Justin Trudeau’s Invisible Jews

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27), the Canadian prime minister issued a politely anodyne public statement that somehow omitted any mention of Jews. Gil Troy, addressing Prime Minister Trudeau in an open letter, explains why this enraged so many of his Jewish constituents:

The key to understanding the Holocaust and to empathizing with those of us who felt excluded when you didn’t single the Jews out for sympathy is realizing that the Nazis singled us out for slaughter. Yes, they killed others, targeting dissidents, Communists, and gays. But . . . killing Jews . . . was central to their ideology, to their mission. It was “the war against the Jews,” not just an unjust war. It wasn’t any kind of evil. It was a specific evil, with a particular pathology and focus. . . .

This visibility-invisibility issue is playing out to our disadvantage again. Shortly after your statement, Israeli [security forces] killed three heavily armed Palestinian terrorists in mid-attack outside Jerusalem’s Damascus Gate. The terrorists had killed Hadar Cohen, a sweet nineteen-year-old who had just been drafted two months earlier to serve her country. Yet CBS News proclaimed (in a headline that was amended after complaints): “Three Palestinians killed as daily violence grinds on.” . . .

It’s not “daily violence” that both sides provoke equally. It’s not Palestinians being killed as part of some routine. It’s Palestinian terrorists hunting Jews. . . .

Please reassure freedom-lovers worldwide that while positioning Canada to be a constructive force for peace, you won’t succumb to the moral laziness of a pox-on-both-your-houses evenhandedness, failing to see who is guiltiest for perpetuating this conflict.

Read more at Canadian Jewish News

More about: Canada, Canadian Jewry, Holocaust, Israel & Zionism, Palestinian terror

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