The Jewish Woman Next Door: Repairing the World One Step at a Time
135
The Jewish Woman Next Door: Repairing the World One Step at a Time
135Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9789657108956 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Urim Publications |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2007 |
| Pages: | 135 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.80(w) x 9.60(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Jewish Woman Next Door
Repairing the World One Step at a Time
By Debby Flancbaum
Urim Publications
Copyright © 2015 Debby FlancbaumAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-965-524-182-2
CHAPTER 1
Section 1
Pidyon Sh'vuyim/ Redeeming Captives
Ransom a captive before you feed the poor. No act of charity is greater; and money collected for any purpose whatsoever may be used as ransom – even if collected to build a synagogue.
R. Joseph Caro, Shulchan Aruch
If you think of Jewish women only as passive observers in dangerous situations and not as active participants – think again! In this section you will meet women who have performed the most extraordinary feats, sometimes heroically risking their own safety to bring other Jews to freedom.
From Biblical times onward, Jewish women have played a central role in freeing other Jews from captivity. At each Passover Seder, we gather around the table and recount the story of the Exodus, in which God, with the help of Moses, Aaron and their sister Miriam, redeemed the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. The Exodus is a central event in Judaism, and of such monumental significance to the Jewish nation that we recall it daily in our prayers, every week in our Shabbat rituals, and on every holiday. Miriam was a key player in our escape. It was Miriam who protected her brother, Moses, from death at Pharoah's hand, thereby allowing him to grow into manhood and become the leader of the Jews. Finally, as Israelites were freed from the Egyptians who drowned in the Red Sea, it was Miriam who led the women in dance and song. The verse they chanted is one of the most famous in the Torah, "Sing to the Lord for He has triumphed gloriously. Horse and driver he has hurled into the sea" (Exodus 15:21).
Jewish women have a long history of social activism on behalf of oppressed Jews fulfilling the mitzvah of Pidyon Sh'vuyim (redeeming captives). During the past century, Jewish women have had opportunities to redeem other Jews from all corners of the globe. In the aftermath of the Nazi horrors, women like Henrietta Szold and Ruth Gruber worked to resettle survivors in Palestine, Europe, Canada and the United States. Women's organizations such as Hadassah were at the forefront of the youth aliyah (settling in the land of Israel) movement, which brought approximately 10,000 children and teenagers, many of whom were without family, from war-torn Europe to Palestine.
In the 1960s, 70s and 80s American Jews became aware of the oppression of Soviet and Syrian Jews, who were being held as political prisoners. Jewish women put a tremendous amount of pressure on our government to help facilitate the release of those who were desirous of political, religious and economic freedom. They staged protests, wrote letters, circulated petitions, and traveled to the Soviet Union to show their solidarity. Women such as Alice Sardell fought for the freedom of Syria's 4,000 Jews who were being held as political hostages. She was their voice when they had none.
Since the 1970s, Jews from Israel and the United States have worked tirelessly to bring thousands of Ethiopian Jews to the Land of Israel in order to escape persecution, poverty and famine. Barbara Ribacove Gordon helped bring the plight of Ethiopian Jews to the international stage. Today, she continues to work toward the goal of rescuing all Ethiopian Jews from bondage and bringing them to safety.
Ruth Gruber
A Safe Haven
"Every life has a defining moment and for me that moment came in the summer of 1944 when I helped to bring nearly 1,000 refugees to safe haven in America," says Ruth Gruber, an award-winning journalist. "That trip changed my life. I knew at that moment that I would spend the rest of my life involved in the rescue of Jews."
"World War II and the Holocaust were still raging in Europe." she explains. "President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced 'that approximately 1,000 refugees should be immediately brought from Italy to this country.'" They would come in as his guests.
