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Category: Op-Ed

Rabbinical Council of America’s GPS brings conversions into question

Back in 2008, the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) announced a new system of conversion, GPS (Geirus Policies and Standards). Ostensibly, their goal was to create a universal and centralized standard for all conversions. We warned then that the GPS system would result in invalidating conversions that had been done in the past in accordance with Orthodox law and approved by the RCA. (JTA, March 10, 2008, “RCA deal hurts rabbi, converts.”)

Unfortunately, we have been proven correct. In a letter sent by the Beth Din of America (BDA, which is under the auspices of the RCA) to the chief rabbinate’s office, it was stated that “we cannot accept the conversion of any rabbi who served in a synagogue without a mehitza.” The RCA should clarify if this refers to any rabbi who ever served in a synagogue without a mehitza, or if it refers to a rabbi who performed that specific conversion while serving in a non-mehitza synagogue. Either way, this pronouncement should alarm countless converts.

Back in the ’60s and ’70s, many Orthodox rabbis ordained at Yeshivah University served in mixed seated shuls. The rav, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, felt that in certain communities, YU rabbis should serve because the shuls may one day construct a mehitza. The BDA letter now places the conversions of all of those rabbis in jeopardy. This means that the children and grandchildren of these converts, some living in Israel, could be declared to not be Jewish. This is a terrible violation of the law, which prohibits the oppression of converts.

It is also a violation of the RCA’s own promise when it declared, “… any conversions performed previously [before GPS] that met its standards then, would continue to be recognized.” (“RCA response to public attack on GPS geirus policies,” March 19, 2009) Prior to the GPS system, when conversions were questioned, the RCA would vouch for its members who were in good standing. The RCA didn’t think twice about Orthodox rabbis who served in mixed seated shuls in the ’50s or ’60s, as this was common practice. This has now changed.

When we wrote that the RCA would question conversions done prior to the 2008 GPS standards, we never asserted that the RCA would conduct a witch-hunt to actively search out converts, find them and declare them invalid. What we said was that those converts who now needed to have their conversions validated by the RCA would be in jeopardy as the RCA would cast aspersions on pre-GPS conversions by imposing post-GPS standards.

This is precisely what is happening. When a convert or their children or grandchildren make aliyah, he or she needs his/her Jewish status validated. Because of the centralization of the GPS standards, the chief rabbinate’s office now turns to the Beth Din of America for guidance. The upshot of this is that conversions performed by RCA rabbis who served in non-mehitza shuls for years – some who even went on to become presidents of the RCA – are now in question.

RCA validation of conversions may not be limited to converts who emigrate to Israel. It can also encompass those applying to Orthodox day schools in the United States or applying for membership in an Orthodox synagogue, as these schools and synagogues will be looking to the RCA for guidance.

In fact, the matter is even worse. As a result of the GPS system, the RCA now has a practice of not only evaluating converts at the time of conversion, but for years after. Most recently, a convert who converted through the GPS system informed us of a call received from an RCA official. Having heard that the convert was struggling with Orthodox communal norms, the official threatened to retroactively invalidate the conversion.

The RCA practices should be of great concern to every convert who converts today. Now, the RCA is not only invalidating conversions done prior to the GPS system but threatening to undo conversions done through the GPS system itself.

It is these issues that require immediate detailed clarification from the RCA. In the meantime, we should all be concerned about what seems to be both a retroactive application of current GPS principles and also a creeping reduction of the convert’s status in the Orthodox community.

Rabbi Marc Angel is founder and director of the Institute for Jewish Ideas and Ideals (jewishideas.org) and a former president of the RCA. Rabbi Avi Weiss is senior rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and founder of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School and Yeshivat Maharat. They are co-founders of the International Rabbinic Fellowship (IRF).

Posted on April 18, 2014April 16, 2014Author Rabbi Avi Weiss, Rabbi Marc AngelCategories Op-EdTags aliyah, Beth Din of America, conversion, Geirus Policies and Standards, International Rabbinic Fellowship, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Rabbinical Council of America, Yeshivah University

Battle for the bronze is where the real excitement lies

As the Winter Olympics returned to the headlines these past few weeks and we were filled with memories of four years ago in Vancouver, I decided this time around to root for the bronze medal winners.

I cheered for the bronze because, in my opinion, the most exiting Olympic competition is not the race for the gold, but the battle for the bronze. While it is exciting to see who will win (I did root for gold medal winners, too), I was particularly drawn to cheer for the ones who didn’t lose.

In 1995, a study was carried out by social psychologists Victoria Medvec, Scott Madey and Thomas Gilovich on the psychology of Olympic medal winners. The study showed that athletes who won the bronze medal were significantly happier with their results than those athletes who won the silver. Those who placed second were more frustrated because they had missed the gold medal, while the bronze medalists were simply happy to have received any honors at all (instead of a fourth-place finish). This is even more pronounced in knockout competitions, such as soccer’s World Cup, or the NCAA Final Four competition, where the bronze medals are achieved by winning a playoff; silver medals are awarded after a defeat in the final.

The truth is that the competitions would seem incomplete without a third-place finisher. Imagine if they only gave out a gold medal. It would be all about one person, too egocentric and too exclusive. For that matter, two is really not much better. The silver medalist is merely the guy who didn’t win. Without a bronze, he or she can’t even say, “Well, at least I didn’t come in third.” Number three, on the other hand, has a sense of fullness, of completion. Like the old saying, “three’s a crowd,” everyone is represented. Or, better put like the TV show, “three’s company.”

We know this in our own colloquialisms, as well. Three is the predominant way we categorize the world around us. What do we call the alphabet? The ABCs. What do you tell your kids when they are trying something and can’t get it right? Third time’s the charm (unless it takes more than that, of course). What does the starter say for a race? On your mark, get set, go! You tell a joke, it has to be: a priest, a minister and a rabbi – leave one out and you risk offending by not being inclusive in your offending humor. Nobody stands up at a wedding and shouts two cheers for the bride and groom. At Starbucks, it’s tall, grande and vente. Even made-up terms have a hierarchy. And, in those cases where the expanse of society has necessitated a fourth category – as in small, medium, large and extra large – it has the clear connotation of existing outside the norm, beyond the scope of what is necessary. It just doesn’t fit – pun intended.

Our rabbis knew this, as well. In the Mishnah, Rabbi Shimon the Righteous proclaims, “Al shlosha d’varim ha’olam omed: al haTorah, v’al haAvodah, v’al gemilut chasadim”: “The world stands on three legs: Torah, prayer and deeds of loving kindness.” Leave out any one of these and the world collapses in disarray. The Vahavtah of the Shema gives the same message: love God with all your heart, soul and might – miss one of these and you have not loved God completely. More positively: do all three of these and you can feel a closeness to God that would otherwise escape you.

Three is a very Jewish number. Three patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It was three days into the journey from Egypt when the Israelites encountered God in the desert. Traditional Jews pray morning, noon and night. Hebrew verbs have three-letter roots, which serve as the foundation for the whole lexicon of Jewish expression. The list goes on.

One of the most powerful instances of three in Jewish tradition is the custom of placing three shovels of earth on a grave at a funeral. I am frequently asked, “Rabbi, why three shovels of earth?” We place three shovels of earth for the same reasons mentioned above. Three is complete; it shows intention and a fullness of action. One could be inadvertent, two is somehow just not enough, but three means that you have fulfilled the mitzvah.

One of my favorite teachings from Jewish tradition is about the mezuzah and why it rests on an angle on the doorpost. Rashi said it should lie flat, while his grandson, Rabbeinu Tam, said it should be vertical. In a rare moment of compromise between these two schools of thought, a student of them both, Rabbi Jacob ben Asher, ordained a third way, a compromise position. It rests on an angle because, among the many given reasons, the key to a peaceful home, to shalom bayit, is compromise, finding a third way.

Bronze medalists give meaning to the achievements of the others, they place everything in perspective. They are not to be forgotten as last of the best, or even remembered as first of the worst. Rather, they are the essential pillar of the competition, the bridge between just making it and not making it at all.

We live most of the moments of our lives on that bridge – balanced precariously between success and failure. Celebrate the bronze medals in the many moments of your life: they are hard fought and hard won.

Rabbi Dan Moskovitz is the senior rabbi of Temple Sholom. Follow him on Twitter, @rabbidanmosk.

Posted on February 28, 2014April 11, 2014Author Rabbi Dan MoskovitzCategories Op-EdTags NCAA Final Four, Scott Madey, Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec, Winter Olympics, World Cup

The rhetoric of Palestine denial

The intensifying Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have caused opponents of a Palestinian state to revive former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir’s 1969 canard that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” However, “Palestine denial” is less a debating point than a conversation- stopper: if there are no Palestinians, then there is no Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and thus no need even to discuss West Bank policies. One problem: Palestinians do, in fact, exist.

In December, Israeli diplomat Danny Ayalon posted a YouTube video entitled “The Real Truth About Palestine,” in which he claimed that Palestine is a place, not a nation: “Like Antarctica, the Amazons or Sahara, naming a place doesn’t create a nation of Antarcticans or Saharans.” And in a recent Front Page Magazine essay, Hoover Institution scholar Bruce Thornton referred to “the so-called Palestinians” and stated that the very idea of a Palestinian nation is but “a device for promoting the incremental war against Israel.”

