Vol. 139: Twentieth Century choices

American dream, or Zionist vision?

My cousin Judy Tannenbum Shuval, a professor emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, died on July 27, a month shy of her 100^th birthday. Like many in her first generation of Israeli pioneers, Judy was a classic (if modest) overachiever.

During her long career spent specializing in the sociology of public health and immigration, Judy wrote seven books, among them Immigrants on the Threshold, the first large-scale work on the adjustment problems of new arrivals in Israel. She represented Israel at the European Society for Health and Medical Sociology. She served as chairwoman of the Israeli Sociological Association. She received the Israel Prize, regarded as her state’s highest cultural honor.

Her late husband Hillel Shuval, a water resources expert, was no slouch, either: As chief environmental health engineer for the new State of Israel in the early ’50s, he played a critical role in an unprecedented miracle: His team “made the desert bloom.” His advice on water resources was sought by the United Nations, the European Union, and governments from Europe to South America to Australia to China. He co-chaired the first Israeli-Palestinian conference on water in 1992, and subsequently participated in joint research projects with Egyptian, Palestinian, and Jordanian water scientists on resolving water conflicts in the Middle East.

He also co-founded the first non-Orthodox Jewish congregation in Israel and wrestled with one of the great ironies of Zionism— what he called the “stranglehold of Orthodoxy” which “deprives Israeli Jews of what they’ve been granted in all other democracies”— that is, the freedom to worship as they choose.

Judy and Hillel were both native Americans who, despite their deep commitment to Zionism, maintained dual U.S. and Israeli citizenships and spent time as visiting professors in American schools like MIT, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. (When I visited them in Jerusalem in 1975, they took me to a gathering of American expatriates like themselves, where the music of choice was Gilbert & Sullivan rather than Hava Nagila.) You could say they were hedging their bets— or more generously, that they were citizens of the world. Whatever— Judy’s death is an occasion not merely to celebrate a remarkable life but also to ponder why human beings flourish in some times and places but suffer in others.

A wife’s veto

Like many Americans, we Rottenbergs tend to assume that the U.S. is our final resting point after thousands of years of dispossession and persecution. Even were that so, migration is never easy.

As early as 1863, my Hungarian great-great-grandfather Marcus Rottenberg seized an opportunity to move to Cleveland and found work there as a peddler. He loved America, and after two years he had saved enough to send steamboat tickets to his wife, Esther, in Hungary, so she and their children could join him. But Esther, unwilling to give up her familiar world for her husband’s strange new land, refused to make the journey. So in 1865, just after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Marcus returned to Hungary.

He never saw America again, but he never forgot it. He built an American-style cottage, wore American suspenders, distributed American silver dollars to his children and grandchildren, and encouraged them to move to America. And ultimately most of them did. But his son, Herman, who had a prosperous lumber mill in Hungary, didn’t emigrate until 1902, when he moved what was left of his household to New York.

The youngest members of that household were a ten-year-old daughter, Augusta, and an eight-old son, Marcus (named for his his grandfather)— who became, respectively, Judy Shuval’s mother and my grandfather.

A rabbi quits the rabbinate

“I remember the occasion of our actually going,” my grandfather told me many decades later. “My sister Augusta and I were in the front seat of a carriage that had about six people in it, and we two were in the front seat with the driver. And I wasn't sad about it— I was going on a journey; it was a nice ride, as far as I knew. And then Augusta said to me, ‘Marc, don't you realize that we'll never come back here again, we may never see this place again?’ Well, I burst into tears, and they had to come over and console me, everybody wondering what's the matter, and they couldn't stop me from crying.”

(They were very lucky, of course. Herman Rottenberg’s sawmill partner and brother-in-law, Moritz Stern, remained in Hungary because he was prosperous there and saw no reason to leave. Seven of his eight children subsequently perished in the Holocaust,)

In New York, like many Jews, the Rottenbergs found work in the garment industry. But they hungered to feed their souls as well as their stomachs. Their arrival in America coincided with the dawn of the Zionist movement, which appealed to their idealistic/Jewish leanings.

As a young man, my Grandpa Marc attended weekly Zionist meetings along with Augusta’s husband David Tannenbaum, who was a rabbi as well as an eloquent speaker. Here they heard captivating lecturers like Chaim Weizmann (later the first president of Israel) and Judah Magnes, a prominent reform rabbi who envisioned a binational state in Palestine where Jews and Arabs would live together as neighbors and friends. So enraptured was David Tannenbaum that he quit the rabbinate to spend more time raising money for the Zionist cause. (David and Augusta went into the semi-made dress business to support themselves.)

