ELKAN’S VIEW 29th April 2015

Israel is a Jewish state which means that sometimes there are Jewish ways around problems. I got caught in Jerusalem some years ago doing something in the traffic that I most certainly should not have been doing. An unnoticed policeman waved me over, so I tried the usual ploy of claiming that my Hebrew wasn’t good but he spoke excellent English. The policeman explained what I shouldn’t have done, fined me 250 Shekels, said that since it was almost Rosh Hashanah he wouldn’t give me any points, and wished me a Shanah Tovah which I heartily reciprocated!

Sometimes things do seem to get out of hand. I parked free outside my son’s flat in Tel Aviv for the first day of Pesach. Later on the Saturday night -Second Seder outside Israel – I came out to find I had got ticket, issued at 8.50 pm, for parking in an area reserved for local residents.

As I left Netanya this week I received my demand for car tax for NIS1826 – just over GBP300 – which is a little steep considering I drive a hybrid. I have to pay the bill and then wait for another demand through the post which shows that the bill has been paid. I then take that and the car for its MOT, which will be another GBP60, and seems to involve a great deal of duplicate paperwork.

Often Israeli systems can be very efficient. I went to visit a friend in the gigantic Tel Hashomer hospital this week. When I came to leave I had lost my parking ticket and expected problems. Not at all! The voice at the other end of the machine asked me my registration number, told me exact l when I had come in, the machine issued me a replacement ticket, and I was on my way for the standard price.

And when I got to the airport this week, Cellcom sent me a text asking if I had remembered my passport and boarding card!

ELKAN’S VIEW 21st April 2015

I am writing this on the afternoon of Wednesday 21^st April, Yom Hazikaron, the day of national memorial for the 23,320 Israeli soldiers who have fallen in the defence of the state. Last night at 8 PM, as happens every year on Yom Hazikaron, the siren sounded throughout Israel and the whole country came to a halt. That was repeated again at 11 o’clock this morning and like many people I was thinking of those for whom the siren commemorated for the first time the son or brother or husband or fiancé who fell in Operation Protective Edge last summer.

The mood changes this evening, and as in Jewish communities throughout the world mourning gives way to joy. We have paid a very high price for our state and we continue to pay it. Like so many others I hope that my grandchildren don’t have to go to war to protect their freedoms but in an increasingly uncertain and unstable Middle East that is probably too much to hope for.

But what an amazing state we have produced! A world leader in so many things that require intelligence. Every time you pick up your computer, or avoid traffic using an app on your smartphone, or benefit from a range of amazing medical advances, you are benefiting from products of the State of Israel.

And it has some other unique features. Israel is the only place where more women fly F-16s then drive cars in Saudi Arabia, where army reservists are commanded by officers younger than their own children, where an entire country comes to a halt to mourn those it has lost, where there is a remarkable diversity of Jewish dress behaviour and practice, where Arabs are allowed to vote in a democratic election. It was David Ben Gurion who said “in Israel, in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles”.This is something that we all experience here on a daily basis.

And long may it continue thus. Israel is really “Reshit tzemichat geulateynu – the first flowering of our redemption”. I am proud every day to be part of it.

ELKAN’S VIEW 15th April 2015

I was strolling through a park in Ra’anana last week when I heard an orchestra and choir rehearsing the Hatikvah. The tune is haunting, although its origins are by no means clear. The wording, by the poet Naftali Hertz Imber, has become so familiar as to almost lose its force. The phrase “Od lo avda tikvateynu – our hope is not yet lost” is a direct rebuttal of the phrase in Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of the dry bones.

What particularly struck me is how very near the valley of the dry bones we actually came. As I write this, it is the evening of Yom HaShoa, Holocaust Memorial Day.

Tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock the siren will sound throughout the whole of Israel and everything will come to a halt. Buses and cars will stop on the motorways and roads, and the passengers will get out and stand in silence in memory of the six million Jews who were murdered merely because they were Jews.

Six million is a very difficult figure to envisage. The current population of Israel is estimated at 8.2 million of which 6.1 million are Jews. To envisage the extent of the Holocaust therefore we need to imagine an Israel – populated, teeming, people everywhere going busily about their business and preoccupations, studying, driving holidaying working – with all its Jewish population removed. Envisage in your mind’s eye a Jerusalem or a Tel Aviv or a Haifa or any other of the hundreds of towns and villages and settlements, or stripped of their population by force, and that population removed with cruelty and terror to be murdered on an industrial scale. That is the extent of the Holocaust.

Is there any reason any more to question the need for a Jewish state? Genocide has not gone away but the world does not seem to care any more and the silence is as deafening now as it was then.
Well does Hatikvah say that we have nurtured for 2000 years the dream of being “Am chofshi be’artzeynu – a free people in our own land”. We are privileged to be of the generation that has seen this dream become reality.