Rabbi Hier's Jerusalem Post op-ed: What Miracle Can Be Greater?

WHAT MIRACLE CAN BE GREATER?

Fortunate are we and our children and grandchildren that we live at a time in history where with our own eyes we have seen the fulfillment of this great miracle

By Rabbi Marvin Hier, Founder & Dean, Simon Wiesenthal Center

May 13, 2018 

I remember in my Yeshiva days reading about the great 18th Century scholar, Rabbi Yaakov Emden’s commentary that the continued existence of the Jewish people is a miracle as great or even greater than G-d’s splitting of the Red Sea. Miracles greater than at the time of the Exodus? No way.

Photo: Rabbis Marvin Hier and Abraham Cooper at the dedication ceremony of the United States Embassy opening in Jerusalem.

Yet, if we carefully trace the winding path that led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, we are left with the conclusion that it was no less miraculous than baby Moses’ floating down the Nile in a basket to be saved by none other than the tyrant’s daughter.

Today, many of us believe that miracles are inspirational fables of yesteryear. Too few of us believe that 3,500 years after Abraham there is still a master conductor who from time-to-time directs the symphony of Jewish destiny even if He refuses to take a bow.

Let us begin by examining one day in history.

On July 20, 1944, Adolf Hitler survives an assassination attempt. He goes on radio to tell the German people that his survival was proof that “fate has selected me for my mission.” In fact, that was Hitler’s last public speech he would ever deliver. Fearing for his safety, his aides never permitted him to speak in public again.

On that very same day, July 20, 1944, perhaps an even more shocking event occurs thousands of miles away in Chicago. The Democratic National Convention had gathered to re-nominate a Franklin D. Roosevelt for a fourth term. Because of wartime restrictions, the President could not accept the nomination in person. Instead, he arrived in San Diego by train where he delivered his acceptance speech to stand for reelection in November.

However, at that same time, a few months before the convention, unbeknownst to the public, a few months earlier Roosevelt’s cardiologist, after an extensive evaluation, informs the President’s senior staff, that with good care Roosevelt might live another year at best. This dramatic development meant that FDR, would when choosing his running mate would also be choosing the next US president, with the world still engulfed in war.

Now let’s leave the convention for a moment and go back to November 2, 1917, when Lord Arthur Balfour stuns the world with the Balfour Declaration stating that the British government supports the establishment of the national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. 30 years later this declaration would be the legal instrument that facilitated the establishment of the State of Israel.

A few months later and a few hundred miles away in France, two young GIs who had only briefly known each other as teens, became fast friends, serving in the same US Army unit during World War I.

Returning home to Missouri a year later, they decide to go into business together. Their names were Harry Truman and Eddie Jacobson.

Back to the 1944 Democratic National Convention.

Senator Harry Truman has no interest in seeking the vice presidency. He wasn’t on the president’s radar and hadn’t even seen Roosevelt in more than a year. In fact, in the lead-up to the convention, he writes a speech nominating Jimmy Byrnes for vice president of the United States.

Truman is understandably shocked when just before the convention an aide to the president tells him that Roosevelt had confided that “Truman is the right man” to run for vice president. He reluctantly agrees and informs Byrnes that he will be unable to nominate him. What he doesn’t know is that Roosevelt told the current vice president, Henry Wallace, “while I cannot say so in public, but I hope it will be the same old team.”

Truman is not at all surprised when the results of the first round of voting showing that, Henry Wallace, the well-known sitting vice president has a few hundred ballot lead over the little-known Truman, but not enough to clinch the nomination.

But then on the second ballot, there is an unexpected surge from all the state delegations, who suddenly coalesce behind Truman.

Remarkably, the man who did everything he could to run away from the vice presidential nomination, wins it by a landslide with 1031 delegates to 105 – defeating a sitting vice president of the United States.

Veteran Senator Alben Barkley, who had been to 11 conventions said he had never seen anything like this before in politics!

Just nine months later, on April 12, 1945, just as the president’s cardiologist predicted, Franklin Roosevelt dies, and Harry S. Truman becomes President of the United States.

Truman has little experience in foreign affairs and is almost totally dependent on his Secretary of State, Gen. George Marshall, who had played a major role in helping defeat the Nazis.

Marshall vehemently opposes the creation of a Jewish State, arguing such a move would be a major blunder, giving the Soviets – America’s adversary in the emerging Cold War – an edge in the Arab World and their oil. General Marshall backed a UN trusteeship, which would mean the end of any hopes for a Jewish State. Marshall tells Truman, “…if he declared statehood, he would resign as Secretary of State.”

Working diligently with Jewish leaders, Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s longtime partner in the haberdashery business intervenes to sway the president to back statehood. But first, United Nations must be persuaded to vote for the partition of Palestine.

This happens on November 29, 1947, with the UN voting to partition Palestine into two states – one Jewish and one Arab. That Shabbat, the Torah reading in synagogues was Parashat Va’Yishlach which remarkably contain the verse- “Your name shall not be called Jacob but Israel shall be your name!” (Genesis 35:10).

But George Marshall’s State Department remained adamant that US recognition should be avoided. Alerted to developments in Washington, Eddie Jacobson urgently arrives at the White House on Saturday, March 13, 1948, and insists on seeing the President without an appointment. The President’s Chief of Staff warns him not to bring up Palestine.

Once in the Oval Office, Jacobson tells the President that Chaim Weitzman, despite being very ill, came to the US and waited in vain for a meeting, “... but you won’t see him”. Emphasizing the importance of the moment, Jacobson chides Truman, "Just like you have a hero in Andrew Jackson, whose statue you’ve placed in the Oval Office; Chaim Weitzman is my hero."

The president looks up at his longtime partner and responds, “You win you bald-headed SOB. I will see him!”

So, on that Shabbat, the day Jacobson barged into the Oval Office uninvited, once again, another remarkable coincidence, in the weekly Torah reading It was Parshat Terumah, time for Truman to offer his Terumah - “tithe” - for the Jewish people. Indeed, that is just what he did.

Five days later, on March 18, Chaim Weitzman was ushered into the Oval Office and summarizes the situation in a follow-up letter to the President. He writes, “The choice for our people is between statehood and extermination. History and providence have placed this issue in your hands.”

Truman got the message. On April 11, 1948, Eddie Jacobson returns to the Oval Office where the President assures him that if a Jewish State is declared, Truman would recognize it.

So, it was on May 14, 1948, the two soldiers, Harry Truman and Eddie Jacobson, who reunited at the time when the Balfour Declaration was first declared, were now reunited again – chosen by The Almighty as messengers to help make that unforgettable day a reality.

