ELKAN’S VIEW 24^th JUNE 2015

Israel is undoubtedly a very prosperous country but the division between the haves and the have-nots can at times be frighteningly large. Statistics reveal that a quarter of Israel’s citizens are living below the poverty line and among them are 850,000 hungry children. At the same time, literally hundreds of thousands of tonnes of perfectly good nutritious food are needlessly destroyed each year.

In 2000 this led Joseph Gitler, an American immigrant, to establish what is now called Leket Israel – Leket is a term used in the Torah requiring farmers to leave a certain amount of food for the poor.

Leeket is now the largest supplier of food free of charge to over 180 nonprofit organisation serving over 140,000 people on a weekly basis. In addition volunteers prepare up to 8000 sandwiches every day to give underprivileged children – sometimes to take home to their siblings – in over 30 cities.

There are about 55,000 volunteers working for Leket all over Israel. The organisation itself has some farms, the land of which has either been gifted to the charity or is available on very favourable rates. A huge amount of food is grown there, and much of the harvesting is done by volunteers, who also rescue 60,000 meals a month from over 250 food establishments.

I am proud to be one of the Netanya volunteers, and my “partners” have ranged from someone who claims to have pushed me in my pram in Preston, to a Canadian Rabbi, and to the charming Irish doctor who is the coordinator of our group.

We collect from four restaurants in the shopping mall at Ir Yamim in South Netanya, receiving the food that is left over when they close at 10 PM. We then go to a baker’s shop where we often receive five or six large black bags full of perfectly good loaves, burekas, cakes and biscuits. We then leave these in a distribution centre in the middle of Netanya and by the next morning they have all been distributed.

The fact that Israel needs this organisation is a tragedy. The fact that so many volunteers work for it, is one of the great aspects of Israeli society.

ELKAN’S VIEW 17 June 2015

Anti-Semitism is an old and dangerous concept, but it mutates in different forms and requires different responses. Its latest form is BDS, the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, which aims to strip Israel of its status in the world, to present Jews in the Diaspora with an ultimate choice between supporting Israel or living in Europe, and ultimately to create a situation where no one will stand up for the State of Israel or the Jewish people.

The centre of this movement, certainly in Europe, appears to be the United Kingdom where universities that ought to be fortresses of honesty and free speech are becoming centres for organised hatred. In many universities Jewish students are denied a fair hearing, and any attempt to tell the truth as it really is on the ground is howled down. To get a fair balanced hearing from the BBC is virtually impossible, and too many of society’s “opinion formers” are determined not to let the facts get in the way of their prejudices.

As Lord Sacks said last week, BDS “is the latest incarnation of the denial to Jews as a distinctive faith and people of the right to be: the right to govern themselves in the land of their beginnings.”

The touchstone by which human behaviour is currently measured is Human Rights, in which Israel is vilified normally without just cause, while at the same time every other breach of human rights is simply ignored. Where are the mass demonstrations about the atrocities in Syria, the church protesting about the treatment of its own adherents in the Muslim world, the mass tragedies in Nigeria and other places; can you imagine the ongoing horror felt by the parents of one of the girls abducted by Boko Haram?

A high-level group of foreign Generals has recently investigated last year’s war and the behaviour of the two sides. They found that the IDF’s scrupulous adherence to the laws of war cost Israeli lives, while Hamas were responsible for the overwhelming majority of civilian deaths in Gaza. I wonder how much this will be publicised and how long it will be remembered.

ELKAN’S VIEW 10 June 2015

France has a long and inglorious record of anti-Jewish actions. Although there were good times, and considerable mediaeval Jewish scholarship came from France (Rashi was a Frenchman) the Jews always felt uncomfortable. Even when the country aspired to the highest ideals – Liberté, Egalité , Fraternité – the Jews always felt excluded from full participation. It was the treatment of Alfred Dreyfus by the French army in 1895 that inspired Theodore Herzl to convene the first Zionist Congress which half a century later led to the establishment of the State of Israel. The Dreyfus affair forms the subject of the new thriller “An Officer and a Spy” by Robert Harris.

The recent statement by the chief of the telecom company Orange, substantially owned by the French government, that he would wish to withdraw from Israel “tomorrow” is the latest statement of this attitude. Given at a press conference in Egypt (where else?) it produced a storm of protest in Israel. The French government have said that it is purely a commercial decision and bears no relationship to the fact that the French company has an arm’s length contract with an Israeli company called Partner which has the franchise in Israel to operate Orange. Obviously the Israeli Orange company also serves people – Jews and Arabs – living in the West Bank and therefore all of them must be tarred with the same anti-Semitic brush.

