The Nakba did not start in 1948—It began in 722 BCE and continued!

 

 

The Nakba did not start in 1948—It began in 722 BCE and continued!

By Rabbi Norbert Weinberg

 

One of the accusations levelled against the legitimacy of the State of Israel is that it was founded in 1948 upon a wholesale expulsion of Arabs from lands they held since “Time Immemorial”. That disaster has been labelled as the “Nakba,” the disaster, of the Palestinians.

[Note-Let us ignore, for this discussion, that the term originally referred to the failure of the great Aab nations to withstand a handful of Jews, per the Lebanese scholar, Constantin Zureiq. It was not widely accepted in reference to the Palestinian Arabs until Arafat created the Nakba Day in 1998, well after the Oslo Accords!]

The real Nakba was not in 1948, nor in 1918 with Lord Balfour, nor in 1896 with Herzl. The Nakba occurred multiple times over the course of millennia, but it was not by the Zionists! If anything, it is the Zionists who reversed history, and undid the destruction of the Land and People, benefitting Jews, Druze, Muslim and Christian Arabs alike.

Look at the past “Disasters.”

 

Nakba 1

There was such a Nakba in 722 BCE, when the bulk of the population of the northern tribes of Israel were carried off by the Assyrians, and yet again, in 586 BCE, when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple and carried off much of the population. This was our first “refugee crisis”. Verdi created his moving “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” at the heart of  his opera, Nabucco, which would then become the theme of the Italian movement for liberation from Austrian dominance.  (These two Empires did short shrift, as well, with the Philistines, Edomites, and other peoples of the region.)

                                   

 

However, with the Shah Cyrus and the Persian restoration, the exiles were allowed to return and the people and land  flourished once again.

By the time of the Roman occupation, in the first century, the population of Judea and the Galilee grew to as much as two million. There was also a large population of Samaritans (the original “Good Samaritans” of Christian Scriptures) cousins to the Judeans as descendants of the northern tribes of Israel who had been spared exile.

[ Contrary to common Jewish assumptions, the core of the Samaritans were descendants of ancient Israel, and that included a considerable number of Cohens, as DNA studies show. They also preserved an ancient version of the Five Books of Moses, still written in the Hebrew script of the First Temple period. See my essay http://www.rabbinorbert.com/2021/05/the-real-good-samaritans.html ]

A base population of two million when world population was three hundred million would mean, in proportion, a population of six million by 1800 (a date I will reference again to mark a turn-around) when world population grew 3-fold to one billion.

However, it turns out that by 1800, the total population of that area, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims, was about 250,000, only a fraction of the original population.

 In fact, from the end of the Crusades, for several centuries, there were as few as 150,000 Jews, Christians and Muslims altogether.

Not for nothing did 19^th century Christian missionaries (not Zionists) called Palestine, “A land without a people, for a people without a land.”  A land that sustained barely 150 to 250,000, that once held two million, was functionally, a “land without a people.”

 

How could it be?

 

Nakba 2

 

The Roman wars against the Jews led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the year 70.  It was then that the Roman Emperor erected  the massive Arch of Titus and the coins stating “Judea Devicta”(Judea Defeated).

 This was followed by the disastrous Bar Kochba rebellion in the year 135. This war was so bitter, that the conquering general, and Emperor, Hadrian, had to leave out the mandatory declaration of victory,” I and the army are well.”  As a consequence, in revenge, Judea was erased from the maps and the term “Palestine,” from Philistia, the ancient Gaza Strip, was used, in order to wipe the memory  Judea from the annals of history.  As a consequence of both wars, a sizable portion of that population was killed or enslaved and exiled to Italy and other parts of the Empire.

 

 

Nevertheless, a significant remnant survived.

That Jewish population was able to finish the compendium of Judaic law, the Mishnah, which set the basis for Jewish practice, by around the year 200. The Jewish population was still vibrant enough to continue to build synagogues, which are even now being uncovered by archaeologists. They created the literature known as the Midrash, commentaries on the Bible, and the collected debates of the Rabbis, (known, ironically, in English as the “Palestinian” Talmud). It was this defeated population that, by the 8th or 9th century, formulated the authoritative Hebrew text of the Bible, the Masorah, upon which the English King James would rely for his authorized translation.

 The Samaritan population survived this period as well and it is surmised that it may have grown to a population of one million.

There was, as well, a small population of Jews who had chosen to follow the teachings of Jesus; these, such as the Ebionites (the Poor), and early Jewish Christians laid the foundation for the rise of Christianity as a separate religion. Out of this portion of ancient Israel there probably arose the current Christian population of the Land of Israel.

 

Nakba 3

The  Christianized Roman Empire instituted draconian laws that led to the grinding down of the Jewish majority, so that some Jews chose exile and some Jews, out of desperation, converted to Christianity. By the 600’s, the Jews had endured enough, and they joined forces with the Sassanian Persians to rebel against the Romans and restore the Temple. That rebellion was put down with drastic consequences for the Jewish population.

