Rabbis' march (1943) - Rabbi Moshe Feinstein Was There - So Was Rabbi Avraham Kalmanowitz! "No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot(s)"

Despite the fears of their opponents, the rabbis’ march did not cause an antisemitic backlash. Ironically, the president’s snub ended up giving the protest the front-page news coverage that the president and his advisers had hoped to avoid. As a result, the march helped galvanize public and congressional sympathy for rescue. That boosted the subsequent efforts on Capitol Hill by Jewish activists, which, combined with behind-the-scenes pressure from the Treasury Department, eventually compelled President Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board. Despite receiving meager government funding and little cooperation from the president or other government agencies, the board played a major role in the rescue of more than 200,000 refugees during the final fifteen months of the war.

 https://x.com/HolocaustMuseum/status/1578080209596710914?s=20

 

1943

2023

 

Participants

Participating rabbis included the leading rabbinical figures of the era, including Rabbi Eliezer Silver and Rabbi Avraham Kalmanowitz of the Vaad Hatzalah. One of the participants was Rabbi Moshe Feinstein who would become one of the most important and famous American Orthodox rabbis and Rabbi Eliezer Poupko, a prominent figure in the orthodox rabbinic world. Rabbi Wolf Gold was also a participant and spoke at the protest.  

 https://x.com/HolocaustMuseum/status/1578080209596710914?s=20

The Rabbis' March was a demonstration in support of American and allied action to stop the destruction of European Jewry. It took place in Washington, D.C., on October 6, 1943, three days before Yom Kippur. It was organized by Hillel Kook, nephew of the chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine and head of the Bergson Group, and involved more than 400 rabbis, mostly members of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada,^[1] from New York and cities throughout the Eastern United States. It was the only such protest in Washington during the Holocaust.

The rabbis were received at steps of the Capitol by the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the Speaker of the House. After prayers for the war effort at the Lincoln Memorial the rabbis marched to the White House to plead with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They were informed that the President was busy all day and were instead received by Vice President Henry Wallace. It was later learned that Roosevelt had several free hours that afternoon, but had avoided meeting the delegation out of concern regarding diplomatic neutrality and on the advice of some of his Jewish aides and several prominent American Jews, many of whom thought the protest would stir up anti-Semitism. Both Stephen Wise (head of the World Jewish Congress) and Samuel Rosenman (the President's advisor, speech writer and head of the American Jewish Committee) claimed that the protesting rabbis, many of whom were both Orthodox as well as recent immigrants (or first-generation Americans), "were not representative of American Jewry" and not the kind of Jews he should meet. In the November 1943 issue of his journal Opinion, Wise referred to the march as a "painful and even lamentable exhibition", calling it "propaganda by stunts" and accused the rabbis of offending the dignity of the Jewish people.^[2][3] Disappointed and angered by the President's failure to meet with them, the rabbis stood in front of the White House where they were met by Senator William Warren Barbour and others, and refused to read their petition aloud, instead handing it off to the Presidential secretary, Marvin McIntyre.

The march garnered much media attention, much of it focused on what was seen as the cold and insulting dismissal of many important community leaders, as well as the people in Europe they were fighting for. The headline in the Washington Times Herald read: "Rabbis Report 'Cold Welcome' at the White House." Editors of The Jewish Daily Forward commented, "Would a similar delegation of 500 Catholic priests have been thus treated?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbis%27_march_(1943)#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-N0827-318,_KZ_Auschwitz,_Ankunft_ungarischer_Juden.jpg

MARCH FOR ISRAEL RALLY LIVE CAM

Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum - Breeder And Founder of Neturei Karta Movement - Encouraged Virulent Hatred Of The State of Israel!

 

Joel Teitelbaum Breeder Of The Neturei Karta Ideology

 Opposition to Zionism of Satmar as the forerunner of Neturei Karta

 Yoel Teitelbaum was famous for his vocal opposition to Zionism in all arenas and never acknowledged that Zionists had saved his life during the Holocaust. He encouraged his followers in Israel to form self-sufficient communities without assistance from the State of Israel and forbade any official engagement with it.

Before World War II, most Hasidic rabbis, as well as many other prominent Orthodox rabbis and leaders, believed that God had promised to return the Jewish people to the Land of Israel under the leadership of the Moshiach, who would arrive when the Jewish people had merited redemption. While awaiting the Moshiach, the Jewish people were to perform the mitzvot and were not to antagonize or rebel against the Gentile nations of the world. In the years following the Holocaust, Teitelbaum strengthened this position.

In Teitelbaum's view, the founding of the modern State of Israel by secular and religious Jews, rather than the Moshiach, violated a Jewish commandment that Jews should wait for the Messiah. Moreover, Teitelbaum taught that the existence of the State of Israel was actually preventing the Messiah from coming.^[10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Teitelbaum

'Terrible desecration of God's name:' Satmar rebbe slams anti-Israel protesters

 

Satmar, a major hasidic group, is known for its extreme conservatism and anti-Zionism. Based in New York post-WWII, it maintains a strong Yiddish education and media system.

Zalman Leib Teitelbaum,of the Satmar Hasidic sect

The leader of the reclusive Satmar hasidic group, Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum, known as the "Satmar Rebbe," has publicly denounced the Neturei Karta group for their recent conduct, particularly their involvement in protests alongside “enemies of Israel.”

The rebbe's speech, shared on social media, included pointed remarks, stating, "It's a terrible desecration of God's name to support murderers in the name of the holy Torah and God's name." He lambasted the group for lacking traditional values and boundaries and acting without Torah guidance.

Last week, members of the extreme sect visited Jenin and met with Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah leaders. According to a post on social media covering the visit, the representatives of Neturei Karta said: "We want to live in co-existence and in peace, our Jewish brothers want it too. We wish to live peacefully together with equal rights, on the basis that we all stand firm against occupation."

Members of the extreme group also demonstrated in New York with anti-Israel protests, where at times, antisemitic signs were held.

Satmar, a major hasidic group, is known for its extreme conservatism and anti-Zionism. Based in New York post-WWII, it maintains a strong Yiddish education and media system. Leadership split post-2006 between Moshe Teitelbaum's sons, Aaron and Zalman Leib, each overseeing separate communities.

Neturei Karta is a haredi Jewish group established in 1938 in Jerusalem, opposing Zionism and advocating for the "peaceful dismantling" of Israel, believing Jewish statehood must await the Messiah, with notable presences in Jerusalem's Mea Shearim and Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet.

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Members of the Neturei Karta orthodox group protest against Israel.

THE BIG JEWISH LIE:

"Satmar Rebbe: NK think they understand more than righteous leaders of the past

The Satmar Rebbe stressed, "There are those who have no tradition of ancestors, act independently, thinking they understand more than previous righteous leaders." He noted the distress this caused his predecessor, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, who also spoke against such actions."

 

Photos: Thousands, Led By Satmar Rebbe, Rally Against Israel in Front of UN

https://matzav.com/photos-thousands-led-by-satmar-rebbe-rally-against-israel-in-front-of-un/

Satmar Anti-Zionist Rally At Nassau Coliseum

https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/headlines-breaking-stories/1533407/photo-essay-satmar-anti-zionist-rally-at-nassau-coliseum-part-2-photos-by-jdn.html

These statements not only reflect the Satmar community's non-Zionist stance but also their preference for avoiding public political activism, in contrast to Neturei Karta's active opposition to the state of Israel.

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-773037?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=IDF%3A+Soldier+held+hostage+by+Hamas+was+killed&utm_campaign=November+14%2C+2023&vgo_ee=pwIfKzQW3fVzDpMGD309Hf5uuhVH3b%2BOKdFaUyMYA1MrCA%3D%3D%3ATTcmal5OTPQbnQN44f8MmaG03feST91e

Oy Vey, The Goyim Too!

 

"The organization has spent the last several years grappling with revelations that its national leaders suppressed reports of abuse and resisted reform for decades. The brief, abuse survivors and those critical of the church say, offers the first clear look at the church’s true position on whether its leaders can be held accountable for abuse." You have to think about preserving the membership and preserving what we stand for.”

*****

Southern Baptists met in New Orleans in June

 

 

 

For six months, almost no one took notice of the brief filed quietly by Southern Baptists in a case winding its way to the Kentucky Supreme Court.

At the center of the case is a woman whose father, a police officer, was convicted in 2020 of sexually abusing her over a period of years when she was a child. The woman later sued several parties, including the Louisville Police Department, saying they knew about the abuse and had a duty to report it. Now, the state’s highest court is considering whether sex abuse victims can have more time to sue “non-perpetrators” — institutions or their leaders that are obligated to protect children from such abuse.

None of it appeared to have anything to do with the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. But in April, lawyers representing the denomination filed an amicus brief opposing expansion of the statute of limitations for lawsuits against third parties, including religious institutions.

The brief, reported by The Louisville Courier-Journal in October, landed like a bombshell in Southern Baptist circles. The organization has spent the last several years grappling with revelations that its national leaders suppressed reports of abuse and resisted reform for decades. The brief, abuse survivors and those critical of the church say, offers the first clear look at the church’s true position on whether its leaders can be held accountable for abuse.

It has led to a flurry of blistering reactions and efforts by S.B.C. leaders to distance themselves from the brief, which they characterize as a decision driven by lawyers. The brief says that the denomination has a “strong interest in the statute-of-limitations issue” in the case, and argues that a 2021 state law allowing abuse victims to sue third-party “non-perpetrators” was not intended to be applied retroactively.

“I’ve never seen such unmitigated and justified anger among Southern Baptists,” said Russell Moore, the former head of the denomination’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who is now the editor in chief of Christianity Today.

The brief has disrupted continuing reform efforts in the denomination, which have gained momentum since an investigation by The Houston Chronicle and The San Antonio Express-News in 2019 revealed that hundreds of Southern Baptist leaders had pleaded guilty or had been convicted of sex crimes in recent decades.

Since then, the denomination has passed a resolution calling abuse both a sin and a crime, commissioned and published a third-party investigation into its handling of abuse and pledged to create a searchable database of people who have been credibly accused of abuse in Southern Baptist settings.

The denomination’s president, Bart Barber, who has supported abuse reforms, said in a statement that he takes “full responsibility” for the denomination joining the brief. He said he was asked for approval by the S.B.C.’s legal team and regrets not giving it the attention he should have. “I know that my credibility with you is harmed by this, perhaps irreparably,” he wrote in an open statement to Southern Baptists.

Yet, in that same statement, he said he is undecided on the matter. “I am not sure exactly what I think about statutes of limitation. I think they are a mixed bag,” he wrote. “I am uncomfortable with the harm statutes of limitations can do, but I also think that they play a valid role in the law sometimes.”

