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Post  Admin Sun 06 Mar 2022, 9:31 pm

Rescuing 100 Jews in Ukraine on Shabbat.March 3, 2022 | by Dr. Yvette Alt MillerFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

Rabbi Nisan Podolsky is rescuing Jews from Ukraine.

I’m in Belarus,” explains Rabbi Nisan Podolsky, just days after escaping from war-ravaged Ukraine. “We’re still working on getting more people out. We’re not resting here.”

In an Aish.com interview, Rabbi Podolsky recounted the harrowing trip he and a hundred other Jews made last Shabbat as they escaped from Ukraine.

Born in Jerusalem, Rabbi Podolsky is a member of the Karlin-Stolin hasidic group that was founded in the 1700s in present-day Belarus. Known for their piety, hospitality, and devotion in prayer, these hasidic Jews live in Israel and around the world, while Rabbi Boruch Meir Yaakov Shochet, their rebbe, resides in Jerusalem. In the years since the end of Communism, some Jews in Belarus and Ukraine have revived the region’s once-vibrant community.

Rabbi Podolsky teachng a group of students in Kyiv

In Kyiv, they have flourished. “We have shuls, schools, and a dormitory yeshiva,” Rabbi Podolsky explains. Rabbi Podolsky lived in Kyiv with his wife Shevy and their six children; the youngest two are 10-week-old twin girls. They joined over a hundred other Karlin-Stolin Jews in Kyiv, including 50 students in the community’s schools. Other Jews would “pop in once in a while to community events to feel a Jewish connection.”

As Russia built up its troops along Ukraine’s borders throughout February, many Ukrainians refused to believe their neighbor would actually invade. Residents in Kyiv, the capital, knew they would be the prime target of any invasion, but the thought that their country would actually come under attack seemed impossible.

In Jerusalem, Rabbi Shochet took the threat of a Russian invasion seriously. He sent an urgent message to Rabbi Podolsky telling him that he and his whole community must leave Kyiv immediately.

At the time, people were looking at us like we were crazy,” Rabbi Podolsky recalls. Their neighbors asked, “Why are you leaving the city? It looks okay.” Undaunted, Rabbi Podolsky and hundred other Karlin-Stolin Jews moved from Kyiv to the small village of Medzhybizh in Ukraine where they thought they wouldn’t be a prime target.

Evacuating a Torah Scroll

Medzhybizh is more west than Kyiv and smaller, so it felt safer,” Rabbi Podolsky notes. Medzhybizh is the birthplace of the Baal Shem Tov, (c1699-1760), the founder of the hasidic movement. For that reason, many Jewish tourists visit the town. “We rented out the big kosher hotel that’s there for the Jewish tourists who come.”

For two weeks, he and his congregants – students, adults and entire families – waited to see if Russia would invade. Local residents thought the group of Jews awaiting an invasion seemed crazy.

On Thursday, February 24, the invasion began. “I woke up very early that morning,” Rabbi Podolsky recalls. “I checked the news and heard that President Putin was giving a speech. I knew something was going to happen. At 6 AM I went outside and saw planes flying overhead and heard explosions in the distance.” He knew that remaining in Ukraine – even in a small town like Mezhyrich – was no longer safe.

We started to think about our options.” The group had several cars with them, but not enough to take everyone to safety. They chartered a bus with a driver, but instead of reporting for work, the driver raced to check on his own family once the invasion began. The Jews in Medzhybizh were stranded.



Friday came and amid the ongoing war, Rabbi Podolsky started making plans for Shabbat. “The roads were all blocked; there were checkpoints.” It seemed their driver would never return. The driver finally returned and Rabbi Podolsky knew they had to leave immediately. Driving or traveling in a bus on Shabbat is prohibited but when human life is at stake, it’s permissible. After double-checking with another rabbi that this was indeed a matter of life and death, Rabbi Podolsky urged his congregants to get onto the bus. “We left half an hour after candle lighting… we had a whole convoy of the bus and cars.”

The trip was harrowing. They stopped at checkpoints and shared the roads with tanks and cannons. In the distance they heard shooting. “It was really scary; we were in the middle of a war,” Rabbi Podolslky recalls. The terrified Jews recited the Shabbat evening prayers on the bus that was their only hope for freedom, welcoming in Shabbat and making Kiddush.

They headed to Belarus. “It sounded crazy because everyone was trying to drive to the European Union,” Rabbi Podoslky recalls. Belarus is closely allied with Russia: they speculated that the guards on the Belarusian border might not be expecting refugees and would let them through, but they couldn’t be sure. “When our convoy finally arrived at the Belarusian border at 2 AM, the guards opened the gates for us. We were finally safe.” Hours later, the Belarus border was closed.

Jews in Ukraine safely arriving

Local Jews had reserved hotel rooms near the border and supplied them with Shabbat food, challah and wine. It was an emotional moment. One member of the group recited the Jewish prayer of thanksgiving, said after experiencing a narrow, life-saving escape, and the entire congregation responded with a heartfelt Amen.

This group of Jews has moved on to the Belarusian city of Pinsk, where the local Karlin-Stolin community is putting them up. Rabbi Podolsky is continuing to bring more Jews out of Ukraine. “I got four buses out today to Moldova,” he said during an Aish.com interview on Wednesday, March 2. “We’re still bringing people out of Kyiv – I’m on the phone right now with an elderly lady trying to convince her that it will be okay, that the journey will be okay.” Even with Kyiv and other key Ukrainian cities coming under siege by Russian forces, Rabbi Podolsky refuses to give up his life-saving work.

People are asking for help. We’re working on arranging buses.” He notes that it’s incredibly difficult to find drivers willing to risk their lives to ferry refugees to safety, and the cost of hiring drivers is tremendous. Once refugees are out of Ukraine, they require assistance. “Everyone left everything behind,” Rabbi Podolsky explains.

Rabbi Podolsky has set up an emergency fund to help his life-saving work rescue Ukrainian Jews. To donate, go to: https://thechesedfund.com/Kyiv

Aish Ukraine Briefing

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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Post  Admin Thu 03 Mar 2022, 7:58 pm

https://aish.com/ukraines-president-volodymyr-zelensky-six-facts/?src=ac-txt
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky: Six Facts.March 1, 2022 | by Dr. Yvette Alt MillerFacebookEmailPrintFriendlyShare

Ukraine’s youthful and unconventional Jewish president is inspiring his nation.

As the war in Ukraine continues, many people around the world are rallying around President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s unconventional, Jewish, 44-year-old leader. Here are six facts about President Zelensky and the crisis in Ukraine today.

1. Grandson of Holocaust Survivors
Volodymyr Zelensky was born January 25, 1978 in Kryvyi Rih, a city in eastern Ukraine. His family is Jewish and, like many Ukrainian Jews, was scarred by the Holocaust. (Zelensky has often drawn attention to the fact that approximately a quarter of all Jews murdered in the Holocaust came from Ukraine, a fact that’s not widely understood.)

During World War II, the town of Kryvyi Rih was occupied by Nazi Germany. It was home to a sizeable Jewish community, and in the years before the Nazi takeover of the town, many Jews fled eastward. Zelensky’s grandmother was one of the Jews who left. “My grandmother was living in Kryvyi Rih, in a part of south Ukraine which was occupied by the fascists,” Zelensky explained. “They killed all the Jews who remained. She had left in an evacuation of Jews to Almaty, Kazakhstan. Many people fled to there. She studied there. She’s a teacher. After World II, she came back. That’s where I was born.”

Zelensky with his parents

In 2020, when Zelensky travelled to Israel to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, he told Israel’s then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stories about Ukraine during the Holocaust. Before he concluded, he said he had one more tale to tell, “about a family of four brothers”:

Three of them, their parents and their families became victims of the Holocaust. All of them were shot by German occupiers who invaded Ukraine. The fourth brother survived… Two years after the war, he had a son, and in 31 years, he had a grandson. In 40 more years, that grandson became president, and he is standing before you today, Mr. Prime Minister.

2. An “Ordinary Soviet Jewish Family”
Zelensky describes his family as “an ordinary Soviet Jewish family.” He noted that since most instances of religious expression were banned in the Soviet Union, his family was not particularly observant., but they were aware of their Jewish heritage.

His family moved to Mongolia for a time while he was young, but returned in time for Zelensky to attend school in Kryvyi Rih. He grew up with Russian as his first language, and also speaks fluent Ukrainian and English.

In the early 1990s, after the demise of the Soviet Union, many Soviet Jews rushed to emigrate, moving to Israel or the United States. Approximately 1.5 million Jews fled in those heady years. Zelensky’s great aunt and her family moved to Israel in the 1990s, but he and his immediate family remained, joining several hundred thousand Jews who chose to stay in Ukraine and Russia.



Zelensky attended the Kryvyi Rih Economic Institute, a branch of Kyiv National Economic University. He graduated in 2000 with a law degree. He met his wife, Olena Zelensky, a screenwriter and spokesperson for Ukrainian women’s rights, in college. (Olena Zelensky is not Jewish; Pres. Zelensky has not commented on unsubstantiated rumors that he converted to Christianity.) Their daughter Oleksandra was born in 2004 and their son Kyrylo was born in 2013.

3. Career as an Comic Actor
Zelensky never practiced law. He started acting in college and eventually founded his own production company called Kvartal 95 - “Neighborhood 95” - after the area in Kryvyi Rih where he grew up. He turned to comedy and became a hit throughout the former Soviet Union, performing stand up and acting in some comic films. In 2006, he won Ukraine’s “Strictly Come Dancing” television competition. He also performed in Israel. He told an Israeli newspaper he’d done shows in “Tel Aviv, in Beersheba, in Haifa, in Jerusalem. In so many cities. So I know Israel. I know people there.”



In 2015 Zelensky began starring in a Ukrainian television show Servant of the People. The year before, Ukraine’s unpopular President Viktor Yanukovych was forced out of office and Pres. Petro Poroshenko was elected instead. It was a tumultuous time in Ukrainian politics: Russia invaded and later annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014; Russian-backed insurgents battled Ukrainian forces in the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in the east of the country; and endemic corruption sapped Ukrainian’s confidence in their government.

In Servant of the People, Zelensky played Vasiliy Goloborodko, a history teacher who shoots to fame after one of his students videos him railing against official corruption and becomes president. His character struck a chord with ordinary Ukrainians who longed for a plain-talking honest politician like Goloborodko.

After years of playing Pres. Goloborodko on television, Zelensky began to harbor political ambitions of his own. In 2018, he registered “Servant of the People” as an official political party.

4. President Zelensky
Campaigning for the presidency, Zelensky relied on his comedy background, posting humorous speeches and skits on social media. His unusual campaigning style paid off: In Ukraine’s 2019 presidential election, Volodymyr Zelensky won an astonishing 73% of the vote.

His path to governing wasn’t always smooth. He faced some accusations of being close to corrupt figures and was accused of bringing in members of his TV production company as key political advisors. Within days, Russia declared a major provocation, extending Russian citizenship to people living in eastern Ukrainian regions controlled by separatist insurgents whom Russia was backing in Donetsk and Luhansk.

At the Western Wall

Zelensky responded to this major assault on Ukrainian territorial integrity with humor, posting on Facebook that he would extend Ukrainian citizenship to people in Russia and others “who suffer from authoritarian or corrupt regimes.”

5. Recognizing Jewish History
When Zelensky ran for office, the Chief Rabbi of Dnipro said to the New York Times: “He should not run because we will have pogroms here again in two years if things go wrong.” Those fears proved misplaced. Instead, Zelensky was open about his Jewishness in office. He oversaw an ongoing project to rename streets and monuments throughout Ukraine, erasing the names of Soviet figures and replacing them with Ukrainian heroes, including Ukrainian Jews in some cases.

He began construction on a memorial at Babi Yar, the ravine outside Kyiv where Nazis murdered 100,000 Jews and other people. The Ukrainian city of Uman is the burial place of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, and a major site for Jewish pilgrims to come and pray. Under Zelensky’s administration, plans are in the works to create what Zelensky called “a historical museum…a big part and…reconstruct(ion) of the synagogue” that Rabbi Nachman prayed in. The monument is to be called “Little Jerusalem”.

6. Resolution in Wartime
In the first hours of the Russian attack on Ukraine, President Zelensky vowed to remain in Kiyv, Ukraine’s capital. On a hastily recorded video made on a cellphone, he declared, “We are all here. Our soldiers are here. The citizens of our country are here…We are all here protecting our independence, our country, and it will continue to be this way. Glory to our defenders. Glory to our heroes. Glory to Ukraine.”


In the days since that first video, Zelensky has continued to urge Ukrainians to resist the Russian onslaught, and has rallied his people to resist. His anguished visage and stirring rhetoric has in many ways become the symbol of the war in Ukraine. He’s described himself as “Target Number One” and his wife and two children as “Target Number Two”. Despite the danger he’s in, Zelensky has vowed to stay and fight.



One political observer, Yulia McGuffie, editor in chief of Ukraine’s Novoye Vremya news site, opposed Pres. Zelensky’s candidacy in 2019, regarding him as a neophyte with no political experience. Today, Zelensky commands a 96% approval rating in Ukraine and Ms. McGuffie, like many Ukrainians, is enthusiastically backing their president. “Full support and respect came, I think, after Russia started its war,” she told the BBC. “All Ukrainians have closed ranks around Zelensky. He is playing a uniting and…inspiring role, partly by his own example. He is leading a government that is repelling Putin’s army, and for that many people sincerely admire and respect him.

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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Post  Admin Sun 27 Feb 2022, 8:38 pm

https://aish.com/dispatch-from-ukraine/?src=ac-rdm
Dispatch from Ukraine.February 27, 2022 | by Dr. Yvette Alt Miller

No one teaches you what to do in a war. Rebbetzin Miriam Moskovitz shares what it’s like in Ukraine right now.

“They started bombing at 5 am,” Miriam Moskovitz explained over a crackling line from Karkhov, Ukraine’s second largest city, on Thursday, February 24, the day Russian troops entered Ukraine.

“We can’t go anywhere at the moment. On the highway to Kharkiv there is fighting going on. The border with Russia is only a 40-minute drive away; the other border (with Poland, to the west of Ukraine) is a good 15 or 16 hour drive.”

Building a Community in Ukraine
Miriam and her husband Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz have called Kharkiv home for over 30 years. Moshe is originally from Caracas, Venezuela, and Miriam is from Sydney, Australia. They were sent to Ukraine by the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, in 1990 to help rebuild Jewish life in the area. At the time, approximately half a million Jews lived in Ukraine. After long decades of Communist rule, when Jewish life was brutally repressed, Jews were eager to begin practicing their religion again and were eager to learn more.

As Russia amassed troops at Ukraine’s borders, few people believed that Russia would actually invade.

The Moskovitzes were among the very first Chabad-Lubavitch families to move to the former Soviet Union after its dissolution. They arrived with their eight-month-old son and found a warm and welcoming community of Jews. “When I came here that first Rosh Hashana with a shofar, people had never seen one before,” Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz explained to Aish.com while fighting raged outside his home. The Ukrainian Jews he and Miriam encountered had long risked their lives and livelihoods to celebrate Passover, but other Jewish holidays and customs were often more difficult to observe.

Rabbi Moshe and Miriam Moskovitz

That began to change when the Moskovitzes set up a shul (synagogue) in Kharkiv. Jews began attending on Shabbat at first. “Little by little they came, and things started to get bigger,” Rabbi Moskovitz recalls.

In 1992, they opened the Ohr Avner Jewish Day School, which today educates over 400 students. The Moskovitz’s family grew along with the Jewish community institutions they were building in Kharkiv. They had eleven more children there, and oldest son is now married with four children and serves as a rabbi in Kharkiv as well.

A Tense Situation
For the past few weeks, as Russia amassed troops at Ukraine’s borders, few people believed that Russia would actually invade. “Nobody believed it was really going to start a war,” explains Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz; “people continued their lives as usual.” Many Ukrainian Jews have moved to Israel over the years. “Israel is in the back of the mind of every person,” Rabbi Moskovitz notes; “they know they can go there if the political situation deteriorates.” But few Jews left in recent weeks: “They thought that Russia would not attack.”

A dance at the wedding of their children last month in Kharkiv.

In fact, while Russian troops amassed, the Moskovitzes were consumed with thoughts of their daughter Bracha’s wedding, which took place in Kharkiv’s Choral Synagogue on January 26, 2022. Bracha’s new husband Mendy is Israeli, but Bracha wanted to get married in the city where she was born and grew up. Some guests expressed unease at traveling to Ukraine while Russia was seemingly threatening war – and some of their wedding entertainers nearly canceled – but the wedding took place with 500 guests. The Moskovitzes rented out an indoor soccer stadium for the party. Even Kharkiv’s mayor Igor Terekhov attended the beautiful event.

War Erupts
The mood in Ukraine changed abruptly on Thursday, February 24 when Russian forces attacked Ukraine on numerous fronts. The relentless shelling woke Miriam and her family at 5 AM. Her son picked up his children and rushed to Miriam and Moshe’s house which has a basement. They thought they would be safer there from the shelling. “All day we’ve been in the basement,” Miriam explained as fighting raged outside of Kharkiv.

“Yesterday we celebrated the 30th anniversary of the founding of our school,” Miriam recalled. The very next day, as Russian forces streamed into Ukraine, a message went out that school was canceled. “Yesterday, I was having a party and celebration in school. I would never have dreamed that today we’d be in shelters”

“They are shelling all day long a few kilometers away…. They’re trying to get into Kharkiv. The army is putting up a very strong fight,” Miriam explained over our crackling phone connection from her basement.

Sheltering in the Synagogue
Thursday morning, as shells were exploding just outside of town, Rabbi Moskovitz went to shul, expecting to find it deserted as congregants stayed home sheltering in place. He thought he would pick up his tefillin and say the morning service at home. Instead, he was surprised to see about 30 people in the building, and he stayed to be with his congregants. One older shul member asked Rabbi Moskovitz what he was doing in the shul instead of remaining safely at home. Rabbi Moskovitz replied that he was exactly where he wanted to be at that moment, in his shul, with his congregation.

After morning services some people were fearful of leaving the shul. More Jews came and by evening about 50 Jews were sheltering in Kharkiv’s synagogue. The situation is dire in Kharkiv, Miriam explained. All the streetlights have been switched off. Miriam left her basement to visit the shul and saw a community that was terrified of the ongoing attack.

The shul in Kharkiv

Being with other Jews during the attacks seemed to feel safer for many. “Some people think if there is going to be an evacuation, they won’t be forgotten in shul,” Miriam notes. “We don’t have beds for all the tens of people who are going to be coming there, but we have warmth and light and food at the moment, and that’s what we’re offering everyone who’s over there.”

Many local Jews called the Moskovitzes for help and advice, and Miriam asked her 16-year-old daughter to man the phones, making lists of everyone who’s called who wants to be evacuated.

Before Shabbat, the Moskovitzes and the ten other Chabad rabbis who live in Kharkiv and their families had been planning to distribute hundreds of Shabbat boxes with challah and other necessities to local families.

She and her husband were considering having Shabbat meals in the shul. While shells exploded in the near distance, she was cooking for Shabbat, even though she wasn’t sure it would be possible to have meals together. “This is a very fluid experience. I have absolutely no experience: no one teaches you what to do in a war.”

Jewish Unity
Miriam usually gives a class Thursday nights, and last Thursday was no exception. “I decided that even though my head wasn’t so focused, let’s keep the class going.” On a typical night, about 30 women attend in person with another 15-20 on Zoom. The night of the invasion, the class took place entirely on Zoom, and attendance was high. Women tuned in not only from Kharkiv but also from elsewhere in Ukraine and even from Israel.

Children play musical instruments during the celebration of Hanukkah at the Kharkiv Choral Synagogue, in Kharkiv.

The women started with reciting Psalms in Hebrew and Russian. Then Miriam spoke about the weekly Torah portion which describes how the entire nation of Israel came together for a common purpose (building the first Tabernacle in the desert). Its theme of Jewish unity had never felt more apt. Miriam spoke about “the importance of uniting together and loving another Jew… I said it’s so amazing that we’re uniting together and all the Jews all over the world are praying for us.”

Just Before Shabbat
I checked in again with Miriam on Friday before Shabbat and the situation was even more tense. “People are calling us the whole time, asking should we leave,” she explained. With the Polish border a 15-hour drive away, she has been suggesting people to stay home and shelter in place.

“We had a quiet night,” on Thursday, but Friday brought a renewal of the fighting. “There were three rockets just now,” she said over the phone. All her grandchildren continued to shelter in Miriam’s basement, and she tried to lighten their spirits. It’s the month of Adar, and Jews are getting ready to celebrate Purim soon. “My grandkids are running around in Purim costumes…We’re trying to keep their spirits up.”

The Kharkiv Choral Synagogue

Rabbi Moskovitz got the shul ready for Shabbat. Fifty people had slept in the building. He made sure that there was Shabbat food in the shul and spent time speaking with people, trying to calm frayed nerves. “We’re hoping for a quiet Sjhabbos,” Miriam said.

She also had a request for people around the world. “We would appreciate everybody’s prayers. Since all Jews are responsible for one another, anyone who can do an extra good deed, or light Shabbos candles, or for men putting on tefillin – this can help build up our strength.”

Saturday Night
When Shabbat was over, I texted Miriam again. It was the middle of the night in Kharkiv and I didn’t expect a reply: I just wanted her to know that I was thinking of her and hoped she was safe. At 4 AM Ukrainian time, Miriam sent me a long text. Here it is. May she and everyone in Ukraine be safe and secure and have peace soon.

It says that you're not supposed to cry on Shabbat, I failed that three times this Shabbat.

The first time, was on Friday night when we managed to get to the synagogue. After the prayers we went downstairs for a Kiddush, filled with people who were brave enough to come, and the many people who have been living in the synagogue since the war started. After Kiddush we started singing "Nyet nyet nikovo", a Russian melody that there is no one that we should fear besides Hashem alone.

The second time, I wasn't able to hold it in, was Shabbat morning, when we blessed the new month of Adar, saying "Mi sheasa nisim l'avoseynu – Who did miracles for our Fathers'', I again felt the tears in my eyes. We also need miracles...

