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Pain is a Reality; Suffering is a Choice.May 22, 2022 | by Rabbi Asher ResnickFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

My grappling with God in the aftermath of my daughter’s sickness and subsequent passing at age 14.

In January, 1990, we received the devastating news that our oldest daughter, Rivka, just over two years old at the time, had leukemia, a cancer of the blood system.

Within the first week of her diagnosis, we were given a very optimistic prognosis: 85–90 percent likelihood for a complete recovery.

Initially, everything seemed to go according to plan, as Rivka went into remission right away. Following 26 months of chemotherapy, mostly on an outpatient basis, we were very hopeful that as the years went on, our daughter’s leukemia would become a thing of the past. She remained in remission and off-treatment for seven additional years, during which time we returned to live in Israel.

Tragically, the nightmare that every parent of a cancer survivor fears occurred in May 1999. Her leukemia, which had somehow remained dormant and undetected for almost ten years, came back into our lives. Rivka was then 11 years old. The doctors told us this was less than 1 percent likely to happen.

Our daughter’s prognosis for a complete recovery was now significantly worse, and we were advised to attempt the risky procedure of a bone marrow transplant. This involves high doses of chemotherapy, along with intensive radiation over the entire body. While this completely obliterates the patient’s immune system, the hope was that it would also eliminate the leukemia in Rivka’s blood.



She received the bone marrow transplant from her baby brother, Yehudah, not quite two years old at the time, just before Rosh Hashanah, in September 1999. Rivka successfully accepted the transplant and was able to leave the hospital after three months, just a few weeks before her bat mitzvah. Ten months after receiving the bone marrow transplant, however, Rivka was struck with a second relapse. At that point, her odds of recovery, according to standard medicine, became dramatically lower.

The doctors attempted a number of different experimental approaches, involving a remarkable total of three additional bone marrow transplants, over the following two years. The first two of these transplants, which also came from her brother, lasted six months each before she relapsed yet again. The final one, which she received from an unrelated donor in England, only lasted a couple of months.

In the end, it was the complications from this last transplant that caused her to pass away, early Shabbos morning, June 29th, 2002.

Each year, on our daughter’s yahrzeit, I would share my research on related topics, as a merit for her, sharing my perspectives in various classes and on my website JewishClarity.com.

What have I learned all these years? Perhaps the most significant point concerns the great fundamental in life of free will. There is a common thought in today’s world that the ability to make choices, particularly within situations of hardship, is greatly limited. That, however, is not the Jewish perspective, and that was most certainly not my experience. While it was often very difficult to keep choosing during the many ordeals we went through, this was ultimately the difference between being empowered, and not merely seeing ourselves as helpless victims. The choices we faced were most significant in three different areas.

Every person has to deal with pain in their life, sometimes minor, sometimes serious, and sometimes overwhelming.

First of all, every person has to deal with pain in their life, sometimes minor, sometimes serious, and sometimes overwhelming. This pain is often a reality we are unable to control. How we relate to this pain, however, is where we are able to make choices. If we focus on the fact that there is a purpose to these painful situations, we will then have the ability to grow from them. If, on the other hand, we choose to ignore any possibility of there being a purpose, we will then be left with only suffering.

While the pain of the situation is a reality, suffering is a choice.

While no one likes pain, if there is enough of a purpose or benefit, we will often welcome a painful situation. An obvious example of this is childbirth. Women are willing to undergo the pain and difficulty of pregnancy and childbirth because having a child at the end of the process makes it all worthwhile. Our goal in life is, therefore, not the avoidance of all pain, but rather the avoidance of any pain that is lacking in purpose or meaning.



Secondly, one of the most difficult areas for the mourner to navigate involves one’s emotions. Emotions play a critical role in our lives and in our fulfillment of Judaism. The goal is to avoid the extremes and strive for a normal balanced approach. On the one hand, one who doesn’t mourn properly is considered to be cruel. But, at the same time, if the expression of the grief is excessive, this is not considered to be healthy. I discovered that we generally possess much more ability to control our emotions than we give ourselves credit for.

And finally, a fundamental decision that every mourner needs to make is how they will live their life in the long term. Judaism has a series of mandated time periods which begin from the moment that one’s close relative passes away. Once all of those times have finished, however, the mourner can ether begin to rejoin life and the world, or maintain his or her separation and isolation.

Recognizing ourselves as members of the Jewish nation and as part of Jewish history can help us to gradually transition back to a normal life. The Jewish people have been managing to do this for thousands of years, beginning with the destruction of the two different Temples, and through all of the terrible pogroms, persecutions, and antisemitism that we’ve had to deal with ever since. Throughout these many difficulties and challenges, Jews always continued to live their lives. They enjoyed celebrations, observed holidays, and remained connected to their communities. As impossible as it may seem to find the proper balance between the conflicting emotions that fill our lives, we have the model of the Jewish people throughout the generations showing us that it can and must be done.

It is striking that the Hebrew word nechama, meaning comfort or consolation, actually refers to reconsidering something or changing one’s perspective. The acceptance of nechama is, therefore, the willingness, within one’s heart, to view the situation differently, and to thereby be able to continue with one’s life.

While the tragic reality will remain exactly as it was, how we accept it and how we relate to it can definitely change. When someone close to us passes away, we also experience a type of death. Without the spiritual healing and the renewed wholeness that we get from Nechama, consolation, it would be impossible for us to continue to exist. The remarkable quality of nechama gives us the strength to reconsider not only the painful situations we are dealing with, but what we ourselves are capable of.

Rabbi Asher Resnick recently published his book, Pain is a Reality, Suffering is a Choice – Grappling with Divine Justice which is the outgrowth of over 30 years of personal engagement with loss and pain, and his drive to understand life’s challenges from a Jewish perspective.

Based on hundreds of classical Torah sources, the book is an extensive presentation of the Torah’s view and wisdom on dealing with difficulties in life, and is presented through the prism of the challenges his family has gone through as a result of his daughter’s illness and passing away at a young age.

Click here to order your copy of Pain is a Reality, Suffering is a Choice.

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The Jewish Trader called “One Tongue” by Native Americans.May 15, 2022 | by Dr. Yvette Alt MillerFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

Julius Meyer spoke six Native American languages in 19th century Nebraska.

In 1864, Julius Meyer was 13 years old when he left his hometown of Bromberg, in Prussia, and boarded a ship headed for the United States which was embroiled in a bitter civil war. Julius planned to join his three older brothers, Max, Adolph and Moritz who were living in the thriving Jewish community of New York City where they worked as merchants.

With the end of the Civil War, the Meyer brothers saw bright new opportunities along America’s burgeoning Western Frontier. Max Meyer was the first brother to move, settling in Omaha, in the Nebraska Territory, in 1866, where he set up a company manufacturing cigars.

Omaha was a happening place. Between 1860 and 1870 the population mushroomed from fewer than 2,000 residents to 16,000, along with 20 churches and 127 saloons.

Julius and the other Meyer brothers soon joined Max. They renamed the cigar business Max Meyer & Brothers Co. and expanded into selling jewelry and musical instruments. Even in his new home, Julius stood out for his Jewish pride. Omaha had very few Jews at the time, but Julius was scrupulous about keeping kosher. Since it was nearly impossible to find kosher meat, it seems he kept a vegetarian diet.

Julius Meyer in front of his store at 163 Farnam Street, Omaha, Nebraska, about 1875. The Julius Meyer Collection

As the family business expanded, Julius carved out a new commercial niche for himself, venturing far into Native American lands and trading Max’s cigars for Indian-made items such as jewelry, clothes and tools. Julius opened a store called “Indian Wigwam” where he sold what he described as “Indian, Chinese and Japanese Curiosities.” It was a popular store and Julius spent a great deal of time trading with various Native American far from home. His travels nearly led to Julius’ death.

Traveling in an unfamiliar area, Julius found himself surrounded by hostile members of a Native American tribe. They seized Julius’ bags and were about to scalp him when Chief Standing Bear, the leader of the Ponca nation, appeared on the scene. Ponca fighters battled the group, saving Julius, and chased off the hostile tribe. Julius was injured in the fight and carried a scar on his forehead for the rest of his life. He also became firm friends with Chief Standing Bear.

Julius’ niece, Lena Rehfeld, later recalled, “Uncle Julius never forgot him for that, and Standing Bear never wanted for anything while he lived that Uncle Julius could provide for him.”

Julius became very close to the Ponca tribe, as well as with the Oglala Sioux, Oglala Lakota, Pawnee, and other groups. In time, he mastered at least six different Native American languages, including Omaha, Ponca, Brule Sioux, Winnebago, Pawnee and Ogallala. Julius even became an honorary member of the Pawnee people, and was given the Pawnee name Box-ka-re-sha Hashta-ka, meaning “Curly-haired white man who speaks with one tongue.” He was incredibly proud of this hard-earned name, and used it widely.

Julius Meyer, Spotted Tail, Iron Bull and Pawnee Killer, about 1875, The Julius Meyer Collection. Although identified by the inscription on the photograph, there are questions about the identities of the Native Americans.

The reference to Julius having only “one tongue” reflected his honesty and trustworthiness. At a time when few European traders dealt honestly with Native Americans, Julius was scrupulously fair and reliable. Julius’ friend Col. T. W. McCullough, editor of the Omaha Bee News, later recalled that “The Indians trusted Julius Meyer implicitly. He always talked to them with a ‘straight tongue.’ He always told them the truth.”

In his time living amongst Native Americans, Julius found ways to keep kosher. His hosts knew that Julius would only eat hard boiled eggs, never the meat. It became customary for his Native American hosts to prepare a batch of hard-boiled eggs whenever Julius was invited to stay.

Photography was a popular new art in the late 1800s, and Julius and some of his Native American friends posed for several iconic photographs. Julius realized that these photos were great publicity for his business and lent his store an aura of grandeur. He began to commission even more photographs with distinguished Native American leaders. In one of Julius’ most famous photographs, four Native American chiefs pose with him: Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Swift Bear and Spotted Tail. (Julius was rumored to have paid each of the chiefs the enormous sum of $200 plus two ponies for the privilege of appearing in the photo with them.)

Group portrait of Sitting Bull, Swift Bear, Spotted Tail, Julius Meyer, and Red Cloud, 1875

Julius’ love of Native American culture extended far beyond business. He worked with Gen. George Crook, who served in the United States’ Indian Wars and emerged as a gadfly calling for the US Government to keep the promises it made to conquered Native American tribes. Gen. Crook became a leading voice in favor of Native American rights and he was aided by Julius Meyer’s work as a translator and conduit to tribal chiefs.

In 1889, the government of France hired Julius to bring Native Americans to France for the Paris Exposition that year. Julius traveled on the long ocean journey with several of his Native American friends, including Chief Standing Bear. They stayed in Paris for nearly a year, explaining Native American culture to visitors from all over the world.

Back at home in Omaha, Julius lived a vividly theatrical life, entertaining widely. When illustrious visitors came to Omaha - including many artists, opera singers and intellectuals of the day - they found that Julius was Omaha’s most distinguished host, running salons out of his home and hosting lavish parties. He loved to play the flute, and helped found the 117-piece symphony called the Omaha Musicians Union, the precursor to the Omaha Symphony, often conducting their concerts.

Julius Meyer and Standing Bear

Though he was one of Omaha’s most prominent citizens, as a Jew Julius was always somewhat of an outsider. He helped start the Standard Club, a nondenominational club where Jews could socialize. Later on, its name was changed to the Metropolitan Club and became a Jewish social club. Julius and his brother Max helped establish a Jewish burial society and Jewish cemetery in Omaha. They were two of the founding members of Nebraska’s first synagogue, Temple Israel in Omaha. With pogroms terrorizing Jewish communities across Russia’s Pale of Jewish Settlement, Julius also formed the Hebrew Benevolent Society to help Russian Jews.

The strange circumstances of Julius’s death remain a mystery to this day. One Spring morning in 1909, Julius left his comfortable apartment and strolled down to his brother Max’s store. The brothers chatted for a while, Julius lit a cigar, and told Max, “Well, I think I will walk up the street a while and get some fresh air.”

Julius Meyer, interpreter for Indians

An hour and a half later, a passer-by found Julius’ body, shot to death in Hanscom Park, two miles away. A gun was placed in his left hand. The local authorities concluded that he had taken his own life, though some historians have pointed out that in photographs, it seems that Julius gripped items such as pipes in his right hand, and commonly wore his holster on his right side, not his left.

Julius Meyer had never married but he was widely mourned throughout Nebraska as a high-spirited entertainer, a patron of the arts, and a proud Jew who insisted on living a publicly Jewish life, even when circumstances made it exceedingly difficult to do so.

About the Author

Dr. Yvette Alt Miller

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Dr. Alt Miller lives with her family in Chicago, and has lectured internationally on Jewish topics. Her book Angels at the table: a Practical Guide to Celebrating Shabbat takes readers through the rituals of Shabbat and more, explaining the full beautiful spectrum of Jewish traditions with warmth and humor. It has been praised as "life-changing", a modern classic, and used in classes and discussion groups around the world.

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The Scandalous History of the Aleppo Codex.May 15, 2022 | by Rabbi Mordechai BecherFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

How the oldest, most complete and most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible founds its way back to Jerusalem.

I am not sure what Socrates would have made of the internet and social media, but in one of the dialogues recorded by Plato, Socrates criticizes the art of writing as something that would destroy memory. “This invention of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember by themselves….”1

To some extent Jewish tradition agrees and this is one reason that for over 1,500 years most of Judaism was transmitted in an oral format, known as the Oral Torah.2 Eventually it became clear that due to the circumstances of exile, unless this information was committed to writing it would be lost completely. In about 170 CE Judah the Prince, a Rabbi and leader of the Jewish people, decided to write down the oral information in the form of a six-volume work known as the Mishnah.3

A Torah scroll

There is, however, one text that the Jewish people have preserved, copied and transmitted for over 3300 years in a format unchanged since antiquity – the Torah scroll. The scroll, written on parchment in an ancient script, does not contain vowel sounds or punctuation, has variations in the spelling of words as either plene or defective, and has words that are pronounced differently than they are written. All this information is part of the Oral Torah. As the Talmud puts it, “Rabbi Yitzḥak said: The vocalization of the scribes, and the ornamentation of the scribes, and the verses with words that are read but not written, and those that are written but not read are all laws transmitted to Moses from Sinai.”4

Concerned that this information would be lost, a group of scholars, known as the Masoretes, decided to write down everything in the Oral Law regarding the text of the Torah scroll. They vowelized the text (nekudot), recorded the cantillation notes which provide punctuation (taamei hamikra or tropp), listed every possible textual variation, and indicated every form of spelling and pronunciation of the sacred text. Because of our veneration for the Torah scroll none of this information may be recorded in the scroll itself – the scroll is pure, unadulterated, pristine, ancient Torah – nothing else.5

The Masoretes were at the right time and place to engage in the monumental task of preserving the text of the Bible and its Oral traditions.

The Masoretes, primarily the Ben Asher family, lived in the 10th century in Tiberias, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. At that time Tiberias was the scholarly, political, economic and cultural capital of Israel and Muslim conquest had brought with it the import of paper-making technology from China. The Masoretes were at the right time and place to engage in the monumental task of preserving the text of the Bible and its Oral traditions. They paid attention to every single letter, to spaces between paragraphs and chapters, to the text’s layout, differences between the written and spoken text and counted the occurrence of words throughout the entire Bible.

The Aleppo Codex

After years of work they produced a codex, a book that contained all the above information both within the text and as marginal notes known as Mesorah.6

Eventually the codex, called the Crown, or Keter, was moved to Jerusalem sometime in the 11th century, but it was apparently stolen by Crusaders at some point. History gets a little murky here, but it seems that the codex was ransomed from the Crusaders at great cost to the Jewish community.

In the 12th century the codex turned up in Fostat, (a city that eventually became Cairo) where there was a large, well-established Jewish community.7 The most famous sage of Fostat was Moses Maimonides, who saw the codex and wrote, “The codex on which I relied on for these matters was a codex renowned in Egypt, which includes all the 24 books [of the Bible]. It was kept in Jerusalem for many years so that scrolls could be checked from it. Everyone relies upon it because it was corrected by ben Asher, who spent many years writing it precisely, and checked it many times.”8

A page removed from the Codex, where the marginal notes can be clearly seen.

In 1375, Maimonides’ great-great-great grandson, David. moved to Aleppo in Syria and it is believed that he brought the treasure with him. The codex became known as the Crown of Aleppo, Keter Aram Tzovah, and it was kept by the Syrian Jews in the Great Synagogue of Aleppo, under intense security, brought out only for the occasional consultation or perusal of scholars.

The Crown remained in the synagogue until November 1947. Due to the rise of Arab nationalism, and the pro-Nazi sympathies of the Syrian regime, many believed that the Crown was in danger. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, an historian and Zionist leader, who later became second president of the State of Israel made attempts to bring the codex to Israel but was unsuccessful.

In November 1947 the Syrian government instigated riots against the Jewish population and the Great Synagogue of Aleppo was burnt down. Rumors flew regarding the fate of the codex – some said it was destroyed, some said it was saved, some claimed that it was saved by one person, others claim a different savior. Two eminent scholars of the codex, Chaim Tawil and Bernard Schneider, list no less than seven different accounts of the fate of the Crown.9

The Great Synagogue of Aleppo before and after the riots of 1947

After the State of Israel was established and the border with Syria was closed efforts to recover the Crown became much more difficult. Yitzchak Ben-Zvi enlisted the aid of the Israeli security services, and involved diplomats, spies and Rabbis in returning the Crown to Israel. Unit 504, a top-secret section of the Israeli Military Intelligence specializing in infiltration of agents into Arab countries was also involved (my security clearance is not high enough to confirm this). This was the unit that took part in obtaining the Dead Sea Scrolls later.

Here again, there are many different versions of what happened, but eventually the Crown, albeit with missing sections and damaged by fire and fungus, came back to its birthplace, Israel. Now the focus turned to preserving the Crown and researching the surviving parts.

Second president of the State of Israel, Yitzchak Ben-Zvi with a Hebrew manuscript.
A manuscript written in Tiberias, Israel in the 10th century, traveled to Jerusalem, was “kidnapped” and ransomed, taken to Egypt, from there to Aleppo, Syria and from there back to Jerusalem, Israel. The Crown of Aleppo is a symbol of Jewish continuity, of Jewish devotion to the Torah, and of the return of the Jewish people to its ancient homeland.

For further reading: The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible, by Matti Friedman

Plato, Phaedrus 14, 274c-275b
See Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 7b, Midrash Tanchumah (Buber), Parshat Noach 3
E. E. Urbach, “Introduction to the Mishnah and to One Hundred Years of Its Scholarship”, Scholarship in Jewish Studies, Vol. 2, (Jerusalem 5758) pp. 716-738
Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 37b
Code of Jewish Law, Yoreh Deah 274:7
Crown of Aleppo: The Mystery of the Oldest Hebrew Bible Codex – Hayim Tawil and Bernard Schneider – Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 2010 pp. 15-27
Ibid. pp. 47-56
Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Torah Scroll 8:4
Crown of Aleppo pp. 82-83
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About the Author

Rabbi Mordechai Becher

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Rabbi Mordechai Becher, originally from Australia, is an instructor at Yeshiva University and alumni Rabbi of Neve Yerushalayim College. He received his ordination from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem and holds an MA in Medieval Jewish History from the Bernard Revel Graduate School where he is a doctoral candidate. He taught at Ohr Somayach and Neve Yerushalayim in Jerusalem and served in the Israel Defense Forces. Rabbi Becher has answered thousands of questions on AsktheRabbi.org, presents a Talmud class, Dimensions of the Daf, for the Jewish Broadcasting Service and was senior lecturer for Gateways for 20 years. Rabbi Becher’s latest book, Gateway to Judaism, published by Artscroll, is in its tenth printing. He has taught in the USA, Canada, England, Israel, South Africa, Australia and Russia, and is a scholar in residence for Legacy Kosher Tours. He has led tours in Africa, Australia, Czech Republic, China, England, Hungary, India, Italy, Israel, Japan, Morocco, Panama, Russia, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam.

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Take Two: Why Pesach Sheini is Significant to Our Family.May 15, 2022 | by Rabbi Avi ShafranFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

On that Jewish date in 1945, my late father-in-law, Mr. Yitzchok Yisroel Cohen, was liberated by American forces from Dachau.

“Second Passover,” or Pesach Sheini, a minor Jewish holiday, is anything but minor in my family. It was on that Jewish date, which, in 1945, fell on April 27 (and this year, falls on May 15), that my late father-in-law, the late Yitzchok Yisroel Cohen, was liberated by American forces from Kaufering, part of the concentration camp complex known as Dachau.

In biblical times, Pesach Sheini, coming a month after Passover, was a day on which Jews who were unable for various reasons to bring the paschal sacrifice on Passover had another opportunity to do so, and to eat its meat along with matzah (unleavened bread), and bitter herbs. For my father-in-law, it became a symbol of his own “second chance” — at life. His happy one as a child in the Polish city of Lodz had been rudely interrupted by the Nazis on September 8, 1939.

Mr. Cohen became a teenage inmate of several concentration camps. On Pesach Sheini in 1945, he and a friend, Yossel Carmel, lay in Kaufering, in a corpse-filled pit, where they had been cast by their captors, who thought them dead.

Over recent days, there had been rumors that the camp’s commanders had been ordered to murder all the prisoners, to deprive the advancing Allied armies of living witnesses to their work.

The friends’ fear, though, was leavened by hope, born of the sound of explosions in the distance. “We prayed,” he later wrote, that “the thunderous explosions would go on forever.” The pair, he recalled, “eventually fell asleep to the beautiful sound of the bombs.”

