STANDING BY OUR VALUES

ELANA MARYLES SZTOKMAN

US PRESIDENT Donald Trump. (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Since Trump took office, it has been difficult for me to be an American-Israeli. Watching fellow Israelis and American-Israelis cheer for a man who has no moral compass or capacity for empathy has been chilling. Moreover, the realization that so many members of my tribe care more about soulless buildings – like, say, an embassy – than they do about real people’s lives has been crushing.

This week, though, as I observe the American government putting children into special toddler-prisons at the American border, these sentiments took perhaps the darkest turn yet. I realized, listening to all the rhetoric surrounding this cruel and inhumane treatment of families, that it’s quite possible that the Trump administration is taking notes from the Netanyahu administration.

Specifically, when US Homeland Security Department Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was asked last week about the policy at the National Sheriffs Association annual conference in New Orleans, she said, “We will not apologize.”

Sound familiar? “Never apologize” was the campaign slogan of Education Minister Naftali Bennett. His party did extremely well thanks to that slogan. After all, what a relief, you know, to be able to live life without ever having to apologize. Do what you want to whomever you want and never look back. What power! It worked for Bennett and now the Americans are trying it out.

This unyielding, detached, heartless bravado that the Israeli government has perfected and that the Americans are currently employing with children at the border has been echoed throughout this catastrophe.

Not caring about other people is the actual policy. For instance, Anne Chandler, who runs the Children’s Border Project, was asked about this by Texas Monthly: “So I make sure I understand: the parents come in and say, ‘We’re persecuted’, and then their child or children are taken away and they’re in lockup for at least six weeks away from the kids and often don’t know where the kids are. Is that what’s happening under zero tolerance?” She responded unequivocally, “We don’t care why you’re afraid.

We don’t care if it’s religion, political, gangs, anything. For all asylum seekers, you are going to be put in jail, in a detention center, and you’re going to have your children taken away from you. That’s the policy.”

The policy of “we don’t care why you’re afraid” is directly connected to “we will not apologize.” It is a process of giving oneself permission to shut off care and compassion for another human being. It is very convenient, and it allows for “policies” that are divorced from people’s real lives. It allows decision-makers to officially dehumanize and thus delegitimize the other, and instead to stand behind cold, calculated “policy.”

Jews should be particularly concerned about this. Even though it seems that at least one Jew is directly at the center of the creation of this policy – the violently anti-immigrant member of the tribe Stephen Miller who, along with Jeff Sessions, crafted the April 8, 2018 memo that created the current “zero tolerance” policy – that doesn’t mean that this is the Jewish way.

Despite the Bennetts and Millers of the world who make Judaism seem like a callous, heartless culture, Jews actually have deep historical, religious, and ethical reasons to protest these terrible actions.

These ideas and practices violate our history. Jews know all too well about immigration, asylum-seeking, and the trauma of families being separated.

It may sound extreme, but comparisons between Trump and Hitler abound. Sue Fendrick, whose mother survived the Holocaust after being separated from her parents – like so many others – wrote on Facebook that, “I am here, my cousins are here, and my mother is alive, because people with far fewer resources and education than I have, said, ‘Hell no, these people are not going to die on my watch,’” adding, that “Do not tell me that Trump is not Hitler – the most pathetic damning with faint praise, or faint defense, imaginable.

Don’t not tell me that the people in his circle are not actual Nazis (some of them actually are).”

The Trump policy of separating out and incarcerating children violates our Jewish collective memory.

The protest against dehumanization is also engraved into our religion.

We are told 36 times in the Torah to be kind to strangers because we were strangers in Egypt. This is how our religion was founded – on the idea that even the most marginalized members of the human race deserve to live life with dignity and freedom. We were there, and the Torah tells us to remember that.

It is more than our own religion, though. Compassion is at the core of all religions, according to Professor Karen Armstrong. The idea that we are all human and all equally deserve to be treated with basic respect is what Prof Armstrong calls “the golden rule”, and she says that if you look deeply, all religions have this at their base. Except, perhaps, whatever religion Trump is currently practicing – which, by all calculations, may be none.

It has been tormenting to watch as Jews fawn all over Trump as if he is the Messiah. It is heartbreaking that so many of my landsmen and landswomen act as if the embassy location is more important than anything else – more important than how human beings are treated, more important than how the most vulnerable children in the world are being treated.

Jews and Israelis need to protest with all our might against the incarceration of innocent children and against the dehumanization of all or any human beings. And we need to push back with full force against the encroaching idea that we are allowed to never apologize and we are allowed to not care why other people are afraid. We need to do this not only to alleviate the suffering of others, but also to ensure that we don’t completely lose our own humanity.

The author is the vice chair of Media and Policy of Democrats Abroad-Israel and a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College.

STOP THE KOTEL TRAVESTY

JPOST EDITORIAL

The question is what will Netanyahu do now.

succot at the kotel 390 7. (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem/The Jerusalem Post)

Benjamin Netanyahu has a number of responsibilities as Israel’s prime minister. His job requires him to protect the country and its citizens, to ensure Israel’s economic growth, and to safeguard its social wellbeing. He also should care about keeping Israel as the homeland for the Jewish people.

Last week, a decision was made to remove Culture and Sport Minister Miri Regev from her position as chairwoman of a ministerial committee for the holy places. We hope that this decision is a positive step – but that will depend on Netanyahu.

According to government regulations, authority over the committee now passes to Netanyahu. Regev announced on Thursday that she cannot remain head of the committee since her conscience does not let her approve a series of upgrades to an egalitarian prayer plaza at the Western Wall.

The question is what will Netanyahu do now. Last summer, he decided to cancel a previous cabinet decision under which the egalitarian plaza would be upgraded; a new entrance to the Kotel – to the known male and female sections as well as the egalitarian plaza – would be constructed; and a new committee, comprised of members of the Reform and Conservative movements, would be established to oversee it.

The decision came under the fierce opposition of ultra-Orthodox (haredi) members of his coalition.

Amid threats that the government would collapse, Netanyahu decided to renege on his previous promise and commitment to progressive Jewish movements throughout the Diaspora. He now has the opportunity to make things right.

The Kotel belongs to Jews everywhere, whether they are Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist or simply Jewish. No one, not the rabbinate, Miri Regev or Benjamin Netanyahu, has ownership over the place that has been in the hearts and minds of Jews for millennia. If Israel wants to continue being the Jewish state – in other words, the homeland for all Jews – it has a responsibility to make Jews feel welcome. Part of that is affording them a place where they can pray and practice their religion the way they see fit.

Regev’s decision not to approve the upgrades is one of the greatest examples of political hypocrisy in recent Israeli history. In 2013, she publicly advocated to allow the Women of the Wall to pray at the Western Wall, and in 2016 she was one of the ministers who voted in support of the original Kotel deal.

Now in 2018, her conscience, as she claims, does not let her approve the plan.

We find it hard to believe that Regev’s conscience has changed. What we do believe is that Regev made cynical use of her position for political gain.

She understood that a decision to approve the plaza would be opposed by haredi parties, and might not sit well with some of the more traditional elements of her Likud Party base. As someone who will need to run in the Likud primaries ahead of the next election, Regev made a simple calculation: she preferred politics over Jewish unity.

As outgoing chairman of the Jewish Agency Natan Sharansky said on Thursday: “Minister Regev’s conscience is her own matter, but her public about-face regarding the need to set established prayer practices at the site is most regrettable.”

It is regrettable, but it is also indicative of a bigger problem with Israeli governments – the frequent decision to choose politics over propriety, and survival in the Knesset over Jewish unity and peoplehood.

This has got to stop. Real leaders don’t follow what their political base dictates; real leaders lead their people from one point to the next. They take risks – not just in the skies over Syria or the Gaza Strip, but also when it comes to the future of their coalition when they believe something is right.

