-class Chassidim to enjoy the benefits of their class position.

Clothing fo r women and their younger children is one o f the few ways for Chassidic and the m ore O rthodox fam ilies to m anifest their m iddle-class status.

For them , "conspicuous consumption " is determ ined by parochial and insular standards-mot by the norms and styles o f the larger society.

dren (for men, the dress is drab and dark and without ostenta­ tion) is one of the few ways for Chassidic and the more Or­ thodox families to manifest their middle-class status. It is ridiculous to ridicule Chassidim for their dress.

Home interiors are another outlet for middle-class Chas­ sidim. From the evidence so far, the Borough Park Orthodox do not care overly much about how their homes look on the outside, although in fairness it must be admitted that Borough Park houses are, on the outside, nothing special and not much can be done with them. Front lawns and gardens are vanish­ ing breeds: the lawns replaced by cement, the gardens making way for additional homes.

But the interiors are another matter. In addition to the seem­ ingly ubiquitous chandeliers and wall-to-wall carpeting, there is much apparent luxuriousness, mostly expensive furniture and silver and crystal artifacts. Of course, there are more than a few shabby homes, but they attract no attention. Where it is found, the emphasis on expensive home furnishing is, once more, an aspect of middle-class behavior. For them, “con­ spicuous consumption" is determined by parochial and insu­ lar standards—not by the norms and styles of the larger soci­ ety.

In one crucial respect Borough Park Jews are not impervious to middle-class trends. As is true of other middle-class neighborhoods—Flatbush and Bensonhurst are useful examples—younger middle-class persons shun like the plague apartments in walk-up buildings. These usually fourstory structures are the most deteriorated buildings in the heart of Borough Park and they are regarded as threats to the stability of the neighborhood, a view which certainly is not diminished when minority-group tenants move into apart­ ments which Jews won't rent.

Chassidim and Orthodox in Borough Park are more inclined toward owning their homes. Apartment buildings, even those with elevators, are by and large considered only suitable for the aging who have “married off their children“ and young couples starting out in marriage. There is an acute shortage of homes for sale in Borough Park, while there is a growing number of vacant apartments. In a recent issue of the Jewish Press, a weekly which is widely read in Borough Park, more than 70 apartments in Borough Park were advertised for let.

There is already a growing move of younger Orthodox Jews from Borough Park to different parts of Flatbush where homes are cheaper and more readily available.

Communal Life in Borough Park Modes of dress and home furnishing are not the only ways these Jews spend their money. The plethora of synagogues 30

and yeshivas and other communal institutions attests to the extent of charitable giving. They do not contribute to Federa­ tion nor, generally, to U.J.A., but they do support their own causes, which include local and distant yeshivas; a host of Israeli institutions; and an array of Orthodox social service activities. Two child-care organizations have been established by the Borough Park Orthodox, and there are dozens of free loan societies. Perhaps most worthy of all, is the work of volunteer women's groups which care for the sick, assist the needy, and engage in all sorts of good works.

They do not contribute to Federation nor, generally, to U .J.A., but they do support their own causes, which include local and distant yeshivas; a host o f Israeli institutions; and an array of Orthodox social service activities.

It is at times of need when the Chassidim and Orthodox do not distinguish among Jews, when they regard all Jews as one community. Total strangers—including non-Orthodox—have been assisted with a dignity and alacrity which are in accord with the highest principles of Tzedaka. On more ordinary occasions, however, and in routine contacts the Chassidim and more Orthodox are aloof from their less-religious neighbors, and they seem to feel that Borough Park should become a ghetto made up only of "their kind." Modern Or­ thodox and non-Orthodox Jews are resentful of this and they see Borough Park as no longer their neighborhood.

In many of the apartment houses elderly Jews predominate, clinging to their rent-controlled apartments. The few government-funded senior-citizen programs are inadequate for their number and needs, which is no more than a reflec­ tion of society's neglect of the elderly. Among the elderly of Borough Park there is another feeling of neglect which is ex­ pressed as the belief that the Chassidim and Orthodox snub them and do not care about them. The feeling may be more psychological than grounded in fact; more the result of old age and the sense of life passing them by, than of any tangible wrongs committed against them by the Chassidim and Or­ thodox. Yet an examination of the structure of Borough Park Jewish life lends crederice to the complaint of the elderly.

Although nearly twenty percent of Borough Park Jews are elderly, they are systematically and deliberately excluded from participation in the umbrella organization which pur­ ports to represent Borough Park Jewry.

Although nearly twenty percent of Borough Park Jews are elderly, they are systematically and deliberately excluded from participation in the umbrella organization which purports to represent Borough Park Jewry.

The only other visible group of Jewish Borough Parkers who do not fit in with the dominant group are Israelis, part of the sizeable migration to New York of Israeli, who have left the Jewish state since 1948. Probably the number of Israelis in Borough Park is not large—certainly not more than 2,000—but Israelis tend toward a street style which is found among the lower-class, and for this reason they are both visible and viewed with a distinct lack of enthusiasm by their Jewish neighbors.

31

Gentiles in the Ghetto

There is a strong tendency for Orthodox Jews to regard the rest of the world with suspicion. There is a widespread belief that down deep most, if not all, Gentiles are potential or closet anti-semites.

Also viewed with a distinct lack of enthusiasm is the nonJewish population of Borough Park. Most of it is Puerto Rican and Italian. But while the Borough Park Orthodox (and, to varying degrees, Orthodox Jews generally) want to have little to do with their non-Jewish neighbors, there is a measure of involvement between Jew and Gentile.

The black population of Borough Park is small, amounting to around 500 in the 1970 census, with most of it in the lessJewish outlying parts. Within the Jewish enclave there are twelve blacks and 18 "oth er non-w hites," most likely apartment-house superintendents and their families.

The Puerto Rican population is another matter. It was 3,300 in 1970, most of it in the peripheral areas, and it has grown during this decade. What is more important, there has been Puerto Rican-Jewish conflict: some of the customary dis­ agreement between rival ethnic groups seeking govern­ ment funds; some of a more serious nature.

There is a strong—and in this country a growing—tendency for Orthodox Jews to regard the rest of the world with suspi­ cion. There is a widespread belief that down deep most, if not all, Gentiles are potential or closet anti-semites, that in the words which are often heard in Orthodox circles, by nature "Esau (non-Jews) detests Jacob (Jews)." In Borough Park, the Orthodox regard Puerto Ricans as a danger to the neighbor­ hood: —the only real threat to Borough Park's stability. They are therefore unhappy because a small number of Puerto Ri­ cans already live within the Jewish enclave, in the walk-ups and a handful of apartment buildings, and the Puerto Rican presence generally is growing.

Racism— or class rivalry?

It is easy to characterize the Jewish attitude as racism and leave it at that. While race is a factor which ought not to be discounted, there is a class factor at work, as well. The Puerto Rican population is, from the looks of things, lower class; and though it is not necessary to buy lock, stock, and barrel Pro­ fessor Edward Banfield's controversial notion of lower class behavior, it also is not necessary to avert one's eyes from reality. Of the violent crime in Borough Park, including an occasional murder, a substantially disproportionate share has been committed by Puerto Ricans, although Jews have been among the victims.

If a person coming into the neighborhood by car enters the area via Fifteenth Avernie, the experience is apt to be disturb­ ing. Just a few short blocks away from expensive homes and many yeshivas and synagogues, there is a strip of urban decay

Just a few short blocks away from expensive homes and many yeshivas and synbagogues, there is a strip of urban decay resembling the South Bronx.

32

resembling the South Bronx. This signals to the Jews what will happen if the lower-class population continues to grow.

In New York City, anything untoward between Jews and Blacks or Hispanics is considered newsworthy, something to be seized by the media and fed to a public which apparently finds such material of more than passing interest. Conflict among whites, on the other hand, is not regarded as deserv­ ing of attention: witness the relations between Jews and Ita­ lians of Borough Park.

In both numbers and population, Italians have always been second to Jews in Borough Park, although the Italian presence has been substantial for more than half a century and, even today, it is far from inconsiderable. On certain blocks the Ita­ lians are in the majority, and a few of these are within the Jewish enclave. At present, Italians probably amount to twenty percent of the population of the entire neighborhood.

From the media it would be impossible to know that be­ neath the middle class tranquility of Borough Park there is a steady undertow of ethnic tension; that in this ghetto of sorts hundreds of minor incidents have occurred in recent years.

