Levitt Letter Extra News

By Monika Scislowska, Associated Press

WARSAW, Poland - Irena Sendler — credited with saving some 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazi Holocaust by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, some of them in baskets — died today, May 12, 2008, her family said. She was 98.

Sendler, among the first to be honored by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial as a Righteous Among Nations for her wartime heroism, died at a Warsaw hospital, daughter Janina Zgrzembska told The Associated Press.

President Lech Kaczynski expressed “great regret” over Sendler’s death, calling her “extremely brave” and “an exceptional person.” In recent years, Kaczynski had spearheaded a campaign to put Sendler’s name forward as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker with the city’s welfare department when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, launching World War II. Warsaw’s Jews were forced into a walled-off ghetto.

Seeking to save the ghetto’s children, Sendler masterminded risky rescue operations. Under the pretext of inspecting sanitary conditions during a typhoid outbreak, she and her assistants ventured inside the ghetto — and smuggled out babies and small children in ambulances and in trams, sometimes wrapped up as packages.

Teenagers escaped by joining teams of workers forced to labor outside the ghetto. They were placed in families, orphanages, hospitals or convents.

Records show that Sendler’s team of about 20 people saved nearly 2,500 children from the Warsaw Ghetto between October 1940 and its final liquidation in April 1943, when the Nazis burned the ghetto, shooting the residents or sending them to death camps.

“Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory,” Sendler said in 2007 in a letter to the Polish Senate after lawmakers honored her efforts in 2007.

In hopes of one day uniting the children with their families — most of whom perished in the Nazis’ death camps — Sendler wrote the children’s real names on slips of paper that she kept at home.

When German police came to arrest her in 1943, an assistant managed to hide the slips, which Sendler later buried in a jar under an apple tree in an associate’s yard. Some 2,500 names were recorded.

“It took a true miracle to save a Jewish child,” Elzbieta Ficowska, who was saved by Sendler’s team as a baby in 1942, recalled in an AP interview in 2007. “Mrs. Sendler saved not only us, but also our children and grandchildren and the generations to come.”

Anyone caught helping Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland risked being summarily shot, along with family members — a fate Sendler only barely escaped herself after the 1943 raid by the Gestapo.

The Nazis took her to the notorious Pawiak prison, which few people left alive. Gestapo agents tortured her repeatedly, leaving Sendler with scars on her body — but she refused to betray her team.

“I kept silent. I preferred to die than to reveal our activity,” she was quoted as saying in Anna Mieszkowska’s biography, “Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: The Story of Irena Sendler.”

Zegota, an underground organization helping Jews, paid a bribe to German guards to free her from the prison. Under a different name, she continued her work.

After World War II, Sendler worked as a social welfare official and director of vocational schools, continuing to assist some of the children she rescued.

“A great person has died — a person with a great heart, with great organizational talents, a person who always stood on the side of the weak,” Warsaw Ghetto survivor Marek Eldeman told TVN24 television.

In 1965, Sendler became one of the first so-called Righteous Gentiles honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics. Poland’s communist leaders at that time would not allow her to travel to Israel; she collected the award in 1983.

Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev said Sender’s “courageous activities rescuing Jews during the Holocaust serve as a beacon of light to the world, inspiring hope and restoring faith in the innate goodness of mankind.”

Despite the Yad Vashem honor, Sendler was largely forgotten in her homeland until recent years. She came to the world’s attention in 2000 when a group of schoolgirls from Uniontown, Kan., wrote a short play about her called “Life in a Jar.”

It went on to garner international attention, and has been performed more than 200 times in the United States, Canada and Poland.

Sendler, born Irena Krzyzanowska, said she lived according to her physician father’s teachings, arguing that “people can be only divided into good or bad; their race, religion, nationality don’t matter.”

She married Mieczyslaw Sendler but they divorced after the war’s end. Sendler then married fellow underground activist Stefan Zgrzembski, and they had two sons and a daughter. One died a few days after birth. The second son, Adam, died of a heart failure in 1999.

Sendler is survived by her daughter and a granddaughter.

See page 28 of April 2008 Levitt Letter.

Israeli youths embrace as a siren marking the annual Holocaust remembrance day sounds in Jerusalem. Photo: AP

Israelis stand outside their cars as a siren marking the annual Holocaust remembrance day sounds in Tel Aviv. Photo: AP

By Hillel Fendel, www.IsraelNN.com

Jews around the world, and particularly in Israel, will commemorate the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, as well as those who were able to fight back, beginning Wednesday evening.

Yom HaShoah V’Hagvurah, Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day, begins this evening at 8 PM with a public ceremony at Warsaw Ghetto Square in Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will speak, survivors will light six torches (see below), the Chief Rabbis will recite prayers, and Cantor Asher Heinowitz will sing the El Malei Rachamim prayer.

The central theme of this year’s commemorations is “Choose Life.” Last year, it was “Bearing Witness.” At 10 PM, a symposium will be held on the topic of “Choose Life,” with the participation of Holocaust survivors and Yad Vashem Chairman Avner Shalev.

The six survivors lighting the torches are the following:

Esther Samuel-Cahn, born in 1933 in Norway. A religiously observant professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, she was awarded the Israel Prize in Statistics in 2004. When she was 9, her father, Rabbi Dr. Yitzchak Samuel, the rabbi of Norwegian Jewry, was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. Several months later, she and her family were hidden behind potato sacks and smuggled to Sweden. At age 13, a year after World War II ended, she immigrated to Israel with her mother and two brothers.

Meir Brand, born in 1936 in Poland. In 1943, closed up in a Nazi-built ghetto, his parents decided to smuggle him out, and after many narrow escapes, he arrived in Budapest, Hungary. He was on the Kastner Train - a trainload of almost 1,700 Jews who escaped from Hungary to safety in Switzerland - but was one of the few dozen who was detained in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After his rescue in 1945, he was brought to Israel via the Jewish Agency’s Aliyat HaNoar (Youth Immigration) project. Here he learned that his parents had been murdered. Meir lived in the Jordan Valley’s Kibbutz N’vei Eitan, and fought in most of Israel’s wars.

Naomi Shadmi, born in 1931 in Hungary. At age 13, her father, older brother and mother were abducted, one after the other, by the Nazis. Naomi and her remaining younger brother were taken to the Budapest Ghetto. After their release, they found that their relatives had been murdered. They came to Israel, where Naomi worked for Israel Police for 20 years.

Tzvi Ungar, born in 1929 in Poland. He survived the Birkenau and Buchenwald concentration camps, as well as the infamous Death March, but the remainder of his family was murdered. In 1948, he immigrated to Israel, fought in the War of Independence, and helped found Kibbutz Malkiyah, practically atop Israel’s border with Lebanon, where he still resides.

Menachem Katz, born in 1925 in Poland. At age 17, he and his family were taken to a ghetto, then banished to the Belzec concentration camp in Poland, where an estimated 600,000 people were murdered. He escaped, and was later followed by his family. In 1946, they were caught on their way to Palestine and taken to Cyprus, where they remained for about a year. A prominent architect, Menachem designed the museum at Kibbutz Baram in memory of the Jews of Berezhany, his birthplace.

Michael Maor, born in Germany in 1933. His family fled to Yugoslavia, then to Italy, and then to the forests with the partisans when Italy came under Nazi influence. In 1944, the Nazis murdered his parents, and he was taken to an orphanage. In Israel, he worked for the Mossad Intelligence Agency, collected evidence against Adolph Eichmann, and established the Border Guard’s intelligence department.

The date of Yom HaShoah was chosen to mark the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Although the day became official by an act of Knesset, it has been traditionally commemorated by Jewish communities around the world. Some religious communities prefer not to commemorate the Holocaust on this day, which falls in the generally happy month of Nissan, but rather on Tisha B’Av or on the Tenth of Tevet, which the Chief Rabbinate of Israel fixed as the day for the recital of the Kaddish prayer for those murdered during the Holocaust whose date of death is not known.

Today’s Golden Oldie was published on April 17, 1992, exactly 16 years ago. We had seen another repressive empire go down.

We Jews have survived and maintained our unique civilization and identity through thousands of years of history …much of it dominated by anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist ideologies, empires, and mass movements. We have watched these great and powerful empires rise, each in turn bringing its own, twisted rewriting of the past.

To survive, however, we must remember. And so each year at Pessah, we sit together, in families, in Seders, around the world, linked with generations stretching back through time, and together we read the Haggadah, a manual of instruction on how to remember who and what we are.

Happy Pessah to us all!

By Steve Feldman and Robert Sklaroff, www.IsraelNN.com

The nation of Israel is about to commemorate its 60th birthday. That’s the official, politically correct line. But to be truly accurate, a cake celebrating the milestone should have more candles than 60 - thousands more.

While it is most certainly true that David Ben-Gurion stood in Tel Aviv in front of a portrait of Zionist patriarch Theodor Herzl and proclaimed Israel’s independence from Britain on May 14, 1948 (immediately after which the armies of five Arab nations attacked the Jewish state), this year’s celebration would more accurately be identified as “Israel 3,200″ or perhaps even “Israel 3,400.”

In other words, the popularly promoted notion that Israel was “founded”, “created”, or “established” just in 1948 by the Western powers to give the Jews a piece of land out of guilt over the Holocaust is not accurate. Israel’s detractors use this claim to try to delegitimize the Middle East’s only true democracy.

After all, Israel has really been in existence since at least 1200 BCE, and some experts place the establishment of Israel as the home of the Jewish people as early as 1406 BCE.

It is dutifully recorded in Scripture (Book of Joshua, ArtScroll Edition) that after the Children of Israel had gathered on the eastern bank of the Jordan River, as instructed by G-d, “When the bearers of the Ark [of the Covenant] arrived at the Jordan and the feet of the kohanim, the bearers of the Ark, were immersed in the edge of the water - and the Jordan was overflowing its banks all the days of the harvest season - the waters descending from upstream stood still and they rose up in one column… and was cut off; and the people crossed opposite Jericho. …[A]ll Israel crossing on dry land until the entire nation finished crossing the Jordan.” (Joshua 3:14-17)

Next, G-d commanded Joshua to select 12 men - one from each Israelite tribe - to each gather one stone from amidst the river bed, bring it into the land of Israel and erect a memorial; “and these stones shall remain a remembrance for the children of Israel forever.” (Joshua 4:7)

Scripture chronicles the date of this miracle: “The people ascended from the Jordan on the tenth of the first month, and encamped at Gilgal at the eastern end of Jericho.” (Joshua 4:19)

Nissan is the first month of the Jewish calendar; and this year, the 10th of Nissan coincides with April 15 in the Gregorian calendar. (Note: Though Nissan is the first month, the Jewish New Year is marked in a different month.)

