GiliGold/VAD_KnessetCorpus huggingface dataset:
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
This year marks the 350th anniversary of the first Jewish community in what later became the United States.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
With the clarity of hindsight we can see that the arrival in 1654 and what is now known as New York and then known as New Amsterdam of 23 Jews was the first page of an extraordinary new chapter in the annals of the Jewish people.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
The reception of that first handful and of the millions who were to follow them plainly constitutes deliverance that calls for celebration and thanksgiving.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
My remarks will focus on the founding of the community, especially in its early years and its many difficulties as well as its many achievements and on the maturation of that community, especially in the 56 years since the birth of the State of Israel.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
I also want to highlight the important transition from Jewish life in British colonial America to full participation in a newly independent United States of America.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
The early history of the Jewish community in America, I would submit, offers some lessons for understanding the American Jewish community today.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
In many ways the first Jewish arrivals in America, victims of religious bigotry, there were many Christian groups who also sought haven on our shores, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Baptists in Georgia, Catholics in Maryland and Protestant pilgrims in New England.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
During the fifteenth century Jews living on the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, endured tragic physical expulsion and bitter religious persecution.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Many mistakenly believed that the persecution all came to a sad end in the fateful year of 1492, but it was not so.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Anti Jewish harassment and the church sponsored Inquisition continued for many decades, eventually reaching the Portuguese colony of Recife Brazil.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
However in the decades before 1654, Recife was under Dutch rule and it became a thriving center of the sugar industry in Brazil.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
While there was still anti Jewish discrimination in those years on the part of the Dutch the city attracted many Jews.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
But by 1654 the Portuguese recaptured Recife and brought with them the dreaded Inquisition.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
We forget that 160 years after the expulsion from Spain Jews still living under Spanish or Portuguese rule were understandably still in fear of the Inquisition.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Afraid for their lives in the Portuguese colony of Recife, twenty three Jews were forced to do what unfortunately is an unhappy reality of Jewish history.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
They fled their homes for an unknown strange land in search of freedom and security.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Because the long arm of the Portuguese Inquisition reached across the Atlantic Ocean the twenty three embarked on a long sea journey seeking new lives in a new land.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
At that moment in history the various European colonial powers, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, France and Holland were competing with one another as they established colonies in North and South America.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
The Recife Jews, some of them already refugees from Europe, sailed for the one colony that offered a real hope for security and survival, the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It is likely that 23 Jews were aware that a commercial company based in the Netherlands, one that had included Jewish members, had founded and funded the New Amsterdam colony.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
… colonies of Catholic nations, France, Spain and of course Portugal, were off limits.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
The British colonies were probably not considered because in 1654 Jews were not legally present in England or its colonies.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Looking back from our vantage point the intrepid twenty three made the wisest possible choice, Dutch Protestant New Amsterdam.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
But the initial reception in that colony where the Hudson and East Rivers meet was hardly an easy or welcoming one.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
New Amsterdam’s Governor, Peter Stuyvesant, did not want the Jews to settle in his colony.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
However, the Jewish members of the settlement company headquartered in Holland compelled the hostile Stuyvesant to admit the twenty three.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
In another familiar aspect of Jewish history the twenty three had to agree the tiny Jewish community would not be a burden financially and in other ways to the general society.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
From the very beginning Jews were in America on sufferance and were less than full citizens.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It required close to two hundred years of intense struggle to reverse that situation.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Although the first Jews in New Amsterdam were free of the Inquisition, it is likely they felt both literally and figuratively at the end of the Jewish road.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
That sense is reflected in the revealing name they give to the first synagogue established in what is now the United States.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Instead of such conventional names as Beth Israel, House of Israel, Bnei Israel, Children of Israel or Beth El, Home of God, the early settlers chose Sheirit Israel, or the Remnants of Israel.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
For the last one hundred years the congregation’s building has been located on West 70th Street and Central Park West in Manhattan.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
The congregation’s founders had no idea they were the forerunners of what became the world’s largest, richest and freest Jewish Diaspora community in 35 hundred years.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Nor could the 23 have known that just ten years after their arrival in New Amsterdam, the British would capture the colony and give it a new name, New York.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Jews in the British colony faced daunting external and internal difficulties.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Rabbinic leadership was always a severe problem.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It was not until the 19th century that a rabbinical school was formally established in America.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
In those early years there were no yeshivas or a sufficient number of qualified Hebrew teachers, spiritual leaders, ritual slaughterers, circumcisers, cantors and others needed to sustain a vigorous Jewish community.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
