 |  |
Click for Contents
|
P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017 Tel. 972-2-531-5440, Fax: 972-2-537-9489 Advertising Fax: 972-2-531-5425, Email Editorial: [email protected] Subscriptions: [email protected] Web site: http://www.jrep.com |
Visions of Venice
Stuart Schoffman
WHEN first I came to live in Israel
at the end of the 1980s, I met a gas station attendant, a Russian Jew, Georgian to be exact, who had spent some years in Los Angeles, where I�d lived for the decade preceding my aliyah. �They begged me to stay,� he said, not specifying who �they� were. �I could have been a millionaire in California! But I wanted to live in Israel.� What, I
inquired, had been his profession in LA? �I taught Georgian folk dancing,� he replied, and topped off my tank. I too had grandiose dreams when I lived in California. My screenwriting partner and I would sit in caf�s on the funky Venice
beachfront, eating omelets, watching the hard-bodied rollerskaters, concocting stories for scripts that would undoubt- edly make us rich and famous. As I sat in one of those same caf�s the other day, gazing at the blue Pacific under a perfect sky, I thought about a conversation I�d had a few days earlier in
Jerusalem, at the same gas pump, with a different Russian immigrant.
He had worked, he said, for 17 years in Russia
as an automotive engineer. His wife was also an
engineer and also had not found work in her pro- fession. After nine years in Israel, they are seri- ously thinking about moving back to Russia, as
many of their friends have already done. �My kids
are afraid to go out, they sit at home all day,� he
said. �What kind of life is this for them?� His wife
and kids have been spending their summers in
Moscow, where the children, 14 and 10, �go to eat
ice cream, go to the zoo, the park.� You would
really prefer Russia to Israel? What about anti-Semitism? Here, we
are always Russians,� he said; his kids are teased by schoolmates
for their non-Hebrew names. �Moscow has 18 million people. Who
cares about a few Jews?�
How quickly the world changes, I sighed as I bit into my perfect
spinach-nut veggieburger. Though Venice, it must be said, has not
changed all that much. Real-estate values may have soared, but the
beachfront is still filled with tattoo artists and bodybuilders, mad
prophets and time-warp folksingers; and wispy-bearded Harry Per- ry, with his white robe and visored turban and electric guitar, still
glides by on rollerskates, doing his mellow Hendrix number. If this
were Tel Aviv, the police would be all over him in nanoseconds,
checking to see if his backpack amplifier was a suicide bomb. Venice was the brainchild of an eccentric tobacco millionaire
named Abbot Kinney, who in 1904 turned a stretch of coastal
marshland into a replica of the Italian Venice, complete with canals
and gondolas. By 1930, the dream had collapsed, the area was
annexed by the city of Los Angeles, and all but a few of the canals
were filled in. Venice, Italy, of course, was the site of the original
Jewish ghetto established in 1516, the word deriving from an iron
foundry that had previously stood there. According to the historian
of Italian Jewry Bernard Dov Cooperman, �the Ghetto�s Jews did
not refer to their enforced residence as a jail. Rather, it was a
biblical �camp of the Hebrews�... these Jews identified with their
community-behind-walls and gloried in it.� As do the Orthodox
California Jews who flock to their little synagogue, long a land- mark of the Venice beachfront, incongruously situated amid the
incense shops and fast-food joints. Strolling past the shul, I thought of two beautiful European
cities, built around waterways, that lay claim to the epithet �Venice
of the North�: St. Petersburg and Stockholm. During my visit last
summer, I marveled at the flowering of Jewish culture in the former
Tzarist capital, where as recently as the 1980s, when I was gliding
about in Hollywood, people were thrown in jail for teaching
Hebrew or preaching aliyah. And earlier this spring, in Stockholm,
I was the guest of the Paideia Institute, a fascinating experiment in
Jewish education created by Barbara Spectre, an American-Israeli,
with funding from the Swedish government. In the wake of
dismaying disclosures about neutral Sweden�s
complicity with Nazi Germany, Prime Minister
Goran Persson in 1999 convened a Holocaust
conference, instituted a national program of Holo- caust education, and allocated $4 million to be
spent on a worthy Jewish project, which turned out
to be Paideia. The institute, housed alongside a Jewish day
school on a fashionable street in downtown Stock- holm, opened its doors last fall. The 19 students in
its one-year program come from 11 European
countries, and they are a marvelous bunch. I met a
sculptor who grew up in East Germany, a Jewish
woman born in Greenland, a young film critic from
Budapest, a Hebrew teacher from St. Petersburg.
The kippah-wearing son of Stockholm�s mohel
studies at Paideia � circumcision is under leg- islative siege in ultra-humane Sweden, but that�s
another story � as does a non-Jewish woman from Warsaw who
speaks Yiddish and wrote her master�s thesis on Israeli philosopher
Yeshayahu Leibowitz.
That the curriculum is pluralistic and eclectic goes without
saying. Barbara Spectre � whose husband Phillip, former head of
Israel�s Masorati (Conservative) movement, is Stockholm�s chief
rabbi � is an educator affiliated with the Shalom Hartman
Institute, and the heart of the program consists of classes taught by
Hartman scholars in Jerusalem via state-of-the-art video confer- encing technology. �Paideia� refers to the Greek ideal of education
through culture, and the course of study includes the arts along with
traditional text study. The idea is for Paideia graduates to become
leaders and innovators in their communities, all of which are
undergoing exciting changes.
A new generation of European Jews, intent on remaining in
Europe, is challenging the notion widely held in Israel and America
that European Judaism is marginal, vestigial, and not destined to
endure � a perception exacerbated by the current wave of anti- Israel sentiment and anti-Semitism on the continent, capped by the
startling showing of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the French elections.
Spectre, by contrast, argues that Jews, the original pan-European
people, can serve as agents of European unity. Sitting here, a Zion- ist in Venice, peering at the indifferent Pacific, I continue to believe
that Jewish omnipresence is the key to our survival, our resilience,
our unique culture. That it will also continue to elicit resentment �
this too goes without saying.
(May 20, 2002)
Columnists
|
 |
|
© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2004 |  |