Hebron: The Roots of Jewish Terror
Halevi, Yossi Klein
HEBRON THE ROOTS OF JEWISH TERROR Hebron is the root, to which the severed cling. Here Adam and Eve sought refuge in their exile from innocence. Here Abraham, uprooted from his father's house and...
...and worst of all, the destruction in 1929 of the ancient Jewish Quarter, the longest continuous Jewish settlement in the Land, 63 passive Orthodox Jews stabbed and burned to death, the mutilated survivors banished to Jerusalem...
...Chas v'shalom, heaven forbid...
...And they ascended into the Negev, and came to Hebron, where Ahiman, Sheshay and Talmay, the children ofAnak, were...
...The late Rav Zvi Yehudah Kook, spiritual leader of Gush Emunim, wrote: "Hebron, as a city of refuge, awakens within us feelings of responsibility and concern for every soul in Israel, even a soul as dishonored as the unintentional murderer...
...Torah was Avraham's father and mother, teaching him respect for others and for himself, and also self-control, so that he could avoid the company of other orphans begging in the streets or, chas v'shalom, God forbid, sinning...
...none had died so easily...
...So that when the Messiah comes, he will appear first here, to reveal to the world the Garden of Eden, buried, for safekeeping, in the holy city of Hebron...
...And they gaze below into the beginnings of the Jewish group soul, shimmering in and out of the deep...
...Rather than harbinger of renewed vibrancy, the randomly dispersed houses and caravans seem like skeletal remains, clinging to the fading memory of intactness, utterly peripheral to the self-absorbed Arab life going on about them...
...God gives me money...
...We're not sitting here for our own sake...
...or those seeking a Diaspora that has vanished, or a biblical past obscured by the intervening Diaspora...
...We arrived at night...
...They knew in advance of our plans...
...Aharon Gross was his study partner...
...If not for the people here, we would not have food to eat," he says...
...It opens to a picture not of its airy new building with the large windows and gym, nor to an explanation of its unique philosophy and curriculum, but to a picture of a bruised child, orphaned in the massacre, eyes wide, and what appear to be white hairs wild on his balding scalp...
...Don't judge your friend until you stand in his place.' Ahavat Yisrael is for every Jew...
...Others gathered in the Ethiopian town of Gondar, scanning the skies...
...We are asking you to do anything in any way in your possibility to save our lives, without any doubt we will not be in life very soon and the action anyway will come to stand still when our life will be over...
...Only when Jews fight back it's not normal...
...If I don't have a son...
...unlike the flimsy black cloth kippah of the Diaspora, unpinned and vulnerable to a sudden wind, its wearer restricted from vigorous movements...
...The Mishna Yoma says: When the priests prepared the morning sacrifice, a messenger was sent to see if the dawn had come...
...I can't...
...In 1970,1 was shot six times by the Milwaukee police in a firebombing attempt against a couple of buildings...
...Just make a mi sheberach for all our boys, they should come home safe...
...the Beit Hadassah Six, ambushed in 1980 while on their way home from Friday night prayers at the Cave of Machpelah...
...If not for people here, we would have no shoes...
...for the men, a new circumcision...
...But no planes came to the mountains of Ethiopia...
...Maybe for Peace Now, it's normal for Arabs to throw stones on Jews...
...Even in Jewish-Arab relations, Rav Kook might find consolation...
...its calendar the seasonal cycle, its holidays historical triumphs, its vigorous saints improving the world measurably, through mitzvot...
...I'm not deliriously happy about it: Hey, great, I'm taking that guy's house, his rug...
...But the peace movement is also right: We can't absorb a million Arabs...
...Terrified, the spies resolved to warn the Israelites: Moses has led us from the haven of Egypt to a grave...
...trailers parked behind the wholesale vegetable market, just beneath the gutted Jewish Quarter...
...we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight...
...The rabbis answer: A person has to stand strong, even against a spirit of folly...
...Some people here have the attitude that it's okay to kill Arabs...
...Perhaps this was the final uprooting for the sake of ingathering, the apocalypse before redemption...
...Light: no gloom...
...Even the barbed wire fence becomes unobtrusive from within, concealed in the modest valley that surrounds Kiryat Arba...
...The Beta Yisrael believed they were the only Jews in the world, the Covenant depending on them alone...
...I know what a gun can do to someone...
...We, not they, are the ba'alei bayit here...
...Nearly half the underground's members are from the Quarter or from Kiryat Arba, or helped establish the Jewish presence here before moving elsewhere to further the settlement effort...
...He knows the secular Zionists failed to create an enduring biblical culture because one cannot profess loyalty to distant ancestors and deny one's father and grandfather...
...The government and the rabbinate didn't recognize these Jews who had never heard of the Talmud...
...He wears a white shirt, indifferent polyester pants, sandals unstrapped like houseslippers...
...For the Hebron Jew, history no w begins in 1929...
...Moses, wrote the rabbis, was so disturbed by this act of recklessness, and so concerned that Pinchas would be taken as a model for zealotry, that he planned to excommunicate him...
...There is always a breeze here, even in the middle of summer...
...The only Jewish community in the world facing physical extinction was the only one denied Zionism's promise of refuge...
...Look what America did to its Japanese citizens-and I'm not defending that...
...And then that terrible comment by Labor Party leader Bar-Lev after the ambush at Beit Hadassah: "If they hadn't been there, they wouldn't have been killed...
...Indeed, the leader of the underground, Menachem Livni, was also chairman of the Committee for the Renewal of Hebron's Jewish Quarter...
...Tonight no Arabs will stare at a returning Jew as though he were an amnesiac absurdly confusing this place, this time, for his home...
...only the past seems to offer perfection...
...and those without fear, the Orthodox Zionists who, like blind men given sight, exult in the world, in their own materialization...
...The ruling Labor Party moved them to the compound of Hebron's military administration while it debated what to do...
...it is, in fact, happening...
...Here Abraham, uprooted from his father's house and sent wandering after uncharted stars, found his first dwelling place in the Land of Canaan...
...a Chassidic war to the death in which no tactics are too desperate or insane: some fasting in sackcloth and even painting swastikas on Israeli flags and desecrating the parental graves of archaeologists in retaliation for their stirring up the sleeping bones of the fathers...
...By linking Hebron's Jewish renewal with the underground, Gush Emunim has implicitly acknowledged the charge of its opponents: that forcing a few dozen armed settlers into an Arab-populated city must end in Arab terror and Jewish counter-terror...
...Yaakov points to his 10-year-old daughter, who is wearing secondhand clothes, proof of Kiryat Arba's generosity: high heels several sizes too big, a grey maxi skirt hanging perilously low on her hips, a matching grey t-shirt with the number "22" on its chest, a string of greyish imitation pearls at her neck...
...My lawyers were kind of telling me, 'We know where you'll be for the next fifteen years.' The political climate was not good for my future well-being...
...I can't...
...Rolling lawns and flower beds separate the white stone buildings, still new in the sun, rising and falling upon the slopes...
...their grapes were the size of boulders...
...It's fun...
...To thwart the officials, who surely would be punished when the leaders of the Land discovered what was happening, Beta Yisrael youth began appearing in the embassy wearing large wooden crosses around their necks...
...You should see our gym...
...Did we come to Eretz Yisrael to recreate the German gymnasia...
...But they have to accept reality...
...Were it not for these tours, they would never see the Israel beyond their self-contained neighborhoods...
...Rav Kook, however, understood Jewish separateness as a prelude to the coming messianic consciousness, in which the borders between Jew and gentile, even between human and animal, would be transcended...
...Why give the children a separate grammar class so that for the rest of their lives they should hate grammar...
...Because my name was Rubin, and because this was Milwaukee, I began getting all kinds of hate mail: 'You Jew,' this and that...
...it was pouring rain, our child was cranky, and this lorry from the absorption center picks us up and drives us through Lod, past these little felafel stands, mud running through the streets...
...The : Jewish presence has expanded from Beit Hadassah to sites throughout the : downtown area: crumbling stone \ buildings with large domed ceilings and damp walls, protected by soldiers in wood towers and sandbag boxes...
...But what...
...They had been separated from the Land since the First Temple, and preserved the literal Judaism of that time of origins, when the people held to the bare letters of the Torah, avoiding the spaces between them like an abyss which, only later, could be filled with commentaries and interpretations, Mishna and Talmud...
...Where others lost their love for the Land because they could no longer yearn for it, Avraham waited for the real Eretz Yisrael to reveal itself...
...Kahane is pushed to the head of a row of teenagers lined one behind the other, clutching the shoulders and waists before them as they shuffle through the crowd, colliding with the dancing circles like a chain belt cut loose and wildly swinging through the otherwise perfectly synchronized cogs...
...In June 1967, like a submerged continent whose discovery forces an instant deepening of history, Eretz Yisrael surfaced...
...Why burden the children with difficult and abstract concepts...
...In the mountains of Ethiopia, white-turbaned priests slaughtered sheep on Passover eve and smeared the blood on doorposts...
...Sarah hovers over her husband, cheeks pinched, her arms tightly crossed at her breasts as if to steady herself in this wavering box perched upon other boxes, testing man's vertical limits, so precarious that she has more than once felt the rooms swaying in the Hebron winds, and only by miracle did they not topple and crush the children playing in the dirt lot below...
...We started with the Bible...
...Who built this place if not Labor...
...Avraham knew that the officials were lying when they told him that the Law was meant only for the Diaspora, that here, in the Land, it could be violated...
...He spreads his hands apart, slowly, the most vigorous gesture he can muster...
...Yet the school's founders are not the anti-religious biblicists of early Zionism, leaping over the culture of the Diaspora to suppress all reminders of its trauma...
...They include the sons-in-law of two of Hebron's leading rabbis, Moshe Levinger, founder of Kiryat Arba, and Eliezer Waldman, head of its military yeshiva...
...Toledano says: "These boys from the underground, you think they're killers...
...The children wear large kippot clipped to their hair, the bright swirling stitches, tightly knit, covering their heads like a helmet...
...Perhaps in their excitement the white Beta Yisrael had forgotten them...
...The enemy chooses the time, the place, and the means-AND ATTACKS...
...Taking your family to the wilderness?' But 1 said to them, 'I've had hard times before and God always took care of me...
...The women gather around and repeat with him each name, conjured by a Jew fifty, a hundred times a day, no petition offered without first invoking the merit of the fathers, whose sleep is continually disturbed by a cacaphony of pleading accents, orphans repeating familial names to ward off drift...
...And the Beta Yisrael were patient...