In the shadow of war

In 1924, when David Tannenbaum and my Grandpa Marc were both in their early 30s, they visited Palestine to see if it would be suitable for young families like theirs. They found a Montessori school system that satisfied them, and Marc put money down on a barren patch of mud which today constitutes the center of Tel Aviv. Financial concerns back home forced them to return to New York in 1925, but Marc held onto that land until 1933.

“We said that in the future, if we get enough money together, we can go there,” Grandpa Marc told me.

Personally, I’m glad that he didn’t. It’s always bothered me that because of an accident of birth, I— who have spent only 20 days in Israel and haven’t been there in 50 years— can board a plane tomorrow and be welcomed in Israel as a citizen, whereas Palestinians whose families have lived there for generations now find themselves stateless refugees, if not victims of bombing and starvation.

But the promise of Zionism— and the willingness to take risks for it— persisted for the Tannenbaums. They returned to Palestine in 1934, when Judy was nine, and went back to America four years later only because the coming of World War II left them no choice. But of course, the Holocaust led directly to the birth of Israel in 1948.

Dismayed by intolerance

Around that time, Judy Tannenbaum found herself in a rowboat with her boyfriend, Hillel Shuval, on a lake in upstate New York, where— safely beyond the range of eavesdroppers— he confided that he was leaving America on a mission for the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization in British Mandatory Palestine. Judy followed him alone to the new state of Israel in 1949, tracked him down, and they were married in 1952. Judy’s parents, Augusta and David Tannenbaum, settled in Israel in 1951, this time for good. I was nine when they left; I still remember bidding them farewell at Harmon Station outside Peekskill, N.Y., where my Grandpa Marc and my grandmother Rosalie had a summer place.

We Americans tend to think of our country as a land of individual opportunity. But the Tannenbaums thought of Israel more ambitiously. To them, it offered the opportunity to build a humane society from scratch— a “light unto the nations,” as commanded by the prophet Isaiah. And for many decades it approached that ideal, thanks to swarms of bright and idealistic people like Judy and Hillel. But times change. Judy and Hillel spent their last years dismayed by the tide of intolerance in Israel— toward Arabs and non-Orthodox Jews alike.

“I went to Israel a Zionist, and I still believe in the importance of Israel,” Hillel told a Washington audience in 1997. But he expressed concern over what he called the “erosion of the fundamental mechanism of democracy” in Israel. To put it mildly, harassing and banishing the strangers among them was not part of Judy and Hillel’s original Zionist vision. But then, neither was mass deportation of foreigners a part of the American dream that brought my ancestors here. How times have changed, in both lands.

Augusta’s kiss

“As we enter the third millennium of the common era,” I wrote 25 years ago in a book on Philadelphia Jewish life, “we Philadelphia Jews are engaged in one of global Judaism’s two remarkable experiments. The first, in Israel, seeks to determine whether Jews, after 2,000 years of statelessness, can exercise political power collectively without being corrupted by it, as the rulers of every other state have been.

“The second, in Diaspora communities like Philadelphia, tests whether Jews, having sustained the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule among ourselves for 3,000 years, can now work alongside our former tormentors— most notably Christians and Muslims— to apply those principles to the development of compassionate societies beyond our own immediate Jewish circle. Both experiments are important, but I personally feel more sanguine about the latter challenge than the former.”

Today I would put it slightly differently. A humane society is like a marriage: You must work at it every day. If you take your eye off the ball, however briefly, no constitution, no separation of powers, no system of checks and balances will save you. Nor will any sacred scripture or holy book. As Judy’s Israeli daughter Tamar Medin put it to me the other day, “We haven’t given up. We’re still working on it.”

I last saw Judy’s mother, my great-aunt Augusta Tannenbaum, in 1955, when she visited New York. I was 13 at the time. As she left, she bent over and kissed me. That gesture struck me as odd, because I barely knew her. Afterward, I learned that Augusta was dying of cancer; she had come to New York to say goodbye to her American family, and indeed she died three months later. That kiss was her way of saying: Don’t forget me. And don’t forget that there’s still work to be done. And as you can see, I haven’t.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com