At Chicago’s Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel synagogue Thursday, there was a slight alteration in the morning services. Worshipers set aside the melody with which Jews have sung Psalm 114 for hundreds of years. Instead, when members of the North Side orthodox congregation sang the stirring opening line–“When Israel came forth out of Egypt”–they switched to the tune of “Hatikvah,” the national anthem of the modern state of Israel.
Meanwhile, Israel’s consul general hosted a reception at the Union League Club. And, Thursday evening, 10,000 people were at Northwestern University’s Welsh-Ryan Arena, where Israeli pop-star Noa and singer Art Garfunkel performed in celebration of Israel’s 50th anniversary.
Which is not to say the day had the same meaning for everyone. To some Jews, there are Promised Lands other than Israel. Many members of Chicago’s Russian Jewish community are more than happy to be living near Devon Avenue rather than in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. For others, Israel is a given; their only question is why it couldn’t have come sooner.
“If we’d had a state before the war,” said Mark Weinberg, 88, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, “Hitler would not have done with us what he did.”
Here are the stories of a few members of Chicago’s Jewish community–and their thoughts on what Israel means to their lives.
A brother’s dedication
Manfred Steinfeld gave Israel an early birthday present. Last September, he dedicated a building in Jerusalem, the Naftali Steinfeld Education Center. Named in his late brother’s honor, it cost Manny $450,000. That was in addition to the $500,000 he gave to the Jewish United Fund’s annual campaign the same year, a big chunk of which is sent to Israel. Steinfeld writes that kind of check every year now, though he couldn’t always. In 1958, while just getting his business started, he gave $75 to Jewish charities.
Asked how much he has donated since, Steinfeld retrieved a scrap of paper from the pyramid of invoices and product catalogues on his desk at Shelby Williams Industries, a furniture manufacturer he founded, with corporate headquarters in the Merchandise Mart. He totaled up the numbers as nonchalantly as if calculating his utility payments, though the sum ran into the millions.
To Steinfeld, 74, financially supporting Israel is a moral utility bill.
It’s both payback for his own good fortune and an insurance policy that others won’t suffer what his family did. When Hitler came to power, his widowed mother desperately wanted to get her family out of Germany, but most countries had closed their borders. America, though, was accepting a limited number of children, so she sent Manny, then 14, to an aunt in Chicago. His brother went to Palestine, where the British also were taking in a few young refugees.
During World War II, Steinfeld served with the 82nd Airborne Division, surviving some bitter fighting. At the war’s end, he went to his native village to be told that his mother and sister had been deported to a concentration camp, where they died.
Shortly afterward, he got a letter from his brother’s kibbutz: One day in 1945, British troops had showed up demanding the surrender of refugees, most of whom were concentration camp survivors who had slipped into the country despite Britain’s embargo.
When the kibbutzniks refused– the refugees would have faced deportation by the British–the soldiers began shooting. Among the eight killed was Naftali Steinfeld, whose name is now inscribed on the building in Israeli.
A building, Manny Steinfeld noted, doesn’t breathe. It can’t talk. “But it does give us a feeling of belonging to Israel,” he said, “a feeling of having done something for the land for which my brother gave his life.”
Through children’s eyes
For months, teachers at the Solomon Schechter Day School in Northbrook, which is affiliated with Judaism’s Conservative movement, had been explaining to their classes the significance of Thursday’s anniversary and the background.
“We used not to be free,” said Adi Ifrach, 9, summarizing those events with a 3rd grader’s feeling for cutting to the heart of a matter. “They made a state so Jews wouldn’t have to live in other countries where they were pushed around.”
“A few years ago, Jews weren’t allowed into Israel, then they fought back. Then they were,” added Nicole Farah, 9, giving her version of Britain’s last-ditch resistance to Israel’s independence.
Sarah Weinberg, a 6th grader, resented the media for holding Israel to a double standard. “Whenever Jews do something bad, they emphasize it,” she said. “When buses get blown up by Arab terrorists, it’s no big deal. But when we shoot three people, they go crazy.”
A classmate, David Avraham, 12, proposed that the problem of violence between Jews and Arabs stemmed from Zionism’s having taken a wrong turn. “It would be better to have another place all to ourselves than Israel not all to ourselves,” he said. “Why not just find another piece of land that we could all move to?”
Avraham was, in fact, echoing the argument of a minority faction in the early Zionist movement, who thought an alternative home for the Jewish people might be found elsewhere than in the Middle East.
Older couple remembers
Daniel and Clare Greenberg are Zionists by family inheritance. His father was a Hebrew teacher. Her parents taught Yiddish. As children, both Daniel and Chaike–the equivalent of her name that Clare prefers–were shlepped to meetings of Chicagoans working for the establishment of a Jewish homeland. Years later, they realized they had shaken the hands of visitors from Palestine, like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, who went on to become Israel’s leaders. The Greenbergs, who live on the Far Northwest Side, even owe their marriage to Zionism: They met at a meeting of Habonim, a Zionist youth group, in 1948.