The only moving things in the camp were shuffling, emaciated “walking skeletons” who had been rendered senseless by starvation and trauma.

The only moving things in the camp were shuffling, emaciated “musselmen,” the “walking skeletons” who had been rendered senseless by starvation and trauma. And so the pair wondered if, perhaps, the camp guards had abandoned the premises. Alas, though, the S.S. returned, bringing along prisoners from other parts of the camp complex, who were kicked toward waiting wagons and, quite literally, thrown onto them.

But, when no one was looking, the two inmates managed to climb down from where they had been cast and found new refuge in a nearby latrine. “Our stomachs,” he recalled, “were convulsing.”

Eventually the wagons left, and the two young men crept back into their cellblock, posing again, not unconvincingly, as corpses.

Then they smelled smoke. Peeking out from their hiding place, the young men saw flames everywhere. Running outside, the newly resurrected pair saw German soldiers watching a barracks burn, thankfully with their backs toward them. There were piles of true corpses all around, and the two quickly threw themselves on the nearest one that wasn’t aflame.

My future father-in-law thought it was the end, and wanted to recite the “final confession” that Jewish liturgy suggests for one who is dying. But his friend reminded him of an aphorism the Talmud ascribes to King David that “Even with a sharp sword against his neck, one should never despair of Divine mercy.”

And that mercy, at least for them, arrived. Every few minutes, bombs whistled overhead, followed by fearsome explosions. The earth shook, but each blast shot shrapnel of hope into their hearts. The Germans now really seemed gone for good.

Dodging the flames and smoldering ruins, the pair ran to the only building still intact, the camp kitchen. There they found a few others who had also successfully hidden from the Nazi mop-up operation.

My father-in-law knew it was Pesach Sheini. The breads became their matzah. No bitter herbs were necessary.

And they discovered a sack of flour. They mixed it with water, fired up the oven and baked flatbreads. My father-in-law, who, throughout his captivity, had kept careful note of the passing of time on the Jewish calendar, knew it was Pesach Sheini. And the breads became their matzah. No bitter herbs were necessary.

The door flew open and another inmate rushed in breathlessly, finally shouting: “The Americans are here!”

A convoy of jeeps roared through the camp. American soldiers approached the barracks, some, Mr. Cohen recalled, with tears streaming down their faces at the sight of the piles of blackened, smoldering skeletons.

“Along with the American soldiers,” he wrote, “we all wept.”

And then he recited the Jewish blessing of gratitude to God for “having kept us alive and able to reach this day.”

Eventually, Mr. Cohen made his way to France, where he cared for and taught Jewish war orphans; and then to Switzerland, where he met and married my dear mother-in-law, may she be well. The couple emigrated to Toronto and raised five children. For decades thereafter, each Second Passover, he and others who had been liberated from Kaufering that day, along with other camps’ survivors, would arrange a special meal of thanksgiving in Toronto or New York, during which they shared memories and gratitude to God.

As the years progressed, however, sadly but inevitably, fewer and fewer of the survivors were in attendance. And, like his friend Mr. Carmel, Mr. Cohen is no longer with us.

But his wife, and my wife and her siblings, along with scores of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, spread across several states, Canada and Israel, gather in groups, in person or virtually, every Pesach Sheini to recall his ordeals and his liberation, the “second life” we are so grateful he was granted by God.

Many are survivors today, of hateful violence, again against Jews in Israel, as well as other people in places like Sudan, Myanmar, Yemen, Europe and Ukraine. Despair is a natural reaction to witnessing such evil. But those who, like my father-in-law — and my own father, who spent the war years in a Soviet labor camp in Siberia — persevered and created new post-trauma lives show that pasts needn’t cripple futures.

That, like in the case of Pesach Sheini, we can be graced with second chances.

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Insights from the film Everything Everywhere All at Once.

There are a lot of ways to explain the multiverse — a concept or theory that our universe is one of many different universes, possibly each containing a different version of ourselves or our world — but the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once simplifies it: every decision in a person’s life is like a fracture point, creating alternate universes where the ramifications of those decisions ripple forward, like the proverbial hurricane blowing after a butterfly flaps its wings.

The movie builds this concept into a beautiful web of maximalist filmmaking and maximum action. Every maybe or could-have-been gives Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) the chance to tap into the mind of an alternate version of herself. In one world, she is a teppanyaki chef. In others, she’s a kung fu master/movie star, blind opera singer, and hot-dog-fingered romantic. There is a multiverse full of potential that she could have fulfilled, she just needs the right help to access the skills, ability, and knowledge she could have had.

Does Judaism believe in a multiverse? It depends on your definition and your sources — it is certainly believed that other worlds besides ours were created. But imagining parallel universes where other versions of us exist would mean that there are other beings besides the humans of this world who have free will (it’s a complicated issue). Maybe we could take the premise of Everything Everywhere All at Once and think about it theoretically.

If we believe in an infinite God who sees all, knows all, including the past, present, and future, then every branching path that we could take exists — just not to us. In the movie, the parallel universes exist, but humans who can’t access those universes merely lack the technology to do so. We lack the knowledge to see what could or might have been.



The potential of our actions is real. Potential exists in the decision points of the mind and the not-yet-actions of our words. When we say we’re going to do things, when we declare that something is going to happen, that does make a difference. Jews who understand the power of language will couch their words by making sure they don’t promise something they might not fulfill or suggest potential bad things that might happen. The Talmud teaches about the power we have to make dreams come true, just by interpreting them.

Thinking about potential realities matters in Judaism. If you regret doing something positive, you can negate its impact on you. If you wish you could have done something negative, that might just rub off on you. Teshuva, or repentance (if you like that translation), is an area where this is most felt — you can turn your missteps into good deeds, because they led you to the place you are now. It’s all a matter of the choices we make, even if only in thought and speech.

We can’t access any other versions of ourselves. We don’t have the technology or knowledge. Should we search for access to the multiverse? Would it benefit us to look for ways to connect to the potential of our alternate decisions? There are questions that traditionally we’re not supposed to ask: what was before the world, what will be after the end of it, what is above the firmament, and what is below the earth. The details of those questions are complicated, but it’s clear that there’s a warning: certain things are not in the realm of human understanding.

Try picturing your day. You decide to get up or stay in bed. You decide to drink coffee or tea. Should you text your friend or not? Pick up that coin? Catch a bus or a train? Get in a fight or concede an argument? Smile at a stranger or ignore them? There are so many minimal, unnoticed moments in every single day. If everyone branched out into a universe for each decision, each branching out to further and further universes, it would be too much for us to comprehend. Losing oneself in the multiverse of decisions is dangerously overwhelming.

We can wonder all we want about would-have-beens, could-have-beens, might-have-maybe-happeneds, but in the end, we’ll just be digging ourselves further into the pit of wishing life was different – which only gets you so far. After a point, you just have to act and make this version of yourself the best it could be.

We can take comfort in the potential of multiversal thinking: if there’s some universe out there where all of our choices have led to us being someone amazing, then there’s a chance, however slim, that it’s the universe we’re living in. And at every decision along the way, we can make the most of it: one thing in one place, spaced out over a reasonable amount of time.

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About the Author

B.C. Wallin

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B.C. Wallin is a Jewish writer, film buff, and Aish alumnus. His writing can be found on Alma, Polygon, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and Input, among others. He lives in New York with his wife and an ever-increasing pile of way too many books.

GOD’S INTENTIONAL WILL

A Sermon by Leslie Weatherhead

The phrase “the will of God” is used so loosely, and the consequence of that looseness to our peace of mind is so serious, that I want to spend some time in thinking through with you the whole subject.  There is nothing about which we ought to think more clearly; and yet, I sometimes think, there is nothing about which men and women are more confused.

Let me illustrate the confusion.  I have a good friend whose dearly loved wife recently died.  When she was dead, he said, “Well, I must just accept it.  It is the will of God.”  But he is himself a doctor, and for weeks he had been fighting for her life.  He had called in the best specialists in London.  He had used all the devices of modern science, all the inventive apparatus by which the energies of nature can be used to fight disease.  Was he all that time fighting against the will of God?  If she had recovered, would he not have called her recovery the will of God?  Yet surely we cannot have it both ways.  The woman’s recovery and the woman’s death cannot equally be the will of God in the sense of being his intention.

Let me illustrate the confusion again.  “My boy was killed ten days ago in one of the raids on Berlin,” said a woman, “but I am trying to bow to the inscrutable will of God.”  But was that the will of God?  I should have said it was the will of the enemy, of Hitler, if you like, of the evil forces we were fighting.  Are they then the same thing?

Here is a mother wringing her hands and weeping in anguish because her baby is dead.  Her minister stands by her, longing to comfort her; but though his presence and prayers may offer consolation, he knows only too well that when the storm is raging it is too late to talk about the anchor that should have been put down before the storm began.  What I mean is that it is so important that we should try to think clearly before disaster falls upon us.  If we do, then in spite of all our grief we have a philosophy of life that steadies us as an anchor steadies a ship.  If we do not, the storm is so furious that little can be done until it has abated.  If only the minister could have injected into the mind of the woman his own belief about God!  But that, alas! is impossible.  In her anguish, this is what the woman said: “I suppose it is the will of God, but if only the doctor had come in time, he could have saved my baby.”  You see the confusion of thought.  If the doctor had come in time, would he have been able to outwit the will of God?

The matter came to me most poignantly when I was in India.  I was standing on the veranda of an Indian home darkened by bereavement.  My Indian friend had lost his little son, the light of his eyes, in a cholera epidemic.  At the far end of his veranda his little daughter, the only remaining child, slept in a cot covered with a mosquito net.  We paced up and down, and I tried in my clumsy way to comfort and console him.  But he said, “Well, padre, it is the will of God.  That’s all there is to it.  It is the will of God.”

Fortunately I knew him well enough to be able to reply without being misunderstood, and I said something like this: “Supposing someone crept up the steps onto the veranda tonight, while you all slept, and deliberately put a wad of cotton soaked in cholera germ culture over your little girl’s mouth as she lay in that cot there on the veranda, what would you think about that?”

“My God,” he said “what would I think about that? Nobody would do such a damnable thing.  If he attempted it and I caught him, I would kill him with as little compunction as I would a snake, and throw him over the veranda.  What do you mean by suggesting such a thing?”

“But, John,” I said quietly, “isn’t that what you have accused God of doing when you said it was his will?  Call your little boy’s death the result of mass ignorance, call it mass folly, call it mass sin, if you like, call it bad drains or communal carelessness, but don’t call it the will of God.”  Surely, we cannot identify as the will of God something for which a man would be locked up in jail, or put in a criminal lunatic asylum.
Those who want a text for this sermon will find it in the eighteenth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel and the fourteenth verse: “It is NOT the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.”

We see by these illustrations – which, of course, could be applied to other disasters besides death – how confused and loose our thinking is about the will of God.  But let me here at once relieve the tension of your mind by anticipating some of the things that I want to say in subsequent sermons of this series.
My own thinking demands a division on the subject into three parts, the first of which we are discussing:
The intentional will of God
The circumstantial will of God
The ultimate will of God
The trouble arises because we use the phrase “the will of God” to cover all three, without making any distinction between them.  But when we look at the Cross of Christ, we can see, I think, the necessity of such a distinction.
Was it God’s intention from the beginning that Jesus would go the Cross?I think the answer to that question must be No.I don’t think Jesus thought that at the beginning of his ministry.He came with the intention that men should follow him, not kill him.The discipleship of men, not the death of Christ, was the intentional will of God, or if you like, God’s ideal purpose – and I sometimes wish that in common language we could keep the phrase “the will of God” for the intentional will of God.
 
But when circumstances wrought by men’s evil set up such a dilemma that Christ as compelled either to die or to run away, then in those circumstances the Cross was the will of God, but only in those circumstances which were themselves the fruit of evil.In those circumstances any other way was unworthy and impossible, and it was in this sense that our Lord said, “Nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.”Because a father in the evil circumstances set up by war says to his son, “I am glad you are in the Army, John,” it does not mean that from the beginning he willed the Army as John’s career.The father would much have preferred, let us say, that his son should be an architect.The father wills the Army for his boy only because in the circumstances which evil has set up it seems to the father, and, indeed, to the boy, the most honorable, as well as inevitable thing to do.
 
Then there is a third sense in which we use the phrase “the will of God,” when we mean God’s ultimate goal – the purposefulness of God which, in spite of evil and, as we shall see, even through evil arrives, with nothing of value lost, at the same goal as would have been reached if the intentional will of god could have been carried through without frustration.I hope we shall come to see in the other sermons of the series that God cannot be finally defeated, and that is what I mean by his omnipotence – not that everything that happens is his will, but that nothing can happen which finally defeats his will.So, in regard to the Cross, God achieved his final goal not simply in spite of the Cross but through it.He achieved a great redemption and realized his ultimate will in as full a sense as he would have done if his intentional will had not been temporarily defeated.
I know people’s minds are very tired through war strain and weariness, but I do want to ask you, in view of any possible hour of subsequent sorrow or disaster, to try to hold in your mind those three distinctive ideas which can finally be harmonized, but which, for clarity, we do well to hold separately:  the intentional will of God, the circumstantial will of God, and the ultimate will of God.

So, we concentrate on the first and think of the will of God in the sense of his ideal intention.  To accomplish that, one of the first things we must do is to disassociate from the phrase “the will of God” all that is evil and unpleasant and unhappy.  That we shall deal with under the heading “The Circumstantial Will of God.”  The intentional will of God means the way in which God pours himself out in goodness, such as the true father longs to do for his son.

In this matter see how confused our thinking has been made by bad hymns.  Here is a verse from one of them:

Though dark my path and sad my lot,
Let me be still and murmur not,
But breathe the prayer divinely taught,
“Thy will be done.”

What sort of a God is this, who of his own intention, not through circumstances thrust into life by ignorance, folly, or sin, but of divine intention, pours misery undeserved and unhappiness, disappointment, and frustration, bereavement, calamity, and ill health on his beloved children, and then asks them to look up through their tears and say, “They will be done?”  We simply must break with the idea that everything that happens is the will of God in the sense of being his intention.  It is within the will of God, if you must use the phrase, in circumstances we have hinted at already.  But we must come to terms with the idea that the intentional will of God can be defeated by the will of man for the time being.  If this were not true, then man would have no real freedom at all.  All evil that is temporarily successful temporarily defeats God.

To go back to our earlier illustrations, I could not say to my dear friend, “Your wife’s death is not the will of God at all.  It is the fruit of human ignorance, and if we could spend as much on medical research as we spend on a battleship, your wife’s life could have been saved;” but though it was not the right moment to say it, one could not help thinking it.

When a young missionary declares his readiness and determination, having been thoroughly tested, and having passed all the necessary examinations, to give his life in order to bring the good news about Christ to people who have not heard it, then we may truly say, “They will be done.”  Not when the baby is dead, but when two young people take their little one to the altar to dedicate him or her to God because they want God to be enthroned in their lovely little home and in the new life that has been born to them – that is the time to say, “Thy will be done.”  Not when little children starve in Europe because of the circumstances of war which the evil of the whole world has brought into being, but when Europe is delivered at last from the ruthless heel of the oppressor, and all little children in a United States of Europe have enough to eat, and can sing and play again happily in the sunshine, with fit bodies and fit minds – that is the time to say, “Thy will be done.”

Come with me to some slum home in the dark back streets of a huge city, where men’s lives and services are means to other men’s ends, where there is disease of body and distortion of mind, where evil festers and grows in sordid and terrible conditions, where men have not even the spirit to rebel, but accept their lot with a listless apathy that is more terrible than a revolution.  And if you say concerning those stunted lives, “This is the will of God,” I say to you that that is a greater blasphemy than the denial of the Holy Trinity.  Industrial oppression, selfish greed, the denial of God’s gifts to his own children because of the greed of the few, the horror of war – these things spell a greater atheism than any verbal arguments man has devised.  We turn back a hundred years and wonder that Christian men could sing hymns to God while slavery was rife.  But, please God, a hundred years hence our descendants will turn back and become incredulous that we ever called ourselves by the name of Christ when his body was torn asunder in our churches, trampled on in our streets, exploited in big business, left to disease when medical knowledge and skill were within reach of the human family, and mutilated by the bombs and burning steel we dropped on one another’s cities.  Call these things evil, call some of the inevitable evil because of widespread sin, but don’t call them the will of God.

Do you not see, therefore, how important it is that we should get thinking right about the will of God?  For by our confusion we thrust people’s minds into unbelievable torment; we blunt the edge of social purpose until men mutter the slogan, “God’s will be done,” when the very opposite of God’s will is being done, and when, if men had seen more clearly into the divine purpose and tightened up their loose thinking, they would have become the instruments of God’s purpose and swept away the evil which they complacently regarded as the will of God.  Men have changed the phrase “the will of God” as savages chant incantations, sealing the whole subject with that silencing taboo and evading the challenge of the disturbing questions which honest thinking would have set ringing through their minds with the insistence of a trumpet call.

There are, however, two difficulties:
The first might be put like this.You may say, “Yes, that’s all very well, but people get a lot of comfort from supposing that their tragedies are the will of God.One can bear a thing if it is God’s will.It is hard to bear it if it is a ghastly mistake and not the will of God at all.Your view is robbing men of comfort.When they feel a thing is the will of God, they can bear it with equanimity.”
I am unrepentant.  Admittedly there is a time when things can be said and there is a time when they cannot be said, however true they may be.  If you are standing in the presence of some great tragedy, there is very little you can say about the will of God.  But I would go on immediately to add this:  There is never any final comfort in a lie.  However closely we may have hugged a lie to our bosom, the moment we see it to be a lie we should be wise to part with it.  Those who take refuse in a lie are like those who take refuge in a flimsy storm shelter made of three-ply wood painted to look like stone.  When they want the shelter most, it will let them down.  He who hides in an idea about God which is not true will, in the hour of real need, be left as comfortless as atheism would leave him; and if it is his own refusal to think things through which lands him in a flimsy shelter than can never give his soul any strengthening protection, then the refusal to think is sin, for Christ commanded that we should love him with all our mind.  I know that to face the truth is costly, and people hate to be made to think, but only the truth can set us free.
Second, there is another objection which could be expressed thus.A man might say, “It is all very well to keep the phrase ‘the will of God’ for the lovely, joyous, healthy, beneficent things that happen to people, but surely some of the greatest qualities in people are made by suffering, and therefore is not that suffering the will of God?For example,” this objector might say, “look how the war brought courage to men and women.”This we will discuss more fully as we think of the circumstantial will of God, but let me make some reply to the objection.
There is a bad snag in the logic of the objector’s remark, for he cannot go on to say, “Therefore the war was the will of God.”  The war did not make courage.  It revealed the courage that was there all the time.  It gave it a tremendous opportunity for self-expression.  Evil is never creative of good, though the circumstances of evil have often been an occasion for the expression of good.

Look not only at the flaw in the logic but at the false implications of theology.  If we say that the suffering caused by evil is essential because of the qualities evoked, then logically we must  assume that God needs evil to produce good: that he could not produce such a thing as courage unless an evil like war demanded it; that when Jesus healed men he was defying the will of God instead of doing it, in that he was removing something essential to the growth of the soul.  If that is true, what happens in the heaven of heavens after all souls are gathered in at last?  Will all the qualities which evil reveals atrophy into nothing because there is no evil to evoke them?  I repeat that evil does not make good qualities.  It reveals them and gives them exercise, but there is always the possibility – and surely this is God’s intention – that those same qualities may be revealed and exercised and manifested as a response to goodness.

Let me recall to you in this connection in the words of Jesus: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her!  How often would I have gathered thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!  Behold, your house is left unto you desolate.”  Note the words “ye would not.”  They imply, “Ye might have done.”  Or look at some other words of Jesus: “If thou hadst known in this day … the things which belong unto peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes.”  Note the words “If thou hadst known”; they might have known, then.  The grand qualities in human nature are not given birth by evil.  God creates them, and they are sometimes revealed by the right reaction of the good man to evil, but they do not depend for their origin on evil, for they can be evoked by a response to the good.

Let us be very, very careful how we use the phrase “the will of God.”  I should like in closing this section to make reference to the passing of a very great religious leader, the Rev. Dr. F. Luke Wiseman.  On a dreadful, foggy day this old saint of eighty-six preached twice – once in Wesley’s own pulpit in City Road.  Then the old man made his way home. His wife died many years ago.  His family are all grown up.  We can imagine the old man sitting down in his armchair by the fire.  He went to sleep and awakened in heaven.  About that you can use the phrase “Thy will be done” – and some of us would add another Biblical phrase: “May my last end be like his.”

We will later fit calamity and distress into the framework of our thought about the will of God, but in the meantime keep the phrase for God’s intention.  And when you see his glory reflected in this lovely earth, in nature around us so full of his beauty, in poem and song, in picture, in music, in great architecture and in lowly service, in the lives of lovely people, in the happiness of a home, in the health of the body and the resilience of the mind and the saintliness of the soul, then, looking up to your Father in heaven, say, “They will be done”; and let us so dedicate our selves that we may be made one in the glorious harmony of all things and all people who carry out his will, that it may be done in earth as the angels do it in heaven.
                                                                                                                  
First in a series of five sermons given by Leslie D. Weatherhead at the City Temple in London after their church was reduced to rubble in World War II.
God’s Intentional Will
God’s Circumstantial Will
God’s Ultimate Will
Discerning the Will of God
In His Will Is Our Peace
 
Weatherhead was a Methodist preacher ordained in 1915, serving in India before serving the church City Temple in London.  He was a prominent figure in the Oxford Movement of the 1930’s.  He was born in 1893 and passed away in 1976 at the age of 82.

PDF available on our website www.twolisteners.org on Classical Christian Literature page

https://aish.com/the-boy-who-cried-messiah-false-messiahs-in-jewish-history/?src=ac-txt
The Boy who Cried Messiah: False Messiahs in Jewish History.March 27, 2022 | by Rabbi Ken SpiroFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

What is the Messiah and how will we know who he really is?

“Messiah” is one of those Hebrew words, like “Amen” and “Hallelujah” that has slipped into the English lexicon. While the concept of the Messiah originated in Judaism, it was later adopted as a theological concept in both Christianity and Islam.

What does the word really mean and how do we know who is the real Messiah?

The root of the word “messiah” is derived from the Hebrew word “to anoint” and is first mentioned in the book of Exodus:

God spoke to Moses saying: “Now, take for your self choice spices…pure myrrh, fragrant cinnamon…fragrant cane…cassia…and a hin of olive oil. Of it you shall make oil of sacred anointment. With it you shall anoint the tent of Meeting (Tabernacle) and the Ark of the Covenant…You shall anoint Aaron and his sons and sanctify them to minister to me. Exodus 30:22-30

Pouring some of this holy oil on objects and individuals designated them as having a God-appointed, higher function. Throughout the Bible different prophets such as Samuel, Nathan and Elijah use this oil to anoint the kings of Israel, signifying them as God’s chosen rulers.

God using an emissary to designate a ruler as a king with God-given authority was adopted in Medieval Christian Europe as the basis for the concept of “divine right of kings.”

This idea of God using an emissary to designate a ruler as a king, with God-given authority, was adopted in Medieval Christian Europe as the basis for the concept of “divine right of kings”- a practice which continues until today. In 1953, when Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of England in Westminster Abbey in London, the Archbishop of Canterbury dabbed oil on her, in imitation of the prophets of ancient Israel. Following this coronation ceremony, the choir sang “Zaddok the Priest” composed in 1727 by Handel for the coronation of King George II, which opens with the lyrics “Zaddok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon king.”

Queen Elizabeth II anointed, as depicted in The Crown

Messiah’s Job Description
While there are many anointed individuals throughout the Bible, in Judaism there is only one anointed one who has the title “The Messiah.” This messiah has a very special role to play in history and is viewed an essential part of traditional Jewish beliefs. He appears during the “End of Days” – the final chapter and the climax of human history to act as a catalyst to speed up the process of redemption for the Jewish people, and ultimately for all of humanity.

The great medieval Jewish scholar Maimonides, also known as the Rambam, gives a short but clear job description:

The King Messiah will arise and restore the kingship of David to its former state and original sovereignty. He will rebuild the sanctuary and gather the dispersed of Israel. All the ancient laws will be re-instituted in his days….”
Maimonides Mishna Torah; Laws of Kings, Chap. 12.

The job is by no means easy. This messiah, this final king of Israel, has to bring all the Jewish people physically back to the Land of Israel and transform the spiritual level of the nation by having the nation recognize the reality of God’s existence and the Divine origin of the Torah and its commandments. The Messiah must also rebuild the Temple, reinstitute the Temple service and defend Israel against anyone or any nation that tries to stop this process. Once he accomplishes all this, he will be appointed the King of Israel.

Maimonides continues:

“If there arise a king from the House of David who meditates in Torah, occupies himself with the commandments…observes the precepts prescribed in the Written and Oral Law, prevails upon Israel to walk in the way of Torah…fights the battles of the Lord, it may be assumed that he is the messiah. If he does these things and succeeds, rebuilds the sanctuary on its site, and gathers the dispersed of Israel, he is beyond all doubt the Messiah. He will prepare the whole world to serve the Lord together. Maimonides Mishna Torah; Laws of Kings, Chap. 12.

While there may have been numerous individuals throughout history who had the potential to be the messiah, you only get the title if you actually complete the job.

This concept of “the coming of the Messiah” at the “End of Days” is not linked to a specific date. Judaism believes that redemption can come at any time and messianic expectation among the Jewish people has fluctuated dramatically throughout history.

Messianic Fervor
In keeping with the idea that “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” we see a pattern emerge in Jewish history: Messianic expectation is highest when the Jewish people are at their lowest.

Here are a few good examples:

The Great Revolt against Rome from 67 to 70 CE which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the Second Temple. The final tragic act in this story was the fall of mountain-fortress of Masada in 73C.E.
The Bar Kochba Revolt, from 132 to 135 C.E. The leader of this revolt, Shimon bar Kosiba, was initially so successful that he earned the support of the great Rabbi Akiva who saw him as a potential messiah. Bar Kosiba was nicknamed “bar Kochba, son of star,” as an allusion to his messianic potential. Tragically, this revolt ended in failure with the death of hundreds of thousands of Jews, including Bar Kochba and Rabbi Akiva and the total decimation of much of the Land of Israel.
The expulsion from Spain in 1492. This calamitous event led to the complete destruction of one of the largest and most important Jewish communities of the Diaspora and is one of the most traumatic events in Jewish history.
The Khmelnitsky Massacre of 1648-1649- This Cossack revolt decimated numerous Jewish communities in Eastern Europe and led to the murder of as many as 100,000 Jews.
During and immediately after these terrible events there were huge upswings in messianic expectation. This messianic fervor was also accompanied by another fascinating phenomenon: false messiahs who claimed to be the saviors of the Jewish people.

Shabtai Tzvi
Of all the false messiah who have appeared throughout Jewish history, the best-known and most impactful was Shabtai Tzvi (1626-1676). Born in Izmir, Turkey in the Ottoman empire, Shabtai was highly intelligent, charismatic, mystically inclined and already an ordained rabbi by the age of 18. Unfortunately, he was also mentally unstable and probably a manic-depressive.

Shabtai Tzvi
He left Turkey and his wanderings eventually led him to Israel where he met another interesting character by the name of Nathan of Gaza. Nathan convinced Shabtai that he was in fact the Messiah and that Nathan was his prophet. Coming after centuries of horrendous persecution, expulsion and slaughter, and only a few years after the very traumatic Khmelnitsky Massacres, the Jewish people were in a very low place and ripe for redemption

Word of Shabtai’s miracles spread far and wide throughout the Jewish world and a huge number of Jews were convinced that this he was the real deal. The diary of a Jewish woman by the name of Gluckel of Hamelin, Germany, gives us a first-hand account of these events:

About this time people began to talk of Shabtai Tzvi…Throughout the world servants and children rent themselves with repentance, prayer and charity for two, yeah, for three years my beloved people Israel sat in labor, but there came forth naught but wind…

Our joy when the letters arrived from Smyrna is not to be told. Most of them were addressed to Sephardim. As fast as they came, they took the letters to the synagogue and read them aloud. Young and old, the Germans, too, hastened to the Sephardi synagogues…

Many sold their houses and lands and all their possessions for the day they hoped to be redeemed. My good father-in-law left his home in Hamlin, abandoned his house and lands and all of his goodly furniture.

The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hamelin

The story didn’t end well. Shabtai went to the Sultan of Turkey and demanded that the sultan place his crown on Shabtai’s head. The sultan’s response was that Shabtai could either convert to Islam or lose his head. Shabtai converted and much of the Jewish world was devasted.

Yearning for the coming of the Messiah and the concomitant era of world peace and clarity remains a central concept in Judaism

These traumatic events let to a massive backlash against messianism and messianic expectation which continues to reverberate in Jewish consciousness until today.

Like the boy who cried wolf, the sad saga of Shabtai Zvi and other pretenders has made the Jewish people very cautious about the whole phenomena.

While multiple tragedies and false messiahs have made the Jewish people cautious about messianic fervor, yearning for the coming of the Messiah and the concomitant era of world peace and clarity remains a central concept in Judaism and a source of hope throughout the long and often difficult history of the Jewish people.

As to the question of when the real messiah will finally come, perhaps the best answer is found in the Jewish mystical work-The Zohar:

“It is not God’s will that the date of the Messiah’s arrival be revealed to man, but when the date draws near, even children will be able to make the calculation.” Zohar, Breishit

https://aish.com/the-letter-of-the-convert-a-survival-story-of-the-crusades/?src=ac-rdm
The Letter of the Convert: A Survival Story of the Crusades.May 8, 2022 | by Dr. Henry AbramsonFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

900 years later, a woman’s story as a convert persecuted by the Crusaders still endures.

Three broken and fragmented documents from the early 1100s are all that remain of the tragic story of a woman from an aristocratic family who chose Judaism, married into a prominent Rabbinic family in Narbonne, and then fled from vicious antisemitic violence to Egypt.

“The Letter of the Convert,” T.S. 16-100, Cambridge University

Held in the remarkable Cairo Geniza collection of Cambridge University, the first letter was transcribed and published in 1931 by the pioneering scholar Jacob Mann (1888-1940), and described how this woman – she is strangely never named – left her wealthy Christian family (probably living in the northwestern region of Normandy) and became a convert to Judaism. She settled in the large Jewish community of Narbonne in the south of France, where she met her husband David, a member of the prominent Todros family, and had three children. Her brothers and others pursued her there, so the young family left the city. This was likely in the fateful summer of 1096.

Peter the Hermit leading Crusaders (Egerton MS, Avignon, 14th c.) via Wikimedia Commons

Beginning in May of that year, a horrific new series of persecutions were unleashed on the Jews of Ashkenazic lands. For months, inspired by the call of Pope Urban II to impose Christian rule on the Holy Land, nobles and peasants alike were planning to make the long march to the land of Israel to defeat the “infidels.” During the fateful summer of 1096, a group of frenzied Crusaders made a deathly calculation: why should they endure the arduous journey across land and sea to Israel, when there were unbelievers in their own midst, that is, the Jews?

The resultant massacres, particularly in the Rhineland, were among the worst that the Jews had endured since the Bar Kochba rebellion a thousand years earlier. In some cases, faced with the choice of baptism or death, whole communities elected to take their own lives rather than renounce their ancestral faith. The experience of the Crusades left a painful, permanent scar in Ashkenazic memory, and the events of that terrible season are marked by the reading of the Av HaRachamim prayer every Sabbath.

David was murdered, and his children were kidnapped, presumably baptized and never seen again. Our heroine was spared.

The first document, known formally as T-S 16.100, relates that the violence caught up with the Todros family. It seems that David and two of the children – a son named Jacob and a three-year old girl named Justa – took refuge in the synagogue. David was murdered, and his children were kidnapped, presumably baptized and never seen again. Our heroine was spared, possibly because she was pregnant, but she and her infant son were left penniless. The letter, signed by one Yehoshuah ben Ovadyia and two men both named Isaac, described her distressing story as a formal request for financial support.

Professor Normal Golb (1928-2020), a renowned Geniza scholar from the University of Chicago, examined the letter and determined that Professor Mann had transcribed one key word incorrectly. An unfortunate hole in the parchment partially obliterates the name of the place where David was murdered, and perhaps consulting the distribution of Crusader attacks on Ashkenazic communities, Mann identified it as Anjou, a puzzlingly distant location from Narbonne in the south. Professor Golb’s close examination suggested that the site was actually the much smaller Monieux. This conclusion pushed the extent of known anti-Jewish Crusader violence into a region where it was previously unknown, a revelation so significant that an otherwise tiny scholarly advance made page four of the New York Times on December 24, 1966.

The brief yet tragic account of this unnamed woman and her suffering during the Crusades, revived nine hundred years after the attacks, inspired two moving works of fiction: Sybilla, a play by Brian Allison (1988) and The Convert, a Flemish novel first published by Belgian author Stefan Hertmans that, in a 2019 English translation, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.

The tiny settlement of Monieux, which did support a Jewish community in the middle ages, suddenly found itself the object of unwelcome attention as the site of an otherwise unknown medieval pogrom. When Geniza scholar Ben Outhwaite noted that more than half of the Wikipedia page for this otherwise innocent town was devoted to the massacre, he declared it “an historical libel against this remote and predominantly peaceful corner of France.” Writing on the Cambridge University Library website in July 2020, he related the more complete story of our heroine from Narbonne.

The Crusader-era Church of St Pierre in Monieux, France via Wikimedia Commons
Dr. Outhwaite, head of the Geniza Research Unit, was aware of a major piece of the puzzle that even Professor Golb did not learn for some twenty years. Edna Engel and Yosef Yahalom, two scholars of the Hebrew University, published studies of the Letter of the Convert that conclusively demonstrated that the handwriting was identical to at least two other fragments in the Geniza collection. Not only were they written by the same hand, they apparently dealt with the same person, our convert from Narbonne!

These two scraps of parchment, although even more badly damaged than the original Letter of the Convert, described a woman who fled her vengeful family to northern Spain, where she lost her husband to violence. The poor condition of the fragments make it difficult to piece together the chronology of events, but it seems that she herself narrowly missed execution, possibly because of her Christian origins. She was rather to be burned at the stake as a heretic, but just as the Jewish community was charged to bring a shroud to wrap her body before the lighting of the pyre, several Jews put together a bribe of thirty-five dinars of silver for the priests, and she was released. She fled to the refuge city of Nájera, where she struggled to raise funds to repay those individuals who had paid the blood money that spared her life.

Where did all this happen? Drs. Engel and Yahalom agreed that Professor Mann’s original association of the violence with Anjou was incorrect, but they also took issue with Professor Golb’s identification of Monieux, which was to the west of Narbonne. They argued that a far more likely candidate was the village of Muño, to the east of Narbonne across the Pyrenees, and very close to Nájera. While a definite conclusion is impossible, a consensus of historians is forming around Muño, as described in Dr. Outhwaite’s research.

And what of our woman from Narbonne? The second fragments describe how she makes her way to Cairo, where she gives birth to a daughter. A refugee from the Crusades, she is supported by the community, presumably to the end of her days. The precious letters of introduction that told her story were consigned to the Geniza of the Ben Ezra synagogue, where they remained for 900 years until their publication in 1931.

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Regine: The Holocaust Survivor Who Invented the First Disco Club.May 3, 2022 | by Dr. Yvette Alt 

The legendary “Queen of the Night”, who recently died, was haunted by her Holocaust experiences.
She was known as “the Queen of the Night” who invented the first discotheque and taught nobles how to dance. She was known simply as Regine and she passed away this week at the age of 92. Former French Culture Minister Jack Lang said she was “poetic and glittering Parisian legend.”

Regine was born Rochelle Zylberberg in Brussels on December 25, 1929 to Jewish parents from Poland. Her childhood was marked by poverty and loss. When Regine was very young, her mother left the family, moving to Argentina. Regine and her father, Joseph, moved to Paris where her father took over a family bakery. Regine later described her father as having a taste for gambling and drinking. He lost his bakery in a card game, leaving himself and his young daughter destitute.

Regine later credited her love of fine fashion - particularly beautiful shoes - with the poverty of her childhood. “We were poor, we had nothing, so shoes became a symbol of freedom,” she told an interviewer.

In May 1940, Regine’s life turned upside down. Nazi Germany invaded Belgium and Jews found themselves in grave danger. Regine and her father went into hiding, moving into the south of France, which was governed by the pro-Nazi Vichy French regime. “I spent two years in a convent transformed into a shelter for the elderly,” Regine recalled. “I stored a lot of pain. But I always kept laughing and dancing. I never lost my good mood.”

She described being beaten in the convent that sheltered her, but both Regine and her father miraculously survived the Holocaust.

They returned to Paris, where Joseph opened a cafe in the city’s Belleville neighborhood. “That was where my ambition began,” Regine said in a BBC interview. “It was a working-class Jewish cafe with all sorts of people passing through. I said to myself: I want a place where I get to choose who comes in. I wanted counts and dukes - people with titles.”

Regine began working in Parisian clubs as a manager. In 1953, she was hired by the fashionable and popular Whisky-a-Gogo club, where she met the sort of glamorous clientele she’d longed to know. “Right from the start, I was with all the best people,” she later described. With flair and imagination, Regine went about transforming the tiny club into a magical-seeming place. “I laid down a linoleum dance floor, like in a kitchen, put in colored lights, and removed the juke-box,” she recalled.

With no money for live music, Regine had to rely on juke boxes for music, but she disliked the silent gaps between songs. “Instead I installed turntables so there was no gap in the music. I was barmaid, doorman, bathroom attendant, hostess - and I also put on the records. It was the first ever discotheque and I was the first ever club disc-jockey,” she later told the BBC.

#It was as if Regine spent her long life trying to create the sense of security and happiness that so eluded her as a child.

Two of Regine’s new acquaintances at the club were Guy and Edmond de Rothschild, cousins from the renown Jewish banking family. Guy and Edmond lent Regine funds to start her own club, Club Regine, in Paris’ Left Bank. From there, Regine’s empire of clubs expanded. By the 1980s, she owned 22 clubs across Europe and the United States. Brigitte Bardot, Andy Warhol, Rudolf Nureyev, Liza Minelli and Kennedy family members all frequented her clubs. One day, Regine received a phone call from the Duke of Windsor (Britain’s former King Edward VIII) asking if Regine would teach him to dance the Twist. “I said gladly - but only at the club. So he became a regular,” she recalled.

In 1977, a New York magazine profile described Regine as still haunted by her wartime loss and terror. “All her parties are the birthdays she never had as a child.” Patrons at her clubs noted that Regine took care of her guests like a doting mother, making sure everyone was happy and enjoying themselves, and dishing up hearty dinners no matter how late the hour. It was as if Regine spent her long life trying to create the sense of security and happiness that so eluded her as a child.

In addition to her nightclub empire, Regine worked as a singer and an actress. Though she played down much of her Jewish identity throughout her long career, one of her most beautiful recordings is of My Yiddishe Momme, a haunting Yiddish song about a child’s longing for her lost mother whom she knows is gone forever and can never return.

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When the State of Israel Was Born: 6 Fascinating Eyewitness Accounts.May 2, 2022 | by Dr. Yvette Alt

On Israel’s first Independence Day, May 14, 1948, the country’s Jews were fighting for their lives.

Friday, May 14, 1948 dawned over an apprehensive Jewish community in the land of Israel. That day, the British Mandate over Palestine expired. The armies of the surrounding Arab countries warned that they would invade should the Jews declare a state. Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv and other Jewish settlements were already under siege from sniper attacks.

Yet in Tel Aviv, at 4 PM, leaders from the Jewish People’s Council assembled in an art museum. With Shabbat approaching, they wanted to make sure their momentous meeting concluded in time for people to return home before sundown. In a solemn voice, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel - the State of Israel.” Jews throughout the land listened to his momentous words on crackling radios. For the first time in 1,878 years, the Jewish people had a national homeland.

Immediately, the armies of five surrounding Arab nations attacked the new Jewish state. Journalist Daniel S. Chertoff noted that the “declaration was like a starter’s pistol for the ‘conventional’ war: Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq immediately declared war and invaded.” (Saudia Arabia sent soldiers to invade Israel, too, under Egyptian command.) The attacks on Jews by Arabs, which had been going on for months, “was instantly transformed into a full-fledged clash of armies.”

Here are six eyewitness accounts of that first Israeli Independence Day.

1. George Adler, Holocaust Survivor
Born in Hungary in 1932, George Adler survived the Holocaust and sailed to Israel in 1947 on the Exodus, a ship that carried Holocaust survivors which was intercepted and turned back by the British. Interred in Germany by the British, Adler managed to travel to Israel in 1948 and recalled the spontaneous celebrations that broke out following Ben-Gurion’s announcement.

“We were dancing in the street. It was like when (World War II) ended. Everyone was happy.”

Adler’s celebration was short-lived. The next day, he recalls, “the shooting started.” Adler volunteered to fight with Israel’s new army.

2. Golda Meir, future Prime Minister
In 1948, Golda Meir was a key member of the Jewish leadership administration. She’d been born in 1898 in Kiev, and her family fled pogroms. She was in the room where David Ben Gurion declared Israel an independent state.

Golda Meir signing Israel’s Declaration of Independence

The State of Israel! My eyes filled with tears, and my hands shook. We had done it. We had brought the Jewish state into existence - and I…had lived to see the day. Whatever happened now, whatever price any of us would have to pay for it, we had re-created the Jewish national home. The long exile was over. From this day on we would no longer live on sufferance in the land of our forefathers. Now we were a nation like other nations… As Ben-Gurion read, I thought again about my children and the children they would have, how different their lives would be from mine…. And I thought about my colleagues in besieged Jerusalem, gathered in the offices of the Jewish Agency, listening to the ceremony through static on the radio…

Just before dawn…I saw for myself through the windows of my room what might be called the formal start of the War of Independence: four Egyptian Spitfires zooming across the city on their way to bomb Tel Aviv’s power station and airport in what was the first air raid of the war. Then, a little later, I watched the first boatload of Jewish immigrants - no longer ‘illegals’ - enter the port of Tel Aviv, freely and proudly. No one hunted them down anymore or chased them or punished them for coming home…. (from My Life by Golda Meir, 1975.)

3. Yehuda Avner - Israeli Speechwriter and Diplomat
At the moment Ben-Gurion announced the Jewish state in Tel Aviv, Yehuda Avner (who would one day go on to serve as Israel’s Ambassador to Britain) was a 20-year-old volunteer in the underground Jewish fighting force the Haganah, assigned to defending the western edge of Jerusalem from Arab attacks.



One of his fellow fighters was Leopold Mahler, a Jewish violinist who’d fled Nazi Germany; he was the grand-nephew of the famous composer Gustav Mahler. Cut off from the rest of Jerusalem, Avner’s group of fighting men had no way of knowing whether Ben-Gurion had actually declared independence. They dispatched Mahler to make the treacherous journey into the center of the town to find out. He returned to his unit’s defensive position near midnight, bearing a bottle of Israeli wine he’d found in Britain’s now-abandoned central police station.

