AISH

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/79487927.html?s=mm
The Christmas Tree
Dec 19, 2009  |  by Jonathan Rosenblumprint article
The Christmas Tree
A Jewish family comes home to discover their house festooned with holiday lights.

Rabbi Berel Wein was once invited to a meeting with the editor of the Detroit Free Press. After introductions had been made, the editor told him the following story.

His mother, Mary, had immigrated to America from Ireland as an uneducated, 18-year-old peasant girl. She was hired as a domestic maid by an observant family. The head of the house was the president of the neighboring Orthodox shul.

Mary knew nothing about Judaism and had probably never met a Jew before arriving in America. The family went on vacation Mary's first December in America, leaving Mary alone in the house. They were scheduled to return on the night of December 24, and Mary realized that there would be no Christmas tree to greet them when they did. This bothered her greatly, and using the money the family had left her, she went out and purchased not only a Christmas tree but all kinds of festive decorations to hang on the front of the house.

When the family returned from vacation, they saw the Christmas tree through the living room window and the rest of the house festooned with holiday lights. They assumed that they had somehow pulled into the wrong driveway and drove around the block. But alas, it was their address.

The head of the family entered the house contemplating how to explain the Christmas tree and lights to the members of the shul, most of whom walked right past his house on their way to shul. Meanwhile, Mary was eagerly anticipating the family's excitement when they realized that they would not be without a Christmas tree.

"In my whole life no one has ever done such a beautiful thing for me as you did."
After entering the house, the head of the family called Mary into his study. He told her, "In my whole life no one has ever done such a beautiful thing for me as you did." Then he took out a $100 bill -- a very large sum in the middle of the Depression -- and gave it to her. Only after that did he explain that Jews do not have Christmas trees.


 
When he had finished telling the story, the editor told Rabbi Wein, "And that is why, there has never been an editorial critical of Israel in the Detroit Free Press since I became editor, and never will be as long as I am the editor."

The shul president's reaction to Mary's mistake -- sympathy instead of anger -- was not because he dreamed that one day her son would the editor of a major metropolitan paper, and thus in a position to aid Israel. (Israel was not yet born.) He acted as he did because it was the right thing to do.

That's what it means to be a Kiddush Hashem, to sanctify God's Name. It is a goal to which we can all strive.

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Online-Anti-Semitism-is-Soaring.html?s=mm
Online Anti-Semitism is Soaring
Dec 20, 2020  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
Online Anti-Semitism is Soaring
Foreign trolls and other extremists are targeting Jews on social media.

Terrorists and foreign trolls are driving anti-Semitic hate online in the United States and elsewhere, posting negatively about Jews and driving hatred of Jews and Israel.

A new study analyzed 250 million extremist anti-Jewish posts and found that anti-Jewish posts increased sharply during times of political uncertainty and unrest. Much of the anti-Jewish hate that’s being posted on social media seems to originate with domestic terrorists and foreign “trolls” in Russia and elsewhere: anonymous and misleading actors who are deliberately trying to stoke hatred towards Jews and foment divisions within the United States.

Prof. Ari Lightman, an expert in online extremism at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, recently spoke with Aish.com about the anti-Semitism that extremists are bringing into American online message boards and conversations – and what we can do to stop it.

He cautioned that it’s often impossible to know the true origin of social media posts and memes. What’s clear from his research, however, is that a plethora of social media users from hate groups, terrorist organizations, and hostile state actors are deliberately concealing their identities and posting anti-Jewish comments and memes, disguised as “ordinary” social media users.

A plethora of social media users from hate groups, terrorist organizations, and hostile state actors are deliberately concealing their identities and posting anti-Jewish comments and memes.
“In my research, a number of Russian fronts are covering for the old school KGB,” continuing that notorious spy agency's attempts to harm and destabilize Russia’s historically enemies – including the United States. “In order to create a positive image of Russia, they promote anti-American feelings to cause unrest.” The fact that the United States is a strong ally of Israel, and that Americans hold broadly pro-Israel feelings, means that attacking Israel – and by extension Jews – can be seen by America’s enemies as a mode of attack on America itself.


 
According to Dr. Lightman, it’s not only state-sponsored actors who are attacking Jews and Israel on American social media. “There are a lot of large monetary interests in Russia,” he explains. “There are oligarchs who have oil, shipping, arms contracts…. By stoking anti-Israel sentiment, there’s a possibility that it helps them sell more arms, more oil, more shipping to Middle Eastern countries… You can see how disinformation can benefit Russian political interests and monetary interests within Russia.”

The recent report, by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at Rutgers University in New Jersey, found that anti-Jewish and anti-Israel posts draw on age-old canards that Jews have too much power and money and are somehow able to bend others towards their wills. Jews are portrayed as uniquely evil and even as having almost superhuman powers which they use to harm others.

Instead of attacking Jews in general, the Institute found that classic anti-Semitic stereotypes are applied to prominent Jews, then spread as conspiracy theories about those individual Jews – with the tacit understanding that these vial smears lower people’s opinions about all Jews in general. Two popular targets are the Rothschild banking family and the financier George Soros, who is a prominent donor to liberal causes. The NCRI found a clear correlation between the online hate that’s directed towards these prominent Jews and real-world attacks against Jews and Jewish interests.

Take George Soros. The Institute found that most attacks against Soros accuse him of being a globalist. He’s routinely accused of subverting “domestic sovereignty (and giving it) over to an international order while (it’s) being undermined internally by immigration and internationalism.” On a typical day, the NCRI found between 2,000 and 3,000 posts attacking George Soros on the sites it monitors. Many of these are posted in coordinated ways by foreign internet trolls and by domestic American extremists and hate figures.

Yet in the days leading up to the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018, the number of anti-George Soros posts rose dramatically to 14,000 a day. While it’s hard to prove that this was linked to the shooting, much of the rhetoric found online about George Soros seemed to echo the social media posts of the shooter, Robert Bowers.

Bowers explained his actions by saying that he blamed Jews for bringing immigrants into the United States. A few hours before he entered the synagogue and murdered eleven Jewish worshippers, he posted on the social network Gab about the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which helps aid (legal) immigrants in the United States: “hias (sic) likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw our optics, I’m going in.” It was an echo of the anti-Semitic smears against George Soros that were filling the internet, and an uncanny example of online hate stoking real-life murder.

Some of the examples of online Jewish hate bear the hallmarks of sophisticated campaigns meant to demonize Jews and Israel.

Some of the examples of online Jewish hate bear the hallmarks of sophisticated campaigns meant to demonize Jews and Israel.
In 2020, people searching Google for the phrase “Jewish baby strollers” found sickening images of ovens on wheels. The NCRI was able to track down a series of messages on the popular extremist message board 4chan in which users boasted that they’d succeeded in manipulating Google’s search algorithms to post the images. While it’s impossible to discern the true identities of the people behind this and other malicious anti-Jewish posts, the NCRI found that both Russian trolls and American extremists sometimes coordinate their posts, sharing content and posting anti-Jewish memes and comments at the same time.

Who is behind this massive rise in anti-Semitic posts? Prof. Lightman cautions that there are many actors, and that they carefully conceal their identities when posting negative comments about Jews. Social media posts, cartoons, graphs and charts, memes and other content that we might assume was posted in good faith by ordinary people was often deliberately created in order to frighten us, inflame our passions, and stoke hate.

It’s “the usual suspects,” who are fomenting anti-Jewish hatred online, Prof. Lightman notes. “The KKK, any of the white supremacist groups, the Proud Boys… Also folks who you might not believe are directly in league with these white supremacist organizations.” These might be anti-Immigrant groups or anti-Israel interests, or even racial justice campaigners who oppose Israeli occupation of Judea and Samaria, the regions known as the West Bank of the Jordan River. These extremists “don’t really care about the collateral damage to an entire ethnic group” that hateful posts might engender, Prof. Lightman explains.

Prof. Lightman warns that online hate speech is increasing at an accelerating rate. “Misinformation is being designed to be subjective and misconstrued: it’s designed to deceive the public.” Alarmingly, extremist social media posts are proliferating even in mainstream social media sites – and our own behavior is making us vulnerable to being deceived.

One problem is the emergence of what academics studying online extremism call echo chambers: these are structural ways that social media sites allow us to keep out other people who might have different views from our own. “If we become friends on Facebook,” Prof. Lightman explains, “and we share a lot of beliefs, we might exclude others (from our online friend group). This reinforces each other’s beliefs to the exclusion of others.” Surrounding ourselves only with opinions that agree with ours online makes us uniquely vulnerable to believing ever more extreme variations of our existing political tenets.

Another problem emerging in social media is the existence of “filter bubbles” that are built into social media sites. Based on our behavior online – what we watch, comment on, click on or “like” – social media sites’ algorithms will feed us similar content. In time, this content can become ever more extreme.

In May 2020 the Wall Street Journal uncovered an internal study that Facebook commissioned – then buried – that showed the site’s algorithms was indeed feeding users ever more extreme content, effectively radicalizing them.

The NCRI report found a worrying increase of extremist anti-Jewish posts on ostensibly mainstream online sites. While extremist posts might originate and proliferate on marginal social media sites that are known for fostering hateful dialogue, these posts and the ideas behind them can migrate for more mainstream discourse online. Newly popular sites like TikTok and Parler have seen particularly high levels of anti-Semitic posts, Prof. Lightman notes.

Periods of civic unrest and transitions of power render people vulnerable to succumbing to online hate.
A key condition for that to happen is stress. Periods of civic unrest and transitions of power render people vulnerable to succumbing to online hate. The NCRI found that “anti-Jewish disinformation by conspiracy groups...peaked on Twitter at the onset of the Floyd social justice protests in May 2020, and remains higher now than it was before the coronavirus pandemic.” One day during the George Floyd protests, the NCRI documented 500,000 Tweets concerning George Soros in one day.

As we all endure the uncertainty of the pandemic, political unrest, and changes in political leadership, the conditions for higher levels of anti-Jewish hatred remain ripe. “We’re all targets for misinformation,” explains Prof. Lightman, “especially when we’re under duress – and we’ve all been under duress for ten months.” He calls misinformation the second pandemic that we’re all currently living through, and being grievously harmed by.

In the face of such coordinated anti-Jewish attacks – and the conditions that help people be more open to believe them – what can we as individuals do to stop online hatred for Jews and Israel and for other marginalized groups?

“We have to be incredibly skeptical and diligent in association with the information we get,” Prof. Lightman cautions. Keep in mind that seemingly authentic sources of information might be completely fabricated. Studies can be biased, graphs that we see online might be wrong, and posts that seem as if they originated with a real-world person might have been written by a terrorist, or by a neo-Nazi, or by a person who’s being paid by a foreign government to impersonate Americans and write hateful posts. “Think like a journalist,” Prof. Lightman urges. Don’t be quick to believe what you read online.

Elderly people and teenagers are particularly vulnerable to misinformation, he notes, and are often targeted on social media. “We have to be skeptical of all the information we consume online." This is a lesson that’s crucial to teach to our kids, who often engage in social media sites where misinformation and hateful posts are rife.

It’s an uphill battle. Most of us are consumers of social media and are exposed to the misinformation and anti-Semitism that fills our screens. We each have an obligation to do what we can to educate ourselves, to speak out when we see incorrect or hateful posts, and to limit our own social media consumption.

In a world with so much hatred and division, perhaps turning away from our computers and phones and making an effort to engage with people in the real world instead is a good place to start.

https://www.aish.com/f/m/The-Marriage-Vaccine-Stop-Criticizing.html?s=mm
The Marriage Vaccine: Stop Criticizing
Dec 5, 2020  |  by Sara Yoheved Riglerprint article
The Marriage Vaccine: Stop Criticizing
Proven 84.6% effective in reducing marital ailments.

Is there one thing a married person can do to prevent most of the ills of marriage? Is there a single practice that will eliminate the fever/chill cycles that plague most marriages?

Indeed, there is. However, “one shot” is not enough. Even two or three injections won't suffice. This is a practice that must be undertaken daily, perhaps several times a day. But its effectiveness has been proven, and the results are impressive beyond expectation.

What is this practice? Stop criticizing!

Criticism destroys more marriages than infidelity. It whittles away at the bond between husband and wife, feeds the negativity of the criticizer, and undermines the self-esteem of the criticized.

Studies have shown that the human brain is hard-wired to negativity. Psychologists call this, “the negativity bias,” the congenital tendency to notice and remember the negative more than the positive. It’s why a wife will remember the times her husband forgot her birthday more than the times he actually gave her a card or gift. It’s why a husband will focus on his wife’s one extravagant expenditure in a credit card bill filled with her necessary, no-fun purchases of food and supplies for the family.

After just two weeks of their refraining from criticism their marriage improved dramatically.
Noticing the negative is our default starting point, but personal and spiritual growth requires that we move toward focusing instead on the positive, towards what’s good in every situation and person. The half-empty glass always leaves the one who drinks it thirsty, dissatisfied, and unhappy.

Participants of my spiritually-based marriage program for women that I've been teaching for over a decade report to me that their marriage improved dramatically after just two weeks of their refraining from criticism. (Of course, there are some marital problems that do not respond to this vaccine; that’s why it’s only 84.6% effective.)

Spouses criticize because they see their husband or wife doing something wrong, and they want to stop the egregious behavior. Never are intelligent people more prone to folly than when they criticize in an effort to improve their spouse, because no one ever improves from criticism. Husbands still leave their socks on the floor after decades of nagging. Wives still spend too much time talking on the phone despite their husbands’ repeatedly pointing out what they should be doing instead.

Repeated criticism proves the adage, “Insanity is doing something over again and thinking you’ll have a different result.” In my marriage webinar, wives complain, “For thirty years I’ve been telling my diabetic husband what he shouldn’t eat.” For thirty years you’ve been telling him? And you expect a different result this time? Insanity!

Worse than Futile
Criticism is worse than merely being ineffective to change your partner. Criticism creates a toxic atmosphere in the home. No one likes to be criticized. Criticism estranges the criticized party, who is likely to retreat emotionally or even physically, finding manifold excuses not to come home. Criticism also harms the criticizer, who gets caught in a vicious cycle of focusing on the negative, of finding endless reasons to be unhappy and angry. Criticism erodes the marriage bond as surely as acid dripping on a rope weakens its fibers.

Criticism never helps and always hurts.
One of Judaism’s most sublime concepts is that the Shechina, the presence of God, rests on the Jewish home when Shalom Bayit [marital harmony] prevails. Marital friction drives the Shechina away. Criticism is a violation of the Torah’s prohibition of onaas devorim, speaking words that hurt another person. You may rationalize that you are criticizing your spouse in order to help him/her, yet criticism has never caused anyone to improve any more than a blowtorch has ever caused a rosebush to bloom.

How to Stop Criticizing
So how do you stop criticizing? Simply stop criticizing. Go on a “criticism fast.” Every time you are about to criticize your spouse, stop and say to yourself, “Criticism never helps and always hurts.”

The Mussar masters advise using a chart to change ingrained behavior patterns. Make yourself a chart with a box for each day. Every time you are tempted to criticize your spouse and you stop yourself, give yourself a check on the chart. When you get 10 checks, buy yourself a small reward that you'll enjoy. When you get 25 checks, buy yourself a big reward. A full-body massage will keep you on your criticism fast for at least a couple of weeks.

When you fail and blurt out a criticism, don't give yourself an “X.” Just pick yourself up and keep on going. As a wise person said: “A successful life is when you get up one more time than you fall.”

Here is a true (pre-Covid-19) story from one of the members of my Kesher Wife Webinar:

I am married for two years, and my husband and I are very careful not to go out at night without each other too often. This past Saturday night, one of my husband's best friends decided to plan a night out to Atlantic City with all the "guys" to celebrate his bachelor party. I was so upset when I heard about this. I said to myself that Atlantic City, the mecca of gambling, drinking, risqué shows, and single women on the prowl, is not a place for a married man without his wife. What made me more upset was that my husband was going to be out all night and come home in the morning. The following day was our anniversary, and I knew he’d be too exhausted to celebrate it properly. I was furious.

My husband was SO excited. I felt utterly disrespected that my husband thought that it is appropriate to be out all night and especially in Atlantic City. When Saturday night came, I was very grumpy but I did not criticize him because I am observing a criticism fast for one month.

When I woke up on Sunday morning around 6:30 AM, my husband still wasn't home. I began to cry. I was so emotionally overwhelmed. My husband came home half an hour later. I wasn't ready to greet him pleasantly without criticism, so I pretended to be asleep. He fell asleep until 11 AM. When he woke up, I was puttering in the kitchen. I resolved to hold tight to my criticism fast, because I knew this argument could get very ugly and ruin our anniversary.

When my husband came into the kitchen, I resolved not to let any criticisms escape my mouth. I smiled at him and asked him if he had fun. I listened to the entire story of his night before I expressed to him how I felt, in the nicest way possible, without criticizing him. I said, "I missed you last night. I felt very lonely sleeping in this big bed by myself, and I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of one of us being out all night." He right away apologized, and told me how he perfectly understood and would be more considerate next time.

After that, we spent the entire day together. We went for a walk in the park and then drove into the city for a romantic dinner at a fancy restaurant. It was actually the best day we have ever had together since we got married! I felt so close to my husband, and I felt so proud of myself.

On the way home, my husband thanked me for "letting" him enjoy his night with his friends, saying that he had a lot of fun but had been looking forward to coming home all night, just to be with me. I know how miserable our anniversary would have been had I criticized my husband. The rewards of refraining from criticism are priceless.

PS: Did I mention that my husband gambled and won money and insisted that I spend it on getting new clothes for myself? YES, the rewards are that good.

Covid-19 restrictions mean that many couples are spending more time than ever confined at home together. Whether that turns out to be a blessing or a curse depends on whether or not you choose to focus on the negative and voice it. In this particular test, being “positive” is the best outcome.

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Is-the-Vatican-Hiding-the-Menorah.html?s=mm
Is the Vatican Hiding the Menorah?
Dec 12, 2020  |  by Unpacked
What happened to the menorah, the iconic Jewish symbol that once stood in the First and Second Temples?

The question that has caused speculation for generations. One of the most popular theories claims the menorah is buried deep within the Vatican. Is there any truth to this enduring rumor or is there another explanation for why the menorah vanished from history?

https://www.aish.com/ci/w/Lilith-The-Real-Story.html?s=mm
Lilith: The Real Story
Dec 12, 2020  |  by Rabbi Menachem Levineprint article
Lilith: The Real Story
Why it's a mistake to make Lilith an icon of Jewish feminism.

“Tis Lilith.
Who?
Adam's first wife is she.
Beware the lure within her lovely tresses,
The splendid sole adornment of her hair;
When she succeeds therewith a youth to snare,
Not soon again she frees him from her jesses”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in his 1808 play Faust: The First Part of the Tragedy

Goethe was one of the early major writers to popularize Lilith. Since the 19th Century, Lilith has become popular across the Western world. She is portrayed in books, movies, television shows, video games, Japanese animes, comics, and music.

The modern feminist movement found inspiration in the vision of Lilith as a powerful female in Jewish folklore, visualizing her as a woman worthy of emulating. In 1972, Israeli American journalist and writer, Lilly Rivlin published an article on Lilith for the feminist magazine Ms., with the aim of redeeming her for contemporary women. The Jewish feminist magazine Lilith, founded in the fall of 1976, took her name as their own, because the editors were galvanized by their interpretation of Lilith’s struggle for equality with Adam.

Since then, interest in Lilith has grown among Jewish and non-Jewish feminists, as well as by listeners to contemporary music by women, as highlighted in the Lilith Fair. As Lilly Rivlin writes in her afterword to the book Whose Lilith? (1998), “In the late twentieth century, self-sufficient women, inspired by the women’s movement, have adopted the Lilith myth as their own. They have transformed her into a female symbol for autonomy, sexual choice, and control of one’s own destiny.”

If you’re looking, Lilith seems to be everywhere in popular culture, and perhaps you would assume she has a leading role in the Bible. Yet Lilith is in fact rarely mentioned in classic Jewish texts.

A Dubious Source
The most quoted book in contemporary sources about Lilith is also the least reliable.i A medieval book called The Alphabet of Ben Sira (not to be confused with the 2nd century BCE apocryphal book The Wisdom of Ben Sira) claims that God created Adam and Lilith at the same time from the dust of the earth. According to this book, Lilith refused to subordinate herself to Adam in their intimate relationship, and she ran away from him using the Ineffable Name. Angels tried to force her to return, and she fought back and refused to go to Adam. The story continues that God then made Adam a second wife, Eve, who was content to stay with Adam.

