Nadene Goldfoot
Endre Friedmann, AKA Robert Capa was a zionist. He photographed his people's yearning and reaching out to their homeland.
Over the following two years, Capa re-visited Israel a number of times to document the waves of immigration, the transit camps, and the deep uncertainty facing the new-born Jewish nation. Despite Capa’s fame as a photographer of wars, these pictures represent a part of his work which is marked by immediacy, warmth and intimacy with his subject.
The images presented here are closer and more familiar than much of than Capa’s earlier work, perhaps because he himself, having fled Hungary for Berlin and Paris, was a symbol of the wandering, driven and desperate Jewish Diaspora. Here, he documents the arrival of thousands of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Turkey and Tunisia in 1949.
One of the nicest words in our language that has become so misunderstood and maligned is the word, Zionism. This word seems to call for a spotlight on it where people have been seen to cringe, like hearing the word Communism or Nazism. No one seems to be able to say for sure what it means or what causes people today to cringe. It has happened because of lack of education, or is it anti-Semitism?
I for one, am a Zionist. Stop cringing. This means that I believe that Jews have had the right to populate Palestine and bring it to its rebirth of Israel, a country it had been since King Saul had become its first king in about the 11th century BCE or 1,200 BCE from the tribe of Benjamin. The kingdom lasted until 70 CE when the Romans had occupied their land years before. The Romans gave them the final coup by burning their 2nd Temple down after looting it and then burning the whole city of Jerusalem and not allowing any Jews back in. A coup or coup d'état is the removal of an existing government from power, usually through violent means. Typically, it is an illegal, unconstitutional seizure of power by a political faction, the military, or a dictator. The land remained a mess until the return of the Jews. They say the land was waiting for their rightful owners to produce again.
The Jews were tenacious about their land and one of their generals, Bar Kokhba, returned 62 years later and took it back from the Romans in 132; holding it for 3 years before dying in battle in keeping it. It was a land that they were directed to live in by G-d through Moses, and then led in by Joshua, with the admonishment to live there.
If you weren't one of the polytheistic people of the world, you took this directive to be super holy and needed to be followed, and this led to the belief in Zionism. The right to live there. Ever since the Jews were overcome and forced out or killed, they've been praying 3 times a day for their return as a people. They started in single returns, one man at a time, one family at a time, something a little group for protection at a time.
Twice Jews were overcome in their history and their best of the population, the young and physically fit were kidnapped and taken; once by the Assyrians in 721 BCE, and then again one of their neighbors, the Babylonians in 597 to 586. The Assyrian group had disappeared from Israelites, but the Babylonian Jews were able to keep a connection going between those in the homeland and those in exile until many actually were able to return in 538 BCE and rebuild their temple that Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed. Cyrus of Persia had thought it an important enough endeavor to have Jews and their Temple back on their own land again. He would have been called the first Zionist.
For the term, Zionism, wasn't created until the late year of 1893, a time almost like yesterday. It was coined by Nathan Birnbaum when he tried to express his feelings of his past ancestors that went back to the Babylonian Exile for sure. It was a return to the land they were destined to live in. To each man there was a certain peace of land meant for them, and this was for the Jews.
Until the 19th century CE, this emotion, this feeling, this directive was a religious part of Judaism and was so expressed in prayers, such as if a Jew ever forgot Jerusalem may they lose the wisdom of their right hand. Many a year there were pseudo-messianic movements; people did return which is called making Aliyah while risking their own lives to get there;
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature."
A late piece of beautiful documentation was done by Mark Twain in 1867, the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He went to Palestine, for the land was called that after 135, named by the Romans in their anger at having to fight 3 years to regain Jerusalem from Bar Kokhba. They named it for the Jews' worst enemy of the day other than themselves, the Philistines, just to make the Jews cringe. Twain took a vacation to visit THE HOLY LAND, EGYPT, THE CRIMEA, GREECE, AND INTERMEDIATE POINTS OF INTEREST.
They took off from Brooklyn on February 1, 1867. He wrote about it in his book, "The Innocents Abroad," he and others being the tourists on the trip. They found barren, mosquito infested land with an occasional Bedouin. The book consists of 285 pages of detail about what all he saw in that year. It proved to be a shocking trip for him as he discovered first hand that Palestine was only from 40 to 60 miles wide. He said that the state of Missouri could be split into 3 Palestines, and then be enough material left for part of another-possibly a whole one! "Therefore, he said, "if we by chance to discover that from DAN to BEERSHEBA there seemed a mighty stretch of country to the Israelites, let us not be airy with them, but reflect that it was and is a mighty stretch when one can not traverse it by rail.
Jews in the late 19th century, Zionism in the Eastern and Southeastern Europe, had movements to return to their land. One was called the Hibbat Zion movement. Zion is the other name of Jerusalem and Jerusalem is the heart and soul of Judaism which we give thanks to King David for his capital. This movement encouraged a return to the land by its people.
As anti-Semitism kept growing in all the places Jews were living in, the need for a return kept on growing, but they were a sparse group, homeless, wanting for leaders, no army backup, etc. Herzl, a journalist, saw the need and the loss of Jews in Russia in the eternal pogroms and then what happened to a French-Jewish Captain Dreyfus who was treated badly because he was Jewish. Dreyfus, known to the world in the Dreyfus Affair, suffered and was imprisoned on an island from the French persecution.
