The Exact Uri Tzvi Greenberg Temple Mount Quotation

Many quote from a speech Uri Tzvi Greenberg, then a MK representing Herut, 

during a Knesset plenum debate but 'enhance' it.

Here is the headline from the Herut newspaper two days after, March 11, 1949:

and it reads:

"He who rules in Jerusalem, rules in Tel Aviv".

And from the Knesset record:

It need be recalled that at that time, Jerusalem was not yet the official capital of Israel. It became so only in December 1949 when David Ben-Gurion passed a government decision. That was why he mentioned Tel Aviv.

Another section of the speech:

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UZ Greenberg: "He Who Rules..."

From the speech delivered by Uri Zvi Greenberg in the Knesst on March 8, 1949, including his famous dictum (underlined):

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Gay Rabbi on Two Truths

In an interview with Sharon Kleinbaum, the rabbi of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST), I spotted this:

“I happen to be someone who can hold two truths at once,” she responds

which, of course, sent me to Uri Tzvi Greenberg's poem with these lines:

And I say: There is one truth and not two.As there is one sun and as there are not two Jerusalems.It was written in the Law of Conquest of Moses and JoshuaUntil the last of my kings and my traitors have consumed.And there will be a day when from the river of Egypt until the EuphratesAnd from the sea until the mountain passes of Moav my boys will go upAnd they will call my enemies and my haters to the last battle.And the blood will decide: Who is the only ruler here.

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Israel Without The Mount Is --- Not Israel

Israel Without The Mount Is --- Not Israel

You will not be in Eilat and your flag’s pole at the Reed Sea

there – as a reed.

You betrayed your Mount, the supreme mountain in all the world,

Sacred of all the mountains in the world.

And you will not sit amongst the nations without this mount

being a backrest for you in the world.

Amongst the nations will be seated he for whom the mount supports his back.

In the secret of glory coincides this mount and in the secret of strength that is hidden in it

You lived in foreign land.

Those who generate hate will know that you are the sons of the supreme mount.

The psalms of your king are routine in their mouths

On a day of mourning for a death or a day when a king is crowned.

Without this glory, what is your worth in the universe?

Remove the North from the world and it will be a triangle.

Remove the East from the world and it will no longer exist.

Israel without the Mount is --- not Israel.

                                                           

                                                                                  Uri Tzvi Greenberg

                                                                                  Spring 1949

^

In Literary Research: Jesus and Uri-Tzvi Greenberg

From the review by Adele Reinhartz (University of Ottawa) of Neta Stahl's "Other and Brother: Jesus in the 20th-Century Jewish Literary Landscape" which, by the way, has the infamous graphic of a Uri Tzvi Greenberg poem on the cover:

"Infamous" in that an order for his arrest was issued in Warsaw causing him to flee to Berlin.

This is was Rheinhaltz writes:

Chapter 2, "Cut off from all of his Brothers, from his Blood," turns to the poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896-1981). Stahl argues that Greenberg uses the figure of Jesus to reflect his own biography and sense of self, including his experiences in the Austria-Hungarian army during World War I, the 1918 pogrom, immigration to Palestine 1923, and most important, the Holocaust. Greenberg's poetry reflects both alienation from and kinship with Jesus, who is both indifferent to and symbolic of the suffering of European Jewry. Greenberg's poetry incorporates Christian imagery not only verbally but also typographically, a point brilliantly illustrated in his poem "Uri Zvi in front of the Cross INRI" that is used to great effect on the cover of Stahl's book. In the poignant poem "God and his Gentiles," the Christian God descends from heaven, travels through Europe, laments the absence of his Jews, and is himself destined for slaughter due to his Jewish appearance. Whereas in other works the figure of Jesus is differentiated from his Christian interpretations, these poems suggest a bifurcation within the figure of Jesus himself, as both "Other" and "Brother."  This chapter provides several illustrations of Stahl's incisive and beautifully written analyses of poetry.

And from the source:

Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896–1981) was one of the most prominent figures in twentieth century Jewish poetry. In Greenberg's poetry perhaps more than in the work of any other modern Jewish writer, the figure of Jesus reflects his own personal, literary and ideological biography, and his sense of selfhood. Greenberg's characterization of Jesus is profoundly ambivalent. His poetry merges elements of rejection and aversion, rooted in traditional Judaism, with a depiction of Jesus as a character of great charm and mystery who rebels against the social and religious conventions of his time. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the different literary devices Greenberg uses to express the tension between Jesus' human aspect, linked to his Jewish character, and his godly aspect, connected to his idolatrous representation within the Christian Church. The second section demonstrates how this tension becomes an actual division between two personas: the Christian Jesus is referenced by the Slavic name “Yezus,” while the “authentic” Jewish Jesus is called “Yeshu.” The third section discusses the tensions between Greenberg's divergent representations of Jesus as Exilic Jew, Zionist pioneer, and even national Messiah.