The third time was after the prayers, we have a beautiful tradition in our where the President of our community, Alexander Kaganovsky, gives blessings to people who have birthdays and special events in the community. Today, he asked everyone to be quiet, and said: "Reb Moishe, I want to tell you in the name of everyone in our community, that we want to thank all of you shluchim (emissaries) who have stayed behind to be together with us. We now see that all of what you have been saying all these years that you are one inseparable part of the community is true" He finished, with a beautiful big hug.

Another beautiful thing about Shabbat is we didn't have our phones and weren't able to check the news. We have received hundreds of WhatsApp and emails from people all over the world, who are concerned and praying for us, who want to know how we're doing. Our poor families all over the world, who want to be reassured that we're doing fine. But on Shabbat our phones were put aside as we lit the Shabbat candles, praying hard for peace everywhere.

There are three moments that I'd like to share, that I wasn't able to capture of course:

The first beautiful moment was after the Shabbat meal in our house, with my family and grandchildren here. They all put on Purim costumes and put on a skit and danced. My daughter Malka explained to me after their happy dance that she knows why we are all sleeping downstairs together in the basement which is our shelter "In the times of Purim, Haman said that the Jews were spread all over and not united...so we have to sleep all together to show we are all one"

Another special moment was during the Mussaf prayer. My son, Yossi, was davening (praying). When he started singing "Hu Elokeinu" (He is Our God) there were loud sounds of the bombing that is taking place on the outskirts of Kharkov, as they are trying to enter the city. As he was singing, we heard the booms, the davening was getting louder and louder, so we could drown out the sounds. Definitely an unforgettable prayer.

Then we had an amazing Shabbat meal downstairs together There was no need for words, or to say anything inspiring. All of us together, over 100 people sitting in the basement of the synagogue which we are currently using as a shelter, including the people who have been sleeping in the synagogue for the past couple of days, joined together in song. Hard to choose just one moment from the hours we shared together...the man from Kramatorsk who had fled to Kharkov in 2014,thanking us for staying and with prayers that the community should only continue to be stronger....and everyone hand in hand singing "hinei ma tov" (how good it is when we are together)...and the standing ovation for the cooks who have also moved into the synagogue to be 24/7 available to feed everyone who is coming in...from the refugees from Donetsk with their children to the old man who is scared to be alone on the fifth floor.

Special moments and definitely a Shabbat I won't forget. A Shabbat full of faith, unity and lots of hope for only very good times ahead. Shavua Tov

Charities that support Ukrainian Jews include:

The Ukraine Jewish Relief Fund run by Chabad-Lubavitch

Ukrainian relief fund set up by the Orthodox Union

Ukraine Relief Fun run by Agudath Israel


https://aish.com/in-ukraine-the-escape-road-not-taken/?src=ac-txt
In Ukraine, The Escape Road Not Taken.February 27, 2022 | by Sara Yoheved Rigler

The Jews of the Ukraine are facing two levels of danger.

I cried when I read about the busses lined up in Uman to transport the Jews to the Kiev airport from which they could fly to safety in Israel. As soon as the Russian bombs started to fall on Thursday, the bus drivers naturally ran home to be with their families, leaving the Jews stranded.

All the citizens of the Ukraine are in danger in the face of the Russian invasion. Jews, however, face a double layer of danger. The default European reaction in times of crisis is to scapegoat the Jews. The history of Ukrainian treatment of Jews, from massacres and pogroms to their unbridled support of the Nazis, does not auger well for the Jews now trapped in this war. Indeed, during the 2014 conflict between Russia and Ukraine, anti-Semitic incidents were reported.

“Until yesterday morning no one believed this could actually happen.”

Anticipating the danger a month ago, Israel sprang into action. The Israeli government devised a contingency plan to bring all 200,000* Ukrainian Jews to Israel, as they had done with the airlift of endangered Ethiopian Jews in 1991. Israel would send planes to airlift the Jews to safety in Israel, provide them with places to live, food, world-class medical care, and all their needs as they settled into their new home. As diplomats from all other countries were fleeing the Ukraine, Israel sent in extra diplomats to process the anticipated wave of fugitives.

On Sunday, February 20, with the Russian invasion imminent, Israel opened its Kiev embassy and Lvov consulate, normally closed on Sundays, for the expected throngs of Jews seeking escape. Ten people showed up at the Kiev embassy, three in Lvov.

That Sunday, two planes of Ukrainian Jews landed in Israel. One held 75 people, the other 22 people.

When Russia launched its invasion on Thursday, Rabbi Moshe Weber, a Chabad emissary in the eastern-Ukraine city of Dnipro, announced, “Until yesterday morning no one believed this could actually happen… There’s definitely a sense of shock here.”

Echoes of the Past
I cried for a second reason when I read about the immobilized busses in Uman, the escape road not taken. It reminded me of a story in Eli Wiesel’s autobiography.

The Nazis occupied Hungary in March, 1944. By that time most of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. While the Nazis tried to keep “The Final Solution” secret, some Jews who had escaped the trains and the camps had made their way to Hungary with their dire warnings. But the Jews there found it hard to accept what they were hearing. As Wiesel described, “…the older people said, ‘We’ve been fed lies. The people of Goethe and Schiller cannot sink to barbarism.’”

Even when the Jews of Wiesel’s town Sighet were stripped of all rights, made to wear the yellow star, beaten, robbed, and herded into a ghetto, they did not fathom the fatal danger they faced. Wiesel wrote:

The truth is that some Jews in Sighet could have escaped the ghetto…. Maria – our old housekeeper, wonderful Maria who had worked for us since I was born—begged us to follow her to her home. She offered us her cabin in a remote hamlet. There would be room for all six of us, and Grandma Nissel as well. Seven in one cabin? Yes, she swore it, as Christ was her witness. She would take care of us, she would handle everything. We said no, politely but firmly.1

The Wiesel family, like all the Jews of the region, were deported to the death camps. His grandparents, parents, and younger sister were murdered there. Eli Wiesel survived to forever rue the escape road not taken.

Escape in the Middle of the Party
Another story, this one with a happy ending: A family of wealthy German Jews was under surveillance by the Gestapo. Nazi Jew-hatred was manifestly clear by that time. This family read the handwriting on the wall and wanted to flee, but a Gestapo car was parked across from their spacious home to prevent that.

For their son’s Bar Mitzvah, they threw a grand party. Hundreds of guests came in and out of the house. At some point during the party, the family, carrying nothing, mingled with the exiting guests and left. They walked to their automobile parked a few blocks away, already packed with a couple of suitcases. By the time anyone, including the servants, realized that the hosts were missing, the family had already crossed the border. They left behind their home, their expensive furniture, the Persian rugs, the precious artwork on the walls, and everything that did not fit into those two bags. But they escaped with their lives. They eventually made their way to America, and have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

If Jews don’t leave in the middle of the party, is it possible they won’t be able to leave at all?

When I heard this story from one grandchild years ago, during a spike in antisemitism in France, I wondered: If Jews don’t leave in the middle of the party, is it possible they won’t be able to leave at all?

The head of Hatzalah in the Ukraine, Shlomo Rosilio, explained on Wednesday night, hours before the invasion, that it’s hard for a family with children to pick up and leave. “They worry that some Ukrainian guy may come in and take whatever they have if they leave. They won’t have anything to come back to. So, no one wants to leave their home.”

Of course, if they knew that their very lives would be in danger, they would have boarded those busses before it was too late. Throughout Jewish history, there has been a fine, hard-to-determine line between danger and doom.

Denying a frightening reality is a basic human response—whether it’s a terminal diagnosis, an unfaithful spouse, or an imminent war. The drive to optimism, that it will all work out, can serve as a noble force that keeps us on our feet when we would otherwise be writhing on the floor in despair.

The Jews of the Ukraine held onto such hope rather than walking away from their homes, communities, and way of life. Who knows what we would have done if we were in their situation.

I am praying for the safety of the Jews of the Ukraine. And I continue to pray for their successful re-settlement here in Israel.

*The estimated number of Ukrainian Jews fluctuates between 40,000 and 200,000, which includes those with one Jewish grandparent, which makes them eligible for Israeli citizenship by the Law of Return.

Memoirs: All Rivers Run to the Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994) p. 63.
See also Dispatch from Ukraine
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Post  Admin Tue 22 Feb 2022, 9:23 pm

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https://www.aish.com/ci/sam/Archaeology-and-the-Destruction-of-Sodom.html?src=ac-txt
Archaeology and the Destruction of Sodom
Feb 21, 2022  |  by Jonathan Sassenprint article
Archaeology and the Destruction of Sodom
The description of the Biblical destruction of Sodom is supported by recent archaeological discoveries.

Dr. Steven Collins, a Christian biblical scholar and the Dean at the College of Archaeology at Trinity Southwest University, Albuquerque, New Mexico has been excavating an archaeological site called Tall el-Hamman (“TeH” for short) for the past 15 years. Dr. Collins collaborated with a wide range of scientific experts from diverse fields and employing the most advanced techniques to develop a comprehensive picture of the fate of TeH. His results were recently published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.

The 64-page paper makes a highly credible and most astounding claim. TeH is located in the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea and the site dates back to the Middle Bronze Age. This is precisely the time and place where one would expect to find the ruins of biblical Sodom. Incredibly, the city unearthed at TeH was destroyed in a unique event that seems to match the biblical account Sodom’s ruination.

Now called Tall el-Hammam, the city is located about 7 miles northeast of the Dead Sea in what is now Jordan. NASA, CC BY-ND

The Biblical account describes Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding area as being overturned at the same time by an act of God – a catastrophic rainstorm of fire and brimstone. Only Lot and his two daughters escaped.

In Genesis, Chapter 13 we learn that Abraham and his nephew Lot had pitched their tents between Beit El and Ai, which is north of Jerusalem. Their shepherds were not getting along with each other, so Abraham suggested to Lot that they part ways, and Lot should find somewhere else to live. At that point the Torah says:


“And Lot raised his eyes, and he saw the entire plain of the Jordan, that it was entirely watered; before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, as you come to Zoar.” (Genesis 13:10)

This is how Dr. Collins describes the plain north of the Dead Sea that the Jordon River flows through:

Located in a generally arid region, the Jordan Valley is one of the best-watered areas in all the southern Levant (Jordan, Israel, and Palestine). In addition to numerous springs created by a disgorging Transjordanian aquifer, the area had hydrological conditions for human habitation somewhat analogous to the Nile Delta region, which is also bordered by arid terrain. During the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) peak occupation, at least an estimated 50,000 people occupied three major cities, plus satellite towns, villages, and hamlets spread across~400 km2 of the eastern Kikkar. TeH was the largest city located on a hill with a commanding view of the entire plain… At that time, it was 10 times larger than Jerusalem and five times larger than Jericho.

Dr. Collins’s excavations of the MBA city found evidence for high temperature burning of the city. Diamond-like carbon, melted construction materials, melted pottery, melted mudbricks, high-pressure shocked quartz, high-temperature melted minerals, melted nuggets of iridium, and many other metals in melt glass were found. All these show evidence of reaching temperatures greater than 1300 °C, with brief exposure to temperatures as high as 2500 °C, the melting point of Iridium.

These temperatures are way beyond what was possible from any man-made fire at that time.
These temperatures are way beyond what was possible from any man-made fire at that time, and there are no volcanoes in the area. In fact, the melted glass looks just like that made by an atomic blast over sand. Another major clue was that the TeH iron-dominant splatter closely matches some types of meteorites. There is though no sign of a meteor crater in the Jordon plain, so what happened?

By careful investigation of the city foundations, Dr. Collins was able to build up the following description of the city. TeH had a lower city surrounded by a defensive wall and within it a hill that was 33 meters high. On this hill was the upper city containing houses and the palace. The hill had formidable defenses that protected the palace: a rampart, a wall, and a monumental gateway. The rampart was constructed from millions of mudbricks and was as much as 30 meters thick at the base and 7–8 meters thick at the top, wide enough for military patrols. A 4-meter thick mudbrick defensive wall on stone foundations with towers lined the outer edge at the top of the rampart. The massive palace complex once had walls ranging from 1.0 to 2.2 meters thick and likely rising to 11–15 m in height, and a 2.2-meter-thick wall separated the raised palace platform from the rest of the upper city. The 4–5-story-tall palace complex (~ 52 m × ~ 27 m), with massive superstructures made of sun-dried mudbricks extended 11–15 meters above the top of the enclosing rampart. It’s no wonder that Lot’s married children in the city laughed at him when he told them it was going to be destroyed!

Today, almost no mudbricks remain on the stone foundations. All the walls are seemingly sheared off nearly level with the tops of the upper-city wall foundations. There is no evidence of collapsed walls across the entire city. There are almost no whole mudbricks visible anywhere, and instead, small fragments of bricks are randomly strewn around as infill within the churned-up, 1.5 m thick destruction matrix. It appears that most bricks were pulverized and blown off the site to the northeast. Millions of mudbricks are missing.

Diamonoids (center) inside a crater were formed by the fireball’s high temperatures and pressures on wood and plants. Malcolm LeCompte, CC BY-ND

Most of the bones found had been shattered into small pieces and mixed into a matrix of pulverized mudbricks. The individuals represented by the bones were violently torn apart by a powerful explosion, leaving only a few hand and foot bones still articulated and unbroken. The circumstances and condition of the human bones and fragments suggest that at the moment of death, these individuals were going about normal activities when they were struck.

The three largest urban cities in the southern Jordan Valley, TeH, Jericho and Tall Nimrin were burned and destroyed simultaneously.

The destruction layer is marked by anomalously high concentrations of salt. Archaeologists excavating nearby sites noted what they termed the “Late Bronze Age Gap”, during which about 16 cities and towns, including TeH, and more than 100 smaller villages were abandoned across the 30-km-wide lower Jordan Valley. This abandonment continued for the entire Late Bronze Age and most of the early Iron Age. Population levels are estimated to have plummeted from 45,000–60,000 people to only a few hundred nomadic tribespeople inhabiting the area following this destruction event. For TeH, the occupation gap is more than 600 years. In the Jericho area in the southwestern Jordan Valley, the archaeological record indicates a gap of approximately 300 years. It appears to have been a regional civilization-ending catastrophe that depopulated more than 500 km2 of the southern Jordan Valley for between 3 and 7 centuries.

The words of the Torah echo these findings:

And the Lord caused to rain down upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire, from the Lord, from heaven. And He turned over these cities and the entire plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and the vegetation of the ground (Genesis 19:24-25).

Sulfur and salt have burned up its entire land! It cannot be sown, nor can it grow [anything], not [even] any grass will sprout upon it. It is like the overturning of Sodom, Gemorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overturned in His fury and in His rage (Deuteronomy 29:22).

All this can be explained by one event – a cosmic airburst.

There are two types of objects that occasionally hit our planet. The most common are stony or metallic meteors. The vast majority of these are small and so burn up in the atmosphere. Occasionally one is large enough to make landfall, and every few thousand years on average one is so large it can make a lot of destruction and leave a crater. Very rarely Earth gets hit by a comet. These are best described as loosely held together dirty snowballs. They are mostly ice with lots of stones mixed in. Typically, objects hit our planet travelling at incredible speeds - tens of thousands of miles per hour. The intense heat and turbulence generated by friction with the atmosphere at these speeds will rapidly break up the comet and vaporize the ice to a gas. When a solid very rapidly turns into a gas, that is called an explosion. When a comet explodes in the atmosphere, it is called a cosmic airburst.

All the data suggests a cosmic airburst occurred a few kilometers southwest of Tall el-Hammam causing, in rapid succession, a high temperature thermal pulse from the fireball that melted all exposed materials. This was followed by a high-temperature, hypervelocity blast wave that demolished and pulverized everything across the city, leveling the city.

Dr. Collins speculates that at the same time the airburst above the Dead Sea (with ~ 34 wt.% salt content) may have thrown into the atmosphere large quantities of hypersaline water that fell across the lower Jordan Valley. After 300-600 years, the high salt concentrations were sufficiently leached out of the salt-contaminated soil to allow the return of agriculture.

The human mortality rate at TeH was 100%, the bodies of the people and animals were torn apart, and their bones blasted into small fragments.
The archaeological findings plus modelling of the airburst give us a good description of what possibly happened on that day. Christopher R. Moore, an archaeologist and Special Projects Director at the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program and South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina, described it like this in his article:

A giant space rock demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city and everyone in it – possibly inspiring the Biblical story of Sodom. A 75-meter diameter rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles above the ground, causing a blast around 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Air temperatures rose above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). Everything either burst into flames or melted.

Seconds later, a massive shockwave smashed into the city, demolishing every building. Moving at about 740 mph (1,200 kph), it was more powerful than the worst tornado ever recorded. They sheared off the top 40 feet (12 m) of the 4-story palace and blew the jumbled debris into the next valley. The ground-hugging blast wave from an airburst/impact would be laden with high-velocity missiles, including sand, gravel, pulverized mudbrick, plaster fragments, potsherds, broken branches, and shattered timbers. These hot missiles would incinerate and strip all flesh and crush all bones. The human mortality rate at TeH was 100%, the bodies of the people and animals were torn apart, and their bones blasted into small fragments.

It isn’t surprising that Lot’s daughters hiding in a cave thought the world was now uninhabited. The smoke could even be seen 40 miles away near Hebron:

And Abraham arose early in the morning to the place where he had stood before the Lord. And he looked over the face of Sodom and Gomorrah and over the entire face of the land of the plain, and he saw, and behold, the smoke of the earth had risen like the smoke of a furnace (Genesis 19:27-28).

Some additional takeaways:

This is the only such event of this size known in recorded history that happened over an inhabited area. There has been one other large recorded cosmic airburst though. In 1908 over the Tunguska River in Siberia a cosmic airburst destroyed millions of trees over 2150km2.

Carbon dating and archaeological dating gave the same date for the destruction as the traditional Jewish chronology. (Here's an easy way to calculate when Sodom was destroyed: Abraham was born in 1948, according to the Hebrew calendar. He was 99 years old when Sodom was destroyed, which was 3735 years ago, or 1714 BCE. The article claims 1700-1600 BCE for carbon dating and 1750–1650 BCE for dating based on pottery).
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https://www.aish.com/ci/s/A-Refugees-Secret-Act-of-Kindness.html?src=ac-txt
Having fled Italy in 1939, Isaac Kinek was very sensitive to the needs of the underdog.

Isaaco was almost four when his parents fled Italy in 1939. His parents had moved from Poland to Milan 15 years earlier when his father was given a coveted post as Cantor of the Sephardic synagogue. The family’s years in Milan had been idyllic but then Mussolini came to power and everything changed.

Isaaco was the youngest of three children and he was close with his sister Hinda and his brother David. They came to America by boat with no friends and no knowledge of English. There was no use complaining; they were happy to get out of Europe alive.



Isaaco became Isaac and he integrated successfully into American society. He went to college and got a degree in education. He was drafted into the National Guard and got up early in the morning to put on his tefillin and say his prayers. He'd trade any non-kosher rations for an extra loaf of bread. Isaac Kinek married Shirley a wonderful woman, they settled in Baltimore and had two adorable little girls who he treated with love and devotion, infusing them with Jewish values and speaking Yiddish at every opportunity. Isaac became an accomplished special educator and administrator in the public school system.

Isaac and Shirley Kinek


Despite his success, he never forgot what it was like to be a refugee. He was always on the lookout for any down and out refugee who might wander into shul. The Yiddish of his youth came in handy since many people coming from Russia or the FSU spoke no English, but the older ones remembered the Yiddish they were raised in.

Isaac's mantra in forging new relationships was : “Fun vannen kumt ah Yid? Where does a Jew come from?” The refugees appreciated the unexpected attention and concern. They couldn't get over this soft-spoken man with perfect Yiddish who showered them with affection and showed them how to pray and put on tefillin, things that were unheard of for people brought up as Communists.

Isaac began driving these new friends to doctor's appointments, providing critical translations which ensured the proper treatment and medication. He invited the refugees over for Shabbat and holiday meals. He drove them around on Sunday trips to see the countryside and pretend they were on a fancy vacation.

One day one of them called Isaac up and asked him to come to the house right away. Isaac got nervous and rushed over, only to find that the man had gathered his friends in the living room just to meet this Yiddish-speaking American who helped others. Isaac was so embarrassed at his sudden celebrity.

Isaac’s now- grown daughters who have families of their own were proud of their father and the kindness and care he gave to others. But there were kindnesses Isaac never revealed to his girls. That changed two weeks ago when Isaac passed away on Shabbat after battling a three-month illness.

Right after his passing, Isaac’s wife revealed a secret that he never wanted anyone to know. She told her two daughters, one of them is my lovely wife. Here’s the rest of the story:

My father-in-law would always go food shopping with Mom. One day he got extra eggs, bread and milk.

There was no hiding anything from Mom. “Isaac, why are you getting more than we need?”

He explained that Sasha, one of the refugees, was undernourished. He didn't have enough to eat, so Dad wanted to help him out. She was immediately on board, proud that her husband was so caring.

“But I don't want to give him a handout,” Isaac explained. “I don't want to embarrass him.”

“So what will you do?”

Dad was lost in thought. At last, a solution formed in his mind that his wife approved.

Mr. Isak (no relation), a Holocaust survivor, was the sexton of the shul Dad went to. One of his jobs was to arrange the food for the third meal on Shabbat served at the synagogue. It was simple fare.

Dad brought the food before Shabbat and told Mr. Isak to keep it in the fridge over Shabbat. After Shabbat was over, Mr. Isak approached Sasha on cue, and said, “Sasha, we have extra food leftover. Can you do me a favor and take it?”

It worked like a charm. Sasha was overjoyed with the windfall. “How will I get this home?”

“I'll drive you,” said Dad to Sasha, with a surreptitious wink at Mr. Isak.

This went on for years, with Sasha never wondering why the shul consistently overbought food. Mission accomplished: much-needed food given in a dignified manner, with as few people knowing about it as possible.

My father-in-law taught us to be sensitive to others, especially to the outsiders, the underdogs, the refugees like he used to be.

He has left enormous shoes to fill.
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Post  Admin Thu 17 Feb 2022, 9:09 pm

Why Opposites Attract
Mar 12, 2016  |  by Chana Levitanprint article
Why Opposites Attract
A well-kept secret to long-term attraction in marriage.
She was attracted to him because he was stable and practical; once married, she got turned off because he was drab and business-like.
He was attracted to her because she was fun and spontaneous; once married, he got annoyed because she was boisterous and unpredictable.
https://www.aish.com/f/m/Why-Opposites-Attract.html?src=ac-txt

Why is it that the thing that attracts us most at the beginning of the relationship turns out to be the very thing that drives us nuts about the other person once married? And what if that very thing actually turned out to be the battery that can continually reenergize a marriage?