This is a sensitive subject, and there is a risk of exaggeration or misunderstanding, as there is whenever ethnic conflict is being described. After all, the majority of Italians living in Borough Park have never been involved in any incidents of an anti-semitic nature. Still, there can be no justification for glos­ sing over what just about every Borough Park Jew knows.

Even in the older, more placid days, there was Italian hostil­ ity against Jews; what was once occasional has become com­ monplace as a Jewish identity has been etched on Borough Park. There is a proliferation of anti-semitic grafitti, ranging from the already common swastikas in subway stations to slogans such as “kill the Jews" on lamposts. Jews are taunted on the street by young Italian passers-by and by toughs racing by car through the neighborhood. Yeshiva students have been attacked in playgrounds, women have had their sheitels pul­ led off and Chassidic men wearing streimlech have been at­ tacked in a similar fashion. To counteract this hooliganism, the Police Department has established a Chassidic decoy unit.

On occasion, there have been brutal physical attacks includ­ ing the use of two-by-fours and baseball bats.

Only a small number of Italians, most of them young, have been involved in these incidents and there is a belief that residents of neighboring Bensonhurst have been responsible fQr some of the worst attacks. Still, the sheer number of inci­ dents and the anti-semitic grafitti and language raise impor­ tant questions about the attitudes and motives of these Ita­ lians.

Whatever the allure of the naive notions of ethnic tranquil­ ity, it is apparent from both experience and research that

Beneath the middle class tranquility o f Borough Park there is a steady undertow of ethnic tension; hundreds of minor incidents have occurred in recent years.

33

wherever ethnic groups residing in proximity maintain a strong sense of ethnic identity there is apt to be a high degree of conflict. In the case of Italians and Jews of Borough Park, it might be said that while the Jewish hostility is discreet and attitudinal, for younger Italians, at least, hostility is likely to be open and, perhaps, physical. For Italian adults, the pattern is probably private, as it is among Jews.

But there are other factors at work in Borough Park. Chassidic dress and the total style of living they bring must engen­ der an element of hostility in the hearts of many Italians and this feeling is not at all diminished by the relative luxurious­ ness of the homes of the newcomers. On top of this, and maybe most important of all, there is an inevitable feeling among Italians that they are losing whatever parts of Borough Park were theirs—even a sense of being driven away. They are virtually a foreign element in a neighborhood where many of their families have now lived for three generations.

There is an inevitable feeling among'Italians that they are losing whatever parts of Borough Park were theirs.

They are virtually a foreign element in a neighborhood where many o f their families have now lived for three generations.

Prospects for the Future There is no turning away from the continued decline of the Italian presence in Borough Park, no matter how much the remaining Italians will not like it. Nor is there any avoiding the increase in the Puerto Rican population, no matter how much Jews will not like it. An urban affairs specialist at Hunter College has examined population trends and pro­ jected what the neighborhoods of New York are likely to look like in the year 2,000. For Borough Park, the projection is for Puerto Rican dominance, a prospect which might well throw a scare into the present Jewish majority.

Actually, there is little reason to believe that during the next twenty years change will be so radical. On the contrary, there is more reason to conclude that the trends of the past twenty years will be maintained, that, in certain respects, Borough Park will become more Jewish still. The cost of housing is certain to rise a great deal more, no matter the talk that it already is too expensive, with more older homes being torn down to suit the Chassidic-Orthodox buyers who can afford to pay whatever is being asked. Those who cannot afford Borough Park prices will move to Flatbush, thereby making Flatbush homes more expensive.

Additional shtiblach will be established, though likely at a slower rate. Yeshivas, however, given the birth-rate among Chassidim in particular, will continue to expand, with space shortages and competition for facilities.

The ranks of the elderly will remain large, with replenish­ ment coming from among those who are now in the near­ aging category. The Chassidic-Orthodox organizations are not likely to be more alert to the needs of the aging until such time

The trends o f the past twenty years will be maintained, that, in certain respects, Borough Park will become more Jewish still.

34

as there is the perception that government funds are available for those groups which purport to represent the elderly.

If present signs are not to be discounted, intra-Chassidic or intra-Orthodox conflict will be heightened in Borough Park.

Government programs, the use of facilities, ideology, leader­ ship, all of these are potential points of conflict. Given its size, character and rate of growth, much will depend on what hap­ pens within the Satmar community.

Borough Park is unique in the American Jewish experience, yet in its Jewish character and ambience it shares much with so many other places in the Diaspora, many of them forgot­ ten, where Jews have lived. For all of its intensity and buoyancy, there is an historical record which suggests that it will prove to be another stopping place in the travail and glory of the Jewish people, a fascinating footnote to the remarkable story of the Jew.

Union of Orthodox Jewish; Congregations of America 81st Anniversary National Dinner Sunday, lyar 16, 5739/M ay 13,1979 The Sheraton Centre (form erly the Am ericana Hotel) 7th Avenue at West 52nd Street, New York, N ew York Couvert: O n e H undred and Twenty-Five Dollars Per Person All Proceeds of the D inner and D inner Journal are to be dedicated to:

UOJCA/NCSY National Youth Appeal For further information on reservations or dinner journal ads, contact: UOJCA Dinner Committee/116 East 27th Street, New York, N.Y. 10016 Joseph Karasick, Dinner Committee Chairman

I

Photo courtesy of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

Freema Gottlieb

A Rabbi Who is a Political Leader: Chief Rabbi Rosen of Romania Meeting — East & West Relaxing over a small but potent cup of acrid Turkish coffee, the Chief Rabbi of Romania, Rabbi Dr. Moses Rosen, permit­ ted himself a rare few moments of expansiveness as to his unique position as representative of the Jewish community in a fairytale Balkan land which has been under a Communist regime since after the last War. Through the windows of one of the better hotels bordering Central Park, all New York City lay outspread as an illuminated tapestry at our feet. Dr. Rosen admitted somberly that luxury suites and jet access to any corner of the Free World had not always fallen to his lot. There had been harsher and more heroic times before he rose to the position he now enjoys —- one as exceptional in the West as it certainly is unique in the Communist countries. It is a paradox that in no democratic country, including Israel, does a Chief Rabbi wield such absolute power, and it is also paradoxical that, precisely in an atheist country, Jews should be viewed as primarily a religious group, and their political representative necessarily be their spiritual leader.

If the position is a unique one, it is because the personality of the man has made it so. The son of a long and illustrious line of rabbis going back to the 'heads of the exile' and the Davidic dynasty, Rabbi Rosen seems to have inherited his ancestors' gift for command. His early years were shaped by religion rather than by politics; the emphasis was away from materialism and there was always more intellectual fare than food in the house when he was a child. For seven hours every day he learned with his father, the late Rabbi Abraham Lev Rosen, and gained a secular education from his own private reading, and not by being subjected to any systematic school­ ing. Only twice a year he would put in an appearance at the official examinations and pass with glory.

It was while he was spending a rare spell at school, how­ ever, that for the first time, at acute danger to himself, his keen sensitivity to injustice came to the fore. When a member of the increasingly popular movement of the Iron Guard (the Romanian equivalent of the S.S.) was exonerated for his part in the shooting of a Jewish student on the grounds of extreme provocation — his victim had been a Jew, and he had to kill him! — the 14-year-old future Chief Rabbi Rosen declared to his classmates that a law which could clear a ''Jew-killer" was a charade. For speaking his mind among his peers, the young Rosen was denounced, brought to Court, and accused

It is a paradox that in no democratic country, including, Ißrael, does a C hief R abbi wield such absolute power, and it is also paradoxical that, precisely in an atheist country, Jews should be viewed as primarily a religious group, and their political representative necessarily be their spiritual leader.

Freema Gottlieb is a free-lance writer who lives in New York City.

She has contributed articles to the London Jewish Chronicle, the Jewish Quarterly, Judaism, Midstream and the Time Literary and Educational Supplement. This is her first appearance in these pages.

37

of lese-majeste. Starting off at this age, he spent what was to be only the first of many periods in prison for his convictions, and for the two following years until he was publicly cleared of the charges, he was suspended from school, and privileged to enjoy more of his great father's intimacy and learning.

