This is a cross-post from Destination Israel

Wandering through some back-streets in downtown Jerusalem yesterday, I stumbled across a small alley (below) which had been furnished with a few benches and trees. Although it wasn’t exactly pretty, this little passage had certainly been made less drab.

As I walked along the passage, I saw two notices, captured in the picture above, on one of the walls. I didn’t pay too much attention to them at first, but as I approached I noticed that the one on the left was rather different to your average street sign. As I came over to read it, I noticed that something else came, too… a big smile over my face. Here’s the sign from closer up.

For those of you who don’t read Hebrew proficiently, the sign reads:

BLESSING OF THE [FRUIT] TREES
In the month of Nissan, Jews customarily recite a blessing upon seeing two blossoming fruit trees: “Blessed are You, Hashem, Lord of the universe, that subtracts nothing from his world, and created in it good creations and good trees, so that mankind may enjoy of them.”

It delighted me to see this ancient Jewish tradition being practiced and honoured. But more than that, in this most tumultuous of cities, it was nothing less than lovely to see this simple plaque.

While there can be intense friction between the Haredi sector and the more liberal end of Israeli society, and while Jews and Arabs remain locked in bitter conflict, it was beautiful to see how faith need not be thrust upon others forcefully.

It’s such a simple thing, but yet something that makes me so incredibly happy and thankful. To be able to live in a place where Jewish traditions, preserved over centuries of persecution and near-extinction, are now flourishing once again really is an incredible thing. For me, this is the essence of the Jewish state; it’s what separates us from all the other countries on earth. For all over the religious struggle between the different streams of Judaism, from the Haredi to the reform, we can all agree on the beauty of blessings such as this and be grateful for seeing our ages-old traditions being brought to the fore in our home city of Jerusalem.

For moments such as this, I truly do thank G-d.

Regular readers will recall the Home Game documentary shown here last month. 12 Tribe Films, who made Home Game, are launching another online documentary in a few weeks: One Of The Lamed-Vav. It is the amazing story of Reb Aryeh Levin, who has been described as the ‘Jewish Mahatma Gandhi’.

Gil Zohar of the Chicago Jewish Star called the documentary: “The compelling story of…a saintly rabbi who stood up to the might of the British Empire in Palestine armed only with love and non-violence.”

You can sign-up here to receive more information about the documentary and its forthcoming online launch.

Senior rabbis in Bat Yam are discussing hiring a shabbat goy.

I’m your man!

In the 1930s, a girl called Margaret Roberts (later Thatcher) was growing up in Grantham, Lincolnshire. Margaret’s big sister Muriel had an Austrian Jewish pen-friend called Edith. When Hitler’s German army occupied Austria, Edith’s worried father asked Margaret and Muriel’s parents if the Roberts family would look after his daughter.

They agreed. Young Edith escaped the tightening grip of the Nazis and went to Grantham to stay with the Roberts. Margaret remembers Edith and the accounts she gave of her life. “She told us what it was like to live as a Jew under an anti-Semitic regime. One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind: the Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets.” (Edith eventually moved to build a new life in South America.)

Later, as Thatcher rose to the leadership of the Conservative Party, she continued to earn a reputation as a friend of the Jewish people. She was a popular MP among her constituents in Finchley (which had a high Jewish population) and was a member of the Anglo-Israel Friendship League of Finchley and the Conservative Friends of Israel. She joined in the singing of Hatikvah at a local event in 1975.

When she took the leadership of the party, Foreign Office mandarins feared her Jewish connections and support for Israel would see her viewed as “a prisoner of the Zionists” by the Arab world. Once PM, her cabinets and behind-the-scenes teams often included many Jewish politicians, prompting Harold Macmillan to quip that she had “more Estonians than Etonians”. (Not the most sensitive of punchlines, but it should be noted that Macmillan too had given shelter to Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 40s.)

Thatcher became the first serving British Prime Minister to visit Israel when she spent three days there in May 1986. (She had visited twice prior to becoming PM.) While respecting her for her symbolic trip, I find the fact it took Britain nearly 40 years to send a serving PM to Israel astonishing.

It was not an entirely rosy relationship between Thatcher and Israel. She described Israel’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear plant in 1981 as “a grave breach of international law” and a “matter of great grief”. (Then US President Ronald Reagan also condemned it incidentally – so much for the American/Israel conspiracy.)

In 1987 she had a less than harmonious dawn summit with Yitzhak Rabin, which he later described as “the shortest breakfast meeting he ever had”. (Her ‘Iron Lady’ tag is thought to have been inherited from Israeli PM Golda Meir.) She also imposed an arms embargo on Israel during the Lebanon war.

However, the number of Jewish Conservative MPs rose under her reign, and dwarfed the number on the Labour benches. As PM, Thatcher had a very healthy relationship with the then Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits. One of my favourite political books is Sir Martin Gilbert’s Churchill And The Jews. I wonder if a similar tone could one day be written about Thatcher’s relationship with the Chosen People?