Reviving Jewish Life in Crete

Records of a Jewish presence in Crete date back to the 2nd century BCE. By the eve of World War II, there were only about 300 Jewish inhabitants of the island, nearly all of whom died in 1944 when the ship taking them to Auschwitz was hit by a British torpedo. Over the last decades, however, a Greek Jew named Nicholas Stavroulakis has rebuilt and revived the synagogue in Chania, Crete’s second largest city and the historic center of the Jewish community. Laura Lippstone writes:

The Etz Hayyim synagogue holds weekly Shabbat services and hosts a research library with some 4,000 volumes—which began with Stavroulakis’s personal collection. Next month, Etz Hayyim will honor both its past and its future. On June 14, it will host both its annual memorial service for the hundreds of Crete’s Jews lost during World War II, as well as an exhibit marking the twentieth anniversary of the reconstruction. . . .

The synagogue’s layout is in the Romaniote, or Judeo-Greek, tradition. The ark faces the eastern wall; the bimah [lectern], the western one. The reconstructed mikveh is fed by a spring. The scattered remains from some rabbinical tombs were recovered and reburied. And in a hallway near the sanctuary is a simple shrine: plaques bearing the names of the Jews of Chania who drowned in 1944.

Services are conducted in Hebrew, Greek, and English. Stavroulakis, who is not a rabbi, leads the Sabbath services, which typically draw about fifteen people. Others with long-term ties to Etz Hayyim, some of them ordained rabbis, are brought in for the High Holy Days.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Greece, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Romaniote Jewry, Synagogues

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