A mixture of thoughts

In France Interior Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie has been in overdrive trying to prevent the conflict in the Middle East from spreading to France, which is one of the few European countries to have both a large Arab population and a (relatively) large Jewish population (the UK is the other). I attended a rally in support of Israel Sunday morning in the park by a tree planted in memory of Itzhak Rabin. There were some inspiring speeches, including one from an Israeli diplomat. I have the feeling the French press is starting to understand Israel and the Jewish community a little better, but it's a slow process.

After the rally S. and I toured the main mosque in Lyon. The visit had been arranged between the mosque and one of Lyon's reform synagogues several weeks ago, and it was decided to go ahead with it, despite the recent events. It was a wonderful experience. The people were very warm, and the mosque is beautiful. Our guide explained some of the basics of Islam in a straightforward manner. I told him how to say a couple of things in Hebrew and he was so appreciative. All the visitors went away feeling they had learned something important. The synagogue and the mosque also arrange regular get-togethers between Muslim women and Jewish women. The women have discussions, or they invite a speaker. Mostly, they just get to know each other. I wish we could have more moments like that, because here too, there isn't much mixing between the two communities. Deep down I think most people want peace, mutual respect and understanding, but the radical elements put such pressure on the ordinary people. I know that Arab-Jewish discussion groups exist in Israel, too, because I hear about them every now and then when I'm riding in the car listening to Radio Judaica Lyon, but it's rare that I hear or read about them in any other media.

Following the wedding of S.'s friend's son in Jerusalem, we celebrated the "shabbat chatan" in the hotel with our friends' families. During one of the meals I left the group, who were singing Jewish songs, to fill up my plate at the buffet tables. As I walked past a group of Christian pilgrims in the other part of the dining room, one of the men made the sign of the cross over himself before eating. Meanwhile, all of the people working in the hotel were Arab. You find this mixture in other countries, too, but there's something special about it in Israel, in Jerusalem, thanks to Israel's policy of open access to religious sites. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the three religions could always co-exist in such harmony?

I read a wonderful book last year, called "Three Cups of Tea". It's about an American who survives a failed attempt to climb K2, one of the highest peaks in the Himalayas, only because of the hospitality of the local people in the northern reaches of Pakistan. After that experience, he decides to devote his life to building schools in that region. He realizes that it is most important to educate girls. Whereas educated boys move away from their remote mountain villages when they grow up, the women become the cement of the local community. They become nurses and engineers and teachers. They have fewer children. They cause the general socio-economic level to rise. But there are so many cultural and religious impediments to this process.

The Palestinians as a people have made so many tragically bad decisions. They have had a painful lack of good leaders. And they still haven't understood that they must take their destiny into their own hands. They must stop crying "Help us!" to the world and help themselves. And they have a powerful weapon: the womb. In the short run this will make them more numerous, but in the long run it will work against them, because the faster the population grows, the harder it will be for them to climb out of poverty. After September 11, 2001, when people were wondering why Islamic terrorists had attacked the United States, B., who was seven at the time, said, "Maybe they're jealous."

Anyway, I know "our" side of the story pretty well, but I know very little about the other side, about what Arab people feel and believe, as individuals.

This year too in Jerusalem

Last year at this time, B’s bar mitzvah and our subsequent trip to Israel brought me out of blogging slumber in order to write about non-political events. This time, it was the wedding of S.'s childhood friend's son that drew us to Israel. The geopolitics nearly overwhelmed us.

It is difficult to find words to describe my feelings upon reading that people were being killed just a few miles from where we were vacationing, on both sides of the Gaza-Israel border: a mixture of sympathy for both Gaza’s and Israel’s civilian victims and an understanding of Israel’s anger and need to protect itself.

Unavoidably, our sympathies lie more with the Israeli side. The eldest son of my Princeton classmate S., whom we visited again this year, is probably in Gaza right now. Our thoughts and prayers go out to him and to his family. I'm biased, and it seems to me that the Arabs of Palestine brought this tragedy on themselves when they voted for Hamas in the first place. Of course this vote was only the latest in a long string of bad choices the Palestinian Arabs have made over the years. But it's not too late. All Hamas has to do is renounce terrorism and stop firing rockets into Israel, and the war will end.

Not that we really felt the war in any way while we were in Israel last week. Had we not seen newspapers, scanned our favorite websites when we had internet access or discussed politics with people we met, we might never have known the difference. In fact, once I did know what was going on, I would have preferred a few more reminders, such as more thorough searches and other security measures.

In entering Tel-Aviv’s Friday crafts market, Nahalat Binyamin, a security guard was checking backpacks, handbags, and the like. I purposely opened only one of the two zippered compartments of my backpack to see if he would ask me to open the other. He didn’t. Okay, that was one day before the Israeli air raids started.

At the end of our 10-day stay and five days after the start of Israel’s military operation, we attended the wedding in Jerusalem. I was expecting to see a security guard at the entrance with a list of guests to be checked off as people arrived – and showed identification. In fact, there were no security measures. Maybe in both cases there was profiling going on. If so, it was a very discreet operation. The wedding itself was a moment of joy. I wish N. and R. much love, long life, good health, healthy offspring, success, tolerance and mutual understanding in their future life together.

Security was very present in the Old City of Jerusalem. There were soldiers on every corner, or so it seemed, although they were mostly engaged, like police and security personnel everywhere, in giving directions. I embarked on an international relations mission of my own, intent on finding Mafouz, whom I had met along the via Dolorosa last year (see this post). It was raining, it was late in the day, and S., B. and D. were waiting for me in a café in the Jewish Quarter. Time was of the essence. I darted in and out of the market streets, up stairways and past the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. What seemed like a wondrous collage of cultures last year started to look like a huge, open air souvenir shop this year. At one point, only a few meters from the spot where I had met Mafouz and thought he lived, I stopped to ask a shopkeeper if he knew him. He recruited me instead to “help him” write a sign in English for his shop, then insisted on giving me a “gift”. He put together a set of earrings I knew S. would never wear, because the clasp was made of some unidentified base metal. Then he explained that one of the earrings was a gift; the other was not. I felt I was caught in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. I managed to extricate myself, but after a few more enquiries, Mafouz was, alas, nowhere to be found.

While in Israel we heard that many Gaza residents would like to be rid of Hamas. In our Tel-Aviv hotel, one of the valets told us that the (Arab) hotel manager has family in Gaza. He said that when he goes there he sees Hamas “officials” driving around in luxury cars while the rest of the population cowers. I would have liked to see confirmation of this in the press.

The articles I read, in the New York Times and Le Monde, seemed more balanced than during previous cycles of Arab-Israeli violence. Perhaps this was due in part to the Israeli government’s concerted media strategy together with its restrictions on media coverage from inside the Gaza strip itself. With each passing day, however, the media tide seems to be turning against Israel’s intended message. Images, it seems, speak louder than principles.

So allow me to conjure up an image of my own. The story begins in Europe at the end of the Second World War. Millions of ethnic Germans have been chased out of western Poland and across the Oder-Neisse line, Germany’s present-day eastern border. These ethnic Germans remain in refugee camps just over the border in Germany, refusing to integrate themselves into the rest of Germany, preferring instead to live indefinitely in the miserable conditions of the camps while demanding to be able to return to their ancestral homes in Poland, a "new" country whose right to exist they do not recognize. (For its part, Germany shows no interest in integrating them anyway, lest the economic strain the country is already experiencing be exacerbated.)

After a while, the refugees claim they are not really Germans after all, they are … Pomeranians and Silesians, and they demand the “right of return” to “occupied” Pomerania and Silesia. In the meantime, they elect a “militant” organization – international journalists alternately call the members “militants”, “activists” or “fighters” – to represent them, which starts sending suicide bombers into Poland in an effort to break Poland’s resolve and obtain the sympathy of the international community. Miraculously, the strategy works. Thus, once a fortnight or so, Szczecin (Stettin), Wroclaw (Breslau) and scores of other Polish cities and towns where the ethnic Germans used to live become a backdrop for carnage: an outdoor market, a crowded bus, a discotheque, etc. Occasionally even cities as far away as Warsaw and Krakow are targeted. It doesn’t matter how many civilians are killed during these attacks, because the world forgets about them quickly. However, it remembers that the exiled Pomeranians and Silesians are so desperate that resorting to indiscriminate violence is, alas, all they can do.

The Pomeranian and Silesian “militants” also forge ties with other European “militant” organizations, such as ETA, the IRA and the Red Brigades, who supply them with an arsenal of weapons of ever-increasing strength. Before long, they can fire rockets deep into Poland, generally from within the refugee camps, vowing to destroy the “Polish entity” and to drive every last Polish man, woman and child into the Baltic Sea.

In an effort to avoid civilian casualties, Poland generally takes no military action, but instead imposes a blockade around the refugee areas, carefully inspecting everything that goes in or out. This is only partly effective, however. Through complicity with their German friends to the west, the Pomeranian and Silesian “militants” smuggle in weapons, but don’t pay much attention to their people’s need for food, clothing, medicine or other basic necessities. The world condemns Poland for “besieging” the refugee camps and decries the abject living conditions of the people there.

Occasionally, Poland does take military action to crush the “militants”, calling them by their real name: terrorists. When this happens, Pomerania and Silesia become the world’s most important geopolitical hotspots, and with one voice, the entire international community calls for an end to the violence.

Now I ask you: could you imagine for one second that such a situation might actually be allowed to exist? And even if you could, how long would Poland put up with these shenanigans before losing its patience?
a) a month
b) a year
c) five years
d) 60 years

Now suspend your disbelief for a moment and imagine such a situation were possible and that Poland did put up with it for 60 years. Now, finally, imagine that “Poland” is less than one-tenth its actual size, has around one-fifth its current population and has enemies not only on its western border but on its eastern and southern borders as well, and you have approximately the situation in which Israel has lived for much of the past 60 years.

Israel’s demands are so unreasonable, aren’t they?

********
Does peace still have a chance? I still hope so.

Safety in Israel

Since our return from Israel several people have asked us if we felt safe there. The short answer to this is "Yes".

I now understand the feelings of the many French Jews who are buying property in Israel. On the one hand, if you are bothered by the anti-Semitism coming from parts of the Arab-Muslim community here, you might think, as I did, that moving from France to Israel is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. On the other hand, they say, at least the Jews call the shots in Israel.

Such was our sense, for better or for worse, of the balance of power there. Incidentally, the feeling of long-time Israelis towards these French newcomers is ambiguous. The former see the latter as at least partly responsible for the sharp rise in real estate prices, while much of that now French-owned real estate remains unoccupied several months of the year.

The tortured relationship between Israel and its Arab neighbors, in particular the Palestinians, was barely noticeable during our stay. There are plenty of Arab neighborhoods, almost all of our taxi drivers were Arab, as were many of the employees in the Jerusalem Novotel. But we sensed no undercurrent of hatred, animosity or threat of violence. We didn’t venture into Hebron, Jericho, Nablus or Ramallah, however, the main cities of the West Bank, nor into Gaza.