While Jews arrived in the Georgia colony just six months after it was founded in the early seventeen hundreds, some anti Jewish restrictions remained in America until the nineteenth century.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Rhode Island, despite its proud legacy of Roger Williams in religious liberty, did not allow Jews to vote or hold elective office until 1843.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Just as the name Sheirit Israel speaks volumes about the early settlers’ view of the future, so to does the construction of the famous synagogue in New Port Rhode Island tells us about the mind set of Jews in colonial America.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Today that Jewish house of worship, now known as the Touro Synagogue, completed in 1763, is an historic national landmark.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It is, however, often forgotten that the congregational leaders insisted their synagogue include a secret trap door that could provide speedy escape in the case of possible anti Jewish physical violence.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
In a symbolic act of confidence in themselves in the newly emerging American society the New Port Jews permanently covered the trap door.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
The days of fleeing were over for the Jews in America.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
By the time of the War of Independence in the 1770s and 1780s it is estimated that the American Jews numbered about three thousand out of a total population of about three million, or one tenth of one percent.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Nearly a 130 years after the Recife refugees arrived in New Amsterdam, American Jews still depended upon Europe for spiritual sustenance and religious validation.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It is important to remember that from the outset Jewish life in America was based upon volunteerism and unlike many European communities, the Kehilla, that is a unified community often endowed with government approval never took hold in either the colonies or in the United States.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
There was no government collective religious tax nor were there legally established ghettos in America’s cities.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Nor is there is a one size fits all American Judaism.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Geographically far from older Jewish communities in Europe and other parts of the world the tiny remnant of Israel grew independently albeit slowly.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Its size grew larger follo
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
wing the Jewish immigration after 1848 and the failed political revolutions in Europe and especially after 1882 when millions of Jews from Eastern Europe came to America to escape government sponsored anti-Semitism including lethal pogroms.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Religion in America was deregulated as a result of history and the Constitution’s First Amendment assuring the separation of church and state.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
So, too, Jewish life has been deregulated.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
A myriad of religious expressions, trade unionism, socialism, Zionism, Yiddishkeit, secularism and domestic politics, both liberal and conservative have all been part of the American Jewish mix.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It is estimated that nearly 70% of today’s American Jewish community trace their family roots to that post 1882 surge in immigration to the United States.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
In more recent years the American Jewish community has witnessed newcomers from such places as the former Soviet Union and Iran.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Finally our community’s early history offers some lessons as we celebrate 350 years of Jewish life in this part of the world.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
From the very beginning in 1654 Jews in America were compelled to develop their own communal institutions to guarantee survival.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
No one person in no government did it for them.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
We need to salute the brave men and women who in those early decades chose to maintain Jewish life in America as a tiny minority.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
They recognized that a new American Judaism needed its own schools, unions of congregations, newspapers, publications, prayer books and other necessities of Jewish life.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Back then, as now, Jewish life frequently appeared fractured, divided and even chaotic.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
But in fact that seeming disarray actually resulted in a vigorous, robust and creative Jewish community.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
The legacy of the early American Jewish community is that American Jews must do it themselves.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Tragically that fact became even clearer following the holocaust when the extraordinary wellsprings of Jewish creativity in Europe were destroyed.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It is also clear that after 56 years of Israeli independence American Jews cannot use the embattled and beloved Jewish State as their surrogate for Jewish identity and continuity.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
However the birth of the State of Israel in 1948 changed the map of the American Jews.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
The return of the Jews to sovereignty and statehood fundamentally altered the meaning of peoplehood and the meaning of American Jewish identity.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Certainly since 1948 the pro Israel consensus within American Jewry has held and American Jewish leaders believed that their most critical priority lies in strengthening the special relationship between America and Israel.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
If not for the unique role of the American Jewish community led by, among other non governmental organizations, the American Jewish Committee, American Middle East policy would in all likelihood resemble more that of the European democracies than the strong friendship between America and Israel that has been bipartisan for over fifty years.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
American Jewish leadership today recognizes its awesome responsibility to assure the support of the United States for the security and wellbeing of Israel.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It knows that for the survival of that State as we know it the U.S.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
veto in the UN Security Council must not be forsaken.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
I would respectfully submit that American Jewry is the Diaspora case that has actually worked.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It has built a vibrant Jewish culture.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It has established its security in American society and in recent decades it has risen to its global responsibility.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
One could not have predicted all of this as early as 1939, let alone 1776.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
But the opportunity that America has provided Jews stands as a remarkable, even exceptional Diaspora case.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
No society in Diaspora Jewish history has so welcomed Jewish participation as has America.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
That fact is well worth celebrating as American Jewry and Israel together work together to strengthen the collective Jewish people.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
When people think of the history of the Jews they think of persecution, expulsion, tragedy, mass murder and now terror.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
