Veterans: Courage and hard work - miracles can happen

Sheldon (Shmuel) Gellar, 78, from Michigan to Jerusalem, 1988.

By ABIGAIL KLEIN LEICHMAN
Updated: JUNE 10, 2016 17:17
Sheldon (Shmuel) Gellar (photo credit: BAKOL RUBEN GELLAR)
Sheldon (Shmuel) Gellar
(photo credit: BAKOL RUBEN GELLAR)
His father’s stories about growing up in Odessa and working in Harlem as a young man instilled the Jewish values of social justice in Sheldon (Shmuel) Gellar at an early age.
Gellar was born in Brooklyn and moved to a working-class, predominantly Italian neighborhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey shortly after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Like many of his Jewish friends, he attended Hebrew school after the public school day was over, and enjoyed boxing.
Shortly after Gellar’s bar mitzva, the family moved to Union, New Jersey, which had been a major center for pro-Nazi groups before World War II.
At 17, he says, he received anti-Semitic death threats after writing an article in the local newspaper critical of senator Joseph McCarthy, who led an anti-communist witch-hunt during the 1950s.
After earning a degree in English at Rutgers University, he went to Paris to study political science.
“During the evenings I attended a Catholic institution that trained people in development. I was the youngest one there; most of the students were government officials from Africa, Asia and Latin America.”
Returning to America on a boat from France, he met his future wife, Patricia.
“I was about to join the Peace Corps and go off to Ghana, but she said if I did then she wouldn’t be waiting for me when I came back. So instead I went to graduate school and got my PhD in political science at Columbia University,” Gellar recounts.
The couple married in 1962. Shortly afterward, Gellar won a Ford Foundation scholarship to go to Senegal for 15 months to do field research for his dissertation on the politics of development. He has been doing research and consulting in Senegal ever since, including a stint as democracy adviser to the United States Agency for International Development in 1998-9.
Gellar’s experiences in Senegal and 14 other African countries fueled his devotion to gaining refugee status for African asylum seekers in Israel.
“These are people whom the government does not accept as refugees. Over 90 percent come from Eritrea and Sudan,” he says, explaining that both countries are radical dictatorships. Sudan’s government practices genocide toward the non-Arab African population of Darfur, and Eritrea forces its youth into military service.
“Many who came to Israel through the Sinai desert had to go through hell to get here,” says Gellar.
“The media calls asylum seekers ‘job seekers’ and the Israeli public thinks they are here to get better jobs rather than to save their lives. With no mechanisms in place to allow asylum seekers to enter Israel legally, Africans have no choice but to enter illegally and are branded as ‘infiltrators’ under a law originally meant to keep out fedayeen guerrillas in the 1950s.”
Gellar is involved with the Kol Haneshama congregation’s support programs for refugees and asylum seekers in Jerusalem, and has visited African detainees in the Holot detention facility in the Negev.
He believes many of these “hardworking, courageous people” could be resettled in the Negev to fill the need for labor and services as Israel’s military shifts its operations southward.
“Most of the asylum seekers were placed in south Tel Aviv’s poorest neighborhoods, and that creates a big problem for the residents and municipal services there,” he says, “but if they could work in different parts of the country this problem would be eased. If we would adopt a positive policy toward them and upgrade their skills, they would return to their countries as friends and allies of Israel.”
Gellar says he salutes the Israeli individuals and organizations that provide services, legal assistance, educational opportunities, moral support and friendship to this population.
“I’ve met many wonderful volunteers, people who represent the Israel I want to live in,” he says.
The story of how Gellar came to live in Israel is not as dramatic, but it does have a romantic element.
During the late 1960s, he became involved with Hillel on the Indiana University campus. In 1970, he decided to take a year’s leave of absence to go to Israel with his wife and two young children and teach African studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
After leaving Indiana University in 1975, Gellar received a Danforth Foundation campus ministry fellowship to study Jewish sources related to social-justice issues.
Over the next few years, he served as a consultant in Africa, fostered black-Jewish dialogue and organized the first Midwest migrant workers conference.
In 1985, he accepted a position as Hillel director at Michigan State University.
“Right after we got to Michigan, we found out my wife had cancer,” he relates.
She died in 1987.
The following year, Gellar took a leave of absence from Hillel and came to Israel with his daughter, Sophia. His son, Michael, was a newlywed then living in Mexico. They attended Ulpan Akiva in Netanya and then moved to the French Hill neighborhood of Jerusalem and registered for classes at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.
There, something unexpected happened: Gellar met Bakol Ruben, a Canadian studying at Pardes. They became study partners, fell in love and got married in the summer of 1989. Their son, Raphael, was born at home in Jerusalem 24 years ago.
“I originally went to Pardes because I felt that I was in the bottom 1 percent of Hillel directors in terms of Jewish knowledge.
I wanted to learn more about Jewish sacred texts and philosophy,” Gellar explains.
“The main reason I stayed was because of Bakol. She was adamant about living in Israel while I was thinking about returning to North America. I realized that she was right. I, too, needed to be in Israel.”
In the 1990s, Gellar taught part-time at Hebrew and Tel Aviv universities and resumed his research and consulting in Africa.
The family then spent 2001 to 2009 in the US, as Gellar took a job as research associate at the Indiana University Workshop in Political Theory and Public Analysis.
He wrote two books during his time there, and started a third, on religion and politics in Africa.
In 2009, the Gellars returned to Israel and settled in Jerusalem’s German Colony.
Bakol Ruben Gellar is an actress in English- speaking theater.
Sophia stayed in Israel as well. She married a Yemenite haredi man with whom she has seven children and one grandchild, and runs a daycare in her home in Petah Tikva.
Michael, now in California, has two children; Raphael is finishing his studies at IDC and pursuing a career as a professional sports journalist.
The Gellar family is a tapestry of different approaches to faith and politics.
“Rather than demonizing Left and Right, I believe we must find the good in all segments of Israeli society,” says Gellar.
“Luckily I found many others who share this vision. Although I still love America, I could never leave Israel. Israel is my home, the homeland of the Jewish people, and a work in progress. I want to be part of this miraculous and challenging experience.”


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