The economic boycott of Israel which used to be proposed and advanced by Western nations has long since faded into obscurity, to be succeeded by the BDS movement which is largely an initiative of the Western left. It nonetheless clearly has anti-Semitic aspects to it and the French were delighted to go along with the Orange’s Chief Executive. Orange is the new Yellow.

In the meantime Haim Ramon who owns Partner is left without an international name for his product. I used to use Orange in Israel but then changed to Cellcom on purely commercial grounds. If Partner relaunches its brand under a different name I will be tempted to go back to them, if only because France would no longer receive a proportion of the company’s profits.

ELKAN’S VIEW 3^rd June 2015

Jewish settlement in Croatia, where I will be when you read this, has had a long and very colourful history, although recently both sad and bloody.

Jews are believed to have settled in Croatia around the third century when Roman influence was very powerful there. Archaeologists have found remains of a third century synagogue, and it seems clear that one stage the Jews took refuge in the palace of the Roman emperor Diocletian, and even built a synagogue there.

One of the earliest references is a letter from the Spanish Rabbi and diplomat Hasdai Ibn Shaprut referring to a Jewish community in the territory, and it would seem that the King of that area sent a delegation to Cordoba which included “Mar Shaul and Mar Joseph”, both Jewish names and titles.

Sephardi Jews arrived in Croatia after the 1492 expulsion from Spain, and although Jews in the area suffered various restrictions, some of the more enlightened leaders encouraged their settlement on the basis that as merchants they would promote trade and therefore prosperity. In the 19^th century the area was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and by 1873 the Jews had full legal equality. There were a number of flourishing communities in the interwar period especially in Zagreb.

In April 1941 Axis Powers invaded Yugoslavia and this proved to be the doom of Croatian Jewry. The ultranationalist and anti-Semitic Ustaše party established the Independent State of Croatia and enthusiastically erected a series of concentration camps. The most notorious of these was Jasenovac the cruelty of whose methods was said to exceed even those at Auschwitz. A total of 32,000 Jews, or 75% of the country’s prewar Jewish population, was murdered.

The list of righteous Gentiles who helped the Jews is large and includes both Muslims and Christians.

After the war many Croatian Jews made Aliyah to Israel but there are synagogues in Dubrovnik Split and Zagreb. There is a strong and flourishing cultural identity including the Zagreb Jewish Film Festival.

Like many other communities however the Jewish community of Croatia wonders how long it will have a future.

ELKAN’S VIEW 27^TH May 2015

Last week I went with two of my grandchildren (and their parents) to spend Shavuot in Kibbutz Keturah which is in the Negev about 50 km north of Eilat.   Keturah was founded by a group of American immigrants in 1973, and although everything is theoretically in Hebrew everyone appears to speak English.

The kibbutz is in the Arava, the sort of dry desert through which the Children of Israel passed on their way to the Promised Land. One can understand here how difficult and soul destroying the journey was. The heat is dry – it went up 37 while we were there – but the Kibbutz has been planned carefully with plenty of trees, some very thoughtful water supplies, and above all a very pleasant swimming pool where most people seemed to spend several hours in the afternoons.

The kibbutz is also the site of one of the largest solar energy fields in Israel. Sunshine is of course a very plentiful commodity in the Negev, and the land is available. The Kibbutz is also involved in bio-technology, fish farming (at Eilat), and such modern matters as a computer repair unit that operates all over the country.

When Masada was excavated a number of seeds were found, and experimentally these were carefully germinated. One of them produced a Judean date palm and this tree, known as the Methuselah tree and grown from a 2000 year old seed, flourishes in the kibbutz.

Religiously Keturah is observant, but there are members from a number of different strands within Judaism. Over the Ark in the beautiful Kibbutz shul was the verse from Psalm 126 “”Shuvah et shviteynu ka’afikim BaNegev – bring back our exiles like streams in the Negev” which when they flow, do so with force. To those who live there from all corners of the Jewish world, and to those of us who had the pleasure of spending a wonderful Shabbat and Chag with them, this verse which we sing at the beginning of Birkat Hamazon, has particular resonance and relevance. We were living in the middle of the rebirth of the Negev.