“Like Israel,” Daniel, 72, said, “this is our 50th year too.”
Even so, Israel at 50 is not quite the kind of miracle the Greenbergs and their parents were expecting. Daniel and Clare grew up in the Labor Zionist movement, a branch of Zionism that embraced two dreams. Beyond their desire for a Jewish homeland, Labor Zionists hoped to make the new nation a more equitable society, where differences of rich and poor would be unknown.
When the Greenbergs first saw Israel in the 1950s, it looked like the realization of their hopes.
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In a poor society, as the newly independent Israel was, it’s not hard to sell a philosophy of sharing. But since then, the country has prospered. On recent trips, the Greenbergs have seen that even the kibbutzim–co-operative communities that long were the nation’s conscience–have lost their socialist fervor. Contemporary Israel is increasingly becoming an American-style consumer society.
Which doesn’t mean the Greenbergs are any less proud to see their emotional godchild reach 50. But now on trips there, they make sure to visit sites evocative of the country’s humbler beginnings. There is, for instance, on the Mediterranean coast, the remnants of a detention camp. There the British once imprisoned would-be immigrants trying to circumvent England’s blockade against Jewish immigration into Palestine. Those strands of barbed wire are still mesmerizing to Daniel and Chaike.
“We like to see,” he said, “where the route to the cell phones began.”
Understanding with time
For political science student Julie Kosowski, 30, of the North Side, Israel’s birthday is less an occasion for celebration than for reflection. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor and a child of the Reform synagogue movement, Kosowski says that until she went to Israel at age 17, she believed the Jewish people had a God-given right to the land of Israel. In her young eyes, the Arabs were “an extension of Nazis–they couldn’t be trusted.”
Later, however, she came to believe that those positions were inconsistent with the values she absorbed from the story of her father, who was a child when the Nazis came to power.
“My father’s history had a profound impact on me,” said Kosowski, who attends the University of Illinois at Chicago. “It made me sensitive to the trauma of dehumanization, the dangers of nationalism, the wonderful effect of resistance.”
She began to connect her father’s story with the plight of the Palestinians under Israeli control: “I understood how complicit people can be when they’re sucked into the dehumanization of another people.”
As an American whose government sends money to Israel, and as a Jew whose grandparents perished in the Holocaust, she felt she had to take a stand.
“I once thought the establishment of Israel was a completely innocent act, part of a story of heroic survival,” she says. “But it’s jeopardized the survival of another people–the Palestinians.
“I don’t believe victims have to be victimizers. Another people should not be oppressed in the name of my religion’s survival–and I believe that’s what’s happening.”
So Kosowski didn’t plan on celebrating Thursday.
“Am I happy my dad’s alive? Yes. Do I want the state of Israel to stop existing? Of course not. But Israel will continue without me going to a celebration of its birthday.”
Further, Kosowski believes the Jewish community in Chicago doesn’t need the festivities.
“We have so many rich traditions to celebrate,” she says. “Our history didn’t start with the Holocaust and the birth of Israel. Our victimization should not be our identity and our armor, but our teacher.”
A quiet celebration
As a religious Jew, Chayim Knobloch observes that Israel is on his mind daily, not just on the annual observance of the modern state’s independence.
Religious Jews pray three times a day, he explains, and the words “Israel” and “Jerusalem” are constantly on their lips. Standing outside his kosher grocery store, Knobloch describes himself as an Orthodox Jew with leanings toward hassidism, the branch of the faith that emphasizes spirituality and joyfulness. But he believes an internal religious experience is more appropriate for Israel’s independence day than a noisy nationalistic celebration.
“That gives too much credit to man and not enough to God,” he says.
So he spent a little extra time Thursday reflecting on the significance of those oft-repeated words, “Israel” and “Jerusalem,” in the Siddur, the Jewish prayer book.
A former Hebrew teacher and an ordained rabbi, Knobloch, 43, now owns the Kol Tuv grocery on West Devon Avenue and another newer store, Kol Touhy, a mile to the north. But his connections with Israel run deep. He has a brother who lives on the Israeli-held West Bank. His son and daughter are studying in Israel, as he did before them. And his father is buried on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives.
“I identify with the land of Israel and the people of Israel as much as anyone else,” he says. But he’s not into what he calls the “external trappings” of the 50th anniversary.
“It’s like the 4th of July,” he explains. “How many people get into the real significance of the holiday, beyond the barbecues and the day off work? Religious Jews tend to take these things more seriously.”