Parades, dances, festooned donkeys and waving pretty girls in farm wagons, marches and bands all celebrated the feast of Shavuot and the triumph of the Jewish farmer, now unfettered by the shackles of the Diaspora and Jewish tradition.

The spring-time festival of Shavuot is the anniversary of the giving the Torah to Israel on Sinai over three millennia ago. New and innovative programs celebrating Shavuot were all the rage in the kibbutzim and in much of the new Israeli society of the 1920’s and 1930’s.

In that age, Shavuot lost all meaning as the holiday of the granting of the Torah to Israel on Sinai and became an almost hedonistic rite of the celebration of Jewish agriculture. Parades, dances, festooned donkeys and waving pretty girls in farm wagons, marches and bands all celebrated the feast of Shavuot and the triumph of the Jewish farmer, now unfettered by the shackles of the Diaspora and Jewish tradition.

All of this was accompanied by a mocking attitude towards the old-fashioned Shavuot and a tough and dedicated spirit of the new age - of Marxism’s triumph - that was to be ushered in together with the new fruits of the season.

All of this was accompanied by a mocking attitude towards the old-fashioned Shavuot and a tough and dedicated spirit of the new age – of Marxism’s triumph – that was to be ushered in together with the new fruits of the season.

Bialik, Tchernikovsy and others wrote poetry about our new farmers and the pagan glory of the new celebrations. In fact, some of the noted writers and journalists of that time wrote that it was certain that May Day, the international holiday of workers and Marxism, would replace Shavuot as the Jewish holiday of the late springtime. Ah, for the good old days of unreal Marxist naivete and doctrinaire thinking!

But the new and innovative Shavuot did not stand the test of time. Communism and Marxism collapsed in the detritus of failed economic planning and murderous dictatorial governments. The kibbutzim now are pretty much broke, both economically and socially. Israeli agriculture is currently almost wholly dependent on foreign laborers doing the work. There is no longer a May Day parade in most of the country and the red flags that were the banners of the brave new world are languishing in mothballs. The Shavuot parades and dances, the enactments of the joys of planting and harvesting, are all passe. The Socialists have turned capitalistic and the Zionists have become post-Zionists.

In 1948 the Jordanian Legion captured the entire Old City of Jerusalem and leveled the Churva synagogue together with all of the other Jewish houses of worship in the Old City. The Jordanian commander boasted that he had permanently ended a millennium of Jewish presence in the Old City with the destruction of the Churva synagogue. However, as all of the enemies of Israel have been prone to do over the ages, he spoke too soon.

In 1701 a number of Eastern European Jews risked all to return to Jerusalem and join the small Jewish community then living in the Holy City in humiliating and dire circumstances.

They were led by the great sage and saint Rabbi Yehuda Hachasid. He died almost immediately upon his arrival in Jerusalem, but his followers persisted and built a modest synagogue in the Old City of Jerusalem. That synagogue was later destroyed and was reestablished modestly. It was known as the Churva (the ruins) named after Rabbi Yehuda Hachasid.

With the advent of a larger immigration of Eastern European Ashkenazic Jews to Jerusalem in the nineteenth century it was rebuilt again, this time in a much larger and more imposing fashion. Its imposing dome and soaring window arches became the landmark of the time for Jewish Jerusalem.

Much of the funds necessary to build such an imposing structure were donated by Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris, the premier Jewish philanthropist of that time. The Churva synagogue became the official home of all Jewish functions in Jerusalem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Chief Rabbis of the then Palestinian Jewish yishuv were installed there as well as the welcoming Sabbath ceremony for the first British High Commissioner for Palestine, the Jew, Sir Herbert Samuel. Theodor Herzl and Baron Rothschild visited the synagogue as did numerous other dignitaries, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Its towering dome became the symbol of Jewish presence in Jerusalem for over eighty years.

In 1948 the Jordanian Legion captured the entire Old City of Jerusalem and leveled the Churva synagogue together with all of the other Jewish houses of worship in the Old City. The Jordanian commander boasted that he had permanently ended a millennium of Jewish presence in the Old City with the destruction of the Churva synagogue.

However, as all of the enemies of Israel have been prone to do over the ages, he spoke too soon.

Nineteen years later the Jordanians were driven out of the Old City in the Six-Day War that they initiated into Jerusalem and a new bustling and vibrant Jewish quarter was rebuilt in toto – except for the Churva synagogue. A window arch of the building was restored and rose above the city as a reminder of the great synagogue that once stood there.

