Levitt Letter Extra News

Passover begins April 9, with tonight being the First Seder on Passover Eve. 

Where Are You?
by Sara Debbie Gutfreund, www.aish.com

 

Every year my great grandmother stood by the living room window on Seder night looking for her son. Uncle Leo was always late, year after year. I would stand beside her in my pink and white dresses and new, shiny shoes, and peer through the lattices of the curtains as I glanced into the darkening, deserted street and then up at my great grandmother’s anxious face.

“Don’t worry Ma, he’s coming. Sit down,” my grandmother would always say. But my great grandmother refused to move from her spot. Sometimes she would pace in front of the window and notice me beside her. Then she would smile for a moment and put her hand on my shoulder as we both looked out past the red oak tree that towered in the front yard.

“Where is he already?” she would repeat as the rest of the family finished setting up the Seder table. And when he finally arrived, she would laugh with relief, and her eyes would fill with a kind of peace that I didn’t understand then. This happened so many times over the years that “Great Grandma standing by the window and Uncle Leo arriving late” became as much a part of Seder night as the matzah and the snow white tablecloth.

A few years ago I stood by my own living room window in the mountains of Jerusalem. I watched my children playing on the swing set in the backyard as I set the table for the Seder. And I felt a stinging pang of homesickness and yearning for the Seders of my childhood. I looked around me at the empty chairs, and I tried to conjure up the images of my grandparents, my great grandparents, my cousins running in and out of the rooms of my childhood home on erev Pesach. I could almost hear the laughter that used to float from the kitchen. But most of all I remembered my great grandmother’s face by the window, and I suddenly realized that her face was a reflection of a sliver of the love that God has for us as He waits for all of His children to come home on Seder night.

One year right before Passover, something happened to me that showed me just how powerful God’s love for us actually is. I was in the garden with my three-year-old, and we had a tall fence around the backyard. When the phone rang I ran inside for a minute, and when I returned my daughter was gone. I looked desperately all around me. Where could she have gone? She couldn’t have climbed over the fence.

And then I saw it. A tiny hole near the side of the fence where the ground was lower. But she couldn’t have possibly crawled under there! I unlocked the fence and ran to the front of the house. And there in the middle of the street was my three-year-old on her tricycle. A car was coming around the corner, and I ran desperately into the street reaching her just in time.

 Can a heart break from gratitude? I held my child and sobbed. I almost lost you. I almost lost my child. This is how the Almighty felt when He took us out of Egypt. My children, I almost lost you. I’m never going to let you go.

It took us so long to come home. We were so late we almost didn’t make it. And like a parent who almost loses a child, on the night of the Seder God promises every Jew that He will hold them and protect them no matter how far from Him they may be.

Personal Redemption

There is a custom for people at the Seder to tell their own stories of personal redemption. How many of us have felt stuck in the emptiness, the loneliness and the materialism of this world and thought that we would never emerge? And in the blink of an eye, our lives, our souls come alive again? Or maybe there was a time when you were lost and confused and then you heard the right words or read just what you needed to understand. Or maybe there was a time when you lost someone that you loved and the grief was so deep and so painful that you thought that you would never smile again. And then one day just when you were about to give up, a child’s laughter penetrated your soul and a hint of a smile began to return. The near miss in a car accident. The narrowly escaped diagnosis. The lost job that became a new opportunity.

Our individual stories of redemption are all integral pieces of our joint, unfolding journey towards national redemption. Because on Seder night God is watching all of us through the windows, waiting for us to come home to Him. And He promises us that when life becomes so hard that it looks like we are lost forever, that is when He will lift us up and bring us home.

 

Author Biography:
Sara Debbie Gutfreund holds a BA from the University of Pennysylvania and a MA in Family Therapy from the University of North Texas. She is currently researching women’s issues and specializing in pre-marital/adolescent counseling. She lives with her husband and children in Telzstone, Israel.

By Ben Lynfield, www.independent.co.uk

When Jaaber Hussein signed an agreement with Israel’s Chief Rabbis last Monday, he inked the only Arab-Jewish accord sure to be meticulously observed by both sides. The deal makes him the owner for one week of all bread, pasta, and beer in Israel – well a huge amount of it anyway. The contract, signed for the past 12 years by the Muslim hotel food manager, is part of the traditional celebrations ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover.

Jews are forbidden by biblical injunction to possess leavened bread, or chametz, during Passover and ironically an Arab is needed to properly observe the holiday. The agreement with Mr. Hussein offers a way of complying with religious edicts without having to wastefully destroy massive quantities of food.

Through legal acrobatics, the forbidden goods belonging to the Israeli state are simply sold to Mr. Hussein for the duration of Passover and then revert back to the state once the holiday is over. Like the government’s adherence to the Sabbath and to dietary laws, the ceremony sets Israel apart as a Jewish state that upholds religious traditions.

Mr. Hussein, a resident of the Israeli Arab town of Abu Ghosh near Jerusalem, sees nothing odd in the arrangement, believing there are affinities between his Islamic faith and Judaism. He relishes the role the Jewish state has assigned him, one that puts his picture on the front pages of Israeli newspapers year after year.

“I see this as a way to help people with whom I work and live,” he said.

Mr. Hussein was a natural choice for the ritual because he works in a hotel that stringently observes Jewish dietary laws. He even keeps some of the strictures at home.

“There are many things that are close in the two religions. If not for politics, the religions would get along very well,” he explains. One example he cites is the halal slaughtering of meat, which he likens to kosher slaughtering.

Passover, which celebrates the biblical exodus from slavery in Egypt, starts tonight and lasts for seven days, eight outside Israel.

The reason for the prohibition of leavened bread is, according to the Bible, that the Israelites departed Egypt in such haste that their bread did not have a chance to rise and so they ate the cracker-like unleavened bread known as matzo.

Many of their descendants in modern Israel defer to this dictum every spring to the extent that a kind of fermented dough fixation suffuses the country. Housewives become the new slaves, scrubbing and vacuum cleaning to remove every trace of chametz. Religious men scald pots in the streets, making them kosher for the holiday.

For the Orthodox, there can be no half-measures. A single crumb that evades detection could spoil everything for Passover.

