Two days after Israel was born in May 1948, more than 40,000 people, representing Jews of all political and religious convictions, jammed Chicago Stadium for a celebration.
At the end, as the lights went out, a massive white-and-blue Israeli flag was unfurled and spotlights were trained on it. Maynard Wishner stood to sing “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem. As he did, he noticed a police officer snap his arm to attention.
Years later, Wishner recalls the moment with great affection, as if it were yesterday.
Choking with emotion, Chicagoan Leonard H. Sherman recalls deciding at 23 to put himself in harm’s way, facing mortar shells in Jerusalem, because he hoped that never again “would there be a homeless Jew or a defenseless Jew.”
Marilyn Silin-Raine went to Israel in 1949 after graduating from the University of Chicago. She settled in Kibbutz Sasa, the first kibbutz created by North American Jews. She remembers with a striking freshness her six years on Israel’s northern border.
“It really got me in the stomach. I was looking for values and I found them, says Silin-Raine, a psychotherapist, as she sits in her Skokie home and leafs through a photo album of her kibbutz days. Nearly 50 years later, her link lives on through her local ties to a group that supports a pro-peace organization in Israel.
These are just three of the thousands of Chicagoans who have opened their hearts, not to mention their checkbooks, to the Jewish state over the last five decades. With blood, money and prayers, Chicago’s Jews helped build modern Israel, a far-off homeland cleaved to the core of its loyal supporters halfway across the world in the heartland of America.
The emotional ties are readily visible in a film produced by Chicago’s Jewish Federation for its annual fund drive. First, grainy black-and-white images of Jews on trains and boats headed for Palestine fill the screen, then pictures of innocent-looking young fighters. Then the movie cuts to interviews with four elderly Chicago men, explaining how their efforts to defend Israel 50 years ago marked them indelibly with a love of the country.
The message is clear: Above all the other issues that concern the more than quarter-million Jews in the Chicago area, Israel takes top priority.
The organization has a compelling reason for asserting such a strong bond with Israel: Chicago’s Jewish establishment is one of the most staunchly pro-Israel in the nation. Yet these are difficult days for many American Jews, torn between their love for Israel and their increasingly open disaffection with religious and political trends in the Jewish state.
The relationship is an enigma of talmudic proportions, this bond between America’s nearly 6 million Jews and their Israeli cousins. Israel now both unites and divides them. One of the most wrenching issues is that of conversion to the Jewish faith, a complicated question reduced to succinct shorthand: “Who’s a Jew?”
In Israel, the (Orthodox) Chief Rabbinate has sole authority, granted by the state, to determine who may convert to Judaism. The state’s failure to recognize Reform and Conservative conversions carried out in Israel has caused an uproar in the U.S., where the vast majority of affiliated Jews belong to these two streams of Judaism.
After decades of unwavering support for the Jewish state, many Americans are offended by the notion that, under the hegemony of Orthodox Judaism, they might be considered less than fully Jewish in Israel. The insult is compounded by the often mistaken belief that Reform and Conservative conversions conducted in America or some other nation outside Israel are not recognized either.
The perceived rejection is a searing wound for many who never questioned their ties to Israel. Ask American Jews about their support for a Jewish state, and you will hear overwhelming affirmation. Yet less than 10 percent of those who have settled in Israel since 1948 came from the U.S.–a deep disappointment to some Zionists–and more than half of American Jews never have visited Israel.
To be sure, Jews in the U.S. have shown their support. Once, American Jews supplied three-fourths of Israel’s budget. And they remain generous. About $1 billion yearly is sent by American Jews to Israel, and Chicago’s Jews give more on a per-person basis than those in New York or Los Angeles, the nation’s two biggest Jewish communities.
So, too, American Jews created the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Washington-based lobby that has wielded near-mythical power over U.S. politicians for years and has helped maintain Israel’s status as the largest single recipient of U.S. foreign aid.
Still, leaders of the United Jewish Appeal, the main U.S. funding arm for Israel, say they failed to meet their fundraising targets last year because of some American Jews’ disenchantment with Israel’s right-wing policies and its rabbinical leaders’ slight to Reform and Conservative Jews.
Open feuding between U.S. supporters and Israel is painful for American Jews, who prefer to shield their internal divisions from outsiders. Chicago’s Jewish Federation is among the groups that have intensified efforts to shore up the links, to calm tensions, to renew American Jews’ identification with Israel.