Fortunate are we and our children and grandchildren that we live at a time in history where, with our own eyes, we have seen the fulfillment of this great miracle. Not only have we walked, “on the mountaintops of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem” as our ancestors did before us and as our great grandchildren will do after us. Here, we are not only to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the creation of Israel, but to witness, thanks to President Trump, the opening of the new American Embassy in Jerusalem the eternal capital of the Jewish people forever.

So, you see, Rabbi Yaakov Emden was quite correct in predicting in the 18th Century that the future miracles of the Jewish people would be as astounding as the miracle of the Exodus!

Rabbi Marvin Hier in Washington DC for Historic Announcement

The Simon Wiesenthal Center applauds President Trump for his historic decision for the United States to correct a 69 year-old travesty and finally recognize Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the State of Israel. 

“Every nation in the world has the right to designate its own capital — except for Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. 

“President Trump's decision should inspire leading nations of the world, led by Canada, Germany, Russia, France, China, Japan, and the United Kingdom to follow suit,” he added.

“This historic decision will ultimately serve the cause of peace and reconciliation. Millions of Christians, Jews and Muslims, as well as people of all faiths, have flocked to Jerusalem since 1967, knowing that unlike the years preceding the Six-Day War, everyone's rights to visit and pray are protected. Millions more will now follow,” Hier added.

“Like President Harry Truman’s singular recognition of the State of Israel, President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, will be a seminal moment in Jewish history,” Rabbi Hier concluded.

The Greatest Threat Facing World Jewry, by Rabbi Marvin Hier, Simon Wiesenthal Center

It was this month, 72 years ago in Berlin, in 1945 that Adolf Hitler wrote his final will in which he predicted it would take a few centuries before anti-Semitism would come back. Of course it took a lot less than a few centuries. But even Hitler could not have predicted that in addition to the familiar slogans of Jew hatred, there would be a much more sophisticated kind of anti-Semitism that would be regularly deployed even in the halls of the United Nations – the very international organization created in order to prevent another Holocaust.

To explain, let me first tell you about a remarkable encounter I had with David Ben-Gurion in the summer of 1971 when I was a rabbi in Vancouver and took

a group of teenagers for their first trip to Israel. We had the special privilege to spend nearly an hour with Ben-Gurion who had retired to his kibbutz in S’De Boker. To this day, I shall never forget what he told our group. He said when you go home I want you to thank your parents and grandparents on my behalf for all they are doing for the State of Israel. Tell them that without their help, without the help of Diaspora Jewry, there would be no State of Israel.

But also tell them that there will come a time in the future where world Jewry and the Diaspora will be dependent on the State of Israel. David Ben-Gurion’s prophetic words have now come true. Today, Israel is the super engine that continues to fuel Diaspora Jewry. Sixty thousand high school and university students from North America alone come every year via Birthright to reconnect with their Jewish identity. Thousands study there and millions visit each year.

That is why I believe strongly that the campaign now being waged to delegitimize Israel by UN agencies around the world is potentially the greatest threat facing world Jewry, because Jews in the Diaspora recognize that without an Israel there will be no Diaspora. So how can we explain that of the 135 resolutions adopted by the UN Human Rights Council in the last decade, more than 50% of them have condemned Israel? How is it possible

that of the 97 resolutions introduced in the last four years by the UN General Assembly, 87 of them were against the State of Israel? Can you believe that the Security Council, since 1948, has condemned Israel in 78 resolutions directly attacking Israel – no other nation comes even close.

There is no obsession with Syria where a quarter of a million people have been slaughtered; no 97 resolutions condemning North Korea, which threatens the world with nuclear weapons; nor with Iran, the leading sponsor of terrorism; nor about the destruction and pillage taking place in Iraq, Libya, or Afghanistan. Not even a resolution against Russia’s action in Ukraine, against the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia, no speaking out against Hamas or Hezbollah, the terrorist organizations who seek a war in the Middle East. Yes, only the Jewish State of Israel, the Middle East’s sole democracy, is singled out year after year, insisting that they withdraw to the indefensible June ’67 borders.

The simple fact is that it was the famous Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister of the dovish Labor party, not Menachem Begin, not Ariel Sharon, not Bibi Netanyahu, who warned the world that an Israeli withdrawal to the June ‘67 borders would in fact mean a return to the Auschwitz borders. Eban’s point was that Israel’s Arab neighbors today live in more than 5 million square miles of land, while the tiny State of Israel, including all the West Bank territories it captured in the 1967 War, started by her Arab neighbors, is no more than 11,200 square miles.

Because of this, Great Britain for the first time issued a stern warning to the UN, “The persistence of bias, particularly the disproportionate volume of resolutions against Israel undermines the Council’s credibility as … an objective international human rights body….” That is why it is imperative that the same voices, across the political spectrum, that are always there to confront racism and bigotry, must add their voices and shine a light on this duplicity and double standard.

The same is true of the Jewish community. We must broaden our agenda and

wage the battle against anti-Semitism not only when our cemeteries are being desecrated, but also when see diplomats, year after year, sit around a fancy table in New York and continue to advocate policies that in effect would mean nothing less than shrinking the State of Israel, where seven million of the world’s fourteen million Jews live, into total oblivion. That, too, my friends, must stir our conscience, and that too, must become the cause of freedom loving people everywhere!

Wishing you and your family a happy Passover.

Rabbi Marvin Hier

Founder and Dean

Simon Wiesenthal Center

Rabbi Hier Calls on Obama to ‘Name, Apologize for and Repudiate’ Anonymous Official Who Called Israeli PM Netanyahu ‘Chickenshit’

Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has called on President Barack Obama to “name, apologize for, and repudiate” the anonymous official who was quoted, in an Atlantic Magazine article by Jeffrey Goldberg, describing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a “chickenshit.”

In a telephone call with The Algemeiner from his Los Angeles office, an incensed Rabbi Hier declared: “It is rather ironic that a senior American official is prepared to curse his friends, yet when it comes to the mortal enemies of the United States – as the Iranians discovered during the recent nuclear negotiation – praise is heaped on them.”

Goldberg’s piece extensively quoted an anonymous “senior Obama administration official” who showered Netanyahu with invective, saying, “The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit.” Goldberg then observed: “Over the years, Obama administration officials have described Netanyahu to me as recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous, and ‘Aspergery.’ (These are verbatim descriptions; I keep a running list.)”

The same official is quoted as saying: “The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars. The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states. The only thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat.”

Another senior official, Goldberg wrote, “agreed that Netanyahu is a ‘chickenshit’ on matters related to the comatose peace process, but added that he’s also a ‘coward’ on the issue of Iran’s nuclear threat.”

