Clasp Friends Wherever You Find them

"We feel that their support is genuine and not deriving from any ulterior motive."
"The number of Jewish communities is limited. When there are large numbers of Christians who are interested in visiting Israel and understanding Israel -- that, of course, is very, very helpful toward improving our international standing."
Akiva Tor, Israeli Foreign Ministry

Thousands of Christian Evangelists among marchers in a parade in the center of Jerusalem, marking the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. October 01, 2015. (Photo by Nati Shohat/Flash90)

 

An unusual collection of people representing delegates from 80 different countries gathered in Jerusalem to show their care and support for the Jewish State. An event that stands out as hugely at variance with the judgemental lack of esteem with which Israel is viewed in many countries of the world, as an 'occupying power', one that seeks to oppress the Palestinians, held to be victimized by the very creation of the State of Israel on lands Palestinian Arabs claim as their own.

 

And so it is with a different interpretation of the situation that the Christian Zionist movement exemplified in the world's Evangelical Christian movement with its pro-Israel International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, views Israel and its presence in its historical homeland. An organization which arranged a summit meeting in Jerusalem to coincide with the Judaic festival of Sukkot. Where a stadium was packed full of cheering pilgrims waving flags from Angola, Brazil China, Germany, Italy and the United States; even Egypt had its delegates.

 

ICEJ International

Recognized as one of the world's fastest-expanding religious movements, Evangelical Christianity is in full support of Israel's existence and its expansion as a Zionist-inspired homeland for Jews returning to the geography of their Biblical heritage. Roughly 700 million of the world's two billion Christians are evangelicals. Theirs is a movement in expansion in Latin America, Africa and Asia representing regions which "hold great potential for the nation of Israel in political, diplomatic and economic terms", according to a position paper presented by the group to Israel's Foreign Ministry last year.

Using the Jewish holiday of Sukkot to highlight their annual summit, the Evangelicals term their week-long gathering of celebration, as the Feast of Tabernacles. In the Biblical era the holiday of Sukkot was characterized through a pilgrimage to the ancient Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. At this year's summit there were prayer rallies and concerts where believers sang Hebrew songs. An annual flag-waving parade marched through the streets of Jerusalem.

Although Israel is hugely condemned throughout the world for the establishment of settlements by Orthodox Jews reclaiming Judea and Samaria as their traditional homelands, now situated in what is called the West Bank which Palestinians claim for their future state, some evangelicals, in particular those from the United States, volunteer as workers on Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

In parliaments worldwide, 32 pro-Israeli caucuses exist, according to the Israel Allies Foundation, a Jewish-Christian political group responsible for bringing two dozen lawmakers from 18 countries to Jerusalem for the summit, to meet with Israeli lawmakers and officials. The purpose of the Israeli parliament's Christian Allies Caucus, initiated in 2004 was to link Christian leaders and Israeli lawmakers; re-launched at this year's summit.

International Christian Embassy Jerusalem director Jurgen Buhler introduced 20 lawmakers from the Ivory Coast who flew to the summit at the Ivory Coast parliament's own expense. They were greeted by a 12-ram's-horn recognition from Taiwanese evangelicals using shofars, the traditional Jewish instrument used at sacred occasions. Nigeria was represented by Rev.Mosy Maduga, head of a network of Christian ministers.

An evangelical South African lawmaker, head of the African Christian Democratic Party, explained his usefulness in blocking anti-Israel motions in South Africa's parliament, one of which represented an effort to label Israeli products produced in the West Bank as "settlement" products. Where once such robust Christian support of Jews and the Jewish homeland would have been regarded with suspicion, the situation now calls for celebration.

What the evangelical Christians are doing is recognizing the historical fount from which the religion they worship emanated from. As the crucible of Christianity, Jerusalem, Judaism and a Jew who has been recognized by Christianity as the Messiah, are simply being given credit where credit is due. And, in the process, redeeming Christianity itself by acknowledging its debt to Judaism, to the Jewish tribe, to the support of the state dedicated to Jewish perseverance in a hostile world.

The European Pathology of Jew-Hatred

Anti-Semitism is virtually unknown in the East, it is a Western disease. Before and during the Second World War official Japan laid out a plan to rescue European Jews from Hitler's extermination plan although Japan was officially aligned with Fascist Germany's Axis alliance. Even so, Japanese society was not infected by suspicion and hatred of Jews; it found them of interest because of the reputation Jews had for business acumen and scientific success.

Not only did the country take in tens of thousands of Jewish refugees desperate to escape the oppressive threats that Nazism meant for their future, but a Japanese consul in Lithuania and his wife managed to rescue another ten thousand Jews from death. The Japanese saw a similarity between Shinto Buddhism and Judaism. Fleeing the Third Reich, European Jewish families travelled to Shanghai, then under Japanese control, where they were able to survive the war.

Asian countries had no tradition of Jew-suspicion and hatred. China and India, members of the Conference of Non-Aligned States led by Nehru, Chou En Lai, Nasser and Tito, saw fit to regard Israel at one time with disfavour, because it was in their economic interests to befriend the Arab states. Once it became clearer to them that much could be gained for their countries' futures by aligning with Israel to further research and business opportunities, that changed; business propelled them, not antipathy toward Jews.

South Korea was fascinated by the unusually high number of Israeli and Jewish scientific Nobel Prize-winners and puzzled over the cause. Their own thinkers concluded that the mental agility required of minds exposed at a young age to Talmud study might be one of the reasons for Jewish ability to think, to imagine creatively, to excel at research and discovery. With this conclusion they thought to introduce Talmudic studies in their schools.

Contrast that to the reception that Jews receive in the countries of the West, where they have historically been barely tolerated, distrusted, blamed and held in contempt. There is a correlation between antipathy toward Jews by Western nations and their respective religions. Judaism was the original monotheistic path to an omniscient, omnipotent being. From Judaism sprang Christianity.

Christians believed that their religion, built from and upon the scaffold of Judaism, perfected monotheism, making Judaism obsolete and redundant. Offense was taken that Jews hadn't the perspicacity to acknowledge this, abandon Judaism and embrace Christianity. Seven hundred years later a middle-aged Arab merchant thought he could perfect Christianity, and inspired by its origins, plucked what he thought useful from both to present to Middle Eastern Bedouins their new religion of Islam.

When Jews refused the Prophet Mohammad's invitation to forsake an outdated Judaism and embrace its updated version of Islam, their tribes were ordered out of Medina and those who refused to leave were slaughtered. Muslims have ever since, while acknowledging both Judaism and Christianity as Abrahamic religions alongside Islam, held both Christianity and Judaism in contempt, exacting a special tax on Jews and Christians to enable them to live in peace alongside Muslims, never as equals.

Western anti-Semitism has a long and dishonourable tradition. The West seems obsessed with Judaism, intolerant of Jewish 'otherness', the Jewish faith and its peoples' inexorable clutching of their authentic monotheism through the millennia, despite the oppressive intolerance that has always characterized Christian-Judaic relations. In the modern era, the State of Israel has appeared as the leading brunt of Western hatred for Jews.

While Israel and Jews are held to a high standard of morals and behaviours, those who oppress them exhibit a paucity of both. Israel is admired for its vitality and resilience, its economic success -- despite having to allocate so much of its resources to defence -- its research and development successes, which other countries clamour to have part of in signing joint ventures that will further their own economies.

Yet while the European Union countries line up to take advantage of Israeli inventions and research successes forging the way into the future of high technology, it also debases itself by regarding Israel as an oppressor of innocent Palestinian refugees as though Palestinian terrorism and violence against Jews have no bearing on the relations between Jews and Arabs.

Israel is invited into membership of the OECD, to become a partner in CERN, as the only non-European member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, since the obvious adeptness of Jews in both those spheres represents a bonus for Europe. Yet special labelling identifying Israeli products manufactured in the West Bank is righteously imposed, even while products from Tibet in Chinese trade are exempt from any such treatment, along with products emanating from Turkey's occupation of half of Cyprus.