Herzl was not a religious man, but he was Jewish and had empathy for his fellow Jews. What to do about antisemitism, he thought. He came up with the idea of creating a Jewish Homeland in Africa. He didn't realize that Jews who remained Jews and had not been absorbed by the land they lived in were praying to return to their own homeland and no place else mattered to them. The idea was a return to THAT land and not just a land. It was he who started the Zionist movement. He saw that at any moment any Jew could be attacked and accused of crimes at anytime.
The good thing was that the land of Israel had never been devoid of Jews living there, but the population had been small; too small to create a country once again. It helped since returning Jews started in 1880 on aliyahs, and there were 5 of them. Herzl was successful. Herzl dreamed of a Jewish state backed by international agreement. His first obstacle was in creating one. Palestine happened to be a small territory once a part of the original kingdom, and only that could satisfy the Jewish soul, because that was the chosen home for Jews according to their beliefs. He felt that Jews would be passionate about protecting their land if given the chance.
The First Zionist Congress was held in 1897. Zionism proceeds from the assumption that the Jews are still a people or a nation. They have stayed together in marriages and locked up together in ghettos. They are the singular religion of "The Old Testament." They were referred to as the "People of the Book." They were not allowed to dress like other people but were forced to be different. They were different. The men could read and write Hebrew. These Jews were people who would not assimilate themselves to other peoples and would keep their identity as a national community. We've been the "Wandering Jews" long enough.
In the 2nd half of the 19th century, Hibbat Zion had evoked the BILU movement among Russian Jewish students who started the agricultural settlement in Palestine in 1882. The movie, Fiddler On The Roof, was about this period.
World War I divided the Zionists into 3 camps; in 2 belligerent blocks and in neutral states for international approval. Zionist leaders continued their work in each of these groups and set up an international office at Copenhagen. The Central European Zionists only received vague pledges from Turkey.
Chaim Weizmann in England was able to induce the British government to issue the BALFOUR DECLARATION in 1917, at the end of the war. That declaration approved of the Jewish National Home in Palestine. France and Italy went along with it. The US Zionists got the agreement of President Wilson of the USA. The Zionists were now working from the newly-created JEWISH AGENCY FOR PALESTINE. All Jews and Arabs were called Palestinians because they were living in Palestine. Jews didn't become Israelis until May 14, 1948.
Five minutes after Golda Meir, a Zionist, and others declared the state of Israel over the radio, they were attacked. Their new country consisted of 600,000 Jews-and Moses had in his last census, 601,730. They had lost 1,820 on the Exodus from Egypt in their 40 year trek.
A Zionist is a person who thinks that it's okay for Jews to have returned to their ancient lands which were desolate at the time, land no one else wanted. Even the few Arabs living there sold their land to eager Jewish buyers who paid extravagant prices for this weed-infested, swamps or desert land they were so happy to rid themselves of. They paid for the land.
They didn't take the land away from people. Even when the War of Independence started in 1947, Arabs were begged by the Jews to remain and not listen to their leaders to leave. They were told to leave by Arab leaders as the Arab army was approaching and they all figured that the Arabs would take the land from the Jews and give it to the Arabs who were eager to occupy their homes. The Jews went around with bullhorns announcing the need to stay and not flee, but many did. Then their leadership warned them not to return after their own army failed to take the land and run the Jews out.
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics. His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He had an IQ of 180. That's about the highest recorded.
Being a Zionist is not a dirty word or a terrible thing. Albert Einstein was a known Zionist. b: 1879 Germany d: 1955 New Jersey
- Albert Einstein (1879–1955), born in the German Empire, a scientist who supported the Zionist movement. Albert Einstein's political views#Zionism. Into math in 1921: In 1933, while Einstein was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power. Because of his Jewish background, Einstein did not return to Germany. He settled in the United States and became an American citizen in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential German nuclear weapons program and recommending that the US begin similar research. Einstein supported the Allies, but generally denounced the idea of nuclear weapons.
- Einstein publicly stated reservations about the proposal to partition the British mandate of Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish countries. In a 1938 speech, "Our Debt to Zionism", he said: "I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. My awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain—especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state. ... If external necessity should after all compel us to assume this burden, let us bear it with tact and patience." His attitudes were nuanced: In his testimony before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in January 1946 he stated that he was not in favour of the creation of a Jewish state, while in a 1947 letter to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru intended to persuade India to support Zionist aims of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, Einstein stated that the Balfour Declaration's proposal to establish a national home for Jews in Palestine "redresses the balance" of justice and history, claiming that "at the end of the first world war, the Allies gave the Arabs 99% of the vast, underpopulated territories liberated from the Turks to satisfy their national aspirations and five independent Arab states were established. One per cent was reserved for the Jews in the land of their origin". Einstein remained strongly supportive of unlimited Jewish immigration to Palestine.
- Albert Einstein, a Jew, but not an Israeli citizen, was offered the presidency in 1952, but turned it down, stating: "I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it.
To sum it up, Zionism is a" Jewish nationalist movement that has had as its goal the creation and support of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews (Hebrew: Eretz Yisraʾel, “the Land of Israel”).
And that's how Israel came to be a 2nd time around. It will be 73 years old on May 14, 1948. Einstein, we could not wait. The time between World Wars was the time to speak up. We did. If anything, the creation of Israel helped to save Judaism. Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer, would agree with me. Rabbis Dov Lipmann, also a knesset member, and Mark Golub would as well. They are definitely Zionists. There are many of us who are zionists.
Resource:
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
book: The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Venice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Zionists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Albert_Einstein#Zionism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Israel#:~:text=Albert%20Einstein%2C%20a%20Jew%2C%20but,that%20I%20cannot%20accept%20it.
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