Standing for Justice
For the past nineteen months, my husband and I have
spent an hour a week on a busy corner in Center City
Philadelphia across from the Israeli Consulate to protest the militaristic
policies of the Sharon government. How did a pair of bourgeois Jewish
grand-parents, who have been active participants in synagogue life, lived and
studied in Israel, and raised two sons, decide to make unpopular public
statements about the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank? We believe that
Judaism stresses the inherent value of ALL human beings: “Whoever saves
a single life saves an entire world.’ (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin
37a) The bloodshed of the past three years in Palestine/Israel moved us to
act. Horrific memories of the twentieth century have moved us to advocate for
the basic human rights of Palestinians and all oppressed people. Just as we
worked to combat institutional racism in American society, we felt compelled
as grandparents to call for justice for all people in the
Middle East as part of our legacy. The American Jewish community’s
inability to tolerate dissident viewpoints about Israel encouraged us to
organize this weekly vigil. When we met in 1954, the fear and suspicion of the
McCarthy era was alive. The Civil Rights movement was birthing. The suburbs
were burgeoning, and city neighborhoods were being redlined.
U.S. national policy was building roads and infrastructure that supported
white flight. We found each other in leftist, liberal student groups and
became a couple because of our many shared values and cultural interests. As newlyweds, we joined the synagogue that Cy’s
family had belonged to for many years but soon found
that its new suburban plant was not where we wanted to raise children. We
began a search to make Jewish practice and tradition central to our personal
and political lives. This commitment encouraged our
participation in many local and national efforts, including the organization
of the Philadelphia public school teachers’ union, buying a house in a
racially integrated neighborhood in 1963, affiliating with an urban synagogue
committed to remaining in that neighborhood, working for equal educational
opportunity for all children from all backgrounds, working actively to oppose
the war in Vietnam, and participating in a regional interfaith movement.
Cy was a participant and leader in experimental
public high schools for most of his teaching career. I also spent many years
teaching English in alternative schools. These schools were committed to the
development of community and to valuing the uniqueness of each person. In the
sixties people like us were called “change agents.” The charge “to
perfect the world as God’s kingdom,” which is part of the prayer
that concludes every Jewish worship service, has guided our personal,
professional, and spiritual lives. Our past ten years of “retirement” have
given one or both of us the opportunity to have been involved in the
following causes: (1) creating Jewish communal resources for persons with
AIDS, (2) organizing two communal seminars on health related issues in the
Philadelphia Jewish community, (3) developing a Jewish healing service, (4)
volunteering to provide patient and family support in a local hospice, (5)
working to combat racism in our local community through the development of
study groups, (6) tutoring children in a local elementary school, (7) working
as a member of an interfaith building group to rebuild an Black church in
Mississippi, (8) teaching a year-long course in German Jewish history, and
(9) working actively for justice in the Middle East. We have been studying German Jewish history and have
taken four trips to Germany in the past three years to work at healing our
relationship to the Nazi Holocaust. Learning the varied history of Jews in
Germany has sharpened our understanding of ourselves as part of Western
tradition and has also aided us in understanding the
role that racism has played in the development of Western culture. We have
had the opportunity to meet with members of the re-emerging Jewish community
and have also met many people from a variety of
backgrounds who are actively working for a just world. These experiences have
given us the chance to witness a society working at owning the negative parts
of its history and developing national policies to prevent their recurrence. At Dachau we learned that
Hitler opened the camp only three weeks after his election to control and
eliminate dissidents and as prelude to the elimination of German Jewry. We
feel affirmed in our weekly vigil for justice in the Middle East through our
better understanding of the silences that greeted the rise of fascism in the
1930s. We are asking people to re-examine the dominant current policies of
the United States government towards Palestine/Israel. Our vigils have become a special kind of community of resistance including people (many seniors, as well as young people) from diverse secular and religious traditions who share a belief in the value of every human being, and are moved to speak out for justice. Spirituality and activism are very deeply connected for each of us. The diversity of traditions and people that have been our teachers has encouraged us to act on our values. We have had forty years of acting on our beliefs! This encourages us to continue reaching out to all people with our shared vision of a just world. Retirement has given us more time and energy to continue our work for the “repair of the world!” as well as strengthening our love and respect for each other. Cy & Lois Swartz Cy & Lois are members of the Philadelphia Jewish Peace Net work pjpn@verizon.net |