Boycott and Divestment of Israeli academics and products is hugely popular with trade unions and universities in the West; with the migration of Arab and Muslim academics and other economic immigrants to Western countries, a new and incendiary form of anti-Semitism has surfaced, one where the West can make common cause in support of 'Palestinian refugees', holding Israel and Jews to blame for a complex and simmering vendetta against Israel's existence in her historical homeland.

The West insists that Jerusalem, Judaism's capital and the location of Judaism's most sacred site before the existence of either Christianity or Islam, be decreed a capital for a nascent Palestinian state. Taking from the original Palestinians, who were Jews, their Biblical-era heritage and handing it to those denying that there were ever ancient Israelites whose geography Arabs have latterly 'inherited'.

While Christians of ancient heritage are being systematically cleansed through violence and vile discrimination throughout the Middle East, the Vatican looks past the massacres and the torching of churches to sign a treaty placing its own churches in Jerusalem under the care of the Palestinian Authority in a tender acknowledgement of its brotherhood with Islam, and its abandonment of Judaism.

Antiquated, Awkward, Deadly

"They were so pure. My wife, she came out fighting."
"My children were unbelievable. They were the best."
"You have to love them as parents. You have to love them as teachers."
Gabi Sassoon, funeral eulogy, Brooklyn, New York

The father of the seven children from the Sassoon family who were killed in a fire in Brooklyn remembered them at a funeral service in Israel. March 23, 2015. Photo by Oded Balilty/Associated Press.

It is the ultra-Orthodox Jewish tradition that on the Sabbath none of the faithful may exert themselves in any manner that can be construed as labour, for Jewish law forbids working in any form on the day of rest. 'Working' is construed as using any modern convenience or equipment of any kind, even switching on a light, or turning the knob on a stove, or turning the heat up for a furnace. Driving a vehicle is strictly prohibited, and religious Jews walk to synagogue.

In obedience to the strictures in the use of any device whatsoever, neither television nor computers can be used; in short just about everything is proscribed. Some Orthodox Jews resort to paying a fee to non-Jews to do those little things that everyone takes for granted, like flicking a light switch, like turning on an oven to bake a meal for a family. It certainly seems as though such proscriptions are absurd to anyone looking on, but the pious observe these customs.

They are hugely inconvenient, but are hewed to nonetheless as a symbol of faith. Rabbinical scholars find small measures that are permitted to bypass some of the obstacles to daily living during the Sabbath but the general proscription does remain. And the tragedy that unfolded this past Sunday in the home of an ultra-religious Jewish family owes its accidental occurrence to that very restriction. It would appear that some such families leave hot plates on all the time so they may be used to warm food without actually turning them off and on.

And the devastating fire that occurred to consume seven children in the Sassoon family on Saturday resulted from a malfunctioning device left on a kitchen counter. So, three girls, age 16, 11 and 6 and their brothers aged 12, 10, 8 and 5, died in that consuming furnace that their home because, trapping them in their second-floor bedrooms. Their mother and one 14-year-old girl managed to escape the conflagration, but not without serious injury. Their father was not at home at the time.

A neighbour saw flames in the Sassoon house and called 911. It took firefighters less than four minutes to arrive, to be met by the distraught, badly burned mother of the children, begging for help, but it was too late to save any of her seven children. She and her daughter were rushed to hospital. The children's father arrived home to find his family destroyed. The fire had spread through the kitchen to the dining room, to a hallway, the stairway leading to the second floor, and the bedrooms.

A funeral service took place on Sunday, thousands of people turned out to pay their respects, while mourners were struck with grief at the sight of the seven small coffins which had been flown to Israel, where the family had lived in Jerusalem before moving to the United States a year and a half earlier. The prayers were conducted in Hebrew. And the mourning was intense.