After over forty years of neglect, world Jewry, especially from Ukraine and Eastern Europe, rallied to the cause of rebuilding the Churva synagogue. The project was successfully completed and on March 15, 2010, the grand rededicated synagogue was opened for prayer and meeting.

The building is more magnificent than ever, though it is a closely accurate reconstruction of the building that was erected in 1864. It glistens with majesty and is suffused with Jewish nostalgia and pride. Its rededication ceremonies were emotional and inspiring. Just as the Jewish people has risen from the ashes of the last century so has the Churva synagogue.

Naturally, the reconstruction and rededication of the Churva synagogue does not sit well with our Palestinian Arab cousins. All sorts of hysterical pronouncements that we were about to destroy the al-Aqasa mosque were publicized throughout the Moslem world. The king of Jordan, who certainly knows better and whose grandfather’s army destroyed the Churva, described its rededication as a provocation. And his country is officially at peace with Israel! It is the presence of Jews in Jerusalem that so disturbs the Arabs.

The rededication of the Churva synagogue serves as a reminder to the eternal Jewish connection to Jerusalem. It declares the Jewish steadfastness to remain and build and thrive in its eternal capital city no matter what.

On November 23, 2010, AP reported on, “an official Palestinian report claiming that… Jerusalem’s Western Wall has no religious significance to Jews…. The report concludes that since Jews have no claim to the area, it is holy Muslim territory and must be part of Palestinian Jerusalem.”

The Jewish people have had long experience with deniers and denials.

The pagan world denied the validity of the Jewish ideas of monotheism and morality. The Romans denied that the Jews had a God at all since there was no “evidence” of His presence, while the presence of the Roman gods was indisputable in their existing imagery and statuary.

The Christian world claimed that the covenant of God with Israel, which they acknowledged to have once been true and is in fact the basis of all Christian theology, was somehow cancelled by the coming of Christianity and that that covenant was transferred now to the Church.

I have already written a number of times about the inexplicable phenomenon of the Holocaust deniers. No pictures, eyewitness accounts, documents or other proofs will sway these anti-Semites. The Holocaust just never happened. The Nazi theory of propaganda that the “big lie” repeated often enough eventually becomes believable and believed is at work here.

The oft-repeated “big lie” when coupled with pathological hatred and systematic denial is truly a most lethal weapon.

The Mufti of Jerusalem, handpicked by Arafat undoubtedly due to his religious leadership qualities and loving spirituality, is a doozy of a denier.

He denies that there ever were any Jewish Temples on the Temple Mount, a statement that undermines all of Christian belief as well. He also denies that the Western Wall has any particular significance, religious or historical, to Jews or to anyone else. It is only a wall that somehow helps support the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Of course, the fact that the wall predates the mosque by seven centuries is also conveniently denied. And in any event, the Mufti claims that the Western Wall and the entire Temple Mount belong exclusively and in perpetuity to the Moslem Waqf that operates the mosques on the Temple Mount. He also denies that there was ever any significant Jewish presence in the Land of Israel until this past century. And to back up his denials, the Waqf is systematically and permanently destroying any physical or archeological evidence of ancient Jewish presence on the Temple Mount.

Of course, the Palestinian Authority generally is very big on denials. After one of its heroic snipers blew off the head of ten month old Shalhevet Pas in Chevron, the Information Minister of the Authority stated that the infant was born badly handicapped and therefore probably was killed by her own mother. It also denies that the Tomb of Rachel, the Cave of the Patriarchs or Joseph’s Tomb have any specific relationship to the Jewish people. And to top it all off, the Palestinians refuse to see that they and their violence and terror are somehow part of the problem and not of the solution to the instability and tragedies of the Middle East. The Palestinian denial of history and reality, prodigious as it is, naturally produces equally prodigious frustration and violence on their part. Treating this deep denial seems to me to be a necessary prerequisite to any sort of meaningful settlement of the Arab-Israeli struggle.

In a perverted way, we old-fashioned Jews owe a debt of gratitude to all of these deniers. The deniers make us aware of what we truly represent and what our core beliefs are. Without the deniers perhaps there would be no serious assessment of ourselves and our place in the world. The deniers are the ones who strip us of our fantasies and illusions and allow us to see things in reality, however painful and unpleasant that reality may be.

The Palestinians and the Mufti have stiffened the backbone of Israel by their denial of our rights and our lives in a fashion that no Israeli leader could have done. David Irving has been a catalyst for even more Holocaust studies, programs and memories. The Exodus deniers only make the Seder night and the holiday of Pesach dearer than ever to us. It is the spectacle of the deniers and their self-inflicted angst that makes it easier for us ordinary folk to continue to believe.

