Heritage: Civilization and the Jews #109; No. 109; Into the Future

<v Narrator>Major funding for this program has been provided by the Charles H. <v Narrator>Revson Foundation, Petrie Stores Corporation and the National <v Narrator>Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding has been provided by the following <v Narrator>contributors. <v Narrator>A complete donor list is available at WNET. <v Narrator>[theme music plays] [audio cuts out multiple times] <v Narrator 2>These Jews were survivors of the Holocaust, refugees, displaced

<v Narrator 2>persons. Behind them lay the smoking and blood soaked ruins <v Narrator 2>of Europe and the devastation of their lives. <v Narrator 2>Behind them lay 6 million of their relatives and family, their friends and neighbors <v Narrator 2>murdered. <v Narrator 2>For over a century, they had assimilated and adapted. <v Narrator 2>They had struggled for their traditions. <v Narrator 2>For the right to be different. <v Narrator 2>They had believed in the possibilities of the brotherhood of man. <v Narrator 2>But now, after the Second World [audio cuts] ?War?, the remnant of European juries <v Narrator 2>and other threatened Jewish communities. <v Narrator 2>The overwhelming hope was for a place of safety, a secure home. <v Narrator 2>[singing] They hoped to live normal lives, <v Narrator 2>to raise families and to live in peace. <v Narrator 2>Some had found refuge in the Americas and in Australia, but most looked <v Narrator 2>elsewhere to a small land with great meaning in their history.

<v Narrator 2>To Palestine, the ancient homeland of their people. <v Narrator 2>Palestine. For centuries, this had been a remote and desolate corner <v Narrator 2>of the Ottoman Turkish Empire with only a small Jewish community. <v Narrator 2>Then in the late 19th and early 20th century, this land saw <v Narrator 2>the arrival of a new breed of Jewish settler. <v Narrator 2>They were young and idealistic from Russia and the country [audio cuts out] <v Narrator 2>in Europe. They came to [audio cuts] agrarian settlements <v Narrator 2>to start what they dreamed would become a new Jewish nation.

<v Narrator 2>They called themselves Zionists. <v Narrator 2>They numbered more than 80,000 by 1914 when the First World War broke <v Narrator 2>out in [audio cuts] Europe. [explosions] <v Narrator 2>The Turkish empire, an ally of Germany, ?came? <v Narrator 2>under attack from allied forces. <v Narrator 2>It collapsed, and British and French troops moved into the Middle East, promising <v Narrator 2>independence to its various region. <v Narrator 2>Palestine fell under [audio cuts] ?British? rule, while its Arab and Jewish populations <v Narrator 2>each waited to be given control of the land. <v Narrator 2>In 1917, Britain had a document, the Balfour Declaration, <v Narrator 2>promising support for a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people. <v Narrator 2>[singing] This promise raised the hopes of Zionists everywhere. <v Narrator 2>In the 1920s, Jewish emigration increased in part because of the new

<v Narrator 2>opportunities in Palestine, in part because of the worsening conditions for Jews <v Narrator 2>in Eastern Europe. <v Narrator 2>On a greater scale than ever before, the Jewish community remade the land <v Narrator 2>clearing fields, draining swamps, building cities. <v Narrator 2>By 1929, the Jewish community had reached 160000. <v Narrator 2>Twenty percent of the total population of Palestine. <v Narrator 2>In the 1930s, Jewish towns were growing steadily. <v Narrator 2>Tel Aviv was already a metropolis. <v Narrator 2>And Jewish emigration was fast increasing as tens of thousands arrived <v Narrator 2>each year, fleeing Nazi power in Europe. <v Narrator 2>In the Middle East, France and Britain had recently created new Arab

<v Narrator 2>states: Iraq, Lebanon, Syria. <v Narrator 2>The Arabs of Palestine were now growing restless, frustrated <v Narrator 2>by continuing British rule, angered by continuing Jewish emigration. <v Narrator 2>In the 30s, there were riots and sporadic outbreaks of violence <v Narrator 2>against both the Jews and the British authorities. <v Narrator 2>But the conflict in Palestine was about to be engulfed by a coming <v Narrator 2>universal conflagration. [explosions] <v Narrator 2>The Second World War brought a half decade of horror and devastation. <v Narrator 2>[mournful music] <v Narrator 2>In Europe, millions were homeless.

<v Narrator 2>Three quarters of the Jews in Nazi occupied Europe had been massacred. <v Narrator 2>For the Jews of Germany, Austria and Poland in particular, home now seemed <v Narrator 2>the abode of murderers. <v Narrator 2>At ?inaudible? in Poland in 1946, there was a further anti-Semitic <v Narrator 2>outbreak. 43 Jews were killed by a mob. <v Speaker>In Palestine, Jews demanded that a safe haven be made there for <v Speaker>the survivors of the Holocaust. <v Speaker>But the British refused. <v Speaker>They continued to limit immigration, severely, hoping to achieve good <v Speaker>relations with the Arab world and protect their influence in the Middle East. <v Speaker>The Jews, however, were determined to increase immigration in defiance of British <v Speaker>authority.