States including California and New York have expanded the statutes of limitations for filing civil suits in abuse cases. About a dozen Catholic dioceses in the United States are currently in bankruptcy proceedings.

Victims and their advocates say that the brief undercuts the intentions of the thousands of local pastors and other delegates at the denomination’s annual meeting who have consistently supported reform efforts.

In the last several years of votes on the meeting floor, “abuse reform is undefeated,” said Mike Keahbone, a pastor in Oklahoma who is on the denomination’s executive committee and its Abuse Reform Implementation Task Force, established last year.

Mr. Keahbone said that members of the executive committee, the denomination’s top leadership body, were not informed about its lawyers’ intentions to join the brief.

Jules Woodson, who has said her youth pastor sexually assaulted her at a Texas church in the 1990s, said she and other abuse survivors felt the denomination seemed to be acting behind closed doors to oppose what it championed in public.

“This is exactly what us survivors have been saying all along,” Ms. Woodson said, describing the denomination as an institution that, when push comes to shove, operates as coldly as a business.

Ms. Woodson and two other survivors issued a statement calling the brief a “disgusting” move to “actively detonate any and all measures of justice that are rightfully ours as victims of abuse.”

The parties signing onto the brief include Lifeway Christian Resources, the denomination’s publishing arm, and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Both are defendants in a suit filed in Kentucky by a woman who says that her father, a Baptist pastor, abused her for years and that employees of various institutions failed to protect her.

Al Mohler Jr., the seminary’s president, said in a statement that in “questions of law” the seminary must defer to legal counsel. A Lifeway spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

Jonathan Whitehead, a lawyer who often represents religious institutions in court, said that while the goal of rectifying abuse is a noble one, it may be too much to expect the denomination to provide pastoral support to victims, to accept legal responsibility for past abuses and to protect its own existence.

“It’s awfully hard to be the party of care and the party of responsibility at the same time.”

For reform advocates, the episode has been disturbing.

“We’re absolutely alienating women, and we’re alienating generations like millennials,” said Keith Myer, a pastor in Maryland who organized a fund-raiser to help abuse victims attend the annual meeting this summer. “It can’t just be about preserving our institutions. You have to think about preserving the membership and preserving what we stand for.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/us/baptists-abuse-kentucky.html

The New Generation of G-D's Spokesmen --- According to various rabbis,Yitzchok Sorotzkin, Elya Brudny from Agudath Israel and Shaul Alter From Ger/Gur..."Hashem Allowed/Wanted this to happen", and Brudny in addition "this is in our best interests"! Pretty sick guys!

 

In Israel, There Is Grief and There Is Fury. Beneath the Fury, Fear.

 

יְהוָה, יְהוָה, אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן

Several hundred attended the funeral of Dana and Carmel Bachar, killed on Oct. 7.

 

I landed in Israel and went straight to a funeral.

It was at a small cemetery surrounded by cypress trees and flowering bougainvillea. Being laid to rest were Dana Bachar, a kindergarten teacher, and Carmel, her 15-year-old son, who loved the waves. They were murdered by Hamas terrorists in Kibbutz Be’eri, near Gaza. Carmel was buried with his surfboard while his father, Avida, who had lost a leg in the attack and was in a wheelchair, looked on and wept.

Several hundred people were present, friends and strangers alike. The mourners were distinctly secular and, in their dress, casual. Be’eri was well known for its pro-peace sympathies: It had a special fund to give financial help to Gazans who came to the kibbutz on work permits, and kibbutzniks would often volunteer to drive sick Palestinians to an oncology center in southern Israel.

“They were to the left of Meretz” is how one leading Israeli political figure described the kibbutz’s political sympathies, referring to the most progressive political party in Israel. Hamas must have known this. It butchered the people there all the same. The group may have had several objectives on Oct. 7, from derailing an Israeli-Saudi peace deal to getting Hezbollah to open a second front. But not the least of its aims was to kill Jews for its own sake, to instill a sense of terror so visceral and vivid that it would imprint itself on Israel’s psyche for generations. In that, it has succeeded.

Avida Bachar, who lost a leg in the attack on his family’s kibbutz, with his surviving daughter at the funeral of his wife and son.

 

What, I wondered, will it take for the country to recover? Surely a decisive military victory over Hamas, for the sake of deterrence if not justice. But any kind of military victory would be far from sufficient.

I have been coming to Israel for 40 years, through good times and bad. I’ve never seen it in a more damaged state than it is in now — a state in which grief competes with fury and where the target of fury is split between the terrorists who committed the atrocities and the political leadership that left the country exposed to attack.

And beneath the fury, fear.

From the funeral, I drove (with a brief roadside stop to take cover from incoming rocket fire) to the morgue at the Shura Army Base, where a forensics team opened trailer-size containers of bagged corpses in cold storage. Even at low temperatures, the smell left no doubt as to what was inside. Gilad Bahat, a police investigator, described examining babies who had been shot and burned, people who had been decapitated after being killed and a gruesome hodgepodge of hard-to-identify arms, skulls and other remains.

“Never have we seen such a sight,” Bahat said. He’s been on the force for 27 years.

Later, at an army headquarters in Tel Aviv, I was given a private screening of some 46 minutes of footage of the events of Oct. 7, assembled from security cameras, smartphone videos recorded by victims and survivors, and the GoPro footage taken by the terrorists themselves. I watched as one terrorist casually murdered a father with a hand grenade and then raided his fridge while two orphaned boys whimpered in fear. I watched another who tried to behead a wounded Thai field worker with a garden hoe while shouting “Allahu akbar.” I listened to a third who, in a phone call to his parents, boasted, “I killed more than 10 Jews with my bare hands!”

I also visited Kibbutz Nir Oz, which lost a quarter of its approximately 400 members to murder and kidnapping. I saw bedroom floors and bunk-bed mattresses soaked in blood. I saw incinerated homes and graffiti in Arabic taking ownership of the crime: “Al-Qassam Brigade.” I met Hadas Calderon, who lost her mother and her niece on Oct. 7, and whose two children and ex-husband are now, as best as she knows, hostages in Gaza. “The world has to scream,” she said. “Bring the children home now.”

Words such as “evil,” “horror,” “blood bath” and “terror” tend to exist, for most of us, on a conceptual or hyperbolic plane. Not for Israelis. They are under no illusions that had the Hamas terrorists been able to kill 100 or 1,000 times as many of them as they did on Oct. 7, they would have done so without hesitation.

That’s a point that needs to factor in to any thoughtful analysis of the Jewish state’s predicament. There’s an asymmetry in this conflict, but it’s not about the preponderance of military power. Israel’s goal in this war is political and strategic: to defeat Hamas as the reigning power in Gaza, even though there will be unavoidable cost in innocent lives, since Hamas operates among civilians. But Hamas’s goal is only secondarily political. Fundamentally, it’s homicidal: to end Israel as a state by slaughtering every Jew within it. How can critics of Israeli policy insist on a unilateral cease-fire or other forms of restraint against Hamas if they can’t offer a credible answer to a reasonable Israeli question: How can we go on like this?

The day after the Bachars’ funeral, I traveled to Camp Iftach, a small military base a few hundred yards north of the Gaza border. It was Oct. 25, a day after Hamas had attempted, unsuccessfully, a seaborne infiltration of the nearby beachside kibbutz of Zikim. The entire area was on high alert.

Getting to the camp meant driving my car at high speed from military checkpoint to checkpoint, tailing an Israeli Army Humvee on sandy roads surrounded by fields burned to ash by falling rockets. The camp itself was a collection of concrete bunkers, with hundreds of shell casings from the pitched battles of Oct. 7 littering the pavement outside.

One of the senior officers on base is Lt. Col. Tom Elgarat, whose careworn face looks much older than his 41 years. When I met him, he was getting his soldiers ready for the ground invasion that would begin a few days later.

“This cannot go on,” he said. “If you have to lose life, if you have to take life, this cannot go on.”

By “this,” Elgarat meant the matzav, the situation, in which Israelis now find themselves. He lives in Tel Aviv, where his wife was trying to hold things together while schools were closed and the kids were home. But he grew up in Nir Oz. One of his cousins there, he says, is “alive by pure chance,” having been barricaded with her family for hours. “I want to look in her face and say, you can go back to your house.” Two of his uncles and one of his best friends are among the hostages.

The issue of Israel’s internally displaced people gets short shrift in most news accounts. But it’s central to the way in which Israelis perceive the war. There are now more than 150,000 Israelis — proportionately the equivalent of about 5.3 million Americans — who were forced out of their homes by the attacks of Oct. 7. Small cities like Sderot, near Gaza, and Kiryat Shmona, near Lebanon, are now mostly ghost towns and will remain that way if the government can’t secure its borders.

Should that happen, sizable parts of Israel’s already minuscule territory would become essentially uninhabitable. That, in turn, would mean the failure of the Jewish state to maintain a safe homeland, presaging the end of Zionism itself. It’s why Israelis think of this war as existential and why they’re willing to put aside their fury at Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers, for a while, to win the war.

Will they win?

If the question is whether Israel will be able to defeat Hamas, the answer is almost certainly yes: Israeli military planners have been war-gaming an invasion of Gaza for decades and, despite the intelligence blunders of Oct. 7, have tools and tactics that can flush Hamas’s fighters out of their maze of tunnels. Nor is the Israeli public likely to be swayed by civilian casualties into supporting any kind of cease-fire in the military campaign until Hamas is defeated and the hostages are returned. Israelis spent 18 years watching Hamas turn to its military advantage every Israeli concession — including free electricity, cash transfers of Qatari funds, work permits for Gazans, thousands of truckloads of humanitarian goods. Israelis won’t get fooled again.

But while Israelis are still processing the horror from the south, the threat of war looms on every side. Around the world, too many people are showing their true colors when it comes to their feelings about Jews, and darkness in the West has made it feel colder in Israel.

A few days after my visit to Camp Iftach, I drove north to Metula, a picturesque Israeli village on a finger of land surrounded on three sides by Lebanon. Other than a handful of soldiers, it was mostly deserted; it would almost surely be captured by Hezbollah in the early hours of a full-scale conflict, which would make the Gaza front look like child’s play.

In the West Bank, nightly Israeli security raids against Hamas and allied terror cells in cities like Jenin and Nablus are largely what stand in the way between the unpopular and corrupt Palestinian Authority and a Hamas coup. Compounding the tension is a sharp uptick in settler violence, with some seeing the crisis as an “opportunity to vent their spleen with M-16s,” as an Israeli reporter put it to me. Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, has even suggested effectively banning the Palestinian olive harvest, ostensibly for security reasons. “That would be like banning the Super Bowl,” the reporter observed. It would guarantee an explosion.

