Yehuda Avner — who, in one of his last acts working in an official capacity for Israel, attempted to make all the kitchens in Israel’s embassies kosher — advised every Israeli prime minister from Levi Eshkol in 1967 to Begin in 1982, and stood by their side at the nation’s most perilous moments.
“You are right that Rabin did not have the same sense of himself as a Jew as the others. Being a sabra prime minister — our first — was a big thing in its day. Interestingly, even though his mother was a socialist firebrand, her father had been a very pious Jew. He was a timber merchant, and one of the few Jews allowed to live in Petrograd. He managed the forests of some relation to the Tsar. That was why they gave him a telephone. So when it rang, he knew someone important was calling. Nevertheless, he never answered the phone on Shabbos, even if it meant losing his livelihood.
“Time and again, I tried to influence Rabin to observe Jewish tradition, at least in public, but he was impatient with religious observance. Whenever I tried to convince him to keep kosher at public functions, he would dismiss it, saying, ‘Azov et zeh — leave it alone.’ I once had the unenviable task of trying to teach him to recite Kaddish in preparation for a visit to Bergen-Belsen as prime minister. I cannot say I was very successful.”
“Not really. You have to remember that though I came to Eretz Yisrael just prior to the War of Independence, my education was in England, where the concept of a permanent government service remains very strong. Beyond my fundamental religious convictions, I am by nature not given to stringent ideologies. Indeed, I’m frequently appalled by those who become slaves to ideologies, and can no longer think for themselves.
“Golda Meir’s blind devotion to her socialist creed is an example. She died a bitter woman when she realized that Israel had been deserted by all her old so-called friends in the Socialist International. I describe her extremely bitter confrontation with Austrian prime minister Bruno Kreisky, a completely assimilated Jew and committed socialist, over the latter’s closure of the major transit point for emigrating Russian Jews under threats of Arab terrorism.
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