‘Has Ben-Gurion declared independence, yes or no?’ asked Elisha Linder, beside himself.

Mahler took a deep breath and solemnly said, ‘David Ben-Gurion declared independence this afternoon in Tel Aviv. The Jewish State comes into being at midnight.

There was a dead silence. Even the air seemed to be holding its breath. Midnight was minutes away… And then the air exploded in joyful tears and laughter. Every breast filled with exultation as we pumped hands and embraced, and roared the national anthem at the top of our voices.

‘Hey, Mahler!’ shouted Elisha cutting through the hullabaloo. ‘Our state - what’s its name?’

The violinist stared back blankly. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t think to ask.’

‘You don’t know?’

Mahler shook his head.

‘How about Yehuda?’ suggested someone. ‘After all, King David’s kingdom was called Yehuda - Judea.’

‘Zion,’ cried another. ‘It’s an obvious choice.’

‘Israel!’ called a third. ‘What’s wrong with Israel?’

‘Let’s drink to that,’ said Elisha with delight, breaking open the bottle of wine and filling a tin mug to the brim. ‘A l’chaim to our new State…’

‘Wait!’ shouted a Chassid whom everybody knew as Nussen der chazzan - a canter by calling, and a most diligent volunteer…from Meah Shearim, the ultra-Orthodox area of Jerusalem. ‘It’s Shabbos. Kiddush first.’

Our crowd gathered around him in a hush, as Nussen der chazzan clasped the mug and, in a sweet cantorial tune began to chant ‘Yom hashishi’ - the blessing for the sanctification of the Sabbath day.

As Nussen’s sacred verses floated off to a higher place of Sabbath bliss his voice swelled, ululated, and trilled into the night, octave upon octave, eyes closed, his cup stretched out and up. And as he concluded the final consecration ‘Blessed art thou O Lord who has hallowed the Sabbath’ - he rose on tiptoe, his arm stiffened, and rocking back and forth, voice trembling with emotion, he added the triumphantly exulted festival blessing to the commemorate this first day of independence - ‘shehecheyanu, vekiyemanu vehegiyanu lazman hazeh’ - Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has given us life, sustained us, and brought us to this time.

‘Amen!’

(from The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership by Yehuda Avner, 2012.)

4. Zippy Porath - Jewish Fighter
Zippy Porath was an American student who arrived in the Land of Israel in 1947 to attend Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She joined the Jewish fighting group the Haganah (precursor to today’s Israeli army) and fought to defend Jerusalem. The following is a letter she wrote to her family in America on May 15, 1948, the day after Israel’s founding.

Dearest Family…Awareness of the full impact of the significance of this day has been somewhat lost to me in the immensity of rapidly developing events that have gripped Jerusalem. The British are actually leaving. We are fighting desperately to take over their strongholds…For the last three days we have been on full alert and this is the ZERO HOUR.

We are waiting impatiently for the return of the contingents of boys dispatched for today’s engagements. Many dear friends are among them… What am I doing here? I’m in charge of the first aid post… Everything we have is ready - blankets, bandages, a bit of cognac, ready for…we don’t know what. This afternoon, it was heavy mortar fire, 25 pounders or more. Tonight, it may be air bombardment… (From Letters from Jerusalem, 1947-1948 by Zipporah Porath, published in 1987.)

5. Chaim Herzog - Future President of Israel
In 1948, Chaim Herzog was a 20-year-old intelligence officer who’d served in the British Army, and now was one of the leaders in the Land of Israel’s Haganah fighting force. On May 14, 1948, Jerusalem was under brutal, sustained attack from Arab forces.

Herzog was ordered to go to the home of the highly excitable French Consul General, Rene Neuville, in Jerusalem, and try to negotiate a ceasefire. Consul General Neuville’s house was located in the middle of no man’s land between Jewish and Jordanian forces.

I knew that Ben-Gurion would announce the creation of a Jewish State that afternoon… At 4pm, with everybody sitting around morosely and nervously, listening to the shooting and shelling and waiting for yet another telephone call from the Old City telling us that the Arabs had agreed to yet another cease-fire, I announced to Neuville and (Belgian Consul General Jean) Nieuwenhuys, ‘I wish to make it clear to you now that as from this moment I represent a Jewish State which has just been proclaimed.’ This was all Neuville needed in order to throw yet another tantrum. He launched into a diatribe against the Jewish State…

Inside the French consulate, I didn’t feel very independent. Bullets came through the open windows, and by nightfall six of us were wounded. Madam Neuville, in direct contrast to her husband, remained calm throughout the proceedings and even brought a makeshift meal for those in our negotiating room. Despite the extreme danger, she did not forget to serve a good French wine. Avoiding the bullets, she crawled on the floor to pour it.

After nightfall - and countless cease-fires - I proposed that we attempt to get back to the Jewish (part of the) city. I would take anybody who wished to go, including the wounded…

(Quoted from Living History: The Memoirs of a Great Israeli Freedom-Fighter, Soldier, Diplomat and Statesman by Chaim Herzog, 1997.)

6. Report in Newsweek, May 14, 1948
Newsweek reported on David Ben-Gurion’s declaration of the Jewish state, and on American President Harry Truman’s recognition of the State of Israel just 11 minutes later - and the subsequent celebrations in the streets of Tel Aviv:

…a small man with shaggy white hair stood in the main gallery of the modern, two-story Tel Aviv Museum of Art on Rothschild Boulevard. He spoke slowly: ‘We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish State…to be called Israel. Thus, David Ben-Gurion, chairman of the Palestine National Council and now Premier of Israel, brought to a climax the half-century struggle of the Jews to recreate their ancient homeland.

In Tel Aviv, Jewish flags flashed on all buildings, automobiles appeared with Jewish license plates, and Haganah officers exchanged toasts in the cafes. That night Tel Aviv was blacked out, but behind the cafe doors the celebrations went on. Just before midnight, when Israel became officially established, doors were flung open and rejoicing crowds again poured into the streets.

Live footage from Israel’s very first Independence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jQcGXYK8Hw&t=18s
About the Author
Dr. Yvette Alt Miller

More from this Author >

Dr. Alt Miller lives with her family in Chicago, and has lectured internationally on Jewish topics. Her book Angels at the table: a Practical Guide to Celebrating Shabbat takes readers through the rituals of Shabbat and more, explaining the full beautiful spectrum of Jewish traditions with warmth and humor. It has been praised as "life-changing", a modern classic, and used in classes and discussion groups around the world.

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The Boxer of Auschwitz: Fight or Be Killed.April 26, 2022 | by Dr. Yvette Alt MillerFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare
Harry Haft’s shocking true story, portrayed in HBO’s new Holocaust film, The Survivor.
Harry Haft’s real-life story is shocking and little known. He was imprisoned in Jaworzno, a concentration camp that was part of the vast Auschwitz complex, and was forced to box his fellow inmates. The loser of each fight was murdered by Nazi guards, who enjoyed watching this macabre spectacle.

Harry was forced to fight in 76 matches. The horror of his experiences never left him. His story is portrayed in HBO’s new film, The Survivor, directed by Academy Award-winner Barry Levinson and starring Ben Foster, who visited Auschwitz and lost 30 lbs. to prepare for the role.

Typical Jewish Childhood
Harry (Hershel) was born in 1925 into an impoverished Jewish family in the Polish town of Belchatow, near the German border, the youngest of eight children. Belchatow’s population was half Jewish at the time, and the Haft family was surrounded by Jewish neighbors and friends who helped and supported them. Harry’s father Moishe was a peddler who died when Harry was just three years old. Desperately poor, he and his siblings all had to work. Harry had his first job at the age of five, delivering birds from the town’s kosher butcher to customers.

Harry Haft
Antisemitism was part of the fabric of the town. Alan Scott Haft, Harry’s son, recalls that teachers in the local public school Harry attended openly favored the Christian pupils, beating and belittling Jewish students for even the slightest mistake. Jews were also attacked by their non-Jewish peers, who imbibed intense antisemitism from sermons in their family churches and homes.

The harshness of his childhood made Harry a fighter. “There were gangs who terrorized the Jewish children,” Alan Scott Haft described in his book about his father Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano (Syracuse University Press: 2006). “Harry understood early that he needed to fight and get a reputation as a fighter so that he would not be their victim.”

German Invasion
Belchatow fell into German hands on October 5, 1939, just weeks after the outbreak of World War II. Belchatow had a large population of ethnic Germans who spoke German at home and attended Lutheran churches in the town. These “Folk Germans” welcomed their new overlords with open arms. For the Jews of Belchatow, their nightmare was just beginning.

Based on his father’s testimony Alan Scott Haft said, “Jews were systematically picked off the streets for forced labor. They were allowed to walk only in the middle of the road. Synagogues were destroyed, and all Jews were made to wear the yellow Star of David on their clothing. Jewish bank accounts were frozen. Jews were forbidden to travel and subjected to a curfew.” Both the occupying Nazis and local residents were encouraged to torture local Jews.

Layb Podlovsky, a survivor from the town, wrote an extensive account of what went on in Belchatow. Early in the occupation:

…the Jews were driven out of their homes and forced to do the most difficult and demeaning tasks. Horrible scenes took place in the Jewish quarters. The bonfire was already burning in New Market Square, and groups of Jews, who were continually bringing Torah scrolls and holy books, were forced to throw them on the first while singing and reciting prayers. And anyone who wanted to (could) beat the Jews; 10-11 year old little German boys tugged at elderly Jews and beat them…”

In March 1941, the Nazis created a Jewish ghetto in Belchatow, forcing Jews from Belchatow and other nearby towns into a cramped, unsanitary section comprising just a few overcrowded streets. Jews were transported to nearby towns to perform forced slave labor, returning to the ghetto at night.

For Harry and his family, the Belchatow Jewish ghetto offered a chance to help others. Harry’s brother Aria started a local smuggling business, and Harry and his brothers worked as smugglers, bringing goods across the border from nearby Germany. For the first time in their lives, Harry’s family was relatively prosperous. Even amidst the terror and misery of the ghetto, Harry’s mother, Hynda, was determined to do all she could to take care of her fellow Jews.

Ben Foster portrays Harry Haft in HBO’s The Survivor

“During this time Hynda was now in a position to help others. Relatives and friends who were hungry or needy were taken in. Harry’s mother sent provisions to cousins who were unable to come in person, and she returned many past favors from neighbors by giving them money.” (Quoted in Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano).

Deportation to Auschwitz
The Nazis began killing more and more Jews in the Belchatow ghetto. During the Purim holiday of 1942, ten Jews were publicly hanged in the ghetto by their Nazi overlords. In August 1942, the Belchatow ghetto was liquidated. The remaining Jews were forced into the ghetto’s synagogue. Several hundred were transferred to the ghetto in the Polish city of Lodz. Thousands remained in the synagogue for three days with no food. On August 14, 1942, nearly all the remaining residents of the Belchatow ghetto were sent to the Chelmno Death Camp where they were murdered.

Harry witnessed the ghetto’s liquidation. He’d been arrested much earlier, and had worked with other Jews as a slave laborer. But in 1942, with the help of a sympathetic foreman, he managed to briefly escape and go back home to see what was happening to his family and the town’s other Jews.

Alan Scott Haft described what happened next. “To Harry’s surprise, the Jewish quarter was practically deserted. It looked as if everyone had been evacuated and only the sick remained, dying in the streets of starvation…” Harry went to the home of his sister Brandel, who had just had her first baby.

Two German trucks overloaded with people passed them on their left. A third truck was being filled with people right in front of Brandel’s house. The Germans were cleaning out the neighborhood right in front of Harry’s eyes… soldiers strong-armed his sister and her husband out of their house and onto the crowded truck. He heard pleading and screaming, and Brandel was crying out to someone as the truck started moving. The next thing Harry saw was a soldier coming out of the house with a baby in his arms running toward the truck. The soldier tossed the newborn toward Brandel’s outstretched arms, but he missed, and the baby crashed to the ground. Another soldier, without hesitation, pulled out a revolver, and shots rang out. The baby’s body was left in the gutter…

Soon after that terrible night, Harry was sent to the Stzelin concentration camp. A month later, he was transferred from there to Auschwitz, and then to the Jaworzno labor camp, a sub-camp of the vast Auschwitz complex. Harry and other Jewish slave laborers toiled in nearby coal mines, working with their bare hands in primitive and dangerous conditions.

In Auschwitz, a high-ranking SS officer named Dietrich Schneider noticed Harry and took steps to befriend him. Schneider first helped Harry after a terrible occurrence: Harry was briefly forced to work in the Auschwitz crematoriums, throwing the bodies of dead Jews into the flames. One day he was forced to throw the body of a Jewish man into the fire, only to realize at the last moment that the man was still alive. After this harrowing incident, Harry refused to work anymore; he didn’t care if the guards shot him. Instead of killing him, Schneider helped Harry, transferring him to a different work detail.

Schneider followed Harry to the Jaworzno work camp and asked him to make a bizarre deal: If Schneider helped Harry to survive, would Harry do all he could to help Schneider avoid justice if Germany lost the war? Harry agreed.

Entertaining Nazis by Fighting
At first, Schneider seemed to honor his end of the bargain by providing Harry with extra food rations. But one day he showed his true colors as a sadistic Nazi. “Now you are a big, strong Jew, my friend, and I am going to make you an entertainer,” he told Harry. “You are going to entertain my friends the other officers and soldiers.” Schneider explained the rules: each Sunday, Harry was to fight fellow Jews in front of the officers’ quarters in back-to-back boxing matches. Boxing gloves were not allowed, though Harry was given a pair of plain leather gloves to wear. Schneider assured Harry that the Jews he’d fight had volunteered to try their luck against him. The boxing matches would end when one man gave up, Schneider explained.

If Harry had any illusions that Schneider was a decent man, that first fight removed any vestiges of hope that the Nazis were capable of decency.

The first opponent was brought into the ring. Harry was shocked by his appearance. He saw before him a half-dead skeleton of a man. It became clear to him at that moment that there would be nothing fair about this match. Harry was eighteen years old, big and strong. Schneider had kept him well fed, not overworked or tortured. Harry looked across the ring and saw the fear on the face of his challenger, and he knew that this man had not volunteered. Harry remembered Schneider’s words about how the fight would end when one man was unable to continue, and now he understood what that meant. (Quoted in Harry Haft: Survivor of Auschwitz, Challenger of Rocky Marciano).

That first day, Harry fought five Jews and easily won each of the matches. The SS guards screamed anti-Jewish slurs throughout the fights as Schneider sat on a grand, throne-like chair, enjoying himself immensely.

Though Schneider offered Harry whisky as a reward for fighting, Harry turned it down, disgusted. He realized that if he threw a match he’d be risking death. As Harry later explained in an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he realized that the losers faced certain death: “As a youngster in school I was already training to be a boxer. I was very powerful. But in Jaworzno, the fight was to the finish. The loser wound up in the hospital and if he didn’t get well after a few days he went out on the next transport to Auschwitz.”

The SS guards began calling Harry the “Jew Animal of Jaworzno”. He won 75 matches over the course of several months. Then one day, he was ordered to fight a real challenger. Schneider told him how important this match was to him; he had bet a substantial amount of money on Harry. When Harry arrived at the makeshift boxing ring, he saw a Jewish man in his 20s who’d been the heavyweight champion of France before the war.

It was the toughest fight Harry had ever had. In the end, covered with blood, he knocked out his strong French competitor. After SS guards carried off the French fighter, Harry heard two gunshots ring out.

Escape
By now, Soviet forces were closing in on Auschwitz. The Nazis tried to cover up the magnitude of their crimes, destroying the gas chambers and other buildings and forcing tens of thousands of Jews to leave Auschwitz and its many sub-camps, leading them on death marches or transporting them by freight cars to other camps such as Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau and Mauthausen. Harry was forced on one of the marches: “12,000 people were marched to GrosRozen and 190 survived,” he told the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “We marched for a week.”

Harry wound up in the Flossenberg concentration camp, where conditions were abysmal. American forces were closing in on the camp, and the Nazi guards announced yet another death march to remove Jews from the camp. Harry and a friend decided to plan an audacious escape. “We are dead men if we don’t get out of here,” he told his friend. They made a run for it, tearing across the lush German countryside. Nazis shot after them and followed them, but Harry and his friend had made it. They were free. They managed to hide in the forest and small towns for several more weeks, until the end of the war.

Life After Wartime
Harry Haft was forever scarred by the Holocaust. After the war, he lived in displaced persons camps. In 1947 the US Army in Munich organized an Amateur Jewish Heavyweight Championship boxing match. Harry was the top winner and became a local celebrity. He appealed to US Gen. Lucius Clay for help in immigrating to America, and in 1948 Gen. Clay arranged for Harry to start a new life in the United States.

Harry and his wife Miriam
Settling with a cousin in New Jersey, Harry worked as a boxer for a time. He had a middling career, and his final fight was against future heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano in 1949. Harry blamed his defeat on the Mafia: “In my days though, the Mafia controlled the boxing game and you did as you were told.”

Harry gave up boxing and settled down, building the beautiful family life that had once seemed like an impossible dream. He married Miriam Wofsoniker and they had three children together. Harry worked in various jobs in New York, including running a fruit and vegetable store in Brooklyn and driving a cab. When he was asked in 1990 what he was most proud of in life, he replied, “My wife and children.”

Despite the love and success he found, Harry suffered his entire life. Each night he had terrible nightmares, reliving his experiences during the Holocaust in vivid detail.

Harry Haft passed away in 2007 at the age of 82. The Survivor will help spread his remarkable story to a wider audience at long last.
The Survivor premiers on HBO April 27, 2022, World Holocaust Remembrance Day.
About the Author

Dr. Yvette Alt Miller
More from this Author >
Dr. Alt Miller lives with her family in Chicago, and has lectured internationally on Jewish topics. Her book Angels at the table: a Practical Guide to Celebrating Shabbat takes readers through the rituals of Shabbat and more, explaining the full beautiful spectrum of Jewish traditions with warmth and humor. It has been praised as "life-changing", a modern classic, and used in classes and discussion groups around the world.

https://aish.com/the-jews-of-india-a-tale-of-three-cities/?src=ac-txt
The Jews of India: A Tale of Three Cities.April 24, 2022 | by Rabbi Mordechai BecherFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

Jews have been in India for over 2,000 years.

Travel often challenges our pre-conceived notions and visiting India does that in a major way. Where else would a favorite Sabbath dish be a chicken-coconut curry?1 And where would you find a Jewtown Road with swastikas decorating some of the buildings?2 Only in India.

The Bene Israel
Street sign in Cochin

The history of the Jewish community in India, according to legends of the Bnei Israel of Bombay, dates to the time of King Solomon. We cannot confirm that date, but it does seem that the history of that community goes back over a thousand years. The Bene Israel Jews have a founding legend/narrative that they say dates to the time of the Second Temple. A ship set sail from Israel in about 175 BCE and sunk of the Konkan Coast, leaving seven couples as survivors of the shipwreck. The Bene Israel Jews, according to this legend, are descendants of those original couples.

Magen David Synagogue, Bombay

They maintained the observance of Shabbat and kosher laws and tended to marry within the community.3 Their first encounter with other Jews was with the arrival of Baghdadi Jews from Iraq in the 19th century who brought them Jewish books and taught them Hebrew. One of India’s greatest military heroes was Lieutenant General J.F.R. Jacob, a Baghdadi Jew, who was responsible for military success against Pakistan and for helping to create the country of Bangladesh. He was also governor of the states of Punjab and Goa,4 and is buried in the Jewish cemetery in New Delhi.

Baghdadi Jews
The Iraqi Jews started moving to India in the 19th century and became successful merchants and business owners, primarily in Calcutta, but also in Bombay. There is a fountain in Bombay named after Flora Sasson, a Sassoon Library and the Sassoon docks; testimony to the prominence of just one Iraqi family in India. The Iraqi Jews maintained their ties with Baghdad and regularly sent questions to Iraq’s greatest Rabbinical authority, Rabbi Yosef Chaim of Baghdad, whose responses are recorded in his collection of responsa.5

Nahoum’s Bakery in Kolkata

Today one of Kolkata’s most popular bakeries is the Nahoum Bakery, founded in 1902 by Iraqi Jews and still owned by a descendant, Isaac Nahoum. This iconic bakery is owned by a Jew, employs Muslim bakers, produces famous Christmas cakes and most of its customers are Hindu.6 The Baghdadis established a Hebrew printing press in Calcutta,7 built beautiful synagogues, created and ran Jewish schools and even bore India’s greatest silent-screen actress, Ruby Myers, known by her stage name, Sulochana.8

Jewish Communities of Kerala
One of India’s most beautiful states is Kerala, situated on the south-western coast, home to extensive spice and fruit plantations and to a solar-powered airport. Kerala was home to Jewish communities for at least 700 years. There is a magnificent synagogue in Crangamore which was built about 1345, and the Paradesi Synagogue, situated in Matanchery, which was built in 1568, and possesses a gold crown for its Torah scroll that was donated by the Maharaja of Travancore in 1808.

Simchat Torah in a Bombay synagogue, 1992

The Kerala Jewish community consisted of the Cochin Jews, known as the Malabar Jews, who claim to have been in India since the time of King Solomon, although more than likely originated in Persia in the 5th to 6th centuries.

