The Jewish Story: Mass Immigration and In-gathering of the Exiles - part I

in Israel says David ben-gurion in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles well I get to see miracles almost every day and that's about as real as it gets cuz I'm Roth Mike Feuer and this is the Jewish story episode three mass immigration and the in gathering of the exiles so last season we ended off with the three decisions in the game you this season we take a little bit catwalk a segue fulfilling some of the backstory of American Zionism because the coming season looking forward is in many ways can be a dialogue between these two remaining bastions of Amish rel America and Israel that is but the drama of our story will stay squarely centered around the Land of Israel and the newborn state I want to come back there today because through this season really more than any of the ones before it we're gonna have to have an eye on the contemporary development of the Jewish story and in order to do that we first need to lay the foundations for understanding today's chapter by fleshing out in detail the process of state building that took place in the first decade or so of israel's history talking about military and foreign policy we got to talk about education domestic policy we've got to look at the roots of the primary fractures at least as I see them within the current social fabric of our fair state secular religious Ashkenazi Mizrahi left and right before we can get to any of this though I actually want to start with a more fundamental question because it's gonna take us a while we could be in the late 40s and early 50s for quite some time and that question that fundamental question I want to start with is one that hasn't got enough tension in my humble opinion ever since the state's founding but it happens to making a frightening comeback in the mouths of Israel's enemies and by the way also in the eyes of those builder Jews who just don't know how to relate to a project anymore when they begin to see its imperfect nature and that question is what's the point what is the purpose of having a Jewish land a Jewish state now when we look back at this time period that we're going to engage today I could tell you a simple story there's no time to ask me after all if you've been following the Jewish story for a little while then you know that since the turn of the 20th century it was build build build and then by the late 20s we added that fight fight fight and then once the war of independence come to end we had on top of that grow grow grow if our mission were nothing more than survival I might accept such answer I'm after all when your actual existence is in question there's very little room for abstract existential questions that's why as we'll see I'm projecting now I don't season for the questions of why and wherefore really erupt in Israeli society in the 70s when for various reasons that we can't discuss right now the sense of imminent disaster begins to recede to some degree within large parts of Israeli society but I want to ask the question now upfront right at the very start and I want to ask that question of what's the point of a Jewish land in the context of two things really first is the reality of the year after on the 10th of March 1949 nearly ten months after the Declaration of Independence the idea finally reached Umrah Shosh at the tip of the gulf of the Red Sea it's the site of biblical a lot as well as the site of the present-day city of the same name and the eighth battalion of the negative Brigade rolled in and took that sleepy village without even a fight and when it was discovered that they didn't even have a flag to raise over their newly conquered land the negative brigade commander nock I'm sorry I gave the orders to just make one and thus Degel hideo was born the inked flag the raising of it I'm sure you've seen it's an iconic image of the war and for our question of what's the point I want you to take a few points of context from the end of the war here one is that the newborn state sustained six thousand three hundred and seventy-three casualties that's nearly 1% of the population and almost 2,000 of them had actually escaped the death camps of Europe's to die on the battlefield there in the Middle East add to this the fact that by the end of the war the IDF was fielding eighty eight thousand soldiers that's almost fifteen percent of the populace in uniform and you'll understand then that this was total war which means at its end in addition to the euphoria of victory there was near total exhaustion that's critical to understand the way in which the country is going to face the challenges that come so another key point of contact at the end of the war offers is territorial because in addition to holding all the territory which UN resolution 181 proposed for a Jewish state Israel had conquered almost 60% of the land proposed to the Arab state now together with that conquest came the flight of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs that had been living there however you think it happened we've touched on that and trust me we'll come back to it again and now suddenly this new state is holding we'll call it a geographic and demographic vacuum and international politics of the horrors the vacuum even more than nature so this is the 1949 reality which gives context to my question what's the point of having a Jewish state we're touching it now but I want to keep it in the back of your mind for a number of coming episodes so I'll just add a few words about another piece of context and that's the state of world Jewry now leaving a sign American jury who we've discussed the bulk of the Jews are in a pretty sketchy situation at this point there's no need to detail the state of the remnants of European Jewry the survivors are huddled now in the DP camps the displaced person camps in Europe desperate to get out it's clear to everyone they have to have a home but you know the idea of repatriation of putting them back to their place of origin even if they could endure the horror of picking up where they left off meant for many of them it's just simply not possible as with my great aunts and uncles that there are people living in their homes we add to this somewhere between 850,000 to 1 million Jews living in the Arab world in 1948 you know hey Hal Pasha who was an Egyptian delegate to the UN addressed the political committee of the General Assembly on November 14 1947 that's just a few days before the UN vote on the partition plan and he'd come for a very particular purpose to deliver a warning he says the United Nations should not lose sight of the fact that the proposed solution might endanger a million Jews living in the Muslim countries partition of Palestine might create in those countries in anti-semitism even more difficult to root out than the anti-semitism which the Allies were trying to eradicate in Germany if the United Nation decides to partition Palestine it might be responsible for the massacre of a large number of Jews it's an interesting statement on one hand there's truth to what he said and it bears reflection in the fact that anti-semitism has indeed found a new home in the Muslim and Arab world on the other hand who's making the decisions here the United Nations is going to be responsible for this massacre the United Nations will cause that anti-semitism or maybe it's just the enemies around us and frankly the violence had already begun before hiccup ahsha's threat in Iraq 150 Jews were murdered in 1941 in a three day program that's known as the hood it was the largest wave of anti-jewish violence that the country had ever seen that was in 41 in Egypt anti-jewish riots broke out in 1945 on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration 82 Yemenite Jews actually died in riots that swept Eden in the wake of the UN's vote for partition and with course with the declaration of the state things only got worse in many countries hundreds of Jews were accused of involvement in scientists plots communist BOTS any kind of plot you can come up with there were continuous attacks basically from June bombs were planted in the Jewish quarter of Cairo the Jewish area of Alexandria was actually burned down Iraq declared martial law it sent his Jews to death put them in jail slapped him with huge fines and in fact all of the Jews of the rock were given the choice in March of 1952 stay and suffer or to leave on the condition of abdicating their citizenship and abandoning their property now there's much more to that story and we're going to hear a lot of it in the coming episode but for now suffice it to say that of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who lived in the Arab world in 1948 today they remain only a few thousand and that's part of the context for our question so here we are in 1949 on one hand um they saw a people in our land and we're holding the greatest gift the Jewish people has arguably received since Sinai a sovereign state on a large swath of our ancestral homeland won by the mightiest Jewish army since the Maccabees in easily framed as the fulfillment of the words of our province I a nickel mean we were like dreamers whole thing's like a dream I can tell you for me personally but the question is what do we do with it for what purpose have we attained this land so that's one side of the equation on the other side broken so broken thousands of dead and wounded the DP camps overflowing the anger of the Muslim world boiling around us uprooting a culture that had lived largely in peace for over a thousand years and from that perspective it seems pretty obvious why we've retained this land you gotta have somewhere to go and there's nowhere else to be so the visionary and the pragmatics don't necessarily make easy bedfellows when you want to put them together into a nation and combine them takes a particular type of leader in the two years following the end of the war 688 thousand immigrants reached the shores of the newborn State of Israel that double its population almost and in the coming two decades by the way the population would more than triple will tell the details of some of that in the coming episode for now I just want to think about the basic challenges posed by such a mass immigration it's staggering when I try to think about it now some of the problems were purely economic and logistical how do you house feed an employee that many people especially when you live in a society that's right now recovering from a terrible war in is already under a universal boycott by all the countries of their region right in by the way there were many in those countries who didn't believe that Israel would survive I think I'll sue ad whose name I'm sure I just butchered the Iraqi Prime Minister who played a central role in passing the law that actually permitted Jewish emigration reported to the Arab League in 1949 on the damage that the mass alia was already wreaking on Israel and his successor Nuri al-saeed actually said that every additional immigrant is an additional nail in Israel's coffin now like I said those were our enemies but as we're going to see in this episode and the next even within the country there was no consensus that unrestrained immigration was a good thing within Israel and we're gonna discuss the strategies that the government chose to overcome the logistical challenge of mass alia and the consequences of these