Ruth realized that these refugees were going to be exhausted, disoriented and frightened after all they had lived through. She believed it was imperative that someone be with them on their journey to America to ease their way. She suggested the plan to Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, for whom she was working as Special Assistant. Ickes thought it was a wonderful idea and decided to send her. In those days it was highly unusual for a woman to be allowed to engage in such a daring mission. Her participation had to be approved though many channels, but finally she was granted permission.
"The voyage was top secret and dangerous," Ruth says. "For my protection, I was made a 'simulated general.' If the Nazis captured me or shot me down, they might kill me if I were an ordinary soldier, but as a General, they had to give me food, clothing, and shelter and keep me alive."
Traveling aboard the A.T.S. Henry Gibbins, they were part of a huge army convoy of twenty-seven vessels. Nazi bombers and U-boats were ominously close by. At night, they cut through the water like ghosts with no lights on and no people on deck.
"They had come from eighteen countries that Hitler had overrun," says Ruth. "Most were Jews, but many were Protestants, Catholics, and Greek Orthodox. They were all ages, from eighty to an infant born in a Jeep and dubbed 'international Harry.' Among them were: Mathilda, who had run an underground rescue station; Leo, an opera star from Zagreb; Edith, who had fought with the Yugoslav partisans; and Manya, who survived five concentration camps to become the group's first bride."
In Ruth's book, "Haven," which recounts the story of the refugees' journey to freedom, she writes, "These people were a cross-section of European life, people who had survived because they scratched and tore and hid and bought false identity papers, and never believed in their own death. I realized that every one of them was alive by a miracle."
On the ship, Ruth was a confidant and a source of strength for the refugees. They came to call her "Mother Ruth." She shared their joys and sorrows, brought their stories to life, and assured them a place in history with her book 'Haven.'
"I often had to stop writing," Ruth says, "because tears were wiping out the words in my notebook. I hoped, through their stories, America might learn the truth of Hitler's crimes."
On August 3, 1944, the ship arrived in New York Harbor. It was the very same day that Anne Frank was captured. Ruth and the refugees were ferried across the water to Hoboken, New Jersey, where she led a press conference introducing some of the refugees and their stories to members of the American press.
They then boarded a train for Oswego, a small town in upper New York state. Some were shocked by their first glimpse of the army camp, Fort Ontario, which was to be their home. It had a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. One of the refugees turned on Ruth, "How could you bring us to another camp, after the terrible camps we escaped from?" Ruth tried to convince him that all U.S. army camps are surrounded by a fence, but many told Ruth, "Don't let him upset you. We're so happy to be in America. And we feel safer protected by a fence."
"Inside the camp, reporters and photographers swarmed around us," Ruth says, "catching the weary and frightened eyes of the elderly, the tentative smiles of the teenagers, and the lost look of children without shoes. Within a few days, townspeople were hurrying along the other side of the fence bringing gifts to the children. One little girl gave her Shirley Temple doll to one of our children, who had never owned a doll."
For a month, they were placed in quarantine that required that no one could leave the base or receive visitors so that army officers could ask them questions about what they had lived through. Although some had experienced shock and fear on arrival, they quickly relaxed when they realized that the officials were kind and food was plentiful. After a short time, their spirits were high and they were optimistic about their futures.
The rooms in the barracks were the first private space many had had in as long as five years while they were trying to escape Hitler's armies. The hard army cots, the army sheets and blankets, and the table and chair felt like the height of luxury. Some of the women improved upon their surroundings by making curtains and bookshelves and pasting newspaper pictures on the walls.
"The schools of Oswego opened their arms to our children," Ruth reports, "and the children brought America and the Bill of Rights into the camp."
In the weeks and months that followed, the refugees began finding ways to keep themselves occupied. They organized classes in everything from music and literature to woodworking. The people of Oswego formed the "fence society." They visited the refugees, delivered care packages and made conversation. The unofficial anthem became "Don't Fence Me In," a song that was popular during that era.