Those families who do not want the extra workload simply check-in to kosher hotels and escape the ardor. Even secular Israelis stock up on pita bread and put it in their freezers so that they too have enough supplies to survive the week.

Last Monday, Mr. Hussein put down a cash deposit of $4,800 for the $150m worth of leavened products he acquires from state companies, the prison service, and the national stock of emergency supplies. The deposit will be returned at the end of the holiday, unless he decides to come up with the full value of the products. In that case he could, in theory, keep them all.

At the close of the holiday, the foodstuffs purchased by Mr. Hussein revert back to their original owners, who have given the Chief Rabbis the power of attorney over their leavened products. “It’s a firm, strong agreement done in the best way,” Mr. Hussein said.

But Israelis are divided on whether the state should be enforcing Passover. A law introduced by religious parties in 1986 bans the display of bread in public areas, except in those where there is a non-Jewish majority. But a court decision last year said it was legal for restaurants to sell leavened products during Passover on the grounds that they are not public spaces. The move sparked anger among the ultra-Orthodox Jews.

This year, ultra-Orthodox activists in Jerusalem sent warning letters to stores, telling them not to sell bread or pizza because this could bring divine punishment on the city. And the chief rabbinate called for supermarkets to install a computer program that would enable cash registers to detect unleavened products by their bar codes so sales could be stopped. Supermarkets cover over their chametz with papers, but the rabbis are concerned that some customers lift the covers and buy proscribed foods.

Variations of the contract between the Israeli state and Mr. Hussein are being signed all over the world between selected non-Jews and rabbis, including those in the UK. The ceremony, like the absence of civil marriages in the country, reflects “some elements of theocracy” in the Israeli state, says Menachem Friedman, a sociologist at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv. “Israel is a unique state – very modern on the one hand but with very strong religious traditional elements on the other. Every government keeps this ritual.”

In one final Passover twist, the restaurants of Mr. Hussein’s town, Abu Ghosh, are gearing up for what is always their busiest week of the year, catering to secular Jews who want to get away from the holiday’s dietary strictures.

“It is also nice that you have people who don’t keep Passover, who eat leavened bread,” Mr. Hussein said. “It is good that we are also able to help the people who are not religious.”

By Susan Estrich
news.yahoo.com

On Jan. 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers entered the largest Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland and liberated the 7,000 prisoners who were still there, most of them sick and dying.

In 2005, for the 60th anniversary of the liberation, the United Nations designated Jan. 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

And so it was certainly not a coincidence that the official spokesman for Iran’s government chose Jan. 27, 2009, to make a statement denouncing the Holocaust as a “big lie” used to justify the existence of the state of Israel. “The Holocaust is a concept coming from a big lie in order to settle a rootless regime in the heart of the Islamic world,” Gholam Hossein Elham told a conference on Gaza held in central Iran’s religious city of Qom.

Iranian leaders are well known for their embrace of the real “big lie.” In 2005, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounced the Holocaust as “myth” and said that Israel was doomed to disappear. The following year, Tehran played host to a convention of liars and deniers; a mass-circulation newspaper sponsored a cartoon competition seeking the “best” cartoon mocking the deaths of millions; and only last September a student group got more attention than they deserved for a disgraceful book celebrating anti-Semitism and mocking the Holocaust.

Sixty-four years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the generation who witnessed the barbarism first-hand is slowly passing on, many of them, like those who were liberated, sick and dying. The danger is that with the passage of that generation, the very existence of the Holocaust becomes not a matter of historic fact, but a subject of pseudo-intellectual debate, a subject about which reasonable people can differ, and a rallying cry for the ignorant and hateful enemies of Israel. News organizations will report the comments of the likes of Gholam Hossein Elham as if they were opinions, not lies. Children will grow up believing that he might be right — or at least that he is not certainly wrong.

On Monday, the eve of the anniversary, President Obama reached out to the Muslim world, granting his first network interview as president to the Dubai-based al-Arabiya network. It was an important symbol, intended to convey to the Muslim world that “the Americans are not your enemy.” The new president said America had made mistakes in the past, but “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there’s no reason why we can’t restore that.”

I do not believe America is the enemy of the Muslim world. But we are, and should be, the enemy of those who would deny the slaughter of six million Jews and denounce Israel as a nation doomed to disappear. I don’t know exactly what “mistakes” the president was referring to, but supporting Israel’s right to exist and defend itself is not, at least in my book, among them.

It is right, and appropriate, to reach out to the Muslim world diplomatically. It is right, and appropriate, for the new president to reach out personally, to remind Muslims of his many relatives who share their faith and of his commitment to find common ground.

But the common ground must include recognition of the lessons of history. It must include respect for the suffering of those who died at the hands of Jew-haters. It must include support for the security of the state of Israel. January 27 is an appropriate day to remember and reaffirm that.

By Judy Siegel-Itzkovich The Jerusalem Post

The war in Gaza has not slowed down the work of Save a Child’s Heart (SACH), the voluntary organization based at Holon’s Wolfson Medical Center that has provided free cardiac surgery to over 600 Palestinians and nearly 2,000 others from around the world.

A three-week-old baby named Jafar from Gaza underwent surgery on the last Sunday in December, two days after Israel’s air strikes on Gaza were launched.

Dr. Lior Sasson, SACH’s chief surgeon, has done so many operations in recent weeks that he can hardly keep track. Jafar, he said, would almost surely have died quickly after birth because he was born with a severe congenital heart defect, the transposition of the great arteries.

“Tomorrow we hope to take out the drainage tube. He is a very sweet baby. We don’t care if he comes from a Hamas family or what. He is a baby,” he said.

In December alone, the SACH staff of 70 – including five physicians – performed lifesaving surgery on 10 children from Gaza. “It is not difficult to get them here. We have a well-oiled operation, and the security forces know us well. There are no problems, even during a war,” Sasson said.

Jafar was accompanied by his grandmother; Sasson conversed with her with the small amount of Arabic he knows.

SACH (www.saveachildsheart.org) was founded by the late Dr. Amram (Ami) Cohen, a pediatric heart surgeon who came on aliya from the U.S. in 1992 and quickly established the organization, which he turned into an important contributor to children’s health worldwide. He joined Wolfson’s staff and served as the deputy chief of cardiovascular surgery and head of pediatric cardiac surgery.

