By GREER FAY CASHMANHebrew University of Jerusalem law professor Ruth Gavison speaks in the Knesset in 2017.(photo credit: MIRIAM ALSTER)
ZOOM IS rapidly taking over our lives – but not entirely. The giant book sale being organized by the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel from Sunday September 6 through Wednesday, September 9, is likely to be live, as people don’t buy books other than rare collectors’ items without leafing through them. For some readers, it’s not just the subject matter or the plot, but also the size of the print. Admittedly on Kindle, readers can control the size of the print, but there’s still a large market out there for non-digital literature. The really good news is that many of the books are in almost as new condition, and even hard covers are being sold for only NIS 5 each.The book sale follows an August 30 Zoom meeting of AACI’s Classic Book Group with Judith Oster PhD. The group will be studying two stories by Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Crown of Feathers and The Slaughterer. For further information contact Judith Oster at 02-624-6256, 058-744-3112, or by email at jxo4@case.edu.Getting back to the book sale, for some people these days, even NIS 5 is an un affordable price. Because so many immigrants from English-speaking countries lost their jobs and are unable to pay for rent, utilities and even food, AACI opened a Corona Emergency Fund and donors have already stepped forward with thousands of shekels that are passed directly to individuals and families in need.Americans and Canadians who want to contribute to the fund from the US and Canada should know that their donations are tax deductible.■ EULOGIES FOR brilliant law professor Ruth Gavison who died last weekend extolled her intellectualism, her clarity of thought, her commitment to civil rights, her compassion for the underdogs of society, her integrity and her compelling oratory, among many other qualities.Gavison was a multi-generation Jerusalemite of North African background on her father’s side and Greek on her mother’s. She taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Law Faculty. She spent several years as the chairperson of the Jerusalem-headquartered Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), which she helped to found in 1972.Together with Rabbi Yaakov Meidan of the Har Etzion Religious Seminary, she wrote a Covenant of Coexistence between Religious and Secular Jews, with the key focus on what united them rather than what divided them. Meidan recalled this week that it was not easy for him, the religious right-winger, and Gavison, the liberal leftist, to find common ground, but they prevailed. He credited the completion of the Covenant of Coexistence to Gavison’s intellectual honesty.Although she convincingly argued her point, she never tried to impose it, and in her effort to understand where Meidan and his fellow religious Zionists came from, she went to Hebron to speak to rabbis there, and also traveled throughout Judea and Samaria speaking to residents, including religious leaders. Whenever she spoke in public about the Covenant, said Meidan, she presented both sides fairly, without favoring one or the other.Though not observant, Gavison was greatly concerned about Jewish continuity, Jewish identity and the future of the Zionist enterprise. It was this concern which led her in 2005 to establish the Metzilah Center for Zionist, Jewish, Liberal and Humanist Thought.Referring to her colleagues on the Left, in an interview with Shahar Ilan of Haaretz in January 2009, she said, “I don’t know how it happened that I turned out a little different. Maybe it’s because my family came from a fairly significant rabbinical heritage. I grew up in the old Sephardi Israeli community. I’m here for many generations, no less than my Arab colleagues. I have graves all over this country. There are graves of my family in Jerusalem inside and outside of the Old City walls, and in Tiberias and Hebron, but not in Safed, to my knowledge. I don’t have the experience of family ties with Europe. I have no family from Europe and I don’t remember any Holocaust stories. I have stories from the Old City and from the Jewish Quarter, and from moving outside the Old City walls and from Mishkenot Sha’ananim and Nahalat Shiva.“I grew up in a Sephardi rabbinical tradition that is more flexible and also Zionist. My maternal grandfather, Rabbi Yosef Mordechai Halevy, was the head of Jerusalem’s Sephardi rabbinic court during my childhood, before the founding of the state. There’s a picture of him at the inauguration ceremony of the Hebrew University with Rabbi [Abraham Isaac] Kook and [Haim Nahman] Bialik. My uncle Rabbi Eliahu Pardes was the chief rabbi of Jerusalem when I was a teenager. I didn’t have to wait to meet Rabbi Meidan to know that there are men who won’t shake my hand; it doesn’t mean that they hate me or disdain me. It’s just another culture.”Ideologically, she said, she hadn’t changed. “I’m a social democrat and I’m in favor of two states for two peoples.
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