choices as we move forward but for now I want to focus on a slightly different aspect of the problem in March of 1949 a little more than two weeks after that Inc flag was raised over a lot Prime Minister David ben-gurion convened a two-day symposium I'm talking about 40 intellectuals cabinet ministers writers academics and other public figures who all came together in order to discuss what he saw to be the next great challenge facing the nation the spiritual cultural absorption as he called it of the masses of immigrants who already begun to flood into the new country in other words he wanted to talk about how we make an Israeli melting pot now keep in mind by the end of the first wave of mass alia which is around 1951 three-quarters of the population were foreign-born and half of all Israelis had lived in the country for less than five years now it's again like I said staggering try to think of how do you make a people how does that many immigrants if you recall the first two episodes of this season touched on the challenge that the American melting pot posed to Jewish identity right it's a model of cultural cohesion which seemed to require a simulation that ran against the desire of the Jews to be the Jews and then we spoke about Horace Kallen and how his Zionist vision of Jewish identity led him to actually propose a different model for American society one in which ethnicity could maintain its voice in a harmonious symphony of culture he called it cultural pluralism is what we named it today now America's need to form one society as a nation was very real and we can see by the by from the growing fractures in its social fabric today that it was only somewhat successful but it pales in comparison to the young state of is girls need to Ford an agent furthermore the Americanization that lay behind the American melting pot as we discussed had two phases one was an attempt to sort of remake everyone in the anglo-saxon mold the idea that the wasps the white anglo-saxon Protestant was an American and everyone had to join that team it had competing model though in that something new would emerge that there was actually an American there was a human being called the American that had never existed before and the two have their own uneasy relationship here in the state of Israel the problem runs even deeper on one hand you have the Jews who have been let's just say a bit fractious for most of our history a degree on what a Jew is well I refer you back to my last episode on the other hand you do have a core social model which is the second alia pioneer the Zionist ideal that really even though it numerically was a fragment of the population still sort of culturally and idealistic Lee was its leader and then of course you have that desire for the new Jew and Ben Grimm's suppose ium was held with the explicit aim that a new Jim must emerge from this ingathering of the dispersed Jews of the world and he was a Jew that would take up the next phase of Zionism nation-building with as much dedication and really along the lines of the pioneers of the second Aliyah now add to this the fact that most of the people in the room also held that classic Zionist assumption of slot ha galoot right the negation of exile they saw the Zionist project in particular this mass immigration not just as a return to place or even a repatriation to homeland this was it this was the opportunity to heal the brokenness and the sickness of Exile and to finally fulfill our divine historic mission by becoming a free people in our land but how oh how on earth do you do such a thing without imploding as a society now always farsighted Ben Gurion saw the cultural challenge that lay on the immediate horizon this is how he stated it in the wake of European jury's annihilation the mass emigration soon arriving in the country will becoming mainly from sparsely populated physically and spiritually impoverished Jews remote from the major centers of the Jewish life and human culture for centuries yeah you heard it he saw the Jews of the Arab world as distant from culture and in particular from the secular European ideologies that had lent such drive to the Zionist project now we'll explore the consequences of this Eurocentric and maybe even racist attitude in the next episode but just keep it in mind Ben green also had his own fears about absorbing large numbers of the survivors of the Holocaust into the Unconquered now they were Europeans but he'd made many trips through the DP camps in the last couple of years and he spoke now at the beginning of the symposium of quote the horrors of war and slaughter that they'd experienced and the residue of concentration camp life that can be seen in them now there's a theme that we can find in between the spaces of a lot of the speeches of the Zionists of this period a concern about the moral fiber of the survivors implicit in that is that anyone who survived must be something to be afraid of now I've promised that we have to discuss the integration or lack thereof like it's better stated of the survivors back into Jewish life both here and in America and I'll likely do that in the context of the capture of out of Eichmann but again I want to say focus on our story right now so ultimately toward the end of his opening speech ben-gurion expressed the goal like this in the coming days when immigration increases immensely a great effort will have to be made to preserve national unity our nation is in the process of being recreated from tribal fragments and this requires gathering up the Jewish human dust scattered throughout the world returning to the Land of Israel and being forged in the crucible of independence in the framework of sovereign state hood Hebrew attitudes and styles that never existed before and that could not have existed in the Diaspora when we were a nation lacking a homeland independence and national freedom will now have to be crystallized that's a statement that deserves to be dissected first of all the Jewish human dust that's a scary phrase in my eyes remember ben-gurion was a product of the great age of social engineering this is a time when Stalin and Mao felt like moving millions of people around for the sake of their nation was perfectly justifiable remember many human beings died in the service of humanity and there's something inhuman about every ideologue but nevertheless taking on the scale of challenges who was facing you you couldn't do otherwise I mean keep in mind when we discuss the Mahabharata in the coming episode Rama bowed are the transit camps in which many of these immigrants were settled and of course his decision to settle the immigrants on the borders sometimes on abandoned in Arab lands sometimes making them build cities where they said that his vision of social engineering at the base of it this notion of the Jewish human dust so you also use this phrase recreation from tribal fragments now this goes to the heart of the question of the melting pot now there's always a tension in the idea of melting pot between how the diversity of ways of being a Jew pre contribute to our society or how it could actually undermine the project of building a nation how do we fix that fractious nature that has plagued us since the destruction of the Second Temple without homogenizing the beautiful diversity out of the Jewish people and finally these Hebrew attributes and styles that never existed before and that could not have existed in the Diaspora do you feel the excitement of what might actually come to be when we're a people in our land but of course that element comes at the end of his speech so at a certain point in the symposium an argument emerged between ben-gurion and professor Martin Buber I would love to have seen this right 'über intellectual mystic and though today many find it hard to reconcile the idea of a support for a bi-national state with Zionism he was a passionate advocate not only of Zionism in general but the need for a pioneering spirit to revive on Israel so their argument began around the nature of the melting pot that could possibly handle the situation they faced ben-gurion wanted to gather gather as we said this Jewish humand us and forged them into a people in the crucible hereit of Independence and the framework of sovereign state hood this is this concept of a mom not suit of a way of being a sovereign people that will get its own treatment in good time but in contrast Boober insisted that from the beginning the Zionist movement had never been about mass numbers it had been focused on choice human material as he called it not mass emigration this is a question that goes all the way back if you recall the arguments between well first Herzl and aha Tom and then you know max Nordau and Jabotinsky on one side and the practical Zionists on the other go back and do some review in season 2 but in boobers words the pioneers of the last generation whose energy and drive ben-gurion wanted to recreate and harness toward the present State Building quote did not come to an immigrant country but to a land waiting for the realization of alia remember alia means going up it's more than immigration it's an elevation and it's an elevation not just physically but spiritually to stepping into a different dimension of action and I don't just say that I can tell you that you're joining the National drama when you step into this land and improvers eyes what we needed to do was to evoke that scent into every immigrant who crossed the shores of Israel he envisioned basically a spiritual melting pot and he said its goal was quote to absorb the masses that were daily entering the country by molding their character and image into the form of a nation to hear it uber wants to clarify the idea of mistake and then let its vision shape every immigrant ben-gurion wants to strengthen the form of the state believing that the task of building will actually allow a newer vision to eventually emerge and that's why Brewer insisted that the first question that they needed to address in the face of mass immigration was what is the purpose of a Jewish land and he posed it from the plenum the answer he got in ben-gurion was a motes 11 min Haaretz the purpose is to bring forth bread from the land uber says back for what purpose ben-gurion says that alone is enough 99% of our people have still not attained a decent living condition to be able to even ask professor boobers question uber replies this is not a question of now or later to which Ben Gurion says it most certainly is a question of now or later burning questions are now facing us even the previous question what are we living for is suited for a people who you already called the refined elite uber says yes that's true ben-gurion replies we have to remain within the framework of earthly Jerusalem if only because there exists a heavenly Jerusalem uber says I was referring to the early Jerusalem all along do you hear the death of their conflict they were both messiness the difference is that ben-gurion was a realist mecaenas and Boober was an idealist messiest both felt the pain of an earthly Jerusalem that it was still split and bleeding from 1948 both believed in the need of molding the masses into a new nation and they shared the belief that the critical role would be played by the pioneering spirit it's just that uber actually held out the hope that the ideal would be realized now or at least in the near future and therefore it