"In Hebron"

Rabbi's Notes - February 2007

by Rabbi Margaret Holub

Drishat shalom (greetings of peace) from Yirushalayim. Mickey and I have been here not even two weeks, and it already feels like we’ve traversed worlds. I hardly know where to begin. I think I’ll start with a story I was told yesterday. In Hebron in the 1920’s there was a small Jewish population living intermingled with their Arab neighbors, a Jewish family in one house, an Arab family in the next. In 1929 there was a violent attack promulgated on the Jewish families by Arabs, apparently not from Hebron but from elsewhere. The Mizrachi family fled for safety to the home of their neighbors, the Shaheen family. The Shaheens hid and cared for the Mizrachis for weeks, while the ravaging went on in the streets. Shaheen and Mizrachi women nursed each other’s babies. When the rampagers came to the door of the Shaheen house, demanding that they turn over any Jews they were hiding. Mrs. Shaheen tore off her head covering and bared her breasts before the marauders – it is no sin in Moslem tradition to be naked but a grave infraction, apparently, to look upon a naked person. “I swear before heaven that there are no Jews here,” she proclaimed. The attackers left, and the Mizrachis were saved. Other Jews in Hebron were not saved, and the pogrom of 1929 is bitterly remembered by many today.

I heard the story of the Shaheen and Mizrachi families yesterday while standing on a rooftop in the middle of Hebron, looking across a rooftop encampment of Israeli soldiers to the homes that once housed these two families. Neither Shaheens nor Mizrachis live in Hebron today, but their descendants know of each other. Years and many changes of circumstance later, one of the Shaheen descendents had to go to the Israeli army to get some sort of permit to travel from one place to another. He showed his passbook to the soldier at the desk, who said, “I know who you are. Your mother nursed me when I was a baby.”

I can hardly even describe Hebron to you. It is probably the most physically intense place I have ever been in my life. Mickey and Cody (Mickey’s elder son, who joined us for a week) and I were there in the company of the Christian Peacemakers Team, a courageous group of people who practice what they call “violence reduction” in places of war. They have a presence in Hebron and also in Kurdistan and in the coca fields of Colombia. You may remember last year that four CPT members were kidnapped last year in Baghdad and one of the four murdered. Our host for the day, and my long-time e-mail contact, Rich Meyer, mentioned by-the-by that one of his tasks was to wait for four days at an Air Force base to receive the body of his dead colleague and then to comfort his family. Remarkable people, the CPT folks.

Hebron is like a bowl, with the Old City in the bottom and hills on all sides. In the center of the center stands the Machpelah, the cave in which Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah and Jacob are all buried. One hilltop is Tel Rumeida, where David started his political career, before he amassed the force to take Jerusalem. The streets are packed densely with buildings, many old, arched and crumbling. Rising atop three or four of the old buildings are new upper stories and clusters of clean, square new development. They stick out above the roofscape like crystals. These are the famed settlements of Hebron, smaller than I imagined. Unlike most other settlements in other parts of the West Bank, these settlements are built right in the middle of everything, sometimes literally atop Palestinian shops and homes.

Also evident from our rooftop perch are a number of places where the army has closed off alleyways with ten-foot concrete barriers, gates chained shut, closing off streets, a rooftop shack looking like a small and shabby sukkah covered with khaki camouflage netting, a small resting place for the Israeli soldiers who walk the top of two old, bumpy roofs day and night, guarding a slightly wider, empty street to our left. The Shaheen and Mizrachi homes are just beyond the soldiers’ station.

We descend from the roof and walk that street. Shuhadeh Street was once the heart of the marketplace. It is now a “sterile zone” in which settlers can walk for a few hundred meters and Palestinians can walk on a different short stretch, passing through a metal detector as they do so. There I see the most viscerally shocking sight of my trip so far – shuttered shops, one after another, block after block – old green, arched iron doors padlocked – each with a Jewish star spray-painted on the front, several inscribed with “mavet l-aravim” (‘death to Arabs.”) Of course I am thinking of Kristallnacht, of Jewish stores in Germany shuttered tight, stars and words of anti-Jewish hatred sprayed on doors there as well. On several of the walls a poster is glued, spelling out in Hebrew and English why Hebron belongs to the Jews. Further along we walk through a metal detector and a snug iron gate, guarded by soldiers, and then arrive at the Machpelah, where we see separate entrances for Jews and for Palestinians, each allowed on different sides of the shrine. A wider, paved road ascends the hill from the Jewish side of the Machpelah to Kiryat Arba, the path that residents of that settlement walk on Shabbat, when they cannot drive to the separate parking lot for Jewish cars and buses.

The specific ironies of the situation are complex: the Jewish star, once used as a symbol of hate against Jewish merchants now used by Jews against Palestinian merchants, the segregated holy place, in which the bones of the matriarchs and patriarchs are divided between Jewish and Palestinian worshipers. But the hatred which seethes from that bowl is not complex at all. The body feels it plain and clear.

Was it just four days earlier that Mickey and Cody and I were at Kibbutz Gal-on, where Mick spent some of his formative years in the late sixties? We were being hosted royally by his old friend and her family – really by the whole kibbutz. People were stopping by the house in droves to say hello. I met many of these great folks when Mickey and I were here in 1995, and once again I felt right at home. Time has in some ways stood still – most of the Gal-on-niks are still on their kibbutz, even though the economic arrangements there have changed drastically. I am moved and touched by the way this small group knows each other so well. It’s kind of like MCJC, maybe even a little more so. Lots of memories of the old days, of raising children together in children’s houses, eating every meal in the dining hall, working side by side. One of the members said sadly that now she only sees her friends once or twice a day, and so they aren't quite as close as they used to be when they began every morning eating together and making plans for the day, then spending that whole day working next to each other…

Our host’s youngest son comes by to spend some time with us. He stays around all evening and comes by the next day too, and I enjoy visiting with him in the crowd. He is a beautiful-looking young man, with a head of blond curls and bright blue eyes. And he has a sweet neshamah. He is a songwriter, a guitar player, working on the kibbutz where he grew up, thinking about moving to Tel Aviv. He has finished the army and is ready to launch into his adult life. “What did you do in the army?” I ask him. “I was in Hebron.” “What was it like there?” He smiles ruefully. “It wasn't fun. I was one of those evil soldiers you see on TV.” He won’t say more.

It’s too soon for conclusions by far. But this is a tiny bit of the soup in which I am privileged to find myself. I look forward to three more weeks here (you’ll see Mickey sooner – he leaves next week, sigh…) and then five weeks in South Africa. I am deeply grateful for this time of sabbatical – time to challenge myself, to sit with some of the questions that drive my soul, to learn from people who are in the middle of it all. But truly, my dears, there is no place like home. I think about you, individually and as my community, all the time. I talk with you in my head. And, God willing, im yirtzeh Hashem, inshallah, I will see you all very soon.

© 2007 Rabbi Margaret Holub

(home) (calendar) (info) (articles) (sponsors) (links) (bios) (reviews) (travel) (recipes) (projects) (photos) (art)

(rge)