Levitt Letter Extra News

By Ludwig Schneider, Israel Today

Most of the Jewish prayers are brachot (benedictions or blessings), in which the one praying blesses God. Blessings begin with this formula:

Baruch Ata Adonai, Eloheinu,

Melech ha’olam…

Blessed are You, O Lord our

God, King of the universe…

There are specific blessings for all occasions—for bread and wine on the Sabbath, for festivals like Passover and Hanukkah, and for simchot (joyous occasions) like bar mitzvahs and weddings.

Any individual Jew can pray alone in his room or at the Western Wall, but when the prayer occurs in the context of a religious service, there must be at least 10 men praying together, or a minyan. This is derived from Abraham’s struggle in prayer for the rescue of Sodom, going down to 10 men (Genesis 18:32).

In accordance with the daily sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem, three prayer times were established, which were later taken up for the service in the synagogue:

Shacharit—The Morning Prayer

Mincha—The Afternoon Prayer

Ma’ariv—The Evening Prayer

At all three prayer times, these two prayers are recited: the Shmoneh Esrei (18 benedictions), and the confession of faith, Shema Yisrael, the “Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4).

The prayers are mostly from the Psalms. However, when the word sela appears, the one praying can add his own extemporaneous prayers and bring his personal requests before the Lord. The sela acts as a finale in the sense of “God is my final help.”

In addition, one is to pray after getting up in the morning and before going to bed, as well as before and after meals and on other set occasions. These prayers are contained in the common prayer book, the Siddur. The word siddur comes from seder (order) because the book gives directions about what to pray and when.

For the Jewish festivals there is the Machzor (cycles), which has several volumes and regulates the cycle of prayers throughout the year. Since the Jews were scattered among the nations and spoke many different languages, the Hebrew text is often printed on the right-hand page of the Siddur while a translation appears on the left-hand page.

A religious Jewish man wears a kippah (skullcap) when he prays. The word kippah means cap, which in turn can be linked with kapparah (atonement), implying that “I am covered by a propitiation.” A religious woman wears a headscarf when praying.

The men also wear a prayer shawl or tallit (Numbers 15:37-41; Deuteronomy 22:12), which has tzitziot (tassels) on each of its four corners. In the New Testament, this term is often translated as the “hem” of the garment.

During morning prayers observant men bind prayer straps or tefillin (phylacteries) to their arms and foreheads. Inside the small tefillin box, which is tied to the forehead, are the following texts written on parchment: Exodus 13:1-10; 11-16; Deuteronomy 6:4-9; 11:13-21.

Jews always pray facing Jerusalem, and those who live in the Holy City pray facing the Temple Mount. In places of Jewish worship and in private homes abroad, a mizrach (a decorated plaque with a blessing, often Psalm 16:8-11) is often placed on the wall facing toward Jerusalem, indicating which way to face in prayer.

The posture of prayer includes bowing down, particularly when the name of God is spoken, or a spreading out of one’s hands before the Lord. Those who wish to demonstrate particular reverence will cover their heads with their prayer shawl or move back three steps. Placing your hands in your pockets while praying is considered irreverent.

While some holy days like Yom Kippur are solemn, prayer is supposed to be joyous, especially on the Sabbath and other festivals. For instance, on the festival of Simchat Torah (Rejoicing in the Law), congregants rejoice like a bridegroom over the bride, dancing around the synagogue while holding the Torah scrolls in their arms.

Outward appearance is not the key factor when praying; however, the outward appearance should mirror one’s inward attitude.