The bodies of the children, which had been flown to Israel from New York City, were laid out on stretchers inside the small Sephardic funeral hall. Credit Oded Balilty/Associated Press
 
As the entire city of New York mourned, its  Fire Department handed out pamphlets titled "Fire Safety for Jewish Observances" as well as smoke alarms and batteries. An online version of the Fire Department pamphlet about dangers during the Sabbath and Jewish holidays appears with a warning: "Stay in the kitchen - don't leave cooking food unattended."

A common-sense caution that one might imagine anyone would be aware of, but timely enough as a reminder to people that such tragedies can result and it is prudent at all times to be aware of such potential danger; too late for the anguished parents who have lost seven children, but perhaps it may help others to avoid a similar dreadful occurrence.

The Babylonian Exile Documented

"The exhibition shares the unique artifacts that illustrate the devastation and resilience of the exiled Judeans as they built their lives in Babylonia."
"Until now we had been unable to tell the complete story of the Babylon Exile and to understand what actually happened to all the Jewish refugees once they were forced out of Judah."
Dr. Filip Vukosavovic, exhibition curator, By the Rivers of Babylon, Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem

As the ancient countries of the Middle East dissolve in a fury of sectarian Islamist violence, antiquities thieves, knowing the value to the international community of unearthing never-before-seen objects of the far distant past, have been busy.

As conflict destroys present-day communities, sending millions of people fleeing -- the carnage resulting from Sunni Islamists assaulting Shi'ite Islamists, and each themselves turning their fury on the minorities living on the edge of tolerance now finding themselves hunted into extinction -- see profiteers unearthing and making a killing on antiquities verifying very similar occasions of pillage and slaughter described in ancient texts.

Islamist terrorists occupy themselves spreading fear and loathing by those whom they hunt and oppress in their zeal to transform the Middle East from its current state of constant sectarian unease and melding of East and West, into a facsimile of its crucible state when this Bedouin religion relying on the two monotheistic religions that pre-dated it for its major precepts overlaid with contempt for what it claims were their experimental stages before being perfected by Islam, also engage in destruction of the vestiges of the fabled past in their devotion to a single divine figure.

Even while destroying the heritage symbols of Judaism and Christianity, cupidity also leads them to place objects of archaeological value into the black market of illegal trade to further finance their jihadist fantasies of conquest.

Ancient Babylonian-era tablets are being seen now for the first time by the public at a museum in Jerusalem. They are thought by many in the world of archaeological antiquities to represent stolen artifacts. Unearthed in Iraq in the very places where ancient towns and villages are being ransacked and their populations flee in panic from the marauding hordes, logic would have it they belong to the country where they are found.

Yet they speak of the history of ancient Judea, of an earlier, far earlier and brutal onslaught that made refugee migrants of the Judaic population sending them into exile in Babylonia. Since they relate directly to the flight of Biblical-era Jews from conflict brought to them by powerfully militant Assyrians overtaken by Babylonians, then the time spent in Babylonia until their return to Israel to rebuild the destroyed Temple of Solomon, would it not make sense for these clay cuneiform tablets citing Jewish history to fall into the hands of Israel's museums?

Antiquities experts in cuneiform writing (recognized as representing one of the world's earliest script forms), speak of the collection of 110 clay tablets as the earliest written evidence of the exile of Judeans from the land of Judah, to what is now southern Iraq. They are held to have come into the possession of illegal traders as a result of the pilfering of the region's rich heritage of archaeological treasures. The owners of the tablets are firm that they were legally purchased.

Cuneiform tablets documenting daily life of Judean exiles in Babylon on display in Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum. (Photo: Reemon Silverman/ Tazpit News Agency)

"We are not interested in anything that is illegally acquired or sneaked out. But it is the role of a museum to protect these pieces", explained Amanda Weiss, director of the bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem. "It's what we are here for."

Yet the war-torn Middle East with its treasury of archaeological artefacts of incalculable value to historians and the world of archeology, is being looted of the treasures that speak to the region's fabulous history. And here's the conundrum and the irony; that the governments of those very same countries, before the onset of the current sectarian conflicts, did little themselves to discover, unearth, catalogue and preserve those artefacts. It has taken war and unscrupulous raiders to uncover the treasures and release them to the international market.

