When It Came to Israel, Too, Frank Sinatra Did It His Way

The great singer and celebrity maintained a longstanding affection for the Jewish state. He first visited Israel in 1962, but his support began much earlier, as Shalom Goldman writes:

In 1947 . . . Sinatra appeared at a benefit concert for the Zionist cause at the Hollywood Bowl. The event was titled “Action for Palestine.” A crowd of 20,000 wildly applauded their idol and called for approval of the partition plan then being deliberated at the United Nations.

The following year, at the request of Zionist leaders, Sinatra smuggled a large amount of money to operatives buying arms for the Haganah. . . . Teddy Kollek, then the Haganah representative in the United States, . . . had purchased a large arms shipment in New York and had to pay the ship’s captain to take it to Palestine. He knew he was being followed by federal agents. To evade them, Kollek asked Sinatra, who was performing at the Copacabana nightclub, to help him evade their surveillance. In Kollek’s words, “In the early hours of the following morning I walked out the front door of the building with a satchel, and the feds followed me. Out the back door went Frank Sinatra, carrying a paper bag filled with cash. He went down to the pier, handed it over, and watched the ship sail.” Years later Sinatra told his daughter Nancy that he did this for the Israelis because “I wanted to help, I was afraid they might fall down.”

Even after the Yom Kippur war, as Israel became increasingly unpopular in liberal circles, Sinatra’s loyalty endured.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Haganah, Israel & Zionism, Popular music, Teddy Kollek, US-Israel relations

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