16/4/97

Antarctica is ours

   If the anti-Semites are right and we’re bent on world domination, we’ll do it the Jewish way: from the bottom up. So it comes as good news that we’ve conquered the south.
    Antarctica is ours.
    One of the few continents with more penguins than Jews, Antarctica may not be the land God bequeathed His Chosen People, but He didn’t say we couldn’t live there either.
    Former Lubavitcher David Hornstein didn’t go to the nether land to missionize among the natives, because there aren’t any. Hornstein, originally from Melbourne, took his Yiddishe neshama and his scientific expertise and went forth unto Scott Base, where he lived for a year.
    He had no problem deciding which shul not to attend. He could scrape together just enough souls for a minyan – except that the other nine humans with him were gentiles, and two of those were women.
    It’s not easy being a Jew.
    Keeping Shabbat was a quandary, because in the summer, the sun never sets. He consulted his mentor, Rabbi Kazen, a New York Lubavitcher, who instructed him to follow New Zealand time. “You can perform any [religious] task with the goodwill and tolerance of others,” Hornstein said with what seemed like enthusiasm, but it was hard to tell because we conducted the interview in cyberspace. “Scott Base even allowed me to put a mezuza on the door.”
    Every holiday was another challenging adventure. “I wanted to celebrate Pessah with a traditional Orthodox seder. On the resupply plane, I got matza and kosher wine, and a Haggada.” Together with his nine gentile seder guests, he held the most southerly seder in history. They went all the way through the proceedings, reading and interpreting the entire Haggada and feasting on chicken, chopped liver, matza ball soup and helzel.  
    “We even opened the door for Eliyahu, but poor Eliyahu had to battle minus 26 degrees and a snowstorm to get in. It was interesting that when the door opened, a white mist wafted in. A bit of Yiddishkeit for the Antarctic.”
    Don’t think Hornstein didn’t come across any other Jews on The Ice, as the region is known. “Sure, I met Nat Polish from New York studying penguins, David Lippman from the US Navy, Vicky Kraus from Denver, Eric Milstein, a C-130 Hercules navigator; we all celebrated Hanukka together.”
    Succot was especially bizarre: eating a meal in a hut in remembrance of desert wanderers is unnerving when the soup freezes solid before you can dip a spoon in. “Anything containing large proportions of water freezes fast at 35 below. Pickles are out. But dried fruit and salmon patties won’t freeze to the inside of your mouth.”
    Hornstein built his succa low-rise – “so it shouldn’t be blown away by the Katabatic winds” – out of the only wood available to him, imported bamboo. Not traditional, but perfectly halachic, and more important, in the right spirit.  
    Like anywhere else, here too a succa attracts neighbors, so Hornstein had to make it penguin-proof.
    Hornstein, 37, left his family behind in New Zealand to work on The Ice. What did he do there? Hard to say; you can never get a straight answer from a scientist: “I ran ozone monitoring equipment such as spectrophometers, spectrometers, magnetometers, radar, three seismic stations and thermistor arrays.”
    Uh-huh.
    Then there are the maintenance tasks, such as “digging out the snow from in front of the freezers.”
    Freezers? On The Ice?!
    “Yeah, we use freezers to keep food warm.”
    Hard to know when he’s kidding.
    It gets cold and it gets c-c-c-c-cold. Thermal gatkes can be the difference between life and death when the wind-chill factor gets as low as 70 below, but sometimes it does get positively balmy: “At one stage in the summer it was slightly edging above zero.”
    Maybe only one Jew in a million will feel the way Hornstein does about The Ice, but he does not see this land as God-forsaken – with a capital G. “It has the most awe-inspiring, pristine views of the wonders of Hashem. How else can you describe perfection and complete and utter desolation?”
    He’s now back with the family, thawing out in Christchurch. He dreams of going back to The Ice someday, but for now, he’ll take any reasonable job that comes his way.
    “I’m unemployed but I have plenty of experience,” he says. “Is there a need in Israel for a Jewish polar explorer?”