A Chosen Few (42 page)

A Jew looking for a Friday-night service in another European city might go to a Jewish neighborhood, sight a man with a hat or yarmulke, and follow him. It would be more complicated in Antwerp because the streets were full of hatted men, and they headed in twenty different directions, clutching their hats and darting through the train line’s dark underpasses of ornate ironwork and tattered posters. Christians stroll to church. Jews always seem to be rushing to synagogue, as though late for an appointment.

In its Jewish neighborhood of about thirty blocks Antwerp gives the impression on a Friday night that it is the most Jewish city in Europe. In truth, this provincial center of a half-million people is in some ways Belgium’s most Flemish city, with its northern Renaissance old center chilled by harsh gusts of wind from the mouth of the Scheldt, its trim and serious nineteenth-century housing, and its wide modern boulevards. The architecture offers an assortment of symmetrically ornate old Dutch brick, elegantly swirled art nouveau, and stark modern—all set against a chronically gray sky. The Flemish do not go out at night, unless to go to their neighborhood pubs, or if they do leave their neighborhood, they drive. There are no traffic jams in Antwerp. Virtually the only pedestrian crowds, aside from tourists in the old town, are the Orthodox Jews who cannot drive on the Sabbath. By the late 1970s, their neighborhood seemed so prosperous, so concentrated, that it was easy to forget that some twenty thousand Antwerp Jews was less than half the prewar population, which had lived in a far larger area of the city.

Flanders as a safe harbor for the late flourishing of Orthodox Judaism is not without its logic. The Flemish, while achieving an affluent modern standard of living, have remained Europe’s most steadfast traditionalists. They have kept their folk customs and the local rituals of each town. They still cling to the Catholic Church,
and like the Jews they usually send their children to their own religious schools. Like Orthodox Jews, the Flemish believe in large families (though in recent years the Flemish birthrate has not been keeping up with the Hasidim). Like their Yiddish-speaking neighbors, they refuse to part with or dilute their dialect. Flemish, which varies from town to town, has remained a purer form of Dutch than in Holland, where Amsterdamers like to adopt foreign words. Flemish eat their own cuisine—stews, husepots, and waterzoois—which are not flashy enough to interest foreigners but help fight the chill of a North Sea wind. Were it not for the fading memories of World War II recalled by the extreme Flemish nationalist movement—which grew more boisterous in the 1970s and by the end of the decade openly violent—Antwerp Jews could have felt totally at home in this Flemish heartland. There is even a marked preference for beards among Flemish men.

Not all Antwerp Jews were religious, and it was sometimes whispered that the nonreligious might count for more than 50 percent. But the nonreligious also sent their children to Jewish schools. More than 90 percent of Antwerp’s Jewish children attend Jewish schools, the highest attendance record of any Jewish community in the world. And even the nonreligious will often keep kosher homes so that they can invite their friends and business associates.

But the many Jewish schools do not include a university. The community is not a particularly well-educated one because it is centered around diamonds, a trade where a good income can be earned without an education. Jewish education in Antwerp emphasizes fluency in Yiddish and Hebrew and religious study. Yiddish is the most commonly heard language in the Jewish quarter, and it is the working language of the diamond trade.

Dress is one of the ways that Antwerp Jews stand out. It is intentional. The clothing of the ultra-Orthodox serves to make a statement about commitment to a special life, a uniquely Jewish life. The belief is that a distinct exterior guards against assimilation and separates a Jew for a particularly pious life. Before the war, in places where Jews lived separate and pious lives, married women wore wigs, men wore curled side locks, long beards, black wool clothing, and broad-brimmed hats over their yarmulkes. The war generation, remembering their yellow stars, felt ambiguous about this idea of being visually set apart. Orthodox men simply wore a hat. They usually did not even grow beards. But their children, raised on tales of the Holocaust, grew up defiant. They thought
their parents’ generation had paid for being too meek, for trying too hard to get along. They wanted to dare to make the statement, “I am a Jew and I am here.” The more outrageous, the better, according to the thinking of this new generation of observant Jews. Hats became even bigger. The
shtreimel
, a wide sable fur hat from pre–twentieth century Poland, became popular for young men to wear on the Sabbath in Antwerp. Beards and
peots
–curled side locks–became longer and were brushed, shampooed, and curled for greater elegance.