In 1988, while serving in the U.S. armed forces in Korea, the head of the international organization Save the Hearts approached him. The organization was sending orphaned and indigent Korean children to Western countries for medical care not available locally. Cohen was so impressed with the idea that he requested and received permission from his superiors to participate in the program, and during the rest of his time in Korea, performed 35 pediatric cardiac surgeries. Cohen died in a tragic accident while climbing the Kilimanjaro Mountain in 2001.

“Ami would be very proud of us that we are continuing what he started by operating on young children from Gaza,” Sasson concluded. Despite the world financial crisis, SACH is still able to attract donations with which the organization is able to continue.

By Duke Helfand Los Angeles Times

Dr. Joel Kushner, left, and Rabbi Richard N. Levy unroll the Yanov Torah during a ceremony at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion near USC. The Torah survived the Holocaust by being cut into pieces, hidden during the war and reassembled afterward. photo credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times

During World War II, Jewish inmates of the Yanov labor camp in occupied Poland defied their Nazi guards, secretly conducting religious services inside their darkened barracks.

To observe their ritual, the Jews had cut religious scrolls into sections, bound the parchment pieces around their bodies, and walked them through Yanov’s front gate. They hid the fragments wherever they could—beneath the floorboards of their barracks, inside hollow bedposts, even in a camp cemetery.

After the camp’s liberation in 1945, one survivor collected the scattered pieces. He assembled them into a single ragged scroll, the Yanov Torah.

Three decades later, the Torah — its parchment warped and water-stained, its patchwork sheets held together by fraying threads — found its way to Los Angeles and into the hands of a leader of the city’s Reform Jewish community, Rabbi Erwin Herman, who devoted the final years of his life to telling its remarkable story.

Last November, Herman’s dying wish was fulfilled when a new generation of Jews celebrated the rebirth of the Yanov Torah.

Carrying the fragile scroll beneath a chuppah, or wedding canopy, Herman’s widow and grandson presented it to the rabbis and rabbinic students at the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion near USC. The students, in turn, will carry the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, to their internships at synagogues throughout California.

“The Yanov Torah is a true child of the Holocaust,” Agnes Herman, 86, told a gathering at the seminary campus. “A survivor.”

The hand-over came as Jews commemorated the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night in 1938 when Germans rampaged against their Jewish neighbors, destroying synagogues, businesses and homes, killing dozens and rounding up thousands for deportation to concentration camps.

Though worldwide audiences are marking the occasion in solemn tones, those who gathered at the seminary struck a joyous chord.

“This Torah is living evidence of people who fought the Nazis in the best way they knew how, which was through faith,” Rabbi Richard N. Levy, director of the School of Rabbinic Studies at the seminary’s Los Angeles campus, said in an interview. “Every time I read the story, and now talk about it, my eyes well up.”

The Yanov Torah might have been lost to history if not for a survivor of the camp, known only as Joseph. After the war, he remained in the nearby city of Lvov.

In 1975, as he was dying, Joseph gave the Torah to a young Jewish doctor, Naum Rit, and his wife, Emma, just weeks before the couple left for the United States. The meeting had been arranged by Naum Rit’s grandfather, who was a longtime friend of Joseph’s.

As the years passed, two versions of the story emerged.

One is told by Rit’s widow. Emma Rit-Uskali says she and her husband visited Joseph’s threadbare room and listened as the survivor recounted the Torah’s tale.

Joseph, she said, told how the Jews of Lvov had braced for their harsh life in the nearby camp by smuggling in sections of the holy text, hiding the pieces in Yanov’s cemetery. Joseph said he collected the Torah sections after the camp was liberated, reassembled them, and hid the piecemeal Torah under his wooden floorboards.

“He asked us to bring this Torah to the free world,” recalled Rit-Uskali, 61, who now lives in Las Vegas. (Naum Rit died in Los Angeles in 1993.)

The Rits, nonobservant Jews who had never seen a Torah, agreed to take the 17-pound scroll from Joseph. When the couple arrived in Los Angeles in 1976, they spoke little English and desperately needed money to feed their two children. So Naum Rit decided to sell the only thing of value he had.

It’s unclear how Rit found Herman, the Reform rabbi. But one day, Rit appeared at the rabbi’s North Hollywood office.

“You buy my Torah,” Rit said in broken English. He related its story with the help of Herman’s secretary, who spoke Yiddish.

Retelling the story
The rabbi and his wife, Agnes, recalled the exchange in a book they later wrote based on the conversation with Rit. That account, called “The Yanov Torah,” offers a variation of the story told by Rit’s wife.

According to the book, small groups of Jews from the Yanov work camp were allowed to return to Lvov for daylong leaves of absence granted by the Nazis for good behavior. Once in Lvov, they dug up Torahs that had been buried in the Jewish cemetery for safeguarding. The Jews cut the Torahs into pieces, binding the sections around their bodies and smuggling them into the camp.

After the war, one survivor, a tailor, collected the pieces and stitched them into a single scroll. Meanwhile, the handful of survivors who remained in Lvov made a pact. The oldest would care for the Torah, handing it to the next in line before each man died. The decades passed, until only one was left. He gave the fragile scroll to Rit, who later offered it to Rabbi Herman.

The rabbi at first declined to buy the Torah, protesting that it was priceless. But astounded by Rit’s story and eager to help him, Herman gave Rit a check for $250, emptying his bank account, and then located benefactors.

A Jewish couple gave $750, but with a request that Herman tell the story of the scroll, rather than leave it in a museum. Herman spent the next 30 years taking the Torah to audiences around the world. Everywhere he went, he unrolled the sacred text and encouraged people to touch it.

In February 2008, Herman died after a prolonged battle with cancer. Agnes Herman asked officials at the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College to honor her husband’s wish that rabbinic students pick up where he left off.

“It was like another child, and I had to make arrangements before I die,” said Herman, a freelance journalist and retired social worker. “I’m almost 87 years old. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here. I want this to continue to live.”

During the ceremony at the college, Herman recounted the Torah’s story one more time. Then, rabbinic students removed the scroll from a hand-sewn cover marked with a faded Star of David and unfurled it, displaying its script written by different hands.