Not Always on the Top Under regimes less favorably inclined towards Jews than the present, Chief Rabbi Rosen's brush with officialdom has not always been from on top, and the love of justice that charac­ terized him from his early years led him more frequently to Under the Fascists he was sent see the insides of prisons than of hotels suites. Under the to a concentration camp. When Fascists he was sent to a concentration camp. When the sol­ the soldiers learned that he was "a rai and the son o f a rabi" he diers learned that he was "a rabbi and the son of a rabbi" he was led to a wall and ordered to was led to a wall and ordered to make the sign of the cross. m ake the sign o f the cross.

On his refusal, two soldiers beat his hands with the butts of their guns to force them into the desired shape. During the whole of an interminable night he was beaten to extract from him the signed confession that he was a Communist. Al­ though he was assured that once having signed, he would be released, he retained enough sense not to affix his signature to what would have been in effect his own death-warrant. After a few more hours of manhandling, this endurance paid off, and he was released from camp.

The next four years he spent in hiding, with a constant flirtation with danger. In January 1941, the Romanian Fascists under their Dictator Antonescu split with the Iron Guard. The outcome of this political rupture, Rabbi Rosen accurately pre­ dicted, could only be a pogrom. He therefore left the main Jewish center in Bucharest to take refuge with friends in a less densely Jewish neighborhood. As predicted, on the 21st of January there ocurred the infamous night when Jews, pasted with red labels reading "kosher meat," were led to the slaugh­ ter house and had their throats cut in the ritual manner. Then their bodies were strung to the beams like carcasses.

The waves of hate followed Rabbi Rosen to his hideout where he was lodging on the ground floor. By great good fortune, the soldiers decided to start with the top of the build­ ing and work their way down. Rabbi Rosen could hear the rough voices, the sounds of looting, and the screams drawing Closer. To escape, women threw themselves from the win­ dows. Suddenly, just as the soldiers were nearing the ground floor, they collected outside in the courtyard, piled back into their vehicle, and drove off. Apparently their car had been loaded to capacity with plunder, and they were going to take it away and unload it and bring it back for more. But Rabbi Rosen did not wait for their return. . ..

By then it was already three in the morning and he was stopped by an official who put a gun to his head and then, 38

inexplicably, hearing that not only was he a Jew, but that he was a rabbi as well, let him go...

In 1942 Rabbi Rosen was entering the synagogue to attend the Kol Nidrei Service on Yom Kwhen he was stopped at the door and asked for his own whereabouts by a man in civilian clothing whom he suspected of belonging to the Iron Guard. "I'll see if I can find him for you," he volunteered, and slipped into the interior of the synagogue. Soon he returned to tell the guards at the door that Rabbi Rosen had not yet arrived. "Wait a little. He'll be here soon," he advised them, walked straight past them, and left.

Championing Desperate Causes The Chief Rabbi's life consisted of such hairbreadth escapes and courageous personal stands against injustice. There is no insulation of the great or the successful against suffering here.

At every point in his life, the Chief Rabbi was ready to champ­ ion and intercede for the most desperate causes. A case in point was that of the Skulener Rebbe, Rabbi Portugal, whom Rabbi Rosen venerates as the "hidden saint" of our genera­ tion. After the War, Rabbi Portugal took into his own home and became father to two hundred orphans who were roam­ ing the streets of the Ukraine after their parents had died in the Camps. Of course, when he took them in, he not only fed them, but had them educated.and join a Jewish religious household, and this led to his denunciation by the Jewish Communists who had him thrown into prison. It was the I personal intercession of the Chief Rabbi with his Government that obtained Rabbi Portugal's release and subsequent per­ mission to comevto the United States. Rabbi Rosen somehow managed to convince the authorities that this gentle old man, with his philanthropic activities, was far from presenting any kind of threat.

In his work Rabbi Rosen also likes to blend dedication to Jewish interests with the welfare of the general poulation, and his Government has learned to appreciate that this last is a very real factor in his moves. After the Romanian floods in 1971 Rabbi Rosen appealed to the perennially generous Jewish Community of the United States to make a gesture embracing all denominations in Romania. With their help the most sophisticated unit for radio cancer therapy in Eastern Europe was set up in Bucharest.

To supply Jewish communal needs in Romania a sum of $300,000. annually is collected from American Jewish donors, and during the earthquake last year $1,000,000 was donated for repair of the synagogues in Bucharest. Two thousand five hundred people eat daily at the eleven highly subsidized kosher restaurants, and people in need are pro­ vided with clothes, medical care, and fuel in winter. The Chief 39

A fter the War, R abbi Portugal took into his own home and becam e father to two hundred orphans who were roaming the streets o f the Ukrain after their parents had died in the Camps.

Two thousand five hundred people eat daily at the eleven, highly subsidized kosher restaurants, and people in need are provided with clothes, medical care, and fuel in winter.

Rabbi combines the work of a pastor, a diplomatic emissary, a public relations figure, with that of a social worker. He has a personal file'on individual cases and claims. There are objec­ tive criteria for the receipt of assistance so that it should not depend on the caprice of any petty official or be regarded as charity, but should arrive in the mail as automatically as the salary of the Chief Rabbi himself.

His Role in the Middle East The Chief Rabbi regards himself rather as a protector of the political interests of his community than as a spiritual leader, although the intense inspiration of his early years has given him an almost visionary sense of Jewish history that has gifted him with the courage to play his particular role on that stage.

Behind the scenes both he and the Romanian Government have taken a significant part in many of the moves for peace in the Middle East. In fact Israel Prime Minister Menachem Begin first broached the subject of an invitation to Sadat to the Romanian Prime Minister and to the Chief Rabbi during his visit to Bucharest, but the Chief Rabbi was unwilling to dilate I further upon that subject. Instead he expressed his own per­ sonal admiration for the Israeli Prime Minister, despite differ­ ences with him on particular political issues.

Unlike other Israeli diplomats, Prime Minister Begin, dur­ ing his visit to Romania, had respected the Jewish Sabbath, requesting that he be moved from his villa out of town to a hotel near the Grand Synagogue so that he should not have to use a car on that day. This Rabbi Rosen interpreted as a tactic, as much as a religious move. The Israeli Prime Minister had also shown himself as very particular about Kashrus, and the banquets he had been served in the Palace of the Romanian Prime Minister had been under the supervision of the Chief Rabbinate. All this had been so many symbolic acts for the benefit of the Romanian Government as much as to say that, in being the Prime Minister of Israel, he felt it right to show respect for things Jewish. The embrace and kiss he gave the Chief Rabbi on his departure could also be read as a wise diplomatic move signifying the ongoing Israeli concern for the Jews of Eastern Europe.

Early in his career as Chief Rabbi, Dr. Rosen managed to convince the authorities that to allow Jews the freedom to practice their religion and to identify with Israel does not clash with their socialist and patriotic allegiances and that to say the Prayer for the State of Israel is not an anti-social act. Rabbi Rosen admitted that, Romania being a Communist country, not every Jew who wished to could immigrate to Israel, but neither could any other citizen leave the country. The oppor­ tunity for Jews to leave, however, was greater than that for any other Romanian minority, since the Government took

into account their special situation and the separation of families that had occurred as a result of the War. In fact, since the War, 400,000 Jews have been allowed to leave, and 350,000 have gone to Israel. In 1976 alone, 2,300 Jews emigrated. Until October 1977, 1,500 had left, the number having fallen only because over 50% of the population was over 60 and not fit to travel. Unlike the Soviet Union, as soon as a person applied for an exit visa he was not automatically debarred from his job unless he was involved with military or State secrets or with the media. It was seen as inconsistent that someone with the explicit function of disseminating patriotic sentiments should be on the verge of emigration. Also unlike Russia, even people involved in this kind of work could apply for other jobs while waiting for their exit visas.

Unlike the Soviet Union, as soom as a person applied for an exit visa he was not autimatically debarred from his jo b unless he was involved with military o f State secrets or with the media. It was seen as inconsistent that som eone with the explicit function o f disseminating patriotic sentiments should be on the verge o f emigration.

Showing the Star It is obvious from his speeches and from his ceremonial attire that Chief Rabbi Rosen appreciates that there is a place in politics for symbolism and a sense of drama. In the Great In the Great Synagogue and on occasions he wears an Synagogue and on official occasions he wears an imposing official imposing purple cap and has a. purple cap and has a huge purple rosette on his black robe huge purple rosette on his black and an immense Star of David blazes on his breast. It is by this robe and an immence Star o f , David blazes on his breast.

