THE FATE OF AMERICAN JEWRY

BY AMBASSADOR ALFRED H. MOSES

Ambassador Alfred H. Moses has over 40 years of experience as an attorney, negotiator and diplomat. Former Ambassador to Romania during the Clinton administration, he is an active partner and senior counsel in the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling, chairs the newly established National Board of Hebrew College and is a member of the new Board of Trustees.

Drawing from his journeys to Eastern Europe in this candid essay, Ambassador Moses assesses the state of contemporary American and World Jewry: Where have we been? Where are we going?

I have always been fascinated by Europe's history and culture. Growing up I would devour the daily news from across the ocean. At first it was curiosity, made all the more alluring by distance and time that separated me from my American and Jewish roots. With the lead-up to World War II, I squirmed in my seat as I watched newsreels of German troops goose-stepping in Vienna, then Prague, followed by Warsaw and Paris. Shrouded by Nazi occupation, news from Europe all but disappeared. However, even at my then young age, I was aware of what was happening to Jewish life in much of Europe. News of the Holocaust that started leaking out a year or two later only confirmed my worst fears. The death of six million Jews made me even more eager to see the world of my fathers before it vanished forever.

For no particular reason, my European travels later took me to Romania, a country in which none of my forefathers had ever set foot. From the moment I arrived in Bucharest 30 years ago, the country spoke to me in familiar ways. It was as if time had stood still. Jews talked to each other in Yiddish, roads were unpaved, roofs thatched. Horse-drawn carts carried meager harvests to market. It was Fiddler on the Roof in real time. I was hooked. First my wife, and later our children, accompanied me behind the Iron Curtain to immerse ourselves in the vanishing world of yesteryear. Listening to young chorus voices singing "My Yiddishe Mama," overhearing Jewish women arguing whether the kreplach was better in Pietra Neamt than in Dorohoi, or davening in an old wooden synagogue where, according to the local legend, the Ba'al Shem Tov himself had prayed, we asked ourselves, "Is this real or are our Kafka-esque imaginations working overtime?"

Most memorable were our Hanukkah visits. After lighting the first candle in the Coral Synagogue in Bucharest, we would leave on the midnight train for Moldova, where 200,000 Jews once lived a shtetl-like existence. Trudging through the dark, cold railroad station at 5:00 the next morning at Falticeni in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, we would begin our visit to 38 Jewish communities throughout Romania. The Chief Rabbi, the late Moses Rosen, his wife and assorted others were our traveling companions. The synagogues we visited were freshly painted, restored to their former glory, even though Rosen told me with misty eyes there would soon be no Jews left to pray in them. In Iasi, where there had once been 70 synagogues, now there was only one. These once-flourishing Jewish communities were but embers; the fire had gone out years before.

We can no longer look to Europe or to European Jewry for fresh ideas or even inspiration.

When I returned to Romania as the American Ambassador in 1994, even the embers were gone. In a little over 50 years, the once-vibrant Romanian Jewish community numbering 800,000 had dwindled to 12,000, most elderly Jews barely subsisting on inadequate pensions and paltry savings. Sighet, where Elie Wiesel was born, was home to over 12,000 Jews before World War II. There were Jewish schools, yeshivot, a Jewish library and theater in this hamlet on the Tiso River bordering Ukraine. When I visited Sighet in 1997, all that was left to remind one of the former Jewish life was a plaque on the house where Romania's Nobel laureate was born (and from where he was transported to Auschwitz) and the thousands of Jewish graves in a locked cemetery, the keys entrusted to a Christian old enough to remember the long-gone Jews of Sighet.

Romania is not unique in this regard. The same experience has befallen Jews throughout Central and Eastern Europe. There are exceptions, for sure, but the signs are unmistakable. With rapidly diminishing numbers, European Jewry has lost the creative spark that shaped the Jewish world for over seven centuries.