 

 Nakba 4

The Christian oppression of Jews was finally ended by the Muslim conquest; the conquerors, at the start, protected the Jews, until the Muslim rulers also imposed draconian laws in order to enforce the subjugation of the enemies of Islam. Some Jews broke under the pressure and converted to Islam; they would become the basis of the Muslim population which mixed with the new Arab conquerors.

In total, though, not only Jews, but Christians and Muslims suffered as well, as the Seljuk Turks fought for control of the Muslim world. In the process, the Seljuks further despoiled the Holy Land , an act that may have prompted the Christian Crusades.

As a result of wars, plagues, and earthquakes, the total population dwindled yet more, from less than a million by the time of the Muslim conquest down to only half a million.

The once numerous Samaritans were forcibly converted to Islam; these closest heirs to ancient northern Israel suffered an almost complete genocide and barely one hundred Samaritans survived by start of the 1900’s. Today, there are about nine hundred, half living in Israel proper, half still in the region of historic Samaria ( Shomron, hence Shomronim, from which we get Samaritan).

Nakba 5

The war between the Crusaders and the Muslims led to further decline, so that by the end of the Crusades, the total population was again whittled down to a quarter million.

Then, just when things could not seem worse, they worsened. The Mamluks, former slaves who had been inducted into the Muslim armies, and then became rulers, applied a scorched- earth policy to the land to prevent the Crusaders from ever returning. They burned the coastal cities, expelled Jews, and destroyed the regional economy. The Black Plague finished off the rest. For the next 2 centuries, the land lay waste and empty, with only 150,000 total population. In the Middle Ages, this truly became a “Land without a People.”

 

The Undoing of History’s Long Nakba, Disaster

A slow turnaround came about only with the Ottoman conquest of the region, and only then did the population creep up slowly, as the Ottomans improved administrative and economic conditions.

The walls around old Jerusalem are the results of Ottoman efforts under Suleiman the Magnificent, mid 1500s, who saw himself as the new King Solomon. Accordingly, he invited Jews to return to the land; Safed became a vital center for new commerce and Jewish spiritual creativity. Thanks to this latter-day Solomon/Suleiman, the Jews could once again create major works of Jewish thought, the Kabbalah of Rabbi Isaac Luria, and the great unifying code of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch. In the 1700s, mystics from Yemen returned to found a school of Kabbalah while Chasidim from eastern Europe returned as well.  [It is thought that the Chasidic “peyos” were borrowed then from the Yemenite Jews “simonim”, signs.]

 

Even under the Ottoman Empire, at its most powerful, the land never returned to its original potential. The Empire surged and then fell back, to become the” Sick Man of Europe.”

 

What finally made the land flourish once again?

The first modern Zionist may well have been Napoleon Bonaparte! He attacked the Ottomans from Egypt and made his way up the coast to Acre and called for a Jewish homeland during his military campaign, in 1799, long before Lord Balfour!

 The Ottomans, realizing that they were falling far behind the European powers in many ways, initiated Improvements in general health services and administration under the Tanzimat reforms, including the modern concept of equal civil rights regardless of religion.

From this period, there is a renewed interest by Europeans, both Christians and Jews,  in what they termed “The Holy Land”. These Europeans revived the long defunct term “Palestine”, for a region which had no political standing the  Ottoman Empire ( The region was divided up between the Sanjak of Jerusalem, administered directly from Istanbul, the Sanjak of Acre,itself a district of Beirut Vilayet, and the Sanjak of Nablus).  Now begins the development of hospitals, schools, urban construction, and the printing press by European Christian missionaries.

Ongoing conflicts between Egypt leaders, such as  Mohammed Ali and Ibrahim Pasha, and the Ottoman Sultans led to an influx of Egyptians, and a further influx of Algerians, Circassians, and Bosnians as conditions improved. Surnames appear, indicating land of origin:” Masri (Egypt), Shami (Syria), Halabi (Aleppo), Hourani (Southern Syria), Boshnaq (Bosnian), Sharkasi (Circassian).

Jews once again began arriving in larger numbers and built new neighborhoods outside of the old city of Jerusalem, bringing investments and development of the land. The Jewish influx grew from a trickle to a stream.

Within the course of a century, the population of Palestine more than doubled, to 600,000!

Today, after another century and a quarter, despite accusations of genocide and ethnic cleansing, the combined populations of modern Israel, West Bank, and Gaza, is one hundred times the population of the land at its lowest in the middle ages.

The population of the State of Israel, before the horrendous pogrom of October 7, 2023, was approximately 9 ​million, of whom 2.1 million are Israeli Arabs. The population of the West Bank was around 3.2 million and the Gaza Strip 2.1m. The combined population of Palestinian territories is thus around 5.3  million people, bringing the total population of Israel-Palestine to about 14.3 million people- that is Jews, Druze, Samaritans, Circassians, Christian Arabs, Muslim Arabs, Bedouin and others.

