David Samel from huffington post,
In Beirut, a recent event, under-reported in the United States, provides a dramatic contrast with the New York controversy over Park51, an Islamic cultural center planned for lower Manhattan. According to Ha’aretz, Lebanon’s largest Jewish synagogue has been saved from the wrecking ball and beautifully restored to its past glory.
The Magen Avraham synagogue had fallen into disrepair during the Lebanese Civil War of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Located in the city center, the synagogue was in danger of being demolished in favor of urban renewal. However, Beirut’s tiny Jewish population decided to save and renovate the structure, and received the approval not only of the Lebanese government but specifically of Hezbollah. The Islamic party, announcing its support, proclaimed: "We respect divine religions, including the Jewish religion."
There was no public outcry, demonstrations, or even controversy. The contrast with the proposal to build the Islamic Center two blocks from the World Trade Center site could not be more stark. There have been increasingly strident and even frightening demonstrations against Park51, and the protesters cannot be dismissed as isolated fringe elements. Some public opinion polls have shown a majority of Americans, even a majority of New Yorkers, against the "Ground Zero Mosque," which has become the unofficial, doubly inaccurate shorthand for the nearby cultural center. Politicians and media pundits have been divided, but many prominent conservatives, and even a significant number of prominent Democrats, such as Anthony Weiner and Harry Reid, have voiced various degrees of opposition.
It would be difficult to reconcile the dramatically different reactions in Beirut and New York. Of course, Park51 is in close proximity to the site where terrorists, supposedly acting in harmony with their interpretation of Islam, committed a heinous atrocity. The principal argument against the cultural center is that the wounds of 2001 are still too fresh to erect any Islamic symbol in the neighborhood. (Of course, anti-mosque fervor has spread to other states, including Tennessee, Wisconsin, and California, where proximity to "hallowed ground" cannot be considered a factor.)
But similar circumstances exist in Beirut as well.
The Lebanese are divided on many issues, but there is overwhelming agreement condemning Israel’s 2006 military campaign that took well over a thousand lives and destroyed residential areas of Beirut and other population centers throughout the country. A generation earlier, Israel’s 1982 invasion had a far higher death toll and began an 18-year military occupation of a wide swath of southern Lebanon. While this occupation featured frequent outbursts of lethal violence against the civilian population, the worst were in 1993 and 1996 when Labor Prime Ministers Rabin and Peres exhibited their "toughness" by randomly killing many civilians and panicking hundreds of thousands more into fleeing their homes.
Even those who might object to a comparison between the 9/11 attacks and Israel’s actions in Lebanon cannot reasonably dispute that Israel is about as unpopular in Lebanon as al-Qaeda is in the U.S. And just as the 9/11 terrorists cited Islam as their motivation, Israel acted as the self-proclaimed "State of the Jewish People". Thus, the Lebanese had at least as much reason to oppose the Beirut synagogue restoration project as Americans have to oppose Park51.
But they did not.
The cooperation of the Lebanese, even Hezbollah, in the synagogue project demonstrates a degree of understanding that is sorely lacking in the U.S. The Lebanese did not allow their raw wounds from Israel’s repeated military assaults against their country to make them intolerant of Beirut’s remaining Jewish community and its symbols. Unfortunately, many Park51 opponents have a different view, holding New York’s Muslim population collectively responsible for the 19 individuals who hijacked not only airplanes but an entire religion. It seems that Americans and New Yorkers have a lot to learn about religious freedom and tolerance, and can take lessons from Beirut.
On a related note: Hezbollah’s approval of the synagogue renovation is entirely consistent with other statements it has made regarding distinctions between Jews and Zionism, e.g. "Our problem with them (the Israelis) is not that they are Jews, but that they are occupiers who are raping our land and holy places." However, it is entirely inconsistent with the 2002 supposed quote of Hezbollah head Nasrallah that has been peddled as genuine by the likes of David Horowitz and Alan Dershowitz and CAMERA: "If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide." This quote has gone viral, even finding its way into a New York Times book review, misleadingly cited by Dershowitz as the source for the quote, as if it had been reported in the Times rather than simply repeated by a book reviewer. Charles Glass, a journalist who actually was captured and held hostage by Hezbollah in 1987, has provided an excellent refutation of the quote, but it persists in hasbara lore because of its great value in portraying Arabs as motivated by genocidal Jew-hatred rather than resistance to Israeli aggression and occupation.
This blog post originally appeared on Mondoweiss.net
Who exactly will worship in the 600-seat Maghen Avraham synagogue in Beirut when it opens next year? The man behind its restoration, and self-styled community leader, Isaac Arazi, exaggerates the numbers of Jews living in, and passing through, Lebanon. In fact, the community at its peak never exceeded 14,000. Jews left in response to antisemitism from 1948 on, and not as the article says, as a result of the 1975 civil war.
June 30 (Bloomberg) — Restoration of Beirut’s only synagogue will be completed in October and religious services will be held there in 2011 for the first time in more than three decades, the leader of the country’s Jewish community said.
“We started from zero with this project and now we hope with the restoration we will be able to once again rebuild a community in Lebanon,” Isaac Arazi, 67, said June 24 in an interview in Beirut.
The Maghen Abraham Synagogue in Wadi Abou Jmil, the city’s historic Jewish quarter, opened in 1926 and once hosted a thriving community that has been eroded by decades of civil war. Prospects for stability have improved since elections a year ago were won by the pro-Western coalition of Saad Hariri, which formed a national unity government with rival Hezbollah and the Muslim group’s Christian allies.
The synagogue’s restoration has so far cost $700,000 and the final bill is expected to reach $1.2 million, Arazi said. Most of the financing has come from Lebanese Jews outside the country, while Christians and Muslims have also contributed.
About 100 Jews now live permanently in Lebanon, while there are some 1,900 living abroad who still own property in the country and visit regularly, according to Arazi, who owns a food-machinery business. In the mid-1960s, there were as many as 22,000 Lebanese Jews, he said.
Historically, Lebanon was a haven for Jews, some of whom descended from people who fled the Spanish inquisition. The country later served a similar role for refugees from Nazi Germany. (Not many of these ended up in Lebanon – ed) Lebanon had “no history of anti-Jewish tensions,” and was the only Arab country whose population of Jews increased after Israel’s creation in 1948, said Kirsten Schulze, a lecturer at the London School of Economics and author of “The Jews of Lebanon.”
Jews began to flee Lebanon, emigrating to Europe as well as North and South America, after sectarian fighting broke out in the 1970s among the nation’s Christian, Muslim and Druze factions (not true – 90 percent left in 1967). The last religious service at Maghen Abraham was held around the middle of that decade.
When it opens again early next year, the synagogue will have seating for 600 men and 300 women. Religious artifacts such as the Torah and other books and items required for services will be brought from Turkey and Syria, and the synagogue will seek to appoint a rabbi familiar with Middle Eastern and North African Sephardic Jewish rituals from the region, possibly from Yemen, Egypt or Turkey, Arazi said.
The community has also begun to repair the Jewish cemetery in Beirut, where about 4,500 Jews are buried, at a cost of about $200,000, and there are also plans to restore defunct synagogues elsewhere in the country, including one in Bhamdoun, a town 23 kilometers (14 miles) from the capital.
Update: the synagogue in Beirut will be nothing more than a museum, a Lebanese Jew pointed out to me recently. The few Jews still in Lebanon – and they mostly live in poverty – reside on the outskirts of Beirut. It is unlikely that they would walk into the city centre to attend Shabbat services.
