One of the greatest achievements of the State of Israel is its long-standing policy of helping Jews in distress around the world.
This custom places Israel among the elite nations that have an acute concern for the well-being of humanity, and, in perhaps the most significant way, emphasizes that Jews everywhere have a welcoming home to which they can return whenever they want to and for whatever reason.
Consider the history:
• Hundreds of thousands of European Jews fled to Palestine before, during and after the Holocaust.
• Operation Moses brought 8,000 starving Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1984.
• Operation Solomon, the far more dangerous and significant followup to Operation Moses in 1991, saved nearly 15,000 Ethiopian Jews from the fallout of ever-worsening political turmoil in that country.
• About 1.2 million Russian Jews now live in Israel. As many as 90 per cent of them made aliyah during the 1980s and 1990s.
The trend continues to this day, albeit in a different form. Since 2005, more than 6,000 African refugees have made the trek to Israel, usually crossing at the Egyptian border. Many of these new arrivals come from war-torn Sudan, and while they are mostly not of Jewish heritage – and, therefore, are not eligible for citizenship under the Law of Return – the Israeli government has been welcoming.
We have been hearing for some time that the major part of the Diaspora reclamation project, so to speak, is now finished. While it’s true that virtually all of the Jews in danger in Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union have been brought to Israel, history tells us that Jews will again, perhaps sooner rather than later, become endangered in their home countries. When this happens, there is no doubt that Israel will be first to lend a helping hand.
But the great zeal to save Jews in peril can be taken too far.
Recently I came across a pamphlet produced by an organization called Yad L’achim. The headline of the leaflet read: “Hundreds of Children like Ahmed Ben Sarah Can Be Learning in Jewish Schools.” A blurb below sets out Ya L’achim’s creed — to “help” Jewish women who have married Arabs to return to Jewish life.
The brochure continues: “[These children] have been raised in Arab villages, cut off from their heritage. Their mothers, who realize they made the mistake of their lives getting involved with Arab men, are trapped in abusive marriages.” Then, Yad L’achim explains how it plans to fix this situation: A “specially trained Yad L’achim team” goes into Arab villages, takes the women and children, provides finances so that the women can fight for custody of the children and, finally, helps to “bring them back to the Jewish people.”
Part mercenary army and part radical kiruv organization, Yad L’achim is doing the sort of work that aliyah proponents must be wary of. This project’s generalizing statement — that Jewish women married to Arab men are unhappy with their circumstances or are the victims of abuse — isn’t backed by any wide-scale evidence. One wonders whether it is the women or Yad L’achim who believe they have made “the mistake of their lives” by marrying non-Jews.
The ideal of reclaiming Jewish people in distress is the greatest lesson Israel has given to the world. But there is a real danger of degrading the purity of the aliyah project. Yad L’achim’s program expresses an agenda that’s more concerned with achieving a dangerously partisan goal than helping Jews in distress. It must be stopped from hiding beneath the umbrella of aliyah.
