Tag #129748 - Interview #78111 (Aristide Streja)

I held conferences on religion at the Community [Ed. note: Various conferences are organized periodically in the conference hall of the Jewish Community in Bucharest, on Popa Soare St.], and I wrote about it. There are many controversies nowadays. The notion of Jew itself is very controversial. Some think that being a Jew means sharing the Mosaic or Judaic faith; others believe that one has to have a Jewish mother in order to be a Jew, like the Israeli law states; others, like some rabbis in the US, believe that being a Jew is something else: it means sympathizing with the Judaic tradition, the Judaic common history, and the position of being Jewish. They believe people are not born Jews - they become Jews. They do it by assuming the position of being a Jew, that is the tradition. There is a Judaic tradition, a historical sense of belonging, a Judaic culture. Assuming these Judaic values means being a Jew and being acknowledged as such. This is what really matters. For instance, [Nicolae] Cajal [12] said that Chanukkah is a holiday that also celebrates the heroism of those Jews who resisted the attack of the Syrian troops, so it's a national holiday, a holiday of the liberation. Of course, we celebrate God's miracle which kept a candle burning for a week. It is a religious holiday, but it is also a national, heroic holiday. It has a range of meanings that have nothing to do with the mystical, purely religious holiday. This is true for all the Judaic holidays; they don't have a mystical meaning exclusively, they also have a lay meaning.