The Children of Israel - better known today as the Jewish People - has inhabited the land of Israel continuously ever since, despite a string of wars, conquests and expulsions. There has always been a remnant, as noted in Jerome Verlin’s book Homeland: The Jewish People’s 3,000-Year Presence in Palestine, which cites the works of the top Middle East historians and scholars of all time.

The first Jew to set foot in the Land of Israel was the Patriarch Abraham. He purchased the cave of Machpelah in Hebron from the Hittites (as is recorded in Genesis 23:16) as a place to bury his wife, Sarah. Later, Abraham himself and the other Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs (except for Rachel) were interred there.

This is the same city of Hebron which the media commonly - and erroneously - refers to as a “Palestinian” (i.e., “Arab”) city. Other Biblical cities, such as Jericho, Shechem (a.k.a, Nablus) and others, are also erroneously referred to as “Palestinian” or “Arab”. However, Abraham did not permanently establish a Jewish community in the Land of Israel at the time.

There is considerable debate among academics as to precisely when the Hebrews entered the Promised Land to stay, though to be sure, it is thousands of years before 1948.

Much of this dispute surrounds a record of early Egyptian history known as “the Merneptah Stele,” an artifact dating to 1209 or 1208 BCE, which was discovered in the first court of Merneptah’s mortuary temple at Thebes by Flinders Petrie in 1896. Merneptah was a pharaoh who ruled over Egypt in the late 13th Century BCE.

The stele refers to Israel as a “foreign people” and it is the only ancient Egyptian document generally accepted as mentioning “Isrir” or “Israel.”

Merneptah’s father, Rameses II, reigned over Egypt during the period when Moses led the exodus of the Jewish People out of Egypt. The Jews then “wandered” in the desert for 40 years before Joshua led them into Canaan from areas to the east. It was then that the Israelites remained in the Land of Israel (including the areas of Judea and Samaria) and later established Jerusalem as their capital.

Another similar ancient artifact, known as the Mesha Stele (also called “the Moabite Stone”), said to date from the 9th Century BCE, records a victory by Moabite King Mesha over Israel and thus also establishes the fact that Israel existed thousands of years ago.

The government and people of Israel - and their supporters throughout the world - must remove the shackles of political correctness and proudly proclaim a legitimate legacy tied to the Land of Israel that goes back more than 3,000 years. As the song goes: “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down.” It is high time that the fallacy that Israel is only 60 years old be brought down.

An annual celebration on the 10th of Nissan would mark the occasion and help ensure that younger generations - which particularly need to be made aware - never forget the Jewish People’s true birthright to the Land.

By Ben Harris, www.JTA.org

When news broke last year that Pope Benedict XVI was reviving an ancient prayer for the conversion of the Jews, the reaction in Jewish circles was outrage tempered by confusion.

Communal leaders warned that the move would deal a serious blow to the four decades of progress in Jewish-Catholic relations following Nostra Aetate – the landmark document that absolved the Jews of collective guilt for the killing of Jesus — unless the pope clarified how the prayer meshed with Catholic doctrine.

Last week, as the pope was preparing to visit the United States, that clarification finally arrived — sort of.

In a statement issued through the Vatican secretary of state, the pope assured that the prayer in the Latin, or Tridentine, Mass “in no way intends to indicate a change in the Catholic Church’s regard for the Jews.” He also reaffirmed that Nostra Aetate “presents the fundamental principles” guiding Catholic relations with the Jewish people.

But as several Jewish organizations were quick to note, the document failed to expressly reject proselytizing — the precise issue that had generated so much unease. Nor did it explain how the normally doctrinaire pontiff reconciled Nostra Aetate’s ecumenical spirit with a prayer for Jewish salvation.

It is against this backdrop that Pope Benedict will arrive for a six-day visit to the United States next week — a visit that not only will feature the official meetings and stadium appearances typical of papal visits, but also an unprecedented outreach effort to the American Jewish community.

Pope Benedict XVI, shown greeting well-wishers in Germany
on World Youth Day in August 2005, will be the first pontiff
to visit an American synagogue. RTSS/Creative Commons

On April 18, the day before Passover, the pope will make his first visit to an American synagogue, where he will offer holiday greetings at the Park East Synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

The day before, at the John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, he will address leaders of five faiths — Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hindu and Jain — and will greet 10 interreligious leaders, including three rabbis. Afterward he will hold a separate audience with American Jewish leaders.

But the Latin Mass issue threatens to cast a long shadow over the visit, whose theme is “Christ, Our Hope.” Several Jewish organizations, including the Anti-Defamation League, issued statements in the past week with harsh appraisals of the papal clarification.

“While they say it does not change Nostra Aetate, the statement does not go far enough to allay concerns about how the message of this prayer will be understood by the people in the pews,” the ADL said in a statement. “The Latin prayer is still out there, and stands by itself, and unless this statement will be read along with the prayer, it will not repair or mitigate the impact of the words of the prayer itself, with its call for Jews to recognize Jesus as the savior of all men and its hope that ‘all Israel will be saved.’”

