How a Jewish Boxer and a Catholic Priest Celebrated Christmas at the Battle of Guadalcanal

On December 24, 1942, the Jewish boxing champion Barney Ross and Reverend Fred Gehring—a Catholic priest from Brooklyn, NY—organized an ecumenical midnight mass for Christian marines in the midst of the battle of Guadalcanal. Ross, whose European-born father had wanted him to be a talmudic scholar, had retired from boxing before the war began. Having enlisted in the Marines, he struck up a close friendship with Gehring, who was in his unit. Ron Grossman tells the story:

In mid-December, Ross found himself and other GIs trapped in a foxhole surrounded by the enemy. The only one not wounded, he held the Japanese at bay by firing his weapon and throwing grenades all night long. By morning, he and another Marine were the only ones alive. So he carried his buddy back to the American base.

But in the runup to Christmas in 1942, he was preoccupied with a favor the priest had asked of him. Gehring played the violin and found a portable organ. Ross was the only one who could play it, so Gehring asked if he would play “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve.

Ross said the only problem was he didn’t know the tune. . . . So Marines hummed it for him until he could play it by ear. At midnight Mass, the war momentarily seemed far away as Ross accompanied hundreds of Marines singing, “All is calm, all is bright.”

In the silence that followed, the priest asked Ross to do an encore. Perhaps something from his tradition? He chose “My Yiddishe Mama,” [a staple of Yiddish vaudeville], which had been his boxing theme song and had been played as he shadowboxed and danced his way from a stadium’s dressing room to the ring.

Read more at Chicago Tribune

More about: Christmas, Jewish music, Jewish-Christian relations, Sports, World War II

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