After 100 guests recited morning prayers and the Torah was placed back in its cover, a faculty member cradled it and joyously carried it around the room.

One student, who will share the Torah with congregants at University Synagogue by UCLA, spoke of his own faith being strengthened by the sacrifices of the Yanov inmates.

As the ceremony drew to a close, Herman rose quietly from her seat, approached the scroll, touched it, and kissed her hand, marking the beginning of yet another step in its long journey.

By Matti Friedman Associated Press

JERUSALEM (AP) — A quest is under way on four continents to find the missing pages of one of the world’s most important holy texts, the 1,000-year-old Hebrew Bible known as the Crown of Aleppo.

Crusaders held it for ransom, fire almost destroyed it, and it was reputedly smuggled across Mideast borders hidden in a washing machine. But in 1958, when it finally reached Israel, 196 pages were missing — about 40 percent of the total — and for some Old Testament scholars they have become a kind of holy grail.

Researchers representing the manuscript’s custodian in Jerusalem now say they have leads on some of the missing pages and are nearer their goal of making the manuscript whole again.

The Crown, known in English as the Aleppo Codex, may not be as famous as the Dead Sea Scrolls; but to many scholars it is even more important, because it is considered the definitive edition of the Bible for Jewry worldwide.

The key to finding the pages is thought to lie with the insular Diaspora of Jews originating in Aleppo, Syria, where the manuscript resided in a synagogue’s iron chest for centuries.

A turning point in its history came three days after the U.N. passed the 1947 resolution to grant Israel statehood, provoking a Syrian mob to burn down the synagogue. Aleppo’s Jews rescued the Codex, but in the ensuing years the 10,000-strong community was uprooted and scattered around the world.

Scholars believe that Aleppo Jews still hold many of the missing pages, while others have fallen into the hands of antiquities dealers. Two fragments have already surfaced: a full page in 1982, and a smaller piece last year that had been carried for decades by a Brooklyn man, Sam Sabbagh, as a good-luck charm. Persistent rumors tell of more waiting to be found.

When the Codex reached Israel 50 years ago it was presented to Izhak Ben-Zvi, the country’s president and a scholar of Jewish communities in the Islamic world. Although the manuscript is housed at the Israel Museum with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Ben-Zvi Institute founded by the late president remains its legal custodian and is behind the new search.

Past efforts, including some by Israeli diplomats and Mossad secret service agents, came up against a wall of silence in the Aleppo community. The new search has recruited a small group of Aleppo Jews, better able to win the community’s trust, and has yielded information on the whereabouts of specific pieces and on the people who are holding them, said Zvi Zameret, the Ben-Zvi Institute’s director.

“Only someone who believes that this manuscript is one of the foundation stones of the people of Israel, someone whose goal is not to get rich — only such a person can make progress,” he said.

He divulged few details lest he compromise the effort. He would say only that the search is being carried out in North, South, and Central America; Israel, and England and that success appeared within reach.

“If there is a possibility, as the rumors say, that there are not only small fragments but also entire sections, that is extremely exciting,” said Adolfo Roitman, the Israel Museum curator in charge of the manuscript. “We’re missing entire books — most of the five Books of Moses, except for a few pages, and we have no Book of Esther, no Book of Daniel.”

He, like most other scholars involved, has met people who know of people who supposedly have pages. But the leads invariably end with people who refuse to talk.

Each page is priceless, but money wouldn’t be an issue for most Aleppo Jews because anyone trafficking in such holy relics could be banished by the community, Roitman said. Some of the Crown’s pages bear an inscription warning that it “may not be sold.”

Some people might be superstitious about the fragments they hold, or believe they are rightfully the property of Aleppo Jews, not of scholars. Others might simply have no idea of the value of what they own.

The Codex, on 491 parchment pages about 12 inches by 10 inches, was transcribed sometime around 930 A.D. by Shlomo Ben Boya’a, a scribe in Tiberias on the banks of the Sea of Galilee. It was edited by a renowned scholar of the time, Aaron Ben-Asher. Its completion marked the end of a centuries-long process that created the final text of the Hebrew Bible.

It belonged to a Jewish community in Jerusalem until it was seized by the Crusaders who captured and sacked the city in 1099. Ransomed, it made its way to Cairo, where it was used by the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who declared it the most accurate copy of the Old Testament.

The manuscript doesn’t contain passages missing from other versions. Instead, its accuracy is a matter of details like vowel signs and single letters that would only slightly alter pronunciation. But Judaism sanctifies each tiny calligraphic flourish in the Bible as a way of ensuring that communities around the world use precisely the same version of the divine book. That’s why the Codex is considered by some to be the most important Jewish text in existence, and why the missing pieces are so coveted.

“The bottom line is that the whole process of putting together the text of the Bible ended with the Codex,” said Rafael Zer of the Hebrew University Bible Project in Jerusalem, which is using the Codex to create what is meant to be the authoritative text of the Old Testament but can’t properly complete it without the missing pages.

Not enough has been done to find them, laments Hayim Tawil of New York’s Yeshiva University, the author of a forthcoming book on the Crown. “For Jews and for Western civilization this manuscript is equivalent to the Magna Carta,” he said.

How the Codex reached Aleppo in northern Syria is unclear. Some scholars believe it was brought by a descendant of Maimonides in the late 1300s.

There it was guarded as the Jews’ most prized possession and talisman. But on Dec. 2, 1947, the mob burned the synagogue. In the ensuing years, Aleppo Jews would describe rushing to snatch pages from the flames. The missing ones have not been seen since, with two exceptions.

One page from the Book of Chronicles survived in the New York apartment of an Aleppo woman and was handed over by her relatives in 1982. Another fragment recounting the Exodus story of the 10 plagues survived in the wallet of Sabbagh, another Aleppo exile in New York, who laminated it and kept it as a good luck charm. Last year, following Sabbagh’s death, his family brought the fragment to join the rest of the manuscript in Jerusalem.

One of the men who rescued pages from the synagogue was Mourad Faham, who sneaked into the building disguised as a Bedouin and found the bulk of the manuscript on the floor, according to his grandson, Jack Dweck.

A decade later he strapped the manuscript under his robe and crossed the border into Turkey, Dweck said. From there it was wrapped in towels and, according to most versions of the story, bundled into a washing machine to be shipped to Israel.

