Human Interest in 10W84

Today, I sifted through 300 documents (the archives were only open from 1:00 to 5:00, because it was a Monday).  I thought that I would share just one of the letters that I found (translated, of course).  I have been rather free with grammar and vocabulary, but have sought to preserve the tone of the original:

 Monsieur the Prefect of Indre-et-Loire,

I have the honor of drawing your benevolent attention to the case of my son:

BRAULT Kléer, born April 30th at Cussay (Indre-et-Loire), on leave from captivity since January 19th 1943, being the father of three children: Albert, born 8/8/35 at Ferriere Larçon, Raymond, born 26/2/37 at Ferriere Larçon, and Micheline, born 15/12/39 at Loches.

Their mother left for an unknown destination, leaving the children in the charge of me, their grandfather, though I am already aging.  Thus, you can well understand the family's full joy when Kleber arrived on leave from captivity in 1943.

And then: My son was summoned to the field-barracks the 10th of the present month, and kept in Prison.  Unable to give us news of his status. 

We are unable to discover of what crime one could accuse him, because, very grateful for his leave from captivity, he always maintained the most perfect observance of appropriate acts and speech regarding the occupying army.  He regularly counted down his remaining time.

The only guess we can hazard is that he was implicated as the innocent victim in mean-spirited feminine vengeance.

My son is employed as an agricultural foreman of a certain Lady, the widow JALOT, living at the Râtellière, at the Chapelle-Blance.  In the same courtyard is found the house inhabited by Mademoiselle DALONNEAU Aimée.  These two women quarrel very often, and very bitterly concerning the roaming of livestock, etc.  Once, following one of these disputes, Madamoiselle Dalonneau summoned her daughter DALONNEAU Gisèle, who works at Parçay camp, in the service of the Germans.  (This young person of very lax scruples elsewhere has a heavy judiciary record, notably for thefts.)  She took up the cause of her mother, and while leaving, threatened Madame Jalot and her servant (my son), despite his not having taken part in the dispute, saying to my son, "before 10 days, you will be gone from here!"

We are these led to supposed that Mademoiselle DALONNEAU, to avenge herself on Madame Jalot, could find nothing better than to deprive her of her foreman.  For this, she, taking advantage of her connections, spuriously denounced my son.
I therefore ask you, Monsieur the Prefect, to please enlighten the occupying authorities on the above details of this affair, and to secure from them the release of my son.  Once his good character becomes evident, which the occupying authorities will easily understand, he will go, of his free will, alone and unescorted, to the convocation of the field-barracks, and no man will have anything with which to reproach him.
Please accept, Monsieur the Prefect, the assurance of my high consideration.
Brault Julien

 There is a reply, too, dated February 15th, 1944.


Monsieur BRAULT Julien, Farmer at the Chapelle-Blanche
I have the honor of informing you that following my intervention, your son was freed, February 10th, an ordinance dismissal having been made on his behalf.
Please accept, Monsieur, the assurance of my distinguished consideration.
The Prefect.

I hope to find more such letters...
By the way, Mazel Tov to Judah Bellin on his marriage!


~JD


"He asks himself whether the woman, when she gives up everything for him, does not perhaps do so for a phantom of him; he wishes first to be thoroughly, indeed, profoundly well known; in order to be loved at all he ventures to let himself be found out.  Only then does he feel the beloved one fully in his possession, when she loves him just as much for the sake of his devilry and concealed instability, as for his goodness, patience, and spirituality" (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil V.194).

First Days at the Tours Archives

Shavuah Tov, everyone!
 I've been in France for nearly a week now.  I've been working hard, looking through the sources on the fates of the Jews in World War II.  So far, I've read sources on Aryanization of Jewish businesses 1940-1942, as well as on Jews losing their jobs in wartime (and seeking compensation in the postwar period).  The collection I'm digging through right now, of which I've read about 200 of the 1500 documents, concerns German arrests of French citizens.
I've come across a few fascinating individual accounts, including one story that is too good to write about until I know for certain that I have read and understood all of the relevant sources.  Just to speak about collection 10W84, I'm amazed by just how many French citizens the SD just grabbed off of the street.  We only know about these people because the local French officials, often at the behest of the disappeareds' family members.  Some of them were imprisoned in local prisons first, and eventually deported for concentration camps, disappearing forever.  However, the most salient characteristic is that the vast majority were arrested for no known reason.  In all of the lists of such victims, under the column for the reason for arrest, the response is nearly always inconnu or ignoré.  If there is a reason given, the crime can be as light as having insulted a German officer, or selling gasoline on the black market.

On an unrelated note, I've just finished my first Shabbat in France!  The local congregation was out of town this weekend, so I just did things by myself, to as great a degree as possible.  When I saw my two baguettes peeking out from under their napkin, I really wanted to take a photograph.  I read a lot, and had a very lazy day: I needed the rest!

Finally, the Tours bus drivers have gone on strike.  They drive in the morning, but not in the evening: in other words, I need to walk home in the evening, which is kind of a pain.  It's so French, though!  On Friday, the union representatives were scheduled to meet the employers: I only hope that they came to a mutually satisfactory solution, so that I don't need to take the 90-minute walk back to my Youth Hostel.
Thank you all, so much, everyone who has Skyped or chatted with me, read or made Facebook comments on my blog.  I miss you all!

~JD

"There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily-preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no "Bible," nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic - but a book of Aristophanes.  How could even Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he repudiated - without Aristophanes!" (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, II.34).

First Day at the Archives

Rather than keep everyone in suspense, I'm going to blow the secret ending to this story right here, right now:
They let me in, and my research will be able to proceed as expected.
I was up at around 4:15 this morning, not because of jet lag, but because I needed to chat with someone on Facebook (we had actually agreed to meet at 3:00, but I slept through that by accident).  The conversation was entirely worth waking up at that time for, but it left me pretty tired for the rest of the morning.  I went through my morning routine, ate breakfast, and walked off to the Rue des Ursulines, where the Departmental Archives are located.
When I arrived there, at around 9:10, I learned that, in fact, I was in the wrong place: there archives of the Indre-et-Loire region has two sites, and I had mistakenly gone to the one containing all of the the archives before mid-1940.  The archivists kindly explained the situation to me, and directed me to the bus-stop.  I made it to the bus just before it left, and hopped on for a 30-odd-minute ride.
My destination was located by a dirty-looking concrete slab with car dealerships, as opposed to the more secluded, floral setting of the archives of the Rue des Ursulines.  These were the right archives, though, and, miraculously, the archivists were expecting me!  One showed me around, explained to me how to access documents (mostly off of a computer).
I got right to work, and got an almost-uninterruped six hours of document-reading.  The collection I'm beginning with deals primarily with the aryanization of Jewish businesses, and is mostly communications between the German authorities and the French prefect.  Just as I was leaving, though, I happened across a remarkable series of documents, which excited me enormously: when I have the complete story to tell, I hope to devote a blog entry to it.
On day one, I went through about 140 documents, of the 700-some in just collection 10W66.  There are many more collections, though: I will need to work very hard over the next two months.
Peace out for now!

~JD

"Like most of the rabbis of the time, Rashi accepted no compensation from the community for his services, and he probably lived from what he earned by viticulture.  Once he begs a correspondent to excuse the shortness of his letter, because he and his family were busy with the vintage.  'All the Jews,' he said, 'are at this moment engaged in the vineyards'" (Maurice Liber, Rashi).

From Tzfat to Tours

My time in Tzfat is over.  The last day,  I had my 7:30 am Chasidut class on Tzitzit with Rabbi Pasternack, followed by 9:15 Shacharit, and 10:30 breakfast.  I finished Chronicles for the second time (I understood it better this time) on my own, then had my Gemara class with Rav Asi (I'm really, really going to miss that guy); we even managed to finish the Sugya (on taking the law into one's own hands), and in time for Halacha class with Rabbi Gorenstein (I realize that I will need to know how to make Kiddush by myself if I can't find a Jewish community in France).  Rav Asi took down my e-mail address, in order to answer the three perplexing questions I had hit him with during our learning today. We had an early Minchah, I made the fastest goodbyes possible, then I was packed and on the bus to Acco (called "Acre" in the Middle Ages), with a couple of apricots in my backpack, by 2:40 pm.  Some people seemed genuinely sorry to see me go; I'm not sure how sincere everyone was, but it was a nice effort, and I left with a jingling palmful of shliach money.  (Many people, throughout my stay at Tzfat, told me that they wanted to see me stay for another year, although I suspect that different people had different motives for telling me this.)  I walked to the bus stop, taking my last look at primordial Tzfat, and found the bus just about to leave -- I had to pay my 30 shekels and stagger to a seat with the bus already in motion.

The bus ride through the Galilee was beautiful, although the roads were bumpy, curvy, and uneven.  It's just as well: with such amazing views of the mountains on every side, I think that a book would have diverted my eyes from seeing Israel.  I don't think I've ever seen so many orchards in my life: at this time of year, Israel really does look like a garden in bloom.  Thousands of years ago, there were Jewish olive presses and olive orchards in this region (archaeologists have found the ruins): now, they've returned.  There was a lot less Rebbe Nachman graffiti in ancient times, though.

I arrived in Acco about an hour later.  The lower compartment where I kept my suitcase did not open, and the bus began to drive off with my suitcase, but it was flagged down, and I retrieved my luggage, no worries.  I walked to the train station, just across the street from the bus stop, and thought about Acre, the site of so much bloodshed during the Crusades.  I paid 49 shekels for a direct ticket to Tel-Aviv airport, ate my apricots (it was 4:00 by this time), and waited about 15 minutes.  There was at least one of group Israeli soldiers riding on the train, to and from I know not wear.  They looked as if they might have been going home: I hope so, for their sake.  I think that I'm going to miss seeing Israeli soldiers.  I spent most of the train ride reading Plato's Republic (from my Kindle), which was, by and large, what I read throughout this particular journey (I also had my Tanakh with me, which takes significantly more concentration, a resource short in supply in transit).  I know that I am not the first to make the connection, but there are a lot of parallels between the ways Plato and Chasidut describe the human soul.  In Phaedrus, Plato (through the mouth of Socrates, of course) describes the soul as a two-horsed chariot, each horse in constant contention with the other; in Book IV of the Republic, he argues that the soul's components "are two, and that they differ from one another; the one with which a man reasons, we may call the rational principle of the soul; the other, with which he loves and hungers and thirsts and feels the flutterings of any other desire, may be termed the irrational or appetitive, the ally of sundry pleasures and satisfactions."  For those of you who haven't had Tanya courses five nights a week, the Alter Rebbe likewise described Jewish people as possessing two souls, the Animal and the Godly: the former is basal, tied to physicality, and addicted to worldly pleasures; the second is motivated by love of God, and is the spark of divinity within every Jewish person.  The human soul as a whole, therefore, he describes as a small city, over which two kings are battling.

The train ride made the distance from Tzfat feel all of a sudden very real, and, despite the resemblances in Plato to Chasidut, I felt as if I was coming up for air out of a long and difficult dive, one of the real lung-crushers (help me here, Travis).  Not all men were wearing kippot, and were reading books other than Talmuds: not all women were wearing headscarves and long-sleeved long dresses.  I got some good reading done.

I arrived at the airport a around 15 hours before my flight was scheduled to take off: I was prepared to spend the night in the airport.  I ended up meeting a man waiting for his fiance's delayed flight (made me think about Judah), spent the last of my shekels on nourishment, and ended up passing out while reading, sometime around 1:00 am.  On Amazon, I had found a free Kindle eBook about Rashi, written in 1906, which I decided to begin (I got around 20% through it).  A passage in the preface nearly made me switch back to the Republic immediately: it began with the dated and unpropitious observation that "no people has greater need than the Jews to steep itself again in the sources of its existence... Scattered over the face of the globe, no longer constituting a body politic, the Jewish people by cultivating its intellectual patrimony creates for itself an ideal fatherland... But the Jewish people, its national life crushed out of it, though deprived of all political ambitions..." etc.  I looked up from my book, and saw three Israeli flags snapping in the weekend, outside, by the landing path.  I smiled, and read the first two chapters.