Granted, part of the value of any such ancient treasures is a careful cataloguing of where they were found and all circumstances surrounding their discovery. Yet even as they are being unceremoniously released from the desert soil into which they sank throughout the succeeding millennia, their value in describing their provenance by themselves place them beyond mere quibbling, as validations of Biblical accounts. Satellite images of sites in Iraq and Syria look like looted moonscapes, describing the work of zealously digging robbers.

 

Archaeologists estimate that there have been hundreds of thousands of these small clay tablets with their cuneiform inscriptions making their way into the hands of unscrupulous dealers aware that they are ill-gotten antiquities, but knowing that there are collectors who will pay whatever the prevailing price is, to obtain them. The currently-displayed clay tablets are felt to have been bought on the London antiquities market when cuneiform artifacts were numerous and readily available.

 

The tablets in question address a 130-year period in the history of the people of Judah, one of the tribes of Israel who were exiled to Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem in the 6th Century B.C. Dates inscribed on the earliest of the tablets are from 15 years following the destruction of the First Jewish Temple [Temple of Solomon: Bais HaMikdash]. 

 

A model of the Second Temple adjacent to the Shrine of the Book exhibit at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion

The Arab Heritage of Jesus' Divinity

"Palestine is here, exactly where it always was. It has been lived in for 4000 years, by Arabs, Christians, Jews and anyone else who showed up. The Roman Emperor Augustus called it Iudaea. Later, in 135 CE, the Romans renamed it Syria Palaestina in an attempt to sever all connection to it by the Jews.  It was part of the Ottoman Empire until its dissolution in 1918, then called Palestine again under the British Mandate. After Israel's war of Independence in 1948, it was and still is called Israel."
"There never has been a Palestinian state. Ever. The West Bank was Jordanian, the Golan Heights were Syrian and the Gaza Strip was Egyptian."
Bassam Tawil, Palestinian Journalist, The Gatestone Institute, 28 December 2014

Mahmoud Abbas, Pope Francis

Atta Jaber/Flash 90

A re-writing of history, however, has Palestinians living since forever in "Palestine". It's true that they did live there, only they weren't then Palestinian Arabs, they were Jews living in "Palestine". There never has been a time when Jews didn't live there. The Palestinian Arabs who now claim to have their heritage firmly lodged in Palestine are relatively recent migrants, having moved from Egypt and Jordan into the area that once was Judea. The ancient place names are familiar to anyone reading the Old Testament, as a geography familiar for its Jewish presence.

But now, not only did those Palestinian Arabs originate from the area, they are also responsible for the presence of Jesus of Nazareth, the God's tender gift to humankind. How in error the world has been from antiquity to the present to attribute the birth of Jesus the Christ to a Jewish mother, Mary, and a Jewish father, Joseph. Mary and Joseph may have been Jewish, and even that must be questioned, according to the new Palestinian narrative, but their son was most certainly of Palestinian Arab origin.

The Palestinian Authority has authorized a "Christmas tradition"  to enrich the Palestinian claim to exceptionalism in the geography, to be honoured by the international community and Christianity in particular. Jesus was no Jew; he was an Arab Palestinian. Senior figures of the Palestinian Authority, along with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas declare it thus, and so it must be; Jesus was "Palestinian". A new art exhibit demonstrates these claims through artistic license and the examples below are testament to their sincerity.
 
Here’s the original by Raphael:

Raphael The Deposition (1507)

In what has become a "Christmas tradition" for the Palestinian Authority (PA), PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and other senior figures of the group once again made the ahistorical claim that Jesus was "Palestinian." This is a historical truth dating back to the year before which was the first time that claim was made; at the time the Israeli Foreign Ministry responded by declaring: "We forgive him because he knows not what he does."

But, again, a week ago the official PA newspaper WAFA was informed by Mahmoud Abbas officially that: "We celebrate the birth of Jesus, a Palestinian messenger of love, justice and peace"; decoded by Palestinian Media Watch. Poor History; it has the parentage and ethnic roots of the most influential prophet in religious history all wrong; how utterly incongruously ignominious. Christianity itself must now look to somehow making amends by recognizing Christ as an Arab, not an accursed Jew.

Ignoring at the same time the inconvenient other bit of history that it was hundreds of years after the death of Jesus that the Roman Empire, still occupying the geography of the Middle East, thought to alter the name of that particular region from Judea to "Palestina". The name itself resurrected thousands of year afterward during the British mandate when after World War I the name change from Israel to "Palestine" took place.

Another update to history and looking forward into the future had the Palestinian Authority Supreme Sharia Judge Mahmound Al-Habbash authoritatively announce the soon-to-occur disappearance of Israel, for a religious war, incited by Mahmoud Abbas is on the near horizon. "Christmas is also a Palestinian holiday because Jesus, peace be upon him, was Palestinian. He was born in Palestine; lived and was sent (as prophet) to Palestine. Therefore Christmas has a special Palestinian flavour."

As though all of this doesn't appear firm enough in validating the historical correction, District Governor of Ramallah and El-Bireh, Laila Ghannam, announced on official PA TV that "We are standing here, Muslims and Christians, in Yasser Arafat Square (named after) the symbol of our cause, to celebrate Christmas. So too we will stand united to celebrate victory, far off as it may be. Merry Christmas, let's celebrate and be merry; Jesus the Messiah is Palestinian, and we are Palestinians and will continue to hold our heads high."

To clinch this new version of religious historical transfiguration, Adnan Al-Damiri, official spokesman for the PA Security Forces celebrated on his December 25 Facebook entry: "The anniversary of love and peace, the birth day of Jesus the Palestinian", while PA chief negotiator Saeb Erekat of Fatah's Central Committee, spoke of "the first Martyr, the first Palestinian, Jesus." Not to be outdone, Tawfiq Tiraw, another Fatah Central Committee member wished the "united Palestinian people a new Christmas that will herald liberty as did Jesus, the first Palestinian."

Jesus -- who knew? -- ordained that the Palestinian Arabs had first place in God's love, and it was they who were chosen to be a light unto the world. We have it on the highest authority of the Palestinian Authority. And so, it is right and proper for Palestinian Arabs to host the world thronging as they do annually to Bethlehem, when tourism is at its height in adoration of a Palestinian Arab chosen by God Almighty as his only son to bring peace and tranquility to the world.

We can judge for ourselves how successful the Palestinian Arabs, anointed by God who sacrificed his only living son as a Palestinian Arab to the cause of world peace -- while the iniquitous Jews continue to claim what is not rightfully theirs; the State of Israel, somewhat truncated from its original, but if the Palestinian Authority has anything to say about it, and they do, soon to be no more -- have demonstrated by their brotherly forbearance that peace is preferable to slaughter..

Pope Francis appeared to keep his counsel to himself when during his visit to the Holy Land in May the Palestinian Authority entertained the pontiff with an extraordinary art exhibit presenting Jesus in his true historical persona as a "suffering Palestinian martyr."

Here’s the Palestinian version of the Rafael painting, from the current Palestine Museum exhibit:


"Jesus’ legs replaced by a photo of the wounded legs of a Palestinian, carried by a man as an Israeli soldier looks on".  The inference relating to 'violence committed by Israel against modern day Palestinians' by Israeli Jews; an historical line from Christ-the-Arab's divine agony to that of his present-day 'descendants'. Now that's artistic innovation for you, hugely aiding historical revisionism to sound success.

A Jewish festival in a town without Jews

By David Mazower BBC World Service

Of the 50,000 citizens in the Polish town of Kutno, not one is Jewish - yet it staged perhaps the most impressive concert of Jewish music I've ever heard. 

The performers were all children from schools in the town, the youngest no more than six or seven.
They belted out old hits in Yiddish and Hebrew with a fluency and stage presence that few adult performers could match.

The concert was the finale of an ambitious festival of Jewish culture that the town has held since 1993.

So why does it happen? The short answer is that my great-grandfather was born there.
There's a long answer too, but we'll come on to that.

