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.

ELKAN’S VIEW 1^st April 2015

With Pesach beginning on Friday night, Israel is gripped with pre-holiday fever. I arrived back on Monday evening, turned on my phone and was greeted by a message from Cellcom welcoming me and suggesting four places where I could hide the Afikoman!

Supermarkets are full of special offers, especially on the items needed for Pesach – wine, Mazot, nuts, new pots and pans. El Al were giving away Haggadot on some of their flights. My bank were kind enough to send me a bottle of good dinner wine, together with a Haggadah that celebrates the traditions of the Moroccan community. Even my group at Shomre Mishkal – Weight Watchers – are involved, with a series of suggested dishes for Seder night and a warning that one sheet of Matza is three points and so is a spoonful of Charoset!

The country is also very conscious of its less fortunate citizens. One of the great paradoxes about Israel, and something that the government has failed to address adequately in recent years, has been the enormous and growing gap between the haves and the have-nots. Admittedly some of this is a problem caused by the crazy attitudes of the Charedi community but this is not the whole story. By the supermarket checkout yesterday was a box into which you could put things that you had just bought for onward transmission to those in need.

Being in Israel for Pesach is very special. Chol Hamoed is a holiday season and I’m looking forward to spending it with my children and grandchildren, going places and enjoying some of the wonderful experiences available in this Jewish state. Freedom is an essential part of human life, and we as a nation know this more than most. How appropriate then is the fact that the festival of freedom is so central to our magnificent religion.

I wish you all a very happy Pesach.

ELKAN’S VIEW 25^h March 2015

Last Sunday I went to the all-day conference entitled “We Believe in Israel” which attracted over 1000 delegates including some from Radlett who also presented.

After an opening plenary in which Chief Rabbi Mirvis, Michael Gove MP and Michael Dugher MP took part there were five breakout sessions each of which had 14 or more alternatives. These included such matters as education on defending Israel against lies, countering the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, and telling good news stories about Israel of which there are thousands that go untold. There were sessions considering the attitude of younger Anglo-Jews towards Israel, how to lobby and to deal with the press, anti-Semitism and Christian perspectives towards Israel and various useful sessions on Israeli attitudes to these problems.

I found some of the presentations unsurprising but disturbing. The very close connection and pride that my generation had towards Israel can no longer be automatically assumed. There is still a strong religious connection to Israel, and the number of religious young people who spend a gap year there and make Aliyah holds firm, but the figures for the less committed are falling. This of course may change in the UK if anti-Semitism really gets a grip as it has in France; I know that even people who are fully committed to living and working in the United Kingdom are beginning to think that a holiday home in Israel is not a bad idea.

The conference closed with a rousing plenary addressed by Gideon Sa’ar a former MK, Lorna Fitzsimons the charismatic “atheist Gentile Zionist”, and the wonderful Israeli Ambassador Daniel Taub.

He pointed out that Israel is flourishing economically and culturally, with more patents and museums per capita, “more new trees per acre, more milk per cow, than any other country”. It helps people to “rise from their wheelchairs with REWALK, diagnose illnesses with Pillcams, and avoid traffic jams with WAZE”. Israel is “one of the 10 happiest places in the world. This is the Israel that our opponents cannot stand. This is the Israel we believe in. “