Star that he is known. When in the early '60's Kruschev wanted officially to mark his break with the policies of the ' 'butcher" Beria he was also attracted by the Star during a visit to Romania. Pomptly on seeing it he left his aides and walked over to chat with the Chief Rabbi as a mark of friendship to the Jews. The next day the incident was publicly congratulated by [ members of his own Government. Similarly during President Nixon's visit to Romania in 1972, the Star was what drew the President of the United States to show a very welcome de­ monstration of friendship to the representative of the Roma­ nian Jewish community.

The Chief Rabbi has the air of an Oriental Potentate, slightly Turkish, very powerful, and his speeches are very mimetic and Churchillian in style. It is not absolutely essential to know Romanian to be able to appreciate a piece of theater in the grand style. Perhaps the most dramatic and colorful splash of pageantry in the Romanian Jewish calendar takes place during the Chief Rabbi's annual Chanukah itinerary through the re­ mote outlying townlets of Moldavia and the Carpathians, in In which I was privileged to take part a few yedrs ago - a far which I was privileged to take part a few years ago — a far remove from the decore o f my remove from the decor of my present meeting with the Chief present meeting with the C hief Rabbi in New York. The most primitive people from these R abbi in New York. villages turn out to greet the Chief Rabbi's procession with singing and with flowers, and gypsies and local peasants with sheepskin coats and leaning on their hoes gaze blankly at all this commotion from the modern world. The wonderful Oriental synagogues, with their domes, pinnacles and 41

minarets, and their gorgeous colors are opened up, vast and echoing to the townsfolk and to the procession, and the lights of the Menorah — a symbol of Jewish survival — reach out through the darkness in what is perhaps the only service held during the whole year in some regions. This is so because the young people have left for Israel and only the old are left, and also because most of the Jewish population of these towns were deported and perished at Auschwitz. What is moving is the lavishness of these buildings looking back on a past age.

And through those echoing vaults rings the voice of the Chief Rabbi — only he has a voice and gestures immense enough to fill them — linking the annals of the past with a Jewish future that is taking place elsewhere, bringing these people in touch, in a way that the media cannot, with what is' going on in Yerushalayim, in the capitals of Europe, and in New York City.

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The Passover Hasadah commentary and interpretation for our times

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43

Moshe Greenes

Princeton: To Be Or Not To Be

The following letter was written by a Jewish alumnus of Princeton University and distributed to yeshivahigh s reply was written by Rabbi Moshe Greenes, Dean of Magen David Yeshivah, the Isaac Shalom School in Brooklyn, New York.

Dear Sir: Please make the following information available tb students interested in applying to Princeton University. Thank you.

"1 had lunch with (Princeton's President) Mr. and Mrs. Hibben sometime between 1930 and 1932...I asked how many Jews there were in Princeton. Mr. Hibben said 'About two hundred.' I said, 'How many were there last year?' He said, 'About two hundred.' I asked how many there were the year before that, 'About two hundred.' I said that was very odd and asked how it happened. He said he didn't know; it just happened. Mrs. Hibben was outraged and said, 'Jack Hibben, I don't see how you can sit there and lie to this young man.

You know very well that you and Dean Eisenhart get together every year and fix the quota.' " (Dr. Robert M. Hutchins, former President of the University of Chicago, Princeton Uni­ versity Archives) Princeton University has always maintained a stringent, covert numerous clausus for Jewish students. Admission Di­ rector Radcliffe Heermance bitterly attacked Carey McWil­ liams' observation in A Mask for Privilege (p. 131) that "Prince­ ton maintains a tight Jewish quota of less than 4 percent of its enrollment," even though Heermance had previously fought a proposal to adopt an admissions system similar to Harvard's because this would give too much power to high school prin­ cipals with regard to admission of Jewish students ( of the Admission Committee, June 14,1935), and had noted that in his experience Jews were "unable to be loyal" to anything (Minutes of the Admission Committee, Jan 25, 1938). In a mo­ ment of public candor Dean Christian Gauss admitted that at Princeton "there is much less equality of opportunity for edu­ cation... than in the Soviet Union" (Time, Vol XLIX, No 21, pp 67-68). As recently as 1970 an official review of Princeton ad­ missions noted that religious affiliation was an important fac­ tor in admission (University: A Princeton Quarterly, Summer 1970, p 13).

While there is little possibility of evading the quota if your name or high school is identifiably Jewish, the following guidelines might help some students who are not thus marked avoid the numerus clausus:

1) Don't have an interview with an alumnus or a member of the Admission Office staff. They are not mandatory for ad­ mission, and are used for purposes of facial identification. In the Report to the President for 1940 the Admission Director noted that ten Jews had been admitted that year, "seven of which admit being Jews." He wouldn't have known that the three students who did not admit they were Jewish were in­ deed Jews had they not had interviews.

2) Question #22 of Princeton's current applicaton form, cited as discriminatory by the Employer Guide to the New Jersey Anti-Discrimination Law, asks which languages are spoken in applicants' homes. Don't say Yiddish or Hebrew is spoken in your home.

3) Don't list identifiably Jewish extracurricular activities in your application.

4) Don't write to ask about Kosher dining facilities or Heb­ raic studies courses. If you or your family have ever been to Israel, don't mention it on the application. In general, don't give the Admission Office any ways to know that you are Jewish.

Rabbi Greenes Replies I read with great interest your recent letter exposing Princeton University's long standing admission policies for Jewish applicants. Your letter, addressed to Jewish educators, then proceeds to offer advice we are asked to pass on to our stu­ dents interested in applying to Princeton on how to sneak past their Jew-detecting devices.

My attention was especially drawn to your, "Guidelines to help students who are not thus marked ("Identifiably Jewish'') avoid the numerus clausus," where you list the traps the unwary applicant may fair into and inadvertantly reveal that he is Jewish.

You head the list with a warning against interviews with an alumnus because they are used for "facial identification" and have in the past exposed a number of Jews who concealed their origin. Finally, you conclude with the warning: Don't give the Admissions Office any ways to know that you are Jewish" (such as, replying "Yiddish" or "Hebrew" to the question on languages spoken; mentioning having visited Israël; asking about Kosher dining facilities, and so on).

While I have no doubt that your motives in sending this ad­ vice to Jewish High School graduates and principals stem from a genuine desire to be helpful to our people, I can not go 45

along with your recommendations at all. I think they are a desecration of the sacred memory of our ancestors who, in the tens and hundreds of thousands, suffered humiliation, physi­ cal and spiritual degradation, even sadistic torture, rather than deny their Jewishness, even if only outwardly.

From Portugal and Spain to St. Petersburg and Vilna, from York and Lincoln to the blood soaked soil of the Ukraine, from cursed Germany to Sicily and Greece, our history is one long nightmare of brutality, murder, sadism and pogroms on the one hand, and on the other a proud, dignified people who would not bow down or surrender to the tyrants.

In most cases, a mere outward abandonment of Judaism would satisfy the tyrants and the multitudes, and offered the additional inducements of tranquility, instead of a life of con­ stant fear; respectability instead of universal abhorrence; material comforts instead of a life of poverty and endless exiles and wanderings from nation to nation in hunger and in total want. But these brave, proud men and women could never renounce their Judaism. They were made of sterner stuff! They ascended the Auto-Da-Fe with the eternal, "Shema YisraeV' on their lips, and chanted Adon Olom as the fire con­ sumed their holy bodies.

Read, dear friend, the history of the Jewish communities of France, of the Ruhr Valley, and of the Rhineland during the Crusades. Read of the Holy Crusaders, those sanctimonious hypocrites who in the name of G-d and love left a trail of blood and pillage in which entire communities died AlKiddush-Hashem.

The Sages and Saints of Ashpira, Magentsa, and Virmaiza accepted slaughter, rather than renounce their Judaism. The same thread of Kiddush Hashem is rewoven throughout our history, century after century, country after country.

How can we betray all this and deny our ancestry for a miserable Princeton acceptance? No, dear friend, it is not worth it. One ounce of our Judaism is worth more than all the glitter and glamour of Princeton. It's worth more than a thousand Princetons. Yes, it is even worth more than all the worldly rewards a Princeton diploma can bestow upon those who are willing to bow down before it and allow themselves to be shackled and emasculated for its favors.

