NAZI MEMORIAL IN CROATIA A DISGRACE TO EUROPE
Efraim Zuroff
Jerusalem Post, January 4, 2012
Imagine for a minute that memorial masses were held in two major cities in Germany on the anniversary of the death of Adolf Hitler. Needless to say, such a ceremony would arouse fury, indignation, and widespread protests not only in Germany, but throughout the entire world. Recently, the local equivalent of such an event took place in Croatia, but instead of anger and demonstrations, not a single word of protest was heard from anywhere in the country.
I am referring to the December 28 memorial masses conducted in Zagreb and Split (and perhaps elsewhere as well) to mark the 51st anniversary of the death of Ante Pavelić, the head of state of the infamous Independent State of Croatia, created by the Nazis and their Italian allies in 1941. Following its establishment, rule was turned over to the local fascist movement, the Ustasha, headed by its Poglavnik (leader) Ante Pavelić.
During the entire course of its brief existence (1941-1945), the Ustasha sought to rid the country (which consisted of the area of today’s Croatia plus most of Bosnia-Herzegovina) of all its minorities, as well as their local political opponents. In order to do so, they established a network of concentration camps all over the country, the largest and most notorious of which was Jasenovac, located on the banks of the Sava River, southeast of Zagreb. There, many tens of thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in a variety of brutal ways, which earned the camp the nickname of the “Auschwitz of the Balkans.”
To this day, there continue to be disputes regarding the total number of civilians murdered by the Ustasha, but the number is certainly no fewer than several hundred thousand, primarily Serbs, along with Jews, Roma and anti-fascist Croats. And while all those who participated in these atrocities bear criminal responsibility, the individual with the greatest culpability was undoubtedly Ante Pavelić, who headed the most lethal regime in Axis-dominated Europe.…
The question now is, how does such an event to honor the memory of one of the biggest mass murderers of World War II pass with nary a word of protest or condemnation? The obvious address for such indignation would be in Croatia itself, where many people fought with Tito’s partisans against the Ustasha, and a significant sector of the population have a strong anti-fascist tradition. But the same question applies outside the country as well.
Croatia is well on its way to membership in the European Union (slated for 2013), a membership which is ostensibly contingent on the acceptance of EU values and norms. Is a memorial mass for one of Europe’s worst war criminals compatible with EU membership?
The sad truth is that in this respect, the European Union has failed miserably in dealing with the resurgence of neo-fascism and the promotion of Holocaust distortion in its post-Communist members. Once admitted to the EU (and NATO), countries like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary and Romania have begun to take active steps to rewrite their World War II histories, minimizing or attempting to hide the highly-significant role played by their nationals in Holocaust crimes, with barely a word of protest or condemnation from Brussels.…
[The] masses in honor of Ante Pavelić are…an insult to all the victims of the Ustasha, their relatives, friends, and people of morality and conscience the world over. The time has come for effective protests from within Croatia, as well as from the European Union, the United States and Canada, Israel and the Jewish world. That is the minimum that we owe the victims of that notorious mass murderer.
(Efraim Zuroff is the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
and director of its Israel Office.)
AFTER 1,500 YEARS, AN INDEX TO THE TALMUD’S LABYRINTHS,
WITH ROOTS IN THE BRONX
Joseph Berger
NY Times, December 27, 2011
The Talmud is a formidable body of work: 63 volumes of rabbinical discourse and disputation that form Judaism’s central scripture after the Torah. It has been around for 1,500 years and is studied every day by tens of thousands of Jews. But trying to navigate through its coiling labyrinth can be enormously difficult because the one thing this monumental work lacks is a widely accepted and accessible index.
But now that breach has been filled, or so claims the publisher of HaMafteach, or the Key, a guide to the Talmud, available in English and Hebrew. It was compiled not by a white-bearded sage, but by a courtly, clean-shaven, tennis-playing immigration lawyer from the Bronx.
The index’s publisher, Feldheim Publishers, predicts it will be snatched up by yeshivas and libraries, but more important, it will be a tool for inveterate Talmud students—and there are plenty of those. Feldheim’s president, Yitzchak Feldheim, said the first printing of 2,000 books—a market test—sold out in a few days here and in Israel. More printings have been ordered.
The index has 6,600 topical entries and 27,000 subtopical entries that point students to the treatises and pages of text they are seeking. In these passages, sages analyze matters like whether one can remarry a former wife after she has been betrothed to another, or how one should handle a lost object found in a garbage heap. The index guides the student to significant laws about Sabbath and daily observance, as well as maxims, parables, commentaries and Talmudic personalities.
The index represents seven years of work, but do not ask Daniel Retter why he undertook it, unless you have a spare hour. His answers are as meandering as the Talmud itself, with pathways leading to byways leading to offshoots that sometimes end in cul-de-sacs. Along the way, his voice sometimes rises and falls in Talmudic singsong, and his eyes glitter with delight at the saga’s oddities.
“My father was a man of letters,” he begins, then describes how his father, Marcus, had been dedicated to Talmud study during an epic life in which, as a child, he escaped the Nazis on the Kindertransports that rescued Jewish children from Germany and took them to British havens. He brought his family, including Daniel, to New York from London in 1949.…
Daniel Retter, 66, attended a yeshiva, enrolled at City College at night while studying Talmud in the daytime, then studied at Brooklyn Law School during the day while digesting Talmud at night. He married another lawyer, Margie, an advocate for abused women seeking Jewish divorces; they raised four children and ended up in Riverdale, where he continued his Talmudic explorations.
“I can’t waste a minute,” he said in an interview at the Manhattan offices of his law firm, Herrick, Feinstein. “If I’m on the immigration line waiting for a client to be called, I study the Talmud.”
But a puzzle nagged at him. He and other students sometimes needed help tracking down a specific passage, law or topic, or the thoughts of sages like Hillel and Shamai. Most of the time the student consults a loftier scholar. “For the life of me,” Mr. Retter said, “I could not understand why the Talmud did not have an index.”
One 50-year-old translation of the Talmud, by Soncino Press, has an index, but its pages do not match those of the standard Aramaic text used by most students hunched over their dog-eared volumes. More recent English translations are either not indexed or have not been completed. For three decades, Talmud students have been able to use a Nexis-like CD search engine, the Responsa Project, created by Bar Ilan University in Israel, that locates words by frequency and proximity. But like Google, it often produces irrelevant hits. Bar Ilan officials acknowledged that the CD had one major disadvantage: students cannot get access to it on the Sabbath, when much learning takes place.…
Until 1445, the concept of an index was meaningless, since books were not being printed. But in the 16th century, the first complete editions of the Talmud were printed by a publisher from Antwerp, Belgium; the Vilna edition, printed in Lithuania in the 19th century, standardized pagination. One effort to help students navigate the Talmud, Mesoras HaShas, provided cross-references alongside the Aramaic text toward similar ideas elsewhere in the Talmud. But, Mr. Retter wrote in his introduction, “it was not an index as that word is commonly understood, because one had to know the location of the initial reference to find the others.…”
Before he went—Talmudists should pardon the expression—whole hog, [Mr. Retter] took his wife’s advice and sought the approval of great sages so the work would be credible. HaMafteach includes letters of endorsement from a dozen, including Yisrael Meir Lau, the former Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel. Mr. Retter also recruited Rabbi Elchanan Kohn, a recognized Israeli Talmud scholar, as his editor.
The index’s potential market is sure to include the thousands of Jews who participate in Daf Yomi, the page-a-day cycle in which everyone studies the same daf—two actual pages—every day for seven and a half years, until all 5,422 pages are completed, when they begin all over again. Some 90,000 people are expected at the Daf Yomi graduation of sorts that will be held in August at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.…
SPREADING THE HEBREW WORD
Gustavo D. Perednik
Jerusalem Post, January 11, 2012
Of the 6,000 extant languages, half will disappear in less than a century; half of the world population speaks 10 languages alone. Gauging a language’s importance according to how many native speakers it numbers would place Hebrew at number 70, yet its influence is much broader.…
Hebrew’s presence is felt in most languages, which include dozens of words like amen, hallelujah, jubilee and sabbatical, and more than 100 everyday sayings and phrases such as broken heart, drop in the bucket, nest of vipers, breath of life, flesh and blood, and a voice crying in the wilderness. Adages like a leopard cannot change its spots, a soft answer turns away wrath, my brother’s keeper, and eat, drink and be merry are all of Hebrew lineage.
More interestingly, the influx of Hebrew semantics is indirect. For instance, the Greek word kirios used to mean just “chief,” but after it was used in the translation of the Hebrew Bible it started to bear the meaning of a universal dominium. Linguist Antoine Meillet explained in 1928 that from Greek to Latin, and hence to all the European languages, “Without Hebrew, many common words and phrases would…have quite another meaning.”
Another way to appreciate Hebrew’s influence is to trace the origins of the alphabet. William Chomsky showed how the Phoenicians—Semites close to the old Hebrews—disseminated the Hebrew-type alphabet among the Greeks. And the 22 letters, before Ezra the Scribe adopted our present block Hebrew writing, were ultimately adopted in most European languages. Traveling west, the Phoenician sailors were impressed by the Greeks’ accomplishments—which did not include reading and writing. Therefore they facilitated aleph, bet and gimmel to become alpha, beta and gamma.
Even more than in words and alphabets, Hebrew’s influence stems from the ideas and narrative that penetrated Western civilization, or what Thomas Cahill sums up as “most of our best words: new, adventure, surprise; unique individual, person, vocation; time, history, future; freedom, progress, spirit; faith, hope, justice…individual destiny, morality, inter-generational accomplishment, personal repentance.… We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes.”
The national book of the Jews has indeed become a sacred text for mankind, the first and most widely published and translated into no less than 1,850 languages (no other book has been translated into even 250 languages.) Since words are cultural storehouses, to speak Hebrew today is like traveling several millennia to the past. Certainly one of Israel’s unparalleled successes is that a Jewish child can read with relative ease texts over a thousand years old.
Since the 16th century, Hebrew learning increased as an inherent part of classical studies. Even Columbus’ interpreter, Luis de Torres, knew Hebrew well, as did the Renaissance scholars, and major poets like William Blake. It became prominent in Puritan England, especially in John Milton’s days.
The eccentric religion of Anglo-Israelism went so far as imagining the Hebraic roots of English, explaining the term “Brit-ish” as “man of the Covenant.” Their French competitor in creative imaginary, the poet Guy de la Boderie traced the word “Gallia” (the original France) to the Hebrew for “waves,” and the name of the French capital to the Hebrew for “man’s glory—pe’er ish.”
The Hebrew impetus arrived in America, where the first published book was Psalms, in 1640, and where Governor William Bradford (one of the Mayflower’s pilgrims) was a devout Hebrew learner. John Cotton established Hebrew in the educational curricula, and when the first North American university, Harvard, was founded in 1636, Hebrew was compulsory for all. The inauguration speech of every academic year during two centuries was read there in Hebrew, until the year 1817. A Hebrew teacher, Ezra Stiles, was the first president of Yale University, whose emblem is still in Hebrew, a language so admired by early Americans that William Gifford argued in his Quarterly Review that some members of the Congress wanted it to become the national language rather than English.
During its meteoric Jewish revival during the past two centuries, the Hebrew language had to overcome several other rival languages. In 1880 Lazar Ludwig Zamenhof foresaw his Esperanto becoming not only an international language but also the language of the Jews; in 1908 the Congress of Czernowitz proclaimed Yiddish as “the Jewish national language;” in 1913 teachers at the newly-opened Technion battled over which language should be used for instruction in the new university—Hebrew or German. They called it the “Battle of languages.”
Hebrew won every battle, and in 1921 was recognized as official language of Palestine, spreading rapidly and giving birth to new, thriving literature. Nowadays, strengthening its status as a classical language abroad will not only promote its appreciation but also the recognition of Israel’s unique contribution to culture. Last and not least, it will also build bridges between the reborn Hebrew nation in its land and mankind as a whole.…
MOTHER TONGUE
Daniella Cheslow
Tablet, January 12, 2012
It is hard to imagine a less charming venue for a concert than Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station, a grimy, labyrinthine, seven-story tower in the city’s most drug-addled neighborhood. Even less likely is that such a concert would be held in Yiddish. But on a night in early January, when Mendy Cahan crooned there in the mama loshen, surrounded by a cavernous collection of Yiddish books illuminated by candlelight, the experience was transformative. “Me without you and you without me is like a handle without a door, like eating without a table,” Cahan sang in Yiddish to visiting French singer Miléna Kartowski, who joined him in a duet.…
Cahan, 48, grew up speaking Yiddish in Antwerp, Belgium, and is determined to save the language from extinction in the Jewish state, where he has lived for the past 30 years.… “After having paved the way through hundreds of years to build Jewish identity, finally we build our homeland,” he told me in English. “I find it unacceptable and wrong if Yiddish would not find its respectful, loving space.…”
When he immigrated to Israel from Belgium in 1980, [Cahan] was surprised to see how sidelined his native tongue had become there. “Many people spoke Yiddish,” Cahan said of the Israel he encountered. “They would read and meet in clubs, but it seemed as if it wasn’t a part of the whole Israeli experience.”
In 1990, he started collecting books. At first, Cahan housed his collection in a dilapidated building in an industrial zone in Jerusalem. He then opened a second library in Tel Aviv. He named the organization overseeing the two libraries “Yung YiDish” in an effort to expand the Yiddish circle beyond the elderly. Yung YiDish is one of several Tel Aviv institutions…that are doing what they can to revive and preserve the tongue that once united the Jews of Eastern Europe, by teaching the language, offering theater, and printing books.
Cahan said it costs $150,000 to $200,000 to properly run Yung YiDish, but private donors provide only half of that. For the rest, he lives by the seat of his pants, begging city hall for a break on his taxes and meeting with the Ministry of Culture to ask for government funding. Cahan spreads word of his center while teaching in Eastern Europe and performing in cities around the world with significant Jewish populations.…
Yiddish, an amalgam of German, Hebrew, and Aramaic written in Hebrew characters, was once the main Jewish dialect in Eastern Europe. But in Israel it was seen as the prime competition to the revival of Hebrew, according to Avraham Novershtern, the director of the Beth Shalom Aleichem Yiddish cultural center in Tel Aviv “There was a conscious decision which began in early 20th century that Hebrew would be the language of the new state…” said Novershtern.…
Tel Aviv remains at the center of the Yiddish revival in Israel, as most of the city’s residents trace their roots to Eastern Europe.… Eliezer Ceizler, assistant director of productions and administration at Tel Aviv’s Yiddishpiel Yiddish theater, which was founded in 1987, said the company now runs more than 300 plays a year.… This month, the theater is performing God, Man, and the Devil, a play about a simple, religious man who wins the lottery. Most of his audience is older, Ceizler said, but he also sees younger Yiddish speakers.…
Cahan said he has also developed a lecture for Israeli high-school students preparing to visit the concentration camps of Eastern Europe. “About the destruction they will hear plenty,” he said. “I bring newspapers and books and magazines to their classrooms so they can touch and feel and get a sense of the life that was”—and the language that was spoken there.…
