Published: 14 May 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
DALIT KAPLAN: The convicted US spy urged an audience in Melbourne on Sunday night to ‘come home’ to Israel, in a video conversation laden with settler nationalism
ON SUNDAY EVENING, the outspoken president of the Mizrachi Organisation, Danny Lamm, stood at a lectern at Caulfield Hebrew Congregation and promised his audience of roughly 300 celebrants of Yom Yerushalayim, (Jerusalem Day), that this event was not about politics. The mood was subdued, yet cheery.
“Tonight, is not intended, and won’t be, a political night. Tonight, is a night about Tefillah,” he said. It’s about prayer.
It had been a stressful couple of weeks for Lamm, and his counterpart, Caulfield Hebrew Congregation president, David Mond. The two had faced strong criticism from much of the Australian Jewish community for their decision to invite the convicted American Jewish spy, Jonathan Pollard, to present a keynote address to their communities as they commemorated the Israeli conquest of the previously Jordanian controlled parts of Jerusalem in 1967 for Yom Yerushalayim.
The event was to be co-hosted by other local pillars of mainstream Orthodox Jewish organisations in Melbourne – youth groups Bnei Akiva and Hineni, the Rabbinical Council of Victoria, and the Council of Orthodox Synagogues Victoria. Even though it was designed to have a broad reach, the majority of the roughly 200 men in the men’s section of the synagogue, and 100 women watching from the women’s gallery upstairs, seemed to be north of 50 years old.
The decision to offer Pollard a platform became embroiled in communal politics. For some, Pollard occupies an almost messianic heroism, lionised as a self-sacrificing warrior for the welfare of the Nation of Israel.
For others, he is seen as a dangerous and remorseless renegade whose reckless actions were deeply damaging to Israel’s relations with the US, and who exposed all Jews in the diaspora to accusations of national disloyalty and anti-Semitism. Alfred Dreyfus’s ghost lurks in the minds of those who subscribe to such a world view.
But Lamm didn’t really see what the big deal was, telling his audience of the controversy on Sunday night that “things got a little bit carried away”.
Danny Lamm addresses the service
After a moving prayer service led by father-son cantor duo, Dov and Shimon Farkas, and a video presenting a history of the conquest of the Old City as divine intervention, Lamm introduced the guest of honour, Jonathan Pollard.
Most of the audience was probably expecting a live Zoom link with Pollard.
Instead, the hosts played a video of a conversation between Pollard and Australian Oleh (migrant), Danny Luria, Executive Director of Ateret Cohanim, an ultra-nationalist Israeli organisation whose mission is to populate the non-Jewish parts of the Old City and its surrounds with Jews.
Pollard, Luria, and Jonathan’s wife, Esther Pollard, were seated on a balcony in front of the highly controversial Jewish Settlement in Silwan, overlooking Beit Yonatan, an apartment block that was acquired and constructed in 2002 in the predominantly Arab East Jerusalem neighbourhood. Beit Yonatan was built and named in honour of Pollard, a point that was laboured during the interview.
In the conversation, Pollard did not explicitly call on Diaspora Jews to betray their governments that night, though he did express the view that the rest of the world is fundamentally hostile to Jews, and regardless of how ostensibly comfortable a Jew might be in the Diaspora, Jewish destruction is imminent, as demonstrated by the rise of Nazism in enlightened Germany.
Pollard’s main message was that Jews should come and settle the land of historic Israel, or as he put it often, “to come home” to Israel. He devoted much of his time lavishing praise on Luria and his organisation for the work they have done, settling the land for the Jews.
“This land, Eretz Hakodesh [the holy land], was given to us exclusively by [the Blessed Holy One],” he lectured. Then gesturing at Luria, he added “it is an even greater honour to do what you’re doing, like Ezra and Nechemia, reclaiming what’s ours”.
He was alluding to the biblical figures, Ezra and Nehemia, who are said to have rebuilt the Jewish Temple after its first destruction in the historical land of Israel.
At that point, footage of the controversial building, Beit Yonatan, flashed on the screen.
The settlers call the neighbourhood Kfar Ha’Temani, or The Yeminite Village, an homage to the Jewish Yemenite community that had called this area home until it was evacuated in 1939 due to the violence of the local Arab rioting.
The acquisition, construction and then inhabiting of that apartment block, and subsequently the adjacent buildings in the area were – and continue to be - mired by inflammatory court, street and political battles. In effect, the activities of organisations like Ateret Cohanim lead to mass dispossession of Palestinians from their current homes, resulting in an escalation of violence in Jerusalem, according to Aviv Tatarsky of Ir Amim, an Israeli non-profit that seeks to advance a shared Jerusalem through advocacy, education and outreach about settler activity and its impacts on Palestinians.
“It is effectively population transfer”, Tatarsky told me during a call from Jerusalem.
Protester outside the event before it started
Sunday night’s audience was told that the event was not political, but spiritual. In Lamm’s language, a night for prayer. But the spiritual language of the event, peppered with biblical references and nostalgia about the land of Israel, served to promote a deeply political agenda – an agenda that is much more radically right-leaning than the majority of the organisations that had sponsored the event.
During the interview, Pollard’s wife, Esther, sat by Pollard’s side, but her participation was minimal. Every time she tried to interject or respond to a question – even those directed to her - her husband would speak over her.
It’s worth noting, at this point, that the generally muzzled Esther was the only female speaker at the entire event, among some half a dozen male speakers/participants.
At the end of the event, I came across an elderly woman, with a thick Yiddish accent, fumbling beneath the cushion of her seat for a set of pearls from a pearl necklace that had snapped during the show.
“Can I help you?” I asked, collecting her walking stick from the floor and then climbing on all fours to look under her seat for her.
Once she was satisfied that we had ingathered all the pearls, I insisted on escorting her down the stairs from the women’s gallery. In case you were wondering, the synagogue does have an elevator, but it has apparently been out of action for some time.
Women – even those with mobility problems such as my new friend – were required to sit upstairs in the women’s gallery of the synagogue, to ensure the segregation of the sexes during the ceremony and presentation.
After our descent, I enquired about her interest in the event.
“Why did you come to tonight’s event?” I asked her.
“My daughter, Judy, brought me,” she said unsentimentally.
“Did you enjoy it?” I asked neutrally.
She paused, and then in in her heavy Yiddish accent that made me feel a pang of nostalgia for a generation of Jewish Holocaust survivors that have all but expired, she said,
“To be honest, I didn’t quite get it.”
She wasn’t the only one left unsatisfied.
