If the fascinating evening also had its tearful moments I take responsibility.

This magazine features an interview by our news editor Binyamin Rose with Britain’s new ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould. The two of us were guests at a reception for the ambassador in Tel Aviv at the home of Rabbi Avraham Shapira z”l a chareidi leader who cast a broad influence a generation ago. At the height of his political career he was known as Israel’s “general manager.” We’d been invited to the meeting by Rabbi Shapira’s son the distinguished Londoner Rabbi Yitzchak Shapira who is a personal friend of the new ambassador.

This meeting was important to the ambassador. As he entered his new position he wanted a deeper acquaintance with Israel’s chareidi community and its views on a variety of subjects. He sought to understand the chareidi position on the secular Zionist state. And of course he wanted to hear an explanation of the chareidi community’s attitude toward military conscription and the response to the demand voiced by the media and the broader public that kollel scholars should go to work. What was our position on returning territories to the Arabs he wanted to know and how did we estimate the chances of making peace with them at all — if in fact we saw any need to make peace? The ambassador showed himself to be knowledgeable on local chareidi affairs and the issues that divide the Israeli population into opposing sectors.

The delegation was genuine. There were no politicians or professional political activists among us. Our group twenty in number included rabbis educators mayors of chareidi towns journalists and authors and administrators of chareidi institutions.

The discussion was stimulating. Despite the diversity of opinions expressed which was only to be expected among a group of people with varying backgrounds it was obvious that we were in general agreement on our disappointment with the moral condition of the secular state of Israel and with its ever-increasing distance from Jewish values in public and official life. We shared the feeling that the State is aping the decadence of the West and of course the speakers all had something to say about the incitement against the chareidi community in the media and the political establishment.

The ambassador listened intently and displayed sympathy for our position although he himself is not observant. In his opening remarks he related that before coming to this meeting he had gazed at a picture of his grandfather from Warsaw who would have felt perfectly comfortable at this gathering sitting among bearded Jews dressed in black. He seemed to be proud of his chareidi forebear and he mentioned that while serving as part of Britain’s diplomatic corps in Islamic Iran he made a point of attending synagogue to assert his Jewishness although he was there as a representative of Britain’s Foreign Office. It was indeed a worthwhile evening marked by mutual respect.

I however felt that as the meeting drew to a close there was something not quite complete. Some of my fellow delegates had expressed vehement criticism of the State and for me something was missing from the picture that had been painted of the chareidi stance on Eretz Yisrael and its place in Jewish life.

When our host asked me to speak I began by saying that I was different in one respect from all the others who were gathered in that room. Baruch Hashem none of them shared what I had experienced in that I had come from there. I was a Holocaust refugee. And I wished to tell them a story related to the subject under discussion Eretz Yisrael and the attitude of the chareidi public toward it.

Two months after the war ended I came to Eretz Yisrael. Not on a ship carrying illegal immigrants I emphasized for the ambassador’s benefit but on a registered British passenger ship as my mother and her three children had been fortunate enough to receive immigration certificates.

We set out from Switzerland which I had reached with Hashem’s help after many hardships fleeing across the border from Nazi-occupied France. I was a six-year-old boy on my own traveling as the leader of a group that included three other children all younger than I. On board the ship were many refugees blighted shattered survivors of the death camps of Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen embittered men and women with barely a spark of light left in their eyes. Some were still dressed in rags. Despite my tender age at the time those images are engraved on my heart albeit blurred somewhat by the passage of many years. But there is one image I will never forget. After a six-day journey from the French port of Toulon we were approaching the shores of Eretz Yisrael. That last night on board the passengers were filled with suspense and nervousness. People could hardly sleep and many got up before dawn to be the first to see the shore of the Promised Land. My mother a”h wakened us children too and took us up on deck. It was thronged with people standing still and silent in the slowly fading night.

Suddenly with the first light of dawn the shoreline appeared on the horizon our first glimpse of the land we’d dreamed of. The height of Mount Carmel lit by the rising sun behind us emerged from the sparkling foreground of the Mediterranean Sea.

And then in a moment that atmosphere of awe was broken. The whole crowd was seized with hysterical madness. Everyone began to weep and wail. They threw themselves down on the floor against the walls of the ship letting out groans of pent-up agony. Only two months earlier these people had been the miserable half-dead inmates of Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald and now they were unable to contain the intensity of this mighty moment. All the dreadful suffering they had born for years the destruction of their families and the loss of all hope all erupted when their eyes beheld the shore of the Promised Land. It was too much for them to bear too big.

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I admit that my voice shook and I felt a tear escape the corner of my eye as I related this experience to the ambassador and the rest of the company. After all these years I still cannot forget that painful moment.

I went on with my story telling them that after that cathartic moment passed a group of religious youths began to sing “Eretz Yisrael bli Torah hi keguf bli neshamah.” This was a popular song at the time among members of Agudas Yisrael and Poalei Agudas Yisrael groups.

I said to the ambassador “Those who sit here with us cannot feel the tremendous sense of gratitude that we who came out of that inferno feel toward Eretz Yisrael. They cannot know what it means to us or understand our ambivalence toward the State of Israel. Once the State was founded it opened its gates to thousands of Holocaust refugees so that on the one hand we are glad it was established yet on the other hand our dream has not yet come true because Eretz Yisrael without Torah is like a body without a soul.

Food for Thought

He who loves Eretz Yisrael Eretz Yisrael loves him.

(Rav Yechezkel Halberstam)