...Throughout apartment building halls in Kiryat Arba, beside pictures of Galilee and Negev scenery meant to dispel the fear of severance from the rest of Israel, hang photographs of Jews murdered while shopping or praying in Hebron below...
...Do you know who those mayors were...
...Was a biblical hero ever stoned...
...They were not the center of divine attention but its periphery...
...But first we have to break from the ideas of Galut...
...He knows those places are not like Kiryat Arba...
...If the Beta Yisrael continued their penitence of yearning, they would some day prove to God their worthiness to return to the Land...
...Mattitya ben Shmuel says: The entire eastern sky must be lit, all the way to Hebron...
...He said to me: 'The gates of peace are opening.' That's what he said: 'The gates of peace are opening.'" The room of Abraham and Sarah leads, like an antechamber, into the vast hall of Isaac and Rebecca, its domed ceiling likewise painted in faded colors...
...In Ashkelon, in Afula, other Beta Yisrael have settled and found full-time work...
...Books are a great thing...
...Here, the Arabs only had to stay peaceful and they would live like kings...
...Are we animals that they throw stones on us...
...Who else if not the Jews...
...Will the brother-in-law of Menachem Livni come forth and take a Torah," and the crowd cheers the name of the leader of the underground...
...one mayor went so far as to promise he would personally load Ethiopians onto trucks and drive them out of his town...
...A barbed wire fence rings the area, as though it were quarantined...
...And, in fact, emissaries from the Land did appear in the villages, bringing with them maps and songs and legends of great battles...
...But I don't for a minute believe it'll come to that...
...Kahane, who once lived in Kiryat Arba, has returned to the people who in the last elections gave him the largest percentage of votes of any town in Israel...
...Avraham Nahliel is short, brown eyes wide, tight curls grey...
...The Chassidim press against the crypt, peaked with the strange pyramid as if here lay not an ancestor of the slaves but their oppressor...
...Instead, the red-and-white stripes of the crypt mock their austere dress, the gold-lettered verses of the Koran etched along the walls confound them like an unknown ancient dialect, and the barefoot Arabs crosslegged on rugs as though natural sons in their parents' home recall the goyim who seized their own homes and businesses the morning after deportation...
...On either side of the room, locked behind a bronze gate whose bars curl into Islamic crescents, a part of the wall has been hollowed to accommodate a large empty mausoleum...
...Yet this is not paranoia...
...they were loyal citizens...
...In the middle building live Yaakov and Sarah Kasa and their five children...
...the great i tzaddikim who spoke with God, judges, prophets, kings, compared to whom we are like grasshoppers, married to pagan women...
...But no matter how hard Avraham tried to disappear into himself, still they abused him...
...The world is hell, exactly hell...
...Here, anxiety is focused outward, toward the avenger waiting by the fence for a hint of weakness, an incautious moment...
...The city is so muted that the plastic strips of glitter displayed by one store suggest not gaiety but hysteria...
...The Bible is embarrassing...
...For Hebron's mountains are higher than Jerusalem's, obscuring the dawn...
...Every Jew should be knowledgeable enough to make his own halachic decisions, without having to run always to a rabbi...
...At such times, Kiryat Arba reveals that, despite its public sobriety, it is not withdrawn but poised for joy...
...Many Moroccan immigrants never overcame the shock of that moment when, their arms open for embrace, they were met instead with officious distance, so that the immigrants themselves became distant from their fellow Jews, and even, some of them, from the Land itself...
...When Avraham Nahliel was an orphan in Morocco, wandering from city to city, no place able to hold him, he dreamed of being a Torah scholar in Jerusalem...
...Somehow I knew enough to know that if the mother isn't Jewish, the child isn't either...
...They are in refugee camps...
...Here, settlers attribute it to Arab provocation, a plot to uproot the Jews or at least hem them in, create a stone and vegetable barrier as the Arab equivalent of the barbed wire fence...
...If I put a bomb on an Arab bus, I couldn't very well say then, 'Hey, you can't put a bomb on my bus, you can't kill my wife and children.' "I see an incredible amount of arrogance developing in Gush Emunim: 'We're on the one true righteous holy path and we can do anything we want.' That mentality didn't begin with the underground...
...Tiny, round Sephardi women enter the room, kissing their fingers and then waving in all directions, singing "Avraham avinu, Sarah imenu," Abraham our father, Sarah our mother...
...And so, when Zionism offered to turn the yearnings for Zion into concrete refuge, among its greatest Jewish opponents were the Orthodox, resisting any encroachment of the real upon their metaphorical Judaism...
...I had gone to Sunday school and got the requisite bar mitzvah, but after eight years of that I didn't know what tefillin [phylacteries] were...
...Later, Byzantine conquerors built a church upon Herod's incomplete structure, suppressing the old Israel beneath its weight...
...Some Beta Yisrael, hearing the news, sold their possessions and came down from the villages and waited in the towns for planes...
...Only once the Jews built here, three years later, did Arabs do the same, extending Hebron's borders to the edge of Kiryat Arba...
...The animal sacrifices will be replaced with grains and fruits, followed by levels of refinement which even Rav Kook could not envision...
...They hold each other's hands, a circle in air...
...They are honoring Rav : Be'eri tonight, however, for his imprisonment with the other members ; of the settlers' underground, now on trial for the car bomb attacks on West Bank Arab mayors, the killing of three students in Hebron's Islamic College and the mining of six Arab buses ferrying worshipers to the Dome of the Rock...
...I thought, My God, what have I done...
...They call to the Fathers in their Yiddish names, rouse them in the Hungarian accents to which their ears would be most accustomed: Avrom Yitzchok Yankev...
...David is friendly, empathic, the corners of his mouth awaiting a smile...
...They figured I'd suffered enough...
...And that's when they were being good to us...
...Another time, they tied him up and took him to the shore and, had Jews not intervened, they would have thrown him into the sea, rehearsing their design on the future Jewish state...
...Or perhaps it is the impressed stoop of a Diaspora Jew, unobtrusive, the young Avraham suppressing any gesture likely to draw attention: a careless expression that could be mistaken for mockery, a sure gait confused with strutting...
...In Talmud Torah Hebron, all subjects are derived from the Bible...
...When a Beta Yisrael went to the market to sell straw baskets, he took with him a wooden bowl, in which a Christian would deposit payment without violating the Beta Yisrael with his touch...
...His shoulders hunch, perhaps from his recent heart operation, which has left him hollow-cheeked and shaking, or from his years working as a carpenter, or the long nights bent over a holy book...
...Avraham wrote Levinger the same letter he had written Shazar, substituting Hebron for Jerusalem...
...For the women, this meant immersion into a ritual bath...
...Surely this was God's final test of their worthiness to enter the Land, one last measure of their patience and will...
...And this thing is very much sorry, that it occurs when the State of Israel is already existing...
...When will you let us feel we are really home...
...But," adds Toledano, "there are times when a loyal citizen must violate the law...
...They called themselves Beta Yisrael, the House of Israel...
...He has to feed his family...
...Sometimes you see everything at once: If we're Jews, shouldn't we live in the Jewish state...
...Everyone is good to us...
...The young orphan found refuge in Torah, learning till midnight after a long day of labor at odd jobs...
...Yimach shemam-May their names be blotted out...
...The fortress opens into an unpaint-ed hall, whose stone walls are peeling into chalk, cracks like tangled roots breaking through the damp stone floor...
...Hebron, the root, contains all possibilities...
...But Rav Kook, evolutionist and vegetarian, saw that not as the goal but as the initial stage of the messianic process...
...too much needs to be explained: The generation of the Exodus, so worthy that all subsequent generations have been on a steady spiritual decline as though slinking away in shame, prostrate before the Golden Calf...
...But to study Talmud at such an early age...
...Just like we couldn't pray at the Cave of Machpelah when they were the big shots here...
...In 1972, the Israeli rabbinate recognized the Beta Yisrael as the lost tribe of Dan...
...You think it's a joke, stones...
...that, paradoxically, only those Jews dedicated to rabbinic Judaism are best equipped to return to the Bible...
...he asks...
...Where do we go after here...
...unemployed workers accused them of taking their jobs...
...here the first Jews are buried, imprinting with death the Jewish right to the Land...
...And then spoke Caleb, as emboldened by Hebron as his comrades were cowed by it: "Let us go up at once, and possess it, for we are well able to overcome...
...I've drunk coffee in Arab homes and held their kids in my lap...
...and refraining, of course, from any sin that would force God to use a Moslem as a punishing rod against him...
...Let it emerge naturally, from the text itself...
...the Gush Emunim settlers-the Zionist Orthodox-are the only Israelis who always carry a gun...
...they cannot pour out their constricted hearts: How is it we live in such perfect continuity and still feel so fragmented...
...Yaakov says maybe he should move there too...
...In the Sudan...
...But the circles, as though programmed, continue to spin, the dancers singing so loudly they fail to notice the band has stopped playing...
...Perhaps the Jews and Moslems who worship here are praying for each other's disappearance...
...I couldn't put it aside...
...Then it's terrorism...
...Now, Kahane is a Knesset member and Levinger is leading the campaign for the settlers' underground...
...Some of the surviving chassidim and mitnagdim formed in Israel a new grouping, charedim, those who fear God, blurring the old distinction between soul and mind and creating instead a new demarcation within Orthodoxy: those who fear not only God, but all of His creation...
...their villas inching toward Kiryat Arba, rows of cabbage like mines with which to cramp the movement of the Jews...
...The Talmud Torah Hebron, Elementary School for Boys, faces the empty hills behind Kiryat Arba, away from Hebron, where no Arab villas confound the biblical view...
...Israel's rabbinate decided the Ethiopians must first undergo "symbolic conversion" to reaffirm their Jewishness, since they had for so long been severed from the Jewish people and had not followed talmudic law...
...He is goateed, tiny, so thin that one imagines his heart visible beneath his shirt, caught between his ribs...
...And they spread themselves upon the manhole as though trying to squirm through, cringing from the cavernous expanse of the room, the intolerable heights of the vaulted ceiling, its mad profusion of colored stripes...
...And they, children, the passive recipients of a world which then vanished, are left alone to mimic every remembered detail: habits and beliefs, superstition and wisdom, all the inherited traditions of equal worth...
...He has all the money he needs, all the sheep...
...A soldier wearing the pine-green uniform of the Border Patrol, a small plastic blue-and-white flag pinned to his chest like a rose, raises his fist in greeting, as though he were guarding a border of time, welcoming the Jews to their most distant past...