Why Can’t My Spouse Just Be More Like Me?
As a marriage therapist, I am often asked how a couple can keep attraction going after many years of marriage. The typical pattern is that the very traits that attracted couples in the beginning of a relationship become sources of friction over the long term.

That very thing that we find so annoying about our spouses can become the fuel of our continued attraction.
When we start to see our spouses’ differences as a problem, we can get into a downward spiral of disrespect and trying to change each other. Did you ever wonder how two people who liked each other enough to get married can end up actually disliking each other? If the downward spiral goes unchecked, it can lead to estrangement and contempt. But this downward spiral can be reversed, and when we start to climb the upward spiral, that very thing that we find so annoying about our spouses can become the fuel of our continued attraction!

Let’s look at how this works in practice. Carly came to speak with me about her second marriage. “I’m so frustrated,” she said. “My husband is too outgoing and talkative; it’s really annoying. He’s always nudging me to go out and do things with him; all I want to do is curl up with a good book. Why can’t he be more like me?”

“Was your first husband on the quiet side?” I inquired.


“No,” Carly told me, “he also was too extroverted and talkative. But we had conflicting values. My second husband and I are on the same page…except that he’s so talkative.”

I asked Carly the obvious: “Why didn’t you marry the quiet, introverted type of guy? Why did you go for the extroverted type again?”

She said, “Well…now that I think about it, I’m only attracted to the outgoing type. I guess I really like the fact that my playful, fun side comes out around my husband. I have trouble accessing the more social part of myself on my own.”

On the surface, Carly “hit it off” with her husband and just felt good around him. But what really fueled her attraction was the way he balanced her out. Back then, when Carly was around her husband-to-be, she felt like the best version of herself.

Carly was eager to learn the steps of the upward spiral and as she ascended, she began to recognize the gift of her husband’s personality difference. Her attraction to him was rekindled and their marriage turned around.

Attraction Reignited
Brett, a guy I interviewed, had pursued his wife for two years in university. He was very drawn to her—she had a certain serenity that hypnotized him. After they got married, fast-paced Brett became really annoyed once he discovered just how slow-paced his wife was. For years he was frustrated in his marriage until, in his words, “I started to see the strength in her slowness.” Brett was not only fast-paced, he was also impulsive and had gotten himself into quite a few messes. “Once I admitted that my fast nature had its flaws,” he explained, “I started to realize how many times my wife saved me. As I opened my eyes, I started to be fascinated by her patience and calm and before you knew it, my attraction reignited!”

You’ll notice that Brett’s initial attraction to his wife was effortless. Yet, in order to kick the attraction back in, he needed to make an effort. We all know that marriage takes some effort. The question is—which efforts are going to yield results? After all, we don’t want to just spin our wheels.

This question led me to search for the wisdom, tools, and techniques that would help couples reconnect to their initial attraction. My research study – in which I surveyed hundreds of married people in the United States and interviewed couples around the world – was aimed at finding the secret of living joyfully with personality differences. The results were both fascinating and inspiring. My new book, That’s Why I Married You! How to Dance with Personality Differences (Gefen Publishing House), is a handbook that guides couples to enjoy their differences, based on the findings of my research.

Why Opposites Attract
What Carly and Brett each discovered in their marriages is what I call “completion.” This word has a bad rap today because people define it as dependence. It seems to convey that we can’t stand on our own two feet and therefore need someone to complete us. This sounds so helpless. If that’s what completion means, I’m not into it either, because a prerequisite to getting married is to be able to stand on your own two feet.

We are attracted to an opposite in order to make sure that we grow and develop throughout our lives.
What I mean by the word completion is: while I can play solo, when I play in a duet I can access parts of myself that are only accessible through the close relationship of marriage. This healthy type of completion is one of the main benefits of marriage; we are precisely attracted to an opposite in order to make sure that we grow and develop throughout our lives. That’s the unconscious magnetism between opposites!

Do I Have to Look for an Opposite?
For those of you who are still single, I’m not suggesting that you look specifically for an opposite. On the contrary, you want to look for similarities—most importantly in values and character traits (see my first book, I Only Want to Get Married Once, for more on how to find your spouse and the importance of values). But don’t worry! If you find yourself attracted to your date, you can bet that there are certain personality differences in the mix. This is because “too similar” can translate into monotonous and boring. It is the “tension of opposites” that underlies much of the initial attraction between people. And it’s that attraction that can be constantly reenergized, if you know how to utilize your personality differences.

Oh! That’s Why I Married You!
When Carly and Brett saw their spouses through the eyes of “completion,” it’s as if they flipped on a light in their marriages. All of a sudden, their personality differences made sense and they were able to access that battery of continued attraction that each couple has. My book shares the concrete steps that Carly, Brett, and many others have taken to travel the upward spiral and illuminate and reenergize their marriages. These are simple steps that anyone can do.

When we learn to use our personality differences the right way, we can grow into the best version of ourselves, help our spouses do the same, and reignite our attraction to make our marriages great. And it is then that we can turn to our spouses and say, “Oh! That’s why I married you!”
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Post  Admin Tue 15 Feb 2022, 11:02 pm

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Death-at-Sea-The-Tragedy-of-the-Struma.html?src=ac-txt
Death at Sea: The Tragedy of the Struma
Feb 12, 2022  |  by Leonard Hurleyprint article
Death at Sea: The Tragedy of the Struma
In 1942, the dilapidated ship carrying 769 desperate Jewish refugees en route to Palestine, was blown up. There was one sole survivor.

Eighty years ago, on the morning of February, 24, 1942, a decrepit cattle boat named MV Struma, sank in the Black Sea. The ship, carrying 769 desperate Jewish refugees, including 101 children, was the last to leave Europe for Palestine during World War II. A Russian submarine torpedoed this “floating cage”, killing everyone on board, except one survivor. The tragic sinking of the Struma sparked widespread international protest against Britain's policy on immigration into Palestine.

By October 1941, the German army controlled the Romanian oil fields. Romanian soldiers and the fanatical Green Shirts, antisemitic League of the Archangel Michael (The Iron Guard) supported by German troops, went on a rampage slaughtering Jews in what the authorities described as “the purification of Romanian land.” Franklin Gunther, the American ambassador in Bucharest, reported “butchery and brutal deprivation of human rights”, stating that 1941 was a black year for the Jews of Romania.

British yacht Xantha in about 1890. In 1941 she was renamed Struma

The Romanian port of Constanta, on the Black Sea, was the main port of embarkation for Palestine. Thousands of terrified refugees poured into Constanta seeking a safe passage through the Bosporus. The Montreux Convention of 1936 declared the Bosporus an open international waterway. Neutral Turkey did allow safe passage for Jews through their country, but like most countries refused haven “for people unwanted anywhere else”.

Palestine became the center of a power game as the British limited Jewish immigration under a League of Nations Mandate (1920 – 1948). The Royal Navy patrolled the coast to block “illegal immigration “. The Arabs supported this policy. Antagonizing the Arabs was not in the British interest as the oil of the Middle East and the Suez Canal were of immense strategic importance. The British impounded ships that got through the blockade and imprisoned crews. Lord Moyne, Walter E. Guinness, Minister for the Middle East who lived in Cairo, and Sir Harold Mac Michael, British Colonial Administrator, enforced this hard-line policy.


The British blocked the sale or rent of ships ferrying Jews. In desperation the Zionists rented the 75-year-old MV Struma, a 240-ton rusting hulk. She had a second-hand engine two old lifeboats and no life belts. The radio transmitter did not work, and the generator failed sporadically. The sanitary facilities consisted of eight toilets, little more than holes at the stern. Yet no one was willing to give up their place on the unseaworthy Struma, a measure of their fear of staying in Romania.

Photo believed to show Struma in port in Istanbul, 1942

On December 12th the Struma, flying the neutral Panamanian flag, departed Constanta. A short distance from port the engine failed. After repairs the ship proceeded and three days later, at the mouth of the Bosporus, the engine again failed. A tug assisted the decrepit Struma into Istanbul harbour. The British told the Turks that the ship could not land in Palestine and insisted they should return her to the Black Sea.

For ten weeks Turkey quarantined the ship. Food and water ran dangerously low, and fevers were rife. Passengers resorted to bribery to get food and water. The squalid conditions on board, the icy winds, freezing temperatures and the fear that the police would force them back to Romania increased the tension. Desperate passengers draped large painted signs in English and Hebrew – “Save Us,” “SOS “, and “Jewish Immigrants” on the sides of the ship.

No help came as the press paid little attention.

David Stoliar, the sole survivor, 1946

On February 23, the police towed the doomed ship ten miles off the coast. Before dawn the next day, in cloudy, damp, and calm weather, an explosion plunged the Struma to the bottom of the frigid sea.

Years later Soviet naval archives revealed that submarine Shch-213 had torpedoed the ship, allegedly by mistake. Stalin had issued instructions to sink neutral ships to deny chromium to the Germans. Chromium, a rare mineral, was essential for manufacturing military equipment and Turkey was selling it to Germany.

The sinking sparked worldwide outrage over Britain’s policy. Guinness and Mac Michael were accused by Zionists as the architects of the tragedy. Calls that “the blood of the Struma refugees will be inflicted upon Mac Michael.” “Wanted for Murder” posters of Mac Michael appeared throughout Palestine. He survived seven attempts on his life.


Walter Guinness, heir to the Guinness empire, was not so lucky and on November 6, 1944, two members of Lehi, a Zionist paramilitary organization, shot him dead in Cairo. His death shocked the British and was one of the reasons for their withdrawal from the Mandate that led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

Turkish light-house keepers saved the sole survivor 19-year-old David Stoliar from drowning. He later joined the British army to fight the Nazis. Stoliar visited those who rescued him from the icy waters of the Black Sea 59 years later.

Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, authors of Death on the Black Sea: The Untold Story of the Struma and World War II’s Holocaust at Sea, write: “The passengers were victims of the British geopolitical strategy of keeping the Arabs pacified, the Turkish insistence on maintaining the façade of neutrality, and the heartless pragmatism of the policy of Stalin and the Soviets to starve the German war machine.”

In their book Frantz and Collins quote Ruth Ben-Zvi, who lost a childhood friend on the Struma: “There were Jews who died by starvation. There were Jews who died on forced marches … There were Jews who were killed in police stations. It was a Holocaust. The means of killing doesn’t matter… It is the Holocaust because they died because they were Jews.”
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Post  Admin Sun 13 Feb 2022, 4:30 pm

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/The-Most-Famous-Jewish-Woman-in-Medieval-England.html?src=ac-txt

The Most Famous Jewish Woman in Medieval England
Feb 13, 2022  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
The Most Famous Jewish Woman in Medieval England
Why Britain just dedicated a new statue to commemorate the trailblazing Licoricia of Winchester.

Britain’s newest statue was unveiled on February 10, 2022 with a group of prominent faith leaders in attendance to honor the Medieval Jewish woman being immortalized. Prince Charles had planned to attend but was forced to withdraw at the last moment when he tested positive for Covid. He sent a message saying he was “desperately disappointed” to miss the event.

In the 1200s, Licoricia of Winchester was one of the wealthiest and most prominent women in all of England during her lifetime. She rubbed shoulders with royalty and occupied a place of prestige and importance in King Henry III’s court. When she died, news of her passing reached far and wide, far beyond England’s shores.

Jews in Medieval England
Little is known of Licoricia’s early life. She was born in the early 1200s and married a man named Abraham, son of Isaac. Abraham seems to have originated in Kent, and moved to Winchester, where there was a small Jewish community. There, he and Licoricia had three sons, Isaac (whose English name was Cokerel), Baruch (Benedict) and Lumbard; and a daughter named Belia.

New statue of Licoricia of Winchester
In the 1200s, Jews lived in England under the protection of the king and were considered the private “property” of the monarch. Jews were barred from most professions, forbidden from owning property, and largely forced into moneylending. When an English Jew died, their property and assets couldn’t be inherited by their children – all wealth was claimed by the crown. Beginning in 1194, King Richard I restricted Jews’ money-lending activity, restricting their business to a few official locations. Historian Richard Huscroft identified “six or seven” locales in all of England where Jews could legally conduct business. The towns of London, Norwich, Lincoln, and Winchester were among the first places designated; several more later joined the list.


Estimations of the number of Jews living in England vary widely, but it’s likely that the Jewish community in Winchester numbered no more than 80 people at the time Licoricia lived there. Most Jews lived clustered together in a central avenue called Jewry street. They were a close-knit group who supported and helped one another. Women as well as men worked in business, and some women formed business partnerships.

Life was incredibly hard for England’s Jews at the time. The first instance of a blood libel - where Jews were accused of killing a Christian child in order to use his blood in Jewish rituals - occurred in 1144 in the English town of Norwich. A second blood libel took place in 1255 - during Licoricia’s lifetime - when the body of a young child was found in a well in the town of Lincoln. The boy’s friends accused local Jews of kidnapping, torturing and murdering the child. Lincoln’s sheriff arrested over 90 Jews; 18 were executed. Both of the children at the centers of these blood libels were made into saints (St. William of Norwich and St. Hugh of Lincoln), stoking Christian hatred of local Jews still further.

In 1239, King Henry III ordered all of England’s Jews to turn over a third of their belongings and assets to the crown; Jews who couldn’t pay were imprisoned in the Tower of London while their property was seized. In 1253, all Jews in England were forced to wear a piece of cloth or parchment in the shape of two stone tablets on their clothes that represented the stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. Wealthy Jews could pay to avoid wearing this mark. (Historians speculate that Licoricia was among those Jews who avoided wearing the degrading garment.)


In 1265, during the unsuccessful rebellion of Simon de Montfrot against the king, fighting came to Winchester as King Henry III’s soldiers routed the rebellion. In the violence, many Christians in Winchester turned on their Jewish neighbors, attacking Winchester’s Jews and seizing their property. Licoricia, as well as some others of the town’s terrified Jews, managed to find refugee inside Winchester Castle. Those who couldn’t make it into the fortress in time were murdered. The survivors left the fortress after the siege and picked up the pieces of their lives, resuming business and communal life, but were left profoundly traumatized.

Building a Business Empire
It was against this turbulent and terrifying backdrop that Licoricia built her money-lending business, eventually becoming one of the wealthiest women in all of England.

The first historical documents that mention her date from early 1234, after the death of her husband Abraham. Licoricia remained in Winchester with her children after his death and continued in the family business of money-lending, going into business with another Jewish woman living in Winchester named Belia.

At some point Licoricia became acquainted with David of Oxford, another Jewish money-lender. He was one of the wealthiest Jews living in England. A communal leader, King Henry III used David to help him enforce his onerous taxes and regulations on England’s Jews. In the early 1240s. David was married to a woman named Muriel, who helped him in his business. But when he met Licoricia, David decided to divorce Muriel and seek Licoricia’s hand in marriage.

Muriel refused to accept the divorce. Two hundred years before, Rabbi Gershom of Mainz had ruled that a Jewish divorce could only be valid when both parties agreed. Muriel insisted that a Beit Din, a rabbinical court, hear her side and adjudicate in her marriage. As was the custom among English Jews at the time, Muriel and her family convened a Beit Din in France, where there was a larger and more scholarly Jewish community. The Beit Din ruled in Muriel’s favor, and a second Beit Din in Oxford threw out the divorce.

However, David was determined to obtain his divorce, and turned to King Henry III for help. King Henry III eagerly seized this chance to revoke the Jews’ autonomy in their civil and religious matters, and ordered his religious leaders to uphold the divorce, which they did. David set up a new house and allowance for Muriel, as Jewish law mandated he do after the divorce, and Licoricia and David soon married.

The Tower of London
Licoricia had another child with David, a son named Asher (known in English variously as Asser, Sweteman or Sweetman), but her marriage to David was short lived: David died in 1244, after only two years with Licoricia. Upon his death, all of his business records were taken to London to the Scaccarium Judaeorum, the special court in which Jewish business dealings were scrutinized and regulated. Licoricia was immediately looked at with suspicion. While the business was being assessed, in order to prevent Licoricia from interfering in any way, authorities arrested and imprisoned her in the Tower of London.

The Tower was a fearsome prison for English Jews. It is where 18 Jews accused of ritual murder were executed. Yet the Tower had also served as a refuge to local Jews during violent anti-Jewish pogroms. A number of Jews were murdered during King Richard I’s coronation in 1189, so before his coronation in 1216, King Henry III took steps to protect local Jews, allowing them to take shelter in the Tower of London.

There are records of Jewish prisoners in the Tower of London paying their jailors to obtain kosher food, and of Jewish prisoners paying bribes to be allowed to observe Yom Kippur in the prison. It’s possible that Licoricia engaged in similar bribery during her imprisonment there, while David’s business affairs were settled.

Starting Over as a Single Woman
When David’s business records were finally released, the authorities offered Licoricia the chance to buy back David’s outstanding loans at the exorbitant price of 5,000 marks. She somehow raised the money and went into business for herself. (In a particularly insulting gesture, most of her fee went to a special fund to build a new shrine to Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey.)

Licoricia took her children and returned to Winchester. There, she built up an even larger money-lending business. She lent funds directly to King Henry III, and visited his court whenever he visited Winchester. She also lent money to members of his royal court, to Queen Eleanor, and to local business people and farmers as well. She likely was outgoing and gregarious, with a winsome personality that drew people of all social classes to her and engendered trust. Legal records at the time record Licoricia’s business dealings across a wide swath of southern England over the next 30 years, usually in partnership with her sons. She lent to rich and poor alike, and also extended credit to her fellow Jews, helping support businesses. In time Licoricia became an intermediary between the Jewish community and the crown.

In 1258, Licoricia’s close business relations with King Henry III led to her being imprisoned in the Tower of London for a second time. Belia, the woman who’d worked with Licoricia as a business partner years before, wished to give a gold ring to King Henry III, perhaps as a bribe or to curry favor with the monarch. She entrusted it with her good friend Licoricia to deliver, but disaster struck. The ring disappeared and one of Licoricia’s neighbors, a woman named Ivetta, accused Licoricia of taking it. Once more, the authorities threw Licoricia into the Tower of London while the matter was investigated. Ivetta was eventually found to be the thief and, and King Henry III ordered Licoricia to be released. (The ring was never found.)

Licoricia’s Murder and the Decline of English Medieval Jewry
One day in 1277, Licoricia’s daughter Belia went to visit her mother and was confronted by a horrific sight: Licoricia and her Christian maid, a woman known as Alice of Bicton, lay dead in the house, both stabbed to death. A large amount of money was gone, presumably stolen by the murderers. Local authorities identified three men as possible culprits and brought them to trial, but a jury acquitted all three. (Conveniently, they named a man who’d left the city and who couldn’t be traced as the prime suspect.) Licoricia’s sons Cokerel and Sweteman later tried to bring civil case against the three men who likely murdered their mother, but with the legal system stacked against Jews, they were unsuccessful.

The 13 years following Licoricia’s death were crushing for England’s Jewish community.

When King Henry III died in 1272, King Edward I ascended the throne and faced increasing pressure from indebted aristocrats to end Jewish money-lending. In 1287, he ordered England’s Jews to pay an enormous tax of 20,000 marks to the crown. In Winchester, the entire Jewish community was imprisoned in Winchester Castle until the onerous tax was raised. Licoricia’s youngest son Asher was amongst them. While imprisoned, he carved a message in Hebrew into his prison cell’s wall: “On Friday Eve of the Sabbath in which the parsha Emor is read, all Jews of the land of the isle were imprisoned. I, Asher, inscribed this….”

The unveiling of the statue at in Winchester
Licoricia’s son Benedict became the only Jewish guildsman in all of Medieval England. He amassed great wealth and was the only English Jew accorded the same rights as an English subject given to Christians. But even this couldn’t save Licoricia’s family from the terrible fate of all English Jews. Another son was executed for the crime of coin-clipping, an accusation that was frequently leveled at English Jews, often baselessly. (Coin clipping was shaving off small amounts of coins and melting down the resulting stolen metal scraps.)
In 1290, all of England’s approximately 3,000 Jews were expelled from the country and banned from ever returning. (Jews were only allowed to live in England once more in 1656.) Licoricia’s descendants, like most of the English Jews, likely moved to France.

Licoricia’s Statue
Licoricia’s new statue depicts her standing erect and looking bold, holding the hand of one of her young sons. The base is inscribed in Hebrew and English with the words from Torah: “Love thy neighbor as thyself” (Leviticus 19:18). It’s a beautiful statue and fitting tribute to a woman who helped support her Jewish community, and who deserves to be remembered today.
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Growth through Adversity: God, Can't You Just Leave Me Alone?
Feb 9, 2022
by Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmithprint article
Growth through Adversity: God, Can't You Just Leave Me Alone? 
Choose life. Because the alternative is death.

Why would a good, omniscient and omnipotent God bring adversity and challenge into my life? We’ve explored two Jewish approaches to this difficult question in previous articles. (You can read them here and here.) This article discusses a third (and final) approach to consider.

I heard the following example from Elana Rosenblatt, the wife of my friend Rabbi Shaul Rosenblatt. She succumbed to breast cancer at the age of 29, leaving behind four children. The strength, grace and spiritual clarity she embodied during her final years brought enormous, unforgettable light to the world. (Shaul has written an excellent book on this subject.)

Elana described three athletes who are training for the Olympics. At the end of a grueling day, their coach tells two of the athletes that they’re free to go, but the third needs to stay for an additional hour of working out and practice.

Why is the coach singling him out?

Sometimes we need the extra squeeze to access our inner greatness.
Because he’s got the greatest shot at winning the gold. The coach is investing more time and energy in him to bring out his formidable potential. The third athlete needs that extra squeeze to access his inner greatness.


We may doubt ourselves and not believe that we are capable of attaining personal greatness, but God has fashioned our soul and He knows what we are made of. He is intimately aware of our inner potential and isn’t prepared to throw in the towel and give up on us, even if that’s what we feel like doing. God is investing in each and every one of us. If we’re not firing on all cylinders, He may turn up the heat and give us the circumstances and challenges we need to rise to the occasion and push ourselves further, sometimes beyond what we could ever imagine.