Dweck, a businessman who lives in New York, home to one of the biggest communities of Aleppo Jews, says he has heard the rumors among his fellow Jews and believes the missing parts exist.

“My guess is that there’s a bigger piece somewhere else, waiting to be found,” he said.

The Rescuer
By Haviv Rettig www.aish,com

In 1972, Toronto high school music teacher Judy Feld Carr came across a news article in The Jerusalem Post that told of the tragic deaths of 12 young Syrian Jewish men who ran across a minefield while attempting to flee Syria across the Turkish border.

“I saw the article and I couldn’t get over it,” Carr recalled in a phone interview with the Post 34 years after that fateful publication. The daughter of an independent-minded fur trader from Sudbury, Ontario, she could not sit helpless while Syria’s Jewish community suffered. “So my late husband and I decided we had to do something about it.” And she did. Spectacularly. Over the next 28 years, Carr masterminded from her Toronto home an international smuggling operation, complete with elaborate secret codes, meetings overseas with foreign agents and extensive bribes for Syrian officials, which rescued 3,228 Jews from persecution.

Much of Carr’s work remains secret. “Even today, more is hidden than known, and we still cannot expose in detail many of [Carr's] rescues,” noted a recent article in IICC Magazine, the journal of the Israeli Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center. Edited by former senior IDF intelligence officer Brig.-Gen. (res.) Ephraim Lapid, IICC Magazine quoted “foreign sources, who revealed that Carr was involved in the creation of a secret and secure information network with extensive connections,” both with “official and secret sources in Israel and private ones in America.”

The story began as a local philanthropic initiative. Distraught over the news article, Carr and her husband, Dr. Ronald Feld, organized lectures and a study day on Syrian Jewry. The participants learned of the persecution of Syrian Jews at the hands of the local Arabs and the regime, some of which continues to this day. They learned of the 1947 pogroms in which Arab mobs smashed homes and synagogues in the 2,500-year-old Jewish community of Aleppo; of laws from the 1940’s barring Jews from purchasing land; of the Muhabarat (secret police) surveillance of Damascus’s Jewish quarter; of the arrest and reported torture of Jews suspected of attempting to leave the country; and of the fact (recently cited in a 2001 US State Department human rights report) that Jews are the only minority in Syria whose religion is denoted in their passports and identity cards.

But, once they understood the problem, “we didn’t know what to do,” Carr said. “So we decided to do what we knew best from [campaigning for] Russian Jewry. We decided to call Syria.” It took almost three weeks (”We were about to give up.”) and the help of a Moroccan Jewish phone operator in Montreal to finally get a phone call through to Syria. “The Syrians would shut the line to Canada as soon as we asked for a Jew,” Carr recalled.

She finally reached the home of a Jewish woman who was on the payroll of the Muhabarat. Luckily, the woman’s husband was the only one home at the time, and though the call from Canada “almost gave him a heart attack,” he divulged the name and address of Rabbi Ibrahim Hamra, who would become the Chief Rabbi of Syria.

Following that initial gambit, Carr and her husband “knew we couldn’t call again, and it wasn’t a good idea to write a letter. So we came up with an idea to send a telegram in French [which is widely spoken in Syria] asking if Rabbi Hamra needed religious books. We prepaid the answer.” Ten days later came the response, a veritable shopping list of Jewish books. And so began Carr’s communication with the Syrian Jewish community.

Though her husband died suddenly of a heart attack in 1973, leaving her alone with three children, Carr maintained and strengthened her fragile contact with Syria’s Jews. When, in 1977, she married Donald Carr, he became her confidant and supporter, and one of only a handful of people around the world who knew about her clandestine activities.

Toronto’s Beth Tzedec synagogue, the largest in Canada, established the Dr. Ronald Feld Fund for Jews in Arab Lands, and Carr used donations to this fund to finance her work. “We had no overhead, no executive directors, no salaries. We didn’t have dinners, cocktail parties, fundraising,” she recalled. “We only printed thank-you cards.” Even so, she said, she received quiet financial help from Jews throughout North America. “It spread by word of mouth across Canada from British Columbia to Newfoundland. Then there was a fund in Baltimore that sent their money,” she said.

At its outset, the fund “was only a link to the rabbi in Damascus, and later on to rabbis in Allepo and Kamashili,” the only three towns in Syria where Jews were legally permitted to reside — and even then restricted to ghettos, forbidden to own cars or to travel. “The rabbis wanted books, tefillin (phylacteries), tallisim (prayer shawls),” Carr related.

Soon, the telegrams and Judaica shipments became a code.

“I started inserting words into the telegrams, like ‘who’s in prison?’” she related. “Then the rabbi would answer with a name, hidden inside my address.”

In order to verify that the rabbi had received the books, Carr would write one verse of psalms inside a book, and Rabbi Hamra would reply with the next one. Eventually, the verses became a way of discussing events, and Carr began to receive updates and news from the community. As the code developed it took on additional elements, including terms taken from Chinese cooking and alcoholic beverages. Carr herself was codenamed “Gin.”

The operation was expanded to Aleppo when another Toronto woman, Hanna Cohen, whose brother was a rabbi in Aleppo, decided to visit him, “taking her life into her hands.” Carr recalled that Cohen was arrested and interrogated, but then returned to Canada. She carried with her, hidden in her clothing, a letter for Carr “from the rabbis in Aleppo begging for books and begging to get out of Syria.”

And so, the network grew steadily. Through Syrian Jews who had escaped to Canada on their own, Carr slowly developed a network of contacts in and outside Syria. She communicated with Syrian government functionaries, judges and even Muhabarat officers, all of whom were brought together by the knowledge that there was money to be made in “selling Jews” to Judy Carr.

She used this network to “to ransom the Jews and to pay off people on the escape route and negotiate prices.” She funneled bribe money to Syrian officials through third parties and negotiated the Jews’ release personally. Over time, with the cooperation of Israel’s secret services, Carr had operatives moving in and out of Syria as well as ready in Turkey and Lebanon to collect escaping Jews and ferry them safely to Israel or elsewhere.

