KUMMUNIQUE

Shalom! We are proud to present another issue of Kummunique.
This issue is filled with Aliyah and Eretz Yisrael inspiration - so enjoy!

In this issue you will find:

1. "A Letter From Brocha"
2. "The Jewschool - Kumah Debate" by Yishai Fleisher
3. "True Jewish Heroes" by Ze'ev Orenstein
4. "A Question of Belonging" by Elaine Margolin

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1. "A Letter From Brocha"
Hello Yishai,

My name is Brocha, I don't know if you remember me but I went on a birthright trip with you. Dror, & I think her name was Tzofiah, were the Madricim. I was the one that fell on Mesadah, hurt my knee and wrist and needed to go to the emergency room, How could you forget that lol!! Also when we were on the bus one day you gave me your Israeli flag and told me that this flag had been yours for a while but that I could have it. It meant a lot to me and I still have it hanging proudly in my apt. I have moved around a lot, and was as far away from frumkeit as one can be, but that flag always hung proudly in whatever apt. I had. And when I moved i never left that flag behind. I took some rough roads in the past few years but I am now finding my way back into yiddishkeit. It is very hard but I am trying every day to be a better and more spiritual person.

I received the Kumah video in a random forwarded e-mail from someone I don't know and the second I saw the word Kumah your name popped into my head and I just wanted to e-mail you and see where your life has led you in the past few years.

I would love to hear back from you, and would also love to share my story with you and whoever may benefit from it.

Sincerely,
Brocha

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2. "The Jewschool - Kumah Debate" by Yishai Fleisher
http://jewschool.com/?p=9833 and on http://www.kumah.org

In an Blog entery entitled "An Open Letter to Kumah" Mobius wrote amongst other things:

"Furthermore, we are faced with the fact that since January 2000 roughly 100,000 Israelis have emigrated from Israel, disillusioned with the Zionist dream, weary of Zionist rhetoric, and infuriated as all-hell with overzealous datim like yourselves. For every new oleh, there is a yored (or two even) willing to take his or her place in America or elsewhere abroad. The proof is in the pudding: A thriving Israeli expatriate scene and a once-again vibrant Jewish community in Germany. Germany!"

This is what I wrote in response to this and other accusations:

"Dear Mobius,

This is what you write on your facebook entry:

"Judaism has always been revolutionary. It seems though that every few decades the tradition becomes ensnared in a rigidity and conservatism which defies its radical roots. Jewschool is an open revolt. "

We at Kumah are for a real revolution. Not a revolution that goes against the rabbis or the establishment. Not a revolution that feels a great need to insult others or to curse to get the message across. Our revolution is a simple one: to break free of the galut, to break free of the trap of materialism, and to choose Israel.

Your long winded diatribes about how everybody is leaving Israel are meaningless because of one simple fact: the majority of Jewish people will be living in the Land of Israel within the next few years. Yes, this is due in part to Diaspora assimilation, but it is also due to a higher Jewish birthrate in Israel, and of course Aliyah. Israel is the home of the Jewish future.

Ezekeiel 37:
21 Tell them: Thus speaks the Lord GOD: I will take the Israelites from among the nations to which they have come, and gather them from all sides to bring them back to their land.
22 I will make them one nation upon the land, in the mountains of Israel, and there shall be one prince for them all. Never again shall they be two nations, and never again shall they be divided into two kingdoms.

Two Kingdoms will be reunited! What are these two kingdoms? The two great centers of Judaism today - USA and Israel.

Where will they be reunited? On the mountains of Israel.

Jeremiah 31
8 Behold, I will bring them back from the land of the north [AMERICA]; I will gather them from the ends of the world, with the blind and the lame in their midst, The mothers and those with child; they shall return as an immense throng.
9 They departed in tears, but I will console them and guide them; I will lead them to brooks of water, on a level road, so that none shall stumble. For I am a father to Israel, Ephraim is my first-born.
10 Hear the word of the LORD, O nations, proclaim it on distant coasts, and say: He who scattered Israel, now gathers them together, he guards them as a shepherd his flock.
11 The LORD shall ransom Jacob, he shall redeem him from the hand of his conqueror.
12 Shouting, they shall mount the heights of Zion, they shall come streaming to the LORD'S blessings: The grain, the wine, and the oil, the sheep and the oxen; They themselves shall be like watered gardens, never again shall they languish.