Lilith is mentioned at least four times in the Babylonian Talmud. In none of these cases is she referred to as Adam’s wife.
However, the book The Alphabet of Ben Sira is in fact not an authoritative source in Jewish literature at all. Perhaps because it bears in its title the familiar name of Ben-Sira some believe it to have authority, but even a cursory reading of the book by one familiar with Jewish texts will demonstrate that this is not a Jewish classic. On the contrary, it is a work filled with demeaning and lewd variations on Biblical accounts and satirical portrayals of Biblical characters. The book is not and never was part of mainstream Jewish literature.ii

Textual References to Lilith in Jewish Sources

The only actual scriptural reference to Lilith is in Isaiah 34:14. It refers to Lilith as being among the beasts of prey and spirits that will lay waste to the land on the day of vengeance. It makes no reference to Adam.

Lilith is mentioned at least four times in the Babylonian Talmud. In none of these cases is she referred to as Adam’s wife. The Talmudic passages discuss Lilith in terms of warning that a man should not sleep alone in a house lest Lilith fall upon him in his sleep, that she could influence the outcome of a pregnancy and describing how Lilith can appear.

The text in which there are many references to Lilith is in the Zohar. In examining some of the references, we can gain a further understanding of what and who Lilith is and is not.

In Medrash Haneelam, a section of Zohar it says:

Rav Yitzchok said in the name of Rav: Adam was created together with his mate, as it says, “Male and female He created them” (Gen. 5:2), and God separated her from him and brought her to Him, as it says, “And He took one of his sides (ribs)”.
Rav Yehoshua said: There was an Eve before this that was taken away because she was a harmful spirit, and another was given in her place.
Said Rava: The second one was physical, the first was not, but was rather made from filth and impure sediment.

The Zohar is clear that this being that preceded Eve was not a person but rather a spirit, a harmful spirit that was impure.

Another passage in the Zohar, on Vayikra 19a, is even more explicit on Lilith’s creation and her connection to Adam:

Come and see: There is a female, a spirit of all spirits, and her name is Lilith, and she was at first with Adam. And in the hour when Adam was created and his body became completed, a thousand spirits from the left [evil] side clung to that body until the Holy One, blessed be He, shouted at them and drove them away. And Adam was lying, a body without a spirit, and his appearance was green, and all those spirits surrounded him. In that hour a cloud descended and pushed away all those spirits. And when Adam stood up, his female was attached to his side. And that holy spirit which was in him spread out to this side and that side, and grew here and there, and thus became complete. Thereafter the Holy One, blessed be He, sawed Adam into two, and made the female. And He brought her to Adam in her perfection like a bride to the canopy. When Lilith saw this, she fled.

The Zohar here states, based on the verses in Genesis, that Adam was created as male and female joined at the side/rib, the female side to be known as Eve. Lilith was a spirit that was with Adam before he and Eve were separated. Once the two halves of Adam and Eve were separate and subsequently married, Lilith fled. In this passage as well, it is clear that Lilith is a negative spirit and not an actual physical person.

The great Kabbalist, the Arizal (Rabbi Isaac Luria, 1534-1572) writes that Samael is in charge of all the “male” demons, called Mazikim, while his “wife” Lilith is in charge of all the “female” demons, called Shedim (Sha’ar HaPesukim on Psalms). He further associates Lilith with the sword of the Angel of Death. The Arizal understood Lilith as a spirit of lust, that is still around and dangerous.

As the female partner of Satan, the Zohar identifies Lilith as “the ruination of the world,” for her role is to bring immorality into the minds and actions of humans.
Based on the Arizal’s understanding, the two above passages in the Zohar can be understood. In the first passage, it describes Adam as having a “harmful spirit” that was removed when Eve was created. The “harmful spirit” of lust was removed when he was married and able to direct his sexuality in a holy and proper manner through connection to his wife. In the latter passage, the understanding is the same. Lilith, representing lust and sexual desire that is directed negatively, “fled” when Adam was joined in marriage to his bride, Eve.

The End of Lililth
The Zohar (ibid) quotes the verse in Isaiah 34:14 that speaks of Lilith. and expounds that when Messiah comes, Lilith will finally be expelled forever:

When the Holy One, blessed be He, will bring about the destruction of the wicked Rome, and turn it into a ruin for all eternity, He will send Lilith there, and let her dwell in that ruin, for she is the ruination of the world. And to this refers the verse, and there shall lie down Lilith and find her a place of rest (Isaiah 34:14).

Based on the Arizal’s explanation of Lilith as the female partner of Satan, we can understand that the Zohar identifies her as “the ruination of the world,” for her role is to bring immorality into the minds and actions of humans. For this reason, when the Messiah comes and the world will reach its perfect state, Lilith, as well as Satan, will be completely obliterated.

With an understanding of Lilith based on authentic classic sources, it should be obvious how distasteful it is to make Lilith an icon of Jewish feminism. After all, what would you think of a man who chooses Satan as his role model?

There are those who assume that the story found in Alphabet of Ben Sira is based on the concept of the “First Eve” found in two places in Genesis Rabbah, a collection of midrashim about the book of Genesis.

According to Rabbi Chiya, this First Eve "returned to dust" (Genesis Raba 22:7, Zohar 34b), and God proceeded to create a second Eve for Adam (Genesis Raba 18.4). The Commentators note that these Midrashim (like many other Midrashim) might not be literally true but rather serve to teach Kabbalistic ideas. Either way, nowhere does the Midrash talk about Lililth or anything like the story of the Alphabet of Ben Sira

Some argue that the work was merely as an impious digest of risqué folktales or an anti-rabbinic satire. Other authorities have suggested that it was a polemical broadside aimed at Karaites, or some other dissident movement.

https://www.aish.com/ho/p/Resisting-the-Nazis-Unknown-Stories.html?s=mm
Resisting the Nazis: Unknown Stories
Dec 5, 2020  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
Resisting the Nazis: Unknown Stories
A London exhibit highlights little known stories of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

A major new exhibit in London is shedding light on Jewish resistance to Nazi tyranny, exposing some stories of ordinary people’s acts of resistance for the first time. “Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust” is being displayed at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London through January 2021. “We want people to understand the scale and variety and range of Jewish resistance across Europe during the Holocaust," explained Dr. Barbara Warnock, Senior Curator at the Library, in a recent Aish.com interview. “Some of the individual stories are so incredible.”

The exhibit, which Dr. Warnock and her team painstakingly put together while working from home during Britain’s total lockdowns in the spring, draws on eyewitness accounts collected by the library in the months and years following the Holocaust. Here are four Jews highlighted in the exhibit.

Have Groisman – Saving Children in Belgium
One incredibly brave Jewish woman highlighted in the exhibit is Have Groisman. Born in Bessarabia, in present day Moldova, in 1910, Have came to Belgium for college and stayed, became a social worker, and married fellow Bessarabian Jew Hertz Jospa in 1933. Together, Have and Hertz helped support the anti-Fascist fighters in the Spanish Civil War, housing refugee children and shielding international anti-Fascist fighters from the authorities.

Hertz and Have Jospa
When Nazi Germany invaded Belgium in 1940, Have and Hertz joined the Belgian underground resistance; Have was given the nom de guerre Yvonne. She helped found the top secret Comite de Defense des Juifs, or Committee for Jewish Defense, dedicated to hiding Jewish children in convents, orphanages, and with sympathetic Belgian families. Have manufactured counterfeit food ration books and identity papers for Jewish children and adults, and kept detailed records of the exact location of each and every Jewish child, so that one day their families might be able to reclaim them – even if the children no longer remembered their biological parents and Jewish relatives.
 
Have described the vastness of her project to the Wiener Library: “Each child was provided with a false name,” she recalled. “It was vital that we should be able to identify actually each child hiding under a borrowed name, for certain very young children knew only their alias. Equally, our service needed to know exactly where the children were lodged. In order to meet these important requirements, I set up an office with coded documents bringing together all the necessary information…I thought that whilst we the physical safety of the children was our prime concern, we should also as far as possible ensure their peace of mind and mental stability, and meet their need for affection by maintaining contacts with their parents…"

Danger was a constant companion; the Committee’s hiding places were often raided, and the underground Committee members faced certain arrest if they were ever found out. In 1943, Hertz was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. For two long years, Have believed he’d been murdered; he miraculously survived and was liberated in 1945.

A photo taken at the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Hertz Jospa is in the top row in the center. (Courtesy of the Jospa family)
Have is credited with saving 2,400 children. She continued to lead former resistance members until her death in 2000. Documents she and her husband wrote describing their wartime activities are held by the Wiener Library and tell her remarkable story in her own words.

Tosia Altman – Organizing Secret Jewish Resistance in Poland’s Ghettos
Born into a Zionist Jewish family in Poland in 1918, Tosia Altman joined the Hashomer Hatzair (“The Young Guard”) Zionist youth movement as a teen. In 1935 she began to prepare to make aliyah, moving to the Land of Israel. Tosia was enthusiastic and popular, and in 1938 the youth group asked her to delay her plans to move to Israel and travel to Warsaw instead, where she’d be in charge of youth education. The assignment ultimately cost Tosia her life – she became one of Poland’s greatest Jewish leaders, continually risking her life to help her fellow Jews.

Tosia was blond and fluent in Polish; at first, her “Aryan” appearance allowed her to move among Jewish communities. Hashomer Hatzair asked her to smuggle information, papers and weapons, and to organize armed resistance groups. From 1939 to 1940, Tosia and other Hashomer Hatzair members travelled around Poland and Lithuania strengthening Jewish morale and resistance. In 1940, the Nazis began moving Polish Jews to heavily fortified ghettos.

Tosia Altman (Courtesy Moreshet Archive)
Defying nearly impossible odds, Tosia managed to smuggle herself into and out of several ghettos, bringing weapons and plans to help foment Jewish resistance. She was part of the planning committee organizing a revolt in the Vilna Ghetto, and subsequently spread that message of armed resistance to the Jewish ghettos in Grodno and Warsaw in Poland.

In 1943, Tosia aided Hashomer Hatzair and other Zionist groups in organizing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, a major act of resistance in which Jews fought the Nazis for nearly a month in April and May 1943. Tosia made secret contacts with non-Jewish Communist resistance groups outside the ghetto, and managed to smuggle precious grenades into the ghetto. She fought in the uprising and had made it out of the ghetto alive, when a fire broke out in the factory attic she was using as a hiding place. Tosia jumped out of the burning building and she was arrested by Polish police, who promptly turned her over to the Nazis. Tosia died of the injuries she sustained in the fire, as was likely tortured at the hands of the Nazis, on May 26, 1943.

In her final letter to her comrades in Israel, Tosia recalled the enormity of the tragedy that was befalling the Jewish people: “Jews are dying before my eyes and I am powerless to help. Did you ever try to shatter a wall with your head?”

The Baum Group – Resisting Nazis in Berlin
When the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933 Herbert and Marianne Baum, a young Jewish couple living in Berlin, began organizing secret meetings to strategize how to oppose the new regime and counter its propaganda. Soon, scores of young Jews were attending the gatherings, and the group started calling itself the Baum Gruppe – the Baum Group. They wrote, printed and distributed anti-fascist literature.

Herbert Baum c. 1935. Baum was probably murdered by the Nazis in prison in 1942.(Weiner Holocaust Library Collection)
When World War II broke out, they continued and tried to organize resistance among Berlin’s Jews. In 1940, Herbert Baum was arrested and forced to work for the Berlin-based engineering company Siemens as a slave laborer. Even there, under the most dire circumstances, he organized a group of Jews who resisted Nazism and facilitated some workers’ escape so they could join the Berlin resistance.

In 1942, Baum Gruppe members set fire to a Nazi art exhibit in Berlin. In retaliation, the Nazis went on a major manhunt, uncovering the identities of the group and arresting them, as well as hundreds of other Berlin Jews. Some were executed immediately, and the others were sent to concentration camps and killed later on. Herbert Baum was tortured to death.

“With the Baum Gruppe, we have some accounts that haven’t been shown before,” explains Dr. Warnock. “There weren’t that many survivors of the group," she notes. One member did manage to escape. She was very ill when she was arrested and the Nazis transferred her to a hospital from which she managed to escape. Later, she was able to give eyewitness testimony to Wiener Library researchers.

“At that time (1942) it was especially difficult for Jewish anti-fascists to live clandestinely,” the survivor described. “The Gestapo was gradually able to arrest the whole group. There were three trials in which 22 death sentences by hanging were delivered. These executions took place and the other members of the group who had been arrested were murdered in various concentration camps. Not one of the victims in the Baum group lived to see thirty. The youngest among them were not even eighteen years old.”

Philipp Manes – Resisting Despair Through Culture in Theresienstadt
The Wiener Library is home to the extraordinary diary of Philipp Manes (1875-1944), a Jewish writer and businessman who resisted the Nazis, not through taking up arms but by buoying the spirits of imprisoned Jews and asserting the ability of Jewish prisoners to think freely and creatively.

In 1942, Philipp and his wife Gertrude were arrested in Germany and sent to the notorious “model” concentration camp Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia.  In Theresienstadt, Jews were given slightly more freedom and better treatment than in other concentration camps: Theresienstadt was run as a “model” concentration camp and used for Nazi propaganda to show the world and international visitors that the Nazis were supposedly treating Jews well.  

Portrait of Philipp Manes drawn by fellow prisoner Arthur Goldschmidt in 1944. (Courtesy Wiener Holocaust Library Collection)
At Theresienstadt and in other camps, Jews resisted Nazi degradations in myriad ways: artistically, culturally, and spiritually.  By maintaining an intense private life, Jews were able to continue Jewish life, despite their dismal surroundings. Many Jews continued to pray and even hold religious services in secret.  Jews continued to create music and art and to hold on to their Jewish identity even under the noses of the Nazi guards.

When Philipp Manes found himself in Theresienstadt, he asserted his resistance to Nazism, rebelling where he could. He ran the concentration camp’s “Orientation Service,” which helped new Jewish prisoners settle into the camp. Soon, Manes began organizing regular cultural events. He invited well known prisoners to deliver lectures, organized concerts, and arranged dramatic readings. In all, he organized over 500 of these cultural events which allowed prisoners to feel free, if only for a moment, as they were distracted from their horrific reality, escaping into art and culture. The prisoners who attended these events called themselves the “Manes Group.”

Philipp Manes kept copious diaries that eventually filled nine journals. In addition to recording his own thoughts and experiences, he included interviews with other prisoners. He also recorded factual testimony of regular deportations from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz. His final entry stops mid-sentence: on October 28, 1944, Philipp and Gertrude Manes were sent on one of the last transports from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, where they were murdered upon arrival. His diaries survived him and were eventually sent to his daughter Eva, who donated them to the Wiener Library, which is now displaying these precious works in its exhibit.

Understanding Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust
For Dr. Barbara Warnock, “Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust” is crucial to our understanding of the Holocaust, and the myriad ways Jews resisted. “We want people to understand the scale and variety of Jewish resistance across Europe,” Dr. Warnock explains, noting that people don’t always think of Jews when they envision resistance during World War II. Despite popular misconceptions, Jews were at the vanguard of resisting Nazi tyranny.  Jews resisted in any way they could: some fought Nazis physically in pitched battles, while others resisted spiritually, insisting on reciting Jewish prayers in secret when they could.  

“What struck me in researching the exhibition is the sheer range and quality (of the Library’s holdings), and diversity of Jewish resistance across the continent. There are so many stories,” Dr. Warnock observes.

“Jewish Resistance to the Holocaust” is currently scheduled to run at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London through January 2021. For more information, and to see some of the Library’s extensive holdings online, visit https://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/.

https://www.aish.com/h/c/mm/Why-Only-Hanukkah-Is-Celebrated-as-a-Family.html?s=mm
Why Only Hanukkah Is Celebrated as a Family
Dec 10, 2020  |  by Eitiel Goldwicht
Judaism places the value of a happy marriage more than military victory, children more than soldiers, and the home more than the battlefield.

https://www.aish.com/h/c/mm/Why-Only-Hanukkah-Is-Celebrated-as-a-Family.html?s=mm
Click here if you are unable to view this video.
I have this sweet childhood memory from Hanukkah that I take with me until today. My father would light the candles and then the entire family would sing the Hanukkah songs together. And then we'd sit on the carpet, all cozy, around my mother and father, and play family games in the glow of the menorah. It was pure moment of fun and laughter, not running anywhere, just enjoying the moment together as a family.

There is something special about Hanukkah, it’s the only holiday we perform as a family. Matzah we eat individually, shofar we blow as a community, but the Hanukkah candles are lit as a family. Why is that?

Perhaps the answer lies in a fascinating law about the Hanukkah candles. If one has only one candle as the Shabbat of Hanukkah is about to begin – he should use it for the shabbat candles and not for the menorah. Shabbat takes precedent.

You see, Hanukkah commemorates one of the greatest military victories in Jewish history, but the Greeks didn’t just try to defeat us, they tried to break us. They knew that the secret of Jewish continuity lies in the Jewish home. That's why they tried to destroy the Jewish home with their decrees, but the Maccabees didn’t give up.

The Shabbat candles symbolize peace at home. This is why the Shabbat lights take precedence, and why uniquely Hanukkah is celebrated as a family, because peace and connection in our Jewish homes is THE secret of Jewish survival and is the mission of the Jewish people as Maimonides put it – “the entire Torah was given in order to make peace in the world.”

This is part of the reason why Judaism alone survived the ancient world – because Judaism places the value of a happy marriage more than military victory, children more than soldiers, and the home more than the battlefield.

As you light the Hanukkah candles, stop for a moment to appreciate and celebrate your Jewish family. Allow the light of peace and harmony, of children and family into your home, because the future of the Jewish people depends on it.

https://www.aish.com/h/c/mm/Flames-of-Hope-The-Power-of-Hanukkah.html?s=mm
Flames of Hope: The Power of Hanukkah
Dec 6, 2020  |  by Rabbi Yaakov Cohen
The menorah represents the faith and hope of the Jewish people that cannot be extinguished.
Click here if you are unable to view this video.
It was the first night of Hanukkah in the Janowska concentration camp and Rabbi Yisrael Spira was desperate to light the Hanukkah candles for the 500 people in his barracks. He managed to quickly collect strands of uniform fabric to be used as wicks as well as shoe polish to be used as oil.

That night, Rabbi Spira gathered everyone together from his barracks. He lit the menorah and made the first blessing on the kindling of the Hanukkah lights, followed by the second blessing of, “She’asah Nissim l’avoseinu bayamim hahem bazman hazeh” – that God made a great miracle for our ancestors in those days and at this time. Rabbi Spiro paused for a moment and then proceeded to make the 3rd and final blessing, “She’hechiyanu v’kiyimanu vihigiyanu lazman hazeh” – that God has kept us alive, has sustained us and brought us to this time. The entire group sang Maoz Tsur together with tears streaming down their cheeks.

After the singing, a young man came up to Rabbi Spiro and said, “Rabbi, something is bothering me. I understand that you could make the blessing over the Hanukkah lights and on the miracles that God performed for our ancestors. But how could you recite the blessing of ‘Shehechiyanu’ with such passion as you utter the words, “God has kept us alive and has sustained us”? Look at us! Look at where we are. This is how he has sustained us?” Rabbi Spiro turned to him and replied, “I asked myself this very same question, which is why I paused before reciting that blessing. But as I looked up, I saw that the eyes of every person in this barrack were filled with hope and faith as they stared at the flickering candle. And I thought to myself, if during such times of darkness, these people could be filled with hope, then I can confidently say She’hechiyanu – that we are grateful to be living. Because it is precisely our faith and hope that has kept us alive throughout our nation's journey.

We are approaching the Holiday of Hanukkah. When we think of the Hanukkah story, we remember the two miraculous events that took place. First, the military victory of the Maccabees over the Syrian Greeks and then the miracle of the oil that should have lasted one day but instead burned for eight.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, once pointed out that what many of us don’t realize is that the Hanukkah story continued centuries later. After the destruction of the second Temple, when all the work of the Maccabees now lay in ruins, some rabbis at the time believed that Hanukkah should be abolished. Why celebrate a freedom that had been lost? Others disagreed, and their view prevailed. Freedom may have been lost, but not hope.

From there, hope became the essence and theme of the holiday; with the Menorah as it’s symbol. Hanukkah became a holiday of light within the Jewish home symbolizing a faith and hope that could not be extinguished.

Hanukkah reminds us that hope gives our people the strength we need to survive tragedy and rebuild shattered lives. The Jewish people survived all of the expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, even the Holocaust itself, because they never gave up their faith and hope that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.