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Uri Tzvi Greenberg Confirmed By Eichmann

I found this fascinating but why, afterwards:

Bettina Stangneth’s recent Eichmann vor Jerusalem, [the book]...comes as a shock even to those of us convinced that Eichmann was highly motivated and knew exactly what he was doing...[writing in] more than 1,300 pages of writings and transcripts from Eichmann’s Argentine period.

...Eichmann [was] at the very center of a network of unrepentant ex-Nazis there who still had supporters in the upper echelons of the Bundesrepublik...This group held regular meetings [in Argentina] where they would drink and vent their bile, but also worked methodically to extend a network of sympathizers, forged documents to exculpate themselves and National Socialism, and spoke seriously of returning to Germany and staging a coup. In this circle of friends, Stangneth concludes, Eichmann remained a “fanatical Nazi.”

...Stangneth quotes the entire rant, which takes up three densely printed pages in the German edition. What comes through is Eichmann’s intense devotion to Nazi aims and defiance in the face of the enormity of German crimes against the Jews, whose lives mean nothing to him. Denying he was a mere bureaucrat, he presents himself as an engaged fighter for his Volk and Blut, his exact words.

As for the Jews, he gives them almost cosmic significance, explaining that their dominance was secured by their vast learning and the imposition of their revelation on other peoples. He finds it “depressing” to think that the Christian Church is built on Jewish revelation and says (this is not in Life) that “it is from this awareness that I fight against this enemy”—a phrase that could have been taken from Carl Schmitt’s writings on the Jew as civilizational enemy. Eichmann comes through as a classic pro-Zionist anti-Semite, “fascinated” with Judaism—he claimed, falsely, to have learned Hebrew from Benjamin Murmelstein in Vienna—and “passionately” devoted to finding them a new homeland. So long as they were driven, by any means necessary, from their current one.

And now, why for me that was fascination.

The concept that Eichmann expresses, that it was the Judaism of the Jews that provided a religious ethic which undermined the code of behavior which he, and his fellow Nazis, sought, that our religion and culture, in its ‘weakness’, as it were, corrupted what the non-Jewish philosophy of life should be, is reflected in the poems of Uri Tzvi Greenberg published in the volume of collected poems on the Holocaust, Rehovot HaNahar (Streets of the River), that appeared in 1951.


In the poem Shir HaPanim HaKadosh: Acheinu Kol Bet Yisrael (The Holy Poem of the Faces: Our Brothers All of the House of Israel), pages 187 – 194, which originally appeared in September 1946, Greenberg asks in a multi-repeated one line refrain

Eich lo yist’munu goyim…

(“How could the non-Jews but not hate us?”)

And he bases this presumption on the fact that Jews provided the example and the standard for much of what the non-Jews inherited in their own rituals, beliefs, morals and restrictive limitations.

“The shining candelabrum that we lit in the Temple on Mount Moriah

Is that which is burning in their halls and huts;

And had it been extinguished, their souls would have been darkened, as the soul

Of their ancient elder and of the soul of the beast in their forest - -

And this they well know, they truly do!

How could the non-Jews but not hate us?”

He highlights Jewish successes in the realm of morals and spiritual achievements and each theme ends with that refrain.


In another poem, on page 32, entitled “The Poem of Avraham’s Race”, he treats his theme as one in which we liberated mankind from idolatry and slavery but nevertheless, we were not congratulated:

“From the day we overcame the nature of fire and water

And we left them behind joyfully for freedom and majesty,

The fire follows right after us: to grab us amidst the straits;

And the water is behind us: to drown us.

From the day we smashed the idols of wood and stone

And we taught that there is a God who creates all creation –

The wood of the non-Jews lies upon us in its death-shadow,

And every stone is angry at us for they do not wish to be a

Foundation for our house.