As for the Nakba of 1948?

All the Arabs of British Palestine numbered 1.3 million. Today, adding Israeli and Palestinian Arabs, plus the Palestinians living in Jordan and other lands, the numbers about 15 million, a growth of over ten times since 1948. If we go back to the time of that first Zionist, Napoleon, from some 250,000 Arabs, it means a growth of forty-eight times, when world population grew only eight times!

That does not sound like a Nakba to me, but a sign of a rebirth and potential for even greater things to come when the Palestinian Arabs decide to work with, not against, their Jewish “B’nei Dodim”, cousins.

 

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Rabbi Norbert Weinberg of President of Memory in Action, a research project focusing on contemporary Jewish history, accessible at www.pastfuturememory.org. He recently published Courage of the Spirit II, The Story of the Jewish People in Europe in the Twentieth Century as Seen through the Events and Documents of Rabbi Dr. William Weinberg .

He is also Rabbi emeritus of Hollywood Temple Beth El.

If you want a deeper dive, here is a Wikipedia source on historic demographics of Palestine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_demographics_of_Palestine_(region)

Some population comparison charts from ChatGPT

What is the relationship between my parents? Discovering Jewish dna as an almist endless circle!

 

What is the relationship between my parents?

By Norbert Weinberg

 

Many years back, I started investigating my family tree, as I knew that both my parents were descended from major rabbinic families. That ancestry included the family of Rabbi Yomtov Lippmann Heller and the family of Rabbi Akiba Eiger. I also knew that my parents shared a common three and four generations above. This is the family chart, adapted from Geni.com.

The top blue line traces the ancestry path from myself, Norbert Weinberg, through my father, Willaim Weinberg, then his mother, Binah Zarwanitzer, and finally, his grandfather, Moses Zarwanitzer. The bottom blue line traces from myself, through my mother, Irene, nee Gottdenker, through her father, Norbert (Nachman) Gottdenker, through his mother, Sossia Gottdenker, the daughter of the aforementioned Moses Zarwanitzer. The red line indicates where the same ancestor sits on the two lineages.

In short, my father’s grandfather is my mother’s great-grandfather, albeit from different wives.

 The black lines indicate lineage from prominent Rabbinic families – Kahana (descendants of R. Yom Tov Lippman Heller) and Eger ( Iger, Eiger, descendants of R. Akiba Eiger).

I posted my DNA kit to a program called gedmatch.com, which has a variety of research tools not available on other genealogy websites. I asked the program to run an “Are your parents related” test.

“What this tool does

Are Your Parents Related analyzing one DNA kit for long homozygous regions, also called ROH. These are areas where both copies of a person's DNA are unusually similar. When a person has large or repeated ROH regions, it may suggest that their biological parents share a common ancestor.”

The results?

“This analysis suggests the person's parents are probably related.

• Largest reported segment: 26.7 cM
• Total reported ROH > 7 cM: 91.1 cM
• Reported regions: 6 “

Then it may this assessment:

“Based on 91.1 ROH shared cM. …

Relationship Type    and Estimated Probability

3C Group (Third cousins)

37.5% but also 2C2R (2^nd cousin twice removed) Half-2C1R (Half-2^nd cousins once removed) and Half-1C3R (Half 1^st cousins, thrice removed).

2C1R Group 29.2%, 3C1R Group 18.0%.

 I queried Google AI to explain these terms based on my chart and test results:

“I have noted those branches of your family tree. When relatives share only one common ancestor (like a grandfather) instead of a couple (both a grandfather and grandmother), the relationship is prefixed with half-Relationship Name. Because your parents descend from different wives of Moses Zarwanitzer, they are half-second cousins once removed.

• The "Half" Factor: Standard second cousins share a full set of great-grandparents. Your parents only share one great-grandfather (or great-great-grandfather depending on the line), making them "half" cousins. Your Relationship: You are a descendant of a half-consanguineous marriage.

Family Tree Abbreviations

In genealogy database records, Ahnen Tafel charts, and pedigree software, this specific connection is denoted using these abbreviations:

• H2C1R – Half-second cousins once removed (the direct shorthand for their relationship)

This is the relationship that the Gedmatch listed as the most probable from the DNA!

AI went one step further: How much genetic material do my parents share?

• Average Shared DNA: ~0.78%. Expected Genetic Range: 0% to 1.5%
• Estimated Shared Centimorgans (cM): ~53 cM (with a typical statistical distribution range between 0 cM and 100 cM).

However, my results showed 91cM, almost double the expected amount for this connection. Largest segment = 26.7 cM. Total of segments > 7 cM = 91.1 cM.

I informed AI of my parents’ shared ancestry from the old rabbinic lines.

“Yes, this confirms exactly where the extra shared DNA is coming from.

