Rosh Hashanah has come and gone without the issue of the haredi draft being resolved.
While many haredi rabbis are urging haredi young men to tear up their call-up papers, Rabbi David Lau, the former Ashkenazi chief rabbi, says that if the young men are genuinely studying, let them continue to do so, but those who are not must serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
Lau has a son who is currently serving in the reserve forces, so it’s not just an idle remark on his part to gain popularity in non-Orthodox circles. In a pre-Rosh Hashanah interview that he gave to Israel Hayom, Lau said that he still regards himself as a public figure, even though he is out of office, and makes a point of visiting the bereaved families of fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism.
He said that more could be achieved if people of opposing viewpoints were to sit down and discuss the various issues of the day, in an attempt to find solutions that are mutually acceptable.
As for army service, he said that he doubts secular soldiers will have a negative influence on haredim who do enlist, because from what he has seen, secular soldiers are not without Jewish values; they simply have a different approach. He noted that he has seen soldiers with tattoos wearing tzitzit (ritual fringes), which indicated that they identified strongly with their Jewish heritage, but not in the same way as haredim.
■ CONGRATULATIONS ARE in order to former prime minister Ehud Olmert, who has a milestone birthday on September 30, when he turns 80. Olmert gave himself a pre-birthday gift last month when he took his son Shaul, a hi-tech entrepreneur, on a roots trip to China and Japan.
Olmert visited both countries when he was still officially in politics, but had a personal as well as a diplomatic reason for visiting China, where his grandfather is buried in the Harbin Jewish cemetery. In June 2004, Olmert, who was then vice premier, visited China, and in accordance with Jewish tradition, placed a stone on his grandfather’s grave.
Like many Russian Jews who fled the country after World War I, and went to China, his grandfather settled in Harbin, where he lived till 1941. Olmert’s father, Mordechai, grew up in Harbin, where he was one of the founders of Betar, the Revisionist Youth Organization.
In 1933, Mordechai left China and moved to Eretz Yisrael, where he worked as an agricultural laborer in the Jewish homeland, although he had a degree from the local polytechnic school, and taught Russian in a Chinese high school.
He was among the founders of the Irgun, as well as one of the founders of the Jabotinsky neighborhood in Binyamina, where Ehud was born – as was another Ehud, the late Ehud Manor, who was an iconic figure in Israel’s entertainment industry.
Mordechai was elected to the Knesset in 1959; although he lost his seat in 1961, he remained politically active. He died in 1998 at the age of 90.
Before becoming vice premier, and eventually prime minister, following the collapse of prime minister Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert was the mayor of Jerusalem. He has a particular affinity for Asian countries and is on the guest lists of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean embassies.
■ JERUSALEMITES, OR visitors to the capital during the intermediate days of Sukkot, who happen to be fans of Israel’s first Nobel Prize laureate, Shmuel Yosef (Shai) Agnon, should make sure to visit the Khan Theater.
In cooperation with the management of Agnon House, the theater is hosting an Agnon Festival, and will feature a new production of A Simple Story with subtitles in English above the stage. The festival will include lectures, theater, old-world food, demonstrations, klezmer performances, and more.
Jeffrey Saks, an expert on Agnon, will give a lecture in English prior to the October 12 show. Saks is the director of research at Agnon House, which is currently undergoing renovations. The house in Talpiot was built in 1931, when the neighborhood was far removed from the rest of Jerusalem. Today, it is an integral part of the city’s cultural landscape.
Agnon House, which is now too small to accommodate all those who wish to participate in activities there, will be enlarged, and Agnon’s collection of 10,000 books will become more accessible to visitors and researchers. An event hall will also be added, and the second floor, where the books are housed, will be made accessible to the mobility-challenged.
Donating blood on first day eligible
■ GIL HOFFMAN, the former political correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, and currently the executive director of HonestReporting, who continues to write a column for this paper, is very proud of his son Ami. The teenager decided to celebrate his birthday by donating blood on the first day that he was legally eligible to do so.
Ami received special permission to donate before he turned 17, as his Hebrew birthday preceded his Gregorian calendar birthday. Ami is the instructor and humanitarian activities supervisor for Magen David Adom’s Jerusalem region, where he is in charge of volunteers for blood drives. The organization could hardly refuse him when he wanted to celebrate his birthday while setting an example.
His dad, who went along with him, just to make sure that Ami was OK after giving blood for the first time, had nothing to worry about, judging by the smiles on both their faces.
MDA is running blood drives throughout the country, as it is essential to increase supplies during war time, since so many more transfusions are needed for the wounded.
■ JUST AS Israel is appreciative of the solidarity events that are held by Diaspora communities, both as fundraisers and morale boosters, so those Diaspora communities, which are suffering severe antisemitism, are appreciative when Israel demonstrates that it cares about what is happening in the places where they live.
Australia, which after the Holocaust was a wonderful haven for Jewish survivors, many of whom became prominent and affluent in “the lucky country,” is now a nightmare for many Jews, despite statements by political leaders and police condemning antisemitic acts.
In sympathy with the Australian Jewish community and its leaders, a solidarity event will be held on Sunday, November 9, at 5:30 p.m., at the Raya and Josef Jaglom Auditorium in the George Wise Senate Building at Tel Aviv University. The event is jointly organized by the Facebook Group of Australians living in Israel, Tel Aviv University, the Jewish National Fund of Australia, and the Jewish Agency for Israel.
Last year, when Jewish Agency Chairman Doron Almog visited Australia, attempts were made to pressure the Australian authorities from issuing him a visa. In the end, the visa was granted. For further information on the solidarity event, contact shavitgeon@gmail.com.
■ CHABAD MINING magnate and philanthropist Joseph Gutnick – who was once a friend and patron of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but believes that Bibi should step down – had more on his plate than usual on Rosh Hashanah.
One of his daughters presented him with a new grandson, whose circumcision ceremony took place on the Jewish New Year. Gutnick’s father and uncle, rabbis Chaim and Sholem Gutnick, arrived in Australia as bachelors after World War II; each had large families after they married, and their children have many offspring.
Joseph’s two sisters, Penina and Chana, had more than two dozen children altogether, and their respective children also have growing families. Gutnick himself and his wife Stera are parents to 11 children, and fertility runs in the family. His three brothers and their wives also have large broods, and his cousins – the offspring of his uncle Shalom, are also quite numerous. From two brothers, a whole tribe emerged.
Gutnick, who has made many visits to Israel and has given generously to Chabad enterprises in Israel, continues to do so, and plans to visit the country again before the end of the year.
■ CURIOUSLY, AT around the same time as Israelis are learning something of the great actress Hanna Rovina, who in 1928 migrated with other actors of the Habima Theater to Mandate-ruled Palestine, American Jews are learning about Esther Rokhel Kaminska, who was known as the Mother of the Yiddish stage.
Her involvement in the theater began after she left her hometown in Grodno and moved to Warsaw, where she married an aspiring actor, but professionally, she moved by leaps and bounds ahead of him even though she had little schooling.
Her three children were all artistic. Her son was a violinist and her two daughters were actresses. One died young, and the other, Ida Kaminska, became a well-known stage and film actress as well as a director. In the 1920s, she was a co-founder of what later became the Warsaw Yiddish State Theater.
The state-funded theater, which continued to function under the Communist regime, and which today is named after the Kaminska mother and daughter, is located in its own building not far from the Polin Jewish Museum. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Esther Rokhel Kaminska, and the 45th anniversary of the death of Ida Kaminska.
They are now being remembered because of a memoir written by Esther Rokhel, which she wrote toward the end of her life when she was suffering from cancer. The memoir was only recently translated, when the task was undertaken by Yiddish actor and playwright Mikhl Yashinsky, who translated it into English.
A review appeared earlier this month in the New York Jewish publication, the Forward, which was originally published in Yiddish and known as Forverts. The review was written by Mikhail Krutikov, the Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan and a regular contributor to the Forward.
After the Forverts stopped publishing in Yiddish, and switched to English, one of its staff members Rukhl Shaechter, who runs a Yiddish section in the publication, drew the attention of readers who have an interest in Yiddish theater, to both the memoir and the review.
In her memoir, writes Krutikov, “Kaminska describes how, in 1883, the Russian government banned stage performances in Yiddish – just one element of its wider antisemitic policies. But this prohibition wasn’t publicized. Each local Russian ‘nachalnik’ (administrator or police chief) was free to interpret the rule however he wanted.”
In other words, Yiddish actors had to keep up the pretense that they were performing in German. To this end, special German translations were prepared of Goldfaden’s operettas, Shulamis, The Sorceress, and a few other plays.
Whenever Kaminska’s troupe wanted to stage a production, they were required to get the nachalnik’s signature on the poster. Obtaining the signature itself demanded a bit of a performance, since it entailed convincing him that the play was in German. As a result, Kaminska herself was often sent on these missions.”