The most recent cycle of violence began while we were in Israel, but I wouldn’t have known anything about it had I not picked up a newspaper. On the day before we left, a rocket fired from Gaza landed in an open area near Ashkelon. Here is the title of the article that appeared in the Jerusalem Post:

Israel fears 'strategic threat' as Katyusha hits N. Ashkelon.
250,000 within rocket range
IDF kills 9 Palestinians in Gaza strikes

Here is the title in the International Herald Tribune from the same day:

Israelis kill 9 in raids into Gaza

It wasn’t until I read the IHT article that I found out that Palestinians from Gaza had fired a rocket and even then, it wasn’t exactly clear which action was in response to which! Ironically, in the paper version of the IHT, there was a subtitle in smaller print that said something like “Rocket lands near Ashkelon.” The contrast was striking: the same two items of information were announced in two newspapers on the same day, but in reverse order and font sizes. So much for the impartial media!

The Holy Land

No matter the feelings I might have had about Judaism when I was growing up – joy, guilt, wonder, sorrow – the Jewish identity is so strong, so compelling that sooner or later it always reels me back in. In some periods of my life religion has played only a minor role, but it has always been in the background and always a part of my character, ready to sally forth at critical moments. Judaism’s values, the importance Jews place on education, the notion that everything is grist for the mill and therefore debatable are hard-wired in me. There’s some ineffable beauty about the 4,000-year tortured journey of this tiny people.

In the Diaspora, especially outside the United States, it’s hard to express your Jewish identity fully without singling yourself out or even cutting yourself off from the surrounding, Gentile world. This is frustrating. Jewish children know from an early age that they are somehow different from everyone else around them. This has always been both Judaism’s strength and its weakness.

Israeli hospitality and Jewish identity
Stepping off an airplane in Israel is like meeting an old friend. The barriers fall away and you can be yourself. You can live Judaism fully and completely. Indeed, our Israeli experience started with passport control in Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. The woman in the booth looked at our passports and saw that B. had just turned 13. “Ah, bar mitzvah,” she said. “Mazel tov. Which parsha (Torah portion) did you read? Miquets?”
“No, Vayigash.” Not bad though. Miquets was the previous week.

This was to be a recurring theme during our two weeks in Israel: many ordinary people, not Yeshiva students or rabbis or other religious Jews, had a great deal of basic Biblical knowledge. We asked my cousins about it, and they confirmed that children in Israel study history starting with the Bible, or – dare I put it another way – study the Bible as history.

Our visit to the Great Synagogue reinforced our feelings of belonging. B. & D. were amazed by the sheer size of it: fifteen hundred seats (Temple Emmanuel in New York is bigger, but they don’t remember it). This was their first tangible piece of evidence, soon to be substantiated elsewhere, that they were truly in a country where a majority of the population was Jewish. This intrigued them. Soon they (and I) were wearing a kippa around Jerusalem. Granted, three or four times a day we’d walk into a place that required us to wear one, anyway. But that wasn’t the reason. We were just proud to belong, and to show it. Now I know some American readers might now be wondering if it’s “dangerous” to wear a kippa in France. In truth, it does attract some unnecessary attention from elements of the Arab-Muslim community, but mostly, it’s that if you’re not religious, it just feels out of place. As I would if I wore my cowboy hat here in France. In Jerusalem wearing a kippa doesn’t feel out of place. Au contraire, it makes your heart beat in rhythm with your surroundings.

Whenever our guide book gave us bad opening time information, people seemed determined to help us. At the Rockefeller Archeological museum, we were initially met with an amused, but firm, “No, the museum is closed today.”
“But our guide book says …”
“I’m sorry. It’s closed every Tuesday.”
And then miraculously, “But I can let you in to climb to the top of the tower and have a look at the Old City? Would you like that?” Would we ever! He also let us walk around a sculpture garden in the museum. I felt like Jamie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler.

At the Tel Aviv “safari” and zoo, the entrance was closed, earlier than expected, but the young attendant at the gate felt sorry for us (must have been my brilliant Hebrew, more on that later!), and let us in, asking us just not to tell anyone. Oops, I just did …

Towards the end of our stay, I noticed that we hadn’t been subjected to the kind of gentle urging to move to Israel, to “make aliyah”, that I had experienced on my previous visit 25 years ago. Israelis we met this time were certainly very proud of their country, but they didn’t ask us why we weren’t planning to live in Israel. Was it my imagination, or was this just another of the ways in which Israel has changed in the intervening time? The country has been through a lot since then, including several waves of immigration.

Old City wanderings
The Jerusalem Novotel is just a stone’s throw from the Damascus Gate, near what was “no-man’s land” until 1967. From there, we set out on foot for the Old City. But first I took my family on a detour, guided by my 30-year-old book of walking tours, Footloose in Jerusalem. I figured if this stuff has been here 2,000 years, what’s another 30? Well, after circling a busy, tired-looking bus station outside the Damascus Gate for 15 minutes, what was supposed to be Jeremiah’s Grotto turned out to be a warehouse with a 14-year-old Arab boy driving a forklift. We never did get to the bottom of that mystery. We headed back to the gate, but not before visiting another out-of-the-way attraction, King Solomon’s mines. These are a series of underground galleries that extend deep into – that is, under – the Muslim quarter of the Old City. This is where stone was quarried for the First Temple and where King Zedekiah allegedly tried to hide from the Babylonians before his family was put to death before his eyes.

