Meir Y. Soloveichik: The Nation of the Dry Bones
In April 1945, the BBC’s Patrick Walker described to the world one of the most remarkable Jewish prayer services in the history of Judaism. It took place on a Friday afternoon, on the eve of the Sabbath in Bergen-Belsen, only days after the concentration camp had been liberated. The worshippers, survivors all, had not participated in a minyan in years. The prayers concluded with words Walker assumed were standard Sabbath liturgy but were actually the words of “Hatikvah,” the anthem of the Zionist movement, and later of the State of Israel. As their voices faded, one of the chaplains leading the service declaimed three Hebrew words, a clarion call that can still be heard on the recording of the broadcast: Am Yisrael chai, the people of Israel liveth!Melanie Phillips: The delirium of Jew-hatred
Walker was witness to what would become the perfect embodiment of the current period of the Jewish calendar, when Israel and world Jewry mark, one week apart, the worst and then the most miraculous moments in Jewish Diaspora history: first Yom Ha’shoah, the commemoration of the Holocaust, and then Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israeli Independence Day.
In order to understand why this is so, we can begin with the Jewish chaplain whose final words defined the service, and whose later recollections and obituaries allow us to see the moment through his eyes. Leslie Hardman, staffed to Britain’s second army, had not been with the troops when the camp was liberated but was told two days later, “Keep a stiff upper lip. We’ve just been into Belsen concentration camp and it’s horrible; but you have got to go there—you’ll find a lot of your people.” He first encountered a Jewish woman whose decrepit appearance was so horrifying that he instinctively backed away, provoking her to cry out in Yiddish, “Farloz mir nit!! Geh nit avek fun mir!” Do not leave me! Do not go away from me!
Hardman walked with her and then saw the others: “Towards me came what seemed to be the remnants of a holocaust—a staggering mass of blackened skin and bones, held together somehow with filthy rags,” he recalled. “‘My God, the dead walk,’ I cried aloud, but I did not recognize my voice.”
The reason for this indifference is obvious. The murder of Sarah Halimi and the attacks on other French Jews over the past few years tread heavily on some neuralgic left-wing toes.Halimi Family Lawyers Announce Bid to Extradite Antisemitic Killer of French Jewish Woman for Trial in Israel
To acknowledge that people in France are being repeatedly attacked and murdered simply because they are Jews destroys the all-important fiction that attacks on Jews are motivated principally by hostility to Israel.
To recognise the motivation for these French attacks means acknowledging something that the left refuses to say and punishes others for saying: that antisemitism is rooted in Islamic religion and culture.
One further aspect of the court’s ruling has a baleful significance well beyond French society. The court held that cannabis-induced delirium precludes an antisemitic motive because delirium wipes out an individual’s “discernment or control.”
But antisemitism is itself a form of delirium. Those in its grip are innately and inescapably delusional. They believe that the Jews possess diabolical and cosmic powers, that they are a secret conspiracy to control global affairs in their own malign interests, that they are responsible for all the ills in the world.
Does anyone seriously suggest that this is not a form of lunacy? Those in its grip cannot discern the reality of Jewish existence and as a result are sometimes unable to control their aggressive behaviour towards Jews. Antisemites are fundamentally irrational.
And yet, whether dealing with the Iranian regime’s genocidal clerics who declare almost daily their hatred of the Jews or with the Nazi-worshipping Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, the west treats such delusional individuals as if they are rational actors. It refuses to acknowledge that antisemitism is itself the infallible marker of a deranged personality.
What the French courts have done is not merely to thwart the delivery of justice for a terrible murder. By stating in effect that antisemitism requires the “discernment and control” negated by delirium, they have also reinforced a far more widespread failure to understand the crucial point about antisemitism and so have also reinforced the resulting failure by the west to stem its terrifying rise.
Lawyers representing relatives of Sarah Halimi — the French Jewish woman brutally murdered in her Paris apartment by an antisemitic intruder in April 2017 — say they are launching an effort to have her accused murderer extradited to Israel to face trial, following the decision of France’s highest appeal court on April 14 to excuse him from legal proceedings on the alleged grounds that his consumption of marijuana had rendered him temporarily insane.French Jews Plan Mass Rally in Paris to Demand Justice for Sarah Halimi
The decision meant that Halimi’s killer — Kobili Traore, a 31-year-old petty criminal who frequented an Islamist mosque near the Paris housing project where he and Halimi both lived — would never have to face trial in France, causing a furious reaction among French Jews.
Speaking to the newspaper Le Monde on Thursday, Halimi family lawyer Francis Szpiner argued that the legal foundations were in place to try Traore in an Israeli court.
“Israeli criminal law provides that when the victim is Jewish and the crime is of an antisemitic nature, Israeli justice has jurisdiction, regardless of the country where the events took place,” said Szpiner, who represents Esther Lekover, the sister of Sarah Halimi and an Israeli citizen.
Israel’s Penal Law of 1977 contains a provision to extend Israeli criminal justice, under certain circumstances, to offenses committed abroad. This includes antisemitic attacks against “the life, body, health, freedom or property of a Jew, as a Jew, or the property of a Jewish institution, because it is such.”
The Jewish community in France is planning a mass rally in Paris on Sunday afternoon to demand justice for Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old French Jew who was murdered in her home by a Muslim neighbor in 2017.
France’s high court ruled last week that Halimi’s killer, who shouted “Allahu akbar” and threw her from her apartment window, could not be prosecuted because he had taken marijuana before the assault and was therefore not in control of his actions. The ruling was met with derision from many corners and has led French President Emanuel Macron to call for changes to his country’s laws.
For the Jewish community in France, it was the latest blow in their fight against antisemitism. According to a report released earlier this month by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, 95 percent of Jews in France said antisemitism is a big problem, and that the true numbers of such attacks may not be known because people are hesitant to report them, in part because they don’t believe that police will act effectively.
In addition to the rally in Paris, a simultaneous one will be held in London in front of the French embassy there. Due to coronavirus restrictions in the United Kingdom, all participants must pre-register and attendance will be limited.
Those who can’t attend the rally are being urged to show their support via social media using the hashtags #JusticeForSarahHalimi and #JeSuisSarahHalimi.