In 2012, three U.S. Republican presidential candidates endorsed Palestine denial: Newt Gingrich called Palestinians “an invented people”; Rick Santorum said “there are no Palestinians … all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis”; and Herman Cain referred to “the so-called Palestinian people.”

Palestine denial, like Holocaust denial, is easily refuted. Most historians, since the publication of Benedict Anderson’s book Imagined Communities three decades ago, have accepted that every people is invented, some very recently.

Italian consciousness dates to 1764 and, until 1871, Italy wasn’t a country. Earlier residents considered themselves Neapolitans or Venetians or Florentines, and their primary loyalties were to their religion or ruler. But “Italian” is not a timeless identity, nation, or people.

Before a UCLA professor coined “Asian American” in 1968, Americans whose backgrounds were Chinese or Filipino or Japanese weren’t really part of a unified ethnic group. Yet the government now applies census and voting-rights laws to Asian Americans as if they existed – which, today, they do.

Czechoslovakia, carved from former Austro-Hungarian territory containing mostly Czechs but also Germans and Slovaks, lasted from 1918 to 1992. But the state was only partially successful in creating a unified Czechoslovakian identity out of those ethnicities. The joke among Jewish historians is that there were Czechs and Slovaks, but the only Czechoslovaks were the Jews of Prague.

Being Jewish is itself an invented identity. Though Judaism is thousands of years old, it’s not ageless. Ancient concepts of tribes and kingdoms differ greatly from today’s nation idea. In fact, Hebrew has a different word for biblical peoplehood (am) and modern nationhood (l’om). Jewish nationalism traces only to the late 1800s, when secular European Jews faced rising nationalist antisemitism in their countries of residence, as expressed in France’s Dreyfus Affair and the Russian pogroms. The central Zionist myth of uninterrupted but dispersed Jewish nationhood with consistent identity tracing to biblical times and finally gathering in modern Israel is historically inaccurate.

Palestinian identity and peoplehood started in the early 20th century, but intensified after the events of 1948 and 1967. The Palestinian nation then developed a strong sense of shared history and future, grievance and aspiration. It has a flag, a shared language (Palestinian Arabic), particular cuisine and a varied literary canon.

Palestine denial is hackneyed and utterly predictable. Its followers boast of the following 1977 citation by Zuheir Muhsain of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s pan-Arabist faction: “The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel.” The obsession over a hoary 35-year-old quote from a Palestinian with a minority viewpoint suggests no other textual evidence exists.

Deniers also champion Mark Twain’s 1867 Innocents Abroad, always using the same passage, which describes Palestine in part as a “desolate country” where Twain “never saw a human being on the whole route.” But this 68-word mantra, presented as a single coherent opinion, selectively combines sentences and phrases from pages 488, 520 and 555 of the travelogue. Never mentioned are Twain’s half-dozen anecdotes about encounters with Arabs in Palestine. Innocents Abroad actually offers more support to the Palestinian narrative than the Zionist one.

Finally, West Bank residents are purportedly just a motley collection of Arab economic migrants, not a unified nation. Of course, the United States was also populated by economic migrants, and everyone recognizes the American people.

Denial rhetoric invalidates Palestinian rights by contradicting common sense and nearly all nationalism scholarship. It also leads to very strange questions. Are Italians a nation? Do Pakistanis (a 75-year-old identity) deserve a state? Should we tell a person who says she’s Asian American, “No, you’re not”?

Opponents of a Palestinian state can raise many legitimate points. But the “myth of Palestine” is not one of them. The idea needs to be retired, so real discussions about the Israeli and Palestinian futures can start.

David Benkof has a master’s degree in modern Jewish history from Stanford. He teaches Hebrew in Jerusalem. He can be reached at [email protected].

Posted on February 7, 2014April 11, 2014Author David BenkofCategories Op-EdTags Benedict Anderson, Bruce Thornton, Danny Ayalon, Imagined Communities, Innocents Abroad, Israel, Mark Twain, Newt Gingrich, Palestine denial, Palestinian identity, Palestinian LIberation Organization, PLO, The Real Truth About Palestine, West Bank, Zionist myth, Zuheir Muhsain
Long-forgotten chapter: 1942’s Operation Torch

Long-forgotten chapter: 1942’s Operation Torch

A message from U.S. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to the people of Casablanca, found on the street of that city in 1942. (image from commons.wikimedia.org)

In the wake of invasion and military defeat in the summer of 1940, Adolf Hitler and the French government in Vichy, now headed by Marshal Pétain, concluded an armistice by virtue of which France was divided into an occupied zone and a non-occupied zone. The conditions imposed by Germany were at first relatively lenient: the French government retained partial autonomy in the occupied north and full autonomy in the non-occupied south. Vichy also retained varying degrees of control over the French colonial empire: while Algeria remained under direct French rule, Morocco and Tunisia had the status of protectorates under their native rulers supervised by France. In Morocco, King Mohammed V defied France by refusing to apply Vichy’s antisemitic laws. In Tunisia, Gestapo and SS followed Erwin Rommel’s army and, in 1942, rounded up the Jewish population for deportation to the Nazi death camps.