<v Speaker>In secret, often in the dark of night, displaced and homeless <v Speaker>Jews were brought to small ports all over the Mediterranean, crammed onto <v Speaker>boats old and barely seaworthy to sail for the forbidden shore of <v Speaker>Palestine. <v Speaker>There were two thousand dollars on a boat built for 400. <v Speaker>Many of us were sick of the crowded conditions. <v Speaker>As storms. <v Speaker>Secrecy was vital as British planes flew overhead. <v Speaker>As we neared the shore, a warship appeared on the horizon. <v Speaker>We had been discovered the hiding was useless, so we came <v Speaker>on deck to. <v Speaker>We knew the British would try to stop us reaching the shore, <v Speaker>but we wanted them to know they could not break our spirit.

<v Speaker>Some of the refugees eluded the British blockade. <v Speaker>Most were captured, their fate once more uncertain. <v Speaker>She told them, you're going to be taken on board the ship, <v Speaker>which will take us to Cyprus. <v Speaker>When we finally sighted that ship into <v Speaker>the port of Haifa, it was the greatest feeling of letdown, <v Speaker>a feeling of trauma and of of uncertainty. <v Speaker>And to some extent, a fear for many of us <v Speaker>came out of concentration camps. <v Speaker>The ship looked like it was fasion camp because the decks were <v Speaker>all why I didn't caged in. <v Speaker>And those of us who are still as sure and <v Speaker>watched others walk into these cages, these were moments of

<v Speaker>dread and difficulty for us. <v Speaker>While over 50000 Jews were interned in camps in Cyprus, <v Speaker>Jewish negotiations with the British led nowhere. <v Speaker>International pressure mounted for Britain to change its policy, but to no <v Speaker>avail. <v Speaker>In Palestine, the Jews now fought the British by all available means. <v Speaker>In 1946, the King David Hotel British headquarters in Jerusalem <v Speaker>was bombed throughout the land. <v Speaker>Bridges were blown up. Soldiers were attacked. <v Speaker>The continuing British response was imprisonments, armed searches, harsh <v Speaker>penalties, an apparatus of repression and control was clamped down, <v Speaker>unable to find a solution. <v Speaker>In February 1947, the British government requested that the United <v Speaker>Nations to intervene.

<v Speaker>After months of inquiry and debate, the United Nations General Assembly <v Speaker>voted whether to partition Palestine into two states. <v Speaker>One Jewish, one Arab. <v Speaker>Yeah, the Soviet Union. <v Speaker>Yes, the United Kingdom abstained. <v Speaker>The United States? <v Speaker>Yes. Approval of the new plan came from countries <v Speaker>both east and West. <v Speaker>The resolution of the Committee for <v Speaker>Palestine was adopted by Surtees to reboot <v Speaker>again in upstate. <v Speaker>There were to be two states occupying the area of Palestine with <v Speaker>Jerusalem and international city. <v Speaker>Once more, 19th centuries after the destruction of Judea by Roman

<v Speaker>legions, the Jews were to have a land of their own. <v Speaker>On May 14th, 1948, ending an occupation of 30 years <v Speaker>and refusing to implement the United Nations partition plan, the British <v Speaker>withdrew from Palestine. <v Speaker>That afternoon in Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion, leader of the National <v Speaker>Jewish Council, proclaimed the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine <v Speaker>to be called Israel. <v Speaker>It was exactly three years, almost to the day since the end of the war in <v Speaker>Europe and the overthrow of the greatest tyranny that had ever oppressed the Jewish <v Speaker>people. For the Jews, it was a miraculous transition <v Speaker>from the deepest valley of despair to the fulfillment of their highest hopes.

<v Speaker>But the Arabs viewed the U.N. <v Speaker>decision as a defeat. <v Speaker>Arab irregulars from Syria and Lebanon, the armies of Egypt and Transjordan <v Speaker>and other Arab forces crossed Palestine's border in arms, <v Speaker>rushing to occupy the vacuum created by the British withdrawal. <v Speaker>The Jews now have to take up arms to defend their lives, along with a <v Speaker>life of their new state with few weapons or supplies, <v Speaker>but with determination and discipline, they created a civilian army. <v Speaker>War raged the length and breadth of the land. <v Speaker>Nowhere more fiercely than in besieged Jerusalem. <v Speaker>It took a year of intense and hard fought conflicts.