The second community was the Paradesi Jews who came to India from Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th centuries following the expulsions from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497.9

The Paradesi Synagogue in Kerala

The third component were Jews who immigrated from Arab countries such as Yemen and Iran and also from Europe, during the 18th and 19th centuries. The city of Cochin has an area know as Jewtown, where the synagogue is located, and where one can see swastikas, an ancient Indian decoration, carved on buildings in Jewtown Road.10

Deep in the heart of a Hindu neighborhood in Cochin one can find the grave of the kabbalist, poet and scholar, Rabbi Nechemia Motta who passed away in 1621. The grave is considered a holy site of prayer by the local Hindus, and still has a clear Hebrew inscription on the grave.

“Here rest the remains of
the famous kabbalist,
The influence of the light of whose learning shines throughout the country,
The perfect sage, the hasid, and
God-fearing Nehemia, the son of
the dear rabbi and sage Abraham Mota.
Our Master departed this life on
Sunday, the 25th of Kislev, 5381.
May his soul rest in peace.”

Most Indian Jews immigrated to Israel once the state was established in 1948, not out of fear, or due to antisemitism, for persecution and prejudice was not experienced by the Jews of India. They immigrated out of a conviction that Israel was their ultimate homeland and point of origin.

Today there are still about 18 synagogues in India, remarkably well preserved, although mostly not in use, and the Indian Jewish population numbers about 5000. There are currently about 70,000 Indian Jews in Israel, many of whom still preserve the unique customs and culture of their communities.11

Haggadah in the Indian dialect of Marathi from Poona (Pune), India

Encyclopedia of Jewish Food by Gil Marks
The Last Jews of Kerala: The 2000 Year History of India’s Forgotten Jewish Community – Edna Fernandes (Skyhorse Publishing, NY: 2008)
The Jews of India: A Story of Three Communities (Israel Museum, Jerusalem: 2002)
An Odyssey in War and Peace: An Autobiography Lt Gen. J.F.R. Jacob
Responsa Rav Pe’alim
Jerusalem Post, article by Christabel Lobo/ JTA, Published: December 25, 2020
India’s Jewish Heritage – Ritual, Art & Lifecycle – Editor, Shalva Weil (Mang Publications, Mumbai: 2004)
The Jews of India – Dalia Ray (Renaissance, Kolkata: 2016)
The Last Jews of Kerala: The 2000 Year History of India’s Forgotten Jewish Community – Edna Fernandes (Skyhorse Publishing, NY: 2008)
The Jews of India: A Story of Three Communities (Israel Museum, Jerusalem: 2002)
https://anumuseum.org.il/

Do You Have the Necessary Grit to Cross Your Red Sea?.April 13, 2022 | by Dr. Leslie M. GutmanFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare
Passover relives the moment when the Jewish nation were all in.
‘Crossing the Rubicon’ is a metaphor used by Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer to explain the difference between being fully committed to a goal versus still weighing its pros and cons. The Rubicon is the river that Julius Caesar crossed in opposition to direct orders from the Roman Senate not to do so. When Caesar crossed the river, it was an act of treason – there was no turning back. On one side of the river, he still had options. Now that he crossed the river, he was 100% committed. In other words, Caesar was all in.

After we cross our metaphorical Rubicon, our mindset changes. A why-orientated mindset (‘Why I am doing this?’, ‘Is this feasible?’, ‘Do I want this?’) is replaced with a how-orientated approach (‘How do I reach my goal?’, ‘What strategies can I use?’, ‘How do I deal with this setback?’). Not surprisingly, research shows that people with this latter mindset are more effective at reaching their goals. The reason is simple: when you have a how-orientated mindset, you plan specifically the what, where and when of actions to meet your goal, rather than being focused on the distractions – such as fears, insecurities, indecision, doubts – that get in your way of moving forward.

Psychologist Angela Duckworth relates the metaphor of ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ to grit – the passion and perseverance for long-term and meaningful goals. People with grit do not give up – they continually work to achieve their aspiration, even in the face of serious disappointment. Their ambition defines their sense of meaning and purpose in this world. Failures become opportunities for learning and growth, however painful.

People with grit earn our respect not only for their talents and abilities but also because their journey has been such a challenging one. The appeal of ‘freebies’ and ‘lucky breaks’ is fleeting. What we value is hard-won achievements – reaching goals despite numerous missteps and stumbling blocks along the way. Our greatest accomplishments are those which we fight to achieve. Through our own efforts, we merit what is meant to be ours in the first place. It is only then that our achievements become truly ours.

The Jewish people emulated this grit when crossing the Red Sea.

As the vengeful Egyptian army advanced, the Jewish people stood with indecision and fear at the edge of the sea. Nachshon ben Aminadav, prince of the tribe of Judah, jumped into the sea, and as the waters reached his mouth and nostrils, he almost drowned. With God’s command, Moses lifted his staff and the waters parted. The Jewish people entered and were saved from assault. After this miracle, the Jewish nation reached such a high level of faith and trust in God that it continues to sustain us even during the most challenging times.

How do we cross our own metaphorical sea to arrive at a place where we are fully committed to striving toward our dreams?

While the Jewish people experienced many setbacks along the way (the Golden Calf, 12 spies, Korach’s rebellion -- just to name a few), they finally made it to the promised land (after more than 40 years!). Crossing the Red Sea was the crucial turning point of their momentous journey. It is the defining moment when the Jewish People committed to their mission. Whatever the cost, there was no turning back. Now, they could move forward from slavery into freedom, accepting the Torah and becoming a nation.

As modern Jews, we can relate to the struggles of our ancestors. We are often in a place of indecision – considering all the available options (there are so many!). How do we cross our own metaphorical sea to arrive at a place where we are fully committed to striving toward our dreams? Psychological research offers a few tips.

First, consider what are your goals, dreams, ambitions – in other words, your sense of purpose in life. What drives your sense of meaning?
Once this is clear, ask yourself – what is my mindset? Am I focused on why or how? With a why mindset, we are always questioning our commitment. When we have a how mindset, in contrast, we concentrate on when, where and how to act, staying on track to reach our goal.
So, how can we change our mindset from a why to a how approach? Here are a few evidence-based suggestions:

List a series of steps necessary to implement your goal. Write down when, where, and how you plan to enact each of these envisioned steps.
Identify at least three specific situations you face regularly and what behavior would best serve your goal in each of those situations. “If this (opportunity/barrier/critical situation) arises, then I will (goal-orientated response).”
Judaism teaches us that each of us has our own unique mission. Psychological research emphasizes that having a sense of purpose and striving for meaningful goals are important for our mental health and wellbeing. Passover offers us an opportunity to become gritty, re-committing ourselves to reaching our dreams and meeting our highest potential. Crossing our metaphorical Red Sea can be the first step on this journey.

In Egypt, Walking in the Footsteps of the Exodus.April 12, 2022 | by Prof. Joshua Berman
Guiding tours to the land of the Pharaohs, I’ve gained an unexpected appreciation for Egyptians – modern and ancient.
Call it “the Exodus in reverse.”
https://aish.com/in-egypt-walking-in-the-footsteps-of-the-exodus/?src=ac-txt
In growing numbers Israeli tour groups are flocking to Cairo, Luxor and Aswan to tour the sites of Egypt, and I recently led the first biblically themed kosher tour there. The exposure to Egypt, ancient and modern, is a mind-bending experience.

It hits you the moment you get on the highway from Cairo International Airport. Before you are two huge signs. To the right “Nasser City,” named for the dictator who sought Israel’s destruction in 1956 and 1967, and to the left, “6th of October City,” erected in commemoration of the surprise attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, 1973.

I can vividly recall as a youngster sitting next to my father in shul on that Yom Kippur morning when the rabbi rose and announced, “Israel has been attacked; we don’t know where and we don’t know by whom.”

But blink an eye and this is what you now see: A kippah-wearing Jew jogging alone in Luxor and in Aswan greeted with applause and cheers as the locals call out morning greetings of “Sabah al-khair!”; 35 Jews walking through the densely packed souk of central Cairo on a Friday morning as hawkers looking to peddle their wares approach, calling “Shalom U-vrachah!”; Jews making a minyan for evening prayers – in the lobby of the Cairo Ramses Hilton; local hotel kitchen staff checking their every move with our kashrut supervisor, eager to respect the laws of the Jews’ parallel to the Muslim dietary laws of halal.

In Egypt, for the first time in my life, I walked around a city where the vast majority of people were like me – devout practitioners of their religion. There was something liberating about not sticking out like a sore thumb in a secular liberal landscape.

Here you read in hieroglyphs names like Miriam and Pinchas, and brush your hand over mud bricks with straw that date to the time of the enslavement in Egypt.

To tour the sites of ancient Egypt is truly to walk in the footsteps of the Exodus. Here you read in hieroglyphs names like Miriam and Pinchas (Pinchas, an Egyptian name? Who knew?), and brush your hand over mud bricks with straw that date to the time of the enslavement in Egypt.

Some of the discoveries are truly revealing. At the Seder table, we recall how God delivered Israel from Egypt “with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” Most would be surprised to learn that this biblical phrase is actually Egyptian in origin: Egyptian inscriptions routinely describe the Pharaoh as “the mighty hand” and his acts as those of “the outstretched arm.”

When the Torah describes God in the same terms used by the Egyptians to exalt their pharaohs, we see at work the dynamics of cultural appropriation. During much of its history, ancient Israel was in Egypt’s shadow. For weak and oppressed peoples, one form of cultural and spiritual resistance is to appropriate the symbols of the oppressor and put them to competitive ideological purposes.

Or consider this: when you write a sentence in hieroglyphs there’s a special rule: if the sentence contains the name of a god, that god’s name must be the first word in the sentence, no matter what it does to the syntax of the rest of the sentence. Think of a verse like Exodus 3:11: “And Moses said to the Lord, ‘who am I that I should go before Pharaoh?’” In hieroglyphs, you’d have to write this, “Lord Moses said to the who am I that I should go before Pharaoh?” That makes reading this stuff incredibly difficult, but as a man of faith myself, the idea behind it resonated with me: put God first, and work your way around Him.

One of the participants excitedly showed me that we have the same phenomenon in Jewish law. The Torah says that the High Priest should wear a diadem inscribed with the words “Holy to God” (kodesh le-Hashem). But according to the Talmud (Shabbat 63b), this must be written in two lines: in the top line, the tetragrammaton alone, and in the lower line “Holy to – .” And then it dawned on me: in sharing this “God-first” mentality, I have something significant in common with these idol-worshipping Jew-enslaving Egyptians of old that I don’t with many of the people I consider good friends today.

None of this would be happening now without the Abraham Accords, whose tailwinds have carried Egypt along as part of the moderate Suni axis and its rapprochement with the Jewish State. Egyptair, which for years refused to fly its planes into Tel Aviv, now does so with daily service. To be sure, this is not for love of Zion but for love of mammon. The Egyptians want Israeli business travelers to transit to Africa through Cairo. They want Jews to visit Egypt because it helps their economy. But not so long ago, such interests couldn’t overcome animosity and radical ideology.

These opportunities challenge us to look at them anew as they look at us anew as well. And, so, it’s a blessed time and a first step. Following the cadence of the Haggadah, we may say: this year is different than all other years. And even If we can now peacefully visit Egypt, but the Egyptians don’t yet sing HaTikvah – dayenu.

Feature image: Minchah prayers at the Sphinx. (courtesy, Sandor Joffe)

Originally appeared in the Times of Israel.

https://aish.com/the-dalai-lama-and-the-exodus/?src=ac-txt
The Dalai Lama and the Exodus.March 27, 2022 | by Rabbi Lord Jonathan SacksFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare
As long as we never lose our story, we will never lose our identity.
Sometimes others know us better than we know ourselves. In the year 2000, a British Jewish research institute came up with a proposal that Jews in Britain be redefined as an ethnic group and not as a religious community. It was a non-Jewish journalist, Andrew Marr, who stated what should have been obvious. He said: "All this is shallow water, and the further in you wade, the shallower it gets."

It is what he wrote next that I found inspirational: "The Jews have always had stories for the rest of us. They have had their Bible, one of the great imaginative works of the human spirit. They have been victim of the worst modernity can do, a mirror for Western madness. Above all they have had the story of their cultural and genetic survival from the Roman Empire to the 2000s, weaving and thriving amid uncomprehending, hostile European tribes."1

The Jews have always had stories for the rest of us. I love that testimony. And indeed, from early on, storytelling has been central to the Jewish tradition. Every culture has its stories. (The late Elie Wiesel once said, "God created man because God loves stories"). Almost certainly, the tradition goes back to the days when our ancestors were hunter- gatherers telling stories around the campfire at night. We are the storytelling animal.

The Israelites had not yet left Egypt, and yet already Moses was telling them how to tell the story. Why this obsession with storytelling?

But what is truly remarkable is the way in which, on the brink of the Exodus, Moses three times tells the Israelites how they are to tell the story to their children in future generations.

When your children ask you, 'What does this ceremony mean to you?' then tell them, 'It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord , who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes when He struck down the Egyptians.' (Ex. 12:26-27)
On that day tell your child, 'I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.' (Ex. 13:8)
"In days to come, when your child asks you, 'What does this mean?' say, 'With a mighty hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. (Ex. 13:14)The Israelites had not yet left Egypt, and yet already Moses was telling them how to tell the story. That is the extraordinary fact. Why so? Why this obsession with storytelling?
The simplest answer is that we are the story we tell ourselves.2 There is an intrinsic, perhaps necessary, link between narrative and identity. In the words of the thinker who did more than most to place this idea at the center of contemporary thought, Alasdair MacIntyre, "Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal."3 We come to know who we are by discovering of which story or stories we are a part.

Jerome Bruner has persuasively argued that narrative is central to the construction of meaning, and meaning is what makes the human condition human.4 No computer needs to be persuaded of its purpose in life before it does what it is supposed to do. Genes need no motivational encouragement. No virus needs a coach. We do not have to enter their mindset to understand what they do and how they do it, because they do not have a mindset to enter.

We act in the present because of things we did or that happened to us in the past, and in order to realize a sought-for future.

But humans do. We act in the present because of things we did or that happened to us in the past, and in order to realize a sought-for future. Even minimally to explain what we are doing is already to tell a story.

Take three people eating salad in a restaurant, one because he needs to lose weight, the second because she's a principled vegetarian, the third because of religious dietary laws. These are three outwardly similar acts, but they belong to different stories and they have different meanings for the people involved.

Storytelling and the Exodus
Why though storytelling and the Exodus?

One of the most powerful passages I have ever read on the nature of Jewish existence is contained in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Considerations on the Government of Poland (1772). This is an unlikely place to find insight on the Jewish condition, but it is there. Rousseau is talking about the greatest of political leaders. First of these, he says, was Moses who "formed and executed the astonishing enterprise of instituting as a national body a swarm of wretched fugitives who had no arts, no weapons, no talents, no virtues, no courage, and who, since they had not an inch of territory of their own, were a troop of strangers upon the face of the earth."

Moses, he says, "dared to make out of this wandering and servile troop a body politic, a free people, and while it wandered in the wilderness without so much as a stone on which to rest its head, gave it the lasting institution, proof against time, fortune and conquerors, which 5000 years have not been able to destroy or even to weaken." This singular nation, he says, so often subjugated and scattered, "has nevertheless maintained itself down to our days, scattered among the other nations without ever merging with them."5

Moses' genius, he says, lay in the nature of the laws that kept Jews as a people apart. But that is only half the story. The other half lies in the institution of storytelling as a fundamental religious duty, recalling and re-enacting the events of the Exodus every year, and in particular, making children central to the story. Noting that in three of the four storytelling passages (three in the Book of Exodus, the fourth in the Book of Deuteronomy) children are referred to as asking questions, the Sages held that the narrative of Seder night should be told in response to a question asked by a child wherever possible. If we are the story we tell about ourselves, then as long as we never lose the story, we will never lose our identity.

Realizing that their stay in exile might be prolonged, the Dalai Lama asked the Jews, whom he regarded as the world's experts in maintaining identity in exile, for advice.

This idea found expression some years ago in a fascinating encounter. Tibet has been governed by the Chinese since 1950. During the 1959 uprising, the Dalai Lama, his life in danger, fled to Dharamsala in India where he and many of his followers have lived ever since. Realizing that their stay in exile might be prolonged, in 1992 he decided to ask Jews, whom he regarded as the world's experts in maintaining identity in exile, for advice. What, he wanted to know, was the secret?

The story of that week-long encounter has been told by Roger Kamenetz in his book, The Jew in the Lotus.6 One of the things they told him was the importance of memory and storytelling in keeping a people's culture and identity alive. They spoke about Passover and the Seder service in particular. So in 1997 Rabbis and American dignitaries held a special Seder service in Washington DC with the Dalai Lama. He wrote this to the participants:

In our dialogue with Rabbis and Jewish scholars, the Tibetan people have learned about the secrets of Jewish spiritual survival in exile: one secret is the Passover Seder. Through it for 2000 years, even in very difficult times, Jewish people remember their liberation from slavery to freedom and this has brought you hope in times of difficulty. We are grateful to our Jewish brothers and sisters for adding to their celebration of freedom the thought of freedom for the Tibetan people.

Cultures are shaped by the range of stories to which they give rise. Some of these have a special role in shaping the self-understanding of those who tell them. We call them master-narratives. They are about large, ongoing groups of people: the tribe, the nation, the civilization. They hold the group together horizontally across space and vertically across time, giving it a shared identity handed on across the generations.

The Exodus story gave Jews the most tenacious identity ever held by a nation.

None has been more powerful than the Exodus story. It gave Jews the most tenacious identity ever held by a nation. In the eras of oppression, it gave hope of freedom. At times of exile, it promised return. It told 200 generations of Jewish children who they were and of what story they were a part. It became the world's master-narrative of liberty, adopted by an astonishing variety of groups, from Puritans in the 17th century to African-Americans in the 19th and to Tibetan Buddhists today.

I believe that I am a character in our people's story, with my own chapter to write, and so are we all. To be a Jew is to see yourself as part of that story, to make it live in our time, and to do your best to hand it on to those who will come after us.

Andrew Marr, The Observer, Sunday 14 May, 2000.
See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: a study in moral theory, London, Duckworth, 1981; Dan P. McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths And The Making Of The Self, New York, Guilford Press, 1997.
MacIntyre though, op. cit., 201.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Harvard University Press, 1986.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and other later political writings, Cambridge University press, 2010, 180.
Roger Kamanetz, The Jew in the Lotus, HarperOne, 2007.

A Passover Dictionary: What Do All These Strange Hebrew Terms Mean?.April 4, 2022 | by Rabbi Ori 
https://aish.com/a-passover-dictionary-what-do-all-these-strange-hebrew-terms-mean/?src=ac-txt
Don’t worry – we’ve got you covered.

Chametz
During Passover we abstain entirely from eating chametz. Literally defined as "leaven," the term chametz refers to products containing fermented grains. Wheat, oats, rye, barley, and spelt which have had contact with water/moisture for longer than 18 minutes would be in the realm of chametz. The Torah tells us (Exodus 12:19-20) that chametz should not be found in your house or eaten during the course of the seven days of Passover.

The symbolism of refraining from chametz on Passover is rooted in the historical episode of the Exodus. When the Jewish people left Egypt, they left in a hurry without any time to allow their food provisions to bake fully into leavened bread. This didn’t dissuade the Jewish people from leaving. When we abstain from chametz, we are showing that despite the hustle and bustle of life, and despite the constant movement that the Jewish people experienced over the ages, it is our deep faith in God and God's deep love for us that has kept us strong throughout the millennia.

Bedikat Chametz – Searching for Leaven
On the night before Passover (this year, it will be on Thursday night, April 14th), the Jewish people gather in their homes at sundown and begin searching for any remaining chametz. This stage of the Passover prep is known as bedikat chametz. Traditionally, we use a beeswax candle, a feather, a wooden spoon, and a paper bag for collecting any chametz found. On the next day, all found chametz gets burned before the fifth seasonal hour, and the "search and destroy" process officially comes to a close.

Homiletically, chametz represents our puffed-up ego that exists inside each one of us, and the bedikat chametz represents the checking, cleansing, and purifying of ourselves from those negative traits that veer us away from doing good. The holiday of Passover is referred to as "a time of our freedom." It’s a unique opportunity to tap into the spiritual forces of true freedom that are more accessible this time of the year as we experience our own exodus.

Haggadah
The Passover Haggadah is a unique guidebook that the Jewish people have been using for centuries to take us through the Passover Seder. The Haggadah gets its name from the commandment in the Torah (Exodus 13:8) which states, "Ve'higadita Le'vincha" – and you shall tell your children about the freedom that the Jewish people experienced when they left Egypt. The Haggadah includes a combination of ancient texts dating back to Biblical times as well as the Talmudic era.

Arguably the most popular Jewish book, the Haggadah is a user-friendly manual that is meant to walk us through the 15 steps of the Seder, enabling us to experience and feel as if we ourselves are leaving "Egypt" in our modern era. Packed with holy blessings, Biblical verses, Talmudic stories, mystical songs, intriguing questions, captivating answers, incredible inspiration and jaw-dropping drama, the Haggadah is a book that has the potential to keep us awake, both physically and spiritually.

Ke'arah – The Seder Plate


The centerpiece of the Seder table is the Ke'arah, the Seder plate. It is a beautiful plate used by the head of each household that contains various items that are either eaten or identified during the course of the meal. The primary components included are: 1) ze'roa – shank bone, 2) beitzah – egg, 3) marror – bitter herbs, 4) charoset – sweet paste, 5) mei melach – salt water, 6) karpas – vegetable, and 7) matzah – unleavened bread. There are different customs as to the exact layout of the various components, and each family should adhere to their custom.