Some groups and observers noted that the German-born pope was well aware of Jewish expectations and chose not to meet them.

“The Vatican has pointedly refused to negate that implication” that the prayer for the Jews implies an operative call to proselytize, said Rabbi David Berger, an Orthodox representative on the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations, or IJCIC, the Vatican’s official Jewish dialogue partner. Berger emphasized that he was speaking in a personal capacity.

“The pope was aware that there were sentiments to explicitly limit this to the End of Days, and the statement does not express this sentiment,” Berger said. “So I think there was a decision not to say so.”

German and Italian Jewish leaders have threatened to cut ties to the Vatican over the issue, while IJCIC, an umbrella group bringing together representatives of various Jewish denominations and organizations, has not yet formulated a consensus opinion on the clarification. A conference call was scheduled for Tuesday.

Speaking of the papal clarification, Rabbi David Rosen, IJCIC’s chairman, said: “It would have been nice if it was more explicit” about proselytizing. “But,” he added, “very often the language of the Vatican tends towards a degree of obscurity.”

Those familiar with the pope’s schedule say that neither event with Jewish leaders will provide an opportunity for genuine exchange. Papal appearances are typically highly choreographed affairs, and meaningful dialogue with the Vatican normally happens quietly away from the media spotlight.

But the level of attention the pope will lavish on American Jews is significant in and of itself, far outstripping that given to leaders of other religious groups the pope is slated to meet with during his U.S. visit.

Jewish organizations lobbied to have to the pope make a gesture to the Jewish community, and the extent of the face time they are getting with the pontiff is widely seen as indicative of his eagerness to move beyond the Latin Mass controversy.

“The significance is purely symbolic,” Rosen said, “and in religious life, symbols are not insignificant.”

Controversy over the prayer began last summer, when the pope issued a declaration paving the way for wider use of the Latin Mass, whose Good Friday liturgy includes a prayer for Jewish conversion.

An early version of the prayer contained incendiary language that spoke of Jewish “blindness” and asked God to “remove the veil from their hearts.” Amid multiple expressions of Jewish concern and confusion, the pope revised the prayer earlier this year and eliminated the reference to Jewish blindness. Instead, the prayer asks God to “enlighten their hearts, so that they might know Jesus Christ as the Savior of all mankind.”

Cardinal Walter Kasper, the head of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with Jews, has tried to contain the fallout from the controversy. Kasper has defended the prayer theologically, but says it refers only to an End of Days scenario and is not actually a call to revive missionizing efforts aimed at Jews.

Rosen says he has written assurance from Kasper that the prayer is not a license to resume missionary activity.

But elsewhere, Kasper has been more equivocal, noting that the absence of “institutionalized” efforts to convert Jews does not mean Christians must “sit on their hands,” according to an unofficial translation of a recent article that appeared originally in German.

That distinction, coupled with the absence of a clear statement on conversion from the Vatican last week, has led some to suppose that the Church made a conscious decision not to endorse Kasper’s earlier views.

“Kasper’s views did not receive the hechsher from higher ups, so the way to correct this is for Pope Benedict himself to address the issue when he meets with Jewish leaders on April 17,” said Seymour Reich, IJCIC’s treasurer, who also stressed he was speaking in a personal capacity.

“Pope Benedict,” he said, “is the only one who can put this issue aside.”

By Matt Siegel, www.jta.org

MOSCOW (JTA) — Although it’s hard to tell by the unusually bare streets here, it’s still winter in Russia. This year, however, instead of piles of snow, the streets of the Russian capital have been blanketed by election posters.

In every public space, posters extol Russians to cast their ballots on March 2 in a presidential campaign derided by observers and most voters as a fait accompli.

Photo: Matt Siegel
A billboard in Moscow that reads “I’m voting for the Future of Russia” extols Russians to cast their ballots in March’s presidential elections.

In one poster, a smiling family is pictured sledding down a white hill with the message, “Everyone in the family to vote, together!” Even metro cards have been stamped with the Russian national emblem and a reminder to riders to do their civic duty.

It’s not much of a contest, however.

With Russia’s popular but term-limited president, Vladimir Putin, having anointed First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev as his successor, Medvedev is all but assured a landslide victory.

Part of this is due to Putin’s enormous popularity. Indeed, even some of the regime’s harshest critics concede that Russians’ standard of life has improved significantly during Putin’s eight years in the Kremlin.

With Russia’s tiny opposition largely being excluded from the process — no major opposition candidates have even been allowed to register — the carefully stage-managed vote for Putin’s successor is being seen as a referendum on Putin’s rule.

Putin has declared that he will head the Medvedev government as prime minister — an indication that he doesn’t plan to cede power.

So while there is little question about the election’s outcome, there are many unanswered questions about the transition of power, such as it is, its long-term impact on Russia and, for Russia’s Jews, its impact on their community.

In many ways the fate of Russia’s Jewish community over the past eight years generally has mirrored that of Russians. No comparable period in Russian history has had as much security, stability and growth of Jewish communal life. Life for Jews here has improved even as political dissent has become more treacherous in Russia.

Michael Savin, a spokesman for the Russian Jewish Congress, praised Putin for helping restore Jewish communal life but refused to answer any political questions.

