Mixed emotions: Some Israelis uneasy about tourism wave
By LARRY DERFNER
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1999
Already for weeks before the millennium, Jerusalem's Old City was filled
with Christian tour groups.
Traffic was gridlocked with tour buses outside the entrance to the Western
Wall plaza.
One group from a California church was strolling single file through the
Jewish Quarter, as a street trumpeter sitting under an archway played a
lilting tune.
Smiling in the sunlight, the pilgrims joined in as they passed by: 'Que
sera, sera/Whatever will be, will be.'
Standing not far away was Samuel Blum, a 19-year-old Hassidic yeshiva
student who divides his time between Monsey, New York and Mea She'arim.
Asked what he thought of the prospect of another couple million or so
Christian pilgrims coming to Israel next year - including, probably, the
pope - he replied: 'This definitely should not be happening in Israel. This
is a Jewish state, this is our land, and the gentiles have no business
here. They could tempt a lot of weak Jews to Christianity.'
Might any good at all come of the massive pilgrimage that's about to
descend on Israel? 'Sorry, but no,' replied Blum.
Elsewhere in the Jewish Quarter, a 40-ish building engineer wearing a
knitted kippa said he felt basically indifferent to the coming of the
Christians in the millennial year - except for one concern he had.
'The Church's true agenda is to put their stamp on Jerusalem - to show how
important Jerusalem is to them and take it away from Israeli sovereignty
and bring it under international control. That may not be what every
Christian pilgrim has in mind, but this is definitely what the leaders of
Christianity want to achieve in the millennium,' said the man, who declined
to give his name.
In Israel during the year 2000, Judaism and Christianity will have the
potential for meeting each other like they never have before. There will be
plenty of formal 'interfaith dialogues' between various rabbis and
Christian leaders. But at the popular level, it seems that most 'serious'
Jews, religious and secular, would largely prefer that the masses of
Christian pilgrims go their own way while the Jews go theirs.
'This is an opportunity for a great ecumenical event, and I'm afraid it's
going to be missed,' said Gershom Gorenberg, a Jerusalem Report editor who
has written extensively about the millennium.
'A great majority of the haredim (ultra-orthodox), and a substantial portion
of religious
Zionists, still view Christianity with suspiciousness or even outright
hostility,' said Prof. Eliezer Don-Yehiya, an authority on religion and
politics at Bar-Ilan University. 'There are understandable historical
reasons for this. The main, if not only, associations they have of
Christianity are exile, forced conversion, antisemitism and the Holocaust.
So I don't expect there to be much of a genuine meeting between Judaism and
Christianity.'
In the Jewish Quarter, Habad follower Sara Wilhelm, 40, said that while
Christians, like Jews, were beloved of God, she had no curiosity about
them, nothing whatsoever she wanted to say to them or hear from them.
'Christianity doesn't exactly have a glorious history in its treatment of
Jews,' she noted.
Her 20-year-old son, Mendy, took a much more pointed approach. 'It says in
the Torah that when the Messiah comes, the gentiles will acknowledge the
Jews as the Chosen People, as the people of God. In other words, they'll
admit that they're wrong and we're right. We have something to offer them,
but they have nothing to offer us.
'If they want to come here and visit without causing any trouble, there's
no problem,' Mendy said. 'But if they try to convert us to their religion,
which is merely a twisted distortion of Judaism, then we have to fight them
all the way.'
Rabbi David Rosen, president of the International Council of Christians and
Jews, and Israel's point man on interfaith dialogue, agreed that Jewish
antipathy towards Christianity didn't arise out of nowhere.
'Memory is a wonderful thing, because where would we be as a people without
memory? But when memory is so obsessive that it blinds you to a changed
reality, then it is a pathological condition,' said Rosen, former chief
rabbi of Ireland.
He noted, however, that the willingness of Israeli rabbis to meet with
Christian leaders has improved considerably in recent years. At the end of
1994, when some 600 Christian leaders came to Jerusalem to celebrate the
Vatican's normalization of relations with Israel, most prominent rabbis
stayed away under pressure from haredi elder Rabbi Eliezer Schach, Rosen
noted. 'Today I don't believe that would happen,' he said, pointing out
that Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisrael Lau and Sephardi Chief Rabbi Eliyahu
Bakshi-Doron meet often with Christian leaders.
Declining to be interviewed for this article, Lau said through a spokesman
that pilgrims will be 'welcomed gladly' to Israel. At the same time,
though, the Chief Rabbinate is once again pressuring Israeli hotels to ban
Christmas trees from their premises this year, on pain of losing their
kashrut certificates, according to testimony this week in the Knesset
Economics Committee.
Tourism businessman Hanoch Segev was quoted at the meeting as saying
Christian tour groups had already cancelled their visits because of
religious restrictions on holiday celebrations.
United Torah Judaism MK Avraham Ravitz was quoted as lauding the Chief
Rabbinate for its work 'in this libertine, anything-goes Israeli society.'
With this week's arrest and imminent deportation of over 20 Christian
millennial cultists on the Mount of Olives, haredi newspapers will again
have something to write about the millennium pilgrimage.
'Other than warning about Christian extremists who may try to commit mass
suicide or something in Jerusalem, which we've written about a number of
times, we're ignoring the millennium. It has nothing to do with Jews,' said
an editor at Yom L'yom, the Shas newspaper.
Suicide cultists is one millennial fear among pious Israeli Jews;
proselytizing evangelists is another.
Rabbi Stewart Weiss, director of Ra'anana's Jewish Outreach Center has said
that while most Christians coming to Israel have innocent intentions, their
ranks are heavily infiltrated by dangerous missionaries. 'Israel is eager
to attract tourists - and their dollars - to bolster our tenuous economy
and promote our image in the world. In return, we are prepared to give up
our time and energy, and share our knowledge and even our land. But let us
make one thing crystal clear to all of our guests: We are not prepared to
give away our souls.'
Gorenberg lamented that the broad ranks of Orthodox Jewry lacked the
self-confidence to encounter Christianity without fear. 'They see
Christianity as out to missionize the Jews, so they think that even
learning about Christianity can put a Jew in danger of converting,' he
said.
Added Rosen: 'Wouldn't it be nice if we could deal with missionaries the
way people in other countries deal with them - by just saying, 'Sorry, I'm
not interested,' and going on our way - instead of always having such a
terribly exaggerated reaction?'
Asked if religious Jews and Christian pilgrims had anything to say to each
other in the millennial year, the Yom L'yom editor, who declined to give
his name, replied, 'I think that as religious people, the Christians should
try to correct the injustices they've done to Jews for the last 2,000
years. Even today, a lot of the antisemitism you see in the world has
Christian motifs. That is what I would say to Christians, and that is what
I would want to hear from them.'
This may be shaping up as one of the themes for the millennial year among
religious and nationalistic Jews: To remind Christians of their sins
against Jews and to demand mea culpas.
In a Jerusalem Post column this week titled, 'Welcoming the pope?' Bar-Ilan
University spokesman David Weinberg. writing on his own behalf, criticized
the Catholic Church for threatening to cancel the pope's scheduled visit in
March because of the Moslem-Christian dispute in Nazareth. While noting
that Pope John Paul II has acted much more fairly to the Jews than had his
predecessors, Weinberg wrote: 'While visiting Yad Vashem, I would expect
the pontiff to come clean on the Catholic Church's Holocaust record (time
to really open the archives); and to make an unambiguous declaration of
repentance for ignoring (at best) the fate of us 'elder
brothers.'...Recompense, repentance and reconciliation - not threats - is
the ideological package with which the Catholic Church should land here.'
Yet Rosen maintained that no matter what gesture the pope made, many Jews
would never be satisfied. 'He has called on Christian to use the pilgrimage
as an opportunity for dialogue with Moslems and Jews, but especially with
Jews, whom he has called Christianity's 'elder brothers.' He's called on
Christians to do 'tshuva,' repentance, for past sins against the Jews,'
noted Rosen, adding, 'The question can be asked - What more do you want him
to say?'
Rabbi David Hartman, a modern Orthodox rabbi who meets often with Christian
leaders, said he'd just as soon the pope didn't visit Yad Vashem. 'I don't
want to meet with Christians so I can inflict guilt on them. I don't want
the Holocaust to be the prism through which they view the Jews and Israel,'
Hartman said.
Instead, he maintained, the millennium in Israel should be used as 'an
opportunity to share with Christians the quality and vitality of Judaism.
Part of the mission of the Jews is to bear witness to the way Torah is a
profound moral and spiritual way of life. We shouldn't just be talking to
ourselves. We have to recognize that there's a world out there to meet.'
By living among themselves and not in the gentile world, Israeli religious
Jews, and secular Jews to some extent, have been insulated from the changes
among Christians in the last half-century, Rosen said. 'We really do have
many good, genuine friends out there,' he said.
But because Israelis know Christians mainly from the dark past, not from
the brighter present, Rosen continued, 'Israeli Jews are generally very
ignorant about Christians and Christianity, and they are satisfied with
this state of affairs. When somebody has delegitimized, marginalized and
assaulted you for so long, you may not be ready to acknowledge that there
has been a change for the better, or even to examine the possibility of
such a change.'
Yet Rosen said that by the time the millennial pilgrimage to Israel ends in
a couple of years, an easing of Jewish hard feelings towards Christianity
will occur - consciously or even subconsciously. 'Israelis on the whole
want the pope to come; they want the Christian pilgrims to come. Israelis
are a hospitable people, and they're going to come in contact with an
enormous demonstration of goodwill. And when you see something like that,
it has an effect on you,' he said.
Don-Yehiya, on the other hand, said hard-core Orthodox Jews would remain
unmoved by Christianity's smiling face. 'Among the moderate,
'traditionally' Orthodox Jews, those who have some open-mindedness about
Christianity, the effect of millions of pilgrims coming to Israel may
filter down into their consciousness to some degree,' he allowed.
Gorenberg wasn't even that optimistic. 'For now at least,' he said 'the
signs are that we're going to treat all these millions of pilgrims as
tourists and nothing more.' This is the second article in an occasional
series.
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