The current issue of this journal has been prepared and published at a critical and painful time, a watershed moment in the history of the Jewish People and the Jewish State. Israel is at war, defending itself against an existential, genocidal threat in the wake of the attacks and depredations perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023. Those in Israel are living a transformed reality. Those of us in the diaspora cite with conviction the famous epigram of Yehuda Halevi: “My heart is in the East, though I am in the farthest reaches of the West.”
In the pages of this journal, Rabbi Chaya Rowen Baker, Dean of the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary in Jerusalem, shares a deeply moving and thoughtful personal account of the Israeli home front and the experience of Israeli civilians since October 7. We are in her debt for her “Letter from Israel.” Rabbi Rowen Baker previously served as rabbi of Congregation Ramot Zion in the French Hill neighborhood of Jerusalem, leading that flagship congregation for sixteen years. Ramot Zion’s sanctuary is called “Ohel Tuvia”—in memory of Rabbi Theodore Friedman, a past president of the Rabbinical Assembly and pioneer of the Masorti movement in Israel and beyond.
In this issue is reprinted another “Letter from Israel”—this one by Rabbi Friedman—written in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The parallels are striking and agonizing. Rabbi Rowen Baker points out that the congregation she would come to lead held its first public services in observance of the High Holy Days of 1973. In personal correspondence, she wrote to me of Rabbi Friedman: “I am honored to follow in his footsteps in this way. And pained that it is necessary.” I know this journal’s readership joins me in responding: The honor is ours, and even “in the farthest reaches of the West,” we share your pain.
We are also privileged to include in this issue JTS Chancellor Emeritus Ismar Schorch’s admiring and inspiring remembrance of his father, Emil Schorsch, and his rabbinate. In an essay rich in history, we read of the Schorsch family, including young Ismar, escaping Nazi Germany in December of 1938: “Relatives in London had secured for us visas to England from its chief rabbi, Joseph H. Hertz, who had been given authority to rescue rabbis from Germany. Years later I would quip that the first rabbi to be ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York in 1894 was destined to rescue the child who had just turned three and would eventually become the institution’s sixth chancellor in 1986.” Chancellor Schorsch writes of his father’s depth of determination to become a rabbi: “A deeply religious personality, he believed that surviving the chaos of war destined him to join the forces of those committed to preventing its recurrence.”
Alas, we have not been spared the tragedy of recurrent war.
As Purim and Pesach approach, with their own foundation in genocidal attacks upon the Jewish People, may we be privileged to receive, as Rabbi Rowen Baker explains is now the customary formulation in the Jewish State, besorot tovot: only good news.
Joseph H. Prouser is rabbi of Temple Emanuel of North Jersey in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, and editor of this journal.