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RABBI IS CALLING FOR CEASEFIRE IN GAZA – HOW I’M HONORING MY DAD,
A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR  
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Rabbi Elliot Kukla
March 6, 2024
Teen Vogue
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_ A member of Rabbis for Ceasefire explains why they interrupted the
UN General Assembly earlier this year. A January poll found 50% of U.S
Jews supported a ceasefire, only 34% opposed it, and 63% of the
general population then in favor of a ceasefire; _

Rabbis for Ceasefire in the security chamber of the UN., Photo
credit: Gili Getz / [link removed]

 

My dad was a Jewish baby born into Nazi-occupied Brussels in January
1942. When he was six weeks old, my grandfather Max and my grandmother
Lily were out for a stroll with my infant father in a baby carriage.
Max saw SS officers walking toward them, and he knew that they were
coming to arrest him.

“Turn around,” Max said to Lily. “Take the baby. Pretend you
don’t know me.” Lily turned away and averted her eyes, but in her
peripheral vision, she watched as her young, handsome husband was
abducted.

Lily never saw Max again. She went into the resistance with false
Aryan papers and sent my father away to hide in a series of Christian
foster homes, and a Catholic nunnery. It would be many years before my
dad was reunited with his mother in the US as an early adolescent.

Decades later, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, my father raised
my sibling and me to resist fascism. He was an ardent protester of
the Vietnam War
[[link removed]] who
had organized with famous Jewish radicals, like Abbie Hoffman
[[link removed]] and Allen
Ginsberg
[[link removed]].
One of my most powerful memories of my father, from when I was nine
years old, was watching him get arrested after he jumped into the
ocean to symbolically block a nuclear warship from anchoring
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our local harbor. Later, he explained to me, laws are not necessarily
fair or ethical.

My dad was a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He
published seven books, he knew eight languages. And yet he took our
childish talks as seriously as any academic conference, and carefully
considered our most outlandish opinions. He put us to bed every night
with a bunny puppet and a chat designed to open our minds. These talks
not only taught us about the history of 20th-century philosophy,
modern art, math, astronomy, economics, political theory, and more,
they taught us to trust our own intellects.

When my father died in December, as Israel’s siege on Gaza raged on,
I knew the best way I could honor his legacy would be through an act
of civil disobedience. Just a few weeks after my father's death, I
flew to Manhattan to join more than three dozen other rabbis and
rabbinical students from Rabbis for Ceasefire
[[link removed]]. We entered the United Nations by
posing as tourists in order to disrupt the General Assembly
[[link removed]].
Just as the United States' first shameful veto of the ceasefire
resolution
[[link removed](AP)%20%E2%80%94%20The,humanitarian%20cease%2Dfire%20in%20Gaza.] for
Gaza was being discussed, we shouted, “Biden: Rabbis demand
ceasefire!” Meanwhile, a larger group of rabbis erupted
into prayers for peace
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the hallowed Security Council chamber below. We were dragged out by
security as we sang armistice songs.

We were not there to protest the UN itself, but to bring media
attention to the lack of a broad American Jewish consensus for the US
veto. A November poll of American Jewish voters found that while
some 63% of Jewish voters supported the veto, within that group, only
45% identified as strongly supporting it.
[[link removed]] At
the same time, we were demanding that the UN fulfill the promise of
its charter and take meaningful actions in line with international law
to stop the slaughter in Gaza, including an arms embargo of Israel.

In the weeks since our action, our mission to call attention to how
the UN is being undermined at a time when we need it most has become
even more urgent. Funding to the United Nations agency for
Palestinian refugees (UNRWA),
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a lifeline for people in Gaza, has been frozen
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to the demands of a number of Western nations, after 12 of 35,000
staff members
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accused by Israel of involvement in the October 7 Hamas attack. (The
UN investigation is ongoing, and as of publication, they “have yet
to receive any evidence from Israel to support the
claims,” according to _The Guardian._
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On February 20, as conditions in Gaza continued to deteriorate and the
reported death toll topped 30,000 [[link removed]], the US
vetoed a ceasefire resolution at the UN for a _third_ time. This
resolution [[link removed]] would have
led to immediate, unhindered humanitarian access for the 1.7 million
displaced Palestinians, as well as the unconditional release of all
hostages.

The UN was created just a few years after my father’s birth, in June
1945, with a charter [[link removed]] to
prevent the kind of human rights abuses that had shaped his life. The
International Court of Justice has issued a provisional ruling
[[link removed].] that
holds Israel responsible for committing actions that could violate the
terms of the Genocide Convention, and has ordered Israel to take
action to provide humanitarian assistance. Many people in the Jewish
community
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uncomfortable with using the word “genocide” to describe
Israel’s aggression because of our own history with Nazis, but to
me, that is exactly why we need to grapple with this word.

It’s not just the astonishingly rapid
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of killing of Palestinians (including children, disabled people, and
elders) that makes it clear to me this is the “never again” I was
raised to guard against; it’s the spiritual dehumanization of
Palestinians that echoes how we as Jews have been dehumanized in the
past. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant referred to fighting
against “human animals
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when discussing the war. Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu
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invoked biblical verses that have been interpreted by many to call for
the killing of every man, woman, and child (including infants) when
referring to his goals in Gaza. On January 7, Security Minister
Itamar Ben-Givir referred to
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“voluntary emigration” of Palestinians out of Gaza as “the right
solution." As a Jew, I know that a “transfer” from home is never
voluntary — and anyone talking about a “solution” for the
existence of a group of people is terrifying.