And then there’s the wider world. Vladimir Putin, whom Netanyahu did so much to court over more than a decade, has all but openly thrown his support behind Hamas, in part because of Russia’s deepening alliance with Hamas’s patrons in Iran. In China, state-run and social media have veered sharply into open antisemitism. In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with whom Israel had been engaged in a careful rapprochement, has reverted to Islamist form. “Hamas is not a terrorist organization,” he told members of his parliamentary group late last month, but a “mujahedeen liberation group struggling to protect its people and lands.”

Just as frightening to many Israelis I spoke with was the turn against Israel in the West, a turn that, increasingly, is nakedly pro-Hamas and antisemitic. It’s visible in more than just the attempted firebombing of a synagogue in Berlin or the chants of “gas the Jews” in Sydney, Australia. It’s also in the sheer indifference among educated elites to Israeli suffering — typified by college-age students tearing down campus posters of kidnapped Israeli civilians.

“The effort on campuses and progressive circles to equate Zionism with all that is evil prepared the ground for the hardening belief that ‘the Jews had it coming,’” Einat Wilf, a Harvard graduate and former member of the Knesset for the Labor Party, told me. To many Israelis, there’s a distinct echo of what happened at German universities beginning about a century ago.

It may be that what started near Gaza will end there, too. But there’s a growing sense among Israelis, as well as many Jews in the diaspora, that what happened on Oct. 7 may be the opening act of something much larger and worse: another worldwide war against the Jews.

A few days after my visit to Camp Iftach, as Israeli troops prepared to enter Gaza, I got a WhatsApp message from Elgarat: “Tonight is the start of the changing process that will bring Israel to a better place. But for my family and many friends, it is too late. All I can do now is focus on the mission. After this is all done, the time for sorrow and grief will come.”

Elgarat had clarity of purpose. But for many Israelis, what comes next seems much more muddled, especially politically. What can Israelis do about a government whose machinations had already created more turmoil and division than Israel had ever seen, whose incompetence and neglect had given Hamas a free hand, yet seems immovable?

“Toppling Bibi will be harder than toppling Hamas,” Anshel Pfeffer, a journalist and the author of “Bibi,” an acclaimed biography of Netanyahu, told me when I had dinner with him in Jerusalem.

Pfeffer’s view isn’t widely shared among Israeli political analysts, who think that massive protests or defections by Likud lawmakers or their coalition partners will quickly bring down the government once the war ends. My guess is that Pfeffer is right: The government, to adapt a line often attributed to Ben Franklin, will hang together because otherwise it will hang separately. And if one of the Oct. 7 lessons for many Israelis is that a right-wing government failed, another lesson is that right-wing ideology was vindicated, at least insofar as a Palestinian state is concerned. If tens of thousands of Israelis were put at mortal risk when Gaza became a quasi-state after Israel’s withdrawal in 2005, what would it mean to put millions of Israelis at risk along much longer borders if the same process were to be repeated in the West Bank? That’s a thought that will weigh heavily on Israelis’ minds if there’s even a whisper of a chance that Hamas or a similar group might come to power.

Even so, it’s hard to overstate the breadth of public disgust with Netanyahu — not only for his failure to heed loud warnings from his generals before Oct. 7 about the military’s diminished readiness, but even more so for his refusal to take responsibility, much less apologize, for his role in the debacle. Seventy-six percent of Israelis think he should resign, according to a recent poll. Ministers can’t show their faces at funerals, shivas or hospital waiting rooms for fear of being yelled at and chased out.

Perhaps nobody feels this disgust more acutely than Amir Tibon, a correspondent for the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Tibon became internationally famous last month after his family’s rescue, by his 62-year-old father, Noam (a retired general), when his kibbutz was overrun by Hamas terrorists. “Saba higea” — “Grandpa is here,” the words with which Amir’s 3-year-old daughter greeted Noam after 10 hours of terrified silence in their safe room — have since become words of pride and hope to Israelis desperately in need of both.

I went to see Amir in a kibbutz in the north, where he and his family were living with relatives. Amir pointed to his shirt: borrowed from a cousin. His car: also borrowed. His pants: from a giveaway rack collected by volunteers.

Amir hails from that segment of Israeli society that Netanyahu and his allies had spent the previous year demonizing: “elites,” “Ashkenazim,” “anarchists,” “leftists.” It’s true that by the terms of Israel’s political discourse, he and his neighbors tilted left; they had certainly been at the forefront of efforts to stop Netanyahu’s efforts to destroy the power of the Supreme Court. But it’s also true that on Oct. 7, it was largely his segment of society that became the embodiment of Zionism, as both its martyrs and its heroes.

I asked Amir what needed to change going forward. His first answer: More people would need permits to carry personal sidearms. “We were trained all our lives to trust the government and trust the military,” he said. “After this, people are going to trust themselves.”

His second: “Zero tolerance for semi-corrupt political appointments,” he said, a clear reference to characters such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right nebbish who holds the position of minister for national security. “Israelis are under too many threats and exposed on too many fronts to accept a mediocre, amateurish, self-interested rule by people who are not trustworthy.”

The Tibon family’s story is testimony that on Oct. 7, Israel’s people were far better than its government. Amir told me of sitting with a member of his kibbutz’s security team “who fought this insane battle, underarmed” against the hundred-odd Hamas terrorists who entered the Nahal Oz kibbutz that morning. “You cannot avoid a sense of despair when you see the leadership we have,” he told me. “And you can’t avoid a sense of pride when you see the citizens who saved lives on that day.”

There were other points of hope mixed into the general gloom of Israeli life today. I met reservists who had dropped busy careers and flown in from Chicago, Dubai and Melbourne, Australia, to rejoin their old units. A sergeant on Elgarat’s staff who goes by the nickname Cholo — he was D.J.’ing large parties in Brazil but flew back to Israel immediately after Oct. 7 to serve — was clear about where he stood: “I am not supporting this government, but I will go to the army.”

Not many countries can inspire such a willingness to sacrifice in times of crisis. It’s how Israel pulled through in the past, particularly during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, where a costly victory helped ease the pain of an initial debacle and where an eventual peace redeemed the price of both.

Also hopeful was the willingness of Israelis to acknowledge failure — and to seek to learn from it.

Nobody in Israel, including in the highest echelons of its defense establishment, disputes the military and intelligence sides of the failure. The lessons from it, tactical and strategic, are sure to be digested in the months ahead. Chief among them: Don’t try to answer a strategic problem, such as Hamas’s rule in Gaza, with a purely technogical solution, like the various wonder weapons that were supposed to keep the group in check.

But the country’s long-term fortunes will depend on its ability to recognize and correct the political failures that led to Oct. 7. Over dozens of conversations here, a few core questions emerged:

Will Israelis finally see the danger of electing tough-talking narcissists who practice the politics of mass polarization? And will they understand that politics in a Jewish state — which is as much a family as it is a polity — can’t be conducted by one narrow majority jamming its ideas down the throats of a bitterly opposed minority?

Will they see the folly of dividing themselves into a multitude of separate and mutually antagonistic tribes — Jewish and Arab; Ashkenazi and Mizrahi; left wing and right wing; secular and religious — so that they can tear one another to political pieces in full view of their foes?

Will they recognize that Israel’s single greatest strategic asset is the devoted patriotism that its people feel for their state — a feeling that will inevitably suffer if their government repeatedly comprises freeloaders, bigots, tax cheats and ideological arsonists?

Will they understand that the ultimate purpose of Zionism is self-rule for the Jewish people, not indefinite rule over others? A plausible Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel may be years or even decades away, given the wretched state of Palestinian politics. But Israel also has a long-term responsibility to safeguard the possibility of such a state against attempts to abort it.

Finally, will Israelis remember that the responsibility that falls on them now is a responsibility not for them alone? “I have a premonition that will not leave me,” the philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote in 1968. “As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the Holocaust will be upon us.”

FOR ADDITIONAL PHOTOS:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/opinion/israel-national-crisis.html?unlocked_article_code=1.9Uw.GoNO.XYvqN9F9TJz1&smid=fb-share

Chabad --- The Quicker Picker Upper!

 

‘Global shortage of tefillin, mezuzahs,’ amid ‘Jewish awakening of the soul,’ Chabad says 

 

"We’re seeing an immense amount of people wanting to connect, wanting to double down and leaning into their Jewish identity and practice," Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesman for Chabad, told JNS. 

 

Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky (right) wraps tefillin on a man as he awaits a group picture in front of Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters in Brooklyn

 

Despite reports of Jews being fearful to display their faith outwardly amid rising antisemitism globally, so many Jews are reconnecting with their faith that supplies are short, according to the largest Jewish network, Chabad-Lubavitch.

“There’s a global shortage of tefillin and mezuzahs,” Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesman for Chabad, told JNS.

“We’re seeing an immense amount of people wanting to connect, wanting to double down and leaning into their Jewish identity and practice,” Seligson said. “People wanting to start putting on tefillin daily, putting a mezuzah on their door, lighting Shabbos candles, coming to synagogue or Shabbos programming to be with other Jews.”

Many are also wearing yarmulkes and necklaces with Stars of David. “They’re saying we’re part of the Jewish people,” Seligson said.

He allowed that some of the renewed or new connections are “in response to being rejected by circles, where some Jews felt at home in the past,” but Seligson said much of the movement is affirmative, or what he called a “Jewish awakening of the soul.”

A new survey that Chabad conducted of 211 of its emissaries (shluchim), representing each U.S. state, bears that out. More than 86% of the emissaries have seen increases in attendance at programs, services or both since Hamas brutally attacked Israel on Oct. 7, and some 98.6% reported seeing an increase “in personal practice related to Jewish traditions and observances among community members.”

Also since the Oct. 7 attacks, 77.3% have observed a stronger sense of “Jewish pride and confidence,” 93.4% have witnessed a stronger “connection to the Jewish people or desire to connect to other Jews,” 88.2% said their communities have “a stronger connection to Israel and her people” and 85.8% reported that their community members have a “deeper connection to their own Jewish identity,” per the survey.

Chabad emissaries also report that their communities are scared, which 81.5% said.

In addition to tefillin, mezuzah and Jewish jewelry, emissaries reported that community members were wearing more shirts with Israel Defense Forces emblems and are increasingly reciting the foundational Shemah prayer.

Also since the Oct. 7 attacks, 77.3% have observed a stronger sense of “Jewish pride and confidence,” 93.4% have witnessed a stronger “connection to the Jewish people or desire to connect to other Jews,” 88.2% said their communities have “a stronger connection to Israel and her people” and 85.8% reported that their community members have a “deeper connection to their own Jewish identity,” per the survey.

“The survey reveals a significant surge in Jewish engagement worldwide, showing a staggering rise in personal Jewish practices,” according to Chabad.

 

Students at the University of Florence in Tuscany, Italy, light candles to welcome in Shabbat. Credit: Chabad on Campus

 

“The vast majority of Chabad rabbis reported that they are seeing a heightened sense of Jewish pride, connection to Israel and stronger Jewish identity among community members,” it added, “with their personal anecdotes underscoring a widespread emotional response and drive for Jewish pride and confidence in the face of antisemitism.”

The International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries, which brings 6,500 rabbis and Jewish leaders to New York City, runs this year from Nov. 9 to Nov. 12. It is the largest gathering of rabbis worldwide and the largest U.S. annual gathering, Chabad says.

 

https://www.jns.org/global-shortage-of-tefillin-mezuzahs-amid-jewish-awakening-of-the-soul-chabad-says/?_se=YW5uZS1tYXJpZS5mYXJvdXpAbGFwb3N0ZS5uZXQ%3D&utm_campaign=Evening+Syndicate+Wednesday+1182023&utm_medium=email&utm_source=brevo

STOP What You Are Doing And Listen ----- The Bright Line Between Good and Evil - Alerting The World To Islamism/Jihad for Decades!

This is a transcript of a recorded podcast. 

Billions of Dollars Wasted On Portraying Jews As Victims! We Are Not Victims - We Now Have Our Destiny In Our Hands!

 Ignore The Haters --- Bibi - Finish The Job --- They Attack Us When We Are Perceived As Weak! We Are Proud Jews With Immense Strength - We Will Not be Intimidated Anymore By The "Civilized World"

 

The Silence of the Holocaust Museums

 

 

The worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust has been greeted with silence by some of the nation’s Holocaust museums including those which issued statements about BLM, the death of George Floyd and every possible issue and cause except the mass murder of Jews.

The Holocaust Museum of Houston has issued statements on its site about George Floyd’s death, “family separation at the U.S. border”, Texas opting out of the refugee resettlement program and rising violence toward “the Asian American and Pacific Islander Community”, as well as some Jewish issues, but no mention of attacks and violence against Jews in Israel.

Three weeks after the Simchat Torah massacres in Israel, it has yet to issue a similar statement on its own site, only on social media. The Holocaust Museum of Houston’s statements appear under its “Resources to Support Racial Equity and Justice” which includes books to read.

None of these books, such as ‘Between The World And Me’ by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who had recently signed a statement defending Hamas, ‘How To Be An Antiracist’ by Ibram X. Kendi, ‘Have Black LIves Ever Mattered?’ by Mumia Abu-Jamal, a cop killer, or ‘The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther’, as well as a book by the founders of BLM, focus on antisemitism. The Holocaust Museum of Houston does however promote the fringe racialist conspiracy theory that the government killed Malcolm X. Many of the authors recommended by the Holocaust Museum of Houston are antisemitic or promote antisemitic figures and movements. There’s room at Houston’s Holocaust Museum for the veneration of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X, both militant haters of Jews, but not Jews.

This is in sharp contrast to the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum which issued a statement condemning the massacre and stating that, “Hamas is a self-avowed Islamic terrorist organization that has the primary goal of annihilating the Jewish nation state of Israel and we strongly affirm Israel’s right to defend itself against this heinous threat.”

The Tucson Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center had in the past issued a statement that equated George Floyd’s death to the Holocaust and announced a ‘shiva’ mourning for Floyd. It also promoted BLM materials from the anti-Israel group, T’ruah.

On Oct 23, the Holocaust Center posted a message from the head of the JCRC, Lynn Davis, about the threats of “election interference” and “election integrity”, A past message was about racial segregation in Tucson. It’s currently promoting an event about ‘banned books’. Its current exhibits include “War Crimes: The World is Watching” about Ukraine.

The Tucson Jewish Museum and Holocaust Center is watching Ukraine, but apart from a brief Instagram message that fails to mention Hamas or condemn the atrocities, only wishes for “a more just, equitable and non-violent world” is closing its eyes to the murder of over 1,000 Jews.

After weeks of silence, South Africa’s Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre and the Durban Holocaust & Genocide Centre, which works with HIAS, issued a baffling statement mourning “the loss of so many innocent lives in Israel and Palestine” and comparing it to the Rwandan genocide without mentioning the mass murder of Jews or the Holocaust.

Most Holocaust museums surveyed did issue some sort of statement about the attacks, even if it was only to retweet a message from the local Jewish federation, and sometimes only on social media, where they are less widely visible. Some issued stronger press statements on their own sites but virtually none then followed up with further updates beyond one press release.

“This is what genocide looks like: innocent Jewish people hunted, kidnapped, killed in their homes, at parties, and in the street. Hamas isn’t targeting Israelis, it’s targeting Jews,” the Florida Holocaust Museum declared. And offered multiple updates.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York issued a statement saying that it “condemns the attacks carried out by Hamas on Israel, during which innocent civilians, including children and the elderly, were taken hostage” and the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center spoke out against the “barbaric aggression against Jews and the State of Israel.”

The vast majority however did not put these statements visibly up front on their sites.

In Los Angeles, the Museum of Tolerance hosted a major rally against the Hamas atrocities in which thousands of Jews gathered to listen to speakers including the museum’s CEO Rabbi Marvin Hier connect the atrocities of the Holocaust to the ravages of Hamas terrorism.

However few museums followed the lead of the Museum of Tolerance in going beyond statements to actually engaging in more meaningful forms of community solidarity. Most have continued on with their usual programming rather than incorporate responses to the atrocities.