...On the border between the Judean farmland and desert rise the Hebron Hills, their slopes terraced with low stone walls, each patch of alternately green and exhausted earth continually reapportioned...
...Though the eleventh of Elul was a Shabbat, the Moroccan Jews on the boat took their belongings and followed the officials into lorries, convinced that the holy custodians of the Land would not dare ask other Jews to desecrate Shabbat unless it was absolutely necessary, a national emergency perhaps, and surely sanctioned by rabbinic decree...
...They were forbidden to own land in the country they once ruled, serfs harvesting the corn and grain of absentee Christian masters, uprooted like the grass on the roofs of their huts...
...and when the Nazis came, those least able or willing to fight were the Orthodox...
...It's not a simple thing...
...But not here...
...That bothered me...
...It's not a very popular solution, but I'm forced to agree with Kahane: sooner or later, we're going to have to expel the Arabs...
...A history class, a geography class, a grammar class: Why...
...they could have arrested us instead of laying an ambush...
...The Talmud is relief: There, finally, is the familiar Judaism, rational, refined, no ! unrestrained pagan urges, the comple-tion of the transition only tentatively begun in the Bible: from animal to Jew...
...But we also have to try to understand them...
...Shazar wrote a polite reply, stating that the time had not yet come for Jews to move into Arab-populated areas...
...the dance of the Jews of Hebron, rejoicing in their farthest return, only to find there the circle's end...
...The very Arab presence reminds these Jews of the massacres that have happened here: the recent murders of two yeshivas students, Aharon Gross, stabbed on a July afternoon while waiting for a hitch, and Yehoshua Salome, shot in the marketplace while buying fruits for Tu b'Shvat, the festival of planting...
...Though the Kasa family has been here a year, the apartment looks as if its occupants are just now moving in, waiting for the things that fill these rooms to animate and reveal their purpose...
...And who, besides, would care to judge his neighbor in a city of refuge...
...huddled in tight spinning rings blurring their own gradual displacement from the center of a thriving crowd to a comer of Arab Hebron, reasserting now its proper dimensions as Jewish Hebron again becomes memory...
...what can I do with it if I don't have-what...
...The black mass comes to a full jerking stop before a clover-shaped, padlocked manhole, beneath which is the inaccessible staircase leading down to the Cave...
...They fill the area where the road bulges on either side into open space: Aharon Gross Square to its right, not a square at all but a shapeless paved emptiness ending at the low stone walls of the Moslem cemetery and named for the yeshiva student killed on this spot...
...We return to the exact place of our yearning, he believed, only to be taught that we have outgrown the forms adequate for our ancestors...
...the Beta Yisrael themselves had a dozen contradictory legends about their ancestry...
...In Torah, we have the city of refuge...
...Avraham opposes the underground...
...And when Abraham heard that his brother Lot was taken captive, he led forth his trained men, bom in his house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued as far as Dan...
...They cannot sprawl upon their parents' stone, whose coldness would stroke their damp foreheads, its roughness a fatherly pinch on the cheek...
...he says, laughing, his mouth open, its scattered, yellow teeth dancing...
...In Talmud Torah Hebron, the Talmud is deferred to its not-yet-established high school...
...An eye for an eye: not, as the rabbis explained it, monetary compensation for the bodily wound, but as it is written, as it was meant by a vigorous, natural people to be practiced...
...Make for us a mi sheberach," the old woman says to the young man, demanding the prayer often said for the healing of the sick...
...but when their study was completed, they were returned to Ethiopia, forbidden to remain...
...Reshaim gedolim," Avraham says of the Moroccans, very evil men, the concept so foreign to him it is as though he were describing mythical characters...
...Because here I am a ba'al habayit...
...Here Abraham purchased the first piece of Jewish land, paying four hundred shekels of silver for the Cave of Machpelah...
...Several thousand Beta Yisrael were brought to Israel by the government of Menachem Begin, the first Israeli prime minister to meet with Ethiopian immigrants and take personal control over rescue operations...
...in Hebron, the settlers' underground was bom...
...What is the name of the sick person...
...I cannot find words to express or stress the terrible situation of all the Jews here...
...The government was able to do anything it pleased, including gunning down its own citizens in the street...
...Our job is to create an authentic Eretz Yisrael education, not to borrow the ideas and methods of Galut, of Exile...
...The people were unusually warm and it looked like a terrific place to raise a family: quiet, healthy air, beautiful hills, lots of kids...
...we're never going to be white enough...
...It offers haven to those uneasy elsewhere, just as in biblical times, when Hebron was a "city of refuge" to which an accidental murderer could flee the avenging family of his victim...
...from the Tower of Babel, ancient civilizations...
...They also had information we weren't armed, but they shot us anyway...
...His articles in these pages have included "A Legacy: On the World Gathering Of Holocaust Survivors" (September 1981), "The State Of Our Dreams" (January-February 1983), "Madmen for the Kingdom: The Complex Legacy of Lehi" (May 1984) and "Kibbutz, Cityside" (November 1984...
...Perhaps it is this sense of hopeless siege that accounts for Kiryat Arba's internal tolerance...
...a senile man who could recall the intimate details of his most distant past but of the present knew nothing...
...I'm not saying there are no problems...
...If Gush Emunim grew from protest to established settlement movement, it was because many Israelis saw it as a counterweight to the post-Yom Kippur War defeatism, a defiant response to the oil-induced pressures for Israeli concessions and to the diplomatic marginality of the Jewish state...
...The Arabs wanted to be ba'alei bayit everywhere, even here, in Eretz Yisrael, and their greed had forced religious Jews to sin...
...Like the charedim, they are committed to preserving rabbinic Judaism, {he rhythms and rituals of a lost Diaspora...
...Children throw stones at stray cats...
...Pinchas also took the law into his own hands...
...Avraham went the very next Shabbat to the Hebron military compound where the government had temporarily settled the squatters...
...Hebron, starting point for Jewish settlement in Eretz Yisrael, is Gush Emunim's spiritual home...
...What finally happened was that a friend in the absorption center took us to Kiryat Arba for a Shabbat...
...All his worries merge into the vertical lines rising from his slender nose into his forehead, the only wrinkles on his taut face...
...In a classroom over whose blackboard hangs a map of the ancient borders of Israel, stretching to Tyre and Damascus in the north and past the Jordan River to the east, and segmented into plots possessed by the 12 tribes, a black-bearded young rabbi paces the aisles, adjusting the fingers of his students to the proper place in their large-type Bibles, like the print used in books for the visually impaired...
...the elite of Hebron Jewry...
...But the reaction of the Israelis stunned me...
...We hope the Israeli government will bring them to us soon...
...Toledano is continually interrupted by teachers and secretaries...
...Some wear the old t-shirt of the Yamit squatters, its slogan, "Stop the Withdrawal from Sinai," imposed upon a black map of Israel segmented into white diagonal stripes that mark the stages of Sinai retreat, the stripes proceeding into the Negev, the central plain, Galilee, until all of Israel is severed into fragments: the fear of losing the Land on which converge nature, history, vigor...
...only some of us are too exhausted to admit it...
...To their Christian neighbors they were demons, learning their blacksmithing skills in the region of fire, where they had fashioned the nails to crucify Jesus...
...Chas v'shalom...
...and they are being tried by a judge who wears a kippah and whose sons live on Gush Emunim settlements and study in its yeshivot...
...the smallest details of his life are governed by rabbinic principles...
...After the Holocaust, many Orthodox Jews accepted the conversion of their world into air as the final verdict on the nature of the Jew...
...Until that time, they sharpened their memories on the black letters clear against the haze of yellow parchment, and kept the blank margins freed from new ideas that might obscure a precious detail and thereby sever their link with the Land...
...Settlers living elsewhere in the territones jokingly delineate four areas of Gush Emunim settlement: Judea, Samaria, Gaza-and Kiryat Arba...
...Mincha...
...here David first founded his kingdom, not yet strong enough to conquer Jerusalem...
...A year later, Avraham heard a radio interview with Rabbi Moshe Levinger, leader of the "Swiss tourists" squatting in Hebron...
...If anyone has a better plan, I'm willing to listen...
...Israeli planes were flying to remote lands and ferrying Jews home...
...The hall winds into a sunny courtyard, where soldiers lounging on folding chairs, their guns laid across their laps, and old Arab men, wearing pinstriped jackets and clashing pinstriped shirts, watch the tourists rush from room to room, in clusters, as though afraid to be alone...
...Separated only by a fence from Kiryat Arba's modest industrial area, is a new mosque, financed by the Saudis, that resembles a missile launcher: its circular base is several stories high, its pink stone spire triumphant over the buildings of the Jews...
...Hovering above one circle, hoisted on shoulders, are the leaders of Gush Emunim, sponsors of tonight's celebration...
...YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI Be not ashamed or confused Why are you downcast, why do you grieve...
...What greater joy is there in the world," he says, raising his eyes...
...Does this feel like a Galut yeshiva...
...The trial began, and it was very controversial...
...When Avraham goes to Hebron he never carries a weapon...
...So the nations will fear the God Abraham serves...
...But I don't have a choice...
...There, he saw the pristine holiness of Hebron, wedded to the State...
...eying the street to anticipate the footpaths of Moslem passersby and prepared at a moment's notice to leap out of their way...
...No point is made without the approval of a biblical passage or rabbinic saying...
...There's only one Israel...
...The ceiling is painted like a beach umbrella in stripes of yellow, red, green, colors chosen for their gaiety, but faded now, as though bleached in the sun, the room rejecting all false vigor imposed upon its years...
...My companion was killed...
...Theirpayot flow from headfuls of hair, not like the chassidic payot, stranded at the temples of a shaved head, reminders of loss, the youthful exuberance sheared like an enervated Samson...
...But for the larger questions, they can't help you...
...In the late 1940s, word spread in the villages: The Jewish kingdom had arisen in the Land and defeated seven Arab armies...
...The messiah had promised that the Red Sea would part, and thereby redress a Beta Yisrael legend that claimed their ancestors had been Israelites who arrived at the Red Sea shore too late, after it had already opened and sealed, watching their brothers on the other shore proceed to the Land while they remained in Exile forever...
...now he dwelt by the terebinths of Mamre...
...if he shows up, we'll extradite.' "Finally, my friend contacted the Israeli Embassy...
...My neighbors said, 'You've become crazy...
...But now, some of Gush Emunim's leading activists are in an Israeli jail...
...But the joy is great, perhaps, only in retrospect...
...We were open politically...
...Many of the children wear t-shirts imprinted with the names of Israel's nationalist parties, Likud, Morasha, Techiya...
...The Arabs have fled to their villas, the aqua doors of their stores are padlocked, the curved letters of their signs scattering in panic before the arrival of the Jews...
...Eretz Yisrael is definitely a one-day-at-a-time place...
...Here, among the religious pioneers of Hebron, Avraham inherited the Land...
...In the hall outside Avraham's apartment, a neighbor has posted a typed sheet in support of the settlers' underground: "THE ARABS ARE OUR ENEMY...
...For the first time, Gush Emunim is in danger of becoming peripheral even among its supporters...
...One student wears the yellow t-shirt of Meir Kahane's Kach, its emblem a Star of David squeezed from within by a fist...
...Just as Maimonides imagined messianic times: simply to be left alone by the goyim and allowed to learn in peace...
...During Passover 1968, 10 families led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger and claiming to be Swiss tourists checked into the Park Hotel...
...Some people talk about a Yamit-type last stand, only much more serious...
...But Christian pilgrims requesting visas were welcomed and processed...
...Because the go'el hadam, the avenger of blood, is chasing him...
...How can Yaakov afford to buy elsewhere without selling his apartment here...
...My wife and I both began reading...
...Pinchas: the Israelite who, seeing a prince of the tribe of Simeon bring a Midianite woman to his tent, slew the couple with his spear...
...We are a school for the children of Eretz Yisrael in Eretz Yisrael...
...On other days they have travelled to Galilee, to the tombs of the obscure, kept alive only in the infallible memories of the Chassidim...
...He will not repeat the sin of the spies, besmirching the good land to which he was brought...
...The rabbi waves his hands and nearly shouts his singsong questions and answers, as though he were addressing not 30 squirming first graders but an army about to march to its greatest victory...
...The crowds move past barricades like passport controls segmenting the narrow streets into separate domains...
...The men take turns peering into the holes as though at a planetarium, the manhole a telescope through which one can attempt to count the infinite lights...
...Finally, Moslem conquerors converted the church into the mosque that stands today, imprinting themselves here so totally a visitor would assume the Patriarchs had been princes of Islam...
...Before that, it's a bit of a story...
...Still the planes didn't come...
...the disinherited heirs of Abraham become not merely the spiritual but the physical Israel, usurping the Jews at the source...
...The Chassidim have become guardians of the graves, their link to the Land confined to those buried within it, an entire community turned into a chevre kaddisha, a burial society...
...What do you think Yamit was about...
...Kiryat Arba recalls the post-1967 neighborhoods built to broaden Jerusalem, as though it too were one of those neighborhoods suddenly cut adrift, extending Jerusalem's boundaries too far before realizing the rest of the city hasn't followed...
...Someone begins to sing, "V'shavu banim ligvulam," the sons will return to their borders, and hundreds of others join in the words of prophesy whose vindication they are: the generation that should have been the last of the Jews, recoiling from its violation full circle back to this place of innocence...
...No vengeance: a ba'al habayit can afford magnanimity...
...Above them crisscross strings of bulbs frosted purple and yellow, dark blue and bright orange, as though a flame has been sifted and subdued into its component colors, the night fading in and out of the alternately brooding and radiant lights...
...Falashas fled their villages and crossed the border to Sudanese camps crowded with starving refugees from the revolution...
...it just passed me by...
...A few Beta Yisrael were even taken to Europe for enlightenment...
...Near the gate's entrance, which is unguarded except at night, is a small commercial strip, its only frivolity a fast-foods caf6, concession to the many soldiers passing through...
...Two empty crypts, festive in red and white stripes, sit like crates in the middle of the hall, each capped with a blue pyramid from whose peak extends a gold scepter, small gold circle on its tip, the quarter moon of Islam in full blossom...
...One of the Sephardi women announces to the tourists: "I saw him like I'm seeing you...
...They deserve their own state...
...At a meeting between Israel's chief rabbis and immigrant leaders, one Beta Yisrael elder said: "Through all the generations of our persecution, our worst enemies never imagined a way to hurt us the way we have been hurt by our own brethren...
...A stone is a weapon, just like a grenade...
...The rabbi sings a biblical verse, and the students, screeching, repeat the chant, each word of more than one syllable rising and falling in a happy key: "And there came one that had escaped and told Abraham the Hebrew...
...And the City of the Fathers fell to Caleb as an inheritance, for he had sought comfort from evil counsel among the ancestors in Hebron...
...In the resulting chaos, Beta Yisrael were slaughtered by right-wing gangs and left-wing gangs, for supporting the revolution, for supporting the monarchy, for Zionism, for sorcery, for turning Christian corpses into mules, for Queen Yehudit who had burned the churches a thousand years before...
...No country in the world was willing to take me in, except Israel...
...I don't, however, foresee it getting a lot better with the Arabs...
...We went to see a representative at the Israel immigration office, and he was very wary...
...But there is no maliciousness in his laughter, only amazement at imposing such a confining model on the children of Eretz Yisrael...
...and, when he looks at his children in their strange costumes, wondering, perhaps, how it is possible that the biblical Jews could be returned to the Land, to Hebron itself, only to be transformed into something unrecognizable...
...They weren't maniacs, these boys...
...His blond hair and full beard are greying, his cheeks are round and red: a face waiting for its components to agree on a common identity...
...Even here, they were Falasha, strangers...
...The thin braided tzitzit along the sides of their pants don't dangle in mid-air, candlewicks waiting to be burned, but reach down like roots...
...Dozens of Chassidim crowd near Isaac's uninhabited stone hut, which marks his burial spot in the Cave below...
...If we go back to those eight-mile-wide borders, there's no way the Arabs will resist trying to cut us in half...
...In 1972 I married Rivka, who wasn't Jewish at the time...
...and only when God assured Moses that Pinchas had acted with Divine guidance was the verdict stayed...
...Just like by abba and imma...
...Exiled from the temporal, ghetto Orthodoxy subverted Judaism to its opposite purpose, not the perfection of physicality but its neutralization, disembodying nature by observing in strange climates the seasonal rhythms of the Land, turning history into metaphor for an individual's spiritual struggles, banishing the impact of mitzvot to unseen realms: a vicarious religion exchanging for physicality the memory of physicality, a poltergeist clinging to the cherished place it could no longer inhabit...
...I go everywhere to visit...
...They are the first Jews without ancestral graves...
...They hold each other's hands and dance in the center of a clapping circle...
...Yaakov says the people of Kiryat Arba have made him feel at home...
...Fixed at the center of his consciousness is the passivity of the ghetto, demanding of his every action its own negation...
...I say I'll take my family and move back across the 'green line.' I came to live in a Jewish state, and if its government makes what I consider to be a stupid mistake, it's still my government...
...it was not possible that the Christians would triumph even here, in the building that flew the blue-and-white banner of the Land...
...Soviet Jews, including Trotsky's grandson, fleeing a dissipating universalism to a Jewish nationalism that strains against its self-imposed limitations and so sees in its own liberation a cosmic messianic process...
...there were no visas available, not even for tourists...
...Inside, he discovered the graves of Adam and Eve, and, just beneath them, the opening to the Garden...
...Its dimensions are untenable: a small square base supporting a towering vaulted ceiling...
...Because until all of the Jewish people is home, I still have one foot in Exile...
...to prevent from happening to them what was happening to other Moroccan children, as though, coming into the Land, an entire generation had suddenly become orphaned...
...A single road circles the huddled buildings like a moat, an army jeep always on patrol...
...Few cars disturb the unusual quiet...
...He checked out Cuba, the Scandinavian countries, a whole bunch of places, and they all basically said, 'Hey, don't bother us, it's a criminal case...
...If you're not a member of the PLO, you can't even get in there...
...The crowds emerge into Hebron's main street, a narrow road without storefronts or sidewalks that was not built for lingering...
...Even their political struggles revolve around the real or imagined violation of bones, the desecrations of secular Israel culminating in a literal trampling on the ancestral graves...
...The wounded of my people will find refuge in you The city rebuilt on its ancient site...
...Just to say that they all about to die...
...Racial jokes were told loudly in their presence...
...it is not to be considered the norm...
...It was the height of the Nixon years...
...When the State of Israel was declared, Avraham, married now with young children, rushed with his family to the first available boat...
...The state has an obligation to democracy-until the state decides it has to act for self-preservation...
...A three-year-old girl here in Kiryat Arba nearly died from a slingshot wound that just missed her brain...
...Kahane, black beard grey at the tip, laughs too, bent as though overcome with merriment...
...The Beta Yisrael were confronted with cosmic vastness...
...As if the Law had been suddenly reversed and one could be murdered simply for living in a city of refuge...
...They wrenched time from its crazed deviations and steadied it for all generations to the First Temple, when the Land and its people were merged, so that when the Beta Yisrael would finally be returned, the Land would recognize them, embrace them as Jacob did Joseph...
...The Beta Yisrael waited...
...History was not circular, striving backward to a lost golden age, but progressive, an irreversible process toward interdependency of all life...
...Not a dot from your Torah have we changed, even your clothes we still wear, your black silk bekechers, your swirling fur streimls which you wore every Shabbos . . . But the biblical shrine offers no mirror returning their own image...
...Lamentations Upon the subterranean Cave of Machpelah rises a massive stone fortress without windows, as though the rectangular structure, the color of sand, were itself buried underground, none but those already within permitted to enter...
...and only when they came to the Land did they remove the crosses and ask for asylum under the Law of Return...
...Knesset member Meir Kahane appears...
...It was an anti-Vietnam protest, but that's all I'd prefer to say about it...
...Look around you," he says...
...but its territory gradually dissolved into isolated, indefensible fragments...
...Elsewhere in Judea and Samaria, that process might be offered by settlers as proof of the prosperity brought by Israeli occupation...
...Ten years ago tonight, Gush Emunim staged its single most successful event, Operation Hakafot, Operation Dancing, sending thousands of protesters to prospective settlement sites throughout Judea and Samaria...
...Ten years later, a group of Kiryat Arba women occupied Beit Hadassah, a Jewish-owned building on Hebron's main street abandoned in the 1929 pogrom...
...Our situation is very complex...
...He speaks with measured passion, as though constantly examining his words and forcing from them new depths of honesty: "I'm living in Kiryat Arba since 1977...
...or the Moroccan Jew who desires the completeness of Torah in the Land and finds instead a wildness that undermines its laws...
...Severed from the surrounding hills, Kiryat Arba relaxes into itself...
...No person sins except that a spirit of folly enters him.' So why should he be punished...
...His uzi rests beside him like a staff...
...It had to be a bureaucratic mistake...
...The inner city through which most of the Jewish dwellings are scattered is meant only for shopping...
...black Jews from Ethiopia, sent by the government because here their presence is not simply tolerated but requested...
...yet it remains intimate...
...And why...
...I heard there's a curfew tonight for them...
...all the questions he cannot yet articulate and that jumble together, one contradicting the other: how it was possible for the Israeli government to know what was happening to the Beta Yisrael and wait for so long to bring them to the Land...
...The journalist asks Toledano if he is concerned about the effect of Rav Dan's arrest on the students...
...Photographs by Michael Fein...
...The commentaries have already been written...
...When that went unanswered, he wrote again, and yet a third time, until, finally, Levinger responded, and invited Avraham to Hebron for Shabbat...
...two former chairmen of the Kiryat Arba municipal council...
...Esther Ohana already died from a stone...
...I'm not proud of carrying it, I don't get pleasure out of it...
...What is this, stones...
...The men squat close to the ground, spread their black coats like parachutes, and peer through the tiny apertures of the bronze manhole, squinting at the pinpricks ot light below, inverted stars...
...Secularists are welcomed...
...Like that 'college' in Shechem where the army found thousands of manuals on how to make bombs...
...Why did Abraham choose as his burial place the Cave of Machpelah...
...He shrugs and smiles to the journalist...
...back to when the symbols of Torah were transmitters of Divine intervention, receptacles of visible energy...
...the Avraham Avinu synagogue turned into a public latrine...
...The several thousand people here : tonight have come to celebrate He...
...from the verse, "Now Abraham and Sarah had grown very old, and Sarah was past the age of child-bearing," sexual reproduction...
...Return us to You and we will return...
...But more terrible still is the memory of 1929, not the massacre itself but the passivity of its victims, the young Talmud students and frail rabbis so used to deferring to the Arabs that they had rejected the protection of the Haganah...
...The Jews would not treat them the way they had treated the Jews...
...only there could its ways be perfected...
...So I began to think a Jew is never going to fit in here...
...Close to 5,000 people live here...
...I'm not happy with expulsion, but I think it's not only for our own good, but ultimately also for the good of the Palestinians...
...Many became hidden Jews and tried to maintain a kingdom of memory...
...Some villagers, restless, trekked to the Israeli Embassy in Addis Ababa, hoping for visas to the Land...
...the Jewish houses sacked, hollowed, their stone doorposts chiselled away to erase the indentations where the mezzuzot had been ripped out, denying even the memory of desecration...
...He begins: "Mi sheberach avoteinu, Avraham, Yitzchak, Yaakov," He who blessed our fathers, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob...
...Look, I know from my own life how things are done...
...Another said: "For thousands of years we suffered for the Torah...
...One young nurse at Shaare Zedek Hospital, where entire wards were filled with Ethiopian children, said: "I always felt a mixture of guilt and envy that I wasn't bom when the great waves of immigrants came, and there were real sacrifices to make...
...Every child in Talmud Torah Hebron can recite the details of the massacre, knows of every Jewish symbol sullied here as brutally as anywhere in the Diaspora: the cemetery stones dug up and replaced with a tomato patch...
...And despite his acts of random rage, he cannot defeat those who wish to exile him again from here, because in the end it is Hebron itself he must defeat...
...He said to us, 'Why don't you go first for a visit?' We told him, 'We've got just enough money for these tickets...
...Yaakov has found only part-time work in Kiryat Arba's small industrial zone...
...Beside it is a picture of torn and singed Torah scrolls...
...The words of the afternoon prayer speed from their pressed lips as though on a higher vibration, or else simply a mumbling buzz, nonsense syllables which once formed words whose meanings explained everything, but are now welded together, one indiscernable from the next, Hebrew reduced to a single emanation...
...Here, in the burial place of those Jews who lived not only before the Talmud but before Torah, the Beta Yisrael were embraced...
...Once, a group of Moslems put a knife to his throat...
...They didn't do it to the German-Americans-just another case of American racism...
...Not until the 16th century, when the Portuguese explorers came and sold guns to the Christians, were the Beta Yisrael soldiers, armed with spears and swords, driven onto cliffs, slitting one another's throats rather than surrender into slavery...
...if a Beta Yisrael had physical contact with a stranger, he would immerse in water and remain outside his village till sunset...
...Kiryat Arba rises suddenly...
...Alone among yeshivot, Talmud Torah Hebron draws its entire curriculum from the Bible, chronicle of Jewish intactness, Israel in its youth, at once physically rooted and divinely linked...
...He arrived on the eleventh of Elul, a new date added to his sacred calendar...
...So I had a friend quietly contact foreign embassies, to inquire what if I happened to show up in their country and ask for asylum...
...But the Law of Return, which offered refuge to every Jew in the world, did not include the Beta Yisrael...
...Some village children were even sent to the Land, for study...
...But Yaakov cannot leave Kiryat Arba...
...I've had no regrets since...
...They rush back and forth between the opposite gates, as if continually recalling something they forgot to say, their outstretched palms quivering up and down, slowly, like an uncertain scale...
...Kiryat Arba faces outward with small windows, squinting, attempting to see only the outline of rolling hills and deny the details upon them: the Arab houses taunting the compressed Jews with their agility on the Land, sidling close to Kiryat Arba, as though on a dare, their crops ending at the fence...
...That, too, is a curse of Galut...
...We are worried about our families," Yaakov Kasa says, looking down, his body frozen...
...Avery significant Jew, Uzi Sharabaf...
...Perhaps the stonings, mocking the Jews in their biblical pretense, are even worse than terrorist attacks...
...Esther Ohana, killed by a stone fired from a slingshot...
...Because he saw a divine light radiating from its entrance...
...It turned out that the police had acted illegally in shooting me six times and killing my friend...
...I was a leftist...
...Perhaps the rabbis could be forgiven their suspicion of Beta Yisrael origins...
...Yaakov sits, unmoving, palms pressed together, as if cementing the two sides of his body...
...when the Jew spoke to God and God answered, in clear, unmistakable words, nothing less compensating for centuries of divine silence...
...The men instantly sway, furiously, as though attempting to flee their bodies, thrusting backward and forward, but in vain, their bodies clinging to their coattails, anticipating even the most desperate sudden lurch...
...Rav Kook died in 1935...
...Worse, the underground members being celebrated in Hebron were arrested by Israel's most hawkish government, led by Yitzhak Shamir and others who had joined Gush Emunim against Begin on the Sinai withdrawal...
...In the 19th century, the white Beta Yisrael appeared...
...The deafening music prevents him from speaking with the many well-wishers who crowd around him, laughing as they pat his back...
...When mincha ends, the Chassidim rush from the crypt, their feet barely touching the ground, an interlocking mass of black choking all space within itself and propelled forward as though pushed or pursued...
...Every one a PLO leader...
...the attack on Hebron's Islamic College followed the stabbing of Aharon Gross...
...Of course, my attitude towards Israel had changed, and now I knew a lot more about anti-Semitism...
...But when the children of Jacob came to bury their father in the Cave, Esau blocked their way...
...Teenage girls forming rings of pressed fingertips bounce three steps forward, turn their heads, hop and kick, the last hora enthusiasts...
...But for the Beta Yisrael, every insult was magnified by their knowledge of their country's reluctance to admit them...
...Then, a democratic government can shoot its own citizens in the street...
...When they recognize among one another's shadows the bright round knitted kippot, their pace quickens, they nearly leap with the joy of sudden release as they realize that tonight only Jews are on the streets, as though the Arabs have all been evacuated...
...The absolute last place in the world I wanted to go to was Israel...
...Every night, says Yaakov, there are classes here in Jewish history and ritual, all that has happened between the First Temple and the Beta Yisrael return to the Land...
...Then my wife got pregnant...
...But perhaps the main attraction of Gush Emunim was its ability, as much by default as by intention, to lay claim to the pioneering past abandoned by a depleted secular Zionism, its young religious settlers in sandals and workshirts restoring Zionism's youth and claiming the legitimacy of its precious symbols...
...Other Israeli realities marred the homecoming of the Beta Yisrael...
...For charedim, however, no trauma must be overcome, because their destroyed world persists, its constricted model a perfect reproduction...
...We never dreamed that we would come back here, only to be told we weren't really Jews...
...Evolution reverses before the abyss...
...your problem is being dealt with...
...He did not live to see the revelation of evil that has stunned his followers back into a biblical literalness...
...Clqthing depots were set up throughout the country...
...I show every human being a pleasant face...
...One of the women, wearing a faded floral dress and floral kerchief tied like a bonnet beneath her throat, approaches a young man praying quietly in a comer...
...In Toledano's office are stacks of Talmud Torah Hebron's glossy promotion brochure...
...I can't even remember the Six Day War...
...The anakim inhabited fortresses like towers of Babel...
...If that's what America did to them, what would it do in our place, with Arabs who are a very real threat...
...For me, justice is to make sure the single Jewish state survives, not to create Arab state number 23...
...It was a long process...
...the people aren't so good as they are here...
...apocalyptic pessimists for whom the root is the safest underground shelter in the coming fire...
...The Japanese-Americans were no threat...
...Large windows...
...But being Jewish still didn't affect my personal life...
...We have a government and we have to respect its laws, even when we don't agree with them...
...and though her kingdom gradually was constricted to the highest mountains, it endured...
...In its ingathering of Diaspora fragments, mirroring human diversity, Kiryat Arba implicitly concedes the universalism that the Jewish people, according to Rav Kook, by nature embodies...
...how, having been rescued, he and his family could find their refuge turned into a prison...
...I thought, Why are people making this distinction...
...I was asking for help and they were willing to give it to me just because I was a Jew...
...Our rabbis today can tell you how to steep tea on Shabbat...
...Why do I pray for all the exiles to come home, if I myself am already in the Land...
...What do they want us to do, sit on our hands like ghetto Jews...
...It had to be a misunderstanding, not at all malicious: just as the Beta Yisrael had not at first believed there could be a white Beta Yisrael, perhaps the government had not yet adjusted to their existence...
...I did what I did for the good of all Americans...
...This is our absolute last stop...
...Their basic attitude was, 'Hey, if you make it into Palestine, you're in.' The old Aliyah Bet, illegal immigration, mentality...
...All ancestral graves are interchangeable now, because the layered stones upon which succeeding generations built have been shattered and scrambled, the face of the first father merged into the face of the last...
...What happened next was that I was recuperating on bail in my parents' house...
...And he divided against them by night, he and his servants, and smote them, and pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left of Damascus...
