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November 21, 2009 5:39 am PST

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This guy is unbelievable. I had not heard that madoff had pretensions to Orthodox Jewish life, but to use this as an opportunity to take potshots at Orthodoxy is not qualitatively different than antisemites using Madoff to take potshots at Jews and Judaism including Rabbi Dorff. Of course he is right that this shows you can’t be a religious Jew simply by observing the laws, any more than you can be a religious Jew marrying your own gender, any more than you can be a good Jew or Israeli by opposing classical Zionist ideology, even if you go to the trouble of ginning up some ‘laws’ to throw Jews off their land.

If I wanted to give Rabbi Dorff the benefit of the doubt I think that he means that observing the forms of rituals does not mean observing the forms of Jewish ethics and Jewish property and contract law, like all Conservative Jews do. But he didn’t say that, why not. so no benefit of the doubt.

But Conservative Judaism has no independent authority or that does not derive at whatever distance from Orthodoxy and this attempt at deniability and distancing will not work. Meanwhile, I feel sure I can judge the quality and quantity of Madoff’s prayers without this insight. If anything, Madoff cultivated Orthodox contacts for the same reason that Willie Sutton stole from banks; not because they have most of the money but because they give most of the money, and are the most trusting within their communities (not for long I feel). Madoff treated his Orthodox identity if any as team colors and not as a check on discipline.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 12/16/08 at 12:24 pm

“If I wanted to give Rabbi Dorff the benefit of the doubt I think that he means that observing the forms of rituals does not mean observing the forms of Jewish ethics and Jewish property and contract law.”

I would agree with that perspective.

Comment by Brad A. Greenberg on 12/16/08 at 12:58 pm

I assume that the the phrase “klal yisroel areizim zeh bazeh” is your transcription error, Brad, since that is meaningless and it would be impossible for a rabbi to say it. The actually famous expression is “Kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh BaZeh”; trust me that in Hebrew the difference is glaring.

In any case, the logic is weak, as the institutions themselves exemplify the principle, and the principle is not weakened by a lone dirtbag like Madoff.

For example, I just heard that results are in on California’s laws on cell-phone use while driving. Accidents are down very significantly, even taking into account that not everyone observes them, not everyone is caught etc. But it would be foolish to say that “this shows you can’t be a religious Jew better driver simply by observing the laws”, even if it is true. The more that observe the laws and the better they observe them, the better the collective result, and that’s all we can ask.

To be sure we could Reform the cell-phone law by changing it to require saluting the flag or conducting meditation workshops focusing upon our social responsibilities and do surveys to test the effectiveness of those. But that gets a little abstract.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 12/16/08 at 1:00 pm

Yes, I made the transcription error. I looked up Kol Yisrael, but, lacking a Jewish education, it didn’t make sense.

Comment by Brad A. Greenberg on 12/16/08 at 1:06 pm

[NerdIcon]
“Klal Yisroel” means the ‘collective of Israel’, “Kol Yisroel” means ‘all of Israel’. Klal could work, but is not the original (talmudic) quote and slightly ungrammatical. It is the word areizim that does not exist, the word is ‘areivim’; hard to translate but involved with connection. The phrase ‘Zeh Bazeh’ makes it ‘are interconnected with each other’, the version ‘Zeh Lazeh’ makes it ‘are responsible for each other’
[/NerdIcon]

Comment by Ben Plonie on 12/16/08 at 2:12 pm

i worked with a very powerful orthodox jew…he was extremely immoral and dangerous…he destroyed many people’s lives including my own…the other jews in the workplace reinforced each others bad behaviors…stop using “religion” to protect each other…this is tribalism…do it in some other country….

Comment by shawna murray md on 12/17/08 at 8:32 am

i worked with a very powerful gentile…he was extremely immoral and dangerous…he destroyed many people’s lives including my own…the other gentiles in the workplace reinforced each others bad behaviors…stop using “bigotry” to protect each other…this is tribalism…do it in some other country….

It’s really true!

Comment by Ben Plonie on 12/17/08 at 1:35 pm

Yeah.  Let me guess the names—GW Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Runsfeld, Chuck Paulson!

Comment by The Web Guy on 12/17/08 at 2:21 pm

No, it was far more personal than that. Although after the trillion dollar ripoff you won’t catch me defending the administration (maybe Rumsfeld.) All the Somali pirates that ever lived, plus all the other pirates that ever lived put together never managed to steal a trillion dollars in.

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we want to call your attention to our emergency evacuation procedures. Escape chutes will deploy off the clearly marked emergency exits located in the front and rear on each side of the aircraft. You should be prepared to use them as necessary. To your left, you will see that the wing engines are on fire. To your right and below is a rubber boat containing your captain and crew. Good luck - this has been a recording.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 12/17/08 at 3:10 pm

this post is bigoted.  it assumes that madoff was a religious jew, with an orthodox identity.  I doubt the author or dorf could identify an orthodox synagouge that madoff attended frequently.

Remember what we learn as kids, when you assume, you make an ass out of you and me.

Comment by sp on 12/18/08 at 8:16 pm

Of course it is bigoted.

A newer blog post confirms that Rabbi/Sage Dorff was just making an assumption about Made-off.

I’m glad this was discovered, as I was feeling just a tad guilty at assuming (correctly) that Rabbi Dorff was using this scandal just as an opportunity to flog his knee-jerk ‘talking points’ against the Orthodox. I felt sure that Madoff was not Orthodox anyway, but even if he is considered Orthodox in any sense it says something about his hypocrisy, not about Orthodoxy. To say that an amoral swindler is Orthodox is like saying that the ‘American Taliban’ (John Phillip Walker Lindh, captured during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan while serving in the Taliban army) was a baptized R.C. and went through a Buddhist period. What does this say about Catholicism? What is the Buddhist position on fighting against America? Dumb, right? But plenty of antisemites are sneering that Madoff’s crimes say something about Jews and that there is a positive Jewish position on committing fraud. I am sure that Rabbi Dorff would never agree with those positions and has good things to say about unity as a value, but I wouldn’t turn my back on him in an overcrowded lifeboat.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 12/18/08 at 9:47 pm

Dorff is correct when he says “This shows you can’t be a religious Jew simply by observing the laws. Being a religious Jew must entail being moral as well”
This applies equally to all other religions and beliefs.  I (not a Jew) have seen people of all faiths go to worship a couple of times a week and assume this meets their entire religious obligations.
The big difference with all other religions is this enormous complication of a Jewish race as well as a religion.  I know there was a rather ‘batty” old lady who handed out anti-Jewish literature near the British Parliament and who was always aquitted on Racial Hatred charges because she said being a Jew was not a race, one could opt in or out of the religion. True, but one cannot opt out of the Jewish DNA.  As a gentile, I fingd the biggest shock in this whole disaster the fact that he (allegedly) happily robbed Jewish charities.

Comment by david chown on 12/20/08 at 12:12 am

This brings up a good point. I concurred with you earlier when I said “Of course he is right that this shows you can’t be a religious Jew simply by observing the laws, any more than you can be a religious Jew ‘marrying’ your own gender” (the last issue that brought Rabbi Dorff to our attention). Now it is time to make finer distinction, because that was not strictly true.

The first line we generally draw in Jewish law is between those relating to God and those relating to people. When seeing the Torah as God’s will the distinction is just academic. Academic is not insignificant; it can be useful but it only changes the way we think about things, not what we actually do. Rabbi Dorff (like Jesus, not coincidentally) would be saying that observing the Human-God laws do not ensure the Human-Human laws and that is true. As an analogy, maintaining and inspecting cars does not ensure that safe driving. The laws are related but not interdependent.

But the flip side of trying to be moral without studying and observing the laws may produce nice people, but not religious Jews. The reason is that laws are relatively well-defined and objective, but free-floating morality is not. Othodoxy has no problem equating morality with observance of laws because it is impossible to observe them without producing a moral community and society. But if one belongs to a religious approach that knocks out the authoritative underpinnings of morality. Again, if people neglect their car maintenance and inspection than a lot more people are going to get hurt, even with good intentions and driving.

I don’t know of any evidence that Madoff was religiously observant in any way but even if he was he violated many Jewish religious laws, because finance is a religious issue like everything else in life. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arba’ah_Turim

If one observes both kinds of laws then it one is a good, religious, moral Jew (and human being). The practice and discipline is supposed to refine our personality and spirit, but if not it is still better to do the right thing for the wrong reason than the wrong thing for he ‘right’ reason.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 12/20/08 at 5:41 pm

‘Beside the fact that it both illegal and immoral to do this to individual investors—to do it to Jewish federations representing the Jewish community is just unconscionable’.
Why, if someone can explain this to me, is it a worse offense, i.e. unconscionable, to do this to the Jewish community? Is it not unconscionable to do this to individual investors?

Comment by Reinout de Waal on 12/20/08 at 10:31 pm

Of course it is unconscionable to do this to individual investors. This is not a choice between OK and bad, it is between terrible and worse.

The keyword you missed is ‘federations’ which could have been capitalized. These are not just financial co-ops but the trust funds for charitable non-profit organizations, containing the proceeds of fund drives and individual donors. These are not people OR organizations who placed money as investments. Investors at least accept that their money is at some degree of risk, although not from outright fraud. But the real damage is done to the countless recipients of the programs funded by those donations; individual recipients, programs, and the recipients of those programs.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 12/20/08 at 11:51 pm

Hello Brad A. Greenberg, First of all thanks for sharing nice information here. I read your post and really very nice and good information you share on Rabbi Elliot Dorff. Nice explanation on this person activities. Really very nice and thanks for it.

