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Em Habanim Semeha: Restoration of Zion As a Response During the Holocaust, edited and translated by Rabbi Dr. Pesach Schindler

Literature of the 3 weeks and the Shoah

Posted 
By Alan Jay Gerber

Midway through the month of Tammuz our religious focus shifts to observances commemorating the saddest events in our history. The destruction of the two temples, the murders and massacres of centuries past, and the hateful actions that fill our daily news feeds are given special attention at this time of year.

“Em Habanim Semeha: Restoration of Zion As a Response During the Holocaust,” by Rabbi Yisachar Shlomo Teichtal, edited and translated by Rabbi Dr. Pesach Schindler, emerges as a premier literary work of the Holocaust era. Teichtal, a chassidic rabbi, was a fervent adherent of a rabid anti-Zionist ideology. During the last years of the Holocaust, as its horrors enveloped his community and ultimately consumed him as well, he openly repudiated his anti-Zionist beliefs and committed his feelings into writings, which evolved into “Eim HaBanim Semeha.”

The book was hidden before Rabbi Teichtal was deported. After the war, it was brought to Israel and printed in Hebrew. Based on classical Jewish sources, the author tries to find meaning in the tragedy unfolding around him. He began to see the galus as the prime source of all the troubles. He regarded aliyah to Israel as the rectifying force, which did not happen because of the widespread anti-Zionist stand of most of the chassidic leadership in Europe during the inter-war years.

In addition to strong theological arguments for the settlement of Israel, Rabbi Teichtal condemns his fellow chassidic rabbis. He directly blames them for the large Jewish presence that remained in East Europe on the eve of World War II.

In 1999 “Eim HaBanim Semeha” was translated into English by Rabbi Dr. Pesach Schindler of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, one of the most distinguished scholars of both the Holocaust era and the chassidic community under Nazi rule. What makes Rabbi Schindler’s work unique is that he does not treat it as a literal translation, but as a learning experience. He translates the most important sections of the book together with detailed footnotes that are designed to be informative and allow the reader to conduct further research. Additionally, the print, type style, and format make it a very user-friendly volume.

Rabbi Schindler, in paraphrasing Rabbi Teichtal’s original work, has edited the book to make it readable for both the expert and the layperson.

In his eloquent and informative introduction to the book, Rabbi Walter Wurzburger, the former rabbi of Shaaray Tefila in Lawrence and a close friend of Dr. Schindler, noted the value of the editor’s introduction to the work. “It enables even readers unfamiliar with the historic background to appreciate the momentous nature of Rabbi Teichtal’s ‘conversion’ from radical anti-Zionism to a passionate advocacy of religious Zionism,” he says.

Rabbi Wurzburger further notes that one major technical flaw in the original volume is that because of its hasty composition under trying conditions, some of the language assumes that the reader has a firm base in the works cited. Thus, notes Rabbi Wurzburger, “even individuals who can read the Hebrew original will derive much benefit from Dr. Schindler’s excellent notes and commentary. With the tools of scholarship at his disposal, he is able to illuminate what would otherwise have remained obscure to those who cannot match his [Rabbi Teichtal’s] extensive knowledge of Talmudic and chassidic literature.”

This is a very delicate topic, sensitive to some who have refused to acknowledge past misjudgments. Rabbi Dr. Schindler’s treatment of this text reflects a keen sensitivity to the issue at hand. I highly recommend it.

Originally published July 16, 2008

Even so-called ATHEISTS Distrust Other Atheists…

In Atheists We Distrust

Subjects believe that people behave better when they think that God is watching over them

By Daisy Grewal on January 17, 2012

Atheists are one of the most disliked groups in America. Only 45 percent of Americans say they would vote for a qualified atheist presidential candidate, and atheists are rated as the least desirable group for a potential son-in-law or daughter-in-law to belong to. Will Gervais at the University of British Columbia recently published a set of studies looking at why atheists are so disliked. His conclusion: It comes down to trust.

Gervais and his colleagues presented participants with a story about a person who accidentally hits a parked car and then fails to leave behind valid insurance information for the other driver. Participants were asked to choose the probability that the person in question was a Christian, a Muslim, a rapist, or an atheist. They thought it equally probable the culprit was an atheist or a rapist, and unlikely the person was a Muslim or Christian. In a different study, Gervais looked at how atheism influences people’s hiring decisions. People were asked to choose between an atheist or a religious candidate for a job requiring either a high or low degree of trust. For the high-trust job of daycare worker, people were more likely to prefer the religious candidate. For the job of waitress, which requires less trust, the atheists fared much better.

It wasn’t just the highly religious participants who expressed a distrust of atheists. People identifying themselves as having no religious affiliation held similar opinions. Gervais and his colleagues discovered that people distrust atheists because of the belief that people behave better when they think that God is watching over them. This belief may have some truth to it. Gervais and his colleague Ara Norenzayan have found that reminding people about God’s presence has the same effect as telling people they are being watched by others: it increases their feelings of self-consciousness and leads them to behave in more socially acceptable ways.

