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https://aish.com/were-adam-and-eve-the-first-people/?src=ac
WERE ADAM AND EVE THE FIRST PEOPLE?
by Tzvi Gluckin
September 10, 2023
How does the Biblical account of the man’s creation jibe with the abundant evidence of human beings dating back tens of thousands of years?

In the book of Genesis, chapter two, God creates the first people, Adam and Eve, and sets them up in the Garden of Eden. If you do the math—based on the Torah’s internal dating system—that event happened a little less than 6,000 years ago (or more specifically, this Rosh Hashanah marks 5,784 years).

How does that idea work when confronted with the abundant evidence of human beings dating back tens of thousands of years?

How long have people been around?
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The oldest human remains, known as the “Omo I Remains,” were found in the Omo Kibish Formation in southwestern Ethiopia, within the East African Rift valley, and recent research indicates they are about 230,000 years old. Other, possibly older, human remains have also been found (the oldest of what appear to be anatomically modern humans were found in Morocco, and are believed to be about 360,000 years old, but those findings are disputed). The Omo I Remains are the oldest that are definitively identified as the species, homosapien.
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But along with finding old human remains, how long have people been doing the things people do, which includes things like intentional burial, worship, cave drawings, farming, building cities, and organizing society?

Burial and Cremation

Burying your dead—as opposed to just letting the body rot where it falls—is a clear indicator of the beginnings of modern man. The earliest undisputed evidence of intentional homosapien burial—indicating purposeful burial, and including funerary objects, and the like—is from the Upper Palaeolithic period (between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago). Although there are disputed claims that include neanderthal burial from as long as 130,000 years ago, and other humans dating back 100,000 years. In Australia, evidence suggests that Aboriginal Australians first started cremating their dead about 50,000 years ago.
Worship
Discoveries in a cave in Botswana indicate that people there were worshiping a python as far back as 70,000 years ago. According to this article, archaeologists found more than 13,000 artifacts, including spearheads and articles that could be connected with ritual use, as well as tools used in carving the stone. These were found in a cave that also included a six by two meter tall rock that resembled the head of a python, and which also included three-to-four hundred indentations that could only have been manmade. The finding indicates the oldest evidence of human worship, besting a 40,000-year-old site previously unearthed in Europe.
Cave Drawings
The oldest cave drawings identified as being made by homosapiens are about 45,000 years old, although others, made by Neanderthals, date back about 64,000 years.
More “Recent” Developments
Evidence suggests that people first started farming about 11,300 to 9,000 years ago, and built the first cities around that time as well. The oldest cities include Çatalhöyük in modern Turkey; the ancient Summerian cities of Eridu, Uruk, and Ur; ‘Ain Ghazal built near the modern city of Jericho; and Mehrgarh in modern-day Pakistan. The world’s oldest continuously inhabited city is Jericho, which dates to about 9,000 years. The oldest organized civilization is the Akkadian Empire, which ruled about 4,500 years ago.

With so much hard evidence of ancient, industrious, creative humans dating back tens of thousands of years, how can Jewish tradition claim that Adam and Eve—created less than 6,000 years ago—were the first people?

Or maybe it doesn’t.

Jewish Tradition
According to numerous rabbinical sources, God created 974 generations before he created Adam. The Talmud1 alludes to this idea, although it doesn’t say it outright:

974 generations were to have been created before the creation of the world, but they were snatched away. God then planted a few of them in each [subsequent] generation, and they are the brazen, arrogant ones of that generation.

Other sources are more explicit. “God said to Israel, ‘My son, I am the one who sat for 974 generations before the world was created.”2 As well as this:

I created 1,000 generations. And how many of them were erased? … 974. What’s the reason [974 were erased]? Because (Psalms 105:8) [refers to], “A promise He gave for 1,000 generations.” And what’s that [promise]? The Torah.3

Plus many other sources that reference that number as well.4

In other words, according to the traditional Jewish sources, the Torah was given to Moses, who—according to the generations listed in the Torah itself—lived 26 generations after Adam, but, for whatever reason, the Torah had already existed for 1,000 generations before it was given to him. (1,000 minus 26 equals 974).5

How do you calculate the length of a generation?
Calculating the length of a generation is a little trickier, especially if you’re trying to understand the length of a generation from the perspective of the Talmudic sages who lived about 1,500 years ago.

In modern times, a generation is considered to be about 25 years (an average based on an estimate of about 20-30 years per generation, which are determined based on various societal factors). Other sources consider a generation to be about 40 years. Also, possibly, based on the ages given in the book of Genesis, and the years those people had their first children—on average, at about 130 years old—a generation could be considered as long as 130 years.6

Obviously, this is just speculation, but based on these numbers, the rabbinical sources seem to indicate that from the dawn of man (specifically, the first homosapiens) until the giving of Torah could be a period ranging anywhere from 25,000 to 130,000 years.

7,000 Year Cycles
Some mystical writings also indicate that world history will comprise seven 7,000-year cycles, or a total of 49,000 years, leaving open the possibility for catastrophic events that end each of these cycles. It’s also a debate amongst these mystical sources whether the current epoch is the second, sixth, or seventh iteration. (Although according to noted author Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, it is important to note that the Arizal—the great 16th century kabbalist, Rabbi Isaac Luria—was opposed to this way of thinking).7

In Jewish thought, the idea that people predate Adam and Eve is not radical
Based on these sources, it is safe to say that Jewish tradition is comfortable with both a) the idea that people had been alive and living on earth for thousands of years before the creation of Adam and Eve, and b) that earlier civilizations (or epochs, or whatever) may have preceded the current one.

Also, keep in mind, these sources are 1,500-plus years old. They are not coming to explain or apologize for modern, enlightenment, scientific discoveries and ideas. They are merely stating long-held Jewish beliefs.

Who were these people that predated Adam and Eve?
The people living before Adam and Eve had the same capacities for rational thought, and the same abilities to make sense of the world. As Rabbi Kaplan explains it:

Around 974 generations before Adam … man developed all the physical and mental capabilities that we possess today. This man had evolved from the ‘dust of the earth’ (as noted in Genesis 2:7), but he still lacked the divine soul that would make him a spiritual being. God then created Adam, the first true human being with a soul.8

These people built the earliest cities, built megalithic structures (Gobekli Tepe is the oldest, at about 11,600 years old, and also aligned with true north and may even contain an accurate map of the constellations as understood in those days), started farming (11,300 years ago), as well as myriad other things.9

Why does the Torah single out the creation of Adam and Eve?
The biblical narrative talks about the spiritual creation of man. According to Jewish tradition, Adam was created on Rosh Hashanah, which would have been the biblical “Day 6” in the year zero (or September 9, 3761 BCE),10 and is the event described in Genesis 2:7. It’s when God blew a breath of life into the clay form He had formed, and that breath is what’s also referred to as the soul (נשמת חיים). In Jewish thought, the dawn of modern man, and true civilization, as well as the ability to recognize God as the Creator, starts at that time.

In the Torah, the creation of spiritual man is the real beginning of the human story. It starts with God giving man a test (Genesis 3), which introduces the concept of free will—the idea that you’re defined by the choices you make—and illustrates the struggle of living with dual, yet opposing, spiritual and animal natures.

One could argue that Genesis, chapter two, is the detailed account of man’s spiritual genesis, and that the brief mention of man’s creation in Genesis 1:27, is describing the creation of the species homosapien.

The Torah also indicates that other people were already alive
This understanding also answers a number of other questions from the early chapters in Genesis. For example, in Genesis 4:14, after Cain kills Abel he’s worried that whoever finds him will kill him. Who are these other people?

Or when it says in Genesis 4:17, “Cain knew his wife.” Who is his wife? Where did she come from?
And also Genesis 6:4, which says, “The Titans (נפלים) were on the earth in those days.” Who are the Titans? Where did they come from?
Based on these sources, it seems that traditional Jewish thought has no problem with the idea that people have been around for a lot longer than the time of Adam and Eve.
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https://aish.com/what-is-rosh-hashanah-about-jew-know-it/?src=ac
Jew Know It: What happens on Rosh Hashanah?
Empower Your Jewish Journey
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by aish.com
September 5, 2023
Whether you're new to Rosh Hashanah or a seasoned observer, this video is a comprehensive guide to understanding and celebrating this special day.
Simply put - Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish new year.
No, that doesn’t mean you’re poppin’ bottles and hitting the clubs like you might on .
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The day itself is important because it celebrates God creating the first people ever, ADAM & EVE. Maybe you’ve heard of them?
So, the same way God CREATED Adam & Eve, you have a once-a-year opportunity during Rosh Hashanah to RECREATE yourself.

This means that who you were last year doesn't have to be who you’ll be next year. You get a chance to change and improve, and Rosh Hashanah has a system to help you do that, and it’s a little more effective than jotting your goals in the Notes app.

Part of that system is known as the “Book of Life.”

ROSH HASHANAH AND THE BOOK OF LIFE
OK, so while the “Book of Life” does have the word “book” in its title, it’s not something you can exactly stream as an audiobook or download on Kindle.

On Rosh Hashanah, you ask to be written into the Book of Life.

Think of the Book of Life as a sort of “cosmic list” that inscribes who will live this coming year.

But it's not just about life and death - it's also about asking to be granted a year filled with meaning, happiness, success, health and positive experiences. You know, the good life!

But this meaningful year isn’t just going to happen on its own, you need to work for it!

And working for anything requires tenacity and fuel, and some of that fuel, of course, comes from food.

WHAT DO YOU EAT ON ROSH HASHANAH?
OK, so there’s no “accidental” food on Rosh Hashanah. Everything you eat, big and small, means something and helps you achieve the goals of Rosh Hashanah.

You eat a round challah on Rosh Hashanah because its shape symbolizes fullness and completion.

It also sort of looks like a crown, symbolizing “God as our King.” Just don’t, like, put the challah on your head, OK?

After the “Hamotzi” – that’s the bread blessing - you dip the bread in honey, symbolizing our prayer for a sweet new year.

You then dip an APPLE in honey, also symbolizing a prayer for a sweet new year, because why not do it twice?

There are a few more foods Jews eat during Rosh Hashanah, such as leeks, cabbage, beets and dates, all of which symbolize our enemies being DESTROYED.
Hear that blast? That's the SHOFAR, which if you didn’t know, is a ram’s horn.

There are three unique sounds that the Shofar belts out: teruah, shevarim and tekiah, and they all mean something different:

TEKIA is a loooong blast that's a bit like a trumpet solo that says, "Remember the shofar blast you heard when the Torah was given to the Jewish people on Mount Sinai? Yeah, that was awesome.”

Then there's SHEVARIM, which is three medium-sized blasts that are meant to sound like someone shedding tears and the Shofar saying, "Hey, it's cool to be vulnerable and to look within yourself. Change is on its way.”

And finally, there’s TERUAH. This one is a whole bunch of short and POWERFUL blasts that’s like a wake-up call to your soul. It says "Hey, put down your phone and pay attention! You've got a chance to become a better version of yourself."

And you should know that the Shofar isn’t just about making noise. It’s actually a sneaky agent of change, delivering a powerful message without using words, like that old friend who just gets us without needing to say a thing.

MAKING THE MOST OF ROSH HASHANAH
Rosh Hashanah is like that moment in a video game when you hit the RESET button, ready to level up your inner self and unlock new achievements in the coming year.

But, like, how can YOU really rock Rosh Hashanah and make it count? Well, it all begins with a bit of self-examination, taking a chill moment to reflect and plan. Ask yourself:

What kind of story do you want to create in the next chapter of your life?

What's on your achievement list for the coming year?

Are you aiming for top grades, a new job, or maybe just learning to cook something other than eggs and pasta?

What's holding you back from unleashing your inner superhero? Stress? Procrastination? That snooze button you've become besties with? Pinpoint those obstacles and get ready to crush them.

Think of that thing you're totally amped about. You know, that project or skill you've been wanting to tackle FOREVER.

This is your year, now get after it!

This has been JEW KNOW IT, a series where we tackle questions big and small about Judaism… even the ones you’re too afraid to ask.

https://aish.com/jewish-heart-of-marrakesh-in-ruins/?src=ac
Jewish Heart of Marrakesh in Ruins
by Dr. Yvette Alt Miller
September 10, 2023
Morocco’s ancient Jewish quarter was severely damaged by Friday’s earthquake.
The horrific 6.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Morocco on Friday night killed thousands of people; many more are injured or missing. International rescuers have been pouring into Morocco to help. Israel’s highly trained disaster relief experts are on stand-by, waiting for permission from Morocco to enter the country and help.
The epicenter of the earthquake was in the High Atlas mountain region, about 45 miles southwest of Marrakesh (also known as Marrakech), Morocco’s fourth-largest city. Much of Marrakesh has been damaged, including the city’s historic “Mellah,” or Jewish quarter. “It’s as if it was hit by a bomb,” explained Hafida Sahaouia, a resident of the quarter, whose own home was utterly destroyed. “We were preparing dinner when we heard something like explosions. Panicked, I quickly went outside with our children. Unfortunately, our house collapsed. We lost everything.”

Much of the Mellah is currently impassable. Once home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the Arab world, today it seems that this centuries-old Jewish quarter has been reduced to rubble.
While rescuers race against the clock to save survivors, Morocco’s Jewish community is coming to terms with incredible loss of life, as well, and the destruction of what was one of the world’s most-visited and unique Jewish quarters. Here is a brief Jewish history of the Mellah.

Ancient Origins

Moroccan Jews have long traced their history back to refugees who fled west after Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzer destroyed the first Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE. Legends also abound about Jews visiting Morocco from the Land of Israel in Biblical times to purchase gold to bring back to Israel, or to fight the Philistines who’d been driven out of the Land of Israel. The oldest archaeological evidence of Jews in Morocco is ancient Hebrew-language tombstones in the ruins of the Roman town of Volubilis in Morocco.

The Miara Jewish Cemetery.

One Medieval Islamic scholar, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) wrote that Jews became so numerous and influential in the area that Berber tribes converted en masse to Judaism. For generations, Khaldun’s assertion was taken as fact, and it was widely assumed that many Moroccan Jews had origins in local tribes. In recent years historians have largely debunked this claim, noting that Morocco’s Jews almost certainly descend directly from visitors from the Land of Israel.

Muslim Coexistence – and Pogroms
Morocco’s territory was largely conquered in the Seventh century CE by the fearsome Muslim warlord Abu al-Muhajir Dinar al-Ansari. He and his troops pressured local Berber leaders to convert to Islam, along with their tribes. Within a generation, the area of present-day Morocco became nearly entirely Muslim. The land’s substantial Christian community largely disappeared. Morocco’s Jews, however, resisted calls to convert, maintaining their distinct beliefs and lifestyles.



Muslim leaders largely tolerated Jews, imposing a “dhimmi” status on them. So long as Jews paid special dhimmi taxes and avoided prestigious professions, they were allowed to remain in Moroccan lands. The conditions Moroccan Jews faced varied. At times, they were allowed to live in Moroccan cities; at other times they were forced to relocate. Under the leadership of Yusuf Ibn Tashfin (c1061-1106) any Jew found to have stayed in Marrakesh overnight was put to death.

