Ramaz head calls for ‘perspective’ in tefillin talk

Paul Shaviv, head of school at Ramaz on the Upper East Side, sent the following email to his school’s community on Monday:

On Sunday evening, I attended a KJ [Kehilath Jeshurun] Men’s Club screening of the riveting documentary "Turkish Passport," which drew in over two hundred people, including the Consul General of Turkey and several of his colleagues.

The film describes how Turkish diplomats in Nazi-occupied France were able to save about 250 French Jews who had Turkish nationality, or family connections to Turkish nationality. (Turkey was neutral for most of the war.)

But the film brought home the sheer horror, minute by minute, of Jews whom the Nazis hunted like vermin in Occupied France in the 1940s: the terror of walking in the street; the terror of the knock on the door; or of being caught and being demanded to show identity. In the middle of this, a handful of Turkish diplomats issued Turkish passports and papers to Jews, who were then able to claim that they were foreign subjects, and therefore “protected.” In Paris, the diplomats demanded the release of “Turkish” Jews from the infamous Drancy detention center. In Nice, the Turkish Consul and his Deputy insisted on climbing into a cattle truck with a group of Jews whom the Nazis were deporting despite their Turkish papers, forcing the Germans to free all the Jews a few hours later in order to avert a diplomatic incident.

In 1944, when it was clear Turkey was going to join the Allies, the Turks organized trains to get “their” Jews out of France and into Turkey itself. About 1,300 Jews were saved in this way — from a Europe that reeked with death, and where to be born Jewish was to be born with an automatic death sentence.

And then I reminded myself of the miracle that 70 years later, not only do we have Jewish life, and Judaism, but we have Jewish schools — and we have Jewish children who want to observe more mitzvot, not fewer. Instead of daring to criticize these children, shouldn’t we be in awe of the miracle they represent? Isn’t it a miracle that there are ANY young people still interested in Torah? Shouldn’t every Jew be unreservedly applauding every child at a Jewish school?