Balint - The Circles of Jewish Life: How A Brit Milah Closed Circles

Judy Lash Balint
www.kumah.org
05 September '11

http://www.kumah.org/2011/09/the-circles-of-jewish-life-how-a-brit-milah-closed-circles/



Earlier this evening, the brit milah of Yishai and Malkah Fleisher’s second child, Elazer Menachem, took place in their apartment in Maale HaZeitim, overlooking the Temple Mount. The brief ceremony that initiated the baby into the covenant of Abraham closed circles for several of the people who crammed into the Fleisher’s home to celebrate the occasion.

Yishai was born in Israel to a family who had managed to escape Leningrad in the 1970s, a few short years before his birth. The Fleishers, like many Russian Jews, were intellectuals whose Jewish identity had been rekindled by the Six-Day War. I met many families like the Fleishers when I traveled to the former Soviet Union in 1974, 1986 and 1989.

The Fleishers were amongst the fortunate ones who arbitrarily received visas for Israel after losing jobs and waiting for years to get out. Following several years of economic struggle in Israel, the family made the difficult decision to leave for the US, where Yishai and his brother and sister grew up.

Yishai is fluent in Russian, Hebrew and English, as is his mother, who in Hebrew addressed those who came to celebrate the brit, as she held her tiny new-born sabra grandson in her arms. In a voice filled with emotion, she marveled at the fact that after all her family’s wanderings, she was holding the second generation of sabras in her family. “At this special moment, we can’t forget all those whom we left behind in the forests of Ukraine; in the fields around Leningrad and in the trenches of Russia,” she said. “My grandson will never know such wanderings–he’s at home here in Jerusalem,” she whispered.



Yishai explained his son’s name. Both his late father and Malka’s father are named Alexander. After consulting their rabbi, the couple decided to incorporate the first two letters of Alexander–the alef and lamed and the last letter, resh–to form a new name for their son based on that of his grandfathers.

As Yishai spoke in Hebrew about his feelings on this momentous occasion in the life of his family, I thought back to when we first met and of our many encounters since.

For about seven years before I made aliya in 1998, I ran the Coalition for Jewish Concerns-Amcha together with its president and founder, Rabbi Avi Weiss. We worked hard to build a grass-roots Jewish activist movement that was mobilized to address all kinds of issues confronting the Jewish community back then. Needless to say, students were the backbone of CJC-Amcha, and Rav Avi spent a good chunk of his time traveling to campuses to inspire Jewish students while I tried to build coalitions with existing student groups and promising Jewish students.

Two of the most personable and committed Jewish students in the New York area were Yishai Fleisher and his friend Ezra Halevi. Radiating intelligence and Jewish pride, Ezra and Yishai were fully committed Zionists who were biding their time and completing their education before heading off to new lives in Israel. In the meantime, they could always be counted on to show up at every demonstration on behalf of Jews in danger, usually bringing with them a cadre of their fellow students.

It wasn’t too many years after my own aliya that I ran into Ezra and Yishai in the Old City one night. Both young men already seemed totally at home in Israel and talked optimistically about their plans.

Yishai had come back to Israel at age 17 to serve in the paratroopers. While earning an undergraduate degree and attending Cardozo Law School where he met an idealistic fellow student named Malkah, Yishai and his friends formed Kumah, the aliyah revolution movement. They set the example, made aliya themselves and encouraged scores of their friends to join them.

Yishai started a new career as a broadcaster and quickly rose to become news director of Israel National Radio, based in Beit El, where the Fleishers moved. Through their dynamism, charisma and knowledgeable commentary, he and Malkah, who also gave up law for broadcasting, built a large following and have appeared on major media outlets speaking on every aspect of Israeli life.

Earlier this year, the Fleishers moved to Maale Hazeitim, the new Jewish neighborhood overlooking the Temple Mount at the edge of the Mt of Olives cemetery. Starting in 1998, under the banner of the Yerushalayim Shelanu movement, I was one of a team of people that brought people to the corner of the Ras El Amud neighborhood, where we would clamber up on the roof of an abandoned Arab building and look down at the huge empty lot to the south. We would tell people about the history of that piece of property and explain the plans for a new Jewish neighborhood to be built there once all the plans had been approved and the vociferous international opposition had died down. Many of the visitors looked at us as if we were completely crazy.

Over the years, we continued to bring people to witness the completion of each phase of the project and now dozens of families like the Fleishers and hundreds of kids are living in the modern, attractive complex. Chaim Silberstein, one of the key movers in the campaign to promote Jewish population in all parts of Jerusalem and a friend of the Fleishers from Beit El, joined in the simcha of the brit.

But this time, as I pointed out to Chaim, we were standing not on a broken down rooftop but in a beautiful finished apartment occupied by a flourishing Jewish family, overlooking a sight generations of Jews have dreamed of. The circles close.
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Judy Lash Balint is an award-winning Jerusalem based writer and author. She blogs at jerusalemdiaries.blogspot.com

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