When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry by Gal Beckerman Page B
Authors: Gal Beckerman
Ads: Link
He also thought it was simply bad strategy—and bad manners—to put the Russians on the spot. Even though he had been willing to support the efforts of the Lishka and Moshe Decter—Goldmann was one of the few who knew about the secret arrangement—he wanted to avoid a head-on clash with the Soviets at all costs. If he could have it his way, the issue would be settled at a private meeting between him and Khrushchev, not by any sort of public action. He was often heard to say that all he needed was a bottle of vodka and an hour with the Politburo. This thinking quickly gained him the reputation of being a
shtadlan,
the old Yiddish expression for the individual in the shtetl who served as a liaison between the villagers and the local Gentile authorities. It was the
shtadlan
who would privately beg for the revising of anti-Jewish laws.
Shtadlonus
became derogatory shorthand for a leader who never wanted to be too obtrusive, who didn't feel he had the right to make demands. When young Jews like Lou Rosenblum and Herb Caron in Cleveland looked at what leaders like Goldmann had done during World War II and the way they were now turning their backs on Soviet Jewry, they saw
shtadlonus.
Goldberg, Javits, and Ribicoff were so eager to further the cause of Soviet Jewry that they had dropped this task in the wrong lap. Only a singular figure—someone from outside the walls of the entrenched establishment—would have the independence and the nerve to demand more.
If Goldmann was the consummate insider, a mannered and worldly German Jew with brilliantined hair, elegant double-breasted suits, and sometimes a pipe clenched between his teeth, then Abraham Joshua Heschel was the epitome of the outsider. There was something biblical about him, with his unruly cloud of white hair and his elfin goatee. His lilting Yiddish accent made his constant stream of aphorisms sound poignant rather than pretentious. When Heschel told his rapt listeners that there "should be a grain of prophet in every man," they heard his words and saw his wizened face and believed that Heschel's body must contain a silo's worth.
Heschel was born in Warsaw, a descendant of the great rabbis of Eastern Europe, among them his namesake, the Apter Rebbe, and even—though he was often too modest to admit it—the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov. Heschel, a prodigy in his youth, was trained at a traditional yeshiva and later received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin. In 1937, Martin Buber, escaping Europe for Palestine, named the thirty-year-old Heschel his successor as director of the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, the innovative Jewish Free University in Frankfurt started by the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. But the Nazis soon kicked Heschel out of Germany, and in 1940, after a few wandering years, he was offered a teaching position at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the main seminary of the Reform movement. It was an invitation that saved his life. But this strain of Judaism turned out to be too starved of ritual for him, too liberal, and in 1946 he found a new home at the Jewish Theological Seminary on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Here, at the prominent school of Conservative Judaism, where he taught ethics, he began writing the beautifully composed books of Jewish philosophy that gained him a reverent following.
The rabbis at JTS, more concerned with parsing the meaning of Talmudic and Mishnaic passages, never accepted Heschel's eccentricities, his deep love of the spiritual, his desire to make Jewish law come alive. They treated him as an outcast, not even allowing him to teach classes in mysticism, the subject for which he was renowned. He was constantly lamenting to his students that they were being trained simply for synagogue administration. How was it possible, he wondered aloud, for them to complete the entire curriculum without taking a single course on the Jewish conception of God?
shtadlan,
the old Yiddish expression for the individual in the shtetl who served as a liaison between the villagers and the local Gentile authorities. It was the
shtadlan
who would privately beg for the revising of anti-Jewish laws.
Shtadlonus
became derogatory shorthand for a leader who never wanted to be too obtrusive, who didn't feel he had the right to make demands. When young Jews like Lou Rosenblum and Herb Caron in Cleveland looked at what leaders like Goldmann had done during World War II and the way they were now turning their backs on Soviet Jewry, they saw
shtadlonus.
Goldberg, Javits, and Ribicoff were so eager to further the cause of Soviet Jewry that they had dropped this task in the wrong lap. Only a singular figure—someone from outside the walls of the entrenched establishment—would have the independence and the nerve to demand more.
If Goldmann was the consummate insider, a mannered and worldly German Jew with brilliantined hair, elegant double-breasted suits, and sometimes a pipe clenched between his teeth, then Abraham Joshua Heschel was the epitome of the outsider. There was something biblical about him, with his unruly cloud of white hair and his elfin goatee. His lilting Yiddish accent made his constant stream of aphorisms sound poignant rather than pretentious. When Heschel told his rapt listeners that there "should be a grain of prophet in every man," they heard his words and saw his wizened face and believed that Heschel's body must contain a silo's worth.
Heschel was born in Warsaw, a descendant of the great rabbis of Eastern Europe, among them his namesake, the Apter Rebbe, and even—though he was often too modest to admit it—the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov. Heschel, a prodigy in his youth, was trained at a traditional yeshiva and later received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin. In 1937, Martin Buber, escaping Europe for Palestine, named the thirty-year-old Heschel his successor as director of the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus, the innovative Jewish Free University in Frankfurt started by the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. But the Nazis soon kicked Heschel out of Germany, and in 1940, after a few wandering years, he was offered a teaching position at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the main seminary of the Reform movement. It was an invitation that saved his life. But this strain of Judaism turned out to be too starved of ritual for him, too liberal, and in 1946 he found a new home at the Jewish Theological Seminary on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Here, at the prominent school of Conservative Judaism, where he taught ethics, he began writing the beautifully composed books of Jewish philosophy that gained him a reverent following.
The rabbis at JTS, more concerned with parsing the meaning of Talmudic and Mishnaic passages, never accepted Heschel's eccentricities, his deep love of the spiritual, his desire to make Jewish law come alive. They treated him as an outcast, not even allowing him to teach classes in mysticism, the subject for which he was renowned. He was constantly lamenting to his students that they were being trained simply for synagogue administration. How was it possible, he wondered aloud, for them to complete the entire curriculum without taking a single course on the Jewish conception of God?
Similar Books