Dwora and Hershl Silberman were of that more modest wartime generation. Although he was strictly religious, Hershl Silberman shaved every morning and dressed like any other Belgian man. But his son Mechilim, named after Dwora’s father, started wearing Hasidic clothes as a child in the late 1950s, even before it became fashionable. Mechilim did not approve of the way his father appeared to hide his Jewishness. If a gentile even knocked on the door, he noticed his father would quickly remove his hat. That was not the kind of Jew he wanted to be. Where had that attitude gotten his parents’ generation? Mechilim wore black and
peots
and hats, and when he could, he would grow a beard for everyone to see. At first, he was thought a little odd, but by the time he was an adult, this was the normal look for Antwerp Jews.

T
HE MEN IN
A
NTWERP
started their weekdays at seven-thirty in the various synagogues, where they wrapped
tefillin
so tightly that their arms turned red, and they said their morning prayers. Then they had breakfast together–coffee, herring, eggs. A few deals were made. A broken watch could be shown to the jeweler, some silver might be discussed with the silver dealer. And there were family matters–matches to be made, marriages to be arranged. By nine o’clock, they were all off to work. It was all in Yiddish, and some older immigrants, finding that Yiddish was all that they needed, never learned Flemish.

They intermarried with the world’s other traditional communities. Antwerp, New York, Jerusalem, and London were places where traditional Jews searched for marriage partners. Young people were constantly marrying in and out of Antwerp. The families had four and five children, and with some leaving and others marrying in, the population remained fairly stable at a little more than twenty thousand.

A typical new arrival was Levy Kohane. His family were Bobover Hasidim who had fled Poland in the 1930s and settled in Antwerp. At the beginning of the occupation, all but the father had been shot during a Nazi roundup of Jews. After the war the father had settled in Paris where, though he said he had lost his beliefs, he raised his four children according to Hasidic tradition. Levy was allowed no contact with girls until he was 20. Then a marriage was arranged with an Antwerp girl. A contract was signed, and the two were brought together. Levy’s first impression: “What could I think? It was one of my first meetings with a girl. Her first with a boy.” They settled in Antwerp and started having children.

S
LOWLY DURING THE
1970s the diamond industry changed. Before the war most of the world’s diamonds had been made in Antwerp. It was the only center that handled large quantities. But now, as in all manual labor industries, there was competition from impoverished countries. Sawing, cleaving, and polishing could all be done cheaper in India. In Antwerp, when cleaving was done at all, it no longer involved much labor since it was generally executed with amazing speed with the use of laser beams. Antwerp’s diamond district gradually began moving away from the manufacturing of diamonds, but it remained prosperous as the world’s great diamond trading center. Brokers peddling rough stones to manufacturers and dealers trading in finished diamonds remained. About three-fourths of the rough diamonds in the world still passed through Antwerp. But fewer of them were being cut there.

Sam Perl closed his sawing factory. After the war there had been about 250 sawers in Antwerp, but by 1980 only some twenty-five remained. Perl used his knowledge from a lifetime in diamonds to become a successful dealer.

Pinchas Kornfeld started as a cleaver like his father, Israel. He did not pass the time listening to people’s troubles while cleaving, as his father had. He had heard enough of that as a child and wanted to avoid Holocaust stories. Instead, he carefully recorded major passages of the Talmud and other commentaries on a reel-to-reel tape recorder, so that he could study while cleaving at home. By the 1970s, he too could see that manufacturing was moving away from Antwerp. In 1979 he became a broker. Then he was a businessman and not a craftsman, and for that, he said, the only thing that was needed was “
mazel
,” luck. Behind the Pelikaanstraat
near the train station, is a little S-hook of four streets lined with modern glass buildings high enough to block the sun on the rare sunny day. This is the diamond district, concentrated mainly in three buildings, the Bourse, the Club, and the Kring (ring). Diamonds are traded there, often around a table in a small office with a small, accurate scale. The Diamond Kring, where brokers such as Pinchas Kornfeld traded, specializes in the rough stones.

