Israeli military enlisting frontline rabbis, critic warns creating against “God’s army”
The Israeli military is mustering battlefield rabbis in what it calls a campaign to promote religious values in its frontline ranks. The move, announced in the latest issue of the military’s official weekly magazine, Bamahane, drew fire on Monday from one of Israel’s most popular newspaper columnists, who cautioned against creating a “God’s Army.”
Under the plan, a reserve army rabbi will be assigned to every battalion in the military’s northern command, whose areas of responsibility include the Lebanese and Syrian borders. “The assimilation of religion into combat battalions is increasing,” said an article in Bamahane, which gave details of the program being implemented after a year-long pilot project.
While rabbis have long served in Israel’s military, their roles traditionally have focused on overseeing adherence to Jewish dietary laws in its kitchens, Sabbath observance and religious ceremonies. Now, the Bamahane article said, “the commander of the Golani (infantry) brigade’s Battalion 51 does not move a meter without his rabbi.”
.
Catholics & Jews discuss their future dialogue, possible Muslim trialogue
Jewish and Roman Catholic leaders reviewing their dialogue over the past four decades expressed concern on Wednesday that younger generations had little idea of the historic reconciliation that has taken place between them. The two faiths must keep this awareness alive at a time when the last survivors of the Holocaust are dying and both the Catholic and Jewish worlds are changing in significant ways, they said at the end of a four-day interfaith conference.
The International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee (ILC) met in Paris to discuss the future of the dialogue begun after the Catholic Church renounced its anti-Semitism and declared its respect for Judaism at the Second Vatican Council in 1965.
“We have new generations for whom the problems between Judaism and Christianity, especially the Shoah, are history,” said Cardinal Kurt Koch, the top Vatican official for relations with Jews. “We can’t leave that to history.” Rabbi David Rosen of the American Jewish Committee said: “Today most young Catholics have no comprehension of how tragic the relationship in the past between Jews and Catholics was. Jews were viewed as the enemies of God, in league with the devil, responsible for the tragedies of the world,” he said, but the Church now saw them as “dearly beloved elder brothers.”
The closed-door talks took up the question of increasing contacts with Muslims without setting out any new initiatives. “We spoke about a trialogue of Catholics, Jews and Muslims because we have a lot in common,” Koch said. “But there are also problems. Some terms don’t always mean the same thing for us.”
Rabbi Richard Marker, the top world Jewish official for interfaith ties, said his International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations already held discussions with some Muslim groups but there was no Islamic world body to speak to. The Vatican also has contacts with different groups in Islam.
IJCIC’s experience in bringing together different strands of Judaism could be a useful model for Muslims trying to create a world body to speak for them with Christians and Jews, he said. “I think there will be two tracks,” Marker said. “There will be some space for trilateral dialogue and there will be a necessity to maintain bilateral dialogue.”
Germany ordains first female rabbi since Holocaust
Germany ordained its first female rabbi since the Holocaust on Thursday, marking a major step in the reintegration of Jews into modern German life.
In the glare of international media, Alina Treiger followed in the footsteps of Regina Jonas, who in 1935 was the first female to be appointed a rabbi in Germany. Jonas, from Berlin, was murdered by the Nazis in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1944.
The Ukrainian-born Treiger said she was thrilled to be ordained, at a ceremony at a synagogue in Berlin, with President Christian Wulff and hundreds of people in attendance, two centuries after the birth of Liberal Judaism in Germany.
“It’s a really exciting day for me. It’s not normal for a woman to be a rabbi and I didn’t know it was even possible when I was younger,” she told German television ZDF. “I’m just happy to be able to share this day with so many people.”
Germany’s Jewish community has grown quickly since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, which prompted an influx of Jews to the country, fuelling a need for more rabbis. Only a handful of Jews remained in Germany after the war, but today the population is believed to be around 200,000. Before Hitler took power in 1933, there were as many as 570,000.
Guestview: Catholics, Jews and petri dishes
The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the authors’ alone. Rabbi Elliot Dorff is rector of the American Jewish University in California and chairs the Conservative Movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards.This article first appeared in the Forward, a Jewish weekly published in New York, and is reprinted with their permission.
By Rabbi Elliot Dorff
This month, Robert Edwards, a professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing (along with Dr. Patrick Steptoe, who died in 1988), in vitro fertilization. The technique whereby eggs are removed from a woman, fertilized in a petri dish (hence the name “in vitro,” or “in a glass”), and then implanted into the womb, has enabled people to procreate who would otherwise not be able to have children.