After the members of Rabbis for Ceasefire were escorted from the UN by
security, we gathered to pray in the rain on the midtown-Manhattan
street. We recited the names of 100 babies who have been killed in
Gaza in recent weeks. As the syllables rolled off my tongue, I pulled
my prayer shawl over my head and thought about how easily my father
could have been on a list of murdered babies.

What if my grandmother _had_ looked back on the love of her life the
day my grandfather was abducted by Nazis? There was just a slight tilt
of the head between my father dying in infancy and his 81-year
lifespan, a minuscule twitch that my own existence depended on. If the
thousands of babies who have died in Gaza had been saved, like my
father, how many books would they also have written? In a genocide, we
don’t just lose lives, we lose culture, art, ideas, inventions,
cures for diseases, poems, love songs, and future generations.

“This proud Jewish history of non-consensus and dissent is currently
being attacked.”

As Jews our own history teaches us about the impacts of genocide, and
how to protect against it. In the Torah, Abraham argues with God
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save Sedom from destruction, if even a few innocent people can be
found.

Our story of liberation is told at Passover through questions, and the
central question of the seder
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“Why is this night different from all other nights?” — remains
unanswered. This is because the ancient rabbis believed in asking
questions as the ultimate expression of freedom. So we have celebrated
leaving behind enslavement in Egypt for the past two thousand years
with a vast, open-ended debate that spans generations
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The Talmud
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the millennia-old holy text that lies at the heart of Jewish practice,
consists of generations of disagreements woven together because
my ancestors knew
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protect the community from narrow-mindedness.

This proud Jewish history of non-consensus and dissent is currently
being attacked. For example, the Anti-Defamation League
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Jonathan Greenblatt has conflated antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and
calls Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace
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Not Now
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groups
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the photo inverse of white supremacists.” Similar pundits and even
other rabbis
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attempt to discredit Jewish opposition to this war, and Israel in
general, by saying that we represent a minority of the Jewish
community, and thus matter less than the majority opinion. And yet a
January poll
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the Institute for Policy and Understanding found that 50% of American
Jews support a ceasefire, only 34% oppose it, and 63% of the general
population is in favor of a ceasefire; a scant 16% of Americans want
this war to continue.

It is true that the majority of mainstream Jewish organizations
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Judaism has preserved and honored minority opinions
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dignity for thousands of years. In the Mishna,
[[link removed]] the oldest and
most authoritative books of Jewish legal thought, the opinions of
both Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai,
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the first century CE, are preserved as holy text even though the
majority almost always sided with Hillel, because of the belief that
minority opinions may prove correct in the future, and honoring them
now shows spiritual humility.

For most of Jewish history, the idea of a political return to the
Promised Land after Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman Empire in 70
CE was, itself, a fringe opinion.
[[link removed]] In
the Talmud we learn that “the Jews should not go up to the Land of
Israel as a wall [[link removed]].”
And this has been interpreted
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most of Jewish history, until the rise of modern Zionism, as a
religious prohibition against going to the land of Israel as a group,
to form a political entity there. My own denomination, Reform Judaism
(the largest
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in Judaism in America), was officially anti-Zionist
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the 1937 Columbus platform
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which included support for Israel. But Reform rabbis were still hotly
divided
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Israel throughout the 1940s. In the ’50s and ’60s, this gradually
shifted due to the Holocaust, and this change was formalized in
the 1976 Reform platform
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which encouraged Israeli citizenship for the first time.

"Judaism has preserved and honored minority opinions
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dignity for thousands of years."

Right now anti-Zionism is a minority view among American Jews,
but younger Jews
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increasingly critical of Israel and the war on Gaza.
[[link removed]] The same poll
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reveal that only 34% of Jews overall oppose a ceasefire also showed
that 41% of Jews over age 50 oppose an immediate ceasefire, while only
22% of Jews age 18-29 do. Like so many times in the past, the US
Jewish community is in the middle of a radical ideological shift.
Today’s young people are telling us where US Jewish life is heading
in the future, and it's up to middle-aged rabbis like me to listen.
It's possible that attitudes toward Israel will change as much in my
child’s lifetime as they did (in the opposite direction) during my
father’s life.

In the meantime, the accusation that the Jewish movement for ceasefire
is “not representative
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of the American Jewish community has been a major talking point
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to discredit us. But not only do a large percentage of Jews
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ceasefire, mainstream appeal has never been a good litmus test for
morality.

My father grew up next door to people in Belgium who were unwilling to
be unpleasant — _they_ were the Nazis; it was the argumentative,
resistant neighbors who harbored him. My dad taught me as a small
child that Martin Luther King Jr. (who was already being hailed as a
hero in my 1980s childhood) was widely unpopular with many Americans
in his day
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He also told me that slavery was both legal and well-liked in its era,
and that Hitler was initially democratically elected to office. The
fact that, right now, the movement for ceasefire is powerful and
growing, but also still stigmatized by much of the American Jewish
community, would only make my father prouder of me.

_[RABBI ELLIOT KUKLA
[[link removed]] is a
chaplain, author, artist and activist.]_

* Jewish community
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* American Jewish community
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* zionism
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* Anti-Zionism
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* Israel
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* Gaza
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* Palestine
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Ceasefire
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* war crimes
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* apartheid
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* West Bank
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* Lebanon
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* Rafah
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* Biden Administration
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* Jewish Voice for Peace
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* #IfNotNow
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* Rabbis for Ceasefire
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