Reviving Jewish Life in Crete

The city of Chania, in northwestern Crete, was home to a small but venerable Jewish community prior to World War II. In 1944, its Jews were put on a boat with their ultimate destination being Auschwitz. A British submarine torpedoed the boat, killing them all. In 1999, Chania’s Etz Hayyim synagogue was rededicated under the auspices of Nicholas Stavroulakis, who has dedicated much of his life to preserving the remnants of Greek Jewry. As Liam Hoare writes, however, the synagogue still lacks a congregation:

Jewish life in Crete . . . predated the destruction of the Second Temple, the creation of the European Diaspora, and the birth of rabbinic and talmudic Judaism. Cretan Judaism and Greek Judaism more broadly developed its own Hellenistic character not only separate from the land of Israel but also from what would become Ashkenaz and Sepharad. . . . In Chania, for example, on Yom Kippur the book of Job was read in the synagogue not in Hebrew but in Greek—a tradition that Stavroulakis has resurrected. . . .

[S]ome of the people who use Etz Hayyim are not Jewish. For example, there are Christian residents of Chania who come from time to time on Shabbat or the high holidays. . . . Of those who use Etz Hayyim that are Jewish, [says Stavroulakis,] “Some of them are Jews who are of ambiguous backgrounds. They’re not Cretan Jews—they are from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, [or are] of mixed North African background; they come to synagogue and are firm supporters. There are [also] Ashkenazim who don’t admit their Judaism anywhere and are able to come to terms with it through the synagogue.”

Read more at eJewish Philanthropy

More about: Greece, Holocaust, Jewish World, Jewish-Christian relations, Romaniote Jewry

 

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