Nassar and Egyptian pilots pre-1967

Probably the most euphoric event in recent Jewish history was the recapture of the Western Wall in the Six Day War. The backdrop to the war is complicated, but basically, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, had the goal of unifying all the Arab countries under his domination. He had many problems reaching this goal, most of them having to do with the Arabs themselves. Nasser had many enemies in the Arab world, foremost of whom was King Hussein of Jordan. He was also on poor terms with Syria, and was aiding one side of a bitter civil war in Yemen and losing. But there was a short-cut to achieving his dream in one fell swoop: destroy the state of Israel.

The Soviet Union also played a role in this. It was at about this time that the first trickle of Russian Jews were allowed to immigrate to Israel. The Soviets, who were supporting the Arabs and providing them with arms, used this as blackmail. Many a time they told the Arabs that if they didn’t follow the Soviet line, then another three or four hundred thousand Russian Jews would be allowed to go to Israel. Yet in May, 1967, for reasons of its own, the Soviet Union falsely informed Egypt and Syria that it had learned of a forthcoming Israeli attack. Based on this report, Nasser felt the time was propitious. He felt he would be able to conquer Israel handily. Meanwhile, Israeli celebrated its 19^th anniversary blissfully oblivious as to what was going to happen in the next three weeks.

Nasser announced that the Egyptian army was going to go on maneuvers in the Sinai, which was a violation of the agreement that had prevailed since the end of the Sinai Campaign. But Sinai belonged to Egypt, so there was no way to keep the Egyptian army out. It crossed with great fanfare and in extremely large numbers. Israel protested, but nothing happened. It was almost a repeat of Hitler. Hitler took over one country, looked around to see if there were repercussions, and when there weren’t any, he went on to the next country. Here, Nasser saw that the U.N. took no action, so then he moved to the second step: he prevented Israeli shipping from coming up the Gulf of Aqaba. He claimed to have installed guns to stop them, though later it was found out to have been a bluff. This was in violation of the hallowed principle of international law: free navigation of the waterways of the world. Naturally, President Johnson even considered sending one of the U.S. flagships up the Gulf of Aqaba to test the blockade, but for all the good intentions and soothing words, nothing happened.

The next step came when Nasser ordered the United Nations peace-keeping troops off of Egyptian territory. The Egyptian government had invited them there in 1957, but now, ten years later, he said he was inviting them all to go home. The General Secretary of the United Nations agreed that Nasser had a right to request it, so the peace-keeping troops left.

Now, Israel began to take notice. Israel warned Egypt not to continue along that line because it would certainly defend itself and go to war. The United States, as is its custom, issued pronouncements that everybody should take two aspirin and be in touch later. That really didn’t do anything for anyone. All it showed was the impotence of the United States.

The United States attempted to get the Soviet Union to restrain Egypt, but it did just the opposite. The Soviet Union felt that it had everything to gain here. If the Arab states won, it would enhance Soviet power. And if they lost, they would become more dependent, which would also increase Soviet power. That’s a terribly cynical policy, but it was correct. The Soviet Union had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Now, Nasser, in his diabolical plan, wanted to surround Israel on all sides. Deep down in his heart, he was afraid Israel might successfully defend itself against Egypt. He therefore made an alliance with Syria, who agreed to shell the Israeli positions in the north, in the Galil and the Golan Heights, which Syria then controlled. But the Syrians, to a certain extent, double-crossed Nasser because they never sent their army into Israel in the Six Day War. They shelled and fired on the Israeli targets and they pinned down a certain number of troops, but they never sent their army in.

What really clinched the matter was King Hussein of Jordan. Hussein was afraid that he would miss the train. He saw now that Syria and Egypt, his two archenemies, had made an alliance. His military analysts showed him that there was a very strong likelihood that Egypt and Syria would win. They also convinced him that diplomatically, the world would do nothing to support Israel. And he was afraid that once Egypt and Syria were successful, they would come not only against the Israeli part of Palestine, but the Jordanian part of it, too. He was afraid that he’d be expelled from the Old City of Jerusalem and lose all that stature and tourism. Well, he was, but not by Egypt and Syria.

So King Hussein joined Nasser. The two archenemies were shown in The New York Times embracing each other in the anticipated victory over the state of Israel and throwing the Jews into the sea.

Eddie Jacobson and Harry Truman in their haberdashery shop in Kansas City, Missouri

Alben Barkley, vice president under Harry Truman, told a famous joke about his position: once there was a mother with two sons; one became a sea captain and the other the vice president of the United States, and neither was ever heard from ever again.