The Seder plate is trying to convey to us the epic story of Passover. With simple, yet profound visuals in the form of different foods, each item represents a different element and aspect of the Jewish people's saga in Egypt. All of it, however, comes together on one single organized plate, representing the fact that God has His plans worked out in an organized way, and although from our perspective things might seem random, we know that He is operating the world with a true rhyme and reason, and ultimately, the Jewish people will prevail.

The Four Cups
One of the most imperative aspects of the Passover Seder is the drinking of the four cups of wine (in Hebrew, "daled kosot"). We drink wine, in particular, since after all, we are celebrating our freedom, and wine is considered to be a drink of royalty. At the same time, while we are celebrating our freedom, it is important not to forget the hardships that befell the Jewish people. As such, it is preferable to drink specifically red wine to remind us of the Jewish bloodshed that took place in Egypt.

The four cups of wine, which are drunk at four crucial parts of the Seder, correspond to the four expressions of redemption that are used by the Torah (Exodus 6:6-7) in describing God’s promise to the Jewish people regarding the Exodus from Egypt. 1) Ve'hotzaiti – "I will take you out…", 2) Ve'hitzalti – "I will save you…", 3) Ve'goalti – "I will redeem you…", and 4) Ve'lokachti – "I will take you as a nation…".

Elijah's Cup
Considered to be one of the most mysterious parts of the Passover night meal, the Cup of Elijah (in Hebrew, "kos shel eliyahu") is the fifth cup that is poured – but not drunken from – at the conclusion of the Grace After Meals. Upon pouring this cup, we step aside from the table for a moment and open the door of the home, and recite several verses, asking God to pour His wrath against the enemies of the Jewish people.

Elijah's Cup, which is the fifth cup, corresponds to the fifth expression of redemption that is used by the Torah (Exodus 6:8): Ve'heveti – "I will bring you to the Land…" In contrast to the other four expressions of redemption, this last one is an allusion to the ultimate Messianic redemption that will take place at the End of Days, and will be ushered by Elijah the Prophet. Although we celebrate our freedom on Passover, Elijah's Cup reminds us that we are not completely free yet, as we are still waiting for the final redemption, may it be soon.

Matzah
The thin, crisp, cracker-type of unleavened bread that the Jewish people eat on Passover is called matzah. Matzah is the primary symbol of the Passover festival; in fact, the Torah (Exodus 23:15) refers to the holiday of Passover as the "Festival of Matzahs" (in Hebrew, "chag hamatzot"). On one hand, matzah is a symbol of redemption and freedom, as this was the food the Jewish people ate when leaving Egypt. On the other hand, matzah is called the "bread of affliction," or poor-man's bread, since it is a food eaten by slaves, thus symbolizing our servitude in Egypt.

These two ideas go hand in hand. Unlike fully baked bread which ferments and rises, thus giving off the impression that it is bigger than it really is, matzah is in the realm of simplicity. What you see is what you get. It is merely a combination of cold water, wheat, and some heat. True freedom is experienced when we live simply, with humility and recognition of a greater Being. The simple matzah serves as an icon of the Jewish people's faith and humility.

Maror – Bitter Herbs
In order to be able to taste and experience the freedom from Egypt, it is important that we first taste and experience the hardships and bitterness of living in Egypt. Maror, one of the items on the Seder plate, is a bitter herb – generally, in the form of horseradish or Romaine lettuce – that we eat during the Passover night meal, which allows us to feel some of the pain that the Jewish people suffered in Egypt. The Torah (Exodus 1:14) tells us that the Egyptians embittered the lives (in Hebrew, "Va'yemararu et chayeihem") of the Jewish people with excruciating laborious activities. The consumption of maror is meant to remind us of the bitter subjugation that we experienced in Egypt.

Charoset
The word charoset comes from the Hebrew word "cheres," which means clay. The thick, sweet, delicious relish – typically composed of grated apples, nuts, cinnamon and red wine – is used during the Passover night meal to sweeten the bitterness of the maror (hence, we dip the maror into the charoset). The thick texture and cloudy color of the charoset dip reminds us of the clay and mortar that the Jewish people used to make bricks in Egypt.

The sweet apples in the charoset remind us of the infamous apple trees in Egypt, where the Jewish women would heroically give birth underneath the trees so that the Egyptians would not discover if and when a Jewish boy was born. Ironically, although many Jewish children were horribly used as “bricks” by the Egyptians, the charoset reminds us to recall the great efforts and courage of the Jewish women to give birth beneath the apple trees. For the rest of history, this show of heroism would strengthen us as a people to never give up hope on a brighter future.

Karpas
Although any vegetable can be used, the prevalent custom is to eat a small portion of a potato for the karpas stage of the Passover night meal. The letters of karpas in Hebrew, can be rearranged to spell: "samech perech", an allusion to the 60 myriad Jews – the 600,000 Jewish males over the age of 20 – who were enslaved with difficult work (in Hebrew, “perech”) in Egypt.

We make the blessing ("Borei Pri Ho'adama") on the karpas and dip the karpas into salt water – representing tears – and eat it. This reminds us of the intense work that the Jewish people experienced in Egypt.

Afikoman
The word afikoman has etymological roots in both Greek and Aramaic, and it refers to food at the end of the meal, a.k.a. dessert. When the holy Temple stood, there was a Biblical commandment (Exodus 12:8) to eat the Paschal Lamb (in Hebrew, "korban pesach") on the night of Passover. The Paschal Lamb would be eaten along with matzah. Today, due to our current state of exile, although we do not have the Paschal Lamb, we still eat the matza – what we call, afikoman – at the end of the Passover night meal to remind us of the Paschal Lamb.

Kittel
During the Passover Seder, many Jewish (married) men have the custom of donning a white robe/tunic, called (in Yiddish) a kittel. The purity of the white colored robe conveys the message that we are indeed holy, pure, and free from our bondage in Egypt. At the same time, the kittel reminds us of the day of death, since it resembles burial shrouds. This thought humbles us so as to not allow the freedom of the night – along with all the fancy utensils and abundance of food – to make us feel haughty.

Enjoy your Seder!

Giving Voice to the Stifled Jews of Iran.April 10, 2022 | 
by Catherine Perez-Shakdam
Shirin lives in constant fear. We met on social media. This is her story.
Iran’s small Jewish community lives under the shadow of institutionalized-hatred, bound by fear and the threat of retaliation should they dare offer but a whisper of resistance. It is those voices I wish to air today, so that their cries find an echo in the silence which suffocates them.
https://aish.com/giving-voice-to-the-stifled-jews-of-iran/?src=ac-txt

Shirin* is the daughter of a textile merchant from Isfahan, an affluent city of central Iran, a six-hour drive from the capital Tehran. Formerly home to a buoyant Jewish community, Isfahan is now home to an estimated 1500 Jews and 13 synagogues, all mostly located in an area dubbed the Jewish Passage, a far cry from the bustling community who once upon a time called the city home.

“After Tehran, Isfahan had one of the most populous and thriving Jewish communities. Today things are very different. The streets of our neighborhoods have gone increasingly quiet and so many of our family members have left for Europe, the United States or Israel. It has been difficult to feel a real sense of belonging now that we are cut off from one another … Even though we try to stay in touch with everyone through social media and Whatsapp, there is always the fear that our phone calls and messages could be misinterpreted by the regime and accusations of espionage or direct support to Israel made against us.

“My cousin left five years ago for the UK and I’ve stayed in touch with her through journals. A family friend who is a trader often travels between Iran, Turkey and the UK and when he does I make sure to give him my journals so that Serena could read them … and vice versa. This way I get to share my innermost thoughts and everyday life without censorship.
It’s a bit lonely as I miss hearing my cousin’s voice but it’s the only safe way we have to maintain our close bond.

I wish we didn’t have to hide ourselves away. Sometimes I wish Iran wasn’t my home.

“I wish we had the freedom to be ourselves and enjoy our families. I wish we didn’t have to hide ourselves away. I wish so many things for my community and my parents. Sometimes I wish Iran wasn’t my home.”

A sister to her four brothers and an only daughter to her loving Jewish parents, Shirin is 27 years old. An avid reader of the French classics, Shirin dreams of teaching at La Sorbonne, a well-known French University in Paris, a dream she knows is unlikely to come true as leaving Iran is not a simple matter.

Shirin has an M.A in French Language and Literature. She now teaches French privately, hoping soon to further her studies by pursuing a degree in Western Philosophy.

“It hasn’t been an easy road for me. I had to work twice as hard as other students and every step of the way I had to justify to both my professors and the faculty administrative body that my ambitions were purely academic and not politically motivated.

“Jews in Iran live under permanent suspicion; everything we do is put under a microscope. The most trivial matters can lead the authorities to question our motives. When I first applied to my B.A in French Language my father had a visit from SEPA (Iran Intelligence Services) asking him why his daughter felt the need to study a foreign language when she could simply marry and limit herself to being a mother and a wife.



“The fear was that I might develop links to French organizations through my studies and get involved in politics.

“Bless them, my parents have been so supportive of me! I’m eternally grateful to my dad for standing up to government officials for me when it would have been so easy for him to demand that I give up.

“I had to wait for an entire year for my application to be accepted. After that I had to face daily berating from my teachers and fellow students. I was also asked to systematically hand over my notes and research papers to a committee for verification before I could be allowed to attend the rest of my classes. I don’t know what they were looking for but I had no choice in the matter. And so I complied.

“I was the only Jew in my classes and I found it difficult to make any friends. I tried but most people kept away from me. It was a lonely experience but I pushed through. My studies mean everything to me and without them I would have nothing.”

Under Constant Suspicion
On paper the Islamic Republic does not discriminate against its citizens on the basis of ethnicity or faith, but realities on the ground are very different - even more so for Iran’s small Jewish community. Fed by paranoia against the Jews, the State peddles the view that every Iranian Jew harbors seditionist feelings towards Tehran and that without proper monitoring they would either foment an uprising or enable foreign agents to sow discord within.

Such level of mistrust has fuelled many great tensions and fanned feelings of enmity against the Jewish communities, leaving the Jews of Iran to have to justify their actions under the watchful eye of the state intelligence services.

“I was told very young not to mix with children outside our community as mixing could put my father and his business in jeopardy. There is no law preventing us from participating in social gatherings or even sports but it’s very much frowned upon. All aspects of life in Iran are closely monitored by SEPA and the Basij (a paramilitary group close to Ayatollah Khameini set up to serve as an auxiliary force engaged in activities such as internal security, and enforcing state control over society.)

Women in Iran have a very limited space within which they can freely move and I have to contend with those limitations on top of being an Iranian Jew.

“Even our synagogues are watched and so many choose to practice at home rather than risk bringing attention to themselves. Being a girl makes things terribly difficult.
Women in Iran have a very limited space within which they can freely move and I have to contend with those limitations on top of being an Iranian Jew. As a child I rarely went to the park with my mother and brothers to play. Even picnics, a favorite hobby among Iranians, had to be a well thought-out affair.

“I’m suffocating … I wish I could be free to choose how I want to live my life and my faith without thinking of all the ways I might put my family in danger.”

Shirin found refuge in the anonymity of social media. We met when Shirin posted a Facebook comment on one of my posts.

Quietly Subservient
“We live under the constant threat of arrest. Should the state decide that we acted against their interests, we face the risk of having our loved ones imprisonned and tortured. Jews cannot travel freely across Iran without arousing suspicion. The state may claim that we can, it’s simply not true. The worst part is that there are no clear guidelines or rulebooks. Everything is up to the intelligence services to decide. A simple text message to a friend could be misunderstood and lead to an arrest or a visit of Basij into our homes.

“Jews are immediately flagged at the airport should we wish to leave the country for fears that we will contact opposition groups and help depose the regime. Our phones are tapped and our gatherings spied on.

“We also have to play a part in the state’s propaganda machine by sending representatives to vouch for the happiness of the Jewish community under the authority of the Ayatollahs.
microscope and our ambitions curtailed to make way for regular Iranians.

“Iran has put so many limitations on us that our only hope would be to leave and relocate elsewhere… but many of us do not wish to leave our homes and our communities. Iran has been home for generations and we are waiting for things to get better. Only it’s not getting any better and the regime has systematically hardened its tone towards us, we live under a cloud of suspicion.

“Things have gotten increasingly difficult since the 2009 unrest. Even though no Jews took part in the protests, the government seems to think that somehow we had a hand in it by financing the Green Movement. Up until 2009 my father had managed to get quite friendly with several notables in Isfahan and that meant that he could trade in relative freedom. After 2009 they had to distance themselves from him. He was told that Tehran had sent a directive that any close contact with dissident groups, including the Jewish community would be looked upon as an act of defiance against the leadership.”

Shirin describes the widespread boycott her community suffers as Jewish businesses and Jewish wealth have become center stage to claims that the Jews of Iran support terrorism abroad and that their actions are designed to harm the economic interests of regular Iranians.

“Schools and universities often call for Iranians to shun Jewish-run businesses by claiming we are financing acts of genocide against Muslim populations abroad. Clerics are describing us as devils and devil-worshippers… and though many people know that to be a lie, they still stay away from us out of fear. Iran is a suffocating country to live in. All we can do is hope to survive the regime.”

I’ve walked the streets of Iran and I attended those very rooms where the “Jewish question” was being addressed. Shirin’s story is typical of that of an Iranian Jew. Cut off from everyday society, Iran’s Jews can only survive by living in seclusion.

*A pseudonym in order to protect her identity.

Feature image: Unsplash.com, Ardalan Hamedani

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The Jews Didn’t Build the Pyramids.March 27, 2022 | by Rabbi Mordechai BecherFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

And other things that Egyptian culture reveals about the Book of Exodus

If you’d like to appreciate rush hour traffic on the George Washington bridge, where I drive to work every morning, then I suggest a visit to Cairo. I was recently a scholar-in-residence for a tour group in Egypt and while driving in Cairo I began to feel nostalgic for New York City traffic.

Some other more significant highlights of the trip were the incredible archaeological sites and the remnants of Jewish presence in Egypt over the past 2,000 years.

Visiting the area of ancient Tanis (Pitom in the Bible) we saw bricks from the time of the Egyptian exile, and they were made of mud, clay and straw as described in the book of Exodus (5:7, 11, 16). Wall paintings in Egypt, such as those in the tomb of Rekh-mi-Re at Thebes, depict foreigners working at brick making using straw and clay. They also suggest that one of the primary tasks was the carrying of these bricks to worksites. The book of Exodus (5:4) refers to carrying burdens as one of the tasks of the Israelite slaves.

This, by the way, is one of the indicators that the Jews did not build the pyramids, which were made of cut limestone blocks, not bricks. In addition, the pyramids were built well before the Children of Israel ever entered Egypt. Sorry to disappoint, but it was indeed aliens.

Joseph and Hieroglyphics
Joseph, was the first Israelite to arrive in Egypt, sold as a slave and brought there by Midianite traders (Genesis 37:28). Interestingly, a wall painting in the tomb of Khum-Hotep III at Beni Hasan depicts a caravan of Semitic Nomads, probably Midianites, entering Egypt bearing goods and slaves to sell.



Tzaphaneth – Paaneah – Joseph’s title in Hieroglyphics
After Joseph’s rise to fame by interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams he is given the title, “Tzapheneth Pa’aneach” (Genesis 41:42-45). When spelled out in hieroglyphics Tza-pa-neth means “the Neth speaks”, or “the god speaks” and “Paaneach” is pa-anakh “the life.” This is a fitting title for Joseph who always spoke in the name of God, attributed his success to God and, literally, brought life (ankh in Egyptian) to Egypt during its years of famine.

Egyptian Dream Book

Joseph’s dream interpretation can be understood in the context of Egyptian culture, since dreams were regarded as extremely significant. There were numerous methods of dream interpretation that were used and were recorded in special “dream books,” one of which is extant in a copy made in the 13th Century BCE. (Views of the Biblical World, Vol. I, p. 101)

The Name of Moses
Moses was found by the daughter of Pharaoh who gave him the name Moshe, which the Bible explains as “drawn from water”, referring to his being saved from the Nile (Exodus 2:10). Two ancient sources, Josephus Flavius, the Roman-Jewish historian, and Philo, the Egyptian- Jewish philosopher, both explain that “mo” is Egyptian for “water” and “uses” is Egyptian for “drawn from” (Josephus, Antiquities 2:9:6; Philo, De Vita Moses, 2:17).

There are those who maintain that the Egyptian “moshe” means “son of” and hence we find many Egyptian names with “moshe” or “mose” as a suffix. Ahmose, means “son of the moon;” Kamose, means “son of Ra’s majesty” and Thutmose, “son of Thot.”

There are some sources that believe the name of Moses was preserved in the non-Jewish world as the legendary Musaeus, teacher of Orpheus, from whom the Muses obtained their name, and reputation as sources of wisdom. So next time you refer to someone as your muse, keep in mind that you may be referencing Judaism’s ultimate muse, Moses. (Josephus, Antiquities 2:9:6; Philo, De Vita Moses, 2:17; Eusebius, Preparatio Evangelica 9:27; Kaplan, The Living Torah, pp. 147-148)

The Ram-God and the Passover Offering
When the Jewish people were about to leave Egypt God commanded them to obtain a sheep or ram, slaughter it and roast it whole on a spit. They were forbidden to boil or bake it and they were supposed to eat in in a gathering of family and friends. (Exodus 12:3-8). This seems to be a strange commandment to give the slaves in preparation for their freedom and the Exodus. The emphasis the Bible puts on the mode of cooking is particularly strange.

The Ram god Khnum
Archaeology throws some light on this curious ritual. A sandstone relief dating to about 1300 B.C.E shows a picture of a muscular human body with a ram’s head. This is the Ram-god Khnum, the Lord of the First Cataract, who presided over the annual rise of the Nile, according to Egyptian mythology (Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 1995, p. 61). The Egyptians would have therefore attached some importance or divine symbolism to rams or sheep.

The Jewish people were not only physically enslaved to the Egyptians, but, like many other slaves, they were also psychologically and ideologically enslaved to the Egyptians. Psychologically – they had a slave mentality that imbued in them a fear and awe of their slave-masters. Ideologically – the Jews had almost lost their tradition of monotheism inherited from Abraham (Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Idolatry 1:3). In order to redeem the Jews, God wanted to free them, not only physically, but also in mind and thought.

Clay brick with straw visible
Now we can understand the Passover offering of a ram as an act of tremendous courage, an act of defiance and an act of rebellion. For slaves to summon the courage to take the symbol of an Egyptian deity, kill it and eat it was quite extraordinary. Not only that, but the Bible commanded them to roast it whole on a spit so that its aroma would be unavoidable to the Egyptians and so that they would instantly recognize a ram on the spit. One can imagine two Egyptians, Ahknaten and Imenhotep walking along in Thebes, smelling the BBQ, looking over the fence into the Goldstein’s backyard and exclaiming, “Oh my god! He’s right there on the spit!” The Jews were thus freeing themselves from their slave mentality, protesting idolatry and, basically saying, “In yo face!” to their former masters.

These are some insights that indicate the intimate knowledge of Egyptian culture in the Hebrew Bible and the reality of slavery and redemption for the Jewish people. Have a wonderful, joyful Passover!

There is a Pharaoh and Moses Inside Each of Us.April 3, 2022 | by Yael Zoldan M.A.FacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

Are we perpetually enslaved to our inner doubts, despair and anger?

It is hard to sing the song of freedom when we do not feel free. So often it feels as though the sea will never split.

Because inside every one of us there is a Pharaoh and he will not let us go. He holds us down and mocks our hopes. He laughs and tells us that we are slaves and we will always be slaves. That there is no other life for us than the one we have.

He points to the wasted, ruined efforts of our past and tells us that we must continue to waste our lives building useless buildings and watching them fall. He tells us that all of our tomorrows will be made of this futile, helpless emptiness. And we hear him and we are crushed and defeated. Depleted of spirit and unable even to cry. We see our future and it looks like our present and it looks like our past. We are not worthy of salvation. We will never reach the promised land.

This is all true. Except.

Except that within each of us there is also a Moses. And his voice says, “Let’s go!” His voice says, “It’s true that you may now be a slave but you don’t have to be tomorrow what you are today. You were not created to build castles in the sand. You are worthy of serving God in the Promised Land. Look up and see that place in the distance. If you believe in yourself you can be saved.”

And all of this is true. Except.

Except that the voice of Moses is a stammer and he speaks so softly that we cannot hear. And if we cannot hear then how can we change? And if we do not change then how will we be free?

We are condemned to be exactly what we are right now, a small, wan version of the self that God willed for us when He blew into us the breath of life. The life that we are now wasting.

This is painful but true. Except.

Even a soft stammer is loud when is speaks the truth.

Except, the thin, soft sound can be heard if you are willing to hear it. If you can be silent long enough. Even a soft stammer is loud when is speaks the truth. You will know the truth when you encounter it. You will recognize the voice that uplifts instead of pushing you down. When you hear it, you can choose to heed its call.

And every word of it will be true.

Sometimes the path to salvation is made of your own work and the sea will not split, so you must swim to get to the other side. Sometimes the lesson is not so obvious, and both the hero and the villain are you. Sometimes the Egypt you escape is within you and you must find a new way to be.

There is always a Pharaoh and a Moses, slavery and salvation. And there is always a choice to make. Only you can decide whose voice you will heed and where you will travel.

And that is eternally true.

11 Famous Ukrainian Jews.April 3, 2022 | by Dr. Yvette Alt MillerFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

Pres. Zelensky joins a long list of amazing Ukrainian Jews who have made the world a better place.