And from the day that the idolaters from the generation of Avram

Until the generation of the Cross

That received from us the knowledge of the One God alone,

That cannot be grasped in physical form

We have not known any refuge from the non-Jews’ anger;

Their blood cries out so for their ancient idol…

And in their sub-consciousness, in moments of the weakness of longing,

They come to us – to the Hebrew well

For they have no prayers of their own in their mouths,

Not on a festive day or one of mourning

Not when they crown their king or when they bury him,

Not on a day celebrating heroism or one after a battle campaign,

On land or sea,

Other than our prayers.

From our king, David,

Come the lips

In the choirs

Selah and Hallelujah and Amen – “

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Nationalist Theater

This evening I attended a theatrical interpretation of Uri Tzvi Greenberg's poem, "In The Ears of A Child I Will Relate" sponsored by the Uri Tzvi Greenberg Heritage House:

That's Elchanan Even-Chen on the left (he's the Latma news anchor) and Yaakov Brody.  Baruch Guttin is director. Dr. Baruch Pelech introduced the poet with a lecture on his approach to Jewish Messianism. Adam Yachin fashioned the backdrop and Asher Golschmidt provided original music accompaniment.

Enjoyable.  And satisfying.

^

Uri Tzvi Greenberg's Mephisto in...German

For inquiries:

Rabin Building, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Mt.Scopus, 91905 Jerusalem, Israel
Tel: 972-2-588-1909 or 588-1686,
Fax: 972-2-581-1369

On Uri Tzvi Greenberg and Jesus Affinity

Hamutal Bar-Yosef on Uriz Tvi Greenberg in this academic article:

Jewish-Christian Relations in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature: A Preliminary Sketch

…The Yiddish and early Hebrew poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg (1894-1981) radicalised the complex Jewish attitude towards Christianity.[52] In Albatros, a Yiddish literary almanac edited by Greenberg himself, he published long poems which expressed his attitude toward Christ with such force and audacity that the editorial office had to stop publication. Greenberg was a frontline soldier in the Austrian Army during the First World War, but deserted it and lived in hiding. After experiencing a pogrom in his hometown of Lemberg (L’vov, L’viv), he became an ardent Zionist.

In his early poems Greenberg often refers to Jesus as “my brother” or “our brother”.[53] In this context Jesus is a symbol of universal human suffering. In his long poem, “The Mystery Man”, published in 1922 in Warsaw in Albatros, Greenberg expressed his universalism with the words:

A man, Uri Zvi, or Ivan or Mustafa
with Shadai in his blood,
or with the cross in the head
or with half a crescent
at the trembling temple.[54]

In the poem “In the Kingdom of the Cross” (1923) Greenberg writes:

“At the churches/ Hangs my brother/ Crucified (…) Brother Jesus, a Jewish skin and bones shrinks”.

Greenberg identified himself with the historical Jesus, whom he – like Klausner – saw as a Jewish nationalist, who had been tortured and killed by the Romans because he was a leader of an anti-Roman revolt. But he detested historical Christianity, which had gone far away from Golgotha. He described Christ as being emptied from his humanity by two thousand years of distance from Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the Galilee. Jesus, who for Greenberg was a symbol of Jewish suffering, had been crucified by Christianity, and he was still being crucified in the Christian churches and cathedrals.

He gives vent to his attitude toward institutionalised Christianity with the words:

Oh Christ’s bald priests!
No man has cut the veins of your hands
And no one has driven his nails in your throats
No one has brought one of you to Golgotha
And hanged him naked on a blossoming tree.
Whose is the lament?
Not yours! It is our pain, the pain of the Jewish redeemer!
Not your agonies! It is our wound.[55]
In 1922 Greenberg published in his Albatros a “concrete” poem in the form of a cross, which was entitled Uri Zvi Before the Cross/ INRI (Jesus the Nazarene King of the Jews).[56] In this poem the poet turned to Jesus, saying:

You have become inanimate, my brother Jesus. You have two thousand years on the cross. Around you the world stopped. But you have forgotten everything. Your frozen brain does not reflect…You have become inanimate, you have tranquillity on your cross. I do not have it. Not me.[57]

The poet sees the Christian cross, a symbol of sympathy with suffering, as an empty, meaningless symbol. For him Jesus became the representative of the Jewish fate: “Ancient Jewish distress, Golgotha, my brother, don’t you see, Golgotha is here: all around.” Pilate places phylacteries on Jesus’ head, which are “a new crown of thorns”.