That might have been Harry Truman’s fate also, except destiny stepped in.

From 1940-1944, FDR’s vice president was Henry Wallace, a very liberal agrarian politician from Iowa. But in his bid for a fourth term, some of the Democratic party leaders persuaded FDR to run with someone “safer.” FDR  chose Senator Harry Truman of Missouri, someone the general American public didn’t really know that much about. What did it matter? He was only going to be vice president.

As we know, things turned out differently. A few weeks into his fourth term, Roosevelt died, and Truman became president. For America generally, and certainly for the Jewish people, he was the right man at the right time.

In the aftermath of the war, Palestine was in an unworkable situation. The Jewish world wanted 100,000 Holocaust survivors to be allowed in, but the British foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, refused. President Truman put pressure on England, but Bevin said dismissively, “He doesn’t want too many of them in New York.”

Aside from his bigotry, this shows you something about Bevin’s obstinacy. Post-war Britain was almost completely dependent on the United States, which was literally feeding Europe. Even under ordinary circumstances, if the president of the United States told you to issue 100,000 certificates of emigration, you would take him seriously. But Bevin was so doctrinaire against the Jews, it made no difference.

But the pressure was building up like a pressure cooker. Every day, the violence increased, and England saw it was in a no-win situation. So Bevin made a dramatic gesture. He declared, “England is going to leave on May 15, 1948. We give the problem to the United Nations.”

In hindsight, it is clear what Bevin intended. The Arabs outnumbered and outgunned the Jews. Bevin assumed that when the Arabs would attempt to destroy them, they would turn to England for help. Then the British would be welcomed back as heroes. So Bevin’s plan was to have his cake and eat it too. And it was not far-fetched. The Arabs were very well-armed.

The UN’s solution was a partition plan: an Arab state and a Jewish state. Jerusalem would be an international city. The Jewish state was made of unconnected sections of land – militarily indefensible and economically unviable. Many Zionists opposed it. But Ben Gurion was the strong man, and he accepted.

The Arabs, for their part, refused. So it was to be decided by a vote in the UN General Assembly. Before then, the Arabists in the State Department, of whom there are still very many, circumvented the president and began pressuring the U.S. delegate, Warren Austin. Austin backed down from the partition plan and proposed instead that the United States should agree to a trusteeship, which was like a mandate all over again. The state of Israel looked like it might be stillborn.

Enter one of the strange stories of history. President Truman had served as an artillery captain in World War I, and one of the members of his battalion was a Jewish man named of Eddie Jacobson. After the war, the two of them went into an unlikely partnership and opened a haberdashery store in Kansas City. The store went bankrupt after three years, but Truman and Jacobson remained loyal friends, which is unusual in itself. Partners who undergo bankruptcy don’t usually enjoy each other’s company afterward.

The Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, who was by then old and half-blind, traveled to the U.S. to try and see Truman to get him to reinforce American support of the partition plan. Truman refused. The Jewish leadership put on whatever pressure it could, but to no avail. Truman would not see Weizmann.

Then the Jews sent in Eddie Jacobson. It’s been written in Truman’s memoirs and many, many other places. Jacobson said, “Mr. President, Harry, you’ve got to do me this one favor. See this tired, old man. He’s come halfway across the world to see you. Just give him a few minutes of your time.” And Truman reluctantly agreed.

Weizmann was a great diplomat. He told Truman, and “You have the opportunity of the ages. If you’ll stay strong now, you’ll go down in history for all eternity.” And Truman was impressed by it, and he called Warren Austin at the UN to inform him of American policy. For added drama, when the call came, Austin was in the middle of a speech about how America was backing out of the partition plan. But when he returned from the phone call, he said, “President Truman has instructed me that the United States supports in full the partition plan as adopted by the United Nations and will work to see it implemented.”

Chaim Weizmann presents Truman with a Torah scroll.

When that happened, the situation turned. The state was declared on May 15, 1948. And not two weeks later, Weizmann presented Truman with the traditional gift Jews give to heads of state: a Torah scroll. When Truman saw it, he said, “I always wanted one of those.”

Since the birth of the state,  Israel has known constant war and terror. There have only been lulls between wars, but never any actual quiet, in spite of Israel’s successful peace treaties with two of its neighboring Arab states, Egypt and Jordan. The hard core of the Arab/Islamist world has never come to terms with the presence of the Jewish people on its ancient home. Yet in spite of this, Israel has prospered in an almost supernatural fashion. It has absorbed immigrants from almost eighty lands. Yet in spite of all of its accomplishments, much of the world sees it as a failure and perhaps even a mistake. But the doomsayers have been proven wrong many times over the centuries of Jewish life. They are again wrong in respect to Israel’s future. May Israel continue to show its pattern of accomplishment and strengthen the people living in our justifiably entitled Jewish homeland.

