TORONTO — Anat Hoffman has a message for Canadian Jews: Israel is “too important to be left to Israelis. The Jews here have a right and a duty to voice their hopes for Israel.” If they don’t, she warned in a Jan. 17 interview, “they may wake up one day and see an Israel they absolutely cannot relate to… Israel is a state of all the Jews, whether they live there or not, and reflects on all Jews.”Anat Hoffman [Frances Kraft photo]
Hoffman – the 56-year-old executive director of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC) in Jerusalem, who was arrested at the Western Wall last summer for carrying a Torah at a women’s Rosh Chodesh service – spoke at Temple Anshe Sholom in Hamilton and also had meetings in Toronto during a two-day visit at the beginning of last week.
She was brought here by ARZA Canada: the Zionist Voice of the Canadian Reform Movement, which is IRAC’s largest donor.
IRAC, the public and legal advocacy arm of the Reform movement in Israel, has taken on issues such as conversion, marriage, divorce, immigrant rights, gender discrimination, racism and corruption since its inception in 1987.
Hoffman rejects the argument that Jews must live in Israel to have a voice on such issues. “It’s very important. We are a young democracy, and if you are a Jew and you live in a democracy, and you can, warn Israel. You’re obliged to tell Israel.”
Recently Hoffman was among the leaders of negotiations that resulted in an additional six-month moratorium of the Rotem Conversion Bill. IRAC has also initiated a court case demanding that Reform and Conservative conversions done in Israel be recognized.
Hoffman, a former Jerusalem city councillor, is convinced the overwhelming majority of Jews believe that values such as pluralism, equality, tolerance and social justice should be major values of the State of Israel. “But they are not vocal enough.”
In response to a ruling last month by dozens of Israel’s municipal chief rabbis that forbids renting or selling property to gentiles, and specifically to Arabs, Hoffman said she’d like Canadian Jews to protest outside the Israeli consulate. “Racism is not the Jewish way,” she said.
IRAC has demanded that Israel’s attorney general fire those rabbis, she said. “They are barred from incitement in their jobs… The chief rabbi of [Safed, who drafted the letter on which the ruling was based] gets money from taxes, including taxes from Israeli Arabs.”
Among her priorities, Hoffman wants to obtain state funding for Reform and Conservative Judaism in Israel. She believes the non-Orthodox movements won’t survive unless they take root in Israel, in large part because of Israel’s dominant influence in the Jewish world.
Hoffman said that people in Israel’s Orthodox community have worked with her to address issues of mutual concern. As well, she said she gets at least two or three calls a day from Orthodox people who don’t identify themselves but encourage her to keep up her fight.
Many of the calls revolve around segregated buses, an issue on which IRAC recently published a report, which it sent to the Knesset.
A typical call, she said, was from a father of young children who can’t help his wife with the baby stroller when they travel by bus, because she has to sit at the back. “This is not the Jewish way,” Hoffman said he told her. “A family should sit together.”
Orthodoxy has “as many voices… as many shades of black as there are colours in the rainbow, but they are silenced institutionally.”
When they call her, she said, they ask her to “save us from our own rabbis.”
And yet, she said, she remains optimistic. “I get pissed off. I don’t get discouraged. I get really upset.”
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