Commenting on the remarks of this second official, Hier asserted: “He said Netanyahu is a coward for not taking pre-emptive action against Iran, but I suppose this anonymous official who is hiding behind his desk is very brave.”

Asked whether he thought Obama should fire the officials who made these comments, Hier said “that’s up to the president.” However, he added, “a senior American official who doesn’t name himself and then hurls curse words at one of our strongest allies should be repudiated by the president. President Obama needs to make it clear that these officials don’t speak for him. Most of all, an apology is in order: That is not the way a senior American official should speak to the Prime Minister of Israel, that is not the way to conduct foreign policy.”

Hier noted that similar sentiments were not forthcoming from the administration about Qatar, a putative American ally that nevertheless backs Hamas and has allegedly been a conduit for funding the Islamic State terrorist organization. “There are no curse words on or off the record about the emir of Qatar for supporting Hamas and supporting Islamic State,” Hier noted. “The emir of Qatar is being rewarded for supporting Hamas and Islamic State. He is certainly not being treated in the way that Netanyahu is now.”

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Hier’s colleague, told The Algemeiner that this latest blow to American-Israeli bilateral relations sent a worrying signal to the Israeli public that the administration cares little about their concerns. Referring to the upsurge of Palestinian violence in Jerusalem, and the recent incitement by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas against Jews seeking to pray on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Cooper said, “ordinary Israelis don’t understand the absence of their best friend and ally, the United States, on these core issues.”

Israeli officials have also begun reacting to the insults leveled at Netanyahu by Obama’s officials. On his Facebook page, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett stated:

“Israel is stronger than all of its defamers.
“The Prime Minister of Israel is not a private person. He is the leader of the Jewish State and the entire Jewish people. Cursing the prime minister and calling him names is an insult not just to him but to the millions of Israeli citizens and Jews across the globe.
“The leader of Syria who slaughtered 150,000 people was not awarded the name ‘chickenshit.’ Neither was the leader of Saudi Arabia who stones women and homosexuals or the leader of Iran who murders freedom protestors.
“If what appears in the press is true, then it seems that the current US administration is throwing Israel under the bus.
“Israel is the only democratic state in the Middle East and has been fighting 66 years to survive. Israel is at the forefront of the free world’s fight against the Islamic terror of ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran. Instead of attacking Israel and putting it at risk, the world should be strengthening and supporting it.
“I call on the US administration to immediately reject these gross comments.”

Measured by a different yardstick By MARVIN HIER

Wars have been occurring since time immemorial. Sometimes they are a necessary last resort to put down evil regimes and tyrants that want to destroy the civilized world.

The world reaction to the Israeli ground incursion into Gaza again raises the question whether Israel is being judged by an entirely separate standard. It is difficult to imagine the United States, Britain or France not responding to terrorists firing thousands of rockets at New York, London or Paris without treated in a similar manner.
Gone and forgotten are the reasons Israel was forced to call up its military reserves and return to Gaza, the place from which it unilaterally withdrew in 2005.

Nobody remembers that Israel was on the receiving end of a barrage of rockets for weeks without returning fire. All that seems to matter to government pundits and the media around the world is the daily tote of Palestinian civilian casualties. There seems to be a dichotomy between other nations’ wars and wars fought by the State of Israel.

Israel is being accused of war crimes, of waging a war against innocent civilians because there is a double standard in the world when it comes to Israel. It is judged by a different yardstick than other nations. To hear that the UN Human Rights Council is once again preparing to charge Israel with war crimes only emphasizes this hypocritical bias toward a country whose moral and ethical conduct is exemplary.
How many countries at war with terrorists who revere death more than life make telephone calls and distribute leaflets warning all civilians to leave? Rather than just asking, “What would you do if Hamas fired thousands of rockets into your country?” let us examine what Western civilization has done.

Wars have been occurring since time immemorial. Sometimes they are a necessary last resort to put down evil regimes and tyrants that want to destroy the civilized world.
One of the pivotal moments in the history of mankind was the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, an event historian Steven Ambrose called one of the most significant events in the past 500 years. To this day, no American president turns down an invitation to be present at a significant D-Day commemoration. Yet it is indisputable that 11,000 to 19,000 civilians, mainly French men, women and children, were killed in the pre-invasion bombings of the Normandy beaches, and an additional 13,632 to 19,890 were killed when Allied soldiers set foot on the beaches.

Furthermore, Winston Churchill, who played the most decisive role in standing up to Adolf Hitler and defeating the Nazis championed the daytime bombing attacks on Germany. And he is widely regarded as perhaps the greatest leader of WWII, Churchill wrote to US Gen. Jacob Devers on October 11, 1943: “... convey... the thanks of the British War Cabinet for the magnificent achievements of the 8th Air Force in the Battle of Germany... In broad daylight, the crews of your bombers have fought their way through... the length and breadth of Germany, striking with deadly accuracy many of the most important hostile industrial installations and ports... The War Cabinet extend their congratulations...

we shall together... beat the life out of industrial Germany and thus hasten the day of final victory.”

Those daytime attacks caused hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.
Now, look at Hamas’s attacks on Israel. Since 2005, including Operation Cast Lead in December 2008-January 2009 and the latest incursion, Operation Protective Edge, the total death toll of Palestinian civilians over nine years is 2,047.

Of course, any innocent civilian casualty is a tragedy. But my point is, when comparing this with what is happening in the Arab world or Ukraine, does Israel deserve the notoriety and anti-Semitic demonstrations being heaped upon it, or does this not prove beyond any shadow of doubt that Israel is being judged unfairly, by a different standard? Critics like to fault Binyamin Netanyahu because he represents the right-of-center Likud, but I have no doubt that had David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding Labor Party prime minister, been in power at this time and watched the ceasefire being violated and hundreds of rockets fired by Hamas into Israel’s population centers and dozens of terror-tunnels built to launch attacks, he would have responded exactly as did Netanyahu.

In a letter dated March 22, 1956, (pictured above) when Ben-Gurion was prime minister, a week after Israel withdrew from Sinai, he wrote: “There is no one more fearful than I, and I admit it, when it comes to sending the Israel Defense Forces to war.

Every nation must do this, and all the European nations have lost [wars] many times, and nothing happened to them [that is, they did not cease to exist], but for us, [each war] is a question of existence.

Therefore, our wish is for peace with all our neighbors, and the State of Israel is ready, as it was previously, to keep with complete faith all the cease-fire agreements, but this is also the obligation of the other side as well.”