For more on the aftermath of the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel, please see our documentary film Faith and Fate 6: The Miracle of Israel, 1945-1948.

Churchill, Truman and Stalin meet in Potsdam after the war.

In honor of the state of Israel’s 62^nd birthday this week, I’d like to recount some of the strange twists of fate that brought it about. So many unlikely things happened that when you look at it all, you have to stand back in awe.

Now, I ask you: of all individuals in World War Two, who is most responsible for the Allied victory? Who was Hitler’s most implacable foe? Who told the world, “We will never surrender”?

The answer, of course, is Winston Churchill. Churchill is an example of how a person is nurtured for the right moment in history. He comes, he does it, and he’s gone. For decades, Churchill had been in the wilderness of British politics, the odd man out. If anybody in 1935 had said that he would become prime minister, the pundits would have laughed. And if anyone had said that after the war, in a grand fit of appreciation, the British people would vote him out of office, it would also be hard to believe, but that’s exactly what happened. What’s more, it happened in the middle of the Potsdam peace conference. Churchill had to go back to England, and his successor Clement Attlee replaced him.

The Mufti of Jerusalem inspects Nazi troops

In my opinion, if Churchill had remained in power, the world would never have come to the position of creating the state of Israel. Why? Because Churchill would not have pushed the anti-Jewish line that the Labour party did. After the war, some 230,000-240,000 Jews were found alive in the concentration camps. The world Jewish leadership requested that 100,000 of them be allowed to emigrate to Palestine, which was under British control. They did not ask for their own state. But Attlee had appointed as his foreign secretary a tough labor organizer named Ernest Bevin who did not like Jews. That is not to say that he was an anti-Semite in the sense that the Nazis were. He was just a bigot. He said, “I will not allow the Jews to push to the head of the queue. England has other problems.” And he would not allow a single Jew into Palestine. He was afraid of Arab reaction.

The Arabs then began the propaganda that they have used so successfully until now. “It’s not our fault that six million Jews got killed in Europe. Why are you punishing us? Let them go to America. Let them go to England. Let them go back to Germany. What do you want from us?”

As though the Mufti did not sit in Berlin for six years during the war, as though the British did not have to put down a number of Arab revolutions on behalf of Nazis.

Exodus passengers back in displaced persons camps in Germany

The reaction of many of the Jews in Palestine was to fight the British, and that was the beginning of what is today the Mossad. They infiltrated the concentration camps and organized the survivors. Jewish refugees marched hundreds and hundreds of miles to embarkation points where ships leased by Jewish organizations would take them to Palestine.

At first, the immigration was successful because England was not prepared to counteract it. Israel has a long coastline, and in the dead of night, you can land a few hundred people, unload them, and be gone in the daytime. The few hundred people were then absorbed into the kibbutzim and the Jewish cities. The Arabs began to scream bloody murder. So then the British navy blockaded the eastern Mediterranean and built a large detention camp on the island of Cyprus. The ships carrying the would-be Jewish immigrants were caught and the people were put in the detention camp. But the world now had sympathy for the Jews. That detention camp showed a terrible callousness to what they had gone through.

The most public incident was with the ship, the Exodus 1947. It was carrying almost 4000 Jewish refugees when the British intercepted it. They didn’t even unload in Cyprus; they brought the ship all the way back to Hamburg, Germany. They had to drag the Jews off the ship kicking and screaming. It may have been a British military triumph, but it was a public relations disaster. And this pressure was the beginning of the end for the British Mandate over Palestine.

For more on the aftermath of the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel, please see our documentary film Faith and Fate 6: The Miracle of Israel, 1945-1948.

IDF soldiers' honor guard for a fallen soldier in the War of Independence

These few weeks are crowded with special days of memory, especially here in Israel. Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Memorial Day), Yom Ha Zikaron (Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers), and Yom Ha Atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) all come upon us in swift succession. They are really the framework for the Israeli psyche governing our national mood and policies. The rest of the world does not and perhaps cannot understand where we are coming from.

Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) has taught us that if someone arises and intends to exterminate the Jewish people as official policy, we will not have any real protectors in the world to defend us. In the past, our erstwhile friends, whether FDR or Churchill, did next to nothing to prevent the Holocaust from occurring. It is unlikely that Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is any more reliable.