It was chilly in the airport, and I'm glad that I had the red hoodie from Andrew and Allison in which to wrap myself for warmth.  Just before 6:00 am, I staggered over to the El Al registration, where I signed in (I got hit with more security questions, but they weren't nearly as difficult as those I had answered when entering Israel).  I checked my suitcase, went through security that didn't even require that I remove my shoes, and even found my way to the Beit Knesset (they were in the middle of P'sukei D'zimra, and I managed to catch up to them by Yishtabach).  I only mention this because, it being Monday morning, this was my last opportunity to have an aliyah in Israel: I wasn't chosen (the odds were against me), but I'm still a little bit disappointed that, after nearly three weeks, I haven't had a single Torah honor.  Perhaps I'm just spoiled at Cornell, where a week doesn't go by without me touching or carrying the Torah Scroll.

The plane to Paris was tightly-packed, and I sat next to a French couple in their 60s.  Throughout the flight, I was trapped in a slicha/pardonnez-moi/excuse me grey zone, where I didn't know what to tell people whom I unintentionally smacked.  Usually, I just mumbled, and that worked out well enough. I read, and though my body really wanted to sleep, I didn't let it.  It was a smooth, pleasant flight.  We arrived just around noon, local time.  I had my passport stamped, grabbed my baggage (without even stopping to state "rien á déclarer"), and ran off to the train station at Charles de Gaulle airport.  It seemed that my French has not sufficiently deteriorated in the past six months so much that I cannot understand or make myself understood, although I still have problems with translating numbers.

I took the train to Saint-Pierre-des-Corps: the ticket cost me (or, more properly, cost the Einaudi Center) 65 Euros.  I took the 5-minute train to Tours, and found myself back in a town I recognized.  Walking up the Rue Nationale, the main street of the city, I saw that little had changed since I first arrived in the town, around 11 months ago.  There was still construction in all of the places that I remembered, and in a few places I didn't remember.  Finally, around 5:30, I arrived at the youth hostel, signed in for a week's worth of room, board, and Internet, and went out to buy food, soap, and napkins.  I found some general guidelines for eating kosher in Europe, and it looks as if baguettes are safe (thank goodness), now that I'm trying to keep by more stringent guidelines.  I took a much-needed shower, ate dinner, chatted with my Mother and Rayleigh on Facebook, and with Eli on Skype.

And I'm available to chat with the rest of you, too, now!  I have a microphone and headphones, and am living in a building where my own voice will not be overheard!  If you want to speak, please, let me know, give me a time, and we can communicate!

~JD

"He whose nature is amorous of anything cannot help loving all that belongs or is akin to the object of his affections" (Plato, Republic).

