ELKAN’S VIEW FROM NETANYA 23^RD JULY 2015

On Saturday night and Sunday we will observe the fast of Tisha B’Av which this year actually falls on Shabbat. Since the only fast observed on Shabbat is Yom Kippur, “the Sabbath of Sabbaths” as it is described in the Torah, Ninth Av is ”nidche – pushed forward” to Sunday 10^th Av. On Saturday night we read “Megillat Eichah – the Book of Lamentations” which tells of the capture and sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. Disturbingly, many of its details have echoes in the Holocaust.

On Saturday night restaurants and cafes in Israel are closed, and it is a strange and slightly eerie experience to go through streets that are normally thronged with people, but are echoingly empty.

Originally the fast marked the anniversary of the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, which by ghastly coincidence occurred on the same day. The inability of the Jewish people to offer up sacrifices, and the growth of a Jewish Diaspora with the consequent difficulty of travelling to Jerusalem, required a non-sacrificial style of service and led to the development of the synagogue. It is only in our day, with the growth of mass air travel, that it is again possible for Jews from all over the world to regularly spend Chagim in the land of Israel.

Tisha B’Av continued to be a day of disasters for our people. The expulsion from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492 both happened on this day, as did the outbreak of the First World War. We commemorate also many of the other disasters that have befallen our people, and there are two moving Kinot – Poems of Lamentation, which describe the massacre at York in 1190. The author of one of them clearly knew many of the people involved and describes them by name.

Tisha B’Av commemorates the disasters of our history, but the Jewish people has always survived with hope, and there is a deep belief that one day the fast will become a festival of joy.

ELKAN’S VIEW 8^th July 2015

Towards the end of last week the Chofesh Hagadol, the great long summer holidays, began in Israeli schools, and with the majority of parents working, a whole industry of Kaytanot, summer schemes or “camps” as they are often called, has begun. Many of these will take place in the same buildings as the pupils go to school anyway, so they have the strange experience of going back to school to do totally non-school things with totally non-school discipline!

Not that discipline is particularly obvious in Israeli schools at the best of times. To those of us brought up in the UK in older and more ordered times, the idea that all the pupils from the first form upwards call their teachers by their first names is extremely strange until you get used to it, and begin to understand that the educational results are extremely good nonetheless.

My grandchildren have been involved in a wide range of things these holidays, ranging from computer courses to intensive chess playing and instruction, while the youngest one who is football mad trains at the practice ground of the Hapoel Tel Aviv club.

Grandparents are involved as well and I expect to have the chance to spend quality time with them and go out for (exhausting) days which is not possible in a system where children go to school six days a week as they do in Israel.

Israel cherishes its children and has quite a high birth rate among both the Arabs and the Charedim, although other sections of society are not backward in this either. There was much comment recently at the suggestion that the world Jewish population has now climbed back almost to where it was before the Holocaust. This is both heartening and sobering; sobering because it has taken us 70 years to repair the damage, and heartening because “Am Yisrael Chai – the People of Israel lives”. Whatever the political problems in the Middle East, no one in Israel is downhearted. The country was recently reckoned to be the fifth happiest place to live in the world and being here is a daily honour and privilege.

ELKAN’S VIEW 1^st July 2015

The boycott of Israel, so widely trumpeted, does possibly have a pernicious moral effect but in practice it is difficult to view it as a serious threat. Indeed, an examination of what is actually going on leads to the conclusion that trade relations between Israel and the outside world are constantly improving.

The UK Ambassador to Israel, the charismatic and very competent Matthew Gould, reported that in the last year bilateral trade between Britain and Israel increased by 26%, eight Israeli companies have gone public on the UK stock exchange, and the Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva now produces one out of every six pills sold in the UK.

Indeed Sajid Javid the Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills recently hailed the last few years as “a golden era for Anglo Israeli business”. He went on to say that as a “proud British-born Muslim” he “shared Israel’s love for freedom and democracy.”

Airline links between Israel and the UK at the moment include ten flights a day between London and Tel Aviv, while easyJet flies between eight other European capitals and BenGurion airport. British Airways is about to introduce its latest 787 Dreamliner aircraft onto the Tel Aviv route.

In so far as the BDS movement is concerned, the truth is that without Israeli support and investment Palestinian economy is non-existent. Even the electricity and water that Gaza received during last summer’s war came from Israel. Agitation against businesses in the West Bank is not good news for the Palestinians many of whom want to improve ties with Israel and work towards coexistence and peace. Boycotts of West Bank products only hurt Palestinians because they work in Israeli enterprises that are situated there.

But the greatest Israeli export story concerns a balloon bearing a Chabad poster that drifted into Lebanon and was seized by Hezbollah. No doubt regarding it as pernicious propaganda, they proudly displayed to the world the famous slogan “We Want Moshiach Now”!

NB I want to acknowledge much of the help for this article from my friend Michael Ordman whose websites www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com and http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now are invaluable sources for the truth about Israel.

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.