During these times, when there is still immense darkness in the world, it is our opportunity to strengthen and renew our faith in a brighter and hopeful future. This Hanukkah, as we ignite the flames of our menorah, let us discover our inextinguishable hope and spread that light to the entire world.

https://www.aish.com/sp/so/My-Life-with-Dystonia.html?s=mm
My Life with Dystonia
Nov 28, 2020  |  by Cheri Tannenbaumprint article
My Life with Dystonia
Miracles do happen… at their prescribed time.

In the 1960s, like so many around me, I was becoming a full-fledged flower child. While I was in the throes of my hippiedom, my mother took me to San Francisco, where it all began. I was not enthralled. Thinking about the "me generation" provoked the question: Is this what I want my life to look like? My conclusion was a heartfelt no.

My brother and two sisters had already become observant Jews. I had taken so many journeys already, my mother suggested that I should check out my own religion as well. I started learning with Rabbi Hier and was soon hooked. However, as the second half of my enchanted year at Stern College began, my handwriting suddenly became totally illegible, for no reason that I could ascertain. My voice inexplicably became monotonic, also apparently without reason.

One day that summer, as I was walking out of my class down the grassy path of the campus, my right leg began to kick my left ankle. Since this only happened occasionally, I thought that perhaps I was unconsciously adopting some of the symptoms of the cases that I was learning about in my psych class. But to my horror the kicking started to occur with every step I took.

I went through a gamut of neurological tests, only to be told that I was the epitome of health who just so happened to be unable to walk or talk.
At the end of the summer, I returned to Vancouver and tried to figure out how to fill my days constructively while waiting for my boyfriend Harvey to propose. One night, I was in the kitchen with my mother. When she spoke to me, I suddenly found myself unable to answer her. My lips were frozen and would not move. When I finally managed to speak, my words came out slurred; they were unintelligible. My family thought it was a joke and started imitating and making fun of me, until they realized I was not joking.

Now unable to speak, with my feet still kicking, I realized it was time to see my physician. He had no idea what was wrong with me, so he sent me to several neurologists for a slew of tests. The results all came back indicating that my health was normal. My physician reiterated that I was in perfectly good health. Nobody could identify the cause of my problems, so they attributed it to "conversion hysteria" – today this is called conversion disorder – connecting my symptoms with my newfound interest in religion and my strong reactions to the suffering of the Jewish people throughout history.

My doctors referred me to a psychiatrist. Twice a week, over the course of about a month, I sat in his office where he would converse with me, trying to figure out the root of the problem. I simply bawled my eyes out. I could not understand why I was there. To me, it seemed perfectly obvious that the problem causing my suffering was physical and not psychological. I was totally sane.

Finally, A Diagnosis
Basically, I was nonfunctional. I felt as if a hose in my gut was siphoning off every bit of strength I had, which wasn’t much. It tore Harvey apart to see me like this, but he continued to feel totally helpless and was unable to help me. Harvey was a very eligible and popular bachelor, and despite my mystery illness, he remained committed to me and we got married in June, 1974. We spent our “honeymoon” at the Scripps Clinic, still searching for answers, being told the exact same thing: all the test results were normal and all I had was hysteria.

I went through the whole gamut of neurological tests available at that time, only to be told over and over again that I was the epitome of health, who just so happened to be unable to walk or talk. Finally I found another neurologist, Dr. Andrea Nash, who told me that she was convinced that I had a physical illness – although she could not identify it – and referred me to her superior, Dr. John Menkes.

I tried to make an appointment, but Dr. Menkes was booked up for months, with his only opening on Saturday, Shabbat, when religious Jews may not travel or do any creative work. I consulted with my rabbi and he said that I could walk there. It took two miles and two hours of my feet kicking each other down the street to reach his office. After examining me, Dr. Menkes diagnosed me with a rare neurological condition called dystonia musculorum deformans.

Finally, it was confirmed: it was not hysteria, and i was totally sane. I had a  physical illness. My initial indescribable elation at finally finding a medical reason for my condition was shattered when the doctor proceeded to tell me how rare it is, that there is no known cause, and, thus, no known treatment or cure.

It was a huge relief that I wasn't suffering from hysteria but it was devastating to know that we'd have to deal with a chronic, incurable illness.
Poor Harvey! All his hopes, dreams, and visions, all his goals and fantasies for a new marriage and a new life were obliterated instantly with the word dystonia. He was totally shattered, and so was I. On the one hand, it was a huge relief that I was not suffering from hysteria; on the other hand, it was devastating to know that we would have to deal with a chronic, incurable illness…possibly, for the rest of our lives. My husband at first was upset and embarrassed by my condition, but eventually he got over it and together we struggled through this as a team.

Facing the World
If you want a small, bitter taste of what it feels like not being able to speak to others, try the following experiment (and don't tell anyone of your plan): The next time you meet with friends, do not say a word. Let it be as if your mouth is sealed. As the conversation flows from topic to topic, do not say a word. If you can manage to do this, you will gain a slight understanding of the constant emotional pain and seclusion of those with speech disorders.

My voice was totally without inflection or expression – a monotone – and my speech was completely unintelligible. I tried another speech therapist, who suggested that I hold my nose when I spoke, to prevent the air from escaping and help make me a little more coherent. Doing this did help me become a little more intelligible, but everywhere I went, people asked me if I needed a tissue.

Whenever I went out into the world, I was armed with the trusty note that I had printed in Hebrew and English. It said, “Hi. My name is Cheri Tannenbaum. I have a neurological condition called dystonia, which affects my speech. I hold my nose when I talk because this helps me to talk a little better. (No, I do not need a tissue!) You need to listen to me very carefully to understand me. Please ask me to repeat myself over and over again until you do. I am not deaf or retarded.”

Whenever I would raise a finger to indicate that I wanted to say something, everyone would say, “Please be quiet! Cheri is going to try to say something!” Then everyone would be watching me, expectantly waiting for me to try to painfully eke out some sounds that might or might not be understood. This was a great purifier of my speech. I learned to consider very carefully whether something needed to be said: most things are not important enough for the monumental effort it would take to try to say them.

At the same time, I had to learn that when there was something truly important for me to say, I needed to be really tenacious and insist that people listen to me.

Not being able to talk bestowed a great advantage on me, as I developed the best listening ear. With pride, I loved it when my friends told me that they felt comfortable telling me their deepest, darkest secrets because they knew that I could not and would not tell a soul.

Growing Family
I didn't want to miss out on being a mother and raising children. My doctors at the time told us that my dystonia was genetic, so there was a 50-50 chance that we would have a child who was ill. I could barely take care of myself, how would I be able to take care of a sick child?

My husband and I wrestled with the issue, and we eventually decided thought God is the ultimate doctor and He knows what we need and what would be best for us. We placed our trust in Him, and I gave birth to a healthy baby girl we name Orit.

After we moved to Israel, I really wanted to have more children. But the doctors told us that with each child the chances of having a sick child goes up. The Almighty gave us another solution. At age 41 the doctors told me that my dystonia isn't genetic! I had another girl at age 42, and a son at 44. Thank God all my kids and grandchildren are healthy!

The Tannenbaum family

I am sure that my children were embarrassed by me, but they never said so outright. I always told them that when they brought friends over, they should explain my issues to them so that they would feel comfortable and not be afraid. This, my children agreed to do. Once, my daughter Nechama brought a friend home and forgot to tell her. The friend started screaming and crying hysterically, and phoned her mother to come and pick her up immediately. It was terrible for all of us. The children I met, including my nieces and nephews, would scream and cry, and run away as soon as they saw me. I would go home and look in the mirror. What I saw was not some kind of monster. I just did not see what they saw, but this is what I was up against.

Laughing Attacks
In August 2014 – as if all this was not burdensome enough – I started having crazy laughing attacks. I would laugh hysterically and uncontrollably, right from my gut. It felt exhilarating and liberating. My laughter would come at any time: alone, with family members or groups of other people, and would last varying amounts of time.

He prescribed a different medicine that had the worst side effect: suddenly I could talk!
Finally, Harvey had had enough and took me to my neurologist, Dr. Avi Reches, who diagnosed me with a rare form of laughing epilepsy. Rare? So what else is new. After prescribing a medicine that disagreed with me, he tried another, and it had the worst side effect in the world: suddenly I COULD TALK.

Yes, God works in very mysterious ways. Yes, there are miracles – they may just take a very long time to happen. At the end of the day, we always end up getting our just due. Never give up. Your situation can change in the blink of an eye, in the snap of a finger, or you may have to wait a while. Perhaps in the end, however, it is worth the wait.

Embracing Life
Happiness is a choice.

I must take life every second as it comes. I know that my day will be a constant struggle and full of humiliation. I try to surround myself with positive, supportive people. I take help from others when I need it. (I always say, “I’m not helpless. I just need some help.”) I try to give to someone else, to transcend my own self-absorption. I hear the call of God: “See how I am helping you to bring out your greatness so that you can be an inspiration to others.” I hear the call of my husband, loving me and rooting for me, and saying, “I still need a life partner despite your disability.” I hear the call of my children loving me and rooting for me, and each saying, “I still need you.” I hear the cry of the people I know loving me and rooting for me and saying, “We all still need you.” I hear my creative spirit calling me and saying, “There is still more beauty that needs to be put into this world.”

After I made aliyah to Israel, a Jerusalem Post reporter wrote about me, “Armed with intelligence, creativity, a sense of humor and an indomitable spirit, there are no challenges Cheri has not been able to meet head-on and prevail.” I try to make sure that continues to be true.

I ask God to give me the strength to cope. I live life one second at a time.

Whatever situation you find yourself in, at any time or in any place, if you are in the moment, doing what is called for wholeheartedly, you are fulfilling your purpose at that time.

Excerpt from Cheri Tannenbaum, Woman of Few Words: My Creative Journey with Dystonia (Jerusalem: Gefen Publishing House, 2019), ISBN: 978-965-229-973-4

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/This-Scares-Me-More-Than-Antisemitism.html?s=mm
This Scares Me More Than Antisemitism
Nov 21, 2020  |  by Rabbi Efrem Goldbergprint article
This Scares Me More Than Antisemitism
The statistical threat of antisemitism pales in comparison to the damage we are doing to ourselves that is spurring the disappearance of our people.

Several years ago, I was standing with our new assistant rabbi, who had just moved here from South Africa, when a stranger came over and engaged us. In the course of our conversation, the man mentioned something about his non-Jewish wife. When he walked away, I looked over and the new rabbi was visibly shaken. I asked what was wrong and he told me it was the first time he had ever met someone who is intermarried. Coming from a Jewish community in South Africa where even those who aren’t observant are overwhelmingly traditional, he had never personally encountered someone who married out of our faith and it left him startled and shaken.

I, too, was startled that day, but for an altogether different reason. I was startled by how not startled I was. Intermarriage has become so “normal” and “mainstream” in America that we meet or hear about someone married to a non-Jew and we don’t flinch.

Indeed, I thought about this story recently when I saw a headline, “Kamala Harris and Douglas Emhoff made history for interfaith families. All Jews should celebrate that.” Politics aside, many have expressed excitement over Kamala’s step-children calling her “Momala” and how Doug broke a glass at their wedding. Others have kvelled that all of President-Elect Joe Biden’s three children, who are Roman Catholic, married Jews.

According to a 2013 Pew survey, 44% of married Jewish respondents, and 58% of those who have married since 2005, are married to a non-Jewish spouse. The rate of intermarriages among non-Orthodox Jews, who make up the majority of the American Jewish population, was a staggering 71%. This data is seven years old and I shudder to think what the numbers look like today.
Correctly, we are all outraged by and concerned with growing antisemitism. This week, the FBI published its 2019 hate crime report, which found that antisemitic hate crimes rose by 14% last year and once again comprised the overwhelming majority of hate crimes based on religion. (60.2% of all hate crime victims were targeted because they were Jews; next on the list were victims of anti-Islamic bias, who comprised 13.2% of the total.) Last year saw a series of lethal antisemitic attacks in Poway, Jersey City, and Monsey that created understandable concern and worry.
Nevertheless, as disturbing as these horrific incidents and troubling trends are, when it comes to Jewish continuity, the statistical threat of antisemitism pales in comparison to the damage we are doing to ourselves and our contributions to the disappearance of our people.

We should continue to make all Jews feel loved, welcomed, and secure with the knowledge that they always have a place within our people.
In his blueprint for sustainable synagogues, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism said, “Interfaith families are now the majority of the movement. Audacious hospitality says, ‘You know what? We’re not going to be just nice and let them in. We’re going to say we can’t be who were meant to be without them.’”

Make no mistake, I am not suggesting we make those who choose differently feel rejected, alienated, or marginalized, or believe that they have no place or future in our people. We should continue to make all Jews feel loved, welcomed, and secure with the knowledge that they always have a place within our people. We should not only leave the door open but welcome them to walk through it.

At the same time, we must not provide hospitality by diluting our values, distorting our principles, or worst of all, compromising on our continuity. The rampant assimilation and growing intermarriage won’t be solved by moving the goal posts, offering a new and convenient definition of who is a Jew or what is a Jewish family, any more than an accountant can solve a bad quarter by cooking the books. We must find a way to simultaneously be hospitable to all Jews while inhospitable to some decisions.

We must love all Jews, and we must also love the Almighty, feel His pain, fight for His values and vision and pursue His blueprint for the Jewish people in His world.

Intermarriage is not a Reform or Conservative challenge, it is not the problem of the “unaffiliated” or “secular.” Too many Orthodox parents have reached out to me about their children who have gone through a robust Jewish education and grew up in observant homes who have met someone non-Jewish and are building a life with them. We are one people, one nation, and we are watching our family hemorrhage.

We need to celebrate the joy of being Jewish in our homes and be willing to sacrifice in our dedication and devotion to Judaism.
This is a time for all of us to dig deep, to draw from the wellsprings of our heritage and our timeless Torah. We must bring God back into the conversations in our homes, celebrate the joy of being Jewish, and be willing to sacrifice in our dedication and devotion to Torah lifestyles.

To be clear, there are parents who are excellent role models, who are deeply and profoundly devoted to Jewish life and living and whose children nevertheless make their own choices about life and about religion. There are no guarantees in life. I share these thoughts not to assign blame or promote guilt or cast aspersions on anyone, but to motivate action and inspiration.

Someone once asked me to meet with a man and his son whom I didn’t know. The son was in a serious relationship with a non-Jew and the father was devastated. He was hoping I could meet and “talk some sense” into the son. I will never forget the conversation in my office. The father began by describing how betrayed he feels, how pained he is and what a mistake his son is making.

When he was done, the son turned to his father and said, "Dad, you speak so self-righteously, you claim to care so much about Judaism and Jewish continuity, but what sacrifices are you making for your Judaism? You have a casual attitude towards Jewish law, you pick and choose as you see fit, you are not consistent about praying or study. You aren’t willing to give up the foods you love, the things you want to do, your time or energy and you want me to give up a girl I have fallen in love with who will make a wonderful wife and mother?"

I was floored. The son had made an articulate and compelling case, not in defense of his tragic choice, but rather as an indictment of a father he believed had no right to be surprised or upset.

If we have a casual and selective attitude towards our Judaism, what can we expect from our children and grandchildren. We need to return to the wells that have sustained us and kept us hydrated throughout our history. We must double down on lifestyles of deep commitment to Jewish law, Jewish life, Torah study, character development and lovingkindness. We must work to share our treasured Torah with Jews around us making outreach a priority, not only for outreach professionals but the responsibility of every concerned Jew.

Hearing about intermarriage, whether in the highest office in the land, or anywhere else, is not something to “celebrate” or admire, it is something to grieve, to be pained by, but most of all, to be driven to do something about.

https://www.aish.com/sp/pg/Five-Ways-to-Build-Your-Gratitude-Muscles.html?s=mm
Five Ways to Build Your Gratitude Muscles
Nov 21, 2020  |  by Sara Debbie Gutfreundprint article
Five Ways to Build Your Gratitude Muscles
This has never been more important than it is now when so much seems to be going wrong in the world and in our lives.

Like any muscle, we need to work on building our gratitude muscles every day. A runner I know – he runs 14-16 miles a day – said that people assume he gets up every day excited to run, but he actually hates running. Every morning he forces himself to overcome the resistance to stay in bed. When he's tired, he runs anyway. When people ask him what he's training for now that so many races are canceled, he replies, "I’m training for life. Because life is so often about forcing ourselves to move forward when all we want to do is give up."

This has never been more important than it is now when it seems so much easier to complain about everything that's wrong in our lives and in the world around us. Training ourselves to be grateful every day requires us to pause and focus on the goodness in our lives. As Thanksgiving approaches, here are five ways for us to build our gratitude muscles.

1. Express authentic gratitude.
It’s easy to be grateful when everything is working out just the way we want it to. It's a lot harder to be grateful when it seems like nothing is going right. So don’t try to pretend to feel grateful for your children when you are struggling with parenting challenges. Don’t try to force yourself to be grateful for abundance when you have just lost your job.

Focus on the one or two things today that you can genuinely feel grateful for in this moment. It could be something small, like a detail in your room you don’t usually pay attention to. Or a beautiful sunrise. It could be the smell of your coffee in the morning. It doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s authentic.

2. View gratitude as a responsibility.
Sometimes when I don’t wake up feeling grateful, I take a deep breath and remind myself that I am responsible for my outlook on the world. I am responsible to thank those around me. It really is a miracle that our lives work the way they do each day. The lights turn on. Packages are delivered. There is hot water in my shower. There are groceries in the store. I can’t begin to thank the countless people who make all this possible, but I can be responsible to at least thank the person right in front of me.

3. Turn gratitude into action.

 
Small actions count. Everything we do matters. If we are in a difficult situation, there is always something we can do to make things worse. And there is always something, however small and seemingly insignificant, we can do to make things better.

To be more grateful, what can we stop doing that is blocking our gratitude? Maybe it’s no longer complaining about things that we can’t control or letting go of a habit that limits our capacity to appreciate our lives.

And what small action can we do to feel more grateful? Maybe it's going outside and looking up at the stars. Maybe it is writing a thank you text. Maybe it is saying a blessing over our food. Maybe it's giving a family member a hug. Every action matters.

4. Practice gratitude for those we are missing this year.
For many of us, this is the first Thanksgiving that we will be not be getting together with family members. Not only do I miss my relatives, but now that we can only see each other on FaceTime I realize how many years I took our Thanksgiving dinners for granted. I took for granted the warmth and the laughter and the connection that we only feel when we are with our families.

This year is an opportunity to feel especially grateful for our families as we feel their absence around our tables.

5. See the bigger picture.
Our lives today are so much easier compared to those who have come before us that we often lose sight of how fortunate we are to be living at this time in history. Though many of us are lonely and stressed during this pandemic, we are also relatively safe and comfortable within our own homes. We have called many events during 2020 "unprecedented", but most of the generations before us have struggled with this and far worse. They struggled with flus and plagues before we were blessed with modern medicine and sanitary hospitals. They faced war and famine and the constant battle just to survive another day.

We can have our groceries delivered to our doors, and the temperature regulated in our homes. We may be stressed about our jobs but most of us are not worried about how we will eat tomorrow. There is a lot of pessimism about the state of the world today and not nearly enough gratitude for how amazing our lives really are. Technology has given us more free time than any other generation in history. We can communicate with each other in ways that only decades ago we could have never imagined.

The question is what are we going to do with all of our freedom and abundance? It's easy to complain and stay stuck in our views of the world. It's harder to train our gratitude muscles when we don’t feel like it. But as an anonymous quote I recently saw said: The grass isn’t greener on the other side - the grass is greener where you water it. Our ability to feel grateful can grow stronger every day when we focus relentlessly on the beauty in this one, precious life.

We're always training for life. Let’s train our gratitude muscles today.

https://www.aish.com/sp/so/The-Jewelry-Thief-in-a-Labor-Camp-in-Poland.html?s=mm
The Jewelry Thief in a Labor Camp in Poland
Nov 21, 2020  |  by Eliezer Shoreprint article
The Jewelry Thief in a Labor Camp in Poland
Elijah the Prophet can come in all types of guises.

If I were to tell you all that happened to me during World War II – how it began for me and how it ended, how I survived and how many times I almost died, the friends I lost and the friends I found – it would fill more volumes than there are years of my life. Some stories do stand out in my mind, though, and this is one of them.

It was 1944 and I was fifteen years old. When the Warsaw Ghetto was liquidated, I was sent to the Budzyn labor camp in Poland, along with 800 other Jews. There were about 2000 of us in the camp altogether, including women and children. Most of us worked until exhaustion or death at a military-industrial complex nearby; some labored as servants in the homes of local Poles.

The trick to survival, I quickly learned, was to maneuver oneself into a job “with benefits” – that is, where the workload was not as heavy, or the supervisor not as blood-thirsty, or food was attainable, even by theft. If any one of those factors were missing, death would come within days.

I had been working in an arms factory. It was difficult and exhausting labor. One day the Polish supervisor motioned to me to follow him to a new location – a spacious, brightly lit warehouse nearby. In the center, propped up on wooden stands, was a large wing from a German fighter plane – fifteen feet long and five feet wide. Other plane parts were lined up along the walls, while cans of gray, green and brown paint were scattered around the room. The Pole showed me what to do. I was to use pressurized spray cans to paint the wings and other parts as evenly as I could, all according to specifications. In my heart, I was delighted, though I dared not show it on my face. It didn’t look like hard work at all, but something that one person could do alone. I thanked God for the work.

Unfortunately, my joy soon turned to despair. The paint had a strong acetone base, and as I sprayed the plane wings, I found myself at the center of a cloud of noxious vapor that burned my lungs, stung my eyes, and confused my thoughts. I tried my best to cover my mouth, but the dirty cloths lying around the room, with their pungent turpentine smell, offered no protection. My hands and face were speckled from the paint, and my head was swimming.

Each morning, before I entered the hall, I would take several deep breaths of clean, fresh air, hoping that they would suffice for the entire day. From then until evening, I took as shallow breaths as possible. Of course, it didn’t really help, and within a short time, I was inhaling the fumes again. It took immense effort to concentrate on the work, though I dared not stop. My thoughts became confused and I often hallucinated. Sometimes, I thought that I heard voices in the empty room, only to realize it was my own voice; I thought I saw people standing around me, though they would vanish when I turned to look. I was alone in the room, save for a Polish supervisor, who sat at the far end of the warehouse, either half-drunk of half-asleep. He never even glanced in my direction.
 
This went on for two weeks, without a break. As soon as I finished one wing, they would bring another one in its place. It got to the point that I could no longer continue. I felt like I was going to die. I thought that a gas chamber would be better than this slow death by poison.

You can bring me my mother’s jewelry. They’re hidden in the graveyard in Warsaw.
It was on one of those days that the supervisor unexpectedly rose from his chair and approached me. Tall, blond and blue-eyed, the vodka on his breath mingled with the other chemical smells in the room. I shook my head and tried to concentrate on what he wanted from me. I felt like I was swimming through some dense, dark liquid, struggling for the surface.

“Jew,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

I couldn’t understand what he meant and took a step back. But he moved in closer, his bloodshot eyes staring at me as though through a fog.

“Jew,” he said again, “what can I do for you?”

“Just let me die,” I said to him, struggling to hold back my tears.

“No,” he said, “tell me what I can do for you. Can I bring you something?”

Bring me something? The words spiraled down into my brain, as though through some muddy whirlpool. The answer I gave him came out by itself. Until today, I don’t know where the words came from.

“You can bring me my mother’s jewelry. They’re hidden in the graveyard in Warsaw.”

“Where? Where?” he said, his filthy hand grabbing my wrist. “Where can I find them!?”

That night, as I made my way back to the bunker, I reviewed what had happened earlier that day. Did the Pole really approach me or was it a hallucination? Did I really tell him about my mother’s jewelry or was I just imagining it? And if I did tell that thieving murderer about it, how could I have been so stupid? My mother’s precious jewelry – now I would never see it again.

The next day, I returned to work, and it was as though nothing had happened. The Pole sat in his corner seat, drunk and half-conscious, and never glanced in my direction. A new plane wing was waiting for me, with no time to waste. What I remembered of yesterday must have been a hallucination. I returned to the suffocating job of painting the wings.

About a week passed. I kept on working in the hangar; the situation did not improve.

One day, the Pole rose from his seat and approached me again. I stopped working to focus on him.

“Jew, take!” he said, and pressed a small, round loaf of brown bread into my hand. Then he turned and went back to his seat.

A loaf of bread! In Budzyn this was more precious than gold! I was so famished, I could have eaten it all in one bite. But I decided to bring it back to the camp to share with my uncle, and my friend, Simcha Holtzberg.

Reentering the camp that evening, I hid the loaf under my shirt. Later that night, lying between my uncle and Simcha on the bunks, I took it out and showed it to them. They couldn’t believe it either; my uncle wanted to hold it, to make sure that it was real.

“Maybe that guard is Elijah the Prophet,” Simcha said with a smile, but I didn’t respond. To be honest, the idea had occurred to me, too. From all the children’s stories that I remembered, he looked like Elijah, with his blue eyes, square jaw and wavy blond hair.

The entire loaf was hollow. Inside was some of my mother’s jewelry. It saved our lives.
We decided that we would eat the entire loaf right there, rather than divide it into small pieces to make it last for days. I broke open the loaf as quietly as I could, so that none of the other prisoners would hear. Suddenly something small fell out of it. I looked and saw that the entire loaf was hollow. Inside was some of my mother’s jewelry. All three of us stared in disbelief. Had that Pole actually traveled 250 miles to Warsaw to unearth it? And why in the world would he give it to me? Was he really Elijah the Prophet?

Of course, we ate the loaf, but more importantly, that jewelry saved our lives. We traded pieces of it for food, clothing and other means of survival. Once, I traded a piece for a slice of bread, and then traded a bite of that bread for the opportunity to put on tefillin that someone had found in the camp. “You have an extra slice of bread today,” my uncle told me. “You can trade a bite to do the mitzvah.”

I continued working in the airplane factory, though the supervisor never looked or spoke to me again, nor I to him. After a few weeks, I was transferred out of there to a new task and location. I could breathe deeply – for a while.

It would be nice to end the story there. To leave it as a mystery, as incomprehensible as my entire survival during those bitter years. But there’s a second part to this tale that needs to be told. It happened years later, after I had already settled and raised a family in Israel.

It was a Saturday night, following the bar mitzvah of our twin sons, Betzalel and Menashe. Our house had been a bedlam of guests, food and gifts the entire day, and my wife and I were finally cleaning up. She was tidying the living room and I was in the kitchen, doing the dishes.

“Enough, Avraham,” she said. “We’ve done enough today. The work isn’t going anywhere, it can wait until tomorrow. There’s supposed to be an interesting lecture in the community center. Let’s go.”

We drove downtown and took our seats. I can’t say whether the speaker was interesting or not; I was so tired that I fell asleep almost as soon as we sat down. Suddenly, though, a comment from someone sitting behind us startled me back to awareness. “Yes, he was in the cemetery in Warsaw.”

“What?” I thought. “Who are they referring to?” When the war broke out, I, too, had sought refuge in the Warsaw cemetery. I sat up in my chair and stared closely at the speaker. I recognized him! It was Yorek, who had hidden there together with me. He was noticeably older, and now a distinguished scholar. He had even authored a book on the Holocaust – the topic of his lecture. When he finished speaking, I approached him.

“Aren’t you Avraham Carmi?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s me!” I replied.

He laughed and embraced me. And then, before I could say anything, he whispered in my ear, “You know, Lieberman stole your mother’s jewelry.”

“Lieberman? Who’s Lieberman?”

“You don’t remember him? Tall, blond, with light-blue eyes. He came to the cemetery and said that you had sent him. He asked for someone to help him find the red mausoleum in the Jewish section.”

That drunken Pole, sleeping all day in the corner of the airplane factory, had really been a Jew, disguising himself to survive the war.
Suddenly, it dawned on me. That drunken Pole, sleeping all day in the corner of the airplane factory, had really been a Jew, disguising himself to survive the war.

“He wasn’t a thief,” I said in a voice, trembling with emotion. “He was Elijah the Prophet!”

“He was to you,” Yorek replied, with an ironic smile.

To make a long story short, this Lieberman also survived the war and made his way to Tel Aviv, where he ran a small factory. Yorek gave me his address, and several days later, I went to see him. As soon as I walked in, I recognized him – though he no longer smelled of alcohol. He greeted me casually, as though we had seen each other just the day before. “Come,” he said, leading me to his office, “I have something for you.” He opened the drawer and took out a small metal tin – my mother’s jewelry box. It was empty, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that the two of us were alive, sitting face to face, in an office in Tel Aviv.

And so, my Elijah was a man of flesh and blood, and a Jew! Yet, he saved my life. To me, he was and will always be an angel in disguise.

This story originally appeared in My Portion in the Land of the Living: The story of Abraham Carmi, by Efrat Hiba. It was translated and adapted by R. Eliezer Shore, in his book Meeting Elijah: true tales of Eliyahu Hanavi (Tehiru Press, 2020), available on Amazon. Click here to order.

https://www.aish.com/sp/so/Off-the-Grid-Joshua-Safrans-Childhood-Was-Nothing-like-Yours.html?s=mm
Off the Grid: Joshua Safran’s Childhood Was Nothing like Yours
Aug 12, 2017  |  by Rabbi Shraga Simmonsprint article
Off the Grid: Joshua Safran’s Childhood Was Nothing like Yours
One boy’s improbable journey from witches’ commune to Jerusalem.

For a Jewish kid growing up in 1980s America, Joshua Safran's childhood was unconventional to say the least. Much of it was spent hitchhiking with his free-spirited mother Claudia across the rural west – living intermittently in a commune, a dilapidated ice cream truck, and on the forest floor without electricity, running water, toilet, or refrigeration.

With great resilience and a sharp mind, by age 25 Joshua was a top-10 law school graduate, happily married, and an observant Jew.

This is his incredible journey.

In the Beginning
Joshua Safran was born in 1975 into a commune of witches in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Rather than cackle over caldrons, these wymyn – the extreme wing of the feminist movement – channeled pagan spiritual energies to "rescue the goddess and heal the world."

Joshua plays fife in the New Mexico desert

"My mother is an incredible idealist," Safran told Aish.com from his home in Portland, Oregon. "She was in search of utopia and brought me along for the ride."

His mother Claudia was a "red diaper baby" – the term for children raised as American Communist. Her father was blacklisted by McCarthy for encouraging the downtrodden proletariat to rise up in a Marxist revolution and overthrow the U.S. government. "They were willing to sacrifice for a utopian ideal," Joshua explains.

When Joshua was 4, Ronald Reagan was elected president. Claudia anticipated nuclear war and took to the hills of the Pacific Northwest to "keep the struggle alive." Mother and son spent the next five years off the grid and on the open road. Joshua had no rules, no father, and no stability.

Home

This tenuous childhood declined further when Claudia married a Marxist guerilla commander from El Salvador – an occultist who also turned out to be a violent alcoholic. Amidst regularly beatings of his mother, young Joshua would hide under the covers, terrified to confront the monster. By age 12, Joshua's soul was so desperate for justice that he plotted to kill his stepfather.

Stirrings of Spirit
Joshua describes his early years as "nominally home-schooled," his mother opposing public school for "teaching bad values of capitalism, violence and competition." When his formal education began in sixth grade, Joshua could read and write at a college level, and was expert in Russian literature, Marxist theory, geography and geopolitics. Yet he was ignorant of basic math and science.

Joshua's social transition was difficult, as the other kids mocked his hippy style. "The paisley patches on my thrift store clothing and tree sap in my hair made me a prime target for redneck bullies of the rural west," he demurs.

One evening, Joshua and his mother were hiking to their home – a tarp in a temperate rain forest of the Pacific Northwest. They met a man who took one look at Joshua and said, "He's got a rabbi's nose!"

Joshua later asked his mother to explain. "Oh, I never told you we're Jewish?" she said, describing it as a family they shared with Freud, Marx and Einstein. Joshua was shocked to find he had deep roots, "that I belonged somewhere." When he pressed for more information about being Jewish, his mother gave a classic Jewish answer: "Let's go to the library and look it up."

The Jewish story mirrored Joshua's life: Outcast, wandering, adversity, seeking higher purpose.
Starting with Encyclopedia Britannica, Joshua discovered he was "descended from an ancient tribe that emerged from the mists of prehistory to teach the world about ethics and God." He looked at the portrait of Maimonides and had a visceral sense this was his personal family photo album.

He also learned that the Jews – scattered to the wind, oppressed and demeaned – soldiered on, believing in their cause and making an impact wherever they went. "On some level this mirrored my life story," Joshua says. "Outcast, wandering through adversity, seeking a higher purpose."

At age 12, Joshua heard the stirring words of Bob Marley's "Corner Stone":

The stone that the builder refuse,
Will always be the head cornerstone.
Joshua and his mother Claudia

These words of rejection and ultimate redemption resonated deeply with Joshua, inspiring him that "all this adversity was somehow laying the foundations of a wonderful life." When his mother claimed those words were written by King David, Joshua pored through the entire book of Psalms to disprove her. "I discovered, to my surprise, King David speaking to me across three millennia."

From there Joshua took refuge in the public library, where he "rode the reading room through space and time," soaking up history books and the Bible, and as a bonus finding refuge from his violent stepfather at home.

"I was deeply affected by Moses," Joshua says. "Moses grows up disconnected from the Jewish people, goes into the wilderness to find God, and is later reunited with his people. For me, this was an important invitation to reclaim my heritage."

Coming Home
Joshua excelled at school and earned a full scholarship to Oberlin College, where he studied Politics, Environmental Studies, and Judaic/Near Eastern Studies. Joshua's research of anthropology, spirituality and philosophy led to the conclusion that his mother's road to utopia – expressed in Wiccan spirituality and Marxist politics – were fabricated fads, incapable of true personal and societal transformation.

Joshua craved authenticity, what he calls "the one and only original, no imitations or substitutions." Seizing on his Jewish roots, he visited the Jewish Federation of Cleveland and – pre-Birthright – wrangled a free ticket to Israel.

Searching for the core of the 4,000-year-old Jewish story, Joshua connected in the Old City of Jerusalem, where he stayed at the Heritage House youth hostel and enjoyed Shabbat meals with the Machlis family. "Every square space was filled with upwards of 100 people," he describes. "I felt the wave of simcha as we walked in."

What impressed him most was the Abrahamic hospitality and sense of inclusion. "I looked pretty weird with my long hair and flannel shirt. In America, they'd call the sheriff. In Israel, people fought over the honor to host me in their home."

early trip to Israel

Joshua's breakthrough experience came while attending a High Holidays beginner's service at Aish HaTorah overlooking the Western Wall. He recalls: "The rabbi announced: 'It's time for the Priestly Blessing. Are there any Kohens here today?' So the guy in front of me – a London gutter punk with orange dreadlocks and a safety pin though his nose – raises his hand. I'm thinking, This will be so embarrassing when security has to escort this guy out.

"But they brought him up front, unfurled a prayer shawl over his shoulders, and all of us, including the esteemed rabbis, stood back to receive the Priestly Blessing. At that moment of acceptance and unity, I knew I was home."

When Joshua returned from Israel, his mother pointed out the irony of – growing up with no rules and no father – and now subscribing to a ‘rule-based patriarchal system’.

“From a young age I felt by a tangible paternal presence, guiding me through life-and-death situations. I was swept by waves in California and almost drowned; I fell out of a massive tree, and I careened down a cliff in a car with no brakes. Each time I felt a calm, omniscient presence coaching me out of it.”

I'd seen the contrived spiritual systems fail.
Joshua was on a spiritual search, knowing very little except that he didn't want a derivative knock-off product. "I'd seen all the contrived spiritual systems and how they failed. As the original monotheistic faith, Judaism has full legitimacy and authenticity. And if it's all an elaborate scam to get me to behave like an ethical, compassionate human being? That's an excellent 'worse-case' scenario!"

After graduating Oberlin, Joshua spent a year studying in the mystic Israeli city of Tzefat. The clean mountain air, storied cobblestones and ancient Jewish wisdom illuminated Joshua's return to his Jewish roots. At Yeshiva Shalom Rav, he discovered Rabbi Shlomo Freifeld's zt"l approach to Torah life – emphasizing inclusion, and not judging people with different traditions or backgrounds. "It uses warmth to show what Judaism can be," Joshua says. "That spoke to my heart."

Crime after Crime
In looking toward a career, Joshua saw lawyers as exemplars of success in America – both financially and in their ability to assist the poor and powerless in a chaotic legal system. Joshua applied to prestigious Berkeley law school and was accepted. That set into motion a new life direction – marriage to his soul mate Leah, fatherhood, a home in trendy North Berkeley, and a corner office at a corporate mega-law firm.

"After living for so long on the margins of society," he says, "I wanted to experience the 'American dream.' Representing Fortune 100 companies, with my own secretary and a hefty salary, I felt I'd finally arrived."

Yet that feeling lasted for six months; the material pleasures failed to satisfy his thirst for a meaningful life. "You're deeply entrenched on a hamster wheel, working ungodly hours," Joshua says, "You're either on the partner track or you're fired. Because of how I grew up, I felt I had to prove that I could compete and succeed as well as everyone else."

"At the law firm, the average burnout rate of an associate – from his first day on the job until the time he either collapses or quits – is 18 months. I lasted for 8 years, and without question what saved me was the mandatory weekly recharge of Shabbat."

Crime After Crime ad

Around this time, California adopted a new law to assist women who'd been sent to prison after defending themselves against an abusive intimate partner. With another lawyer, Joshua took on a pioneering case that tested this law and unknowingly stumbled into a 7-year ordeal that led him to confront the demons lurking from encounters with his own abusive stepfather.

The case centered on Deborah Peagler, a sweet and dynamic woman who led the world's largest women’s prison gospel choir. At age 15 she'd been taken by a pimp and drug dealer in south central Los Angeles, forced into prostitution and horrifically abused for six years. When the pimp was found dead, Deborah was falsely charged and convicted of murder. By the time Joshua entered the picture, she'd already languished 20 years in prison.

The case caught the interest of Yoav Potash, Joshua's friend and filmmaker who agreed to document the case. In the seven-year process to obtain freedom ("a nightmarish, bureaucratic rabbit hole of injustice"), Joshua exposed deep corruption in the LA District Attorney's office and attracted nationwide media attention.

"I'd plotted to kill my abusive stepfather. That could have been me sitting in prison."
For Joshua, the case became personal when Deborah explained how the pimp, after a beating, would use raw steaks to heal her wounds. The words hit Joshua like an anvil, conjuring up his darkest childhood memories of his mother being beaten by the Salvadorian revolutionary. "Deborah was a metaphorical extension of my own experience," he says. "I'd plotted to kill my abusive stepfather. That could have been me sitting in prison."

Joshua subsequently shared his experiences with Deborah, the first time he'd ever discussed them openly. "I had therapy sessions with a convicted murderer at the maximum security prison," he says wryly.

Employing legal creativity and prodigious tenacity, Joshua eventually obtained Deborah's release from prison. The case – especially Joshua's unique involvement – was immortalized in the documentary Crime After Crime, winner of dozens of awards and featured at the Sundance Film Festival and Oprah Winfrey Network.

For Joshua, this entire ordeal was a tikkun, a spiritual repair of sorts. "For years I'd been carrying the burden of my own cowardice when my mother might have been killed and I didn't do anything to protect her," he says. "The fight for Deborah's freedom helped prove to my 10-year-old self that I finally had the courage to stand up against domestic abuse."

Free Spirit book cover

Out of this caldron, Joshua produced a memoir of his childhood, Free Spirit: Growing Up On the Road and Off the Grid. Critics called it “beautiful, powerful, introspective, hilarious, heartbreaking... and a remarkable account of survival despite the odds."

Joshua is now a nationally recognized expert on domestic violence and wrongful imprisonment, and a regular on the Jewish lecture circuit. His message is one of liberating people from stigmas that ruin their lives. "With my own childhood, I needed the courage and permission to confront my experiences, to talk about it, and not be ashamed," he says. "Everywhere I go I get pulled aside by people carrying around these lifelong secrets."

Today and Beyond
Joshua's childhood left him with jagged edges, and he is determined to provide a more "normal" life for his three daughters, ages 10-14. "Everything I do as a father, I view dramatically as a tikkun for my own childhood," he says. "I'm trying to navigate this middle path, where my children gain the resilience I had growing up – but without the difficult experiences that gave me that training."

Joshua and his wife are applying ancient Torah wisdom to navigate life's core areas: marriage, parenting, community, and spiritual growth.

Joshua today

Viewers of the domestic abuse film see how Torah ideals impact Joshua's devotion to the cause. The film shows Joshua at morning prayers, praising God for "releasing those who are bound" (matir asurim). Joshua tells the camera: “If someone is wrongfully imprisoned, we have an obligation to fight to free them, to liberate them.”

With sensitivity guided by Torah, Joshua’s role in this story is a Kiddush Hashem. Joshua says he was particularly inspired by the stories of Rabbi Aryeh Levin (A Tzaddik in Our Time), a Jerusalem holy man who dedicated his life to helping prisoners. "Every inmate prays for the day when a team of lawyers will show up and fight for their release," he says.

