For Now, Civility Comes to Jewish Community’s Debate

For now, Los Angeles’ politically splintered Jewish community is as one in the aftermath of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The differences that have erupted in the past over the quest for peace in the Holy Land seemed to dissipate in the candlelight of Monday’s vigil for the fallen leader. But flickering shadows of apprehension remain.

Jewish leaders here say they have little doubt that profound divisions will surface again within the Los Angeles Jewish community over how best to secure peace with the Palestinians and Israel’s Arab neighbors. The only question, they say, is whether the level of fury will recede.

Even before Rabin’s assassination, Jewish leaders in Los Angeles said they were growing increasingly uneasy about the tone of debate among Los Angeles Jews over the Middle East peace process.

While the divisions here have never approached the vitriolic and hate-filled rhetoric that surfaced in Israel--where Rabin was hanged in effigy and likened to a Nazi--Jewish leaders here say the lack of civility has been troubling.

“It’s expressed in speech and the way people spoke to one another,” Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, western regional director of the American Jewish Committee, said this week.

In contrast to the candlelight vigil in front of the Israeli Consulate that police said drew more than 5,000 mourners, a picture of Los Angeles Jewish opinion that was unsettling to some erupted three months ago, when several hundred people gathered at the offices of the Jewish Federation on Wilshire Boulevard to join what was supposed to be a much-needed dialogue over political differences. That event quickly turned into a raucous and contentious confrontation.

“I walked away feeling sick,” said the meeting’s moderator, UCLA political science professor Steven Spiegel, adding, “I was extremely disturbed about the divisions that the evening had suggested” and the depth of the rancor between the two sides. Spiegel said he spent half his time that night trying to maintain order.

While others, including Rabbi Harvey J. Fields, head of the Jewish Federation Council’s sponsoring community relations committee, said there was “a very high level of civility” at the meeting, the Jewish Journal newspaper wrote in September that the forum, titled “A Thousand Shades of Gray,” was a place where every position was seen as either “black or white.”

At one point, the newspaper said, an Orthodox rabbi likened the Israeli government’s treatment of Jewish settlers in the West Bank to the behavior of Nazi storm troopers.

“A lot of us have been mourning the real lack of civility in the discourse in our community,” said Rabbi Janet Marder of the Pacific Southwest Regional Council of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, a Reform denomination.

“There has been a real distrust of the motives of those with whom we disagree. I only hope that this tragedy can help us see the error of that kind of discourse and the dangers inherent in it,” Marder said this week.

The question now is not whether Rabin’s assassination will bridge deeply held differences among Jews over the future of Israel. Those differences will remain. What Jewish leaders in Los Angeles are asking is whether Rabin’s death will only temporarily cool the heated rhetoric.

For some, much will depend on what unfolds in Israel. For others, choosing a position will remain deeply personal, particularly for Los Angeles Jews who have relatives or friends living in the West Bank.

Most--including conservatives who questioned the Rabin government’s peace initiatives--believe that, at least in the short term, Rabin’s death will cause Jews here to step back and temper their comments. But they can only hope that the civility imposed by the sobering loss of Rabin will endure.

Los Angeles Jewish leaders do concur that Israel can no longer count on a united Jewish front in Los Angeles, the city with the second-largest concentration of Jews in the United States.

“I don’t think there’s any going back” to the days of unquestioned support, said Stanley K. Sheinbaum, a Democratic political activist from Brentwood and board member of the American Jewish Congress who supports the peace process.

Orthodox Rabbi Abner Weiss, who opposes the peace process, agrees.

“I think the Jewish community all over the world mirrors the situation in Israel,” Weiss said. “The Israeli population is divided exactly down the middle. It seems that is how the Los Angeles community is divided as well.”