For Moroccan Jews, periods of relatively peaceful coexistence alternated with horrific anti-Jewish violence as anti-Jewish pogroms broke out during times of political and social tension. One pogrom in Fez in 1033 is thought to have killed over 6,000 Jews. A major pogrom broke out in Marrakesh in 1232. Some historians believe that another pogrom in Fez in 1465 killed nearly all of the city’s Jews.

In the 1400s, the Sultan took steps to protect Fez’s Jews, inviting them to live in a royal property called the Mellah. “Mellah” means salt in Arabic, and the land he allowed Jews to settle on is thought to have once been either a storehouse for salt or a place where saltwater was stored. Soon, other Moroccan cities established “Mellahs” of their own, including Marrakesh.

Welcoming Jews from Spain
Spanish Jews had long fled to North Africa during times of persecution in Spain. After the expulsion of all Jews from Spain in 1492, what had become a steady trickle of Jewish immigration into Morocco became a flood. Spanish (and later Portuguese) Jews poured into Moroccan Jewish communities; Marrakesh was a popular destination for these newcomers.

The Slat al-Azama Synagogue

It took generations for the two groups to mix. Jews who’d long lived in Morocco referred to themselves as Toshavim: “residents.” Many spoke local dialects incorporating Hebrew and Moroccan Berber words. Spanish and Portuguese newcomers were known as Megorshim: “those who were expelled.” They spoke different Arabic dialects as well as the distinctive Jewish language Ladino. The two Jewish communities lived side by side, but worshipped in their own synagogues which maintained different traditions. One of Marrakesh’s best-known and most beautiful synagogues, the Slat al-Azama Synagogue, was founded by Spanish Jews.

Flourishing Religious Life
Until the 1920s, Marrakesh’s Mellah was home to the largest Jewish community in all of Morocco, maintaining dozens of synagogues and schools. Marrakesh became an important local center for studying the Talmud and Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism. While Jews in other Moroccan Mellahs suffered from waves of violence and intense poverty and prejudice, Marrakesh’s Jewish community fared better than most. Some local rulers unleashed violence on Marrakesh’s Jews. For generations, however, Jewish life and learning flourished. By the 1947 census, Marrakesh’s Mellah was home to over 50,000 Jews.

Safety During WWII

During World War II, the Vichy French regime ordered Morocco’s Sultan Mohammed V to implement the same anti-Jewish decrees as Vichy France. The king famously refused, declaring “There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only Moroccan subjects.” Sadly, the Sultan’s tolerance did not extend to all his subjects; when Allied troops landed in North Africa in 1942, anti-Jewish pogroms spontaneously broke out throughout the country. Foreign Jews who fled to Morocco seeking safety were imprisoned in concentration camps.

Fleeing to Israel
With the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, violence flared once again against Moroccan Jews, particularly in the cities Djerada and Oujda. Dozens were murdered and many more were injured. In later years, anti-Jewish violence spread to other Moroccan cities. Though the Jews of Marrakesh were largely safe from the massacres and pogroms in other Moroccan towns, they joined an exodus of Moroccan Jews leaving for Israel. Thousands of Jews left each year, until 1956, when Morocco gained independence and forbade Jews to leave. Instead of being reassured that their newly independent country would protect them, Morocco’s Jews increased their pace of emigration, leaving illegally to make their way to Israel.



Between 1948 and 1971, over a quarter of a million Jews moved from Morocco to the Jewish state.

Continuing Jewish Life in Marrakesh
Despite the huge numbers of Jews who left, Marrakesh and a few other Moroccan cities remained home to small Jewish communities. In 2020, it was estimated that about 2,000 Jews continue to call Morocco home; 250 of these lived in Marrakesh.

Marrakesh’s Mellah became a tourist destination in recent years, with visitors from all over the word drawn to its evocative streets and plazas and breathtakingly beautiful synagogues. In 2017, King Mohammed VI met with Marrakesh Jews and heard their complaints that local city authorities had removed many of the historic Jewish names from streets and landmarks in the neighborhood, replacing them with Arabic names. The king ordered that the old Jewish street names be restored.

With the terrible destruction by the earthquake, the future of this once-vibrant Jewish community is in question. Please pray for the safety of all the victims of Friday’s earthquake.

https://aish.com/why-you-make-bad-choices/?src=ac
Why You Make Bad Choices
by Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmith
September 7, 2023
Choosing life isn’t so obvious. Here’s a practical tool just in time for Rosh Hashanah.
Choose life.
That ubiquitous phrase plastered on t-shirts and Instagram posts comes from the Torah portion that is read before Rosh Hashanah: “I have placed before you life and death, blessing and curse; choose life!” (Deut. 30:20).
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Why You Make Bad Choices
But who needs to be told to choose life? Faced with the choice between blessing and curse, life and death, do you really need God to tell you what choice to make?
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Apparently you do. Here’s why.
Since God is Infinite, He has no needs. He is one and complete, without lack. Therefore He gets nothing out of creating the universe. He doesn’t need the ego stroke when we pray to Him. Life is a gift for us, not Him. And it’s a gift that is perfectly altruistic, in a manner that our finite minds can’t really fathom, because no matter how selfless we are, we always get something in return. We get the pleasure and deep-seated satisfaction that comes through giving.

So God wants us to have ultimate pleasure and meaning. We are pleasure-meaning- fulfillment seekers. It’s built into the very fiber of our being. Everything we do stems from our drive to attain some kind of fulfillment and satisfaction.

But if we are hard-wired to pursue pleasure and meaning, how could anyone choose the opposite and engage in actions that lead to emptiness, dissatisfaction and destruction?

Because we also have a lower part of us that tries to seduce us into doing things that ultimately go against our best interest. This baser self is a genius at subterfuge, selling us short-term glitz that masks the negative consequences that are sure to follow. So our lizard brain tells us, “You need to unwind, all this stress isn’t good for you. So smoke that joint, drink that wine, binge-watch that Neftlix series. You know that’s what you want…” We get confused and seduced, and settle for counterfeit pleasures that in the end leave us feeling deflated, numb and worthless.

Evil gets rationalized. A curse presents itself as a blessing, and instead of choosing life, we are tempted to choose death. The Freudian death wish was succinctly stated in the Talmud: “A person’s evil inclination overcomes him each day and seeks to kill him” (Sukkot 52b).

We get confused and succumb to the clutches of comfort and escape from pain, forfeiting the real pleasures that only come through hard-earned effort.

So God instructs us: Choose life! Cut through the confusion and don’t get sucked in by the counterfeit pleasure that is offering you nothing but escape and emptiness, a suicide in installments.

On Rosh Hashanah, we plead to God, “Remember us for life!” We want to be sealed in the Book of Life, to make the choices that will yield real meaning and fulfillment. Rabbi Noah Weinberg would often say, “The battle for life is the battle for sanity.” Don’t allow yourself to get confused and fall down that rabbithole. One of your most effective weapons in the battle to choose life is clarity. Unmask the confusion and see it for what it really is: a death trap.

A friend recently sent me this list of daily reminders, written by Greg Isenberg, co-founder/CEO of Late Checkout.I thought it was a powerful tool to getclarity and not to allowour lower selves to get us off track. Greg masterfully captures some of the daily choices we are faced with, articulating the two opposing sides, the life and the death, the blessing and the curse.

The first step in battle is to know your enemy. Realize what you’re up against and attain the clarity to make healthy, productive choices. Greg’s list can help you increase your awareness:

Scared —> Take one risk
Stuck —> Walk
Tired —> Sleep
Confused —> Ask
Frustrated —> Move
Burned out —> Day off
Impatient —> Review progress
Overthinking —> Write
Unmotivated —> Remember your "why"
I came up with a few of my own and suggest you add yours to the list:

Unloved—> Give
Angry —> Empathize
Unhappy—> Appreciate
Hopeless —> Pray
Aimless —> Introspect
Apathetic —> Create
Shana tova. May God bless you with a year full of good health, joy and clarity to consistently choose life.

https://aish.com/five-questions-to-ask-yourself-before-rosh-hashanah/?src=ac
Five Questions to Ask Yourself Before Rosh Hashanah
TRENDING
APPROACHING GOD
10 Questions to Ask Yourself This Rosh Hashanah
3 min read
NEW BEGINNINGS
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by Debbie Gutfreund
September 3, 2023
Thought-provoking questions to help you prepare for the High Holidays.

Rosh Hashanah gives you the gift of a sacred pause in your life. It’s a time when you can step back and examine not only the past year but also the year to come. It is a time for reflecting on your values and beliefs.

The quality of the questions you ask yourself impacts the quality of your life. Asking yourself these five questions before Rosh Hashanah will help you use the gift of this sacred time.

1. What have I learned in the past year?
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Soul Music: A Black Jew’s Spiritual Journey
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What can you learn from your successes? And perhaps more importantly, what can you learn from your mistakes? So much happens over the course of the year; it can seem like a blur. Make a list of some of the highlights and transitions that you experienced and some crucial lessons will emerge. You can see patterns that helped you succeed and habits that led to mistakes.

2. What are my goals for the coming year?
What would you like to do more of? What would you like to decrease? This pause that the Jewish new year gives you can help you extricate yourself from just living in “survival mode” and step back to reflect on which goals you’d like to accomplish in the coming year. Which areas would you like to grow in? What are your priorities? What would you like to take out of your schedule? What would you like to add that would enhance your life and align with your values?

3. Where is God in my life?
In the Hebrew month of Elul that precedes Rosh Hashanah, God is closer, even if you aren’t sure how to pray or connect with Him. There is a sacred closeness available now that you can access. Ask yourself if there is space for God in your life. Are you appreciating the awe-filled world around you and the myriad ways in which God orchestrates miracles in your own life? You can start with the short “Modeh Ani” prayer recited when you first open your eyes in the morning to thank God for the gift of a new day (after all, it’s Gal Gadot’s favorite prayer). Or you can try saying the Shema, Judaism’s central declaration that God is One, before you go to sleep to express not only gratitude for what happened that day but to express a desire for a connection with God and an acknowledgement of His importance in your life.

4. What am I most grateful for?

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Gratitude can change how you see the world. When you focus on the blessings you have, you see abundance in your life. Try keeping a simple gratitude journal each day, listing both the small and big things for which you are grateful. Don’t forget the ever-present ones that are easy to forget: your health, your family, food, shelter, education. Sometimes you forget how much you have because you have so much.

5. Which relationships in my life need my attention?
Is there someone that you need to apologize to? Is there someone that you need to forgive? Maybe there is a friendship that you have let go that you would like to begin again? Perhaps there is a child, a parent or a spouse who needs your attention or your time.

These days leading up to Rosh Hashanah are opportunities to reconnect, to your deeper, authentic self, to the people you love, and to God. Recognize the gift of the sacred pause of these days. Put aside some time to ask yourself these questions to reflect and grow.

https://aish.com/soul-music-a-black-jews-spiritual-journey/?src=ac
Soul Music: A Black Jew’s Spiritual Journey
Yosef Oryahh is a minority within a minority within a minority. A black Jew raised Orthodox, the twists and turns of his personal story are truly unique.
by Sara Yoheved Rigler
September 6, 2023
Yosef Oryahh is a minority within a minority within a minority. A black Jew raised Orthodox, the twists and turns of his personal story are truly unique.

Yosef Oryahh was adopted at birth by an Orthodox Jewish couple who had been married for years without children. Following Jewish law, he was converted as a baby, pending his choosing to be a Jew when he reached Bar Mitzvah age. Yosef’s parents sent him, their only child, to a religious school in Boca Raton, Florida, where he studied in Hebrew and English. With long payot (side curls) and tzitzits (ritual fringes) dangling from his waist, Yosef looked like all the other boys in his class, except for his skin color. He never experienced any prejudice. He was one of the kids in a community that worked to emphasis the soul over the body.

Yosef wearing the coat of many colors with his mother (R) and grandmother.

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Soul Music: A Black Jew’s Spiritual Journey

When Yosef was 13, his parents divorced, and his father disappeared. Yosef’s devoted mother Sarah Chaya sold her jewelry to pay for his tuition to an Orthodox middle school. But by the time Yosef was ready to start high school, Sarah Chaya had nothing left to sell. She reluctantly sent him to the local public high school.

Yosef’s first day of public school was the first time he experienced prejudice—not because he was black (half the school was black), but because he was Jewish. The other kids had never seen a person with a kippah, peyot, and tzitzits. They taunted him, asking if he had horns under his yarmulke.

By the time he graduated high school, his kippah was off and his dreadlocks were down past his shoulders.

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SPEAKING YIDDISH TO CHICKENS: HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS ON SOUTH JERSEY POULTRY FARMS
CAROL UNGAR
Why Holocaust survivors flocked to chicken farms after the war.
Chicken farming?

That may not sound like a career for a nice Jewish boy or girl, yet for a mid-century moment, Jewish chicken farmers – many of them Holocaust survivors – helped transform Southern New Jersey into a poultry and egg powerhouse. During their peak years one out of every five eggs consumed in New York City, the world's largest city, came from their farms.

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Gianmarco Soresi: This Jewish-Italian Comedian Is Making Waves in Standup
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How did they do it? Through hard work, grit, and good luck, which quickly soured.

“Most were completely inexperienced,” says Seth Stern, a grandson of these farmers and author of “Speaking Yiddish to Chickens.” The title isn’t a joke. Survivors chose this work because it didn’t demand English fluency.

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“The chickens didn’t care if you spoke Yiddish to them,” Stern explained in an Aish.com interview.


Two families on the Vineland, New Jersey-area poultry farm they jointly purchased in 1947.

Answering ads in the Yiddish press, these former concentration camp inmates flocked to the farming communities around Vineland. Some, like Stern’s grandfather Nuchim, a former partisan, decided that farming was the answer to their dreams.

Their exact numbers are unclear.

A Jewish Agricultural Society survey from those years estimated. that “as many as 10 percent of Jewish displaced persons relocated to these farms; Stern believes that the actual number is closer to 3,000 or roughly 2 percent of the 140,000 displaced persons who landed in the US between 1946 and 1954. In absolute terms that is miniscule but proportionally, it was double the number of Jews who farmed nationwide during that time.

After the nightmare of the war years many sought a quiet rural life, the chance to be self-employed and live in a community of people like them. For some, that dream came true at least for a while.

“On Orchard Road and similar streets around Vineland, these survivors found a new sense of security on their own land and a measure of comfort being surrounded by neighbors who had experienced similar horrors,” writes Stern.

Yet farm life could also be brutal. “It was hard physical work,” said Stern. “The coops smelled bad you had to wake up early and work seven days a week and there were no vacations.”

Yet the long hours may have had a therapeutic quality. “In the context of farming, worrying about chickens left less time to dwell on what they lost and how they suffered,” writes Stern.

When the federal government dropped price subsidies for eggs, turning a profit became increasingly difficult. That, along with the emergence of factory-sized poultry farms which produced eggs by the millions, brought about a collapse in South Jersey’s poultry farming economy.
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Gianmarco Soresi: This Jewish-Italian Comedian Is Making Waves in Standup
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by Kylie Ora Lobell
September 4, 2023
Throughout Soresi’s impressive career, he’s embraced his Jewish identity onstage and off.
Last November, Gianmarco Soresi made his debut on “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” immediately jumping into his Jewish background and how it affects him in his everyday life.

While getting drinks at a bar from a German bartender, Soresi’s Jewishness came up.

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The Nazi Officer Who Saved 100 Jewish Families
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“The bartender told me, ‘I’m so sorry for the Holocaust,’” Soresi told the Corden crowd. “How am I supposed to respond to that as a Jew? ‘No worries! Don’t let it happen again!’ I didn’t know, so I just said, ‘Could I get a free beer?’ And he said, ‘I would, but my boss would get mad,’ and I said, ‘I get it. You’re just following orders.’”


Soresi isn’t afraid to push the envelope, a trait that’s gotten him far in comedy since he started doing standup in 2016.

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“Before that, I was just failing at acting,” he said. “And then I wrote an autobiographical play for the New York Fringe Festival, and a lot of the positive feedback was for the part where I was talking to the audience.”


Since stepping into standup, in addition to appearing on James Corden Soresi has also been a New Face at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, a prestigious honor that has propelled many other comedians in their careers. He appeared with Tiffany Haddish and Billy Crystal in the movie “Here Today,” starred in his own special on Amazon Prime, and performs standup on the road 45 weekends a year.

“Doing standup is a real rush,” he said. “Everything is rockin’ and rollin’ and you feel the joy of getting laughter. When I’m offstage, my mind is always wandering, whether it’s because I’m ADD or OCD or just Jewish. When I’m on stage, I’m very present and alive and I’m in the moment.”

Growing up in a Jewish-Italian family
Soresi grew up in Potomac, Maryland, with a Jewish mother and an Italian father. However, he didn’t do much in terms of his Jewish practice. When his mom was a child, her parents asked her if she wanted to do a bat mitzvah or a sweet 16 party.

“She said she wanted a sweet 16,” he said. “That was the end of her really doing much practice. We went to temple maybe two times a year. We’d always do Pesach seder, and like a good theater kid I’d eagerly await when I could hold the book and read it out loud.”


When the comedian was 26, he went on Birthright to Israel, and today he’s dating a woman with more of a background in Judaism.

“She grew up Chabad, which has definitely brought me close to Judaism,” he said.

Soresi lives on the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that was predominantly Jewish around the turn of the 20th century. He lives across from the Tenement Museum, a remnant of the Jewish history there, and he’s near Russ & Daughters, a legendary New York eatery that features top-quality smoked fish and lox.

Soresi is happy to go to Shabbat dinners and collaborate with a Chabad rabbi – together, they made a video promoting his standup dates. He also performs at Jewish community centers and entertains Jews of all ages.

“It feels like I’m being welcomed with open arms, even if I wasn’t raised to practice Judaism,” he said. “I enjoy being welcomed into that world.”


Judaism is something that he is deeply connected to, and he is proud of it – especially in the face of antisemitism. When he performed in a few places on the road, he mentioned he was Jewish on stage and received some pushback.

“People made an ‘eck’ comment,’” Soresi said. “This makes me feel more Jewish. I’m not going to pretend I was persecuted or anything, but their negative reaction makes me say, “Take a hike. This is who I am.”

When he posts about being Jewish online to his large following – he has 249,000 followers on Instagram and 595,000 on TikTok – he sometimes receives antisemitic comments as well.

“I’ll get 10 comments about ‘Free Palestine,’” he said. “It’s irrelevant to the thing I’m saying in the video. I’m an American Jew.”


The biggest incident that stands out in his mind is when he got messages from an audience member that said, “I hope Hitler sends you back to a concentration camp so you can write some new material.”

Soresi joked, “I think he had a misunderstanding of what a concentration camp is. It’s not an artists’ retreat. But I can take this in stride because I don’t feel threatened. This person was obviously going through something.”

Building on his success
Looking ahead, Soresi hopes to keep touring as well as film a one-hour special. He also has a podcast he records regularly – it focuses on cynicism.

“My podcast is called ‘The Downside,’ and it’s all about complaining,” he said. “It’s even more Jewish than I thought it could be.”

He’s enjoying being on stage and making people laugh, and would keep doing it no matter what happens with his career.

“Someone messaged me and said, ‘I’m going through chemotherapy, and your clips brought me joy,’” he said. “I get so much joy because this is exactly what I want to do. I would keep doing standup even if someone messaged me and said, ‘I hate your comedy.’ But I am glad that people enjoy it.”

Featured photos by Mindy Tucker

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When Jews Found Refuge in the Sikh Empire
by Dr. Yvette Alt Miller
September 3, 2023
A storied kingdom saved the lives of hundreds of Jews.

In the first half of the 19th century, visitors to the Sikh Empire, centered in modern-day Pakistan, were amazed by the splendor of its royal court. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum describes it as “one of the most magnificent in the whole of India.” Ranjit Singh, the maharaja who ruled in opulence, maintained a solid gold throne for state occasions, though he usually preferred to eschew luxury and often sat on the floor with his subjects.

Ranjit Singh was a brilliant military leader and statesman known as “The Lion of the Punjab.” He was a member of the Sikh faith, a monotheistic religion which developed in the 1400s in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent. The Sikh Empire he forged stood for 50 years, until it was conquered by British East India forces in 1849. During Ranjit Singh’s rule, the Sikh Empire was known for religious tolerance. In the annals of the region’s bloody history, his rule stood out as a golden age of peace and security.

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The Golden Throne of Ranjit Singh, about 1820-30, Museum no. 2518(IS)
In an almost forgotten episode of both Jewish and Sikh history, the Sikh Empire Ranjit Singh founded came to the aid of Jews in their hour of need. In the midst of horrific anti-Jewish violence miles away, the Sikh Empire opened its doors to Jews, helping save hundreds of lives. The Sikh Empire became a home to a now long-forgotten Jewish community in the heart of Pakistan’s Punjab region.

Jews in a Holy Iranian City
While the Sikh Empire was flourishing, over a thousand miles to the northwest a very different region was engaged in long-running fights and violence. In the early 1800s, the city of Mashhad - today Iran’s third largest city - was a semi-autonomous region, buffeted by local fighting and struggles between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

In the annals of the region’s bloody history, Ranjit Singh’s rule stood out as a golden age of peace and security.

Hi Elaine,

A mother wrote to me last week with an interesting question:

My six-year-old son asked me the following: If God created the universe, who created God? What is the appropriate answer to a young mind?

I was doubly impressed – by the six-year-old who asked such a great a question, and by the mom who took his question seriously enough to ask how to answer him.

The first thing I wrote to the mom was how great that her son is asking such big questions. I suggested that even more valuable than the specific answer, she could use this as an opportunity to inculcate in her son the importance of questioning and being curious about the world and ideas. This is the bedrock of learning; indeed, the foundation of becoming his own individuated person, able to think for himself and carve out his own path in life.

This shouldn’t be taken for granted. I’ve met many young Jews who were turned off by Judaism when they were kids because their Hebrew school teacher or day school rabbi disregarded their question, or worse told them, “You can’t ask that question here.” That non-reply inadvertently conveys the message that you shouldn’t think and that Judaism doesn’t have the answers to your questions.

Abraham’s Search for God

Then I suggested an answer the mom could share with her son:

When Abraham, the first forefather of the Jewish People, was a small boy, he asked his father a similar question. His father Terach owned an idol store with all sorts of cool gods on the shelves. One day his father got a new moon god and Abraham asked his father, “Hey, where did this one come from?” His father told him that he got it from the local idol factory. After all, somebody had to make that moon god.


Abraham thought about that and then asked, “Who made the idol factory?” His curious mind kept going back in time, asking, “Who created that? And who created that?” Because everything that exists has something that came before it which created it, like you have parents, and your parents had parents, stretching all the way back in time.

At one point Abraham reached the beginning of it all, the first point of time, and he asked, “Who created Time? Who created the whole universe?”

As he got older, Abraham began to understand that the Being Who created Time must be Infinite, existing beyond Time, since Time wasn’t yet created. That Being is God.
Then Abraham asked your question, “Who created God?”

Now this gets really interesting. If something created God, is He God? If God was created, then he is just like us. He isn’t infinite; He has a beginning which means He exists in time. And since He exists in time He can also end, like all things eventually end. That isn’t God. God is Eternal. Eternal means He always existed; He has no beginning. So nothing made Him or gave Him life. He is Life, and all life stems from His never-ending lifeforce. And that’s why God can never die, since He exists above Time. So God’s existence is totally different that our existence.

I concluded by telling the mom that she’ll be surprised how much young minds can understand and to please let me know how her discussion goes.

How Did It Go?
A few days later she wrote me back:
Dear Rabbi Coopersmith,
I shared your answer with my son. We had a sincere conversation. He was very interested in the origin of the universe and the meaning of "Time" and "Eternal" being. But he was mostly interested in your final explanation that God is the source of Life. He concluded that everything in the universe is Life and is God and that is the meaning of life.


Thank you so much for giving me some tools to deal with such a big question and for nurturing a young mind.


The most sophisticated minds have difficulty describing the Infinite God and His interplay with creation. This precocious six-year-old did a pretty darn good, albeit imperfect, job. (A point to consider: Everything is a reflection of God; not everything is God – which is pantheism.) Indeed, God and Life are one. Nothing gives Him life; He is Life itself, eternal, unending and absolute, the transcendent Source of all existence.

I look forward to the next question he comes up with!
Shabbat shalom, and feel free send me questions and comments.
Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmith
Editor in Chief, Aish.com
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Timeless Jewish Wisdom for Modern Lives

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What is the Meaning of the Star of David?
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WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THE STAR OF DAVID?
RABBI SHRAGA SIMMONS
From the Holocaust to the Israeli flag, what is the deeper meaning of this six-pointed Jewish symbol?
In modern times, the Star of David has become a premier Jewish symbol. This six-pointed star (hexagram), made of two interlocking triangles, can be found on mezuzahs, menorahs, tallit bags and kippahs. Ambulances in Israel bear the sign of the red Star of David, and the flag of Israel has a blue Star of David planted squarely in the center.

What is the origin of this six-pointed symbol and its deeper meaning?

The Star of David appeared thousands of years ago in the cultures of the East. It was also a popular symbol in pagan traditions, and used as a decorative device in first-century churches and even in Muslim culture.

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The Star of David isn’t referred to in the Bible or the Talmud. The symbol was first adopted by Jews in the mid-14th century, when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV granted the Jews of Prague the right to carry a flag. They chose the six-pointed star.

Suggested Symbolism
There are numerous suggested meanings. One central idea is that the six points of the Star of David symbolize God's rule over the universe in all six directions: north, south, east, west, up and down.

Originally, the Hebrew name Magen David ― literally "Shield of David" ― poetically referred to God. It acknowledges that King David, a military hero, didn’t win by his own might, but by the support of God.

The hexagram in Islam, photo: Vikramjit Singh Rooprai
Another idea is that a six-pointed star receives form and substance from its solid center. This inner core represents the spiritual dimension, surrounded by the six universal directions. (A similar idea applies to Shabbat ― the seventh day which gives balance and perspective to the six weekdays.)

In Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, the two triangles represent the dichotomies inherent in a human being: good vs. evil, spiritual vs. physical, etc. The two triangles may also represent the reciprocal relationship between the Jewish people and God. The triangle pointing "up" symbolizes our good deeds which go up to heaven, and then activate a flow of goodness back down to the world, symbolized by the triangle pointing down.

Some note that the Star of David is a complicated interlocking figure which has not six (hexagram) but rather 12 (dodecagram) sides. One can consider it as composed of two overlapping triangles or as composed of six smaller triangles emerging from a central hexagram. Like the Jewish people, the star has 12 sides, representing the 12 tribes of Israel.

A more practical theory is that during the Bar Kochba rebellion by the Jews of the Roman province of Judea, led by Simon bar Kochba, against the Roman Empire in the first century, a new technology was developed for shields using the inherent stability of the triangle. Behind the shield were two interlocking triangles, forming a hexagonal pattern of support points. (Buckminster Fuller, the 20th century American architect, inventor and futurist, showed how strong triangle-based designs are with his geodesics.)

One cynical suggestion is that the Star of David is an appropriate symbol for the internal strife that often afflicts Jewish nation: two triangles pointing in opposite directions!

The Star of David also became a sad symbol of the Holocaust when the Nazis forced Jews to wear an identifying yellow star. Actually, Jews were forced to wear special badges during the Middle Ages, both by Muslim and Christian authorities, and even in Israel under the Ottoman Empire.

So whether it is a blue star waving proudly on a flag, or a gold star adorning a synagogue's entrance, the Star of David stands as a reminder that for the Jewish people, in God we trust.

UMAN: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE CITY OF SOULS
RABBI MENACHEM LEVINE
What is the history behind this magnetic Ukrainian city that draws tens of thousands of Jews every year?
The Two Massacres
Located approximately 130 miles south of Kyiv on the Umanka River, Uman is a well-known city that was part of Poland-Lithuania until the 1793 Partition of Poland that ended the existence of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. For more than a century (1726–1832), it was owned by the prominent Potocki family. (The famous convert, Avraham ben Avraham, was a member of that noble family.)

Uman was first mentioned in historical documents in 1616, but the earliest discussion of the Jewish community was in the early 18th century. The Haidamacks were a violent group of Cossacks and serfs that rebelled against the Polish nobility and banded together to attack cities throughout Ukraine. In 1749, they cold-bloodedly killed many Jews of Uman and burned down part of the town.

In the late 1750’s, Count Franciszek Salęzy Potocki decided to restore Uman. He fostered its development as a commercial center by holding fairs there and rebuilding parts of the city. He built Sofiyivka, a beautiful park in Uman with grand eighteenth-century landscape architecture that has remained until today.
Count Potocki permitted 450 Jews to reside in Uman, but their respite was short-lived. In 1768, a new Haidamack rebellion, under the leadership of a peasant Cossack revolutionary, Maksim Zhelezniak, destroyed many Ukrainian towns and estates. After murdering the Jews of Tetiyev, Zhelezniak marched south into Uman on June 19, 1788. In terror, many Poles and Jews had fled to the fortified city of Uman under the protection of Commandant Mladanovitch, assisted by Ivan Gonta. Although some were suspicious that Gonta’s sympathies lay with Zhelezniak, he was sent to fight as the leader of the soldiers anyway. When Gonta joined forces with Zhelezniak and betrayed those who had sent him, the Poles and Jews in Uman joined to fight their mutual enemy. Yet, despite their valiant and desperate efforts, the city fell.
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The Nazi Officer Who Saved 100 Jewish Families
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THE NAZI OFFICER WHO SAVED 100 JEWISH FAMILIES
KYLIE ORA LOBELL
Dr. Albert Battel turned against Hitler and risked his life to save Jews.
Dr. Albert Battel was a German loyalist. Born in the Province of Silesia in 1891, a part of the German empire, Battel served in the German Army during World War I. The war was devastating for Germany; the country lost 12% of its population and 13% of its land to the Allied forces.

In the aftermath of WWI, Battel attended the University of Berlin and the University of Breslau, became an attorney, and practiced in Breslau, Poland (now renamed Wroclaw). As Hitler began his ascent to power, Battel heard him speak and was inspired to join the Nazi Party in the early 1930s, serving as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht army reserves.