...Each chest-shaped stone, approximating the burial spot of Abraham and Sarah in the Cave below, is covered with a green Persian carpet, its patterns obscured, inlaid with dust...
...Except for a flat straw basket covered with swirls and a broken imitation cuckoo clock, the white walls are bare, smudged as if with the groping fingerprints of a blind man...
...What finally happened was that the court had mercy on me and let me go with a heavy fine...
...or the way they were" packed onto trucks like prisoners, the dour faces of the officials not bothering to conceal their ambivalence towards the human material entering the Land...
...we didn't know much about what was going on...
...Here, in the root which has not yet been branched, rabbis and kadis together preside over the Cave, offering a model for joint rule of the Jews' Judea and Samaria and the Arabs' West Bank, the only solution befitting holy land...
...As etherealness became timidity, the Orthodox Jew forgot how to survive...
...When he says the word, "Torah," he laughs, stretching its latter vowel into an exclamation of delight...
...twice before in this century, on Zionism and on Nazism, those abstractions failed him...
...Once, I was driving with someone to Hebron...
...Rav Dan wrote them an open letter explaining that what he did was only because of unusual circumstances...
...You see...
...Do they think they can do to us here what they did to us in Galut1...
...members of the original "Swiss tourists" group...
...When the spies returned to the desert, they declared: "The cities are great and fortified up to heaven...
...But the Beta Yisrael, who once were said to number a million, continued to lose their people to disease, attacks and now to new Christian missionaries from the West, whose aid was often more substantial than that of the white Jews...
...Kiryat Arba is protecting Jerusalem, not the other way around...
...For charedi yeshivot, the Bible is a children's primer, dispensed with as soon as the student is strong enough to carry a volume of Talmud...
...In 1977, the monarchy was overthrown by a pro-Soviet revolution...
...I'm not about to fight the Jewish people...
...But that paradox ultimately undermines the Orthodox Zionist, because the rabbinic Judaism he seeks to preserve neutralizes the biblical vigor meant to infuse it...
...Avraham never, chas v'shalom, joined those Moroccans longing for the Exile like the tribes in the desert dreaming of Egypt...
...Only the settlers come here alone, unafraid, ba'alei bayit...
...The slave trade in Beta Yisrael resumed...
...To the right of the courtyard is the room devoted to Abraham and Sarah...
...bron the pioneer, this time as the first '¦ Arab-populated West Bank city successfully penetrated by Jews...
...I'm not saying it's the most just solution...
...The | crowd responds with the song of Ex-| ile, "Tzion halo tishali I'shlom assirayich, Zion, won't you ask about the well-being of your prisoners...
...There's a national consensus for our being here...
...at night they turned themselves into scavenging hyenas and kidnapped Christian babies and drank their blood...
...and only when Chushan ben Dan drew his sword and severed Esau's head could Jacob be buried among his fathers...
...Or Talmud: no one will argue its importance...
...he remained on board with his family till sundown, watching the shore, the Land of Israel just beyond reach...
...I installed them...
...Its side entrance is narrow, surreptitious, the building's only flair the rounded turrets that fail to dispel its prison-like facade...
...Kahane is raised atop sturdy shoulders and handed a giant Israeli flag on a pole, and laughs as he points the flag forward, leading the charge...
...The classroom windows are unusually large for any school, and inconceivable for a yeshiva, as if deliberately inviting the students to daydream into the landscape...
...To whom...
...The faded blue-green stores on the short, twisting side streets that surround and conceal the shuk offer burlap sacks of spices and trays of diagonally-cut pastries and bowls with sheeps' heads floating in their own blood to the constantly moving crowds of Arab women in uniform grey housecoats...
...Even a loyal Orthodox Jew must sometimes violate the Law...
...When one's gaze remains inward, Kiryat Arba becomes the most tolerant Orthodox community in Israel...
...But for occasional political graffiti, the stone walls are empty, without even the elsewhere common, brightly-painted Mid-East movie posters...
...unlike other Orthodox areas, no roadblocks deter Shabbat drivers here...
...I bought the whole line...
...Within this space, the crowds form dancing circles...
...Patience, said the emissaries...
...When Passover ended, they revealed themselves as settlers and refused to leave...
...But who will Abraham leave it all to...
...Kahane had denounced Levinger as a traitor, and sent his Kach followers into Levinger's living room, fistfighting with Levinger's wife, Miriam...
...With Rav Dan away . . Rav Dan Be'eri, founder and principal of Talmud Torah Hebron, is away in jail, a member of the settlers' underground...
...if we go for a visit, who knows when we'll go back to live.' "In December 1976, we made aliyah...
...Sephardim looking for cheap apartments, and finding in Kiryat Arba an Ashkenazi respect for their culture...
...And so to the Cave fled Caleb ben Yefunah, spy from the tribe ofJudah, seeking assurance that this first glimmer of permanent exile was deceptive, and the wandering Israelites would find refuge in the Land...
...Building contractors volunteered to renovate homes for the new immigrants...
...Low mats of grape vines surround the houses, and squat olive trees, their branches bending toward the earth...
...A son...
...They have Jordan, which is»histori-cally part of Palestine...
...In the mountain enclaves to which they had fled, the Beta Yisrael were hunted like rare animals, sold as slaves as if there had been no Exodus, their children abducted into monasteries...
...Much as he tries, he can flee no further back...
...and to the villages came European Jews passionate for the black Jews who recalled the time of Israel's innocence...
...More Jews have been killed in Hebron than anywhere else in Judea and Samaria...
...But this night remains, above all, a celebration, not just of Simchat Torah and of reborn Jewish Hebron, but of Gush Emunim itself...
...The miracle of life in Eretz Yisrael: even one's physical labor is part of the work of Torah...
...Later, following his self-inflicted circumcision, Abraham returned to Hebron, to heal, perhaps from an intimation of the suffering he had just released into the world...
...Everything is taught here in a living context, not isolated in artificial categories...
...Families built their huts near a river to allow for ritual bathing, so frequent the Ethiopians could tell a Beta Yisrael by the smell of water on his body...
...But if light has appeared even over Hebron, then surely the time for Temple service has come...
...Only one thing...
...With our longing for the past at once fulfilled and frustrated, we can then resume our spiritual ascent...
...Nothing less than the spoken word of God, imply the rabbis, can sanction the behavior of a Pinchas...
...Israelis, reminded of the purpose for their economic and military troubles, embraced the barefoot refugees who had trekked hundreds of miles, some of them carrying dying relatives on their backs...
...They are everywhere: their children playing with Kiryat Arba's children in the numerous little playgrounds that fill the town's empty spaces, the women in bright bulbous kerchiefs and white sheets over long embroidered dresses, teenage boys in jeans and t-shirts and tiny knitted kippot pinned flat against their tight round hair, old men with wooly white beards, the rims of their dusty fedoras entirely lowered or raised...
...As the founder of Kiryat Arba, mingling with the highest government officials, Levinger had barred the disreputable Kahane from Gush Emunim circles, had even convinced the Likud government to dismantle Kahane's settlement, El Nakam, God of Vengeance, in the Hebron Hills...
...From stone alleys whose darkness is relieved only by the distant lights of Arab villas on the surrounding hills, groups of Jews appear...
...The Jews lived in Morocco for thousands of years, but they never forgot they were guests, deferential to their brutal hosts...
...Look, there are 22 Arab states...
...Charedim are the only Jews in Israel who don't serve in the army and who can't handle a gun...
...Posters supporting the underground members and bearing rows of their snapshots-fat and jovial and mustached, lean and bearded and intense-hang on the stone walls of the Moslem cemetery, and, nearby, on the high circular railing surrounding the six-pointed marble memorial to Aharon Gross...
...Yigal Allon, author of the famous peace plan...
...And they clutch the rounded sides of the manhole, huddle into one another as they realize, too late, that they are separating through a widening sieve, all they once remembered loosening, the solidity containing the holes dissolving, and they feel themselves drifting away...
...Patiently: they would not repeat the tragedy of a hundred years before, when the villages emptied and barefoot Beta Yisrael had followed a mad messiah and died by the thousands on a futile exodus to the Red Sea...
...For Sarah, there are classes in modem life, like how to make vegetables emerge from the frozen blocks sold in colored boxes...
...A clarinet and organ play chassidic songs over loudspeakers, the frenetic pace of the mournful music simulating joy...
...Tonight is a time of reunion for those who participated in Operation Hakafot and now live in thriving settlements built on those empty hills, a night of rejoicing in the extraordinary success of Gush Emunim...
...Orthodoxy divided into rival camps of chassidim and mitnagdim, advocates of the soul and of the intellect, as though, too long in i proximity to Christianity, Judaism had ! abandoned its mediation between ' spirit and matter and accepted the Christian despair of the world...
...So faithfully did the Beta Yisrael conjure the forms of the Land, signalling to God their preparedness to return to it, that they recreated the kingdom of David and Solomon...
...Couples, including the elderly, were told their marriages were invalid and required a new ceremony...
...A son...
...Every morning I davened in the Cave of Machpelah with Uzi Sharabaf, Rav Levinger's son-in-law...
...Till the seventh step: from there Jews could peek inside...
...as they aim their cameras and videos at the sites they will notice only later, spies gathering masses of random information whose relative importance they cannot determine...
...An Orthodox Jew, Toledano seeks validation for his break with rabbinic authority and finds it in the Bible, in Pinchas: murdering without due process and ignoring Moses and the Elders, who might have displayed the caution of the rabbis, who branded as cruel a court that once in 70 years condemned a man to death...
...The most Islamic of West Bank cities, Hebron resists all penetration...
...Government officials calmed the Ethiopians: All immigrants have had similar difficulties...
...Dentists offered free treatment...
...and to the tombs of the famous, like Rabbi Akiva, whose flesh was torn by the Romans with giant iron combs, and like Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, still performing miracles, vibrant from beyond the grave...
...They were told by Israeli officials to go home...
...He couldn't help himself...
...Hey, it's okay to fight the Israeli army.' "People here ask each other what will be if the government gives up the territories...
...For here, in Israel's potential Belfast, is the only shrine shared by Jew and Moslem: the Cave of Machpelah, where Isaac and Ishmael together buried their father, Abraham...
...Not at all...
...But it is precisely the boldness of his action, not the cautious afterthought of the Rabbis, that moves Toledano to invoke Pinchas...
...Often, on an ordinary week night, dancing crowds will fill the circular street, escorting a groom to his bride, oraTorah scroll written for four fallen soldiers to the yeshiva in which they studied...