Knowing that your mother's maternal side connects back to Kahana relatives in the 1700s–1800s bridges the final gap. This historical data directly explains the breakdown in your GEDmatch chart. [1]

How the Kahana Connection Explains the DNA

In traditional European Jewish communities (where surnames like Kahana and Zarwantizer are highly prominent), it was extremely common for families to intermarry across multiple generations in the same region. [2, 3, 4] By having Kahana ancestors on your mother's side, your parents do not just share Moses Zarwanitzer. They also share a deeper, older layer of Kahana/Zarwantizer ancestry further up the tree. This hidden layout changes how your segments are interpreted:

• The Single-Line Segment: The 26.7 cM segment on Chromosome 4 likely stems from the more recent, direct connection—the split-wife lineage of Moses Zarwanitzer.
• The Deeper-Line Segments: The 21.4 cM (Chr 15) and 15.7 cM (Chr 20) segments are very likely blocks inherited from those older 18th-century Kahana lines. Because your mother's maternal family kept those blocks intact within their population loop, your parents both inherited the exact same chunks.

What This Means for Your Tree

This setup is a classic example of pedigree collapse and minor endogamy. Your tree is narrowing down as you move backward, meaning the same individuals are filling multiple spots on your fan chart. [5]

Because of this, your parents share more genetic traits than a standard pair of half-second cousins once removed. This historical overlap is why their total shared DNA is inflated to 91 cM rather than sitting closer to the statistical average of 53 cM.”

 

AI did not pick up on the Eiger connection here and only based itself on the likelihood of the Kahana family ancestry. However, I have some old charts shared to me by other researchers that show the multiple overlaps in rabbinic families. Such as this one:

My paternal grandmother’s side and my maternal grandmother’s side shared this common ancestor, Moses Aaron Leml Teomim-Frankel (https://www.jewgenpedia.com/families/teomim) who passed away over 4 centuries ago!

 

 

 

[1] https://whoareyoumadeof.com

[2] https://encyclopedia.yivo.org

[3] https://www.facebook.com

[4] https://www.familysearch.org

[5] https://www.facebook.com

 

 

The Jews and the Arabs in Palestine- a debate between Einstein and Kahler vs Hitti

 

The claim to what is now the State of Israel and the Palestinain Authority is so ancient that it is overgrown with ancient moss. It was debated in ancient Rome and again, in the comments of Rashi on the Bible during the Crusades. Since the rise of political Zionism and the Second Arab Awakening, it is still front and center even today, 78 years after the founding of the State of Israel as recognized by the United Nations.

During WWII, as Jews were being slaughtered en masse in Europe and the knives were being sharpened in the Middle East, the Congress of the United States held an inquiry as to whar should be done to save the Jews. This led to a claim by noted Arab historian, Phillip K . Hitti and a rebuttal by the great Nobel Prize winning Albert Einstein and the equally noted scholar and philsopher, on the faculkty of Cornell and Princtein, Erich Kahler.

Phillip K .Hitti denounced the attempt to allow for a Jewish homeland, as, he claimed, Jews came and went:

"The so-called Arabs of Palestine, particularly the Christians among them, are the modern representatives of that ancient native stock. The Hebrews came and went. The natives remained. The Hebrew Kingdom of Israel was destroyed in 722 B.C. by the Assyrian Sargon II; that of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.c. First the ten, then the two tribes were carried away' into captivity. All flickers of national life. were extinguished by later rulers and the hold of the Jews over Palestine was gone forever."

This is the same claim repeated today by Hamas and by the Palestinian Authority. 

Einstein and Kahler's rebuttal was that we never totally vanished from the land:

    "Professor Hitti says: "The Hebrews came and went. The natives remained." Now the fact is that the Israelites-we prefer to use this term because the Arabs also belong to the "Hebrew" peoples-the Israelites came, but they never went. From Professor Hitti' s picture one would gain the impression that Jewish history in Palestine did not amount to very much after the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah and the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BC ,A few "flickers of national life," that's all. But after the Babylonian captivity the second great period, a true renaissance, of Jewish Palestine began, leading, on the one hand, to the elaboration of the Palestinian Talmud and, on the other, to the birth of Christianity from Judaism. If we were vindictive we could ask Professor Hitti whether he knows something of the revolt of the Maccabees and the ensuing independent Kingdom of the Hasmoneans lasting nearly a century. He knows, of course.

It was as late as A.D. 429 that the Jewish Patriarchate in Palestine was abolished. Jewish communities persisted in Palestine uninterruptedly throughout the ages. In the tenth century,the Arab writer, Mukadassi, complained about the predominance of the Jewish population in Jerusalem. From the fifteenth centnry on, the city of Safed in Upper Galilee became a flowering Jewish intellectnal center where the mystical philosophy of the Kabbalah was taught and perfected. It lasted until it was wiped out by the Turkish governor in the seventeenth centnry. Spanish Jews, after their expulsion, sought refuge in their homeland of old; messianic movements in the_ eighth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries aimed at the liberation and reestablishment of Jewish Palestine. And constantly from all over the world Jewish individuals who felt their end approaching made pilgrimages to the Holy Land to die and and be buried in its sacred soil." [ Note: this author's great-great grandparents were such idealists who gave away their property to their heirs while they were in their 80's and went to Safed, sadly to be murdered in their own home by robbers who took what they had.]