In the weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, sparking untold suffering and destruction and causing the largest refugee crisis since World War II, Ukraine’s Jewish President, Volodymyr Zelensky has emerged as a hero. Zelensky has rallied nations and individuals across the world and he’s been open about his Jewish background, explaining to journalists that he is the grandson of Holocaust survivors and grew up in “an ordinary Soviet Jewish family.”

Zelensky isn’t the only Ukrainian Jew to inspire people around the world and change history. Here are 11 other Ukrainian Jews who made the world a better place.

Ba’al Shem Tov
Yisrael ben Eliezer was born in 1700 in Poland, close to the Ukrainian border. He became a renown mystic leader and is the founder of the Jewish Hasidic movement, which emphasizes worshiping God with intense joy. He amassed a devoted following of Jews who called him the “Ba’al Shem Tov,” the “Good Master of the (Divine) Name”. He settled in the Ukrainian city of Medzhybizh sometime in the 1730s and taught Jews there that even the most simple Jew is able to reach the heavens with simple, heartfelt prayers.

He incorporated elements from Jewish mysticism into his teachings, emphasizing that every single element of the world contains a Divine spark. Huge numbers of Ukrainian Jews embraced the Hasidic movement which later spread throughout Europe and the world.

Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky


Born in 1880 in the city of Odessa, Ze’ev Jabotinsky grew up completely assimilated. He had no connection to Judaism until he was an adult. He became a celebrated Russian journalist, filing stories from across Europe.

In 1903, the infamous Kishinev Pogrom changed the course of Jabotinsky’s life. Over three days of rioting, beginning on Easter Sunday, hundreds of Jews in the Moldovan city of Kishinev were attacked, injured, and killed. Their property was destroyed and Jews cowered in fear as the murderous mob rampaged unchecked. Hundreds of Jewish women were violently assaulted. It became clear that Jews had little future in Europe.

Jabotinsky was convinced Jews needed a Jewish state to be secure and became an ardent Zionist. He helped found the Jewish Legion to help British forces during World War I, and advocated tirelessly for a Jewish state in the land of Israel. Expelled from the land of Israel in 1929 by the British authorities, Jabotinsky continued to advance the cause of Jewish liberation, founding the underground Irgun military force and insisting on Jewish statehood. He died in exile in 1940.

Golda Meir


Israel’s 4th Prime Minister was born in 1898 in Kyiv. Her family was destitute. She recalled her father looking for work and having only bread and herring to eat. Golda wrote in her memoirs, “Despite everything, on Friday nights our house was always full of people, members of the family mostly. I remember swarms of cousins, second cousins, aunts and uncles. None of them was to survive the Holocaust, but they live on in my mind’s eye, sitting around our kitchen table, drinking tea out of glasses and, on the Sabbath and holidays, singing for hours - and I remember my parents’ sweet voices ringing out above the others.”

Meir went on to become one of the architects of the Zionist movement. She worked for Israel’s Federation of Labor; after World War II she negotiated with the British authorities to let in desperate Jewish refugees, and conducted diplomacy with Jordan’s King Abdullah I, trying (in vain) to convince him to refrain from attacking a future Jewish state.

Golda Meir was one of the signatories of Israel’s Declaration of Independence on May 14, 1948, and served as Israel’s ambassador to Russia, as Israel’s Foreign Minister (she was the world’s only female foreign minister at the time), and in became Israel’s Prime Minister in 1969, serving until 1974.

Otto Preminger


The groundbreaking film noir director was born in 1905 in Vyzhnytsia, Ukraine. He started his career as a theater director, and later became one of the most famous movie directors in the world. In his long movie career, he directed over 40 films, including Laura, Carmen Jones, The Man With the Golden Arm, Bounjour Tristesse, Porgy and Bess, Anatomy of a Murder, Exodus and Tell Me You Love Me Junie Moon.

Natan Sharansky


The famous former Soviet refusenik and Israeli politician was born in Donetsk, Ukraine in 1948. As a young man he worked as an interpreter for the Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. As Natan explored his Jewish identity, he became a spokesman for the Soviet Jewry dissident movement. He became a refusenik in 1973 after his application to emigrate to Israel was denied, and was arrested on trumped-up charges of treason and spying in 1977.

Sentenced to 13 years in a labor camp in Siberia, Natan coped with his imprisonment by focusing on his Jewish life. He later observed that in prison, as he embraced his Jewish identity, he found himself feeling like a free man.

Natan Sharansky was finally allowed to emigrate in 1986. He moved to Israel and later served as President of the Zionist Forum and editor of the Jerusalem Report. He formed a new political party in 1995, and was elected to Israel’s Knesset, eventually serving in various ministerial roles and as Deputy Prime Minister from 2001 to 2003. He served as Chairman of the Executive for the Jewish Agency from June 2009 to August 2018

Simon Wiesenthal


The famed Nazi hunter was born in 1908 in Buchach, Ukraine. During the Holocaust he was imprisoned in five Nazi concentration camps. After surviving the Holocaust, he dedicated his life to bringing Nazi criminals to justice and to educating future generations about the Holocaust.

In the days after his liberation from Mauthausen concentration camp, Wiesenthal handed American prosecutors a list of Nazis and offered his personal testimony to their crimes. In 1960 Weisenthal, his wife Cyla, and their daughter Paulinka set up the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna. Working out of a tiny office with little help, they scoured telephone directories to locate Nazi war criminals. Their efforts led to the 1963 arrest of Karl Silberhauer, who helped arrest Anne Frank and her family, Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor death camps, and many others. In 1977, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles carried forward his vision; it is a global Jewish human rights center that researches the Holocaust and educates people about its horrors.

Selman Waksman


Born in 1888 in Kiev, Selman Waksman became one of the world’s most foremost biochemists. He not only discovered many antibiotics, he coined the term as it’s used today. A teacher at Rutgers University for 40 years, Dr. Waksman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1952. He’s credited with developing over a dozen antibiotics, including those that treat tuberculosis. He used the proceeded of his Nobel Prize to fund the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers to continue research.

Vladimir Horowitz


One of the greatest pianists of the 20th century, Vladimir Horowitz was born in 1903 in Kyiv. He redefined many of the most famous pieces of classical music, interpreting standards by Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky using his prodigious talent and flamboyant style. Horowitz used to say he wanted to continually evolve as an artist, and “grow until I die.”

Sholom Aleichem


Sholom Aleichem (which means the traditional Hebrew greeting “Peace to you”) was the pen name of Sholom Rabinovitsch. He was born in 1859 in the Ukrainian town of Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky. Though he originally wrote in Hebrew and Russian, Sholom Aleichem later began to write exclusively in Yiddish.

His first Yiddish story appeared in 1883, and he went on to publish more than 40 Yiddish books, including plays, short stories and full-length novels. His stories of Tevya the milkman formed the basis of the 1964 musical Fiddler on the Roof. A wealthy man, Sholom Aleichem used his personal fortune to underwrite Yiddish publishing and support struggling Yiddish authors.

Mila Kunis


The actress was born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine in 1983 and immigrated to the United States when she was seven years old. Despite the fact that her husband Ashton Kutcher isn’t Jewish, Mila has been open about the fact that her family, including her two children, Wyatt and Dimitri, celebrate Shabbat. “We do Shabbat at our house,” she’s told reporters. When her daughter Wyatt was young, she used to wake up excited every Friday morning, looking forward to the family’s Friday night Shabbat dinner.

“I love the idea of - regardless of where we are in the world, regardless of what we’re doing, on Friday night, we take a minute to just acknowledge one another, to acknowledge our children; to acknowledge our family, say I love you… And that’s how I look at Shabbat,” she’s explained.

Mila led a moment of silence in solidarity with Ukraine at the Oscars ceremony this year, and she and her husband have been publicly thanked by Ukrainian President Zelensky for helping Ukraine in its hour of need.

Jan Koum


The billionaire founder of WhatsApp was born in Kyiv in 1976. After the fall of Communism, Jan and his mother moved to California, but life was far from easy in their new home. His father remained behind in Ukraine, and soon after moving to America, Jan’s mother became ill with cancer. Jan worked as a janitor while he was still a teenager, and he and his mother struggled to make ends meet with the help of food stamps and public housing.

Jan taught himself programming and worked for Ernst and Young and Yahoo. He got the idea for WhatsApp, a free telephone and messaging system, from his own experiences as a teenager, when he found it prohibitively expensive to call relatives. Jan teamed up with friends and fellow programmers and launched WhatsApp Inc. in 2009. The business’ first headquarters was the very building in Mountain View, California, where Jan used to go to collect his family’s food stamps.

The company hit many roadblocks. Jan and his partners persevered and ironed out many of the kinks in their business model. In 2014, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19 billion. Since selling WhatsApp, Jan has founded The Koum Family Foundation, which gives grants to higher education, as well as to Jewish and Israeli charitable causes.

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About the Author

Dr. Yvette Alt Miller

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Dr. Alt Miller lives with her family in Chicago, and has lectured internationally on Jewish topics. Her book Angels at the table: a Practical Guide to Celebrating Shabbat takes readers through the rituals of Shabbat and more, explaining the full beautiful spectrum of Jewish traditions with warmth and humor. It has been praised as "life-changing", a modern classic, and used in classes and discussion groups around the world.
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Was the (Jewish) Darling of the Iranian Mullahs a Mossad Spy?.March 28, 2022 | by Sara Yoheved

The real reason Catherine Shakdam rejected Shia Islam.

Catherine Perez-Shakdam’s life reads like One Thousand and One Nights. Her biographical stories include a paternal grandfather incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp in Tunisia, a maternal grandfather who sought to escape Hitler by converting to Christianity and fighting in the French resistance, four years living as a Sunni Muslim wife in Yemen, escorting the future President of Iran on the campaign trail, and other tales more intricately woven than a deftly designed Persian carpet.

Who is Catherine Perez-Shakdam? A self-hating Jew? A devout Shia Muslim? A political analyst with two Masters degrees? A London-based consultant to the UN Security Council? A virulent anti-Israel mouthpiece of the Iranian government? A Zionist who blogs for an Israeli newspaper?

The truth is: all of the above in turn, as she followed a path of self-discovery that demanded hair-pin turns and the courage to admit, “I was 100% wrong.”

The Making of a Self-Hating Jew
When the liability of being a Jew outweighs any spiritual or social advantage, some Jews not only renounce their Jewish identity but turn against it with loathing. Such is the story of Catherine’s father, Isidro Perez. His secular Jewish parents lived in Spain. In the 1930s, his father Eli Perez became a Communist, and thus in the crosshairs of Franco’s fascist government. The family decided to flee to British mandate Palestine via North Africa.

They stopped in Tunisia, a French protectorate. After France fell to the Nazis, Tunisia was ruled by the pro-Nazi government of Vichy France. The Perez family were arrested as Jews and interned in a Nazi concentration camp. There were no gas chambers in the camp. The Jewish inmates were simply left to die of disease or starvation. One of the Perezes’ sons died of starvation. Eli Perez was a doctor. He helped cure a camp guard of typhoid. Before the rest of the Perez family succumbed, the guard helped them escape.
After World War II, they remained in Tunisia. When their son Isidro turned 18, he moved to Paris for university. As Catherine relates in an exclusive Aish.com interview:

“My father literally inherited the trauma of his parents. They never recovered from what they suffered. The whole family was fractured on a cellular level because of what they had gone through.

“My father spent his entire life denying his identity. He hated being a Jew. He did everything he could to change his accent and to become as French as he could. For him Judaism was literally a plague.

“I grew up with my mom being quite comfortable with her identity, where she was quite happy being a secular Jew. My father was not only secular, but he was quite antisemitic in that he hated himself and everything that had to do with Judaism and Israel.”

Catherine’s mother’s family had followed a different trajectory. Living for generations as Jews in southern France, her maternal grandfather Jean-Baptiste Levy recognized in the 1930s the encroaching antisemitism of Europe. He had his whole family convert to Christianity, changing his name from Levy to Laval. Although the Nazis recognized no such conversions, living under the Vichy government in southern France, the family passed safely. Jean-Baptiste fought in the French Resistance, was captured twice, and escaped to fight again. He was later awarded France’s highest military honor.

After the war, the Lavals resumed their Jewish identity, but it was a tenuous identity rooted neither in Jewish observance nor tradition, like a cut flower that cannot propagate.

Catherine’s mother died when she was 11, so Catherine was left with her antisemitic father. “I had no sense of belonging to the Jewish community… I was raised extremely secular. And I feel like for the longest time I was sitting between two chairs, where I had a regular French upbringing, but at the same time I had this part of my identity that was never explored nor cultivated.”

Marrying into Islam
Shortly after her mother’s death, Catherine’s father married again, a Christian woman. Catherine was shipped off to an elite boarding school. After high school graduation, she moved to the United Kingdom for university. There she met a handsome Muslim man from Yemen who had everything she lacked – a stable family and a strong religious identity.

“I had just left an all-girls boarding school,” Catherine explains, “so I was very, very naïve. And I was so desperate to belong somewhere. I had a hunger for belonging and acceptance and a sense of identity. Although I was not raised religious, I always had this hunger for the spiritual.”

With no understanding of what it meant to be Muslim, Catherine married him. She was 18 years old.

Catherine eventually fell in love with Shia Islam.

Her husband told her that she had to convert to Islam in order to be accepted by his family. “I didn’t mind,” remembers Catherine, “because I didn’t know what it meant.”

Catherine read the Koran and became interested in Sufi mysticism. But from the beginning she had an almost visceral rejection of the Sunni Islam that her husband devoutly practiced. “The interpretation that the Sunnis have of Islam is very restrictive. It’s dark and nefarious and I never liked it. It’s not coming from a place of seeking knowledge. It’s all about the practice, without teaching people that through the practice they would elevate themselves. It’s divorced from the Divine.”

Eventually, through her reading, Catherine was introduced to and fell in love with Shia Islam. “Shia Islam is very spiritual,” she asserts. “It’s not so much about the practice, but about the ideals, that we have to speak truth, fight oppression, and all the universal values. They encourage you to learn and to have critical thinking, to work on yourself and try to become a better person. I decided, that I can do. That speaks to me.”

Meanwhile, at the age of 19, she gave birth to a son, and three years later a daughter. In 2008, after nine years of marriage, they moved to Yemen, where they lived with her husband’s family for four years.

Yet her abandoned Jewish identity continued to plague her. “My in-laws bullied me every day for being Jewish,” she remembers. “Any time there was something about Israel on TV, they would blame me, saying ‘YOUR people this and YOUR people that.’”

The Invitation to Iran
While in Yemen, Catherine, who had earned two Masters degrees, worked as an economist, political analyst, and journalist. Her area of expertise was Yemen. She became a consultant on Yemen for the United Nations Security Council. Her articles condemning Sunni Saudi Arabia as the cradle of radical Islam eventually caught the attention of Shia Iran. In 2015, the Iranian regime invited her to Tehran.

At a conference in Tehran

By that time, Catherine and her family had returned to England. In 2013, Catherine ended her emotionally abusive marriage. Her Sunni husband’s opposition to her Shia allegiance gave her the courage to finally break free. “I had been so profoundly touched by Shia Islam,” Catherine reminisces, “that there was no way I was going to let him take that away from me.”

My being so sincere in my belief in Shia Islam allowed me to get very close to the Iranians.

The Mullahs in Iran, scrutinizing Catherine’s articles in a plethora of respected newspapers, recognized a devoted believer. “My being so sincere in my belief in Shia Islam allowed me to get very close to the Iranians. They saw my sincerity and thought they could use me to become a pawn in their games. Which they did.”

The occasion of Iran’s first invitation to Catherine was a conference on Palestine. Her virulently anti-Israel reporting had made her a prime candidate to represent their hatred of Israel on Iranian TV and beyond. The surreal experience of that conference still causes Catherine to wonder:

“I walked into the belly of the beast. I was sitting in a hall in Tehran, and across from me was sitting not only the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also the head of Hamas, the head of Hezbollah, people whose whole purpose in life is to destroy the Jewish people.”

I directed my anger at Israel and decided to make them the devil of the story.

Apparently, no one noticed Catherine’s name tag with her obviously Jewish maiden name Perez. “All they saw was this Western girl from France that they could use for their propaganda machine.”

Catherine willingly complied, spouting criticisms of the “Zionist entity” that further endeared her to the Iranian regime. Today she analyzes what drove her:

“I had been quite critical of Israel. I think I was doing what my dad did, to be very angry at myself for being Jewish. Israel had been such a source of bullying for me during my marriage, that I was so angry. I just wanted them to stop. I tried to disappear my Jewishness by vehemently defending the Palestinians. I just refused to try to see things in context or from the Israeli point of view. I just refused. I directed my anger at Israel and decided to make them the devil of the story.

“But at the same time, I had a profound disgust with myself for doing it. I was very conflicted, but I did it anyway. I was a self-hating Jew, and the worst part for me was that I wasn’t aware that I was doing that. I was being this self-righteous analyst speaking on behalf of the oppressed of the world, not realizing that I had become a weapon against my own people.”

In a turn of events worthy of a spy novel, Catherine found herself the darling of the Mullahs. Over several trips during the following two years, she was granted access to the inner circle of the Iranian regime. The day before Iran’s 2017 presidential election, Catherine was granted an interview with Ebrahim Raisi, who would become president in 2021. She then was allowed to follow Raisi on the campaign trail from Tehran to Rasht, while he candidly described to her his vision for Iran.

Catherine with Ebrahim Raisi, future President of Iran

“Very few Western journalists with decades of loyalty behind them,” declares Catherine, “reached the people I reached in a couple of years. I don’t know how. But there must be a deeper reason for it, because those things don’t happen. They allowed me into their circle. I saw things. I know how they work.”

Catherine revealed that the Iranian leaders, all religious men, propositioned her.

While the antisemitism she saw didn’t horrify her, something else did. In her Aish.com interview, Catherine revealed that the Iranian leaders, all religious men, propositioned her. “I have text messages,” she revealed. “They all tried to proposition me. All of them. I could bring down the house of cards on them because their religious institutions are just a sham. They made sexual overtures to me. Not just me, but all Western converts. They have an obsession with Western girls.”

Taking Off the Hijab
Catherine today
A disillusioned Catherine returned to England and took off her hijab. As she describes that choice: “By then I had gotten close to so many of the clerical institutions, and saw so much wrong-doing. There were so many allegations of rape and cases of molestation that I kept hearing from other women, that I decided, ‘This community is perverse on a level that I can’t even comprehend.’ There are beautiful things in Shia Islam, but I’ve learned that there is such a divorce between those principles that they claim to embody and who they are as a people in their religious identity.”

Prof. Marandi, Dean of Tehran University, called Catherine and demanded that on Iranian TV she wear the hijab. Catherine refused. After that, the Iranian regime gradually cut off all contact with her.

“Shia Islam,” she says, “is a form of spiritual colonialism; they try to disappear people’s identity. I think it’s pernicious and fascist, and I will do everything I can to expose it, because I was a victim of it. I came out the other side. I just woke up. It was really quick and quite profound. I just woke up and said, ‘What are you doing?’ and that was it. Once you wake up, there is no way you can go back. It’s like someone is trying to put you back in an old skin.”

Catherine, the girl desperate for an identity, was again left drifting, not knowing who she really was.

Both Sides Now


Two years later, Catherine’s daughter Rianne challenged her mother in a fateful encounter. Rianne wanted to understand where she came from.

Knowing that she had Jewish roots, she read everything she could about the Holocaust. Then she came across a YouTube video of Rudy Rochman, a Zionist activist, talking about Zionism and antisemitism.

One day, when Catherine came home from work, Rianne insisted that she watch a video by Rudy. Catherine demurred. She was tired; she would watch it later. Rianne insisted, “You’re always telling me to look at both sides, but you’ve never been willing to look at the Israeli side of the Palestinian conflict.” Catherine gave in and watched the video.

“My daughter saved me,” Catherine later declared. “Everything I had believed up to that point about the Israel-Palestinian conflict crumbled. Rudy put it in terms that were so simple yet so powerful, and I heard it. You know how sometimes you’re not ready to hear something, and then one day, you’re ready? That video deconstructed years of what I believe was brainwashing. I felt such a relief, because I realized then that I don’t have to hate myself any more.

I had actually become a weapon in the hands of the people who are trying to destroy us, including me.

“I watched many more, including some about Jewish identity. And I didn’t feel alone anymore. Everything I heard I just knew on a visceral level.”

“From that point on I promised myself that I would do everything I could to atone. Because I really felt guilt. I was 100% wrong. And I really feel it’s important for me to come clean and to tell people. I’m not proud of what I’ve done, but I want people to know that it’s okay to change your mind, to mess up, as long as you are responsible enough to own up to your mistakes and say, from now on I will do better.

“I want to atone for what I’ve done because I’ve done a lot of disservice to my people. It’s not fair, because my suffering did not justify the hate that I put on them. I had actually become a weapon in the hands of the people who are trying to destroy us, including me.

“There are forces at work, they make us hate ourselves for who we are. And that needs to stop.”

The Media Storm
In November, 2021, Catherine publicly came out for the first time as a Zionist, writing a blog for the Times of Israel, “What my interview with President Raisi taught me about Iran.” In it, she told of her experience as a mouthpiece of the Iranian regime and their orientation to the world.

On March 13, 2022, Aaron Boxerman wrote in the Times of Israel about the media firestorm caused by that piece:

Perez-Shakdam wrote three posts on the Times of Israel’s blog platform in November, the third of which described her interview with Raisi. It went largely unnoticed for three months, but in recent days has started to make headlines in Persian and Arabic media, causing a social media firestorm even amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Iranian media quickly declared her an Israeli Mossad spy, and broadcasters who had been spotted with her were forced to issue clarifications.

