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To the Editors:
How wonderful it was to read Yossi Klein Halevi’s article on Jacob Birnbaum (“Jacob Birnbaum and the Struggle for Soviet Jewry,” Azure 17, Spring 2004). I met Birnbaum during my first visit to the United States after being expelled from a Soviet prison in 1981. His modesty was such that I could scarcely comprehend the extent of his role in the struggle on behalf of Soviet Jewry. Naturally, the activists in the field were more conspicuous than Birnbaum the theoretician. It was only through this essay that I came to understand the great inspiration that served him in his leadership in the early days.
It is important to note, however, that our Zionist activity in the Soviet Union was largely unconnected to what Birnbaum was doing. Nonetheless, we did both start with the same frame of reference: The lessons of the Holocaust. Zionist activism in Riga, for example, began at the Holocaust graves of Rombola, on the outskirts of the town where I grew up to become one of the famed “airplane hijackers.” Klein Halevi is correct in saying that the incident was the turning point of the struggle. However, he does not mention that on December 24, 1970—the day we were sentenced—100,000 Jews assembled in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza in New York and demanded, “Let my people go.”
I now understand that they gathered thanks in no small part to Jacob Birnbaum, whose vision was so wonderfully realized. Klein Halevi writes that, from the outset, Birnbaum envisioned the educational impact of the struggle on American youth, and he was right.
If I am not mistaken, it was Malcolm Hoenlein who told me during my visit to the United States, “We have educated an entire generation on your struggle.” While I was most happy to hear this, I am sorry that the contribution our struggle has made is still a modest one. It is true that many of the activists grew into leaders, and their greatness is in that they replaced the previous establishment. I can only regret, however, that the desire to engage in an uncompromising public fight on behalf of the Jewish people has not become a more widespread custom.
Yosef Mendelevich
Jerusalem
To the Editors:
In recent times, there has been a growing tendency to minimize the significance of the protest movement on behalf of Soviet Jewry. Accordingly, the decision of Azure’s editors to publish Yossi Klein Halevi’s masterly survey of the rise of the Soviet Jewry movement in America on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary is most timely, and has stimulated numerous important discussions.
Reaching back into his own memories of a passionate, youthful activism, and backed up by substantial documentation, Klein Halevi has shown the seminal nature of the student movement for Soviet Jewry in the 1960s, the movement that laid the foundations of the later, more influential national movement. Naturally, he is modest about his own contributions to that important student ferment. As a result, I would recommend readers to his moving book, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist: An American Story (1995).
I am also pleased that he has captured so much of my own determination to shape not only a protest movement, but a truly redemptive movement in the spirit of the Jewish faith and history.
Jacob Birnbaum
New York City
Yossi Klein Halevi responds:
I am deeply appreciative to Yosef Mendelevich for his response, especially for his warm memories of Jacob Birnbaum. One point, though, needs to be corrected: The demonstration of December 24, 1970 did not attract anywhere near 100,000 participants. In fact, not until two years later, with the first Solidarity Sunday demonstration, organized by Malcolm Hoenlein’s Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, did a Soviet Jewry demonstration finally attract that level of mass participation. Though relatively small, the demonstrations that did occur during the Leningrad Trial were passionate and frequent—and inspired by Birnbaum’s vision and active, practical guidance.
Eliezer Berkovits
To the Editors:
David Hazony’s essay “Eliezer Berkovits, Theologian of Zionism” (Azure 17, Spring 2004) does due justice to a thinker whose Zionist theology—as opposed to his writing on the Holocaust—is often ignored.
However, it seems to me that by setting up Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook as a foil to Berkovits, Hazony presents a simplistic version of the thinking of the former, while in fact both thinkers share many of the positions attributed by Hazony to Berkovits alone.
Hazony notes three characteristics of Berkovits’ theological Zionism: (i) “that the Jewish collective identity is… a prerequisite for the fulfillment of the Jewish moral vision”; (ii) “that the centrality of the collective translates into a demand for national sovereignty”; and (iii) “that the resultant understanding of Jewish history, the predicament of exile, and the problem of enlightenment makes the Jewish state a precondition for the success and even survival of Judaism in the modern era.”
R. Kook often articulated the first two of these ideas. For example, in one of his comprehensive essays, “The Intellectual Process in Israel,” he writes:
From the very inception of this people… there was manifested the aspiration to establish a great human collective that would “keep the way of the Lord to do righteousness and justice”…. In order that this goal be accomplished, this human collective must be in possession of a socio-political state, a sovereign state at the peak of human civilization…. Such a nation will make a statement that not only an elite, not only pietists and ascetics may live in the light of the divine idea, but entire peoples with all that society has to offer… encompassing all the socio-economic strata, from the intelligentsia all the way down to the masses.
In addition, both thinkers realized that the return to the land and the establishment of a state would require a renewal, but not a reform, of halacha. R. Kook wrote of the uniqueness of the “Tora of the land of Israel” and the need to create a new synthesis of halacha and agada,while Berkovits tried to locate within the system of talmudic law those principles which would allow for this renewal.
Hazony also gives short shrift to R. Kook’s relevance by pigeonholing him and his son, Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda, as “redemptive determinists.” It would, I believe, not be advisable to read any idea or position of the son as representative of the father. The writings of the elder Kook reveal a much more complex thinker than the one to whom Hazony alludes. It is correct that he saw the Zionist enterprise as part of a messianic process (the claim of determinism is more difficult to maintain), but this position was made possible by an appreciation of the role of modernity in bringing about a renewal of Judaism, which in turn is possible only in the land of Israel.
Yet Hazony continues to identify father and son in assuming that the political agenda enunciated by Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda and his disciples after 1967 is the only true heritage of the father’s thought. Furthermore, he assumes that with the rejection of the territorial message by the majority of Israeli society, R. Kook’s thought is no longer relevant.
In fact, disciples of the elder R. Kook who do not follow the dogmatic line of the Merkaz Harav Kook yeshiva have showed how his teachings can be relevant in contemporary Israel. In this context, the names and writings of Rabbis Yehuda Amital, Yoel Bin-Nun, and Yuval Sherlo are exemplary.