Here is the text of the debate in print

Courage of the Spirit II commemorates human resilience despite Nazi prison and Soviet exile

 

 

         Courage of the Spirit II  commemorates human resilience despite Nazi prison and Soviet exile

Eight decades after his liberation from the Nazis and the Soviets, the account of Rabbi Dr. William Weinberg imprisonments and escapes has been reissued in a new, expanded edition

Faith in both the divine and the human spirit makes survival against all odds possible.  Courage of the Spirit II (hardcover ISBN 979-8180897619; papeerback ISBN 979-8257337536) demonstrates that power. It portrays the spiritual struggle of one man during the first half of the twentieth century—the author’s father, Rabbi Dr. William Weinberg, who survived under Nazi and Communist tyranny to become the first State Rabbi of the community of Holocaust survivors in the German State of Hesse. This edition is issued a decade after the initial publication and incorporates new material.

It is fitting that the first edition became available to the public just 75 years after Rabbi Weinberg was arrested and incarcerated by the Nazis in the notorious Fortress Spilberk in Brno following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and  this second edition appears eight decades after his liberation and adds documents that shed light on those first years of survival.

Rabbi Weinberg’s saga serves as a tour of the ideologies and principles of the contemporary world, but it also encompasses the movements that shape Judaism today: Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative, as well as political Zionism. It is a story that spans thousands of physical miles, by freight train and on foot, from the Galician Shtetl to cosmopolitan Vienna and Berlin, and to Stalingrad and central Asia and back as Rabbi Weinberg kept one step ahead of the Nazi armies. It traverses the mental and emotional journey from the medieval Shtetl, the great empires, and the weak democracies and totalitarian regimes that followed, and finally, to liberation.

Along the way, we meet significant figures in Rabbi Weinberg’s life: Martin Buber and Mannes Sperber, the founders of Israel’s Marxist-Socialist party, Rabbi Leo Baeck, and Albert Einstein. We are shown a window into life in a Nazi prison and concentration camp, the day-to-day life of Jews in Nazi Berlin, and the vagaries of survival under Stalin’s totalitarian shelter.

The new edition adds three essays, translated from the German,  by Rabbi Weinberg, published in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust that highlight the battles that lay ahead of the handful of survivors of the Nazi horrors.

“This book reconstructs these events from conversations with my father, from family notes, and from historical documentation,” says the author, Rabbi Norbert Weinberg. The author is currently involved in a research project, Memory in Action documenting events of  the now vanished region of Galicia ( now part of Ukraine), as well as a history of Hollywood’s first temple.

Courage of the Spirit is the first part of a trilogy. The second part will follow the account of Irene Gottdenker, the author’s mother, who openly survived the Holocaust in the guise of a Pole of German descent and witnessed the destruction of the Jews in Lwow and Warsaw. The third part will examine the rebirth of Jewish life in the refugee camps in Austria and then in the city of Frankfurt, Germany, and the environs. 

Courage of the Spirit is now available through Amazon,

https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Spirit-II-Twentieth-Documents/dp/B0H51SC93D/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0

 

 

.  The author’s page can be accessed at www.amazon.com/author/nweinberg.

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Vignettes of Life in the Worker’s Paradise- for those who think Mao and Marx are cool

 

Vignettes of Life in the Worker’s Paradise

Socialism and Communism seem to be cool,once again, among our young, who never experienced what it's like when you live under the thumb of a commissar who decides what you get and when, Of course, none of the younger generation would know what a sigh of relief came over the world when the Soviet Union disbanded and communism disappeared, with the exceptions of Cuba and North Korea. China had already begun on the path of a mixed state controlled and free enterprise economy, and  North Vietnam, which had fought bitterly against the United States to impose communism on South Vietnam, was also hurrying to abandon the machinery, if not the veneer.

Here, excerpted from my book,  Courage of the Spirit, is a description of life under the thougthful gaze of the Party.

 

(http://www.google.com/imgres?q=marx+and+engels&hl=en&biw=1401&bih=690&tbm=isch&tbnid=ny6D_VMWlBfa0M:&imgrefurl=http://www.ottawalife.com/2012/07/moriartys-musings-my-russian-symphony/karl-marx-friedrich-engels-vladimir-lenin-joseph-stalin/&docid=uOzEEol8x3cz9M&imgurl=http://www.ottawalife.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Karl-Marx-Friedrich-Engels-Vladimir-Lenin-Joseph-Stalin.jpg&w=1024&h=768&ei=Zje_UaGhIcSxyQGA54HYDQ&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:7,s:0,i:112&iact=rc&page=1&tbnh=169&tbnw=214&start=0&ndsp=12&tx=83&ty=84)

An great American journalist, Lincoln Steffens, visited with Lenin at the outset of the Soviet Revolution. Highly impressed by what he saw, he returned to the United States and famously declared:” I have seen the future and it works!”