American Jewish history, particularly of the last two hundred years, offers us the opportunity to explore how Jews have flourished in a free an pluralistic society where church and state are separated and where religion is entirely voluntary.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
If there is a central theme to American Jewish history it is the story of how Judaism and Jewish life have been transformed by freedom.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
That said, we also need to look critically at the unfinished agenda of American Jewry.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
We have very serious problems of assimilation and mixed marriage and there are no obvious solutions.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
We need to make Jewish literacy the hallmark of the American Jewish ethos.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
We need to strengthen American Jewish attachments to the State of Israel and to Jewish peoplehood.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
More important we need to combat the disinterest among so many in matters Jewish which in turn mean disinterest in matters related to Israel.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Secondly, we need to be realistic that the last few years in particular have not been good years in Jewish history.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Threats to Jewish survival exist worldwide.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
American Jews as active citizens in the world’s only super power must take responsibility together with Israel for the health and welfare of the Jewish people worldwide.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
The AJC has committed itself to active participation in the observance of 350 years of American Jewish history.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
In doing so we have recognized our need to reaffirm the reverence for justice, freedom, equality and pluralism that have made America the haven it has been for us and for all Americans, our commitment to sustaining America’s role as the champion of freedom and democracy throughout the world, our obligation to recognized what American Jewry has achieved over three and a half centuries and to consider and dedicate ourselves to the tasks that lie before us in the century ahead, and our duty to give thanks for having been sustained and enabled to reach this anniversary.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Celebrate 350 is a consortium of American Jewish organizations including the American Jewish Committee.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It is chaired by past AJC President Bob Rivkin.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It has come together to spearhead events marking the significance of 350 years of Jewish life in North America.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Celebrate 350 has arranged for the minting of a medallion which I presented to Speaker Rivlin as representative of the Knesset immediately before this session.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
That medallion states on one side “Proclaim liberty throughout the land” in English and Hebrew, the line coming from Leviticus and relates to the jubilee year.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
It also appears on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
On the other side an excerpt from President Washington’s letter of 1790, that is, before the Bill of Rights to what is now known as the Touro Synagogue of Newport, Rhode Island and about which I spoke a few minutes ago, asserting that happily the government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
In presenting the medallion to the Israeli Knesset on behalf of Celebrate 350, as a symbol of the commonality between the world’s two most significant Jewish communities and as a pledge that we American Jews will continue to recognize and act upon our responsibility to the security and wellbeing of the State of Israel and worldwide Jewry.
MR. ROBERT GOODKIND:
Thank you very much.
CHAIRPERSON:
I’d like now to call upon MK Yuli Edelstein to say a few words.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
I’ll start with the remark that is not true today.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
I have to confess that whenever I address our counterparts, parliamentarians from different countries, or groups, delegations coming to the Knesset, I always start with saying, you are visiting the Knesset on a very special day.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
It is always a very safe phrase to start with.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
Today is a little bit different.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
Mah nishtanah?
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
Today really is as little bit different and I think that the decision we are all facing is a decision that will echo for many, many years here in Israel and outside.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
Just help us G-d to take the right decision.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
The second point would be that we as Jews here in Israel – you know, there are all these attempts of some scholars, especially sociologists, to explain that Israelis are different from Jews.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
So I have a proof that we are no different.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
Our trouble is not enough.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
A true story – yesterday I go to my grocery store around the corner and I found a big ad on the door, Republicans abroad, please note the vote is taking place there and there and there.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
So we are now very active, I guess, in the American elections.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
They say that there are dozens of thousands of voters here in Israel.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
Both Democrats and the Republicans are hunting them.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
So I think our own trouble is not enough.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
We have to be very actively involved, but on the other hand, it’s good news.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
It means that many of your Landsmen, or former Landsmen, whichever way you want to put it have made aliyah and are not only struggling with the difficulties of life in Israel but are still promoting their ideas in favor of Bush or Kerry or whoever the candidates might be.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
I think it is for me also good and promising news except for the confession that I sincerely laughed when I saw this huge ad in the midst of our discussion here.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
On a more serious, and I’ll finish with that, I am well aware that the initiators of this session of the American Jewish Committee are doing many tachlistic projects in order to keep the dialogue between Israel and the Diaspora Jewry and they’d rather have it as a dialogue and not a monologue.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
If I am allowed I would say that in the nearest future we, here, whatever the decision taken tomorrow might be, will be facing a lot of difficulties and a lot of public debate.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
It will be very important with this whole debate going on not to lose the connection and not to lose the stream of the dialogue with the Diaspora Jewry, with the American Jewry first and foremost.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
I just hope that everyone present here by this very visit and by saying that everyone present will take back home will help in keeping this dialogue alive, I think it’s in our mutual interest.
