The Medal That Opened Doors

BY YITZCHAK S. DREZDNER – Hamodia

Please tell us about your background, Rabbi Jacobs.

I was born in Holland in 1949, and both my parents are Dutch. My four grandparents, who survived the war – and it’s very rare that you’ll find someone born in Europe after World War II with four living grandparents – were also born in Holland. And their parents were born in Holland as well. So I’m a real Dutchman.

I was brought up in Amsterdam and went to yeshivos in Brunoy [Paris] and in Brooklyn, New York, and later learned in kollel in Kiryat Malachi, Israel. My wife’s family name is Raskin, and her parents are British Chabadniks. We married and settled in Holland in 1975. I became rabbi of the small community of Amersfoort, and at the same time I taught both children and adults in Leeuwarden, Neede, Rozendaal, Aalten, Zwolle, Enschede, and many other smaller nearby communities.

The Sinai Center in Amersfoort, the only Jewish psychiatric hospital in Europe, asked me to serve as their chaplain as well. The center had two hundred inpatients at that time and about three thousand outpatients. It specializes in treating people with post-traumatic stress syndrome and people suffering the trauma of war.

At first the hospital appeared to me to be a place merely to house the ill as opposed to a place of healing, and they didn’t even require that I have a[n academic] degree. Currently, of course, I do have my degree and I am a member of the hospital’s board of directors, which would never accept a chaplain who did not have the proper credentials.

Later on I became the assistant to Holland’s Chief Rabbi Eliezer Berlinger, to whom I reported twice a week and with whom I discussed all vital rabbinical issues. When he was niftar in 1985, I took over his position. I’m so pleased that I can still devote part of my time to working at the psychiatric hospital.

Please tell us about the medal you were awarded.
It was an honor to be awarded a medal that recognizes me as an officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau, a Dutch military and civilian order of chivalry founded in 1892 by Queen Regent Emma of the Netherlands. Here in Holland this is a big honor. It was given to me mainly for my work with psychiatric patients. The award itself is not important to me, but my achievements here, for whatever they are worth, are very important to me.

Was I aiming for this honor? Chas v’shalom, not at all. Was I aiming to become chief rabbi? Also, not at all. After my marriage I settled in Holland to build Yiddishkeit, or rather to save what we can save. The community is very small. Once a community of ten thousand strictly Orthodox Jews, Holland now has only about two hundred Orthodox families, so there’s not much possibility to rebuild. The best we can aspire to is to save, to retain what’s here.

In many areas of the world the only thing a rabbi can do is what a lifeguard does at a swimming pool: make sure no one drowns, that they all stay alive. Everywhere there are souls to be saved. As people return to Yiddishkeit here in Holland, we mostly advise them to relocate, to go to a place where there’s more of a possibility to live a true life of Torah.

So how did I end up with this honor? The district in which I live is very large, and not many Jewish people live here. In the whole of Holland, I think there are about fifty thousand Jews, with half of them in my district. But they’re spread out over an area that’s larger than Eretz Yisrael.

Before the war, Holland had many Jewish communities that lived in peace with their Dutch neighbors. It was not like Poland or Russia, where they were often persecuted or expelled. Here, each little village once had a Jewish population, and the mayors of those communities want to preserve the memory of their Jews who were killed during World War II. So over the years, many mayors and regional governors contacted me, asking me to speak at memorial ceremonies.

I often wondered why I kept making the acquaintance of so many non-Jewish people eager to memorialize Jews and erect monuments. During the war my district had a few political concentration camps and the infamous transit camp called Gangslager Westerbork. So I was invited to give speeches, and invariably, Jews who had no contact whatsoever with the Jewish community came to honor their grandparents who were killed during the war. So I made a lot of very important contacts. This I understood.

But why all the contacts with gentiles? I was puzzled. Then I became involved with the cheder in Amsterdam. It’s a frum cheder, with between 180 and two hundred boys and girls in separate divisions from kindergarten through high school, so it’s still very small. We need money to pay the teachers, both limudei kodesh and limudei chol. So I started using my contacts to get some support from the government and from non-Jewish foundations that are willing to help us, for example, by providing the security that we need and paying the teachers for limudei chol.

My networking helped me with my efforts to strengthen Yiddishkeit and increase Jewish services in the hospital too. Also, baruch Hashem, I am able to help people with personal problems and to undertake secret missions for Jews in trouble. Recently I was able to speak to one of the foreign ministries on behalf of someone in another country who needed important help from the Dutch government. Thanks to all the contacts that I built up slowly over the years, today I can do a lot of things that are helpful to Yiddishkeit and Yidden.