<v Speaker>The United Nations plan was destroyed in the flow of battle. <v Speaker>Access to the old city of Jerusalem was lost. <v Speaker>The city was split its holiest places in the hands of Arab forces. <v Speaker>By 1949, Israel emerged victorious, but at great <v Speaker>cost. Six thousand dead, one percent of the Jewish <v Speaker>population. <v Speaker>For the first time in almost two thousand years, there was a Jewish <v Speaker>state. <v Speaker>And in May nineteen forty nine, Israel took her place as a member of <v Speaker>the United Nations. <v Speaker>By some miracle, it had been successful. <v Speaker>The Jews had been landless, united by the ties of their common history. <v Speaker>Their shared faith and the ever recurring cycles of their religious calendar. <v Speaker>But now a great community had been created into place, which had

<v Speaker>dominated Jewish history. <v Speaker>These Jews were bound together, not just in time, but also in space. <v Speaker>In the space of this new state and the ancient prayer next <v Speaker>year in Jerusalem took on a new meaning, a new significance. <v Speaker>Jerusalem was now within reach. <v Speaker>There was a welcoming door, a place of their own. <v Speaker>A state whose fundamental law gave every Jew in the world the right <v Speaker>to enter. <v Speaker>And they came more than five hundred thousand in the first <v Speaker>three years alone. <v Speaker>By 1951, the Jewish population of Israel had doubled <v Speaker>to more than a million. <v Speaker>They came from 42 countries, many like these Yemenite

<v Speaker>from the Arab lands. <v Speaker>For the Yemen nights, it seems a biblical promise fulfilled <v Speaker>to be returned to Israel on the wings of an eagle, though the eagle turned out <v Speaker>to be a battered DC 6 plane after played laboriously <v Speaker>brought out the entire Jewish community of Yemen. <v Speaker>One hundred and twenty thousand more were flown in from Iraq. <v Speaker>For centuries, many Jews had lived scattered throughout Arab lands. <v Speaker>Their customs and culture very different from that of their European brethren. <v Speaker>But in Israel, all these Jews were to share a common destiny and a common <v Speaker>purpose. <v Speaker>From Morocco, Jews brought the celebration of the Moonah, <v Speaker>a festival unique to that community marking the end of Passover, <v Speaker>variety of customs that have developed among the Jews during and two

<v Speaker>thousand years of dispersal was now brought together for the first time <v Speaker>within the borders of a single land. <v Speaker>For most of those who came, Israel meant more than a refuge they hope <v Speaker>to find in it a place of rebirth for the Jewish people. <v Speaker>The site of a new Jewish culture. <v Speaker>It was the deepest conviction of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first <v Speaker>prime minister, that his people would create a new and vital <v Speaker>culture as they worked to transform the land. <v Speaker>He made a point of working on the land himself, demonstrating by <v Speaker>his labor his belief in a society without privilege.

<v Speaker>He wrote. One could hardly find a revolution that goes deeper than what Zionism <v Speaker>wants to do to the life of the Hebrew people. <v Speaker>It is to be a homeland for every Jew who returns their <v Speaker>homeland that provides equally for all children. <v Speaker>Ben Gurion and his wife lie buried here at the edge of the <v Speaker>desert, which was at the heart of his vision near the kibbutz, stable <v Speaker>care. His last hope. <v Speaker>Inspired by the Zionist dream, Israelis took a neglected countryside <v Speaker>and remade it. <v Speaker>The kibbutz, a new kind of collective settlement, was one engine <v Speaker>of this progress. <v Speaker>A small number of Jews left behind their professions and their experiences <v Speaker>of urban life to join in the kibbutzim and other pioneering

<v Speaker>villages to follow a new ideal. <v Speaker>While working the land to participate equally in decisions made <v Speaker>for the good of the community and the country as a whole, <v Speaker>we go into a new place. <v Speaker>We were going to build not just the settlement, not just the village, <v Speaker>but in the new world life. <v Speaker>Something different, something better place based on equality <v Speaker>and mutual help. <v Speaker>Another society. <v Speaker>But the challenge that brought me to Israel was the simple challenge, the new country, <v Speaker>the Jewish culture, the idea of building <v Speaker>something from nothing. <v Speaker>The togetherness of the kibbutz appealed to me. <v Speaker>But the hardship of the kibbutz appealed to me. <v Speaker>I was like what we did then to the opening up of the West in the United States. <v Speaker>The kibbutz, with its altruistic ideals and its all embracing social

<v Speaker>concern, has been a principal source of leaders for the whole of Israeli <v Speaker>society. <v Speaker>It has been an abiding symbol of one aspect of the scientists dream. <v Speaker>The establishment of Israel had a profound effect on Jews everywhere. <v Speaker>It gave them new inspiration, a new source of pride in Great <v Speaker>Britain, in France, in North and South America, around the world, <v Speaker>Jewish communities found strength and inner meaning in the existence of a Jewish <v Speaker>state. Nowhere were these effects more apparent than in the <v Speaker>world's largest Jewish community. <v Speaker>Among the Jews of the United States. <v Speaker>The Jewish population of this land has grown to 6 million since

<v Speaker>the days when many Jews first arrived to settle these streets and tenements <v Speaker>on New York's Lower East Side. <v Speaker>The Jews who came from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th <v Speaker>centuries saw America as the golden door to their future. <v Speaker>They brought with them a rich mix of responses to the modern world. <v Speaker>The ambition that moved them all, however, was to become Americans. <v Speaker>As they made their way into American society, they were transformed, <v Speaker>shaped by the culture of this land. <v Speaker>They were Americans that's closely tied to a Jewish world. <v Speaker>Their loyalties and their sentiments flowed in both directions.