Rather than rush to Jerusalem in search of a cease-fire only when Israel is defending herself from rocket attacks, had all the leaders at the UN, EU and US State Department rushed to prevent Hamas from acquiring 10,000 rockets and building 64 terror-tunnels, there would be no civilian deaths today in Gaza or Israel.

Rabbi Marvin Hier is the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The only solution for the people of Gaza: No more tunnels! No more rockets! And no more Hamas! Watch Rabbi Marvin Hier

SWC founder and dean gave a resounding speach to a packed pro-Israel rally in Los Angeles' Saban Theater, challenging the hypocrisy of the world's leaders: "Why is it only an emergency when Israel finally defends herself and responds to the terrorists?"  … "Lets not distort history and judge Israel by a different standard in an attempt to make her the poster child for collateral damage."

SIGN THE PETITON: Join the 30,000+ who have already called on President Obama to urge Mr. Abbas to drop Hamas from the government or risk losing US funding. If you haven't done so already, please sign the petition today ….

How Many Times Is Enough? By RABBI MARVIN HIER

World leaders are waxing their moral credentials at the terrorists and their constituencies while abandoning their friends with phony band aid solutions.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon make statements to reporters in Cairo Photo: REUTERS

The more I listen to the 'band aid solutions' proposed by some world leaders and diplomats reacting to Israel's incursion into Gaza, the more convinced I am that some of the ideas have been lifted right from the "Wise Men of Chelm."For the third time in a decade Israel was forced to call up tens of thousands of reserves to re-enter Gaza, the place they unilaterally withdrew from in 2005, to again respond to the hundreds of rockets being fired by Hamas' terrorists at their major population centers.No sooner did the operation begin than a chorus of voices combining leaders of the European Union, the Arab World, and editorials in the leading newspapers like theNew York Times began sounding the familiar alarm warning Israel of massive civilian casualties.
Even the United States, England, and France who unequivocally support  Israel's right to defend its citizens against rocket attacks, insist that the Israeli incursion into Gaza must be very limited in scope to avoid civilian collateral damage.
But now is the time to ask the uncomfortable question, even of our friends who support us. Why is there such a double standard when it comes to Israel? Why is it that world leaders never miss an opportunity to set their alarms and ask for a wake up call only when Israel hits back at the Hamas terrorists?
Where were those moral voices and wake up calls when it came to taking steps and adapting measures to prevent Hamas from stockpiling 10,000 rockets?  Why didn't UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon, Secretary of State John Kerry and the Foreign Ministers of the EU rush to Israel to convene a conference on how to tighten the borders and close the tunnels in order to prevent the terrorists from smuggling arms and weapons into Gaza and to demand that no foreign aid ever be dispersed into neighborhoods housing any Hamas military personnel? Why is there never an emergency Security Council meeting on how to excise the malignancy and finally end Hamas' rule of terror in Gaza? Why do they only shuttle to the region to find a way to reign in the defenders and never on how to stop the perpetrators and their funders like Iran and Qatar?
Of course it's horrible to see the images of innocent children killed as a result of the incursion. But whose fault is it, if not the sick Hamas ideology of loving death and martyrdom and deliberately placing children in harms way. Now, once again, they may have taken a missing Israeli soldier hostage who is either dead or still alive to use as a bargaining chip in an attempt to force Israel to again release hundreds of terrorists with blood on their hands.
The legendary town of Chelm is famous in Jewish history for its collection of simpletons whose ideas never came close to solving the problem. Located on a mountaintop, the town faced a terrible dilemma when its citizens began falling off the mountaintop. Responding to the crisis, the city convened its 'Wise Men'  and came up with a 'perfect Chelm solution - they would build a hospital at the bottom of the mountain!
That is precisely what world leaders are again doing in Gaza.  They are waxing their moral credentials at the terrorists and their constituencies while abandoning their friends with phony band aid solutions that they all know can't work while forcing  Israel to relive the same nightmare every few years. No country in the world is subjected to such treatment that only strengthens and props up terrorists and makes greater the price we will all have to pay.
Meanwhile, while the world leaders shuttle to Jerusalem to end the incursion, 40 meters below the ground somewhere in Gaza, the Hamas terrorist leaders, confident as always, are already plotting how many civilian airlines they will be able to bring down when they take delivery of their first SA-11 surface to air missile.

Rabbi Hier is the Founder and Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center

Rabbi Heir to President Obama: Now is the time This fantasy idea that Abbas sold to the State Department and White House is absolutely dead even though it has not yet officially been buried.

Now is the time for President Barack Obama to make that inconvenient call to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and finally deliver the news to him that the United States can no longer support a Palestinian government that includes ministers affiliated with Hamas, the terrorist group now firing hundreds of Iranian missiles at Israel’s major population centers.

As one astute Israeli journalist remarked to me last week from a bomb shelter in Jerusalem, this fantasy idea that Abbas sold to the State Department and White House is absolutely dead even though it has not yet officially been buried.

That the Obama national security team could sign off on an idea that makes the distinction between active Hamas operatives and so-called independently minded “technocrats” is just mind boggling.

Where were these so-called nonpartisan bureaucrats in the new Palestinian unity government when it came to preventing their leaders from again inflicting untold tragedy and suffering upon the citizens of Gaza? This was their opportunity to show the Israelis that the White House was right to support the idea that there are, in fact, non-political voices in Gaza who think differently from the old guard.

But these “technocrats” remained silent. Not one of them seized the moment to part company with the past, and chart a new course by, for example, publicly expressing regret over what happened to the innocent three boys on their way home from yeshiva in Gush Etzion. To take the opportunity to write an editorial or send a brief letter of condolence to each of the parents of the Israeli teenagers so brutally murdered by Hamas, the organization they represent.

Over six hundred Israelis personally visited the tent of the bereaved Palestinian Khdeir family whose 16-year-old son Mohammed Abu was burned alive by Jewish terrorists. Why was there no similar outpouring from Palestinians in the West Bank or letters of sympathy from Gaza residents to the families of Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Fraenkel? If it’s because these “technocrats” are fearful of even making such a symbolic gesture to the Hamas leadership, then how are they ever going to muster the courage to tell their leaders that they must engage in peace talks with Israel? It seems that the only one who has told the truth about Abbas’ unity government was Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Gaza who told the world that “we are leaving the chairs but not leaving the role.”

Now is the time for President Obama and the leadership of EU to recognize there are no real technocrats in Gaza, only “terrorcrats” who either fully support Hamas or are too fearful to ever speak out against them; they are nothing more than impotent enablers, helping to prop up one of the world’s most destructive terrorist groups.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is absolutely right in drawing the conclusion from all this that Israel can never leave the Jordan Valley and place the security of millions of Israeli citizens in the hands of electronic surveillance.

