Dwora and Hershl Silberman were of that more modest wartime generation. Although he was strictly religious, Hershl Silberman shaved every morning and dressed like any other Belgian man. But his son Mechilim, named after Dwora's father, started wearing Ha-sidic clothes as a child in the late 1950s, even before it became fashionable. Mechilim did not approve of the way his father appeared to hide his Jewishness. If a gentile even knocked on the door, he noticed his father would quickly remove his hat. That was not the kind of Jew he wanted to be. Where had that attitude gotten his parents’ generation? Mechilim wore black and peots and hats, and when he could, he would grow a beard for everyone to see. At first, he was thought a little odd, but by the time he was an adult, this was the normal look for Antwerp Jews.
THE MEN IN ANTWERP started their weekdays at seven-thirty in the various synagogues, where they wrapped tefillin so tightly that their arms turned red, and they said their morning prayers. Then they had breakfast together—coffee, herring, eggs. A few deals were made. A broken watch could be shown to the jeweler, some silver might be discussed with the silver dealer. And there were family matters—matches to be made, marriages to be arranged. By nine o'clock, they were all off to work. It was all in Yiddish, and some older immigrants, finding that Yiddish was all that they needed, never learned Flemish.
They intermarried with the world's other traditional communities. Antwerp, New York, Jerusalem, and London were places where traditional Jews searched for marriage partners. Young people were constantly marrying in and out of Antwerp. The families had four and five children, and with some leaving and others marrying in, the population remained fairly stable at a little more than twenty thousand.
A typical new arrival was Levy Kohane. His family were Bobover Hasidim who had fled Poland in the 1930s and settled in Antwerp. At the beginning of the occupation, all but the father had been shot during a Nazi roundup of Jews. After the war the father had settled in Paris where, though he said he had lost his beliefs, he raised his four children according to Hasidic tradition. Levy was allowed no contact with girls until he was 20. Then a marriage was arranged with an Antwerp girl. A contract was signed, and the two were brought together. Levy's first impression: “What could I think? It was one of my first meetings with a girl. Her first with a boy.” They settled in Antwerp and started having children.
SLOWLY DURING THE 1970S the diamond industry changed. Before the war most of the world's diamonds had been made in Antwerp. It was the only center that handled large quantities. But now, as in all manual labor industries, there was competition from impoverished countries. Sawing, cleaving, and polishing could all be done cheaper in India. In Antwerp, when cleaving was done at all, it no longer involved much labor since it was generally executed with amazing speed with the use of laser beams. Antwerp's diamond district gradually began moving away from the manufacturing of diamonds, but it remained prosperous as the world's great diamond trading center. Brokers peddling rough stones to manufacturers and dealers trading in finished diamonds remained. About three-fourths of the rough diamonds in the world still passed through Antwerp. But fewer of them were being cut there.
Sam Perl closed his sawing factory. After the war there had been about 250 sawers in Antwerp, but by 1980 only some twenty-five remained. Perl used his knowledge from a lifetime in diamonds to become a successful dealer.
Pinchas Kornfeld started as a cleaver like his father, Israel. He did not pass the time listening to people's troubles while cleaving, as his father had. He had heard enough of that as a child and wanted to avoid Holocaust stories. Instead, he carefully recorded major passages of the Talmud and other commentaries on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, so that he could study while cleaving at home. By the 1970s, he too could see that manufacturing was moving away from Antwerp. In 1979 he became a broker. Then he was a businessman and not a craftsman, and for that, he said, the only thing that was needed was “mazel,” luck. Behind the Pehkaanstraat near the train station, is a little S-hook of four streets lined with modern glass buildings high enough to block the sun on the rare sunny day. This is the diamond district, concentrated mainly in three buildings, the Bourse, the Club, and the Kring (ring). Diamonds are traded there, often around a table in a small office with a small, accurate scale. The Diamond Kring, where brokers such as Pinchas Kornfeld traded, specializes in the rough stones.
Kornfeld was active in Jewish institutions such as Agudat Israel, a worldwide Orthodox organization. Because Pinchas was soft-spoken and diplomatic, he seemed a good choice for handling anxious parents whose children would be attending an Agudat Israel summer camp in the Ardennes. Someone had to talk to the parents, assure them that their children would be well looked after, that the vegetarian wouldn't get meat, and that the boy who had to leave early would get back.