The leaders of the world, if they are not latent anti-Semites, are overtly unrealistic. They prefer not to get it. So they conclude that Shiite Iran does not mean what it says when it regularly proclaims our eventual destruction. But Yom Ha Shoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) comes to remind us that reality differs from naïve hopes and ill-thought policies.

The fecklessness of the world in the face of militant Islam, unabating terrorism, and rogue nuclear armed states inspires little confidence here in Israel. We may say “never again,” but deep down in our hearts we know that “again” remains a distinct possibility.

The world wants us to get over the Holocaust while at the same time is creating a scenario that constantly reminds us of its reoccurence. People who are bitten by large dogs do not walk on the same side of the street where Rottweilers are present.

The Jewish people have paid a heavy price for maintaining our little state. Tens of thousands of Jews have been killed and continue to die for its preservation. The Arab world has basically never come to terms with the reality of the existence of the State of Israel. Constant war, mindless terrorism, unceasing incitement, never ending accusations, fabrications and biased UN resolutions have been the daily fare of the State of Israel since its inception.

We can never lose a war, but we are never allowed to win one either. So Yom Ha Zikaron (Memorial Day for Fallen Israeli Soldiers) tragically becomes a regular occurrence in our lives. Golda Meir may have fabulously expressed mourning over the deaths of the Arabs in their struggles against our existence, but the Arabs have never expressed such regrets.

The Ayatollahs of Iran say that they willing to lose fifteen million(!) Iranians in order to eradicate the State of Israel. It is hard to see how one can come to an accommodation with such bloodthirsty, uncaring fanatics whose value for human life, theirs and certainly ours, is so cheap. So Yom Ha Zikaron (Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers) comes to remind us of the real world and the heartbreaking cost that Israel has paid and continues to pay for survival.

Pious platitudes about peace do not change the reality of murderous intent on the ground. We have been down that road too many times in the past to be seduced to go there again.

The miracle of the past century was and remains the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel. Yom Ha Atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) has to be viewed in that light. The tragedy is that this miracle, unlike Chanukah and Purim, had no religious leadership that could have cloaked it with the necessary ritual that would have made the day meaningful to all sections of Israeli and Jewish society. Having a barbecue in the park hardly makes it a memorable day, a tradition of observance that can be passed on to later generations.

Those of us who were alive when the state came into being and experienced all the pangs of its establishment are a fast-disappearing breed. The deniers amongst us, certainly in the non-Jewish world, already distort and falsify the story. The victim has become the oppressor and Goliath struts around the world stage as David. Yom Ha Atzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) should come to remind us of the real story of Jewish heroism and triumph against all odds.

It should also remind the world that even though it is popular and oh so politically correct and progressively noble to damn Israel, in the long run it is very counterproductive to do so. Just ask the Soviet Union! So let us take these days to heart and stand tall for our God and land.

For more on the aftermath of the Holocaust and the birth of the state of Israel, please see our documentary film Faith and Fate 6: The Miracle of Israel, 1945-1948.

Ben Gurion as a volunteer in the Jewish Legion 1918

It is 3922 years since the Exodus from Egypt. So many different eras, empires, civilizations and technological and political revolutions have occurred over those thirty-nine centuries that it is difficult to imagine that a small and stubbornly different people could have survived it all, much less continue to prosper and influence the world in so many ways. 

Jewish history is not only facts and dates, scholarship and academic disciplines. It is, more importantly, inspiration and faith, guidance and hope, vision and destiny. For all practical purposes, Jewish history begins with Passover, with the Exodus from Egypt. It is ironic that there are those in the Jewish world who, for whatever unfathomable reasons, have attempted to deny the entire narrative of the Exodus from Egypt. 

All of Jewish history and Jewish survival itself puts the lie to such attempts and theories. Judaism is based upon the simple notion that my grandfather was not a liar. Yes, there are deniers of the Exodus, but we are witness to the fact that many truths, such as the Holocaust, can spawn a denial industry. Denial will not change the truth. Knowing the Jewish story is itself a great high point of our pre-Passover preparations.I’ve often said I’d like to have the old-time secularists back. David Ben Gurion was an ardent secularist, but there were certain basics he never denied. Here is an excerpt from the speech he made in front of the Peel Commission in 1936. 

