DISCRIMINATION IN ISRAEL

Following are modified excerpts from an article published in Ha'arets by Ada Ushpiz (June 8 2001) and giving something of an insight into the impact of discrimination in the country. These are the tendencies that will ultimately lead to an internal crisis among the populace:

THE HORROR OF THAT NIGHT

The families and friends of some of the teenage victims of the bombing at a Tel Aviv were forced to deal not only with the loss of their loved ones, but with religious discrimination in death, in a culture in which they remain and seemingly choose to remain strangers.

"I'm the girl's mother," said Tatiana Madbaneko, hastening to offer a pleasant greeting to the journalists knocking on her door a few hours after her daughter's funeral (16 year old Mariana), one of the 20 recently killed in the bombing at the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv.

"I am not Jewish," she says, laying her cards on the table, "but in Israel, I feel Jewish. I thank the State for the immigrant benefits I got, I thank all the people who have helped us. Everything worked out without any problems, the funeral, everything, everyone helped, the municipality, everyone."

Like most victims of the attack, the Madbaneko family arrived with the latest waves of immigration. They live in a small rented apartment in Yad Eliyahu in an Amidar housing project with the graying walls that have come to symbolise the poor neighborhoods of the development towns and the outskirts of the cities. They came from the frozen expanses of northern Russia. The father was a firefighter in the snowy forests of Novo-Sibirsk. In order to keep his job, the father had to change his Jewish name, Blitz-Blau, to Madbaneko. He suffered back problems. The crumbling of Soviet society mainly endangered the children, who were likely to be exposed to alcoholism, drugs and youth gangs. Israel looked to him like an unexpected way out, a hope for a better future for his four children. But the Israeli reality quickly slapped him in the face.

"It was hard for him, he collapsed," contributed a neighbor. The father is now unemployed, living off National Insurance Institute payments and fighting to increase the disability percentage he was given. At first, he found work washing dishes at restaurants. "We aren't complaining. In Russia there were periods when we didn't get paid for half a year and we learned to live off of nothing.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's face on the television screen shook the father out of his torpor. "Where is Sharon?" he shouted, shaking, climbing with difficulty onto the sofa. "Where is he? I want him to look me in the eye. What does he have to say to me? My daughter was only 16." Viktor's voice broke. "She hadn't even been kissed by a boy."

As in other stories of that terrible night, the sound of the explosion at the discotheque on the beach was heard in Tatiana's apartment. She did not imagine that anything having to do with her daughter had happened. Father was sitting on a bench outside the apartment with his nephew, Mark Musganov, 20, and some of his friends. They joked that maybe the Cinerama discotheque near their neighborhood had blown up.

Phone calls from alarmed friends began to come in on Friday night, asking about Marian. They had already broadcast the news of the explosion in the discotheque at the Dolphinarium. The father knew that his daughter had gone to this discotheque. He did not allow his daughter Sofia, 14, to join her. This was the second time in her life that Mariana had gone to a discotheque. She had wanted to stay home and study, as was her wont, but her friends persuaded her to go out and "let go a bit" before an important exam on Sunday.

LOOKING FOR MARIANA

Thus began a series of endless treks around the hospitals and then to the forensic institute, hoping against hope that Mariana was alive. Calls to Mariana's cellular phone went unanswered. Her father broke down. "Tore out his hair," related Mark. "Didn't know what to do with himself, was in shock from the uncertainty. It was terrible. He kept saying: 'I should have known that such things happen, I shouldn't have let her go.' They took me in to see the body. It wasn't Mariana, lying there with her face exposed and two drops of blood on her forehead."

They waited for hours. Then Mariana was identified among the dead. Mark and Viktor identified her first. The father sat down and repeated several times: "This is my daughter."

What the mother was repressing, the cousin Mark and Maria Nuserev, 17, a girlfriend of one of Mariana's relatives, expressed. As immigrants, they have experienced alienation from Israeli society: The routine tirade of curses at school heard by nearly every immigrant student from the CIS - "stinking Russian," "dirty pig" and the like - is only the more obvious aspect of the new-found reality in the Jewish homeland. They have endless stories of taunts and fistfights. The desperate desire to be accepted, to fit in, is also perhaps part of Tatiana's silence.

But in addition to being immigrants from Russia, their Jewishness is "in doubt" so Mariana's parents are forced into hopeless shadowboxing with a society that is practised in "hating gentiles." They so much want to find a way to the heart of this society, with all its prejudices. "Every immigration has its own key experience. This attack, this is our absorption," said Mark with conviction, a kind of initiation rite into the Israeli reality in which the "sub-myths" are bathed in blood, land and bereavement, and where your "Israeliness" is measured by the number of wars in which you have participated.