In the summer of 1980, on the day the children were leaving, Kornfeld went to the Agudat Israel office where the bus would be parked and the parents would gather with their children, waiting for him to reassure them. It would take patience, but it had to be done. Trying to make the day more enjoyable, he brought his own six-year-old son and his little daughter, who were both still too little for the camp. They could play around the bus where the older children were gathering.
Levy Kohane was there with his father, seeing off his younger brother David. David was very quiet and studious. He had been very attached to his mother and had seemed depressed since her death a year before. At 15, he was the baby of the family, and everyone fussed over him and worried about him. The summer camp would probably be good for him. His brother and father said their good-byes and walked away. As Levy crossed the street, he noticed a young man at the corner throwing rocks. This kind of thing was happening sometimes now—some troubled kid would decide to throw a few rocks at the Jews.
But then he realized that the man on the corner was not throwing rocks, he was throwing hand grenades. He threw two, and then sprinted down the street. Kornfeld heard the explosion and ran outside. Children were standing wide-eyed in the street. People were scurrying in different directions, not knowing where to run, while younger children stood paralyzed with terror. Kornfeld caught a glimpse of his own children, but he did not have time to comfort them because there was so much blood on people, on the street. He called the police and ambulances arrived in two minutes, which was still too late for David Kohane. With a piece of shrapnel through his chest, he writhed in agony for a few seconds, and when his father leaned over him, he whispered, “It hurts.” Then he died, the only fatality. But 20 of the 55 people present were wounded.
Minutes later, the police caught the killer. The attack had been on a narrow treeless street of solid, high-ceilinged big-windowed houses in the heart of the residential section of the Jewish neighborhood. The killer had apparently planned to escape to the Belgielei, the wide-open boulevard that led to the train tracks by the Van Den Nestlei synagogue. From there, it would have been easy to follow the tracks up Pelikaanstraat to the train station. To run almost the entire length of the Jewish ghetto through the main thoroughfares on a lazy, uncrowded summer day does not seem like much of an escape plan. But the attacker didn't even do that. He got confused on the Belgielei, where there is a traffic circle that always confuses out-of-towners, and he turned the wrong way, heading back toward the scene of the crime and into the hands of the police.
The man was a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian, Nasser Al-Saied. A resident of Saudi Arabia, he claimed to be working for a dissident movement of El Fatah, acting under the orders of someone named Wahid who was never found. His attorney pleaded that he was “a Palestinian soldier” and pointed out that he had been raised “in a particularly abject brutality.” The attorney described the plight of homeless Palestinians and how his parents, farmers near Jaffa, had been forced off their land in the 1948 war. Nasser was said to be a good soldier who unquestioningly followed instructions and was not a criminal. Proof of this, according to his attorney, was the fact that although armed, he did not resist arrest.
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The jury pondered these issues for one hour before returning with a verdict of guilty. He was sentenced to death, a symbolic gesture since there was no capital punishment in Belgium. A death penalty is automatically reduced to twenty years with the possibility of release after ten years.
In his own defense, Nasser Al-Saied had stated that he had acted ‘out of conviction.” He denied being anti-Jewish. His only quarrel was with Zionism. Nasser, the anti-Zionist, had attacked a program of Agudat Israel, itself a somewhat anti-Zionist organization that bad accepted the founding of the Jewish state with considerable ambivalence. As for his victim David Kohane, who was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Putte, across the Dutch border, he and his family were Bobover Hasidim. They spoke Yiddish as a first language but rejected modern Hebrew. Ancient Hebrew was reserved for prayer. David's brother Levy explained, “Yiddish is the language of Jews. [Modern] Hebrew is the language of Israelis.” To him, Israel was in a sense “anti-Jewish,” because it led Jews away from traditional Jewish life, the kind of life that he followed in Antwerp. This was the kind of Zionist that was killed at the age of 15 by this Palestinian soldier.