Netanyahu now has a chance to make amends for his regretful decision last year to repeal the Kotel deal. As prime minister, it is his responsibility.

ILTV ISRAEL21 MAMANET

אמאנט ישראל

Polish priest set for sainthood criticized for anti-Semitism

Associated Press and Israel Hayom Staff

Making Cardinal August Hlond, head of Poland’s Catholic Church during World War II, a saint would “further embolden” Polish government in its “headlong efforts to selectively rewrite Polish activities from that tragic era,” says Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The tomb of Cardinal August Hlond, the World War II-era head of Poland’s Catholic Church, in St. John’s Cathedral in Warsaw | Photo: AP

Pope Francis’ decision to move the cardinal who headed Poland’s Catholic Church during World War II a step closer to possible sainthood has hit a stumbling block after two leading Jewish organizations and a Polish Catholic publication called out his anti-Semitic views.

It is not clear if the protests will derail the path to sainthood for Cardinal August Hlond, but in the past, the Vatican has taken such protests seriously and at the very least submitted the cases to closer review.

In May, Francis approved a decree recognizing Hlond’s “heroic virtues.” For him to be beatified, the Vatican must confirm a miracle attributed to Hlond’s intercession. It must confirm a second one for him to be made a saint.

Born in Poland on July 5, 1881, Hlond was the highest-ranking church official in the overwhelmingly Catholic country from 1926 until his death in 1948. He is highly respected in Poland for rejecting Nazi Germany’s proposals for a collaborative government, and for protecting the church’s independence during the first years of communism after the war.

In its protest, the American Jewish Committee pointed to a passage in a 1936 pastoral letter by Hlond, then the primate of Poland, that revealed his attitude toward Jews as a “corruptive influence,” echoing the general line of the Catholic Church of the time.

The group also criticized Hlond’s failure to condemn the killings of at least 40 Jews by a mob in the 1946 Kielce pogrom. It said moving forward with the canonization process will be seen as an “expression of approval of Cardinal Hlond’s extremely negative approach toward the Jewish community.”

“It’s very difficult to see how you can still claim that the man was a paragon [of saintliness] when the data is so explicit,” AJC’s director of interreligious affairs, Rabbi David Rosen, told The Associated Press.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center said making Hlond a saint would “further embolden” Poland’s right-wing government in its “headlong efforts to selectively rewrite Polish activities from that tragic era.”

Most recently, Poland passed a controversial Holocaust speech law, presented as an attempt to defend the country’s “good name.” The law was scaled back Wednesday, scrapping the penalty of ‎imprisonment for people who attribute Nazi crimes to the ‎Polish nation, but leaving the possibility of fines ‎in place.‎

One passage in Hlond’s letter, which priests read out in churches at Lent in 1936, reads: “It is a fact that the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free thinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism and subversion.”

It has frequently been cited as evidence of the Catholic Church’s institutional anti-Semitism prior to the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

But Hlond also wrote that there are many “ethically outstanding, noble and respectable” Jews, and that all Jews should be “respected and loved as persons and as neighbors.”

In what appeared to be a condemnation of German Nazi laws, the letter warned against anti-Semitism that is “imported from abroad” and is “incompatible with Catholic ethics.”

“It is not allowed to attack Jews, beat them, injure them or slander them,” Hlond wrote.

He said it was “good” to support Polish businesses and avoid Jewish ones, but it was “forbidden” to “ravage Jewish shops, destroy the goods of the Jews, break windows [or] throw firecrackers at their homes.”

Rosen, who has decades of experience in Catholic-Jewish relations, said the process of making Hlond a saint should be halted.

But the Polish priest promoting Hlond’s case before the Vatican’s Congregations for the Causes of Saints, Monsignor Boguslaw Koziol, said the criticism is “unfounded” because Hlond’s words had been taken out of context. Koziol has discussed all the documents with Vatican experts and insists Hlond preached love regardless of nation or religion.

