Page 132 - issue

(D. Katz continued from page 74)
porarily” by the Ponovezher Rov, who
did not want to give up his seat. It took
about a year for Rav Kahaneman to be
“persuaded” to resign his seat in favor of
the Yiddishist guy, and it left a bad taste. much more. The Zionists claimed that
Parliamentary life was not without its
droll moments, however. The Lithuanian
Minister of Finance made a speech char-
acterizing Jewish businessmen as chron-
ic cheaters and tax evaders. Well, even
the Ponovezher Rov had no trouble join-
ing in condemning that statement. Why
droll? Three months later, the same Min-
ister of Finance was convicted of taking
bribes and sentenced to prison. Pi ksil
mechita lo (A fool’s mouth is his ruin),
as it says in Proverbs (18:7)
Then it got less funny. The govern-
ment announced it wanted to change
the law governing kehilos. Lithuania had
had kehilos for many centuries, but the
Czar has stripped them of their powers
in the 1830s. Then the new Republic of
Lithuania had restored many kehila pow-
ers. Five years later Lithuania was having
second thoughts.
What exactly was a kehila? Good
question. If you are a secular Jew, par-
ticularly a secular Zionist, the kehila
is all about Jewish secular social orga-
nization. The kehila is an Associated, a
Federation, a secular entity. It may fund
religious institutions or causes, or it may
not. It is a mini-Jewish state. Religion is
just one of its activities, and far from the Jewish unity and even as betraying the
most important one. For religious Jews,
on the other hand, a kehila is a religious
entity. Maintenance of the Torah and its
laws and values is its raison d’etre. To a
religious Jew, a secular kehila is an oxy-
moron.
Because of these fundamental hash-
kafic differences, it was hard to get the
Jewish Faction in parliament, which was
a coalition of the three Jewish groups, to
agree on what they wanted the kehila to
be under Lithuanian law.
It so happened that the gentile point
of view dovetailed with the Achdus point
of view. The Lithuanians were Catholic
and nationalist. They could understand
a Jewish community as a religious enti-
ty. They could live with Jewish religious
freedom and a religious organization to
124 u www.wherewhatwhen.com u
regulate it under law. That would match
the Catholic and Protestant models. I
might add that the Lithuanians are into
racial purity, so they were as opposed to
intermarriage as the Ponovezher Rov!
But what the secular Zionists wanted was
under something called the 1919 Minori-
ties Treaty of Versailles, new countries,
including Lithuania, were required to al-
low the Jews to set up a mini-parliament
and a mini-administration that would
pass laws binding on Lithuanian Jews,
administer those laws (with the help of
the Lithuanian police), levy taxes on the
Jews, and also secure funding from the
Lithuanian treasury to help pay for the
Jewish mini-government: something, in
other words, that we call today (loosely)
“Sharia law.”
The Zionists were technically right;
Lithuania had indeed bound itself by
treaty to do all that. But the Lithua-
nians did not want to. As I said before,
who wants a state-within-a-state? So
the Lithuanians cleverly played Jewish
politics, promising the Achdus that they
would go along with a system of religious
kehilos but not with secular ones. This
placed Achdus in a delicate spot. Should
they strike a deal with the government?
After all, Achdus did indeed believe in
the religious definition of the kehila, not of Achdus, he was physically threatened
in the secular (atheist) definition. And
maybe they could get desperately-needed
funding for Yavneh and the yeshivos. On
the other hand, if they split from the Jew- Achdus meeting was cancelled. In short,
ish Faction, it would be seen as breaking
cause of Jewish civil rights, which legally
Lithuania was bound to provide.
In the end, Achdus went for the deal
with the government, which provoked
a firestorm of anger on the part of the
Zionists and Yiddishists. The Zionists
charged that the Agudah was making a
grab for the assets of the kehila, to which The elections turned out to have been
they were democratically not entitled.
The stage was set for the stormy parlia-
mentary elections of 1926. This time, the
Achdus was not part of the Jewish Fac-
tion; it ran against it.
These were stormy elections indeed.
The incensed Zionists and Yiddishists
called the Agudah every name in the
book. For its part, the Agudah assembled
99 rabbonim to publish a call to vote for
Achdus. The rabbinical mood was mili-
tant, but it was much too Agudah, so
much so that they alienated the Mizrachi
rabbis and voters, which was a political
blunder. After all, a substantial number
of Achdus voters were Mizrachists. But
politics breeds militancy. The Telzer Rov
wanted to publish a cherem on anyone
who voted against Achdus. The Kovner
Rov strenuously objected, on many
grounds. The Ponovezher Rov suggest-
ed they publish a bracha on anyone who
voted for Achdus, and this was accepted.
However, some “genius” screwed it up by
publishing a poster showing a mountain
and someone voting Achdus with the
words, “Ve-nasata es habracha al Har
Grizim,” which left little to the imagina-
tion as to the consequences of not voting
for Achdus. Achdus posters declared that
the Zionists were perpetrating a “pilegesh
b’Giv’ah,” strong words indeed.
For their part, the Zionists called the
Achdus every dirty name in the book,
cursing them and accusing them of pre-
ferring religious Catholics to irreligious
Jews. This was indeed a clever election
ploy in Lithuania. Zionists also disrupted
Achdus rallies. When the famous gaon,
Rabbi Leib Rubin of Vilkomir, wanted to
deliver a speech in his own shul in favor
and had to call in the Lithuanian police
for personal protection. In Shavel, the Zi-
onist disturbances were so violent that an
it was Charlottesville in Lithuania…
When the elections were held, Achdus
was wiped out; they lost every seat. It was
a triumph for the Zionists and a humili-
ation for the rabbonim. But the whole
business turned out to be short lived. Not
long after the parliamentary elections, a
right-wing group staged a coup d’etat,
seizing power and ending democracy.
one big bracha levatala, as parliament it-
self ceased to exist! From then to the end
of the Republic of Lithuania, in 1940, the
country was a dictatorship. It wasn’t Hit-
ler, but there was no more Jewish demo-
cratic politics or talk of minority rights.
The dictatorship was willing to allow re-
ligious kehilos only; everything else had
to be funded by the Jews themselves, as