As for the people of Gaza, who overwhelmingly voted to put their fate in the hands of Hamas, they have two choices: either vote Hamas out or forever remain hostage to Hamas’ insanity until the messianic era.

The author is founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Interview with SWC's Rabbi Marvin Hier on the enemy Israel faces today: Hamas terrorists

Published on Jul 10, 2014

"The Jewish people have had many enemies our history. None can compare with the Nazi regime, but even they revered life over death, rather than Hamas terrorists who embrace their culture of death, over life. You cannot have a unity government with these terrorists," Rabbi Marvin Hier, SWC Dean & Founder

TAKE ACTION: Sign the Center's petition to President Obama urging that he withdraw funding for a Palestinian Authority/Hamas Unity Government

Remarks by Rabbi Marvin Hier to French President François Hollande - Élysée Palace

Mr. President;

Thank you for meeting with the delegation of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Thank you for your continued strong support of and friendship with the State of Israel.

This is the Wiesenthal Center’s fourth meeting with a President of France at the Elysee Palace.

I want to take this opportunity to immediately reciprocate your kindness and extend an invitation on behalf of our Board of Trustees to deliver a human rights address at our renowned Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles in the near future.

We meet at a pivotal time in history, when the Jewish community and France’s democratic values are under unprecedented attack by the forces of extremism both from the Far-Right and from extreme Islamist purveyors of religious intolerance, violence and murder.

We appreciated that in immediately aftermath of the murders of a Rabbi and young children on the grounds of a Yeshiva in Toulouse you and then-President Sarkozy suspended your campaigns to come to Toulouse and denounce the savagery. But unfortunately, today, Mohammed Merah along with the French-born murderer of innocents at the Brussels Jewish Museum, are revered by many young Muslims, here in France and around the world.

Why is this so?

Certainly, the Internet plays a role, but we believe the main reason is that religious leadership of the Muslim communities remains part of the problem, not part of the solution.

As Simon Wiesenthal told President Mitterrand in this historic place, “The Nazi Holocaust could never had happened if not for the enablers; the Clergy and teachers who waited in silence and failed to protest when their protests could have made a difference.”

Mr. President, even in this magnificent City, the cradle of human rights,  the world witnessed the price of silence when Jewish citizens were taken from their homes during the Shoah and sent to Drancy and ultimately to their deaths at Auschwitz.

Mr. President, in our time these French-born terrorists, like other terrorists were not born with hate in their hearts. Who are the teachers and enablers of these Jihadists who inspired them to go to Syria, to become apostles of hate and violence?

Where are the ringing condemnations from religious leaders-- of the Jihadist terrorism on the streets of Europe?

In the presence of French, American, Canadian and British Jewish leaders gathered here today, I declare with certainty that if G-d forbid, a terrorist attack was carried out by a Jew against innocent civilians, there would be wall-to-wall public condemnation by every Jewish leader in the world.

No less should be expected from the leaders of the largest Muslim population in Europe.

We eagerly look forward to learning what steps are being undertaken by your government to address this crisis that threatens the viability of the French Jewish Community.

Thank you…

Rabbi Marvin Hier, Hollywood’s Oscar-Winning Rabbi Takes Jewish History to the Stars Hier's office may be the only office in America to contain both a shas and an Oscar. Saul Austerlitz

Since its inception in 1995, Moriah Films, run by executive producer Richard Trank and dean and founder Rabbi Marvin Hier, who in his other job is head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and one of the most prominent Jewish leaders in the United States, has made it its mission to produce a film library devoted to the Jewish experience in the 20th and 21st centuries. “This is a very serious undertaking. It is not an undertaking that is flimsy,” said Hier. “I consider it to be one of the greatest outreach programs of the world Jewish community.”

Hier is head of three organizations: Moriah, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the Museum of Tolerance, which are interrelated but subtly different: The center combats global anti-Semitism; the museum, while concentrating on the Holocaust, also devotes space to other forms of intolerance; and Moriah is solely about the Jewish experience. At the same time that Hier is meeting with the pope, Moriah is promoting a film about the early years of the state of Israel and the Simon Wiesenthal Center is putting out a statement castigating the American interim deal with Iran about their nuclear program. Occasionally this multiplicity of titles creates a sense of confusion, but mostly it just generates fruitful overlap. (“You [just] have to change the yarmulkes,” Hier said of his multiple roles.)

Along the long wall flanking his desk, a bookshelf holds numerous sets of the Talmud and books about the Holocaust with titles like Nazi Gold. On the wall facing him, a glass case contains Hier’s two Academy Awards and a picture of him accepting his award for The Long Way Home from Robert De Niro. Scattered about the room are pictures with Margaret Thatcher, Warren Beatty, Simon Wiesenthal, and Frank Sinatra presenting Genocide alongside Elizabeth Taylor. This may be the only office in America to contain both a shas and an Oscar.

With his gray pinstripe suit, blue tie, rimless glasses, and black velvet kippah, Hier seems more like the well-dressed businessman at your local synagogue than a major Hollywood macher. A movie buff as a young rabbinical student, Hier used to see movies at the Palestine Theater on Clinton Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, preferring Westerns starring Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. He received his rabbinic degree from the Rabbi Jacob Joseph yeshiva and served as a pulpit rabbi in Vancouver, B.C., before heading out to Los Angeles in the late 1970s to start the Simon Wiesenthal Center, named after the famous Nazi hunter, which elbowed aside the Martyrs Memorial Museum, then being put together by local Holocaust survivors.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center was intended to combat global anti-Semitism and included what was then a small museum devoted to the Holocaust. Hier was putting together a permanent exhibit on the Holocaust and was planning to use 13 or 14 slide projectors to display relevant images. Screenwriter Fay Kanin (Teacher’s Pet) came by and saw them at work and had a suggestion: “Why don’t you do a film?”

“He’s like a high-rent, ethical version of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton”

From the very outset, Hier’s Hollywood contacts were influential in establishing a toehold for the Wiesenthal Center and for Moriah, which got off the ground with the assistance of Hollywood insiders like Jeffrey Katzenberg and Ron Meyer; the Kennedy Center premiere of Genocide was chaired by Frank Sinatra. Hier and Moriah have since become significant players in the film industry with their ever-growing slate of documentaries, leaning on a glittering array of stars to help promote their films. Moriah’s latest film, The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers, is no slouch in this department, with an array of A-list stars brought in to provide the voices for Israeli leaders: Michael Douglas does a turn as Yitzhak Rabin, two-time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz is Menachem Begin, and Sandra Bullock plays Golda Meir.