If the descendants of the intellectual and spiritual giants of Ashpira, Magentsa and Virmaiza are not fine enough for Princeton, if they prefer the descendants of Torquemeda to those of Abarbanel; of Hmelnitski to those of and Taz; if they prefer the grandchildren of Goebels, Eichman and Him­ mler to those of Michelson, Steinmetz and Salk, then let us have enough pride and self-respect to say to them, "Curses on you Princeton. You do not deserve to have the holy seed of 46

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob within your decadent walls."

Rather than advise young Jews to allow snobbish Princeton to make Marranos of them, I would advise these gifted Jewish students to reject Princeton as one would reject a house of leprosy.

Follow Disraeli's example in the British Parliament and tell your detractors that your ancestors were prophets and buil­ ders of the Temple of G-d in Jerusalem, Gaonim and Tsadikkim, philosophers and astronomers, mathematicians and physicians when their ancestors were still caliban-like brutes in bear skins living in caves, whose most pronounced skill was bludgeoning their neighbor and stealing his cattle and daughters.

Let our young people seek their fortunes elsewhere out of respect for their noble ancestors whose memory they desec­ rate every time they cross the threshhold of an institution which makes the denial of their Jewish origin a prerequisite for admission.

Let our young people think of the past... and think of the future, when mankind will face the great day of reckoning in "The End of Days." How insignificant and meaningless a Princeton diploma will then be. What scorn will be reserved for its holders who acquired it at so high a price! And what glory will surround those who bore the mantle of Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov through the dark, bitter years of exile and degradation.

Yours truly, Moshe Greenes

Enjoy...

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47

Cyril Domb

Creativity in Halacha "These are the statutes and ordinances and Toros which the Lord made between Himself and the children of Israel at Mount Sinai." This verse at the end of Leviticus uses the plural form Toros, and is interpreted by the Midrash as relat­ ing to the written Torah and oral Torah. An appreciation of the nature and significance of the Oral Torah is an essential prerequisite for understanding the historical development of Rabbinic Judaism.

Written instructions are often susceptible to different in­ terpretations, and the first task of the oral Torah was to give authoritative guidance as to which interpretation is authentic.

But a written code is also limited in scope, and can deal with only a fraction of the practical situations which may arise.

How can new problems be tackled for which there is no exact precedent? The Torah itself records such a case in relation to the inheritance of the daughters of Zelophehad (Numbers Ch. 27). During the lifetime of Moses it was still possible to seek divine guidance. But once the written Torah had been com­ pleted the maxim of Heaven 'Lo(it is not in Heaven) took over; it was the task of the spiritual leaders to apply their knowledge of Torah principles and precedents to arrive at a decision.

Since there is no unique way of appealing to principles and precedents, evefy new question initiated a discussion and de­ bate, and this became a characteristic feature in the sub­ When the "Supreme Court" of sequent development of halacha. When the "Supreme Court" the Sanhedrin was in of the Sanhedrin was in existence, the debate terminated in a existence, the debate majority decision and the minority view was dropped. But by terminated in a majority decisi m and the minority view the Talmudic era the Sanhedrin was no longer able to func­ was dropped. tion, and the arguments supporting all different possible points of view are recorded in full detail.

How is a definitive halachic ruling then to be achieved on Professor Domb is president of the any question where there are such differing views? This is a Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists in Great Britain. He is a sophisticated matter to which much attention is devoted by Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Rabbis of the Talmud, and the Rishonim who succeeded King's College, London them. A number of guidelines are formulated in the Talmud, University, and has been on the faculty o f Oxford, Cambridge, but these are often insufficient to ensure a unique solution, University of Maryland, Yeshiva and there is considerable scope for individual interpretation.

University, Hebrew University, Bar-Ilan, and the Weizmann Some time after the close of the Talmud came the era of the Institue. He is the Co-Editor of "poskim" i.e. authorities like Alfasi or Maimonides who gave Challenge: Torah View On Science clear and unequivocal rulings on all problems raised in the And Its Problems, published by AOJS. Talmud. But in relation to new problems a parallel literature He is the first Orthodox Jew to be arose, the responsa of individual Rabbis to questions put to selected as a member of the Royal them by scholars or members of their community. This literaSociety of Great Britain.

48

ture, which has continued without interruption to our own day illustrates the flexibility of halacha, and the manner in which it can adapt to new situations. It contains contributions from all different corners of the diaspora wherever Torah observant Jews had settled, and reflects the different social and economic conditions in which they lived.

Periodicals Discussing Halacha A new phenomenon of the past few decades has been the growth of Hebrew periodicals containing discussion of new halachic problems. Many of the participants in these discus­ sions are young Rabbis who do not claim to provide authorita­ tive rulings, but who endeavor to clarify the main points at issue in reaching a conclusion. When the English language periodical Tradition was launched in 1958 in the USA, it con­ tained an important innovation, a regular section reviewing the current halachic periodical literature. For several years whilst he was at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York, Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits was responsible for this review, and his contributions formed the basis of a paperback volume, Jewish Law Faces Modern Problems published by Yeshiva Uni­ versity in 1965. In 1970 this review section was taken over by Rabbi David Bleich, and the experience has now enabled him to publish a more ambitious volume Contemporary Halakhic Problems which attempts to classify systematically both recent responsa and recent halachic periodical literature.

The reader cannot fail to be impressed by the variety and scope of questions which have been considered. There are ritualistic problems such as whether it is possible to use a single sterilizer for both meat and dairy utensils in an Israeli hospital, or how to design an automatic elevator which will avoid Sabbath desecration; whether with the help of transis­ tors a microphone can be produced which may be used in a synagogue on Sabbath. Some very fundamental problems have been thrown up by modern medical practice to which the halachic attitude must be defined, like the establishment of criteria of death, sterilization, abortion and autopsies; other medical problems are highly individual—whether plastic surgery is permissible, or whether pre-marital monitoring for Tay-Sachs disease (a genetic disorder having a high incidence of Jewish victims which can give rise to seriously defective children) is a desirable precaution.

The section on social problems serves as a timely reminder that the Choshen Mishpat section of the Shulchan Aruch has important practical applications and is not merely of academic interest. There are several modern responsa discussing the rights of workers to organize themselves into unions, and in what circumstances it is permissible to declare strikes. And in

When the English language periodical Tradition was launched in 1958 in the USA, it contained an important innovation, a regular section reviewing the current halachic periodical literature.

Some very fundamental problems have been thrown up by modern medical practice to which the halachic attitude must be defined.

49

regard to the acute social disease of changing neighborhoods in the USA arising from panic selling of houses, the Lubavitcher Rebbe pointed out ten years ago that the sale of a dwelling within a Jewish neighborhood is subject to rigid halachic limitations which he enunciated in detail.

The problems which have received widest publicity in re­ cent years are those concerned with personal status, marriage, and divorce, especially in Israel where these are in the hands of the Beth Din. Rabbi Bleich has performed a particularly useful service by his excellent survey of the problems of Agunah, Mamzeros, and conversion. In fact one of the most educative features of the book in all sections is the lucid sum­ mary of the history and background of each ,topic as it is introduced. In relation to the controversial Langer case it is refreshing to read an unemotional description of the argul ments for and against Rabbi Goren's action.

Rabbi Bleich has performed a particularly useful service by his excellent survey o f the problems of Agunah, Mamzeros, and conversion.

The Layman and Halacha The layman interested in halacha will derive knowledge and benefit from studying this volume. He will learn to ap­ preciate how the principles of halacha are applied to com­ pletely new situations, and how the appropriate balance bet­ ween flexibility and rigidity must be sought in posing an ac­ ceptable halachic solution. He will see the halachic process in organic development, the different initial reactions of diffe­ rent authorities to a new problem, the resultant debate and discussion, the gradual emergence of a consensus among leading authorities, with occasional differing minority views.

He will witness the energy and intellectual effort invested in attempts to find solutions which ease the burden of Torah observant Jews in difficulfpersonal circumstances.

Perhaps his greatest reward will be the insight he gains into the character and humanity of leading halachic authorities; the Chazon Ish urges that it is not sufficient to allow a woman in labor to travel to the hospital in an ambulance on Shabbath, she should also be accompanied; Rabbi S.Y. Zevin in consider­ ing a request to the Minister of the Interior by the municipality of Tel Aviv to initiate legislation to ban beggars from the streets declares it is unthinkable that a Jewish community bar any individual from seeking charity; Rabbi Z. Sorotzkin in response to a query emanating from an enforced labor camp in the Soviet Union tries to find a precedent which might permit the morning Amidah to be recited as early as midnight, but feels that he needs the support of two other Rabbinic authorities for such an innovation; Rabbi S.Z. Auerbach rules that it is permissible to perform such services as lighting a fire or boiling water on Sabbath on behalf of a patient who is seriously ill, even though a kindled lamp or boiled water 50

could be secured from a neighbor, if obtaining these items from the neighbor would cause the latter some deprivation or inconvenience.

