By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
The past year has been a strong one for Bainbridge Island’s Congregation Kol Shalom. The Reform synagogue has its first-ever home of its own, membership has increased markedly, and a well-known part-time rabbi will be joining them this summer. Yet not all is positive in this small island community that overlooks downtown Seattle.
Judy Hartstone, a board member and treasurer for Kol Shalom, said she has watched the congregation grow from an unaffiliated havurah with 15 families at the beginning of the 1990s to a full-sized congregation of approximately 70 families. In the last year alone, they have added 15 new families to their roster, continuing a history of growth despite recently losing five families to moves out of the area and other causes.
This year, she said, they were able to rent a small space to hold Shabbat and other services for the first time. They had used church facilities in the past.
Kol Shalom will also have the services of local rabbi Mark Glickman, formerly of Temple Beth El in Tacoma, who will work part-time and lead Shabbat services a few times a month. For the past year, Rabbi Laura Rappaport has traveled from her home in Boise, Idaho every few weeks and slept above the sanctuary. Student rabbi Sari Laufer also made several visits this year from Los Angeles.
The congregation has been making use of their space to try to add what they see as a needed balance to the community’s ongoing conversation about Israel and the Middle East. Hartstone said they have been experiencing some anti-Semitic acts recently, including poison-pen e-mails and “desecration of our little Jewish cemetery.”
She said there is a lot of pro-Palestinian sentiment being expressed in this mostly liberal island enclave.
“A year and a half ago, the Arts and Humanities Council on Bainbridge Island put on a four-part arts and lecture series that was pretty one-sided,” Hartstone said. She said the congregation had hosted a meeting with the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee and U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, the Democratic congressman who lives on the island.
Beginning in 2001, a group of women have been organizing mostly short and peaceful vigils near the ferry docks on Friday afternoons. Modeled after the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, the Women In Black developed from a small group of women protesting the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and has become an international movement with branches in cities scattered throughout the world.
“The Women In Black just stand for peace – well, everybody stands for peace,” Hartstone said. “The position of the Women in Black is that peace is thwarted by Israel. That’s my opinion [of them],” Hartstone cautioned. “You’d have to ask them for their opinion.” JTNews’ repeated attempts to contact WIB did not receive a response.
A visit on May 2 by Israel’s Consul General Yossi Amrani, which was coordinated by Barry Goren, Executive Vice President of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, was one more attempt to bring Israel’s perspective to Bainbridge.
“It’s really a pleasure being here today as I end my own personal journey to the Pacific Northwest,” he told an almost full house at Kol Shalom. Amrani is about to complete his four-year assignment to the western United States
Amrani spoke to the congregation on the afternoon that Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s call for withdrawal from Gaza was voted down in a Likud Party referendum.
He said the Likud’s nearly two-to-one vote against the prime minister’s plan for “unilateral disengagement” and withdrawing settlements in Gaza “does not mean the end of the plan.”
“That does mean the prime minister is facing a setback – a very serious political setback, but a minority in a big party cannot decide the future of the entire country. So we are expecting to see some political upheaval in Israel,” he said. “Even if they were rebuffed today by the majority of voters in the Likud Party, [it] does not mean that the plan itself is not good for Israel.”
Amrani said he is not able to prophesy the future of Israel – having been wrong enough times when he has predicted, he said – but added that from his personal viewpoint, “the prime minister and the government have realized that there is no other way to move ahead than natural separations for certain reasons. By a landslide, most Israelis – 70 percent of Israelis – think this is the right thing to do.”
As befitting a diplomat speaking for his country, Amrani made a strong case for the Sharon Administration’s policies. He hit mostly familiar notes in building his argu-ment – that unilateral withdrawal was a logical outgrowth of not having a reliable negotiating partner on the Palestinian side.
“We have negotiated with Chairman Arafat for years and we have reached agreements,” he said. “But the very fact that every time we have to go on with negotiations and to have another agreement is a manifestation or proof that this is someone who you can never rely on, trust, or even reach an agreement with that will be comprehensive and final.
Yasser Arafat doesn’t have an interest in ending the conflict,” Amrani said. “If there is someone in this region that wants to end the conflict…it’s Israel – for a reason: we are the minority in that region. We’ll always be outnumbered by the Arabs,” he said.
“Israel’s future, Israel’s history, Israel’s idea of a vision of having an Israel, is as a Jewish and a democratic homeland. If we do not separate from the Palestinians, if we do not end the Israeli occupation over the Gaza and the West Bank, we may find ourselves politically outnumbered by the Palestinians.”
He warned that Israel could be confronted with a demand that the Palestinians on the other side of the Green Line might demand the right to vote in Israeli elections, overwhelming Jewish voters and bringing in a Palestinian majority government.
Amrani answered questions from the overwhelmingly friendly audience for about 45 minutes, but took an officiously neutral position on the presidential elections, saying it was not his place to tell Americans who their leader should be. He then went on to praise George W. Bush’s recent unbending support of Israel.