Grandma's army

Over the centuries, the wandering nature of the Jewish people – mostly forced – has left a trail of unconnected contributions to a variety of civilizations. Jews built thriving institutions in Babylonia (today Iraq). They built colleges, hospitals, welfare centres, etc. only to be dispersed around 1,000 C.E. and have to start over again in a different place. The story then repeated itself   in England, where Jews were expelled in 1290, and France in 1394. To be repeated in the Spanish expulsion in 1942……and then again and again. In extolling Zionism, the Yiddish writer and Nobel Prize Laureate Sholom Aleichem, compares sovereignty of land to ownership of property, and the wandering Jew as, at best, renting. An apartment building composed entirely of owners is always kept in better condition than a similar building occupied only by renters. When a group pursue collective objectives, these will be more successfully achieved when such efforts are concentrated in, and from, a cent...

  “Israel doesn’t exist because the Holocaust happened. The Holocaust happened because Israel didn’t exist.” We are currently in the “sandwich” between the twin tragedies of the Holocaust and Day of Remembrance for the 24,000 Israeli soldiers killed in battle since the state began. Since its inception in 1988, every year, more than a quarter of a million participants have marched down the same 3-kilometer path leading from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Holocaust Remembrance Day -   as a tribute to the most significant loss in the history of the Jewish people, and humanity. This March of the Living bears witness to one of history’s darkest hours, recommitting to the Never Again imperative.  An other imperative was the horrendous progroms being perpetrated against the Jews in Russia   during World War I -   the worst progroms Eastern Europe had ever known. Jews living in villages and towns along the front lines had been expelled, and horrific attacks ensued. Afte...