Koziol believes that the whole passage, titled “From our Sins,” was progressive for its time and aimed to protect Jews from violence. But he admits it also included questionable ideas.

Hlond’s critics “have focused on this negative part of the letter, but are not quoting any other part,” he said.

Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny argued that the letter failed to protect Jews from the attacks of Polish nationalists.

It said Hlond did not “suggest any way out of the ‘Jewish problem,’ or any good plan for a dignified and peaceful coexistence in one country. One could protest: These were not yet the times of dialogue. But one may also reply: Shouldn’t we expect candidates for sainthood to be larger than the routine thinking of their times?”

Referring to the July 4, 1946 pogrom in the town of Kielce – where a mob and secret security forces killed at least 40 Jews and two Poles who were defending them – Rosen said that Hlond “did not condemn the pogrom nor urge Poles to stop murdering Jews. Rather, he pointed out that the Jews were all communists or supporters of communism and that the pogrom was their own fault.”

However, Koziol blames Poland’s post-war communist rule for Hlond’s reticence. Any direct condemnation would have meant a confrontation with the regime and repercussions for the church.

In 2005, the Vatican shelved the planned beatification of French priest Rev. Leon Dehon and launched an inquiry after complaints about his anti-Semitic views.

TRIAL OF EX-MINISTER FOR SPYING FOR IRAN OPENS

YONAH JEREMY BOB, ANNA AHRONHEIM

Former Israeli Minister Gonen Segev in court . (photo credit: AMIT SHABAY/POOL)

The trial of disgraced former minister Gonen Segev, who was arrested for spying for Iran, opened on Thursday, though behind closeddoors due to a gag order still on much of the details.

Segev, who appeared in the Jerusalem District Court, is expected to plead not guilty initially, though the prosecution believes that there may eventually be a plea deal.

Channel 10 previously reported that Segev admitted to the spying charges, but explained he was trying to help Israel and return as a “hero” under the guise of spying for Iran.

The former energy and infrastructure minister – who also spent time in jail for drug smuggling, forgery and fraud between 2005 and 2007 – was extradited from Equatorial Guinea and arrested in May on suspicion of assisting the enemy in a time of war, spying against the State of Israel and providing intelligence to the enemy.

According to Channel 10, Segev was held in solitary confinement for nine days in a Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) facility in the center of the country and was not allowed to contact his attorneys during that time.

The report added that Segev told interrogators from the Shin Bet that he did not hand over any classified information to his Iranian handlers and that he had no ideological or financial motive to help an enemy state.

“I wanted to fool the Iranians and come back to Israel a hero,” he was quoted as saying during his interrogation.
Segev is suspected of providing his Iranian handlers with intelligence related to, among other things, Israel’s energy industry, security sites, buildings and officials in Israeli political and security bodies.

On Thursday, Walla! lost most of its motion to lift a gag order on new details in the case, but at least was given a heavily-censored copy of the formal indictment.

The former minister lived in Nigeria for close to 10 years where he practiced medicine after his license was revoked in Israel. He was arrested and convicted for drug smuggling and credit card fraud in 2005 after attempting to smuggle 32,000 ecstasy tablets from the Netherlands into Israel.

While in Nigeria, Segev served as doctor to members of the Jewish community as well as diplomats, even receiving an official letter of appreciation from the head of security at the Foreign Ministry for saving the life of an Israeli diplomat.

According to Channel 10, Segev was lured to the Iranian Embassy in Abuja under the guise of treating the children of the Iranian staff.

A statement released by the Shin Bet in June, said that the investigation by the agency and Israel police found that Segev, who first met with elements of the Iranian embassy in Nigeria in 2012, knew that they were from Iranian intelligence. The Shin Bet stated that Segev was recruited and acted as an agent on behalf of Iranian intelligence and later traveled twice to Iran to meet with his handlers.

While Israeli security officials do not think Segev gave any sensitive or classified intelligence to Tehran, Lebanon’s Al Akhbar reported that he provided Iran with “a variety of information that will serve it in the struggle against the Zionist entity.”