Conscious of Origins : Israelis: a Dual Sense of Heritage

Members of Prime Minister Shimon Peres’ staff were naturally curious when Yardena, their notoriously surly Moroccan-born cleaning lady, showed up at work humming contentedly one morning last month during the premier’s surprise summit with Morocco’s King Hassan II.

“I’m so happy!” she explained. “I’ve been waiting 38 years for this. My prime minister has gone to meet my king!”

Some Israeli political analysts believe that the pride that Peres’ visit to Hassan’s summer home at Ifrane evoked in the cleaning lady and others among Israel’s nearly 500,000 Jews of Moroccan origin will one day pay him dividends at the polls.

A Telling Influence

But even if it does not, the incident illustrates that despite this country’s extraordinary success in absorbing immigrants and quickly shaping them into a unique nation, the lands of their origins still exert a telling emotional, psychological and cultural influence on many Israelis.

Thirty-eight years after the creation of the state, more than 42% of all Israeli Jews are foreign-born. And an equal percentage were born to at least one immigrant parent, according to government statistics.

The state-owned Israeli radio--its domestic service--broadcasts in a dozen languages, including Russian, English, French, Spanish, Hungarian and Maghribi, an Arabic dialect spoken mostly in Morocco.

There are scores of clubs here for Jews of various backgrounds, ranging from the Union of Immigrants from Bukovina, a region in central Europe comprised of parts of what are today northern Romania and the southwestern Soviet Union, to the Assn. of Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI).

‘Real American Bagel’

One of several regular publications from the American and Canadian association recently carried an Israeli restaurant advertisement for a “real American bagel and lox.”

When a prominent Israeli member of Parliament was finally able to bring his mother’s body from her native Poland to Israel for reburial, four busloads of immigrants representing the Assn. of Radom Jews, her hometown in Poland, showed up for the service.

There are so many Israelis of Indian origin in Kiryat Gat, southwest of Jerusalem, that they support a local cricket club. And the city of Yeroham for a long time employed an official Hindi translator.

During the recent World Cup soccer competition, which was televised here, the thousands of Jews who immigrated from Argentina in the 1970s were among the most vocal supporters for soccer star Diego Maradona.

About 60,000 former Soviet Jews here are linked to special dish antennas that bring regular Soviet television broadcasts into their new homes by satellite.

And until recently, at least, there was a “Bulgarian parliament” in Jaffa composed of immigrant elders who met daily in a local coffee shop to discuss such burning issues as whether it is possible for a man to walk on the moon. (They decided--on a split vote and despite evidence to the contrary--that it wasn’t.)

Absorption Speeded

Israeli governments, acting out of a combination of ideology and necessity, have traditionally done all they could to speed the absorption process.

The raison d’etre of the Zionist enterprise comprises the twin goals of kibbutz galuyot (the ingathering of the exiles) and mizug galuyot (the merging of the exiles). And the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict ensures that unity is regarded as a matter of national survival.

In a small country like Israel, said Iraqi-born writer Sami Michael, “we can’t afford to build 10 or 20 different cultures.”

With its network of “absorption centers,” Hebrew language classes, government subsidies and instant citizenship, Israel has probably the most highly developed system of integrating new immigrants in the world. Universal military conscription is another powerful integrating mechanism, as is a standardized national educational system, a single national television network and national newspapers.

While newcomers are probably absorbed into the national mainstream faster here than in most immigrant societies, Israelis remain very conscious of national origin.

In Moscow, for example, the nationality of a Russian Jew is officially listed as “Jewish” on his identity documents. But once he immigrates to Israel, he becomes known as a “Russi.”

An Israeli of American origin, even though he has been here for 30 years, may well find himself accosted at a party for what “his” President, Ronald Reagan, did or did not do.

“In Biblical times there were a dozen Hebrew tribes in the country,” wrote Leonard Fine in “Will The Real Israel Please Stand Up,” a newcomer’s guide. “Today its immigrants and settlers come from a hundred lands and cultures.”

To an outsider, it sometimes appears a tossup as to which trend is dominant: Is a powerful Zionist ideology transforming Israel’s modern “tribes”? Or are the “tribes” transforming the society and its official ideology?

“The average Israeli, without knowing it, swears in four or five different languages,” said Zeev Chafets, an American-born author and former government press office director.

There is no Israeli cuisine in Israel; there is instead a United Nations of restaurants in the major cities featuring everything from Hungarian to Vietnamese cooking.

One of the country’s happiest holidays is an import from Morocco. Called “Maimuna,” it is a day for mass picnics and celebrations marking the arrival of spring.

While both Israel and the United States were built by immigrants, Israel has never been a “melting pot” in the same sense as the United States. America’s immigrants came seeking new opportunity. Israel’s frequently had nowhere else to go.

Also, the Jews who came here had been raised to believe that Israel was theirs, a national patrimony dating from Biblical times. The Irish, Italians, Spaniards and Jews who went to the United States did not see themselves as American before they arrived.

Dual Heritages

The nature and extent of the bonds that Israelis feel to the lands of their origins vary widely, although most seem to maintain at least a mild curiosity about their “other” heritage.

“I can’t see defining myself as a Polish Jew,” said sociologist Zeev Shivat, the 34-year-old Israeli-born son of Polish Jewish immigrants. However, he said, he was called by a Polish nickname as a child, knows a few Polish words and would like to see the place “where my parents were born and raised.”

The attitudes of most Israelis who came from Arab countries, and those from the Soviet Union, are colored by the knowledge that there is no turning back. Author Michael, who left Iraq at age 21, admitted: “I was sad for many years, even after leaving a very backward country, because I knew I couldn’t go back to see my home, to see my school, to see my friends.”

A Temptation to Return

Many Israelis of American origin, by contrast, admit that the temptation to return to what they see as a vastly easier and more comfortable life in the United States is never far from their minds.

Israelis of Moroccan origin, who tend to be near the bottom of the economic scale here, seem particularly slow to be fully accepted.

“Poorer groups retain their identity longer not because they like it, but because other groups reject them,” said Michael.

When Peres took a prominent Israeli politician of Moroccan origin along with him to his meeting with Hassan, it was a source of pride for the rest of Israel’s Moroccan Jews because, as one political analyst put it, it showed that Peres was taking them seriously.

Helped Begin’s Career

Tensions here between Jews of European origin, Ashkenazim, and those of Middle Eastern and North African origin, Sephardim, are well known, and were directly involved in the rise to political power in the late 1970s of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s Likud Bloc.

Likud played on the often heavy-handed methods used by the Labor governments that preceded it to force the masses of Sephardim who arrived in the 1950s and early 1960s into Ashkenazim cultural molds.

Sociologist Shivat noted that in the last Israeli elections two years ago, two-thirds of Likud voters were Sephardim, while two-thirds of those who voted for Peres’ Labor Alignment were Ashkenazim.

But the social dividing lines are not limited to Sephardim and Ashkenazim.

“Even today, if the granddaughter of (Sephardic) Iraqi Jews comes home and says she’s going to marry a (Sephardic) Moroccan, her parents won’t be happy,” said author Michael.

“This, then, is the ironic climax of the long, tortuous history of the Jews,” wrote Leonard Fine in his newcomers’ guide. “Denied their own land for 20 centuries, they wandered everywhere, irritating, influencing and enriching the nations of the world. . . . Today they again have a land of their own . . . yet they remain, to some extent, divided into different tribes and communities.”