Rabbi Is Calling for Ceasefire in Gaza – How I’m Honoring My Dad, a Holocaust Survivor
My dad was a Jewish baby born into Nazi-occupied Brussels in January 1942. When he was six weeks old, my grandfather Max and my grandmother Lily were out for a stroll with my infant father in a baby carriage. Max saw SS officers walking toward them, and he knew that they were coming to arrest him.
“Turn around,” Max said to Lily. “Take the baby. Pretend you don’t know me.” Lily turned away and averted her eyes, but in her peripheral vision, she watched as her young, handsome husband was abducted.
Lily never saw Max again. She went into the resistance with false Aryan papers and sent my father away to hide in a series of Christian foster homes, and a Catholic nunnery. It would be many years before my dad was reunited with his mother in the US as an early adolescent.
Decades later, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, my father raised my sibling and me to resist fascism. He was an ardent protester of the Vietnam War who had organized with famous Jewish radicals, like Abbie Hoffman and Allen Ginsberg. One of my most powerful memories of my father, from when I was nine years old, was watching him get arrested after he jumped into the ocean to symbolically block a nuclear warship from anchoring in our local harbor. Later, he explained to me, laws are not necessarily fair or ethical.
My dad was a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He published seven books, he knew eight languages. And yet he took our childish talks as seriously as any academic conference, and carefully considered our most outlandish opinions. He put us to bed every night with a bunny puppet and a chat designed to open our minds. These talks not only taught us about the history of 20th-century philosophy, modern art, math, astronomy, economics, political theory, and more, they taught us to trust our own intellects.
When my father died in December, as Israel’s siege on Gaza raged on, I knew the best way I could honor his legacy would be through an act of civil disobedience. Just a few weeks after my father's death, I flew to Manhattan to join more than three dozen other rabbis and rabbinical students from Rabbis for Ceasefire. We entered the United Nations by posing as tourists in order to disrupt the General Assembly. Just as the United States' first shameful veto of the ceasefire resolution for Gaza was being discussed, we shouted, “Biden: Rabbis demand ceasefire!” Meanwhile, a larger group of rabbis erupted into prayers for peace in the hallowed Security Council chamber below. We were dragged out by security as we sang armistice songs.
We were not there to protest the UN itself, but to bring media attention to the lack of a broad American Jewish consensus for the US veto. A November poll of American Jewish voters found that while some 63% of Jewish voters supported the veto, within that group, only 45% identified as strongly supporting it. At the same time, we were demanding that the UN fulfill the promise of its charter and take meaningful actions in line with international law to stop the slaughter in Gaza, including an arms embargo of Israel.
In the weeks since our action, our mission to call attention to how the UN is being undermined at a time when we need it most has become even more urgent. Funding to the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), considered a lifeline for people in Gaza, has been frozen due to the demands of a number of Western nations, after 12 of 35,000 staff members were accused by Israel of involvement in the October 7 Hamas attack. (The UN investigation is ongoing, and as of publication, they “have yet to receive any evidence from Israel to support the claims,” according to The Guardian.)
On February 20, as conditions in Gaza continued to deteriorate and the reported death toll topped 30,000, the US vetoed a ceasefire resolution at the UN for a third time. This resolution would have led to immediate, unhindered humanitarian access for the 1.7 million displaced Palestinians, as well as the unconditional release of all hostages.
The UN was created just a few years after my father’s birth, in June 1945, with a charter to prevent the kind of human rights abuses that had shaped his life. The International Court of Justice has issued a provisional ruling that holds Israel responsible for committing actions that could violate the terms of the Genocide Convention, and has ordered Israel to take action to provide humanitarian assistance. Many people in the Jewish community are uncomfortable with using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s aggression because of our own history with Nazis, but to me, that is exactly why we need to grapple with this word.
It’s not just the astonishingly rapid pace of killing of Palestinians (including children, disabled people, and elders) that makes it clear to me this is the “never again” I was raised to guard against; it’s the spiritual dehumanization of Palestinians that echoes how we as Jews have been dehumanized in the past. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant referred to fighting against “human animals” when discussing the war. Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu has invoked biblical verses that have been interpreted by many to call for the killing of every man, woman, and child (including infants) when referring to his goals in Gaza. On January 7, Security Minister Itamar Ben-Givir referred to the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians out of Gaza as “the right solution." As a Jew, I know that a “transfer” from home is never voluntary — and anyone talking about a “solution” for the existence of a group of people is terrifying.