In the spring of 1942, strong disagreements among the Allies came to light in regard of the strategy to adopt against Germany. While President Franklin Roosevelt initially leaned in favor of Josef Stalin’s insistent demand for a landing in Western Europe in 1942, in the end, he reluctantly rallied to Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s view that such a landing at that time could not possibly succeed. He believed that the Allies would not be ready for this risky operation until late in 1943, or even 1944. Churchill proposed that, instead, an Allied landing be staged in North Africa, in order to deny Germany and Italy full control over the Mediterranean and compel Rommel’s army, which was retreating from Libya, to fight on two fronts.

In preparation for this operation, the Americans entered into secret contacts with the anti-Vichy underground in Algiers to enlist its assistance in the landing, albeit with some reluctance since the United States still recognized the legality of the Vichy government with which it maintained diplomatic relations.

Such is the background of Operation Torch placed under the command of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower. On the morning of Nov. 8, 1942, a mostly American fleet of more than 100,000 men landed under air cover on the coasts of Morocco and Algeria. Three days later, the Germans violated the armistice of 1940 and invaded the southern zone of France in collaboration with the Italians.

In the port of Algiers, the landing was greatly facilitated by the local resistance, composed in the main of young students, who effectively sabotaged the communications of the local French military, seized public buildings and even arrested two of the top commanders: Admiral François Darlan, Pétain’s former prime minister, and Gen. Alphonse Juin. It is important to note that two-thirds of these 400 young resistance fighters were Jews. The French authorities in Algeria were fanatically devoted to Vichy and so zealous in the implementation of that regime’s antisemitic legislation, that they established internment camps in the Sahara in preparation for the round-up and deportation of the Jewish population to the death camps of Europe. Vichy also deprived the 116,000 Jews of Algeria of the French citizenship that had been awarded them in the 19th century.

What happened after the Allied landing is simply shocking. The young Jews, whose support facilitated the capture of the Algerian capital, were abandoned to whatever fate had in store for them. Instead of handing North Africa to the control of the Free French Forces organized by Gen. Charles de Gaulle from London, the Americans allowed Vichy’s stooges to remain at the helm.

What happened after the Allied landing is simply shocking. The young Jews, whose support facilitated the capture of the Algerian capital, were abandoned to whatever fate had in store for them. Instead of handing North Africa to the control of the Free French Forces organized by Gen. Charles de Gaulle from London, the Americans allowed Vichy’s stooges to remain at the helm.

Roosevelt despised de Gaulle and his Free French Forces, and chose to place in command of the French army of North Africa, whose commanders, including Darlan, resented Germany’s violation of the armistice of 1940, the semi-Vichyste Gen. Henri Giraud. The young anti-Vichy fighters were for the most arrested and interned in the Sahara. Some of them narrowly avoided being executed. The Vichy laws remained in force. De Gaulle eventually rallied a number of generals in charge of colonial troops in French Equatorial Africa and arrived in May 1943 in Algiers, where he established the authority of Free France, invalidated the Vichy laws, and restored to the Jews their French citizenship.

Unfortunately for those of us who grew up revering him, Roosevelt’s connivance with Giraud and Vichy’s military commanders, and politicians in Algeria who had conveniently changed sides, was not the only instance of his betrayal of the hope that our people had pinned on him during the dreadful years of the Shoah. As for de Gaulle, the sympathy that he expressed for the suffering of our people at the time of the liberation of France and his sadness-filled admonition to his Jewish soldiers in the Free French Forces that antisemitism was not dead, were expressions of a friendship, which unfortunately did not survive the temptations of realpolitik and opportunism. On the morrow of Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967, de Gaulle labeled the Jews a “proud and domineering people” and turned France from an ally into an enemy of Israel.

It took nearly half a century for the Jewish resistance in France to win official recognition; for the members of the Jewish communist urban underground, even longer. The Jewish contribution to the liberation of French Algeria is only now beginning to be written about.

René Goldman is professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia.

Format ImagePosted on January 17, 2014March 31, 2014Author René GoldmanCategories Op-EdTags Alphonse Juin, Charles de Gaulle, Dwight Eisenhower, François Darlan, Franklin Roosevelt, Free French Forces, French Algeria, Henri Giraud, Marshal Pétain, Operation Torch, resistance fighters, Vichy, Winston Churchill

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