לְנַגֵּב

Yesterday, we saw that the Hebrew word for dessert – קִנּוּחַ- comes from the active-intensive פִּעֵל verb, לְקַנֵּחַ- one of the words for to wipe.

A more common word for to wipe is לְנַגֵּב, also a פִּעֵל verb. Unlikeלקנח, however, לנגב implies wiping to the point of dryness.

For example:

אָחֲרֵי שֶׁרוֹחֲצִים יָדַיִם, טוֹב לְנַגֵּב אֹתָם.
After washing hands, (its) good to wipe them dry.

Eating hummus is sometimes called לְנַגֵּב חוּמוּס, since eaters tend to wipe their plates dry with pitta.

You may have noticed that the root of לנגב is נ.ג.ב (n.g.b), the same as that of the name of the Israeli desert (not dessert, desert), the Negev – הַנֶּגֶב. It’s not clear exactly what the etymology of נגב-Negev is, but one theory is that the נגב is a place that has “been wiped dry” of precipitation.

A couple living in the נגב is looking to change that, fulfilling David Ben Gurion’s vision of making the desert bloom – with people, vegetation, and a thriving economy. Check out their video.

נ.ג.ב is also the root of the Hebrew word for towel, מַגֶּבֶת.

Visit Ktzat Ivrit.

Defenders of President Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust were dealt a blow last week when a study by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum rejected a claim they have made regarding the U.S. failure to bomb Auschwitz.

Officials and supporters of the Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Institute in Hyde Park, New York, have claimed for years that David Ben-Gurion opposed bombing Auschwitz, for fear of harming prisoners. Roosevelt supporters have made the claim to deflect criticism of FDR for the U.S. rejection of requests to bomb the death camp.

A newly-completed two-year study by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has concluded, however, that Ben-Gurion opposed bombing the camp only for several weeks when he believed it was a slave labor camp, and then reversed himself when he learned more about the true nature of Auschwitz.

Ben-Gurion’s Jewish Agency colleagues in Europe and the United States then repeatedly pressed Allied officials to bomb the camp.

“There is now broad agreement among Holocaust historians regarding the question of David Ben-Gurion’s position on bombing Auschwitz,” said Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which had been urging the U.S. Holocaust Museum to review the subject in depth.

“Roosevelt’s apologists can no longer use Ben-Gurion to whitewash the Roosevelt administration’s refusal to bomb Auschwitz.”

The Wyman Insitute has issued a study of its own, “America’s Failure to Bomb Auschwitz: A New Consensus Among Historians,” which is available at www.WymanInstitute.org.

Among the Jewish leaders who called on the Allies to bomb Auschwitz in 1944 were World Zionist Organization president (and later president of Israel) Chaim Weizmann, senior Jewish Agency official (and later Israeli prime minister) Moshe Sharett, veteran Jewish leader Nahum Goldmann, and Palestine Labor Zionist leader (and future Israeli prime minister) Golda Meir.

Yitzhak Shamir was arguably the most determined and stubborn Israeli prime minister since David Ben-Gurion. In the winter of 1991, during the first Gulf War, Shamir was faced with an existential dilemma that is very reminiscent of the current quandary that we face. True, Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons because Menachem Begin bombed his reactor despite Shimon Peres’s objections. But the Scud missiles that Saddam fired at greater Tel Aviv could certainly have carried a chemical payload that would have caused mass casualties.

Today, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens Israel and simultaneously awakens the ire of the Western nations, just as Saddam did 20 years ago. When Saddam captured Kuwait, the first President Bush put together an international coalition and attacked him.

What was the consideration that motivated the “intransigent” Shamir to stay out of the fighting? We can safely assume that Israel preferred to let others do its dirty work. If the entire world was fighting Iraq for its own reasons, what reason could there have been to give Saddam the “proof” that this was a Zionist war, allowing him to destabilize the already shaky coalition?

For his part, Saddam made no attempt to fight back. All that interested him was to present himself as a warrior against Israel by focusing his resources on firing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv. For the first time since Israel’s War of Independence, the nation’s civilian population found itself under direct attack. Israel’s citizens became addicted to their sealed rooms, plastic sheets covering their windows, gas masks, and the voice of the IDF spokesman and his “secret weapon” to treat trauma – a glass of water.

Twenty years later, we can say that Shamir made a strategically deplorable decision, with repercussions more severe than the damage done by the Yom Kippur War. The coalition forces did not prevent any Scud missiles from being fired at Israel. In other words, nobody did the dirty work for us. What happened was that Israel’s enemies were no longer afraid to attack its civilian population. Israel’s deterrence factor took a severe blow.

Whoever expected some sort of benefit in exchange for our self-restraint instead got the opposite. Israel did not understand that when a country deposits is existential battles in the hands of others its existence becomes something for which it must pay. In no time, Shamir found himself under heavy U.S. pressure. He was dragged to Madrid, forced to indirectly recognize the PLO, and made to plant the seeds that eventually sprouted into the Oslo Accords. This has led to the thousands of soldiers and citizens who have paid with their lives for those accords.

Shamir also paid a personal price for his mistake. The U.S. interfered with the elections in Israel and delayed loan guarantees that Shamir had requested to help absorb the masses of Soviet Jews immigrating to Israel. Yitzhak Rabin won the premiership. Immediately after his victory, the U.S. went forward with the loan guarantees.

And now to our current situation: Ahmadinejad, like Saddam, is preparing to destroy Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu, like Shamir, is hoping that the world will, for its own reasons, do the dirty work for us and fight our existential war.

The economic and political sanctions against Iran have not worked, and it looks like we are nearing the moment of truth. Here’s the question: is it better if Israel attacks Iran, or if the West does so? From Shamir’s mistake we can conclude that greater Tel Aviv will be on the receiving end of the entire payload that Iran can muster. The second lesson we learn from Shamir is that the Western coalition will not be overly concerned with the threat hanging over Israel’s head. As we all remember, not one Scud missile was destroyed before it was launched.

If Israel does not attack Iran and leaves the work for others, our position will be further weakened. First, because a passive Israel will have no power of deterrence against Iran; second, because it is technically more difficult to defend oneself from a passive stance.

The most serious lesson that we must learn from Shamir, however, is that the question mark hovering today over Israel’s right to exist will turn into a large exclamation point. The West will extort Israel to pay dearly for an attack that it could have carried out more effectively by itself.

The last option, also highly possible, is that nobody will attack – neither Israel nor the West. This is actually the worst scenario of all, because a gun that appears in the first act will always shoot by the third act. Nuclear weapons in the hands of the ayatollahs will be activated in the second act, and it doesn’t look like plastic sheets and water will help this time.

Beneath Baruch Spinoza’s smiling bust on his tombstone on the grounds of the Nieuwe Kerk in the Hague is an inscription of his famous motto, “caute” (written cavte on the stone, see image one), or “cautiously” in Latin. Between that admonition and the dates of his life – 1632 to 1677, cut short by an illness whose identity is hotly debated – is the Hebrew word “amcha” or “amach”, Hebrew for “your people” or “your nation.”

The word, which appears on a stone which was provided by David Ben Gurion, a groupie, is ambiguous, to say the least. Is the word’s subject God – meaning, “[Spinoza is one of] Your nation” – in which case the word evokes the declaration of 1 Chronicles 17: 21, “And who is like Your nation (k’amcha) Israel, a single nation in the land?”

Spinoza’s Tombstone

All photos courtesy of the author

Or is Spinoza the subject? Perhaps the church and its community were the true people of the philosopher excommunicated by the rabbis for heresy. If that were the intention, it would be doubly tragic, as Spinoza’s bones were discarded in the church’s yard after his friends and family stopped paying rent for his tomb. The inscription “amcha” defiantly and ironically marks the tomb commemorating a man who had no people and who, even in death, could not seem to rest in peace.

My first of several walks through the downtown area of The Hague occurred somewhat in a jet-lagged daze. Still, that alone does not explain the many Jewish monuments and buildings I walked right past without appreciating their significance. Even after he had shown me hidden Stars of David, former synagogues and a matzoh factory, it caught me completely off guard when Jewish tour guide Remco Dorr led me to Spinoza’s grave on the grounds of the church right across the street from my hotel.

Whether he was discussing the temporary posts and chains rabbis set up beside canal drawbridges to allow residents to carry outside the ritual boundary (t’chum) on the Sabbath or the cultural and economic gulfs between Sephardic (Portuguese) and Ashkenazi Jews in the 17th century, one cannot say too much about Dorr’s breadth of knowledge except that it was rivaled only by his enthusiasm for his city’s history.