Lemonade
I’ve experienced this in my life. Initially overwhelmed with the challenge of raising a special needs’ child, looking back I can see how the incomparable blessing of our son has changed me and my entire family. Yehuda forces me to work on being more patient, a trait I know I am sorely lacking. He has taught our family the language of hugs and has made his siblings more sensitive, empathetic and respectful of people who are different.

We can respond to adversity by accepting it and using it to motivate ourselves to work harder in accomplishing our life’s purpose.

That’s what the Berman family did when their young son Brian was diagnosed with Type 1 Gaucher, a rare genetic disorder that results in missing an enzyme that breaks down fatty substances called lipid. At the time there was no treatment available. At first the parents asked “Why me, why us?” and then they sprang into action. They searched high and low and found a doctor who was making potential breakthroughs in treatment.

Their son Brian was the first person to receive successful treatment. Today there is treatment for Gaucher disease, thanks to the efforts spearheaded by the Berman family. Brian is a healthy, active husband and father of five children, and the president of The Gaucher Foundation, the very foundation that his parents created decades ago.

Life and Death Battle
But why does God make it so hard for us to reach our potential? Why do we need to push ourselves? What if I’m happy binge-watching Netflix all day? God, just leave me and my munchies alone!

The explanation lies in understanding the nature of free will.

When framing the essence of free will, the Torah says, “See I have placed before you today the life and the good, and the death and the evil…. choose life so that you may live” (Deuteronomy, 30:15,19). Free will is not merely a choice between good evil; it’s a choice between life and death.

How so? Who chooses death?

We all do.

Rabbi Noah Weinberg, obm, demonstrated this point by asking students, “What’s the opposite of pain?” Most people reply, “Pleasure.”

The opposite of pain is not pleasure; it’s no pain – comfort. Don’t confuse comfort with pleasure.
Rabbi Weinberg would retort, “Incorrect. The opposite of pain is not pleasure; it’s no pain – comfort. Don’t confuse comfort with pleasure.”

Comfort is the absence of pain, lying on the beach without a care in the world, a numbing affects of Novocain, sleeping in… The ultimate experience of no pain is death itself. Suicide. The Talmud says that we all have a death wish, a part of us that wants to put us back in the ground and end it all. And once the yetzer hara, our lower self, can’t win that battle, he moves on to the next best thing, namely suicide in installments.

That enticement comes in all shapes and sizes – we all have our temptations and forms of escape – and it never lets up.

On the other side of our free will battle is the option to choose life. Our soul yearns to soar, to grow, to accomplish. Real pleasure requires pain and effort, not running away from it. “No pain, no gain,” as the saying goes. The most meaningful moments we have come through the crucible of struggle.

God, Who is Infinite and complete, has put us in the world to attain ultimate meaning and fulfillment, which comes through exerting our free will muscles, overcoming the drive for comfort, and choosing genuine pleasure.

It couldn’t be any other way, because free will is what makes us like God, Who is free and independent. The desire to stay inert and throw away our potential because it’s more comfortable is an escape, a form of death. It's choosing meaningless. It’s the very opposite of God, Who is eternal life.

Like a parent who cannot tolerate seeing his child sleeping in, smoking pot and playing computer games all day, God wants us to get off the couch, conquer our demons, and taste the deep-seated pleasure and meaning that is there for the taking, if we want it badly enough.

Choose life. Because the alternative is death.
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Post  Admin Tue 08 Feb 2022, 5:35 pm

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/This-Black-Rapper-Is-Spreading-Holocaust-Awareness.html?src=ac-txt
This Black Rapper Is Spreading Holocaust Awareness
Feb 5, 2022  |  by Faygie Holtprint article
This Black Rapper Is Spreading Holocaust Awareness
With soulful lyrics, Curtis Bates is educating the next gen about the evils of hate.
Like many young people his age, Curtis Bates didn’t know a lot about the Holocaust beyond what he’d learned in history class.
“We covered it for a little minute in school, in world history class in ninth grade,” he says. “I knew bits and pieces. Nothing pertaining to the real details of what occurred. I knew who Hitler was and I knew the Nazis and that they invaded Poland, but nothing more.”

Missing in that narrative is how the Nazis systematically exterminated millions of Jews, annihilating two thirds of European Jewry in a matter of years.

Bates, 20, an African-American college student from the West Side neighborhood of Detroit, is hoping to educate his peers and the next generation about the horrors of the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews, the evils of Hitler and how a generation can be made to believe falsehoods spread through the media.

And he’s using his musical talents to do, thanks in part to his role in a new documentary, Shoah Ambassadors. The film follows two young adults, musician Bates and artist Hailey Callahan, as they learn about the horrors of the Holocaust through a series of meetings with survivors along with educational tours of the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan and a virtual discussion with a representative from Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.

“Picture This U Sittin In Yo Home Eatin Dinner
Some people kick down tha door and say they
takin U wit em They put U in tha ghetto the worst
living conditions …”

In the film the two work independently to share their knowledge with others through their art. Callahan created a stained-glass cattle car to illustrate the war machine the Nazis used to transport Jews to their deaths, while Bates wrote and performed three original rap songs that appear in the film.

“I was most surprised by how Hitler’s teachings were actually sold to his followers through propaganda and journalism,” says Bates, who is studying journalism at Wayne County Community College. “I didn’t understand how he was able to get such an army of people to commit such heinous acts. I don’t know how he justified it to them, but when it was explained to me” as part of the educational component of Shoah Ambassadors, “how Hitler controlled the media and the narrative, it made more sense, but it still shocked me.”

“A dark time in history that we’ll always remember
The man who orchestrated that plan was Adolf Hitler
He was a demon had to be tha closest thing to satan
Used propaganda on that Germans and became they dictator … ”

“Shoah Ambassadors” is the brainchild of documentary filmmaker Keith Famie, who had worked with Holocaust survivors in other films. Famie was dismayed when a story came up on his social media feed that claimed the Holocaust is “a made-up story.”

“To be honest, I was just irritated,” Famie, who is not Jewish, says. “I thought this is one of the stupidest things I ever heard. I was there, I walked in Auschwitz… Then I started asking some basic questions of young people, and sure enough they don’t know what the Holocaust is or what a concentration camp is or where it took place.”

Research backs up Famie’s assertion. According to a 2019 study by the Pew Research Center, more than half of U.S. teens polled could not say how many Jews died in the Holocaust or how Hitler rose to power. More recently, a study funded by a nonprofit group in Canada, found that a third of teens polled felt the Holocaust was either fabricated or exaggerated.

Curtis Bates talking to Holocaust survivors

Determined to make a film that would speak to young, primarily non-Jewish teens, Famie took a film crew to cover a talk at the Zekelman Holocaust Center near Detroit by a Holocaust survivor. The audience? A group of about 100 high school students. “She was impactful,” he recalls, “but at the end of the day, they just didn’t get it.… The informational, generational gap was too wide, and I thought there had to be a better way to tell the story.”

He then hit on the idea of having young people go on a journey of discovery about the Holocaust with viewers coming along for the ride. When he met Bates, the director knew he’d found one of two of his ambassadors and tasked the young musician with creating the music that would frame the film, even though some in the Jewish community had reservations about telling the Holocaust through rap music.


For Bates, participation in Shoah Ambassadors gave him the opportunity to showcase his musical talents in a new arena. “I knew it would be a good opportunity to learn about the Holocaust and it would challenge my artistry—if I could pull off my vision of what Keith had in mind. I thought he had a good plan and a good vision, and I definitely wanted to help him carry that out.”

The filmmaker set out a few ground rules for the young rapper. There could be no profanity and the songs had to be “articulate and easy to hear the words, and they had to tell a story.”

He also gave the rapper the name for one of the songs, “Stolen Dreams.” With those parameters Bates got to work.

“With my songs and artistry, I always take a storytelling approach,” he explains. “This was a different story for me to tell, rather than a story from my life that I usually do, I had to find a way to apply that skill to tell a story that was taught to me at the Holocaust memorial center and by talking with the survivors.”


Hearing the survivors talk about their experiences “was like an out-of-body experience,” Bates says. “I didn’t know people from the Holocaust were still here and to hear their stories out of their own mouths.” “Stolen Dreams” was the first thing he recorded for the film and Famie calls it “brilliant.”

“When we cut that first piece of film with that song—a long time before the rest of the film was finished—it solidified any concerns the Jewish community had about a rap song in a Holocaust documentary,” says Famie. “Those that saw it, just sat back and said this is going to be amazing.”

Bates, though, wasn’t done wowing the director or viewers with his lyrical prose.

Rene Lichtman, one of Holocaust survivors featured in the documentary, is a painter and during the film he is shown creating a piece of artwork with the words “Never Again” on it. When he showed the final artwork to Bates, Lichtman challenged him to write a song called “Never Again.”

Bates was game to try it, and so was Famie. “We agreed that it should be a call to action against all forms of injustice,” recalls Bates. “Aside from it being a song about the Holocaust, it also a song about ending injustice across all people so young people will hear it and absorb and take the message, carrying it into real life.”

“6 Million lost souls gone and we can’t replace em
It’s time to address the problem now so everybody face em
We gotta end the hatred…”

After a few weeks, Bates played a few bars of his rendition of “Never Again” for Famie and he knew the ending of the documentary would need to be reworked to accommodate the song. He also engaged the Detroit Children’s Choir to sing it on screen with Bates.

“Music can succeed in telling any story because of the impact and influence it has on the culture and especially on young people.”
Ironically, this is not the first time the phrase “Never Again” has been turned into a song about antisemitism and hate. In 1998, the hip-hop group Wu-Tang Clan released a song with the same title about the Holocaust.

Bates, who is a fan of the group’s work, was surprised to learn about the song, and said “it’s cool to know that artists I admire have used their creativity and platform to speak on serious subjects.”

“Music can succeed in telling any story because of the impact and influence it has on the culture and especially on young people,” says Bates. “Where I’m from music creates dialogue, sets trends, brings people together, separates them, and overall addresses the climate of what’s going on in the world.”

Young people, he continues, “are impressionable, learning more every day, and a part of the world that influences them is the art they consume.”

Which is why Bates’s music in “Shoah Ambassadors” might just bridge the gap between the young teens today and the Shoah survivors still in our midst.

Shoah Ambassadors bridges the chasm between Holocaust survivors who endured the nightmare of World War II and today’s bright-eyed, tech-savvy youths who may have only a limited grasp of what their elders suffered. Visit their website at: http://shoahambassadors.com/

Click below to watch the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz8p44pCcwE
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Saying Goodbye to My Readers
Jan 30, 2022  |  by Emuna Bravermanprint article
Saying Goodbye to My Readers
I’ve been with Aish.com since the very beginning and I’m very grateful to my readers.

Just over 21 years ago, Aish.com, a brand new Jewish content website decided to take a chance on someone with no known writing experience (except for some dreadful essays in law school that my professor said sounded like a soap opera!). They never looked back.

It’s been an amazing journey, granting me the opportunity to share with you, my dear Aish.com readers, my musings – about life, marriage, parenting and grandparenting and everything in between, and most importantly about our relationship with God.

I was also granted the privilege of authoring an advice column, Dear Emuna, for many years where, among other things, I hope I helped untold numbers of mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law resolve their differences (it’s definitely made me a better mother-in-law in the process).

Aish.com is in the process of changing its format and focus to double down on reaching a younger, less affiliated audience. I admit, this is not my forte or the crowd I comfortably address. I speak to people who are closer to my age, closer to my life experience. It’s a group that still wants to learn and grow and change – despite our (advancing – but not yet advanced!) age. I hope to find ways to continue to do that, and I’m exploring various options.

I’m grateful for the privilege and obligation of writing a weekly column for all these years. (How did I possibly think of something to say every week?! Secret: only with God’s help.) And I’m grateful to you, my readers, who paid attention, who agreed or and disagreed, but found value in what I had to offer. I will miss you.


I didn’t think I would feel sad saying goodbye. I knew this day was coming and had time to emotionally prepare. I thought I would welcome the freeing up of some time on my calendar but I know I’m going to miss this job, this opportunity, this chance to touch the hearts and minds of others.

I want to thank the Aish.com staff, particularly the editor-in chief, Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmith, for taking a chance on me. I appreciate the effort and time he invested (although maybe not the times he passed on my articles and I had to write a new one!).

I am confident that when this proverbial door shuts, another one will in fact open. Stay tuned. And thanks for everything.
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Post  Admin Tue 01 Feb 2022, 8:42 pm

My Story of Sexual Abuse
Jan 29, 2022
by Rachel Cohen, in collaboration with The Layers Project Magazineprint article
My Story of Sexual Abuse
It’s time to free myself from the shackles of shame.

It's time to tell my story of sexual abuse.

I’ll be honest; I’m absolutely terrified right now. Scared out of my mind that by opening up to myself and to you, I’ll be judged, or worse, found guilty. After all these years I’m still afraid to find out that it was all my fault.

I can only live in hiding for so long and I’ve reached a point where I’m ready for my secrets to emerge.

It’s time to free myself from the shackles of that shame. It’s time to tell my story.

Here’s the truth: I’m an expert at numbing.


Emotional, physical, mental – take your pick.

For me, numbing is the strategic way in which my mind and body attempt to gain control of my messy, chaotic thoughts, emotions, and behaviors by gently beating them into submission. After many years of practice, it has become an acquired reflex; any time I am in danger of experiencing even the slightest discomfort, a subconscious switch is flipped that instantly envelopes me in metaphoric bubble wrap.

I’d only survive if I left my body and let my emotions drain out of me. I was there physically, but the rest of me was floating high above where monsters didn’t exist.
To some, this may seem like a brilliant plan, to others a very unhealthy practice. But to me? I never even debated the pros and cons of going through life completely cut off from my feelings. Instead, it was an instinctive decision born out of the necessity to protect myself from the pain to which I was being subjected.

When I was six years old, I was sexually abused regularly by an unrelated adult in my life. He bought me flowers, gave me chocolate and presents, and then when he had succeeded in making me pliable and trusting, shattered the bubble of innocence that was my existence.

 


It was in those moments of abuse that I realized I would only survive if I left my body and let my emotions drain out of me. I may have been there physically, but the rest of me was floating high above, in a place where monsters didn’t exist.

The more abuse I endured, the less connected I became to my thoughts and feelings. Months of abuse contradicted everything I had learned up until that point- that the world was, for the most part, a sunny, safe place to be. I began feeling bewildered and lost; nothing made sense. While my friends were together playing ‘house’ and ‘school’, I was scribbling the words ‘I feel blue’ and crying myself to sleep.

The effort it took to keep my unfathomable secret hidden began to take a toll on my body. Each time I looked in the mirror I could swear I was slowly disintegrating from the fear and shame that were weighing me down. I desperately wanted to confide in someone, to let them know that I was falling apart.

But I couldn’t.

I was terrified that no one would love me anymore, that they would think I was evil.
I was terrified that no one would love me anymore, that they would think I was evil. So I continued to be the ‘good girl’ everyone expected me to be, never considering the fact that doing so was destroying me.

The abuse lasted a year and ended when I was seven. My memories from ages seven through twelve are hazy and amorphous, as though I was sleepwalking through life. I hadn’t yet learned how to completely numb my thoughts and feelings, and I remained a quiet and secretive child who was often depressed and anxious. Much to my parent’s dismay, I became obsessed with reading books about the Holocaust, chronic illness, and death, and would burst into tears at random times for no obvious reason.

I didn’t have the language to express what had happened, nor could I fully comprehend how I felt about it. My thoughts and feelings manifested as stomachaches and headaches instead, and since no doctor could find a cause for them, I was labeled a hypochondriac and accused of making it up to get attention. Eventually, I began to dismiss my physical symptoms as well, telling myself that I was imagining them.

Throughout junior high and high school, I did everything in my power to smother my painful emotions. I was mortified by the strength of my depression; the way it broke me down and took control of me. The cycle of shame, depression, and self-loathing continued until I became absolutely desperate to make it all disappear. I stopped eating after discovering that the pangs of an empty stomach overshadowed any other emotion. The hungrier I became, the better I felt.

At the age of fifteen, I met a boy who made me feel safe enough to let my guard down. When I was with him, I didn’t feel the need to bury my feelings to protect myself. In fact, I savored the intensity of the untempered happiness and excitement that constantly bubbled up from my heart. My life was suddenly full of the vibrant colors of love and passion, a stark contrast to the dull, colorless days that had been my normal for as long as I could remember. I didn’t feel the need to starve myself anymore, as I was no longer threatened by difficult emotions.

I thought I had healed.

The explosions of color I so readily embraced were no match for the years of trauma I had yet to process in therapy.
We got married four years later and I was the happiest I had ever been. But I learned soon after that despite their incredible vibrancy and beauty, the explosions of color I so readily embraced were no match for the years of trauma I had yet to process in therapy.

All I wanted was to feel totally present with the man I love but I couldn’t because even the slightest touch would trigger flashbacks. In those moments, it felt like I was being violently pulled out of the warm safety of our home and into the hell where my abuse had taken place so many years before. I no longer felt like an adult but the vulnerable six-year-old girl I had once been.

I had hoped that the flashbacks would ease with time, but they continued. I endured them in silence, trying to keep my torment hidden from the one person who made me feel safe. I feared that he would be in pain if he knew how much I was suffering.

In the years that followed, I knew I was blessed to have a loving husband, two wonderful children, close family, and great friends, but I was still suffering from dissociation and flashbacks. Having all these people in my life made me want to get better.

I started therapy and worked towards the moment I felt ready to share the trauma I had experienced with my husband and loved ones. The incredible support and validation I was fortunate to receive helped keep me tethered to reality and prevented me from losing myself while I processed my traumatic memories.

I wish I could say that my life magically transformed after that. Healing doesn’t happen linearly and I soon fell back into the grips of my trauma and started numbing myself again. Instead of processing my feelings of heartbreak, loss and grief, I spent most of my time sleeping those feelings away and sitting in front of the TV for hours on end. I was barely functional.

With the support of my husband, I finally admitted to myself that I needed more help than my usual once-a-week therapy. After researching numerous options, we made the decision that I would go to a residential treatment center in Florida for people with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

There was no place to hide from my emotions there. I tore myself wide open, shattered the barriers that held my emotions captive and began the long process of putting myself back together.
I spent five weeks away from my family doing the hardest emotional work I had ever done. There was no place to hide from my emotions there; I was forced to face my demons head on. Through journaling, meditation, yoga, group therapy, equine, art and music therapy, I once again tore myself wide open, shattered the barriers that held my emotions captive and began the long process of putting myself back together.

I found myself feeling deeply for the first time in years. It wasn’t easy, as my mind was an exposed nerve, raw and vulnerable. During one particularly cathartic group therapy session, as I laughed and cried simultaneously, I came to the realization that in order to experience happiness I needed to open my heart to sadness as well. The magnitude of that statement changed my world; joy, pleasure, gratitude and contentment were all possible as long as sorrow, despair, disappointment and loneliness were embraced as well.

I left Florida five weeks later with a better grasp of my emotions and healthier coping skills. For the first time in my life, I believed that I could get better.

My trauma had taken up so much space in my inner world that I couldn’t form my own identity. I had no idea who I was, what my real thoughts, feelings and opinions were.

As I began to heal, the cloud of the trauma started to lift. For the first time, I had the resources within me to help me figure out who I was and who I wanted to be; what was important to me, and what I valued and aspired to.

I share my story in the hopes that someone out there will find strength in knowing they, too, are not alone.
These days, the hardest value for me to practice is presence. Presence when it’s easy, but also when it’s painful or hard or sad. I do so by recognizing my emotions and respecting them; looking inward into my core instead of reaching outward to find ways to numb. Connecting to others who have had a similar life experience also helps; being able to guide them towards healing as they help me do the same.

For most of my life, I thought I had to endure this burden alone.

Healing began when I realized I didn’t have to.

I share my story in the hopes that someone out there will find strength in knowing they, too, are not alone.

This article originally appeared on The Layers Project Magazine, where you can find more meaningful stories about Jewish women. Click here to purchase the new book from The Layers Project, "Layers: Personal Narratives of Struggle, Resilience, and Growth From Jewish Women". Use code Layers10 for 10% your order.

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Post  Admin Sun 30 Jan 2022, 3:40 pm

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Ukraine-and-the-Jews-12-Facts.html?src=ac-rdm
Ukraine and the Jews: 12 Facts
Jan 29, 2022  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
Ukraine and the Jews: 12 Facts
Key moments of Jewish history have occurred in Ukraine.

With a huge build-up in Russian troops along Ukraine’s borders in recent weeks, many people are fearful that Russia will invade Ukraine. Ukraine is a complex and diverse nation with an incredibly rich Jewish history. Here are 12 facts about Jews in Ukraine.

1. Jews lived in Ukraine since ancient times.
Jews have been living in present-day Ukraine since ancient times. The ancient Greek city of Chersonesos, near present day Sevastopol (located in the Crimean Peninsula, which was formerly part of Ukraine and was annexed by Russia in 2014), was once home to Jews. Prof. J. Andrew Overman of Macalester College directed the Black Sea Project in the 1990s, and described some of his team’s many Jewish finds:

“The team has focused on uncovering evidence of a Jewish presence in Chersonesos during the Roman period. Menorahs, oil lamps with a Torah shrine depicted on the face, and graffiti in Hebrew and Greek have all been found at Chersonesos. One Hebrew fragment even mentions Jerusalem – the only known instance of this outside of ancient Israel. Additionally, one of the menorahs appears to date from the hellenistic period, making it one of the earliest known to scholars,” Prof. Overman observed in 1997 in a letter to The New York Times.

2. The Kingdom of the Khazars is said to have converted to Judaism.
Eastern Ukraine was home to the Khazar empire, a kingdom of Turkic people that arose in southeastern Russia in the 6th Century CE and extended as far west as Kiev, the capital of present-day Ukraine. Some accounts say that in the 8th Century, the Khazar king converted to Judaism and ordered that his followers do so as well. Many Khazars became Jewish, embracing Jewish holidays and Shabbat and keeping kosher.

The Khazar "Moses coin" found in the Spillings Hoard and dated c. 800. It is inscribed with "Moses is the messenger of God" instead of the usual Muslim text "Muhammad is the messenger of God".
The Khazars at the time were ruled by a semi-divine king called a Khagan, and local chieftains called “Begs”. Legend says that the Khazar king ordered representatives from the three monotheistic faiths to his palace and listened to each of them discuss their religion. He was struck with Judaism’s beauty and lucidity.


