JNS
At a Western Wall event, Israel’s chief rabbis and European counterparts reflected on the closing of a painful chapter.
At the opening ceremony on Monday for a three-day annual visit to Israel of the Conference of European Rabbis (CER), the news broke that Israel Police Master Sgt. Ran Gvili’s body had been recovered in Gaza.
“Today, we have one eye crying and another eye that’s happy,” said Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel Kalman Meir Ber, during his address to the gathering, a series of sermons and prayers at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Ber was referring to the mixture of grief and relief experienced in Israel and the Jewish world over the return of Gvili, the last remaining hostage held by Hamas.
Gvili, who died fighting Hamas terrorists as a volunteer for the Israel Police Special Patrol Unit (Yasam), was among some 1,200 people whom Hamas terrorists killed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. They took Gvili’s body, along with 250 other living or dead hostages. Of those, 168 have been returned alive.
CER president Pinchas Goldschmidt noted that both the news and the venue served as reminders of the strong sense of shared fate between European Jewry and Israel. Ber pointed out that the return of Gvili’s body for a proper burial is in keeping with Judaism’s fundamental religious commandment and thus helps alleviate some of the pain.
He added that seeing how “the people of Israel, the army, fought to find the last body to bring it home for a Jewish burial,” made the day “truly wonderful."
Ber referred to the "tumultuous period" since the Oct. 7 massacre as one that has led to a "spiritual awakening,” and urged the rabbis of the CER to use the regional developments “to bring people closer to Judaism’s fold.”
Both Ber and his Sephardic counterpart, Rabbi David Yosef, were appointed to their posts in 2024. As a result, it was the first time that many of the dozens of CER rabbis were meeting them.
Yosef asked the visitors to intervene on the Chief Rabbinate’s behalf in what he described as its struggle with the judiciary and Israel’s Supreme Court, which he said were “hostile to the rabbinical establishment.”
He cited a Supreme Court ruling last year that briefly stripped Israel’s rabbinical courts, which act as family courts under the judiciary, of the authority to award child-support payments. The Knesset passed a two-year interim measure that reinstated that authority to the rabbinical courts.
“This is a difficult time for the people of Israel, both in the land of Israel and in the Diaspora," Yosef said. "We have trouble with enemies. We also have an internal struggle, and it’s often over Judaism: our beating heart."
He stated: “We know what happened in the land of Israel, how enemies rose up to destroy us, how we fought for our lives. And the world blames us and hates us. The increase in antisemitism is everywhere, but we need to look also at the positive aspect of this hatred. It reminds many Jews who have grown distant from our faith that they’re Jewish. The enemies defame us, hurl insults at us. But it causes many Jews to come closer. We rabbis must bring them closer."
In the Diaspora, he said, “wherever freedom was given to Jews, many assimilated. When Jews were closed in ghettos and were persecuted, they knew to keep Judaism."
CER's Goldschmidt revealed in his speech new details about the circumstances that led the organization to move the current gathering, which had been slated to take place in November in Azerbaijan, to Israel.
It was, he explained “because the evil kingdom, the rulers of Iran, planned a terror attack against the conference in Baku. A week before it, we got a phone call from Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, telling us he cannot ensure our safety due to a terror alert that Iran was planning an attack no smaller than the one that happened in Australia."
He went on, “We think of the people in Iran fighting the evil kingdom.We support the Iranian people and hope they overthrow this kingdom of malice, so we can live in a new Middle East.”
He pointed to the insecurity that the current climate is causing European-Jewish communities, many of whose members are considering moving to Israel.
“Some rabbis may ask whether their communities will remain," he said. "Does it make sense to invest so many resources in building communities if they are on the verge of moving away? I know rabbis are also thinking of their families. Can they walk down the street with their children, or are they exposing them to an antisemitic attack just by being there with them?”
Goldschmidt, a former chief rabbi of Moscow who left in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, asked his organization’s rabbis to persevere despite the above apprehension.
Quoting Talmudic sage Rabbi Akiva, Goldschmidt said: “Erect a sukkah [temporary dwelling] even if the wind blows it away the next day. The next hour. Because you have done your part: You have built a sukkah.”