<v Speaker>By the 30s, the East European Jews were finding a place of distinction <v Speaker>in American life. <v Speaker>My way. <v Speaker>No deal for the American people. <v Speaker>The administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt involved Jews in government. <v Speaker>Never before. <v Speaker>While many became at home in the streets and the neighborhoods of this country, <v Speaker>they continued to feel a part of an extended Jewish community. <v Speaker>More and more, they participated in international affairs through support <v Speaker>for scientists in Palestine. <v Speaker>As Hitler's power grew in Europe, the scientism became a rallying point <v Speaker>for the American Jewish community in the wake of <v Speaker>the Second World War. <v Speaker>All of America celebrated the overthrow of Nazi Germany.

<v Speaker>For the Jews of America, the victory was a poignant one, but incomplete. <v Speaker>They now threw their support behind the Jews of Palestine. <v Speaker>In the successful effort to found a haven for the European refugees. <v Speaker>By the 1950s, Jews were joining in all walks of American life <v Speaker>in every way they gave themselves to and were welcomed by the American world. <v Speaker>In these years, the Jewish community was changing rapidly <v Speaker>before the war. <v Speaker>Most Jews had lived in places like the Lower East Side of New York or <v Speaker>other urban Jewish neighborhoods. <v Speaker>Now many were leaving those places behind. <v Speaker>Their experiences of urban life were receding into memory, into <v Speaker>nostalgia.

<v Speaker>Even so, you had a little Middle Eastern enclave here. <v Speaker>It was also a street that the Romanians dominate. <v Speaker>You can't see it now, but most of the cafes or many of the cafes were long. <v Speaker>Here on allergy. <v Speaker>The old way of life has become a memory. <v Speaker>For decades, Jews have been moving to the suburbs, moving to communities <v Speaker>which are mixed and integrated. <v Speaker>The sense of an immediate Jewish world is gone. <v Speaker>They have become part of a larger American community. <v Speaker>These Jews and their children are freer to pursue their individual lives <v Speaker>than Jews have ever been in the history of the Diaspora. <v Speaker>But in America, Judaism has become in many ways a faith <v Speaker>like the other religions of the land. <v Speaker>For Jews and non-Jews alike, worship is a voluntary part of life.

<v Speaker>Yo, yo, yo, yo. <v Speaker>On that score. <v Speaker>For thousands of years, the Jews have been more than just the followers of a religion. <v Speaker>They have been a people. <v Speaker>So in America, a question arises whether <v Speaker>they could remain a community and if so, how? <v Speaker>For there is a danger, the temptation of assimilation. <v Speaker>In America, less than half belong to a synagogue and more than one <v Speaker>of every three marries someone who is not a Jew.

<v Speaker>But the Jews of America retain a sense of communal concern <v Speaker>that continually seeks expression. <v Speaker>There are a wealth of Jewish organizations and services, local community <v Speaker>centers, federations of Jewish philanthropy, national associations. <v Speaker>This network of activities helps maintain the community. <v Speaker>And within this network, support for Israel has come to play a vital <v Speaker>role more than just a reason to march down New York's Fifth Avenue <v Speaker>in an annual parade. <v Speaker>In recent years, a concern for Israel has cut across all the <v Speaker>distinctions that separate American Jews, whether religious or nonreligious, <v Speaker>whether traditionalist or reform.

<v Speaker>Although few desire to settle there for many, Israel has become <v Speaker>an important factor in the way they define themselves as Jews. <v Speaker>The concern for Israel is real and heartfelt. <v Speaker>Not the least because Israel is a land beset by enemies and the peaceful <v Speaker>haven has remained an elusive dream. <v Speaker>The Jews of the diaspora, remembering the Holocaust, have feared that the Israeli <v Speaker>community would be engulfed and destroyed. <v Speaker>In 1967, the nightmare once more threatened. <v Speaker>In May of that year, Egypt demanded that U.N. <v Speaker>forces be withdrawn from Sinai. <v Speaker>It moved to cut off the Israeli port of a lot and massed a thousand <v Speaker>tanks and 100000 troops in Sinai for two weeks. <v Speaker>Israel sought international assistance, but in vain.

<v Speaker>Israel's response when it came was swift and unexpectedly devastating. <v Speaker>In less than a week, Israel was victorious. <v Speaker>The Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank of Jordan <v Speaker>under Israeli control. <v Speaker>On June the 7th, Israeli soldiers took possession of the old city <v Speaker>of Jerusalem, to which they had been denied access for 19 years. <v Speaker>Now, Jews were again able to reach the Western Wall, the ancient temple <v Speaker>site, to pray before the deeply moving symbol of their origins as <v Speaker>a people. <v Narrator 2>Around the world, Jews were intensely proud of Israel's victory.

<v Narrator 2>For most communities, the effect was profound. <v Narrator 2>Nowhere more so than among the 2 million Jews of the Soviet Union. <v Narrator 2>One who remembers that moment vividly is ?Allah Rousinek? <v Narrator 2>who was a high school student in Moscow at the time. <v ?Allah Rousinek?>In uh 1967, it was for the first time that <v ?Allah Rousinek?>on the 5th of June that I heard that there was a Jewish state. <v ?Allah Rousinek?>It was for the first time that the word Jewish had some <v ?Allah Rousinek?>positive connection. There was a Jewish state. <v ?Allah Rousinek?>It meant that uh it's not that I'm kind of <v ?Allah Rousinek?>an outcast, that I belong to a state. <v ?Allah Rousinek?>And after that, it didn't take me long to learn that there is a Jewish people <v ?Allah Rousinek?>that live in a Jewish state, that they have a Jewish history and religion <v ?Allah Rousinek?>and uh the language.

<v ?Allah Rousinek?>And it is not that I don't belong anywhere. <v ?Allah Rousinek?>I, I do belong. I have a people and uh I have a <v ?Allah Rousinek?>country. <v Narrator 2>Red Square Moscow in the 1930s. <v Narrator 2>The communist revolution had brought an end to the Sardis, pogroms, and persecutions <v Narrator 2>of the Jews. <v Narrator 2>The Jews became prominent in Soviet life in politics, science and <v Narrator 2>in the arts. <v Narrator 2>The Soviets also encouraged all the cultures of their multinational state, <v Narrator 2>including a secular Yiddish culture. <v Narrator 2>?Shlomo Mithoyles?, one of the greatest actors of his generation, <v Narrator 2>was one of many who benefited from government support. <v Narrator 2>He was lionized as the director of the Moscow Yiddish Theater in the thirties, <v Narrator 2>where many classics of the Yiddish stage were presented as authentic expressions <v Narrator 2>of proletarian culture. <v Narrator 2>Yiddish literature of all kinds flourished.

<v Narrator 2>One hundred and fifty thousand Jewish children studied in Yiddish at state <v Narrator 2>sponsored schools. <v Narrator 2>In the course of the 1930s, however, Joseph Stalin turned his government <v Narrator 2>into a system of absolute rule. <v Narrator 2>He liquidated old allies, even friends. <v Narrator 2>Among them, Trotsky, a true and founder of the Red Army. <v Narrator 2>The Jews, like others, lost many of their leaders in the purges. <v Speaker>But the war years that followed brought a reconciliation of sorts <v Speaker>Stalin back to the formation of a Jewish anti-fascist league, <v Speaker>including me, Hoyle's and important Jewish writers and intellectuals. <v Speaker>The war over, however, Stalin, fearful of disloyalty on all sides, <v Speaker>selected the Jews as a major target of his paranoia among <v Speaker>the first to be liquidated. <v Speaker>Shlomo Hoyle's, as in Sari's times, official <v Speaker>anti-Semitism again became state policy.

<v Speaker>No one was safe. The leaders of the anti-Fascist League, the legions <v Speaker>of Yiddish culture. The poet Perez Marx murdered. <v Speaker>The novelist David Bergersen murdered. <v Speaker>Dozens were liquidated, all on fabricated charges. <v Speaker>The Soviet state set about crushing the identity of its Jews. <v Speaker>Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia, the Jewish Quarter <v Speaker>in 1980. <v Speaker>These pictures taken by a Soviet Jew, no doubt ginger hash vely <v Speaker>documented the remains of Soviet Jewish life. <v Speaker>It was becoming harder and harder to practice or feel as a <v Speaker>Jew. And everything to do with the past and tradition was <v Speaker>vanishing. <v Speaker>I knew if I didn't record of sin, no, it would soon be too <v Speaker>late.