Kornfeld was active in Jewish institutions such as Agudat Israel, a worldwide Orthodox organization. Because Pinchas was soft-spoken and diplomatic, he seemed a good choice for handling anxious parents whose children would be attending an Agudat Israel summer camp in the Ardennes. Someone had to talk to the parents, assure them that their children would be well looked after, that the vegetarian wouldn’t get meat, and that the boy who had to leave early would get back.

In the summer of 1980, on the day the children were leaving, Kornfeld went to the Agudat Israel office where the bus would be parked and the parents would gather with their children, waiting for him to reassure them. It would take patience, but it had to be done. Trying to make the day more enjoyable, he brought his own six-year-old son and his little daughter, who were both still too little for the camp. They could play around the bus where the older children were gathering.

Levy Kohane was there with his father, seeing off his younger brother David. David was very quiet and studious. He had been very attached to his mother and had seemed depressed since her death a year before. At 15, he was the baby of the family, and everyone fussed over him and worried about him. The summer camp would probably be good for him. His brother and father said their good-byes and walked away. As Levy crossed the street, he noticed a young man at the corner throwing rocks. This kind of thing was happening sometimes now—some troubled kid would decide to throw a few rocks at the Jews.

But then he realized that the man on the corner was not throwing rocks, he was throwing hand grenades. He threw two, and then sprinted down the street. Kornfeld heard the explosion and ran outside. Children were standing wide-eyed in the street. People were scurrying in different directions, not knowing where to run, while younger children stood paralyzed with terror. Kornfeld caught a glimpse of his own children, but he did not have time to comfort them because there was so much blood on people, on the
street. He called the police and ambulances arrived in two minutes, which was still too late for David Kohane. With a piece of shrapnel through his chest, he writhed in agony for a few seconds, and when his father leaned over him, he whispered, “It hurts.” Then he died, the only fatality. But 20 of the 55 people present were wounded.

Minutes later, the police caught the killer. The attack had been on a narrow treeless street of solid, high-ceilinged big-windowed houses in the heart of the residential section of the Jewish neighborhood. The killer had apparently planned to escape to the Belgielei, the wide-open boulevard that led to the train tracks by the Van Den Nestlei synagogue. From there, it would have been easy to follow the tracks up Pelikaanstraat to the train station. To run almost the entire length of the Jewish ghetto through the main thoroughfares on a lazy, uncrowded summer day does not seem like much of an escape plan. But the attacker didn’t even do that. He got confused on the Belgielei, where there is a traffic circle that always confuses out-of-towners, and he turned the wrong way, heading back toward the scene of the crime and into the hands of the police.

The man was a twenty-five-year-old Palestinian, Nasser Al-Saied. A resident of Saudi Arabia, he claimed to be working for a dissident movement of El Fatah, acting under the orders of someone named Wahid who was never found. His attorney pleaded that he was “a Palestinian soldier” and pointed out that he had been raised “in a particularly abject brutality.” The attorney described the plight of homeless Palestinians and how his parents, farmers near Jaffa, had been forced off their land in the 1948 war. Nasser was said to be a good soldier who unquestioningly followed instructions and was not a criminal. Proof of this, according to his attorney, was the fact that although armed, he did not resist arrest.

The jury pondered these issues for one hour before returning with a verdict of guilty. He was sentenced to death, a symbolic gesture since there was no capital punishment in Belgium. A death penalty is automatically reduced to twenty years with the possibility of release after ten years.

In his own defense, Nasser Al-Saied had stated that he had acted “out of conviction.” He denied being anti-Jewish. His only quarrel was with Zionism. Nasser, the anti-Zionist, had attacked a program of Agudat Israel, itself a somewhat anti-Zionist organization that had accepted the founding of the Jewish state with considerable
ambivalence. As for his victim David Kohane, who was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Putte, across the Dutch border, he and his family were Bobover Hasidim. They spoke Yiddish as a first language but rejected modern Hebrew. Ancient Hebrew was reserved for prayer. David’s brother Levy explained, “Yiddish is the language of Jews. [Modern] Hebrew is the language of Israelis.” To him, Israel was in a sense “anti-Jewish,” because it led Jews away from traditional Jewish life, the kind of life that he followed in Antwerp. This was the kind of Zionist that was killed at the age of 15 by this Palestinian soldier.