Religious vs. Secular : Mormon Issue Splits Israelis Into 2 Camps

Moshe Dann, 45, is a newly Orthodox Jew whose return to religion began in his native New York. By the summer of 1982, he had emigrated to Israel, where he married an Israeli-born widow with three children and went to work for Yad LeAchim, a religious youth organization.

“In a world where nothing makes sense, the only thing you have is the Torah,” Dann said in a recent interview, referring to the entire body of Jewish religious literature. “I don’t know where I am, but I know that the only way out is in those books.”

Teddy Kollek, 74, is a decidedly non-religious native of Vienna, who in 1934 came to what was then Palestine and soon allied himself with David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father. For 20 years, Kollek has been mayor of Jerusalem, and he has managed by deft political maneuver and compromise to maintain a remarkable degree of peace in this culturally and religiously fragmented city.

An Unlikely Pair

The Orthodox Jew and the secular Israeli mayor seem an unlikely pair to have become the prime protagonists in a bitter controversy over a $15-million Mormon education center being built on a hill overlooking Jerusalem’s walled Old City.

But a year-old argument that at first pitted Jews against Mormons has turned into an argument among Jews--one that involves the very nature of the Jewish state.

“The fight is not over the Mormon Center but over the character of Israel,” Kollek said.

In Jerusalem more than in any other place, Kollek said, Israel must show tolerance for other religions. Efforts to stop the center, he said, are based on outdated, ghetto-bred fears that can only harm Israel and the image of Judaism around the world.

But Dann says it is the exaggerated concern that Kollek and others show for the opinions of non-Jews that reflects a ghetto mentality.

‘Can’t Worry About Congress’

“I don’t think we should be concerned with how we’re perceived if we’re right,” Dann said. “If we’re doing something for the Jewish people, we can’t worry about whether (the U.S.) Congress is going to stop giving us aid or not.”

A Cabinet-level government committee appointed in December to investigate the dispute is itself reported to be evenly split on whether construction of the center, already half-complete, should be allowed to proceed. The committee is expected to publish its findings within the next week or two, but whatever it recommends, the deeper debate illuminated by the Mormon Center will undoubtedly continue.

The center’s beginnings were remarkably peaceful. Since 1968, the Mormons’ Brigham Young University has offered its students a semester of study in Israel, and in 1973 the university began thinking of putting up a building to replace the quarters it rents. The new building would accommodate 200 students.

The university started looking for a suitable site in Jerusalem, and the search went on until 1981, when the city offered to lease a large plot adjacent to the Mount of Olives. It took until May, 1984, for all the necessary government committees and offices to approve the building plans, which also had to be published in the press to invite any outside objection.

Among those who gave their blessings were Mayor Kollek, the Foreign Ministry, the Education Ministry and Yosef Burg, who at the time was interior minister. Burg is head of Israel’s National Religious Party in Parliament, and as minister of religious affairs in the present government, he was named chairman of the Cabinet committee that is reviewing the project.

Not Aware of Plans

While all this studying and planning was going on, Dann said, the Orthodox Jews who now oppose the center so actively were not aware of it. They knew nothing about Mormon theology, he said, or about the Mormons’ plans for the center.

It was not until last year, he said, that the threat became clear--partly with the help of someone in Mormon headquarters in Salt Lake City who supplied documents discussing the center’s potential for missionary activity.

Dann refuses to identify the informant but said he was motivated by concern that unless the Jerusalem project was stopped, it would ruin relations between Jews and Mormons around the world.

Jewish sensitivity to missionary activity is based on a history of efforts at forced conversion to Christianity as well as the systematic extinction of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. It runs so deep that Jews discourage conversion even to Judaism.

‘Leave Us Alone’

“The central issue for every Jew in the world is ‘Please leave us alone,’ ” Dann said.

So when Yad LeAchim began disseminating information about the Mormons’ missionary activity in general and plans for the proposed center in particular, it quickly tapped strong support, particularly among the so-called ultra-Orthodox Jews.

David Galbraith, director of the Mormon program here, conceded that in the early days, “we were exploring, probing, looking for different ways that the church might be represented in this land.” But Mormon officials quickly realized that anything remotely resembling missionary activity would be unacceptable here, he said. They have since vowed repeatedly, orally and in writing, that the center will not be used for proselytizing.