<v Speaker>It would all be gone in Burbidge if <v Speaker>the synagogue had become a stocking factory in Kiev <v Speaker>and movie house in neurosis. <v Speaker>It was a sewing shop in Tbilisi, a club house <v Speaker>in Lithuania and office building told the <v Speaker>meeting house official hostility <v Speaker>to Jewish identity has remained a part of government policy <v Speaker>within the Soviet empire. <v Speaker>Jews are considered a people, but a people whose culture the Soviets <v Speaker>are seeking to repress. <v Speaker>Jewish education, even in private, is forbidden. <v Speaker>Hebrew is banned, as are all expressions of Jewish culture. <v Speaker>Since the 1960s, unofficial quotas have excluded Jews <v Speaker>from many posts in government, in the army, in medical and scientific institutes. <v Speaker>University admission is restricted after

<v Speaker>the Six Day War. Many Jews sought exit visas for Israel. <v Speaker>No Soviet citizen is free to leave the country, but the Kremlin <v Speaker>to further detente gradually allowed two hundred and fifty thousand <v Speaker>Jews to emigrate. <v Speaker>An exodus without precedent in Soviet annals. <v Speaker>But two million remain. <v Speaker>And the Jews of other lands watched with concern as many Soviet Jews, <v Speaker>having asked to leave, suffer the floor wage of Soviet oppression. <v Speaker>The plight of Soviet Jews. <v Speaker>The periodic threats to the security of Israel. <v Speaker>These and the dangers Jewish communities have faced from Argentina to <v Speaker>Ethiopia have brought the worlds of Jews together in a common cause. <v Speaker>Since 1967, there has been a new sense of solidarity

<v Speaker>in Britain, in France, as here in America, in public demonstrations <v Speaker>of protests and support, unifying the community and give hope <v Speaker>to the imprisoned and the persecuted. <v Speaker>So that Anatoly her husband. <v Speaker>So let the free world and others can hear our voices. <v Speaker>Yes, Reale. Hi. <v Speaker>I present to you. Tell Sharansky. <v Speaker>He tells Sharansky, wife of an imprisoned Soviet scientist. <v Speaker>Shalom, friends, again, <v Speaker>we gather together to call for the immediate, immediate release of Prisoner <v Speaker>of Zion, Anatoly Sharansky and other prisoners <v Speaker>from Christobel Prison. My husband Anatoly has written me <v Speaker>of his faith. <v Speaker>She has faith in the indivisible unity of the people of Israel <v Speaker>and his faith in the dignity of men.

<v Speaker>And I thought he has. <v Speaker>The Jews are particularly sensitive to questions of human dignity in the light <v Speaker>of their history and its traumas of this century. <v Speaker>These are Holocaust survivors gathered in Israel in 1982 <v Speaker>to remember and to remind they are <v Speaker>a remnant of the remnant. <v Speaker>At the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial in Jerusalem, they honor their dead <v Speaker>and especially the bravery of those who resisted in the camps, in the ghettos, <v Speaker>in the Warsaw uprising. <v Speaker>And among the partisans. <v Speaker>They remember the past, but they look to the future determined <v Speaker>to preserve an identity for which millions lost their lives.

<v Speaker>There is ample reason to mistrust the progress humankind is deemed to have made, <v Speaker>especially in this century. <v Speaker>The experience, which these few survived has raised profound <v Speaker>and unanswerable questions. <v Speaker>In the words of the Jewish philosopher. <v Speaker>Bouba, how is a life with God still possible in a <v Speaker>time in which there is an hour schvitz? <v Speaker>One can still believe in the God who allowed these things to happen. <v Speaker>But can one still speak to him? <v Speaker>Can one still hear his word? <v Speaker>The experience of the Holocaust has helped to redefine the relationship <v Speaker>of Christians and Jews. <v Speaker>The Reverend Bruce Bramblett.

<v Speaker>I'd grown up with Jewish kids, had gone to schools with Jewish kids, <v Speaker>but really never learned about the Holocaust. <v Speaker>So I went to the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem <v Speaker>without any of that background whatsoever. <v Speaker>And I was already a clergyman at that point, had already gone through my seminary <v Speaker>training. And in the middle of that museum found myself <v Speaker>reading the story and weeping. <v Speaker>You can't build trust after that kind of relationship of two thousand years very <v Speaker>easily. I think it's also somebody once said that the great burden of <v Speaker>of Jewish of Jewish life is is suffering, <v Speaker>but the great burden of Christianity is guilt. <v Speaker>And I think while individual Christians cannot. <v Speaker>Cannot individually take responsibility for the whole history of Christianity. <v Speaker>I think to the extent that Christians. <v Speaker>Change their attitudes and revise their thinking about Judaism to

<v Speaker>the extent that they can act in metanoia repentance for those <v Speaker>attitudes of the past and assure that something like the Holocaust never can <v Speaker>happen again. <v Speaker>From the earliest days of Christianity, many had held Judaism <v Speaker>and all Jews in all generations responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. <v Speaker>In 1965, during the Second Vatican Council, the Roman <v Speaker>Catholic Church declared this charge groundless and reaffirmed the common <v Speaker>spiritual foundations of Judaism and Christianity. <v Speaker>This is Prague for a thousand years, in part a Jewish city. <v Speaker>The Nazis massacred Czechoslovakia's Jews and gathered <v Speaker>here in Prague, tapestries tore our covers, rabbinical commentaries, <v Speaker>ritual ornaments, all that they had pillaged and looted from every jury