 

My father and uncle spent several years in the future and made every effort possible to get back to the present.

 

The Soviet system had as its goal the shaping of the new Soviet man, an altruistic individual who would give his all for the common good, as attributed to Marx:” From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs. “ Marxism-Leninism,or Communism, would embody the goals of ancient preachers and idealists, the Utopia, free of the burdens of religious superstition and the restrictions of bourgeois society; all would own equally, private property would be abolished. Ultimately, in this ideal situation, Marx’s partner Engels predicted, the State itself would be superfluous and wither away. There would only be a very short “ dictatorship of the proletariat” for the transition.

 

 In this ideal world, as George Orwell’s Napoleon the Pig declared,” All animals are equal—but some are more equal than others”.

 

The idea of collective ownership produced dismal results. As my father explained, when all own everything, everyone owns nothing, and no one takes responsibility for anything and the Soviet economy lagged far behind the economies of America and Europe.

 

The “temporary dictatorship” lasted some 70 years, only to be replaced by a government of wealthy oligarchs and a flat ( or “regressive”) tax system

 

In some sense, both Communism and Nazism shared policies of terror and the overwhelming force of state and party machinery to create a new society. To the credit of communism, it must be said that the frenzy of terror was in pursuit of the noblest goals of human ideals, whereas for Nazism, the goals were the outright elevation of one race overall others and the annihilation of the Jews as the greatest obstacle to that victory.

 

Years later, when the American Jewish community agitated on behalf of Soviet Jewry, under the slogan, ”Let my people Go,” there were some voices calling the Soviet oppression of Jewish religion a second Holocaust. This hurt my father deeply. For all the flaws of the Soviets, all the rest of European Jewry would have been dead had the Soviets not crushed the German forces at Stalingrad and then rolled on to Berlin. He also told me that the Soviets could not possibly let Jews leave the Iron Curtain—because after the Jews, then the Satellite states like Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Republics such as the Ukraine and Kazakhstan and all the rest would clamor to leave. No system willingly commits suicide. Indeed, while some Jews were allowed to leave in the 1970’s, by 1980 the exit doors were shut again.        Only with glasnost and perestroika under Mikhail Gorbachov did the gates open again. As my father said would happen, the whole house of cards came tumbling down.

 

 

                   On Jewish life

                   What of Jewish life inside the Soviet Union. Stalin himself had published a statement:

                   “ In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law ,active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.J. Stalin (  Pravda, No. 329, November 30, 1936)

The Jews were a recognized nationality, and Yiddish a recognized language, and there was even an attempt at establishing a Jewish autonomous region, Birobidzhan ( far away to the extreme eastern end of Russia ).

It is no wonder that the Jews of Russia believed that the Revolution opened up new hope. After all, under the Tsar, there was a common policy, attributed to Supreme Prosecutor of the Holy Synod, Konstantin Pobedonetsov,” One third will die, one third will leave the country, and one third will be assimilated within the Russian people.”

Within a few years after the Revolution, those Jews in key positions of leadership , such as Trotsky ,Zinoviev and Kaminev, would be ousted and executed, while the regime did all it could to suppress Jewish religious and cultural identification. Lenin had already expressed the future policy towards Jews in the first year of the Revolution: “Jews and city dwellers of the Ukraine must be taken by hedgehog-skin gauntlets, sent to fight on front lines and should never be allowed in any administrative positions.”

My father tried to find out what the prognosis for Jewish identity was. He had rented a room with a Jewish family and in a very private  conversation one day, asked the father of the household what it was like to be a Jew in the Soviet Union. The man’s son was seated in the room and upon hearing the question immediately clapped his ears on his head , shouted,” I refuse to hear anything of this discussion” and stormed out. That one act defined for my father the future for Jews in the Soviet Union. If anything, both the host and my father were lucky, as youngsters were encouraged to betray reactionary statements or deeds of their parents.

(Typical cartoon published in post-Stalin USSR showing a Jew bowing to a Nazi boot.)

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=anti+semitism+in+soviet+union&hl=en&biw=1401&bih=646&tbm=isch&tbnid=4BHvrvpC9mMCnM:&imgrefurl=http://www.soviet-empire.com/ussr/viewtopic.php%3Ff%3D107%26t%3D52305&docid=qltfN5VyZxkGBM&imgurl=http://www.geschichteinchronologie.ch/judentum-aktenlage/antisem/d/EncJud_anti-semitism-band3-kolonne150-karikatur-jude-m-nazistiefel.jpg&w=645&h=590&ei=9zi_Ueb4AaeqyAG4wIHgCw&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:25,s:0,i:166&iact=rc&page=2&tbnh=180&tbnw=216&start=22&ndsp=27&tx=88&ty=94

Don’t walk where you shouldn’t and volunteer gladly

My father was still naïve at the beginning of his exile in the Soviet Union. One fine day, the weather was good, so he went out for a walk, a saw a lovely park. He walked around, enjoyed the trees and the greenery, and suddenly, found himself surrounded by guards and hauled off to prison. After Berlin and Brno, he had had his full of prison.