...In the northwest comer of Ethiopia, perched between Christian and Moslem tribes, in mud-walled and grass-coned villages hidden in steep mountain refuges remote from any road, lived the biblical Jews...
...Isaac, too, came to Hebron to recover, immediately after his reprieve from the altar, stunned into becoming the most ethereal of the fathers, withdrawn and morose...
...To whom...
...The Ethiopians called them Falasha, strangers...
...There is no sick person," she says, annoyed...
...Our goal is to produce religious doctors, leaders, engineers, army officers...
...A college...
...Toledano laughs at his mention of the gymnasia, the educational system popular in the early years of the Yishuv...
...Meanwhile, my prospects for the trial began looking better, and I dropped the idea of fleeing abroad...
...One by one, relatives of the arrested men are summoned to a flatbed truck and handed Torahs...
...When I heard that Uzi was the one who had done it, I couldn't believe it...
...The attack on the Arab mayors was in retaliation for the murder of six Jews at Beit Hadassah...
...here Caleb dissented from the defeatism of the spies and urged the invasion of Canaan...
...Everything comes from Torah and everything returns to Torah...
...And here began the Israeli settlement of Judea and Samaria...
...In Morocco, I had no Arab friends...
...And so he makes this compromise: He will consult the rabbis on how long to steep tea on Shabbat, but on the larger questions of life and death he refuses to be burdened by their abstract concepts...
...Lots of media coverage...
...A glass-encased breakfront is empty, awaiting the porcelain dogs and gondolas with which Israelis fill their living room displays...
...Not just rabbis...
...Yet Hebron contained not only giants barring entry to the Land but also the Cave of Machpelah, burial place of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, receptacle of the promise of triumphant Jewish settlement...
...When Aharon Gross was killed in the middle of the day in front of hundreds of Arabs, Uzi lost his head and went into the Islamic College...
...Though there is room for them to spread comfortably around the large crypt, the Chassidim remain huddled along one side, several layers removed, restless eyes darting as though attempting to stroke the stones their tangled arms cannot reach...
...When Abraham came to purchase the Cave of Machpelah, the people of Hebron so welcomed him that they offered the burial site as a gift...
...But when they threw rocks, even murdered...
...Yimach shemam," he adds for emphasis, may their names be blotted out, pronouncing the Hebrew guttural "chet" like a breath, "het," as though trying, on second thought, to soften his harsh words...
...An Orthodox Jew, Rav Kook believed the Temple would be rebuilt and its animal sacrifices resumed...
...Indeed, Rav Kook might see in Hebron Jewry a new people trying to be bom...
...In that spirit must we rebuild the City of the Fathers...
...Perhaps the planes had approached but could not land...
...Mayors of several hard-pressed towns publicly told the Ethiopian immigrants to stay away...
...Back to that time when the sound of the shofar could topple walls, the mere sight of the Ark scatter Israel's enemies in flight...
...To restore us to the farthest root, beyond even Abraham: back to the Garden...
...They kill us so we should be allowed to kill them.' That's crap...
...But it is very hard...
...One town in Israel requested the honor of receiving Beta Yisrael immigrants: the City of the Fathers, Kiryat Arba...
...He made immediate plans for his permanent return...
...Even after the band and the man selling cotton candy have all gone home, and departing chartered buses have thinned the crowd to a few hundred...
...And so they reciprocated the revulsion of their neighbors, confirming themselves as Ethiopia's untouchables...
...The boys grip one another's shoulders and spin, encircling their friends who rapidly wave large Israeli flags, blue and white smoke rings, mimicking the circles below...
...It was a real shock...
...And so they prowl the Land in search of the elusive burial site of mameh and tateh, and arrive, finally, here, at the deepest family grave...
...Avraham wandered from moshav to town, trying to feed his children, and to keep words of the Torah in their mouths, so that they would remain as Jewish in the Land as they would have been in Morocco...
...Conditions in Ethiopia, and perhaps, too, an embarrassing public campaign against the Israeli failure to rescue Ethiopian Jews, persuaded the government to move...
...God doesn't want that...
...To whom...
...Israeli emissaries were ferreting out Jewish children hidden in Polish monasteries, Afghani Moslem tribesmen rumored to possess Torah scrolls, prowling the most hidden comers so that no Jew would be excluded from the great ingathering...
...Maybe for Galut it was fine to take second-rate teachers for the cheder, those who couldn't find jobs anywhere else...
...But, says Avraham, laughing, the Messiah is coming...
...Kiryat Arba encourages no internal barriers of any kind...
...Days after the reunification of Jerusalem, Avraham wrote a letter to President Shazar: Adoni, sir, I am a simple Jew, all my life dreaming of ascending to Jerusalem...
...I love it out here...
...Rav Be'eri, a French convert to Juda-i ism, is founder of Kiryat Arba's renowned yeshiva elementary school, ! Talmud Torah Hebron, whose inte-j grated curriculum is based entirely on the Bible...
...pulling bystanders into their snake dance, pace quickening, until they no longer dance but run, laughing, stumbling teenagers trying to catch onto the racing bodies before them...
...An eye for an eye: they had turned their gaze to an alien place, and now they would be kept from the Land which, like Moses on Mount Nebo, they strained, once a year, to see: the white-robed pilgrims following the chanting priests bearing Torah parchments and ascending Mount Sigd, slowly, like old men, up the well-trod path to the top of the mountain, facing Jerusalem, not even its outline visible, only a haze in the farthest distance rising like smoke from the ruins...
...It is very dangerous for a Jew in the Sudan...
...Letters in fractured Hebrew began arriving in Israel from Ethiopia: "We are still waiting with much patience and hopes to our salvation by the Israeli nation in our holy country for which we are dreaming...
...In homes and buildings throughout Kiryat Arba hang identical framed photographs of an old Chassidic Jew, gazing straight ahead, almost severe in his steadiness...
...When we got there, I told him, 'Adoni, sir, if you don't put away that weapon I'm not getting out of the car.' I follow the Torah: 'Its ways are the ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace.' Those who do violence against the Arabs, who want to throw the Arabs out from here, are sinning...
...Sarah works a few hours a day sweeping the town's immigrant absorption center...
...And Abram moved his tent, and dwelt by the terebinths ofMamre, which are in Hebron...
...but nowhere else do Hebrew and Arabic prayers commingle...
...When he let his mind roam further, he would review all the mitzvot a Jew could only leam about in the Diaspora but which he could actually perform in Eretz Yisrael: the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the Temple sacrifices, the land left fallow every seventh year...
...Our students are taught to be loyal citizens...
...Renew our days as of old...
...Adoni, what they»did was forbidden by Torah...
...The large brims of their round black hats overlap as they press against one another, no intimacy too intense, always prepared for a spatial contraction and fearing only a sudden opening in which one might become irretrievably severed...
...Yaakov Kasa sits on the edge of the couch, utterly still, as though afraid to provoke the pink floral bedsheet thrown over the cushions that has already decided to move half-way to the floor...
...The music pauses...
...three years later, the government embraced them in the Law of Return...
...Do you know what it's like to travel the roads here...
...For four hundred years the Beta Yisrael fought to preserve their kingdom, their armies equipped with weapons made by their own blacksmiths, the finest in Ethiopia...
...Covering most of his head, bowl-like, is a large knitted white kippah without embroidery on its rim, like those worn by Islamic mystics...
...They sing loudly, almost shouting the words through the silent side streets, so that the Arabs will know that nothing can defeat this nation in its joy...
...Darwinism, wrote Rav Kook, was an apt scientific description of this spiritual reality, the infinite evolution of the collective soul...
...Now I will have something to tell my children, too...
...Those closest reach out to touch the stone house, but it is empty, deserted, not a tomb at all but a reminder of the elu-siveness of family graves...
...Here, in Eretz Yisrael, Avraham is a ba'al habayit, a "lord of the house...
...What if some day he needed a place to run to-and Israel would be closed to him...
...and near the old Jewish cemetery, wanderers seeking permanency, only to find it in ruin and death...
...The white Jews promised help, and over the years, sent some money and books...
...With the thwarting of the expectations Jews bring to Hebron may come the realization that the past offers no permanent refuge: whether it is the former leftist convinced that the Arabs like the Canaanites must be expelled, but whose conscience shrinks from brutality...
...To have your wife and children take a bus to Jerusalem and not know if they're going to come home in one piece...
...as if the white Beta Yisrael, too long in exile from the Land, had forgotten that vegetables are grown on soil, which they cover here with concrete as though to deny it, only the Arabs across the fence recalling how to treat the earth...
...But now, yes...
...No Jewish community in the Yishuv had suffered such a pogrom...
...Measure for measure: their ancestors had chosen exile and now exile had rejected them...
...According to one Beta Yisrael legend, their ancestors had left the Land while the First Temple still stood, to escort Menelik, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, back to his mother's kingdom in Ethiopia...
...only when he insisted did they accept payment...
...The Torah was not meant for Exile but for Eretz Yisrael...
...But hints of the rage he will not admit to himself involuntarily seep into his conversation, as when he recalls the two lirah each immigrant was handed, like a beggar, in place of a word of welcome or a smile from a fellow Jew...
...You see those windows...
...Perhaps the leaders of the Land didn't know they were waiting...
...Hebron is the source of both coexistence and strife...
...Or perhaps this is all illusion...
...For those who remained Beta Yisrael, redemption depended on the intensity of their alienation from Exile...
...The Chassidim are on a day-long tour of Judean and Samarian grave sites that has already taken them to Rachel's lonely tomb in Bethlehem...
...Everyone in Israel knows that...
...I thought, Hey, my child isn't going to be a part of my people...
...When he is lowered back to the ground, he is taken to Rabbi Moshe Levinger...
...I don't enjoy bullying people...
...in 1970, it built Kiryat Arba, the first Israeli town in the territories, on a hill outside the city, the squatters compromising their demand to settle within Hebron itself...
...he has Eretz Yisrael...
...From the paschal sacrifice, reenacted in the ritual slaughter of a sheep, students learn anatomy...
...Because they had left the Land willingly, the Beta Yisrael were punished with exile...
...Spread comfortably through the hills, settled on the ground or balanced on thin pillars like stilts, are single-story, white stone Arab houses, angular but softened by arched windows, over which weave metal trellises, not for protection but whim...
...Toledano would be appalled at the suggestion that the underground and its supporters were rebelling against rabbinic authority, or that Talmud Torah Hebron's policy of deferring Talmud study to an as-yet-non-existent high school expresses an unacknowledged urge to be freed from the Talmud completely...
...You know...
...But still the planes didn't come...