“That is who we are as a people, and we are not walking away from these ties,” says Michael Kotzin, a senior vice president of the federation.
Kotzin does not mince words, not about this, not about Israel. Unlike most American Jews, Kotzin has lived and worked in Israel. His parents emigrated there. He has a grown son there. He is of two worlds, here and there.
Many American Jews admit that they don’t understand Israelis, and that they clung to an idealized image for years. But, they quickly add, Israelis’ views of American Jews can be just as distorted.
What, then, links the disparate voices of American Jews, those who care little about Israel and those caught up in its existence, its religious divisions, its political feuds and its furious debates about peace with the Palestinians?
Wishner, who may have held more leadership positions than anyone else in Chicago’s Jewish community, offers an explanation. It comes from his Yiddish-speaking immigrant parents, one-time garment workers, who imbued him with a feeling for his “family,” fellow Jews.
“The answer is to understand the depth and breadth of our we-ness,” suggests Wishner, an attorney and business executive in Chicago.
Examples abound. Bettylu Saltzman came from a home infused with unspoken support for Israel. Her father is Philip Klutznick, a former Cabinet secretary, legendary Chicago real estate developer and prominent leader of American Jewry.
Yet his daughter never showed much interest in Israel or Jewish community activities. Saltzman’s link with Israel came later in life. And what prompted it, she admits, was largely a “gut” feeling.
A meeting several years ago of the New Israel Fund, a small fundraising organization that promotes the rights of non-Orthodox Jews, women and minorities in Israel, drew her in. She has since become a U.S. leader of the group and speaks passionately about the importance of democracy in Israel.
Rabbi Eleanor Smith of Temple Beth Emet, a Reform congregation in suburban Evanston, describes the dismay of some American Jews over their treatment by Israel’s Orthodox rabbis and the growing lack of interest in Israel, if not outright disillusionment.
Last fall, during the Jewish New Year, Smith spoke frankly about the disconnect between American Jews and Israel.
“Though it might be heretical, I believe that many American Jews are feeling disaffected with Israel, caught in a private conundrum for which there is no public forum,” the rabbi said in her sermon, sending a nervous titter through the congregation.
Her answer: Stop the divide now. “Israel needs us, and we need her,” she said.
Rabbi Michael Azose heads the Sephardic Congregation, a small Orthodox synagogue in Evanston. The congregation’s members, most of whom come from the Middle East, share a concern about some American Jews’ declining interest in Israel.
But the rabbi, whose parents came from Turkey, says the ones to blame are not Orthodox Jews, who make up less than 10 percent of American Jews. The Orthodox are the ones, he says, who fill up the airlines to Israel and are most likely to emigrate there.
He also feels little compulsion to take part in the Jewish Federation’s unprecedented drive in the last year to spur unity among the feuding branches of Judaism. “We can’t change our ideas,” he says flatly. “This is not a business deal here.”
In some ways, the current divisions recall old controversies. Before Israel’s founding, many Jews in Chicago and across the U.S. had mixed feelings about a Zionist state. Some Orthodox Jews considered it blasphemous to establish a Jewish state before the arrival of the Messiah. Some Reform Jews considered Judaism a religion, not a nationality, and believed support for Zionism would make them seem disloyal as Americans.
On the other side were Zionists who believed passionately that Jews should have a national homeland. Some Chicago-based Zionists in the 1920s even dreamed of a community in the new land that would be called Chicago.
The Nazi murders of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust melted much ambivalence among American Jews toward Israel. And Israel’s birth drew the strings even tighter.
Fifty years later, Richard Wexler, a Chicago real estate lawyer and national chairman of the United Jewish Appeal, believes current tensions complicate his life. “I have to feel that this friction is more deep-seated than it has ever been,” he said one recent afternoon.
Wexler does not hide his pain, but he is not as troubled as others. While American Jews may be disunited, he says, they are at least focused on the same subject: Israel. And maybe, he adds wistfully, the rhetoric will cool down.
A similar faith is shared by Wishner, who recalls bumping into a fellow Jew downtown during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, as Iraq was hurtling missiles at Israel.
As far as he knew, the man had never given money, nor joined in Jewish activities. But he stopped Wishner and excitedly asked, “What are we going to do?”
“We,” Wishner echoed, both surprised and pleased.