BURIED OUTSIDE THE FENCE

The blow landed on the Madbaneko family and on two other families who discovered that the bodies of their loved ones were segregated at burial from the other victims as "doubtfully Jewish" - even before they had begun to understand that their daughters had been killed. They wanted to bury their children with the others who had shared their fates. Mariana was to have been buried with her friend, Anya, who was standing beside her when the explosion occurred in the line for the discotheque, but then they were reminded, with full commiseration on their loss, that Anya had been Jewish while Mariana's status was "doubtful".

Before the burial society had released itself from the coils of "the sanctity of the Sabbath," someone from the municipality had already phoned them and suggested that the family bury Mariana at a Kibbutz. A short time passed before aides to MK Landver, who is chair of the Association of Immigrants from Russia, drew their attention to the fact that the kibbutz was demanding payment, and proposed instead the idea of burial at Kibbutz Givat Brenner, with which the association has cultural ties.

When the Sabbath was over, MK Yuri Stern informed them of the "generous" offer - as it was insensitively and haughtily defined by MK Avraham Ravitz (United Torah Judaism) - to bury them in "the doubtful section" at the Yarkon Cemetery. This was a rather creative solution that had been cooked up especially for the privileged victims of "the despicable murderous attack," the result of heavy pressure on the burial society by government ministers, including the prime minister himself.

Stunned and finding it difficult to grasp the nature of the offers being made, the Madbeneko and Skian families chose to go to Givat Brenner. At the secular burial given there to their daughters, they could give expression to Russian folk customs practiced at Jewish and Christian burials, and inter their daughters next to the graves of other Jews, with no discrimination.

"I'm not insulted, everything is fine," Tatiana soothed Alex. "Only all the phone calls and the bother were a bit annoying, but everything is fine. Listen, at Givat Brenner she is together with Russians, and that's good. Please write that I thank everyone who came, that they pulled down the sheet and let me say farewell to the girl, to see her. For Russians this is most precious - to see her, to dress her in a bridal gown, with bracelets and a wreath of flowers on her forehead. Everything's fine."

Liana Skian, 15, who was born in the Ukraine, was buried with her teddy bear.

IRENA WAS JUST 17

Grigory and Raissa Nafmaniashtsy - he is Jewish, she is Christian - did not want to bury Irena, 17, in a coffin. The father in particular craved a religious Jewish burial. When Yuri Stern proposed to Irena's uncle, Alex Nafmaniashtsy, that she be buried at the Yarkon Cemetery "like everyone else," they were pleased.

Justice Minsiter Meir Shitreet personally promised Alex that "everything was arranged," and that they would not bury her "beyond the fence." The family suspected nothing. It was only natural and obvious to them that the horrible murder of their daughter opened the entry gates for her to the Jewish community.

The unbearable pain glistens in the mother's eyes. Stuffed toy bears and Dalmatian dogs stood on the desk in Irena's room just where she had put them. The father, with a mustache and a red face, a black skullcap on his head, stroked the photograph of the grave in one of the newspapers. He is a television technician by profession, and now works at an electrical appliance plant in Holon. The mother works as a saleswoman. That night, she did not know that her daughter had gone to the discotheque, nor was she watching television.

They also found it hard to identify Irena at the forensic institute until her mother came and added details like birthmarks, a bracelet, a watch, nail polish. Pavel went in with his mother to identify the body. The father waited outside in a state of collapse, weeping "Oy, I saw that it was she and I didn't believe it. I had to see the birthmark behind her ear," wailed the mother. Immediately after that, she collapsed into the arms of the social workers who surrounded her.

We could have immigrated to Germany and we chose our homeland, the land of the Jews. We felt ourselves to be Jewish. I hope that this attack will make it clear that there is no difference between us and them."

This is what Pavel felt before he discovered in the newspaper that indeed his sister had been buried, contrary to all the promises, in "the doubtful section" of the Yarkon Cemetery, surrounded by bushes that separate both from the section of unmarked graves and the section of the "Community of Israel." Pavel gazed helplessly at the newspaper, silent.

"I have no words," he mumbled. "What nerve. I knew there was a special place, but not of 'doubtful Jews.' I thought it was a special place for all the people who were killed in the attack. What a screwed-up state," he muttered despite himself. "I don't understand it. There's a kind of wall that you can't break through, something that doesn't make sense, some kind of monopoly of power. To call us 'gentiles,' when a disaster like this happens, it's just insensitivity."

"Oy, my daughter is all alone," wailed the mother. "What, she isn't with soldiers? They said she was together with soldiers."

"The Justice Minister promised us personally," repeated the uncle, Alex.

"Who could have believed it?"

It cannot be ignored that religious rejection like this - in a society where religion has a monopoly on every area of life - is like general, insufferable and wicked exclusion. Irena's mother could not be comforted. She felt they had injured her very soul, interfered crudely with her daughter's portion in the next world. Only the father managed to gather his last bit of strength to repel the new pain that had descended on his wife and son.

Israel has failed to create a truly humane society, where people are respected merely for their humanity. The inevitable tensions between seeking to be a Jewish society and the concerns for dignity and equal opportunity for all citizens threaten to cast Israeli society into turmoil.