“If I Am Not For Myself, What Am I?”

Isi Leibler died recently in Jerusalem at the age of 86. I was not acquainted with this name or this person until I read an article by Melanie Phillips published in the New York Times**. His story is about his focus on Jewish leadership that failed their community. This role made his life more difficult, but this difficulty did not prevent him from carrying it out. He has been influential on the international stage for decades.

The messages he broadcasted are increasing relevant in our world today.

Born in Belgium in 1934, Leibler left a leadership position in the Australian Jewish community to make Aliyah to Israel in 1999. He has been credited with facilitating diplomatic relations between Israel and India as well as China. He reportedly played a seminal role in the liberation of Russian Jews immigration to Israel, beginning with raising the issue before the Australian parliament in 1959, and then before the United Nations. This was realized three decades later.

What has particularly attracted my notice was his continued activism regarding the failure of some prominent Jewish institutions to act aggressively in defending and advancing Jewish interests.

He publicly attacked Jewish leaders like Nahum Goldmann, the head of the World Jewish Congress, for not being explicit about Russian antisemitism because Goldmann feared it was undiplomatic and would harm efforts to achieve religious and cultural rights in Russia.

Leibler argued that the lot of Jews is never improved by seeking accommodation with enemies, and, indeed, aided the enemies of the Jewish people. Leibler advanced a militant campaign to bring the horrors which Jews in Russia faced to the world at large.

Leibler’s public activism was dominated by his fight against the demonization of Israel that has, more and more, become a feature of the post-Holocaust world. His attention focused on the passivity, and worse, of diaspora Jewish leadership in the face of these developments. He recognized it as a metamorphosed form of antisemitism. Given that the world has shifted from Jewry primarily inhabiting the diaspora, to the current situation where almost half of all the world’s Jews inhabit Israel, it can be nothing else.

This practice, Leibler saw, was, more and more, a feature of the conversation among the western intelligentsia, increasingly brazen and intrusive. He publicly called it out in his writings, with particular attention to the lip-service paid to its countering by leadership in the British Jewish community. They let the lies being told about Israel to be spread without presenting the truths and realities of Israel’s struggle to survive in the face of enemies foreign and domestic.