Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen of Romania delivered one of the strongest attacks yet on the Israeli government’s controversial decision last week to allow Soviet Jews leaving the USSR on Israeli visas no option but to come to Israel.
“If Theodor Herzl were to arise from his grave today, he would drop dead of shame. The decision is a shameful blot on Zionism,” Rosen told the Jerusalem Post in a weekend interview. He was referring to the founder of the Zionist movement.
Rosen also was sharply critical of Israel’s entire approach to the Soviet Jewry problem, which he thought was too public, too political and too secular.
The Cabinet decided by majority vote June 19 to issue visas only to those Jews in the USSR who are committed to settling in Israel. To ensure that commitment, they will be required to fly directly to Tel Aviv via Romania, after picking up their visas at the Israel Embassy in Bucharest.
The policy “will create a new category of prisoners of Zion, people who are forced to come here,” Rosen said. “Prisoners of Zion” is the term applied by Israelis to Jews imprisoned by the Soviet authorities because they were active for aliyah.
Rosen’s criticism of the Cabinet’s action is shared by such prominent former refuseniks as Natan Sharansky and Yosef Mendelevich, who live in Israel, and by a significant number of Israeli commentators and politicians.
On Sunday, leaders of Diaspora Jewry balked at the Cabinet’s decree, during a rare session of the joint Jewish Agency-Israel government coordinating body.
UJA CLASH WITH DINITZ, KAPLAN
According to reports, representatives of the United Jewish Appeal clashed with Simcha Dinitz, chairman of the World Zionist Organization-Jewish Agency Executive, and Mendel Kaplan, chairman of the Jewish Agency Board of Governors.
Those two officials support the Cabinet decision, their position being that Israeli visas should not be used to transfer Jews from “one Diaspora to another.” But Kaplan avoided a head-on collision by proposing that the Jewish Agency component of the joint body consider the issue again at a meeting of the agency Board of Governors this Friday.
Under the standing agreement between the government and Jewish Agency, a policy of this nature requires the endorsement of both. At the same time, decisions with respect to visa policy are clearly Israel’s exclusive prerogative as a sovereign state. The criticism of the new policy by Rabbi Rosen contains no small degree of irony. As the spiritual and temporal leader of the Jewish community in Romania, he is credited in Israel with the mass aliyah of Romanian Jews.
He was awarded a doctoral degree by the Hebrew University here last week. At a dinner in his honor later, Premier Yitzhak Shamir and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres joined in praising Rosen’s key role in promoting aliyah over the past 40 years.
In that period, they noted, Romania’s Jewish community, which numbered 400,000 in 1948, shrank to 20,000 today. Almost all of those Jews or their progeny now live in Israel. This is Rosen’s great achievement and source of pride, the Israeli leaders said.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