“The diversity of Jewish life in Russia serves as a proof that the policy of state-directed anti-Semitism has vanished into the past,” Savin said.

The main questions facing Russians — Jews and non-Jews — is how power will be divided between Putin and Medvedev, and will the Russia that Putin has forged survive without him at the helm?

During his tenure Putin “accumulated both formal and informal authority,” said Masha Lipman, an analyst at the Carnegie Center in Moscow. “Now that he’s handing over the formal authority to Medvedev, what happens to the informal part?”

Under the Russian constitution, the president is commander in chief of the Russian armed forces and responsible for setting the direction of foreign and domestic policy. The role of prime minister traditionally has been quite weak, but Putin himself has made clear he intends to wield significant influence from his new post.

Putin will be leaving office at the pinnacle of his popularity and power. According to a recent poll by the Levada Center, an independent Moscow-based research organization, Putin’s approval rating in January was 86 percent.

Although Medvedev enjoys high approval ratings, too, little is known about him. Medvedev’s main appeal seems to stem from Putin’s endorsement and the tremendous resources thrown behind his campaign by the state.

“Right now Medvedev is certainly not his own man; his nomination is not due to his own political campaign,” Lipman said. “It’s due to the fact that Putin hand-picked him and offered him to the public and to the elite as his choice. This is the way that people perceive him.”

Medvedev has made almost no major policy speeches during the election cycle, and coverage of him on state-controlled media is constant, glowing and vague. The 42-year-old law professor is said to be a reformer, but on foreign policy issues he has uttered little more than vagaries about increasing cooperation with the West.

Russia’s election campaign has been widely criticized in the West both for the use of state-controlled media to advance the party of power’s candidate and the exclusion of opposition figures.

For the second time in four months, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe announced that its monitors will boycott a Russian election due to restrictions on the number of observers allowed in the country and the duration of their stay. In December, the OSCE did the same with elections for Russia’s Duma.

“The restrictions that were imposed on us by the Russian authorities basically forced us not to send an observation mission for the upcoming elections,” said OSCE spokesperson Jens-Hagen Eschenbaecher.

Medvedev will face three opponents in the election, none of whom is capable of mounting a serious challenge. Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, perennial also-ran Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the little-known Democratic Party’s Andrei Bogdanov were the only candidates allowed to register. Former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, a strong critic of the Kremlin, was disqualified for allegedly submitting forged signatures.

The don’t-rock-the-boat message from the Kremlin seems to have been picked up in the Jewish community as well. Of Russia’s three major Jewish communal organizations, only the Chabad-led Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, which has thrived here due to what many see as its leaders’ connections in the Kremlin, was willing to discuss the political situation with JTA.

The federation’s Rabbi Berel Lazar praised Putin for combating anti-Semitism, promoting interfaith dialogue and strengthening the country. Asked about Putin’s supposed rollback of democracy and human rights, Lazar blamed the West.

“I think that the West in general doesn’t really understand Russia all the way,” he told JTA.

“I’m not saying that everything here is the best, but the country needs a different kind of leadership and not necessarily the kind you have in America today,” Lazar said. “To try to apply the same standard to Russia is not a good idea.”

By Rachel Neuwirth, www.americanthinker.com

The entire body of the Jewish people today — in Israel, in Europe, in America, in Australia and New Zealand, and throughout the world — is in grave danger. Our very existence as a people and as a faith is in jeopardy. The threat to our survival has two components to it: the external siege being waged against Israel and the Jewish people throughout the world by the international jihadist movement, its sympathizers and appeasers; and the internal siege that we Jews, both in Israel and in the Diaspora, including the United States, are waging against ourselves.

We will look first at the external siege — war that is being waged against us. It has its military, diplomatic, and ideological-propaganda aspects.

Military threat

On the “military” front (if that is the right word for the front of violence and terror) we have been under constant assault since the signing of the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO in 1993.

During the past fourteen and a half years the Palestinian Arab terrorists have murdered over 1,800 Israelis, two thirds of them civilians. This is more than the total number of Israelis murdered by the Palestinian Arabs in the forty-four years preceding the “peace accords.” Many of the killers have been members of the Palestinian Arab “police force” established with Israel ’s consent in Gaza, Judea and Samaria under the Oslo accords. Indeed, Palestinian “police” have murdered three Israelis just over the past month.

For the past seven years, Israeli towns and villages near the border with Gaza have been subjected to rocket attacks; during the past two years, the city of Sderot, with a population of some 23,000, has been bombarded with rockets nearly every day. Its residents have about twenty seconds whenever a warning siren sounds to duck into a shelter. The missiles have killed some people; many more have been wounded; and thousands, including Sderot’s children, have suffered shock and trauma.

Egypt, supposedly at peace with Israel, has enabled the Hamas terrorists who control Gaza to move vast amounts of armaments, money and soldiers into this territory, and to transform themselves from a guerilla force into an army able to fight Israel on NEAR equal terms. The Israelis have even captured on videotape Egyptian “border guards” helping to smuggle in terrorists.

Then there are the Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, who killed about 140 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians in 2006, many of them with long range rockets that struck deep inside the Galilee, including Israel ’s third largest city, Haifa. Hezbollah recently struck again with rockets at kibbutz Shlomi. Since the 2006 Lebanon war, Hezbollah has completely rearmed, and now has missiles that can strike at the heart of Tel Aviv.