Indeed, since Louise Brown, the first baby conceived through IVF, was born in 1978, some four million children have been conceived using this technique. Today between 1% and 2% of all babies born in the United States and other developed countries each year are conceived through IVF.
In vitro fertilization has had two ancillary benefits. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a technique developed about 10 years ago, enables couples to use IVF to avoid serious genetic diseases by extracting and testing one cell from each of a group of IVF embryos and then implanting only the ones without the disease. This avoids requiring the woman to carry a baby who might have a lethal or debilitating genetic disease for several months before testing and then possibly aborting the fetus.
Embryonic stem cell research is another boon produced by IVF. Using frozen embryos left over by couples who have used IVF to have children, scientists have justified hope of producing cures for some of our worst diseases — cancer, heart attacks, strokes, Parkinson’s, spinal cord injuries — and may even ultimately produce tissues and full organs for transplant.
Jews have been overwhelmingly — actually, almost universally — in favor of all of these developments, and Catholics have been opposed to them all. Catholics have therefore opposed the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Professor Edwards, and Jews have applauded it. Why?
New rabbi for Mumbai Jewish centre attacked in 2008
It was almost two years ago that Islamist militants attacked Mumbai and killed at least 166 people. Among them were six Jews, including Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka. Most non-Jewish readers probably had no idea what a Brooklyn-based Jewish couple was doing there. Many Jews would have known right away — they were running the Chabad House, one of a worldwide network of Jewish centres run by Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement devoted to supporting Jewish life wherever it may be found.
The news angle to this story is that the Mumbai centre has a new rabbi, just in time for the High Holidays, as reported in my feature here. Rabbi Chanoch Gechtman arrived there recently with his wife Leiky to take up the challenge of filling Holtzberg’s shoes. “I still can’t quite fathom that they are not here, they were such extraordinary people,” he said in an email from Mumbai. After all the damage to the original building, they’ve moved to another building not far away, but the address is not advertised on their website for understandable reasons.
This could be a daunting assignment, but Gechtman, 25, seemed eager to get to work. “People really believe in this city. It’s a place with a lot of energy; it’s full of life,” he said. “There is really an endless amount of work to be accomplished. And the Holtzbergs set the bar very high.” The work is literally endless — a couple that goes out on an assignment like this is expected to stay permanently. The commitment for the “shluchim,” as these emissaries are called, is supposed to be for life. And it’s a job for both the rabbi and his wife. Running a Chabad House means offering services such as kosher Sabbath dinners, Torah classes, youth programmes, day care facilities, summer camps and women’s ritual baths. It’s an open house for any Jew who wants to participate — locals, expatriates or tourists passing through the city.
“The Mumbai Jewish community definitely wants to move beyond 26/11. While we will obviously never forget what happened, we need to focus forward on helping the many people who need our assistance, so that Jewish life flourishes here,” Gechtman said.
On a recent visit to New York, I went to the world headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch to find out more about this network, which has expanded dramatically over the past few decades. The Crown Heights section of Brooklyn seems an unlikely place for the world headquarters of anything, but the house at 770 Eastern Parkway has been Chabad’s base since 1940, when the then leader, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, escaped from Nazi-occupied Poland. The last Chabad Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, worked there until his death in 1994. Chabad also has a large building next door.
Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, the movement’s spokesman and director of its extensive Chabad.org website, told me the first emissary went to Morocco in 1951. The network grew both in the United States and abroad, popping up on American university campuses as well as increasingly far-flung foreign destinations. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the region where the Lubavitchers originally came from, opened up many new opportunities in Russia.
Now, there are about 4,000 married couples working in around 3,500 institutions the movement runs in 77 countries around the world. Check out the directory of centres around the world here — it’s hard to say which location is the most far-flung or unlikely. How about Luang Prabang?
Ultra-trad Catholics upset rabbi’s lecture in Paris cathedral
Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris witnessed a scene on Sunday afternoon that seemed to be from a bygone age. A rabbi invited to deliver a lecture about Catholic-Jewish dialogue was interrupted by young arch-traditionalist Catholics who began to pray the rosary to make “amends for the outrage” of letting him speak there. Rabbi Rivon Krygier had to leave the nave and retire to the sacristy, where he read his text into a microphone to broadcast it to about 1,200 people who came to hear him. Read our full story here.
Rabbi Krygier, the head of a small Conservative Jewish congregation in Paris, had the grace to recognise that his hecklers were a tiny minority. “They’ll say they succeeded in banishing the rabbi to the sacristy,” he told the Catholic daily La Croix. “This is an act that has to be taken seriously, but the Christians active in dialogue seem much more determined to continue on this path.”
The warm round of applause that Krygier received when he returned to the nave after the lecture bore that out. At the same time, arch-traditionalists such as Rev. Régis de Cacqueray, head of the French section of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) congratulated protesters for their “courage” and said: “The Paris cathedral is neither a synagogue nor a Masonic temple.”
An ultra-traditionalist blog called “Les Intransigeants” (The Intransigents) spoke its mind more openly: “Notre Dame again defended against the outrage by the merchants of the Temple.” The rest of the post was worse anti-Semitic venom.
This incident came at a time of growing tension between the mainstream French Church and a small minority of arch-traditionalists who reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), especially the opening it brought to fellow Christians, Jews and the faithful of other religions.
These arch-traditionalists, who are stronger in France than most other countries, have gotten several boosts from the Vatican in recent years. Pope Benedict lifted the excommunications of four SSPX bishops last year, a move that caused an embarrassing uproar when one turned out to be a Holocaust denier. The SSPX was then invited to doctrinal discussions at the Vatican, which are now going into their third round. Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the Swiss-based SSPX, said recently that the Vatican theologians at the talks “wish the Church well but want to save the Council at the same time. This is a squaring of the circle.”
The French bishops, many of whom wanted the SSPX rebels to accept the Vatican II reforms before being returned to the Church, have responded by organising conferences such as Notre Dame’s Lenten Lectures series to explain the Vatican II reforms and their relevance for today’s Church to parishioners who may not know many details about an event that happened almost five decades ago.
To drosaupan:
I really wish that through this ecumenical dialogue, anti-Semites like you will be set straight, to get your history corrected and realize that the Romans killed Jesus, not the Jews.
The last Pope said “The Jews are our elder brothers.” Obviously, you weren’t listening.
Sex abuse claims against famed rabbi grip Israel
Israeli police said on Friday they were looking into allegations of sexual abuse against one of the country’s most famous and politically influential rabbis, in a case that has triggered dramatic headlines this week.
Mordechai Elon – known as “Rabbi Motti” by viewers of his popular TV show and by many young men in the West Bank settler movement — has vehemently denied the accusations by a group of fellow rabbis who say their aim is to combat sexual harassment by authority figures.
But that has not stopped a wave of soul-searching, which has some parallels with recent turmoil in the Roman Catholic church. At issue is the power of charismatic clerics over young people in their care, as well as questions about the extent to which religious communities should regulate their own affairs without involving the Jewish state’s secular authorities.
A Justice Ministry spokesman said the attorney-general had asked police to consider whether there was sufficient evidence to mount a formal criminal investigation, after the organisation Takana alleged Elon had broken a promise made to fellow rabbis some years ago to limit his contacts with young men and youths.
How does a rabbi get involved in dialogue with Muslims?
How does a rabbi get involved in dialogue with Muslims? On this blog, we often write about interfaith dialogue, for which personal contact is crucial, without talking much about the background of the personalities involved.
Given the constraints of journalism, that’s not surprising. But it does leave out some of the insights I gain from talking at length with rabbis and imams about themselves and their work.
One of these rabbis, Burton Visotzky of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, has now filled in part of this gap for me by giving a video interview to the Journal of Interreligious Dialogue. Vistozky is an occasional blogger for our GUESTVIEW series of outside contributions.
Starting with his initial work in Jewish-Christian dialogue, he explains how he got increasingly involved in contacts with Muslims — to the point of speaking at Friday prayers in New York’s Islamic Cultural Center, hosting its imam, Shamsi Ali, at the JTS synagogue and visiting Muslim countries for dialogue sessions there. He was in the first group of Jews invited to meet King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia when the monarch hosted an interfaith conference in Madrid in July 2008.
Here he is telling it in his own words:
Apart from nine scholarly books, Visotzky has also worked with Bill Moyers on the 10-hour PBS television series Genesis: A Living Conversation in 1996 and published a novel about Jewish-Muslim relations in 11th century Cairo, A Delightful Compendium of Consolation, in 2008.
Out of the spotlight, Israel and Vatican negotiate holy sites
There have been a series of significant and highly publicised events recently in Vatican-Jewish relations.
Pope Benedict put his predecessor Pius XII along the road to Roman Catholic sainthood last month, angering many Jews who accused the wartime pope of turning a blind eye to the Nazi Holocaust. Benedict defended the move this week during his first visit to Rome’s synagogue, which prompted Israel to ask the pope to open up the Vatican archives covering Pius’ reign between 1939-1958.