<v Speaker>in Europe. They intended to create a museum of a vanished <v Speaker>people. <v Speaker>The artifacts are now in the care of the Czech state archives. <v Speaker>In 1983, the exhibit was prepared for shipment to America <v Speaker>and the Nazis unique museum became instead a precious legacy <v Speaker>of centuries of Jewish piety and artistic expression. <v Speaker>For the Jews of today, these objects donated to synagogues <v Speaker>in memory of departed loved ones are themselves a moving link to the past, <v Speaker>to a world that is no more. <v Speaker>But aspects of that world are still remembered and preserved its language, <v Speaker>its attitudes, its music. <v Speaker>On a street corner in New York City, klezmer, the tradition

<v Speaker>of popular shtetl music is celebrated. <v Speaker>The klezmer was the performer whose joyous music accompanied <v Speaker>weddings, bar mitzvahs and other celebrations of ordinary life. <v Speaker>Many of the cultural traditions of the Jews have moved through time and space <v Speaker>to be rediscovered and treasured by new generations in different <v Speaker>worlds. <v Speaker>For some, such as these, Hasidim, tradition shapes and defines <v Speaker>the very details of life, preserving the style of dress, of <v Speaker>speech, of religious practice common in Eastern Europe two centuries <v Speaker>ago banafsha Mental Snelson The Lubavitcher Ebbe <v Speaker>The Seventh trippier that title meets the members of his community. <v Speaker>These Hasidim are a small minority, less than 1 percent of the world's Jews,

<v Speaker>but they actively seek to reach the larger Jewish community with their message <v Speaker>of a binding tradition and their influence extends beyond their numbers. <v Speaker>The traditions of Jewish life are taken up in different forms by <v Speaker>others. <v Speaker>In this backyard in an American suburb, a group of conservative <v Speaker>Jews share in an intimate and informal kind of service. <v Speaker>This is a rock group, one of many throughout America. <v Speaker>In small gatherings reform, a conservative and sometimes orthodox <v Speaker>Jews reaffirm their belonging to a world of Jewish life, <v Speaker>culture and worship. <v Speaker>It is an American phenomenon, reflecting the patterns and ideals

<v Speaker>of American society in many groups. <v Speaker>Women share with men the responsibilities of ritual, but the importance <v Speaker>of ancient Jewish tradition is everywhere. <v Speaker>Parents <v Speaker>say they have RA <v Speaker>is but one small aspect of the great variety with which Judaism has <v Speaker>responded to a free environment. <v Speaker>More representative of orthos within the mainstream. <v Speaker>The vast majority of America's Jews as we have Richard Shabbat <v Speaker>in our home. <v Speaker>So do we receive it at this family's service in the extended <v Speaker>home of the Jew, the synagogue, whether in the synagogue <v Speaker>or in life outside of the Jewish community? <v Speaker>These Americans have found that their Jewishness is an integral part of America <v Speaker>woven into the fabric of the nation state.

<v Speaker>We would choose a new time. <v Speaker>There is virtually no realm of American life that is closed to them. <v Speaker>There is no aspect of American society that has not in some way <v Speaker>benefited from their contributions. <v Speaker>In this more tolerant, more integrated world, Jews everywhere <v Speaker>have been seeking new and diverse expressions of their Jewish identity <v Speaker>in the great community of America, in the populace jurys of France, <v Speaker>where more than half a million Jews live in Great Britain with 400000 <v Speaker>in countries from Australia to Brazil.

<v Speaker>Jewish life and experience continue in rich and creative variety. <v Speaker>In Israel, citizenship itself is part of Jewish identity. <v Speaker>Over the years, Israeli society has continued to grow and mature <v Speaker>in less than four decades since the founding of the state. <v Speaker>The image of the land and the tempo of its life has been transformed. <v Speaker>Its Jewish population has swelled from 600000 in <v Speaker>1948 to over 3 million today. <v Speaker>In the last 20 years, Israel has progressed well beyond its agricultural <v Speaker>beginnings to develop successful industries based on science <v Speaker>and technology. <v Speaker>Israel possesses one of the few genuine democracies in the Middle East. <v Speaker>The variety of its lifestyles is unique among the world's juries.

<v Speaker>These Sephardim, the Jews who immigrated from Islamic lands, <v Speaker>make up 60 percent of its population. <v Speaker>It is their style and their enthusiasms which now tend to color the culture <v Speaker>rather than that of the European Jews who are Israel's founders. <v Speaker>Among Israel's most unique and remarkable achievements is the revival <v Speaker>of Hebrew. And its transformation from a mainly liturgical language <v Speaker>into a language for everyday life. <v Speaker>The ancient tongue gives the eloquent testimony to the fact that Israel <v Speaker>is the land, both old and new. <v Speaker>But Israel's success, its triumphs and achievements are linked to a dilemma. <v Speaker>The fate and future of the Palestinian and in the upheavals <v Speaker>that created Israel, many lost their homes. <v Speaker>Some fled to Syria and Lebanon.

<v Speaker>Others to the West Bank. <v Speaker>This is a refugee camp near Jericho built after the war of 1948. <v Speaker>For a while, it housed the homeless till it was abandoned in 1967. <v Speaker>Syria, Egypt and Jordan have repeatedly cast the die of war <v Speaker>in the name of the Palestinian Arabs. <v Speaker>Each time they have lost. <v Speaker>More than 17 percent of Israel's citizens are Arabs, both Muslim <v Speaker>and Christian, who did not flee the country in the war of 1948. <v Speaker>They have full civil rights. <v Speaker>They are represented by Arab members of parliament. <v Speaker>Some are judges, mayors, officials. <v Speaker>But there are still unresolved problems and tensions. <v Speaker>These Arabs are citizens of a Jewish state, but members of

<v Speaker>an Arab nation, as one has said, my nation is at war with <v Speaker>my state. Therein lies the dilemma. <v Speaker>In Israel, for the first time in millennia, Jews have had to come to <v Speaker>terms with the exercise of state power and the use of military <v Speaker>force. Given the embattled and isolated circumstances <v Speaker>in which it has always found itself, Israel has in a sense become <v Speaker>like other nations. <v Speaker>Its actions controversial, its population divided <v Speaker>now at the end of four decades. <v Speaker>Israel is confronting the limitations and dangers of military power. <v Speaker>The difficult lesson that while arms may protect, they cannot always <v Speaker>make peace. <v Speaker>Israel pays the price. Other nations pay.

<v Speaker>It has its cemetaries of war dead. <v Speaker>Its day of remembrance. <v Speaker>It has had already many wars, too many wars. <v Speaker>You know, she is. <v Speaker>Guess the symbolic symbol. <v Speaker>But Israelis cling to the hope of peace. <v Speaker>And there has been one significant and poignant breach in the wall <v Speaker>of isolation in 1979 with American <v Speaker>mediation. Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt, and at last <v Speaker>Israel was able to say, with its largest and most powerful Arab neighbor, <v Speaker>no more war.

<v Speaker>No more war and the opportunity to grow and to prosper, <v Speaker>to build and to plant, to live out their lives in peace. <v Speaker>To secure a safe future. <v Speaker>In the north of Israel, members of a kibbutz celebrate Shafron, <v Speaker>a double celebration marking the giving of the law at Mount Sinai <v Speaker>and the harvesting of the season's first fruits. <v Speaker>The realities of life are often painful and difficult. <v Speaker>But a new generation of Israelis is striving to overcome the problems <v Speaker>that have beset this small land and in their striving. <v Speaker>They will create through the examples of their lives. <v Speaker>A new expression of Jewishness. <v Speaker>The Jews of Israel will always draw strength and inspiration from the memory

<v Speaker>of their past. <v Speaker>They share with Jews everywhere a sense of history, a set of ideals <v Speaker>for a sanctified memory is what holds the Jewish people together. <v Speaker>They remember at this Festival of Tabernacles events lost in <v Speaker>the mists of time, the wandering through the deserts of Sinai <v Speaker>and the first and greatest Jewish contribution, the idea of the one <v Speaker>God. <v Speaker>They remember at this the Western Wall of Herod's Temple. <v Speaker>All the history of their part in the ancient world and their sense of <v Speaker>themselves as a nation. <v Speaker>They remember the millennium of the European sojourn, the persecutions <v Speaker>and golden times of their ongoing dispersion and the fulfillment <v Speaker>of the Zionist dream. <v Speaker>Throughout their complex history, they have continued to evolve as a unique <v Speaker>and remarkable civilization.

<v Speaker>They have borrowed from and contributed to the many cultures with which they have <v Speaker>been in contact. <v Speaker>In the rich variety of their lives, they reflect the variety <v Speaker>of Lall civilization. <v Narrator 2>The story of the Jews has an astonishing resonance, their strange destiny, <v Narrator 2>their achievements, their suffering and their vision are an enduring part of <v Narrator 2>civilization, for civilization is the bringing together of the memories <v Narrator 2>and the experiences of all peoples. <v Narrator 2>We are, all of us, the children of history. <v Narrator 2>And for the enrichment of our world, we must try. <v Narrator 2>Each of us, to understand our heritage, to judge it in the light of its highest <v Narrator 2>values, and to pass it on as a treasure for all mankind. <v Narrator 2>This is the message of the Jews to the world. <v Narrator 2>[music playing] <v Narrator>Major funding for this program has been provided by the Charles H.

<v Narrator>Revson Foundation, Petrie Stores Corporation and the National <v Narrator>Endowment for the Humanities. <v Narrator>Additional funding has been provided by the following contributors. <v Narrator>A complete donor list is available at WNET. <v Narrator>Abba Eban has written a companion book to this series, which is published by Summit <v Narrator>Books and is available in bookstores and libraries. <v Narrator>[PBS theme plays]