Comment by quality inspection on 6/04/09 at 10:23 am

THE DECLARATION OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL
May 14, 1948

On May 14, 1948, on the day in which the British Mandate over a Palestine expired, the Jewish People’s Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum, and approved the following proclamation, declaring the establishment of the State of Israel. The new state was recognized that night by the United States and three days later by the USSR.

ERETZ-ISRAEL [(Hebrew) - the Land of Israel, Palestine] was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.

After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom.

Impelled by this historic and traditional attachment, Jews strove in every successive generation to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. In recent decades they returned in their masses. Pioneers, ma’pilim [(Hebrew) - immigrants coming to Eretz-Israel in defiance of restrictive legislation] and defenders, they made deserts bloom, revived the Hebrew language, built villages and towns, and created a thriving community controlling its own economy and culture, loving peace but knowing how to defend itself, bringing the blessings of progress to all the country’s inhabitants, and aspiring towards independent nationhood.

In the year 5657 (1897), at the summons of the spiritual father of the Jewish State, Theodore Herzl, the First Zionist Congress convened and proclaimed the right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country.

This right was recognized in the Balfour Declaration of the 2nd November, 1917, and re-affirmed in the Mandate of the League of Nations which, in particular, gave international sanction to the historic connection between the Jewish people and Eretz-Israel and to the right of the Jewish people to rebuild its National Home.

The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations.

Survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Europe, as well as Jews from other parts of the world, continued to migrate to Eretz-Israel, undaunted by difficulties, restrictions and dangers, and never ceased to assert their right to a life of dignity, freedom and honest toil in their national homeland.

In the Second World War, the Jewish community of this country contributed its full share to the struggle of the freedom- and peace-loving nations against the forces of Nazi wickedness and, by the blood of its soldiers and its war effort, gained the right to be reckoned among the peoples who founded the United Nations.

On the 29th November, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the establishment of a Jewish State in Eretz-Israel; the General Assembly required the inhabitants of Eretz-Israel to take such steps as were necessary on their part for the implementation of that resolution. This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their State is irrevocable.

This right is the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.

ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE’S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People’s Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People’s Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called “Israel”.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open for Jewish immigration and for the Ingathering of the Exiles; it will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; it will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

THE STATE OF ISRAEL is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November, 1947, and will take steps to bring about the economic union of the whole of Eretz-Israel.

WE APPEAL to the United Nations to assist the Jewish people in the building-up of its State and to receive the State of Israel into the comity of nations.

WE APPEAL - in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months - to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

WE APPEAL to the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora to rally round the Jews of Eretz-Israel in the tasks of immigration and upbuilding and to stand by them in the great struggle for the realization of the age-old dream - the redemption of Israel.

PLACING OUR TRUST IN THE “ROCK OF ISRAEL”, WE AFFIX OUR SIGNATURES TO THIS PROCLAMATION AT THIS SESSION OF THE PROVISIONAL COUNCIL OF STATE, ON THE SOIL OF THE HOMELAND, IN THE CITY OF TEL-AVIV, ON THIS SABBATH EVE, THE 5TH DAY OF IYAR, 5708 (14TH MAY,1948).

David Ben-Gurion

Daniel Auster
Mordekhai Bentov
Yitzchak Ben Zvi
Eliyahu Berligne
Fritz Bernstein
Rabbi Wolf Gold
Meir Grabovsky
Yitzchak Gruenbaum
Dr. Abraham Granovsky
Eliyahu Dobkin
Meir Wilner-Kovner
Zerach Wahrhaftig
Herzl Vardi   Rachel Cohen
Rabbi Kalman Kahana
Saadia Kobashi
Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Levin
Meir David Loewenstein
Zvi Luria
Golda Myerson
Nachum Nir
Zvi Segal
Rabbi Yehuda Leib Hacohen Fishman
  David Zvi Pinkas
Aharon Zisling
Moshe Kolodny
Eliezer Kaplan
Abraham Katznelson
Felix Rosenblueth
David Remez
Berl Repetur
Mordekhai Shattner
Ben Zion Sternberg
Bekhor Shitreet
Moshe Shapira
Moshe Shertok

THE SECULAR ZIONIST AGENDA FOR A JEWISH STATE
Rabbi Dr. Chaim Simons
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
August 2007
© Copyright. 2007. Chaim Simons
INTRODUCTION
In an article in the English edition of “Mishpacha” in January 2005 appeared the following:
“The Left is still loyal to the State of Israel in varying levels of faithfulness, but it hates Eretz Yisrael. The difference between these two is clear: Eretz Yisrael is a reminder of the Left’s Jewish past, which it wishes to forget. … The Left’s disconnection from the Jewish nation has reached the point where they are prepared for settlers to be killed during the evacuation effort [Gaza area and North Shomron]. Spokesmen of the Left have already announced that this will not be a war of brother against brother since ‘the settlers are not our brothers’.” (1)
Unfortunately this is not a new phenomenon. It has always been an integral part of the secular Zionist agenda. They wanted a Jewish State (according to some of them, even if it were to be in Uganda or Argentina) but it had to be administered according to their programme and perception for the “New Jew.”
***********************************************
NOTE
Although much of the material appearing in this paper can be found in other books or articles, the material is often brought down as secondary or even tertiary sources. In addition, the primary sources are on a number of occasions incorrectly quoted and there are even cases where the quotations given do not occur in the sources given. Therefore the only quotations of statements made by secular Zionists brought in this paper are those which the author of this paper has a photocopy from in the original in his possession. Due to limitations in the disc space, facsimiles of these documents cannot appear in this online copy. In many cases the original documents are no longer extant or could not be located, despite extensive searching. In such cases the information alleged to be contained in them has been completely omitted from this paper.
In the English quotes, Palestine usually appears when referring to Eretz Yisrael and it has of course be left as it appears in the original.
The following words appearing in the Hebrew quotes have not been translated:
Aliyah – Jewish immigration to Eretz Yisrael
Hachshara – Training given to people in preparation for Aliyah
Shlichim - Jewish emissaries sent abroad to Jewish communities
Yishuv - Jewish community of Eretz Yisrael
*************************************************
SELECTIVITY – THE SECULAR ZIONIST WAY
Eretz Yisrael was Divinely given to the Jewish people (2) and every Jew has an equal right to live there. However as we shall see, the secular Zionists thought otherwise.
At the eighteenth Zionist Congress held in Prague in August 1933, Ben-Gurion said:

“Eretz Yisrael today needs not ordinary immigrants, but pioneers. The difference between them is simple – an immigrant comes to take from the land, whereas a pioneer comes to give to the land. Therefore we demand priority for Aliyah to pioneers.”(3)
The question here is how would Ben-Gurion define an “ordinary immigrant” and how a “pioneer”? From his speech, it is obvious that a person working the land on a kibbutz is a pioneer. However, it would almost certainly appear that an old person coming to spend his last years in the Holy Land or even a Yeshiva student would be classed as a mere “ordinary immigrant”!(4)
A few months later in mid-October 1933 a meeting took place between, amongst others, the High Commissioner for Palestine, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Shertok (Sharett). The Minutes of the meeting were written up by Shertok.
During the course of this meeting Ben-Gurion spoke about the three million Jews then living in Poland and stated that

“Palestine offered no solution for all Polish Jews. Immigration into Palestine was necessarily limited; therefore it had to and could be a selected immigration. Zionism was not a philanthropic enterprise, they really wanted here the best type of Jew to develop the Jewish National Home, but they had to be given sufficient scope to bring over people of whom the country was in need.”(5)
The question which remains is who would decide who was “the best type of Jew”? As will soon be seen, such a Jew was someone who was a secular Zionist!
It was a few years later at the 20th Zionist Congress held in Zurich in August 1937, that Weizmann spelled out more specifically what was meant by “selective Aliyah.”