But all is not lost. American Jewish life was formed by European Jewish ideas and personalities. During the last two centuries, over three million Jews emigrated from Europe to the United States, more than one million since the rise of Hitler 70 years ago. European Jewry of yesteryear has carried over to the United States. The over-confined, self-absorbed, complacent, didactic, routinized Jewish life of Central and Eastern Europe burst forth with fresh energy and vigor on American soil, just as our American Founding Fathers 100 years earlier had brought to this continent intellectual sparks of political liberty and private rights emanating from the likes of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and David Hume to create "a more perfect union."

We need to ask ourselves where will the creative force come from to keep the Jewish fire alive in America?

No Jewish Hall of Fame would be complete without the names of Solomon Schechter born in Romania, Mordecai Menahem Kaplan born in Lithuania, Abraham Joshua Heschel born in Poland, Joseph Dov Soloveitchik born in Lithuania, and Menachem Mendel Schneersohn born in Russia. All emigrated from Europe to the United States, where Schechter became principal architect of Conservative Judaism, Kaplan founded the Reconstructionist Movement, Heschel, a towering Jewish personality, influenced Jews broadly through his writings and teaching, Soloveitchik became the unchallenged leader of modern Orthodoxy, known simply as "the Rav," and Schneersohn, the Lubavitch Rebbe, was responsible for the movement's success in evangelizing Jews to return to Orthodoxy.

This is past tense. We can no longer look to Europe or to European Jewry for fresh ideas or even inspiration. Jews from the former Soviet Union were the last wave of Jewish emigration from Europe to the United States. Today we are living in an increasingly bipolar Jewish world. Over 80 percent of World Jewry lives in the United States and Israel.

Now that we are on our own, we need to ask ourselves where will the creative force come from to keep the Jewish fire alive in America? Family bonds, collective memories, a sense of belonging to one another and ties to Israel cannot carry the day. Judaism, the religion, needs to speak to us and we need to speak to it. At this point I ought to confess that I am neither a rabbi nor the son of a rabbi, but the descendant of a long line of sturdy, if undistinguished, burghers. But one thing I know: Dwelling on the past is not the answer. Tisha b'Av is not for me. I can no longer mourn for a mythicized past that no right-thinking person would want to re-create. I do not want to rebuild the Temple, not the first one that looked like a Phoenician temple, nor the Greek one that Herrod built. The same goes for animal sacrifice. Even if there were no Humane Society, I would be opposed. Ditto the High Priest and the rest of the flock. Rabbinic Judaism: Halakhah, Aggadah, Rashi, Maimonides, the Gaonim, and our other great teachers are my spiritual home, with certain emendations.

Now that I am in a confessional mood, let me also tell you that I do not pray for God to return to Zion. I reject the thought that Jews can only find God in His Holy Place. If God created the universe in accordance with His will, He is everywhere, including in outer space. While I am at it, here is another prayer I refuse to utter: "May the All Merciful One break the yoke from off our neck and lead us upright to our land." There is no yoke around my neck unless my love for America has become a choker.

With all our supposed intelligence, communal strength and wealth, how do we ensure that we, too, do not become a community of embers?

I also have my problems with the American Jewish community's preoccupation with the Holocaust. This unspeakable tragedy was not a religious event. It was a human horror that we did not cause and were powerless to prevent. Mourning was altogether proper at the time, but 60 years later we need to concentrate on renewal lest we dwell on the past rather than look to the future.

With all our supposed intelligence, communal strength and wealth in a hospitable and welcoming country, how do we ensure that in time we, too, do not become a community of embers swallowed up by the dominant culture as a result of our own indifference? The rabbis who have spoken to us down through the ages took it for granted that God created man capable of understanding moral ideas and values, capable of discriminating between good and evil, and that we are responsible for our own good and the good of others. We are the inheritors of 3,000 years of good teaching. Ever accretive, ever engaged in wrestling with the notion of God, ever looking to bring meaning to our lives, ever judging us in terms of values and bestowing on mankind a role in God's universe a little lower than the angels, Judaism speaks to me. A hundred years from now will the "still small voice" be heard in America? That is the question.

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