In the poem “A World on a Slope” (1922) the poet expressed his nihilistic loss of his former faith in Christian ideals. In this poem Jesus is fiercely attacked by a band of invalids and madmen who curse him and mock at him. They demand that he should get down from his heavenly cross to earth and join them, the real sufferes. They cry:

Get down from the cross,
you man, in our image!
Get down! The world has chimed: thirteen![58]

In this poem Christ is described as being emptied from his humanity by two thousand years of distance from Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the Galilee. Never before did any Jewish writer dare to directly attack and caricaturise the image of Christ.

At a time when many European intellectuals believed in a pacifist future, Greenberg prophesied the destruction of Europe together with the Jews. He wrote:

But I am telling you the prophecy – the black prophecy:
From our valleys a pillar of cloud will rise
From our dark breaths, woe to us how bitter they are!
And you will not realize the terror in your flesh.
And will go on prattling from burning palates
The Jews!
The Jews!
While poisonous gases will enter into palaces
And suddenly icons will scream in Yiddish.[59]
The Jews have nochance to survive in Europe. “Ten will remain, ten pain-stricken Jews … in order to prove: there was such a nation, on the Christian earth of distress”, he wrote in his “In the Kingdom of the Cross” (1923).

Greenberg describes the metamorphosis he went through:

I have been long meditating in the inwardness: is it possible
That those who kneel in Europe toward Bethlehem
And sanctify the bible – are those, these barbarians,
Whose dream is to annihilate the Jews completely?
Now he must admit that what the elders used to say about gentiles is true:
Oh, true-true-true is what my elders say:
The dead in the kloister is not my brother, he is Jezus.[60]

In 1925 Greenberg had written scathingly, “The land of enlightened Europe is not enlightened for the Jews. We are the most contemptible of humanity, as is well known”[61].

Now Greenberg perceived Christianity to be one element of a suspicious anti-Jewish world: “We [the Jews] are the only lonely ones in the world”, he wrote.
When aleady in Palestine, Greenberg wrote in a Hebrew essay (in his characteristic expressionistic style):

Hey, it should be said once and for all: the pain of the pure Christianity is the pain of the stabbed Judaism. The wound is in our flesh under the skin, not theirs. The problem: Jesus of Nazareth, who was crossed when he was thirty-three years old – this is our problem, from us it arose.[62]

His fierce attacks on Christian Europe reach their climax in his post-Shoah collection of poetry in Hebrew Streets of the River (1951). Greenberg’s emotional attitude toward the gentile world represents the psychological disastrous results of the Jewish experience in antisemitic Europe. The memory of this cruel experience is still active in the collective psychology and in political decisions in Israel and outside it.

[52] In the 1910s and early 1920s Greenberg wrote expressionist poetry mostly in Yiddish, and edited the avant-guard Yiddish almanach Albatros (Warsaw 1922- Berlin 1923). He began writing in Hebrew after his emigration to Palestine in 1924. On Greenberg’s attitude to Christ, Christians and Christianity see Noah H. Rosenblum, “Ha-Antitetiut Ha-te’ologit-Historit Shebanatsrut Beshirat Uri Zvi Greenberg” (The Theological-Historical Christian Antithesis in Uri Zvi Greenber’s Poetry), Prakim 4 (New York, 1966), pp. 263-320; S. Lindbaum, Shirat Uri Zvi Greenberg: Kavei Mit’ar [The Poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg: Contours], (Tel-Aviv: Hadar, 1984), pp. 117-159.
[53] Lindbaum, ibid., p. 118.
[54] “Di misterie mentsch”, trans. by H. Bar-Yosef, Albatros 2 (1922), p. 14.
[55] Ibid..
[56] This poem might have been the inspiration for Chagall’s The White Crucifixion (1938) where the same letters, INRI, appear above the cross).
[57] “Uri Zvi Greenberg faren Tslav INRI”, Albatros, 2 (1922), pp. 3-4.
[58] “Velt Borg-Arop”, Kholiastre, (Warsaw 1922), p. 17.
[59] English translation quoted from Baal-Teshuva, chagall: A Retrospective (New York 1995), pp. 301-302.
[60] Here Greenberg uses the Polish pronounceation of the word “Jesus” (in contrast to the Hebrew “Yeshu”), to emphasize Jesus’ otherness.
[61] “Etsleinu ba-olam” [At our place in the world), sadan 4 (August 1925), p. 5.
[62] Editorial column of Sadan, edited by U.Z. Greenberg, 1-2 (Jerusalem, 1935), p. 2, trans. By H. Bar-Yosef.

an do you read Polish?

^

30 Years Since The Passing of Uri Tzvi Greenberg

Last night, the 30th anniversary of the death of the national poet Uri Tzvi Greenberg was marked at the Begin Heritage Center, sponsored by the Uri Tzvi Greenberg House.

Geula Cohen, Herzl Makov, Amir Benayun, Shlomo Bar, Nava Makmil-Atir, Prof. Dan Miron, Prof. Yehuda Friedlander, Dr. Tamar Monson-Wolf and Eliaz Cohen participated.

A video of Amir Benayun singing one of Uri Tzvi's poems he set to music, go here.

Pictures:

a) Geula Cohen

b) Prof. Dan Miron and Aliza Tur-Malka Greenberg

c) Dr. Tamar Monson-Wolf, Prof. Yehuda Friedlander and Eliaz Cohen

d) My wife Batya with Geula

d) Amir Benayun

e) Shlomo Bar

f) Navah Makmil-Atir

Uri Tzvi Greenberg - Photographs

Source:

At the editorial offices of the Cracow daily, Novy/Nowy Dziennik (Nowy Dziennik (Kraków, 1918-1939), in the mid-1930s:-

He was meeting with Dr. M. Kanfer, the editor:

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When Art Interprets Literature

Interpretating a poem by Uri Tzvi Greenberg, "Im Malchus Fun Tzelem".


For a critical understanding. see Jesus in Greenberg's Poetry.


- - -

Uri Tzvi Greenberg

In his living room in Ramat Gan

Uri Tzvi Greenberg in a NYTimes Blog

Another entry at Schott's Blog at the NYTimes.

This time a bit of Uri Tzvi Greenberg:

נאהב יהודים

…We will love ourselves: Jews who are swordless, hated!
Together we’ll pray the prayer of great fraternity,
for it is holy as the living blood running at the feet of the murderer;
for it is pure as the tear in the orphaned infant’s eye.
The non-Jews open before us the fire and the sea
and we have chosen: life and the reestablishment of our kingdom.
Shoulder to shoulder! So that there should be no space between a Jew’s body and his comrade, crowded together!!
A congregation of Jews awaiting the Messiah.

The original can be found in his Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 60.

Shivers Up My Spine

There's a competition over at Schott's blog at the New York Times:

co-vocabularists are invited to share the words, phrases, prose and poetry which send goose bumps up their arms or shivers down their spines.

Here's mine. Not quite Christmasly:


The Hebrew poet, Uri Tzvi Greenberg, penned these lines that were published in 1937:

(my translation)

"...We will love ourselves: Jews who are swordless, hated!
Together we'll pray the prayer of great fraternity,
for it is holy as the living blood running at the feet of the murderer;
for it is pure as the tear in the orphaned infant's eye.
The non-Jews open before us the fire and the sea
and we have chosen: life and the reestablishment of our kingdom.
Shoulder to shoulder! So that there should be no space between a Jew's body and his comrade, crowded together!!
A congregation of Jews awaiting the Messiah."

The original can be found in his Collected Works, Vol. III, p. 60.

It should be recalled that the poem was composed in the fall of 1929 and is not a Holocaust-themed piece of literature, in response to Arab riots that summer which killed 133 in Mandate Palestine.

It surely has sent shivers up my spine since I first read it over 40 years ago, thinking about the history of the Jews in the 20th century in the lands of Exile and in the renewed Homeland.

10th Anniversary of Uri Tzvi Greenberg Heritage Center

Holocaust Poem of Uri Tzvi Greenberg

Uri Tzvi Greenberg: Under the tooth of their plow


translated by Milton Teichman (with corrections by Yisrael Medad)
The American Poetry Review, July 1995
Published in Rechovot HaNahar (*), page 279-280


Again the snows have melted there--and the murderers now are farmers.(1)

They have gone out there to plow their fields--fields that are my graveyards.

If the tooth of the plow digs up a skeleton which breaks over the furrow,

The plowman will neither grieve nor tremble

But he will smile--he will recognize the mark his implement left.

Once more a spring landscape--flowering bulbs, lilac, twittering birds.

Herds lie down by the shallow waters of the sparkling stream.

Only there are no more Jews walking by -- with their beards and sidecurls.

They are gone from the inns with their prayershawls and fringes;

Gone from the shops that sold trinkets, or cloths, or food.

Gone from their workshops, gone from the trains, the markets, the synagogues-

All, all under the tooth of the Christian plow.

With abounding grace God has visited his Gentiles.

