LEGALLY, its A QM DEAL BUT MokaLLy, i Rs. AN OBLiGATION TO ACT NiS Restoring Respect Great Britain is having trouble justifying its monarchy these days, and some in Israel are questioning the moral authority of the chief rabbinate, an office that combines politics and religion in the Jewish state. On Sunday, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau and Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron were chosen Chief Ashkenazi and Chief Sephardi Rabbis, respec- tively, for 10-year thrills. They face an uphill battle in reviving a sense of respect for their important offices. During the vicious campaign leading up to the rabbinical elections, there were public charges of bribery, financial irregularities and womanizing against various candidates, whom former Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren referred to as "minor leaguers" in terms of Torah scholar- ship. The chief rabbinate, established during the British Mandate, is the authority for Israeli marriages and divorces and the supervision of kosher food, but that authority does not go unchallenged. Secular Jews resent what they Why Jewish Survival? LEONARD FEIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS A C/) w C.1) LU CC LU LU 6. DILEMMA cidNATHON HID TO WRESTLE Wi ••. oesr-,/ consider the intrusion of religion on their per- sonal lives; many Chasidic and non-Zionist Orthodox Jews resent the rulings of an office of the Zionist state they do not accept. Politics plays a heavy hand in the chief rabbinate. For many years the National Reli- gious Party (NRP), which is staunchly Zion- ist, controlled the rabbinate. But the NRP opted not to join the Rabin-led government and the Shas Party (associated with non-Zionist, very Orthodox Sephardim), the only religious party in the government, is now the dominant influ- ence. How that may influence future relations between religion and the state remains to be seen. What is dear, though, is that the new chief rabbis must do all in their power to bring a l moral, ethical voice to religion in Israel, whose( image has suffered a real beating during the nasty campaign. Last week, the outgoing chief rabbis bemoaned the current state of affairs, describing it as "not befitting the rabbis or the rabbinate." To that we can only add, Amen. CI so obvious that the question itself is trivial: Institutions do what they know how to do, which is, by and large, what they were doing yes- terday. That is true even of the L.A. federation, notwith- standing the fact that over the years, it has come up with more than one impor- tant innovation. The more interesting and by far the more important question is what federations around the country are disposed to do about it. No great surprise: The evidence suggests that what they propose to do about it is to substitute a couple of new words for the two that have lost their compelling appeal and to go on with business pretty much as usual. The language of crisis is alto- gether too familiar, too in- tegral to their world-view, too abandon it. So if Israel is less manifestly in crisis (oh, for the good old days of war) and the Holocaust now becomes more a memory than a motive, fill in the blanks with other and more voguish words. iZST 11' ? 1Th LS /RE S4MC — Opinion recent report on the crisis of the Los Angeles Jewish fed- eration — some mill- ions short of what they an- ticipated in collections, slashing operating and agency budgets for the se- cond time this year — con- cludes with the following ob- servation from a federation "insider": "We are dealing with a new generation that no longer remembers the Holocaust and which can't remember when there wasn't an Israel. We need something to bring them to identify with a Jewish com- munity in a broader sense." So what else is new? The Torah of the organized corn- munity has long stood on two legs, Israel and the Holocaust, and, for varied and predicted reasons, both are considerably less sturdy than once they once were. We might wonder why it has taken so long for the in- stitutional community to wake to the institutional and fiscal implications of the weakening of its traditional supports, but the answer is is Wan' VIE Ftssim co st ? Ladies and gentlemen, this way to the emergency en- trance: Intermarriage and anti-Semitism. For those who are turned principally inward, we have the new and alarming data ,A) Opinion on Jewish self-destruction through intermarriage, the evidence that our "I do's" are spoken increasingly to strangers and will, within a generation, lead to a mass "I won't" regarding Jewish af- filiation, Jewish life. And for those whose antennae are pointed out- ward, we have reports from nearly everywhere of a rise in anti-Semitism. You want Germany? Here are the skinheads. Here are the best-sellers. You want Russia? Here's Pamyat. You want the good old U.S. of A? Here's New York City, and here's Farrakhan, et cetera et cetera, ad nauseam. In the nick of time, then, we have lucked out. We re- main partners in a voyage of the damned; it's just that the reefs that threaten to capsize us have changed; no big deal; a reef is a reef. By whatever name, the threat to Jewish survival remains and that is the banner under which we have learned to march and under which we shall ever continue to mar- ch. It all comes down to Jew- ish survival, which is plainly our collective obsession. It is an obsession that derives from our destabilizing historical experience — and that is encouraged and tained by the myopic ti ty of our institutions. I say this not as an en of Jewish survival, pe the thought. I say this cause of an absolute con tion that if a people want Survival is not something to sta for; survival is th result of standin for something. stand, it must stand something. Survival is something to stand for; s viv- al is the result of st ding for something. Until we can persuasiv complete the followi sentence, we shall be trouble, and our survi will remain iffy: "It is portant that the Jews s vive in order that --- ---." In order that wh In order that we not dis pear? But to say that is say that we build our lives a redundancy. The sentence is not so t ribly difficult to comple nor is there only o substantial way to compl it. "In order to do God's wi is one way. "In order to p vide a sheltering comm in an impersonal society" another. My own, the on believe most precisely rives from the intersection the Jewish tradition and t American tradition, is " order to help mend t world, a task they a assigned and for which th texts and their memori and their situation ha prepared them." But I don't insist that ma is the "right" one, only th we cannot build a wort future on a foundation perpetual emergenc however the emergency the moment be defined. cannot, and we do not ne to; there are better a healthier ways — which, n so incidentally, are al more likely to improve t odds on our survival. ,