Lord Peel's arrival at the Peel Commission, 1936

For background, the Peel Commission occurred during the British Mandate over Palestine. After a series of Arab attacks against the Jews, the British attempted to extricate themselves from this nutcracker of Arab violence and Jewish pressure by establishing a commission to study the problem, appointing Lord Peel as its chairman. Under the shadow of Hitler’s rise in Germany, England floated a trial balloon in the form of a partition plan. The proposed Jewish section would have consisted of tiny, barely visible slivers and could never become a viable national entity. But while the Jews were displeased by the Peel Commission Report, the Arabs were even more outraged and violence again spread throughout the country. Ben Gurion’s speech was given in the midst of the commission, well before its conclusions: 

“300 years ago, there came to the New World a boat, and its name was the Mayflower. The Mayflower’s landing on Plymouth Rock was one of the great historical events in the history of England and in the history of America. But I would like to ask any Englishman sitting here on the commission, what day did the Mayflower leave port? What date was it? I’d like to ask the Americans: do they know what date the Mayflower left port in England? How many people were on the boat? Who were their leaders? What kind of food did they eat on the boat? 

“More than 3300 years ago, long before the Mayflower, our people left Egypt, and every Jew in the world, wherever he is, knows what day they left. And he knows what food they ate. And we still eat that food every anniversary. And we know who our leader was. And we sit down and tell the story to our children and grandchildren in order to guarantee that it will never be forgotten. And we say our two slogans: ‘Now we may be enslaved, but next year, we’ll be a free people.’ 

“. . . Now we are behind the Soviet Union and their prison. Now, we’re in Germany where Hitler is destroying us. Now we’re scattered throughout the world, but next year, we’ll be in Jerusalem. There’ll come a day that we’ll come home to Zion, to the Land of Israel. That is the nature of the Jewish people.”[1] 

That was Ben Gurion. He understood Passover. He got it. The only thing is, the task of the Passover seder is to try and pass down those values to the next generation. Tragically, Ben Gurion’s own descendants had no seder to make sure they got it. 

[1] Translation mine from Ben Gurion’s autobiography. 

For more on the birth of the state of Israel, please see our film “Faith and Fate VI: The Miracle of Israel, 1945-1948.”

Gilad Shalit, IDF soldier held captive by Hamas since June 2006

The issue of the redemption of Jewish hostages and captives from enemy hands is a very old and painful one. The Talmud records that even though the commandment to redeem captured Jews is of top priority in Jewish life, we are nevertheless forbidden to pay an exorbitant price to secure the freedom of such a captive. In that age, when hostages and captives were sold on the slave market, it was relatively simple to judge what an “exorbitant” price was. But in our times, the criterion is much more difficult.

Israel, unfortunately, has had to deal with this problem quite a number of times in the past few decades. Its main goal has always been to return the captive home in the best condition possible. But great debate always accompanies this policy, and I am grateful that such terrible decisions are not mine to make. Many have said that the prices paid were “exorbitant.” Others say that the price was worthwhile. Who can decide on such impossible Hobbesian choices?

Jewish history is replete with incidents of hostages. One of the most famous was in the 13th century when the great Rabbi Meir of Rottenburg was taken hostage by the Emperor Rudolph I and held for a ransom of 30,000 marks, the equivalent of a billion dollars in those times. His main disciple, Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel (a/k/a the Rosh) undertook to raise that sum, and the Jewish communities of the area, out of their great love and respect for Rabbi Meir, donated what they could. But Rabbi Meir himself forbade the Jews to ransom him, arguing that it would set a precedent and encourage the emperor to kidnap a different rabbi and demand more ransom money. So instead, the Rosh bribed an enormous number of lower-level officials to make sure that Rabbi Meir at least had decent living conditions and was able to receive visitors.

Emperor Rudolph did not relent on his extortionist demands, and after seven years, Rabbi Meir passed away in the prison of the castle. The emperor then demanded the very same exorbitant ransom for the release of the rabbi’s body. Jewish burial, like redeeming captives, is also a cardinal principle of Jewish law. But in accordance with the wishes of Rabbi Meir as he expressed them during his last years of life, the ransom was not paid.

The graves of Rabbi Meir of Rottenburg and Alexander ben Solomon Wimpfren.

The emperor held the body for thirteen years. Eventually, a wealthy Jew came to a settlement with him, and Rabbi Meir was buried in the ancient Jewish cemetery of Worms. Next to his grave lies the body of the wealthy Jew who obtained the release of his remains. These two graves have remained a place of Jewish visitation and veneration even until our day.

Similarly, during the reign of the Czars of Russia in the nineteenth century, many rabbis and Jewish public figures were arrested, almost always on trumped up charges. Great efforts were made to obtain their freedom, often by exerting political and diplomatic pressure on the Russian government from other world powers. Means of corrupting the police and government ministers were also employed, but again, there was a great hesitation to pay any “exorbitant” price to the Czar and his cohorts for the release of the arrested prisoners.

