The Historian, Partisan, and War Hero Who Led Yad Vashem

Born in the Polish shtetl of Swieciany (now Svencionys) in 1926, the great historian of the Holocaust Yitzḥak Arad died in Tel Aviv on May 6. Arad, himself a survivor of the Shoah, was the director of Yad Vashem from 1972 to 1993, and authored several important historical works on Hitler’s war against the Jews. Joseph Berger tells his story, beginning with his teenage years in a Nazi ghetto:

[Arad] survived, at first as a forced laborer—cleaning captured Soviet weapons in a munitions warehouse—and then, sensing what fate awaited, by smuggling weapons to partisans in the nearby forests and forming an underground movement in the ghetto. He, his sister, and their underground associates eventually stole a revolver and escaped, meeting up with a brigade of Soviet partisans.

Acquiring the lifelong nickname Tolka (diminutive for Anatoly), he took part in ambushing German bases in what is now Belarus and setting up mines that blew up more than a dozen trains carrying German soldiers and supplies. Among his exploits was a battle with pro-German Lithuanian partisans in fields and forests covered in deep snow in the village of Girdan.

A Zionist since childhood, Arad made his way to Palestine, [where he] joined the fight for an autonomous Jewish land, serving with the Palmaḥ, the elite fighting force that was eventually incorporated into the Israeli army after Israel declared its independence in 1948. Assigned to an armor brigade, he rose to the rank of brigadier general, retiring in 1972.

He was among the first scholars to study the Jewish partisans in the forests and the ghettos and the systematic murder of Jews by killing squads as the German Army moved deeper into Soviet territory. . . . Arad remained active with Yad Vashem until his last weeks.

Read more at New York Times

More about: Holocaust, IDF, Jewish history, Yad Vashem

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