Tzfat Economics

Just time for a short reflection on something I've noticed, living in the poorest city in Israel.
There's a very different sort of work schedule for most people around here.  As I mentioned, the men at the synagogue where I study don't pray until 9:15 or so.  Some of them are employed at ordinary businesses, but can apparently make time in their work schedules for morning prayer.  Others, especially the older men, are professional Torah scholars: they study all day long, and the state supports them.  At least one other, in his 20s, is in a one-year period following his marriage, in which he learns Torah full-time, and the state supports him.  With his government paycheck, he can afford expensive clothes, plenty of good food, and rent, for himself and for his wife.
Those who are employed, at least, in commerce, have very short work hours.  Stores tend to close at around 2:00 pm here, may be closed all afternoon on Fridays and (for some reason) Tuesdays.  Today, Friday, at around 10:15 am, I visited the post office, and it was already closed for the weekend, even though the schedule posted outside indicated that it should have been open.
All of the Rabbis whose homes I have visited have large houses, well-furnished, and with large libraries.  The Chabad House can afford to give large public meals, with copious vodka, on Saturdays.
The question is: with apparently so little work being done, where is all of this money coming from, and why isn't there more obvious poverty?  There are poor people here, but they're as much a part of the community as anyone else; the only difference is that they need to borrow Tefillin, and go around the synagogue and Beit Midrash asking for money (which they always receive).
This reminds me of an article I read a couple of years ago, on the Washington Post website.  I can no longer find it, but the poorest community of 100 or more people, in the United States, is an ultra-orthodox Jewish community just outside of New York City.  All of the shop signs are in Yiddish, most of the women don't have jobs, all the men spend their days studying Torah.  Everyone has enough to eat and to wear, though, because everyone shares necessary articles (strollers, etc), especially the wealthier community members.
Is this how Tzfat remains statistically poor, yet apparently well-off?  Does Tzfat just run on state money (and how do taxpayers who are secular Jews feel about supporting Torah scholars and Yeshiva students)?  Does it run on endowments from affluent Jews who want Tzfat to have a functioning Jewish community?  I don't know.
Shabbat Shalom!

~JD

"אדם מועד לעולם
בין שוגג בין מזיד
בין ער בין ישן"

[A person is always liable to cause damages -- whether unintentionally or intentionally, whether waking or sleeping] (Bava Kama 2:4).

Typical Day at Tzemach Tzedek

So, it's about time that I gave some kind of description of my daily schedule.  Here's a sample, using this Tuesday as fairly typical (actually, better than many).  Now that Rabbi Eli is gone, I'm spending less time in Shiurim with him, and more time with other Rabbis, at least in terms of classes.

By the way, I've tried to attach links to any unusual terminology I may have used without thinking.  They links are for you, George, in case you're reading this.

6:50 -- Got out of bed, performed morning necessities, and left for the Beit Midrash.  I thought that we had Chasidut class this morning, but because of the Fabrengen that kept everyone up until 1:00 or 2:00 last night, we didn't.  So I continued to read from my Tanakh, finishing the final chapters of Chronicles, and reading some more Psalms, including what might be one of my favorites, 119.

9:00 -- Shacharit in the Synagogue.  Chabad takes a really long time for prayer, so I had enough time to actually say every part of P'sukei D'zimra, which is very unusual for me.  I needed to wait for my friend Yosi to finish, so I waited for everyone to finish, which didn't happen until nearly 10:40 (I wonder if community members have problems with their employers, because they can't realistically make it to work until 11:00, and I see them in the Beit Midrash at the middle of the day).  I kept on reading Psalms, and made it to 145, Ashrei.

10:40 -- Left the Synagogue with Yosi, who showed me the way to the bank and the post office.  I needed to withdraw money (I only had 8 shekels left -- sorry, parents, but I'm trying to be financially responsible!).  I then went to the post office to mail four postcards, to Eliezer's bookstore to buy four more, and back to the dormitory for a breakfast of some porridge with fruit.  On the way back to the dorms, I saw a very upsetting incident on the street.  However, it could just have been because of cultural differences in Israel and the U.S. that I found it so upsetting.