The winter of 1944 was one of the coldest on record in Oswego. The refugees were confined to a snowy camp, and the mood was somber. The war appeared to be ending, and as a result, they constantly worried about their status. Since they were neither prisoners of war nor illegal immigrants, but guests of the President, they had no status. Moreover, they had signed a paper before boarding the ship, promising that they would return to Europe following the end of the war. "They would have signed anything," says Ruth, "to escape the terror and the bombings." But what would they be returning to?
With help from people like Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, and a few others, Ruth continued to fight for them. She even brought a team of Jewish and non-Jewish leaders to ask President Harry Truman to grant them permission to stay here.
"Then on December 23," Ruth says, "as a Christmas present, President Truman announced on the radio that the refugees in Oswego could stay. They had to leave the United States on busses, cross the Rainbow Bridge into Canada, shake the hand of the American consul, receive a visa, and re-enter the United States." They eventually became United States citizens.
Ruth Gruber, who is now in her nineties, was subsequently involved in a great many efforts to redeem Jews from captivity. Her book, Haven, was made into a four-hour miniseries by CBS and is now available on DVD. Ruth chronicled the activities of the ship, Exodus 1947, which brought Holocaust survivors to the Holy Land, and she was involved in the rescue of thousands of Jews from Yemen, Iraq, Romania, the former Soviet Union, and most recently from Ethiopia.
Barbara Ribacove Gordon
The Revealing Moment
Barbara Ribakove Gordon was in the process of learning as much as she could about Judaism and Jewish history when she was offered an opportunity to visit the concentration camps of Europe. Although that was canceled, a few days later, she was invited on a trip to learn about the conditions facing Romanian Jewry. Barbara said, "I figured that it was more important to spend my time working on behalf of living Jews than to visit dead ones." On her mission to Romania, Barbara was disturbed to find out that many Jews there were denied the right to emigrate. When she came back to the United States, she began advocating for the release of two families and was successful in her efforts. She says, "I knew after my first experience with rescuing Jews that I could actually have an impact."
Thus in 1981 Barbara joined a group of a dozen other brave souls from North America and traveled to Ethiopia to validate the distressing stories that were coming out of that country. Word was just beginning to spread throughout the international Jewish community that Ethiopian Jews were suffering intolerable hardships and persecution. As Jews worldwide were slowly learning about these poor people's plight and mobilizing to rescue them, Barbara and her companions were the first to embark on an historic fact-finding mission.
This weary bunch had to travel through Ethiopia by mule, foot and horseback, through huge rocky mountains with precipitous drops. Terrified of heights and even more afraid of mules, Barbara lacked the appropriate clothing or supplies for the grueling terrain. During the day, the blazing sun beat down on their heads, and at night they froze without sweatshirts or enough blankets. Several became gravely ill with food poisoning. Barbara, a writer for a health magazine, was the closest thing they had to a doctor or nurse. Her new friends depended on her to administer first aid using the tiny kit she had brought along in case someone had a headache or a blister. Never did she envision that she would have to apply antibiotic ointment to her own backside, covered with painful saddle sores.
One night they slept fitfully on the ground, huddled together, as they heard the chilling sounds of leopards howling in the surrounding trees. They did not have the luxury of giving in to terror or apprehension. They had to move forward.
Barbara, a citified mother and freelance writer, was naïve enough to think that this trip would be an adventure, and never anticipated that she would actually be risking her life. After an exhausting two day journey (there was then no direct way to fly to Ethiopia) they arrived only to be denied authorization to go to Jewish villages in Gondar Province, home to many Jews and ordinarily easily accessible.
With the help of the Mossad (Israel's version of the C.I.A.) the Jews were already trickling out of Ethiopia and making their slow aliyah (immigration to Israel) through Sudan. The then-communist Ethiopian government, in an attempt to isolate and punish them, refused to allow them visitors.
