Why I Am Connected to and Love Israel

By

Carol Schaye

*(Full disclosure, this is not a discussion about the Israel versus Hamas War)

Living in a federal housing project for poor people in Miami Beach, Florida as a kid, I didn’t know I was poor until I got to High School. Probably because all my friends were poor, none of our fathers were living with us, and the majority of the tenants in that project were divorced, abandoned, Jewish, women with children. Myth number one about the Jewish people, that Jewish men make good husbands was not my experience as a child.

My Grandfather and his siblings had emigrated to America from Israel in the early 1900s. My mother, Tikvah (Hope in English) was raised in a kosher religious house. We moved to Florida from Pennsylvania, chasing my father for child support. She found work as a Hebrew School teacher at Temple Emanuel, in Miami Beach when my love affair with Israel began, at age nine years old.

My mother’s job at Temple Emanuel required her to be at their Hebrew School (the once-dead biblical language, which has been revived and is the spoken language of Israel) several days and hours each week. I found myself attending Hebrew School three days a week after public school, attending synagogue on Saturday, and United Synagogue Youth brunches on Sunday. Temple Emanuel’s younger of two Rabbis, the kind handsome Rabbi Abramowitz and his wife Rachel (The Rebbetzin) were like family to my mother, my sister, and me. The Rabbi’s children spoke in Hebrew and English and called their father Abah and their mother Emah. Surrounded by kind Hebrew school teachers and a welcoming Rabbi I still didn’t think I was poor, I thought I was special.

In Hebrew school, we learned the Hatikvah (The Israeli national anthem “The Hope”), and we sang Hebrew songs to help us learn Hebrew i.e. “Issac and Moshe were learning to skate” and “I have a Mishbooka here in my hand”.

When I was nine years old, the country of Israel was about eight years old (officially). Unaware of the struggles the Jewish people had gone through previous to my birth I was excited to help the country of Israel grow. Toward that end, I walked the streets of Miami Beach, Florida (then an enclave for elderly Jewish retirees) holding a white can bank, with a blue star of David on it.

Arabs, Jewish People, and Germany

No one in my family ever mentioned Arabs, or Islam or said anything negative about Palestinians. When they discussed the need for the land of Israel to be a Jewish Country, they spoke of the centuries of persecution of the Jewish people all over the world. Some family members disliked President Roosevelt for not acting sooner to enter World War II. No one in my family would buy a Volkswagen as it was the German people’s car. Three of my Uncles fought in World War II overseas and during family gatherings the focus was on a dislike for the German people. There was no discussion of Japanese or Italians (who also were enemies of the United States during World War II). To this day I have difficulty hearing someone speak German. This I attribute to the fact that my country, The United States of America, has fought two world wars against Germany, so knowing history I remain suspicious. That was learned from an early age. As described above the focus in Hebrew and Sunday School was to learn about Judaism and to help support the toddler country of Israel. There was never even once hate speech in the synagogue regarding any ethnic group. The focus was learning to be Jewish, and learning about Israel. I remain as before with no ill will toward Arabs, Muslims, and Islam.

A Brief History of Zionism and Israel

Modern Israel springs from both religious and political sources. The biblical promise of a land for the Jews and a return to the Temple in Jerusalem were enshrined in Judaism and sustained Jewish identity through an exile of 19 centuries following the failed revolts in Judaea against the Romans early in the Common Era. By the 1800s, fewer than 25,000 Jews still lived in their ancient homeland, and these were largely concentrated in Jerusalem, then a provincial backwater of the Ottoman Empire in the 1880s, however, a rise in European anti-Semitism and revived Jewish national pride combined to inspire a new wave of emigration to Palestine in the form of agricultural colonies financed by the Rothschilds and other wealthy families. Political Zionism came a decade later when the Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl began advocating a Jewish state as the political solution for both antisemitism (he had covered the sensational Dreyfus affair in France) and Jewish secular identity.⁽¹⁾