“I told the members of the Royal [Peel] Commission that six million Jews want to go on Aliyah. One of the members asked me ‘Do you think you could bring all of them to Eretz Yisrael?’ On this I answered … that two million young people… we want to save. The old people will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They have already become like dust, economic and moral dust in this cruel world.”(6)
A similar rejection of elderly Jews to go on Aliyah was made by Henry Montor, the Executive Vice-Chairman of the United Jewish Appeal for Refugees towards the beginning of 1940. A ship full of refugees not certified by the Zionist organisations, were on the high seas. Many of the passengers were elderly. The captain of the ship required money to bring them to Eretz Yisrael. Rabbi Baruch Rabinowitz of Maryland took the matter in hand and tried to get the necessary money from Montor to pay the captain. In his long rambling letter of reply, Montor wrote about the Jewish Agency’s policy of “selectivity” – “the choice of young men and women who are trained in Europe for productive purposes either in agriculture or industry.” With regard to the elderly Jews on board this ship, Montor wrote:
“There could be no more deadly ammunition provided to the enemies of Zionism, whether they be in the ranks of the British Government or the Arabs, or even in the ranks of the Jewish people, if Palestine were to be flooded with very old people or with undesirables who would make impossible the conditions of life in Palestine and destroy the prospect of creating such economic circumstances as would insure a continuity of immigration.”(7)
Maybe it would have been appropriate for him to have renamed his organisation “United Jewish Appeal for Selected Refugees”! At least the donors would then have had a better idea of what they were giving money for.
The secular Zionists were not even ashamed to put out a memorandum in which they quite openly had a section “Who to save”. This memorandum (of April/May 1943) was headed that its distribution was “intended for Zionist functionaries only” and it included instructions “not to pass it on to non-Zionist groups who participate in the Working Committee.”(8) Although it came out under the name of A. [Apolinary] Hartglas, it has been suggested that in fact it was Yitzchak Gruenbaum who actually wrote it. (9) Under this section, he wrote
“…. to my sorrow we have to say that if we are able to save only ten thousand people and we need to save fifty thousand [those chosen] should be of use in building up the land and the revival of the nation.… First and foremost one must rescue children since they are the best material for the Yishuv. One must rescue the pioneering youth, especially those who have had training and are idealistically qualified for Zionist work. One should rescue the Zionist functionaries since they deserve something from the Zionist movement for their work…. Pure philanthropic rescue, for example, saving the Jews of Germany, if carried out in an indiscriminate manner, could from a Zionist prospective only cause harm.”(10)
As can be seen, just as with both Weizmann and Montor, Hartglas was not interested in old people coming to Eretz Yisrael. Even amongst the younger generation, he was only interested in those who would work the land - Yeshivah students were of no use to him.
Further exclusions to Aliyah by the secular Zionists were people who were not members of the Zionist camp. Some Jews who succeeded in arriving in Eretz Yisrael in the second half of 1944 gave evidence on this question. Pinchas Gross who had been one of the public workers of Agudat Yisrael in Rumania stated:
“The first principle of the Zionist Aliyah Committee in Bucharest was not to allow members of Agudat Yisrael to go on Aliyah to Eretz Yisrael. This was despite the agreement which had been made before the war between Agudat Yisrael and the Jewish Agency on the Aliyah quotas for members of Agudat Yisrael… Shlichim from the [Aliyah] Committee in Bucharest arrived in Transylvania with large sums of money in order to transfer hundreds of pioneers to Bucharest for the purpose of Aliyah. We also asked for our members the possibility of Aliyah but we were rudely rejected.”(11)
One might think that this money was “Zionist money” and therefore it was proper to reject such a request. However, this was shown not to be the case just a few weeks later when Weissberg who was a member of the Aliyah Committee in Bucharest, gave evidence before the Rescue Committee in Jerusalem. During this evidence he stated:
“It is true that the Agudah was not granted equal rights with regards to receiving money for assistance in Rumania. We did not know that the money which arrived from Eretz Yisrael was money from the Rescue Committee in which all the Yishuv participated. We thought that the money was Jewish Agency money.… I must inform you that help was not given to the pioneers and youth of Agudat Yisrael. We did not know that Agudah is a partner in matters of rescue and in particular in matters of Aliyah. Also regarding the Aliyah of the pioneers of Agudah, we did not know that they were entitled to go on Aliyah, until we arrived in Eretz Yisrael.”(12)
We can thus see that the secular Zionists did nothing to even inform the Agudah what they were entitled to, let alone implement such an entitlement.
There were also others who had been misled in believing that the money was “Zionist money”. For example, the Vishnitzer Rebbe, Rabbi Eliezer Hager, testified that when he asked why the ultra-Orthodox were not receiving any money, received the answer, “This money is Zionist and it is set aside solely for Zionists.”(13)
Pinchas Gross further stated:
“The ultra-Orthodox youth were not at all considered for this [financial] assistance either in their home town or for the possibility of Aliyah. We applied… for assistance for our youth who before the war did a period of Hachshara and were no less fit for Aliyah than other pioneers – but we did not even receive an answer. The excuse was that the money was Zionist money and was solely for them.”(14)
This attitude of the secular Zionists in their use of public money for their kith and kin and of their “priorities” did not pass without comment, even from non-Orthodox sources.
Dr. Judah Leon Magnes in addressing a meeting of the Rescue Committee in July 1944 was very critical of those who wanted:
“first of all to save the Zionists, and afterwards, if possible – also the others, but above all the Zionists. I spoke to somebody…. The man said… we will save our men…. I said to him … the others are also Jews. He said: It is so, they are Jews, but this is a universal argument, a perpetual argument and we will not give in on this.”(15)
Magnes’ comments on the necessity for non-selectivity when doing rescue work are illustrated by the work performed during the Second World War by Recha Sternbuch, who succeeded in rescuing thousands of Jews from the Nazis. Recha was associated with the strictly Orthodox Agudat Yisrael party. However, unlike the secular Zionists, she rescued Jews (and even some non-Jews) regardless of their level of religious observance or Zionist party affiliation.(16)
ZIONISM – AND ONLY THEN JEWISH LIVES
A few months after the beginning of the Second World War the Zionists received entry visas to Eretz Yisrael for 2,900 German Jews. It was necessary to have a meeting with the British Colonial Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald, in connection with these visas and in November 1939, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Shertok met to discuss this question. Ben-Gurion strongly opposed such a meeting with MacDonald and he told Shertok that
“our political future is more important than saving 2,900 Jews.” Shertok, who completely disagreed with Ben-Gurion, commented in his diary, “he [Ben-Gurion] was prepared to forgo them [the 2,900 Jews].”(17)
Even in July 1944, which was towards the end of this war, when the Holocaust was still in full progress and its implementation was already well known, Ben-Gurion still had the same attitude. A meeting of the Executive of the Jewish Agency was held in Jerusalem at the beginning of July 1944. On its agenda was the subject of the rescue of Jews.
Rabbi Baruch Yehoshua Yerachmiel Rabinowicz, the Munkaczer Rebbe in Hungary, was involved in this rescue effort and the question of a meeting with him was mentioned at this Jewish Agency meeting. In answer Ben-Gurion stated that he did not oppose such a meeting, “We must do everything in this matter [of rescue] including things which seem fantastic.” Had Ben-Gurion said no more, it would have been praiseworthy, but he then continued, “But there is one condition: the work will not cause damage to Zionism.”(18)
In a letter to the Israeli daily newspaper “Ha’aretz” in 1983, the historian Professor Yigal Eilam confirmed that this was the attitude of the Zionist leaders during the period of the Holocaust. He wrote:

“The policy of the Zionists during the long period of the Holocaust gave priority to the building up of the land and the establishment of a State, over the saving of Jews…. One already needs to tell these things in a open and direct manner. The Zionists did very little in the saving of Jews, not because they were unable to do more, but because they were concentrating on the Zionist enterprise.”(19)
In a similar vein, in an article by the historian Dina Porat which appeared in “Ha’aretz” in 1991, she wrote
“From the moment that the State became the primary objective, the life of a Jew became secondary in accordance with the principal ‘the State of Israel is above everything’”.(20)
The shortsightedness of the secular Zionist leaders in this matter was written about in 1984 by Rabbi Morris Sherer, the President of Agudat Yisrael, in his comments on the report by Professor Seymour Maxwell Finger entitled “American Jewry during the Holocaust.” Rabbi Sherer commented:
“Alas, they [the secular Zionist leaders] did not perceive how utterly ridiculous and heartless it was for Jewish leaders to concentrate on a postwar homeland, when the people for whom they were seeking this home were being slaughtered like sheep!” (21)
Unlike Ben-Gurion who put Zionism first, and Jewish lives just in second place, the Rabbis of the period immediately put “Pikuach Nefesh” (the saving of lives) first. Sabbath observance is one of the fundamentals of Jewish observance, with the most stringent of punishments for their non-observance, yet despite this, Pikuach Nefesh overrides the Sabbath.(22) In order to save lives during the Holocaust, two leading British Rabbis, Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld and Rabbi Isadore Grunfeld, who were occupied in forging passports to save Jews, continued their work on the Sabbath.(23) Rabbis Boruch Kaplan and Rabbi Alexander Linchner rode around Brooklyn in New York in a car on the Sabbath from house to house collecting money to save Jews.(24) (These actions are normally forbidden on the Sabbath.)
IF NOT ALIYAH, LET THEM PERISH
In 1933, Hitler rose to power and during the subsequent years, more and more draconian measures, such as the Nuremberg laws were enacted against the Jews. In 1938 Hitler marched into Austria to the cheers of the non-Jewish population. The situation for the Jews under Hitler’s domination became unbearable and places of refuge became a grave necessity. It was thus at this period that President Franklin Roosevelt convened a conference of thirty-two nations at the French resort town of Evian to try and find places of refuge for Jews wanting to flee from Hitler. One would naturally have thought that the Zionist leaders of the time would make the most of this opportunity and devote all their time and energy to ensure that successful results would emerge from this Conference. But sadly this was not to be. Already in mid-June 1938, before the opening of the Conference, Dr. Georg Landauer wrote to Dr. Stephen Wise, who was head of the Zionist Organization of America. In it he wrote:
“I am writing this letter to you at the request of Dr. Weizmann, as we are very much concerned in case the issue is presented at the [Evian] Conference in a manner which may harm the work for Palestine. Even if the Conference will not place countries other than Palestine in the front for Jewish immigration, there will certainly be public appeals which will tend to overshadow the importance of Palestine…. We feel all the more concern as it may bind Jewish organisations to collect large sums of money for assisting Jewish refugees, and these collections are likely to interfere with our own campaigns.”(25)
Two weeks later the Jewish Agency Executive met in Jerusalem and opposition to the planned Evian Conference was openly stated.
Yitzchak Gruenbaum said:
“The Evian Conference can be expected to cause us grave damage - Eretz Yisrael could be eliminated as a country for Jewish immigration … [we are] very apprehensive that in this Conference, it could be relegated to the end of the line. We have to prevent this damage… There is the danger that whilst searching for a destination country, some new territory will be found to which Jewish immigration will be directed. We must defend our principle that Jewish settlement can only succeed in Eretz Yisrael and that no other settlement can come into the calculation.”(26)
Menachem Ussishkin then addressed the meeting in a similar vein. The Evian Conference very much worried him and he supported the words of Gruenbaum.
“Mr. Gruenbaum is right when he says that there is the danger that Eretz Yisrael will be removed from the agenda even by the Jews and one should see this as a tremendous blow to us.”(27)
Of course the ideal solution was for Jews to go to Eretz Yisrael. However in view of the then political situation, immigration there was not a feasible proposition. Surely the only question then should have been how to save and help as many Jews as possible. It was this fact that should have been the only concern of the speakers at that Jewish Agency Executive meeting – but it wasn’t!
A few weeks later, Weizmann wrote to Stephen Wise. Towards the beginning of his letter he wrote: “I made arrangements, before leaving for my holiday, to put in a few days at Evian.”(28) If one thinks for a moment about this sentence, one can see that it is horrific. Surely, if there was even the slightest opportunity of saving even one Jew, Weizmann who was the President of the Zionist Organization should have immediately cancelled his personal holiday arrangements and spent all his time at Evian trying to lobby the various delegates to accept Jews in their countries. But what do we see? – he will just before going on holiday “put in a few days at Evian.”
In fact he was later persuaded by his friends not to even “put in a few days” there, to which advice he followed.(29) The reason was stated by Dr. Arthur Ruppin at a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on 21 August. Ruppin stated “we then decided that it would not be to our prestige for Dr. Weizmann to appear in Evian” (30) – the reason being that he would only have been allowed to speak in a sub-committee! Jewish lives were at stake and to worry about prestige!!
One can immediately contrast this attitude with that of the Jewish religious leaders of the time. Rabbi Aharon Kotler had come under some criticism for meeting in the course of his rescue work with Stephen Wise, a leader of the Reform movement. He shrugged such reprobation saying, “I would prostrate myself before the Pope if I knew it would help to save even the fingernail of one Jewish child.”(31)
Unfortunately nothing concrete came out of the Evian Conference. The situation of the Jews in Germany got even worse and on 9 November 1938 there was the infamous Kristallnacht.
A few days later, Weizmann heard that there was a scheme to resettle German Jews in a country other than Eretz Yisrael. This he did not like and he immediately sent off a telegram to stop any financial backing for such a scheme. This telegram was sent to Samuel Vandenbergh in Wassemar:
“Understand you are embarking large financial effort for settlement German Jews. Beg of you to be careful not disperse and dissipate energies which can nowhere be applied with greater effectiveness both immediately and lasting than in Palestine.”(32)
Since at that period emigration to Eretz Yisrael was unfortunately not a practical proposition, Weizmann is effectively saying that rather than immigrate to another country, the Jews must remain in Nazi Germany. We can see that also Ben-Gurion thought on these same lines as the other secular Zionist leaders. It was at this period that Ben-Gurion addressed the Mapai Central Committee. He realised the seriousness of the situation and said
“On these awesome days at the start of the threatened destruction of European Jewry…. If I would know that it would be possible to save all the German [Jewish] children by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, I would choose the second option – since before us is not just these children but the history of the Jewish people.”(33)
At this period, the Germans had already established concentration camps and were sending Jews to them. In order to pre-empt this, it was necessary to find the means of arranging their emigration from Germany. Ben-Gurion, however, felt this could cause a diversion of resources and endanger Zionism. A few days after his above quoted speech to the Mapai Central Committee, he addressed the Executive of the Jewish Agency:

“Zionism now stands in danger.… If the Jews will have to choose on the one hand the refugee question,[namely] saving Jews from concentration camps and on the other hand assisting a national museum in Eretz Yisrael, mercy would decide the matter and all the energy of the [Jewish] people would be diverted to saving Jews in the various countries. Zionism would be struck off the agenda, not only in world opinion in England and America, but also in Jewish public opinion. The existence of Zionism would be at risk if we allow a separation between the refugee problem and the Eretz Yisrael problem.”(34)
NOT ONE PENNY, NOT ONE CENT
The mass extermination of the Jews of Europe was already well known by the end of 1942. Saving Jews could and should have been top priority. But in order to save large numbers of people from extermination costs money – whether normal expenses or money for bribery. Needless to say, the money has to come from somewhere. All the time money was donated by world Jewry to funds such as the Keren Hayesod, the JNF, and so on. It is true that this money had been specifically donated for Eretz Yisrael, but here was a case of Pikuach Nefesh and it would have been quite legitimate, indeed mandatory, to have utilised this money for the saving of Jewish lives. The Jews then living in Eretz Yisrael were even saying so. However Yitzchak Gruenbaum, who was head of the Rescue Committee of the Jewish Agency thought otherwise. In a speech to the Zionist Smaller Actions Committee in January 1943 he expressed his views:
“Meanwhile a mood has begun to sweep over Eretz Yisrael which I think is very dangerous to Zionism…. How is it possible that such a thing can occur in Eretz Yisrael, that in a meeting they will call out to me, ‘If you don’t have any money [for rescuing European Jewry] take the money of the Keren Hayesod, take the money from the bank – there, there is money, in the Keren Hayedod there is money.’ … These days in Eretz Yisrael it is being said, ‘don’t put Eretz Yisrael at the top of your priorities at this difficult time, at the period of a Holocaust and destruction of European Jewry,’ …. I don’t accept such a thing. And when they asked me to give money of the Keren Hayesod to save Diaspora Jewry, I said no and I again said no…. I am not going to defend myself, in the same way that I will not justify or defend myself if they accuse me of murdering my mother …. But I think it is necessary to say here: Zionism is above everything.”(35)
The only consolation from reading Gruenbaum’s speech, is that the Jews living in Eretz Yisrael were demanding the diverting of Keren Hayesod money to rescue efforts, even though this meant that less money would arrive in Eretz Yisrael and could accordingly affect their living standards. In contrast Gruenbaum commented “Zionism is above everything” even though this meant not rescuing European Jewry from the Holocaust.
In his book “Perfidy”, Ben Hecht quoted how Gruenbaum said “No” to the giving of money for rescue activities.(36) In a critical “Analysis” of this book by the American Section of the Executive of the Jewish Agency, they write that this quoted sentence by Ben Hecht “has been most viciously torn out of context. The writer of this Analysis then tries to prove, quoting other parts of Gruenbaum’s speech that he wanted to do everything to save European Jewry. (37) However he conveniently omitted one crucial part of the speech: “Zionism is above everything” – namely we will certainly do everything to save European Jewry provided that it is not at the expense of Zionism!
One might add that in 1961, Gruenbaum gave an interview to the paper “Etgar” from the comfort of his house in Gan Shmuel, in which he repeated these statements he made during the war, without even hinting he had been wrong.
“Interviewer: Was there then no money in the kitty of the Jewish Agency, the JNF, the Keren Hayesod?

Gruenbaum: Yes. Even then the argument went: Isn’t there any money? Take it from the JNF. I said: No! They did not want to forgive me for this and until this day, there are murmurings about this. The money was needed for Zionism.

Interviewer: What is the meaning of “for Zionism” when the saving of lives is at stake? Does Zionism want Jews alive or dead?

Gruenbaum: The saving of life does not override Zion. For Jews, the State is essential. Therefore, in accordance with my manner I said the truth – that is No!”(38)
Gruenbaum went on to say that he then went to South Africa to raise money for rescue purposes. However we all know that the raising of money, especially when one has to travel to another continent takes time and every day taken meant more Jews were being sent to the gas chambers. Surely the correct thing was to immediately take money from these Zionist kitties and if at a later date one succeeded in raising money, one could return it to the Zionist funds.
Even before the war, when Jews were already being persecuted in Germany and Austria, it was widely accepted that money to save Jewish lives came before money for Zionism. In was in late October 1938 that the treasurer of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) said
“The upbuilding of Palestine was all very well, but Jews in Europe were starving and persecuted – and they, JDC felt, had first claim on whatever funds were available.”(39)
ALSO THE BRITISH SECULAR ZIONISTS
Placing Zionism above the saving the lives of Jews was also a phenomenon of the British secular Zionists. Towards the end of 1942, when the Nazi extermination plans became known, British Jewry decided to make representations to the British Government. At a meeting of the British section of the Jewish Agency held in December 1942, the “Nazi Extermination Policy” was on the agenda. Here is an extract from the official minutes of this meeting when discussing this item:
“Dr. Brodetsky … made it quite clear that if Palestine was not properly mentioned then he would not be a member of the Delegation to Mr. Eden….
Lord Melchett said it would be disastrous for any body of Jews to go to Mr. Eden and not put Palestine in the forefront of their plans. Such a body would not represent the views of the Jews either here or elsewhere…..
Mr. Marks said he fully agreed, and if this condition was not satisfied, then he would not be a member of the delegation. Unless Palestine was properly dealt with, they should criticise the delegation up and down the country and cause a revolution inside the Board of Deputies…. The dignity of the Jewish people was at stake and it was only in Palestine that the Jews could get their dignity back.”(40)
As we well see, the above British secular Zionists would only attend a meeting with British Government officials to save Jews from the “Nazi Extermination Policy” if Eretz Yisrael was to be given a prominent place at these meetings. Furthermore it was Jewish lives which were “at stake” and it was no time to worry about “dignity” being “at stake”.
It was at the same period that the British secular Zionists sabotaged negotiations that Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld was making with the British Government for the rescue of the endangered Jews in Nazi Europe. Such rescue of Jews was not a new thing with Rabbi Schonfeld. Just before the Second World War, he had organised Kindertransports and brought over to England from Germany and Austria thousands of children.(41) To accommodate some of them he even utilized his own house with him sleeping in the attic.(42)
Towards the end of 1942, Rabbi Schonfeld organised steps to rescue Jews from Nazi Europe. To this end he worked exceptionally hard to organise wide support for a Motion to be tabled in the British Parliament for the British Government to be prepared to find temporary refuge in its territories or territories under its control for those endangered by the Nazis. Within two weeks he amassed a total of 277 Parliamentary signatures of all parties for this Motion. (43)
One would have thought that the British secular Zionists would have welcomed and co-operated in such an initiative. Sadly this was not the case. In a letter to the “Jewish Chronicle” at that period, Rabbi Schonfeld wrote