 

Unbeknownst to him, he had stumbled upon a local headquarters for the NKVD, “EnKaViDa”, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the governmental agency responsible for executing enemies of the people and carting others off to the Soviet Gulag .( Later, it was replaced by the KGB, where current Russian leader Putin received his training).

 

My father underwent a full day of intensive interrogation. Who are you? Where are you from? What are you looking for? A German speaker with Czech passport seemed highly suspicious to them but eventually they let him go, unharmed. Very fortunate for my father!

 NKVD Chief Lavrenty Beria

http://russiapedia.rt.com/files/prominent-russians/politics-and-society/lavrentiy-beria/lavrentiy-beria_3-t.jpg

 

He learned that when leaders ask for volunteers that is understood to be an order. One day, all loyal comrades were asked to volunteer to help in the war effort by volunteering in the local salt mine. My father gladly volunteered to shovel salt, as that was the best of all options.

 

The very last thing  you would want in this system was to raise suspicion. My father at one time smoked heavily and when the first warning notices came out about cancer  I asked him how he started.

 

“Before I came to the Soviet Union, I never smoked. However, we were doing well and were invited to many social gatherings with party and government officials. They would offer food, but Russian food was much to heavy and fatty ( and pork laden) for me to stomach. Then they would offer me a glass of vodka, but I had no stomach for liquor  Then they offered me their cigarettes. Now, these cigarettes contain the strongest and harshest tobacco in the world and they had a long filter to smoke them through, that’s how strong the tobacco was.  I realized that they were looking at as if I were some anti-social criminal, an enemy of the people, so I picked up the cigarette and puffed away  That’s how I learned, finally, how to smoke.” ( My father quit in his 60’s, but suffered circulatory problems that later proved fatal—perhaps that was the price he paid for his Russian smoking habit).

Belmorkanal, the popular cigarette of the period

 

http://rsmilit.narod.ru/p0000002.jpg

 

 

 

Being a Chemist in the Soviet Union

 

My father was enamored of American detergents—“I am amazed—I have no idea what materials and processes these engineers have that can produce such wonderful cleansers!”

 

When I was about seven or eight, my father would take me into the kitchen, take a pot, some flour and water, mix it, cook it, and , behold, I would have a very fine glue for gluing my school projects together This, my father explained, is how you make things work when you don’t have the right supplies and the right tools. That, he explained, is how he learned to succeed in the factories in Stalin’s worker’s paradise.

 

His Russian was very limited. One day, he walked into his supervisor with a sample of a product he had just prepared. He asked the supervisor for his opinion. “ Nichevo”, “Nothing” was the response.

 

My father turned around, tweaked the ingredients, and came back for the supervisors opinion. Again,”Nichevo”-“Nothing”!

 

And again, my father, feeling worried, turned around, tweaked the ingredients and came back again. And again, “ Nichevo”!Nothing.

 

My father was flabbergasted.”What is wrong? I don’t understand! I have come back, each time with a better product, and you still don’t like it!”.

What do you mean, ”Don’t like it? I told you “Nichevo”- there’s nothing wrong—go ahead and make it!

 

Nichevo, ничего, ( the “g” souns like a “v” to add to the confusion) is an old Russian phrase ,still in use, that means” Don’t worry. The result is much better than expected.”!

     

One day, his factory received instructions to make soap and a quota of the number and size of the bars to produce. Keep in mind that the Soviet economy was a top-down system, marked by central planning and 5-Year Plans ( that never worked). However, the raw materials needed were scarce, and there was only enough to produce half the quantity of soap that was ordered. What to do? Failure was not an option.

 

My father gave instructions to charge the ratio of chemicals and water in the process, so that the requisite quantity could be produced. Unfortunately for the would be bather, the soap was incredibly soft and crumbled in the hands ( it was mostly water). He therefore printed instructions to go along with the soap: Before using, place the soap in a warm location, such as a moderate oven, for a certain amount of time” .The excess water would evaporate and the result would be  a much  shrunken but useable bar of soap.

 

How did the accounting for these 5-Year economic plans work. An order would go out for production, my father described, for 10,000 blankets. However, there was enough raw material for only 2000 blankets. The problem was solved by creative accounting. Factory A would weave the cloth and announce that it had processed 2000 blankets. Factory B would cut the blankets to size and announce that it had processed 2000 blankets. Factory C would stitch the blankets for another 2000 , factory D would fold them for another 2000, and factory E would ship out the finished 2000 blankets. Thus 5 factories processed 2000 blankets each, for a total of 10,000 blankets processed, thereby all met the goal and brought glory and pride to the workers and the Chairman of the Party.