By Peggy Shapiro, www.americanthinker.com

Where could you hear radio talk show hosts Dennis Prager and Michael Medved, military analyst Elliot Chodoff, Israel’s Ambassador Michael Oren, Senator Joe Lieberman, country music star Randy Travis, and cantor and musical theater singer Dudu Fisher on the same stage with ministers and orthodox rabbis? Where could you see over four thousand Christians waving Israeli and American flags to the singing of national anthems of Israel and the U.S. and breaking out in spontaneous dance during the playing of Havah Nagilah? Where could you witness Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and Pentecostals wearing Star of David necklaces, which they had just purchased at an Israel bazaar?  That’s what I heard, saw, and witnessed at the Conference of Christians United for Israel in Washington D.C. on July 19-22 when Christian Zionists from a multitude of denominations and backgrounds took up the huge Convention Center and made over 400 lobby appointments on Capital Hill to speak up for Israel and mark a change in the Jewish-Christian relationship.

The attendees were African Americans, Asians, Caucasians, Hispanics, teens, octogenarians, the affluent, and the unemployed from all over the U.S. I met a Nigerian mechanical engineering student who was pursuing a Master’s Degree and supporting a wife and child, a stunningly beautiful airline hostess who brought her granddaughter, an African American grandmother who was planning her 16th trip to Israel, and a food chemist for a large corporation. I spoke to a shy woman from the southern tip of Illinois. She had never made a public speech or taken political action and called herself “a hick from the sticks.” My roommate, along with 89 others, made their way to Washington from Minnesota on a 24-hour bus ride. The crowd was diverse, but they shared one common mission, which was proclaimed on the banners which hung from every rafter: “For Zion’s sake, I will not keep silent.” They were united by their commitment to speak up on behalf of the State of Israel and for its rights to exist, to self defense, and to sovereignty.

The focus of the conference was a two-pronged message to Congress and to the Obama administration, which has recently taken Israel to task for adding housing to accommodate the natural growth in its “settlements,” while soft-peddling any criticism of Iran’s nuclear ambitions: Israel is not the obstacle to peace, and the U.S. must place crippling sanctions on Iran to stop the terror-sponsoring state from acquiring nuclear arms.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told the group, “Critics say the stumbling block [to peace in the Middle East] is settlements or Jerusalem or refugees,” “We all know the real stumbling block to peace is posed by those who vehemently deny the nation of Israel’s historical right to the land of Zion.” Democrat Shelley Berkley (D-Nev) minced no words in her criticism,  “…to pin the peace process” on the settlement issue “is absolutely foolhardy. To publicly dress down the State of Israel is a huge mistake.”  CUFI founder and chairman Pastor John Hagee forcefully summed up the message, “America is singling out Israel…Despite all of the risks Israel has taken for peace, our government is pressuring Israel to take more risks. Hello Congress, we’re putting pressure on the wrong people here. You want to get tough, get tough with the terrorists, not the only democracy in the Middle East.” The crowd responded with a thunderous ovation.

Speaker after speaker pointed to the refusal of Palestinians and Arabs to accept a Jewish state in any part of the Middle East as the cause of the sixty-one year conflict, and to Iran for escalating the terror through its proxies of Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south. They urged the administration not to underestimate Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the existential threat they pose to Israel and to the entire region. U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who accepted CUFI’s Defender of Israel Award at the Tuesday Night to Honor Israel, evening, said, “The chief obstacle to peace in the Middle East is not Israelis living on the West Bank but the regime in Tehran.”

After an extravagant Night to Honor Israel, on Wednesday, CUFI delegates took the message to Capitol Hill to tell their members of Congress not pressure the Jewish state but to respect the democratic nation and work with it as a friend. Representatives were also asked to co-sponsor legislation that could strengthen the President’s hand in the event that negotiations do not prove fruitful. One bill is the Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act, which would impose sanctions on companies that help Iran import or produce refined petroleum. The other bill, The Iran Sanctions Enabling Act, which authorizes state and local governments to divest from companies investing in Iran’s energy sector, never made it to the floor when it was introduced last year.

The CUFI conference sent a message not only to Congress and to the President, but also to Jews. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who addressed the conference via satellite, acknowledged that the conference marked the changing relationship of Christians and Jews. “For centuries, the relationship between Christians and Jews was marked by conflict rather than partnership and friendship, but this is changing. A new chapter in the relationship between us is now being written.” Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, in a passionate speech proclaimed that the threats Jews face today from a regime that is determined to wipe Israel off the map are fundamentally different from the threats Jews faced in 1939 because now there are “tens of millions of Christians who will not be silent and stand with the State of Israel.”

In the breakout sessions to fellow Christians, pastors addressed the skepticism of some in the Jewish community about allying with Christian Zionists because of a history of Church anti-Semitism and replacement theology (which teaches that Christians replaced Jews as the “Chosen People”). In a number of meetings, clergy warned that some Evangelicals, such as former President Jimmy Carter, are spewing anti-Semitism when they profess Replacement Theology. The pastors gave the biblical foundation for the support of Israel. It is not the conversion of Jews nor hastening the end of days, but the strongly held belief that God blesses those who bless the Jews and curses those who curse the Jews. (Genesis 12:13)

C.U.F.I., established only four years ago, now has 150,000 members who are living their belief and who have aspirations for growing to millions of voices which “are silent no more” when Jews or the Jewish State are in danger.

By Ronald Kessler, www.NewsMax.com

Reaction to President Obama’s speech to a Muslim audience in Cairo in early June has drawn a range of reaction from many Jewish leaders. Detractors condemned it as a revision of the long and close relationship between the U.S. and Israel. But many who backed Obama were also surprised and dismayed over Obama’s speech. Such reactions from major Jewish leaders have largely remained beneath the surface, exchanged privately among them.

Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, spoke out. “I have no problem with addressing the Muslim world. We here at the conference have done it for about 12 or 15 years. But the question is, what is the message they get? It’s not so much what he says, but how do they perceive what he says?”

On the one hand, Hoenlein says, “His reference to Israel and the special relationship being unbreakable is important, and references to persecution and Holocaust denial were important.”

But Hoenlein is disturbed that Obama did not mention the Jewish people’s ancient connection with the land of Israel. “There was no reference to the 3,000 years of Jewish connection to this land,” he says. “And that is one of the propaganda lines that the Arabs use: that the Jews are interlopers, that the two Temples never existed, that there was never any Jewish history in Israel. I don’t believe that was the president’s intent, but not making those references is troubling.”

Jews have claimed a connection to the land of their forefathers since 1400 B.C. Even after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., many Jews continued to reside in Jerusalem through the centuries, surviving various invasions. An 1845 Ottoman census of Jerusalem showed Jews outnumbered Muslim Arabs by almost 2 to 1 and were the dominant ethnic group in the region.

In his speech, President Obama addressed the issue of the Holocaust head-on, saying “Six million Jews were killed — more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today.” But he quickly changed the subject, comparing Hitler’s genocide of the Jews to the Palestinian struggle.

Hoenlein doesn’t buy Obama’s line of reasoning. “The Palestinian refugee problem, or dislocation as he said, didn’t come about because of the creation of the Jewish state,” Hoenlein says. “It came about because the Arab states declared war on Israel and warned the Arabs that they would suffer the same fate as the Jews if they didn’t get out. And then they kept them as political pawns. The reason the Palestinians don’t have a state is because their leaders rejected every offer for peace. Whether it was in 1937 or 1947 or 1967, or later on, up until Ehud Olmert’s offer and Ehud Barak’s offer, they rejected everything, even when they were getting virtually everything they had asked for.”

That is because, “The problem really is not what Israel does, it’s that Israel is,” Hoenlein says. “And they’re not ready to accept the existence of the Jewish state.”

Obama also failed to mention the other refugee problem involving nearly a million Jews. In 1948, Jews populated the major Arab cities from Baghdad in the east to Casablanca in the west. After Israel saw its rebirth, Jews “were driven out of Arab countries penniless, and some of their families had lived there for a thousand years, and yet there was no reference to them.” Hoenlein adds, “It’s a question of the realities that are communicated to a vast audience in the Arab Muslim world.”

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.”