“This effort was met by a persistent attempt on the part of Professor Brodetsky [President of the Board of Deputies of British Jews] and some of his colleagues to sabotage the entire move. Without even full knowledge of the details, he and his collaborators asked Members of the House [of Parliament] to desist from supporting the new effort.”(44)
Rabbi Schonfeld further elaborated on this in a letter to “The Times” of London at the time of the Eichmann trial in 1961.
“Already while the Parliamentary motion was gathering momentum voices of dissent were heard from Zionist quarters: ‘Why not Palestine?’ The obvious answers that the most urgent concern was humanitarian and not political, that the Mufti-Nazi alliance ruled out Palestine for the immediate saving of lives….When the next steps were being energetically pursued by over 100 M.Ps [Members of Parliament] and Lords, a spokesman for the Zionists announced that the Jews would oppose the motion on the grounds of its omitting to refer to Palestine …. and thereafter the motion was dead.”(45)
Rabbi Schonfeld’s initiative came up at a meeting of the British Executive of the Jewish Agency in January 1943. At this meeting, Berl Locker said that he and two of his colleagues
“had asked him [Rabbi Schonfeld] to postpone the meeting in the House of Commons and not to continue working off his own bat. They had also pointed out that the resolution which he had proposed did not mention Palestine…. Mr. Locker wondered whether it would be a good thing for him or Dr. Brodetsky to write a letter to the Chief Rabbi, who might be able to do something to stop this mischief.”(46)
What was this “mischief” of Rabbi Dr. Schonfeld’s that these British secular Zionists wanted “stopped”? This “mischief” was his trying to save the lives of Jews who were in Nazi Europe!!
EPILOGUE
In an interview given by someone who worked with the late Klausenberger Rebbe for half a century, he said in answer to a question on the Holocaust,

“When the Sabra and Shatila affair rocked the nation, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv, demanding a commission of inquiry into the government’s lack of response to the massacre of Palestinians by Phalangist militants in Lebanon, the Rebbe couldn’t restrain himself. During a Shiur he delivered in Bnei Brak, he asked pointedly why there was no call for a commission of inquiry into the lack of response of the Zionist leaders in Eretz Yisrael during the murder of millions of Jews in the Nazi-occupied lands. They had ignored the matter completely.”(47)
REFERENCES
1) Rabbi Moshe Grylak, “How do they “know” it all?” Mishpacha (English edition), (Monsey, NY: Tikshoret VeChinuch Dati-Yehudi), 12 January 2005, pp.6-7.
2) e.g. Genesis chap.12 verse 7.
3) Stenographisches Protokoll XVIII Zionistenkongresses, [Official Minutes of the 18th Zionist Congress], (London: Zentralbureau der Zionistischen Organisation), p.219.
4) David Kranzler, Thy Brother’s Blood, (New York: Mesorah Publications, 1987), pp.61-62, 241, 244.
5) Minutes of Interview with His Excellency the High Commissioner, 17 October 1933, pp.4-5 (Labour Archives – Lavon Institute IV-104-49-2-64. There is also a copy in Ben-Gurion Archives). At a later date Ben-Gurion wrote up these minutes (in Hebrew) in his memoirs without any suggestion that they were not what he had said at this meeting, (David Ben-Gurion, Memoirs, vol.1, (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1971), p.672).
6) Official Minutes of the 20th Zionist Congress, (Jerusalem: Executive of the Zionist Organisation and the Jewish Agency), pp.32-33.
7) Montor to Rabinowitz, 1 February 1940, pp.2, 4, (Jabotinsky Archives, HT-10/16).
8) A. Hartglas, Comments concerning assistance and rescue, (April/May 1943 – possibly 24 April 1943), p.1, (CZA S26/1306 [previous no. S26/1232]).
9) Aryeh Morgenstern, “Vaad hahatzalah hameuchad .…,” Yalkut Moreshet, (Tel Aviv: Moreshet), vol.13, June 1971, p.95 fn.67.
10) Hartglas, op. cit., p.3.
11) Evidence of Pinchas Gross, a public worker of Agudat Yisrael of Rumania, given in Tel Aviv on 27 July 1944, p.2, (CZA S26/1189 [previous no. S26/1079]).
12) Minutes, Presidium of the Rescue Committee, Jerusalem, 25 August 1944, (CZA S26/1189 [previous no. S26/1079]).
13) Evidence of Vishnitzer Rebbe taken in Tel Aviv in April 1944, p.1, (CZA S26/1189 [previous no, S26/1079]).
14) Pinchas Gross, op. cit.
15) Minutes, Rescue Committee, Jerusalem, 14 July 1944, p.7, (CZA S26/1327 [previous no. S26/1238aleph]).
16) Kranzler, op. cit., pp194-95.
17) Moshe Shertok Handwritten diary, 13 November 1939, p.66, (CZA S25/198/3. [Shertok also made a handwritten copy of his own diary CZA A245/14]
18) Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive. Jerusalem, 2 July 1944. p.8, (CZA).
19) Yigal Eilam, Letters to the Editor, Haaretz, (Tel Aviv), 15 April 1983, p.24.
20) Dina Porat, “Manipulatzit Haadmorim,” Haaretz, (Tel Aviv), 12 April 1991, p.3b.
21) Seymour Maxwell Finger, American Jewry during the Holocaust, (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, second printing May 1984), Comment by Rabbi Morris Sherer, p.16.
22) Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim, chap.328, para.2.
23) S. Fordsham, Inbox, Mishpacha (English edition), op. cit., 9 May 2007, p.10
24) Kranzler, op. cit., p.6.
25) Landauer to Wise, 13 June 1938, p.1, (CZA S53/1552aleph).
26) Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive, Jerusalem, 26 June 1938, p.6, (CZA)
27) Ibid., p.7.
28) Weizmann to Wise. 14 July 1938, p.1, (CZA Z4/17198).
29) Ibid., p.2.
30) Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive, Jerusalem, 21 August 1938, p.7. (CZA).
31) Kranzler, op. cit., p.146.
32) Telegram, Weizmann to Vandenburgh, 16 November 1938, (CZA Z4/17335).
33) Minutes, Mapai Central Committee, 7 December 1938, p.41, (Labour Party Archives – Bet Berl 2-23-1938-21 bet).
34) Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive, Jerusalem, 11 December 1938, p.4, (CZA)
35) Minutes, Zionist Smaller Actions Committee, 18 January 1943, pp.12-13, (CZA).
36) Ben Hecht, Perfidy, (New York: Julian Messner, 1962), p.50.
37) The American Section of the Executive of the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency. Ben Hecht’s ‘Perfidy’ - An analysis of his rewriting of history, (New York: [s.n.], 1962), p.9.
38) “Mi asham b’hafkara,” conversation with Yitzchak Gruenbaum, Etgar, (Tel Aviv: Mercaz Hapeula Hashemit), no.8, 29 June 1961, p.5.
39) Yehuda Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper, (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), p.255.
40) Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive, London, 21 December 1942, pp.2-3. (CZA Z4/302/26).
41) e.g. David Kranzler. Holocaust Hero, (New Jersey: Ktav, 2004).
42) Ibid., pp.38-39.
43) Solomon Schonfeld, Letters to the Editor, The Times, (London), 6 June 1961, p.13.
44) Solomon Schonfeld, Letters to the Editor, The Jewish Chronicle, (London), 29 January 1943, p.5.
45) Schonfeld, The Times, op. cit.
46) Minutes, Jewish Agency Executive, London, 21 January 1943, (CZA Z4/302/26).

Comment by Harry Wood on 9/16/09 at 4:27 am

Here is some material that supports the primacy of Eretz Yisrael.

Continuous Jewish Presence in the Holy Land
The Jews were never a people without a homeland. Having been robbed of their land, Jews never ceased to give expression to their anguish at their deprivation and to pray for and demand its return. Throughout the nearly two millennia of dispersion, Palestine remained the focus of the national culture. Every single day in all those seventy generations, devout Jews gave voice to their attachment to Zion.

