January 14, 2005

"The Air of Freedom"

As I write this, I am standing on a hill overlooking Jerusalem. A few days ago, I met a young woman recently admitted to the faculty of one of Israel's universities. She is an immigrant who arrived in Israel from the former Soviet Union ten years ago without a high school diploma or any means of support. In Israel, she succeeded in six years to earn a doctoral degree. En route, she married a native born Israeli. The country's leading universities all pursued her for their faculties. And around her neck, she wears a gold chain with a Christian cross.

I, like others, went to the Soviet Union in the 1970s to organize aliyah and to stir the hearts of the three million Jews there to their heritage and homeland. We organized the aliyah of thousands. Night after night, planes packed beyond their capacity landed on Israel’s soil. Many deplaned with nothing more than the shirt on their backs—and hope. We danced with them as live bands played traditional Jewish songs. In my heart this was nothing less than a miracle. I heard Soviet Jews, deprived of freedom and any Jewish knowledge, sing aloud, "The people of Israel lives."

One million Jews arrived in Israel from the Soviet Union, free to live in the land of their fathers as Jews. But they also arrived as fodder for the hungry Christian missionaries who wanted to capture their souls. The exact numbers of Soviet olim who apostated to Christianity are unknown to me but estimates of one hundred to three hundred thousand seem realistic.

The proselytizers were evangelical missionaries. They are the same people who now want Israel to retain every inch of its land. Some of Israel's Orthodox Jews argue that the Soviet immigrants who have apostated are among the twenty percent of the olim who turned out not to be Jews at all, but who came to Israel for economic benefits and to escape the tyranny of Soviet autocracy and post-Soviet turmoil. These Jews argue that even if the apostates were Jewish, it is important to have Christian support in the battle against Sharon’s disengagement plans.

This is not the only crisis my fellow Jews are ignoring: the other is the Falash Murra in Ethiopia who claim to be Jewish. If they are halachically Jewish, then we should bring them all to Israel at once. If they are not Jewish, they are suffering as a result of their Jewish past and because they want to be Jewish, and this alone should make us want to bring them to Israel. Equally important is the fact that they were at one time forced into Christian conversion. Their acculturation, therefore, should be a complete exposure to Torah and mitzvot. But most of Israel’s Orthodox Jews, immersed in land issues and the disengagement with Gaza, are ignoring the Ethiopians.

To my surprise while here, I found a number of important secular political leaders concerned about both the Falash Murra and the Soviet olim. I urged several religious members of the Knesset to join their secular colleagues in considering possible solutions. I met with rejection. "The secularists are only interested in giving away our land and the de-Judaization of Israel," the religious members of the Knesset told me. They would not meet with the secularists.

We've all heard it a thousand times: Why was the Land lost to us for two thousand years? And how many times do we have to hear the answer: "Sinat chinom," useless enmity.

As I stand here, I look out at an Israel more beautiful than ever. From the shores of the Mediterranean to the shores of the Red Sea, from the snow-covered slopes to the beaches, from the deserts to the plains, this is our Jewish State. In spite of the wars and politics, children walk to their schools each morning and many of them carry pages of eternal Torah truths in freshly printed books. Where I stand on this hill, I see a heaven of blue and clouds of white. I see the same blue and white on the flag of Israel, a flag that flies freely in the face of both friends and enemies. I ask all of you who read this column to come to Israel and breathe its air of freedom. I ask you to stand with your fellow Jews and confront the crises in our collective soul.

Edited by Anna Olswanger

Shabbat Shalom