Then it was in through the Damascus Gate and into the bustling Muslim quarter of the Old City. Here, gravity draws you into the colorful, main market streets, but through diversionary tactics, I managed to draw may family off them and into the back alleyways. At one point, while looking at the map, as any good tourist would, I heard children playing around me and felt something plastic strike my foot. When I looked away from the map I saw a youngster holding a gun, which had presumably just fired the dart that had landed on my foot. Somehow, I understood this instinctively, although I will admit to a split-second of anxiety. Along the via Dolorosa, we asked a man for directions. His name was Mafouz. He told us about his love for the city we were exploring and that he was born in. He was Christian, and that evening, December 24, he was going to Bethlehem. He was already reveling in the expectation of it. We also saw kids pushing or pulling huge carts, laden with bread, sundry supplies or even eggs. I took a picture of the boy pulling the eggs. B. thought I shouldn’t have done it, that it was a form of Schadenfreude. Of course, he didn’t say it that way. He said, “He’s poor, he’s working hard, and here you come, a tourist, you take his picture. Ha ha, isn’t that funny, all those eggs?” He’s right, of course, but isn’t 13 a bit young for such middle-class guilt?

When we reached the Jewish quarter, the family breathed a sigh of relief. The first sounds we heard were those of children in a classroom. We were on familiar turf. We turned left and saw an archaeological museum. We turned right and saw a cultural center. We went straight and saw a group of four historic Sephardic synagogues. We turned another corner and came out onto a large open area where a group of female soldiers were sitting on benches, guns strapped across their backs. We walked down some stairs and found ourselves on the Cardo, flanked by art galleries.

We were home. All that remained on our agenda for the day was a visit to the Wailing Wall, the Kotel in Hebrew, the last remaining vestige of the Second Temple, destroyed in the year 70 of the common era. The Kotel is at one end of a wide plaza (access is through metal detectors), and is divided into two sides, one for men and one for women. So we split up, without much ceremony, S. to one side, B., D. and me to the other. It was only afterwards that I realized how emotional it was going to be for S. Her mother, who passed away last July, had never been to Israel. But how she had dreamed of going! So now here was her daughter, on a pilgrimage by proxy, with strangers to either side of her and no way of communicating. It was emotional for us, too. I felt a physical connection to the Wall and the 2,000 years of history since the destruction of the Temple that it represents for me. B. & D. were busily writing notes and searching for available cracks in the Wall. So was I, but I hadn’t noticed the tables and chairs set up for just that purpose. So I squatted. When I started to get up, however, I felt a shooting pain in my back. Usually that means that within 24 hours, I will look like a walking question mark; that is, if I can walk at all. The “Muslim prayer” position sometimes alleviates this, but it wasn’t the place for Muslim prayer. Miraculously, the pain did not recur.

Nearby a man was talking animatedly on his cell phone. Then he balanced the phone on a stone in the Wall and left it there for a few minutes. Why not? If you can fax a message to the Wall, why not phone one in directly? I offered to put D. on my shoulders so his note would be higher on the Wall (and possibly get read sooner), but he declined. Occasionally men came over to me to ask for donations to charities that allegedly help poor families. In truth, it was hard to tell where the charity ended and the begging began. Later in the week, we took a tour of the tunnel that runs along the wall under the Muslim quarter. It runs alongside the retaining wall of the Temple Mount, of which the Wailing Wall is part, and in certain places you can see just how far down the wall goes. Or rather, just how high the wall was before the intervening 2,000 years of building, destruction and rebuilding raised the level of the city up another 15-20 meters.

When I first walked through the Old City 25 years ago, it was a magical four-dimensional journey. Back then, I had never seen anything like it. The layers of time, the diversity, the strangeness of it, the beauty of it. This time, it was even more wondrous than it was then. More has been finished, excavated and developed, especially in the Jewish quarter. But something in me had changed. The sights were somehow familiar.

History
Every time we take a trip somewhere, we set out with grand, idealistic notions about how much our children will learn about the culture and history of the country or region we are visiting. Idealism usually gives way to disappointment at the first museum visit. At the Palacio Real in Madrid, jewel of Spanish architecture, decorative arts and repository of a few centuries of Spanish royal history, B. & D. spent most of their time playing with the buttons on the audioguide. So with the Palmach Museum, the Hall of Independence and the Museum of the Diaspora on the schedule, we expected the worst.

But that was then, and this was now. For the first time, they felt the museum exhibits were meant for them. They, especially, B. felt a personal, albeit distant connection to the people, whether Biblical or contemporary, whose lives and destiny were being explained to them. I certainly never felt this way growing up Jewish in the United States. Maybe because being Jewish was so ordinary to me, whereas they, growing up in France, see it as extraordinary. Perhaps those feelings then found full expression in Israel, where they began to understand just how extraordinary the destiny of the Jewish people has been.

The Hall of Independence is perhaps the most understated museum I’ve ever seen. It used to be the Tel Aviv art museum and is the place where the State of Israel was declared on May 14, 1948. The visit consists of watching a short film and listening to an impassioned presentation of the events of that historic day, delivered by museum staff. No multimedia experiences, no ancient artifacts, just the tables and chairs used that day. Not to worry, the Palmach museum filled in our knowledge about the birth of the State of Israel with its multimedia journey into the lives of members of this pre-statehood defense organization, which initially received training in the British army. The Museum of the Diaspora was a wondrous journey through the ages. I could have spent a few days there, but luckily, my family, as fascinated as they were by what they learned, reminded me that we might want to do a few other things in the next few days (eat, sleep, bathe, etc.). Finally, the Time Elevator, a cross between a cinema and an amusement park, helped us to sort out the Jeremiahs, the Hezekiahs, the Zedekiahs, the Herods and the myriad other important characters who have left their mark on the history of the Jewish people.