Standing behind Hezbollah are Syria and Iran. Both of these hateful regimes make no bones about their desire to destroy Israel. Both are armed with chemical and biological weapons, missiles that can reach every inch of Israeli territory, the most advanced fighter jets, and numerous other ultramodern weapons. Both regimes are working at break-neck speed to develop nuclear weapons. This has been thoroughly documented, despite the attempts of the recent “National Intelligence Estimate” to deny this reality.

Threat of violence
The campaign of violence against Jews has been extended to the Diaspora. There has been a massive increase in anti-Semitic incidents throughout Europe. In London, Paris, and Brussels, Jews are routinely assaulted on the street and on public transportation facilities. Many synagogues have been vandalized, and some burned to the ground. Desecrations of Jewish cemeteries are so common that they have ceased to be news. In “peaceful” Switzerland, a rabbi was gunned down recently in the street simply because he was wearing traditional Jewish garb.

Nor should we American Jews think that we have been immune to the spreading hatred. According to FBI statistics, of some 1,500 hate crimes connected with the religion of the victims last year, over 1,000 were directed at Jews — more than five times the number of crimes directed at the next most vulnerable group, Muslims, and more than ten times the number of hate crimes directed against Christians. On March 1, 1994, a Lebanese Muslim murdered a Jewish boy and seriously injured several others on the Brooklyn Bridge, simply because they were Jews. On July 4, 2002, at the El Al terminal of Los Angeles Airport, two Jews were killed and four wounded by an Egyptian gunman, simply because they were Jews seeking to board a plane for Israel. On July 28, 2007 an Arab Muslim man walked into a Jewish center in Seattle, murdered a Jewish woman and injured five other women simply because they were Jews.

Even more troubling, perhaps, is the strange insensitivity often displayed by our own government toward many of these hate crimes. For example, the FBI described the murder of the Jewish boy on the Brooklyn Bridge as a case of “road rage,” even when the political and religious motives of the assassin were attested to by many witnesses. And when the Egyptian, Muslim fundamentalist gunman mowed down Jews at the Los Angeles El Al terminal, the FBI investigating officer asserted, “there is no evidence that this was terrorism.”

Diplomatic threat
On the diplomatic front, Israel has been under relentless pressure from the international community, including, sad to say, our own beloved United States, to make unilateral concessions to the Palestinian terrorists that place Israel in deadly peril. The so-called “Quartet” of great powers, consisting of the United States, the European Community, the United Nations, and Russia, has bludgeoned Israel into accepting the so-called “Road Map” plan, which requires Israel to withdraw more or less to its June 4, 1967 borders. The late Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, once aptly called these lines “the Auschwitz frontiers.”

Pressure to implement the “road map” has continued relentlessly through the Annapolis conference last month and during President Bush’s recent visit to Israel . The United States has also put relentless pressure on Israel to withdraw security checkpoints that are vital to preventing the movement of terrorists and their weapons into Israel, to end all construction of Jewish housing outside the 1967 borders, including those neighborhoods of Jerusalem outside of this “green line,” to acquiesce in the partition of Jerusalem, and to evacuate Jewish residents from the so-called “unauthorized settlements” or “illegal outposts” — many of them on land legally owned by Jews, in some cases owned by Jews for decades.

The Palestinian Arab leadership, for its part, has demanded that Israel accept within its borders all four million Arabs who claim that they are descended from refugees who left Israel sixty years ago, during her War of Independence. They also want Israel to evict the roughly 450,000 Jews who live in areas outside the 1967 lines, which would require Israel to resettle these unfortunate people, too, within its now-truncated territory. Obviously, Israel could not survive the importation of millions of Arabs who have been taught to hate her from birth. But it also would be very difficult to absorb half a million Jews forced from their homes. They would have good reason to hate their own country.

Yet the United States has given Israel little encouragement to resist these demands of the Palestinian Arabs.

Propaganda threat
But by far the most insidious and dangerous front in the war against Israel is the propaganda war. In the Arab countries and Iran, this takes the form of the crudest lies and stereotypes derived from Nazi propaganda and the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But it is also being waged in a more subtle way by the media throughout Europe, the United States, and even within Israel itself; and by the academic and educational establishments of all of these countries as well. The Western media and academic “experts” portray Israel as a Western colonial implant into the Middle East that has uprooted and dispossessed the “indigenous” Arab population and stolen their land. Israelis are portrayed as religious fanatics intent on seizing other people’s land in order to fulfill Biblical promises.

Nor should we overlook that the hate propaganda and libels directed against Israel are directed against the Jews of the Diaspora as well, especially American Jews. Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer and former President Jimmy Carter claim that American Jews exert excessive power over American foreign policy; that they use this power on behalf of a foreign country, Israel, to the disadvantage and injury of the United States; and that we silence anyone who criticizes Israel with threats, unfair criticism or dismissal from their jobs.

All of these allegations, both those against Israel itself and those against its Jewish supporters in the United States and elsewhere, are lies. But through constant repetition, they have been bought into by hundreds of millions of people throughout the world, including Europe, the United States, and saddest of all, within Israel itself. This is the ultimate fulfillment of Hitler’s observation in Mein Kampf that the bigger the lie is, if it is repeated often enough, the more likely it is to be believed.

