Our correspondent has met a number of people better informed about this event than most. He has managed to put a number of questions to Rabbi Meir Dayan who performed the ceremony. He told us that the Pulsa de-Nura is imposed in exceptional cases on individuals who represent a threat to the integrity of the Torah and can be used only against Jews.
Accordingly, myths that Jewish sages used the curse against Hitler are entirely without foundation. As far as he is aware, in the twentieth century the Pulsa de-Nura has been used only twice, against Trotsky and against Yitzhak Rabin.
As regards Yitzhak Rabin, there is at least a certain logic there. As regards Trotsky, the explanation given by the participants in the ritual appears totally absurd: they held that Trotsky had caused great harm to the whole Jewish people by replacing veneration of the Torah with veneration of an idol, which in his case was social revolution.
A present-day Jewish authority, Rabbi Eliayahu Luriye, the descendant of a great rabbi and kabbalist, has stated categorically and succinctly that if this ritual really was performed, then it was at the hands of semiliterate activists. While the public is still heatedly discussing whether the villainous murder of the Prime Minister was linked to this ancient curse or whether the two events were unconnected, reports have come in of a further nocturnal gathering at Rosh Pina Cemetery. Once again a group of bearded Jews dressed in black, and one dressed in white who performed the ceremony, gathered at the grave of Ben-Yosef.
The cemetery watchman, an involuntary witness of the secret assembly, reported it to his superiors but asked not to be named if the information became public. Although he was in the immediate vicinity of the ceremony, he also declined to reveal the name of the person cursed. The registration number of the minibus in which the nocturnal visitors to Rosh Pina departed was noted while it was in the car park. Our correspondent, Adik Shapiro, has with great ingenuity established that the vehicle is registered in Hebron and that its owner is the notorious extremist settler, implicated in the Baruch Goldstein case, Gershon Shimes.
The Kabbalists pictured this curse as a blow with a fiery spear threaded with rings of fire.
The question now is, who is next in line to be struck this “fiery blow”?
18. 1996, Haifa
F
ROM A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
H
ILDA AND
E
WA
M
ANUKYAN
“On the way back we stopped at Mount Tabor and Daniel conducted prayers there. Everybody was already tired and I thought it was unnecessary. He performed a short prayer service and at the end he said, ‘Look at each other! See what ordinary faces we have, not all beautiful, not all young, some even quite indifferent. Then imagine the moment which will come when we shall all have faces radiant with God’s beauty, such as the Lord intended. Look at little Simeon, we shall all be as innocent and beautiful as babes, and perhaps even more so.’
“Nikolai, the father of baby Simeon, who had also been christened that day, kept pestering Daniel the whole journey with theological questions, about the Fall and Original Sin. I didn’t understand all of it, because they spoke in Russian some of the time. I only saw that Daniel was constantly trying to talk to him about the Holy Theophany, the Transfiguration, and was wreathed in smiles, while the other, a dreary individual, was only interested in Original Sin and hell. I know for a fact that Daniel does not believe in hell. He shrugs and says, ‘Christ is risen? What room does that leave for hell? Don’t create one for yourself, and there will be no hell.’
“That night, however, a dreadful evil befell us.”
June 2006
L
ETTER FROM
L
UDMILA
U
LITSKAYA TO
E
LENA
K
OSTIOUKOVITCH
Dear Lyalya,
With God’s help I am coming to the end of this story. It began in August 1992 when Daniel Rufeisen came to my home. I don’t remember whether I told you about this. He was passing through Moscow on his way to Minsk. He sat in a chair, his sandaled feet barely reaching the floor. He was very friendly and very ordinary, but at the same time I could feel something happening. Either the roof had been removed or there was a fireball under the ceiling. I realized afterward that this was a man who lived in the presence of God, and that the presence was so powerful that other people could feel it, too.
We ate, drank, and talked. People asked him questions and he replied. Happily somebody turned on a dictaphone and I was able to replay the whole conversation afterward. Parts of it have been used in this book. Altogether I have used quite a lot of information taken from books written about him: In the Lion’s Den by the American professor Nechama Tec, Daniel Oswald Rufeisen, der Mann aus der Löwengrube by Dieter Corbach, and some others. Everything that has been written about him seemed to me far less than he deserved. I tried myself to write about him, went to Israel after his death, met his brother and many of the people around him. As you know, that came to nothing.
In those years I bore many grudges, not just against the Church so much as against the Lord God himself. All the revelations I had so cherished seemed suddenly dull, grimy rags. Everything about Christianity seemed airless and nauseating.
You atheists have an easier time of it. You measure everything only against your own conscience. In your Catholic Italy the Church is always victorious. In the West the Church is deeply embedded in your culture, while in Russia it is deeply embedded in our lack of culture. How bizarre that cultured Italian atheists like Umberto Eco and a dozen or two others, and you, too, the epitome of Italian womanhood, disdain contemporary Catholicism while remaining fully aware that if it were to be taken away from your amazing culture, there would be nothing left. In Russia the Church’s links with culture are much weaker; its links with primitive paganism are far stronger. At this point every anthropologist in the world will turn against me for deprecating the pagan world, but it would still be interesting, using that principle of subtraction, to see what would be left of Christianity in Russia if we took the paganism away.
Poor Christianity! It can be only poor. Any victorious Church, whether of the West or the East, totally rejects Christ. That is an inescapable fact. Would the Son of Man in his worn sandals and poor raiment accept into his circle that Byzantine pack of greedy and cynical hangers-on at court who today comprise the Church establishment? After all, even an honest Pharisee he viewed with suspicion! And what need do they have of him as they anathematize and excommunicate each other, denouncing erroneous professions of faith. Throughout his life, Daniel moved toward one simple idea: believe whatever you please, that is your private affair, but observe the ten commandments and behave with dignity. Incidentally, in order to do that you don’t even need to be a Christian. You can believe in nothing, you can be a hopeless agnostic or a materialistic atheist. Daniel’s choice, however, was Jesus and he believed that Jesus opens hearts and that people are freed by Him from hatred and malice.
During the Soviet period, the Church in Russia got out of the habit of being victorious. It found that being persecuted and humiliated suited it better. Now see what has happened. With the change of regime our Church has rolled over and started purring to the state. “Love us and we will love you. Let’s thieve together and share the spoils!” The Church community has accepted that arrangement jubilantly. It filled me with revulsion. If only you knew what amazing Christians I met when I was young, men and women of a departed generation, people who returned from emigration and had never been infected by the Soviet corruption: Father Andrey Sergiyenko, Elena Vedernikova, Maria Mikhailovna Muravyova, Nina Bruni. Of the people who stayed in Russia there were all those old ladies who remained steadfast: another Maria Mikhailovna with the unaristocratic surname of Kukushkina, who looked after Alyosha and Petya when they were little while I was celebrating my love in Andrey’s studio; our lift attendant Anastasia Vasilieva, who gave us her touching pictures of cockerels and dogs. And indeed, Father Alexander Men, Father Sergiy Zheludkov, Anatoliy Emmanuilovich Krasnov-Levitin, the Vedernikovs. For me those people were the Church.