History is omnipresent in Israel. I suppose if you live there you get used to that and lose your wide-eyed innocence, just as I have become used to France's history. We Americans are very impressed by old things, I'm told. But it's hard not to be impressed by the ruins at Caesaria, which line about a kilometer of shoreline. Herod had another palace here, in addition to the one at Masada and the Temple he rebuilt and expanded in Jerusalem. Indeed, it was not François Mitterrand who invented the notion of "grands projets".

We did not go to Yad Vashem, the museum of the Holocaust. I don’t remember much detail from my visit there 25 years ago, only the piercing, harrowing nature of it, and I remember being overcome with grief and despair by the end of the visit. We didn’t want our kids, who are just learning to enjoy Judaism, to have that joy snuffed out, nipped in the bud. We were afraid that they, especially D. (9), might interpret, even unconsciously, the dehumanization and extermination of Jews as a deserved fate. We do not want them to think the whole world is hostile to them before they’ve had a chance to know why Judaism is so worth holding on to. Are we overprotective? Ironically, we have had two Holocaust-related experiences since returning to France, but discussion of these will have to wait for a future post.

Family & Friends
When my grandmother emigrated from Poland to the United States in 1917, her elder sister was already in Palestine, and her younger twin sisters went there shortly thereafter. Their descendents now live in Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Haifa and elsewhere in the country. So our family was largely spared the horrors of the Shoah. But if we were comfortably settled in the United States, the same expression couldn’t really be used to describe the way of life in Palestine and then in Israel since 1917. On my previous visit, I remember family members describing those years, saying “’We had nothing. Nothing.” Everything they had now, they had worked and fought for. Twenty-five years ago, I thought they were materialistic when they boasted about how much they had achieved and how much they had. This time I understood differently. They were proud, in a way that comes only through personal hardship, much more than I have experienced in my life. They’re still proud, although maybe they don’t wear their pride so much on the outside anymore. Israel has made it. It has an advanced, technological, Western-style economy.

We spent an evening in Jerusalem, an afternoon near Tel Aviv and an evening in Haifa with family members, most of whom I hadn’t seen in 25 years or had never met. But there was lots to talk about. There was much discussion of genealogy, as one cousin tried to glean as much information as he could about our family history from another point of view and input it into his genealogy software. R., our hostess in Jerusalem, is the widow of one of my mother’s first cousins. He was the first Israeli cousin I remember meeting. In 1968 he came to the States with his family, and the emotional link I formed with him and his immediate family was strong, and still is.

The emotional bonds extended beyond our family. We also saw a woman with whom my mother- and father-in-law had become friendly when we lived in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. It’s not always easy to make friends in later life, but she did. We moved to Lyon, her husband died and she moved to Israel, then my mother-in-law died. Through all this, she remained faithful, writing to us on all occasions, happy and sad.

S. was my roommate for two years at Princeton, and he has been in Israel a few years longer than I have been in France. He is now married and has five children, and all but one of them, plus his wife, were there when we came to have dinner with them at their home in Beit Shemesh. Their family seemed so loving and so united, and I imagine that the importance they place on their spiritual life and the energy they put into it had something to do with that. Life seemed like a common adventure they were all taking part in. S. was so enthusiastic about our coming to Israel that he wanted to get together more than once during our stay, which we did!

The Desert
The road from Jerusalem through the Judean Desert to the Dead Sea loses altitude very quickly after leaving the city, ultimately plunging to 400 meters below sea level, the lowest point on Earth. It also loses moisture. One might say it is the beginning of the Negev, and it is dry! Its barren slopes of ochre earth make Wyoming prairies look like lush, well-manicured lawns in comparison.

Ein Gedi is an oasis on the shore of the Dead Sea. The kibbutz there includes guest accommodations and now earns much of its revenue through tourism. We toured the celebrated botanical gardens containing plant species imported from all over the world, but our guide fielded more questions about the life of the people in the kibbutz and on the changes currently taking place on Israeli kibbutzim, than on the plant life we were observing.

At the Ein Gedi spa, you can see just how far the shoreline has retreated in recent decades. When the spa was built, I think the water came right up to it. Now it's about 500 meters away. You can even take a little shuttle bus to it. In fact, in the summer, you're probably well advised to do so. I'm not sure about the healing powers of Dead Sea mud, however. Either it or the water turned my skin white and left it smelling of sulfur until the end of our stay.

Masada, the ancient fortress that first served as a palace for King Herod, then as protection for the Jewish zealots who held out against the Romans for a few years after the Temple was destroyed, is only a few miles away. The one-hour climb by flashlight up a narrow, twisting pathway in the July pre-dawn darkness 25 years ago was much more technical and dramatic than ours was this time round. There was also a lot less to see back then. I remember kicking around the dusty mountaintop, looking into a huge cistern and a mikvah (ritual bath) and most of all watching the sun rise. Now at the base of the mountain there’s a museum housing imaginative displays of the artifacts excavated on top, with commentary piped right into your ears from the audioguide. The sheer number of everyday objects is astounding. You can now spend an entire day touring the top of the mountain, where much has been restored and another audioguide feeds you information for the duration of your visit. While we were there, a bar and a bat mitzvah were taking place. Interestingly, the tourist information seemed to place less emphasis on the collective suicide aspect of the zealots’ fate than I had remembered from my previous visit. S. had a similar recollection from her visit 17 years ago. We later learned later that there’s now some controversy over exactly what happened at Masada during those final months way back in the 70s. Back down at the gift shop I looked for the book written in the 1960s by the excavation team’s leader, Yigael Yadin, who had also been an Israeli military leader, but B. said bluntly, “No, it’s too old. Come on, let’s go.”