The attack was in July 1980. In 1990, Nasser Al-Saied was set free. The Belgian government denied it had made a deal, but prior to Nasser Al-Saied's release, a Belgian family, the Houtekins, were taken hostage by Arabs. The Antwerp Jews immediately saw what was coming and wrote the government, saying they knew a trade would be proposed and asking the government to reject it. The foreign minister wrote back that such a swap would never be made. But elections were coming, and this typical wholesome Belgian family, the Houtekins, were in the newspapers every day until one day, miraculously, they were released. Soon after, Nasser Al-Saied, the Palestinian soldier, was himself released for good behavior.
25
In Paris
ISRAEL WAS STILL A GREAT PLACE TO BE YOUNG, AND WHEN the Six-Day War was over, the demonstrations and fundraising finished, Daniel Altmann went back to his northern kibbutz. Palestinian children would occasionally throw a rock, but you could still have fun. A group of friends from the kibbutz volunteered for an archaeological dig in the Greek Orthodox sector of Jerusalem. Digging in the bottom of a pit, they found oil lamps, not all of which they turned over to the archaeologist. In addition to these souvenirs they would save small shards of pottery that were of no archaeological value and sell them by the kilo to Arab merchants, who ground them up and made “oil lamps from the time of Herod” to sell to tourists.
But the Altmanns did not raise their children just to have fun, and so Daniel returned to Paris, where he attended the prestigious Paris Institute for Political Science Studies, “Sciences-Po.” In this leading university he met many of the Jewish intellectuals who a decade later would emerge as key figures in the Socialist government of Sciences-Po graduate Francois Mitterrand. Daniel then attended an elite officers’ school and afterward, served as an officer in Berlin. For major holidays he would go to a West Berlin synagogue that was packed with American soldiers. After a two-year tour as a French officer, he joined the family steel business in northern France, where he had no contact at all with Judaism.
He had never lived much of a Jewish life, but in Valenciennes, a town near the Belgian border—where, for the first time, he was completely cut off from other Jews—a question came to him: “Am I a Jew or not?” It seemed to him, at 26, that he had to make a choice. He had behind him the whole history of the Blums, the Levys, and the Altmanns. He thought about his great-grandfather, who had believed he was an established businessman until the Dreyfus case forced him to flee; about his grandfather, who lived the good life in Paris until the Nazis came and he had to sell his business; about his uncle, who was deported despite his changed name; and about the way his parents had raised him and his two sisters to be affluent Parisians who only occasionally entertained the idea of Jewishness. You can't be a little bit Jewish, can you? Aren't you either Jewish or not Jewish? Isn't that what we had all discovered by accident?
Daniel became active in Jewish fundraising activities, and soon he was president of a group called New Leadership, an organization of people like him—young Jews from wealthy families working to raise money for Israel. Daniel organized visits to Israel, going back himself several times. More than fun and funny pottery, this work had become a way for him to feel Jewish, feel involved with Jewish life. But did giving money, raising funds, mean being involved in Judaism? He was still troubled, and one day at a Jewish wedding he began talking about this to a man he met. The man said, “Listen, if you want to search a bit, call me.”
Altmann began spending one night a week studying the Mish-nah, the first part of the Talmud. After a year his teacher said he needed a more advanced teacher and sent him to Rue Pavee, to the dank and moldy building next to the Rue Pavee synagogue where Chaim Rottenberg and his wife Rifka lived. On the top floor, in a large threadbare room with worn floorboards, Rav Rottenberg taught a small group of men on Thursday nights. They were the people he had somehow grabbed to join his fast-growing community.
In 1978, the year that Altmann met him, Rottenberg was still a man of boundless energy, a rigorous, uncompromising enforcer. Before Passover that year, he had gone to Strasbourg to inspect the matzoh makers, storming into the factory in his black coat, asking questions, looking around, making sure the matzoh was baked in no more than eighteen minutes because, it is thought, leavening could take place if it were baked any longer. The matzoh dough was being mixed in a huge vat, and Rottenberg had to climb up a ladder to peer in and make sure everything looked kosher and chametz free. Preoccupied by the inspection, he lost his balance and fell off the ladder.
To Rifka, this was the fatal fall, the fall from the matzoh vat, somehow God's will. In truth, the doctors examining him after the accident discovered he was suffering from Parkinson's disease. Thereafter he slowly weakened.
