OPINION | THE GREAT SYNAGOGUE SAGA | TEXTBOOK CASE OF RESTITUTION GONE AWRY | STOLEN ELECTION SAGA | THE LJC | THE AJC | THE GWF | USCPAHA
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OPINION
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by Dovid Katz
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I have argued that Jewish diaspora history comprises a permanent, central religious spine, a tree trunk if you will, characterized by “secular outbursts” that produce magnificent contributions both to Jewish and to world culture, arts and sciences. The recurring and harmonious patterning includes the great religious treasures remaining precious also to the secularists, be it the Bible, or a wall in Jerusalem or a synagogue in Prague. There has also been bidirectional cross-fertilization of achievements and their use, without either group wanting to usurp the other’s treasures, but rather to benefit from them. One of the outcomes is that great Jewish religious sites around the world, including synagogues and yeshivas, have become invaluable survivals of a rich and varied diaspora history that have a profound meaning for the non religious or not-so-religious — as well as for wider, multiculturalist non-Jewish society.
That patterning is only internally ruined on the rare occasions when secularists, instead of taking pride and feeling joy at the continuity of religious life alongside their own, have turned against it with a venom. Grabbed assets and effectively proclaimed “victory” over the ancient religion of their own immediate ancestors. The most notorious case might well be the “Yevsektsiya,” the Soviet Union’s early investment in “good Jewish citizens” who would gleefully help destroy the religious Jewish mainstream of Jewish life that boasts thousands of years of uninterrupted survival in the face of monumental intolerance. They would mock the sanctity of synagogues, yeshivas and cemeteries, and revel in replacing them with artefacts of “Soviet modernity” while relegating the sacred, at best, to the cellars of a museum of a distant, extinct past.