Rabbi Zalman Lent gives a lesson on multiculturalism to students in Ireland for Passover

Published on Apr 15, 2019

On Friday this week, the Jewish holiday of Passover begins and Dublin based Rabbi Zalman Lent has chosen the occasion to discuss the holiday and give a lesson on multiculturalism at his synagogue with a group of Students from Stratford College in Rathgar which he describes as a Jewish and multi-denominational school.

Rabbi Lent says the school has a lovely mix of different backgrounds, cultures and faiths like Jewish, Christian, Hindu and Atheist all together although Muslims and Africans are not mentioned. The Rabbi says he wants to look at the story of the Exodus and Passover to see if there are any contemporary lessons the students can learn.

The students all introduce themselves and are from a range of backgrounds. One child describes himself as “just Irish” but this draws laughter from the other students. Rabbi Lent remarks that young people are very in tune with social and global problems and wants to hear how they think the world can be made a better place.

The Rabbi begins by explaining that the ancient Hebrews relocated from the land of Canaan and resettled in Egypt due to a famine. One of the students is asked whether that means anything to him in an Irish context and Ayyush Tambde remarks that the potato crop failed in Ireland in 1845 and “loads of people had to migrate to America and Australia and other countries” and that this led to a huge depopulation in rural areas.

What had actually happened was that the Irish and been colonised and stripped of their land, and the food that was farmed in Ireland was shipped out to feed the British empire. Irish people could only grow potatoes in the small parcels of land allotted to them so when the potato crop failed, the British let them starve. Irish people did not migrate to Australia during this period. Some were forcibly deported there as prisoners if they committed a crime such as stealing food to feed themselves.

Some other Irish people moved to Britain if they could afford the fare, not as refugees but as citizens of the United Kingdom. Max Musumeci answers next and says that there were many times that the Jewish people have had to move to many different countries and that the most recent example was the holocaust “where many Jewish people wanted to migrate to America and other countries but were pushed back” due to quotas on migrants being in place.

Musumeci relates this to modern times and says Syrians and people from other war-torn countries want to migrate to more prosperous countries but “they are being denied their access and that is really sad that history is repeating itself”.

The Rabbi said this was a really important point. In January 2018, Israel said it would pay thousands of African migrants $3,500 to leave Israel, or face internment in a migrant detention camp in the Negev desert if they were caught in the country after the end of March. Israel already paid grants of $1,500 to migrants who agreed to leave the country but the new proposal raised the figure. The government said it wanted to preserve Israel’s ethnic character.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti…

Outgoing IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot has acknowledged that Israel has provided weaponry to “Syrian rebel groups” in the Golan Heights during the country’s seven-year civil war for “self defence”.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-chi…

A majority of Israelis oppose taking in refugees according to a poll released in September, with support for allowing entry to such migrants ranking well behind that of citizens in many other Western countries. According to the Pew Research Center survey, 57 percent of Israelis oppose accepting refugees fleeing war and conflict, the highest among countries polled. Antagonism in Israel toward migrants has hardened in recent years with an estimated 35,000 African immigrants in the country facing hostility from lawmakers and residents in communities with high migrant populations.

While the migrants say they are refugees fleeing conflict or persecution, Israel views them as job-seekers who threaten the Jewish character of the state. Unlike many European countries included in the Pew poll, Israel has been unaffected by the waves of migrants leaving the Middle East and Africa for Europe and other Western countries.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels…

Last July Israel’s parliament passed a law characterising the country as principally a Jewish state in part over fears over the high birth-rate of Israeli Arabs. Netanyahu said he wanted to preserve the Jewish character of the State of Israel. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle…