Grandma's army

  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 has again reared its ugly head in today’s society. Assimilation has not proven the answer. In Russia, during the last quarter of the 19 th century, a great number of Jews assimilated, many becoming Christians. Anti-Semitisim didn’t disappear but worsened. The use of the term "pogrom" became common in the English language after a large-scale wave of murderous anti-Jewish riots swept through more than 200 towns and villages in south-western Imperial Russia. As a result of the growing anti-Semitism, between three to five million Jews escaped to the west. The doctor and writer, Leon Pinsker,   believed like many others,   that the spreading of Emancipation and humanism would bring an end to anti-Semitism. When the progroms which erupted, were eventually abetted by the government and defended by the ...

Like the corona virus, the new anti-Semitism has mutated so that practitioners of it can deny that they are anti-Semites. “After all”, they’ll say, “I’m not a racist. I have no problem with Jews or Judaism. I only have a problem with the State of Israel”. But in a world of 56 Muslim nations and 103 Christian ones, there is only one Jewish state, which constitutes one-quarter of one per cent of the land mass of the Middle East! Israel is the only one of the 193 member nations of the United Nations that has its right to exist regularly challenged, with one state, Iran, and other groups, committed to its destruction. How come the Jews have been  “chosen” for thousands of years as the world’s scapegoats whenever a crisis emerges? At the time of Jesus, Jews were hated because of their religion. At the time of Hitler they were hated because of their race. Today, since the leading source of authority worldwide is “human rights” Israel is regularly accused of crimes against humanity:...

A LIFE-THREATENING DISEASE Like the beginning of every new year - and especially after the one just passed - we hope that the new year will bring to the world a change for the better. Tragically, one thing never changes…. It should come as no surprise that Jews are in the forefront of scientists and others dealing with the COVID-19 virus. To name a few: Mikael Dolsten is the Chief Scientific Officer at Pfizer; Albert Boria is the   Pfizer CEO; An Israeli, Tal Zaks is the Chief Medical Officer for Moderna ; Drew Weissman is one of the two scientists responsible for pioneering a breakthrough with the development of the mRNA vaccine used by both Moderna and Pfizer; Jeff Zients will be Joe Biden’s overseer for the entire CORONA response; Dr. Rochelle Walensky   is Biden’s new Head of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.   It also comes as no surprise that Jews   are being blamed for the latest pandemic, just as they were blamed for the Black Death in th...

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...

ZIONISM - SPIRITUAL Jews often trace their nationhood back to the biblical kingdoms of David and Solomon, 950 BCE. The word  Zion  is used in a theological or spiritual sense in Scripture. In the Old Testament  Zion   refers figuratively to Israel as the people of God ( Isaiah 60:14 ) . –ism is a suffix added to the end of a word to indicate that the word represents a specific practice, system, or philosophy - accepted as an authority by a group or school of thought.  Often these practices, systems, or philosophies are political ideologies or artistic movements.  After the destruction of the Temple and their defeat by the Romans, the Jews passed beyond the realm of politics, becoming a nation of the spirit. They managed to construct a political strategy so creative that they could linger on as a nation after losing the three building blocks of nationhood: land , central authority , and the means of self-defense . In every place they settled, they ...

Today is “Jerusalem Day” and I am taking advantage   of my blog to quote excerpts from a moving article I once received concerning Jerusalem. It was written by Eliezer Whartman after the Six Day War, in memory of his son Moshe z”l who fell in a clash with terrorists in Lebanon in 1975. “I am not a creature from another planet, as you seem to believe. I am a Jerusalemite – like yourselves, a man of flesh and blood. I am a citizen of my city, an integral part of my people. There was a Jerusalem before there was a New York. When Berlin, Moscow, London and Paris were forest and swamp, there was a thriving Jewish community here. It gave something to the world which you nations have rejected ever since you established yourselves – a humane moral code. Here the prophets walked, their words flashing like forked lightening. Here a people who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, fought off waves of heathen would-be conquerors, bled and died on the battlements, hurled th...

Last week the subject was the Six Day war. A far different war was inflicted upon us six years later. The Yom Kippur war caught Israel completely by surprise since our enemies chose the most holy day in the Jewish calendar to attack us. The then Prime Minister, Golda Meir, visited the worn- out and filthy soldiers in the front line. One exhausted member of a tank crew asked Golda: “My father was killed in the 1948 war, and we won. Last week I lost my best friend and we’re now winning. But is all our sacrifice worthwhile, Golda? What’s the use of our military power if we can’t win the peace? After expressing her understanding of his question and her condolences,   Golda Meir added: In 1948, in this season of the year, I arrived in Moscow as Israel’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union. The State of Israel was brand new. Stalinism was at its height. Jews, as Jews, had no rights. They had been cut off from their fellow Jews for 30 years. Since the Communist revolu...

                                          Ephraim Kishon (1924-2005), deserves a blog of his own. He was Israel’s premier satirist, whose biting wit shaped the national agenda of the formative years of the Jewish state, and kept people laughing at the same time. Mr. Kishon’s influence went beyond the large number of people who read his books and newspaper column or watched the skits, plays and movies he wrote. He was one of the most popular satirists worldwide, selling more than 40 million books in his half-century of writing.  Efraim Kishon’s quotes: Israel is a country so tiny that there is no room to write its name on the world map. It is a country of boundless boundaries. It is a country where mothers learn the mother tongue from their sons. It is a country wh...

JEW BASHERS Einstein on this very subject: "If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew". The Jews are the only people in the world who have found hostility in every country in which they settled in any numbers. Throughout history people have accused the Jews of the most outrageous, unbelievable things – from causing the plague and other scourges, to present day Holocaust deniers.   In spite of the fact that the Holocaust was the best documented account of genocide in the world ever written. Deborah Lipstadt a history professor was asked to write a book on Holocaust deniers. She maintains that for deniers to be right all “others” have to be wrong . The “others” are the victims, the survivors; bystanders, such as the   Poles who lived around the death camps and wat...

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 ...