needed to be our immediate question of what for well ben-gurion believe that only a historical social process would be able to melt the Jews into a people were adequate to the task of even asking the question much less realizing the ideal now this is the forum and it's no coincidence in which Ben grand made his famous statement I say that the Messiah has not yet come and I pray that he will never come the moment that he arrives he'll cease to be the Messiah it's because the Messiah is needed so badly that he will not be coming the Messianic age is more vital than the Messiah himself and the Jewish people lives in the Messianic age awaiting its arrival believing it this is the main factor in preserving the life of the Jewish people I mean it's astounding when greens genius was in being able to distinguish between the present requirement and its ultimate purpose and his pragmatism drove him to focus on the howl of state building rather than the why while his messianism aloud and believe that this itself will become the vessel that would bring about the redemption of the people focus on the how build the vessel and it will fill with the why in fact that's what he called the state clear cow a precious vessel it was not the purpose it was the means now symposiums are of course useful forums for thought anybody wants to invite me to one I'm happy to come and it says a lot about ben-gurion character as a leader that he saw the intellectuals of his day as critical voices in helping to answer questions of state have I that such things were still occurring but the reins of statecraft lie in the hands of government and there will be two laws that give effect the Banger Ian's vision of the melting pot because of course in all the fights of these few years he wins first was the National Service law right the original version of which actually obligated every young man and woman not only to undergo military training but agricultural training as well the hope was that through the military and their agricultural arm they could inculcate those second alia ideals of pioneering into every new young Israeli and you have to take from this that from the outset the Israeli army has been as much a tool for social engineering as for self-defense the second law the one destined to shape a new nation out of the tribal fragments and human dust deserves a bit of a discussion on its own if you look at the third part of the Israeli Declaration of Independence you will see that it reads the State of Israel will be open to Jewish alia and kibbutz galeota the in gathering of the exiles it will strive to develop the country for the benefit of all of its inhabitants and will be founded on the principles of liberty justice and peace in light of the vision of the prophets of Israel will maintain a complete equality of social and political rights for all of its citizens regardless of religion race or gender now we'll tell the story of how the Israeli government actually took shape in a later episode and I want to explore together this question of a constitution but for now if you want to understand the world view of the people who made up the provisional government that formed once the British Mandate came to an end then all you need to know is that their first act of legislation was to remove any limitation imposed by the mandatory government on Jewish immigration that was their major concern yet the Jews home and not long after the war when an actual government the Knesset took form discussion of the legal parameters for citizenship and immigration began now first of all the ingredients coalition set the aim of passing a citizenship law that would not distinguish between Jews and non-jews even though they believed in a Jewish state they recognized that they were on thin ice both demographically meaning the balance of jews - arabs within the country and democratically and their ability to be part of the new polity of nations represented by the united nations it took 17 drafts to get there just think of what governance looks like with these types of jews but on July 3rd 1950 the combined citizenship law was brought before the first Knesset and the preface of the final draft reads as such Israeli citizenship is not contingent on membership in the Jewish people or the Jewish religion or the Jewish National Movement and on the other hand such membership is not sufficient to confer status of Israeli citizenship this goes to the heart of a deep question that we've already posed a few times how do you have a state which embodies a nation that doesn't actually live in your state the Knesset is not the sovereign body of the Jewish people because a Jew living in Brooklyn isn't under their jurisdiction at the same time to think that it's simply the sovereign body of the Israeli people is insufficient when you understand the relationship between the Jews of the world and the Jewish state and vice versa the Knesset can't simply be the embodiment of the Jewish people or even the Jewish state since there are non Jewish members of the Knesset itself not to mention plenty of citizens so it's complicated and the citizenship log gives expression to that statement in the Declaration of Independence of complete equality of social and political rights for all citizens but what about the declaration that the State of Israel will be open to Jewish alia and kyboots gaya to the in gathering of the exiles where does that come into law and can it be transformed into an actionable law without actually undermining the principle of equality unless you think that that's purely an academic historical question take a quick cruise on the Holy Internet and you see what people are saying about the Israeli law of return