Many of Hier’s encounters with Hollywood have a certain madcap glow, as if the rabbi’s presence is a walking setup and everyone is only too glad to provide the punchline. Hier remembered his first trip to the Academy Awards, for Genocide. “I’ve got an Oscar, and am wearing a yarmulke. Jack Lemmon says to Walter Matthau, ‘Walter, they changed the rules. When you and I went to school to get one of these you had to go to a good acting school. Now you have to go to a good yeshiva!’ ”

Hier’s remarkable success is, in fact, the primary cause of his detractors’ dissatisfaction. “He’s like a high-rent, ethical version of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton,” said Luke Ford, a Los Angeles blogger who covers the Jewish world and has written about Hier. “A fantastic hustler. He knows how to work with the goyim, he’s a master of it, he knows how to do it in a way that brings status to him and to the Jews.” For his part, Hier has heard all the queries and complaints before and often jumps in to answer them—even before they have been asked. “Some of the critics say, ‘Why do you use stars?’ ” he told me. “Well, who should we use? We could say like this: Chaim Bernstein is narrating the first film, Shoshana Feldman is narrating the second film. That won’t go anywhere.”

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Hier’s films may rarely make it to the multiplex—although The Prime Ministers is opening in more than 70 cities across the country—but he talks business like an old-school studio mogul, with one crucial difference. “If you want to send a message, use Western Union,” Samuel Goldwyn once famously said. Hier prefers to use his films to disseminate his message, seeing them as serving as cinematic ambassadors for Jewish history and the Jewish state.

Moriah’s house style can best be described as Jewish Ken Burns, employing dramatic music cues, artfully framed still photographs, and archival footage in the service of straightforward, no-frills storytelling. The birth of Zionism and the foundation of the Jewish state are presented as nothing less than miracles. “It’s an unbelievable story,” Israeli President Shimon Peres gushes at the start of It Is No Dream: The Life of Theodor Herzl. Given the Wiesenthal Center’s roots in fighting prejudice, Moriah’s films also often center around anti-Semitism; Herzl’s burgeoning interest in a Jewish state is grounded in the Dreyfus trial, the Jew-hating Viennese mayor Karl Luger, and anti-Semitic graffiti in the streets.

Hier and director Clint Eastwood, November 2010, in Los Angeles, Calif.(Photo by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)

To promote Hier’s from-the-gutter-to-the-stars narrative of Jewish history, Moriah not only attracts top-flight talent but gets them free of charge. Moriah has never paid its celebrity narrators. Hier mostly demurs from answering the question of why stars like Bullock and Douglas would choose to spend their valuable time narrating documentaries for Moriah. Many performers are themselves Jewish, or have emotional attachments to Jewish causes. Hier somewhat farcically credits Sandra Bullock with taking the role of Golda Meir because her mother and grandmother were public-school teachers, like Meir had been in Milwaukee before immigrating to Palestine. Genocide narrator Elizabeth Taylor, who was married to Jewish film producer Mike Todd, had converted to Judaism. Orson Welles, who narrated Genocidealong with Taylor, thought of himself as part-Jewish. Add to this the perception that doing good works for Jewish organizations might be a career boost in a still-very-Jewish industry, and you end up with wonderful oddities like Dustin Hoffman reciting the words of Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik.

And some observers see Moriah’s appeal as even more directly linked to Hier. “Jews dominate Hollywood, and this guy is an authentic Jew. He’s Orthodox. So, he’s the real deal,” said Ford. “And so if you work for free for him, you’re doing the real thing for the Jews, and you’re enhancing your status in Hollywood. There’s no downside to it. You network with other powerful people in Hollywood, and it’s just win-win-win.” Ford argues that working with Moriah is a means of building one’s Hollywood cachet. “It’s like the opposite of saying anything bad about Jews,” said Ford, who mentions Mel Gibson’s tirades as an example of a career-ending anti-Semitic faux pas. “It shows how cool you are. It’s the ultimate fashion statement. And you’re doing it for someone who’s got a really good brand.”

Down the hall from Hier’s office is a suite of state-of-the-art sound and editing equipment. On the morning I visited in November, a pair of sound editors were working on footage of Hier’s recent meeting with Pope Francis. Trank, who co-produced, directed, and wrote The Prime Ministers, had approached Hier in 1996 with a proposal to update an Avid editing system, jettisoning the time-consuming approach of physically cutting film. The cost was eye-popping—roughly $250,000—but gave Moriah the flexibility to make its films entirely in-house. “Jeffrey Katzenberg and Ron Meyer gave us the advice. They said, if it’s a one-shot deal, then retail is not a bad idea,” said Hier. “If you’re going to do this regularly, you have to set up your own studio. Don’t come to us, because it will be too costly, and it won’t be fair. This way you have your own equipment, your own sound studio, your own Avid and everything. And it’ll be much cheaper.”

Moriah’s documentaries, which typically cost around $1 million each to produce, are paid for through donations from supporters. Trank is the house writer and director, having spent more than three decades working for the Wiesenthal Center and Moriah. He was hired in 1981 after having interviewed Hier and Rabbi Abraham Cooper for a radio show. At first, Trank worked on Holocaust survivors’ oral histories, before branching out to short videos, and eventually to feature-length documentaries. Trank was a producer on the Wiesenthal Center’s second film, Echoes That Remain (1991), and Liberation (1994), which had initially been intended as an exhibit for the Museum of Tolerance. “And then we realized that something like that is a temporary exhibit. You’re investing a huge amount of money. It’s in one place. It would make much more sense to do it as a film. It could have an endless platform,” said Trank.

Hier said he spends most Thursday afternoons with Trank and the Moriah team, looking at footage and discussing potential changes. Speaking to the filmmakers responsible for Hier’s two Oscars, though, provided a different take on his involvement in the artistic process. “We met a little bit at the beginning, but he had very little to do with the film,” said Mark Jonathan Harris, the director of The Long Way Home and currently a filmmaker and distinguished professor at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. “Very little indeed,” said Arnold Schwartzman, the director of Genocide, about Hier’s day-to-day involvement in production. “The rabbi in fact has received two Oscars [for work] which quite frankly, in terms of creative input, is virtually nonexistent.”

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Hier’s best-known film, for which he received one of his Oscars, was Genocide—a project he got creatively involved with when Simon Wiesenthal grew agitated over, of all things, an illustration of Raoul Wallenberg that was set to appear in the film. Wallenberg, Wiesenthal insisted, would never appear with a hat. Hier pleaded with Schwartzman for months to remove Wallenberg’s hat until photographic evidence, brought back by Hier’s colleague Rabbi Abraham Cooper from a Helsinki tribunal on Wallenberg’s mysterious postwar fate, demonstrated incontrovertibly that the Swedish diplomat had, indeed, worn a hat.

