A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [60]
The tough measures of the British Labour government did not prove to be much of a deterrent to people who had survived the worst of the Third Reich. They walked or rode across Europe to wherever they could link up with the Haganah. Many of the refugees were drawn to the lowlands, Belgium and Holland, because of their busy ports and liberal immigration policies. The Belgian government allowed Jewish organizations to bring in thirty thousand Jewish refugees at a time. If they re-emigrated, another thirty thousand could be brought in.
One of the Haganah operatives in Antwerp was Sam Perl, the diamond sawer. Between 1945 and 1948 he helped move thousands of refugees clandestinely to Palestine. It was not a systematic operation. With a seemingly inexhaustible demand, they took as many refugees as they could whenever it was possible. They used two houses to hide and prepare Palestine-bound immigrants until the night when a Haganah agent would come and take them by train to the town of Kortrijk, in southern Belgium, then across the French border through France to a ship in Marseilles. Sometimes they would instead be taken across the Italian border and down the peninsula to Ban.
Meanwhile, a nagging theological debate was inflamed. A strictly religious Jew prays three times a day, and each time, among the prayers recited is the hope to someday return to Israel. When a religious Jew dies, a small sachet of soil from Israel is placed under the corpse's head. Every Passover, Jews pray that they will be next year in Jerusalem. This had been a central part of diaspora culture for nineteen hundred years, ever since the Romans conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. Someday a Messiah would appear and all the Jews throughout the world would return to Israel. In seventeenth-century Amsterdam the building of the Esnoga had been delayed a number of years because the community was convinced that the Messiah was about to appear and that they would all be momentarily leaving for Israel. Now, after the Second World War, the real possibility was being raised that they could be “next year in Jerusalem.” The problem was that—in Europe—it was quite clear that the Messiah had not come, and thus by strict interpretation, it was not yet time for Jerusalem. Moreover, the Zionist movement was not particularly religious. Many of the Jews who were now building the new nation were from a secular leftist tradition—the same tradition as the unknown angry Jew who in the late 1930s had scribbled “Down with Passover. Long live May Day!” on Antwerp's Van Den Nestlei synagogue. Some Orthodox felt that it was better to have no Israel than to have one that did not follow the laws.
Antwerp was a center for the Haganah, but it also had a higher percentage of traditional religious Jews than any other Jewish community in the world. The subject of Israel's nationhood became particularly tense in Antwerp. A small number of the Jews there were actively opposed to the creation of the State of Israel. Not all of them were Orthodox. This was not a conflict between religious and non-religious Jews. There were all kinds of Jews on both sides of the issue for a variety of reasons. The sight of homeless Jewish refugees made some religious opponents accept the idea of the Jewish state in spite of their misgivings. Sam Perl, for all his Haganah activity, was a deeply religious Orthodox Jew.
Struggling to hold together their new, fragile postwar unity, the Antwerp Jewish leaders tried to get all the rabbis to agree not to talk about Israel at all. It was a political issue and should just be left alone. But it is not in Jewish tradition to avoid debate, and the agreement did not last long. Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg, for one, could never resist criticizing Zionists, and after Israel was created in 1948,