Internal threat
But it is we Jews’ siege of ourselves from within our own communities that presents the gravest danger to our survival as a people and as a faith community: our self-doubts; our demoralization; our loss of confidence in the righteousness of our own cause; our lack of unity; the loss of our religious beliefs, and of what is an essential part of our religion, our mission as a people.

Because so many of us have lost faith in the righteousness of our own struggle for survival, and have accepted the lies of our enemies, the government and people of Israel have been increasingly yielding to the demands of our enemies and false friends without even putting up a struggle. In order to survive, we must win a victory over the sickness of our enemies; but before we can do that, we must heal ourselves.

For some Jews, their psychological sickness has progressed to the point of outright identification with the enemies of our people, and active participation in their ideological, propaganda and political assault on us. These Jews have actively taken sides with the enemy, at least on the level of ideology, communications and propaganda — perhaps in the belief that “if you can’t beat them, join them.” These Jews constitute an internal Jewish fifth column that threatens us more severely than all our external enemies combined. The anti-Israel and anti-Jewish Jews among us are like a dagger pointed directly at the heart of Israel and the Jewish people.

Thousands of Jewish journalists, academics, filmmakers, artists and “intellectuals” in the United States, Canada, Europe, and within Israel itself have actively participated in the campaign of vilification and lies against Israel. There is even a “minyan” of Jewish reporters working for the notorious al-Qaeda mouthpiece al-Jazeera. These Jewish haters of Zion have a greater impact and credibility than any other group of anti-Israel propagandists. Who, after all, would believe that Jews would lie about their own people and institutions? And their impact is greatest on their fellow Jews, of course; they have sapped the will of Israelis to resist the demands of their enemies, and the will of the American and other Diaspora Jews to stand behind Israel, by persuading them that Israel ’s cause is not just.

But our internal propagandist fifth column, disastrous though its impact has been on our morale, is only one of the negative influences contributing to the collapse of the Jewish will to resist the relentless pressure of our enemies.

A tremendous, and humanly understandable, war-weariness has gripped Israelis. Prime Minister Olmert gave voice to this terrible war fatigue when he said,

“We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want to we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies.”

We must remember that a man or woman struggling to walk to safety through numbing cold may become very tired indeed, to the point of wishing to lie down in the snow and fall asleep. But then he or she will not wake up.

Loss of faith in God and in the truths of our religion is yet another reason for our spreading defeatism and our failure to resist the assault on us as Jews. It is our religion that teaches us that we are a distinct people with a land of our own. It is our religion that teaches us that we have a unique destiny, and that we must survive as a people if we are to fulfill our mission to be “a light unto the nations.” Once we forget our faith, the temptation to assimilate into our environment completely and forget about what happens to our fellow Jews becomes very great.

And for us, the Jews of the golden American Diaspora, our very comfort, prosperity and seeming security have concealed the common danger from us — much as they concealed from the Jews of Germany and elsewhere in Europe the grave danger that they faced from Nazism, until it was too late to do anything. They think, “What has all this got to do with me? I am leading a perfectly contented and prosperous life here in America with my family. I am very comfortable. Why should I care about what is happening to other Jewish people 6,000 miles away?”

The answer to this understandable human reaction is the answer that Mordecai sent to Esther when she expressed her fear of approaching King Ahasuerus to appeal for the life of her fellow Jews: “Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace. On the contrary . . .you and your father’s house will perish.” (Esther 4:12). If Israel should fall, do not imagine that we American Jews shall escape persecution by enemies who see our vulnerability.

Our lethargy and indifference are grave mistakes that will come back to haunt us. While World War II was going on, few Jews in America even knew about, or much less reacted to, the genocide being committed against our brethren in Europe, even though the essential facts about their fate were known to American Jewish leaders as early as 1942. It was only after the war ended and photographs of the bodies of the victims appeared in the newspapers that the enormity of what had happened began to sink in with American Jews. Serious discussion and study of the Holocaust did not even begin among us until the 1960s.

This time, we will not have the luxury of a slow response to the dangers facing not only the Jews of Israel, but also ourselves.

Nor should Christians and other non-Jews in America and throughout the Western world be indifferent to what is happening. The international jihad waged by the radical Islamists targets not only Jews, but all Christians (referred to by the jihadis as “Crusaders”) and all of Western civilization as well. The Jews are the first on the list of groups targeted for extinction by the radical jihadis, but they are by no means the last on this list. In our vulnerability to the poisonous ideological winds sweeping in from the Middle East and South Asia, we Jews are the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” — the first to suffer the lethal effects of the poison, but not the last.

By Sarah Morrison, www.IsraelNN.com

Berta Lovinger is no ordinary olah hadasha [new immigrant to Israel]. At the ripe old age of 95, she was the oldest Jew to come home to Israel on the Nefesh B’Nefesh flight of new immigrants. The Nefesh B’Nefesh (NBN) organization eases the obstacles facing North American Jews wishing to make aliyah (move to Israel), and organizes planeloads of new immigrants. NBN brought more than 3,000 Jews from Western countries to the Jewish state in 2007.

Finally home, Berta Lovinger touches down on Israeli soil.

Originally from Hungary, Mrs. Lovinger is a Holocaust survivor, along with her two children. The three of them went into hiding under falsified Aryan papers that her husband acquired.