The Wallenberg dispute was merely a warmup for the conflict between the director and Hier over credit for Genocide. Hier called Schwartzman and told him that the board had suggested he receive a cowriter’s credit. Schwartzman argued that historian Martin Gilbert had written the bulk of the script, but after Hier convinced Gilbert to share the credit, the director agreed to the change. Later, Hier would also successfully claim a producer’s credit—the one that would enable him to receive an Oscar for the film.

A filmmaker and graphic designer who was a protégé of Saul Bass, Schwartzman gaveGenocide more verve than its successors. This is in no small part due to Welles, whose Charles Foster Kane voice conveys just the right tone of sneering incredulity at the failings of Western governments to prevent the slaughter of the Jews of Europe. Schwartzman treats the screen like a blackboard, covering it with dynamic graphics and panning across still photographs. The breaking glass at a wedding ceremony becomes the breaking glass of Kristallnacht, and a graphic shows a man putting on tefillin made of barbed wire.

“There was no state of Israel then,” Welles offers as part of the explanation for why no other countries extended a helping hand to the Jewish people, underscoring the fundamental point of Moriah’s future films: that the state of Israel is the Jews’ protection against future Holocausts. “No one is responsible?” Welles asks near Genocide’s conclusion, incredulous and appalled. “It just happened? A freak accident along the road of history?” Wiesenthal himself appears in response at the film’s end, placing a slip of paper in the Western Wall that reads, “I AM MY BROTHER’S KEEPER.”

Despite having directed the film, Harris received no Oscar for The Long Way Home. Harris is philosophical about the contretemps, but Schwartzman, who was then chairman of the Academy’s documentary executive committee, changed the rules after The Long Way Hometo ensure that one of the two Oscar recipients for Best Documentary must be the film’s director.

Director of the Museum of Tolerance Liebe Geft, actress Sharon Stone, and Rabbi Marvin Hier in Los Angeles, December 2010.(Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images For PFI)

After the success of The Long Way Home, Harris signed on to make a film for the 50th anniversary of the state of Israel. “I said, if we did a film about this, we have to really try to look honestly at Israel, and the rabbi said, ‘warts and all.’ He agreed. But in the end, they didn’t like the warts,” said Harris. The initial goal for the film, titled A Dream No More, was to avoid the traditional spokesmen for Israel—the politicians and generals—and find unique voices like novelist David Grossman. According to Harris, Hier was nonplussed by the proposed film treatment: “What is this, twenty no-name Jews? Where’s my Paul Newman?”

Hier and Moriah were displeased with the first cut of A Dream No More and wound up firing Harris from the film. Harris chalks up his firing to the uncertain political climate in which his film was made. “It was two years after the assassination of Rabin,” said Harris. “It was a difficult time in Israel. People were still in mourning for Rabin. We tried to do an honest film looking at what Israel had accomplished in 50 years and some of the challenges that remain.” Harris believes that his film would have been entirely uncontroversial in Israel, but that the American dialogue about Israeli politics remains more closed-lipped. Ultimately, Moriah released In Search of Peace instead, covering the period from 1948 to 1967. “There was never a second film. Because the problems started in 1967,” said Harris. “I think they were afraid of alienating [then-prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. That’s my take.”

Harris went on to make another Academy Award-winning film, Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, and bears no ill will toward Hier or Moriah. “I’m grateful for the fact that they hired me to do The Long Way Home. And I’m grateful for the fact, even though A Dream No More was never released, it gave me, personally, a chance to see and experience Israel and meet people I otherwise would never have had the chance to do. I don’t regret that experience at all.”

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Hier believes in film as a method of reaching unaffiliated Jews who otherwise might not be aware of their cultural and historical heritage. Making movies is merely the latest iteration of a millennium’s worth of technological adaptation on the part of Jews in the name of preserving their intellectual treasures. Hier gestures at his Schottenstein edition of the Talmud—handsome burgundy volumes that feature the traditional layout of the Talmud with a matching English translation on the opposite side of the page.

“Now look what happened to the Shas,” said Hier. “It was all in Hebrew and Aramaic, and the message to the Jewish community was, you either know those two languages, we’re happy to produce for you books, if you want to learn the Talmud, but if you’re insisting on English and notes, get lost. [Of course, the Talmud was originally written in Aramaic because it was the English of its day—the vernacular language most Jews spoke.] Then we changed our attitude. What do you mean, get lost? If they get lost, we get lost! So, they better not take that attitude. So, they said, let’s do it in English, with comprehensive notes.”

He went on. “The same thing about film. The Pew Report tells the following story. The good news is, we got, more or less, a million Jews that know they’re members of a shul, they pay their dues. The rest, they’re wandering somewhere. And they begin wandering right after their bar and bas mitzvahs. Who’s going to reach them? We live in a new generation where the Internet and the computer are dominant. Media is dominant. People are watching films. Who’s going to reach them with our story?”

These stories are not intended only for Jews, but for the world’s vast non-Jewish majority. “How can 14 million Jews compete with China? They’ll tell us there are 14 million Chinese people in a village,” said Hier. “We need friends! The reach of Moriah Films, telling our story, which is quite a story, is about trying to make friends.”

It is Hier’s belief that Jews are at peril, always running the risk of being maltreated, exiled, or worse: He conceives of his films as a uniquely flexible tool for advocacy, an analog to, and PR campaign for, world Jewry’s most precious insurance policy—the state of Israel. “One of the most important things that Israel has to do is it has to have friends in the world who’d be willing to understand that there ought to be room on this planet for a Jewish state, because look what happened when there wasn’t any room,” said Hier. “We believe if something ever happened to the state of Israel, God forbid, Diaspora Jewry would be finished.”

Moriah tells the story of the Israeli miracle in order to protect the state’s rights and emphasize its unique role in the formation of the postwar Jewish spirit. “Jews started to walk taller. We didn’t need a chiropractor,” said Hier. Israel “is the chiropractor of the Jewish people.”

Yet other Jewish leaders remain concerned about the particular messages Hier and Moriah choose to emphasize. “The easiest way for Jews to make common cause with others is on the issue of anti-Semitism. And it doesn’t require appearing too Jewish,” said one prominent Jewish leader in Southern California who asked not to be named out of a desire to avoid conflict with Hier and the Wiesenthal Center. “Everybody agrees that we should fight discrimination and that the Holocaust was a catastrophe, a travesty. There’s no demands that are made on you.” The Jewish leader has no qualms with the stories Moriah (and the Wiesenthal Center) tell, only on their “over-emphasis” and “prioritization” over other kinds of Jewish stories. “They’re salesmen, and they’re selling a product,” he said. “He’s selling an angle. And he means it! He believes in it. But he’s selling an angle.”

Hier and Moriah are, fairly or unfairly, viewed as the poster children for what is seen as the Academy’s fixation on Holocaust-themed documentaries. Hier’s second Oscar, for The Long Way Home, came during a stretch between 1995 and 2000 when four of the six Academy Award winners for Best Documentary were about the Holocaust. Hier is unapologetic about his desire to tell the story of the Holocaust, but his affiliation with the Museum of Tolerance notwithstanding, Moriah is interested in more than just the Holocaust, having branched out in recent years to make films about Herzl, Winston Churchill, the fate of survivors in the years before Israel’s establishment, and the early years of the state of Israel. Some topics seem a strange fit with Moriah’s stated mission; what particular connection with Jewish history does Walking With Destiny, a hagiographic account of Churchill’s World War II years, have?

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Moriah’s latest cinematic effort extends and continues its recurring interest in Israel-themed films. After two decades and two Oscars, Moriah is an established brand in the world of documentary film, its stories professionally and efficiently told. The Prime Ministers fits snugly with Moriah’s earlier films, its Zionist triumphalism emphasizing Israel’s successes and downplaying its missteps. Adapting Yehuda Avner’s memoir, the film expects its audience to be familiar with the rough outline of Israel’s first two decades, preferring to offer a handpicked selection of anecdotes involving the country’s first prime ministers, from David Ben-Gurion to Golda Meir.

Its time frame is notably similar to an earlier Moriah film, In Search of Peace, which similarly touches on controversial topics, but only gently. The credits indicate that In Search, which covers the years 1948 to 1967, would be the first of two films, but no sequel ever emerged. In Search does discuss the forced Palestinian exodus during the war of 1948, quoting a shopkeeper in Jerusalem’s Greek Colony who fled, convinced that “next week, or 10 days’ time, we are going back to our houses.” We hear a Palestinian girl’s eyewitness testimony from the massacre at Deir Yassin and Ashkenazi chief rabbi Yitzhak Herzog’s issuance of herem (excommunication) for those responsible for the massacre.

The bulk of the film, though, is a hopscotch through the first two decades of Israeli history with an emphasis on the triumphant. Certain topics, like Golda Meir’s travels abroad and the fierce fight over accepting reparations from Germany, recur here and in The Prime Ministers. Moriah prefers triumph and uplift to nuance and controversy; In Search of Peaceends with the Six Day War and the return of the Old City to Israeli sovereignty, only lightly touching on the occupation that ensued.

Producer Rabbi Marvin Hier, Oscar winner Sandra Bullock as the voice of Prime Minister Golda Meir, and Director/Producer Richard Trank. (Moriah Films)

Hier received a copy of The Prime Ministers from a board member and was struck by it. He passed it along to Trank, who was also impressed. Hier asked his son Avi, who lives in Israel, to call Avner and express their interest. “He said, ‘Yehuda, you never told us about this!’ ” said Hier. “He put me on the phone; I said, ‘Yehuda, we’d like to do the film.’ He couldn’t believe it, that we were interested. He said, ‘Nobody called me!’ ” Moriah ended up beating out a number of other suitors for the rights to The Prime Ministers and called on Avner to narrate the film adaptation of his book. “I was nervous because I didn’t know what he’d be like on camera,” said Trank. “As soon as we sat down, I knew.”

Adapting Avner’s book has turned into Moriah’s most complex project yet. Avner’s 700-page book, chock-full of personal anecdotes about Israeli leaders the author had known, offered a wealth of material. Trank began editing together a rough cut and showing it to Hier at their weekly meetings. “Every week we were watching, cutting, rabbi’s very happy, my editor’s very happy, I’m very happy,” remembered Trank, “and we get to a certain point where an hour and 35, hour 40 minutes into the movie—” “According to the book, we’re only on page 148,” Hier said with a chuckle. “At this point, we’ll be on The Prime Ministers for five years!” Hier and Trank conferred and ultimately decided to split the book into two separate films, with the first, subtitled The Pioneers, concluding shortly after the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

Much like In Search of Peace, The Prime Ministers mostly bypasses the more complex or traumatic aspects of Israeli history in favor of an uplifting, if occasionally bittersweet, story of triumph. The Prime Ministers ends on a downbeat note, with Meir’s resignation after the Yom Kippur War, but leaves the strong impression of an unbroken chain of forward-thinking and fundamentally decent Israeli leaders.

The Israeli occupation of the West Bank, mostly absent from In Search of Peace and The Prime Ministers, is more present, yet still underplayed, in Trank’s finely wrought short documentary Beautiful Music. The film follows a blind, autistic Palestinian woman named Raja, raised by Christian missionaries on the West Bank, who flourishes under the care of an Israeli piano teacher named Devorah Schramm living in nearby Gilo. Raja, who cannot speak, discovers music as a lifeline. The film takes a darker turn when the second intifada, in 2000, keeps Raja from making the journey from Beit Jala to Schramm’s home in Gilo. Will Raja be able to make it to her piano recital? Beautiful Music is tender and touching, with Schramm concluding by saying that “if we look deeply at another person, we see another person. When we look at headlines, we see generalities. All of us need to look at people.”

Hier’s often-expressed hawkishness—Tom Segev refers to the Wiesenthal Center’s “neoconservative, universalist worldview” in his biography of Wiesenthal—undoubtedly colors some of Moriah’s films and their approach to recent Middle Eastern history. The Prime Ministers is a look at Israeli history that only lightly engages with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Trank said that the second installation will take up the subject, but one wonders whether Hier views Moriah as another form of advocacy for his own constricted version of history.

Hier sees his political ideology as a product of the teachings of Rabbi Soloveitchik. The Rav argued that “every Jew should be in the entrance of his tent,” engaged with the world and contributing to mankind, and Hier is the embodiment of that belief—perhaps to a fault. He is in the entrance of his tent, inviting the world in, and sometimes his voice may drown out other, potentially dissenting voices. “I think people look and they’re very proud,” Trank said of Hier’s image in the Southern California Jewish community. “I’ve been on planes with Rabbi Hier where a non-Jewish flight attendant is like, ‘You’re Rabbi Hier!’ A lot of that has to do with what we’ve done in the entertainment world.”