Development Site - Changes here will not affect the live (production) site.

Recollections of a Jewish Air-Force Chaplain

March 21 2018

During the Korean war, Chaim Feuerman—then studying at an Orthodox yeshiva in Brooklyn—joined the U.S. Air Force to serve as a chaplain. After very brief training, he was sent to Lackland Air Force Base in Texas to minister to new recruits. He relates some of his experiences:

Most of the chaplains [at the base] were in their mid-forties or fifties. I was a very young chaplain, just twenty-three. My trainees were much younger—seventeen. . . . When the trainees first landed on the base, their heads were shaved right away; they were then sent to the showers and stuck into loose-fitting dungarees—fatigues. No snappy uniforms for them yet.

The next stop on the assembly line was the chapel. The boys now had to hear an inspirational talk from a chaplain, any chaplain, be he a reverend, priest, rabbi, or imam—it was all the same to the military. My assignment was to tell them to be good boys, to stay away from drinking and nonsense. . . . It didn’t matter that my “congregants” weren’t Jewish. My job was to serve the spiritual needs of all faiths—to encourage the men to be patriotic, honest, “brave, courageous, and bold.”

Many of the Christian chaplains gave very long and tedious sermons. To their thinking, they finally had a captive audience—a chapel full of people—and they weren’t going to let these boys go so quickly. Their long sermons would then hold up the next group of inductees waiting to get into the chapel. This put the chaplains in conflict with the barbers, who wanted the assembly line to move quickly—they were paid by the head.

At one point, the Christian chaplains wanted to build a baptistery on the base. . . . After I looked at the plans and dimensions, I realized the baptistery could also serve as a kosher mikveh. . . . I asked [my mentor, Rabbi Isaac] Hutner if I could use it, [even though it was built with Christian religious ritual in mind]. He told me I could, because the baptistery was owned by the U.S. government, which is committed to the separation of church and state.

Read more at Jewish Action

More about: American Jewish History, History & Ideas, Jews in the military, U.S. military, Yitzchok Hutner

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic