1.
The day after Hitler was appointed chancellor, pogroms against Germany's Jews began under the protection of the SA, the Nazi stormtroopers, on the chancellor's orders. The riots sparked a wave of protests around the world, and Germany's Jews were shaken for the sake of their homeland and its good name. Yaakov Trachtenberg, a publisher in Charlottenburg, appealed to Jewish communities across the Reich to repel "the propaganda of horror." His office began to receive statements from the major organizations of Germany's Jews that stood with the chancellor against those who slandered him and the German fatherland.
"We Jews of Germany have for generations been part of the very flesh of the German fatherland, the German people and German honor, and so we will continue in the future. We will serve Germany with all our strength, with loyalty and love... We reject... the despicable propaganda... against our fatherland" (Union of Jewish Reich Soldiers).
The president of the Union of Rabbis in Germany, Dr. Leo Baeck, wrote: "The national German revolution fights on two fronts: a struggle against Bolshevism and the reconstruction of the German fatherland... The reconstruction of Germany is a noble ideal, accepted by all the Jews of the German fatherland. There is no other country in Europe in which the bond between Jews and their fatherland is so strong and intimate."
In the summer of 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were enacted and emancipation was revoked along with Jews' citizenship. In October 1938 the identity cards of Germany's Jews received the letter J (Jude) and the original name of the cardholder was appended with Israel for men and Sara for women. This was how the Nazis returned to "Germans of the Mosaic faith" (of the religion of Moses) their original identity.
2.
And what about the US? In the early 1950s Elmer Berger, a Reform rabbi who rejected Jewish nationalism, wrote that the State of Israel is evidence of Hitler's victory, because the Zionists "exploited the powerlessness of the Jews under the Nazi regime to promote Hitler's idea of separation (between the Jews and the nations of the world), by turning it into a positive value and political capital to establish the Jewish state."
During a visit to the Middle East he went to Egypt, Syria and Iraq. He wrote that "there is no sign or trace of anti-Semitism in those countries." He dismissed the accusation that Nasser persecuted the remnants of the Jewish community as a "Zionist conspiracy" and declared that "there was never true discrimination on the part of Muslims toward the Jews."
3.
And Canada? At the end of 2002 a Jewish professor named Michael Neumann of the University of Ontario wrote: "My only concern is indeed to help the Palestinians... I am not really interested in truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except insofar as it serves that goal... (To that end) I will use anything, including lies, injustice and obfuscation, to do it. If an effective strategy means that some truths about the Jews will not see the light of day, I do not care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism, or reasonable hostility toward Jews, I do not care. If that means encouraging cruel racial anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the State of Israel, I still do not care."
In April 2009 the Neumann brothers sent a letter to the president and to Yad Vashem demanding that their grandmother's name be removed from the list of Holocaust victims: "Remove our grandmother's name from the memorial wall at Yad Vashem... Please accept this as an expression of disgust and contempt for your state and everything it represents." His brother Osha added: "Israel created a fusion between the image of Jewish perpetrators and war criminals and the victims of the concentration camps as weak people. This fusion is abhorrent to me. I do not want to take part in it." There are many such examples.
4.
The existence of Jews in an independent state sometimes creates an intellectual and emotional dissonance for Jews of the diaspora, because they have to explain, at the very least to themselves, why they do not make Aliya to their ancestral land. There are many excuses, and for a not small number there is an overlap between ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist attitudes and liberal anti-Israel positions that verge on anti-Semitism.
In the mid-1890s the anti-Semitic politician Karl Lueger was elected mayor of Vienna. In his campaign he proclaimed: "These Jews, they rob us of everything sacred to us! Fatherland! Nationality! And finally our property as well." The rise of anti-Semitism drove many Jews to convert, assimilate or turn away from their people, but it also pushed one man, Binyamin Ze'ev Herzl, to understand that the Jews had no future in Europe other than returning home to Zion. Herzl did not live to see the results of his call, but those who accepted it and returned home were spared the final solution that awaited them from Lueger's spiritual descendants.
5.
In 1492, after an almost thousand-year stay in Spain, the Jewish people were expelled. Among the exiles was a four-year-old child named Joseph Karo, later one of the greatest of Israel in all generations, author of the Shulchan Aruch, the Great Halacha Codex of the Jewish People. In 1536 he made Aliya to the land of Israel and settled in Safed. One night, during the Shavu'ot festival, the holy group led by Rabbi Karo heard "a voice speaking from the pious one, a great voice..." that was heard again the next day, and it was interpreted by them as a heavenly voice: "Go up to the Land of Israel, for not all times are the same... and if you desire and listen, the good land you will eat, therefore hurry and go up..." Do the Jews of New York hear the call?
Rabbi Judah Alkalai wrote in the 19th century that one must distinguish between private repentance (Teshuva in Hebrew) and general repentance. Private repentance is a religious matter, remorse for sin, confession and personal atonement. General repentance is "that all Israel will return to the Lord our God to the land of our fathers' inheritance" (The root of Teshuva derives from shuv, which means: to return). Concerning general repentance "all the prophets commanded... and Israel will not be redeemed except in repentance... which means... that Israel will return to the holy land."
From this we can understand the depth of the words of the tannaitic sage Rabbi Yehoshua in the Talmud: "If (the People of) Israel do not repent, they are not redeemed, and the Holy One, blessed be He, will set over them a king whose decrees are harsh like Haman's, and Israel will repent and he will restore them to the right." Haman sought "to annihilate, to kill and to destroy all the Jews" (Book of Esther 3:13). If Israel does not repent, in other words, if they do not return home to Zion, they are not redeemed, and perhaps they do not want to be redeemed but to remain in their exile. Then, the Talmud says, a terrible anti-Semitism will awaken that will raise rulers committed to the ideology that crushes the Jewish people and its state. Admittedly this is a long process, but why wait for it to ripen fully?
6.
In the week between the call "Go forth from your land and from your birthplace and from your father's house to the land that I will show you" (Genesis 12:1), and the Lord's announcement to Sarah of the birth of Isaac (18:10), the first native-born who never left the land, we were notified about the election of a Muslim anti-Semite as mayor of the city with the largest number of Jews in the world. After the binding of Isaac, we are told: "For I will surely bless you and I will surely multiply your offspring... and your descendants will inherit the gates of their enemies." (Genesis 22:17).
Come home, Jews, my brothers and sisters. You do not see it now, as Jews in other periods did not perceive the danger at its outset. But perhaps a future generation will tell our descendants that the historical process of the return of American Jews to their ancient homeland began this week.