The decisions regarding these cases were basically ad hoc, depending on the exact circumstances of each case. But the problem of an “exorbitant” price always remained within the Jewish community, and apparently remains so until our day. Judaism abhors simplistic answers to complicated problems. There has never been a simple answer to the question of ransoming Jewish prisoners or hostages, and there obviously is no simple answer today. We can only pray for wisdom, patience, and balanced behavior to help us arrive at the correct decisions in such matters, if and when, God forbid, they arise.

Jerusalem today. Photo by David Shankbone.

History is made up of all sorts of interesting twists of fate, and the story of the development of Jerusalem is full of them.

It began with the “chance” meeting of Sir Moses Montefiore and Rabbi Shmuel Salant in Damascus. Sir Montefiore had just made his historic visit to Damascus to advocate on behalf of the Jews imprisoned in the Damascus blood libel. Rabbi Salant, originally from Eastern Europe, was en route to Jerusalem to make a new home for himself. From this “chance” meeting grew a friendship that would bring about the entire development of the city.

Sir Montefiore was a trustee of the will of the great Jewish philanthropist, Judah Touro. He passed away in 1854, leaving $300,000 to Jewish charities – an enormous sum in those times. The will specified that $50,000 should go to benefit the Jews of the city of Jerusalem, but it did not say precisely how. So with $50,000 burning a hole in his pocket, Sir Montefiore visited his friend Rabbi Salant in Jerusalem. The rabbi advised that they buy land outside the walls of the Old City because the Old City was getting too crowded.

Sir Montefiore approached a certain Arab about the purchase of the land and made him an enormously generous offer. The legend is that the Arab refused, saying, “I’ll never sell this land out of my family. I’ll give it to you, Sir Moses Montefiore, but I won’t sell it to you.”

Sir Montefiore was astute enough to know that this Arab wasn’t interested in giving the land away. So he approached him a second time, a third time, and a fourth time until finally the price hit the critical mark and the Arab said, “I won’t sell it, but if you’ll give the money toward ‘a good cause,’ then I’ll ‘give’ the land to you.”

Those were the terms on which the deal was struck.

The Montefiore Windmill today

The land he bought was right outside the walls of the Old City, 18,000 dunam in size, and they named it Neve Shaananim. The next neighborhood Sir Montefiore bought was called Yemin Moshe, named in his honor. There he built the famous windmill, which is still a tourist attraction today. Unfortunately, it has never been anything more than that. The plan was that it would be a grain-milling station that would provide employment for people, but the builder failed to realize that a windmill in dry, landlocked Jerusalem does not work the same way as the mills on the coast of Holland.

The problem was that the Arabs in those times were much like the Arabs now. Jews could not go out safely at night. People were reluctant to move out of the Old City, where they were protected by the walls. That was the significance of the name “Neve Shaananim,” which means “the home of those who are at peace.” In reality, after the apartments were built and the first settlers went to live there, the danger was so real that people would go to the new city during the day so that there would be a Jewish presence there, but at night, they would return to sleep within the Old City walls. And since Jerusalem was under the control of the Ottoman Turks, there were no policemen for the Jews to appeal to. Therefore, it was not until 1872 that a group of seven young families agreed to buy land outside the walls and actually sleep there at night. That neighborhood is called Nachlat Shiva, “the inheritance of the seven.” It was no-man’s land between 1948 and 1967, but it was the first Jewish presence that took hold outside the Old City.

Bikur Cholim Hospital today

Another great accomplishment of this remarkable team was the founding of Jerusalem’s first hospital, Bikur Cholim Hospital. Sir Montefiore purchased the building and supplied drugs and equipment from Europe, items which were scarce if not non-existent under the Ottoman Empire. And the hospital proved its worth in 1866 when there was a terrible cholera outbreak in Jerusalem in which hundreds of people died. The hospital tended to Jew and Arab alike, though it was primitive medicine. In fact, for the first thirty years, the hospital did not even have a registered doctor, but it was still some sort of place for the sick. It exists today, though no longer in its original location in the Old City. It is best known for its neo-natal unit.

Sir Montefiore, Rabbi Shmuel Salant, and the rabbi’s son Binyamin Beinish continued to develop Jerusalem for the rest of their lives. In fact, in 1909, months before Rabbi Salant passed away, he laid the cornerstone for the Jerusalem neighborhood of Shaarei Chesed, where I live now. He was old, weak, and blind, but he would not miss the dedication of a new neighborhood. And that was their life’s work; under them, Jerusalem multiplied a thousand fold. Without them, it would not be what it is today.