In the Middle Ages, the great Spanish Jewish sage Judah Halevi (1075-1141) wrote The Kuzari, a beautiful philosophical book that imagined the discussion between the king of the Khazars and the visiting rabbi. The Kuzari is a robust defense of Judaism against critics from other religions and from indifference.

3. Ukraine was a refuge to Jews in the Middle Ages.
The Middle Ages were a tumultuous time in Ukraine. Accounts describe the city of Kiev as being home to a substantial Jewish community in the 11th and 12th centuries. There were two heavily Jewish suburbs of the city, and one entryway into Kiev’s city walls that was known as the “Jewish Gate”. There are also references to a Jewish scholar at the time known as Moshe ben Yaakov of Kiev.

In the early Middle Ages, the largely Jewish kingdom of the Khazars was buffeted by invading Russian forces, which ransacked its capital city in about the year 965 CE. The end of the Khazar kingdom came in the 1200s, when Mongol tribes invaded much of present-day Ukraine and Poland, causing huge devastation and loss of life. In order to build back its power and wealth, Poland invited new residents to move into its territories from the west, primarily from Germanic lands.

The Great Synagogue of Lutsk, renovated after WW2. Lutsk, Ukraine 1984. Beit Hatfutsot, the Oster Visual Documentation Center. Courtesy of Anna Herz, Germany
Poland’s invitation for immigrants to come attracted Jews who were fleeing massacres in central Europe in the wake of the Crusades and the Black Death. Jews settled throughout Poland, including in territories that form present-day Ukraine, most notably the region of Volhynia, which lies at the intersection of Poland, Belarus and Ukraine. By the 1400s, up to 30,000 Jews were thought to be living in 60 different communities across Ukraine, including in the present day capital city, Kiev.

4. Ukrainians blamed Jews for their landlords’ greed.
Jewish life in present-day Ukraine became even more entrenched after 1569, when much of present-day Ukraine came under a new political alliance, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Ukraine was an uneasy mix of many different ethnic groups. Much of the farmland and industry in Ukraine was the property of Polish nobles who were Catholic. The peasants in Ukraine were a mix of Eastern Orthodox Ukrainians and groups known as Cossacks, who lived primarily in the southern part of Ukraine. In the far south, the Crimean Peninsula was owned by the Ottoman Empire and populated largely by Tatar Muslims, who engaged in constant, low level warfare with Cossacks along their border. Both groups would stage squirmishes into each other’s territories, seizing property and slaves.

Cossack Mamay and the Haidamaka hang a Jewish usurer by his heels. Ukrainian folk art, 19th century

With many farms and businesses owned by absentee Polish landlords and nobles, an exploitative system called arenda developed, which allowed agents to manage farms and other enterprises on behalf of absent landlords. It was often Jews who were employed to manage the arenda economy, acting as caretakers for absentee nobles and landowners. Jews managed salt mines, farms, mills, and inns. They also became local tax collectors for Polish noblemen. Many arendas were in the alcohol trade: brewing, selling alcohol and managing inns and taverns were often seen as Jewish professions.

Working for hated landlords put Jews in an impossible position: they needed the arenda system in order to survive economically, but the local peasants blamed Jews for their employers’ increasingly abusive practices. When Polish nobles increased taxes on their already suffering tenants, it was their Jewish agents who bore the blame. In time, extreme antisemitism became engrained in much of Ukrainian culture.

5. The Chmielnicki Massacres
A series of Cossack raids began in 1648, aimed at freeing Cossack communities from the domination of Polish landlords. The leader of these attacks was Bohdan Chmielnicki, who agitated for an independent Ukrainian country. Reflecting Cossack culture, Chmielnicki blamed Jews for his countrymen’s problems and encouraged his followers to massacre Jews.



Between 1648 and 1651, Chmielnicki’s followers killed about 20,000 Jews with unimaginable barbarity. Approximately half of all Jews living in Ukraine fled. So great was the Cossacks’’ depravity that some terrified Jews even fled into Crimea, where they faced slavery in the hands of Muslim Tatars.

The official records of the Jewish community in Kiev recorded the beginning of the massacres:

Immediately after the death of the pious King Wladyslaw (1648) tens of thousands of villains, among them Cossacks…went forth and committed manu murders in the holy communities of Niemirow, Tulczyn, Machnowka, and other hold communities who congregated in order to save their lives from the…sword… Since the destruction of the Temple no other cruel murder like this one was committed for the sanctification of the name” of God.

Another eyewitness account described “they massacred about 6,000 souls in the town…and they drowned several hundreds in the water and by all kinds of cruel torments. In the synagogue, before the Holy Ark, they slaughtered with butchers’ knives…after which they destroyed the synagogue and took out all the Torah books…they tore them up…and they laid them out…for men and animals to trample on…they also made sandals of them…and several other garments.” The Cossacks knew no bounds in their sadism and cruelty and attacked and killed Jews – as well as some Polish nobles – with horrific barbarity.

Chmielnicki appealed for military aid from Russia and in 1654 much of Cossack-controlled Ukraine became a client state of Russia. Sporadic pogroms continued through the years, most notably in the city of Uman in 1768.

6. Ukraine was a major center in the Pale of Settlement.
In the 1780s and 1790s, Russia gained an enormous amount of territory, much of which was home to large Jewish communities at the time.

With the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War in 1768, Russia began impinging on the Ottoman Empire’s semi-autonomous holdings in Crimea Russia annexed Crimea in 1783. (Crimea borders contemporary Ukraine and was part of Ukraine until 2014, when Russia annexed it once again). This large land acquisition coincided with an even greater gain in territory for the Russian empire. Russia’s Empress Catherine the Great oversaw three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in 1772, 1793 and 1795. Within the span of a few years, Russia became home to the largest population of Jews anywhere in the world.



Jews had long been banned from living in most of Russia, and they remained unwelcome guests even when Poland and Lithuania came under Russian control. Catherine the Great confined Jews to newly acquired territories, with one notable exception: Jews were encouraged to move into Crimea in order to help settle sparsely inhabited territories there. The area where Jews were allowed to live was known as the Pale of Settlement: Cherta Osedlosti (“Boundary of Settlement”) in Russian and Der Techum Ha’Moyshev (‘Limits of Residence”) in Yiddish.

The exact boundaries of this area fluctuated through the years, but it included Russian-owned Poland, Lithuania, Belorussia (present day Belarus), Bessarabia, Crimea, and most of Ukraine. In time, the Jewish community in Ukraine would become one of the most spiritual, vibrant, and influential anywhere in the world.

7. Hasidic Judaism started in Ukraine.
The founder of Hasidic Judaism, the Baal Shem Tov (1700-1760) didn’t live in Ukraine; his home was a couple of miles outside the Ukrainian border, in Poland. But the friend and disciple who spread the ideas of Hasidic Judaism and developed it into a distinct religious movement did so within Ukraine, from his base in the city of Mezeritch.

Rabbi Dov Ber, also known as the Maggid (preacher) of Mezeritch (1704-1772), first consulted with the Baal Shem Tov when he was ill. The Baal Shem Tov was known as a healer, as well as a religious sage. Rabbi Dov Ber was so impressed that he adopted the Baal Shem Tov’s worldview, which emphasized worshiping God with joy. Within a generation, Ukraine was home to some of the most important and influential Hasidic masters, including Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev and Menachem Nachum (and his son Modechai Twersky) of Chernobil. Ukrainian Jewish communities embraced Hasidic Judaism, with its emphasis on rigorously religious practice combined with spirituality and an emphasis on infusing religious observance with joy.

Perhaps the greatest Hasidic rabbi in Ukraine was Rabbi Nahman, from the Ukrainian town of Breslov (1772-1811), a great grandson of the Baal Shem Tov and a direct descendent of the Maharal, one of Europe’s greatest rabbis who lived in 16th century Prague. Rabbi Nahman built a large community in the Ukrainian town of Zlapotol in the early 1800s. He taught that Jews should strive to feel close to God at all times, and that feeling happy is best way to appreciate all of God’s many blessings.

8. Thousands of Jews visit Rabbi Nachman’s grave in Ukraine every year.
Rabbi Nahman’s gravesite in Uman

The Ukrainian town of Uman, about 125 miles south of Kiev, is where Rabbi Nachman of Breslov lived during his final years and is buried. Uman has emerged as a major pilgrimage site for thousands of Jews each year. The most popular time to go is Rosh Hashanah, when tens of thousands of Jews visit Uman to celebrate the holiday together in the place where Rabbi Nahman taught.

9. The term “pogrom” was invented after riots in Ukraine.
In 1881, Czar Alexander II was murdered by a left-wing terrorist. Soon, it was being (incorrectly) reported across Russia that the new Czar Alexander III had ordered Russian subjects to kill Jews. Pogroms broke out, with the greatest number taking place in Ukraine. These weren’t the first massacres of Jews in Ukraine and elsewhere in the Pale of Settlement, but the frequency and intensity of the mob attacks resulted in the phenomenon being given a new name: pogrom, which means violence in Russian.

Pogroms continued throughout the end of the 19th century. Some of the most horrible pogroms took place in 1905, after Czar Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto, guaranteeing all Russian subjects some basic political rights. The manifesto came at a perilous time in Russian politics, with political rivals ready to attack each other. As violence broke out, mobs turned on the Jews in their midst. Some of the worst anti-Jewish attacks were in the Ukrainian city of Odessa: the Jewish newspaper Voskhod reported that over 800 Jews were murdered in pogroms in Odessa in the days following the October Manifesto, and several thousands more were wounded.


Among the many towns engulfed in pogroms in 1905 was Kiev, Ukraine’s capital. There, the rampaging crowds attacked Jews for three days and nights. One of the terrified Jews during that ordeal was the well-known Yiddish writer known as Sholem Aleichem (his real name was Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich). For three days, he and his family hid in a hotel, listening to the terrible screams from their fellow Jews as they were attacked, maimed and killed outside.

Sholem Aleichem’s daughter later described the moment they realized their lives were in danger: “We ran from our beds to the windows on the street and looked down on the scene of brutality and murder – a gang of hoodlums beating a poor young Jew with heavy sticks; blood was running over the face of the young man, who was vainly shrieking for aid. A policeman stood nearby, casually looking on and not moving a finger.”

Sholem Aleichem
After the Kiev pogrom, Sholem Aleichem’s entire family fled Ukraine, eventually settling in New York.

The Russian Revolution in 1917, the Polish Ukrainian War of 1918-1919, the Ukrainian War of Independence, and the Soviet-Polish War of 1919-1921 sparked waves of hundreds of pogroms across the region which killed approximately 100,000 Jews. (Ukraine was briefly independent, before being divided by Poland and Russia.) The violence was unspeakably intense. In the Ukrainian town of Proskurov, for instance, a three-day pogrom that broke out on February 15, 1919 killed 1,500 Jews. The town of Pogrebinschi experienced two pogroms: in May, 1919 Soviet troops went on a murderous rampage, killing 400 Jews. Three months later, Ukrainian nationalists staged a second pogrom and murdered a further 350 Jews there. Over 1,300 towns became scenes of horrific violence towards Jews.

10. Modern Zionism was born in Ukraine.
As Ukraine was roiled by the wave of pogroms in 1881, a group of idealistic Jewish students realized that the only way Jews could ever live in safety was in their own land, in the Land of Israel. In 1882, they formed the first modern Zionist organization, BILU. The name was an acronym of the Biblical verse Beit Ya’akov Lechu V’nalcha – “The House of Jacob, come let us go'' (Isaiah 2:5).


BILU managed to raise money to send 14 university students to the Jewish town of Rishon Le-Zion, where they farmed. The Ukrainian Jews had a very difficult time. They lacked farming skills and faced continual violence from Arab raiders. Yet their experiment in farming in the Land of Israel showed other Jews in Europe that it could be done.

11. One and a half million Ukrainian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.
Before the Holocaust, Ukraine had the largest Jewish population of any European country. For the first year of World War II, Ukrainian Jews were relatively protected by the non-aggression pact that Hitler and Stalin signed, guaranteeing that Nazi troops wouldn’t invade Russia’s vast territories. That changed on June 22, 1941, when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, and invaded the Soviet Union. In the ensuing years, special Nazi troops called Einsatzgruppen entered towns in Ukraine and elsewhere in eastern Europe, rounding up all Jews, forcing them to dig large mass graves, then shooting them.

The largest Nazi massacre in Ukraine – and one of the largest single massacres in the entire Holocaust – took place near Ukraine’s capital Kiev on September 28, 1941, in Babi Yar. On that morning, all Jews were ordered to assemble in the center of the city. Under Nazi guard – and in full view of the populace – they were marched out of the city to a large natural ravine on the outskirts of Kiev called Babi Yar. The ostensible “reason” given for this wholesale massacre of Jewish women, children and old men (most young men were away fighting) was a Soviet attack on military headquarters in Kiev.



The Nazi Einsatzgruppe C unit which carried out the killing kept meticulous records of the day:

The bitter hostility of the Ukrainian population against the Jews is extremely great… All Jews were arrested in retaliation for the arson in Kiev, and altogether 33,771 Jews were executed on September 29th and 30th. Gold, valuables and clothing were collected and…given to the appointed city administration for distribution to the needy population.

33,771 Jews were shot over two days and their bodies thrown into the Babi Yar ravine. Over the following two years, more than 60,000 more people were murdered at Babi Yar. In addition to Jews, Soviet POWs, Roma and psychiatric patients from a nearby hospital were also killed. It’s estimated that of the approximately 100,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar, 60,000 of them were Jews.

Following the Holocaust, Ukrainian Jews faced hostility and violence from their neighbors when they returned home. The crimes of the Holocaust were covered up; Babi Yar was largely filled in and only received a memorial 1976. It did not specify that Jews were the primary victims who died there.

12. Ukraine’s president is a Jewish comedian who once played a president on TV.
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was elected in 2019, he wasn’t a politician – though he’d played one on TV.

President Zelensky at the Western Wall

Zelensky, who was just 41 when he became Ukraine’s president, shot to fame in Ukraine when he appeared on a hit television show there called Servant of the People, in which he played an honest president. His fellow countrymen were sick of corruption, and elected the Jewish actor with a landslide 73% of the vote.

President Zelensky is Jewish (as is Ukraine’s former Prime Minister, Volodymyr Groysman). As he faces 100,000 Russian troops amassed at his borders, President Zelensky is hoping to fend off a Russian invasion, and has appealed to the example of the Jewish state, which vigorously defends itself from external enemies: “Both Ukrainians and Jews value freedom, and they work equally for the future of our states to become to our liking, and not the future which others want for us. Israel is often an example for Ukraine.”
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Post  Admin Fri 28 Jan 2022, 12:23 am

https://www.aish.com/ho/video/The-Mutation-of-Antisemitism.html?src=ac-txt
The Mutation of Antisemitism
Jan 25, 2022
by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks
We are witnessing the rise of antisemitism around the world. How has antisemitism mutated over time? And why does its return today present a danger not just for Jews, but for all who care about our common humanity?
Within living memory of the Holocaust, after which the world said it would never happen again, antisemitism has returned.

But what is antisemitism and why should its return be cause for grave concern, not only for Jews but for all of us?

Historically, antisemitism has been hard to define, because it expresses itself in such contradictory ways. Before the Holocaust, Jews were hated because they were poor and because they were rich; because they were communists and because they were capitalists; because they kept to themselves and because they infiltrated everywhere; because they clung to ancient religious beliefs and because they were rootless cosmopolitans who believed nothing.

So what is antisemitism? Let’s be clear – not liking people because they’re different isn’t antisemitism. It’s xenophobia. Criticizing Israel isn’t antisemitism: it’s part of the democratic process, and Israel is a democracy.

Antisemitism is something much more dangerous – it means persecuting Jews and denying them the right to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else.

It’s a prejudice that like a virus, has survived over time by mutating.

So in the Middle Ages, Jews were persecuted because of their religion.

In the 19th and 20th centuries they were reviled because of their race.

Today, Jews are attacked because of the existence of their nation state, Israel. Denying Israel’s right to exist is the new antisemitism.

And just as antisemitism has mutated, so has its legitimization. Each time, as the persecution descended into barbarity, the persecutors reached for the highest form of justification available.

In the Middle Ages, it was religion.

In post-Enlightenment Europe it was science: the so called scientific study of race.

Today it is human rights.

Whenever you hear human rights invoked to deny Israel’s right to exist, you are hearing the new antisemitism.

So, why has it returned? There are many reasons but one root cause is the cognitive failure called scapegoating.

When bad things happen to a group, its members can ask one of two questions: “What did we do wrong?” or “Who did this to us?” The entire fate of the group will depend on which it chooses.

If it asks, “What did we do wrong?” it has begun the process of healing the harm. If instead it asks, “Who did this to us?” it has defined itself as a victim. It will then seek a scapegoat to blame for all its problems.

Classically this has been the Jews, because for a thousand years they were the most conspicuous non-Christian minority in Europe and today because Israel is the most conspicuous non-Muslim country in the Middle East.

The argument is always the same. We are innocent; therefore they are guilty. Therefore if we are to be free, they – the Jews or the state of Israel – must be destroyed. That is how the great evils begin.

Why then should we all care about this? After all, if we’re not Jewish, what has it got to do with us?

The answer is that anti-Semitism is about the inability of a group to make space for difference.

And because we are all different, the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.

It wasn’t Jews alone who suffered under Hitler. It wasn’t Jews alone who suffered under Stalin. It isn’t Jews alone who suffer under the radical Islamists and others who deny Israel’s right to exist.

Antisemitism is the world’s most reliable early warning sign of a major threat to freedom, humanity and the dignity of difference.

It matters to all of us.

Which is why we must fight it together.
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Post  Admin Thu 27 Jan 2022, 6:49 pm

God, Paradox, and the Holocaust: When Our Minds Cannot Understand
Jan 26, 2022
by Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmithprint article
God, Paradox, and the Holocaust: When Our Minds Cannot Understand
The inability to fully grasp the nature of God is humbling and frustrating, and forces us to “live with the question.”

Flatlands, Edwin Abbot’s mind-bending book, describes a character stuck in a two-dimensional world, trying to come to grips with the reality of a three-dimensional universe. He can’t.

Since everything he perceives is limited by his two-dimensional plane of existence, it’s impossible for him to wrap his head around something that has height or depth.

It’s an apt metaphor for the interplay between the finite and Infinite dimensions. Since human beings are stuck in a finite world bounded by time and space, we can’t wrap our heads around the essence of an Infinite Being. Our brains are finite, our words are finite, everything we perceive is finite.

Since human beings are stuck in a finite world bound by time and space, we can’t wrap our heads around the essence of an Infinite Being.
But we are not left in the total dark. Just as a two-dimensional character can perceive a three-dimensional finger that intersects with his world, we too can understand aspects of the Infinite through our finite prism. From the finite, we can infer a partial understanding of the Infinite. For example, if an entity has a beginning or end, by definition it must be finite. It has a limit, a border. Therefore, we can infer that an Infinite Being has no beginning nor end. That’s what we mean when we say God is eternal. He has no starting point; nothing brought Him into existence since there is no “before”. Existence is intrinsic to Him. Likewise, God cannot die; He transcends time.

This definition of eternal makes sense, even though we cannot fully grasp what it means. The negation of the finite is within our realm of understanding; it deals with the finite world which we can grasp. But the flipside – the positive description of what that means – is beyond our full comprehension. Even the very word “Infinite” merely states what God is not – “in/finite, not finite” – not what He truly is.

The inability to fully grasp the nature of God is humbling and frustrating. In our fast paced world with reams of information at our fingertips, we bristle at the idea that there is an unsurpassable limit to our knowledge. Money, education and the right connections are not going to help in this case. We’ve hit our wall; we are not God. There is only so much we can understand.

Sometimes realizing that the answer we seek is beyond us is the most intellectually honest position to take.
Recognizing the uncomfortable reality that we cannot perceive everything forces us to “live with the question.” Sometimes realizing that the answer we seek is beyond us is the most intellectually honest position to take. It may not leave us satisfied; we abhor the vacuum an unanswered question leaves in its wake. But it’s not a copout; it’s an honest recognition of our limitation.

Here are two examples to illustrate this point.

The Free Will Paradox
Take this well-known conundrum: If God knows everything, how do we have free will?

Maimonides phrases the question like this:

Since the Holy One, blessed be He, knows everything that will occur before it comes to pass, does He or does He not know whether a person will be righteous or wicked?

If He knows that he will be righteous, [it appears] impossible for him not to be righteous. However, if one would say that despite His knowledge that he would be righteous, it is possible for him to be wicked, then His knowledge would be incomplete. (Laws of Teshuva, 5:5)

Either man doesn’t have free will, which denies the pillar of Judaism*, or God’s knowledge is incomplete, which goes against His Infinite nature. How can both God’s knowledge and man’s free will be true?

In short, the Rambam explains that indeed both man’s free will and God’s complete knowledge simultaneously exist, but since we cannot grasp the nature of God’s knowledge – because it is part of His Infinite essence – we cannot wrap our heads around the nature of His knowledge and understand how the two can co-exist.

We can’t understand the true nature the Infinite, which is necessary to grasp in order to know how the two dimensions can co-exist. God only knows. Literally.
This is the nature of paradox. Anytime we try to bridge the gap between the finite and Infinite dimensions, we hit the limit of our comprehension. We can’t understand the true nature the Infinite, which is necessary in order to know how the two dimensions can coexist. God only knows. Literally.

Being stuck in a finite world with finite brains necessitates living with paradox. It’s frustrating, but tolerable. Contrast this to encountering a contradiction, which is intolerable. Contradiction means two things cannot simultaneously exist because one of them is wrong. Since both elements are within our grasp, we need to root out the mistaken notion and resolve the conflict. The Talmud is replete with fierce debates attempting to resolve contradictions, with the aim to come to a correct understanding of the truth.

God and the Holocaust
Many people are not bothered by paradox. Most people are bothered by the Holocaust. How can we reconcile God’s love and innate goodness with the murder of six million Jews?

The issue of suffering – personal and national – is an extremely complex one, the full scope of which can’t be fully addressed here. But I do want to make the following point. There is an arrogance to assume we can understand everything, that we are privy to all the relevant information and factors, and can pass judgment on every matter. There is so much we don’t – and cannot – know. It’s presumptuous to conclude that we know better than God.

We live in a sliver of time; it’s impossible for us to see the whole picture. Imagine a person looking through a keyhole and he’s shocked by what he sees. A person is about to murder a man by stabbing him in the chest! He throws the door open and yells, “Stop!”

He immediately sees that he is standing in an operating room where a surgeon is about to perform open heart surgery to save a man’s life. What he thought was a murder, due to his lack of perspective, was in fact a life-saving operation.

Our lives are a small thread that comprises that tapestry of history.
Our lives are a small thread that comprises a minuscule part of the tapestry of history. At this moment in time we cannot fully grasp the whole story; it’s beyond us. We have to “live with the question” while trusting that the Infinite Creator Who lovingly guides everything knows what He is doing and is moving each and every piece exactly where it needs to be, somehow culminating in the fulfillment of His ultimate, perfect vision.

Nothing is out of God’s reach; everything happens for a reason, even when we don’t understand it.

Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto writes in The Knowing Heart:

There is no deed, small or great, whose ultimate end is not universal perfection, as stated by our sages (Talmud Brachot, 60b): “All that is done by Heaven is for the good.” For in the time to come, the Holy One, Blessed be He, will make known His ways...showing how even the chastisements and tribulations were precursors of good and actual preparation for blessing. For the Holy One, Blessed be He, desires only the perfection of His creation.

Right now, we cannot see how such tragedy could be part of God’s perfect plan – we may be even offended by the thought. But the story is still unfolding, and at the end of history when all the pieces are in place, we’ll be able to look back and say, “Now I get it” (like the feeling you got watching the ending of the film, The Sixth Sense, when everything fell into place and clicked, forcing you to rethink everything that just happened).

In the meantime, we are stuck in this sliver of time, unable to connect the dots and understand. So we need to live with the question, secure in the knowledge that God, Who loves us beyond measure and does everything for our ultimate good, is in the driver’s seat.

*As the Rambam writes: “This principle [of free will] is a fundamental concept and a pillar on which rests the totality of the Torah and mitzvot as it says, ‘Behold, I have set before you today life [and good, death and evil]’ (Deut.30:15)." Similarly, it says, ‘Behold, I have set before you today [the blessing and the curse],’ (Deut. 11:26) implying that the choice is in your hands” Any one of the deeds of men which a person desires to do, he may, whether good or evil.” Laws of Teshuva, 5:3
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My Personal Struggle Reconciling the Holocaust with a Loving God
Jan 24, 2022  |  by Sara Yoheved Riglerprint article
My Personal Struggle Reconciling the Holocaust with a Loving God
A radical new lens enabled me to see God’s love.

A basic principle of Judaism is that God loves us. How do we reconcile that with the suffering and horrors of the Holocaust?

I spent decades of my life struggling with this question. On the one hand, I grew up basking in blessing: a solidly middle-class second-generation American Jewish home in suburban New Jersey, with loving, virtuous parents, a close-knit extended family, and a community around our Conservative synagogue that provided social interaction and social action causes. This was the 1950s and early 60s, a period of political and financial stability.

Yet, I also lived in a parallel universe, obsessed and haunted by the Holocaust. Within me seethed a volcano of boiling hatred and anger toward everything German. I refused to take a ride in a Volkswagen, buy a German product, or let my father take my picture with his new German camera. In those days there were no Holocaust movies, and only one Holocaust book I knew of: Commandant of Auschwitz, which I borrowed over and over again from my friend.

After one week of classes, one night I woke up confounded. I had been dreaming in fluent German.
As a freshman in high school, with all my friends choosing to learn French or Spanish, I shocked them by choosing German. “Know thine enemy,” I explained with steely eyes. “I want to read Mein Kampf in the original.” After one week of classes, one night I woke up confounded. I had been dreaming in fluent German.

Who was I, an American girl with the emotions of a Holocaust victim? Who was God, who could be so good and yet permit such evil?

An Uncomfortable Relationship

I went to Brandeis University, where I was among a small cadre of students who ate on the kosher line and attended Shabbat services at the campus Hillel. In that post-Holocaust era, Brandeis was 80% Jewish. But most of my fellow students ignored God, while my psychology professors either fired the Jewish God, replacing him with a humanistic concept of God, or gravitated to the spirituality of India.

For my junior year, I went to India on a college-year program. There I discovered an entire population who loved God. From my professors to the servants in my dormitory, everyone had a comfortable relationship with their ishta, their chosen aspect of God. Their God issued no commandments and made no demands. They on their part had no expectations and harbored no complaints. When suffering befell them, it was the result of their own karma, their own bad actions, in this lifetime or a previous incarnation. No one blamed God for their adversity.

A covenantal relationship is an uncomfortable relationship. It goads and challenges and demands reciprocity.
How different this was from my own relationship with God! We Jews had a Covenant with God. God promised justice, reward for doing good, punishment for doing bad. And He promised that He would intervene in our lives, and never, ever abandon us. A covenantal relationship is an uncomfortable relationship. It goads and challenges and demands reciprocity. Expectations fly back and forth like dishes in a marital quarrel. Living in India was a respite for my battered soul.

Discovering the Soul
Yet in India I learned a lesson that changed my life and ultimately would reconcile me with the Jewish God. I had thought of myself as consisting of two elements: a mind and a body. As an over-achiever, my goal – the quintessential Jewish goal – was to develop my mind with education, more and more academic degrees. In India I learned of a new element to my identity, more important than either mind or body: the soul.

In nine years of after-school Jewish education, I had never heard of an afterlife. In India, learning that my essential identity is as a soul changed everything.
The soul? This spiritual entity had never been mentioned in Hebrew school. A soul is immortal; it does not die when the body dies. In Hebrew school I had learned that Christianity is a “pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die” religion, but Judaism is a this-world religion. In nine years of after-school Jewish education, I had never heard of an afterlife. In India, learning that my essential identity is as a soul changed everything. My life goal became to develop not my mind, but my soul. And if the soul is immortal – what came before and what comes after this lifetime?

At the end of that year, winding my way back to America, I had a 7-hour layover in Vienna. (I had refused a shorter layover in Frankfurt because I adamantly refused to go to Germany.) Walking in an antebellum Viennese residential neighborhood, I had a frightening flashback. A flashback is unlike a memory. A memory is inside your head. In a flashback, you are inside the memory, reliving it. The flashback confirmed what I had begun to suspect. That although I was born this time in 1948, in a previous life my soul had lived – and died – in the Holocaust. Reincarnation made the puzzle pieces of my parallel universes fit together.

Many years later I would learn that reincarnation – called gilgul neshamot – is a Jewish concept that stretches back millennia in Kabbalah and is explicit in Judaism since the 16th century.

Reincarnation, Seriously?
I did not speak of my belief in reincarnation for decades, lest it shatter my carefully constructed intellectual persona. After all, in the West reincarnation is a subject of jokes. But about ten years ago, when I did reveal to a few friends my secret belief that I am a reincarnated Holocaust soul, I discovered that every one of them also had a secret sense that they had died in the Holocaust. None of them was a child of survivors or had ever heard of the Holocaust as a young child. Yet each one had a unique childhood experience, usually a recurring dream, that made no sense except as a traumatic memory from a past life.

I spent the next eight years collecting more testimonies – of Holocaust-related dreams, phobias, flashbacks, and panic attacks from people born after 1945. Over 450 people filled in my online survey and another hundred sent me emails detailing their Holocaust haunted experiences. Less than 10 per cent of them were descendants of survivors or non-survivors. A third of them were born into non-Jewish families where the Holocaust was never discussed.

Since the publication of my book I’ve Been Here Before: When Souls of the Holocaust Return, more than a hundred additional people have filled in my online survey testifying to their Holocaust dreams, etc., and many people have written to me. All of them thought, until reading my book, that they were the only one. All of them were ashamed to speak of their experiences lest they be deemed weird. Every time I have given a zoom lecture on the subject, at least a few members of the audience admit afterwards that they, too, have had such experiences. This is apparently a widespread phenomenon – souls of the Holocaust alive again today.

Looking at life through a spiritual lens is like looking at the cosmos through the lens of Einsteinian physics. Just as the laws of Newtonian physics no longer apply on such a massive scale, so the laws of justice, cause-and-effect, and God’s treatment of us take on a radical new meaning from the perspective of myriads of years and many lifetimes.

The Holocaust was a horrific chapter ending, but it was not the end of the story for any soul. Just as zooming out on a computer image suddenly makes everything around it visible, so I have come to see the Holocaust in the context not only of the Jewish people’s millennia-long journey toward the destined Final Redemption, but also of the individual victims’ long soul journeys. The six years of horror became, rather than a black circle filling my vision, a thick but short black line, preceded by a much longer timeline stretching back into history and followed by a line extending into the future.

The God who loves us continues to lead us through the valleys and mountains of our soul journeys to our own final redemption.
For me and most of the hundreds of individuals I have interviewed for my book, the color of what follows that black line is various shades of pastel. We were born to loving families in a period of political and financial stability, and have been blessed with felicitous lives. God’s love, invisible during the Holocaust, is again visible to all who allow themselves to see it. Human beings are never meant to live in the comfort zone. Challenge and the work of inner growth is always before us.

Yet the trauma of the Holocaust should not define us nor limit us. Rather, it can be a springboard for our ongoing soul development. The God who loves us continues to lead us through the valleys and mountains of our soul journeys to our own final redemption.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day
This coming Thursday, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The greatest threat to remembering the Holocaust is “Holocaust Fatigue.” People are weary of hearing of the suffering of the victims and the cruelty of the perpetrators. I have organized a Zoom program for that Thursday night with a different perspective – stories of survivors and returned souls displaying heroic resilience and engaged in the mission of soul rectification. Please join me by clicking here to register.
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Shakespeare and the Jews: 7 Facts
Jan 22, 2022  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
Shakespeare and the Jews: 7 Facts
How the Bard’s plays defined the way audiences look at Jews for generations.
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? …warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
These lines from William Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice are among his most famous. In the play, Shakespeare indulged in horrible anti-Jewish stereotypes, yet also depicted Jews as real people with feelings and emotions, a thought that was revolutionary at the time.
https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Shakespeare-and-the-Jews-7-Facts.html?src=ac-rdm

Shakespeare influenced the ways that Jews have been perceived for hundreds of years. Here are seven little-known facts about Shakespeare, his plays, and Jews.

1. Jews were banned from living in England, yet some Jews secretly lived there.
When Shakespeare was born in 1564, Jews had been banned from living in England for 274 years. In the year 1290, England’s King Edward I officially barred any Jewish settlement in his kingdom and expelled England’s sizable Medieval communities.

Yet Jewish communities did flourish in several towns in England, in secret. Prof. James Shapiro of Columbia University combed historical records for any mention of Jews living in England during Shakespeare’s day, and found myriad references to secret Jewish communities. In 1540, a family was brought to court in London on charges of maintaining their “Jewish and heretical faith” in secret. That same year, official documents record other people “suspected to be Jews” being arrested, also in London.

Given that there were secret Jewish communities living in London at the time, it’s possible that Shakespeare knew London Jews.
Several references exist to secret Jewish communities in Bristol, about 120 miles from London, during the Renaissance. Portuguese Jews lived in the city, possibly having escaped from the Inquisition in their native land. At least one Ashkenazi Jew, a Prague-born Jewish man named Joachim Gaunse, lived openly for a time in Bristol in the 1580s. (He was eventually arrested on the charge of not believing in Jesus; it’s unclear what the outcome of his case was.)


In his book The Woman Who Defied Kings: The Life and Times of Dona Gracia Nasi, Andree Aelion Brooks describes a clandestine route established by the secret Portuguese Jew Dona Gracia Nasi in the 1500s. She ran a trading empire and would hide Jews in her ships to smuggle them out of Inquisition-dominated Spain and Portugal (where being a secret Jew could result in torture and death) and bring them into England. There, a Jewish agent known as Christopher Fernandes would ferry the fleeing Jews onto boats bound for the Netherlands, where Jews could live openly.

Portrait of Gracia Mendes Nasi.
It’s impossible to know whether or not Shakespeare ever met a Jew. Virginia Woolf famously imagines what Shakespeare’s life was like, in her well-known essay “A Room of One’s Own”. After an extensive classical education, Shakespeare went “to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theater; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theater, became a successful actor, and lived at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practiced his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen.” Given that there were secret Jewish communities living in London at the time, it’s possible that Shakespeare knew London Jews.

2. Shakespeare knew about Roderigo Lopez, a Jew accused of trying to murder Queen Elizabeth I.
While Shakespeare was living and working in London (he moved to the capital in about the year 1585), he lived within a few miles of another Londoner, a secret Jew named Roderigo Lopez. In 1594, Lopez was arrested and charged with treason and plotting to kill Queen Elizabeth I. His trial gripped all of London: Shakespeare might have been among the throngs watching Lopez’s court case and subsequent execution. The “Lopez Affair” became a defining event of the era.

Lopes (right) speaking with a Spaniard (engraving by Esaias van Hulsen)

Lopez was a secret Jew, born in 1524 in Portugal. When it seemed that his Jewish faith might be unmasked, Lopez fled to England where he changed his first name to Ruy and began to practice the medicine that he’d studied back in Portugal. He was a popular physician and quickly attained a high degree of stature and respect in London, specializing in prescribing herbs such as anise and sumac, which today are recognized as having beneficial effects.

Queen Elizabeth I named Lopez her royal physician in 1584. It’s unclear how secret his Jewish faith remained, but it seems he was known at least to some people as a crypto-Jew. Lopez found himself with some powerful enemies, including the Earl of Essex, who was a close confidante of the queen.

Queen Elizabeth I
Seeking to rid the court of his arch-enemy, the Earl of Essex accused Lopez of plotting to poison the queen. Queen Elizabeth delayed his trial three months, refusing to believe that her trusted physician would seek to harm her. Eventually, his enemies accused Lopez of treason, leaving the queen with no choice but to try him. The official record of his trial notes that Lopez “like a Jew, did utterly with great oaths and execrations deny all.” His Jewishness was front and center during his trial, and sparked anti-Jewish hysteria across the capital.

Lopez was found guilty and was publicly executed in 1596. An enormous crowd watched his death and filled the air with chants of “Hang the Jew!” It’s widely speculated that Shakespeare inspired his character Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, which was first performed in 1605, on Lopez and his trial.

3. Shakespeare wasn’t the only playwright of the time to write about Jews.
The Merchant of Venice wasn’t the only play during Shakespeare’s life to depict Jews. In 1596, London readers were treated to a work of fiction called The Orator written under the pseudonym Lazarus Piot (likely the author Anthony Munday). One plot line bears a marked similarity to The Merchant of Venice and depicts a Jew who demands a “pound of flesh” from a Christian borrower in payment of a debt. (In The Merchant of Venice, an evil Jewish moneylender named Shylock demands payment from the Christian character Antonio, even if it kills him.)

In 1571, Queen Elizabeth I had made the dramatic change of legalizing money-lending in England, spawning endless debates about the newly widespread phenomenon of interest-charging loans. Commercial lending was a contentious issue, discussed endlessly in private conversations across in England in the late 1500s, as reflected by usury being a central theme in some English plays.

The Trial Scene, 'The Merchant of Venice', Act IV, Scene 1. Oil on canvas by Robert Smirke.

In 1583, London theatergoers watched The Three Ladies of London by playwright Robert Wilson. This play also featured a Christian borrower who was indebted to a Jew, though in this play it’s the Jewish lender who’s depicted as the more honorable character.

A few years before Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice premiered, audiences watched The Jew of Malta by Robert Marlowe, first performed in 1592. It features a dastardly, evil Jew named Barrabas who hates all that is good and pure and fiendishly plots to kill his many enemies, including an entire convent full of nuns and a priest. The play ends with Barrabas being burned at the stake. Shakespeare scholar Bernard Greenbanier, who taught at Brooklyn College from 1926 to 1964, has written that The Jew of Malta can be read primarily as a critique of Christian morals at the time. It did so, however, by creating a horrible caricature of a Jew which shaped audiences’ expectations of what Jewish characters looked like.

4. Shakespeare indulged in the antisemitism of the day.
In The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish character Shylock is odious, but he also is depicted as human. There can be some sympathy as we watch him. Yet in many of his other plays, Shakespeare displayed the same casual antisemitism that marked his contemporaries.

William Shakespeare
Thus, in the famous cauldron scene in Macbeth, one of the disgusting ingredients the witches toss into their potion is “liver of blaspheming Jew”. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, the character Launce complains that another character “has no more pity in him than a dog. A Jew would have wept” yet he did not. In Much Ado About Nothing, the character Benedick declares his love for Beatrice, saying “if I do not love her, I am a Jew.” For Shakespeare, as for most Englishmen at the time, Jews were shorthand for something bad, not real human beings.

5. The Merchant of Venice was a favorite play in Nazi Germany
British Lawyer Anthony Julius has observed that ever since it was written, The Merchant of Venice has been used to depict whatever anti-Jewish stereotypes were most prevalent at the time. “The reception history of the play confirms that Shylock is taken by reader and audience to be a representative Jew.”

The 1943 production of The Merchant of Venice directed by Nazi-party member Lothar Müthel
The play’s negative depiction of Jews made it a favorite in Nazi Germany. Between 1933 and 1939, there were over 50 performances in Germany. Audiences were encouraged to boo and jeer whenever Shylock appeared on the stage. A special performance of the play marked the day in 1943 when Vienna officially announced that it was Judeinrein, empty of all Jews.

6. Modern-day audiences have yelled anti-Jewish jeers at Shylock.
Shakespeare’s theater troupe was known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. In 1599 they built their own theater building in London called the Globe Theater. After that theater burned down, a second Globe Theater was rebuilt in 1614. The theater closed 28 years later, and in 1997 it was rebuilt once again near its original location near the River Thames; it’s since become a popular tourist destination in London.

The Globe Theater

Audiences are encouraged to be loud and rowdy, just as they were in Shakespeare’s day. That behavior wasn’t the only way in which audiences mimicked Shakespeare’s times. During one early performance of The Merchant of Venice in 1998, audiences hissed and booed at Shylock, jeering whenever the Jewish character appeared onstage. Theater critic Carole Woddis wrote that watching the play in the newly rebuilt Globe “still uncomfortably reinforces racial, Jewish stereotypes.” (Responding to criticism, then Globe director Mark Rylance robustly defended the audiences’ reactions as part of an authentic theatrical experience.)

7. Yiddish audiences embraced Shakespeare
During the heyday of Yiddish theater, Shakespeare’s plays were perennial favorites, translated into Yiddish and sometimes altered to include more Jewish storylines. “By the early 1890s American Yiddish actors were wild about Shakespeare,” notes Joel Berkowitz in his book Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage (University of Iowa Press: 2010). Yiddish-speaking audiences in New York could watch Yiddish versions of Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and even The Merchant of Venice.

King Lear in Yiddish
Sometimes Shakespeare’s plays in Yiddish were advertised as ibergezetst un farbesert – translated and improved. That was certainly the case with The Jewish King Lear, premiered in 1892. In this version, the hero is Dovid Moysheles, a Jewish merchant from Vilna who decides to divide his estate between his three daughters and move to the Land of Israel. (Like King Lear, Moysheles misjudges his daughters’ characters. He ends up as a homeless, blind beggar, accompanied by his trusted servant Shammai.) The play was made into a feature film in 1934, and lives on a testament to the enduring popularity of Shakespeare’s plays. Endlessly elastic and interesting, able to be recycled and reinvented, Shakespeare’s works continue to challenge and entertain.
 
About the Author

Dr. Yvette Alt MillerMore by 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 Challenges Facing the American Jewish Community
Jan 15, 2022  |  by Jack Wertheimerprint article
The Challenges Facing the American Jewish Community
What the latest Pew report, and the muted response to it, actually reveal about the state of the American Jewish community.

Last May, the Pew Research Center issued a report on “Jewish Americans in 2020” based upon a wide-ranging survey. Anticipating the report’s imminent release, one journalist predicted: “If history is any guide, the results will launch a thousand internal Jewish debates about who is a Jew, who gets to decide, and what’s the future for a diverse, splintered, assimilated, and persistent community of communities.”

Yet nothing of the sort has happened, as a simple Google search makes plain: In quantitative terms there are four times as many web entries for the previous national survey of American Jews as compared to the new one. Rather than stimulate debates, “Jewish Americans in 2020” has received only muted attention from communal policymakers.

To read op-eds about the meaning of Pew’s findings is to be transported to a never-never land where all is well and distressing news is magically transformed into something positive.
The commentariat, though, has not been silent about the report, and what it has said is quite remarkable. To read op-eds and listen to Zoom discussions about the meaning of Pew’s findings is to be transported to a never-never land where all is well and even distressing news is magically transformed into something positive. Here are a few examples of the general direction taken by commentators:

American Jews overall participate considerably less in all forms of Jewish life than a generation or two ago, but the good news, we are told, is that the youngest adults do engage with a few aspects of Jewish life at roughly the same rates as their elders – meaning there is no cause for concern about a generational decline in Jewish engagement.

Or take the condition of non-Orthodox synagogues, which are hemorrhaging members, aging, merging, and closing; all that’s somehow offset, it is said, because cultural Jews enjoy sampling traditional Jewish foods and visiting Jewish websites.


As for the rate of intermarriage among non-Orthodox Jews, we can breathe a sigh of relief because it has not increased since the 2013 study, holding steady at a “mere” 72% for those who wed between 2010 and 2020. The good news, according to some observers, is that nearly three-quarters of American Jews regard “leading an ethical and moral Jewish life” as essential to their Jewishness; never mind that only one-third regard “being part of a Jewish community” as essential.

Overall Jewish fertility rates hover only slightly below replacement levels, we are informed; but that is possible only because the small population of Orthodox Jewish families averages three times as many children as the non-Orthodox.

Minimizing or ignoring evidence of internal weakness in Jewish communal life seems to be the preferred response to the study.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that interpreters of the Pew study are working overtime to make lemonade from lemons. Minimizing or ignoring evidence of internal weakness in Jewish communal life seems to be the preferred response to the study. But is all the upbeat talk helpful if the goal is to strengthen Jewish life and secure the American Jewish future? Or to put it differently, might communal policymakers and funders act with greater wisdom – and possibly reprioritize – if they contended with the serious challenges facing American Jewish life rather than be lulled into complacency with happy talk?