As for domestic violence, it is an issue that remains close to Joshua's heart. "I always wondered why my mother would allow herself to be beaten. I later discovered that the problem extends back to my great-great-grandfather who became an orphan when the Cossacks murdered his parents while he hid in a closet. He was devastated and raged out violently like a family lightning rod, starting a chain passed down through each generation. Here I am, five generations later, experiencing the fallout of that pogrom."

"My Communist grandparents had strong Messianic yearnings."
Meanwhile, Joshua is grateful for the sense of idealism he inherited from his Jewish grandparents. "They were raised with traditional eastern European Jewish values, so had strong Messianic yearnings. Yet they applied our 4,000-year-old yearnings onto Communism, the popular 'ism' of the time."

Joshua's mother inherited both this idealism and lightning rod syndrome, heading for the hills in what Joshua calls "the last woman standing, seeking a higher truth, and called to sacrifice for the good of humanity."

Safran is not Joshua's given last name. He and his wife chose it together, based on the root sefer, book. That's where this whole story begins, as the People of the Book, and reversing a generational search for utopia – from one direction to a traditional Jewish ideal. His three daughters attend Jewish day school, one a recent Bat Mitzvah was a family first in 110 years.

Joshua reflects: "If I could do it all over again, I'd choose the experience slogging through muddy trails at my mother's side, over the cushy sugar-and-television suburban life I'd once dreamed of. At Oberlin, I met kids from suburban families who were clinically depressed, on medication, suicidal, and complained their parents never cared about them. The grass is always greener. So I enjoy the small pleasures like a hot shower and I get excited when the utility bills come."

For Joshua Safran, it's all part of his miraculous storybook adventure.

https://www.aish.com/ci/s/Demonizing-Pfizers-Jewish-CEO.html?s=mm
Demonizing Pfizer’s Jewish CEO
Nov 17, 2020  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
Demonizing Pfizer’s Jewish CEO
A Greek newspaper is attacking Albert Bourla with anti-Semitic tropes.

On Monday, November 9, 2020, the US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer made a welcome announcement: a vaccine they were working on, along with the drug maker Biontech, has shown promising results in clinical trials, blocking over 90% of Covid-19 infections during trials to date. The news sparked exhilaration: Pfizer’s stock soared and billions of people around the world dared hope that Pfizer might soon help end the Covid-19 pandemic.

But relief and hope were in short supply in the offices of Greece’s Makeleio newspaper. Instead of covering Pfizer’s good news, the small paper zeroed in on the Greek Jewish heritage of Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, who was born in Thessaloniki, a port city in Greece which was once a major Jewish center, known as the “Jerusalem of the Balkans” before World War II.

The newspaper claimed that Bourla is evil and the vaccine that Pfizer is working on is actually deadly. The paper juxtaposed a photo of Bourla with that of Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, who conducted gruesome experiments on Jewish prisoners. In case any readers missed the Holocaust reference, the paper included a picture of Nazi-era striped concentration camp uniforms. Albert Bourla wants to “stick the needle” into Greeks, delivering what the paper described as “poison” in the guise of a vaccine.



After receiving criticism for this bizarre anti-Semitic headline, Makeleio published another hate-filled article three days later, describing Bourla as a “Greek Jew” who was in thrall to a made-up, sinister-sounding “Israel Council”.

Echoes of Nazi Slurs

The newspaper’s slurs wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Nazi times. Leveling such anti-Semitic slanders at a Jew from Thessaloniki is an ironic repeat of history, echoing the days when Thessaloniki’s Jews were targeted and smeared, accused of being evil and of having almost superhuman powers to harm non-Jews.

In the years following the Spanish expulsion of Jews in 1492, about twenty thousand Jewish refugees moved to Thessaloniki (formerly called Salonika). It became the largest Jewish center in all of Greece; by 1939 about 55,000 called the city home. When German troops occupied the city in 1942, they plundered the city, sending the Jewish inhabitants to concentration camps and seizing tens of thousands of pieces of art and other property back to Germany. Only 4% of Thessaloniki’s Jews survived.

Albert Bourla

For years after the Holocaust, Thessaloniki’s residents seemed to do their best to obliterate their city’s Jewish heritage. A new university, Aristotle University, was built atop the town’s Jewish cemetery, destroying generations of Jewish graves. It was only in the 1980s that Thessaloniki first erected a monument dedicated to the memory of the over 50,000 of the city’s Jews who’d been murdered. Today, approximately 1,000 Jews live in Thessaloniki. Jewish life there is more visible today, but it’s not easy.

High Levels of Anti-Jewish Hatred in Greece
Despite being home to a very small Jewish community – just 5,000 out of a national population of nearly 11 million – Greece harbors intense anti-Jewish feelings. A recent poll by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that 69% of Greeks harbor anti-Semitic opinions, as compared to 24% in Western Europe and 26% of people globally. Greek levels of anti-Jewish feeling were higher than anywhere else in the world outside of the Middle East.

A whopping 80% of Greeks agreed with the statement that Jews have too much power in the business world, and 82% agreed that Jews have too much power in financial markets. 74% believe that Jews have too much power over world affairs, and 69% assert that Jews have control global media to an unacceptable degree. In 2018, only 39% of Greek respondents said they had a positive view of Jews; that number had declined from 44% just two years previously.

Media coverage is a possible driver of these hateful attitudes. Some Greek newspapers routinely slander Jews and the Jewish state using horrendous anti-Jewish stereotypes. In fact, the week before Makeleio printed its outrageous slanders against Albert Bourla, it was ordered to pay a fine by a Greek court for insulting Greek Jewish community leader Minos Moissis, whom a columnist called a “crude Jew” who stole money from “poor Greeks”.

Makeleio is a smaller newspaper, commanding only about 8% of the market share in Greece, but anti-Jewish slurs are common in other papers as well. In 2018 the left-leaning, more prestigious newspaper Efimerida ton Syntakton, which usually is critical of anti-Semitism within Greece, published an outrageous cartoon depicting Israeli soldiers as Nazis, leaving bloody handprints on the Western Wall, Judaism’s most sacred site.

On August 7, 2018, the extremist newspaper Eleftheri Ora accused “Zionism” of causing the deadly forest fires near Athens that killed over 100 people.

While many Greeks condemned the outrageous Makeleio headlines, their damaging message continues to resonate with thousands of readers. “The identification of the CEO of Pfizer with Mengele, the so-called butcher of Auschwitz, is an appalling and unethical assault against Albert Bourla only because he is a Jew,” the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (KIS) declared. Greece’s Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs condemned the articles as “the most vile antisemitism which brings to mind the Medieval period when Jews were accused of every disaster, illness or defeat.”

Yet with tensions running high due to the global pandemic, Jews are once again finding themselves in the cross hairs, accused of nefarious actions and subject to conspiracy theories much as we were during the Middle Ages.

Blaming Jews for Covid-19
A May 2020 report by American Jewish Communities (AJC) found that Jews were being blamed for the coronavirus pandemic around the world.

A Lebanese-American professor at California State University, Stanislaus, falsely tweeted that Jews would use the Covid pandemic to justify mass imprisonment of “non-Jews”. In Turkey, a retired intelligence official made the false charge on President Erdogan’s television network that Jews and Zionists had invented Covid-19. The Palestinian Authority (PA) issued untrue official communications that falsely claimed Israeli hospitals were only treating Jewish patients with Covid-19 – even though Israel at the time was supplying the PA with medical training, test kits and other medical equipment and PPE.

This steady drumbeat of blame has had a chilling effect. A study in May 2020 by Oxford University found that fully one in five English people believed the completely untrue claim that Jews created Covid-19 in order to bring about global financial collapse and to profit financially. The Community Security Trust CST) in England has documented multiple anti-Jewish conspiracy theories that have become popular, blaming Jews for supposedly inventing or spreading Covid-19.

Countering anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theories
“Conspiracy beliefs have...been linked to feelings of powerlessness, anxiety, isolation and alienation,” Dr. Aleksandra Cichocka, a political psychologist at the University of Kent in England and an expert in conspiracy theories, notes. “Those who feel that they are insignificant cogs in the political machinery tend to assume that there are nefarious influences at play.”

That’s why it’s more crucial than ever to stand up now and counter false assertions whenever we hear them. The bizarre attacks on Albert Bourla by Greece’s Makeleio newspaper might sound so far-fetched that it’s impossible anyone would actually believe them. Yet hearing this sort of anti-Jewish slur does have an effect, causing people in time to suspect Jews and to harbor negative feelings and fears towards us.

Now is the time to take a stand against conspiracy theories and anti-Jewish slurs. When you hear of anti-Semitic articles or insinuations, speak up. Post on social media. Write letters to the editors of news outlets that engage in attacks on Jews or others. In this parlous time, we all have an obligation to make sure that we are beacons of reasoned discussion, and to make our reasoned opinions heard.

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/A-Rabbis-Confession-What-I-Discovered-by-Not-Going-to-Shul.html?s=mm
A Rabbi’s Confession: What I Discovered by Not Going to Shul
Nov 14, 2020  |  by Rabbi Benjamin Blechprint article
A Rabbi’s Confession: What I Discovered by Not Going to Shul
I prayed and learned Torah at home, but there was no way I could replace the communal aspect that only a synagogue supplies.

Who would believe that I would admit to this publicly?

Praying is an essential part of my life. I’ve always been profoundly moved by the beautiful explanation given by rabbinic commentators as reason for why we pray three times a day: If our bodies need the physical nourishment of breakfast, lunch and dinner for a healthy lifestyle then our souls similarly require the spiritual sustenance of Shacharit, Minchah and Ma’ariv. Going to shul is not just a mitzvah, it’s almost a medical requirement.

And yet with just a very few rare exceptions on the High Holy Days – made possible by outdoor prayer on a temporarily closed for traffic city street- I haven’t been able to pray in a synagogue since the start of the global pandemic. For the longest time the local shuls were shut down by city edict. When they finally were permitted to reopen with strict guidelines for number of attendees, age restrictions for the elderly as well as my own doctor’s orders have forced me to continue my personal spiritual quarantine.

So it is now more than half a year that I haven’t been able to talk to God in the sanctity of my otherwise “second home” – a synagogue that allows me to feel kinship not only with the Almighty but with my fellow community of Jews as well.

This period of personal deprivation has taught me a crucial lesson about the blessing of synagogue life. In Jewish tradition a synagogue is known by three different Hebrew names. It is commonly called a Beit Tefillah – a house of prayer. Others frequently prefer to refer to it as a Beit Midrash – a house of study. Finally, and perhaps most often, it is known as a Beit Ha-Knesset, a house of communal gathering.


The three names emphasize the three different purposes of the place Jewish genius created to serve as substitute for the holy Temple after its destruction. A synagogue, the Talmud tells us, is a mikdash me’at – a mini sanctuary and perhaps more than anything else it was historically responsible for the preservation of Judaism and the Jewish people.

Each of the three Hebrew names for a synagogue emphasizes a different important aspect.
Yet each of the Hebrew names for a synagogue emphasizes a different important aspect. Obviously, prayer is one of them. Of course it should be called a Beit Tefillah, a House of Prayer. Yet, a synagogue without an emphasis on the study of Torah surely lacks a crucial component. It was Rabbi Kook who famously said that the difference between prayer and Torah is that in prayer man speaks to God and in Torah God speaks to man. The synagogue needs to emphasize both of these conversations and its Hebrew name can certainly reflect one or the other.

But the third name, Beit Ha-Knesset, a house of communal gathering, focuses on a different dimension of synagogue life: community. A synagogue is other people. A synagogue is friendship. A synagogue is sharing in the lives of others. It allows for communal celebrations of joy, commemorations of achievements, exchanging of Mazel Tovs. It makes possible offering condolences, helping others get through times of grief and of sorrows, showing other people with a hug or a handshake that they are not alone.

Yes, we are permitted to pray by ourselves, but it is not ideal. Prayer should take place with a minyan – at least nine other people. As a Hasidic rabbi beautifully put it, “The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.” In the United States, a recent issue of Psychology Today tells us, loneliness is currently at epidemic levels. A recent Cigna study of 20,000 U.S. adults found that nearly half of Americans feel like they are alone. There is no doubt that loneliness is on the rise. And it affects people of all ages. A survey by AARP, showed that more than 42 million U.S. adults over age 45 suffer from chronic loneliness.

In the Torah, after reading of the creation of mankind, the Torah tells us, “It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). A beautiful rabbinic commentary I once heard on this verse is that it is meant to be an addendum to the previous seven times when God, evaluating His acts of creation, uttered His conclusion that “it is good.” Yes, the world and all that God brought into being “is good”, but that is only on one condition. It is good when it is shared. It is beautiful when it is not viewed in isolation. “Lo tov” – it is not good when we are alone, separated from any sense of communal life, estranged from others and condemned to what criminologists recognize as the cruelest form of punishment – solitary confinement.

A synagogue is primarily referred to as a Beit Ha-Knesset. It is where loneliness is exchanged for community, isolation is transformed into the holiness not only of prayer and of Torah study but also of friendship, of shared values, and – yes – even of the kiddush at the end of the services.

Life when not shared with others is unbearably desolate. And frankly, I'm lonely.
So here's my confession. I survived seven months without being in shul. But while I sorely missed my House of Prayer, I prayed at home and still found a great deal of spiritual connection with God. I did not hear the reading of the Torah in a Beit Midrash – but I managed to learn quite a bit on my own with the Torah commentaries in my personal library. But the one thing I could not replace was the Beit Ha-Knesset.

Now I truly understand why Beit Ha-Knesset remains the most universal way people refer to a shul. Life when not shared with others is unbearably desolate; none of us can be truly human in isolation. Our service of God requires that we relate to other people. Frankly, I’m lonely.

And when the day will come, please God in the very near future, when the plague will be but a bitter memory, I will treasure as never before the blessings of community, friendship, and of togetherness that only a Beit Ha-Knesset can provide.

https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/it-was-the-honour-of-our-lives-to-work-for-rabbi-lord-sacks/
PRINCE CHARLES: I have lost a trusted guide, an inspired teacher and a friend
BY HRH PRINCE CHARLES
WRITING EXCLUSIVELY FOR JEWISH NEWS, the heir to the throne pays tribute to Lord Sacks as a “source of wisdom, sanity and moral conviction in bewildering and confusing times”.
 
JN Podcast Special: Tribute to Rabbi Lord Sacks
BY JN PODCAST
‘It was the honour of our lives to work for Rabbi Lord Sacks’
BY DAN SACKER, JOANNA BENARROCH AND DEBBY IFIELD
Dan Sacker, Joanna Benarroch and Debby Ifield find the words beyond the tears after losing an inspiring boss, mentor and friend.
When we were asked to write something about our boss Rabbi Sacks, the truth is that we weren’t sure we could.

We didn’t know if it was possible to find the words beyond the tears and we apologise now because this piece, try as we may, will not do him justice.

His passing, too sudden, too soon, when there was so much work still to do, has left a gaping hole in so many people’s lives.

We find it so difficult to comprehend a world without him in it. It doesn’t seem fair, it doesn’t make sense, and we don’t think it will for a very long time to come.

Rabbi Sacks was a giant of his – or any – generation, a Gadol HaDor, an irreplaceable and irrepressible leader of leaders, and a peerless and wise teacher whose intellectual clarity and moral voice carried such weight across the global Jewish community and far beyond. 

Yet to us, as he was to all who had the privilege of working for him, he was above anything else an inspiring boss, mentor and friend. He was the person who phoned us multiple times a day, sometimes to discuss work-related matters but more often than not just to chat about a new book he’d ordered, a new idea he’d read, a random YouTube music video he’d discovered or to laugh at a good joke he’d heard. 

He was the person we spent our working day with, helping to coordinate and prepare him for his various engagements, draft countless articles and speeches, write and research books and record videos, always challenging us to push boundaries, to never accept things as they were, to utilise every avenue possible to bring his ideas to the world. He was even the person who trusted us enough to tweet and use Facebook on his behalf!

But he was so much more than that. He was the person who quietly, away from the limelight, gave so many individuals, groups, rabbonim or organisations who needed it, and needed him, his most precious thing: time, which he did so willingly, unfailingly and consistently. 
He was the person who quietly advised global leaders, helped mediate other peoples’ problems and offered endless support and guidance to anyone who asked his advice. And he was the person who called us when we had personal traumas or issues to deal with. And called again an hour later to check in. And again an hour after that. 
https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/it-was-the-honour-of-our-lives-to-work-for-rabbi-lord-sacks/

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Rabbi-Dovid-Feinstein-Torah-Greatness-and-Humility.html?s=mm
Rabbi Dovid Feinstein: Torah Greatness and Humility
Nov 11, 2020  |  by Dassy Litchmanprint article
Rabbi Dovid Feinstein: Torah Greatness and Humility
The world has lost a Torah giant.

The Talmud (Taanit 7a) compares Torah to water: just as water leaves a high place and flows to a lower place, similarly the Torah only establishes itself in one who is humble. The Jewish nation just lost a paragon of humility in the late Torah genius, Rabbi Dovid Feinstein, who died last Friday at age 91.

Rabbi Feinstein was one of the leading authorities on Jewish law in the world and a member of the Council of Torah Scholars of Agudath Israel of America. When questions arose regarding end of life issues, few were willing to apply the halacha, Jewish law, and rule on such sensitive cases. Who knew enough to determine what was appropriate? Rav Dovid knew what he knew. While he was an introvert by nature, he would confidently rule on halachic queries from all ends of the earth.
Rabbi Feinstein took his responsibility to rule on Jewish law very seriously. An incredibly self-disciplined person, he was constantly studying. At the many weddings he was invited to, the Rabbi would sit and learn. In his study, he would sit and learn. In his office, he would sit and learn. He became who he was through decades of toil in the understanding of the intricacies of the Talmud. It was this dedication to study that made his accessibility so meaningful.

A Kind Neighbor
The Lower East Side was home to Rav Dovid for the last 83 years. It is here that his loss is palpably felt.

Rav Dovid patronized the local establishments. Every week, he used to shop for groceries at the local Kosher market, and he would eat breakfast in the Kosher pizza shop every morning. While he was there, anyone and everyone was welcome to come sit at his table to join him. Many took advantage of the opportunity to ask questions about the application of Jewish law, or for advice in a personal matter. He was available and accessible to anyone who sought his opinion, and he didn't force his opinion on anyone who didn't care to ask for it.


On Simchat Torah, the Rosh HaYeshiva used to sit in the center of the lively dancing, holding a Sefer Torah. One year, when we were about four years old, one of his granddaughters and I thought of playing "don't get trampled," and we joined the circle of men dancing, running in and out of the circle. Suffice it to say that it was dangerous for us, as well as for the adults trying not to trip over us.

The Rosh HaYeshiva noticed our game, smiled warmly, and invited us to come sit with him in the center of the circle.

Rabbi Shlomo Fishelis, a grandson of the late Rabbi, mentioned in his eulogy that his grandfather was "a good sport." He shared that the Rosh HaYeshiva would pose for photographs with anyone who asked for them, and he would retake the photograph as many times as necessary until the petitioner was happy.

When Artscroll was struggling to survive, Rav Dovid loaned his life savings to their founders, his students, to keep it afloat. A Jewish newspaper once asked prominent people which three dinner guests for Friday night would they want to have. Many listed great personalities in Tanach, Talmud or from today. Rav Dovid replied he would have three poor people who need a meal. 

Not Interested in Honor
Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ), where Rav Dovid served as Rosh Yeshiva, remained an unassuming stop on the F train in Lower Manhattan, despite being the home of such towering Talmudic scholars. Jews from all walks of life, including those with limited background in Jewish learning, made their way to MTJ. No one at MTJ batted an eyelash. Many of the towering Talmudic scholars offered to study together with them. The Rosh HaYeshiva created an environment where people came to study Torah, and any external trappings were irrelevant.

Rav Shach once said about Rav Dovid's illustrious father, Rav Moshe Feinstein, "His greatness was in his simplicity." Rav Dovid lived up to his noble heritage.

The world has lost a Torah giant. We will miss his great leadership and insightful wisdom, as well as his warmth and accessibility.



https://www.aish.com/sp/so/Stranger-on-a-Train.html?s=mm
A serendipitous encounter with a Hungarian survivor leads to an incredible reunion.
Marcel Sternberger, a photographer, was a creature of habit. He used to take the 9:09 Long Island Railroad to Woodside every morning. But on the morning of January 10, 1948, he didn’t do it. He decided to go and visit a sickly friend who was dying. He wanted to pay him a visit because he knew he wouldn’t be around that much longer. As a result, Marcel hopped on a different train – a train that he had never ridden before.

As he got on another man got up hurriedly to leave. This left a vacant seat which Marcel managed to get. Sitting next to him was a man who was reading a Hungarian newspaper. Marcel Sternberger, being of Hungarian decent himself, eventually struck up a conversation with the fellow. He asked the stranger what he was doing in New York City. The man replied that he was in the city looking for his wife.