...With each new humiliation, the foundation of rebuilt Hebron is threatened, as though it were being dismantled, stone by stone...
...Army roadblocks outside the city detour traffic to a back road that passes the white apartment blocs of Kiryat Arba, Hebron's Jewish suburb, and leads into a vacant lot near the Cave of Machpelah...
...Our curriculum is based on the Bible because that is how Jews studied when they inhabited the Land...
...And tonight, demonstrating its support for the underground, Gush Emunim has exchanged its claim to the chalutzic, the pioneering, tradition for a sectarian marginality, theirs no longer a struggle for Utopia but against extinction...
...Levinger, taut face sunburned as though singed by his bristling red beard, spaces between his protruding teeth, confronts his old enemy...
...He'll take care of me in the holy city of Hebron.'" The family moved in late 1968, and adopted the name Nahliel, from the verse "Zeh nahalat ?/-This is the inheritance of the Lord...
...he says, pointing to the yeshiva and laughing...
...If you're for Arafat, you're a moderate...
...A new landscape rises here, competing towers of Babel, lookout posts not to the heavens but toward one another...
...They live here...
...On its freshly-painted, bright orange walls hang cut-outs of animals mentioned in the Bible, lions and leopards and elephants who once roamed these hills, and pictures of biblical trees and plants that once covered the landscape but now grow scattered...
...But what can he do...
...They spoke of endless Diasporas like mythical kingdoms, of expansive legal and philosophical systems, embroidered rituals around the letters of the Torah...
...In 1967, these hills were bare...
...Frozen in that moment between continuity and rupture, they cannot even embellish the tradition as their own fathers and grandfathers had'done, lest an essential detail be irrevocably obscured...
...They were led by powerful rulers, like Queen Yehudit, who rose against the Christians trying to forcibly convert her people, and captured the holy city of Axum, the New Jerusalem of the Copts, burning its churches and massacring its ruling family and filling its wells with sand...
...And so no other Diaspora, however ghettoized or fenced within rabbinic law, so isolated itself as the black Jews of Ethiopia...
...I drink tea with Arabs in Hebron...
...On the hilly roads from desert settlements to the south, on unlit new highways from nascent Samarian cities to the north, on the narrow, climbing road from Jerusalem to the west, where cars with yellow Israeli license plates are often stoned and an Egged bus was recently ambushed by gunfire, chartered buses are bringing Jews to Hebron, to prolong the festival of dancing...
...From Lecha Dodi, a prayer of welcome to the Sabbath It is the night after Simchat Torah, the festival of rejoicing, when the Torah scrolls are wound back to their point of origin and rings of dancing Jews simulate its circular movement...
...When reminded that in the Torah the go'el hadam is permitted to pursue only the actual murderer, and that those killed at the Islamic College were not responsible for Aharon Gross's death, Avraham nods his head: "Absolutely forbidden...
...The Orthodox Jew became stranger even to his own body, mistaking that ultimate exile for spiritual perfection...
...Were he alive today, would Rav Kook see in the Jewish return to Hebron a blessing...
...From his living room Avraham can see Yeshivat Nir, the military yeshiva that is the center of Kiryat Arba's religious and social life...
...Torah taught him a parent's love, God's love for the Jewish people, and also sibling love, ahavat Yisrael, the love of Jew for fellow Jew...
...I carry a gun when I go into Hebron...
...the Jews of the First Temple still close enough to the Revelation of Sinai to be intimidated into silence by the spoken word of God...
...But we felt Jews should have the right to live in the West Bank-the territories, we called it...
...European Jews programmed for continuity, they find themselves now on the wrong side of a void so total it has erased even the markings of death...
...The foundations of the fortress were laid by Herod...
...Affirming Eretz Yisrael, Talmud Torah Hebron restores to Judaism the physicality it had once, before Diaspora, celebrated: a tangible holiness, a religion whose protagonist is a people interacting with its land...
...The astonishing number of converts here is, perhaps, yet another step in Hebron's evolution: Not yet ready to embrace the world, Hebron is instead infiltrated from without...
...The government gives an immigrant his apartment, and then he must fend for himself...
...Juden ver-botenl" says an American celebrant, laughing...
...We had once a saying in Israel: "The best to the air force.' Now the saying must be, 'The best to education.' Why can't we create here the finest educational system in the world...
...whereas for the Orthodox Zionists of Talmud Torah Hebron, only a return of the Diaspora to its biblical youth can redeem the rituals sullied with the martyrdom that belied their power...
...On Chanukah it happened...
...Yet Toledano is a rabbinic Jew...
...David Rubin has the face of a man prematurely stunned into old age and of a teenager struggling against the persistent traces of childhood...
...They enjoy killing...
...I hereby offer myself, my wife and my nine children as pioneers to resettle the holy Old City...
...A yeshiva boy from Brooklyn is still a vegetable after seven years, from a stone...
...And the Hebron 'College': People hear the word 'college' and think, a college...
...This is very important," he says, and, though he otherwise has trouble standing, rises in a single movement to retrieve one of the holy books that fill the shelves from floor to ceiling in the spare living room, until the table, too, is covered with books, their spinal titles erased from constant bending...
...Hebron is not only birthplace but burial ground...
...whose yarmulkes slip to the sides of their heads like bandages, their jackets open against the cold autumn night...
...The lowered comer of his right eye nearly touches the rising comer of his mouth, as if winking, sharing a private joke with the boys: "Can you believe we convinced them a bunch of yeshiva guys like us could be dangerous...
...So what do we do: if we have to keep the West Bank but, for the same reason, survival, we can't absorb the Arabs living there, that leaves, as I see it, only one solution...
...When the spies were sent into the desert to survey the Land, they came to Hebron, and there found the last refuge of the anakim, primordial giants, the earliest human form which emerged, grotesque, from the exuberance of Creation...
...The Beta Yisrael are concentrated in three buildings, below the circular road and outside the ring of Kiryat Arba, part of the town's expansion into the valley along the security fence...
...Every person has his limits...
...What do I think will happen here...
...God has given him everything-and why...
...Even among Zionist yeshivot, this is a radical departure...
...He barely moves his lips as he prays, not swaying or moaning, as though he were not praying at all but answering a prayer, his very presence here its fulfillment...
...That got us interested...
...God gives me Eretz Yisrael...
...The loudspeakers plead for order and, when most of the circles have finally unwound, announce that the children of Rav Dan Be'eri will be honored with carrying the large Sephardi Torahs, whose cone containers resemble shell casings...
...What...
...There is no movie theater here, no public entertainment without higher purpose: a visit by a pro-settlement politician, a circumcision, a wedding...
...all they can do is preserve that Judaism perfected in Exile, so holy it dissolved into air...
...What is Abraham missing...
...I have to obey it...
...Eliyahu Hanavi, Elijah the prophet: the Angel of Chanukah...
...The dancing continues for hours...
...Few of its signs are in English, almost none in Hebrew...
...And who will buy an apartment in a Falasha building in Kiryat Arba...
...The buses empty their passengers into the darkness: yeshiva high school girls in braids and knee socks and parkas with epaulets, tall and wiry bearded men with intense eyes and few words, fat men with handlebar mustaches and pistols without holsters jammed into the waists of their pants, women with stoic faces, no makeup, whose only whim is the carefully measured hair protruding from the kerchief line drawn just above their foreheads, teenage boys Yossi Klein Halevi, a moment contributing editor living in Israel, writes for the Village Voice and moment...
...And the rabbis who will, God willing, emerge from here will be leaders, guides for life's important questions...
...In Talmud Torah Hebron's administrative office, director Aharon Toledano pauses from his workload, unusually heavy these last weeks, to explain to a visiting journalist the school's philosophy...
...When Rivka converted, we decided to move to Israel...
...That impressed me...
...what is it worth...
...a city of refuge for the "new Israel," itself a coalition of marginal Jewish groups who now find themselves, by default, at the center...
...Ki cham libo.' Because his heart is hot...
...Its four-story buildings appear to house giants, alert, sleepless...
...The last refuge of the anakim, Hebron is primordial earth, untamed...
...Only after six Jews were ambushed and killed outside Beit Hadassah in 1980 did a reluctant : Likud government agree to a limited j Jewish return to Hebron, its ancient Jewish community destroyed and born | again in blood...
...On classroom walls hang posters that urge, "And you shall settle the Land," as if that commandment were itself sufficient, embracing all others...
...But when the euphoria settled, the Beta Yisrael realized they were not yet fully home...
...Queen Yehudit was finally defeated by a Christian-Moslem alliance...
...In autumn, 1984, the Ethiopian famine worsening, Prime Minister Shimon Peres initiated the massive rescue airlift known as "Operation Moses...
...For though Hebron confirms the Jewish right to Eretz Yisrael and the tenacity of Jewish settlement, it is now also proof of our transience on the Land, of the ghetto's endless reach, extending retroactively, poisoning the root...
...Over 300 Beta Yisrael now live in Kiryat Arba...
...Kiryat Arba is perhaps the most eclectic Orthodox community anywhere, embracing converts sent by the Chief Rabbinate, which knows that only here are they assured a warm welcome: the son of a German Supreme Court judge, a Frenchwoman who spent 15 years as a missionary in the Congo, the nephew of the former Arab mayor of Hebron...
...Perhaps the pilots hadn't heard the government's decision...
...Why does the murderer have to run there...
...and to its left, the now-deserted lot where wholesale vegetables are loaded from concrete platforms, behind which, terraced on a hill, are the grey stone shells of the Old Jewish Quarter, their facades torn off like an unhinged door revealing an unbearable intimacy: ghost-blue walls and rusted random pipes and half-moon windows without glass and domed ceilings hunched beneath their own weight, peeling entire chunks of plaster and stone, the shame of unburied death...
...When the prayer is over, the women distribute damp and fragrant myrtle branches from immense plastic bags to tourists who shout at one another, "Which one's Abraham...
...the Land, amnesiac, claimed never to have known them...
...apocalyptic optimists who have glimpsed a vision beyond destruction but who remain apocalyptic because they cannot transcend their own personal traumas...
...no other community had to fight the government of Israel for its right to aliyah...
...Abraham Isaac Kook, Chief Rabbi of Palestine at the time of the chalutzim, the pioneers, and theologian of the religious Zionist synthesis, is beloved in Kiryat Arba for his ecstatic vision of Jewish renewal, his glorification of the Jew and the Land...
...The Jewish people is one body...
...We are grateful to everyone here," says Yaakov...
...Avraham speaks little of what followed...
Vol. 10 • April 1985 • No. 4