Rabbi Bleich's task was not easy. The number of periodicals containing halachic material has burgeoned, and I counted at least twenty different titles, several of them not readily availa­ ble for public distribution. In addition he has kept up to date With volumes of new responsa from Rabbinic authorities all oyer the world, as they appeared. As a result he has produced a landmark for the English-speaking Torah student, a well indexed, comprehensive, and readable summary of the im­ portant halachic discussions of recent years. It will be of spe­ cial value to the growing body of young people who possess the intellectual capacity to appreciate the finer details of halachic arguments, but lack the technical knowledge to ena­ ble them to follow the original sources.

The number of periodicals containing halachic material has burgeoned, and I counted at least twenty different titles.

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4 O rthodox couples tell their stories about living in Israel.

52

ARE YO U C O N S ID E R IN G A L IY A H ?

Do you have questions about living, working and raising a family in Israel? Then you will want to read the new booklet, Four Orthodox Couples. Write today for your free copy from: UOJC Aliyah Department 116 East 27th Street New York, N .Y . 10016

JEWISH LIFE A Statement of Purposes ...In the pages of Jewish Life we will share with you insights into the Jewish past as they clarify the Jewish present, and as they help us to see into the future. We will examine the Jewish present in the light of the past, and in the light of what must be our future aspirations. We will look into the future, not with any mystical powers—there are few Jews today who lay claim to such powers—but with the techniques made available to us by the Jewish mind and the Jewish heart refined by Torah learning and historical Jewish experience ... ... Jewish Life will continue to be a platform for the expression of diverse points of view in the American Torah commun­ ity. Here these criteria alone will gain admittance to the minds of our readers: a commitment to Jewish values, and an articulate expression of a point of view on matters of interest and deep concern to other committed Jews. Surely not all readers will agree with our application of these criteria—and we earnestly look forward to hearing from them. Writing is a mystique I hope to explore in these pages, particularly as it relates to the articulation and in­ terpretation of Torah values and concepts. And reading too is a mystique: but the two can function only in unison... ... Most people who read are aware of the difficulties of trans­ lating from one language into another. When a judge an­ grily said to a Yiddish interpreter that there must be an English word that means "shofar," the reply was "it's a horn." When asked why he didn't say so to begin with, the interpreter shrugged his shoulders and said, "Because it's not a horn!" But few readers realize that all writing is in a sense "translation, '^particularly when we try to express Torah concepts in any language other than Hebrew.

All such attempts must, therefore, by definition, fall short of their mark. It shall here be our objective to come as close to the mark as we can in stretching the English language to accommodate Torah categories and Torah concepts as Jews have in the past used other foreign tongues.

In these difficult tasks we solicit your help, your under­ standing, your patience—and your prayers.

Yaakov Jacobs

Attention Librarians!

I

We will send a free sample copy of Jewish Life to any university, public, or Jewish communal library if you agree to display it on your periodical shelf. Send us a note on your letterhead and we'll send you your free sample copy with information on special library rates. Write to Jewish Life/Library Service/116 East 27th Street/New York, New York/11016 53

Eliyahu Safran

The Holocaust and Halakhah

Responsa literature, he writeSj "is a situation plucked from reality, an actual part o f the very life under study,. The truth o f its details has been investigated and ascertained by a contemporary Court o f law that examined documents and witnesses and critically

scrutinized all evidence.

Rabbi Safran is spiritual leader of Congregation Poale Zedeck, and Director o f the Prise Institute of C ontinuing Education in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Irving J. Rosenbaum/Ktav Publishing House, New York 1976, The Library of Jewish Law and Ethics fsWi Sh’ailos U'Teshuvos is a rabbinic term denoting an exchange of letters in which one party consults another on halachic matter. Al­ ready in use in Talmudic times, this responsa literature developed during the Geonic era and throughout this period, played a decisive role in disseminating the Oral Law, and establishing the Babylonian Talmud as the sole authority in the life of the Jewish people.

Throughout the generations, individuals, groups and entire communities turned to local, national and international scholars and spiritual leaders for guidance on new halachic problems for which they could find no precedent. Nor were problems wanting oh scrip­ tural, traditional and spiritual subjects, as well as, ritual and legal practices. Collections of these responsa constitute a distinctive and fundamental body of Jewish religious literature.

In his introduction to Urban Civilization in Pre-Crusade Europe, a study of organized town-life in northwestern Europe during the tenth and eleventh centuries based on responsa literature, Dr. Irving A. Agus, professor of medieval Jewish history at Yeshiva Universtiy, explains the unique function of responsa as a primary source of knowledge of Jewish history in various eras and countries.

Responsa literature, he writes, "is a situation plucked from reality, an actual part of the very life under study. The truth of its details has been investigated and ascertained by a contemporary court of law that examined documents and witnesses and critically scrutinized all evidence. The highly technical analysis of the case by the outstand­ ing talmudic scholar has served as a powerful barrier against corrupt tion and against change of the significant parts of the cast." The unique advantage responsa literature has over other accepted histor­ ical sources of data—such as chronographies, official documents and biographies—is that the evidence and information it provides is signed. A responsa echoes the pulse of everyday life, the beliefs, the speech, the details and events of ordinary people—usually blurred and indistinct in standard historical sources.

In his opening paragraph to a two-part, "Halachic Issues of Holocaust and Destruction in Europe" (Sinai, Mosad Harav Kook; Vol. 64-1969) my revered father, Dr. Joseph Safran, writes: "During the fateful days of the European Holocaust in our generation, many difficult halachic queries were accumulated. The Holocaust brought with it destruction and slaughter, minder and annihilation of mill­ ions of Jews. Many were martyred, and there remained but a hand­ ful who were uprooted and transferred in all directions with the raging storm. Under the most degrading and bestial rule, in a time of confusion and chaos in the cities, forest and concentration camps, many saw the need to underscore their commitment and dedication

54

to the preservation of halacha, and sought the guidance of their spiritual leaders, most of whom suffered along with them." This is the substance of Irving J. Rosenbaum's Holocaust and Halakhah.The work mirrors the persistent efforts of the East Euro­ pean Jews to conform to halachic Judaism in the face of certain defeat and in the midst of endless sadism and cruelty. Rabbi Rosen­ baum has succeeded in making available to the English reader a rare and painful chapter of responsa literature. His book is based primar­ ily on the most important source for Holocaust responsa, Teshuvos MI-Ma'amakim (Responsa From the Depths), by Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, one of the few surviving rabbinical scholars of Lithuania. The rabbinic rulings dealt with in Rosenbaum's book were written in Germany, Hungary, Poland and Lithuania from the beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933 and conclude with the liberation of the camps in 1945. The reader will find in this work rulings that provide insight into the situation of Jews in the ghettos and death camps of the Holocaust. These responsa treat such subjects as the justifiability of suicide, murder and abortion under the oppressing conditions of the time. They also discuss the observance of Pesach, Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah—and even Purim—in the Ghetto of Kovno and the Auschwitz death camp. In reading the questions and their replies one is filled with an overwhelming sense of awe, of fear and trem­ bling, and with an overpowering awareness of the daily struggle to survive. Oneshe'aila that came to Rabbi Efrati, for example, involved a group of Jews hiding in a bunker from the Nazis, who were con­ ducting a "search and destroy" operation. "It was certain that they would all be killed if the Germans discovered their hiding place.

Suddenly, an infant...began to cry. It was impossible to quiet him... one of the men seized... [a pillow] and covered the child's face.

After the Germans had left and they were safe, they removed the pillow and found, to their dismay, that the infant had suffocated."

Rabbi Efrati was asked: Was this man's action permissible, since it was done to save the lives of others? And if it was not permissible, even though the death was caused unintentionally, must the man accept upon himself some type of penance through which he might atone for his sin ?