The Modern City
Weatherwise, if our late December / early January visit was anything to go by, a winter in Tel Aviv is like a summer in Brittany. We spent part of one sunny day lounging on the beach and playing beach paddleball, right behind our hotel. We even dipped our legs into the water. Tel Aviv shopping centers glitter, there are some dazzlingly new office towers, and the oldest part of Tel Aviv, a neighborhood called Neveh Tzedek, bustles with activity, galleries and trendy shops. Nearby is an even older section, technically part of the old Arab city of Jaffa. Old Jaffa is now almost entirely Jewish, has great views of the city (sort of like viewing Los Angeles from Palos Verdes) and is also filled with galleries, shops, etc. But I wouldn’t hasten to call Tel Aviv a beautiful city. The construction materials used to build most structures seem to age poorly, so relatively new buildings look worn. This is in contrast to Jerusalem, where all buildings must be built with Jerusalem stone.

I wandered into one of the non-Jewish structures in Old Jaffa, St. Peter’s Monastery, while the rest of the family walked on into the large nearby plaza where several newlywed couples were being photographed. It was near the end of our stay in Israel. Inside, the church was decorated for Christmas with a tree, a nativity scene and other trimmings. Somehow it all seemed strangely familiar. Here I was in a country where most people are Jewish, where my background, customs and foods are dominant, yet seeing the church decorated for Christmas made me realize I was far from home. Normally at this time of year, I’d be seeing these decorations every day.

Hebrew
I tried to speak as much Hebrew as I could while we were in Israel, but whenever I did, especially if we were in a bit of a hurry, the cry of “Speak English” came from the back seat. Every once in a while, I met someone who spoke very little English. This was like manna from heaven, as new Hebrew words, phrases and conjugations would rain down upon me without the conversation switching to English. I was constantly looking at signs and printed material, trying to figure out as much as I could. Every language has its difficulty. In Hebrew, it’s hard to see a word and connect it with the spoken version you might have heard a half-hour earlier, because you’ll usually see it without the vowels. The word “renaissance” for example, becomes the equivalent of “rnsnc” in Hebrew characters and can be pronounced in myriad ways if you don’t already know the word. So, it’s easy to be put off by a mass of Hebrew text, telling yourself you can’t read it. But in fact, when I tried, I could always make out a few words, sometimes even whole sentences. R., one of my Jerusalem cousins, has been encouraging me to speak more Hebrew, and I want to, if only so that I can read her novels someday.

I began to wonder how Israeli children learn to read Hebrew, if they cannot “sound out words”. In France, debate has raged for decades about the best method: global or syllabic. So I thought that if Israeli children learned to recognize, to photograph new words, that could deal a coup de grâce to arguments claiming that only the syllabic method works and that the global method handicaps children for life. After all, 7 million Israelis can’t be wrong. Right? But then I noticed that books for children are usually written with vowels. So I asked some of our Israeli cousins about this and they said that in fact the same debate has raged in Israel for decades!

One of my cousins is a retired tour guide and used to take Israeli groups to many parts of the world. Once, he said, he was in the Basque country of Spain and people asked him how the Jews of Palestine ­– the future Israelis – had revived the Hebrew language. Indeed the advent of modern Hebrew is probably the most successful example of the revival of an ancient language. He answered that the Jews had a secret weapon: the Bible. The Bible is written in Hebrew. It’s all in there, verb conjugations and all.

Bar mitzvah

Many events over the past two years could have warranted a blog entry: the World Cup, the death of l’Abbé Pierre, Marcel Marceau or Saddam Hussein, Nicolas Sarkozy’s election and subsequent escapades, the release of the iPhone, the Arche de Zoé affair, the most recent round of strikes, or France’s newest anti-smoking laws, which ban the practice in all public buildings, including bars and restaurants. S. and I are looking forward with glee to telling restaurant owners that it is now a pleasure to dine out.

But I had decided that the next time I wrote, the subject would be personal, not political. That subject has come: B.’s bar mitzvah and our subsequent trip to Israel.

For those readers who might not know what a bar mitzvah is, suffice it to say that it’s a rite of passage for 13-year-olds in the Jewish religion. The bar mitzvah boy (or bat mitzvah girl) reads a passage from the Torah (the Pentateuch) and/or the Haftarah (a selection from the Prophets), and is recognized as an adult member of the Jewish community, responsible for all of his/her subsequent actions. This is usually followed by much rejoicing.

In our case, it was joyful, but it was also an emotional bar mitzvah, in particular because there was a big downside to the event. B.’s grandmother A. passed away at the end of July after a four-year battle with cancer, less than five months before B.’s big day. I remembered her involvement in the planning of our wedding and thought back on all the years I knew her since then. What a treat it would have been for her to see her elder grandson become a young man. We missed her softness, her savoir-vivre, her wisdom and most of all, her presence.

Also, our synagogue had been through an upheaval over the previous year. Our president fell ill and died rather suddenly just about a year ago. She had devoted her life to our congregation, but with her gone, the factions were laid bare. The rabbi, who had inspired B. and other bar mitzvah “candidates” to devote themselves to study, found himself in profound disagreement with many prominent members of the congregation and resigned in September.

Now, you don’t replace a “liberal”, i.e. conservative/reform rabbi in France at the drop of a kippa. If you wanted to count the total number of such rabbis in France on your fingers, you wouldn’t run out of fingers. All the others are orthodox. So since September we have had to call upon a rabbi who also officiates at another “liberal” synagogue 500 kms away in Toulouse. Luckily, our shared rabbi was to be in Lyon on December 15.