The consciousness of the Jew that Palestine was his country was not a theoretical exercise or an article of theology or a sophisticated political outlook. It was in a sense all of these—and it was a pervasive and inextricable element in the very warp and woof of his daily life. Jewish prayers, Jewish literature, are saturated with the love and the longing for and the sense of belonging to Palestine. Except for religion and the love between the sexes, there is no theme so pervasive in the literature of any other nation, no theme has yielded so much thought and feeling and expression, as the relationship of the Jew to Palestine in Jewish literature and philosophy. And in his home on family occasions, in his daily customs on weekdays and Shabbat, when he said grace over meals, when he got married, when he built his house, when he said words of comfort to mourners, the context was always his exile, his hope and belief in the return to Zion, and the reconstruction of his homeland. So intense was this sense of affinity that, if in the vicissitudes of exile he could not envisage that restoration during his, lifetime, it was a matter of faith that with the coming of the Messiah and the Resurrection he would be brought back to the land after his death.

Over the centuries, through the pressures of Persecution—of social and economic discrimination, of periodic death and destruction—the area of exile widened. Hounded and oppressed, the Jews moved from country to country. They carried Eretz Israel with them wherever they went. Jewish festivals remained tuned to the circumstances and conditions of the Jewish homeland. Whether they remained in warm Italy or Spain, whether they found homes in cold Eastern Europe, whether they found their way to North America or came to live in the southern hemisphere where the seasons are reversed, the Jews celebrated the Palestinian spring and its autumn and winter. They prayed for dew in May and for rain in October. On Passover they ceremonially celebrated the liberation from Egyptian bondage, the original national establishment in the Promised Land-and they conjured up the vision of a new liberation.

Never in the periods of greatest persecution did the Jews as a people renounce that faith. Never in the periods of greatest peril to their very existence physically, and the seeming impossibility of their ever regaining the land of Israel, did they seek a substitute for the homeland. Time after time throughout the centuries, there arose bold spirits who believed, or claimed, they had a plan, or a divine vision, for the restoration of the Jewish people to Palestine. Time after time a wave of hope surged through the ghettos of Europe at the news of some new would-be Messiah. The Jews’ hopes were dashed and the dream faded, but never for a day did they relinquish their bond with their country.

There were Jews who fell by the wayside. Given a choice under torture, or during periods of civic equality and material prosperity, they forsook their religion or turned their backs on their historic country. But the people, the land—as it was called for all those centuries: simply Ha’aretz, the Land—remained the one and only homeland, unchanging and irreplaceable. If ever a right has been maintained by unrelenting insistence on the claim, it was the Jewish right to Palestine.

Widely unknown, its significance certainly long ungrasped, is the no less awesome fact that throughout the eighteen centuries between the fall of the Second Jewish Commonwealth and the beginnings of the Third, in our time, the tenacity of Jewish attachment to the land of Israel found continuous expression in the country itself. It was long believed—and still is—even in some presumably knowledgeable quarters, that throughout those centuries there were no Jews in Palestine. The popular conception has been that all the Jews who survived the Destruction of 70 C.E. went into exile and that their descendants began coming back only 1,800 years later. This is not a fact.1 One of the most astonishing elements in the history of the Jewish people—and of Palestine—is the continuity, in the face of the circumstances, of Jewish life in the country.

It is a continuity that waxed and waned, that moved in kaleidoscopic shifts, in response to the pressures of the foreign imperial rulers who in bewildering succession imposed themselves on the country. It is a pattern of stubborn refusal, in the face of oppression, banishment, and slaughter, to let go of an often tenuous hold in the country, a determined digging in sustained by a faith in the ultimate full restoration, of which every Jew living in the homeland saw himself as caretaker and precursor.

This people that was “not here”—the Jewish community in Palestine, its history continuous and purposeful—in fact played a unique role in Jewish history. Too often lacking detail and depth, the story of the Jewish presence in Palestine, threaded together from a colourful variety of sources and references, pagan and Christian, Jewish and Moslem, spread over the whole period between the second and the nineteenth centuries, is a fascinating and compelling counterpoint to the, dominating theme of the longing-in-exile.

Only when they had crushed the revolt led by Simon Bar Kochba in 135 C.E.—over sixty years after the destruction of the Second Temple—did the Romans make a determined effort to stamp out Jewish identity in the Jewish homeland. They initiated the long process of laying the country waste. It was then that Jerusalem, “plowed over” at the order of Hadrian, was renamed Aelia Capitolina, and the country, denied of the name Judea, was renamed Syria Palestina. In the revolt itself—the fiercest and longest revolt faced by the Roman Empire—580,000 Jewish soldiers perished in battle, and an untold number of civilians died of starvation and pestilence; 985 villages were destroyed.2

Yet even after this further disaster, Jewish life remained active and productive. Banished from Jerusalem, it now centred on Galilee. Refugees returned; Jews who had been sold into slavery were redeemed. In the centuries after Bar Kochba and Hadrian, some of the most significant creations of the Jewish spirit were produced in Palestine. It was then that the Mishnah was completed and the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled, and the bulk of the community farmed the land.

The Roman Empire adopted Christianity in the fourth century; henceforth its policy in Palestine was governed by a new purpose: to prevent the birth of any glimmer of renewed hope of Jewish independence. It was after all, basic to Christian theology that loss of national independence was an act of God designed to punish the Jewish people for their rejection of Christ. The work of the Almighty had to be helped along. Some emperors were more lenient than others, but the minimal criteria of oppression and restriction were nearly always maintained.

Nevertheless, even the meagre surviving sources Name forty-three Jewish communities in Palestine in the sixth century: twelve towns on the coast, in the Negev, and east of the Jordan, and thirty-one villages in Galilee and in the Jordan valley.

The Jews’ thoughts at every opportunity turned to the hope of national restoration. In the year 351, they launched yet another revolt, provoking heavy retribution When, in 438, the Empress Eudocia removed the ban on Jews’ praying at the Temple site, the heads of the Community in Galilee issued a call “to the great and mighty people of the Jews” which began: “Know that the end of the exile of our people has come”!3

In the belief of restoration to come, the Jews made an alliance with the Persians who invaded Palestine in 614, fought at their side, overwhelmed the Byzantine garrison in Jerusalem, and for three years governed the city.4 But the Persians made their peace with the Emperor Heraclius. Christian rule was re-established, and those Jews who survived the consequent slaughter were once more banished from the city. A new chapter of vengeful Byzantine persecution was enacted, but as it happened, it was short-lived. A new force was on the march. In 632, the Moslem Arab invaders came and conquered. By the year 640, Palestine had become a part of the emerging Moslem empire.

The 450-year Moslem rule in Palestine was first under the Omayyads (predominantly Arab), who governed tolerantly from Damascus; then under the Abbasid dynasty (predominantly Turkish), in growing anarchy, from Baghdad; and finally, in alternating tolerance and persecution, under the Fatimids from Cairo. The Moslem Arabs took from the Jews the lands to which they had clung for twenty generations after the fall of the Jewish state. The Crusaders, who came after them and ruled Palestine or parts of it for the better part of two centuries, massacred the Jews in the cities. Yet, under the Moslems openly, under the Crusaders more circumspectly, the Jewish community of Palestine, in circumstances it is impossible to understand or to analyse, held on by the skin of its teeth, somehow survived, and worked, and fought. Along with the Arabs and the Turks, the Jews were among the most vigorous defenders of Jerusalem against the Crusaders. When the city fell, the Crusaders gathered the Jews in a synagogue and burned them. The Jews almost single-handedly defended Haifa against the Crusaders, holding out in the besieged town for a whole month (June-July 1099). At this time, a full thousand years after the fall of the Jewish state, there were Jewish communities all over the country. Fifty of them are known to us; they include Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramleh, Ashkelon, Caesarea, and Gaza.

During more than six centuries of Moslem and Crusader rule, periods of tolerance or preoccupied indifference flickered fitfully between periods of concentrated persecution. Jews, driven from the villages, fled to the towns. Surviving massacre in the inland towns, they made their way to the coast. When the coastal towns were destroyed, they succeeded somehow in returning inland. Throughout those centuries, war was almost continuous, whether between Cross and Crescent or among the Moslems themselves. The Jewish community, now heavily reduced, maintained itself in stiff-necked endurance.

Moslem and Christian records report that they pursued a variety of occupations. The Arab geographer Abu Abdallah Mohammed—known as Mukadassi—writing in the tenth century, describes the Jews as the assayers of coins, the dyers, the tanners, and the bankers in the community. In his time, a period of Fatimid tolerance, many Jewish officials were serving the regime. While they were not allowed to hold land in the Crusader period, the Jews controlled much of the commerce of the coastal towns during times of quiescence. Most of them were artisans: glassblowers in Sidon, furriers and dyers in Jerusalem.

In the midst of all their vicissitudes and in the face of all change, Hebrew scholarship and literary creation went on flourishing. It was in this period that the Hebrew grammarians at Tiberias evolved their Hebrew vowel-pointing system, giving form to the modem study of the language; and a large volume of piyutim and midrashim had their origin in Palestine in those days.

After the Crusaders, there came a period of wild disturbance as first the Kharezmians—an Asian tribe appearing fleetingly on the stage of history—and then the Mongol hordes, invaded Palestine. They sowed new ruin and destruction throughout the country. Its cities were laid waste, its lands were burned, its trees were uprooted, the younger part of its population was destroyed.