MK YULI EDELSTEIN:
Thank you very much.
RESHET CHEN:
I’d also like to say something to you.
RESHET CHEN:
The issue of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the issue of the occupied territories is not an Israeli issue, it is a Zionist issue, it is a Jewish issue.
RESHET CHEN:
As such this is an issue that should concern you just as much as it concerns us.
RESHET CHEN:
This is one of the few issues that I believe that Jews from around the world, any Zionist Jew, has the right and obligation to stand up and speak his mind.
RESHET CHEN:
If that means that on this issue American Jewry will have to be in argument within itself, so be it.
RESHET CHEN:
It’s not that terrible to be in argument on some issue.
RESHET CHEN:
But this is an issue that I believe is important enough to be a Jewish issue.
RESHET CHEN:
Because we need to make a decision between a Jewish democratic country and a dual national country.
RESHET CHEN:
This is the issue that is on the table.
RESHET CHEN:
Because if we stay there and we want this country to be a democracy then we have to choose between democracy and Judaism, a Jewish homeland.
RESHET CHEN:
And we don’t want to have to make this choice.
RESHET CHEN:
So I ask you to speak your mind and not to resort to the methods that are very, very understandable, of Israel right or wrong, Israeli government right or wrong.
RESHET CHEN:
We support the Israeli government.
RESHET CHEN:
It so happens that the Israeli government right now – I am part of it and it is doing what I think is right.
RESHET CHEN:
But regardless of that, I think that you have the right and obligation to have your mind and to speak it.
RESHET CHEN:
Thank you.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
I am privileged to participate in the celebration of 350 years of American Jewry.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
We are so grateful to you.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
I have the least personal and community of thanks as former Soviet Jews to the American Jewry, for your participation in the campaign Let My People Go, for your effort to give freedom to Sharansky, for your generous help as American States to the State of Israel, for your generous help to the Jewish Agency.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
Only a week ago I had here representatives of Brooklyn Business Club, former Soviet Jews from Brooklyn that are now going to have a program for business help to the former Soviet Union immigrants businessmen in Israel.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
We have very difficult times and as always you are ready to help.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
I want to say to you, we are here, I, Collette Avital, the Chief of the Aliyah and Immigration Committee, we are thinking together with Nathan Sharansky and the President of the State about solutions.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
We want to see the second chamber of the Israeli Parliament, the chamber of Jewish people.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
You participate in very important decisions in this Jewish Parliament.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
I entered the Knesset and was very green as a lawmaker, but I voted against the decision to have only Orthodox conversions, as it was against my coalition.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
I think that such questions we have to give a solution only together.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
At the end of my speech there is no Israel without strong Diasporas and first and foremost without the American Jewish Diaspora.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
There are no self respecting proud Jews without a strong Israel.
MK MARINA SOLODKIN:
Toda.
M.K. ORIT NOKED:
I had the privilege of being the guest of the ADC at the annual meeting two years ago.
M.K. ORIT NOKED:
Of course I want to thank Eran Lehrman and Shula Bahat.
M.K. ORIT NOKED:
I will always remember what I learned about the power, the values and the commitment of the American Jews and their love to Israel.
M.K. ORIT NOKED:
As all my friends said about this day, I think this is a very, very special and historic day and also difficult for some of us.
M.K. ORIT NOKED:
Give us your help and support as we take the difficult decisions on Israel’s future.
M.K. ORIT NOKED:
We know we can rely on you.
M.K. ORIT NOKED:
Thank you.
MK MATAN VILNA’I:
So as Jews that are coming from abroad you are very important for us.