Chabad's critic from within

Chabad's critic from within
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/945761.html

By Tom Segev

In one of the workrooms of the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem sits a white-bearded Jew beleaguering the ultra-Orthodox community with words of heresy. In the secular world he would be described as a "new historian," but the storm aroused in the Hasidic world by the work of Rabbi Yehoshua Mondshein is much greater than what any new historian has ever stirred up in the Zionist establishment. Mondshein is exposing the commonly accepted fictions of the ultra-Orthodox world, including the stories of wonders and miracles disseminated by Chabad Hasidim. It's a major scandal, because Mondshein himself is a Chabad Hasid.

He is a reserved man; every word he says seems first to be filtered through seven stages of investigation, none of them superfluous. But on the Internet he massacres the unfounded ultra-Orthodox tales with razor-sharp ridicule that combines extraordinary scholarship and secular slang. In doing so, he cites a famous rabbi who wrote: "If a Hasid says, 'I saw it with my own eyes,' then he may have heard. And when a Hasid says he heard, then it certainly never happened." Mondshein compares the Hasidic tales to the book "Yalkut Hakzavim" (Sack of Lies) that contains stories about the Palmach, the pre-state strike force. He calls them chizbatim - tall tales combining fact and fiction. Among other things, he attacks the custom of finding answers to questions in the letters of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Chabad spiritual leader who died in 1994, often answered his followers' letters, and his replies were collected in 24 volumes. They are known as the "Holy Letters," and many people believe the letters contain an answer to every question: whether to marry or divorce, have an operation or wait, travel abroad or stay home.
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Mondshein ridicules them, talking about the various routes including the "short route" or the "green route," in which you can receive the rebbe's approval for anything you want. You open the book at random and usually your eye falls on the word "confirm," and that is the sign. "The word 'confirm,'" wrote Mondshein, "appears in the rebbe's letters thousands of times, because usually each letter began with the words 'I hereby confirm receipt of your letter.'"

When Mondshein mentions the rebbe he adds to his name the Hebrew initials "zayin, yod, ayin" - the Hebrew acronym for z'khuto yagen aleinu (may his merit protect us), which means the rebbe is dead. By doing so, he arouses the anger of the "Messianists," who disseminate the belief that the Messiah King is alive and well.

He checks names, dates, places and references, and discovers people who could not have done what they supposedly did because they were no longer alive. There are also "citations" that were never written, from nonexistent books. He often questions the inner logic of the stories: Was the Polish nobleman a wizard or only the son of a wizard? And how did the story develop from a cat in the bag to a cat without a bag? Mondshein devoted one column to the story of a mouse, which he published in the Chabad youth movement's newsletter:

The Income Tax Authority is harassing Moti's grandfather. He queries the rebbe and hears from him a story about a wicked landlord who had a Jew indicted, but at the trial it turned out that a mouse had devoured all the prosecution's documents and the Jew was acquitted. The same thing happened to Moti's grandfather: The computer mouse erased all his debts to the Income Tax Authority and the case was closed. As the rebbe wrote: "Nothing in the world was created for no reason; every creature has a purpose and a mission that it must carry out in the world." Mondshein is willing to ignore all the "logical problems" involved in closing the case, but he asks: Where exactly did the rebbe write the words attributed to him? Apparently he didn't.

His column is called "Stories and how they developed," and the Web site that hosts him is called Shturem (Yiddish for storm). He lets his readers respond to his words. Many ask why he is doing this to them: "What good will it do us? In any case, we're a confused generation, we'll only become more confused." Mondshein believes that there are true stories of wonders, but an increasing number of such stories can be disproved, and in his opinion they can only cause damage. The truth is important to him; skepticism does not scare him.

He does not limit his subversion to the Chabad Hasidim. A hilula - a public celebration in memory of a saintly rabbi - around what was described as the grave of Rabbi Ovadia of Bartenura led him to conclude that the purpose was to establish the Jews' presence in Silwan in East Jerusalem. That is desirable in his opinion, but the problem is that nobody knows for certain where the rabbi is buried.

The hilula was described as "the renewal of a tradition," but Rabbi Mondshein found no such tradition. So he concluded that it was a new invention. He asked himself why the celebration was called for the 3rd day of Sivan, and found an answer for that, too: The 3rd of Sivan will never fall on a Shabbat, and therefore the hilula will never be canceled.

The committee that initiated the celebration published an item to the effect that it was held with the participation of "tens of thousands." Mondshein reported: The Shturem editorial board learned from the police spokesman that there were only 900 people present. Is it any wonder that he has enemies? But even they cannot ignore his achievements as a learned scholar, detective and historian. "Mondshein is a bit of a heretic, but tremendously knowledgeable," they wrote on a competing site.

Why not?

During his visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority last week, U.S. President George W. Bush lingered next to a June 1944 aerial photograph of Auschwitz with the inscription: "Why wasn't Auschwitz bombed?" Bush looked at the photo and remarked: "We should have bombed it."

On Sunday I saw a group of young Israelis next to the photo. "The picture that you see proves that the Americans knew exactly what was happening in Auschwitz and nevertheless did not bomb the camp," said the guide. Someone asked why. "There were various reasons for that," replied the guide. "Apparently the Jewish question was secondary for them."

Visitors who insist on knowing more can watch the film clip that says the Americans bombed fuel installations very near the Auschwitz gas chambers, but the pilots who participated in the operation did not know about them. Had they read The New York Times they would have known. The entire world knew already. Had they bombed the camp, or at least the railroad tracks leading to it, it may have been possible to rescue only the last of the Jews exterminated there, but there were several thousand of them.

There may have been some logic in not doing so. Whatever the case, Yad Vashem for some reason prefers to make do with a question mark. This is a matter that requires an exclamation point, or at least a period. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington handles the issue more courageously, in the spirit of President Bush's words in Jerusalem. Yad Vashem is allowed to do the same.