from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 24 Jan 2009 06:39 PM PST

Rabbi Hollander warned America, “The Arabs are already saying, ‘

Today Aza (Gaza), Tomorrow Jerusalem. Soon they will be
saying, Today Jerusalem,! Tomorrow America, G–d forbid.

Americans take note while there is still time.”

Rabbi David Hollander was from another generation, a
time when Orthodox Rabbis did not bow to discretion or

found themselves silenced by the politically correct

whims of liberalism. Instead even in the Age of Political

Correctness, he continued to fight for what was for right well

into his nineties-- dying as the oldest pulpit Rabbi in America
at the age of 96.

His uncompromising stands would often result in him being marginalized

and mocked by an increasingly liberal generation of Modern Orthodoxy in

America, who no longer took the causes he fought for seriously.
Yet he refused to be politically correct, he refused to be silenced, and

refused to see evil and not speak up against it.

“I represent the right wing,” he says. “I took a
very strong stand. I carried on the fight
for the last 60 years.“I am not a moderate in any way.”

In 1956 he led a delegation of Rabbis to work on behalf of Soviet

Jews imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, only 3 years after

the death of Stalin.

Inside the 73-year-old synagogue, religious and community leaders

addressed the crowd in English, Yiddish, and Russian. Rabbi Hollander
recalled leading the first official delegation of American rabbis to
the Soviet Union in 1956. ‘’When just a few blocks from the Kremlin
I saw a house of God, I could not believe that such a small building had
survived so close to the Kremlin,'’ he said. ‘’Where is Stalin, where is
Lenin today? Communism is dead, but the little Torah is marching
today, and with Russian Jews. Who would have thought that, 20 years
ago?'’

I personally remember Rabbi Hollander describing the scene,
the intimidation by Police and KGB personnel, and finally

reaching the Moscow Synagogue, and reading the words
the words of our Forefather Jacob in Genesis 28:17 inscribed

above it, "אֵין זֶה, כִּי אִם-בֵּית אֱלֹהִים, וְזֶה, שַׁעַר הַשָּׁמָיִם, "This is none
other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven".

And he marveled to see that even in the darkness at the
heart of Soviet power, G-d was still present.

From leading that 1956 delegation of Rabbis to
his modern day challenges to the leftist policies of

appeasement toward terrorism in Israel

and America, his life spanned a world of challenges

and a refusal to remain silent, no matter what.

As a pulpit Rabbi he took on areas that no one else wanted, in the
Bronx and Brighton Beach, as a man he was both courageous and

humble, well read, deliberate and yet forceful.

There will be plenty of brief pieces "remembering him", but very few

remembering what he really stood for.

“The root cause
of terrorism is the success of terrorism,”

This story recently came to mind when Senator Joseph
Lieberman was in Israel and announced as loudly as he
could that the Jews have no right to live on "occupied
territory." We are painfully ashamed because very
recently, a non-Jew, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
defended Israel, and pointedly referred to the West Bank as
"so-called occupied territory." Senator Lieberman, who calls
himself an Orthodox Jew, does not stop from pontificating
that part of the Holy Land given by G-d to the Jews is forbidden
to Jews.

It is difficult to have such high expectation from our modern
American Joseph. Yet, one would still expect some humility,
some integrity and some fairness in judging who is at fault in
the current terror war in the State of Israel. Lieberman
deplored the "desperate" humanitarian condition of the
Palestinians without stating clearly that the sole
responsibility for this "desperate humanitarian
condition" of the Palestinians lies with the Arabs,
who train their sons and daughters to kill themselves
in the process of killing Jews.

This shows how far the current Joseph has drifted from his
Biblical namesake. He wears his alleged Orthodoxy on his
sleeve and uses it as a campaigning point. This is most
unbecoming and un-Jewish.

Rabbi Hollander was always ready to use public forums,

from radio appearances debating terrorist apologies,

to his regular Jewish Press columns, which the paper

does not appear to have put online for some reason, and

in the Algemeiner, he remained a vibrant and witty voice

for truth right up to the end, as the

followingremembrance recalls,

I saw him just a few weeks ago in a rehab. center.
He told me that he was up until 3:00 AM preparing 2 articles for the
Jewish Press and Algemeiner Journal about the Mumbai
tragedy. He was sharp and witty and a pleasre to talk to.
He was broad minded, well educated and well read, yet a
true ehrliche yid, with torah haskafos who loved all of klal
yisroel.

3 years ago, at the age of 93, Rabbi Hollander showed he
hadn't changed when he defied Mayor Bloomberg, and his alliance and

dirty payoffs to Lenora Fulani, openly challenging him over it in public

when no one else would.

When the Orthodox rabbinical board (Vaad Harabbanim)
of Flatbush endorsed Mayor Bloomberg for reelection at its
June 22 annual meeting, there was a gadfly in the ointment.
Rabbi David B. Hollander stood up and asked the mayor about
his alliance with Lenora Fulani, the Independence Party leader
who defended on NY1 News in April her 1989 statement that
Jews are "mass murderers of people of color." According to
Hollander, the mayor's response was to claim that Fulani is
only one out of 90,000 members in the Independence Party.
Hollander recalls snapping back that Fulani is in fact the leader
of the party, but since no one in the audience backed him up, the
mayor was able to go on to other questions as if an adequate
answer had been given.

Here is how Rabbi Hollanderdescribed the encounter in his

customarily modest and understated way.

The mice held their annual convention and the delegates
came from all over. A major item on the agenda was a question of life and death,
namely, how to escape sudden death by being swallowed by the cat.
The main problem was that due to the silent footsteps of the cat,
there was no advance warning and, hence, no time to run into the safety
of the holes. One mouse offered a solution: All listened with rapt
attention. "In order to hear the cat," said the delegate, "we must
hang a bell on the cat’s neck, giving us enough time to hide." They
applauded this brilliant solution. But the celebration ceased
when one of the wiser delegates asked: "Who of us will hang the
bell on the neck of the cat?"

The lesson of this story is that it is one
thing to have great ideas, but it is
something else to put it into
practice if it requires the selfless
and dangerous feat of "hanging the
bell," of sounding the alarm before it
is too late...

This is still the key to the challenges facing us in America and
Israel. The failure, the refusal to remove the atzmo, the
self-interest, the drive for election and reelection and the
ambition for affluence prevent the words and
deeds needed to prevent destruction...
Even in the Orthodox camp we see the atzmo of self-serving
condemnations, resulting in the failure to hang the bell--
to speak up when Jews, the Torah and Israel are maligned.

Recently I was present at a gathering of an Orthodox
organization, where a public official was seeking support
in an election. The candidate himself was present to give his
campaign talk. There seemed to be unanimity for his
endorsement, despite the well-publicized fact that he
was seeking the endorsement of a political party of
90,000 members headed by a woman who said
that "Jews are mass-murderers of people of color."
Since I [attend] this organization’s gathering only from time
to time, I was reluctant to ask for the floor, hoping that one of
the regulars would say something. But alas, no one wanted to
hang the bell to say anything. It was then that I thought of our
sages’ teaching, that where there are no men, you should strive
to be a man (Perek 2:6).

In keeping with this advice I asked for the floor--which was not
granted, because my reputation for hanging the bell had preceded me.
The candidate himself pointed to my raised hand and I was finally
called upon. I asked how he could associate himself with the enemies
of the Jews and of America. He did not deny their anti-Semitism. He said
instead that you cannot reject 90,000 members because of the
wrongs of one person. I countered, of course, that it was not just one
person, for she is the head of the party.

This is just one example. There are times when the failure to protest
evil is an indication that one is not truly upset. The Brisker Rav,
zt"l, said that Job was punished by pain all over his body because of his
silence when the plan to remove the Jewish peril to Egypt was
presented. But why this particular punishment? The answer is that
Job rationalized his silence by saying to himself that his words
will be ineffective.

He was therefore afflicted with pain, to show that when you have pain
you cry out because it hurts, and if you don’t cry out it is because it
does not hurt.

After the Disengagement that ethnically cleansed the Jewish population

of Gaza, Rabbi Hollander said the following words.

"Why are we here?" Hollander asked. "It's over! So why are we bothering
ourselves and pestering the consulate? The answer is in the Torah." He
went on to explain how when Yaakov was shown the bloodied shirt that
made him draw the conclusion that Yosef was no more, Yaakov mourned
but he did not accept consolation. Yosef was still alive.
"We are mourning, but we are not allowed to accept consolation for that
which is still alive!" declared Hollander. "The land will come back to us!"