Rabbis, Groups Debate Boycott of Olympics

Protesters demonstrate against China's human-rights record as the Olympic torch passes through San Francisco on April 9.

Photo by Elizabeth Friedman Branoff/Courtesy of American Jewish World Service

WASHINGTON

A large group of rabbis spanning Judaism's religious movements says it has an answer to the vexing question of how to send China an Olympic-sized message without harming the interests of athletes or Israel.

In an appeal issued April 30 and timed for last week's commemoration of Yom Hashoah, 185 Jewish leaders -- mostly of them clergy -- appealed to Jews not to attend the Beijing Olympics this summer as tourists.

The next day, the Anti-Defamation League rejected the boycott call and said comparisons the clergy statement made to the 1936 Berlin Olympics were inappropriate. In recent days, three Orthodox groups -- the Orthodox Union, Agudath Israel of America and the National Council of Young Israel -- also rejected the boycott idea.

Representatives of the three Orthodox groups said that they felt obliged to issue statements so the public would not construe the boycott call as reflecting the entirety of Jewish opinion.

China is the principal power propping up the regime in Sudan, where government-allied militias have murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians in the civil war in the Darfur region. It is also cracking down harshly on movements in Tibet.

Jewish groups have played a disproportionate and lead role in drawing Western attention to the Darfur killings. Yet deciding whether or not to confront China, which enjoys thriving trade with Israel, presents a more complicated set of issues than attempting to isolate Sudan, a poor country that does not want relations with the Jewish state.

Also complicating matters is that the United States and Israel have scored modest successes in getting China to join the effort to isolate Iran until it ends its suspected nuclear-weapons program.

The appeal is cast narrowly, organizers said, as a way around such dilemmas that other groups and nations have faced in determining how to confront the Chinese over human-rights abuses while not harming athletes and national interests.

"There's a difference between doing business, which is a necessity, and spending discretionary income on sports, which gives a country legitimacy that's doing a number of very bad things that Jews should be sensitive to," said Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the head of Manhattan's Kehilath Jeshurun synagogue, who was a coordinator of the statement.

Lookstein and another Orthodox organizer of the petition, Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg, the former chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, saw an opportunity when they learned that China was preparing a kosher kitchen for the Olympics. The outreach to Jewish religious needs struck a chord.

"Beijing's authorization of the creation of a kosher kitchen at the Olympics village is apparently intended to help attract Jewish tourists to the games, as part of its broader strategy of improving its image and deflecting attention from its complicity in severe human-rights abuses at home and abroad," the statement said. "Jews should not be party to the whitewashing of such a regime, kosher kitchen or no kosher kitchen. Regimes that practice or enable oppression, terrorism or genocide are not kosher."

The Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which took part in preparing the statement, noted that Germany used the 1936 Olympics to help create the false impression of secure Jewish communities and thereby diminish American awareness of the impending Nazi threat.

The ADL statement rejected such parallels.

"We believe that these comparisons are inappropriate," its statement said. "China is a complicated society that is changing and opening up in many ways, and one simply cannot equate the Beijing Olympics with those games in Nazi Germany on the eve of the Holocaust."

Greenberg said the offensive aspect of preparing the kosher kitchen was in using the appeal as a means to subvert opposition to China's human-rights abuses.

"They're trying to use providing kosher food as a way of building up the Olympics," he said.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said the rabbis' statement is "a moral appeal to Jewish individuals around the world."

The organizers did not approach Jewish groups, although they hoped that some would sign on. The American Jewish Congress has signed.

The ADL, in rejecting the boycott call, said, "While there is no doubt that China has an extremely poor human-rights record and that its actions in Tibet and Sudan are to be condemned, we believe that asking the Jewish community to engage in a boycott of the games could be counterproductive and would not produce any tangible result."

Greenberg and Lookstein lined up other Orthodox notables to sign on, including Rabbi Norman Lamm, chancellor of Yeshiva University; Rabbi Dov Linzer, dean of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a rabbinical school in New York City; and David Bernstein, dean of the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies in Israel.

They were joined by the leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements, as well as dozens of rabbis across the United States and Canada.