Still, with every new pledge by the Mormons, there seemed to be more leaked documents casting doubt on their sincerity. Simultaneously, opponents waged a damaging campaign of innuendo, hinting that legal approval for the center had been obtained by bribery or deception and even suggesting some vaguely defined connection between the Mormons and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

No ‘Smoking Gun’

Many of these arguments were refuted outright, and the opponents never produced anything resembling a “smoking gun” to back up their suggestions of wrongdoing. Nonetheless, Galbraith admitted, the campaign is having a devastating effect. “Two months ago, we were in trouble,” he said.

The Mormons finally hired a public relations firm to help counter the charges against them.

Meanwhile, articles have appeared in the Israeli press showing that more Salt Lake City Mormons have converted to Judaism than Jerusalem Jews to Mormonism since Brigham Young University started its program here 18 years ago.

Jews in Utah and Idaho have written letters of support for the Mormons, describing them as good friends and neighbors who would never go back on their word not to proselytize in Israel.

Among others, Moshe Arens, a minister without portfolio in the Cabinet, has warned publicly that the Orthodox campaign against the center is damaging Israel’s image in the United States, where the Mormons have traditionally been both active politically and friendly toward Israel.

Focus Has Shifted

But the most important change is that the focus of the argument has slowly shifted from the Mormons and their center to the Orthodox opponents, their motives and their methods.

Particularly damaging has been a campaign of threats and harassment by ultra-Orthodox extremists directed against Galbraith and others connected with the center. There are already deep and bitter divisions here between secular and religious Jews, and the threats have provided the secular camp with another weapon.

At one point Galbraith had his telephone disconnected because of the barrage of threatening calls. Two of 10 Jewish guest lecturers in his program have quit under pressure from the extremists, he said.

A memorable appearance on Israel television--in which Galbraith played a tape recording of some of the threatening calls he has received--was a turning point, galvanizing sentiment against the Orthodox Jews and, if only by default, for the Mormons.

‘Acting Like the Mafia’

Referring to the extremists, Kollek said: “To where have their idiocy, evil and feelings of inferiority taken them? They started with telephone threats against a few Mormon activists in Jerusalem. They threatened the 5-year-old child of one of the Mormons. They are acting like the Italian Mafia.”

The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith offered Mormon officials advice on how to cope with bomb threats against the center.

The league’s American director, Nate Perlmutter, said while here on a recent visit, “What really counts is that ‘made by Christians’ medievalism not be adopted by Jews, not in this already excessively punished century and surely not in a city which should be a light unto all cities.”

Dann said: “The ADL is essentially functioning as a middleman for the Mormons. We were sold out by our own people.”

Containing the Extremists

Dann conceded that the actions of the extremists have damaged the cause, and he said opponents of the center have moved to stop them.

“We got the message across very clearly that anything like this is only hurting us,” he said, but he added that it is understandable that opponents of the Mormon center are angry that it was approved. “I hope we can contain the frustration and the anger and the sense of outrage here,” he said.

Extremism aside, the internal debate touches fundamental differences over the meaning of the Jewish state.

“Implicit in Zionism is the yearning for normalization,” said David Hartman, a lecturer on Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University here. “This normalization is often viewed as the beginning of the assimilation of Israelis into world culture, but it can be understood as a new opportunity to evolve a sense of identity which does not make fear of forced conversion and pogroms into the cementing force of the community.”

Moving With Dignity

Hartman argued that Judaism “must move culturally and religiously with the same dignity and power as it has in creating a political framework for its physical survival.”

“It would be ludicrous,” he said, “to build a strong army to guarantee our physical survival and yet spiritually and culturally face the world with the traumatized mind of the ghetto Jew.”

Solomon Sharfman, a former president of the Rabbinical Council of America, argued that he and his family emigrated to Israel to live in a country where Jews and Jewish culture are dominant. “But even here,” he said, “we have found that this cannot be taken for granted. . . . For here, too, the dominant culture is a Western and materialistic one, spawning alienation, defeatism and nihilism. It is not fear of diverse ideas that motivates opposition to the Mormon center, but a profound sense of our collective self-respect.”