But behind the scenes, out of the spotlight, the Catholic church and Jewish state have restarted efforts to put to rest a property dispute in the Holy Land that goes back much further than World War Two or Israel’s founding in 1948. Churches acquired large amounts of land around Jerusalem as the Ottoman empire went into decline from the early 19th century. Today, many official Israeli buildings sit on leased church land. But agreement on the legal status of these properties has evaded governments and popes for decades.
After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took office early last year, his Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon was made pointman in a push to settle the decades-old debate. Ayalon was at the Vatican last month to try to narrow divides over six religious sites, including what is believed by Christians to be the Cenacle of the Last Supper, whose future status remains uncertain. Negotiating teams held a meeting again this month, which ended with the vague statement that they “did useful work in atmosphere of cordaility” and that they would meet again. Ayalon heads to the Vatican again in May.
The Vatican got some unexpected support last week from a prominent rabbi who is active in Christian-Jewish dialogue and attended the pope’s visit to the Rome synagogue. Rabbi David Rosen, the British-born international director of interreligious affairs of the American Jewish Committee, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Israel’s behaviour toward the Vatican since they agreed to diplomatic relations in 1993 has been “outrageous.”
“Any (other) country would have threatened to withdraw its ambassador long ago over Israel’s failure to honour agreements,” he said. Rosen said the Vatican agreed to diplomatic relations after Israel said it would recognise the legal status of Catholic institutions and exempt their property in Israel from taxes.
This was supposed to take about two years, he said, but this has not still not happened. Rosen told Haaretz the Vatican wanted its local hierarchy to be recognised under Israeli law and treated as a whole organisation, rather than treating each Catholic church as a separate nonprofit organisation as is now the case. Israeli bureaucrats wore down the Vatican by negotiating every tax clause separately instead of granting a general concession, as the Vatican expected them to do, Rosen said.
Visiting synagogues is not getting easier for Pope Benedict
Visiting synagogues is not getting any easier for Pope Benedict.
Today’s meeting with Rome’s Jewish community was the third time he has entered a synagogue, which is a kind of a papal record considering that his predecessor Pope John Paul — probably the first pope to do so since Saint Peter two millennia ago — made only one such visit himself.
His first synagogue visit, in Cologne only months after his 2005 election, was heavy with the symbolism of a German pope visiting Jews in Germany. At one point, the rabbi referred to an elderly woman in the congregation who had a concentration camp number tattooed on her arm. He did this, though, to say that she could not have never imagined back there in Auschwitz that her son — a leader of the Cologne Jewish community present at the ceremony — would one day welcome the pope to a synagogue in Germany. It was tense, but it seemed to be a good start.
Three years later, he got a warm welcome at New York’s Park East Synagogue. Chief Rabbi Arthur Schneier, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor, thanked God that both of them had made it through the Second World War and seen the Catholic-Jewish reconciliation begun by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. “Your presence here gives us hope and courage for the road we still have to travel together,” he added. Benedict seemed to be getting over the stumbling block of his German background and finding a way to reach out to Jews.
But instead of getting easier, today’s third visit — to the synagogue at Rome’s old Jewish ghetto — turned out to be the most difficult of all. Over 1,000 Roman Jews were deported to Nazi death camps in 1943; only 16 of them survived. The local Jewish community was divided over the visit, with some urging that it be put off after Benedict honoured his wartime predecessor Pope Pius XII last month by moving him closer to sainthood. Pius’s controversial role during the Holocaust — or non-role, as his critics see it, because he did not speak out — is a roadblock on the path of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation. But Benedict seems determined to honour him, and every time he speaks or acts in his favour, the barrier seems to get higher.
Rome’s Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni insisted on going ahead with the visit but Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, head of the Italian Rabbinical Assembly, boycotted it. Citing Benedict’s support for Pius and his decision to lift the excommunication of a Holocaust denying ultra-traditionalist bishop, Laras said ties between Catholic and Jews had “become increasingly weaker during this pontificate.”
Benedict’s visit began a stop at the ghetto monument to Rome’s deported Jews. At the synagogue along the banks of the Tiber, Di Segni and his colleagues greeted the pope and escorted him into the imposing building. Among those attending were a handful of aging concentration camp survivors wearing blue shawls with prisoner’s stripes. They got a long round of applause when they were introduced during the ceremony.
-
Resident FaithWorld Expert
-