When we know that somebody believes in the possibility of divine punishment, we seem to assume they are less likely to do something unethical. Based on this logic, Gervais and Norenzayan hypothesized that reminding people about the existence of secular authority figures, such as policemen and judges, might alleviate people’s prejudice towards atheists. In one study, they had people watch either a travel video or a video of a police chief giving an end-of-the-year report. They then asked participants how much they agreed with certain statements about atheists (e.g., “I would be uncomfortable with an atheist teaching my child.”) In addition, they measured participants’ prejudice towards other groups, including Muslims and Jewish people. Their results showed that viewing the video of the police chief resulted in less distrust towards atheists. However, it had no effect on people’s prejudice towards other groups. From a psychological standpoint, God and secular authority figures may be somewhat interchangeable. The existence of either helps us feel more trusting of others.

Continue reading…

From Scientific American, here.

Remember and Don’t Forget What the Gedolim Did to Gush Katif!

Ten Years On We Must Remember Gush Katif

 |  Jul 19, 2015

Life in Gush Katif was good, even idyllic. The children had free range to roam about. No one locked their doors. And the sea was always there along with rolling acres of gleaming golden sand.

Once, a child of five went missing. The people searched everywhere, fearing the worst. At last they found him, fast asleep, under his best friend’s bed. That child is now 40 years old.

In the early days, during the 80’s, not too many Gush Katif people owned cars. So the Jews would go to nearby Khan Yunis to do their shopping or get their drivers licenses. But it was a symbiotic relationship and the Arabs in Khan Yunis depended on the Jews of the Gush as much as the Jews depended on them. Thousands of Arabs were employed by the Jewish farmers of Gush Katif.

In fact, our tour guide on 10 Buses for 10 Years, Oreet Segal, said that Ganei Tal, where she lived, employed 400 hundred Arab workers at the time of the “Expulsion.” “That’s what I call it,” she said, “Because that’s what it was.”

Segal notes that their Arab workers just wanted to do their work and go home to their families at the end of the day. Unfortunately, in uprooting 22 communities, and expelling just shy of 11,000 people from their homes (if you count those expelled from the Shomron, Samaria), the Sharon government effectively created a situation of rampant Arab and Jewish unemployment. The Arabs who had worked in Gush Katif for the Jews, were now without work. But the Jews of Gush Katif lost their farms and also had no place to live, despite assurances that “for everyone, there is a solution,” which turned out to be a lie.

As of this writing, ten years since the Expulsion, 300 Gush Katif families/expellees still have no homes.

Most of the 11,000 had no idea where they were going when they were trucked out of the communities to which they had devoted their youth and strength, making something out of nothing, a bit like the Creator. When they moved in, an Arab sheikh had dropped by with bread and salt to welcome them. “What will you do?” he asked. “No one has ever managed to grow anything here.”

Ah, but the Jews have come back, they said. Now things will grow.

And grow they did. They grew tomatoes, peppers, and herbs. They prospered. And all of it was l’tiferet Medinat Yisrael, for the glory of the State of Israel, for they were not only trying to carve a living from hostile growing conditions, but living the Zionist dream.

It was the government that encouraged them to live there, the government that put them there. And now, it was the government that on a capricious whim expelled them as if these people and the lives they’d built were inconsequential. They took them out in trucks, stuck them in hotels and guest houses, where some of the expellees lived for a year.

Does living in a hotel for a year sound like a fun time? It might until you consider that your children might be in separate rooms, sometimes on separate floors, behind locked doors. Or perhaps all together in one room, mother, father, and all five children.

While the expelled were in the hotels, the government set up “caravillas” for some of them, or as Segal called them, “Cardboard boxes.”

I remember all this in vivid living color, because I monitored the sitution from my perch in Efrat. I remember how the missiles rained down on the caravillas and the irony of that. We’d thrown them out of their homes for “peace” and installed them in cardboard boxes, making the expellees targets for the tens of thousands of missile attacks that would and did (and do) ensue as a result of the Expulsion.

We were a small minibus of a group, touring the communities that absorbed most of the expellees of Gush Katif. The idea behind this tour, sponsored by the International Young Israel Movement, Israel Region (IYIM), was to raise awareness of the plight of the Gush Katif people, ten years on. Nine more such groups will be visiting the area in upcoming weeks. I would urge anyone who can to sign up for the limited number of seats available, because this is one helluva shocking eye-opener.

The injustice done to these people is horrifying. It makes you sick to your stomach to think of it: how Sharon made the Expulsion an election issue, promised he would not do it. How he then promised to accept the mandate of the people and then promptly rejected the results of the referendum that was held. How he promised that the settlers would be compensated.

And how subsequently they were NOT. Not compensated.

Sure. They got something. Take Oreet, our tour guide from Ganei Tal. She had a home there that was 325 square meters and received a compensation package that was enough to build a home that was 160 square meters. Oreet and her family were farmers. They grew tomatoes, herbs, and peppers. When they had a good year, like other people in Gush Katif, they built on an extra room. What else were they going to spend their money on?

So she had this money, after 11 months of being in a hotel with her 5 children. She and her husband no longer had the farm, hence no livelihood. They were middle-aged, too old to be employable, unless they wanted to bag items for customers in the local Superpharm. But they had bills to pay and mouths to feed.

What kind of solution is THAT?

Continue reading…

From Israelly Cool, here.