Inspired by Hitler, Battel joined the Nazi Party in the early 1930s, serving as a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht army reserves.

When Battel was 51, he was stationed in the town of Przemysl in Poland, working as the adjutant to Major Max Liedtke, the local military commander. On July 26, 1942, the Nazis were planning to “resettle” the Jewish ghetto there, which was a code word for “liquidate.”
Battel couldn’t believe his eyes: Jewish children and adults were beaten. Families were separated from each other and sent to their death in the concentration camps. Others were killed on the spot.

This was a moment of truth for Battel. He so deeply loved his country, but at the same time, liquidation was not an act of patriotism. It was murder.
Could he go through with it?
Defying orders from the Nazis
Battel’s conscience kicked in. Though he wanted to serve his country, he couldn’t stand idly by as people were being beaten and killed.

Though he wanted to serve his country, he couldn’t stand idly by as people were being beaten and killed.

He summoned Major Max Liedke, his superior, and together, they ordered that the bridge over the River San – the only way into the ghetto – be blocked. When the SS commando tried to cross over to the other side, the sergeant-major tasked with overseeing the bridge threatened to shoot the soldiers unless they retreated. This happened in the middle of the afternoon, with the local inhabitants watching in shock.

Later in the day, Battel got army trucks to go into the ghetto and save 100 Jewish families. He placed them under the protection of the Wehrmacht and they were not sent to Belzec concentration camp, like so many others.

Sadly, the rest of the 24,000 Jews in the town were murdered.

Paying the price for saving Jews
Following the rebellion, the Nazis launched a secret investigation into Battel. They didn’t make it public because the entire incident was so embarrassing. The investigation reached the highest level of the Nazi party; Martin Borman, Hitler’s right-hand man and chief of the Party Chancellery, read the documentation and evidence against Battel. Heinrich Himmler, the chief architect of the Holocaust and another high-ranking Nazi Party leader, was going to have Battel arrested immediately after the war ended.

Albert Battal at 3 Piłsudskiego, Przemyśl, Poland, 1942

Not only had Battel defied Nazi orders – he also showed kindness towards the Jews prior to this event. Before the war, a party tribunal indicted Battel for giving a loan to a Jewish colleague. Then, when he was serving in Przemysl, he shook hands with Dr. Duldig, the chairman of the Jewish Council there and a friend of his from university.

Battel had no idea he was being investigated. He had been released from the army in 1944 because of a heart condition and returned to Breslau. He was drafted into the Volkssturm, a German militia that was founded right before the war ended and under control of the Nazi Party, with Himmler serving as commander. While in the Volkssturm, Battel was captured. After the war ended, he was released, and he settled in West Germany.

Because the investigation against Battel was kept secret, it was never revealed in his lifetime that he had gone against the Nazis. Following the war, he was unable to practice law anymore because of his affiliation with the Nazi party. He passed away from heart disease in 1952 in Hattersheim, near Frankfurt.

Battel’s legacy and honor at Yad Vashem
In 1963, some of Battel’s actions were revealed during a war crimes trial involving Himmler’s records. The documents showed that Battel was called a “friend of the Jewish people,” and the judge in the case said that Battel was a Nazi who chose to “stand up for the cause of human dignity.”

Battel was recognized by Yad Vashem’s Righteous Among the Nation.

Later on, Dr. Zeev Goshen, an Israeli lawyer, was researching Battel’s story. In 1981, he urged Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, to designate Battel as a gentile who was Righteous Among the Nations. Israeli Michael Goldmann-Gilad, who was a teenager in the Przemyśl ghetto when Battel rescued the families, confirmed the story.

When talking about Battel, Goldmann-Gilad said, “We Jews knew that we had a protector in him. A few of the people Dr. Battel took out of the ghetto survived and are in Israel. Few like him risked their position and life out of decency and humanity.” Another survivor, Toni Rinde, saw a photo of Battel and also confirmed how he saved her family during the liquidation.

Today, a tree is planted in Israel to honor Battel and his legacy. Out of thousands and thousands, he was the one and only Nazi officer to risk his life, take a public stand against Hitler and his evil party, and save countless precious lives in the process.

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HEROD’S COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP WITH JUDAISM
MARK SHIFFER
Herod was a controversial figure. As king of Judea he reconstructed the Second Temple, but as a puppet of Rome was distrusted by his people.

History is full of people that don’t fit neatly into a coherent narrative. Herod was one of those figures.

The man known as Herod the Great was king of Judea from 37 B.C.E. until his death in 4 B.C.E. His long rein came at pivotal points in both Jewish and Roman history and Herod tried to fit into both worlds.

Herod was born in 73 B.C.E. into a prominent Idumean family. His grandfather, Antipas, was a pagan who converted to Judaism under the Hasmoneans and soon befriended the ruling party. However, Herod was never considered Jewish by rabbinic authorities under Jewish law.

In later years, as the Hasmonean dynasty tore itself apart from internal feuding, Herod’s father Antipater assisted the Roman invasion of Judea. Rome at the time was involved in its own civil war and Antipater shrewdly sided with the victorious Julius Caesar. As a reward, Antipater was given Roman citizenship and appointed as governor of Judea.

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Antipater’s son Herod became governor of the Galilee region. Coming from an aristocratic family, Herod grew up with a combination of Hellenistic and Jewish influences.

In 40 B.C.E. the Parthian kingdom invaded Judea and temporarily kicked out the Romans. Rome then proclaimed Herod king of Judea and sent him a large army to retake their province, which he did in 37 B.C.E. To solidify his political power, Herod married into the royal Hasmonean family, marrying a Jewish princess named Miriam. Decades later an increasingly paranoid Herod executed her.

Depiction of Miriam’s execution.

Evidence of Herod’s relationship with Judaism is found in archaeological records. And there are many from this time. During the Second Temple period, purity and cleanliness were emphasized among the Jewish population.1 Numerous mikvahs, ritual baths one would immerse in to become spiritually pure, were built, especially around Jerusalem. Mikvahs were found in all of Herod’s palaces. A few were smaller private mikvahs designed specifically for the royal family, some perhaps used by Herod himself.

Did Herod keep kosher? Upon hearing that the paranoid king of Judea had executed two of his sons, the Roman emperor Augustus was quoted as saying “It’s better to be Herod’s pig than his son.”2 The dark implication here was that Herod refrained from eating pork.

The royal family imported many exotic foods from the vast Roman Empire. One of the imports was a fermented fish sauce called garum. While the garum recipe was typically made with specific ingredients, Herod’s recipe was unusual, containing only kosher fish.3 This revealed a level of Jewish observance he adhered to.

In contrast to his eating habits, however, Herod imported many non-kosher wines. This list included wines forbidden by religious authorities. Whether he drank them or not is unknown. It’s more likely that Herod decided on the level of kosher based on his audiences, not due to any level of religious observance.

Herod’s art collection was generally in sync with Jewish law. Similar to the Hasmonean rulers before him, Herod’s palaces were decorated with abstract drawings, refraining from portraying sculptures or mosaics representing human or animal figures. This was based on Jewish laws against creating objects that could be used for idol worship. However, one of Herod’s palaces did contain a drawing of a sea battle depicting soldiers fighting.

Yet Herod’s most memorable display of his Judaism was the extensive and costly renovations to the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The Talmud states, “He who has not seen Herod’s building, has never in his life seen a truly grand building.”4

Model of Portion of Second Temple

In fact, the Temple building project was so vast it remained unfinished when the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. The transformation of the Temple emphasized Herod’s kinship to his Jewish heritage. It’s significant that Josephus wrote that in deference, Herod refrained from ever entering the Temple ground, as he was not a priest.5

Another reason for the massive construction project was likely due to Herod’s ego and his desire to expand the Temple to a size that earlier generations only dreamed of, making it the envy of the ancient world.

King Herod is carried off by servants in a 17th-century German engraving.
However, there were also the practical aspects to the Temple program. One reason for expansion was to accommodate the increasing numbers of pilgrims flocking to Jerusalem from around the empire during major festivals.

There were many areas where Herod deviated from Judaism. Herod built and dedicated smaller pagan temples honoring his Roman patrons in parts of Judea, particularly in areas that had large non-Jewish populations. He also added theaters and gymnasia, making these regions more Hellenistic then Jewish.

Towards the end of his life, Herod ordered a large golden eagle statue to be placed in Jerusalem at the main gate leading to the Temple, in order to honor Rome. The act was met with great resistance, most who viewed the foreign object as idol worship. The ancient writer Josephus relates that a group of men organized and pulled down the statue.6

Painting of Herod the Great
Herod gathered Jewish leaders to his palace and lectured them about his anger at the mob’s action. He burned alive those arrested. The Talmud relates how Herod slaughtered most of the sages in his anger and considers him an evil person.

This was not the first time Herod had meddled with the running of the Temple. Herod had once appointed his wife Miriam’s brother Aristobulus to the position of High Priest. However, as Aristobulus became increasingly popular in the role, Herod ordered him murdered.

Herod killed thousands during his long reign, including many of his own family. Herod’s long reign did not buffer tensions between the Roman Empire and Judea. Frictions increased until it exploded into a devastating war less than a century later. The first Roman-Jewish war took place between 66-70 C.E. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed or enslaved from this conflict. The Holy Temple and much of Jerusalem were destroyed. The slaves from Judea the and spoils from the Temple were paraded through Rome in celebration. Both would be used to build the Roman Colosseum, a building dedicated to deadly competition.

FROM THE EDITOR IN CHIEF
RABBI NECHEMIA COOPERSMITH
Hi Elaine,

The Hebrew month of Elul, a spiritually super-charged time leading up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, has a surprising theme. The word “Elul” is an acronym for the phrase "Ani l'dodi v'dodi li – I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me" that comes from King Solomon’s Song of Songs (6:3).

 
To borrow from Tina Turner’s famous song, what’s love got to do with it?  Why does this phrase that articulates the deep longing between two lovers, which is a metaphor for the love between God and the Jewish People, serve as the core focus of preparing for Rosh Hashanah? 
 

What’s the Essence of Rosh Hashanah?
 

Rosh Hashanah transports you back to the very beginning of time when God, as CEO of the universe, was setting budgets and job descriptions for all of humanity. As a mutli-gazzilionaire, there is no limit to what this CEO can allocate. The only limit is His employees’ understanding of the company’s vision and the extent of their responsibility to implement the CEO’s bottom line.    
  

On Rosh Hashanah, you stand before God as CEO of the universe, making your case for the upcoming year. The previous year is over; your past performance is not relevant. Every person is starting a new chapter and everything is up for grabs. Now is the time to get clarity, articulate your dreams, and genuinely commit to make them happen.

The month of Elulis the crucial time period to recalibrate your goals and get ready to make your presentation to the Boss Himself.    


Two Obstacles
 

But embracing this challenge requires overcoming two sizable obstacles that you likely find yourself slamming into: apathy and discouragement.

 
If you don’t care about furthering God’s bottom line, why bother with all this introspection and chest-beating? You’re perfectly content to stay where you are, putting in your minimal effort to live a decent life and spending the rest of your time on social media and binge-watching, and whatever fix you need to comfortably pass away the time.  Apathy stops all growth in its tracks.

 
And if you do want to work on personal growth and take preparing for Rosh Hashanah seriously, there’s that voice that whispers in your ear: “Who are you kidding? How many times have you gone down this road, and look where you are? In the exact same spot, with the exact same issues. People don’t change. Admit it, you’re a failure and there is no reason to think this year will be any different.”
 

Discouragement saps your energy and cynically undermines your ability to change.

The phrase “I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me" that typifies the essence of Elul is the life preserver you need to extract you from your debilitating apathy and discouragement. 
 

How so?
 

Love is the Pillar
 

Stephen Covey, the author of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, popularized the expression, “Love is a verb.” One of the Judaism’s commandments is “to love your neighbor” which most commentaries define as expressing love through action. It’s tricky to mandate an emotion; commanding action is far more doable.
 

Marriage is the commitment to shower your spouse with acts of love, no matter what mood you’re in and whether or not you’re feeling the love. Regardless of your feeling, love her – meaning put your love into action. Show affection, give compliments, go out on a date, be curious and listen, and most importantly care about the things your spouse cares about. As Rabbi Noach Orlowek, a well-known educator in Jerusalem, often says, “What’s important to you is important to me.”
 

Putting your love into action fosters feelings of love. What starts as a verb becomes an object.  And the distance you may have been feeling between you and your spouse dissipates as the intimacy is restored.
 

Now apply this with God. It’s okay if you’re not feeling the love. Love is a verb; just do it. Don’t wait for the sudden inspiration. Take a few quiet moments and ask yourself: what are the things that are important to God that I can work on making important to me? Give yourself some time to answer; you may be surprised to hear what your inner self says when you access it with honesty and vulnerability.
 

Then select one or two things that speak most to you and start implementing them, slowly but surely. These first steps loosen the shackles of apathy and help close the spiritual distance you may be feeling with God. But you need to make the first move, not God. That’s why the phrase begins, “I am for my beloved” – it’s starts with you taking the first step.
 

The Ultimate Cheerleader 
 

Love flows both ways. Once you take that first step in drawing closer to God, your efforts will be met with God’s welcoming embrace.  God’s love is a constant. Even the smallest step forward impacts the tenor of the relationship.
 

God reciprocates, as expressed in the second part of the phrase, “and my Beloved is for me.” This is essential to overcoming discouragement.
 

While you may have moments where you feel like throwing in the towel and give up on yourself, God sees what you’re really made of. As your Creator Who invested in you immeasurable potential for greatness that only you can achieve through your unique mission in life, God is rooting for you and wants you to succeed. Feel that love and allow it to empower you to take the next step forward in your journey.
 

Preparing for Rosh Hashanah should not be a heavy downer. It’s an auspicious, exciting time for clarity and closeness, grounded in positivity and love.
 

That’s why the essence of Elul is expressed through the phrase "I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me", underscoring the love that exemplifies this period.
 

Turns out that love has everything to do with it. Initiating small steps to strengthen your relationship with God will shake off your apathy and arouse a greater feeling of love and closeness. And this, in turn, will be reciprocated by God’s constant love, giving you the encouragement and confidence to plow forward, step by step, in fulfilling your life’s journey.   
 

Shabbat shalom, and feel free send me questions and comments.


Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmith
Editor in Chief, Aish.com

https://aish.com/golda-meir-11-little-known-facts-about-israels-remarkable-prime-minister/?src=ac
Golda Meir: 11 Little-Known Facts about Israel’s Remarkable Prime Minister
by Dr. Yvette Alt Miller
August 24, 2023
There’s a lot you don’t know about Israel’s Iron Lady.

The new movie Golda depicts former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir’s day-by-day decisions during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Viewers watch as Golda - played by Helen Mirren - juggles high-stakes diplomacy and brinkmanship over 19 excruciating days which defined her premiership. Israel ultimately won the war but with a terrible loss of life.

Here are 11 lesser-known facts about Golda Meir, one of Israel’s most famous founders.

1. Golda’s first memory was fearing for her life.
Born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1898, Golda spent her first eight years in the shadow of horrific antisemitism there. Her very first memory was of her father Moshe desperately trying to reinforce the entrance to the little house they shared with another Jewish family while a violent mob brayed for blood outside.

Golda later described:

I can still recall quite distinctly hearing about a pogrom that was to descend upon us….I knew it had something to do with being Jewish and with the rabble that used to surge through town, brandishing knives and huge sticks, screaming ‘Christ-killers’ as they looked for the Jews and who were now going to do terrible things to me and to my family…to this day I remember how scared I was and how angry that all my father could do to protect me was to nail a few planks together while he waited for the hooligans to come. (Quoted in My Life by Golda Meir: 1975)

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Golda later described that the fear of that terrible night never left her, and helped motivate her to build a Jewish state where Jews could live freely in safety.

2. Her namesake was a Jewish grandma with a will of steel.
Golda was named after her great grandmother, who was known for having a will of iron in the family. When Golda’s father Moshe asked her mother Blume to marry him, Blume’s family opposed the match, claiming that Moshe wasn’t accomplished enough for their daughter. Great grandma Golda intervened, firmly telling the family that the only quality that really mattered was being a “mensch” - a quality that described Moshe to a tee. The marriage went ahead.

Golda as a child
Great grandma Golda had a curious habit: instead of putting sugar in her tea, she flavored it with salt to remind herself of the bitterness of the Diaspora, when Jews were exiled from their homeland in Israel.

3. Her activism began at age 10.
Golda Meir’s family migrated to the United States, settling in Milwaukee. When she was ten years old, Golda’s elementary school suddenly announced that instead of using second-hand textbooks, all students had to purchase new books. Golda’s immigrant family - like many impoverished families in her Jewish neighborhood - couldn’t afford the expense. So Golda swung into action, helping to form a student club to raise money for new books. Golda and her friends rented out a hall and put on a show; Golda recited poems in Yiddish for a paying audience. Afterwards, she described that fundraising experience as her first “public work”.

4. Golda Meir ran away from home.
As she grew into a teenager, Golda repeatedly clashed with her parents. They wanted her to marry young, while Golda wanted to focus on higher education. One day, Golda ran away from home and moved in with her older sister Sheyna, who was living in Denver. There, Golda attended high school and met Sheyna’s passionately Zionist friends who used to fill Sheyna’s apartment every evening, debating how they could best bring about the creation of a Jewish state.

Golda Mabovitch in Milwaukee, 1914.
Her time in Denver changed Golda’s life: she became a feisty political actor, and also Golda Mabovitch in Milwaukee, 1914.met her husband, Morris, who was one of the Zionist intellectuals who used to gather in Sheyna’s home.

5. Golda trained as a Milwaukee schoolteacher.
Returning to Milwaukee, Golda enrolled in a teacher training college and taught Yiddish in the evenings at a Yiddish language school to Jewish immigrants and their children. She never worked as a teacher and in 1921 moved to the Land of Israel with her husband Morris. The elementary school that Golda Meir attended in Milwaukee still exists and is now known as the Golda Meir School.

Golda Meir with husband Morris Meyerson. (Courtesy: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries)

6. Golda was one of two women to sign Israel’s Declaration of Independence.
Golda Meir and David Ben-Gurion during the signing of the Declaration of Independence at the Tel Aviv Museum, May 14, 1948. (Photo: Frank Scherschel, Israel GPO)

On May 14, 1948, Golda Meir became one of the signatories of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. She was one of only two women who signed the document (the other was Rachel Cohen-Kagan, president of WIZO, the Women’s International Zionist Organization). As the declaration founding the new State of Israel was read, Golda later recalled thinking:

The State of Israel! My eyes filled with tears, and my hands shook. We had done it. We had brought the Jewish state into existence - and I, Golda Mobovitch Meyerson, had lived to see the day. Whatever happened now, whatever price any of us would have to pay for it, we had re-created the Jewish national home…As Ben-Gurion read, I thought again about my children and the children they would have, how different their lives would be from mine and how different my own life would be from what it had been in the past…” (Quoted in My Life by Golda Meir: 1975)

7. She helped double Israel’s population in just a few years.
Between 1949, when Golda Meir was appointed Israel’s Minister of Labor, and by 1951, Israel’s population doubled, surging from 800,000 to 1,600,000 as Jewish refugees poured into Israel from around the world, many from Arab and Middle Eastern countries which in some cases attacked and expelled their centuries-old Jewish communities once Israel was established.

David Ben-Gurion with Golda Meir at the Knesset in Jerusalem. (Photo: Fritz Cohen, Israel Government Press Office.)
As Minister of Labor, Golda was charged with building housing and employment opportunities for these penniless immigrants. It was nearly an impossible task, but Golda never backed down from Israel’s essential promise of providing a home and a haven for every Jew.

8. As ambassador to the USSR, Golda Meir ran her embassy like a kibbutz.
Golda Meir was Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union. Representing the Jewish state, she was determined to build a model that would express the essence of her new country. As ambassador, Golda eschewed all luxury and lavish entertaining. She’d lived on a kibbutz when she first moved to the Land of Israel and loved that uniquely Israeli experiment in communal living. In Moscow, she instituted a kibbutz-like structure among Israel’s diplomats. “We would work together,” she later described, “eat together, get the same amount of pocket money and take turns doing whatever chores had to be done.”

9. Golda Meir electrified Soviet Jewry.
When she became Israel’s ambassador to the USSR in 1948, Russia’s Jews lived under the constant threat of arrest or murder any time they expressed their Jewish identity. The previous year, Soviet Authorities declared that Yom Kippur was an ordinary working day in Moscow, even though it fell on a Saturday that year, in order to prevent Jews from attending synagogue. Teaching Hebrew was banned; it was even against the law for Soviet Jews to keep Hebrew books in their homes. Soviet officials told Golda Meir that Soviet Jews felt no connection to the State of Israel.

On Rosh Hashanah 1948, Golda Meir made her way to the Choral Synagogue as Ambassador of the State of Israel. She didn’t know what to expect, and the scene in front of the synagogue took her breath away. 50,000 of Moscow’s Jews had turned out to see her, the living embodiment of the Jewish homeland. “Within seconds,” Golda later recorded in her memoirs, “they had surrounded me, almost lifting me bodily, almost crushing me, saying my name over and over again.”

Golda Meir with U.S. President John F. Kennedy, December 27, 1962.
Deprived of the ability to learn Hebrew, tens of thousands of Jews called out Shalom! “I knew that the Soviet Union had not succeeded in breaking their spirit,” Golda realized; “The Jews had remained Jews.”

10. Despite early Israel’s poverty, Golda Meir insisted they aid Africa.
In 1958, Golda Meir was serving as Israel’s Foreign Minister (the sole female foreign minister in the world at that time), and delivered a major pledge to African states: that Israel would help solve problems of food and water security, healthcare, sanitation, economic development, and education. She helped establish MASHAV, Israel’s Agency for International Development Cooperation, which coordinates and funds development projects with African nations to this day.

Golda Meir with the children of Kibbutz Shefaim, July 1950. Photo by Teddy Brauner/GPO

Israeli politician Yehuda Avner was a young aide in the 1950s, and recalled Golda Meir explaining her goals:

Golda Meir’s matriarchal features wore an earnest and dedicated expression, and her voice went husky as she avowed, ‘It has fallen to me to carry out Dr. Theodor Herzl’s vision (of founding a Jewish state). Each year, more and more African States are gaining national independence. Like us, their freedom was won only after years of struggle. Like us, they had to fight for their statehood. And like us, nobody handed them their sovereignty on a silver platter… Israel’s national-building experience is uniquely placed to lend a helping hand to the new African States. We have a vast amount of expertise to offer…

We are going to send out to the new African states scores, even hundreds, thousands of Israeli experts of every sort - technologists, scientists, doctors, engineers, teachers, agronomists, irrigation experts. They will all have but one task - to unselfishly share their know-how with the African people. (Quoted in The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership by Yehuda Avner: 2010)

11. Golda Meir was the first female leader in the Middle East - and the 4th in the world.
Golda Meir speaking at the historic visit of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (center) on November 21, 1977, with Shimon Peres to the right. Photo by Ya’acov Sa’ar/GPO

When she became Prime Minister of Israel in 1969, Golda Meir was the first female head of state in the Middle East - and only the fourth female national leader in modern history. Her premiership was dominated by the Yom Kippur War, sparked by the coordinated surprise attack on Israel by Syria and Egypt on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Lasting 19 days, the grueling war is shown in searing detail in the movie Golda. Israel repelled the invaders, but at a cost of over 2,700 Israeli lives. For the rest of her life, Golda Meir bitterly regretted her decision not to call up reserve troops sooner.

This article is adapted from Portraits of Valor: Remarkable Jewish Women You Should Know by Yvette Alt Miller, Ph.D.

https://aish.com/how-emma-lazarus-discovered-her-heritage-and-became-the-voice-of-her-people/?src=ac
How Emma Lazarus Discovered Her Heritage and Became the Voice of Her Peo
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by Rabbi Elie Mischel
August 22, 2023
11 min read
The famous Jewish writer should be remembered for more than her immortal words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.

If Emma Lazarus is remembered at all, it’s for her immortal words inscribed upon the inner wall of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” For millions of refugees, her sonnet evokes America’s image as a nation of kindness fundamentally different from all the other great powers of world history.

But who was this astonishing young poet who stunned the likes of the novelist Henry James, who wrote to his sister that he “met and fell in love with Emma Lazarus: a poetess, a magaziness, and a Jewess”? Who was this rising star of American literature, tragically cut down by illness at the age 38, just as she reached the height of her literary powers?


There is far more to Emma Lazarus than her remarkable poem. America’s first celebrity returnee to Judaism, she bravely stood up for her people and blazed a trail for thousands of Jews who would one day awaken to their roots.

A Jewess Among Christians
Emma Lazarus was born in 1849 in New York City, where she would live the rest of her life. Both of her parents’ families arrived in Manhattan before the American Revolution, part of the small but influential Sephardic Jewish community in New York. Emma’s father, the successful sugar merchant Moses Lazarus, had little interest in Judaism or the Jewish community. A member of the exclusive – and very non-Jewish – Union and Knickerbocker Clubs, he bought a summer home in the fashionable section of Newport, Rhode Island, far from the town’s historic synagogue.

Emma grew up with little awareness or understanding of her heritage and successfully integrated into Christian society.

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Unsurprisingly, Emma grew up with little awareness or understanding of her heritage. She observed Christmas with her Christian friends and spent Friday evenings at the elegant salons of Richard and Helena Gilder, the editor and illustrator of Century Magazine. At a time when most American Jews and Christians avoided social mingling, Emma successfully integrated into Christian society. Other than her many sisters, she had no close Jewish friends. All of her best friends were Christian.

Though she lacked a strong Jewish education, Emma recognized early on that she was different. In her early twenties, while strolling through Newport, Emma was drawn to the neglected Newport synagogue, where few Jews then prayed. Everywhere she looked, she found symbols of the Jewish people’s decline:

No signs of life are here: the very prayers
Inscribed around are in a language dead;
The light of the "perpetual lamp" is spent
That an undying radiance was to shed.

At this early stage, Emma calls Hebrew a “language dead” and considers the light of Judaism “spent.” But she does so with deep sadness, perhaps sensing that this abandoned synagogue reflected her own neglected religious identity.

What prayers were in this temple offered up,
Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,
By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!
(In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport)

Calling Out Antisemitism
As Emma’s reputation grew in literary circles, she largely avoided Jewish themes, with one prominent exception: Christian antisemitism. In a highly publicized case in 1877, the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York, refused to admit Joseph Seligman, a wealthy German Jewish banker. The owner, Judge Henry Hilton, explained that he had no objection to “true Hebrews,” the Sephardic Jews with a long history in America, and only objected to “greedy” and “dirty” immigrant Jews like Seligman. Emma never forgot this act of blatant and public antisemitism.


In an essay that could have easily been written today as Jewish students are squeezed out of elite universities and are harassed on campuses throughout America, she wrote: “Within recent years… in our schools and colleges, even in our scientific universities, Jewish scholars are frequently subjected to annoyance on account of their race… In other words, all the magnanimity, patience, charity, and humanity, which the Jews have manifested in return for centuries of persecution, have been thus far inadequate to eradicate the profound antipathy engendered by fanaticism and ready to break out in one or another shape at any moment of popular excitement.”1

Though she was personally spared from explicit discrimination, Emma was regularly referred to as “the Jewess” by her Christian friends. As she later wrote in a letter to Philip Cowen, “I am perfectly conscious that… contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the community towards us.” Her personal experiences led her to study the long history of hypocritical Christian antisemitism, a theme she would return to in many of her poems, including The Death of Rashi and The Crowing of the Red Cock:

When the long roll of Christian guilt
Against his sires and kin is known,
The flood of tears, the life-blood spilt,
The agony of ages shown,
What oceans can the stain remove,
From Christian law and Christian love?
(The Crowing of the Red Cock)

A Departure from the Rule of Silence
Emma’s growing identification with her people accelerated in the wake of a terrible outbreak of Russian pogroms in the early 1880s. Russian antisemites murdered over 40 Jews, raped hundreds of Jewish women, and destroyed thousands of Jewish homes and businesses. Horrified and shaken by the news, Emma’s Jewish consciousness, always present if often subdued, took center stage. Overnight, it seemed to many critics, she was transformed into “a flaming prophetess whose lines reverberated across the continents.”2

With stirring Jewish pride and righteous fury, Emma published a book of poetry, Songs of a Semite, in which she fully and unequivocally embraced her Jewish identity. With this slender book of powerful poems, Emma declared that she intended to stand up for “disgraced, despised, immortal Israel”3 without apology or hesitation. As an anonymous reviewer wrote, he had finally “come upon a Jewess who made a departure from the rule of silence.”4 Suffused with defiant Jewish pride, Emma’s Jewish poems should be required reading for every Jewish child.


Written 14 years before Theodor Herzl launched political Zionism with the publication of The Jewish State, Emma called upon her downtrodden people to rise up in strength and return their ancient homeland. Evoking Ezekiel’s powerful image of dry bones come to life, Emma wrote:

The Spirit is not dead, proclaim the word,
Where lay dead bones, a host of armed men stand!
I ope your graves, my people, saith the Lord,
And I shall place you living in your land.
(The New Ezekiel)

In her simple but powerful poem, The Banner of the Jew, Emma called for action. The Jews themselves must rise up, fight back and take their destiny in their own hands. Anticipating Herzl, she called for a modern Ezra to lead his people home:

Wake, Israel, wake! Recall to-day
The glorious Maccabean rage…
Oh deem not dead that martial fire,
Say not the mystic flame is spent!
With Moses' law and David's lyre,
Your ancient strength remains unbent.
Let but an Ezra rise anew,
To lift the BANNER OF THE JEW!

Not content with writing poetry, Emma founded the Society for the Improvement and Emigration of East European Jews in 1883, whose goal was to raise money to send large numbers of suffering East European Jews to resettle in the holy land. The Society corresponded and shared ideas with Baron Maurice de Hirsch and the Alliance Israelite Universelle. At the same time, Emma published a series of 15 essays in The American Hebrew, later published together as An Epistle to the Hebrews, in which she made her case for the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland.


Emma drew upon the writings of both Jewish and Christian proto-Zionists like George Eliot, Laurence Oliphant and Leo Pinsker, and used her literary celebrity to popularize them in America. “A home for the homeless, a goal for the wanderer, an asylum for the persecuted, a nation for the denationalized. Such is the need of our generation, and whether it be voiced in the hissing denunciations of Anti-Semitism, in the enthusiasm of helpful Christian advocates, or in the piteous appeal from Hungary and Galicia, from Bessarabia and Warsaw, the call is too distinct for misconstruction, and too loud to remain ignored and unanswered.”5

Her call to return home met with stiff opposition. Only two years later, in 1885, the Union of Reform Congregations issued its infamous Pittsburgh Platform, stating, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community. [We] expect therefore neither a return to Palestine nor a restoration of… the Jewish state.” Meanwhile, Abram S. Isaacs, later the editor of The American Hebrew, rebuked Emma, arguing that it was “unwise to advocate a separate nationality… at a time when anti-Semites are creating the impression that Jews… are only Palestinians, Semites [and] Orientals.”6

Despite her passion and prominence, Emma’s Society fell apart within two years. In the words of Bette Roth Young, “she was the wrong age, the wrong sex, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”7 Emma herself sensed early on that she was ahead of her time. Writing 65 years before the establishment of the modern State of Israel, she presciently wrote: “In all such questions as this, that which is agitated to-day, is formulated and acted upon on the morrow, or as Emerson put it, ‘the aspiration of this century is the code of the next.’”8

Five months after the disbanding of her society, Emma sailed to Europe with her sisters. By January 1887, she was seriously ill with cancer, and her sisters brought her home that July. She died on November 19, 1887, only 38 years old.

From “They” to “We”
From the moment of Emma’s untimely death, many of Emma’s family members and friends sought to minimize her Jewish identity. Annie Lazarus Johnston, Emma’s sister who converted to Anglican-Catholicism, denied a publisher’s request to publish Emma’s Jewish poems. She wrote: “There has been a tendency on the part of the public to over emphasize the Hebraic strain of her work, giving it this quality of sectarian propaganda, which I greatly deplore, for I consider this to have been merely a phase in my sister’s development, called forth by righteous indignation at the tragic happenings of those days. Then, unfortunately, owing to her untimely death, this was destined to be her final word.”9

Annie and much of the family found Emma’s embrace of her “backwards” people both baffling and embarrassing. What could possibly compel her to lean into her identity as a Jew, one they had fled from their entire life?

In a profound way, Emma was a fiercely dedicated Jew.

The entire arc of Emma’s life refutes this claim. As a young woman, she referred to Jews as “they”; but as she matured, she referred to them as “we.” The title of her greatest work, Songs of a Semite, was a public proclamation of Emma’s wholehearted identification with her people. As she herself made clear, “I do not hesitate to say that our national defect is that we are not ‘tribal’ enough; we have not sufficient solidarity to perceive that when the life and property of a Jew in the uttermost provinces of the Caucuses are attacked, the dignity of a Jew in free America is humiliated… Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”10

Though she did not live an observant Jewish lifestyle – perhaps she would have had she lived – Emma Lazarus was, in a profound way, a fiercely dedicated Jew. Defying the expectations of her family and social circle, she boldly asserted her solidarity with her people, a people she hardly knew but deeply loved. Her willingness to stand up for her beleaguered nation, to fight on their behalf, elevated her from a talented writer to the voice of her people.

For Jews who were not raised in religious homes or did not receive a proper Jewish education, Emma is an inspiration. “No words of praise can be too great for one who… voluntarily returns to the old household, publicly proclaiming herself one it its members, and bringing to it not alone a heart filled with sympathy, but the pen of a prophet…”11

May her memory lift the “banner of the Jew.”

"The Jewish Problem" Century 25 (1883): 602-11
Aaron Kramer, Emma Lazarus: Her Life and Work
Emma Lazarus, The Choice
Miss Lazarus’s ‘Songs of a Semite,’” Century 25 (1883): 471-472
Emma Lazarus, An Epistle to the Hebrews
Cited in Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, 275
Bette Roth Young, Emma Lazarus and Her Jewish Problem, American Jewish History, Vol. 84, No. 4, SPECIAL ISSUE: Defining Jewish Identity in America, Part One (December 1996), 291-313
"The Jewish Problem" Century 25 (1883): 602-11
Letter of Annie Lazarus Johnston to Bernard G. Richards, February 25, 1926, Papers of Bernard G. Richards, JTS Library
Emma Lazarus, An Epistle to the Hebrews
Cyrus Sulzberger, “Emma Lazarus as a Jew,” American Hebrew33 (1887)

https://aish.com/jews-on-the-moon/?src=ac
Jews On the Moon
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by Adina Hershberg
August 14, 2023

Six lunar craters and the Jews for which they are named.
Between 1969 and 1972, 12 men walked on the moon. Although there are no Jewish footprints on the moon’s surface as of yet, more than ten Jews have lunar craters named after them.

Lunar craters are caused by meteorites and asteroids colliding with the lunar surface. There are 5,185 lunar craters that are more than 12 miles (20 km) in diameter, approximately one million craters larger than half a mile (1 km) in diameter and more than half a billion that are larger than 11 yards (10 meters).

In 1651, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, an Italian Jesuit professor of astronomy and philosophy, prepared a comprehensive work on astronomy with a complete map of the moon. Riccioli named the lunar craters after the outstanding astronomers of the Middle Ages; four of them were named after rabbis. Since 1919, the assignment of the craters’ names is regulated by the International Astronomical Union.

Here are six craters and the Jews for whom they are named.

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Rabbi Levi
Crater Levi is named after 14th century French-born Rabbi Levi ben Gershom (also known as the Ralbag and Gersonides), known for his important contributions in Jewish philosophy, mathematics, navigation and astronomy. He invented the Jacob’s Staff, also known as the cross-staff, an instrument used to measure the angular distance between two heavenly objects. This tool was used by sailing ships to navigate by the stars.

Rabbi Levi CraterRabbi Levi Crater
He lived in a time when terrible tragedies befell the once great Jewish communities of France. At that time, the cruel King Phillip the 4th was busy waging war on his neighbors. As a result, his treasury became empty and he decreed that all Jews be expelled from France and their possessions be given to him. Rabbi Levi escaped most of the trouble because he lived in a small city in southern France which belonged to the Pope. Rabbi Levi devoted his entire life to spreading the light of knowledge among fellow Jews and to the promotion of science and tolerance in the world at large.

He showed his extraordinary capabilities at an early age. He mastered the Talmud, and by the age of 30 he was an accomplished physician. He wrote commentaries on the Torah, the Prophets, and Writings. He also wrote a commentary on the Mishna. He wrote many poems, especially dirges, in which he bewailed the terrible persecution suffered by his brethren in France. He died in 1344 at the age of 56.

Abenezra

The crater Abenezra is named after the Sephardic sage, poet, biblical commentator and astrologer Spanish-born Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra (1092-1167). His adventurous life began in Tudela, Spain. He spent the first half of his life in various cities in the Arabic part of Spain. He was always in financial straits. The generosity of his admirers made his life somewhat easier. They appreciated the elegance and stylishness of his poetry and other writings. He wrote books on various subjects, including philosophy, calendar mathematics, medicine, chess and astronomy.  His religious poems, prayers and writings are permeated with warmth and deep feeling, and his boundless faith and trust in God.

Abenezra CraterThe Abenezra Crater
The second half of his life he traveled from country to country, studying people and countries, cultures and languages. He even visited the Holy Land where he learned Kabbalah from sages in Safed and Tiberias.

Zagut

The 52-mile (84 km) in diameter moon crater Zagut is named after Rabbi Abraham Zacuto (his Hebrew name was Zechut). Rabbi Zacuto was born in Spain in 1452. He was a mathematician, historian, doctor, navigator, rabbi, and astronomer. When he was 20, he started working on Almanach, which calculates geographical coordinates. He improved the astrolabe, an instrument invented by the ancient Greeks in 225 B.C.E. which was used to make planetary measurements, typically of the altitudes of celestial bodies and in navigation for calculating latitude.

Rabbi Abraham Zacuto
Without his personal guidance, knowledge, and inventions, Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama may have failed in their quests. Rabbi Zacuto knew that such contributions to science by a Jew, and particularly a rabbi, created a favorable impression upon his non-Jewish peers.

After being expelled from Spain, he moved to Portugal. After the expulsion from Portugal he moved to Tunis where he wrote the majority of his Book of Lineage which recorded the first 1,500 years of Jewish history. Apparently, he wrote this encyclopedic work with only one tractate of Talmud and hardly any other reference books except for those few that the expelled Jews brought with them.

Cori on the Moon

Gerty Theresa Cori
Jewish Nobel Prize winner, Gerty Theresa Cori (maiden name Radnitz) was born in Prague on August 15, 1896, to an upper-middle-class sophisticated family. She attended medical school in Prague where she met Carl Cori. His family felt that her being Jewish would stifle Carl Cori’s advancement. She converted to Catholicism so that they could be married in a church. Gerty was unsuccessful in assuaging their fears.

Their eventual decision to leave Europe was fueled primarily by rampant antisemitism. Carl Cori was offered a position in the US and Gerty followed half a year later.

In 1947 she became the first American woman—the third woman ever – to win the Nobel Prize. Planetary study was not what made her a scientific star. She and Carl received it together in recognition for their life’s work on carbohydrate metabolism, which expanded understanding of how muscles make and store energy and the role of enzymes, with implications for the treatment of diabetes, among other diseases. In her honor, both the moon and Venus have a Cori Crater named after her.

Sylvester

James Joseph Sylvester was born in 1814 and was the first observant Jew to hold a professorship in Britain. He excelled in math at Cambridge, attaining second place in his year, but was refused a degree or a prize because he was Jewish.

Sylvester CraterThe Sylvester Crater
In 1838 he became professor of natural philosophy at University College London and published 15 papers on fluid dynamics and algebraic equations. After spending some time in America, he returned to England where he became an actuary and math tutor. Florence Nightingale was one of his students.

In 1855 he became professor at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and was the second president of the London Mathematical Society. He retired at the age of 55, in 1870, due to army rules, and in 1877 he went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He founded the American Journal of Mathematics, the first American mathematical journal.  In 1883, he became professor of Geometry at Oxford, finally retiring in 1892, at the age of 78. He died in 1897. A 36-mile (58 km) crater located near the north pole of the Moon was named after him.

Resnik

Judith Resnik

Pilot, software engineer, electrical engineer and NASA astronaut Judith Resnik (1949-1986) grew up in a religious Jewish home in Akron, Ohio. At first she planned to become a concert pianist, but turned down Juilliard School of Music in order to study mathematics.

In 1978, at the age of 29, Dr. Resnik became a NASA astronaut. She was the fourth woman, the second American woman, and the first Jewish woman of any nationality to fly in space. She logged 145 hours in orbit.

She was briefly marred to engineer Michael Oldak. They divorced in 1975, but remained in touch. In August 1984 Dr. Resnik invited her former husband to Cape Canaveral, Florida to watch her blast off and become the second American woman to orbit the earth.

Dr. Resnik’s first flight took place in 1984 aboard the Discovery space shuttle. It was also the maiden voyage for the spacecraft. On January 26, 1986, she participated in the ill-fated space shuttle Challenger. It broke up 73 seconds into launch killing all seven crew members. The spacecraft disintegrated 46,000 feet (14 km) above the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Cape Canaveral. The Resnik crater was named in her memory.

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The Jewish Invention of the Alphabet
n Ancient Egypt, Hieroglyphics was the formal writing system. It combined logo-graphic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters. The first decipherable sentence written in Hieroglyphs dates to 2700 BCE.

But after more than a thousand years of highly complex Cuneiform and Hieroglyphics, a new simple form of writing was created that revolutionized communication, enabling the common man, for the first time ever, to read and write.

Creation of the Alphabet
The idea of an alphabetic writing system was conceived only once in history, and all known alphabets derive from that seminar script. The method for creating the alphabet was fairly simple. There are some 1000 Egyptian hieroglyphs or pictures denoting words or syllables. The alphabet creators took 22 of these pictures, but instead of connecting them to their Egyptian words, they used the first letter of the corresponding Semitic word and turned it into a single letter. The modern Hebrew reader can often make out the connection between the hieroglyph and the Hebrew letter. For instance, the hieroglyph that serves as the basis for the Hebrew letter Ayin is a human eye. The symbol for a house (bayit) became the Hebrew letter Bet, the symbol for a snake (nahash in Hebrew) became the letter Nun and the symbol for water (mayim) became the letter Mem.

This new writing system was a remarkable stroke of genius. Instead of using hundreds of signs, there were now fewer than 30 to memorize, and these served to indicate single sounds. But this small number of characters sufficed to represent every single word in the language. Furthermore, instead of applying a complex set of reading rules, the alphabet offered one, fixed reading method. While containing only a fraction of the symbols of Hieroglyphics and Cuneiform, the alphabet also enabled far more intricate sentences.

Archaeological Discoveries
How do we know how the alphabet was created? In 1905 Sir Flinders Petrie, the father of Egyptian archaeology, along with his wife Hilda, discovered several hieroglyphic-like inscriptions in ancient Egyptian copper and turquoise mines located in the southern Sinai peninsula.

Petrie initially thought these were regular Egyptian texts. But since they comprised the repeated use of a very small repertoire of the overall number of hieroglyphs, he identified these awkward signs as an alphabetic script derived from Egyptian symbols. And yet he was unable to read them.

Some ten years later the script was deciphered by the premier linguist of his day, the famous English Egyptologist, Sir Alan Gardiner. He identified the language as early Semitic “Canaanite”. The script became known as "Proto-Sinaitic" and was dated to the late Middle Bronze Age. It was later found to be in use between 1800 and 1500 BCE.

Hebrew, as the world's oldest alphabet, was first asserted in the 1920's by German Prof. Hubert Grimme, an expert in Semitic languages. Later W. F. Albright, the father of Biblical Archaeology, popularized the idea that these Semitic writings were the work of Israelite slaves.

“Phoenician”
Despite early recognition of the world's first alphabet as Hebrew, this understanding was eventually rejected in favor of a Phoenician origin. During the Middle Egyptian Kingdom era there were six Semitic peoples living in the Canaanite area: Israelites, Phoenicians, Amorites, Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites. The Phoenicians (modern day Lebanon) were known as seafaring merchants who traveled between Canaan and many other lands, including Egypt. They therefore could have connected the Egyptian hieroglyphs with the Canaanite words.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls Phoenician, "the probable ancestor of all Western alphabets." And the United Nations claims that the Phoenician alphabet was "the prototype for all alphabets in the world."

But this is weird, because the oldest examples of the Proto-Sinaitic script significantly predate the existence of Phoenician culture and don't come from Phoenicia. Furthermore, the experts couldn't fit Phoenician words with the text. And since no other (non-Hebrew) Semitic languages were able to yield any meaningful translations either, these historically vital inscriptions languished unreadable for over a century.

It Can't Be Hebrew!
Hebrew, by the way, wasn't even considered an option. The experts claimed that the Israelites in Egypt, if they existed at all, could not have been there that early. They also said that the gap between the first alphabet and earliest Hebrew writing found in the Land of Israel was just too wide. The earliest Hebrew writing, the Khirbet Keiyafa Ostracon, found near the central Israeli city of Beit Shemesh, was dated to 1000 BCE. The creation of the alphabet was at least 500 years earlier. If they were related, why weren't earlier Hebrew scripts discovered?

The lead curse tablet, Michael C. Luddeni | Associates for Biblical Research (ABR)

en, just two years ago, archaeologist Scott Stripling, working on Mount Ebal, just north of the Samarian city of Shechem, made an amazing discovery. His team found an ancient Hebrew curse tablet (defixio) made of a folded lead sheet about an inch high and an inch wide (2.5 by 2.5 cm). The tablet's inscription reads, "Cursed, cursed, cursed — cursed by the God Yahweh". Amazingly the tablet was found next to what some believe is Joshua's altar and in the location the Bible tells us that the Jewish people were commanded by God to curse those who violated the Divine commandments. This new find was dated to about 1400 BCE. Egyptian scarabs found the site date from the same time period. In contrast, no extant inscription in the Phoenician alphabet is older than 1050 BCE. This makes the Hebrew connection by far the closest.

From Egypt to Canaan
The oldest Proto-Sinatic text dates to about 1800 BCE with the latest from the late 1500s BCE. After that, the alphabet stops appearing in Egypt and suddenly pops-up in Canaan. What Semitic people were known to have lived in Egypt and then suddenly moved to the Land of Israel? The scholars were mystified. In Canaan it rapidly caught on with the various peoples living there and evolved into the Paleo-Hebrew and Paleo-Canaanite scripts more familiar to scholars.

Two-in-One
To be able to create the alphabet, the inventor had to master two very different fields of knowledge. On the one hand he had to have an understanding of written language in general and hieroglyphics in particular, such that only a royal Egyptian insider would have. On the other hand, he had to be a native Semitic speaker with a strong Semitic identity, in order to have both the ability and desire to create a Semitic alphabet. This combination is so extraordinary as to seem almost impossible and yet the Bible describes exactly such a person – Jacob’s son Joseph, who ended up becoming the viceroy of Egypt, and his two sons, Ephraim and Menashe.

The conception of the alphabet also required a high level of creativity, which the Jewish People have demonstrated in spades.

Grammatical Similarities
There is also a unique grammatical connection between Egyptian hieroglyphics and Hebrew. Hieroglyphics uses the definite particle (like “the” in English) to talk about a specific object. Dr. Brian Rickett of the Mikra Research Laboratory notes that, of all the Semitic languages, only Hebrew also uses the definite particle (“ha”). None of the other Semitic languages have this element.


This bulla bears the words “to Natan-Melech, servant of the king.” Written in the Old Hebrew script, it dates to the sixth century B.C.E. and possibly refers to the court official mentioned in 2 Kings 23:11. Credit: Eliyahu Yanai / Public domain

Though the academic establishment has long held that the Phoenicians were behind the alphabet's creation – this assumption was recently challenged by a group of modern scholars. They say the original assumption of Hebrew was correct. These scholars include world renowned Egyptologist David Rohl, Prof. Douglas Petrovich and ancient Hebrew language expert Rabbi Michael S. Bar-Ron. Petrovich even wrote a book about his discoveries, “Hebrew – The World’s Oldest Alphabet”, by Jerusalem publisher Carta. But Petrovich and Bar-Ron went further than just identifying the language as Hebrew – they actually deciphered the texts. What they revealed was astounding.

Petrovich found references to several people mentioned in the Torah. These include Asenath – wife of Joseph, Hovav, the son of Yitro and Ahisamach – the father of Oholiav who helped lead the construction of the tabernacle and the holy ark.


For example, according to Petrovich, the SINAI 375a inscription names Ahisamach, a master craftsman at the turquoise mines, “The overseer of Minerals, Ahisamach”. This fits in perfectly with the Biblical text, as his son Oholiab, a master craftsman himself, would have learned his skills from his father. The corresponding Biblical verse reads, "And behold, I Myself have appointed with him [Bezalel], Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan; and in the hearts of all who are adept I have put skill, that they may make all that I have commanded you: the tent of meeting, and the ark of testimony … " (Exodus 31:1–11)

Most incredible of all was the discovery of an inscription with a direct reference to Moses in a stone slab referred to as SINAI 361. It reads: "Our bound servitude had lingered. Moses then provoked astonishment.” Dated to 1446 BC, this inscription written by the Hebrew miners at Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai references the oppression of Israel under the 18th dynasty pharaohs and the ten plagues of Egypt.

Cursing the Golden Calf


When Bar-Ron translated the SINAI 249 inscription, he found a polemic against the idol Ba`alat and the Jews who worshiped her.

SINAI 349
Lo I cut down the gate of the Accursed One!
Those [belonging to] Ba'alat are worthless!
Give answer to our brothers:
“Shame on you that have committed this disgrace.”
They have committed sin! They have committed sin!

Ba`alat is the West Semitic name for Hathor, the golden cow goddess of Egypt and the goddess of Love. Sinai-based Serabit el-Khadim, where the inscription was found, was the location of a major temple of Hathor. It is located only three days walking distance from the traditional location of Mount Sinai. Egyptologist David Rohl noted that Ba`alat is a perfect fit for the Golden Calf that the Israelites worshiped at Sinai.

The "Hymn to Hathor", circa 1500 BCE, includes these words:

Come, oh Golden One, who eats of praise, because the food of her desire is dancing,
Who shines on the festival at the time of lighting, who is content with the dancing at night.
'Come!
The procession is in the place of inebriation, that hall of traveling through the marshes.

See how closely this matches the description in the Book of Exodus:

Exodus 32: 3 – All the people took off their (gold) earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took them and formed them into a mold of a calf. "This Israel is your god, who brought you out of Egypt!"
Exodus 32:19 – As he approached the camp, he saw the calf and the dancing; and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tablets out of his hands, and broke them beneath the mount.

Even the English alphabet we use today originated with same primordial alphabet created by the Jews in Egypt almost 4000 years ago. Future discoveries will continue to shed light on this fascinating subject.

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The Journalist Who Stood Up to Hitler
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by Kylie Ora Lobell
August 15, 2023
5 min read

Dorothy Thompson was the first foreign journalist that Hitler expelled in the lead up to the war, and she used her voice to advocate for the Jewish People.

In 1931, Dorothy Thompson, an American journalist stationed in Europe, was writing a profile piece on a new leader emerging in Germany: Adolf Hitler. This was two years before he was to be elected chancellor of Germany, become a dictator, start World War II and eventually murder 6 million Jews in the Holocaust.

When Thompson first met Hitler to write the profile, she said she “was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany.” But after less than a minute of talking to Hitler – the man who failed to rise to power during the Beer Hall Putsch and then wrote the hateful “Mein Kampf” in prison – she determined that he was a nobody.

Dorothy Thompson, testifying to Congress in support of repealing the Neutrality Acts, April 1939. US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog,” she wrote.
During the interview, Hitler admitted that if he did come to power, he would establish an authority-state: “Everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below,” he said.

The profile piece turned into a hit piece; Thompson, a former women’s rights activist with the suffrage movement, said this “magnificent propagandist” was “inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man.”

Thompson’s profile, titled “I Saw Hitler!” appeared in a 1932 issue of Cosmopolitan and then was reprinted into a book of the same title.

Several months after the article was published, Hitler came to power. Realizing that she had woefully underestimated this evil man, Thompson wrote a number of negative articles about him, which caught his eye – and ultimately losing her position as a foreign correspondent.

In 1934, the secret police visited Thompson in her hotel room, and she was given an order to leave Germany within 48 hours. She was the first foreign journalist expelled from the country, and she landed on the front page of papers around the globe.

“As far as I can see, I was really put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy,” she said. “My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime in the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a messiah sent of God to save the German people.”

Trying to take down Hitler – and fighting for Jews
Though Thompson had to leave Germany, due to her expulsion, her career skyrocketed. She started writing a column for the New York Herald Tribune that was syndicated to more than 100 different newspapers, and she was a guest on NBC radio and wrote a regular column for Ladies’ Home Journal. In her writing and radio work, Thompson constantly criticized Hitler and the Nazis and advocated for the Jewish people to establish their own state..

In 1938, the journalist released a book called “Refugees: Anarchy or Organization?” where she fought on behalf of refugees from both the Spanish Civil War and Germany, saying, they “could bring to a new country resources of skill which would increase its wealth and trade.”


When Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish German student, killed a German diplomat – which led to Kristallnacht – Thompson broadcasted, “I want to talk about that boy. I feel as though I knew him, for in the past five years I have met so many whose story is the same — the same except for this unique desperate act. Herschel Grynzspan was one of the hundreds of thousands of refugees whom the terror east of the Rhine has turned loose in the world.”

Americans heard Thompson’s broadcast and raised $40,000 for Grynszpan’s legal defense. Unfortunately, the trial never ended up being held. The Gestapo seized him and he was presumed to have been killed; what really happened still remains a mystery.

The next year, when Nazi sympathizers hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939, Thompson disrupted it by laughing during the speeches, and the police had to remove her for her own safety.

At the February 1939 German American Bund rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City, Dorothy Thompson heckled the pro-Nazi speakers, and had to be escorted out of the arena for her own safety.
She repeatedly brought up the horrific atrocities Nazis were inflicting onto the Jews and urged the American government to take action.

In a broadcast, she stated, “They are holding every Jew in Germany as a hostage. Therefore, we who are not Jews must speak, speak our sorrow and indignation and disgust in so many voices that they will be heard.”

Thompson’s legacy in the world of journalism and beyond
Thompson was not afraid to speak out against Hitler in a time when others were. She was dubbed the “First Lady of American Journalism” and became almost as influential as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. One biographer wrote that Thompson became “the leading American voice in the war against fascism.”
Though the journalist quickly rose to fame, after the war, she did not retain her celebrity status. She also had opinions that landed her in hot water with her publishers and she changed her views on Zionism.

However, her influence cannot be understated. She risked her own safety to stand up to pure evil – and will forever be remembered for her bravery.

As Thompson herself wrote, “There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth.”

Though the journalist quickly rose to fame, after the war, she did not retain her celebrity status. She also had opinions that landed her in hot water with her publishers and she changed her views on Zionism.

However, her influence cannot be understated. She risked her own safety to stand up to pure evil – and will forever be remembered for her bravery.

As Thompson herself wrote, “There is nothing to fear except the persistent refusal to find out the truth.”

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5 Ways to Jumpstart Your Personal Growth
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by Rabbi Nechemia Coopersmith
August 31, 2022
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This is the best time of year to shake things up.

1. Strengthen Your Free Will Muscles
Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, literally means “head of the year.” It’s referred to as the head because the New Year is the time to attain clarity and vision about your life’s purpose and goals for the upcoming year.

The Hebrew month of Elul, which began this week, is the last month of the year. If Rosh Hashanah is the head, Elul – the end of the year – is signified by the feet. In Hebrew, a foot is regel, which shares the same Hebrew root as “habit,” moving mindlessly on auto pilot.

The mandate of the end of the Jewish year is to reconnect it to the previous Rosh Hashanah when you were burning with passion to accomplish clearly defined goals. Now is the time to shake off the dust of complacency and to infuse this last month with the vitality you had at the beginning of the year.

When you live by habit, you’re sleepwalking, going through the motions, and letting your free will muscles atrophy. The most important thing you can do to jumpstart your spiritual growth is to stop being a zombie and strengthen your free will muscles by making active choices.

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That's why every morning during the month of Elul the shofar is blown. It’s your daily reminder to wake up! Break your routine, wrestle with your lethargy, go to battle with your laziness, negativity, and repeat cycles of giving up.

Reconnect to your greatest gift: your free will.

How?

Pick one clearly defined act that you can commit to for the next four weeks, something that requires a real effort (but manageable) and will lift you out of the dross of your habituated life. It may be committing to exercise for 15 minutes a day – no matter what, giving one person a sincere compliment every day, doing something that is out of your comfort zone.

Each mini victory is significant. You’ll feel empowered, confident, unstuck. It can show you that with hard work, change is possible, and give you the initial momentum you need to move further.

2. Put More Focus on Your Most Important Relationships
Interpersonal relationships are the primary training ground for spiritual growth. How you treat others is the most concrete way to excel in giving and become more like God, the Ultimate Giver.

It’s common for people to treat their coworkers and strangers better than their spouse and children. It’s easy to take for granted your most important relationships – after all, they’re always there.

Until they aren’t.

Don’t take your spouse and kids for granted. This month, put them at the top of your priority list. Spend more quality – and quantity – time, be extra considerate, affectionate, and attentive.

3. Waste Less Time
The plethora of streaming platforms and social media feeds generate a tsunami of distraction and, let’s face it, causes us to waste oodles of time. If you want to show up on Rosh Hashanah and plead your case for another year of life, you need to demonstrate that you value your time and are serious about using it meaningfully.

Where can you cut back on killing time?

4. Do More Jewish
Take on doing one additional spiritual practice that you find meaningful. It may be reading an inspiring book, taking a weekly online class about a Jewish subject, or having a family Shabbat dinner filled with good food, meaningful conversation and song. Think about something that resonates with you, and make sure it’s not too daunting.

5. Have a Heart-to-Heart with God
Even if you’re not the crunchy-granola spiritual type or a Hasid in the making, consider giving this a shot. The Jewish concept of God – an Infinite, Eternal, All-Encompassing Being Who has no form – is very abstract, and it's easy to relegate this transcendent Being to the Heavens while you go about your life on earth.

Work on making God tangible, right here, right now. Open up your heart and talk to Him, share your feelings, your fears, your anger, whatever is on your mind or weighing down your heart. It doesn’t have to be in a synagogue, or with a prayer book. God is everywhere, aware, listening; just find some quiet alone time and confide in Him. And keep at it. You may be surprised to see how having those heart-to-heart chats makes you feel connected to Him.

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BRADLEY COOPER’S FAKE "JEWISH" NOSE

DR. YVETTE ALT MILLER
A look at the surprising long history of the slur against "Jewish noses."
A look at the surprising long history of the slur against “Jewish noses.”

When Netflix released the first images from its upcoming movie Maestro, about the great Jewish American conductor Leonard Bernstein, the stills from the movie caused an uproar. Bradley Cooper, who is starring and directing the film, donned a large prosthetic nose to portray the famous musician. (The just-released trailer has reignited the debate.)

Cooper, who is not Jewish, has been accused of “Jewface,” the exaggerated portrayal of Jewish characters by non-Jewish actors, who sometimes resort to stereotypes that can veer dangerously close to antisemitic tropes. As James Hirsh, a co-host of the Menschwarmers podcast has noted, “This is Cooper’s third time portraying a historical figure on screen. No prosthetics were used to play American Sniper’s Chris Kyle or Licorice Pizza’s Jon Peters. He didn’t use them to play the Elephant Man on Broadway.” Why suddenly don a fake nose now?