 

Not one stone could be turned over without the approval of a Party supervisor. One time, my uncle observed that the process of preparing a batch of chemicals was going too slowly. The factory workers would pour the raw materials into a huge vat and then leave to sit around while the chemical reactions took place on their own. He realized, quite simply, that each chemical ingredient was mired in its own level, and the necessary process was going exceedingly slowly. He called the workers back to the vat, fit them out with huge ladles, and ordered them to stir the batch. Indeed, the process took place in much less time and the order was ready well before it was due.

 

The head of the factory called him in. My uncle was sure he would be congratulated on his success and initiative.

 

“How dare you!” the factory boss demanded,” How dare you do something like this without clearing it with the Party attaché!”

 

With all this, one may ask, how did the Soviet system function. In the early years of collectivization, millions died of starvation as the farmers had no incentive to raise crops. The great breadbasket of the Ukraine, for example, became a wasteland ?

Eventually, my father explained, there was robust, private economy. Everyone was able to pull aside something, be it a few crops from the back yard that were much better than those grown by the collective, or some factory goods that were spirited out. All was available, for a price, on flourishing underground black market economy. Capitalism succeeded under the radar of communism.

     

      The benefit of no diploma

 

My father was doing very well at the factory. The supervisor called him in.” Tell me, Wilgelm Samulovich, how is it that you are so successful. You produce one new innovation after another. What’s your secret?”

 

My father looked around at the office. There were certificates on the wall, but not a single book on the shelf.

 

“Tell me,”  my father replied,” Where are you chemistry manuals and reference books?

 

”Manuals! Reference books! Why on earth do I need them. I am a diplomad graduate of the chemical engineering institute.  I know the subject, I don’t need any books!”

“ Well, you see”, my father confessed, “ I never completed any formal training. So you see, I am constantly going back to my chemistry manuals and finding new things that I never knew before.!”

 

He was proud that even had a patent on file in Russia. I asked him what happened to it. “The Germans were making their way to Stalingrad, the lines of communication with the agency responsible were cut, and I could not wait for it to arrive. I headed east.”

 

       

Books Save Lives

     

What was the one lesson about the value of reading that I appreciated them most and that I repeated to my children when they were in school.

 

My father , while still in the Stalingrad area, was confronted with a major undertaking. Harvest time was coming soon and the Kolkhozy, the collective farms, would be sending the wagons out to the fields to collect the wheat needed to feed the hundred million plus citizens of the Soviet Union, and especially to keep the Red Army fit enough to battle the Axis forces.

 

There was one simple hitch. The wagon wheels needed to be greased; otherwise, the wheels would not turn easily, and whether by horse or by tractor, the farmers would not be able to collect the harvest in time before the weather changed and the crops would be ruined. However, because of wartime priorities, all the refined petrochemicals needed to produce the right grade of grease had been requisitioned to the war effort. After all, tanks and bombers needed the grease first.

 

The challenge presented my father’s factory was to produce a reasonable grade of wagon grease with the residue from the refineries in the area that were no good for anything else.

 

My father was up to the challenge, found the ingredients, prepared the batch, and the factory began production. The grease was placed into containers ready to be shipped.

 

Then, the worst happened; some chemical reaction had gone wrong and the grease began to bubble over. The grease would soon be completely useless. My father was in a panic.

 

He communicated with chemists in the area and as far as Moscow. No one could come up with a solution, and, in their fashion, they bade him farewell, because, simply, in this, failure was not an option.

 

My father was sure that at any moment, the NKVD would be pounding on the door, to cart him off to Siberian Gulag, at best, and possible execution as an enemy of the people.

 

He did what his natural inclination told him; go to the library and read a book.

 

At the library, out of sheer curiosity, he pulled out a book on pharmaceuticals, and thumbed through it. He land on a page of remedies for stomach gas, that called for using activated charcoal, a common treatment still used today. Charcoal is heated in the presence of certain gases, and tiny pores open up in the process that increase the absorptive capacity of charcoal. Eureka!

 

He ran back to the factory, gave instructions to find all sources of charcoal. The pharmaceutical book had specified a finer quality charcoal, processed from animal bones, but in wartime Russia, he took what he could get. Within a short while, he had enough charcoal to place into the vats of grease and soon enough, the bubbling subsided. The grease was saved, the wagons wheels turned, and the harvest came in.

 

However, my father knew one small secret. Because he could only use the poor supplies and equipment on hand, the charcoal had course grains in it. Over the course of time, these  particles would grind away at the wheels and the wheels would come to a halt. By then, however, he wasn’t as worried. The Germans were on their way to Stalingrad and he was on his way to Central Asia.

 

Moral of the story—when in trouble, open a book about something you don’t know. It may save your life ( and millions of others as well).

 

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