Yes, springtime is springtime--and the summer will be bountiful.

Roadside trees swell as those in the gardens.

Never has fruit been so red now that there are no more Jews.

Jews had no bells that rang for God.

Blessed is Christianity for they have bells ringing from on high.

Even now, the voice of bells rings over the plain, flowing over a

bright and fragrant landscape.

The bells are a mighty voice, master of everything.

Once they passed over the roofs of Jews--but no more.

Blessed is Christianity for it has bells on the heights to honor

a God who is good to Christians and to all....

And all the Jews lie under the tooth of their plow,

Or under the pasture grass,

Or in forest graves,

Or on the banks of rivers, or within them,

Or on the roadsides.

Praise be to Yezunyu (2) with solemn bells: Bim-bam!

-------------------

Notes

1. The reference is to Poles who collaborated with the Nazis in the murder of Jews.

2. Diminutive for Jesus.

================================================

(*)

Wolf-Monzon, Tamar.
Livnat, Zohar.

The Poetic Codes of Rechovot ha-nahar ("Streets of the River"), pp. 19-33

Rechovot ha-nahar, Uri Zvi Greenberg's great book of lamentation over the destruction and loss of European Jewry, follows an ancient tradition of lamentation over the destruction and persecution of the Jewish people which has developed in Hebrew poetry since the era of the piyyut and medieval poetry. In this book Greenberg uses a new poetic language, including concepts and expressions such as kosef ('yearning'), nigun ('melody') and nofim ('landscapes'), which appear for the first time in this book but will reappear in other contexts in later texts. In this sense, Rehovot ha-nahar is a constitutive text, which introduces a new poetic and linguistic code.

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Volume 23, Number 2, Winter 2005

Spend A Moment With Spender

David Aberbach, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Studies at McGill University, Canada, has a piece on the poet Stephen Spender (here), on the topic of "Stephen Spender's Jewish roots".

I've extracted this as relevant to my blogging and you should know that:

Spender inherited his parents’ liberal views and commitment to social causes, progress and culture...Spender remained under the spell of German high culture and, as soon as the war ended, he revisited Germany and wrote a book about its ruins. Spender had something of the bizarre attachment of German Jews to Germany, described by Frederic Grunfeld: “While half the German Jews were being murdered in the name of a greater Germany, many of the rest continued to think of themselves as ambassadors of the German Geist”...Spender transcends his age, partly for reasons having to do with his German-Jewish background and the failed “symbiosis” of Deutschtum and Judentum, of the prophet Isaiah and Goethe, with an admixture of English Romanticism and Liberalism...The moral basis of Spender’s Communist sympathies was the biblical idea that, as he wrote, “all men are equal in the eyes of God, and that the riches of the few are an injustice to the many”.

My selection:

he saw the creation of the State of Israel in moral terms, as the rectification of a historic injustice. Spender described as miraculous Israel’s survival after being attacked in 1948 by five Arab countries as well as Palestinian Arabs, when many predicted its annihilation and a renewal of the Holocaust. In his book on Youth Aliyah, Learning Laughter (1952), commissioned by George Weidenfeld, Spender defined Israel’s purpose – like that of all nations which have adopted the Hebrew Bible – as religious and moral: to be “a light unto the nations”, an example to the world. As a poet with a social conscience (see, for example, “An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum”), Spender was particularly moved by the care given in Israel in the early years of statehood to deprived and traumatized children (including many Holocaust survivors) from dozens of countries, the majority being refugees fleeing persecution in Arab lands. He suggested that the integration of Oriental and Western children in Israel could be an international model for pluralism.

Israel seemed to fulfil biblical prophecy, as an apocalyptic redemption after centuries of anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust: “There has been a terrible wave of persecution; there has been the miracle of the birth of the State; there has been the deliverance from the invading Arabs; there has been the Ingathering; and now there is the struggle demanding a unity which accepts the significance of all these things”. Of the modern significance of the festival of Passover, Spender wrote: “It is not only the celebration of a past religious experience but participation in the miracle of our own times”. Great religious poetry was needed to retell the biblical story in modern terms: Uri Zvi Greenberg was Israel’s poet of national rebirth.

Haim Watzman and I Dialoguing

Here.

Aliza Tur-Malka Greenberg

The widow of Israel's greatest national poet, Uri Tzvi Greenberg, was present at an event of the Begin Center Monday night and I took the occasion to be photographed with her.




She herself is a poet in her own right.