Comparing photos from Netflix’s movie with actual pictures of Leonard Bernstein, the contrast between the two images is noticeable: Cooper’s nose appears larger than Bernstein’s. (My middle school son laughed when I showed him the images, observing that Cooper’s overly large schnoz looks “like blackface for Jews”.)
Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein
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I get that acting is all about creating an illusion. Some of the most well-known Jewish characters on the silver screen have been played by non-Jews (British actor Ben Kingsley playing Itzak Stern in Schindler’s List, Italian actor Robert Benigni playing Guido Orefice in Life is Beautiful, and Hellen Mirren as Golda Meir in an upcoming movie). I’m sure that Bradley Cooper can perform ably as Leonard Bernstein – but why the huge nose? (Bernstein's three children released a letter supporting Cooper's portrayal and prosthetic nose.)

Sadly, there’s a long and ignominious history of portraying Jews with huge noses. “The visual sources for and fundamental meaning of these features are no mystery,” observes Dr. Sara Lipton, Professor of Medieval History at Stonybrook University in New York and the author of Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (2014).

In the Middle Ages, it was common for Christian artists to depict the Devil as a quasi-animalistic creature with a grotesque, animal-like nose. “Long or large, downward-curved, snout-like or beak-like noses, especially when combined with brutish expressions and shaggy beards, had long served as visual indicators of bestiality, brutality, irrationality, and evil,” she notes. In about the 1200s, Christian artists began to depict Jews with these exaggerated features, drawing huge noses on Jewish subjects as a marker of their supposed evil. The idea of a “Jewish nose” became firmly embedded in the collective Western imagination.

Let’s get one thing straight: Jewish noses are no larger than non-Jewish ones.

If you don’t believe me, consult the research of the late anthropologist Dr. Maurice Fishberg. Born in 1872 in Russia (present day Ukraine), Dr. Fishberg moved to New York in 1889, where he studied medicine and became a noted physician.

Aren’t their noses just about the same without the prothesis?

At the time, the burgeoning study of eugenics posited that some races were superior to others. Dr. Fishberg wondered if many of the slurs against Jews - including that their supposedly large noses reflected shady morals - had any scientific basis. In 1911, Dr. Fishberg set out to settle the question of whether Jewish noses really were much larger than the average non-Jewish proboscis (a fancy way of saying nose). He meticulously measured the noses of a whopping 4,000 Jews and compared them with others.

His conclusion? The noses of Jews are not statistically larger - as a group - than the noses of anyone else.

His findings failed to budge the persistent myth that Jewish noses are unusually large. Twenty-seven years later, the notorious Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher published his famously influential children’s book Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom) in which he ominously told a generation of German children, “One can most easily tell a Jew by his nose. The Jewish nose is bent at its point. It looks like the number six… Many Gentiles also have bent noses. But their noses bend upwards, not downwards. Such a nose is a hook nose or an eagle nose. It is not at all like a Jewish nose.”

Nazi propaganda routinely depicted Jews with grotesque, exaggerated noses. When Otto Dietrich, the Nazi Reich press chief from 1937 to 1945 was convicted of war crimes after the Holocaust, the judge noted in his decision that “It is…clear that a well thought-out, oft-repeated, persistent campaign to arouse the hatred of the German people against Jews was fostered and directed by the press department and its press chief…” Routinely printing distorted images of Jews with grotesque noses was a key part of that propaganda. (Quoted from The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust by Jeffrey Herf: 2006.)

Even the medical profession has long disregarded the fact that Jews’ noses are no larger, on average, than other people’s noses. “For over a century, the term the ‘Jewish nose’ has been used in Western scientific literature to describe a set of physical features thought to constitute a distinct, race-based deformity,” notes plastic surgeon Dr. Beth Preminger.

She notes that in 1850, the well-known anthropologist Robert Knox wrote that Jews’ faces are marred by “a large, massive, club-shaped, hooked nose, three or four times larger than suits the face…Thus it is that the Jewish face never can (be), and never is, perfectly beautiful.” So much for scientific objectivity.

Medical journals and textbooks have long openly advocated the surgical “fixing” of “Jewish” noses. In 1930, Dr. William Wesley Carter wrote that “the modification of accentuated family or racial characteristics, such as are sometimes observable especially in Semitic subjects…is frequently of great importance to the individual.” As recently as 1996, one surgical manual described how to “correct” a “Jewish nose”. Another 1998 textbook discussing rhinoplasty (nose jobs) described patients undergoing the procedure as being “of Jewish ancestry” or of “Jewish descent”.

These attitudes led a whole generation of Jewish women to go under the knife in order to “fix” their so-called “Jewish noses”. One actress who resisted the lure of a nose job is Barbra Streisand, and she was often asked about this unusual decision. In one 1985 interview with Barbara Walters, Barbra Streisand felt the need to justify her decision to keep her natural nose: “Well, first of all I didn’t have the money to have my nose fixed - even if I had thought about it, which I did think about it. The real reason is I didn’t trust the doctors to make my nose right…I thought my nose went with my face, ya know, it’s all rather odd.”

Some stereotypes about the “Jewish nose” seem to be receding. Since 2000, for instance, the number of nose jobs done in the United States has declined by 43%. As early as 1999, Dr. H. George Brennan, a plastic surgeon, noted a new resurgence in pride among Jews who loved their noses au naturale. In the past, Dr. Brennan told The New York Times, “fixing” a “Jewish nose” “was the thing to do. You had your bat mitzvah and you got your nose done.” Increasingly this isn’t the case today.

That doesn’t mean that the myth of the huge-nosed Jews is gone.

Recently, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, a German anti-Nazi organization, noted that harmful images of Jews depicted with exaggerated noses continue to circulate, often in far-right antisemitic publications and websites. “A big nose, a greedy gaze and sidelocks - most antisemitic images of ‘the Jew’ include these features. Frequently, these are depictions of men in expensive suits and big glasses, rubbing their hands. They paint a picture of a money-grabbing, rich man. The outward appearance that is attributed to ‘the Jew’ make him the Other, an outsider. This portrayal can be found frequently as a meme in right-wing extremist and terrorist online subcultures…”

With rates of antisemitic sentiments and crimes reaching record levels around the world, it’s time to examine our own anti-Jewish prejudices, including the false stereotype that Jews have unusually large noses. This age-old, harmful slur doesn’t belong on Netflix.

I’m looking forward to watching Maestro when it comes out, and I’m sure that Bradley Cooper will do a wonderful job portraying Leonard Bernstein. I just want him to lose the fake nose.

https://aish.com/the-sacklers-why-some-jews-do-evil/?src=ac
 The Sacklers: When Jews Do Evil; Jewish Couple in Maui Providing Relief
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The Sacklers: Why Some Jews Do Evil
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THE SACKLERS: WHY SOME JEWS DO EVIL
SARA YOHEVED RIGLER
The Netflix series about America's opioid crisis is a warning to all of us.
The Netflix series “Painkiller,” about how the Sackler family engineered the opioid epidemic, never mentions that they are Jewish. But, as a Jew watching the docudrama, I cringed. Because everyone knows that the Sacklers are Jewish. Just like everyone knows that Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein were Jewish. Just like everyone knows that Einstein, Jonas Salk, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were Jewish.

How could one tiny people—just 2% of the American population—produce such shining goodness and also such abysmal evil?

How could one tiny people—just 2% of the American population—produce such shining goodness and also such abysmal evil?

Historian Ken Spiro provides an answer. In his book Destiny, he writes that the mission of the Jewish People is to fix the world, to be “a light unto the nations” as the Bible puts it. The drive to improve the world was programed into the Jew’s spiritual DNA. This tremendous drive is supposed to be channeled by the rules and disciplines of the Torah, which commands honesty and integrity in business, justice and fairness in communal affairs, and kindness and compassion in personal conduct. But when Jews ignore the Torah, when they cease to inculcate its values and wisdom and live by it, their tremendous drive get derailed.

This produces the evil acts perpetuated by the Sacklers.
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As Rabbi Noah Weinberg, founder of Aish, put it:

Jews are driven. When they are connected to Judaism, they are driven to change the world. And if they are not connected to Judaism, they are just driven. And for this reason, you can’t keep the Jews down. They will always rise to the top. They will become famous doctors, top lawyers, Nobel Prize winners. And when they stop driving themselves, they will drive their children.

Sackler Legacy
“Painkiller” co-created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue, a Jew and the son of a Conservative rabbi, manages to convey the tremendous evil of Richard Sackler, laced with a thin thread of impulse to change the world. In the pivotal scene where Richard Sackler is convincing his father and uncle to hold onto Purdue Pharmaceuticals, he tells them that human beings run away from pain and run toward pleasure. “If we place ourselves right there between pain and pleasure, if we become gatekeepers for everyone who wants to get away from pain, then we have changed the world… And you will never have to worry about money ever again.”

At that early stage of the story, Richard Sackler’s greed is intertwined with his drive to change the world.

The series begins in Richard Sackler’s lavish mansion when he is awakened by the annoying beep of a smoke alarm. He searches throughout the many rooms of his mansion until he locates the offending alarm, then tries hard to silence it. Throughout the series, Richard is plagued by the recurrent beep of the smoke alarm. It is an apt metaphor for conscience. The beep that bothers him is not the loud wail set off by fire and smoke, but the quiet signal that the battery in the smoke alarm is running low. The “battery” that powers the conscience of a Jew is the moral standards of the Torah: social responsibility, compassion for the disempowered, justice that pays no heed to wealth, and the humility of knowing that God, not any man, runs the world. When that “battery” runs low, there is no effective alarm to alert the home’s residents that a fire is raging.

In “Painkiller” the beep of the smoke alarm is drowned out by the loud voice of the deceased Arthur Sackler, Richard’s uncle who launched the family’s financial success and is now haunting him. Arthur’s obsession was “legacy.” He made huge donations to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, universities, and hospitals, where the Sackler name was brandished on buildings and wings galore. His message to his children before his death was: “Leave the world a better place than when you entered it.”

They don’t. The movie, with dramatic license, portrays the devastation wrought to individuals and families by OxyContin, produced by the Sackler-owned Purdue Pharma, described as “heroin in a pill.” Almost a half million people have died of prescription drug overdoses. OxyContin is the chief culprit.

Rather than simply put OxyContin on the market as a painkiller for doctors to prescribe, Richard Sackler mobilized an army of sexy young women to cajole doctors to prescribe the drug in ever-increasing doses. Both the women and the doctors were rewarded financially and with perks for pushing the drug. According to Patrick Radden Keefe’s investigative piece that appeared in The New Yorker, “The Family that Built an Empire of Pain,” in 2001, Purdue Pharma paid 40 million dollars in bonuses to its sales force. It is a lurid story of human greed and lust, exactly the propensities that the Torah attempts to rein in.

When the Jewish drive to change the world is harnessed to Jewish wisdom and values, the result is a socially conscious and compassionate society.

Richard Sackler’s obsession is both greed and ego. Toward the end of the series, he says, “I care about making money and winning. That’s it.”

Jewish Drive
This is Jewish drive gone awry. But when the Jewish drive to change the world is harnessed to Jewish wisdom and values, the result is a socially conscious and compassionate society. Jews have been at the forefront of every movement for social improvement in American society. As Irish American scholar Thomas Cahill pointed out:

The Jews…gave us the Conscience of the West, the belief that this God who is One is not the God of outward show but the “still, small voice” of conscience, the God of compassion, … the God who cares about each of his creatures, especially the human beings created “in his image,” and that he insists we do the same.

The Jews gave us the Outside and the Inside—our outlook and our inner life. … We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact—new, adventure, surprise, unique, individual, person, vocation, time, history, future, freedom progress, spirit, faith, hope, justice—are the gifts of the Jews. [The Gifts of the Jews, pp. 239-241]

Ken Spiro’s Destiny has pages listing Jews who have contributed in the scientific, technological, medical, financial, fashion, and entertainment fields. In terms of social causes, Spiro names the Jews behind the National Social Security Act, the NAACP, the feministic movement, the SPCA, and the American Red Cross. Even the Salvation Army, one of the largest Christian charities in the world, was founded by William Booth, whose mother was Jewish.

At the dawn of the Civil Rights movement in 1963-64, one half of the Freedom Riders who traveled to Mississippi to register black voters were Jews. A milestone event of that era was the disappearance in June, 1964, of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. Seven weeks later their bodies were found, having been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. Two of three -- Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner -- were Jews from New York.

Spiro also lists Jews who have used their innate drive to corrupt and exploit: the gangsters Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Jacob “Greasy Thumb” Guzik; the insider trading champ Ivan Boesky, and the Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff. Spiro’s book was published in 2018, before Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein and the Sacklers had become household names identified with monstrous vice. As any objective assessment makes clear, however, the number of Jewish villains is dwarfed by the number of Jews who have used their innate drive to improve the world.

Fix You
At the end of this week, Jews will enter the Hebrew month of Elul that kickstarts the 40-day period that ends with Yom Kippur. The singular focus of this time period is to examine one’s deeds, to turn the drive to fix the world inward toward fixing oneself and to evaluate how one’s life falls short of the Jewish ideals of kindness, honesty, integrity, and service of God.

Jews are driven, but the direction you go is up to each individual.

I don’t know if the Sacklers ever attended synagogue on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, but clearly they never engaged in the introspection that would have recharged their moral battery nor evaluated their deeds according to Judaism’s standards. Only once, in Kentucky in 2015, was Richard Sackler legally forced to make a deposition about his role in the development and marketing of OxyContin. Tyler Thompson, the lead attorney, described Sackler’s demeanor to journalist Patrick Keefe: “A smirk and a so-what attitude—an absolute lack of remorse.” This is the antithesis of what Judaism requires of Jews.

In the Torah God commands: “I have put before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life” (Deut. 30:19). Jewish drive fuels you to cover extraordinary distances, to persist in seemingly hopeless journeys, and to travel through uncharted territories. Jews are driven, but the direction you go is up to you. And this pre-Yom Kippur season assures you that if you are going in the wrong direction, you have the fuel necessary to make a U-turn and arrive at a different destination.

https://aish.com/the-sacklers-why-some-jews-do-evil/?src=ac
The Sacklers: Why Some Jews Do Evil
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by Sara Yoheved Rigler
August 16, 2023
The Netflix series about America's opioid crisis is a warning to all of us.

The Netflix series “Painkiller,” about how the Sackler family engineered the opioid epidemic, never mentions that they are Jewish. But, as a Jew watching the docudrama, I cringed. Because everyone knows that the Sacklers are Jewish. Just like everyone knows that Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein were Jewish. Just like everyone knows that Einstein, Jonas Salk, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were Jewish.

How could one tiny people—just 2% of the American population—produce such shining goodness and also such abysmal evil?

How could one tiny people—just 2% of the American population—produce such shining goodness and also such abysmal evil?

Historian Ken Spiro provides an answer. In his book Destiny, he writes that the mission of the Jewish People is to fix the world, to be “a light unto the nations” as the Bible puts it. The drive to improve the world was programed into the Jew’s spiritual DNA. This tremendous drive is supposed to be channeled by the rules and disciplines of the Torah, which commands honesty and integrity in business, justice and fairness in communal affairs, and kindness and compassion in personal conduct. But when Jews ignore the Torah, when they cease to inculcate its values and wisdom and live by it, their tremendous drive get derailed.

This produces the evil acts perpetuated by the Sacklers.