One of Carr’s most interesting stories concerns not Jews, but an ancient and priceless Keter, or Bible manuscript. The Damascus Keter, produced in Burgos in northwestern Spain in 1260 and taken to Muslim lands by Jews fleeing the Spanish Inquisition, was smuggled out of Syria by one of Carr’s agents, hidden in stacks of documents. Today it resides in Israel’s National Library in Jerusalem.

All the time that Carr worked covertly to rescue Syrian Jews, she publicly lobbied Canadian officials, diplomats and Jewish organizations, never revealing her activities. All of them underestimated the woman with whom they were dealing, considering her an amateur activist tackling issues beyond her ken.

“I never had any publicity. It had to be a totally secret operation,” she said. “The world media doesn’t look at Canada except for the weather report, so no one knew what I was doing.” That changed in the late 1990’s.

In 1999, University of Toronto historian Harold Troper turned Carr’s story into a book, The Ransomed of God: The Remarkable Story of One Woman’s Role in the Rescue of Syrian Jews [re-released in paperback in 2007 as "The Rescuer"]. In May 2001, she was invested into the Order of Canada, the country’s highest honor. Her story was “one of international drama and suspense,” according to the office of Canada’s Governor General, which awarded her the honor and praised her for her “selfless concern for others.” She has also been recognized, albeit less prestigiously, in the Jewish world. The late prime minister Yitzhak Rabin thanked her for her “hard and dangerous work” in a 1995 letter, adding that Israel and Syrian Jews “will never be able to reward you as you deserve.” She is also the recipient of the Simon Wiesenthal Award for Tolerance, Justice and Human Rights.

But Carr, now a grandmother of 13, shies away from the publicity. Most of those she rescued don’t know the identity of the person who, from far-away Toronto, cleared their path to freedom.

“I’ve been to a few Syrian weddings and bar mitzvahs in Israel and Brooklyn,” she said with embarrassment. “I don’t like the kavod [honor], because they make me go under the chuppah (wedding canopy), and then they see who I was and that’s not necessary. It’s not necessary.” Carr remains in touch with the rabbis of the communities, and with those she rescued from inside Syrian prisons and helped to flee to North and South America and Israel.

“I gave a speech in Sao Paulo [Brazil] before Rosh Hashanah,” she related, “and people there stood up and said, ‘Judy, don’t you know me? You took me out on the escape route.’” One of them was a Sephardi rabbi who carried with him a prayer book inscribed with Carr’s handwriting.

“He apologized because he knew my rules [forbidding carrying religiously identifiable objects on the escape route],” she said with pride, “but he said he put it in his pocket when he left, and it has brought him good luck.”

By Deborah Weiss FrontPageMagazine.com

November 9, 2008 marked the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. It was a night of terror which constituted the commencement of the Holocaust. It was a horrible night, but it was merely a foreshadow of the doom yet to come. This anniversary should not merely commemorate the horrible events that took place in 1938. Rather, it should serve as a warning that we must learn the lessons of history lest we repeat our mistakes; we must take our enemies’ words seriously, and we must not be complacent in the face of evil.

Hitler disguised his plan to exterminate Jews when he first seized power in 1933. Instead of announcing his plan for genocide, he implemented more palatable anti-Semitic policies, which were incremental, systematic, and strategic. Initially, the policies deprived Jews of social, economic, and legal rights. They helped to desensitize the public to discrimination and hate. Eventually, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped the Jews of their German citizenship and they remained legally nationless.

In October of 1938, the Nazis deported approximately 17,000 Polish Jews back to their land of origin. Each was allowed to take one suitcase of belongings. Their businesses, homes, and other possessions were confiscated by the German government. However, Poland refused to take the Jews back, as they were no longer Polish citizens. They remained on the border of Poland in military stables, penniless, jobless, and in hideous conditions.

Herschel Grynzpan, a 17-year-old student in Paris, learned that this was the plight of his family. His sister, Berta, had sent him a postcard from the Polish outskirts, asking him to send money. Enraged, Herschel bought a gun. On November 7, 1938 he went to the German Embassy and fired five shots at the Third Secretary, Ernst von Rath, whom he mistook for the Ambassador. Herschel took this drastic action to draw attention to how Germany was treating the Jews. Two days later, von Rath died.

The assassination was the perfect pretext for Nazi reprisal against the Jews. Josef Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, organized what later became known as “Kristallnacht” or “night of the broken glass.” Some historians believe that the Nazis had planned an act of violence against the Jews well before the shooting, and were merely waiting for the right moment to implement it.

On November 9, 1938, Richard Heydrich, head of the office that oversaw the Gestapo, the SA, and the State Police, issued a telegraph to all headquarters and police stations. It informed them that riots against the Jews in Austria and Germany would occur that night and into the next morning. It instructed them not to interfere with the violence and to protect only the lives and property of non-Jews.

That evening, acting under Nazi instructions, mobs of Germans and Austrians incited riots. Dozens of Jews were killed, Torah scrolls were desecrated, and hundreds of synagogues were burned to ashes, many of which had been historical houses of worship standing proudly in Germany for centuries prior. Firemen were forbidden from extinguishing the flames.

Approximately 7500 Jewish shops, businesses and homes were vandalized, pillaged and ransacked. This included orphanages and hospitals for sick Jewish children. Some standers-by joined in the rampage, including women and children. Others cried, and more remained silent. Thirty thousand young, healthy Jewish males were arrested, imprisoned and sent to concentration camps. The next morning, the streets were littered with shattered glass from the broken windows.

When all was said and done, some complained that destroying Jewish goods affected German businesses. As a result, the Jews were fined one billion marks to pay for the damage that had been done to them. Claims paid by insurance companies for the broken glass were taken by the state. It took six months for the windows to be completely replaced.

Kristallnacht signaled a dramatic shift in policy from political, social and economic persecution to physical beatings and murder. It was the inevitable progression of incremental discrimination and hate-filled policies. It was also the first violent pogrom in Western Europe in centuries. Further, it marked the end of the German-Jewish legacy which included centuries of religious scholarship, business-building, social activism, culture, science, government service and other Jewish contributions to German society. Previously, many Jews had even fought and died as German soldiers out of loyalty to their Fatherland.