Yet the dust of the Mongol hordes, defeated by the Mamluks, had hardly settled when the Jerusalem community, which had been all but exterminated, was re-established. This was the work of the famous, scholar Moses ben Nachman (Nachmanides, the “RaMbaN’). From the day in 1267 when RaMbaN settled in the city, there was a coherent Jewish community in the Old City of Jerusalem until it was driven out, temporarily as it proved, by the British-led Arab Legion from Transjordan nearly seven hundred years later.

For two and a half centuries (1260-1516), Palestine was part of the Empire of the Mamluks, Moslems of Turkish-Tartar origin who ruled first from Turkey, then from Egypt. War and uprisings, bloodshed and destruction, flowed in almost incessant waves across their domain. Though Palestine was not always involved in the strife, it was frequently enough implicated to hasten the process of physical destruction. Jews (and Christians) suffered persecution and humiliation. Yet toward the end of the rule of the Mamluks, at the close of the fifteenth century, Christian and Jewish visitors and pilgrims noted the presence of substantial Jewish communities. Even the meagre records that survived report nearly thirty Jewish urban and rural communities at, the opening of the sixteenth century.

By now nearly fifteen hundred years had passed since the destruction of the Jewish state. Jewish life in Palestine had survived Byzantine ruthlessness, had endured the discriminations, persecutions, and massacres of the variegated Moslem sects-Arab Omayyads, Abbasids, and Fatimids, the Turkish Seljuks, and the Mamluks. Jewish life had by some historic sleight of hand outlived the Crusaders, its mortal enemy. It had survived Mongol barbarism.

More than an expression of self-preservation, Jewish life had a purpose and a mission. It was the trustee and the advance guard of restoration. At the close of the fifteenth century, the pilgrim Arnold Van Harff reported that he had found many Jews in Jerusalem and that they spoke Hebrew. They told another traveller, Felix Fabri, that they hoped soon to resettle the Holy Land.5

During the same period, Martin Kahatnik (who did not like Jews), visiting Jerusalem during his pilgrimage, exclaimed:
 

The heathens oppress them at their pleasure. They know that the Jews think and say that this is the Holy Land that was promised to them. Those of them who live here are regarded as holy by the other Jews, for in spite of all the tribulations and the agonies they suffer at the hands of the heathen, they refuse to leave the place.6
At the height of their splendour, in the first generations after their conquest of Palestine in 1516, the Ottoman Turks were tolerant and showed a friendly face to the Jews. During the sixteenth century, there developed a new effervescence in the life of the Jews in the country. Thirty communities, urban and rural, are recorded at the opening of the Ottoman era. They include Haifa, Sh’chem, Hebron, Ramleh, Jaffa, Gaza, Jerusalem, and many in the north. Their centre was Safed; its community grew quickly. It became the largest in Palestine and assumed the recognised spiritual leadership of the whole Jewish world. The luster of the cultural “golden age” that now, developed shone over the whole country and has inspired Jewish spiritual life to the present day. It was there and then that a phenomenal group of mystic philosophers evolved the mysteries of the Cabala. It was at that time and in the inspiration of the place that Joseph Caro compiled the Shulhan Aruch, the formidable codification of Jewish observance, which largely guides orthodox custom to this day. Poets and writers flourished. Safed achieved a fusion of scholarship and piety with trade, commerce, and agriculture. In the town, the Jews developed a number of branches of trade, especially in grain, spices, and cloth. They specialised once again in the dyeing trade. Lying halfway between Damascus and Sidon on the Mediterranean coast, Safed gained special importance in the commercial relations in the area. The 8,000 or 10,000 Jews in Safed in 1555 grew to 20,000 or 30,000 by the end of the century.7
In the neighbouring Galilean countryside, a number of Jewish villages—from Turkish sources we know of ten of them—continued to occupy themselves with the production of wheat and barley and cotton, vegetables and olives, vines and fruit, pulse and sesame.8

The recurrent references in the sketchy records that have survived suggest that in some of those Galilean villages—such as Kfar Alma, Ein Zeitim., Biria, Pekiin, Kfar Hanania, Kfar Kana, Kfar Yassif—the Jews, against all logic and in defiance of the pressures and exactions and confiscations of generation after generation of foreign conquerors, had succeeded in clinging to the land for fifteen centuries.9 Now for several decades of benevolent Ottoman rule, the Jewish communities flourished in village and town.

The history of the second half of the sixteenth century illustrates the dynamism of the Palestinian Jews their prosperity, their progressiveness, and their subjugation. In 1577, a Hebrew printing press was established in Safed. The first press in Palestine, it was also the first in Asia. In 1576, and again in 1577, the Sultan Murad III, the first anti-Jewish Ottoman ruler, ordered the deportation of 1,000 wealthy Jews from Safed, though they had not broken any laws or transgressed in any way. They were needed by Murad to strengthen the economy of another of the Sultan’s provinces—Cyprus. It is not known whether they were in fact deported or reprieved.10

The honeymoon period between the Ottoman Empire and the Jews lasted only as long as the empire flourished. With the beginning and development of its long decline in the seventeenth century, oppression and anarchy made growing inroads into the country, and Jewish life began to follow a confused pattern of persecutions, prohibitions, and ephemeral prosperity. Prosperity grew rarer, persecutions and oppressions became the norm. The Ottomans, to whom Palestine was merely a source of revenue, began to exploit the Jews’ fierce attachment to Palestine. They were consequently made to pay a heavy price for living there. They were taxed beyond measure and were subjected to a system of arbitrary fines. Early in the seventeenth century, two Christian travellers, Johann van Egmont and John Hayman, could say of the Jews in Safed: “Life here is the poorest and most miserable that one can imagine.” The Turks so oppressed them, they wrote, that “they pay for the very air they breathe.“11

Again and again during the three centuries of Turkish Decline, the Jews so lived and bore themselves that even hostile Christian travellers were moved to express their astonishment at their pertinacity—despite suffering, humiliation, and violence-in clinging to, their homeland

The Jews of Jerusalem, wrote the Jesuit Father Michael Naud in 1674, were agreed about one thing: “paying heavily to the Turk for their right to stay here.—They prefer being prisoners in Jerusalem to enjoying the freedom they could acquire elsewhere… The love of the Jews for the Holy Land, which they lost through their betrayal [of Christ], is unbelievable. Many of them come from Europe to find a little comfort, though the yoke is heavy.“12

And not in Jerusalem alone. Even as anarchy spread over the land, marauding raids by Bedouins from the desert increased, and the roads became further infested with bandits, and while the Sultan’s men, when they appeared at all, came only to collect both the heavy taxes directed against all and the special taxes exacted from the Jews, Jewish communities still held on all over the country. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, travellers reported them in Hebron (where, in addition to the regular exactions, threats of deportation, arrests, violence, and bloodshed, the Jews suffered the gruesome tribulations of a blood libel in 1775); Gaza, Ramleh, Sh’chem, Safed (where the community had lost its pre-eminence and its prosperity); Acre, Sidon, Tyre, Haifa, Irsuf, Caesarea, and El Arish; And Jews continued to live and till the soil in Galilean villages.

But as the country itself declined and the bare essentials of life became inaccessible, the Jewish community also contracted. By the end of the eighteenth century, historians’ estimates put their number at between 10,000 and 15,000. Their national role, however, was never blurred. When the Jews in Palestine had no economic basis, the Jews abroad regarded it as their minimum national duty to insure their physical maintenance, and a steady stream of emissaries brought back funds from the Diaspora. In the long run, this had a degrading effect on those Jews who came to depend on these contributions for all their needs. But the significance of the motive and spirit of the aid is not lessened: the Jews in Palestine were regarded as the guardians of the Jewish heritage. Nor can one ignore the endurance and pertinacity of the recipients, in the face of oppression and humiliation and the threat of physical violence, in their role of “guardians of the walls.”

However determined the Jews in Palestine might have been, however deep their attachment to the land, and however strong their sense of mission in living in it, the historic circumstances should surely have ground them out of physical existence long before the onset of modem times.

Merely to recall the succession of conquerors who passed through the country and who oppressed or slaughtered Jews, deliberately or only incidentally to their struggle for power or survival, raises the question of how any Jews survived at all, let alone in coherent communities. Pagan Romans, Byzantine Christians, the various Moslem imperial dynasties (especially during the Seljuk Turkish interlude, before the Crusaders), the Crusaders themselves, the Kharezmians and the Mongols, the Ottoman Turks-all these passed over the body of the Jewish community. How then did a Jewish community survive at all? How did it survive as an arm of the Jewish people, consciously vigilant for the day of national restoration?

The answer to these questions reflects another aspect of the phenomenal affinity of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. In spite of bans and prohibitions, in spite of the most improbable and unpromising circumstances, there was never a period throughout centuries of exile without Jewish immigration to Palestine. Aliyah (“going up”) was a deliberate expression and demonstration of the national affinity to the land. A constant inflow gave life and often vigour to the Palestinian community. By present-day standards, the numbers were not great. By the standards of those ages, and in the circumstances of the times, the significance and weight of that stream of aliyah—almost always an individual undertaking—matches the achievements of the modem Zionist movement.

Modern Zionism did indeed start the count of the waves of immigration after 1882, but only the frame and the capacity for organisation were new: The living movement to the land had never ceased.

