White Elephants

My kibbutz has a number of “white elephants”, not the South-East Asian sacred animal, just a number of outmoded structures, monuments we can’t dismantle or modify for other purposes. There’s a Ferris wheel in the children’s playground built by an enterprising member. It rotated slowly a few times a year during festivals carrying a parent with a child or two. A few years ago, it was declared unsafe by the Standards Institution of Israel (SII). Eventually it will be sold for scrap metal.

The same tireless Ferris wheel constructor somehow managed to bring a retired Kfir jet fighter to Ein Harod. Now we have a flying white elephant, a “gift” from the Israeli air force museum at Hatzerim Airbase in the Negev. I’m waiting to see how much it cost us to transport and mount the plane on its stand. Another thought crossed my mind – Eventually the Kfir will also “go the way of all metal.”

 

 

Our largest “white elephant” is a multi-purpose cultural events hall built in 1965 and named “Beit Lavi” in memory of one Ein Harod’s founding fathers. It was built with a small budget, too small to fulfil its many purposes. It now houses two local engineering and design offices that occupy only a small part of the building.

Our Pesach Seder was held in the hall. Members, family and friends filled the hall to maximum capacity with over a thousand people participating in the Seder.

Now and again, there were affordable theatrical performances and films were screened on the backdrop of the stage.

Renowned flautist Jan-Pierre Rampal, violinist Isaac Stern and many other classical musicians performed here to packed audiences. All that was before the advent of TV in Israel (1967) that brought about the gradual demise of Beit Lavi’s

functioning life.

However, there’s one redeeming factor, the hall’s large roof has been covered with solar panels, so it will stay with us for a while.

Other large kibbutzim with more or less cash to spare, also built grandiose halls. Today they too are used for limited purposes, or stand lonely and neglected. They all have herds of “white elephants”, some converted to storerooms etc., or waiting to be demolished.

The “white elephant” phenomenon is certainly not unique to kibbutzim. All over the world cinemas, concert halls and other once essential buildings have been demolished or converted. There are ancient precedents, notably during the transition from the Roman to the Byzantine eras when the rise of Christianity closed the symbols of the pagan past.

Let’s warp back to the present day to witness an ironic twist. “The Carmelite nuns in Blackrock, County Dublin, are to close their 174-year-old monastery due to falling numbers and a shortage of vocations. There are 11 Carmelite monasteries in Ireland, with some 150 contemplative female Carmelites and 300 male Carmelites. 

In Quebec, since the Quiet Revolution, over 500 churches (20% of the total) have been closed or converted for non-worship-based uses. In the 1950s, 95% of Quebec's population went to Mass; in the present day, that number is closer to 5%.

In 2018, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that churches in Minnesota were being closed due to dwindling attendance. Mainline protestant churches in Minnesota have seen the sharpest declines in their congregations. The Catholic Church has closed 81 churches between 2000 and 2017; the Archdiocese of Minneapolis closed 21 churches in 2010 and has had to merge dozens more. In roughly the same time frame, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Minnesota has lost 200,000 members and closed 150 churches. The United Methodist Church, which is Minnesota's second-largest Protestant denomination, has closed 65 of its churches. In the early 1990s, the Archdiocese of Chicago closed almost 40 Catholic churches and schools. In 2016, increasing costs and priest shortages fuelled plans to close or consolidate up to 100 Chicago Catholic churches and schools in the next 15 years. The Archdiocese of New York announced in 2014 that nearly 1/3 of their churches were merging and closing. The Archdiocese of Boston closed more than 70 churches between 2004 and 2019. Nationally, Catholic school enrolment has declined by more than 430,000 students since 2008.

Moderate and liberal denominations in the United States have been closing down churches at a rate three or four times greater than the number of new churches being consecrated.

it has been reported that fewer than half of Britons are expected to identify as Christian in the 2021 census. Nevertheless, in other places Catholicism has fared better.  According to the Spanish Centre for Sociological Research, 60.2% of Spaniards self-identified as Catholic in 2020. According to a 2014 Pew Research Centre study, 83.3% of Italy's residents are Christians.

Let’s move on to the Jewish diaspora.

According to a recent Pew Research Centre survey the American Jewish population, like other religious groups, is in constant flux. Some people who were raised as Jews have left the religion, while some who were raised outside the faith now identify with it. Many others have switched denominations within Judaism – a trend that has seen the Reform movement grow modestly and Conservative Judaism experience a net loss. Overall, nearly nine-in-ten U.S. adults who were raised Jewish (88%) are still Jewish today. This includes 70% who identify with the Jewish religion and 18% who don’t identify with any religion but who consider themselves Jewish in some other way, such as culturally, ethnically or by family background.

At this juncture I want to digress briefly in order to include a rather aggressive Islamic trend.

The particular controversy flared up in Germany about Muslim communities buying churches to convert them into mosques. It revealed the communities’ lack of understanding of the turbulent situation of European society and the rise of Islamophobia.

