It’s a masterpiece.
A majestic celebration of stone, glass, and wood lynch-pinned by a pillar of skylight surrounded by six levels of vast, concentric bookshelves – the new National Library of Israel is a monument to three millennia of Jewish creation, conviction, and hope.
It is also a monument to one self-made man’s unusual welding of financial leadership and cultural vision, and to his life’s tragic end this week, as the victim of a merciless political age.
His name was David Blumberg.
BORN IN 1944 to a blue-collar worker at Haifa Port, David went to work, as a messenger boy, when everyone else went to high school. But that was during the day. In the evenings, he went to night school. It was the beginning of a journey to the financial sector’s highest peaks.
What started with an economics degree at the Hebrew University and an entry-level position at the Bank of Israel, eventually produced, successively, the CEO of Israel’s fourth largest bank, UMB, and the two largest mortgage banks, Tefahot and Bank of Jerusalem.
Blumberg left banking, became national library chair
Illustrious though all this was, at 63, Blumberg made a sharp career change, leaving banking and entering the National Library of Israel as chairman of its board. A 20-year second career thus began, a career that would blend cultural vision, managerial leadership, and epochal demise.
OPENED IN 1892 with fewer than 10,000 books, the library that today stores four million books in addition to thousands of periodicals, manuscripts, films, records and computerized files, spent most of its years in Hebrew University’s Givat Ram campus. Anyone who worked there realized it was “national” mostly by name.
Yes, it contained every book ever published in Israel and was home to national treasures, from the papers of Albert Einstein, S.Y. Agnon, and Franz Kafka, to the 1,100-year-old Torah scroll of the Aleppo Codex, the first printed Talmud, and texts from the works of Moses Maimonides in his own handwriting.
Even so, the nation itself was removed from the library, and many didn’t even know it existed. That was the first thing Blumberg resolved to change. Short and bespectacled, but authoritative and full of energy, he turned the library into a cultural center. Concerts, movies and popular lectures, previously rare between its austere reading halls, became routine and drew large audiences. Yet Blumberg knew this treatment was symptomatic.
The library’s location, at the rear of an academic campus, was unworkable. To be counted in one breath with the British Library, the Library of Congress, or the Bibliothèque nationale de France, their Israeli version must be built from scratch, elsewhere, he argued.
“I said the library must be at a place where everyone will see it,” he told me repeatedly in several conversations we had in his last months. In fact, he said, the library should be extracted from the Hebrew University not only physically, but also institutionally. Only this way would it transform from an academic enclave to a national landmark.
And the location should not be merely central. It should be symbolic, smack between the Knesset and the Israel Museum, where it indeed emerged. “I wanted anyone visiting Israel to be taken to the National Library straight from their visit to Yad Vashem,” he said. “This way, after seeing what the world did to the Jews, they would see what the Jews did to the world.”
And so, after long years of intense work involving legislation, budgeting, architecture and landscaping, the project took off. And then, with the new building’s skeleton long complete and its inauguration steadily approaching, calamity struck.
Blumberg, a Channel 13 scoop said, had paid hush money to an employee so she won’t publicize a sexual harassment complaint she threatened to file against him. Days later, saying “I am too old and tired to fight this one,” Blumberg resigned.
“LIKE MOSES on Mount Nebo,” he told me three weeks ago in his house, incidentally three houses away from where I went to kindergarten. I found a wreck.
His nostrils attached to an oxygen concentrator’s nasal tubes, David had to pause between sentences to inhale air. Like Moses at the doorstep of the Promise Land, he meant that his great project was inaugurated in his conspicuous absence.
We had only a superficial acquaintance, but David had read one of my books and wanted to discuss it. He had no ulterior motive. He knew his days were numbered. He just liked reading books and talking to their writers. “Ever hear of Zemach Atlas?” he asked, referring to the hero of Chaim Grade’s novel by that name, about Lithuania’s yeshivas and the Musar (ethics) movement’s ascetics. “I wanted everyone to read such books,” he said.
Several weeks earlier, driving him to a meeting with a circle of his friends, and then pushing him in his wheelchair from the car to the event, I felt in all its cruelty what fall from grace meant. I have no idea what happened with that anonymous woman other than that David was known to be a tough boss, and evidently had hurt that employee, though one has to wonder how a document that is all about non-publication ends up publicized, and in turn for what.
The question is why such a dusty fait accompli was suddenly retrieved, and how it became major political news despite having happened in such a non-political setting. And the answer is that Blumberg hired, as the library’s rector, Shai Nitzan, the former state attorney who decided to indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Chances that Netanyahu was personally involved in Blumberg’s liquidation are low. His right-hand man, Ron Dermer, was David’s beloved son-in-law. Netanyahu’s blind followers, however, don’t need their idol’s instructions in order to serve him. Like the Molech’s worshipers, they stare at their metallic god’s poker face, gilded arms and blazing palms, and push their sacrifice into its flames.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.