Some Painful Questions The issues and themes, of the questions concern themselves with the entire spectrum of halacha: "May one —or must one—risk his own life to save the life of someone else?" "May one endanger the life of someone else in order to save his own life?" "Can a Jew save his own life by purchasing a baptismal certificate?" "What b'rachah is to be recited before martyrdom?" "How does one react to a directive that any woman found pregnant will be killed ?" "Might a woman who is pjegnant have an abortion in order to save her life?" "May a Jew read a page of Talmud to a Nazi who wants to know what it says?" "May one recite a b'rachah on only three of the Four Minim 55

The work mirrors the persistent efforts o f the East European Jews to conform to halachic Judaism in the face o f certain defeat and in the midst o f endless sadism and cruelty.

Rabbi Rosenbaum has succeeded in making available to the English reader a rare and painful chapter o f responsa literature.

His companion there writes that Berkowitz "spent months in laboriously writing a Siddur so that , "G-d forbid , the world should not remain without a Siddur."

"Many made great sacrifices in order to keep the week in order to be given freedom from work on Shabbos. They agreed to perform the most difficult labor during the week in order to be given freedom from work on the Shabbos. There were those who gave up the special food rations which were distributed to those who would work seven days - this at a time when hunger was too great to bear."

available in Aushwitz?" “Can one substitute tea for wine in making Havdalah?" “Should Kaddish be recited for a righteous Christian?"

"Can a talis be made from stolen wool?" "Is it permitted to pay and exorbitant price (four rations of bread) in order to obtain a pair of Tefillin?" "Are Jews in the Kovno Ghetto—a 'temporary dwelling'—required to have a mezuzah on their doorposts?'^ "Can one save his own life by illegally obtaining white cards?" "How should labor be done on the Shabbos?" "What is the marital status of a wife on whose arm are tatooed the words: 'Prostitute for the Armies of Hitler'? ." "Can a former kapo, who regretted his former evil deeds and completely repented what he had done to his fellow Jews, now serve as a She-li'ach Tzibur?"

The book is an epic of Jewish heroism. Reb Naftali Weintraub, the gabbai of Gafinovitz's shul, inquired whether he was obligated by halachah to risk his life in order to go to pray morning and evening in the synagogue he was accustomed to attend?—and whether one is in fact required to sacrifice his life rather than abandon the mitzvos of Torah study and Tefillah. One Moshe Berkowitz from Zhelikov, whose entire family was destroyed, was hidden in a bunker near Warsaw for some time. His companion there writes that Berkowitz "spent months in laboriously writing a Siddur so that, "G-d forbid, the world should not remain without a Siddur." In the Dautmorgan Camp there was a group of Yeshiva Bachurim who would get together every night to study Mishnayos, where one of them, "a thin, white faced ladfrom Novorodok, would recite out loud chapter after chapter of Mishnayos from memory, and the rest would repeat each saying." In Garelitz, one of the camps in the Gross-Rosen Complex, Yankel Pick studied Talmud during the daily march from the "block!" He would arrange for some of the other inmates of Block 6 to march alongside him each morning enroute to the factory and each evening on their return. "Their feet marched to the melody of the Talmud study. It was as if the the melody, was a marching song." In the labor camp of Plaszow, where the Germans set up a factory for the manufacture of brushes, the Jewish craftsmen of Cracow set up a she’ur in the Daf Yomi. In Buchenwald ..."We quickly inspected [the Tefillin they had found] and then prayed in them with an ecstasy which is impossible ever to experi­ ence again in our lives." Rabbi Elchanan Person, a survivor of the Kovno Ghetto writes: "Many made great sacrifices in order to keep the Shabbos. They agreed to perform the most difficult labor during the week in order to be given freedom from work on the Shabbos.

There were those who gave up the special food rations which were distributed to those who would work seven days—this at a time when hunger was too great to bear." Y. Kashetzkky writes: "In the ghetto of Kletzk, erev Yom Kippur, the rabbis of the city went from house to house and directed the Jews not to absent themselves from work on Yom Kippur. However, we all fasted the entire day as we worked at our regular task of building the Nazi barracks."

56

The Reservoir of Jewish Spirit Linked with the glorious armed resistance of Jewish partisans, camp victims and ghetto denizens, is the supreme courage and stamina of faithful and authentic Jews, who in the words of the editor of the series, Norman Lamm, "summoned up an unbelievable and invin­ cible dedication to G-d, to Judaism and to life itself. They tapped that mysterious and mystical reservoir of Jewish spirit which has been the Jew's surest promise of survival."

It has long been proven that the Nazi creed was primarily a politi­ cal theology. Using military confrontation as only one of its objec­ tives the Nazi movement leveled its relentless intellectual armament against the soul of the Jewish nation. Ultimate annihilation of the spiritual Jew took precedence even over the success of the Nazi war machine against the allied reprisals. To this the Jews responded, as Rabbi Rosenbaum points out, with added fervor and a more in­ tensely zealous concern for their spiritual health. He recounts how Jews struggled to continue to study the Torah in organized groups in the ghettos; to pray and wear Tefillin in the camps; to sound the Shofar; to smuggle in an Esrog; to surreptitiously bake matzoh and organize a Seder; to get hold of and light one Chanukah candleunder the ever-prowling eyes of the Nazis and their Polish, Lithua­ nian, Ukranian and Hungarian henchmen."Most remarkable, to the point of taxing credibility."

As a Chassid was being lined up to be shot by a Gestapo officer he turned to his Rebbe and asked: "Rebbe what blessing do I recite before I publicly sanctify the name of G-d?" With tears streaming down his face, the Rebbe replied: "Blessed art Thou, the Eternal, our God, King of the Universe, who has not made me a gentile." The Holocaust and Halakhah is a reaffirmation of and a renewed testimony to an eternal truth—AM YISRAEL CHAI! We are a holy People, a unique People, a persistent People, chosen by G-d to be an Eternal People.

Ultimate annihilation o f the spiritual Jew took precedence even over the success o f the Nazi war machine against the allied reprisals. To this the Jews respon dedlas R abbi Rosenbaum points out, with added fervor and a more intensely zealous concern for their spiritual health.

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Eliyahu Safran

Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest David Hartman/ The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia 1976 A contemporary scholar has said that the life of Maimonides seems more plausible as a legend than as a fact. His achieve­ ments incline one to believe that "Maimonides " is the name of a whole academy of scholars.

In 1148, Moshe ben Maimon's Bar Mitzvah year, Cordova, Spain fell victim to the ruthless Almohades and the Maimon family was forced to spend a period of almost nine years wan­ dering from place to place until, in 1160, they séttled in Fez. Yet the Rambam- in those years of wandering which he him­ self describes as a period "while my mind was troubled, and amid divinely ordained exiles, on journeys by land and tossed on the tempests of the sea,"—laid a solid foundation to his vast and varied learning and writings. During those trying times he produced a number of significant works, including: a treatise on the Jewish calendar (Ma'Amar Ha'Ibbur) providing great insight into astronomy and mathematics; the Millos gayon on logic, written when he was twenty-three; and com­ plete notes for a commentary on several tractates of the Babylonian Talmud. His first major work, the Commentary on the Mishneh, appeared in 1168, after ten years of continuing efforts, and a decade later his monumental, unique and novel code, the Mishneh Torah appeared as an embracing corpus of Jewish law so that "discerning students....will have no need to roam and ramble about in other books in search of informa­ tion." His intention in producing the Yad Hachazakah, as this work is also known, was to codify everything concerning "that which is forbidden or permitted, clean or unclean, and the other rules of the Torah." The Yad remains the clearest, most systematic and orderly of all codes, written in a fluent, precise and elegant Hebrew. Sometime between 1185 and 1190 Maimonides completed the Guide of the Perplexed which earned for him the reputation as the greatest Jewish philosopher. The Guide became thè encyclopedia of Jewish philosophy, for, in essence, it covers the spectrum of philosophic problems: reason versus revelation; the existence, unity and incorporeality of G-d; the freedom of G-d's actions; Creation of the World; problems of physics;-miracles and natural law; prophecy; evil; Providence; and an attempt to offer reasons for the commandments of the Torah.