the right of every Jew to become a citizen of the state of Israel it is seen not only in the world of sort of Israel haters but even amongst the left-wing academic elite of Israel as intrinsically opposed to the Democratic character of the state after all how could you favor one group over another by the way I might go into it if you're interested you should look at the notes for this show if you're a patron by the way for $1 patronage you can get access to the bibliography that comes with beat show I know I need to catch up don't worry it's coming but just for now you should know that there are good reasons good arguments be made that it is a principle of international law that countries have the right to restrict their immigration and make it partial toward repatriation of those they deemed to be the descendants of their citizens but that being said the government's first response to this problem was a void let the question of encouraging the mass immigration of Jews become one of policy and not law and they seem to think that that would solve the problem of the contradiction but the Declaration of Independence says the state will be open not only the Jewish immigration but they give boots call yoke as well to this vision of the in gathering of the exiles and that deserves a word on its own in fact a few words from God if you will do vol 31 through 5 describes what will happen it will be when all these things come upon you and you will return to the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul then the Lord your God will bring you're exiles and he will have mercy upon you he once again gathered from all the nations of the Lord your God had dispersed you it goes on and you should read it all but essentially any will bring to the land which our forefathers possessed he will take possession of it and he will do good to you and he will make you more numerous then your forefathers now there's so much in these lines the link between our behavior and the return one to which was rejected by the secular zionists the the relationship between the exiles scattered throughout the world and the land of their forefathers all this goes to the heart of that complex mix of cross currents between pragmatic survival romantic nationalism and classic Jewish Masson ISM that make off the roots of the Zionist movement and by the way are still feeding our society today both in its unity and its fractious nature how do you relate to this project but it's not simply a matter of one of getting the Jews in the door and it's not even a question of how do you then create a culture that can meld these Jews back into one nation but it's rather bound up with an underlying assumption by the Jewish people that I mentioned is one of God in history now Rob's our waha fleg who happens to be actually the father of the rabbit of my shul coincidence but it's a fun one was the director of the Institute for the Study of Jewish law within the Ministry of Justice in the new government and he believed that leaving the question of kibbutz guilt of the in gathering of the exiles the policy was not enough that in order to really fulfill not only the promise of the Declaration of Independence but really the purpose of having a Jewish state at all he believed the law must state unequivocally that there was a principle that a Jew arriving in Israel is returning to their homeland and therefore was not just an immigrant like any other and so in response to the 15th draft the citizenship law rava HOF Nick wrote it is inevitable that the citizenship law in the State of Israel will struggle with the apparent contradiction between two fundamental prints balls of the state the ingathering of israel's exiles meaning classic religious messianism and the guarantee of equal rights for every citizen and resident meaning liberal democracy and the realization of the goal of Zionism kibbutz Kyle York as he says it requires a special stance toward alia from the Jewish Diaspora and there's a need and a necessity to give expression to the stance in law every disregard for or attempted neglect of the quest for an appropriate way to underscore the principle of kibbutz galeota in law out of fear of creating a disparity of treatment between Jews and non-jews will only pass the core of the problem on to the administration apparent discrimination will perhaps disappear from the law but not from life camouflage discrimination is far worse than open and clearly defined discrimination he's putting his finger on a couple of very important points here number one that there are two phases to the State of Israel there is the civil democratic which is a guarantee of equal rights and then there is the national historic and perhaps even divine messianic the in gathering of the exiles and those two need to be enshrined in law together and even though as he points out it seems to be that there's a contradiction and he doesn't necessarily deny that what he's saying is that to try to avoid that contradiction through enshrining only the democratic principle in law and leaving the national historical or perhaps messianic to a question of government policy will only camouflage the actual goals of that government as he says camouflage discrimination is worse than open and clearly defined distinction so the solution he suggested is to separate there's a general citizenship law on one hand and the law if keepeth scully oath of the ingathering of the a Gasol's which would state that every jew making alia in israel in order to settle should be viewed as an individual returning to their homeland and therefore automatically naturalized as a citizen and can you imagine the merit the result of gravattack's intervention the law of return was passed by the Knesset on July 5th only two days after the citizenship law for all it's significant it's a strikingly short piece of legislation whose purpose is clear from the first line it says every Jew has the right to come to this country as an au Lac notice an immigrant in Hebrew is one who goes up now the catch is as we mentioned in a previous episode the law doesn't define who is a Jew now partially that's because of the potentially explosive nature of such a debate in the fear that its impact would have on what was still a very information social fabric and another reason which needs to be appreciated is in 1950 who in their right mind would imagine that anyone who wasn't actually a Jew either motivated by ideology or fleeing persecution and therefore a Jew in the traditional sense would want to move to the State of Israel but the fact is once you state every Jew has a right to come to this country you can't avoid defining the Jew the first major challenge in action will come in 1962 and what's known as the brother Daniel case in short brother Daniel was born Oswald rusyn a Polish Jew one in fact who helped to save hundreds of his fellow Jews during the Holocaust and then he himself eventually took shelter in a convent and while he was there he was baptized and apparently not by force because after the war became a Carmelite monk and though he went on to serve as a Catholic priest in Poland during a wave of government anti-semitism in the 50s brother Daniel actually applied to emigrate to Israel under the new law of return and he maintained in his application that though he practiced the Catholic religion I mean he was a monk he was still a Jew quote my ethnic origin is and always will be Jewish I have no other nationality if I'm not a Jew what am i I did not accept Christianity to leave my people I added it to my Judaism I feel as a Jew well anyone who knows the history of Judaism Christianity and certainly those who've been listening to the Jewish story for quite some time know that that's a very uneasy statement and eventually in 1962 the Supreme Court the Israeli Supreme Court actually ruled that the law of return does not include Jews who practice another religion that's a complicated question right on the national religious and ethnic front in 1969 there was another case that came before the court and it ruled that a child born in Israel to a Jewish Israeli father and a non-jewish mother could be registered as Jewish in Israel's population registry now if you don't know that's a ruling that runs counter to the traditional Jewish legal definition of a Jew which is someone born to a Jewish mother controversy erupted and it led in 1972 an amendment to the law of return which is quite significant number one was for the purposes of this law Jew means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion there's both the brother Daniel case and the what's called the baby Shelly case of course it doesn't define what type of conversion and if you're familiar with the battles in Israel today and that's a big one but then it includes this amendment includes the rights of members of the family which is the rights of a Jew under this law and the rights of an old lad as well as the rights of an old land or any other act men are also vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew the spouse of a Jew the spouse of the child of a Jew and the spouse of the grandchild of a Jew except for a person who's been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion meaning just like Hitler who saw you as a Jew if you had one Jewish grandparent so - now the rights of the law of return apply to those Jews as well now there are many more facets of the story of mass alia and we're going to tackle them like I said in the coming episode it might even take us three but for now here's another element of that pragmatic messianism driving David ben-gurion on one hand the citizenship law allowed Israel to join the polity of democratic nations and I've one am grateful that this is so both there's a pragmatist who knows that we need the world to get by and as a believer in our redemptive mission that we should never be entirely other than the world on the practical level the Law of Return gave a legal framework for integrating the Jewish masses of the world into the state and I'm the visionary level it opened the doors not just for immigration or even simple repatriation to the State of Israel it opened the Land of Israel to the ingathering of the exiles and that's a practical opening on the way to Redemption so I just want to thank a few people I want to thank all the folks who give their hard-earned money and help make this show possible I want to invite you to join them you can go right now to my website Jewish story that CEO and up in the upper right hand corner you'll see a little box that says be a patron you can click on through for a little bit of per pod cast support and as long as I'm making invitations want to let you be in touch Rob Mike Feuer at gmail you can also find me at the Jewish story podcast on Facebook or Rob Mike Feuer on Facebook and one last invitation the first webinar was a great success and I'm already taking registration for the second so Sammy an email if you want the details and get involved I also want to thank the Land of Israel Network that's the Land of Israel dot-com for creating a platform that allows me to eat so many amazing people I want to thank the part based Institute Dar es Gorda IL for building an educational institution that allows me to touch the hearts and minds of so many amazing Jews I wanna invite you to join them by the way this coming summer some great teaching going on and I want to thank you for