Theodor Herzl (2 May 1860 – 3 July 1904) was an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and political activist who was the father of modern political Zionism. Herzl formed the Zionist Organization and promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine to form a Jewish state. Herzl was born in Pest, Kingdom of Hungary, to a prosperous Neo-long family. After a brief legal career in Vienna, he became the Paris correspondent for the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse. Confronted with antisemitic events in Vienna, he concluded that anti-Jewish sentiment would make Jewish assimilation impossible and that the only solution for Jews was the establishment of a Jewish state. In 1896, Herzl published the pamphlet Der Judenstaat, in which he elaborated his visions of a Jewish homeland. His ideas attracted international attention and rapidly established Herzl as a major figure in the Jewish world. ⁽²⁾

On November 29, 1947, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a Resolution for the establishment of an independent Jewish State in Palestine and called upon the inhabitants of the country to take such steps as may be necessary on their part to put the plan into effect.

“This recognition by the United Nations of the right of the Jewish people to establish their Independent State may not be revoked. It is, moreover, the self-evident right of the Jewish people to be a nation, as all other nations, in its own Sovereign State.”

My Experiences of Negativity Toward the Jewish People at Home in the USA

Raised in a Jewish household, in a predominantly Jewish City, frequently attending synagogue, I didn’t know what antisemitism was. As mentioned above it is not what we did in synagogue and Hebrew School, our focus was elsewhere. At age seventeen years old my mother uprooted us and moved us to Brooklyn, New York. Our Brooklyn neighborhood was predominately Jewish and Italian American. It was in Brooklyn where I began to meet Black Americans who were not plentiful on Miami Beach. It was the 1960s and we all joined together to protest for equal rights, women’s rights, and an end to the Vietnam War. It wasn’t until I was married, looking for a house in Ulster, County New York that I experienced antisemitism. So unfamiliar with it that I was at a loss. Dorothy Van Der Berg our realtor mentioned to my husband, who was a physician, and to me a registered nurse, that had we looked for a house ten years earlier the realtors would make certain we didn’t find one because we were Jewish. She felt comfortable expressing this to potential buyers of a small farm. We did find a farm and moved to Ulster County, and we both worked at local hospitals (my husband was desperately needed due to work since physicians were in critical shortage in Ulster County). Alone at the house one day, a workman drove up in his truck to work on our septic tank. Seeing I was alone he cornered me and said, “Jews try to hide they are Jews by changing their names to Irish-sounding names but we keep track of who they are.” One day at the small local grocery store the owner approached me when I was alone and said to me, “There were Jews who moved here before and they thought they knew everything but we taught them, we burned their barn down.”

We kept the farm but returned to New York City using the farm only on weekends.

While sitting on the stoop of the brownstone where we lived in Manhattan, a neighbor stopped to chat before going upstairs. As she left the building superintendent looked at me and said, “That’s one Jew Hitler shouldn’t have missed.” (In New York City that happened).

Then as time passed, I realized that some of the black citizens whom I had protested with and for were speaking kindly of Louis Farrakhan, the racist antisemitic Moslem Cleric.

I saw a Moslem US Congresswoman speaking about the Jewish people as though they were cheap, “It’s all about the Benjamins with them” she said.

I saw a synagogue attacked and Jewish worshippers murdered in that synagogue.

I saw a march in Charleston, where the marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us.”

I saw the president of the United States state, “Some of them were good people.”

I watched as US citizens turned against the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel, for defending itself against a terrorist organization that attacked them. I heard friends say “From the river to the sea”.

I had a friend blame the bombing of the world trade center on the Jewish people.

I heard my mother’s voice saying, ‘Israel must exist so the Jewish people have somewhere to go because sooner or later every country takes away our citizenship and persecutes us.”

I continue to have hope for my Arab neighbors that we will find a lasting peace.

I will never give up on Israel. I believe in a two state solution. I love Israel and all the people who planted the olive trees in the desert with the money from my white can bank with the star of David on it.

*1 Wikipedia website

*2 Wikipedia website

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