However, Barbara and her colleagues did not make this long trip to sit idly by in hotel rooms. They were determined to see first-hand the conditions in which Ethiopian Jews were living, and devised what they thought was a clever strategy to outsmart the local officials. In order to meet Jews in a tiny and remote village in the Semian Mountains, they pretended to go on safari, and it wasn't until the travelers actually began this arduous trek that they began to doubt the sanity of their plot. Perhaps it was they who had been outwitted. When they arrived in the Jewish village of Shewada, tired, hungry and miserable, they found people who were desperately poor and malnourished. The children were covered with flies. Surprisingly, the Jews at first did not want the visitors. They did not believe that these white people could possibly be Jews; after all, in their experience all Jews were black. They previously had unpleasant encounters with missionaries posing as Jews, who tried to convert them and their children. Even though it was possible that these strangers might offer desperately needed food or supplies, these proud Ethiopians refused to bend their principles by providing access to their impressionable children.
However, Brett Goldberg, a member of the group and a linguist from Yale who spoke Amharic (the Ethiopian language), gradually gained their trust. He persuaded the Ethiopians to permit the travelers to view the village synagogue, which was a round stone hut that looked unlike any other synagogue they had ever seen. The Torah was contained in a book, instead of a scroll, and was written in the Ethiopian religious language, Ge'ez, rather than in traditional Hebrew. These disoriented, sick and weary travelers were afraid to admit, even to themselves, that they might have made a huge mistake in coming to this country. How could they make real contact with these unfamiliar people, living in the middle of nowhere, in horrible conditions, without a "real" Torah or a "real" synagogue. There was suddenly an unspoken undercurrent of doubt as they wondered if they had endured hardship for nothing. Then, for some reason that no one could quite understand, one member of the group asked an Ethiopian Jewish elder, "Which Torah portion are you reading this Shabbat?" The Ethiopian leader replied, "We will be chanting Parshat Noach (the story of Noah), which was the same section that Jews all over the world were reading that week.
This answer represented a transcendental moment for Barbara and the others. Somehow these people, living in squalor and isolated from the rest of the Jewish world (in fact, from the entire world), without watches, telephones, or any other form of communication, remained in synch with Jews everywhere. Even those among the travelers who were not religiously observant realized the amazing connection that had just been made, surpassing time, space, distance, skin color and culture. Indeed, they were all Jews.
By 1991, Barbara had become the founder and executive director of NACOEJ, the North American Conference on Ethiopian Jewry, and was intimately involved in relief and rescue, including Operation Solomon. Because of the raging civil war, the Jews in Ethiopia were in increasingly more danger. The United States and Israel persuaded the opposing factions to make a temporary cease-fire so that the Jews could safely make their way out. The two armies stood motionless while forty-one El Al flights, packed with Jewish refugees, flew them to the Land of Israel. This twentieth century miracle of Jewish life, a modern day Exodus story, occurred largely because a New York journalist took a leap of faith and traveled on an uncharted path to rescue other Jews from bondage. Today NACOEJ is still providing aid for thousands of Ethiopian Jews who have not yet left for Israel, and in Israel offers essential educational programs for the community.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Jewish Woman Next Door by Debby Flancbaum. Copyright © 2015 Debby Flancbaum. Excerpted by permission of Urim Publications.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Louis Flancbaum, M.D.,Introduction,
1. Pidyon Sh'vuyim / Redeeming Captives,
2. Tzedakah / Righteousness,
3. Hachnasat Orchim / Welcoming Guests,
4. Bikkur Chollim / Visiting the Sick,
5. V'ahavta L'reyacha / Loving One's Neighbor,
6. Lo Ta'amod al Dam Re'echa / Do Not Stand Idly by While the Blood of Your Neighbor is Being Shed,
7. Talmud Torah / The Study of Torah,
8. Kavod Hamayt, Nichum Avaylim / Honoring the Dead and Comforting the Bereaved,
9. Ahavat Zion / Zionism and Love of the Land of Israel,
10. Rodef Shalom / The Pursuit of Peace,
Acknowledgments,