The day after Kristallnacht, Goebbels announced, “[W]e shed not a tear for them. They stood in the way long enough. We can use the space made free more usefully than as a Jewish fortress.” He announced government-sanctioned reprisals against the Jewish community. Within weeks after the shooting of von Rath, Jewish newspapers and magazines were banned from publication, Jewish children were banned from “Aryan” state elementary schools, and all Jewish cultural activities were suspended indefinitely. The Nazis issued a “Decree on Eliminating the Jews from German Economic Life.” Jewish businesses were not allowed to re-open unless they were managed by non-Jews. Jews were no longer allowed to own radios or have driver’s licenses. They were given curfews and geographically segregated. Virtually no Jewish-German contact was permitted in public life, whether related to transportation, schooling, or hospitals.

Though many newspapers and magazines throughout the world condemned the Nazis, little action was taken to actually help the Jews in Germany. Some Jews were permitted to enter England. President Roosevelt stated that refugees already in America on visas could remain. However, the U.S. legislature voted not to open its doors to additional Jewish refugees. And for the most part, other western countries did not change their immigration policies to come to the rescue of the Jews.

The apparent apathy of the “civilized world” in response to Nazi brutality against the Jews only emboldened them. It led them rightly to believe that they could commit ever increasing acts of violence and cruelty without consequence. Jews in Germany, who were no longer citizens of any country, remained trapped in Germany without legal or physical protections from any government. They were no longer human; they were “untermenschen” (subhuman).

During the 1942 Wannsee Conference, the SS adopted the “Final Solution” as official government policy. It paved the way for them to implement policies toward a Judenfrei Europe, and to extinguish the Jewish race as humans would extinguish rodents. Heydrich, who had previously participated in the meeting to remove Jews from all economic life, was appointed Chief Executor of the Final Solution.

Today it is not Aryan supremacists who want to extinguish all Jews, but Islamist supremacists who want all countries to be ruled by Sharia. In some regions of the world, Islamists are imposing their will through acts of violence and terrorism. In the West, they are using non-violent means to achieve the same radical goals. They are lobbying, legislating, litigating, and infiltrating our governments and universities. They are fighting to obtain preferential treatment and take away our freedom.

We must stop our enemies in their first steps on the path toward evil. We cannot give them a foothold. If we do, we have been forewarned. In the face of apathy and complacency, our values, freedom, and national security will be at risk.

Edmund Burke once said “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”. Make no mistake about it — Hitler is back with a different name. After WWII, the world vowed never again. Today, we have another chance to look evil in the eye and take action to defeat it. Will we rise to the challenge? Or will we, once again, sit idly by?

By Hillel Fendel, www.IsraelNN.com

The widely-disseminated Arab Muslim position that the Temple Mount is not Jewish has been debunked — by the Supreme Muslim Council (Waqf) of Jerusalem, in a Temple Mount guide published in 1925.

Guidebook Puts the Lie to Current Arab Campaign

In 1997, the chief Muslim cleric of the Palestinian Authority, Mufti Ikrama Sabri, stated, “The claim of the Jews to the right over [Jerusalem] is false, and we recognize nothing but an entirely Islamic Jerusalem under Islamic supervision…”

Thus began a campaign to convince the world that the millennia-old natural association between Jerusalem and Jews was untrue. As Islamic Movement chief Raed Salah stated in 2006, “We remind, for the 1,000th time, that the entire Al-Aqsa mosque [on the Temple Mount], including all of its area and alleys above the ground and under it, is exclusive and absolute Muslim property, and no one else has any rights to even one grain of earth in it.”

However, it is now known that this “absolute” Muslim claim is actually not as absolute as claimed. In fact, back in 1925, the Supreme Muslim Council — also known as the Waqf, which has overseen Temple Mount activities on behalf of the Muslim religion for hundreds of years — boasted proudly that the site was none other than that of Solomon’s Temple.

The Jerusalem-based Temple Institute (http://www.templeinstitute.org) reports that it has acquired a copy of the official 1925 Supreme Muslim Council Guide Book to Al-Haram Al-Sharif (the Muslim name for the Temple Mount). On page 4, the Waqf states, “Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which ‘David built there an altar unto the L-rd…’, citing the source in 2 Samuel XXIV, 25.”

In addition, on page 16, the pamphlet makes reference to the underground area in the southeast corner of the Mount, which it refers to as Solomon’s Stables. “Little is known for certain of the history of the chamber itself,” the guide reads. “It dates probably as far back as the construction of Solomon’s Temple. According to Josephus, it was in existence and was used as a place of refuge by the Jews at the time of the conquest of Jerusalem by Titus in the year 70 A.D.”

The Temple Mount in Jerusalem was in fact the site of the two Jewish Holy Temples which stood for nearly 1,000 years (see below).

Proof of Muslim Anti-Jewish Revisionism

The Temple Institute’s Rabbi Chaim Richman writes that the pamphlet provides proof that the Waqf’s current position is a departure from traditional Muslim belief. “In recent years,” he writes, “the Muslim Waqf has come to deny the historic existence of the Holy Temple, claiming that the Temple Mount belongs solely to the Muslim nation, and that there exists no connection between the Jewish nation and the Temple Mount. It is clear from this pamphlet that the revised Waqf position strays from traditional Muslim acknowledgment of the Mount’s Jewish antecedents.”

“The current denial of historical reality is merely one tool in the war being waged by Muslims against the G-d of Israel and the entire ‘infidel’ world,” Richman declares.

Examples of the new Palestinian/Arab position on Jerusalem:
PA Mufti Sabri was quoted in the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam on November 22, 1997 as saying, “The ‘Al-Buraq’ Wall [the Western Wall] is a part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Jews have no relation to it.”

The same newspaper, on July 18, 1997, reported that Hamad Yusef, head of The Institution for the Rejuvenation of the Palestinian Heritage, referred to the “false historical claim of the Jews in the holy city, a claim which they were unable to prove in all of the excavations conducted by foreign groups for the past hundred years.” The paper also stated that Hamad “accused the Israelis of unprecedented historical forgeries, emphasizing the Palestinian, the Arab and the Islamic nature of the holy city for the past 6,000 years. Israel fails in her attempt to find a historical connection to Jerusalem.” (courtesy of Jewish Virtual Library)

Jewish History on the Mount

The Temple Mount in Jerusalem was the site of the two Jewish Holy Temples, the first of which was built by King Solomon in the year 832 BCE, close to 1,500 years before Islam was founded. It stood for over 400 years, and after the 70-year Babylonian Exile, a Second Temple was built on the same site. Thus, for nearly 1,000 years, Holy Temples stood on the site, until the Romans conquered the entire land and destroyed the Second Temple. Though the area came under the control of the Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Christians, Turks, British and others over the intervening centuries, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount were always the focus of Jewish religious and national yearnings, and continued to be the Jews’ “capital” even while in exile. In the Six Day War of 1967, the modern State of Israel liberated the Temple Mount area and all of Jerusalem, placing it under Jewish control once again after a hiatus of 1,900 years.

Israel, however, never actualized its sovereignty over the holy Temple Mount site, but rather granted the Waqf nearly total control. Jews, in fact, have not been allowed to pray there ever since then-Chief IDF Rabbi Shlomo Goren led a prayer service there on the first Tisha B’Av after the liberation. Jews’ visiting hours are also restricted.

By Ben Harris, www.jta.org

Sarah Palin is being disinvited from the Jewish-sponsored Iran rally, sources told JTA.

The move follows two days of controversy for organizers of Monday�s rally to protest Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations.

The controversy erupted after JTA reported that Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, had accepted an invitation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to speak at the event. The news of Palin�s participation prompted Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who had pledged several weeks earlier to speak at the rally, to announce she was withdrawing from the event.

Spokespeople for both Palin and Clinton proceeded to trade barbs over who was responsible for tainting the rally with politics.

A Clinton spokesperson said the senator withdrew because the rally had become “a partisan political event.”

Palin spokeswoman Tracy Schmitt took a shot at Clinton, saying the Republican nominee “believes that the danger of a nuclear Iran is greater than party or politics.”

The National Jewish Democratic Council defended Clinton’s decision not to attend and called for Palin to be disinvited so as to preserve the nonpartisan nature of the effort to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

On Thursday, the Conference of Presidents held a conference call for rally organizers in which the decision was made to limit participation in the rally to unelected officials, participants on the call told JTA.

Shortly afterward, organizers put out a statement saying, “In order to keep the focus on Iranian threats and to ensure that this critical message not be obscured, the organizers of the rally have decided not to have any American political personalities appear.”

The statement said Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and Israeli Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik would address the demonstration.

The controversy has sparked concern that the issue of stopping Iran has been politicized, undermining efforts to cast opposition to Ahmadinejad’s belligerence and nuclear ambitions as a broad bipartisan issue in the United States. Jewish organizers have labored to present the Iranian regime as a threat not only to Israel but to the United States and the world.

In an effort to avoid the taint of imbalance and partisanship, the Presidents Conference issued a late invitation to the Obama campaign Wednesday morning. But reportedly irked by the conference’s slight, the Obama camp did not commit to sending a representative.

Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Presidents Conference, told JTA earlier this week that the invitation to speak at the rally was extended to Clinton several weeks ago. He also told The New York Jewish Week that once Clinton accepted, organizers did not want to supersede her by bringing in someone from the Obama campaign.

Fred Zeidman, a leading Jewish backer of Republican presidential nominee John McCain, told JTA he was approached about helping secure a speaker around the time of the Republican National Convention at the beginning of September in Minnesota. Zeidman said he forwarded the request to the campaign last week with a recommendation that it cooperate.

�I remember saying to our guys, Hillary Clinton is representing the other side,� Zeidman said. �We�ve got to really take this seriously.�

In a statement this week, the McCain campaign noted its participation in the rally and derided Obama’s stated willingness to negotiate with the man being protested.

“Instead of pressuring Senator Clinton to withdraw and pressuring the event’s organizers to disinvite Governor Palin, we hope Senator Obama will consider lending his own voice to this cause,� McCain-Palin spokesman Michael Goldfarb said in a statement published on a Washington Post�s campaign blog, The Trail. �And if [the] Senator subsequently wishes to clarify any remarks that might be misconstrued, he will have the opportunity to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions after he speaks at the U.N. the following day.”

Clinton advisers said the senator dropped out of her own accord, not due to any pressure from the Obama campaign, according to the Washington Post.

The rally “is not and will not be a partisan event,” Hoenlein told The Jewish Week before his group decided to cancel the invitation to Palin. “The organizers reached out to a wide spectrum of people. Hillary accepted early in August. We also asked numerous Republicans. Some we approached couldn’t make it, and since Governor Palin was coming to the United Nations to meet world leaders, her staff agreed to have her speak.”

Ira Forman, the National Jewish Democratic Council’s executive director, said it is the McCain campaign that was guilty of politicizing the rally with its partisan statements.

Along with other Jews involved in organizing the event, Forman also laid blame with the Presidents Conference, saying it bungled matters either by inviting Palin at all or by failing to notify the Clinton camp promptly that it had secured Palin’s participation. Forman praised the decision Thursday to cancel Palin�s appearance.

�It was a wise decision to make,� he said. �It depoliticizes an event that fundamentally needs support from everybody and shouldn’t be part of the political circus this year.�

Jewish Republicans agreed that the organizers blundered — but said the mistake was withdrawing the invitation to Palin.

�This is one of the biggest black marks on our community that I can remember in more than 20 years of working in the Jewish community,� Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JTA. �I think it is absolutely outrageous that we allow people with a partisan political agenda to hijack an event that is designed to send a message to Iran and the rest of the world of the U.S.’s commitment to ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons. The fact that we can’t put partisan differences aside to come together on something like this, it’s sad and it’s disappointing.�

As the campaigns sparred over who was guilty of placing partisanship above principle, some Jewish leaders worried that an event intended to display unity in the face of the Iranian threat was crumbling.

�I do think that’s unfortunate,” said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism. “The point here obviously is to show broad bipartisan support for the need to stop a nuclear Iran. We don’t want the message to be diverted by internal political considerations.�

�It doesn’t make sense to me as an American Jewish policy matter, and as an American matter, to let one party or the other off the hook over what is going to be, objectively in our view, the most serious foreign policy issue of the next administration,� said David Twersky, a senior advisor on policy, international affairs and communications at the American Jewish Congress. �It’s not a good policy for the Jews.