An examination of trend lines may prove clarifying. “Jewish Americans in 2020,” follows on the heels of a survey conducted just seven years earlier, titled “Portrait of Jewish Americans” (2013). A brief comparison of data reported in those two studies may serve as a mirror for the American Jewish community to see its own reflection.

Between 2013 and 2020, according to these two national studies, shrinking proportions of American Jews identified strongly and participated actively in Jewish life. Take the religious sphere: Seder attendance dropped from 70% to 62%; fasting on Yom Kippur was down by 7%. Five percent fewer American Jews claimed to keep a kosher home. And the percentage of Jewish adults who claimed to attend synagogue seldom or never rose from 41% to 52%. Religion was deemed very important by 26% of the adult Jewish population in 2013; seven years later that figure dropped by 5%.

Religion was deemed very important by 26% of the adult Jewish population in 2013; seven years later that figure dropped by 5%.
We know that the “Nones,” those who eschew a religious identification, are on the rise everywhere, especially among younger adults. So, let’s look at other types of Jewish connection. Giving to Jewish causes now is the province of a minority of Jews, having slid from 56% in 2013 to 48% in 2020. Only 42% of Jewish adults consider their Jewishness – no matter how they define it – to be a very important part of their lives, down from 46%. Thirty percent of American Jewish adults claimed to feel very attached to Israel in 2013; seven years later that figure dropped by 5%. Close friendship with other Jews is no longer as common: One-quarter of Jewish adults claimed they have hardly any or no close Jewish friends, an increase of 4%. Even if we remove religious participation from the discussion, Jewish secular, cultural, or what used to be called “peoplehood” engagement is also weaker.

Taken together, these figures suggest declining commitment to specifically Jewish causes, distancing from the Jewish state and its people, and the fraying of Jewish social networks so necessary for anchoring Jews to their people.

The same trends are even more pronounced among the youngest Jewish adults. In the 18-29 age group, the percentage who claimed that their Jewishness is not too important or not at all important rose from 22% to 33%. Those stating they have hardly any or no Jewish friends rose from 26% to 35%. Giving to Jewish causes dropped from 39% to 33% over seven years. And in this age group, feeling very or somewhat attached to Israel slid from 60% to 48%.

One way these trends have been understood is as artifacts of the respondents’ life stage: Younger Jewish adults are living through a particularly unsettling time in their lives – leaving home for the first time, learning about their interests and strengths, deciding on a career path and possibly seeking mates. Perhaps, then, their Jewish involvements will deepen once they have resolved some of these important matters. One hopes so, but why were those in the 18-29 age group more invested in Jewish life seven years ago?

Some will claim, perhaps, that the new Pew findings were distorted by altered patterns of behavior due to the pandemic, which had begun to rage in the U.S. during the final three months of the survey. Fortunately, we have other studies conducted in local Jewish communities that may serve as a way to test the validity of “Jewish Americans in 2020.”

Between 2015 and 2021, a number of Jewish communities of varying sizes and in different regions of the country conducted population studies. Eleven of them had also been surveyed between 10 and 15 years earlier with comparable questions and methods. We can identify trends over time in those communities – including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, the Twin Cities, South Palm Beach, and West Palm Beach, locales where a total of one-and-a-half million Jews reside.

Comparing the community studies conducted in the first decade of the current century with their counterparts in 2015-21, we find the same patterns repeated: declines in Jewish religious observances such as Seder attendance, lighting Shabbat candles, maintaining a kosher home, and attending synagogue at least once a month. The studies also registered shrinking day school, part-time Jewish schooling, and early childhood enrollments. Strong attachment to Israel was down, as was the percentage giving to Jewish causes.

We find the same patterns repeated: declines in Jewish religious observance, shrinking day school enrollment, and increased rates of intermarriage.
Which indicators showed dramatic increases? Rates of intermarriage, the percentage of Jews living in the same household with non-Jews (spouses, partners, or children), and the number of Jews living alone. Denominationally, the Orthodox proportions grew, those who identified as Conservative and Reform declined, and the Nones increased. Notably, the number of Jewish children declined. All these findings are consistent with data in Pew’s “Jewish Americans in 2020.”

Several of the communities where paired studies are available have long and distinguished histories of intense Jewish communal participation. All the more shocking then is evidence of their decline. To take one of the more dramatic examples: The Chicago Jewish community has long enjoyed a reputation as highly cohesive and supportive of the local federation of Jewish philanthropy. But in the latest study, only 11% of households contributed to the federation campaign, compared to 44% just one decade earlier. Overall giving to any Jewish cause slid from 65% to 51%. In Chicagoland, synagogue membership dropped by 10% and belonging to a Jewish organization by 7%. The percentage of Jews feeling very attached to Israel also decreased by 10%.

Or take the Denver Jewish community, which was studied in 2007 and again in 2018-19. Donors to the federation actually increased sharply from 23% to 48% in those years, as did Seder attendance (from 57% to 70%). But in this model Western community, with its strong support from the Rose Community Fund, membership in a synagogue was halved (from 32% to 16%), as was the percentage who attended services at least once a month. The population claiming that being Jewish is very important dropped from 61% to 47%, coupled with a significant drop in those who felt it very important to be part of the local Jewish community. Jews who felt very attached to Israel also declined by 9%.

And then, to cite one more locale, let’s note what happened in Boston between 2005 and 2015. In this community, widely regarded with justification as an intellectual and policy leader, some measures of religious engagement, such as Seder attendance and Hannukah candle-lighting, saw increased participation. But synagogue membership and monthly synagogue service attendance declined significantly. So, too, did identification with any of the non-Orthodox religious denominations. Over 20% fewer people claimed a strong attachment to Israel. And the intermarriage rate for Jewish individuals jumped by 35% in one decade. In Boston and other communities, any modest increase in participation in one sphere of Jewish life was matched by significant declines in several others.

There is ample evidence from local community studies, then, that Pew got it right in its national survey. In fact, where communities engaged in two self-studies separated by 10 or more years, levels of decline were even more pronounced than in the Pew studies.

What are we to make of the downward trajectory tracked by these recent surveys? A popular explanation avers that what we are seeing is not a weakening of Jewish life, but merely a transition to new forms of Jewish identification. Rather than express their Jewishness through religious participation or support for Israel and other peoplehood causes, or socializing with Jews, more Jews now are participating in Jewish cultural activities, such as attending Jewish film festivals, viewing Jewish museum exhibits, eating traditional Jewish foods, reading Jewish-themed books, and visiting websites with Jewish content. Some observers have gone so far as to declare that the present moment represents a veritable renaissance of Jewish cultural life, even as other forms of Jewishness are in decline.

Few who do not partake of religious life participate often in Jewish cultural activities. Overall, nearly half (48%) of American Jews claim they do not engage often in any Jewish cultural activities.
As it happens, findings in the Pew 2020 study cast serious doubt on that theory. By any measure, it’s a stretch to say that cultural activities are replacing religion and peoplehood as vibrant modes of Jewish expression for the vast majority of American Jews. To the contrary, active participation in religious life correlates with Jewish cultural engagement. The reverse is also true: Few who do not partake of religious life participate often in Jewish cultural activities. Overall, nearly half (48%) of American Jews claim they do not engage often in any Jewish cultural activities and only 18% participate often in four or more such cultural activities. This is also true for younger Jews who are less avid consumers of Jewish culture than their elders. (The one notable and understandable exception: participation in online conversations about being Jewish.) Cultural Jewishness is not picking up where religious Judaism is leaving off.

And yet, conventional wisdom dismisses concern about the turn away from religious and Jewish peoplehood connections as mere nostalgia for 20th-century Jewish life. Here’s how the argument goes: Just because religious participation and support for the Jewish people moved Jews in the 20th century that is no reason to fixate on these forms of involvement in the current century. We’re living in a new era and previous ways of doing things are passé. One could note in response that religious expression and responsibility for fellow Jews have a history dating back more than 2,000 years. They hardly were inventions of 20th-century American Jews. The triad at the core of Jewish theology, after all, refers to God, Torah, and Israel. Distancing from the latter two would seem to represent an epic shift away from what Jews have long held sacred.

We are witnessing the abandonment by significant portions of the Jewish population of the twin pillars that supported Jewish communal life: adherence to a set of common religious practices and a commitment to care for Jewish needs at home and abroad.
What we are witnessing is the abandonment by significant portions of the Jewish population of the twin pillars that supported Jewish communal life: adherence to a set of common religious practices and a commitment to care for Jewish needs at home and abroad. Large majorities of Jews used to celebrate a Seder, fast on the Day of Atonement, and attend synagogues at least on the High Holidays. Increasing numbers of Jews today no longer do so. And the desire to belong to a Jewish community, support its institutions, and feel a strong kinship with fellow Jews, especially in Israel, is also waning. Little wonder that unified action seems such a remote possibility in today’s Jewish community.

To aggravate the situation further, new rules concocted by a small fringe of self-styled progressives dictate what may or may not be uttered in public, making it even more difficult to face current challenges. In the name of inclusion, it is now impermissible to speak of declining fertility rates, spiraling intermarriage numbers, plummeting levels of Jewish literacy, and increasing assimilation. Public discussions of these developments must be banished from communal discourse, some contend, because they may cause offense to individuals who will take personal umbrage. Whether by design or happenstance, this campaign has further stifled serious policy debates about how to confront the realities of American Jewish life.

And yet staring us in the face are Pew’s own data, which tell us that the expanding sector of the Nones plays a major role in declining participation. And who are the Jews of no religion? As the historian Jonathan Sarna points out, nearly 80% of the Nones – a group constituting roughly one-third of the American Jewish community – are married to a non-Jewish spouse. “The chasms illuminated by the Pew survey between religious Jews and nonreligious ones, and between Jews who have married within their faith and those who have not, increasingly divide Jews once brought together by a common set of beliefs,” Sarna writes.

True, a small minority of the Nones do engage in Jewish rituals and support Jewish causes. And yes, a minority of intermarried families is working tenaciously to raise its children as Jews. Of course, those families should be welcomed and encouraged. And according to the Pew data, they overwhelmingly do feel welcome. But large majorities in both groups (and they overlap heavily) are disengaged and by their own admission do not want to participate in Jewish life.

Among the intermarried who constitute nearly three-quarters of recently marrying non-Orthodox Jews, just 12% say it’s very important that their grandchildren identify as Jews.
A question in the latest Pew study perhaps best captures the challenge facing American Jewry today: When asked how important it is that their current or future grandchildren will be Jewish, 45% of Jews by religion answered very important, compared to merely 4% of the Nones. Notably, among the intermarried who constitute nearly three-quarters of recently marrying non-Orthodox Jews, just 12% say it’s very important that their grandchildren identify as Jews. The question probes how committed the respondent is to the Jewish future. If only minorities of American Jews – and hardly any of those among the fast-growing Nones – are invested in ensuring the Jewish future in their own families, how can we continue to pretend that American Jewish life is sound?

Some communal leaders believe that highlighting these symptoms of weakening Jewish commitments is the last thing we should do if the goal is to revitalize American Jewish life. Those who care, they contend, will find the news demoralizing. Besides, why would philanthropists want to invest their resources in a floundering enterprise? They are looking for winners, not losers. Better to emphasize the positive.

Curiously, the same people undoubtedly would reject this mindset when it comes to worrisome findings not directly connected to Jewish life. Imagine how they would have reacted if physicians in the closing decades of the 20th century had decided to minimize undeniable evidence linking cigarette smoking to health hazards. Or if more recently, scientists had downplayed the baneful consequences of climate change. Would Jewish policymakers or any thinking people tolerate such an ostrichlike approach or would they demand honest reporting about impending threats? To ask the question is to answer it: Sounding a tocsin to warn of a crisis is both the responsible course of action and most efficacious means to rally forces to confront challenges.

A very different calculus motivates another sector of policymakers who also are not interested in broadcasting unpalatable news. “What’s the point?” some ask. Large swaths of American Jews are on their way out of Jewish life. They may identify vaguely as being Jewish but do little to act upon their Jewishness. Their departure from the Jewish scene is inevitable. Ignore them and let’s focus instead on the hardiest sector of the Jewish population. As one op-ed headline advised, “Forget ‘Outreach.’ Pew 2020 tells us we should be investing in the Orthodox.” That’s where, some are convinced, the only realistic future of American Jewish life is to be found.

It’s precisely within the Orthodox camp that we find the most active outreach efforts aimed at helping all kinds of Jews find their way to heightened Jewish engagement.
Survey data surely have detailed the strength of Orthodox Jews – their strong commitments to Jewish living, study of Jewish sacred texts, family formation, and raising well-educated Jews deeply knowledgeable about their religious tradition. Yet it’s precisely within the Orthodox camp that we find the most active outreach efforts aimed at helping all kinds of Jews find their way to heightened Jewish engagement. Based on the principle that no Jew should be written off, that every Jew contains a spark that, if properly ignited, will transform into passion for Jewishness, thousands of Orthodox Jews devote their lives to outreach. Their dedication is the best response to those eager to write off everyone who is not Orthodox.

So, too, are the multiplying efforts by long-established Jewish institutions and recent startups to reach Jews who are only minimally involved or not at all participating. Birthright Israel, which sends college students and those somewhat older on 10-day free trips to Israel, has a 20-year history of turning that experience into a springboard for many participants to become more actively involved in Jewish activities when they return home.

New types of study programs are exposing Jews to sacred Jewish texts for the first time. The largest so-called “legacy” organizations have divisions dedicated to involving younger Jews in efforts to combat antisemitism, learning how to allocate Jewish communal grants and organizing events in support of Israel. To their great credit, highly creative and thoughtful members of the Gen X, Millennial, and, most recently, Gen Z cohorts are working to entice their age peers to participate in religious activities (often held in unconventional settings), social programs and cultural exploration. Previously uninvolved Jews are participating, often for the first time. The problem is that those who do attend are dwarfed numerically by the many who remain aloof.

What, then, is to be done? A good place to begin is by jettisoning the odd notion that individuals lacking Jewish literacy are likely to become active participants in Jewish religious and communal life. Perhaps, some instinctual sense of belonging drove an earlier generation of poorly educated Jews to join, but that is no longer true in most cases. By their own admission in 2020, 36% of those surveyed between the ages of 18 and 29 conceded that what keeps them away from synagogue services is their belief that they “don’t know enough to participate.” We can only speculate about the numbers who are uninvolved in other Jewish activities for the same reason. Large numbers of Jews stay away from Jewish settings because they lack basic Jewish literacy and skills.

Exposure to a combination of Jewish day school education, overnight camps with Jewish content, youth group involvement, and Israel travel produces adults who are the most likely to become active participants in their Jewish communities.
In contrast to this downbeat message, a vast trove of research about the impact of high-quality Jewish education provides an upbeat lesson. Exposure to a combination of Jewish day school education, overnight camps with Jewish content, youth group involvement, and Israel travel produces adults who are the most likely to become active participants, if not leaders, in their Jewish communities. When young children are enrolled in Jewish early childhood programs and day camps, they enter portals leading to other forms of Jewish education. Studies also suggest positive effects of part-time Jewish education when combined with informal Jewish education.

Though recent initiatives aim to widen the pool of young people receiving a Jewish education, those opportunities are not available for large numbers of young Jews. Those who care about the Jewish future have a responsibility to ensure the availability of a serious Jewish education for every Jewish child.

The latest Pew study also makes abundantly clear that inquiring how Jews feel about being Jewish is far less illuminating than asking them what they actively do to demonstrate their identification. American Jewish life will become stronger when people enact their Jewishness by showing up in places where Jews gather, by attending, joining, giving, and volunteering. In the private sphere, families “do” Jewish when they introduce home rituals, celebrate Jewish holidays, discuss Jewish topics, and model for young people that their elders – parents, grandparents, and other family members – regard being Jewish as important and valuable. For good reason, Jewish tradition has long promoted deeds, fulfilling commandments (mitzvot), as the way Jews enact their commitments.

For good reason, Jewish tradition has long promoted deeds, fulfilling commandments (mitzvot), as the way Jews enact their commitments.
The new Pew study also poses an urgent challenge to Jewish leaders and communal funders: Will they confront the findings in a sustained and honest fashion? Judging by the soothing messaging about these reports emanating from communal institutions, this self-evident requirement is not being met.

As a federation executive put it to me: “How we spin [findings] publicly seems analogous to a political party unwilling to criticize its constituencies, both because it would be self-defeating and is a reflection on itself.” But how else can self-correction come about if failings and their causes are ignored? Jewish philanthropy and communal funding flow to a broad range of causes. Surely, the data we have at our disposal point to the need for a through-going assessment of communal priorities.

Undoubtedly, such a reevaluation will elicit different recommendations. And the many disparate views, in turn, may well paralyze policymakers. Difficult conversations are inevitable because competing Jewish values will clash. Which needs are most deserving of priority at this juncture – involving Gen Z and millennials or caring for the elderly, support for nonsectarian causes or a sharper focus on Jewish needs, funding for Israel or for domestic Jewish programs, more investment in combatting antisemitism or educating Jewish children, intensifying the involvement of those already somewhat engaged or reaching out to the least engaged?

Moreover, assumptions about what is necessary for Jewish life to thrive are in urgent need of rethinking. It’s time for the anodyne response to the latest Pew study to be replaced by serious reflection and action. Let the “thousands of internal Jewish debates,” predicted before “American Jews in 2020” appeared, begin at last.

This article originally appeared on tabletmag.com
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On the Other Side of Hate: A Former Nazi Speaks Out
Jan 17, 2022  |  by Rivka Ronda Robinsonprint article
On the Other Side of Hate: A Former Nazi Speaks Out
After the synagogue attack in Texas, former Nazi TM Garret says we can rise above fear.
TM Garret realizes he could have been in that synagogue in Colleyville, Texas – not in his former life as a white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan leader, but as someone in the process of becoming a Jew by choice.
https://www.aish.com/ci/s/On-the-Other-Side-of-Hate-A-Former-Nazi-Speaks-Out.html?src=ac-txt

After a terrorist took the rabbi and three Congregation Beth Israel members hostage during Shabbat morning services, Garret flashed back to the first time he had gone to synagogue to pray. It was Yom Kippur two years ago. He had attended many times as a public speaker, but in 2019 Garret, a researcher and analyst for the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, threw his hat in the ring and began to identify with the Jewish people.

“I already had joined Jewish friends for Shabbat dinners, Passover and Hanukkah. I had lectured many times at synagogues and Chabad houses. But I had never been to a synagogue just for the purpose of being in services and praying,” he reflects.

During his former days of hate
“So I decided to make Yom Kippur my first time. I became acquainted with the rabbi of Or Chadash Synagogue in Memphis, Tennessee, and was warmly welcomed. Yom Kippur was a perfect day for me – I had to ask for a lot of forgiveness that night. For the first time in life I wore a yarmulke and they handed me a transliteration so I could pray in Hebrew.”


After services a congregant sought him out to inquire about antisemitism in Germany, where Garret was born. Garret assured him that Jews wouldn’t have to worry about the Germans again, knowing how much his homeland had atoned for its egregious Holocaust history.

He spoke too soon. The next day – the holiest on the Jewish calendar – a neo-Nazi attacked a synagogue in Halle, Germany. Garret felt betrayed: “What did I tell these people last night?” Then it dawned on him: “If someone had entered that synagogue where I was last night with the intention of murdering everybody inside, I would have been dead. I looked like a Jew, I prayed like a Jew.” 

After many years of exploration, the 46-year-old human rights activist finally feels he has found his spiritual home in Judaism.

Garret was born into a German Catholic family that only attended church on Christmas. While he grew up believing in God, religion didn’t play a major part in his life for a long time.

I explored all these groups I once hated and found out how many stereotypes that many people believe in are just wrong.
He felt like an outcast in the small German town of his youth. Both parents had a drinking problem and they divorced shortly after his birth. His mother was rearing four children by herself, which was unusual in those days.

Uncomfortable in his own skin, Garret embraced bigotry to blend in. As a teenager he fell in with hate groups, became a white supremacist and then climbed the ladder to become a leader in the Ku Klux Klan in Europe.

Love and Compassion Melted Away Hate
Fifteen years ago, after vilifying anyone who was different, from Jews and Muslims to immigrants and gays, a door opened to escape the hell of hate. It came in the form of a Turkish Muslim man who showed Garret love, compassion and commonalities that are bridges.

Speaking out against hate
“After a long journey I was allowed to explore all these groups I once hated,” says Garret. “I found out how many stereotypes that many people believe in are just wrong.

“In 2018 I started to explore Judaism. The ethics of Judaism aligned with my newly formed ethics, I felt attracted to this diverse community and since I never stopped believing in God, I also found a new religious home. At first, I wasn’t sure what I was attracted towards most – the community, the ethics or the religion. I found that Judaism is all of it! I developed a deep love for it, and in 2020 it became clear to me. I made the decision to join these wonderful people and to convert.”

Self-Reflection: Will I Be a Good Jew?
Garret asked himself many questions before coming to that conclusion. Is this the right thing? Does it make sense? Would I be a good Jew? His rabbi reassured him, “It’s a journey. Do the best you can.”

Garret has a sense of what it feels like to belong to a minority group. The Simon Wiesenthal Center once gave him a jacket emblazoned with a Star of David after speaking engagements at the Alpha Epsilon Pi 106th International Convention and National Museum of American Jewish Military History in Washington, D.C. Wearing it on the street, Garret had a startling thought. “I wouldn’t be surprised if I get hit in the back by a bottle.” He didn’t take off the jacket.

You can’t fight hate with hate. We break down their barriers with compassion and unconditional love.
After the synagogue standoff in Colleyville, where all four hostages were saved, Garret said it’s important not to cave into fear. “I think this is why the Jewish people are still here. They never gave into fear or abandoned their beliefs.”

The Power of Compassion and Connection
Garret counsels people to recognize they have the power to help others  get out of the forest of hate before becoming violent actors who inflict hurt. Try to talk rather than vilify them. Show understanding for their fears, with empathy but not sympathy, while clearly saying you don’t share their opinions.

Find compassion for those you might disagree with. Seek to understand them as people rather than dismissing them with a label. Look for ways to have a conversation. Listen rather than enter these conversations with the goal to change them or to tell them that you are right and they are wrong.

