Not long ago we visited the Mea Shearim neighborhood with the whole family.
This was the Shabbat adjacent to Yom Kippur, the one they call "Shabbat Shuva", on which fragrant air blows.
It turned out that we were staying nearby, and suddenly the question appeared: why don't we take the children to visit this special neighborhood?
After all, we have already moved the family to remote places in Israel and the world just to see something - cultures, costumes and signs - and finally we found some scrap attraction, who knows, that does not reach the ankles of Mea Shearim.
Besides, this neighborhood is part of the family story.
Here is an opportunity to tell the children how the family got here after the deportation in '48.
How did a grandmother manage, a widow with nine children and quite a few grandchildren, in the crowded neighborhood that was already ultra-Orthodox at the time.
About the alleyway childhood of my father and his brother, who studied Chumash with Rashi from the age of 3-4, tasted the taste of hunger and played stanga with children who grew up to be Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and Rabbi Kadori, may their memory be blessed.
We will find strange or funny stickers on the walls, and we will try to translate or at least explain.
And near the small industrial area of Mea Shearim we will stop for a moment to tell how my father - your grandfather - learned the art of glass blowing, after he had to leave school and help support the family.
Yes, precisely in Mea Shearim, at "Nekar", he learned the profession he practiced until his last day.
Of course a hundred Sheareim!
We took a few bottles of water with us and left.
A few minutes later - all we wanted was to get away from there and never come back.
The beginning was actually promising.
We managed to tell some of the stories, and answer some questions such as: why when the ad announces "atonements" is there a drawing of a rooster?
And why is it so dirty here?
"I hope the shoe that Charlie Chaplin ate in the movie didn't set foot here before," my 8-year-old son reasoned and we laughed, but suddenly we saw things that we had no interest or desire to explain.
"All we wanted was to get away from there and never come back."
Mea Shearim neighborhood, photo: Oren Ben Hakon
Along the street, between every pair of windows, at the height of a child's eyes, hateful inscriptions were smeared.
"Zions = Amalek".
"Zions = Nazis".
And the cherry - "Our demand: Holocaust for Zionists".
I thought for a moment that I didn't understand correctly.
There's no way it's what it says.
Maybe we missed something in the scoring and this is generally a protest against the matriculation grades.
No, what?
It's exactly what it says.
Someone here misses Europe to the point of obsession.
He has some kind of deviation, and he spreads it in the public domain of a neighborhood whose main advertisement is that it is so sensitive, vulnerable, and therefore it comes back and demands from every visitor that they adjust their clothing and behavior to the standard accepted by the local residents - all of them supremely righteous.
I didn't have a word to say to the children.
Even between myself I could not find anything reasonable to say.
True, angry graffiti on the walls of Mea Shearim is nothing new.
It's usually even considered part of the experience.
But not what we see now.
not this.
Come on, kids!
We're going from here.
On the way we explained to the children that most of the residents of the neighborhood do not think so.
Most of them are nice people, and they probably don't like this terrible address.
The twisted man who wrote this does not represent anyone.
But on the other hand, we must admit that there is a problem here.
After all, if someone had written a different slogan on this wall, let's say "Our demand: free love", "rock and roll", or even "Hiya'la, marry me?"
- We all know how quickly the address was erased, covered and disappeared from view.
Even at noon on Yom Kippur, someone would find a way to remove the unwanted words from the environment, and even before the spray paint was dry.
And here, with the filth in front of us, with "our demand: a holocaust for the Zionists", Mea Shearim flows.
And for that it is very difficult to forgive the entire neighborhood.
What does a person think about after he gathers his children in a panic and tells them "let's get out of here"?
He thinks about the danger that hovers over every closed clan.
On the curse of the suffocatingly homogeneous life.
On the filth of the stagnant water and the stale air of the cellars with no movement or window.
And of course "what will happen?", because one can only speculate what promises the various candidates for Prime Minister made to the political leadership of the ultra-Orthodox public.
But the fact that the ultra-Orthodox demand "no core studies" is outrageous.
Because it relies on the arrogant pretense that says: Don't educate me.
We are doing so well.
Our souls are more refined and higher than you can even perceive.
An empty and lost pretension of someone who hasn't taken a small Shabbat walk on Degel Street for a long time, which could have been exciting, exciting and thought-provoking, if not for the fact that almost all of the Hebrew that is smeared on his walls is based on the entire dictionary of hate.
For years now, my friends and I have been part of a pioneering experiment in the field of prayer.
There are thousands of synagogues in Israel, and the vast majority are sectarian.
There are almost no Israeli synagogues.
Already on the sign you can see if it is Yemeni, Moroccan or Ashkenazi, as if nothing happened and as if only yesterday we entered Israel.
A few years ago we gathered, a small group of Jerusalemites, and decided to try to build an integrated prayer.
In any case, most of us have formed such mixed families, and we are raising children with a wide range and heart, who feel at home in all that Israel has to offer.
They eat Yemeni soup with kneidlech, spread schnitzel on the rice and know that stuffed vine leaves are the sushi of the Kurds.
Speaking of food, in my childhood the restaurants were also like synagogues.
The Romanians went to the Romanian restaurant, the Bulgarians sat at the entrance of the Bulgarian restaurant, the Poles went to "Batya", and those who ordered bone broth at the "Yemen Vineyard" were mostly those looking for their mother's soup.
Lots of restaurants were defined as "Oriental".
They offered very tasty eggplant salads, along with a terrible thing called "Turkish salad".
We often ate excellent kebabs there, but the steak was a shoemaker's job.
And for dessert they always offered "Bavarian Cream", because "Bavaria Fur" is the beer and the beating heart of the East.
Praise God, those days are over.
Thanks to openness and inquisitiveness, Israeli cuisine took off.
Why?
Because the kitchen is democratic, and Israeli cuisine has no rabbinate.
Most Israeli children draw a diverse spectrum of tastes, and every kitchen is forced to leave out some foods that simply don't pass muster today.
This is exactly what we wanted to happen in our synagogue.
And after a few years, one can already state that the journey is not easy, but fascinating and worthwhile.
All in all we succeeded.
Why?
I can testify for myself that I am no longer able to spend an entire Yom Kippur according to one sect.
Sorry.
With all due respect to authenticity, the place is too narrow for me, too stuffy for me.
I lack texts, melodies and approaches that are only obtained when styles are combined.
And most importantly: children grow up in our community, and they sing everything out loud, their hearts are open, and everything is natural and theirs, and it is not urgent to know or ask from which grandmother's side, and where exactly on the globe, every verse and every tune comes from.
This is the summary of my holiday experience for this year, and it is overall optimistic.
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il
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