Rather than lose interest and drift away, B. was dedicated and determined to go through with this. After all, he had already invested several years in Hebrew school and 12-15 months in bar mitzvah preparation. So was I, for B. had asked me to read (i.e. chant) the Haftarah and I had already invested three months in that! In fact, the whole family felt involved in a common endeavor.

Not only did B. read from the Torah, he also led most of the service on Friday evening and on Saturday morning. In this respect, he did more than many bar mitzvah boys in orthodox synagogues. He sang in Hebrew and read in French and English, all with remarkable fluency, as if he had been doing it for years. Oh yes, he had been (see above). Then there was his sermon, his commentary on the week’s Torah portion (“Vayigash”), focusing on the reconciliation between Joseph and his brothers when they come to see him in Egypt because of the famine in Canaan. At first, the idea of preparing this sermon terrified B. He did not know where to start. Especially as there had developed within the congregation a sort of arms race. In the preceding months, it seemed that each successive bar/bat mitzvah tried to equal if not surpass his/her predecessor in terms of intellectual prowess. If one cited Rashi, the next would cite Maimonides, and so forth. B. did not feel up to this. In the end, with coaching from a teacher at the synagogue, he described, in his own words, what the Torah portion meant for him, relating it to his own life.

He also thanked the people in his life who had helped him in his achievement. Then he had a very emotional moment. He was thanking his grandfather for driving him to and from his bar mitzvah lessons, even though his grandmother was very sick at the time. Suddenly the tears welled up in his eyes, his throat knotted and he couldn’t continue. It was a pregnant moment, and everyone waited. Then he reached down somewhere and brought up the courage to go on.

I could go on for many screens praising my son, but I’ll stop now. I’ll just add that all the emotions so close to the surface must have touched other people too, because several of our guests told us how moved they were, how beautiful it all was. Perhaps they were also thinking of that particularly emotional moment.

With A.’s passing so heavy on our hearts, we had no real desire to make a big party, but we wanted B. to enjoy a celebration of some kind. So the next day we had a lunch, primarily for our closest family members, and a week later, we took off on a two-week trip to Israel. But that will be the subject of a future post.

June madness

With each passing day I don’t write on my blog, I have the impression that when I do post an entry, it will have to be more momentous than if I had posted it a day earlier. By the end of a week, it seems nothing less than the next definitive (Franco-)American novel will do, or at the very least, something to outshine A Year in Provence and its sequels. This is a slippery slope, as it means that each day, I will be less likely to actually do something about the blank blog page. Music is like this, too, I find. If you don’t practice for a few days, you know that it’s going to be harder when you do, so you unconsciously put it off for another day. Before you know it, weeks have gone by and you haven’t played, sung, etc.

So I have decided to meet the problem head on and get back to that unstable equilibrium that is the artist’s lot (if I may use that term to describe myself). Just, please – don’t expect anything momentous.

Last weekend was an action-packed weekend in an action-packed month, and I need to explain why to my non-French readers. In France, the year ends in June, especially if you have children or take part in any extra-professional activities. All the end-of-year school performances, parties, ceremonies, etc. take place in June. If you belong to a community group or activity (la vie associative, as it’s called here), the chances are the season ends in June. I suppose the phenomenon exists in the US (and other countries) too, but it seems more acute here. People virtually get together to say goodbye, before scattering like a treefull of starlings after a loud bang! If you were to spend a summer in France without ever going to the seashore, you’d think France hibernates, which would be a semantic contradiction, but I digress. (If you do go to the shore during this hypothetical summer, you will see more bare breasts than most American men see in a lifetime, but again, I digress.)

Friday was the fête de l’école, the end-of-year festival at B.’s and D.’s school. The theme was dance though the centuries, and I got to see B do a lovely waltz with one of the girls in his class. B’s parents were far more charmed by this than B was.

The highlight of the weekend was a concert on Saturday evening given by our rabbi and two female opera singers who are members of the congregation. They sang songs in Yiddish, Ladino and Hebrew, accompanied either by a piano or a guitar, and it was glorious. Now you would think that an event like this would draw hundreds (dare I say thousands?) of people. It didn’t; there were around 130 people in the audience. Once you know the type of congregation and the state of Judaism in general in France, it is no longer surprising. The congregation is libérale, a flavor halfway between American conservative and reform Judaism. There are a few libérale synagogues in France, about one in every major city, plus two or three in Paris. The other 95% of French synagogues are squarely in what would be called the “orthodox” category in America. The 95% don’t officially recognize the 5%, and so they refused to do any advertising for the concert. Even the Jewish radio station in Lyon refused to air an announcement about it. We also added a little self-flagellation: the concert started before the end of Shabbat on Saturday evening, not a good way to make friends with a religious, observant community. Future concerts, I am told – stay tuned! more to come! – will not conflict with the Sabbath.

On Sunday, B., D. and I did a 2-hour horse ride at La Ferme de la Dame Blanche, a riding club near the foothills of the Monts du Lyonnais, outside Lyon. This was their last Sunday ride of the season, and it conflicted with the fête du poney club at the club where D. has been taking lessons. But the Sunday ride at La Dame Blanche was his first opportunity to ride outside an arena without someone holding his pony. Both he and his Dad were very proud. The four 8-11 year-old girls on the ride, however (why does every riding club has a bevy of 8-11 year-old girls?), were disappointed we didn’t gallop. The scenery was stunning, the temperature was in the nineties (°F), and I would have worn my cowboy hat to protect me from the sun, but they (the ride leader and B. and D.) insisted I wear a helmet.

