Soviet Jewish immigrants in Israel represent the cultural and spiritual future of the Jewish nation and their talents and contributions must be encouraged and nurtured. This view was expressed today by Israeli President Zalman Shazar during an hour-long meeting with 40 Jewish and Israeli journalists. Speaking in Yiddish, the 83-year-old statesman described how the Soviet Jews, “who come to Israel out of a thick entangled jungle that is the Soviet Union,” are completely dedicated to building a Jewish life for themselves in their new home.
He noted that many of the Soviet Jews become integrated after six months in absorption centers but that some find it difficult to relate to the new Israeli scene and must find ways of overcoming cultural and psychological hurdles. For the most part, Shazar said, the difficulties encountered are the result of impatience on the part of the new immigrants who want to find their niche in the new society and the impatience on the part of the Israelis who do not quite know how to relate on all levels to the newcomers.
Shazar stressed that the Soviet Jewish immigrants, unlike Jewish immigrants from other countries and earlier olim, seek myriad ways of expressing their identity as Jews and that sometimes their efforts at expressing their Jewishness Jars the equilibrium of Israelis. Some Soviet Jews are dissatisfied with what they find in Israel compared to what they expected. But, he noted, dissatisfaction is a chronic affliction of Jews like crying at a wedding when they should be happy. The earlier immigrants and the sabras have already decided, more or less, what their condition of existence in Israel should be. The Soviet immigrants are still uncertain.
Asked what keeps the feeling of Jewishness alive among Jews in the Soviet Union, Shazar replied that it was a combination of deep-rooted consciousness, Zionism “and the deepest sources of Jewishness, akin to mysticism.” He urged the journalists to promote a greater consciousness of Jewish-literature, history and culture among younger Jews in order to prevent the well-of Jewish consciousness from drying up.
SHAZAR, LUBAVITCHER REBBE EXCHANGE GIFTS
Shazar noted that many Jews in the diaspora express their Jewishness in indirect ways. He cited as an example a folksinger he met who told him that when he sings Black folk songs and spirituals he feels a kinship to the Jewish people because the spirituals talk about Moses and the Jordan River. The lesson, Shazar said, was that no matter how far afield Jews seem to wander they remain in essence Jews seeking their identity.
Shazar made a similar point yesterday when-he met for 75 minutes with a 25-member delegation of the Presidents Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations headed by its president Jacob Stein. He said that Soviet Jewish intellectuals, scientists, writers, professors and engineers are having a difficult time being integrated into Israeli society. This is so, he said, because these elements were part of a privileged strata in the USSR and now have to learn to live in a society where there are no such groupings. He also related that his meeting with President Nixon last Friday, after the memorial service to the late President Harry S Truman, was warm and friendly. He said Nixon showed a deep understanding of Israel’s problems.
Last night, Shazar, accompanied by security men, visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menahem. M. Schneersohn at his home in Brooklyn. The rebbe had sent a delegation of older hasidim to meet Shazar at his Hotel Pierre suite, before proceeding to Brooklyn where they arrived at 8:30 p.m. Despite the cold, throngs of dancing and singing hasidic Jews greeted the President. The rebbe spoke publicly for one-half hour with Shazar. The two men exchanged gifts and the President gave the rebbe several rare hasidic manuscripts written by the rebbe’s ancestors.
The rebbe presented Shazar with three leather bound volumes: one, containing the writings from the Baal Shemtov; one, writings from Rabbi Dovber of Messeritch; and the third volume, the writings from Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of the Chabad Lubavitch movement. The two men spoke of problems that confront Jews in Israel and throughout the world, and underscored the spiritual significance of the Torah. They later spoke privately for some five hours.
IN MEMORY OF BIALIK
Chaim Nachman Bialik, the Jewish national poet, was born 100 years ago today. The son of a village innkeeper in southern Russia, he was given the traditional Jewish education of his day, culminating at-the Yeshiva of Volozhin, the greatest institution of Jewish learning in Eastern Europe. Volozhin fashioned his character and provided his vast store of Jewish knowledge. He missed nothing from Genesis to the latest scribe of his day and everything that was in between.
For sheer poetic force he was among the great poets of all time by any yardstick. As a Hebrew poet he covered the whole gamut of Jewish experience. He ranged from a harrowing lament for the destruction of the Temple to a protest over the pogrom of Kishinev, from the abiding longing for Zion to melancholy reflections on the passing of an era, from admonitions about divisions and futile arguments in Jewish life to the extolling of the moral and ethical values in Jewish teaching.
The more Jewish Bialik was, the more universal he was. Some of his memorable poems relate to the human condition. They mourn talent enslaved by poetry, weep for orphans without protection, echo the pain of the lonely who sing to themselves like a cricket in a humble dwelling, and praise the downtrodden and voiceless whom he begs to accept him in their midst.
Bialik lived in Eretz Israel since 1924. He died in Vienna in 1934 after an operation and was buried in Tel Aviv. He foresaw his untimely passing:
After my death mourn me thus: There was a man and, see, he is no more. And his song was cut before time…
The greatest Hebrew poet since the golden age, Bialik was the custodian of the Jewish heritage and tradition, the exponent of the Jewish genius and the interpreter of the longing for Zion. He is shared by Israel and the diaspora and his spell remains an abiding force for unity in Jewish life.
Mario Gibson Barboza, Brazil’s Foreign Minister, will visit Israel as an official guest from Feb, 4-8, and Egypt from Jan. 28-Feb. 1.
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.