Iranian chief cleric Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s office quickly disavowed any connection with her. Many of her media appearances and articles were wiped from state websites, although archived versions of some can still be found.

Catherine scoffs at the absurdity of the accusation that she was a Mossad spy. But how have the massive denunciations affected her? “Since I have come out publicly as a Jew and a Zionist, I have never felt more powerful within myself, more grounded. I’ve been put in the middle of the storm, and it hasn’t phased me. Because for the first time in my life I know exactly who I am.”

LIVE INTERVIEW WITH CATHERINE SHAKDAM

On Sara Rigler’s YouTube Channel
Sunday, April 3, 1 PM EDT, 10 AM PDT, 8 PM Israel
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About the Author
Sara Yoheved Rigler

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Sara Yoheved Rigler’s YouTube channel is "From Within the Walls of Jerusalem", where she relates stories, presents gems of Jewish wisdom, and teaches practical life tools. Her newest book, I’ve Been Here Before: When Souls of the Holocaust Return, is the product of 8 years of research into reincarnated souls from the Holocaust. She is also the author of six best-sellers: Holy Woman; Lights from Jerusalem; Battle Plans: How to Fight the Yetzer Hara (with Rebbetzin Tziporah Heller); G-d Winked: Tales and Lessons from My Spiritual Adventures; Heavenprints; and Emunah with Love and Chicken Soup. She gives a weekly Marriage Webinar for Jewish Workshops on a spiritual approach to marriage, with hundreds of members throughout the world. She lives in the Old City of Jerusalem. Her website is: sararigler.com.

https://aish.com/jewish-foods-from-ukraine/?src=ac-txt
Jewish Foods from Ukraine.March 23, 2022 | by Dr. Yvette Alt MillerFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

Some of the most beloved Jewish dishes have their roots in Ukraine.

Before the Holocaust, Ukraine was home to the world’s largest Jewish population, numbering over 1.5 million. Jews made up nearly 5% of Ukraine’s population. Over 40,000 Jews still called Ukraine home, until Russia invaded Ukraine, sending civilians scrambling to flee.

Some of the most beloved Jewish dishes have their roots in Ukraine, where generations of home cooks have borrowed cooking ideas from their non-Jewish neighbors. And Jews have influenced wider Ukrainian cuisine in turn.

Here are six beloved Jewish foods that had their origins in Ukraine.

Babka
Babka is one of the most popular Jewish cakes: usually baked in a loaf pan, Jewish babka features rolled layers of yeast dough around a sweet filling, often cinnamon and nuts or – a more recent, American addition – chocolate.

Yet babka is also a beloved Ukrainian cake, albeit in slightly different form. The food historian and writer Lesley Chamberlain has speculated that babka came to Ukraine and Poland in the 1500s when Poland’s Queen Bona Sforza had her chefs adapt the popular Italian yeast cake pannetone. Like pannetone, Ukrainian babkas are tall confections, often baked in a high, rounded pan.




In both Ukrainian and Yiddish, baba means grandma, and this cake was likely originally named after grandmothers, whether because it was a treat that women lovingly prepared for their grandchildren or because the cake’s tall fluted shape resembled a grandmother’s long skirts. In time, the name transformed to the diminutive babka, meaning little grandmother.

Jewish cooks in Ukraine began preparing babka differently from their non-Jewish neighbors. On Fridays when Jewish women prepared challah dough, it became customary to use dough scraps to prepare small babka cakes, usually in loaf pans like bread instead of in the tall babka pans that were common in non-Jewish homes. Jewish babka also differed in being made with oil, not butter, so that it could be eaten after a meat meal on Shabbat.

Click here for a chocolate babka recipe.

Kasha Varnishkes
In Ukraine, two of the most iconic national foods are kasha, made of nutty-flavored cooked buckwheat, and varenyky, pockets of dough stuffed with meat or cheese or vegetables and then boiled. (Var means to boil in Ukrainian.)

Jewish cooks in Ukraine developed their own twist on varenyky, stuffing the dumplings with a mixture of caramelized onions (which was popular way of adding flavor throughout Ashkenazi Jewish cooking) and kasha. In time, Jewish cooks stopped the labor-intensive process of stuffing varenyky and simply boiled small home-made noodles and combined them with cooked kasha and caramelized onions.

The resulting dish was called Kasha Varnishkes and became widely popular in Jewish kitchens throughout eastern Europe. When Jews moved to the United States in the 20th Century, many adopted mass-produced bow-tie noodles in this classic dish, giving Kasha Varnishkes a new look for a new generation.

Click here for a classic Kasha Varnishkes recipe.

Potato Latkes
Potatoes weren’t widely eaten in Europe until the 1700s. Before then, Jewish cooks embraced various forms of pancakes: cheese pancakes especially were considered a Jewish food, and spread from Italian Jewish communities (who used a soft ricotta-like cheese to form the dough) in the Middle Ages to Jewish homes across Europe.

Ukrainian Jews called their pancakes latkes from the Ukrainian word for pancake, oladka.

With the discovery of potatoes in the New World, cooking practices in Europe began to change. Ukrainian cooks embraced a light, fluffy form of potato pancake made with finely grated potato and onion and fried in oil. These potato pancakes, called deruny, are one of Ukraine’s most famous national foods and are commonly eaten with butter and soft cheese like sour cream.

Jews in Ukraine made their own version of potato pancakes, sometimes frying them in oil, not butter, so that they could be served as an accompaniment to a meat meal. Ukrainian Jews called their pancakes latkes from the Ukrainian word for pancake, oladka. In time, latkes spread throughout the Jewish world, a beloved dish that is especially enjoyed on Hanukkah.

Click here for potato latkes recipes.

Challah
Perhaps no food is as central to Jewish identity as challah, the braided loaves of rich bread that adorn Shabbat tables in Jewish homes across the world. Yet Jews haven’t always eaten challah as we know it.

It’s customary on Shabbat to have two loaves of bread, recalling the double portion of manna that God gave to our ancestors every Friday as they wandered in the wilderness after the Exodus from Egypt. For years, these loaves didn’t have one particular name: they’ve sometimes been called broches (Yiddish for blessings) or lachamim (Hebrew for breads).

The name challah began to be applied to special Shabbat bread in the 1400s in Austria, and soon spread to other Jewish communities. At about that time, European cooks – both Jewish and Gentile – began to experiment with creating rich breads – sometimes containing additives like nuts or fruit – that were formed into elaborate braids before being baked. Ukrainian bakers began creating egg-infused breads called kolach which today are a popular Christmas treat. Jews began making egg-infused sweet braided loaves too, but with a key difference: Jewish challah bread, as it soon became known, was made with oil instead of butter.

Click here for challah recipes.

Borscht
The original borscht soup was invented in Ukraine, and it wasn’t very appetizing. In the Middle Ages, Ukrainian peasants used to pick a bitter white root vegetable called borsh (cow parsnips in English) and use these sharp vegetables as the basis for a soup. When they could find other vegetables, families would add ingredients like mushrooms or cabbage to their borscht soup. Since this early version of borscht was so bitter-tasting, it was common to stir in some smetana, a sour cream-like cheese, to cut the sharp taste.

Jews in Ukraine prepared borscht like their non-Jewish neighbors, driven to cook this dish out of poverty and scarceness. Borscht took a turn for the better during the Renaissance, when farmers in Ukraine and elsewhere in eastern Europe began to grow beets, a hardy vegetable with a much sweeter taste than cow parsnips. Ukrainian cooks began to make borscht soup out of beets, keeping the name of their original soup.

It was at this point that Jewish borscht and Ukrainian borscht began to diverge. When they could afford it, Ukrainian cooks added meat, beans and other vegetables to their borsch soups. Then, at the table, they added the traditional smetana to their borscht. Jewish cooks began to create two very different types of borscht: thick, hearty meat-based borscht soups, and thin ones that were vegetarian, which they could enjoy with smetana. When Jews immigrated in large numbers to the United States, it was this second type of Jewish Ukrainian borscht that became most popular, and today many Jews associate borscht with a light pink colored soup, made from beets and flavored with sour cream.

https://aish.com/borscht-the-favorite-jewish-soup/https://aish.com/borscht-the-favorite-jewish-soup/

Madeleine Albright’s Secret Jewish Past
by Dr. Yvette Alt Miller
Madeleine Albright’s Secret Jewish Past.March 24, 2022 | by Dr. Yvette Alt Millery
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The former Secretary of State, who has just died, discovered she was Jewish at age 59.

In 1996, when Madeleine Albright was being considered by US President Bill Clinton to be his Secretary of State, she was asked many questions about her eligibility by State Department officials.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Albright explained how her family fled to London in 1939 when she was just two years old, staying there for the duration of World War II. She explained how afterwards, her family returned to Czechoslovakia, where her father, Josef Korbel, worked as a diplomat and an academic. A fierce opponent of Communism, he moved his family abroad again in 1948, settling in Denver. (In a strange historical coincidence, one of Prof. Korbel’s favorite students was a brilliant young student named Condoleezza Rice, who would one day become the US’s second female Secretary of State, after Albright.)

Albright’s family became naturalized American citizens. She worked as a journalist and after gaining a Ph.D. in International Relations from Columbia University, she entered politics, eventually becoming a member of the National Security Council staff under President Carter. Fluent in Czech, French, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and Polish, Albright had already served as Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations, where she advocated a muscular approach to peacekeeping, criticizing Cuba after it shot down two small airplanes owned by an American charity, and condemning the 1994 ethnic violence in Rwanda as genocide.

When she was asked if she had anything more to add, Albright said she’d recently received letters from people with information about her family’s fate in Czechoslovakia during the Holocaust. “It’s conceivable that I’m of Jewish background,” Albright explained.

The Washington Post published a bombshell article that revealed Albright’s Jewishness and that three of her grandparents were murdered by the Nazis.

The State Department officials were dismissive of this news. “So what? The president is not antisemitic,” they responded. A month later, the Washington Post published a bombshell article that revealed Albright’s Jewishness and that three of her grandparents were murdered by the Nazis, as well as dozens of her cousins and other relatives.


“Here at age 59, I thought I knew everything about myself,” she wrote in her memoir Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948, which Albright published in 2012, long after she’d left office. She grew up in a Roman Catholic home. (She’d later find out that her parents “converted” to Catholicism when she was five years old.) In 1959, Albright had converted to Episcopalianism to marry her husband Joseph Medil Albright (they had three children and divorced in 1982.)

She recalled how she’d become increasingly curious about whether her family was Jewish. As US Ambassador to the United Nations, she was a well-known figure and people who’d known her family in Czechoslovakia had written to her, telling her about her relatives. Suddenly, Albright wrote in Prague Winter, “in January 1997, before we had time to explore further, a hardworking Washington Post reporter, Michael Dobbs, uncovered news that stunned us all: according to his research, three of my grandparents and numerous other family members had died in the Holocaust.”

Many critics were scathing, dismissing Albright’s assertions that she hadn’t realized her family was Jewish. How could a sophisticated, knowledgeable woman who’d studied International Relations and traveled extensively throughout Europe not possibly realize that her parents had been Jews? How could she never have questioned her family’s deadly fate during the Holocaust?

I suspect that my parents thought life would be easier for us if we were raised as Christians instead of Jews.

“I was shocked and, to be honest, embarrassed to discover that I had not known my family history better,” she wrote. It was a stance Albright never disavowed. She always maintained that she hadn’t known that her family was Jewish until the 1990s. “I suspect that my parents thought life would be easier for us if we were raised as Christians instead of Jews,'' she later explained.

Cautiously Embracing Her Jewish Heritage
Albright began to cautiously embrace her Jewish identity during the most hectic time in her life. “About the time I became Secretary of State,” she wrote in her book Hell and Other Destinations: a 21st Century Memoir (published in 2020), “I learned that my heritage was Jewish and that more than two dozen members of my family, including three grandparents, had died in the Holocaust… When I said that I had been unaware of these facts, many commentators accused me of lying and suggested that for reasons of personal ambition, I had taken pains to conceal my Jewish ancestry. This was a mortifying accusation that left me feeling helpless and yet made no sense…”

She wrote of her intense guilt at realizing that this essential fact was only now being recognized. Her brother John and sister Kate immediately traveled to the Czech Republic to visit their parents’ birthplaces. “Given the demands of my new job, I could not travel with them at the time, but instead flew to Prague in July (1997), where I saw the names of our family members inscribed on the interior walls of the Pinkas Synagogue, along with those of more than 77,000 other Czechoslovak Jews who had perished during the war. With the help from local Jewish officials, we were able to form in our minds a general outline of what our ancestors had gone through during the Nazi occupation…”

While she pieced together her family’s history – and digested the scope of the secrets her parents had kept from her – Albright was traveling the world, helping mediate an end to some of the globe’s most pressing disputes.

After leaving office in 2001, after serving 14 years as Secretary of State, Sec. Albright opened a consulting firm, wrote several books, and taught at Georgetown University. She also continued to explore her family’s Jewish history and document her own transformation. Albright spent years researching the fate of many of her dozens of relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust. After she published Prague Winter, many people who’d known the relations and family friends whose stories she’d uncovered in the book reached out, and Albright had another series of intense experiences, meeting more people who’d known her family.

Years after learning she was Jewish, she celebrated Hanukkah with her grandchildren

When she first found out that she was Jewish in 1997, Albright described feeling distant from the Jewish community. “I am a firm admirer of the Jewish traditions but could not – beginning at the age of 59 – feel myself fully a part of it,” she wrote in Prague Winter. Yet over time, Albright began to embrace her identity as a Jew.

In a 2012 interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Albright said “I have reasons for gratitude that my origins are richer and more complex than I had thought; but still, I wish my parents would have explained to me, when I was old enough to understand, what they had done. I would like to have had a chance to discuss every aspect of their deliberations.” She said that finally, years after learning she was Jewish, she celebrated Hanukkah with her grandchildren

Denied the opportunity to talk frankly about her family’s Jewishness while her parents were alive, Albright painstakingly researched her family’s lost history. In her final years, learning about her Jewish family took up much of her time. “I…felt driven to learn more about the grandparents whom I had been too young to know,” she told Mr. Blitzer, “especially by then I had become a grandparent myself.”

While the world mourns Madeleine Albright as one of the last century’s most high profile political actors, her grandchildren are mourning their more personal loss of their Jewish grandmother who loved them.

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 The 8 Biggest Jewish Moments In Oscar History

The Academy Awards celebrates the best in movies, and for almost 100 years, Jews have been killing it.
by aish.com, B.C. WallinThe 8 Biggest Jewish Moments In Oscar History

The Academy Awards celebrates the best in movies, and for almost 100 years, Jews have been killing it.
by aish.com, B.C. Wallin
 The 8 Biggest Jewish Moments In Oscar History
The Academy Awards celebrates the best in movies, and for almost 100 years, Jews have been killing it.
by aish.com, B.C. Wallin
About the Author
B.C. Wallin
More from this Author >
B.C. Wallin is a Jewish writer, film buff, and Aish alumnus. His writing can be found on Alma, Polygon, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and Input, among others. He lives in New York with his wife and an ever-increasing pile of way too many books.

https://aish.com/putin-has-zombified-my-good-friends-back-in-russia/?src=ac-txt
Putin has Zombified My Good Friends Back in Russia.
March 20, 2022 | by Vitaliy Katsenelson
With ironclad control of media, Putin wants Russians to forget their history so he can repeat it.

The world has never seen sanctions like those applied to Russia. They aim straight at the jugular of the Russian financial system, liable to plunge the Russian economy into inflation the magnitude of which it has not seen since the early 1990s. In addition, the sanctions should in theory deprive Russia of the economic oxygen it needs for President Vladimir Putin to strengthen the Russian military and put a painfully high price tag on future wars.

Will sanctions bring an end to Putin? The West is betting that the Russian people will revolt against their dictatorial ruler, and this will bring an end to the war. But sanctions have a checkered history. They didn’t get rid of Castro in Cuba or the Kims in North Korea. It took more than a decade for sanctions against South Africa in the 1980s to bear fruit.

In fact, these sanctions may give Putin even more power. How? He may not be able to control sanctions or their impact, but he can control what Russian citizens believe about them.

In 2014, I was perplexed by how the Russian people could possibly support and not be outraged by Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine. But I live in Denver, and I read mostly American and European newspapers. I wanted to see what was going on in Ukraine from the Russian perspective, so I went on a seven-day news diet: I watched only Russian TV – Channel One Russia, the state-owned broadcaster, which I hadn’t seen in more than 20 years – and read Pravda, the Russian newspaper whose name means “truth.”

In Russia, there is only one media voice and that is the voice of the government; all other voices were silenced.

I have to confess, it is hard not to develop a lot of self-doubt about your previously held views when you watch Russian TV for a week. But then you have to remind yourself that Putin’s Russia doesn’t have a free press. The free press that briefly existed after the Soviet Union collapsed is gone – Putin killed it. The government controls most TV channels, radio and newspapers. What Russians see on TV, read in print, and listen to on the radio is direct propaganda from the Kremlin.

I know exactly what I am going to hear back from some of my fellow Americans. They are going to say: Don’t you think Americans are brainwashed by Fox News, MSNBC, CNN and other news outlets? And sure, there is no question that American news is more biased today than ever before.

No shared reality
But there is a difference between bias and what is happening in Russia. At least by watching different news outlets and reading different newspapers, Americans can triangulate to get to the truth. Most importantly, the US government doesn’t tell networks what to say. The editor of The Washington Post doesn’t have to worry about being arrested on a trumped-up charge if he writes a scathing article about President Biden.

In Russia, there is only one media voice and that is the voice of the government; all other voices were silenced. The government has zero accountability. Think of Watergate, Irangate, and other “gate” scandals that were exposed by the press – they could never happen in today’s Russia.

I never appreciated the free press as much as I do now. The free press shines a light on government actions. It provides a much-needed feedback loop between government and the public.

Over the last few days things have gotten tremendously worse on this front. Russia passed a new law: If you call this war with Ukraine a war, not a “special operation” or publish any views that contradict stories put out by the Ministry of Defense (i.e., create “fake news”) you can get up to 15 years in prison. Providing assistance to foreign organizations that oppose the war (sorry, “special operation”) with Ukraine will be considered treason, which may result in up to 20 years in prison. Needless to say, most independent local and foreign news organization immediately closed their doors. Since the invasion, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media have also been blocked in Russia. In other words, Russia turned into China overnight.

I belong to a WhatsApp group chat with my classmates from middle school in Russia in the 80s. This is what they told me: Russia was forced into this war. It is getting rid of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine. The Russian Army is liberating Donbas and Lugansk from Ukrainian genocide. Their admiration for Putin was at a new high. (The stories I read that Putin’s popularity is hitting new heights seem to be true.) At the end of the conversation, I was convinced they were brainwashed and they were convinced that I’m brainwashed.

We had no shared reality to stand on.

These are folks I went to school with, played in the snow with. I even had crushes on a couple of them. They are kind, good people, but Putin’s TV has completely zombified them. As one of my friends said, they have Russian TV playing in their brains.

Control of the media allows Putin to completely distort and carefully craft his version of the truth.

Control of the media allows Putin to completely distort and carefully craft his version of the truth. And this is why I am worried that sanctions may not be as effective as we hope and that Russia’s next chapter looks very dark.

Not everyone is zombified in Russia. A few of my school friends reached out to me privately and expressed their disgust with the war. They did not want to voice their opinions in public, even when we talked on WhatsApp. Despite WhatsApp’s claim of end-to-end encryption, they were still concerned that they might be monitored. These are not paranoid people, but individuals who know the ugly Russian history and who are acutely aware that the punishment that newly passed laws carry for being labeled an “enemy of the state” or a “collaborator with the enemy” (yours truly) is 15 years in prison.

Return of the Gulag
This isn’t the first time Russia has trusted a bad, even evil, leader. Until the late 1980s, Joseph Stalin was a Soviet hero who led the Soviet Union to victory against the Nazis. After perestroika and glasnost in the late 1980s, we were shocked to learn that the evil of Stalin, the father figure we admired so much, was fully on par with Hitler’s. Stalin killed 20 million people, while 27 million people died in WWII.

If you were called an “enemy of the people” in Stalin’s Russia, there was no due process; you were guilty and you were either shot or sent to a gulag, where you’d die from inhuman working conditions and hunger. In fact, a lot of magnificent Soviet infrastructure was built by slave labor (“enemies of the people”).

To my shock, this war is more popular in Russia than I ever thought it would be.

Today, Putin’s government is rewriting history. Stalin is back in vogue again. He is glorified as a leader who united the country, and new statues of him are popping up across Russia. In 2014 Russia passed a law that prohibits criticism of Soviet activities during WWII, and thus of Stalin.

In less than two weeks since the beginning of the Ukraine war, with the passing of new laws, Russia has made an enormous leap back towards 1937 and an oppressive Stalin-like regime. Meanwhile, Ukraine, thanks to Russia, has been sent back to 1941, with women and children started dying from artillery and rocket bombings.

The situation in Russia will get worse. Mothers will realize they have lost their children in Ukraine, and sanctions will cause enormous unemployment, breadlines, and maybe even hunger. People will start speaking up more – and the Stalin-era oppression will likely come back in full swing. The country will suddenly be swarming with “enemies of the state” and gulags will be back in vogue again.

Putin wants Russians to forget their history so he can repeat it.

Unfortunately, to my shock, this war is more popular in Russia than I ever thought it would be. Putin is under little pressure to conclude it, and, as my Russian middle school friend said, “The war has already started; we have to finish it.”

This op-ed originally appeared on the Times of Israel.