The Man Collecting and Preserving the Everyday Objects of East European Jewry

In a trip to Poland in 2015, Arthur Kurzweil discovered a network of East European amateur archaeologists on the lookout for buried historical objects—and found out that there are countless dreidels under the soil. He then began a collection that now includes some 4,000 of the Hanukkah toys, as well as numerous other realia too quotidian to get the attention of most museums. Shira Hanau reports:

It’s not just dreidels that surround Kurzweil. Quietly and in collaboration with Eastern Europe’s sizable community of treasure hunters, he has amassed a sweeping collection of Jewish objects. . . . While Holocaust museums and concentration camps bring visitors face to face with the piles of shoes and eyeglasses worn by Jews who were about to be killed, Kurzweil lives with reminders of the lives they lived.

In addition to the tiny dreidels, made of pewter and lead and clearly intended for children, Kurzweil has also collected boxes of metal kosher seals, which would have been affixed to packages of food to attest to their kosher status; dozens of pins that would have been worn by members of Jewish youth and Zionist organizations; and coin-sized metal disks that synagogues would have handed out to people being called to the Torah.

And for Kurzweil, the relationships with people in Eastern Europe are [also] important. Kurzweil has traveled to [his father’s birthplace, the former shtetl of] Dobromyl, ten times and has gotten to know some of the people who live there over the years. In 2017, he even donated a playground to the town and raised over $22,000 to purchase supplies for the local school.

Read more at Jewish Telegraphic Agency

More about: Archaeology, East European Jewry

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