“What do you mean, you’re looking for your wife?”

The stranger then said, “Well, my wife and I used to live in Dubreken in Hungary. During the war, I was taken away and made to work in the Ukraine burying the German dead. In time I managed to escape and run back to freedom. When I returned home, I found that my wife had also been taken away by the Nazis. One of the neighbors said they thought she had been taken to Auschwitz and therefore she would have been killed in the gas ovens.”

Marcel Sternberger

Someone else told him that they thought that the Americans had arrived in time to save some of the prisoners and had taken some of them to America. His wife might have been among those that were rescued. He said, “By a long shot, I’m hoping my wife is here.”

Marcel Sternberger kept listening to this story. The more he listened, the more familiar the account sounded to him. He asked, “What is your wife’s name?”

The stranger said, “My wife’s name is Maria. My last name is Paskin. It’s Maria Paskin.”

Sternberger took out his wallet and found a dog-eared piece of paper. As he looked down he saw the name Maria Paskin with a telephone number. He had met the lady at a party some time back. She had shared with him the same story that he had just heard. For some reason, he made a note of her name and number.

Marcel then said, “Look, I want to do something for you now. What is your name?”

He said, “My name is Bela Paskin.”

“Bela, get off with me at the next station.”

As they got off of the train, Marcel went over to a phone and called the number on the dog-eared piece of paper. After many, many, rings a feeble voice answered the phone. Marcel asked if he was speaking to Maria Paskin and she said that he was. He then went on to say, “Maria, my name is Marcel Sternberger. We met some weeks ago.”

She said that remembered him. He said, “Can you tell me what your husband’s name is?”

Rather shocked, the lady answered, “My husband’s name is Bela Paskin.”

“Can you tell me a little more about him?”

Sternberger photographing Albert Einstein, 1950
Again, the two stories were identical. Sternberger said, “Just a moment, I think you’re about to witness one of the greatest miracles you will ever see.” Then, as Marcel held on to the receiver, he called Bela Paskin into the booth and he said, “Would you please speak to this person?”

In about 10 seconds or so Bela’s expression changed. His look was beyond description. He then started to scream as the tears profusely poured down his creeks, “It’s Maria! It’s Maria! It’s Maria!”

Marcel Sternberger took him away from the telephone and hailed a taxi. He was going to go with his new friend to be a part of the moment when he decided that the occasion was too sacred for him to witness. So he put Bela Paskin into the cab, paid the taxi driver, told him where to take him, and sent him on to the reunion of his dreams.

This story originally appeared in Readers' Digest in 1948.

Alex Trebek’s Quiet Dignity
Nov 10, 2020  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
Alex Trebek’s Quiet Dignity
Reflections on the game show host from three Jewish contestants.
https://www.aish.com/ci/s/Alex-Trebeks-Quiet-Dignity.html?s=mm
With the death of Alex Trebek, host of the game show Jeopardy, America has lost a quiet voice of dignity. In his 37 years with Jeopardy, Alex modeled some key Jewish teachings: courtesy, the ability to listen respectfully, and a firm refusal to ever embarrass others. Whether the guests on his show were winning or losing, Alex always treated them as peers worthy of esteem.
Quest for Decency
Decency was a core goal of Jeopardy from the beginning. The show was born out of a desire to restore some decency to television game shows. In the 1950s, cheating scandals rocked several popular game shows when it was revealed that producers on some of the most popular shows had leaked answers to select contestants beforehand.

In 1963, talk show host and media mogul Merv Griffin was talking to his wife about how he missed the old quiz shows. Given the scandals, he thought viewers would wonder if the answers had been leaked ahead of time. Merv’s wife Julann had a novel suggestion: why not make a show where the guests were given an answer, and then asked to make up the question?

Merv created a show called What’s the Question, then changed its name to Jeopardy in 1964. The first host was Art Fleming, who set the tone of decorum and inclusivity that helped make Jeopardy such a hit. Breaking with social norms of the time, Mr. Fleming used to take the unusual step of wishing viewers not only Merry Christmas each December, but also addressed the show’s Jewish fans. “I’d like to wish all people of the Jewish faith a most happy and joyous Hanukkah,” he used to say, in a groundbreaking gesture of good will.

Alex Trebek began hosting the show in 1984. Born in Sudbury, Ontario in Canada, in 1940, Alex grew up attending Catholic school and entered broadcasting as a way to earn money to help pay for his philosophy studies at college. He moved to the United States in 1973 and eventually became an American citizen.

“You have to set your ego aside,” Alex said of his role as a game show host. “If you want to be a good host, you have to figure out a way to get the contestants to – as in the old television commercials about the military – ‘be all you can be.’ Because if they do well, the show does well. And if the show does well, by association, I do well.”

Under Alex Trebek’s guidance, Jeopardy became an integral part of American life. Over 37 years, he hosted over 8,000 shows. Jeopardy contestants were diverse, and the show made an effort to ensure that contestants from every background felt welcomed.

Jewish Contestant Covering Her Hair
“Alex was very kind,” recalls Marianne Novak, a religiously observant Jewish educator from Chicago who competed on Jeopardy in October 2016. Alex “would talk to you to make sure you’re comfortable.” During one break in the filming when she and Alex spoke for a few minutes, he asked what she spent her time doing: when Marianne described her rigorous schedule of learning Torah, Alex was enthusiastic and encouraging.

That kindness extended to the entire Jeopardy crew, Marianne observed. She’d auditioned for the show a few years previously, and was surprised to see that most of the same staff members were still working for Alex years later. “That’s very rare in television,” she notes.

Before she appeared on the show, Marianne worried about the scarf she habitually wears, covering her hair. She considered wearing a wig, as some Orthodox Jewish women do, on the show, but decided to be herself and go ahead with her usual hair covering. To her surprise, the Jeopardy crew was encouraging. They’d had many religious Jewish contestants who covered their hair before; Marianne’s wore her wide headband-like scarf on the show with pride.

Nearly Divulging a Top-Secret Mission Helping Soviet Jews
When Chicago-area doctor David Sales appeared on Jeopardy in 2001, he found Alex to be “a real mensch,” using the Yiddish word for an honorable person. “He was very approachable, very smart.”

Contestants were asked to jot down a few interesting facts about themselves so that Alex would be able to better ask them questions about themselves. One of David’s facts he gave Alex was that he’d once gone on a medical mission to the Soviet Union, flying to Russia and Uzbekistan just around the time the USSR broke up.

It had been a decade since David’s trip, so he told Alex about a top-secret mission he carried out during the trip, unbeknownst to the other doctors on the mission. At the time, Soviet Jews were living with few amenities; Jewish life was strictly regulated and many Soviet Jews lived in abject poverty. “There were still refuseniks," David recalled, Jews who’d applied for permission to leave the Soviet Union and move to Israel and were refused, and also denied jobs, apartments and opportunities as a result.

Before his trip, David got in touch with a Chicago-area Jewish charity that aided Soviet Jews and asked how he could help. Would he be able to smuggle vital medicines to Jewish communities there? David didn’t hesitate: he agreed to bring medicines with him. When the time came to fly out for the mission, he left a few days early, carrying two suitcases: one for his clothes and one stuffed full of medicines – primarily antibiotics. The Jewish charity gave him top secret instructions to meet one representative from the Jewish community on a street corner in Moscow, where he handed over half the medicines. Another secret Jewish emissary met him in Samarkand in Uzbekistan. “I thought the story about the medicines would be the most interesting” thing to talk about with Alex on air, David recalls.

His wife wasn’t so sure. While David was getting ready to go on the air, his wife phoned the studio and asked to speak with him. David was in the “green room” where contestants got ready, and couldn’t be reached. Was it possible to send a message to Alex Trebek instead? Even though it had been a decade since David’s life-saving heroism, she worried that telling his story might be dangerous to Russian Jews. When the time came for Alex Trebek to chat with David on air, he asked him about his medical mission to the former Soviet Union – but left out any reference to him bringing medicines with him.

Keeping Shabbat While Competing on Jeopardy
“When I got the call to come and be on Jeopardy for the teachers' tournament” in 2020, New York City Jewish day school teacher Meggy Kwait was told to fly out to California on a Saturday along with the other contestants. An observant Jew, Meggy doesn’t fly on Shabbat; she asked the Jeopardy producer if she could fly out on Sunday instead.

Alex Trebek and Meggy KwaitAlex Trebek and Meggy Kwait

Of course, was the answer. Meggy then asked if some of her relatives would be able to sit in the studio audience and watch the show. “Of course, we have to have the whole mishpacha!” the producer said, using the Hebrew word for family.

Healing Service for Alex Trebek
When Alex Trebek announced that he was suffering from Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, some of his former contestants created an online service to pray for his health. Organized by Geoffrey Mitelman of New York, the March 14, 2019 service brought together dozens of people who’d competed on the show. Marianne Novak participated in the event, reading a modified Jewish prayer for healing. “It was just beautiful,” she said of the event.

Alex Trebek and Geoffrey MitlemanAlex Trebek and Geoffrey Mitleman

“If (Alex) hadn’t been such a good guy, if he wasn’t such a good person, this wouldn’t have happened,” Marianne noted. “He was such a calm, cool guy who didn’t take himself seriously. He was someone people felt a connection to even though they only met him for ten minutes” during the course of the program. “If you’re that kind of person, those things sort of exude, and people connect with them.” It’s a sentiment many people who competed on the show share, she explains.

Enduring Legacy
Jeopardy is currently still on air, and will continue showing previously taped episodes until the final week of December. David Sales still avidly watches the show and was moved by a recent episode aired just days before Alex Trebek’s death. A contestant from California appeared on the show, and mentioned that he’d attended Jewish day school. “His chit chat item,” David chuckled, “was that when he was in day school he used to sing (the Jewish prayer) Adon Olam to the Jeopardy melody.”

Jeopardy occupies a unique place in American culture. It’s not merely a game show: it’s also a bastion of decency and decorum, a place where contestants relate to one another with respect and where everyone relates to each other with professionalism and good sportsmanship. Alex Trebek helped foster this positive attitude. He will be sorely missed.

https://www.aish.com/tp/i/sacks/Answering-the-Call.html?s=mm
Answering the Call
Vayeira (Genesis 18-22)
Nov 1, 2020
by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacksprint article
Answering the Call
Abraham was the first great Jewish leader. He took responsibility and didn’t wait for others to act.

The early history of humanity is set out in the Torah as a series of disappointments. God gave human beings freedom, which they then misused. Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Cain murdered Abel. Within a relatively short time, the world before the Flood became dominated by violence. All flesh perverted its way on the earth. God created order, but humans created chaos. Even after the Flood, humanity, in the form of the builders of Babel, were guilty of hubris, thinking that people could build a tower that “reaches heaven" (Gen. 11:4).

Humans failed to respond to God, which is where Abraham enters the picture. We are not quite sure, at the beginning, what it is that Abraham is summoned to do. We know he is commanded to leave his land, birthplace and father’s house and travel “to the land I will show you,” (Gen. 12:1) but what he is to do when he gets there, we do not know. On this the Torah is silent. What is Abraham’s mission? What makes him special? What makes him more than a good man in a bad age, as was Noah? What makes him a leader and the father of a nation of leaders?

To decode the mystery we have to recall what the Torah has been signalling prior to this point. I suggested in previous weeks that a - perhaps the - key theme is a failure of responsibility. Adam and Eve lack personal responsibility. Adam says, “It wasn’t me; it was the woman.” Eve says, “It wasn’t me, it was the serpent.” It is as if they deny being the authors of their own stories – as if they do not understand either freedom or the responsibility it entails.

Cain does not deny personal responsibility. He does not say, “It wasn’t me. It was Abel’s fault for provoking me.” Instead he denies moral responsibility: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Noah fails the test of collective responsibility. He is a man of virtue in an age of vice, but he makes no impact on his contemporaries. He saves his family (and the animals) but no one else. According to the plain reading of the text, he does not even try.


If we understand this, we understand Abraham. He exercises personal responsibility. In parshat Lech Lecha, a quarrel breaks out between Abraham's herdsmen and those of his nephew Lot. Seeing that this was no random occurrence but the result of their having too many cattle to be able to graze together, Abraham immediately proposes a solution:

Abram said to Lot, “Let there not be a quarrel between you and me, or between your herders and mine, for we are brothers. Is not the whole land before you? Let’s part company. If you go to the left, I will go to the right; if you go to the right, I’ll go to the left.” (Gen. 13:8-9)

Note that Abraham passes no judgment. He does not ask whose fault the argument was. He does not ask who will gain from any particular outcome. He gives Lot the choice. He sees the problem and acts.

In the next chapter of Bereishit we are told about a local war, as a result of which Lot is among the people taken captive. Immediately Abraham gathers a force, pursues the invaders, rescues Lot and with him, all the other captives. He returns these captives safely to their homes, refusing to take any of the spoils of victory that he is offered by the grateful king of Sodom.

This is a strange passage – it depicts Abraham very differently from the nomadic shepherd we see elsewhere. The passage is best understood in the context of the story of Cain. Abraham shows he is his brother’s (or brother’s son’s) keeper. He immediately understands the nature of moral responsibility. Despite the fact that Lot chose to live where he did with its attendant risks, Abraham does not say, “His safety is his responsibility, not mine.”

Then, in this week’s parsha of Vayera, comes the great moment: a human being challenges God Himself for the very first time. God is about to pass judgment on Sodom. Abraham, fearing that this will mean that the city will be destroyed, says:

“Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do justice?” (Gen. 18:23–25)

This is a remarkable speech. By what right does a mere mortal challenge God Himself?

The short answer is that God Himself signalled that he should. Listen carefully to the text:

Then the Lord said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? Abraham will surely become a great and powerful nation, and all nations on earth will be blessed through him” ... Then the Lord said, “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin so grievous that I will go down and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached Me.” (Gen. 18:17–21)

Those words, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?” are a clear hint that God wants Abraham to respond; otherwise why would He have said them?

The story of Abraham can only be understood against the backdrop of the story of Noah. There too, God told Noah in advance that he was about to bring punishment to the world.

So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth” (Gen. 6:13).

Noah did not protest. To the contrary, we are told three times that Noah “did as God commanded him” (Gen. 6:22; 7:5; 7:9). Noah accepted the verdict. Abraham challenged it. Abraham understood the third principle we have been exploring over the past few weeks: collective responsibility.

The people of Sodom were not Abraham's brothers and sisters, so he was going beyond even what he did in rescuing Lot. He prayed on their behalf because he understood the idea of human solidarity, immortally expressed by John Donne:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself ...
Any man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.1

But a question remains. Why did God call on Abraham to challenge Him? Was there anything Abraham knew that God didn’t know? That idea is absurd. The answer is surely this: Abraham was to become the role model and initiator of a new faith, one that would not defend the human status quo but challenge it.

Abraham had to have the courage to challenge God if his descendants were to challenge human rulers, as Moses and the Prophets did. Jews do not accept the world that is. They challenge it in the name of the world that ought to be. This is a critical turning point in human history: the birth of the world’s first religion of protest – the emergence of a faith that challenges the world instead of accepting it.

Abraham was not a conventional leader. He did not rule a nation. There was as yet no nation for him to lead. But he was the role model of leadership as Judaism understands it. He took responsibility. He acted; he didn’t wait for others to act. Of Noah, the Torah says, “he walked with God” (Gen. 6:9). But to Abraham, God says, “Walk before Me,” (Gen. 17:1), meaning: be a leader. Walk ahead. Take personal responsibility. Take moral responsibility. Take collective responsibility.

Judaism is God’s call to responsibility.

QUESTIONS (AROUND THE SHABBAT TABLE)
What could Adam, Eve, Cain and Noah have said or done differently, to face up to their various responsibilities?
What was Abraham’s greatest quality?
How can we continue Abraham’s legacy today?
NOTES

John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII.


CONNECT WITH THE CHIEF RABBI

Download the Chief Rabbi’s new iPhone and iPad app via www.chiefrabbi.org for mobile access to his video study sessions as well as his articles and speeches. Alternatively, search for “Chief Rabbi” in the App Store on your iPhone.
SUBSCRIBE TO COVENANT & CONVERSATION

To receive Covenant & Conversation and other news from the Office of the Chief Rabbi direct to your inbox each week, please subscribe at www.chiefrabbi.org.

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/The-Truth-about-Jews-and-Kazakhstan.html?s=mm
The Truth about Jews and Kazakhstan
Nov 1, 2020  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
The Truth about Jews and Kazakhstan
Don't believe Borat about Kazakhstan's hatred of Jews. The reality is rather different.
Sasha Baron Cohen portrays Borat, a bumbling Kazakh who’s racist, sexist and virulently anti-Semitic. He jokes about Kazakhstan being a nation where Jews are hated. Yet the reality is very different. Long abused by the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan today is a pluralistic country with a small but flourishing Jewish life. Here are six facts about Kazakhstan and Jews.
Early Russian Army Conscripts
Kazakhstan is a massive country in Central Asia. For years, it was sparsely inhabited by nomadic tribes; in fact, the word Kazakh comes from the Turkic word “Kaz,” meaning wander. In ancient times, much of today’s Kazakhstan was ruled by Persia; in the Middle Ages it was governed by Genghis Khan. Jewish merchants settled in the town of Turkestan in this period, and built a synagogue whose remains can still be seen today.

In the 1700s, Russia began advancing into Kazakh territory. The atmosphere in Russia was full of change: Czar Nicolas I fancied himself a reformer and wanted to make sweeping changes to Russia’s large Jewish community. In 1827 he instituted a brutal draft forcing Jewish communities to provide boys for the Russian army. Numbers varied in different communities, but averaged about four boys each year per 1,000 Jews. Service in the Russian army was all-consuming; conscripts had to serve for 25 years. Unlike other soldiers who didn’t have to join the army until age 18, for Jews the draft age was lowered to 12.

Though Jewish conscripts were technically allowed to practice their religion, the reality was very difficult. Taken from home, brought up among anti-Semitic soldiers and denied contact with Jewish communities, most Jewish soldiers in the Czar’s army lost their connection to Jewish life. Even worse, if any soldier married and had children, their offspring became property of the Russian state and were mandated to attend Russian military schools.

Despite these incredible hardships, some Jewish Russian recruits who found themselves stationed in Kazakhstan did form Jewish communities. Clusters of Jews lived in several towns across Kazakhstan, praying in private homes and living low-profile Jewish lives. In Almaty (then known as Verniy), the largest town in Kazakhstan, local Jews opened a synagogue in 1884 – Kazakhstan’s first since the Middle Ages. Located in a small wooden building, it served about a hundred Jews, most soldiers and veterans.
Exiled to Kazakhstan for Practicing Judaism
Under Soviet rule, Kazakhstan was exploited, starved and used as a dumping ground for political prisoners. Kazakhstan is a vast land, encompassing mountainous areas as well as inhospitable deserts and steppes. The harsh terrain of Kazakhstan’s interior was soon dotted with a vast system of gulags, political prisons where millions of dissenters and ethnic minorities were imprisoned, tortured, and often died. One of the gulags, at the Karaganda coal mine in Kazakhstan, was 300,000 square miles – about the size of France – and processed over a million political prisoners. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who wrote The Gulag Archipelago, was imprisoned in Kazakhstan.

Among the dissenters sent to gulags in Kazakhstan and elsewhere were Jews who insisted on clinging to their religious observance in defiance of Soviet law. One of these Jews was Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, the father of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of blessed memory, the late Lubavitcher Rebbe.

Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson
Born in 1860, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was a brilliant scholar; his wife Chana was also a distinguished intellectual and together they helped Jewish life continue in the Soviet Union. The couple became the chief rabbi and rebbetzin of Dnepropetrovsk (then known as Yekatrinoslav) in Ukraine. Religious life was strictly controlled, and Rabbi Levi Yitzchak risked his life to build a secret mikveh (Jewish ritual bath), and to perform secret Jewish weddings. Jews at the time were allowed to bake matzah, but were forbidden from having rabbinic supervision to make sure it was kosher. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak interceded with the authorities to gain permission to ensure that his community’s matzah was kosher for Passover.

The Jewish community in Jaffa, in what today is the State of Israel, invited Rabbi Levi Yitzchak and Chana and their family to move there and lead the community, sending visas for them and the couple’s four sons. But the Schneerson family stayed in the Soviet Union, working to help keep Jewish life going. Just before Passover in 1939, Stalin sent the fearsome secret police to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s house. They ransacked his library, then arrested the rabbi for activities supporting Jewish life. He was sent to one of the notorious gulags in Kazakhstan, where he was tortured over a period of nearly a year.

Afterwards, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak was banished to the Kazakh town of Chi’ili. His wife Chana joined him. Eventually, they were allowed to move to Almaty where they led the Jewish community. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak passed away in Almaty in 1944. In August 2020, the Government of Kazakhstan designated Rabbi Levi Yitzchak’s grave a national heritage site.
Bukharian Jews
Not all the Jews of Kazakhstan are Russian. Kazakhstan borders the nations Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the south; these nations are home to Bukharian Jews, some of whom have made Kazakhstan home.
Bukharian Jews trace their history to 539 BCE, when King Cyrus conquered Persia, ending the Jewish exile there that occurred a generation before when Nebuchadnezer conquered the Land of Israel and destroyed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. King Cyrus allowed Jews to return to Israel, where they promptly began work on the Second Temple. Some Jews remained in Persia, however. Over time, groups of Persian Jews moved further north, into the Central Asian areas that today form the Republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and neighboring regions. In time, these “Bukharan” Jews – named after a town called Bukhara in Uzbekistan where a Jewish community settled – became cut off from other Jewish populations. They spoke a language called Bukhari or Judeo-Tajik, which was heavily influenced by Tajik language groups and which also incorporates many Hebrew words,
Facing Muslim anti-Semitism and a forbidding, inhospitable terrain, Bukharan Jews gradually became spiritually and culturally degraded. That changed in 1793, when a Moroccan Jewish leader, Rabbi Joseph Maman al-Maghribi, visited the area and decided to stay to help the Bukharan Jewish community. Rabbi Maman established the Hibbat Zion – “Love of Zion” – movement, which sent thousands of Bukharan children to Jerusalem, first for visits, and then in time to move there permanently. By the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, there was already an established Bukharan community in Jerusalem. Following the revolution when Central Asian Republics came under Soviet rule, many more Bukharan Jews left to join their brethren in the Land of Israel. Some smaller groups of Bukharan Jews migrated further north, settling in Kazakh towns and villages, as well.
Haven During the Holocaust
In his latest movie, Sasha Baron Cohen has Borat describe the Holocaust as a high point in Kazakhstan’s history. The comedian had a point, but it’s the opposite of his joke: the terrible years of the Holocaust were a high point in Kazakh history, when it welcomed over 8,500 Jews who were fleeing from the Nazis.
These desperate Jews came from across Russia and Russian-held Poland. Kazakhstan was remote and impoverished, but it offered a safe haven far from Nazi aggression. Prof. Anna Shternshis, a Professor of Yiddish Studies and the Director of the Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto, uncovered a World War II era Yiddish song called Kazakhstan, which describes what Prof. Shternshis has called the “melting pot” of Jewish life in Kazakhstan during the Holocaust. (She included Kazakhstan in a Grammy-winning CD she produced called Yiddish Glory: The Lost Songs of World War II in 2018.) Jews from Poland and the Soviet Union, and also Jewish political prisoners who’d been released by the Soviet authorities from gulags in Kazakhstan all mingled together in Kazakhstan during the war.
Portrait of the Schanzer family in Kazakhstan where they settled after first being imprisoned in Siberia. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
“I have suffered from when I was born endlessly,” the song begins, before going on to describe the warm welcome Jews who were fleeing the Holocaust received in Kazakhstan. The song is a testament to the many different ethnic groups who called Kazakhstan home. “A Kazakh, an Ossetian, a Uigher and a Georgian, Ukrainian, Roma, Russian, Kalymyk, Tajik, Belarussian.... Now, our family has another member: You are our brother, (dear) Jew.” Most of the Jews finding refuge in Kazakhstan spent the war in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city.
Hidden Jews
Though the Soviet authorities who ruled Kazakhstan forbade most forms of Jewish religious expression, Jewish life did exist in Kazakhstan, thanks to one incredibly brave Chabad rabbi from Brooklyn, Rabbi Hillel Liberov. In 1944, after Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson died, Rabbi Liberov realized that the Jews of Kazakhstan needed a leader, and he moved to Almaty. From 1944 until his death in 1982, Rabbi Liberov served as the unofficial chief rabbi of Almaty. He led secret Jewish services, and slaughtered animals according to Jewish kosher law so Kazakh Jews could have some kosher meat for Shabbat and holidays. It was incredibly dangerous work: his children back home in Brooklyn didn’t know if they’d ever see him again. He faced arrest at any moment. Yet his heroic efforts kept Jewish life alive in Kazakhstan.
Polish Jews, exiled by the Soviets exiled to the village of Zhuravlovka, Kazakhstan, stand in front of a mud hut. (USHMM)
Many Jews were sent to Kazakhstan during the Soviet era to work on mining and nuclear testing projects in the Republic. Though Jewish life was severely repressed, some Jews did manage to live Jewish lives in secret. It’s unknown today how many thousands of Jews risked torture and death to attend secret religious services and celebrate illicit Jewish weddings during this period.
Flourishing Jewish Life Today
Today, a sizable community of up to 20,000 Jews call Kazakhstan home. (Different organizations cite different numbers; some estimate that the Jewish community is as small as 3,500.) The Chief Rabbi, Yeshaya E. Cohen, first moved to the country in 1994. “When I arrived in Almaty, it was an entirely different atmosphere” from the rest of the Soviet Union, he’s recalled, noting the “kind and friendly people” in Kazakhstan.
Rabbi Yeshaya E. Cohen
Almaty has the country’s largest Jewish community, and smaller Jewish populations are found in regions including Astana, Semiplatinsk, Dzhambul, Uralsk, and Karaganda. Over twenty Jewish communal organizations contribute to Kazakh Jewish life, often with help from larger Jewish communities worldwide. In Karaganda, for instance, the thousand-strong Jewish community is aided by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which runs a Jewish community center. Local Jews attend cultural events, take Jewish classes, and also volunteer distributing food and supplies to impoverished local Jews.
During Soviet times, Kazakhstan suffered enormously. Many of the Soviet Union’s nuclear tests were completed in Kazakhstan, and much of the country was filled with gulags. Ethnic Kazakhs were treated as second class citizens in their own home, with Russians being favored. Kazakhstan declared independence after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and since then, it has seen extraordinary change – including the flourishing of Jewish life, which had so long been suppressed by Soviet authorities.
Rabbi Cohen notes that far from being the Jew-hating caricature of Borat, Kazakhs are tolerant to the Jewish minority in their midst. Hanukkah, especially, is a wonderful holiday in the country, and often coincides with Kazakhstan's Independence Day. “It’s a reason to be twice as happy,” Rabbi Cohen explains, “for we still remember the Soviet times when everybody had to be the same, as people were afraid to express themselves in their clothes, thoughts and beliefs.”
Today, Kazakhstan’s Jews are free to show their Jewishness. A new generation is growing up with synagogues, Jewish schools, and Jewish classes open for the first time in the country in years.

https://www.aish.com/jw/me/US-Passports-Can-Now-Say-Jerusalem-Israel.html?s=mm
U.S. Passports Can Now Say Jerusalem, Israel
Nov 1, 2020  |  by Rabbi Shraga Simmonsprint article
U.S. Passports Can Now Say Jerusalem, Israel
Correcting an absurd historic injustice.

I’ll never forget the first time I went to obtain a passport for one of my children born in Jerusalem. When the clerk at the US Consulate asked what to list as place of birth, I said, “Jerusalem, Israel.”

“Sorry, that’s not an option,” she dutifully explained. “US citizens born in Jerusalem can list ‘Jerusalem’ – but not ‘Israel’.”

Last week, after decades of political hand-wringing, US ambassador to Israel David Friedman issued the first passport that lists “Israel" as the place of birth. The passport recipient, as shown in the photo above? Jerusalem-born teen Menachem Zivotofsky, whose parents launched a pair of failed battles at the US Supreme Court aimed at reversing America’s longstanding policy. 

The event corrected a historic distortion that treats Jerusalem as a vexing diplomatic issue and equates Jewish and Islamic claims to Jerusalem. This despite that Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital twice as long as Islam has even existed. The city is mentioned 457 times in the Jewish Bible; Jerusalem is mentioned zero times in the Koran. Jerusalem is the one and only Jewish capital; whereas Jerusalem has never – in all of human history – been an Arab or Islamic capital city.

As recently as 2016, the US was siding with a position that Jewish rights to even the Western Wall is a violation of international rights.

Canadian Pioneers

 
Rectifying this absurd injustice has been a long journey.

Back in 2005, 18-year-old Eli Veffer, born in Jerusalem, launched a court battle against the Canadian government to have "Jerusalem, Israel" listed in his Canadian passport as his birthplace. The case of “Eliyahu Yoshua Veffer v. Minister of Foreign Affairs” cited Canadian policy that allows passport applicants to choose the country of birth – even when the territory is disputed. With Jerusalem as the lone exception, Veffer claimed that erasing any mention of the Jewish homeland constituted discrimination of his basic rights to freedom of conscience, religion, and identity.

The case was spearheaded by Shmuel Veffer, Eli’s father, for many years a beloved rabbi at Aish in Jerusalem and Toronto. “We argued that ‘Israel’ is part of our son’s identity,” Shmuel told Aish.com, “and he resented being told he does not have a country of birth.'”

After a 3-year legal fight, the case reached the Supreme Court of Canada which ruled against the Veffers.

“We expected to lose,” says Shmuel, who now runs the Israeli olive oil export, Galilee Green. “But after consulting with Rabbi Noah Weinberg, we felt the battle was worth it. The court case would bring to the world's attention the absurdity of pretending that Jerusalem was not the capital of Israel.”

The passport that started it all: Eli Veffer’s 2004 Canadian passport.

Supreme Court Ruling
The Veffers' Canadian lawsuit got international press and inspired the Zivotofsky family to file a similar suit against the US Government. They argued that Congress passed a law in 1995 recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The practical implication of this law was deferred by a succession of presidents, until 2002 when Congress passed legislation requiring consular documents to list Jerusalem-born citizens’ place of birth as Israel.

The DC-based father-daughter team of Nathan and Alyza Lewin filed a lawsuit on Zivotofsky’s behalf, demanding that his passport list ‘Israel’ as his place of birth.

In 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled against the Zivotofskys, claiming that Congress had overstepped its bounds. In writing the dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts decried: “The court takes the perilous step – for the first time in our history – of allowing the president to defy an act of Congress in the field of foreign affairs.”

In 2017, the US moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – paving the way for last week’s passport recognition that Ambassador Friedman says brings US “passport policy in line with our foreign policy and common sense.”

Shmuel Veffer notes the poetic justice of this historic event taking place the week of Parshat Lech Lecha, where we read of Abraham standing alone, at great personal effort, to ensure the triumph of justice.

“The moral of the story,” Shmuel says, “is that one person, standing up with truth against the whole world, can truly make a difference.”

At a 2014 Supreme Court hearing: From left: Menachem Zivotofsky, his father Ari, attorney Alyza Lewin, and Lewin’s father Nathan. (credit: Rikki Gordon Lewin)

TIMELINE OF JUSTICE
1995 – US Congress passes law recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital
2002 – Congress passes legislation requiring consular documents to list Jerusalem-born citizens’ place of birth as Israel
2006 – Eliyahu Veffer files a lawsuit against the Canadian government, demanding that his passport say he was born in “Jerusalem, Israel.” Canada’s Supreme Court rejects his claim.
2017 – The US Supreme Court rules against Menachem Zivotofsky in a similar lawsuit
2020 – US government issues first passport listing “Jerusalem, Israel”

https://www.aish.com/jw/me/US-Passports-Can-Now-Say-Jerusalem-Israel.html?s=mm
U.S. Passports Can Now Say Jerusalem, Israel
Nov 1, 2020  |  by Rabbi Shraga Simmonsprint article
U.S. Passports Can Now Say Jerusalem, Israel
Correcting an absurd historic injustice.

I’ll never forget the first time I went to obtain a passport for one of my children born in Jerusalem. When the clerk at the US Consulate asked what to list as place of birth, I said, “Jerusalem, Israel.”

“Sorry, that’s not an option,” she dutifully explained. “US citizens born in Jerusalem can list ‘Jerusalem’ – but not ‘Israel’.”

Last week, after decades of political hand-wringing, US ambassador to Israel David Friedman issued the first passport that lists “Israel" as the place of birth. The passport recipient, as shown in the photo above? Jerusalem-born teen Menachem Zivotofsky, whose parents launched a pair of failed battles at the US Supreme Court aimed at reversing America’s longstanding policy. 

The event corrected a historic distortion that treats Jerusalem as a vexing diplomatic issue and equates Jewish and Islamic claims to Jerusalem. This despite that Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital twice as long as Islam has even existed. The city is mentioned 457 times in the Jewish Bible; Jerusalem is mentioned zero times in the Koran. Jerusalem is the one and only Jewish capital; whereas Jerusalem has never – in all of human history – been an Arab or Islamic capital city.

As recently as 2016, the US was siding with a position that Jewish rights to even the Western Wall is a violation of international rights.

Canadian Pioneers

 
Rectifying this absurd injustice has been a long journey.

Back in 2005, 18-year-old Eli Veffer, born in Jerusalem, launched a court battle against the Canadian government to have "Jerusalem, Israel" listed in his Canadian passport as his birthplace. The case of “Eliyahu Yoshua Veffer v. Minister of Foreign Affairs” cited Canadian policy that allows passport applicants to choose the country of birth – even when the territory is disputed. With Jerusalem as the lone exception, Veffer claimed that erasing any mention of the Jewish homeland constituted discrimination of his basic rights to freedom of conscience, religion, and identity.

The case was spearheaded by Shmuel Veffer, Eli’s father, for many years a beloved rabbi at Aish in Jerusalem and Toronto. “We argued that ‘Israel’ is part of our son’s identity,” Shmuel told Aish.com, “and he resented being told he does not have a country of birth.'”

After a 3-year legal fight, the case reached the Supreme Court of Canada which ruled against the Veffers.

“We expected to lose,” says Shmuel, who now runs the Israeli olive oil export, Galilee Green. “But after consulting with Rabbi Noah Weinberg, we felt the battle was worth it. The court case would bring to the world's attention the absurdity of pretending that Jerusalem was not the capital of Israel.”

The passport that started it all: Eli Veffer’s 2004 Canadian passport.

Supreme Court Ruling
The Veffers' Canadian lawsuit got international press and inspired the Zivotofsky family to file a similar suit against the US Government. They argued that Congress passed a law in 1995 recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The practical implication of this law was deferred by a succession of presidents, until 2002 when Congress passed legislation requiring consular documents to list Jerusalem-born citizens’ place of birth as Israel.

The DC-based father-daughter team of Nathan and Alyza Lewin filed a lawsuit on Zivotofsky’s behalf, demanding that his passport list ‘Israel’ as his place of birth.

In 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled against the Zivotofskys, claiming that Congress had overstepped its bounds. In writing the dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts decried: “The court takes the perilous step – for the first time in our history – of allowing the president to defy an act of Congress in the field of foreign affairs.”

In 2017, the US moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – paving the way for last week’s passport recognition that Ambassador Friedman says brings US “passport policy in line with our foreign policy and common sense.”

Shmuel Veffer notes the poetic justice of this historic event taking place the week of Parshat Lech Lecha, where we read of Abraham standing alone, at great personal effort, to ensure the triumph of justice.

“The moral of the story,” Shmuel says, “is that one person, standing up with truth against the whole world, can truly make a difference.”

At a 2014 Supreme Court hearing: From left: Menachem Zivotofsky, his father Ari, attorney Alyza Lewin, and Lewin’s father Nathan. (credit: Rikki Gordon Lewin)

TIMELINE OF JUSTICE
1995 – US Congress passes law recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital
2002 – Congress passes legislation requiring consular documents to list Jerusalem-born citizens’ place of birth as Israel
2006 – Eliyahu Veffer files a lawsuit against the Canadian government, demanding that his passport say he was born in “Jerusalem, Israel.” Canada’s Supreme Court rejects his claim.
2017 – The US Supreme Court rules against Menachem Zivotofsky in a similar lawsuit
2020 – US government issues first passport listing “Jerusalem, Israel”

https://www.aish.com/jw/s/Burning-the-Talmud-in-Venice.html?s=mm
Burning the Talmud in Venice
Oct 27, 2020  |  by Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article
Burning the Talmud in Venice
October 31 marks the tragic anniversary of the end of a golden age of Hebrew books in Venice.

This year, October 31 falls on the 13th of Cheshvan, the anniversary of a horrific event in Jewish history – the burning of the Talmud and other Jewish books in the center of Venice in 1553.

A few years before this massive Jewish book burning, the thought that Jewish books would be hunted down and destroyed in Venice might have seemed impossible. At the time, Venice was the center of the Hebrew publishing industry.

After the printing press was invented in the mid-1400s by Johannes Gutenberg, publishing houses sprung up throughout Europe. This new technology caused a huge revolution: for the first time, books and other printed items could be mass-produced. Families that might have only owned one book before – a laboriously hand-written Bible, perhaps – could suddenly acquire a small library of their own. Learning and education were completely transformed.

Venice discriminated against Jews in the extreme.
In Italy, this new atmosphere of intellectual inquiry was often led by Jews. Historian Solomon Graetz described the key role Italian Jews played in the development of the Renaissance there: “Jewish youths attended the Italian universities, and acquired a more liberal education. The Italian Jews were the first to make us of the newly discovered art of Gutenberg, and printing houses soon rose in many parts of Italy – in Reggio, Ferrara, Pieva di Sacco, Bologna, Soncino, Ixion, and Naples.” (Quoted in History of the Jews: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, Vol. IV by Solomon Graetz, 1904.)

Venice, however, refused to grant permission for Jews to set up printing presses. Though prosperous and home to a large Jewish community, Venice discriminated against Jews in the extreme. Jews had to wear ridiculous yellow garments and hats whenever they ventured out in public. In 1515, Venice forced all Jews to live crammed into an inhospitable island called the Ghetto (the origin of the term Ghetto in English), where they were locked in each night. Despite their education, Jews could not enter most professions and were barred from sitting on the city’s powerful, secretive leadership council.


 
Daniel Bomberg, a non-Jewish businessman from Antwerp, saw a market for Jewish books in the city, and requested permission from the city authorities to open a printing press specializing in Hebrew works. (It would have been impossible for a Jew to go into business in this way.) Bomberg moved to Venice and spent years trying to bribe local officials for permission to set up shop. Finally, in 1515, after paying an enormous bribe, he was granted approval. Bomberg hired four local Jewish assistants (including at least one of whom seemingly publicly embraced Christianity) and started setting Hebrew text on his presses.

Bomberg’s first printed work was the Jewish classic Mikraot Gedolot, a version of the Hebrew Bible containing key commentaries by important Medieval rabbis. He then went on to print editions of the Talmud. Bomberg printed books were incredibly high quality: he used only the finest ink and paper, and soon learned Jewish households were clamoring to buy copies of his books. Though there were several Jewish printing presses operating throughout Italy at the time, Venice became synonymous with the new Hebrew printing press industry, setting a standard that many other presses tried to follow.

Even though Jewish life and learning flourished in Italy, it did so despite a terrifying drumbeat of intense anti-Jewish hatred that sometimes flared into violence. As Solomon Graetz notes: “The relatively secure and honorable position of the Jews in Italy did not fail to rouse against them the anger of those fanatical monks who sought to cover with the cloak of religious zeal either their dissolute conduct or the ambitious share with which they took in worldly affairs.” Some priests blamed Jews for all sorts of ills: perhaps the most vocal Jew-bater in Italy at the time was the 15th Century Franciscan priest Bernardinus of Feltre, who encouraged hatred of and violence against Jews in the generation before the heyday of the Italian Hebrew printing press.

Bernardinus railed against Jews in his sermons, openly trying to foment violence. He was so vituperative that some of the leading princes and aristocrats of Italy forced him to quit a succession of cities and towns across Italy. Duke Galeazzo of Milan forced Bernardinus to leave his city rather than whip up massacres of Jews there. Civic leaders in Florence and Tuscany protected their Jews and forbade Bernardinus from preaching. Bernardinus did manage to incite violence against Jews in Pisa and Venice. He finally left for the north of Italy, where he had his greatest success in the city of Trent: A Christian baby was found dead and Bernardinus blamed the Jews of Trent, who were all thrown into prison, many were tortured. The dead baby was beatified by the Catholic Church as Simon of Trent, and Jews were banished from ever living in the city again. Against this grim background, Jewish learning flourished and Hebrew books were printed by the thousands across Italy. Despite the Jews’ relative prominence, the specter of danger never entirely disappeared.

In Venice, the threat of violence bubbling against the surface would soon erupt. The cause was other non-Jewish businessmen entering the Hebrew printing business, hoping to capitalize on Bomberg’s success and make a fortune printing Hebrew language books for Venice’s large and educated Jewish community.