A Christian association called Friends of the Protestant Church in Berlin published a report on the conversion of ten churches into mosques, in Germany this year. It said the phenomenon was not new, but it was repeated and deliberate.

At the end of 2018, the Nur Mosque was inaugurated in Hamburg after a Muslim investor bought a church and donated it to the Islamic centre of the city. Similar actions were carried out in the Netherlands, Britain and France. The most prominent examples of the actions were the openings of Al Fateh Mosque in Amsterdam, the Sultan Ayoub Mosque and the Osman Ghazi Mosque in the Netherlands. In France, the Dominican Church in Lille and the Saint Joseph Church in Paris have been turned into mosques.

The association said: “What the Muslims are doing is not wise behaviour.”

This controversy serves to highlight the great crisis experienced by Muslim communities in Europe as they were joined by recent waves of immigrants. More and more, the communities are coming under the fire of angry populist right-wing politicians in Europe.

Another time warp to the time of the British Mandate in Palestine in order to include more music.

In the early 1930’s violinist Bronislaw Huberman, played to an audience comprised of pioneers from Ein Harod and Tel Yosef. The concert was held in a make-do open-air theatre in the quarry at the foot at Mount Gilboa.  Much later, after the kibbutz was relocated to its present site Leonard Bernstein conducted on at least two occasions on the stage of an open-air theatre known simply as “The Stage.”

Today “The Stage” serves as a storeroom.

I hasten to add that I have never played a musical instrument, I sing off key, but despite these impediments I love music, especially classical music.

Having said that, I want to include a very controversial debate concerning two world renowned Jewish musicians.

Considered by many to be one of the most remarkable prodigies since Mozart

Yehudi Menuhin’s record on Judaism and Israel is decidedly complex and controversial. At a time when virtually all Jewish musicians and many others refused to perform with Wilhelm Furtwangler, the despised “Nazi Conductor” – including violinist Bronislaw Huberman, whom Menuhin greatly admired. Menuhin broke with crowd and became the first post-Holocaust Jew to perform under Furtwangler’s baton, a decision for which he was bitterly criticised.

He also made a point of giving benefit concerts in support of “displaced Palestinian refugees.” He remained president of UNESCO’s international Music Council even after the UN adopted the “Zionism is Racism” resolution (1974) – a decision for which he was again severely criticised – and even went so far as to publicly rebuke Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, and other Jewish musicians who signed a statement renouncing UNESCO for its anti-Israel resolutions.

In his speech before the Knesset upon accepting Israel’s prestigious Wolf Prize (1991), Menuhin bitterly criticised Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank, characterising it as “contempt for the basic dignities of life, this steady asphyxiation of a dependent people.”

Undoubtedly reflecting the views of his father, who had written that “Jews should be Jews; not Nazis,” Menuhin compared Israel to Nazi Germany (1998): “Israel’s mission is no longer that of a Promised Land for a persecuted people… What’s extraordinary is that some things never die completely, even the illness which prevailed yesterday in Nazi Germany and is today progressing in that land [Israel].” He went on to challenge Israel’s right to Jerusalem, characterising exclusive Jewish control of the city as “unthinkable.”

Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim is today almost a persona non grata in Israel. Barenboim defined his relations with Israel as follows:

“Since 1952 I have owned an Israeli passport. Since I was fifteen years old, I have travelled the world as a musician. I have lived in London and in Paris and I commuted for years between Chicago and Berlin. Before I had an Israeli passport, I had an Argentinean one; later I acquired a Spanish one. And in 2007, I became the only Israeli in the world who can also show a Palestinian passport at an Israeli border crossing. I am, so to speak, living evidence of the fact that only a pragmatic two-state solution (or better yet, absurd as it sounds, a federation of three states: Israel, Palestine and Jordan) can bring peace to the region. My answer to those who say I am naïve, only an artist? That I am not a political person, even if I shook the hands of Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres as a child: not politics, but humanity has always concerned me. In that sense I feel able and, as an artist, especially qualified to analyse the situation.”

I admire Daniel Barenboim the musician, not his naïveté.

I want to conclude with a brief reference to the Israeli sculptor Yigael Tumarkin. One of his sculptures stands in front  of our largest white elephant.

 

Beit Lavi November 2021 with one of Yigael Tumarkin’s stainless steel sculptures in the foreground.

 

Maybe it’s just an urban legend, a spurious baseless story, but according to one account, Tumarkin commissioned a number of stainless-steel sculptures to be crafted by Palbam Advanced Metal Works, Ein Harod Ihud. On completion of the contract Tumarkin  was slightly cash-strapped and in lieu of the full payment he chose to leave us the phallic symbol seen in the image above.

 Next week I won’t be able to send my usual post. I will be undergoing a medical procedure (not an operation).

Hopefully I will be back the week after I return home.

Well, that should arouse some comment!

 

Take care

Beni,                                                                           11^th of November, 2021.