Yesterday was the fête de la musique. Throughout France on June 21, the longest day of the year, amateur and professional musicians give free concerts in the street and in concert halls. So did my singing group, but that’s a topic for another post ….

Bruno Gollnisch finally booted out of Lyon III

Usually when there is an anti-Semitic event in France – the vandalizing of a synagogue, the defacing of Jewish graves – my inbox fills up. The content ranges from concern about anti-Semitism in France, which many people outside the country think is rampant, to tirades against France as the most anti-Semitic country on Earth, parallels to the Dreyfus Affair and “humor” about French anti-Semitism. In the past few weeks, my inbox has not been so full. But look at what has been happening.

In late January, President Jacques Chirac attended the ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and gave a moving speech. A few days earlier he inaugurated the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, now Europe’s largest documentation center for Jewish contemporary history, on a level with Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Last month, Israel opened its new embassy in Paris and the Israeli foreign minister, Sylvan Shalom, was received by President Chirac. Shalom expressed satisfaction at recent French domestic and foreign policy positions, specifically, that the French government had taken a pro-Hezbollah radio station off the air (even if it hasn’t agreed to call Hezbollah a terrorist organization), that it favored Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon (this was before Hariri’s assassination) and that it was determined to stop Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Around the same time, Israel’s head of state visited France, only the second time an Israeli president has done so since the State of Israel was founded. Was Chirac just posturing? If so, why was he posturing when he was friendly to Israel but sincere when he visited Yassir Arafat in the hospital? (I got some lovely e-mails after that one.)

The biggest news came this week. Bruno Gollnisch, heir to the throne of the far-right Front National political party – if its superannuated leader Jean-Marie Le Pen ever steps down –, member of the European parliament, Rhône-Alpes regional councilman and professor of law and Japanese civilization at Lyon University (“Lyon III”) has finally been kicked out of that university for his revisionist remarks.

In a press conference last October he said that “no serious historian still believes in the conclusions of the Nuremberg trials” and claimed that historians should be able to debate the “real number of victims” of the Holocaust. Finally, he said that “there should be debate about how the people actually died” (my translations). He didn’t call the existence of the gas chambers into question directly, but … let’s just say this wasn’t the first time Mr. Gollnisch’s tongue got away from him. Nor, as we’ll see in a minute, the last.

Interestingly, in an absolute sense, I agree with him. We should be able to debate these things freely and openly. France’s strict prohibition against the expression of revisionist, anti-Semitic or racist beliefs may, in theory, go too far. In reality, however, it seems to me the vast majority of the those who say these things harbor deep-seated anti-Semitism and allowing them free rein would just be encouragement, not for debate, but for pursuit of their pre-determined agendas.

There was indignation throughout France after Mr. Gollnisch’s October remarks, and particularly here in Lyon (he teaches a few blocks from here). Once the heat got turned up on him, he said that the Minister of Justice, Dominique Perben and the Minister of Education, François Fillon, were persecuting him because they “had promised his head” to the Conseil représentatif des institutions juives de France (CRIF), the French Jewish umbrella organization. Naturally. Everyone knows that Jews control the country, and French politicians are their lackeys.

Mr. Gollnisch has both supporters and detractors, so the climate at the university was confrontational. To prevent an outbreak of violence, in December the dean of the university denied him access until the school’s disciplinary committee rendered its report. The Conseil d’Etat overturned that decision, and he resumed his lectures, with bodyguards at his side and police standing by, but then Mr. Fillon decided it was best to suspend him pending the decision of his peers.

That decision came on Saturday: a five-year suspension. Until now Mr. Gollnisch’s teaching post and standing as a specialist on Japanese civilization have always lent him respectability. They have also tarnished the reputation of Lyon III. That advantage is now history. When the suspension is over, he’ll be 60 years old, and eligible for retirement. Of course he can always appeal….

To be sure, not every prominent person in France has condemned Mr. Gollnisch. In February, Raymond Barre, former prime minister under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and former mayor of Lyon, said in an interview that he knows Bruno Gollnisch personally, and that “he gets carried away sometimes, but he’s a good man. Comments escape him, but underneath it all, I don’t think he believes them” (my translation again). Raymond Barre was PM when the synagogue in the rue Copernic was bombed in 1980 and uttered an infamous slip of the tongue, lamenting that the attack had struck “Jews and innocent Frenchmen”. Just thinking about that comment now makes me realize how far French politicians have come in the past 25 years.

Also to be sure, there are still plenty of anti-Semitic incidents taking place in France. As there are, sadly, in other European countries, in the United States and elsewhere. (Here are two web sites that catalog them: the CRIF, mentioned above, and the Anti-Defamation League.)

I searched for “Gollnisch” in the online versions of several US publications for news stories about this series of events and here is what I found:

Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Cleveland Plain Dealer, St Louis Post-Dispatch, Miami Herald: no stories

New York Times: most recent story – Nov. 2003

Washington Post: “World in Brief” item, dated March 5, 2005, as follows (entire text):

LYON, France -- Lyon University, part of which is named after Jean Moulin, the hero of the French Resistance murdered by the Nazis in 1943, said it would suspend a professor for five years after he questioned whether the Nazis used gas chambers in the Holocaust.

Bruno Gollnisch already faces a legal probe in France for questioning how the gas chambers were used by the Nazis and how many Jews were killed.

Just wanted to let everyone know that mixed in with the bad things, good things are happening too in France, even though the France-bashing media aren’t reporting them.