It took four years of study to turn Daniel Altmann, the wealthy assimilated Parisian, into a devout Orthodox Jew. He decided to marry and start a traditional family. Not exactly like Levy Kohane, who had never been in the company of a girl, thirty-year-old Altmann went to the synagogue, to the study group, the cheder, and asked for a suitable woman to marry. The community found him Lynda Abitan, a woman from a deeply religious Marrakesh family. Lynda's father had died when she was very young, and her mother had raised six children by herself, working in a factory, making sure they were all religious and well married. Lynda was the outspoken, independent, and still-unmarried one. Her mother was beginning to worry about her. She was religious, but she just didn't seem to be conforming to the Orthodox mold.
Thirteen years had passed since Lazare Bouaziz married Suzy Ewenczyk. More than half the Sephardic marriages were now with Ashkenazim, and it was no longer an issue that was given great importance. French Jewry had a Sephardic majority that had strongly colored the community and was thoroughly blending with it. The two groups were no longer distinct. In January 1981, the same year that Altmann married Lynda Abitan, Rene Sirat became the first North African Grand Rabbi of France. Much was made in the general press of the fact that this ruling Ashkenazic bastion was now falling to the Sephardim, as though the struggle for control of the community had been won by the North Africans. But Sirat's first official act the day he became Grand Rabbi was to go to the Soviet embassy and request a visa to visit Soviet Jews. The application was denied, but Sirat continued to apply pressure on the Soviets and to make sure that French Jewry did not forget about the struggle of Jews in the Soviet Union. Given the numbers and activism of Sephardic rabbis, it may be a long time before there is another Ashkenazic Grand Rabbi, but the ascent of Sirat may also have been the last time anyone would ever give it a thought. Even separate congregations were becoming increasingly rare.
The Altmanns were not concerned that Daniel was marrying a Sephardi, and in fact they greatly admired Lynda's mother as a tough, hard-working, industrious woman. One of Daniel's sisters had also married a Moroccan, and no one had seen th
at match as an issue. But after ten years, when that marriage failed, even happily married Daniel suspected that differences between Ashke-nazim and Sephardim were to blame. “Matching an Ashkenazic woman with a Sephardic man is a big problem,” he observed.
In 1981 the issue between the Altmanns and the Abitans was not Sephardim versus Ashkenazim. It was assimilation. Lynda was already a little wild, and it was worrisome to her deeply religious mother to see her marrying into this bourgeois French family. Even though Daniel had studied hard and had turned traditional, they worried about it lasting. Lynda's mother loved the Rue Pavee synagogue, because she claimed it was the only one in Paris that had never committed the outrage of having organ music. The other Altmanns rarely went to any synagogue at all. When they did, it was to the “liberal” synagogue on Rue Copernic, over in their expensive sixteenth arrondissement. At Copernic it was not just the music that was untraditional; there was not even separate seating for men and women.
The Altmanns had been eager for their son to get married. He had been “fooling around” for long enough. But his marriage to Lynda Abitan exposed them to a strange world that they did not like. They had tried not to say too much when their son grew a beard and started studying. But it was not until Daniel's wedding that they saw what his new world was really like. At the wedding not only did men and women sit apart, they did not even touch. They did not even dance together. Instead, Daniel would dance with the other bearded men while the women were off in another corner. What century was this all from? Modern successful Jews did not act like this. Who had influenced him? Who had changed him? Was he really going to live like strange oppressed people from some faraway backward country?
TO LIVE A TRADITIONAL JEWISH LIFE means to live in a community centered around a rabbi and a synagogue that has to be within walking distance. But to live within walking distance of Rue Pavee was increasingly difficult. The Marais was getting refurbished. New museums were opening to draw tourists. Bit by bit, the old buildings that used to be propped up with thick timbers running into the narrow streets were getting reconstructed, resurfaced, carefully divided into apartments and sold for prices previously unknown in eastern Paris. The city had timed the Marais renovation well, and the buildings were becoming ready just as real estate prices were starting to rapidly inflate. It had closed the central market, Les Halles, and the entire historical center was being reworked. The Marais was no longer a working-class, commercial area. There was no longer a lively market to drift toward late at night. The working-class residents were being moved to the suburbs, while the buildings that had been working-class tenements for centuries were being turned into luxury apartments. The official claim was that the original tenants would be given opportunities to move back to their old neighborhood. But working-class people did not want to move into a deluxe neighborhood that offered high prices and few jobs.
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