Since his death, generations of scholars have engaged in full-time study of his works. Hundreds of commentaries have been annotated to his Mishneh Torah, Commentary on the Mish58

Studentsnot search not only nah, SeferHamitzvos, andGuide. Students search only for for , legal and philosophical legal and philosophical meanings, but for a comprehension of meanings, but for a the unity to be found in the body of his works and their comprehension o f the unity to inter-relationships, particularly in his two major works, the be found in the body o f his words and their Mishneh Torah and the Guide of the Perplexed. inter-relationships, particularly Dr. Isadore Twersky, in the beginning of his essay, "Som e in his two major works, the non-Halakhic aspects of the Mishneh Torah," summarizes the Mishneh Torah and the Guide o f the Perplexed. diverse views of the harmony and tension that many have seen in Maimonides' major works. "The relationship between these two monumental works, one juridical and the other philosophical, is obvious and straightforward to some, obscure and problematic for others. Some detect harmony Some detect harmony and find a deliberate progression in his and find deliberate progression in his writings while others writings while others hear only hear only cacophony and see intentional disjunctions...Some cacophony and see intentional see these two works on entirely different levels, with the im­ disjunctions... plication that the Mishneh Torah can suggest nothing of the typically intellectualistic stance of Maimonides inasmuch as it deals with beliefs and opinions only insofar as they are im­ plied in prohibitions and commands, or that it conceals the author's true incompatibility between law and philosophy— or between law and any metajuridical system;... and therefore any attempted combination must be discordant or incongru­ ous. Many scholars, of course, assume that Maimonides' writ­ ings are structured and informed by an integrated community of interests embracing theology and law." The issue then is the problem of unity in Maimonides' major works.

That Maimonides was not only the great Jewish philosopher, but also the great Talmudist of his time, is the thesis of Maimonides: Torah andPhilosophic Quest, by David Hartman, lecturer in Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University and founder and director of the Shalom Hartman University of Judaic Studies in Jerusalem. Maimonides, the superior Talmudist and Halachist, who in his Mishneh Torah is con­ cerned with both norms of conduct and norms of religious belief, becomes active, in the Guide o f the Perplexed, a philosophic work, in expounding the physical and metaphys­ ical verities in a way which reduces the danger of philosophi­ cal truth to a religion. In the introduction to this work, Shlomo Pines writes that, "David Hartman takes issue with that thesis in which it is argued that the legal writings subserve an exclu­ sive practical end and accordingly contain no indications of Maimonides' theoretical views which to some extent, can be gathered... from the Guide of the The tendency of Hartman's investigations is to prove that the connection bet­ ween the halachic writings and the Guide of the Perplexed is much closer than is admitted."

Hartman, in contradistinction to such scholars as Isaac Husik and Leo Strauss, whose views he analyzes in the book's

59

The unified and integrated person sees the religious as grounded in revelation and traditional authority, and the human as grounded in reason.

Maimonides, argues Hartman, exposes his reader to philosophy but stresses a halachic way t G-d which must be united with philosophy.

Introductory Chapter, recognizes the legitimacy of philosophy within tradition, and thus adopts the option of "integration" to resolve the conflict of tradition and reason.

The unified and integrated person sees the religious as grounded in revelation and traditional authority, and the human as grounded in reason. "Divine revelation need not be in discord with human understanding. In fact where- they share a common domain, in principle, they are never in dis­ cord. Man's rationality participates in the divine systems of knowledge. They are not two truths"(p. 15). Hartman proves in an eloquent and textually convincing manner that Maimonides chose the way of integration and that his total philosophical approach was an attempt to show, how the free search for truth, arrived at through the study of logic, physics and metaphysics, can and does live harmoniously with the way of life designed and defined by halachah, the normative tradition of Judaism. Insistence on action and the primacy of the Mitzvah act is not weakened by the contemplative ideal; rather deeper insight, understanding and purpose is realized once the philosophic way is found. The thought process and the contemplative ideal is not insulated from halacha, but af­ fects it in a new, higher manner. Sinai is not only a stage in man's spiritual development, but the ultimate place to which man constantly returns— even when he has reached the heights of metaphysical knowledge. Thus, the need to integ­ rate.

Through a comprehensive study and analysis of major is­ sues in Maimonidean philosophy and halacha, Hartman con­ vincingly demonstrates the intrinsic harmony of Maimonides' overall philosophy and religious outlook. All of the chapters lead one to a synoptic view of Maimonides' work, and attest to his remarkable unity and systematic progression.

"Philosophy, to Maimonides, not only points to the contem­ plative ideal, but also suggests a method of changing the reli­ gious attitudes and perspectives of a person" (p. 65).

Maimonides, argues Hartman, exposes his reader to philosophy throughout his legal works. He articulates a tradi­ tion which not only has use for philosophy but stresses a halachic way to G-d which must be united with philosophy.

Maimonides' approach to beliefs and halachic behavior opens the way for the integration of philosophy and Torah. "The person whose spiritual life is nurtured by reason can fully embrace the spiritual life of his community. His intellect is never compromised when he acts within the framework of Torah" (p. 137-138). If it were true that halachah and tradition coerced the acceptance of beliefs which reason would deem as false, a person so coerced would have no choice but to supress his intellect, or reject tradition,or accept tradition for political 60

expediency. Rambam teaches that no such option need exist.

"The individual who has found his way to G-d by reason can accept communal forms of spirituality, i.e. halacha, as a whole man; he need not sever his political and social life from his individual aspirations. He knows Judaism never allows au­ thority to overstep tfie limits of its legitimate competence and to invade domains where reason is m aster" (p. 138).

Maimonides viewed the all embracing universality of philosophy and thus felt the intrinsic need to integrate it with his own tradition.

To the philosophic Jew, halachah provides a life-norm for that which is present to all men only during moments of intel­ lection. The awe and humility which is felt by the philosopher when he encounters G-d's majesty, comes about from reflec­ tion on G -d 's wisdom m anifest in nature. f"F or the philosopher who lives by halachah, the consciousness of being a creature who lives in the presence of G-d results from the discipline of the Mitzvos. Halachah continuously sets G-d before the philosopher" (p. 209).

HM is Hartman's purpose, in his Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest, to make scholar and layman aware of the mutual interaction of philosophy and halachah in Maimonidean thought. The "true" Maimonides Hartman finds in the passion for halachah so evident in the first chapters of the Mishneh Torah; here Maimonides describes how the "G-d of being can be understood and loved by all rational men.'' With the same passion, the "true" Maimonides consummates his legal-halachic creativity in the Guide of the Perplexed. K The Maimonidean image created by Hartman is of the philosopher who does insist upon the superiority of the theoretical life, quests for a rationale of the law and intimates its postulates. As Professor Twersky puts it: "Maimonides consistently espoused a sensitized view of religion and moral­ ity, demanding a full and uncompromising but inspired and sensitive observance of the law openly disdaining the per­ functory, vulgar view of the masses, searching for the ulti­ mate religious significance of every human action, indicting literalism and equating it with ignorance, and urging a com­ mitment to and quest for wisdom." The creation of such a product is only possible through interweaving the thread of the Mishneh Torah and the Moreh Nevuchim.

In studying Maimonides' texts one becomes cognizant of change, evolution of thought, allusive presentation of ideas and sometimes even contradictions. The works, however, add up to a judicious interpretation and most systematic presenta­ tion of Jewish beliefs and practices. In an excellent preface to A Maimonides Reader, (Behrman House) Dr. Isadore Twersky points out most eloquently: "As it moves from one literary

T or the phildspher who lives by halachah , the consciousness o f being a crature who lives in the presence o f G-d results from thé discipline o f the Mitzvos.

Halacha continously sets G-d before the philosopher."

61

"As it moves from one literary form to another; from textual explication to independent exposition, one would think he had a master plan from the very beginning to achieve his over-reaching objective; to bring law and philosophy - two apparently incongruous attitudes o f mind, two jealous rivals - into fruitful harmony."

form to another, from textual explication to independent ex­ position, one would think he had a master plan from the very beginning to achieve his over-reaching objective; to bring law and philosophy— two apparently incongruous attitudes of mind, two jealous rivals— into fruitful harmony."

Hartman's book helps one to recognize Rambam's master plan and learn how his objective was reached. The book, which has already won the acclaim of many contemporary Jewish scholars and the Jewish Book Council's Jewish Thought Award, puts to rest the fragmented approach to Maimonides and resolves the alleged dichotomy between law and philosophy. Hartman has reaffirmed Rambam's individu­ ality. Maimonides has again appeared as the "witness to the fact that intense love for a particular way of life need not entail intellectual and spiritual indifference to that which is beyond one's own tradition."

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