A selection of letters published in the AJN print edition of November 20, 2009

Shared experience of refugees

A PICTURE tells a thousand words. Congratulations to The AJN for its definitive front page (13/11) of the Dunera, which carried 2000 German-Jewish refugees, and the Oceanic Viking carrying Sri Lankan asylum seekers.

Yes, the circumstances are different. But surely, from a humanitarian perspective, they share an overriding commonality -– people simply fleeing for their lives.

I am tired of the fearmongering propagated by our politicians, the media and our fellow Jews that “letting them in will open the floodgates”.

Can we not simply move beyond this paranoia of fear and open our hearts to these desperate people? What a crazy and sad world we live in when fear is our dominant emotion.

Is our memory so short, our conscience so numb? Our “parents and brothers” were on one of those boats.

What if the Australian Government had not let in the “Dunera Boys”? If only more countries, including our own, had been prepared to let in more Jews fleeing the horrors of Europe.

Let us remember what Hillel said when explaining what the Torah was about: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the commentary. Go and learn.”

Hillel recognised brotherly love as one of the fundamental principles of Jewish moral law.

DEBRA KORMAN
Hawthorn East, Vic

We were also strangers in a strange land

RABBI Ralph Genende is to be commended for speaking out in favour of a more compassionate and humane policy towards asylum seekers (AJN 13/11).

He has demonstrated relevant leadership in writing that the time has come for Australia to “speed up the processing of migrants, to accept as many of these desperate people as soon as possible, to forgo paranoia for principle and to assert itself as a bastion of chesed in an uncaring world”.

I encourage more rabbis who feel this way to write about this issue and share their thoughts with their congregations about how they interpret the pasuk “do not oppress the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”.

ITTAY FLESCHER
Caulfield, Vic

Communal silence over Pilger peace prize

IT is the biggest outcry against human decency to make John Pilger the recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize (AJN 13/11). It is an insult to any peace movement.

Pilger is entitled to his views, but I believe he did not do his homework in researching this field, something that every journalist must do before expressing his opinion pro or contra any subject.

Where was Pilger while the Israeli army was sending warnings to the Palestinians during the last Lebanon and Gaza wars, asking people to move before the bombardment took place? Instead, they made human shields out of their own people.

I do not recall any warnings to the people of Sderot before rockets were constantly hitting them. Is Pilger aware of the fact that Israeli doctors treated injured Palestinian children in that war?

Does Pilger realise that Iran’s nuclear threat is a danger not only for Israel, but for the whole world? To defend Iran – the most undemocratic country, full of hate and crimes – is an insult to humanity.

And our leaders did not respond. Shame and an outcry.

HELEN LEPERERE
Elsternwick, Vic

Don’t downplay threat from the far Right

WITH all the alarm-bell ringing about “left-wing anti-Semitism made respectable by its cover of anti-Zionism” and the claim that no far-right academics and trade unionists are calling for boycotts of Israel (that’s because there are no far-right academics or trade unionists to speak of), I somehow can’t help but think that Michael Burd was downplaying the evils of the anti-Semitic far Right (AJN 13/11).

If Burd had read The AJN feature “Far Right on the rise?” (06/11) and noted that despite “anti-Semitic roots”, the far Right’s support for Israel is on the increase, I reckon he would have removed them from his “dangerous cocktail” recipe and made it a straight Left and had the far Right as the appetiser.

Henry Herzog
St Kilda East, Vic

IAJV and J Street

MICHAEL Visontay’s comparison of J Street and the Independent Australian Jewish Voices (IAJV) is both thoughtful and thought-provoking (AJN 13/11). But his analysis of why the IAJV “rankles a substantial number of Australian Jews, and stops them up from supporting the group”, in my view, fails to address two significant factors.

Visontay attributes the hostile attitude of many Australian Jews towards the IAJV to the group’s lack of an underlying support for Israel as both a country and a nation.

However, many Jewish Australians, from both the Centre and the Left, perceive the IAJV to be stridently anti-Israel in many of its public statements and activities, rather than merely lacking in empathy. Members of the IAJV may protest that this is not the group’s raison d’etre, but it is certainly the preoccupation of its most prominent spokespeople.

The second reason is because many of its members, especially those with a high public profile, have no apparent connection with Judaism or any facet of the Jewish community other than an accident of birth or family ties that they choose to parade when convenient.

A comparison of the membership of the J Street Advisory Council and the IAJV list of signatories is illuminating. J Street may be seen by some to be left-wing, dovish, avant-garde or naive, but it represents a large segment of the American Jewish community in all its glory and folly, whereas the IAJV represents a fringe, many of whom just happened to be born Jewish.

JONATHAN SLONIM
Caulfield North, Vic

Stop all the wailing about the wall

IN his letter published in The Australian, Brian Haill draws an analogy between the Berlin Wall and Israel’s security wall. (“Another wall to topple”, The Australian 11/11).

Walls and fences are built for many reasons – some good, some bad, some pure evil. The Berlin Wall was offensive, in both senses of the word, being built to imprison and oppress people who wished to escape from a Stalinist dictatorship.

The Warsaw Ghetto wall and the walls of all ghettos created by the Nazis were pure evil in intent, being built to concentrate, imprison and persecute European Jews. On the other hand, the French Maginot Line fortifications, built before World War II, were purely defensive in intent and reflected the defensive mentality within France during the years between the wars.

Clearly it is not the construction of a wall or fence itself that is morally objectionable, but the intent behind such a construction.

The security wall/fence in Israel was built, as the name suggests, as a defensive measure. It was reluctantly constructed in direct response to waves of suicide bombers.

The security wall has been extremely effective in reducing such attacks. The security wall is not some sort of “land grab” -– Israel has repeatedly stated that the wall does not constitute a final border, but is an essential, temporary initiative until a peace settlement is achieved. Given Israel’s record of withdrawing from land -– most recently its withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 -– it is entitled to be taken at its word.

Those who castigate and demonise Israel for defending itself would do well to consider how they would view the security wall if it were their own life and the lives of their loved ones that were under threat.

DR BILL ANDERSON
Surrey Hills, Vic

Claude corrected and Durkheim defended

SOME correction to your otherwise excellent feature on the death of Claude Levi-Strauss (AJN 13/11) is appropriate.

It is incorrect to say that Emile Durkheim cared little about the Dreyfus Affair and saw it as an unfathomable “aberration”. Together with  Emile Zola, Marcel Proust, and progressive politician Jean Jaures, Durkheim was a leading “Dreyfusard”, a public supporter of Alfred Dreyfus.

As for Levi-Strauss, he was both less and more than simply a great anthropological field worker or ­theorist.

Less, because his standing as a practising anthropologist among his academic peers is equivocal. But more, since through his dispute with Sartre in the 1960s, he was instrumental in putting an end to the dominance of existentialism over French intellectual life.

For Sartre and the Left, the social world and human history were amenable to rational understanding. If people could understand their world, then they also should, and could, be held responsible for the choices they made.

With his advocacy of structuralism, Levi-Strauss overturned that position.

In archaic societies, he held, “the myths live and speak through us without our realising it”. Likewise, in modern societies, for all who follow in his intellectual wake, “discourse” lives. Its various forms live their own reality, and we, unaware of it, are the medium through which they do so.

The rise of structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism and the eagerness to treat all human activity as simply forms of discourse is, more than any anyone else’s, Levi-Strauss’s great achievement.

PROF CLIVE KESSLER
Emeritus Professor of Anthropology & Sociology
The University of New South Wales

Missing Kristallnacht coverage?

IT is disappointing that The Australian Jewish News, our communal newspaper, could not see fit to report the annual commemoration of Kristallnacht held by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies at Emanuel School on November 9, the 71st anniversary of that tragic event.

I trust that Holocaust remembrance has not yet been relegated to a minor place in the community’s consciousness; at least not while so many of our precious survivors are still among us.

One, Fred Stein, spoke movingly of his experience of that time as a young boy in Berlin.

A most interesting aspect of the evening was the presentation by Kevin Russell, who spoke about his great-grandfather, the Aboriginal activist William Cooper, who led a delegation from the Australian Aborigines League to the German consulate in Melbourne to “protest at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany”.

It is most remarkable that in early December 1938, shortly after the Kristallnacht pogrom, it should be an Aboriginal who would take this initiative at a time when his own people were suffering and when others, better placed, remained silent.

MICHAEL JAKU
Chairperson, NSW Jewish Board of Deputies Shoah Remembrance Committee

Unorthodox view on same-sex marriage

JOSH Bartak has misunderstood my argument (AJN 13/11). In putting forward an explanation for why perseverance is sometimes the wrong approach to sustaining a marriage, it was necessary to explain that some people get married for less than sincere reasons, due in part to a lack of available options.

I wasn’t suggesting for a moment that Orthodox Judaism be forced to do anything. A little introspection wouldn’t go astray, however.

Rabbi Chaim Ingram asks in puzzlement why I singled out the Orthodox Jewish community. It was appropriate for two reasons.

Firstly, the Orthodox Jewish community, in particular, is intolerant of same-sex relationships, and this intolerance is why some marriages come about and then fail. Secondly, it fitted into the context of the conversation.

A rabbi headmaster of an Orthodox Jewish school was writing a column in a Jewish newspaper about marital problems in the Jewish community.

There was no need to mention fundamentalist intolerance of same-sex relationships from other faiths or communities in Australia to justify the fundamental intolerance of Orthodox Judaism.

MICHAEL BARNETT
Aleph Melbourne

Covert davvening at simchas

I FIND the way that Ma’ariv is conducted at many Orthodox simchas in Melbourne highly inappropriate.

Rather than davvening openly as a formal part of the proceedings, often someone decides that they want to davven Ma’ariv, then furtively goes around recruiting men for this “clandestine” assignment.

The group then sneaks out, finds an out-of-the-way spot, and attempts to concentrate on reciting prayers -– despite being in an environment where this is often difficult because of the music or aspects of the location itself.

Many who would have liked to join the group don’t realise it is happening, while others feel pressured to join and go through the motions of davvening in an environment not at all conducive to it.

At a bar mitzvah, davvening as a formal part of the proceedings would also allow the bar mitzvah boy to take part in – perhaps even lead – the service.

MARK SYMONS
Caulfield North, Vic

Credit where credit’s due

AS a contributor to the anthology Building a Nation, I would like to point out a serious omission in your excellent article about Sarah Saaroni (AJN 13/11).

The editor of the books, Julie Meadows, put an enormous amount of time and work, and I think love, into the project. She conducted many of the 30 or more interviews, arranged for the photos to be taken and put it all together. She surely deserves a mention.

EVA URBACH
Caulfield North, Vic

If you would like to submit a letter, email letters@jewishnews.net.au