After the members of Rabbis for Ceasefire were escorted from the UN by security, we gathered to pray in the rain on the midtown-Manhattan street. We recited the names of 100 babies who have been killed in Gaza in recent weeks. As the syllables rolled off my tongue, I pulled my prayer shawl over my head and thought about how easily my father could have been on a list of murdered babies.
What if my grandmother had looked back on the love of her life the day my grandfather was abducted by Nazis? There was just a slight tilt of the head between my father dying in infancy and his 81-year lifespan, a minuscule twitch that my own existence depended on. If the thousands of babies who have died in Gaza had been saved, like my father, how many books would they also have written? In a genocide, we don’t just lose lives, we lose culture, art, ideas, inventions, cures for diseases, poems, love songs, and future generations.
As Jews our own history teaches us about the impacts of genocide, and how to protect against it. In the Torah, Abraham argues with God to save Sedom from destruction, if even a few innocent people can be found.
Our story of liberation is told at Passover through questions, and the central question of the seder — “Why is this night different from all other nights?” — remains unanswered. This is because the ancient rabbis believed in asking questions as the ultimate expression of freedom. So we have celebrated leaving behind enslavement in Egypt for the past two thousand years with a vast, open-ended debate that spans generations. The Talmud, the millennia-old holy text that lies at the heart of Jewish practice, consists of generations of disagreements woven together because my ancestors knew that nonconformity can protect the community from narrow-mindedness.
This proud Jewish history of non-consensus and dissent is currently being attacked. For example, the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt has conflated antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and calls Jewish groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now “hate groups, the photo inverse of white supremacists.” Similar pundits and even other rabbis seemingly attempt to discredit Jewish opposition to this war, and Israel in general, by saying that we represent a minority of the Jewish community, and thus matter less than the majority opinion. And yet a January poll from the Institute for Policy and Understanding found that 50% of American Jews support a ceasefire, only 34% oppose it, and 63% of the general population is in favor of a ceasefire; a scant 16% of Americans want this war to continue.
It is true that the majority of mainstream Jewish organizations support Israel’s war. However, Judaism has preserved and honored minority opinions with dignity for thousands of years. In the Mishna, the oldest and most authoritative books of Jewish legal thought, the opinions of both Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai, from the first century CE, are preserved as holy text even though the majority almost always sided with Hillel, because of the belief that minority opinions may prove correct in the future, and honoring them now shows spiritual humility.
For most of Jewish history, the idea of a political return to the Promised Land after Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman Empire in 70 CE was, itself, a fringe opinion. In the Talmud we learn that “the Jews should not go up to the Land of Israel as a wall.” And this has been interpreted for most of Jewish history, until the rise of modern Zionism, as a religious prohibition against going to the land of Israel as a group, to form a political entity there. My own denomination, Reform Judaism (the largest movement in Judaism in America), was officially anti-Zionist until the 1937 Columbus platform, which included support for Israel. But Reform rabbis were still hotly divided over Israel throughout the 1940s. In the ’50s and ’60s, this gradually shifted due to the Holocaust, and this change was formalized in the 1976 Reform platform, which encouraged Israeli citizenship for the first time.
Right now anti-Zionism is a minority view among American Jews, but younger Jews are increasingly critical of Israel and the war on Gaza. The same poll to reveal that only 34% of Jews overall oppose a ceasefire also showed that 41% of Jews over age 50 oppose an immediate ceasefire, while only 22% of Jews age 18-29 do. Like so many times in the past, the US Jewish community is in the middle of a radical ideological shift. Today’s young people are telling us where US Jewish life is heading in the future, and it's up to middle-aged rabbis like me to listen. It's possible that attitudes toward Israel will change as much in my child’s lifetime as they did (in the opposite direction) during my father’s life.
In the meantime, the accusation that the Jewish movement for ceasefire is “not representative” of the American Jewish community has been a major talking point used to discredit us. But not only do a large percentage of Jews actually want a ceasefire, mainstream appeal has never been a good litmus test for morality.
My father grew up next door to people in Belgium who were unwilling to be unpleasant — they were the Nazis; it was the argumentative, resistant neighbors who harbored him. My dad taught me as a small child that Martin Luther King Jr. (who was already being hailed as a hero in my 1980s childhood) was widely unpopular with many Americans in his day. He also told me that slavery was both legal and well-liked in its era, and that Hitler was initially democratically elected to office. The fact that, right now, the movement for ceasefire is powerful and growing, but also still stigmatized by much of the American Jewish community, would only make my father prouder of me.
[Rabbi Elliot Kukla is a chaplain, author, artist and activist.]