From its start, Dorr’s two-hour tour reflected the Jewish crisis in the city which is the seat of the Dutch government. Before World War II, 17,000 Jews lived in The Hague. The Jewish population of The Hague today is about 2,000. The former shtetl is now Chinatown, and walking along Wagenstraat, strung with hanging red lanterns, one reaches a mini supermarket called U-Shop with a fa?ade of two ram’s heads and two lambs still intact, betraying the storefront’s prior identity as a Jewish butcher’s shop (image two).

Synagogue-turned-mosque

The next stop on Wagenstraat was a 19th century synagogue and mikveh (used from 1844 to 1974), now a mosque (since 1979). According to Dorr, the only aspect of the synagogue (image three) that remains is balcony that was the women’s section. An inscription on a cornerstone close to the ground, far beneath the minarets, still attests (in Hebrew and Dutch) to the building’s origins: “The first stone of the construction of the sanctuary of God, this Ashkenazi congregation Yeshurun , the holy congregation of The Hague, may God defend it, which was placed on Tuesday, the 25th of Nissan, 5603 [1843].”

Walking from the synagogue-turned-mosque to Spinoza’s former attic apartment (17th century rent, 50 guilders per year), Dorr explained that Jewish scavenger hunting in The Hague is different from say Germany.

Whereas stone doorframes in Germany still divulge the locations of mezuzahs past, Dutch frames were made of wood, which has long been replaced. There are some inscriptions – Dorr noted one, “H. G. Klausmeyer, 1922″ in particular – that remain, but many landmarks, like the Jewish orphanage on the Paviljoensgracht, which was a holding place for Jews before they were deported during the Second World War, were destroyed and rebuilt.

A monument on the Rabbijn Maarsenplein square (named for the former chief rabbi of The Hague, Isaac Maarsen, and just steps from Spinoza’s grave at the first Protestant church in The Hague) is particularly poignant.

The square is the grounds of an old playground at a Jewish school where 1,700 children were rounded up before being deported to concentration camps. The sculpture, created by Sara Benhamou and Eric de Vries, consists of six empty chairs (inscribed with the names and ages of martyred children) arranged in a manner that conveys ladders leading upward toward the heavens. The chairs are surrounded by Hebrew and Dutch texts identifying the subject of the memorial. According to Dorr, there used to be seven chairs (an understandable number for a Jewish memorial), but one was stolen.

Storefront, previously Jewish butcher

The remainder of our tour addressed laws preventing Jews from being buried in the city limits, a former Jewish department store De Bijenkorf (which Dorr’s mother remembers being barred from as a Jew during World War II) and a former synagogue turned into a department store, which still has its foundation stone intact, and where rabbis insisted that no bathroom be placed on the site of the former ark. It also included a Holocaust memorial (image four), which bears the biblical quotation, “Remember what Amalek did to you Don’t forget,” and which Dorr said he was displeased to see so haphazardly placed so close to a restaurant.

In some senses, one would have hoped that there would be more spotlights and attention showered on the Jewish memorials and former synagogues in The Hague. Perhaps if they were more conspicuous, I wouldn’t have walked right past them the first and second and third times. But somewhere along the way, dazzled by Dorr’s engrossing woven narratives, it struck me that the hunt for The Jewish Hague required no reconfiguring or modification.

Holocaust Memorial

The Stars of David and former synagogues need not hit every pedestrian over the head. It is enough that they can be teased out and revived in the hands of someone like Dorr (though one fears he is irreplaceable and hard to imitate). Maybe there is no better metaphor for the Jewish life that was and is (albeit downsized significantly) in The Hague than a series of inscriptions and works of art hidden in plain sight.

“We have no idea where he is,” Dorr said solemnly, looking at Spinoza’s tomb stone in that church backyard. “He’s scattered around the church somewhere.” Can one imagine much more pitiful than that?

              Menachem Wecker, who blogs on faith and art for the Houston Chronicle at http://blogs.chron.com/iconia, welcomes comments at mwecker@gmail.com.

This article is the second in a series on Jewish Amsterdam and The Hague, which is based on a trip sponsored by the Netherlands Board of Tourism & Conventions.