Behind the Headlines Olim Need Their Roots and Their Past

“A tree without roots will not grow. New branches will sprout only if the roots are preserved. The mistake made during the 1950’s in the absorption of the mass aliya of Jews from North Africa was to try to destroy our roots and erase our past,” said Eli Amir, the new director-general of Youth Aliya.

History has turned full circle for Amir, who was himself a ward of the Youth Aliya organization. As a 13-year-old Iraqi immigrant, he was sent to kibbutz Mishmar Ha’emek in the Jezreel Valley. There, in the fields of the ideological socialism of the Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz, he felt the full impact of the social and culture shock, which threatened to engulf and denigrate his own roots and tradition.

Amir assumed the position of director-general in November after his predecessor, Meir Gottesman, retired. He is determined not to repeat the mistakes of the ’50’s and ’60’s. “I know what it is like to leave one’s family at a young age, and I am no stranger to the pains of absorption,” said Amir in a recent interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Amir left Baghdad in 1950 with his parents and six siblings, when he was 12 years old. His family lived for a number of years in tents in the makeshift “ma’abarot” immigrant camps.

Amir has no bitterness about his own painful absorption process. “However difficult and painful my first experiences on the kibbutz were, it was there that I learned to be an Israeli,” he said. “The kibbutz was the best passage I could wish for into Israeli society.”

A MOVING DOCUMENT

He recently published a novel called “Tarnago Kaparot” (“Scapegoat”), in which he recounts the experiences of a group of Iraqi and Moroccan teenagers sent to a kibbutz through Youth Aliya in those years of mass immigration.

Through the eyes of Nuri, a young Iraqi immigrant similar to Amir himself, we perceive the clash of cultures on the kibbutz as it appeared to those who were made to feel that their traditions were worthless, their families primitive.

Nuri is torn between a desire to be like “them” in a society which proclaims that there is no “them” and “us,” and his need to retain his own identity, his own music and his values. He clings to his own name, despite callous attempts to Hebraicize it into “Nimrod,” yet he listens to a Mozart concerto time and time again, in an effort to assimilate “their” music, while the familiar sounds of the traditional oud gradually lose their soothing value on him.

He recounts the pain of a young boy who watches his father, a respected middle-class businessman from Baghdad, humiliated by the mass spraying of D.D.T. as they alight from the airplane in their promised land, and reduced to poverty and menial work in the ma’abarot.

“Scapegoat,” a moving document of the origins of the social gap between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, has been incorporated into the Israeli high school syllabus. It is soon to be translated into English.

Amir left the kibbutz after three years and returned to the ma’abara to support his family. He started work as a messenger boy in a government office, studying the while in the evenings. He worked his way up the ranks of the civil service, and in 1969, was appointed assistant to the Minister of Absorption and Immigration. He has spent the past 16 years dealing with problems of Absorption, in the government and in the Jewish Agency.

Now, in his new position heading Youth Aliya, Amir plans to encourage the children of emigrants to return to their homeland. “I want to create a young society of, say, 30 teenagers from New York, who would come to live on a kibbutz for a few years,” he said. “The parents took these children to the U.S., now it is the children’s turn to bring their parents back to Israel. It would also like to create a similar project for the children of Russian emigrants who did not reach Israel.”

The emphasis “must be on socialization, on helping the new olim feel that they belong, that they are part of the mainstream of society and not an alienated fringe group. And most important, we must not destroy their roots,” Amir stressed.

A CHALLENGE TO AMIR’S CREDO

Nowadays, Amir is faced with a challenge to his credo. Hundreds of Jewish Ethiopian children, brought to Israel in the recent massive air-lift known as Operation Moses, are in the care of Youth Aliya. Many were orphaned along the long and weary route to Israel, or split from their families when the operation was prematurely cut off by the Sudanese government in January.

“We have to maintain the culture and roots of Ethiopian Jewry,” said Amir. “Man is not a machine; he gets used to a new culture and learns new habits according to his own internal clock.” The shock is inevitable, beginning with the first encounter with the “big bird,” the airplane which lifted them out of their traditional society and landed them in a modern technological one. “We must not press them and expect them to adopt within days,” said Amir.