The surviving records are meagre. There was much movement during the days of the Moslem conquest. Tenth century appeals for aliyah by the Karaite leaders In Jerusalem have survived. There were periods when immigration was forbidden absolutely; no Jew could “legally” or safely enter Palestine while the Crusaders ruled. Yet precisely in that period, Yehuda Halevi, the greatest Hebrew poet of the exile, issued a call to the Jews to emigrate, and many generations drew active inspiration from his teaching. (He himself died soon after his arrival in Jerusalem in 1141, crushed, according to legend, by a Crusader’s horse.) A group of immigrants who came from Provence in France in the middle of the twelfth century must have been scholars of great repute, for they are believed to have been responsible for changing the Eretz Israel tradition of observing the New Year on only one day; ever since their time, the observance has lasted two days. There are slight allusive records of other groups who came after them. Among the immigrants who began arriving when the Crusaders’ grip on Palestine had been broken by Saladin was an organised group of three hundred rabbis who came from France and England in 1210 to strengthen especially the Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Acre, and Ramleh. Their work proved vain. A generation later came the destruction by the Mongol invaders. Yet no sooner had they passed than a new immigrant, Moses Nachmanides, came to Jerusalem, finding only two Jews, a dyer and his son; but he and the disciples who answered his call re-established the community.

Though Yehuda Halevi and Nachmanides were the most famous medieval preachers of aliyah, they were not the only ones. From the twelfth century onward, the surviving writings of a long series of Jewish travellers described their experiences in Palestine. Some them remained to settle; all propagated the national duty and means of individual redemption of the “going up” to live in the homeland.

The concentrated scientific horror of the Holocaust in twentieth-century Europe has perhaps weakened the memory of the experience of the people to whom, year after year, generation after generation, Europe was purgatory. Those, after all, were the Middle Ages; those were the centuries when the Jews of Europe were subjected to the whole range of persecution, from mass degradation to death after torture. For a Jew who could not and would not hide his identity to make his way from his own familiar city or village to another, from the country whose language he knew through countries foreign to him, meant to expose himself almost certainly to suspicion, insult, and humiliation, probably to robbery and violence, possibly to murder. All travel was hazardous. For a Jew in the thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth century (and even later) to set out on the odyssey from Western Europe to Palestine was a heroic undertaking, which often ended in disaster. To the vast mass of Jews sunk in misery, whose joy it was to turn their faces eastward three times daily and pray for the return to Zion, that return in their lifetime was a dream of heaven.

There were periods, moreover, when the Popes ordered their adherents to prevent Jewish travel to Palestine. For most of the fifteenth century, the Italian maritime states denied Jews the use of ships for getting to Palestine, thus forcing them to abandon their project or to make the whole journey by a roundabout land route, adding to the initial complications of their travel the dangers of movement through Germany, Poland, and southern Russia, or through the inhospitable Balkans and a Black Sea crossing before reaching the comparative safety of Turkey. In 1433, shortly after the ban was imposed, there came a vigorous call by Yitzhak Tsarefati, urging the Jews to come by way of then tolerant Turkey. Immigration of the bolder spirits continued. Often the journey took years, while immigrant worked at the intermediate stopping places to raise the expenses for the next leg of his journey or, as sometimes happened, while he invited the local rich Jews to finance his journey and to share vicariously in the mitzvah of his aliyah.

Siebald Rieter and Johann Tucker, Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem in 1479, wrote down the route and stopping places of a Jew newly arrived as an immigrant from Germany. He had set out from Nuremberg and travelled to Posen (about 300 miles). Then Posen [Poznan] to Lublin 250 miles Lublin to Lemberg [Lvov] 120 miles Lemberg to Khotin 150 miles Khotin to Akerman 150 miles Akerman to Samsun 6 days Samsun to Tokat 6-7 days Tokat to Aleppo 15 days Aleppo to Damascus 7 days Damascus to Jerusalem 6 days

Ottoman Sultans had encouraged Jewish immigration into their dominions. With their conquest of Palestine, its gates too were opened. Though conditions in Europe made it possible for only a very few Jews to “get up and go,” a stream of immigrants flowed to Palestine at once. Many who came were refugees from the Inquisition. They comprised a great variety of occupations; they were scholars and artisans and merchants. They filled all the existing Jewish centres. That flow of Jews from abroad injected a new pulse into Jewish life in Palestine in the sixteenth century.

As the Ottoman regime deteriorated, the conditions of life in Palestine grew harsher, but waves of immigration continued. In the middle of the seventeenth century, there passed through the Jewish people an electric current of self-identification and intensified affinity with its homeland. For the first time in Eastern Europe, which had given shelter to their ancestors fleeing from persecution in the West, rebelling Cossacks in 1648 and 1649 subjected the Jews to massacre as fierce as any in Jewish history. Impoverished and helpless, the survivors fled to the nearest refuge—now once more in Western Europe. Again the bolder spirits among them made their way to Palestine.

That same generation was electrified once more by the advent of Shabbetai Zevi, the self-appointed Messiah whose imposture and whose following among the Jews in both the East and the West was made possible only by the unchanged aspirations of the Jews for restoration. The dream of being somehow wafted to the land of Israel under the banner of the Messiah evaporated, but again there were determined men who somehow found the means and made their way to Palestine, by sea or by stages, overland through Turkey and Syria.

The degeneration of the central Ottoman regime, the anarchy in the local administration, the degradations and exactions, plagues and pestilence, and the min of the country, continued in the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century. The masses of Jews in Europe were living in greater poverty than ever. Yet immigrants, now also in groups, continued to come. Surviving letters tell about the adventures of groups who came from Italy, Morocco, and Turkey. Other letters report on the steady stream of Hasidim, disciples of the Baal Shem-Tov, from Galicia and Lithuania, proceeding during the whole of the second half of the eighteenth century.

It is clear that by now the state of the country was exacting a higher toll in lives than could be replaced by immigrants. But the immigrants who came shut their eyes to the physical ruin and squalor, accepted with love every hardship and tribulation and danger. Thus, in 1810, the disciples of the Vilna Goan who had just emigrated, wrote:
 

Truly, how marvellous it is to five in the good country. Truly, how wonderful it is to love our country.—Even in her ruin there is none to compare with her, even in her desolation she is unequalled, in her silence there is none like her. Good are her ashes and her stones.13
These immigrants of 1810 were yet to suffer unimagined trials. Earthquake, pestilence, and murderous onslaught by marauding brigands were part of the record of their lives. But they were one of the last links in the long chain bridging the gap between the exile of their people and its independence. They or their children lived to see the beginnings of the modern restoration of the country. Some of them lived to meet one of the pioneers of restoration, Sir Moses Montefiore, the Jewish philanthropist from Britain who, through the greater part of the nineteenth century, conceived and pursued a variety of practical plans to resettle the Jews in their homeland. With him began the gray dawn of reconstruction. Some of the children of those immigrants lived to share in the enterprise and purpose and daring that in 1869 moved a group of seven Jews in Jerusalem to emerge from the Old City and set up the first housing project outside its walls. Each of them built a house among the rocks and the jackals in the wilderness that ultimately came to be called Nahlat Shiva (Estate of the Seven). Today it is the heart of downtown Jerusalem, bounded by the Jaffa Road, between Zion Square and the Bank of Israel.
In 1878, another group made its way across the mountains of Judea to set up the first modern Jewish agricultural settlement at Petah Tikva, which thus became the “mother of the settlements.” Eight years earlier, the first modern agricultural school in Palestine had been opened at Mikveh Yisrael near Jaffa. As we see it now—and they in 1810 would not have been surprised, for this was their faith and this was their purpose—the long vigil was coming to an end.

1. James Parkes, the Christian scholar who has done much to explode the myth, writes: “[The Jews’] real title deeds were written by the ... heroic endurance of those who had maintained a Jewish presence in the Land through the centuries, and in spite of every discouragement.” Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine (London, 1970), p. 266.

2. Dio Cassius, History of the Romans, Theodor Monunsen, Provinces of the Roman Empire. Both quoted in Jacob De Haas, History of Palestine, the Last Two Thousand Years (New York, 1934). p. 52.

3. Avraham Yaari, Igrot Eretz Yisrael (Tel Aviv, 1943), p. 46.

4. A. Malmat, H. Tadmor, M. Stem, S. Safrai, Toledot Am Yisrael Bi’mei Kedem (Tel Aviv, 1969), p. 348. Recent archaeological finds in Jerusalem suggest that the period was five years.

5. The Pilgrimage of Arnold van Harff (London, 1946), p. 217; The Wanderings of Felix Fabri (London, 1807), p. 130.

6. Justin V. Prasek, Martin Kabatnik (Prague). Quoted in Michael Ish-Shalom, Masaei Notzrim Beeretz Yisrael (Tel Aviv, 1965), p. 265.

7. H. H. Ben-Sasson, Toledot Hayehudim Bi’mei Habeinayim (Tel Aviv, 1969), pp. 239-240.

8. Bernard Lewis, Notes and Documents from the Turkish Archives (Jerusalem, 1952), p. 15ff

9. Yitzhak Ben-Zwi, She’ar Yashuv (Jerusalem, 1966), p. 10.

10. Lewis, pp. 28-33.

11. Travels (London, 1759), quoted by Ish-Shalom, p. 388.

12. R. P. Michael Naud, Voyage Nouveau de la Terre-Sainte (Paris, 1702), pp. 58, 563.

13. Avraham Yaari, p. 330.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 9/16/09 at 7:21 pm

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