Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust
Day, from the night of April 20, through April 21, meant that depressing coronavirus
news shared somewhat equal billing with solemn Holocaust-related news items, at
least for a few days. A news piece in the Jerusalem
Post in that genre, spoke of the resurgence of the Dortmund, Germany
Jewish community, which today numbers 3,000 souls, around the same as in 1938, when
an evil madman with a mustache unleashed the eternal hatred in the German
breast for the Jewish people. Dortmund, it seems, has recovered so nicely that
they’ve gone ahead and built the first Jewish school in that city since 1942.
Presumably, we are supposed to
see this resurrection as an achievement, perhaps even something miraculous: a murdered
people coming back to life, as strong as ever.
It makes me sick. What? You
didn’t get the message the first time around? You’ve come back for another go?
But I’ve written about my
feelings on this before. I wrote about this in 2018, in a piece I called, “The
Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave” which described my anguish at reading about three
orthodox rabbis ordained
in Berlin, after an 80-year “interruption.”
No one should be reviving
Jewish life in Germany. No Jews should live there, ever. It’s a place that does
not want us. It’s a place that hates us, now as then, even when the hate is
maintained at a slow simmer—with bubbles that only occasionally poke above the
water line—instead of a rolling boil.
A resurgence of Jewish life in
Germany is not a good thing and should not be encouraged. Especially when it is
today, so easy to hop on a plane to live in
Israel, in Jewish indigenous
territory, the place we prayed to return to all these thousands of years.
By coincidence, on the same day
I read about the resurgence of Jewish life in Germany, I read a different news
piece about dead Jews clamoring to be buried in Israel, an expensive proposition
made even more costly, due to the global pandemic. The rising costs of burial
in the Holy Land for Diaspora Jews are due not only to costs associated with
coronavirus precautions, but also, it seems to price gouging. The Jewish
Press, nonetheless, reports that over 200 coronavirus victims, wrapped and
packed according to Israel’s Ministry of Health strict guidelines, have been
brought to the Jewish State for burial. With COVID-19 taking so many lives in
the Jewish community, dead Jews are practically an entire industry.
This at a time when unemployment in Israel has risen to unseemly heights and the
Israeli economy has plunged.
גופות של 18 יהודים, שנפטרו בחו"ל לאחר שחלו בקורונה, הובאו לפני כניסת שבת לישראל כדי להיקבר באדמת ארץ הקודש. הגופות הובאו מליאז' בבלגיה במטוס ג'מבו של "אטלס אייר" הפועל בשירות אל על. בתוך שבועיים הגיעו מעל 200 גופות של חולי קורונה שנארזו ע"פ פרוטוקול מיוחד. @Yossi_eli @avischarf pic.twitter.com/jYQyXn8K0t— איתי בלומנטל Itay Blumental (@ItayBlumental) April 18, 2020
Exactly how much does it cost
to be buried in Israel? There’s the burial plot, which in non-pandemic times can
cost as much as $35,000. There’s the airfare ($1k-$3k on El Al, $30,000 to
$40,000 if using a private jet), with added costs for pandemic precautions (another
$200-$300). But the cost to transport dead American Jews has zoomed ever upward,
as the demand rises, to some $200,000 a flight. ZAKA Chairman Yehuda
Meshi-Zahav claimed that one family paid $270,000 to fly a body to Israel in a
private jet.
The costs do not end here. There’s
a fee from Ben Gurion Airport to the burial society, which may reach a cost of
$1,300. Then there’s cleansing the body which can cost around $800.
In short, it costs as much for
Diaspora Jews to be buried in Israel as it does to purchase a modest Israeli apartment.
Framed another way, it costs as much to be dead in Israel as it does to live in
Israel. And by the way, Israel’s National
Insurance Institute “pays burial expenses and related services for every
person who dies in Israel and is buried in Israel, and for every Israeli
resident who dies outside of Israel.”
It seems to me that the two
news items, one detailing the resurgence of the Jewish community in Dortmund,
Germany, the other detailing dead Jews clamoring to be buried in the Holy Land,
express a kind of backward Jewish ghetto mentality that must be addressed. Jews
should not live in Germany, but in Israel. Jews should not be clamoring to be
dead in Israel, but to live in Israel.
The Torah teaches “Chai B’hem,” that we should live and not
die by the precepts handed down to Moses at Sinai. We should not be focused on
the resurrection of the murdered or on where we wish to be buried, but where we
will live now, in the present. Our entire focus should be on building the
Jewish community in Israel, and only in Israel, now and forever.
Once someone lives in Israel
and subsequently dies, after living a long life, to 120, the burial costs nothing,
so you don’t even have to think about it. It’s a twofer, Folks. The burial’s
already covered. So you might as well make the best of it and spend your hard-earned
cash dollars on life.