The best part is that our revolution is not just talk, it's real, it's happening. Our movie's climax are the pictures of new immigrants, real people arriving. They are not running away from anything - they are choosing Israel.

Yes - I am a Zionist and I believe Hashem is recalling the family back home. The birth of the State of Israel following the Holocaust, the return of the Jewish people to their Biblical homeland, miraculous wars, amazing success - with all the challenges - I LOVE Israel, I love its air, I love its people. I see PAST THE CYNICISM which seems to be in vogue on this site.

We're done with galut, and we are going to build an amazing Israel.
Mobius, I invite you to help spread the message of the real Revolution. "

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3. "True Jewish Heroes" by Ze'ev Orenstein
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/2006/01/true_jewish_her.php

Without Aliyah, the State of Israel would be lost.

I am not speaking merely in terms of demography, where, in the Jewish State of Israel, every time a Jew makes Aliyah or a Jewish child is born, it serves as one of the greatest expressions of Jewish / Zionist fulfillment that one can actualize today - as it helps to ensure the continued vitality of the Jewish State of Israel.

No, Aliyah plays a much greater role in strengthening the Jewish State of Israel than simply bumping up the Jewish population statistics.

To see how great a role olim play in Israeli society all one needs to do is follow Ariel Sharon's medical situation, and see who has been treating him since his stroke last week.

Sharon's Argentinean-born surgical team:

The surgical team that has performed brain surgery three times on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon reportedly treats him like any other patient, with no shaky hands or thoughts that the whole nation - and much of the world - is watching...

The chief surgeon is Dr. Jose Cohen, who, five years ago - living and working as a neurosurgeon in Argentina - would never have dreamed that he would perform lifesaving operations on Israel's leader.

Cohen, 39, was born and trained as a physician in Rosario, and subsequently specialized in Buenos Aires before coming on aliya four years ago to work at Hadassah. He is on call by his stroke unit 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Regarded as "an angel" by many of his patients, he heads a multidisciplinary team of some 20 physicians, nurses, computer experts, technicians and others...

(Felix) Umansky, 62, immigrated in 1973 and did his specialty in neurosurgery at Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva. He spent three years in the early 1980s at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Since 1984, Umansky has been at Hadassah, becoming a full professor at the Hebrew University Medical Faculty in 1991. He is an expert in surgery of the base of the skull and has conducted much basic and clinical research on microanatomy of the brain...

The three-member anesthesiology team that has taken part in Sharon's surgeries consists of Dr. Yoram Weiss, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1959; and brothers Dr. Ya'acov and Dr. David Gozal, born in 1959 and 1958 in Morocco. They both immigrated from France.
I have no doubt that all of these immensely gifted individuals could have excelled in their respective fields in their countries of birth. Yet, I doubt whether these doctors - these Jews - would have ever had the opportunity to contribute to the Jewish People on as grand a scale (and stage) had they decided against moving to Israel - had they decided against coming Home and devoting their talents and energies to their people and to their Homeland.
These doctors are true Jewish heroes and role models - at least they are in my eyes.

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4. "A Question Of Belonging" by Elaine Margolin
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1134309584745&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

ALIYA: Three Generations of American-Jewish Immigration to Israel
By Liel Leibovitz
St. Martin's Press
288pp., $24.95

Liel Leibovitz's stirring book brought me in touch with my dead father - at least the part of him that always longed for Israel. Before our family metastasized into bits and pieces shredded amidst the American continent, he would sit at our family dinner table in Long Island arguing with my mother about some of our neighbors who were contemplating making aliya; he was smitten with the idea, she frightened to death of it.