“I hid in a small village in Czechoslovakia with my two children, who were eight and eleven at the time. I saved them. Nobody else came back from the Holocaust with children. Only I did. Nobody asked me who I was in the village. I took care that my children wouldn’t go out, because someone might have asked what their names were. It was not so easy. We are here, though. My children [Miriam Pollak, 71, and Alex Lovinger, 69] are here in Israel, and I could not ask for more.”

Poster of U.S. and Israel Flags

After the Holocaust, Mrs. Lovinger moved to Montreal, where she spent the past sixty years until she made her recent decision to come to Israel.

Moments after her wheelchair touched down on the tarmac at Ben Gurion airport, Mrs. Lovinger was asked by Israel National Radio why she was making aliyah. “I moved here because my children are here. It was very lonely in Montreal. I realized that I could be with my children and grandchildren if I move. Now, I will join them. I’m so happy to be here.”

Mrs. Lovinger will reside in Petach Tikva, outside Tel Aviv, with her daughter.
“I have to count how many grandchildren I’m going to be with! I also have one great-grandson, and I’m so happy to be with all of them,” Mrs. Lovinger said.

Her one great-grandson is currently serving in the Israel Defense Forces.

“I don’t complain. I have everything,” Mrs. Lovinger said. “I’m happy I’m in Israel, and I enjoy whatever comes to me. At 95 years old, what else can I say?”

By Burt Prelutsky, www.BurtPrelutsky.com

Usually, when people say they’re not religious, they’re looking to pick a fight or at least start an argument. That’s probably because people who identify themselves as atheists or agnostics are often as dogmatic as Cotton Mather and have merely made a religion of their own non-belief.

In my case, however, religion simply plays no role in my life. Or perhaps I should say institutionalized religion, seeing as how I very much subscribe to the Judeo-Christian value system. It’s the reason that I’m so grateful that two sets of Russian Jewish grandparents had the guts to pack up their kids and caboodle and move to America.

Unfortunately, they—and many others like them—included in their baggage several hundred years’ worth of religious antagonisms. In far too many cases, these fears and prejudices, although initially well-founded, have been passed along like precious heirlooms from one generation to the next.

Even among some of my friends and relatives, there are those who half-expect their Christian neighbors to start organizing pogroms any day now. They remain unconvinced that Hitler and the Nazis were pagans. And even when I point out that it was American and British soldiers, mainly Christians, who brought down the Third Reich and liberated the concentration camps, it often falls on deaf ears.

So, although I do not accept that we are all fallen creatures or that Jesus Christ died for my sins, I am thankful that I live in a Christian nation. I realize that it’s only my dumb luck to be an American. The fact of the matter is that when it comes to one’s religion, it is usually determined by geography, not by choice. If you’re born in Japan, you are likely to be a Buddhist; if you’re born in Italy, you’re likely to be a Roman Catholic; in India, a Hindu; in England, an Anglican; and in Utah, a Mormon.

This is not to suggest that, even in my eyes, all religions are equally valid. You’d have to be one of those non-judgmental pinheads who sound the trumpets for cultural diversity, pretending to believe that all nations, all religions, and all ideologies are equally good and equally bad. So long as Islam is around, only an idiot could seriously promote such nonsense.

Muslims are people who believe that freedom is a naughty word, who believe that women are no better than cattle, and who refer to the ninth century as the good old days. It was bad enough when they used a newspaper cartoon as an excuse to go berserk. Now they’re outraged because of a Sudanese teddy bear! These Neanderthals actually wanted to torture and execute English schoolteacher Gilliam Gibbons because, at the behest of seven-year-olds in her class, she named the stuffed toy Mohammed.

These simpletons seem to spend half their lives on their knees praying, and the other half up in arms, looking to kill somebody for some utterly stupid reason. They are a blot on humanity, and humanity, I think we’d all agree, isn’t that great to begin with.

Imagine if Catholics were as psychotic as Islamists. Just having a little Jesus on your dashboard or a crèche in your front yard would be like signing your own death warrant.

So, even though I haven’t a religious bone in my body, I have every reason to be grateful I was born in a country in which it’s Christ’s birthday, and not Mohammed’s first slaying of an infidel, that’s celebrated as a national holiday.

By Ezra HaLevi, www.IsraelNN.com

The Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi lit the third candle of Hanukkah with soldiers and officers who recently came on Aliyah (literally, ascent – used to describe Jewish immigration to Israel) from various countries across the globe.

Most of the soldiers came to Israel by themselves, without their families.

The Chief of Staff related his memories as a young officer taking part in secret operations assisting the Aliyah of the Jews of Ethiopia and told them how he felt then as a Jewish and Israeli officer. He also told them that the heroism of today’s IDF fighters is no less than that of the Macabbees.

The Maccabees, the heroes of the Hanukkah festival, stood up to Hellenist cultural pressures and to Jewish assimilationists allied with the Greeks, fomenting and winning a civil war. They returned and rededicated the desecrated Holy Temple, and the small amount of spiritually-untainted oil for the menora (candelabrum) lasted eight days – a sign of Divine approval and the return of miracles to the Temple in Jerusalem.

Pictured on the left in a red beret is IDF Chief Rabbi Avi Ronsky, a resident of the Shomron town of Itamar. Right of him is Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi.