Why are there anti-Israel Jews

A recent article in the Jerusalem Post looked at the critical attitude towards Israel of some prominent Jews, in particular, Noam Chomsky, Bernie Saunders and George Soros. The article considered the question of hatred and love, but did not touch of the unease many felt in the face of Zionism. If you saw yourself as an emancipated member of a secular, liberal society, Jewish nationalism was anathema. You were an America or Hungarian, or for that matter international stateless intellectual and your Jewishness was merely incidental to who you were. For those of us who experienced the vast disillusionment with the secular, liberal society that we were part of, those of us who felt betrayed by friends, neighbours and compatriots, our Zionist creed was non-negotiable. We were identified with Judaism, we were Jewish and this is how the rest of the world saw us. Facing antisemitism was the natural fate of Jews and confronting this hatred was incumbent on all Jews. Israel and Zionism will be there when the world turns on the comfortable broad minded liberals like Chomsky, Saunders and Soros who will be perceived as the enemies of the societies they live in, the eternal other who can be blamed for the ills of facing their world. As a Zionist I have to accept that there will be Jewish ganevim, there will be Jews whom I don't like, and Israeli politicians whose policies I don't agree with. I don't have to place Israel on a pedestal as a country superior to others, I don't have to attribute to my fellow Jews qualities superior to all other people. If Israel is to be a state like all other states in the community of nations we have to apply the same yardstick as we do to all others. We must not presume that just because Jews hold a special religious role among the myriad of beliefs  that they are in any way on a higher plain. The fact that the Zionist adventure turned into such a successful state, with all its shortcomings and limitations, is akin to a miracle and beyond all expectations of the original founders and dreamers. That like Jews today, the original founders and dreamers could not agree among themselves is part of this amazing story.

What do we commemorate

Over the last few weeks Donald Maurice and Inbal Megiddo of the New Zealand School of Music put together an interesting and challenging programme for this year's Kristallnacht Commemoration Concert. This concert has little to do with Kristallnacht, just as Yom HaShoah has little to do with the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising or the UN Holocaust Memorial Day with the liberation of Auschwitz. These all commemorate something much more than the dates of these significant events. Yom HaShoah is part of the Israeli Zionist narrative of 'never again', Jews will never again go to their deaths as sheep to the slaughter. The UN Holocaust Memorial Day is a recognition of the great tragedy that was brought about by the denial of universal human rights.
So what is the Kristallnacht Commemoration concert about. First of all, it is about human experience told in music; not speeches, not ceremonial gestures, candle lighting, just music. Only two of the items to be performed have a direct link to Kristallnacht, Richard Fuchs's setting of Eliot's Song of Simeon and Dachaulied composed by two prisoners as they marched to Dachau. 
Richard Fuchs was a successful, prosperous architect living in Karlsruhe, Germany, but in 1938, like many German Jews, he realized that he had to emigrate. On Kristallnacht he was arrested and imprisoned in Dachau. and was only released when he secured a visa to come to New Zealand. Until 1938 all his songs were set to texts by German authors. As he was planning to move to an English speaking country he clearly thought it appropriate to write music to a setting of a poem by possibly the greatest contemporary English poet, T. S Eliot. The fact that A Song of Simeon was about a New Testament personality and had a clear religious overtone was perhaps less significant than that Fuchs identifies with some of the lines of the poem:

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come?

The other works in the programme are either by composers who were murdered during the Holocaust, works by two composers who were imprisoned in Theresienstadt and later killed in Auschwitz, The Finale of the opera The Emperor of Atlantis by Victor Ullman and Gideon Klein's String Trio. Mieczyslaw Weinberg survived the Holocaust because he fled from Poland to the Soviet Union, but most of his family were murdered. He continually referred in his music to his early life in Warsaw, his Cello Sonata will have echoes of that lost world. Then there will be works by contemporary composers who a generation, perhaps two generations later explore the tragedy of the Holocaust through their music, Lori Laitman's Five Vedem Songs for voice, setting of poems by boys who were murdered,  Strings of Love by Boris Pigovat whose grandparents were among the 31,000 killed at Babi Yar, outside Kiev. Laurence Sherr's Cello Sonata, which uses themes of Jewish resistance. Thus each of these works reflect a different aspect of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was not one event but a whole cluster of events and individual tragedies, so it is appropriate that its commemoration should embrace the many aspects of these tragedies.
 

To fast or not to fast

My father was a simple man, not a learned scholar like Elyse Goldstein of Toronto. Elyse Goldstein wrote a blog published in the Times of Israel in which she explained why she stopped fasting on Tisha B'Av. She doesn't mourn for the destruction of the Temple. Knocking those old and corrupt priest off their perch was a good thing. All the argument about women praying at the wall only leads to trouble. She has no regrets about the destruction of the Temple. Perhaps she has nothing in her life to make her confront the big issues of her existence though fasting and commemoration. My father on the other hand did fast. He would have described himself as an agnostic. He was brought up in a traditional Jewish home, but the question of the existence of God didn't bother him. It was how to live his life and the purpose of living that mattered to him. When faced with a miracle he recognized it. He was fated to survive, to live and to live for a purpose. Early in November 1944 as a slave labourer, he was marched from Budapest, Hungary, towards the Austrian border to dig trenches to stop the invading Soviet tanks.  He then went on to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. When the camp was full to overflowing with prisoners who arrived from Hungary, a subcamp was set up in Gunskirchen 37 km from the main camp. In April 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war, my father, with 17,000 others was transferred from the main camp to Gunskirchen, Only some 5000 of these men were still alive when the camp was liberated on May 4, 19 The forced march there took as long as three days because it was a march of dying people obliged to carry their dead companions along with them. While the column of men was trudging along in the snow through the narrow alpine pass, one of the soldiers, perhaps only a teenager, a bewildered member of the Hitler Jugend who escorted the group, took pot shot at the men just for the thrill of it.  In the instant when the shot was fired my father stumbled and was left behind for dead on the ground. When the column passed and was out of sight my father got up, and having no alternative, joined the next column of Jewish walking skeletons. My father survived through a miracle, the amazing miracle that the shot missed him. He commemorated this personal miracle for the rest of his life by fasting on the anniversary of that day. He came face to face with the personal miracle of survival. Those of us, who have not had such a personal encounter can only experience the tragedies of the lives of others through fasting and appreciating that we survived while Jews like us were massacred over the generations. It behoves us to remember and through fasting experience the destruction of the Temple, the annihilation of Jerusalem and the murder of Jews in ancient Palestine, and then in various parts of Europe from the early Medieval persecution by the Visigoths, to the Crusades, the expulsion from Spain and Portugal, the destruction of the Jewry of Ukraine by the Cossacks, the pogroms in Russia, the slaughter of Jews on an industrial scale during the Holocaust. When my father fasted on the anniversary of his miraculous survival he knew that fasting has nothing to do with priests of old, or the equality of women; it is about acknowledging the miracle.