He would show us pictures of Israeli soldiers, tall and tan, their faces smiling, and his emotionally fevered pitch would escalate as he tried to imagine the emergence of the young Jewish state and its brave new warriors. My father's fervor soon cooled, but mine didn't, and I remember feeling the first pangs of alienation from my own country, wondering where exactly I belonged.

Perhaps this question of belonging is one all of us have to answer; it is a nagging quagmire for most American Jews who often feel as if they are straddling two separate realities. American life requires a constant division between our public and private selves, and being an American Jew involves an intricate and continual internal negotiation with ourselves and others. Often, many of us are pushing away longings we don't even understand.

Leibovitz, the cultural editor of the Jewish Week in Manhattan and a native of Israel where his family has lived for multiple generations, tackles the thorny issues of identity and place and how they are fused in the Jewish imagination. He chronicles the lives of three American Jewish families who made aliya to Israel in 1947, 1969 and 2001, respectively.

These moving biographical essays are not fairy-tales; they are often gritty retellings of the physical, emotional and cultural obstacles each family faced in order to become Israelis.

Leibovitz believes the decision to make aliya is an emotional one, a chance to relish the exuberance one feels when "one walks down the streets of Jerusalem, realizing that one's ancestors walked those same streets centuries ago. It is present when one experiences the depth of spirituality in Israel, the sort of spirituality that relies less on texts and ceremonies and prayers, and more on the air and the sea."

HIS FIRST story is the most compelling. Marlin Levin had returned home to Pennsylvania in 1946 after serving in the Intelligence Corps as a cryptographer. He had seen a tremendous amount of combat and was an eyewitness to the liberation of the concentration camps. Soon after returning home he found himself listless and depressed, uncertain about his future. His only obsession was to read all he could get his hands on about the struggling Jewish community in Palestine.

Fighting a growing lethargy that threatened to overtake him, Levin asked himself how he could "go to war with Germany and Japan, to fight for an ephemeral and enticing idea, freedom, yet not budge when his own people were standing trial? How could he, who had listened to his grandmother haltingly tell stories of pogroms in her native Russia, he who had witnessed the aftermath of the Holocaust, not join the struggle to ensure that such atrocities were never committed again against the Jewish people?"

Levin soon left with his young wife for Palestine in 1947, where he immediately found work as a journalist and assisted the Haganah in breaking codes - the same kind of work he had done during the Second World War. Levin, now in his 80s, can still recall the difficulties and thrills of his early years in Israel, and the joy he felt in being part of the creation of the Jewish State.

In the second essay, Leibovitz tells us about the Ginsberg family, who made aliya to a kibbutz in Israel in 1962. Mike Ginsberg's father had died suddenly, and his mother had brought him and his three brothers there in order to start a new life. Feeling ill at ease at first, the family slowly adjusted to the new customs and language. Before he married and raised three sons, Mike Ginsberg would serve in the Israeli Army, where he remains in charge of security near the Lebanese border to this day.

Ginsberg came to Israel over 40 years ago, when he was still in his teens, yet he can remember his early and intense infatuation with the Israeli Army. He remembers watching the Independence Day Parade in Haifa shortly after his arrival in Israel, thinking, "Here were Jews who could handle guns better than Bugsy Siegel and were even braver than Sandy Koufax. Here were warriors."

The third story is about Sharon and Danny Kalker and their four children. The Kalkers, an Orthodox family from Queens, arrived in 2001 to live in Hashmonaim, a small community just a few miles east of the Green Line. Marital tensions and career disappointments threatened their family's adjustment at first, but eventually each member of the family slowly learned to find their own way.

Leibovitz is a fine writer and is able to leap easily into the consciousness of another. He is not an invisible narrator; his presence and passion are felt throughout these pages. One senses he is still on his own personal journey; he is a truth-seeker, a romantic, and an Israeli perched upon a rooftop in New York trying to answer for himself the question his three families have already mastered: "Where do I really belong?"