The first of these was Marco Antonio Giustiniani, an Italian nobleman who set up a Hebrew printing press in Venice in 1545. From the start, Giustiniani was openly hostile to Daniel Bomberg. Giustiniani began printing editions of the very same books that Bomberg was printing, and even seemed to try to provoke Bomberg with the logo that Giustiniani adopted. Giustiniani’s mark, printed in all his books, depicted a picture of the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, with a quote from the Jewish prophet Haggai, “The glory of this later Temple will be greater than the first….” (Haggai 2:9). His message was clear: his new business would quash Bomberg’s lucrative press.

Within a few years, other non-Jewish businessmen opened yet more Hebrew printing presses in Venice. These businessmen were also cutthroat, vying to put their rivals out of business. (Indeed, Bomberg’s press soon closed.) They behaved with a startling lack of decency, routinely undercutting each other and printing the same volumes that their competitors had already released. And they employed a certain type of worker: men who’d been raised as Jews, who knew Hebrew and could lay out sheets of Hebrew text, but who’d converted to Christianity, making them more attractive as employees in the anti-Semitic atmosphere of the time.

One of these newcomers was a Venetian native named Alvise Bragadin, who founded a wildly popular press called Stamparia Bragadina, printing Hebrew books. One of his first products was an edition of the classic Jewish work Mishneh Torah by Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (1138-1204). Alvise Bragadin apparently used Bomberg’s edition and added a key new element.

Bragadin approached Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen, the Chief Rabbi head of a renowned yeshiva in nearby Padua, and one of the greatest rabbis of the era. Rabbi Katzenellenbogen gave his consent for a penetrating commentary that he wrote on the work to be included in Bragadin’s edition, and even invested some of his own money to finance the work. For Bragadin, this was a master stroke, establishing the Stamparia Bragadin as the most highly regarded of Venice’s Hebrew presses. Rabbi Katzenellenbogen was revered by Jewish readers who clamored to have his commentary; the Bragadin edition of the Mishneh Torah was a huge success.

An angry Giustiniani decided to orchestrate Bragadin’s utter downfall. He began printing copies of the Mishneh Torah of his own, and added Rabbi Katzenellenbogen’s groundbreaking and wildly popular commentary – which he’d given specifically to Alvise Bragadin only – without writing the name of their author. Giustiniani priced these editions lower than Bragadin’s, undercutting his rival. Moreover, Giustiniani began a public smear campaign, claiming that Rabbi Katzenellenborgen’s commentary was being poorly received and was of faulty scholarship.

Facing financial ruin after investing in the Bragadin edition, Rabbi Katzenellenbogen wrote to one of the most prominent rabbis of the time, Rabbi Moshe Isserlis, known as the Rema, who was a cousin of his. Rabbi Isserlis lived in far-away Cracow, but he agreed to adjudicate the conflict in Venice. After hearing all sides of the case presented by Rabbi Katzenellenbogen, Rabbi Isserlis issued a complex legal ruling, appealing to the Talmud’s many injunctions to always be scrupulously honest in business matters. Citing Jewish laws that prohibit unfair competition, underhand dealings, and sloppy work, he instructed Venice’s Jews – and other Jewish customers – to buy only the Bragadin edition of the work until it sold out, at which point Jews could then begin purchasing the Giustiniani editions. Even though Guistiniani was not Jewish, Jewish law was incumbent on him in this matter, Rabbi Isserlis wrote.

Despite this ruling, neither printing press owner was satisfied. Ignoring their many loyal Jewish customers, they turned to Church authorities and each denounced the other for printing “blasphemous” Hebrew texts. Both the Bragadin and Giustiniani Hebrew printing presses had printed editions of the Talmud and now Bragadin and Giustiniani themselves were calling these volumes heretical and accusing the other of violating Church teachings by printing them.

This was no idle threat. Elsewhere in Europe, the Inquisition was actively rooting out heretical material; both Jews and Protestants were targets of the Church’s fearsome Inquisitors. Italian Inquisitors heard the evidence brought by Bragadin and Giustiniani, as well as apostate Jews they marshaled to their cause, men who’d turned their back on Judaism and were all too eager to prove their Christian bona fides by denouncing their fellow Jews.

Finally, in August 1553, the Italian Inquisitors issued their ruling: all copies of the Talmud were to be burned. Anyone found hiding volumes of this Jewish holy work would be imprisoned. Those who informed on their neighbors would receive a financial reward.

The first Italian city to burn its Talmuds was Rome: on Rosh Hashanah, Inquisition authorities forced their way into every Jewish home in the city, confiscating not only the Talmud but every single book in Hebrew they could find. These were burned in an enormous bonfire in Rome’s central Campo di Fiori public square. A couple of weeks later, a similar bonfire consumed the Jewish books in Bologna. One month after that, the Inquisitors set their sights on Venice, the jewel of Hebrew publishing.

The Hebrew month of Cheshvan is sometimes called “Mar Cheshvan,” or “Bitter Cheshvan,” since it is the only Hebrew month to contain no holidays. In the year 1553, the month of Cheshvan was indescribably bitter for another reason: it saw the destruction of an incredible amount of Jewish scholarship in the city of Venice. While some Jews managed to hide treasured volumes at huge risk to themselves, nearly every copy of the Talmud, as well as other Hebrew works, were seized from family homes, schools and synagogues. The Inquisitors built an enormous fire in Venice’s beautiful Piazza San Marco and publicly burned thousands of books. The authorities issued a blanket ban on printing any more Hebrew books in Venice. (The ban was only lifted only a decade later, with severe restrictions.)

The destruction had a profound effect on Jewish life for generations. After thousands of Jewish books were burned, the shutting of Venetian presses meant that there was very little way Jews could rebuild their book collections. Hebrew printing presses in Lublin and Salonika began ramping up production, issuing more printed editions of the Talmud. In Italy, meanwhile, Jewish students focused on the few Jewish books that were available. It was relatively easy to buy copies of books by the great North African Medieval Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob Alfasi ha-Cohen (known as the Rif), in Italy for instance, so his works gained a new prominence among Italian Jews.

Even after the Talmud was allowed to be printed once again in Venice, it was only with heavy edits and under a different name. Venice never again regained its prominence as a center for Jewish printing and scholarship – and the horrible memory of the raging fire in St. Mark’s Square in the heart of the city haunted Italian Jews for years.

https://www.aish.com/ci/s/Jewish-Leadership-During-Cholera-Epidemic-1848.html?s=mm
Jewish Leadership During Cholera Epidemic, 1848
Oct 25, 2020  |  by Rabbi Hillel Goldbergprint article
Jewish Leadership During Cholera Epidemic, 1848
Life was at stake. A young Rabbi Yisrael Salanter was moved to take forceful action.

In 1848, a cholera epidemic struck Vilna, Lithuania. It was near Yom Kippur.

Two incidents have come down to us from that frightful time, one rather well known, one not. It is the lesser known incident that, I believe, speaks loudest at this time of the coronavirus.

In 2020 we have been mentally, medically and psychologically unprepared for an epidemic, let alone a pandemic. The same was true in Vilna in 1848. Leadership was called for. Rabbi Israel Salanter stepped up.

Only 38 years old at the time, he assumed spiritual authority for the physical welfare of the Jewish citizenry. He was a brilliant Talmudist, but was not a member of Vilna Beth Din and held no other communal position.

Although there are different versions of precisely what did on Yom Kippur, most versions yield this picture: He issued a halachic ruling that it was required (not permitted) to eat on Yom Kippur in order to prevent the weakening of one’s body, which would render one vulnerable to the cholera and to death. People were dying every day in Vilna. Rabbi Israel not only issued the ruling, he ate himself, in full view of the congregation. He shortened the prayers. He advised people to take walks in the fresh air.

An uproar ensued. By what authority did this young rabbi usurp the prerogative of the Beth Din of Vilna, “the Jerusalem of Lithuania”?

Rabbi Israel was unmoved. Life was at stake. His relatively young age and secondary position did not alter his course.

There are also different versions about what he did the day after Yom Kippur. One version, transmitted by Rabbi Y. Y. Weinberg, has it this way:

When called to task by the Vilna Beth Din for not consulting with it before he issued his ruling, the rabbi did not defend himself or provide his reasoning. Rather, he delivered a brilliant talmudic discourse – on a totally unrelated topic. He made his point. His knowledge was equal to that of the Beth Din. He was not to be questioned.

Parenthetically, his leadership during the cholera epidemic was the initial step that transformed him into the major figure in Jewish history that he has become.

Rabbi Israel’s act on Yom Kipppur is the more well known of his actions during the cholera epidemic. The lesser known act is this:

Rabbi Israel established and raised the funds for a makeshift hospital of 1,500 beds and persuaded physicians to work without pay.
Rabbi Israel established and raised the funds for a makeshift hospital of 1,500 beds and persuaded physicians to work without pay. He organized a platoon of 60-70 yeshiva students to be first responders, to provide what we would call today emergency services to those who fell ill with cholera.

Rabbi Israel was especially present on Fridays and Shabbos to make certain that his lenient rulings concerning the preparation of hot meals on Shabbos for the ill were implemented by his students, without resort to asking gentiles to step in to perform the otherwise forbidden Shabbos labors. These were obligations on Jews.

An extraordinary exchange punctuated this sequence of events. A certain elder in Vilna fell ill to cholera. Rabbi Israel’s students spared no effort to save his life, including chopping wood and boiling water for him on Shabbos. After a while, the elder got well, whereupon he came to Rabbi Israel and his committee to thank them for saving his life. He said, however, that the yeshiva students were excessive in their violation of the Shabbos laws.

Rabbi Israel, known for his extreme self-effacement and sensitivity to other’s feelings, did something no one had ever seen him do. He became outraged and yelled at the man in full view of all those present:

“You idiot! You’re going to tell me what is permitted and what is forbidden? I have taken on myself to ask 60 to 70 young people to work with the ill continually, and I promised their parents that I would keep them healthy, G-d willing, and indeed they are all healthy – not one has taken ill. Are you prepared to do this?”

The elder apologized profusely – which was not the point. The point was that Rabbi Israel could not afford to let the message get out that these young men ought not risk their patients’ health by easing up on the Sabbath violations, which, if they did, would also mean not risking their own health; and the entire project could collapse in tragic loss of life.

I regard Rabbi Israel’s triage hospital as the more challenging and meaningful of the two steps that he took, given the current coronavirus with its attendant risks undertaken by health workers, the triage hospitals in public parks, the suggestions by some that young people intentionally expose themselves to the coronavirus and (hopefully) build an immunity to it, so that they can treat others (hopefully) without risk.

Rabbi Israel’s actions raise weighty questions. How could Rabbi Israel expose his students to the ill? How could he take it upon himself to promise their parents that none of them would become ill themselves? How do we explain that reportedly none of them did fall ill? Would any rabbi do this today, during the coronavirus?

Among the possible answers:

Perhaps there is a distinction between cholera and the coronavirus, or between the conditions of contagion in a relatively small city like 19th-century Vilna and large cities today.

Perhaps Rabbi Salanter’s utter acceptance of the Torah’s demand that human life be saved, no matter what, protected him and his students. Put differently, perhaps the utter faith of the students in the supremacy of saving human life, and in the spiritual stature of their mentor, protected them.

I may be misinformed, and I hope I am, but I do not think anyone today would or could take upon himself the actions and the promise that Rabbi Israel took upon himself. We are left with the imperative to do all we can, as individuals, to protect ourselves. Analogous to our hand-washing, mask-wearing and social distancing, Rabbi Israel issued rulings for the healthy. Among them was not to eat fish, since the doctors in Vilna considered it a risk.

Rabbi Israel ruled: To eat fish is to eat pig meat. Equally forbidden.

One of the eminences of Vilna approached Rabbi Israel and asked:

“Since I always eat fish on Shabbos, and since I am healthy, may I taste soup made with fish?”

Rabbi Israel answered: “Sure. Just put some hazir (pig product) in the soup and then eat them together.”

Postscript: Writing apparently during the cholera epidemic, Rabbi Israel made these points:

Precaution is piety. Adherence to the strictures of the doctors, even if that upends normal religious practice, is itself adherence to the religion.

Bitterness is not in order. Since change in lifestyle is the proper religious response to the crisis, the change is an opportunity to serve God with joy.

Minimize mourning. In a dialectical docket of complementary values, Rabbi Israel priorities the sweetness of the fate of dead – their eternal reward – but then notes the supreme importance of mourning over the dead and the loss of the richness of this world, finally locking both values into the present moment: If someone has died from cholera, the relatives should not stress themselves by mourning overmuch, but take hold of the first value, seeing their loved one as having reached the ultimate goal: eternal life.
This article originally appeared in the Intermountain Jewish News

https://www.aish.com/ci/s/Former-Muslim-Terrorist-and-Holocaust-Survivor-Confront-Prejudice.html?s=mm
Former Muslim Terrorist and Holocaust Survivor Confront Prejudice
Oct 25, 2020  |  by Ronda Robinsonprint article
Former Muslim Terrorist and Holocaust Survivor Confront Prejudice
Two people with radically different pasts come together to fight hate and anti-Semitism.

The two men stretch out their left forearms – one white, one brown, both bearing the number A10491.

The former belongs to Irving Roth, 91, a Jew who was born in a small Slovakian village, experienced the flames of hatred in Europe as a teen-ager and survived the Auschwitz and Buchenwald death camps in Poland and Germany.

The latter belongs to Kasim Hafeez, 36, a former Muslim jihadist of Pakistani heritage who left behind his extremist beliefs and native Britain to become a Christian, live in America and support Israel. He had Roth’s Auschwitz number tattooed on his arm in an act of solidarity.

They are unlikely friends, these two. Their outstretched arms in a publicity shot for a new documentary prove the point. Roth and Hafeez weave together their stories in “Never Again,” a look at historical and current anti-Semitism. Christians United for Israel produced the film that was released in theaters across the United States last week.

It all started when they met at CUFI events, both speaking on the dangers of prejudice and propaganda.


 https://www.aish.com/ci/s/Former-Muslim-Terrorist-and-Holocaust-Survivor-Confront-Prejudice.html?s=mm
“It was instant love for the ideas and what we were trying to do,” Roth told Aish.com.

“Irving is just an awesome human being,” Hafeez agreed. “The horrors he suffered are unimaginable to me. He’s lived a full life and has so much joy about him. He has so much energy, but at the same time, he carries that burden of the past.”

Their lives could not be more different.

The Handwriting on the Wall
Roth grew up in Hummene, Slovakia, where 7,000 Protestants, Catholics and Jews lived in relative harmony. He had friends of all religions. Then on the first day of sixth grade in September 1940, he read a sign outside the gates of his schoolyard that declared, “No Jews or dogs allowed.”

The Holocaust began with a series of laws against the Jews. They were no longer allowed to go to school, the park or the beach. They couldn’t wear or own any article of clothing made from skins or furs. Roth had to deliver his sheepskin coat to the police department.

Irving Roth
Economic panic fanned the flames. Soon Jews were not allowed to own a business. Because of the new laws, Roth’s father, Joseph, invited a gentile friend into his lumber firm so it would appear to be a Christian business. The friend betrayed their agreement, demanding half the profits and taking over the business.

In 1943 the Roths fled to Hungary. They had relatives in a small village with whom Irving, his brother and grandparents stayed. Joseph and his wife went on to Budapest so he could work as an accountant. However, Joseph fell ill and ended up in the hospital. A righteous gentile nurse took in the couple and hid them in her one-bedroom apartment for several months.

Meanwhile, the Nazis forced Irving, his brother and grandparents onto one of the first transports to Auschwitz. Their arrival after three days and nights in a cattle car was traumatic.

“In the distance I see flames. That kind of scared me. We’re standing on the platform next to the cattle car. As the line moved, I was separated from my grandparents. They were marched off to the buildings with the chimneys and flames. They were told they were going to take a shower after which they were going to get a warm meal. Of course they didn’t tell them they were going to the gas chamber to be murdered.”

Toward the end of World War II, Roth and his brother were part of a forced march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald in January 1945. About a month later his brother was in a “selection,” in which the Nazis determined whom to kill and whom to keep alive for slave labor, and taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he was murdered.

How a Righteous Gentile Saved a World
“In Buchenwald there was even less food than in Auschwitz,” said Roth. “It was so overcrowded that if you got a boiled potato every second day or a bowl of soup, you were lucky.”

He weighed 75 pounds when American forces liberated Buchenwald April 11, 1945. However, he counts himself lucky. “I was one of the few fortunate young people whose parents survived the oppression because of being hidden by a righteous gentile.”

The Roths made their way to the United States, where Irving was drafted into the Army, earned a degree in electrical engineering from the former Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, and worked as an engineer for Unisys for 33 years. He married and had a family.

Since retiring as director of research for Unisys in 1994, he has served as director of the Holocaust Resource Center–Temple Judea of Manhasset and authored and edited books about the Holocaust and the evils of prejudice.

Confessions of a Former Terrorist
Hafeez addresses prejudice from the other side. Born in Nottingham in England’s East Midlands, home to a large population of Muslim immigrants, he learned the Koran and grew up on a diet of anti-Semitic and anti-West messages.

“I hated America. The Jews were the reason for all the evil in the world.”
He admitted, “I hated America. The Jews were the reason for all the evil in the world.”

America personified the West. He believed it to be controlled by Jews, whom Israel personified.

Kasim Hafeez in Israel
A feeling of being an outsider in the United Kingdom – even though he was born there – made it easier to embrace the ideology. “You’re feeling that you don’t belong. You’re looking for identity, and these extremist groups use that. So Islam is the constant you can lean on. You’re not British, you’re not Pakistani, you’re Muslim first, that’s all that matters. It was us versus them.”

In short, Hafeez said, “When you think you’re a victim you allow yourself to justify things you wouldn’t normally justify.”

At his most radical point, he planned to go to Pakistan and connect with a terrorist group. But first he wanted to gain knowledge about his enemy. He obtained a copy of the 2003 book “The Case for Israel,” by Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz.

“I thought it was complete rubbish, but decided to buy the book so I could prove this was wrong,” Hafeez said in an interview from his home in Florida. “As I started reading it, it raised questions I’d never raised. When you believe something to the point of wanting to kill others, you don’t read one book and say, ‘Oh okay, I was wrong.’ ”

His curiosity piqued, he started reading more books on the Middle East. In 2007 he decided to go to Israel and see the reality. Security officers at Ben Gurion Airport questioned him for eight hours before admitting him into the country.

“The change began when I spoke to ordinary people – Christians, Jews, actual Israelis. It’s hard to hold on to your own bigoted beliefs when you are confronted with the truth.”

After his trip he went back to Britain and told people about his experience. Family and friends responded with hostility. From personal experience he knows, “When you embrace weak or flawed ideas you’re hesitant to have them questioned.”

Today, Hafeez works as a Middle East analyst for CUFI. He is a speaker, writer, and pro-Israel activist. He made a new beginning for himself in Canada in 2013 and lived there several years before moving south.

On the speaking circuit he talks about the need to make a choice and do what is right – for instance, condemning attacks on synagogues.

Hafeez knows the power words and symbols play in creating propaganda to distort people’s beliefs and impel them to action. He speaks on college campuses and encounters students who see graphic images that are presented as “evidence” of human rights violations – when in fact the perpetrators may be Hamas oppressing its own people.

He and Roth aim to educate their audiences how to filter information to determine the source, the bias and the intention behind it.

Evil Begins with Words
“One of the messages we want people to understand is that all evil begins in words,” says Roth, invoking what he calls “the most evil event in human history whose objective, the complete annihilation of the Jews of Europe, was based on pure lies.”

He has spoken to perhaps a half-million people on the Holocaust through a variety of organizations, schools and colleges, churches and synagogues. “What drives me is I was a victim, along with 10 to 11 million other Jews of Europe, of this type of demonization, and can see the signposts along the road from democracy to mass murder. I want to make sure my great-grandchildren can live in freedom.”

How will students in the mid-21st century know what happened in the Holocaust? Roth talks about the need for surrogate eyewitnesses after the Holocaust survivors pass on.

I want to ensure that what happened to Irving will never happen to his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
That’s why he gave Hafeez permission to tattoo his Auschwitz number A10491 on the younger man’s arm. The unlikely duo are partners in teaching how a democracy can become a dictatorship, and God-fearing people can become murderers. They want to help prevent both.

“This is one of the most important challenges I’m going to be involved in,” added Hafeez. "I want to ensure that what happened to Irving will never happen to his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

“I want to speak out because when you have the level of hatred I had, it poisons you and the world. If I could stop anyone from going down that path, I would.”