Fragments of Jewish History in the United Arab Emirates

Now that Israeli tourists will be free to travel to the UAE, the Times of Israel notes some sites of particular Jewish interest, including the sole trace of the Jews who lived there centuries ago:

The existence of an ancient Jewish community in the area upon which the United Arab Emirates now stands is poorly documented. Benjamin of Tudela, [a 12th-century Spanish Jewish traveler and writer], said he found a Jewish community in Kis in the modern-day emirate of Ras al-Khaimah, the northernmost of the emirates. Beyond his words, little trace of that community remains.

But records of Jewish communities in the area have not entirely vanished. In Ras al-Khaimah’s National Museum stands the tombstone of one David son of Moses, unearthed in the 1970s by local residents.

The tombstone features clearly legible Hebrew writing, with some Judeo-Arabic mixed in. According to the historian Timothy Power, the mysterious David may have migrated from Persia to nearby cosmopolitan Hormuz at the height of its commercial splendor, between the 14th and 16th centuries.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Benjamin of Tudela, Jewish history, United Arab Emirates

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