Holocaust museums have generally continued with their pre-existing programs. Traditional museums have limited their programming to exploring the history of the Holocaust while postmodern museums have put on exhibits about Ukraine, civil rights and the LGBTQ movement. Both behaviors show what is broken about Holocaust museums.

Museums robotically continuing on with commemorations of Kristallnacht without actually pausing to reflect and bring in the current attacks on Jews are violating their mission of ‘Never Again’ and museums that have displaced Jewish programming don’t even have that mission and have no reason to exist. Few Holocaust museums have managed to dynamically bridge the gap between the antisemitism crises of the past and present the way that the Museum of Tolerance has. Both types of museums treat antisemitism as part of a dead past.

Remembering the past is important and commemorating the dead is a crucial Jewish mission. It is why synagogues have plaques with little eternal flames with the names of those who have passed and some Jews hardly visit a synagogue except to recite the Kaddish prayer for the dead. But the reason American Jews invested so much effort into Holocaust commemorations was as a reminder to a comfortable population of the reality of murderous antisemitism.

Current events, not just the Hamas massacre of Jews, but the widespread show of support for it on college campuses, in the media and in the public square, is why those museums exist.

The silence of the Holocaust museums, their inability to pivot to dealing with the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, exposes their moral failure. Contrary to their rhetoric, the Holocaust museums and commemorations did not prepare the Jewish community for this. This did not even prepare the Holocaust museums themselves to meaningfully address the crisis.

The notion that Holocaust memorialization was a viable substitute for a deeply rooted Jewish identity, a knowledge of authentic Judaism and for collective Jewish security, has utterly failed. Kristallnacht exhibits are important, but without the context of a larger Jewish identity, can just as easily be exploited by indoctrinated teenagers to argue that Israelis are the new Nazis.

The universalization of the Holocaust detached a key moment in Jewish history from the Jews and wrongly assumed that using it to teach tolerance would neutralize antisemitism. Not only did this approach fail at fighting antisemitism, but it has been hijacked to spread antisemitism, and it has left a generation of youth without the Jewish identity that would allow them to resist.

The most meaningful responses to the Holocaust are not to reduce it to dry history or to universalize it, but to hold on to the Jewish culture and life that the Nazis sought to destroy, and to learn the lessons of that past in order to prepare for the next wave of attacks. The two most meaningful responses to the Holocaust were not to be found in museums, but in the revival of traditional Judaism in America and the rebirth of the State of Israel. These ‘particularistic’ elements rejected by liberal Jews have long since proven their worth by building a Jewish future. Holocaust commemorations are important, but they are no substitute for a Jewish life.

The silence of some Holocaust museums and the refusal of most others to place the events of the High Holy Day Massacres at the top of their calendar is an institutional indictment. Jews have spent far too long building museums when we should have been building a future.

http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2023/11/the-silence-of-holocaust-museums.html?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Daniel+Greenfield+Article%3A+The+Silence+of+the+Holocaust+Museums&utm_campaign=20231107_m177131304_Daniel+Greenfield+Article%3A+%28post_title%29&utm_term=The+Silence+of+the+Holocaust+Museums

UOJ Bais Din Calling For A "Jewmanitarian Pause" On Fake Conversions! Hershel Schachter's Convert To Judaism Partially Dressed At A Party In Beverly Hills Friday Night/Shabbos October 20 --- !!! Shiksas Rushing To $chachter's Apartment To Marry Wealthy Jews With Modern Orthodox Mommies!

BUY MY SNEAKERS - FASTEST WAY TO BEAT THE CROWDS

 

 

 

RCA HAD THIS UP ON THEIR SITE --- UNTIL I EXPOSED THEM AND SCHACHTER AS FRAUDS:

"a. Where the Conversion is Primarily for the sake of Marriage

i. Where marriage to a particular Jewish partner is a major incentive to a prospective conversion, there is an increased possibility that the geirus may come with less than the complete commitment necessary for a conversion that would be in keeping with the standards we are trying to set for the regional Batei Din. Nonetheless, experience also shows that such a motivation can result in converts of the highest caliber. Conversion for the sake of marriage therefore requires the Beit Din to constantly reevaluate if the candidate and future partner are likely to subscribe to the requisite beliefs and practices. The Beit Din must be convinced that if the potential spouse were to disappear from the candidate’s life, his or her commitment to the Jewish faith and people would not waver. These factors inevitably prolong the process and make examination of the prospective convert more intense. Indeed, should the couple mention a proposed wedding date as a deadline or goal, the Beit Din should respond that the process will take significantly longer than that......"

c. Requirements of Other People in a Candidate’s Life

i. When a candidate is previously intermarried or is converting for the sake of an individual Jew (as per above), the spouse’s observance level and attitudes must be consistent with the present and future Torah observance of the candidate and not be a source of conflict or opposition to the convert’s adopting a halachic lifestyle. The Beit Din should also consider whether other significant individuals in the candidate’s life such as parents, or any existing minor children, will have an impact on the success or failure of the process and the aftermath of conversion.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/style/who-invited-ivanka.html?algo=clicks_decay_6_diversified&block=3&campaign_id=142&emc=edit_fory_20231026&fellback=true&imp_id=5578060332565826&instance_id=106212&nl=for-you&nlid=32999454&pool=channel-replacement-ls&rank=3&regi_id=32999454&req_id=4377166381473028&segment_id=148418&surface=for-you-email-channelless&user_id=cd11df7e4826fae198be96d8f3a4bb15&variant=1_channel_translated_pool_popularity_pers