They’ll often let you become a trusted source for them before they trust the radicals, says Garret. “We break down their barriers with compassion and unconditional love. This is how I got deradicalized. You can’t fight hate with hate.”
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Martin Luther King Had a Dream. Did his Wife and Family Support It?
Jan 18, 2014  |  by Rabbi Efrem Goldbergprint article
Martin Luther King Had a Dream. Did his Wife and Family Support It?
Not all dreams are created equal.
https://www.aish.com/ci/s/Not-All-Dreams-Are-Created-Equal.html?src=ac-txt
On August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., whose contributions and influence we will mark this coming Monday, delivered what ultimately became his signature speech. Many identify that address, delivered to over 250,000 civil rights supporters that had gathered for the March on Washington, as the defining moment in the American civil rights movement.

What many don’t know is that the now-famous “I have a dream” speech was not intended to be given that day. Dr. King had actually delivered a different speech and was moving to close when a woman called out from the crowd, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” He then deviated from his original ending, partially improvised on the spot, and launched into a vivid and compelling description of his dream of freedom and equality for all.

Due to hard work, resolve and perseverance, MLK’s vision went from a dream to at least a partial reality. His dream was not about himself, his advancement, or his glory. He dreamt of a better, more just and fair world in which all are respected, appreciated and treated equally and fairly.

Do our dreams include a vision for a better world for all or just for ourselves?
As we mark MLK’s life this coming week it seems appropriate to ask ourselves – what do we dream of? What do we wish for? Do our dreams include others or just ourselves? Do our dreams include a vision for a better world for all or just for ourselves? How do our dreams integrate with those of our families, our spouses, or our children? Are our dreams compatible with our realities, our commitments, and our obligations, or do our dreams necessarily require us to abandon them?

Sorry Honey, I'm Going to Mars
Starting in 2024, a new initiative called Mars One will begin sending people to Mars in the hopes of creating a permanent human settlement there. Missions will leave every two years to bring people. The decision to go is irreversible, as those that move will have a one-way ticket with no mechanism to come home. Furthermore, under Martian gravity, a person’s bone density would decrease significantly and he or she would be unable to return to withstand Earth’s gravity, which is far stronger.


The organization publicly invited all those interested to apply for a spot and remarkably, since just April of last year, more than 200,000 individuals have applied. Last month, 1,058 applicants were contacted and told that they had made it through to the second round. Among them, is 38-year-old Ken Sullivan, a medevac pilot from Utah who has always dreamt of exploring and inhabiting another planet. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, there is only one minor problem. Ken applied without ever consulting his wife Becky, and now the two are struggling with what his dream means for their marriage and family.

“The question is do we get divorced now or get divorced later,” she said. “If I stand in the way of his dreams and passions, then we get divorced now, so I have to be supportive.” Ken’s dream is not only affecting his wife, but it has unalterable consequences for his four children, ranging in age from 6 months to 13 years old who, if he is selected, stand to never see their father again. The permanent effect on his family is not lost on Ken, who said,, “I just hope the family will be able to forgive me down the road. Hopefully there isn’t too much hatred of my being selfish in pursuing a dream that isn’t theirs.”

What do Ken’s children think of his father's dream? Dreams are wonderful, significant, and important. They cause us to aspire, to be ambitious and to seek out goals. But dreams should bring us closer to the people we love, not drive us apart from them. Dreams should include those that we care about, not marginalize them. Dreams should be compatible with and reinforce our values, our commitments, and our obligations, not cause us to abrogate, distort, or compromise them.

I cannot relate to the over-200,000 people who are ready to voluntarily leave our planet and all that inhabit it, never to come back here or see those people again.

Many of us, like Ken, are putting our dreams ahead of our families.
But many of us, like Ken, are putting our dreams ahead of our families. We may not abandon our spouse and children to go to Mars, but many neglect time with their spouse and children to pursue personal dreams and interests that don’t benefit or advance our family or even help us become better spouses or parents to them.

There is nothing wrong with dreaming of a low golf handicap or competing in a triathlon. It is wonderful to dream of professional or financial success beyond imagination. But these dreams must be pursued in moderation, with the consent and cooperation, hopefully followed by support, of our families, as well as in conjunction with our other responsibilities, not in place of them. Our dreams must never make us judgmental or intolerant of those who don’t share them.

Not all dreams are responsible or appropriate to pursue. Someone might dream of owning a yacht, but it would be financially reckless and irresponsible to do so. Some might dream of fancy luxury vacations, but it would mean taking children out of Jewish day school. Some might dream of spending Saturdays on the beach or dream of tasting lobster, but it would mean compromising on our heritage and its expectations of us.

Like Martin Luther King, Jr. we should all have dreams and work hard to make them into reality. But like Dr. King, our dreams should be inclusive, noble, balanced, sophisticated, serve to better the world and bring people closer together. Most importantly, our dreams should be coordinated with our families and pursued only with their support.

The Talmud describes what happened when the sages approached Rabbi Elazar Ben Azarya to accept the position of Nasi, the head of the Sanhedrin. He must have been stunned by the invitation and incredibly excited and enthusiastic. After all, Nasi was the most prestigious and prominent position of the Jewish people and he was only 18 years old at the time. Nevertheless, Rabbi Elazar’s response to them is so instructive. “I have to consult with my wife before I can give you an answer,” he said. Though it would have been a dream come true, he refused to accept the dream position without the buy-in and support of his wife first.

Ken Sullivan’s application is unconscionable. Dreams should never hurt, cause pain or create division. They should heal, unify, and create a better circumstance for ourselves, our families and the world.
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https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Antisemitism-The-Problem-We-All-Live-With.html?src=ac-txt
Antisemitism: The Problem We All Live With
Jan 9, 2022
by Rabbi Chanoch Oppenheimprint article
Antisemitism: The Problem We All Live With
One answer: Do more Jewish.

I received a disturbing text from Daniel*, a person who began attending one of my classes. Daniel was helping a neighbor, a widow, who was moving and giving her house to her children who would rent it for income. Daniel and his neighbor had known each other for years and had a good relationship. He told her not to hesitate if he could help in her in any way. He received the following text from her son.

Stop harassing my mother. You are not a good person and if you continue, you will not be happy. BTW, we would never rent to your shady kind. We know what you are up to. Salam Alaikum…You should meet your new Palestinian neighbors we’re thinking of renting to or maybe some Afghan refugees.

This was one part of a larger text that was replete with obscenities and antisemitic overtones. Daniel was shaken and felt unsafe encountering antisemitism head on.

Antisemitism is a problem we all live with. As Joshua Malina recently pointed out in The Atlantic, why do the anti-racists of Hollywood still tolerate and hire Mel Gibson, a raging anti-Semite? Anyone familiar with Jewish history knows that hatred of Jews is ancient. In 2019, Bari Weiss said at the Jewish Federation of Greater Charlotte’s Main Event, that until the modern era, Jews were denied the basic rights of their non-Jewish neighbors and bore the brunt of hatred and persecution. What can do about it?

Her answer was, “Do more Jewish.” Go to services, attend a class, learn about our history, and engage in meaningful Jewish conversations with others.

That was the essentially message I gave to Daniel. It’s not logical to hate Jews or Israel, who have given so many gifts to the world.


Anne Frank pondered why Jews are hated. “Who knows, it might even be our religion from which the world and peoples learn good, and for that reason and that reason only do we have to suffer now. We can never become just Netherlanders, or just English, or representatives of any country for that matter; we will always remain Jews, but we want to, too.” (Diary entry April 11, 1944)

“Jews gave the world the concept of God, and the world has never forgiven them for it.”
The Franks were not a religious family, but 16-year-old Anne understood that it might be what we stand for. “It might even be our religion from which the world and all peoples learn good…” As Ernest van den Haag, a non-Jewish 20th century sociologist wrote in The Jewish Mystique, “Jews gave the world the concept of God, and the world has never forgiven them for it.”

We can’t forget what that “we can never become…representatives of any country…we will always remain Jews.”

Now more than ever is time to engage with your Jewish identity. That might mean attending a Shabbat dinner, or even trying to make your own. It might mean seeking relevant Jewish content and becoming comfortable experiencing Jewish practices, even though you don’t observe them yourself. It might mean taking a trip to Israel or learning about our collective history and where we fit in the 21st century.

While many noble people and groups are fighting global anti-Semitism, you can do your part by exploring your Jewish identity and discovering if there’s something worth fighting for.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Charlotte Jewish News.
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Post  Admin Sun 09 Jan 2022, 7:24 pm

Sidney Poitier and the Jewish Waiter who Taught Him How to Read
Jan 9, 2022  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
Sidney Poitier and the Jewish Waiter who Taught Him How to Read
The famous actor found success after a kindly Jewish waiter taught him to read.

Sidney Poitier, who died last week at the age of 94, was a towering presence for much of his life. The first Black Hollywood movie star, Poitier was the first Black actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor, for his starring role in the 1963 movie Lilies of the Field. He appeared in over 39 movies and worked as a director, novelist and served as ambassador from the Bahamas (where his family lived) to Japan and the UN.

“I walked with kings,” Poitier said about his seemingly charmed life. Yet in a 2013 interview, he revealed the secret to his early success: an elderly Jewish man who taught him to read, enabling Poitier to escape from poverty and illiteracy to achieve his potential.

Born in 1927, Poitier’s parents Reginald and Evelyn Poitier were impoverished tomato farmers. “There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone,” Poitier later recalled. “Well, that’s my dad. And he was a very good man.”

Poitier was born in Miami - three months premature - while his parents were in America on a trip to sell tomatoes. His parents already had six children, and they weren’t sure whether Sidney would survive. His father even bought a casket, thinking there was no way his premature baby would make it.

Against all odds, Sidney survived, but his childhood was a difficult one.
Against all odds, Sidney survived, but his childhood was a difficult one. He wore flour sacks, lived in a series of impoverished towns in Florida and the Caribbean, and attended school for only two years – he left at the age of 12 to take a menial labor job.


By the time Poitier was 14, he was hanging around with an unsavory crowd. His older brother Cyril was married and living in Miami, and his parents sent Sidney to stay with him to take him away from negative influences. Once he was living in America, Poitier decided he wanted to be an actor, and made his way to New York City in 1943, at the age of 16.

There, he auditioned with the prestigious American Negro Theater in Harlem, but when they handed him a script to read, Poitier wasn’t able to make out the words. With so little schooling, he was effectively illiterate. Unfit for any other job, he went to work as a dishwasher in a New York restaurant where he met the elderly Jewish waiter who would change his life.

Poitier was the first Black to win Academy Award for Best Actor

“There was one of the waiters, a Jewish guy, elderly man, and he looked over at me, and he was looking at me for quite a while,” Poitier recalled. “I had a newspaper, it was called Journal American. And he walked over to me, and he said, ‘What’s new in the paper?’ And I looked up at this man. I said to him, ‘I can’t tell you what’s in the paper, because I can’t read very well.’ He said, ‘Let me ask you something, would you like me to read with you?’ I said to him, ‘Yes, if you like.’”

They studied late at night in the restaurant, long after closing time. The elderly Jewish waiter – Poitier later described him as patient and bespectacled – painstakingly taught Poitier the meanings of punctuation marks and how to sound out words. Poitier later described: “He sat there with me week after week after week.” They used newspapers to sound out words. During the day, Poitier listened to the radio to expand his vocabulary and diction; at night he read with the Jewish waiter. Eventually, after about six months, Poitier was finally a fluent reader.

He tried out again for the American Negro Theater, and was accepted as an apprentice. Still a complete unknown, Poitier had to work in the theater as a janitor, as well. One day, another of the theater’s actors – none other than future superstar Harry Belafonte – failed to show up for rehearsals on a day that a Broadway producer was in the audience. Poitier stood in for Belafonte, and was chosen for the Broadway play: an all-Black production of Lysistrata in 1946.

Poitier continued to work on stage and in television, and still had to resort to menial jobs to make ends meet. In 1950, he finally gained widespread recognition as a serious actor for his role as a doctor pursued by a racist patient in the film No Way Out. Other hit movies soon followed, including Cry, the Beloved Country in 1952 and Blackboard Jungle in 1955, in which he plays a gifted, troubled, student.

Celebrating his 92nd birthday

He always insisted on taking dignified roles, playing upstanding characters with strong moral fiber.

Poitier wrote three autobiographies and one novel, a science fiction-tinged mystery called Montaro Caine, published in 2013. The main character, named Montaro, is a Jewish graduate student whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Austria. The book was critically panned and never sold many copies, but it might have been Poitier’s tribute in some form to the elderly Jew years before who first taught him to write.

Once Poitier was established as a successful actor, he tried to find the waiter who’d helped him so much during his teenage years. To his lasting regret, Poitier never found him.
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Post  Admin Thu 06 Jan 2022, 7:44 pm

https://www.aish.com/sp/pg/Wheres-the-Empathy-On-Punching-a-Flight-Attendant-in-the-Face.html?src=ac-txt
Where’s the Empathy? On Punching a Flight Attendant in the Face
Jan 5, 2022
by Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmithprint article
Where’s the Empathy? On Punching a Flight Attendant in the Face
Unchecked, we tend to be self-centered, lazy and mean-spirited. Empathy doesn’t come naturally; it needs to be chosen.

I vividly remember the moment I realized that every person is a whole universe just as real as me. It may sound a bit odd – even pretentious – but it was a brief, mind-blowing experience for my 17-year-old self.

I was driving home from a friend at 2 in the morning and the streets of Toronto were deserted. I stopped at a red light, it was really cold and Tom Waits was casting his spell through the radio when another car pulled up beside me in the other lane. I looked over at the driver – an older man with grey hair who was looking straight ahead, and then it hit me.

That man in the car has a whole life, just like I do. He’s headed somewhere – maybe on his way home to his wife. Maybe he has cancer. Maybe he’s burdened with debt. What are his hopes and dreams and disappointments? There is an entire pulsating universe sitting in that car.

These millions of extras, who I thought were here just for scenery, are in fact playing the central role in their own cinematic universe.
I was stunned. I realized that I’m not the only main character in this film called life. These millions of extras, who I thought were here just for scenery, are in fact playing the central role in their own cinematic universe.

It’s a challenge to view others as real as you. It’s easy to strip them of their humanity and reduce them to annoying obstacles, pests, who stand in your way.

This lack of empathy – entering another person’s world and feeling their pain and joy as real as your own – can result in extreme violence. A man was recently arrested for punching an American Airline flight attendant in the face, putting her in the hospital, because she inadvertently bumped into him as she passed through the first-class cabin. Would he have broken her facial bones if the flight attendant was his daughter? I highly doubt it.

Why Validation Helps
In Hebrew the term for empathy is “nosei ol im chaveiro – helping to carry the burden of your friend.” Just recognizing and validating the experience someone is having helps to alleviate their pain. Their problem is still there, but knowing that they are not alone, that someone feels what they’re feeling, lightens their load and makes it a drop easier to carry.

You can see the power of empathy in a shiva home. Someone just lost a loved one and we pay a shiva call, we show up. We don’t say anything to the mourner unless they initiate conversation with you, because what is there to say? You can’t fix this; the person is never coming back. But just being there, validating their pain, helps the mourner carry their burden.

The lack of empathy allows us to sleep at night while we ignore victims of abuse, and their families, whose lives are reeling from trauma and in many cases destroyed.
The lack of empathy shields us from feeling another person’s pain, and that enables us to become cold and distant, even cruel. It’s what allows us to sleep at night while we ignore victims of abuse, and their families, whose lives are reeling from trauma and in many cases destroyed.

Choose to Care
We need to fight against our natural tendency to be selfish, and make the active choice to feel another person’s pain. In describing Moses ascension to greatness, the verse says, “Moses grew up and went to his brethren and saw their pain (Exodus, 2:11). At that moment Moses takes decisive action and kills the Egyptian who was pummeling a Hebrew slave. The plight of the Hebrew slaves, whom he regards as his people despite growing up in the palace of Pharaoh, pierces his heart, compelling Moses to act and take responsibility.

Rashi, the foremost Biblical commentary, comments on the verse “he saw their pain” that Moses “placed his eyes and heart in order to feel their pain.” What is Rashi adding? Isn’t that exactly what the verse says?

I believe Rashi is telling us the Moses made a proactive choice. He directed his eyes and heart to his people and didn’t turn away. It would have been so easy for him to just remain in his sheltered bubble and not care about anyone else but himself. It’s far more comfortable to ignore the cries of the downtrodden and not feel the weight of responsibility for the situation than doing something about it.

Leadership begins with getting out of yourself, seeing others as real as you and feeling their pain. Owning the situation motivates you to step up to the task and compels you to make the greatest difference you can.

Unchecked, we tend to be self-centered, lazy and mean-spirited. Empathy doesn’t come naturally. But it’s a critical choice we need to make, because empathy touches on the essence of what makes us human, and it allows us to see the humanity in others.
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Post  Admin Thu 06 Jan 2022, 7:40 pm

https://www.aish.com/sp/pg/Wheres-the-Empathy-On-Punching-a-Flight-Attendant-in-the-Face.html?src=ac-txt
Where’s the Empathy? On Punching a Flight Attendant in the Face
Jan 5, 2022
by Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmithprint article
Where’s the Empathy? On Punching a Flight Attendant in the Face
Unchecked, we tend to be self-centered, lazy and mean-spirited. Empathy doesn’t come naturally; it needs to be chosen.

I vividly remember the moment I realized that every person is a whole universe just as real as me. It may sound a bit odd – even pretentious – but it was a brief, mind-blowing experience for my 17-year-old self.

I was driving home from a friend at 2 in the morning and the streets of Toronto were deserted. I stopped at a red light, it was really cold and Tom Waits was casting his spell through the radio when another car pulled up beside me in the other lane. I looked over at the driver – an older man with grey hair who was looking straight ahead, and then it hit me.

That man in the car has a whole life, just like I do. He’s headed somewhere – maybe on his way home to his wife. Maybe he has cancer. Maybe he’s burdened with debt. What are his hopes and dreams and disappointments? There is an entire pulsating universe sitting in that car.

These millions of extras, who I thought were here just for scenery, are in fact playing the central role in their own cinematic universe.
I was stunned. I realized that I’m not the only main character in this film called life. These millions of extras, who I thought were here just for scenery, are in fact playing the central role in their own cinematic universe.

It’s a challenge to view others as real as you. It’s easy to strip them of their humanity and reduce them to annoying obstacles, pests, who stand in your way.

This lack of empathy – entering another person’s world and feeling their pain and joy as real as your own – can result in extreme violence. A man was recently arrested for punching an American Airline flight attendant in the face, putting her in the hospital, because she inadvertently bumped into him as she passed through the first-class cabin. Would he have broken her facial bones if the flight attendant was his daughter? I highly doubt it.

Why Validation Helps
In Hebrew the term for empathy is “nosei ol im chaveiro – helping to carry the burden of your friend.” Just recognizing and validating the experience someone is having helps to alleviate their pain. Their problem is still there, but knowing that they are not alone, that someone feels what they’re feeling, lightens their load and makes it a drop easier to carry.

You can see the power of empathy in a shiva home. Someone just lost a loved one and we pay a shiva call, we show up. We don’t say anything to the mourner unless they initiate conversation with you, because what is there to say? You can’t fix this; the person is never coming back. But just being there, validating their pain, helps the mourner carry their burden.

The lack of empathy allows us to sleep at night while we ignore victims of abuse, and their families, whose lives are reeling from trauma and in many cases destroyed.
The lack of empathy shields us from feeling another person’s pain, and that enables us to become cold and distant, even cruel. It’s what allows us to sleep at night while we ignore victims of abuse, and their families, whose lives are reeling from trauma and in many cases destroyed.

Choose to Care
We need to fight against our natural tendency to be selfish, and make the active choice to feel another person’s pain. In describing Moses ascension to greatness, the verse says, “Moses grew up and went to his brethren and saw their pain (Exodus, 2:11). At that moment Moses takes decisive action and kills the Egyptian who was pummeling a Hebrew slave. The plight of the Hebrew slaves, whom he regards as his people despite growing up in the palace of Pharaoh, pierces his heart, compelling Moses to act and take responsibility.

Rashi, the foremost Biblical commentary, comments on the verse “he saw their pain” that Moses “placed his eyes and heart in order to feel their pain.” What is Rashi adding? Isn’t that exactly what the verse says?

I believe Rashi is telling us the Moses made a proactive choice. He directed his eyes and heart to his people and didn’t turn away. It would have been so easy for him to just remain in his sheltered bubble and not care about anyone else but himself. It’s far more comfortable to ignore the cries of the downtrodden and not feel the weight of responsibility for the situation than doing something about it.

Leadership begins with getting out of yourself, seeing others as real as you and feeling their pain. Owning the situation motivates you to step up to the task and compels you to make the greatest difference you can.

Unchecked, we tend to be self-centered, lazy and mean-spirited. Empathy doesn’t come naturally. But it’s a critical choice we need to make, because empathy touches on the essence of what makes us human, and it allows us to see the humanity in others.
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Post  Admin Tue 04 Jan 2022, 5:01 pm

Elaine, get the real thing!

1 Kings 8:27 But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain You. How much less this temple which I have built!

Perhaps you’ve seen pictures or have even visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem, what many believe to be the last standing Wall of the Second Temple. But people come from all over the world to pray there and put their prayer notes into the cracks between its stones. Believe it or not, I’ve actually come across a few websites which advertise their desire to receive your faxed prayer requests -- and for a low, low fee of 29.99, will take and put them into the cracks of the wall for you!

This is a very nice gesture and all ---- but who needs it? God is ALIVE! He hears us whenever and wherever we call!

When Solomon set out to build the first temple, the Lord told Him that He cannot be contained in a manmade structure. He is infinite and all-encompassing! He’s not in a wall or any other man-made object! And amazingly, infinite as He is, He promises to draw near to us as we draw near to Him!

God wants to have a deep and intimate relationship with us. He wants us to experience the life-changing power of His healing and deliverance in our lives. In the words of Keith Green, “Going to church doesn’t make us a Christian any more than going to McDonald’s makes us a hamburger”!

Elaine, let’s not get distracted by the man-made ways people try to connect with God – let’s cry out for intimacy with Him right here and right now. And let’s also not forget to pray for revelation for all who seek Him – that they would see the truth of the Messiah, Yeshua HaMashiach (Jesus).

Your family in the Lord with much agape love,

George, Baht Rivka, Elianna & Obadiah
Phoenix, Arizona

Editor's Note: Our preferred social media platform is Telegram [ Follow us on Telegram ].
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