11:15 -- I arrived back at the Beit Midrash, in time for Gemara lesson with Rav Asi.  Not everyone was on time, and I have the chance to ask Rabbi Pasternack about the event on the street, and what I might or might not have been obligated to do under such circumstances.  In class, the course got caught up in some pilpul.  We're looking at a dispute between Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Nachman, in tractate Bava Kama, over the circumstances under which a person may take the law into his own hands (in my opinion, a very important question).  Pretty much, the two agree that a person should always defend his property when it's in immediate danger, but they tried to search for a certain case in which there was clearly no immediate danger, in order to resolve the dispute.  (According to my reading of the text, there's actually a third opinion, held by Rabbi Chisda, that a person may under no circumstances defend his property out of court, but he's clearly in a 2-to-1 minority.)  Today, because one student and Rav Asi got in a dispute over the mathematics of logic, in relationship to a Baraita.  I now know this Baraita all too well.  Here is a paraphrase: If a man sees his neighbor's ox getting on top of his own ox in order to gore it, and he pulls his ox out from under it, and the other ox falls and dies as a result, then he is exempt from payment; but if (under the same circumstances) he pushed his neighbor's ox off of his ox, and his ox died, then he is liable for payment.  In any case, the argument lasted so long that we missed our Halachah class with Rabbi Gorenstein, which typically lasts from 1:00 until 1:30, in which we're learning the laws of making Kiddush on Friday nights.  (I'm hoping that we'll get to the issue of the validity of grape juice, which a very good friend of mine has questioned, and which I therefore would like to know more about.)

1:30 -- Minchah.  Done and done.

1:50-2:50 -- Read Kitzur Shulchan Aruch on hurtful speech (cursing, insulting,etc) with Ben.  Ordinarily, we would have instead reviewed Gemara together, but because of today's lack of progress, we never got very far in class, so we read the Halachic work instead.  We are learning, for instance, that one may not misdirect people in commerce, call someone by an insulting nickname even if that nickname has become thoroughly attached to him or her, ask someone a difficult question to which one knows the respondent does not know the answer, or insistently invite one's neighbor to one's house.

2:50-4:15 -- Read the book of Jeremiah with Ari, alternating by chapter, with some discussion.  Got through chapters 5-16, or so, I think.  Visions, prophecies, denunciations, false prophets, corrupt monarchs, idolatry, Babylonians at the gate -- all in a day's work.  I'm glad to be returning to this prophetical book; in fact, I think that I should really go back and review all of the Former Prophets, and then the three Major Prophets.  In other words, I have a lot of homework to do!

4:15-6:30 -- Two back-to-back classes with Rav Asi.  The first one was on relating certain Psalms to certain events in King David's life, with relevant midrashim, etc.; today, the topic was David's annointment as king.  The second class is based on a sicha by the Rebbe on spiritual challenges.

6:30-7:40 -- Cross-referenced in Bava Mezia 58b-59a of passages from Kitzur Shulchan Aruch with Ben.  We learned some interesting things.  Also, I finished the book of Psalms, and tried my best to continue reading Mishnah Bava Kama, reviewing legal responsibility for damage caused by one's livestock's feet (and, by extension, all damage caused by animals' general movements, excluding eating and deliberate attacking).  I'm doing my best to understand as much as possible of each Mishnah in Hebrew; Rabbinic Hebrew, at least in this tractate, tends to be both very simple and very repetitive.  I really like the Kahati edition that I'm using (recommend to me by both Eli and Peninah), which includes a brief summary of the associated Gemara and other famous interpretations, in order to give the reader some idea of the classical understanding of the Mishnah.

7:40-9:00 -- Two back-to-back classes with Rabbi Gorenstein.  The first is on Tanya, continuing with chapter 12.  The second I didn't really understand, we became so sidetracked, but it was more Chasidut.

9:00 -- Ben and I run back to quickly eat dinner, of vegetable soup, with some cold salad.  We walk back with Dovid.

9:30 -- Ma'ariv.  Done and done.

10:20 -- Back at the dorm, in time for my least favorite part of the day: e-mail and other computing.  I have a huge pile I need to answer every day, and I don't even have time to write certain important ones.  I also wrote all of the last post, and most of this one, too.

2:30 -- Bed, really tired, by now.

~JD

כיצד השן מועדת לאכול את הראוי לה"
הבהמה מועדת לאכול פרות וירקות
"אכלה כסות או כלים משלם חצי נזק


[In what case is the tooth (of the animal) fully liable (for the damage it causes)?  For eating what is natural for it.  The beast is fully liable in regards to eating fruits and vegetables. (For) eating a garment or utensils, (the owner) pays for half of the damages] (Bava Kama 2:2).