Through my work as chief rabbi, I also contacted Rabbanim living in different countries, many of them young. I became one of the members of the Vaad, the Rabbinical Center of Europe. This organization deals with political issues affecting Jewish life, such as shechitah, which is a concern not only in Holland.

You see, Holland is a very sophisticated country, and many other countries look to us to see what happens here. We could easily import meat from somewhere else; there are not so many people keeping kosher here, and it’s actually cheaper to import meat than to slaughter it locally. But this became a political issue. We must continue legal shechitah here because if we let them prohibit it in Holland, chalilah, then it would be a sign for the rest of Europe.

So when shechitah became an issue, I was approached by lay leaders who asked me to contact government officials, the people I’d met during years of representing the Jewish community at local and national events. We had met before, so it wasn’t difficult for me to ask for their assistance.

Also, in Holland the general population respects a rabbi. There are not so many Rabbanim here, so people respect me, and that might be a factor in my being able to do some good. When Chief Rabbi Berlinger, z”l, was niftar, although I had been his assistant for many years, they didn’t appoint me as chief rabbi but rather as acting chief rabbi, for various political reasons within the Jewish community.

In 2008, after twenty-three years, I was finally appointed chief rabbi. In the speech I gave when I was installed, I said that after a trial of twenty-three years, my appointment was finally realized. To me the ceremony was somewhat of amusing because nothing had actually changed – neither my responsibilities nor my salary, only the upgrading of my title, which now suited the committee.

But after it took place, I did notice a change. People perceive me differently, as if I’m a different person. I’m not different; I’m the same! But the official title helps me, not only in Jewish society, but also in my interactions with non-Jews. I can get to places that did not accept me before, and now doors open for me and the work I do for others. The same applies to the medal.

When did you receive this medal?
To be awarded this medal, people need to submit an application on your behalf. I didn’t know people were applying for me. It is submitted to the mayor, who sends it to the regional governor, who forwards it to the national government, to a special department of a ministry under the queen. It is only awarded to people who served the country in an exemplary manner.

On Queen Beatrix’s birthday this year, three thousand people received a medal. Out of the three thousand, 87 percent became “members,” 13 percent became “knights,” and only 15 or 20 were honored with the title of “officer,” I among them. I think I was so honored because my work not only impacts Dutch citizens locally but nationally and internationally as well.

My work in the psychiatric hospital was also mentioned as one of the reasons I received the title. I have worked with the mentally challenged for decades, in Holland and across Europe, and I have fought to have the rights of these people, many of them frum, recognized and respected. Baruch Hashem, things are changing in this area, but twenty or even ten years ago people looked down on anyone who had any connection to psychiatric needs.

I only heard that I was being honored the evening before it became publicly known. I had heard that people had submitted my name but never dreamed that I would be designated an “officer.” To me the award is not personally important. After 120 years, I will not be asked, “Did you win a medal?” But I feel good that through me the Jewish community in my country has received well-deserved recognition, that its chief rabbi has been honored as a representative of the Jewish nation.

We have been reading about the problems shechitah faces in Holland. What can you tell us about this important issue?
Holland is unique, possibly in the entire world, as it is home to a political party (Party for the Animals, PvdD) that was formed to guard the well-being of animals. The party won a few seats in the Lower House of our Parliament, and they started a campaign against ritual slaughter, not only against us – mainly against us, but also against the Muslims, who only eat specially slaughtered meat called hallal.

At first no one paid attention to what we thought of as a small political fringe party. But then they got their bill accepted by the Lower House of Parliament, and suddenly we woke up to the fact that thanks to them, Holland could very well enact a law forbidding shechitah, outlawing any slaughter without first anesthetizing the animal.

Not all of the support for this law came from those who are against shechitah. Many of the supporting votes came from parties opposed to Muslims and who for that reason voted in favor of the law. Other supportive political parties had different reasons to vote for the anti-shechitah legislation. That’s the nature of politics – “If you vote for me on this, I’ll vote for you on that.”

The law passed in the Lower House and went to the Senate, or First Chamber. When that happened, I and the other members of the special committee spoke up. We contacted many members of that house, approached everyone we could reach. We worked extremely hard, and b’chasdei Hashem, we were successful in preventing the law from being passed. The discussion in Parliament took an entire day and night, but in the end the law was not passed.

No one can be sure why the law did not pass, but many feel that it is because one addendum would have been impossible to enforce. It might simply be that because the Senate is less political than the Lower House, the senators were freer to think more deeply into the proposed law and weigh whether it would deny total freedom of religion to both Jews and Muslims.