Grandma's army

The Gospels were theology, not history. Evangelizing documents that laid the foundation of a new faith. A faith that, by the end of the first century, was in sharp conflict with the one from which it had sprung. The refusal of the Jews to accept Jesus as their savior was regarded as a mortal threat to the early Church, and there were many attacks on the Jews. Numerous critical biblical scholars and contemporary historians have concluded that the evangelists and their editors in the early Church consciously shifted the blame for Jesus’ death from the Romans to the Jews. This was in order to make Christianity more appealing to gentiles living under Roman rule, and less threatening to the Romans themselves. Within a few short years of the crucifixion, the Jesus movement was in grave danger of being reabsorbed by Judaism. There was nothing the Church Fathers could do to change the fact that Jesus died a Roman death at the hands of Roman troops. But if they could suggest that the Jews had f...

World War II was different from any other military campaign - it was actually two wars running on parallel lines. One was with the usual objective of conquering territory. The other objective was a war of worldwide liquidation of   the Jews. In fact, Hitler was so obsessed by hatred that his last anti-Semitic tirade was written in his will, right before putting the pistol to his head! Three weeks in the summer is an annual period of mourning for many Jews. It begins on the day when the walls of Jerusalem were breached by the Romans in 69 BCE, and concludes when both Temples were destroyed. It is the saddest day of the Jewish calendar, and incorporates many other tragedies  that happened to the Jews at the same time of the year. Fasting during the last day of this period (this coming Sunday), the book of Lamentations is read in the darkened synagogues. Although the events described above happened over 2,000 years ago, the book of Lamentations, which is part of...

During the Passover holidays I visited “Jewish” Salonika, the second largest city in Greece and the capital of Macedonia. Since Jews all over the world will be commemorating Holocaust Day tomorrow, we were interested to learn what became of the local Jewish community during WWII. Unbelievably, we were told that 98% of the community perished in concentration camps!  To compound the tragedy -   the physical extermination of Salonikan Jews was followed by almost total oblivion about the history, influences and accomplishments of the city’s Jews. The first Jews are thought to have arrived in the region in 513 B.C.E. and remained uninterrupted throughout the Roman and Byzantine eras. However, it was the influx of the 20,000 Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition in 1492 and found refuge in Ottomon Saloniki, which created an autonomous Jewish city. At least two thirds of the total population were Jewish. Salonika was dubbed “Mother of Israel” and “Jerusalem of the Balkans...

LATRUN - II One of the fiercest and most crucial battles of the War of Independence was the fight for the fortress of Latrun , which commands the main road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. This series of engagements is important in its own right, and also because some who fought there went on to become important figures. Two would even rise to the office of prime minister: Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon . The fortress at Latrun, and the nearby Trappist monastery overlook the scenic Ayalon Valley, about 16 kilometers west of Jerusalem Its commanding location along an ancient route gives it great strategic value, making it the site of many battles, going back to biblical times. Here, Joshua prayed for God to make the sun stand still so he could finish defeating the Amorites (Joshua 10:12-13). In 167 BCE the Ayalon Valley was where Judah the Maccabi won an important victory over the Seleucids. The Templars built a fortress there in 1187.   In the late 1930s in Mandatory Pale...

This year Israel celebrated the 70th anniversary of its statehood. Many, and not only Jews, have described the incredible progress and development of Israel during that period as a miracle. Looking at it objectively, it is difficult to see it in any other way. When David Ben-Gurion spoke of Israel as being The Light of the Nations the poor and arid country was barely able to sustain itself, let alone give humanitarian aid to others. Israel started off in the most humble and adverse conditions. With the end of the British mandate and the  establishment of the Jewish State of Israel in 1948 ,  a “war of extinction” was undertaken by all of Israel’s Arab neighbors. Israel’s small population then of just over 800,000 people managed not only to defend itself, but also to even conquer territory beyond the truncated partition lines allocated to it by the United Nations at the time. In addition, this mostly desert state absorbed in its early years hundreds of tho...

How can anyone in the world, politically astute, who looks at the map and the demographics and says it’s within the power of the Jewish people to bring peace? There is a chorus around the world which accompanies our peace process which states: “Go on with this peace process. It is good for you. It is the only way. You are morally obliged to continue”. We hear it from everywhere in the whole of enlightened Europe. “The number of Jews killed in terrorist attacks is small, and you are accustomed to death. You have been hounded for generations, and lost six million only three generations ago. With one and a half million children among   those millions, what matters it in the grand scheme of things if another teenager is murdered.” A nation worn and grief-stricken from the devastation of the Holocaust believed that its victory in war, the final arbiter of international politics, would ensure its ultimate acceptance in the region. Yet the Arabs refus...

Too often I found myself saying something like,  “ If only I hadn’t done this or that” and them went on to contemplate how very different things would have been, if I had taken note of the word if , stopped to think about what I was doing and changed direction. The most popular poet of his day, Rudyard Kipling, even wrote a poem called if . I can still remember some of the lines by heart and they sum up, for me, the eternal Jewish story: “ If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too: If you can wait and not be tired of waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating And yet don’t look too good nor talk too wise….. The unreasoning hatred in this world to the Jewish people is one of the great mysteries of the human story. It is the oldest social disease and, unfortunately, it is still ...

Israel is a country in the Middle East, a piece of real estate so small that one needs a magnifying glass when searching for it on a map. Its main inhabitants, the Jews, together with their brothers and sisters throughout the world , amount to a pathetic less than 0.02 percent   of the world population. As Sir Isaiah Berlin once famously quipped, “The Jews have enjoyed rather too much history and too little geography.” The anti-Semite has a hard time with Jews. They boycott us in academia, journalism, European governments, the marketplace, etc. The trouble with us is that we are constantly breaking the rules. For thousands of years, we have survived powerful empires that did everything to destroy us – the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, the Germans - and there were plenty to give them a willing hand. In the 20 th century, it looked as if they had finally succeeded. Six million were murdered in the Holocaust. But, instead of disappearing, we decided that after 2,000 yea...

I have always been something of a musical snob and only interested in classical music. I therefore missed out on a great artist of our times and only discovered him after he died,  when listening to his prophetic swansong “Hineni”. Nineteen days before his own death, Leonard Cohen issued the album “You Want It Darker”, whose prophetic words were matched to music which was the deepest, darkest and slowest of his career. After my interest was awakened I discovered that Leonard Cohen”s ancestors came from a village in Lithuania called Moletai, just outside of Vilna. The list of people who trace their ancestry to this small town, those who the Nazis and Lithuanians wanted to annihilate, includes many of the greatest Jewish minds of our time. It includes Nobel Prize Laureate Bob Dylan ; Canada’s great international human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler; former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin ; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ; painter Marc Chagall ; foremost American composer Aar...

I am now back in Israel, waiting for my granddaughter to give us her impressions of her life as a “lone soldier”. Actually, she is serving in the airforce so we are still “up in the air”. Which reminds me of something I heard some time ago which is probably  not well-known. Perhaps the most emotional song to emerge out of the mass exodus from Europe was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” which was introduced in the popular film The Wizard of Oz.  The song was voted the 20 th century’s No. 1 song by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. The lyrics were written by Yip Harburg, the youngest of four children born, in New York to Russian-Jewish immigrants. The music was written by Harold Arlen son of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. In writing it, the two men reached deep into their immigrant Jewish consciousness, from the progroms of the past and the Holocaust about to happen. Read the lyrics in their Jewish context and suddenly th...