Remembering the Righteous among the Muslims

Just as there were numerous instances of Christians rescuing Jews during World War II—sometimes at great risk to their own lives—there were also instances of Muslims doing the same. Robert Satloff recounts the story of a Tunisian bathhouse-proprietor who rescued his Jewish friend Joseph Naccache when the Nazis occupied their country:

Hamza Abdul Jalil knew that it was a dangerous moment for the Jews of his neighborhood. When the roundup of Jews began, Hamza told Joseph [Naccache] that if he ever needed a place to hide, he should come to the hammam (Turkish-style bathhouse). When Joseph began to fear that the German dragnet was closing in, he took Hamza up on his offer. For two weeks, Hamza protected him deep inside the labyrinth of the hammam, providing refuge and food, so that Joseph could evade his pursuers. Hamza neither requested nor accepted any payment.

After he left the hammam for another hiding place, Joseph was eventually captured by the Germans and sent to labor camps in the Tunisian hinterland. A lifetime later, he still remembered the kindness of the proprietor of the local hammam.

Read more at Daily Star

More about: History & Ideas, Holocaust, Mizrahi Jewry, Muslim-Jewish relations, Righteous Among the Nations, Tunisia

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society