My great-grandfather, Sholem Asch, was born in Kutno in 1880 in a one-storey wooden house teeming with children, and a yard full of livestock that his father traded.

He moved to Warsaw, then Paris and New York, and became one of the most famous Jewish writers of the 1920s and 30s. 

He left Kutno far behind, but the Jewish community he grew up in - with its beggars, traders, butchers, rabbis, prostitutes and assorted schemers and dreamers - all found a kind of immortality in his stories and plays.

That world was swept away in World War Two.
Kutno's experience was typical. In one day the entire Jewish community - 8,000 people - was marched at gunpoint to the grounds of a deserted factory at the edge of town.

They spent two years in filthy, overcrowded conditions, with many dying of disease, hunger and cold, before being murdered in gas vans at Chelmno death camp.

  

When the war ended, Kutno, like so many other towns and cities across Poland, essentially started over again, learning to function without its Jewish tailors, shoemakers, lawyers and merchants.
A town with a hole at its heart.

Asch's play God Of Vengeance, set in a brothel in Poland, is being performed in Yiddish in Warsaw

Polish attitudes to the country's Jewish past are complex. There's plenty of lingering anti-Semitism, a kind of kitsch theme park nostalgia, pride in Poles who saved Jews during the war, and guilt about those who collaborated.

To complicate the picture further, there is a deep-rooted conviction that Poles themselves are victims of a turbulent history.
But even that's not the whole story.

Sholem Asch (left), with the Russian writer Maxim Gorky in Moscow in the 1920s

Something else has emerged in the last 20 years: a growing number of Poles who feel profound loss about the Jewish nation that vanished from their midst.
I came across some of them strolling in Warsaw's vast Jewish cemetery.

They were buying brightly-coloured memorial lanterns to place on graves of people they had no personal connection with, but wanted to honour and remember.

As I stood in front of the large mausoleum to Yitskhok Leybush Peretz, a giant of Yiddish literature, I noticed a glamorous young couple peering at it.

She had thigh-high leather boots, bright red lipstick, an elegant cape.
He had cheekbones to rival Rudolf Nureyev, a natty silk scarf and a trendy beret.
"Do you know who's buried here?" I asked.

"We're Polish - so of course we know about Peretz," they said. "We just can't read the Yiddish words on the tomb."

That deep respect for a vanished culture has also resulted in a world-class museum that's just opened in the heart of Warsaw's former Jewish quarter.

A beautiful shimmering glass structure, it tells the bittersweet story of the Jews' long love affair with Poland with clear-eyed honesty and real flair.

Those same feelings of curiosity, loss and kinship led a handful of people in Kutno to start up a Jewish festival as Poland emerged from communism in the early 1990s.

As private cafes and general stores began to open up, the town announced its first Sholem Asch Festival, a sign that Kutno was looking west, and engaging with European culture.
The town has come a long way since then.

A reconstruction of a wooden synagogue in the new museum

Its new business park is attracting American, German and Chinese companies, and provides jobs for 6,000 locals.

The Sholem Asch Festival has also come a long way. It includes a literary competition on a Jewish theme that attracts hundreds of entries from all over Poland.

There's a local Jewish dance band, theatre performances, and new translations of my great-grandfather's works into Polish.

Poland's rediscovery of its Jewish past started in Warsaw and Krakow, places where Jewish communities re-emerged as the war ended.

It's now spread far beyond the big cities and is growing year by year.
It might not be a mass movement, but as Kutno shows, it's more than just a token effort.

And in a world where bitter sectarian conflicts grab most of the headlines, a Jewish festival in a town with no Jews is surely something worth celebrating.

 
More from the Magazine

David Mazower remembers more of his family including his cousin Paul. The family patriarch had given all his 10 children an identical watch. Nine of the watches disappeared over time. But at the age of 20, Paul had torn the inner cover off his watch and hidden it inside a window sill in his home in the Polish city of Lodz, before he was deported. He returned as a liberated survivor, persuaded the new occupants of his home to let him in, and retrieved the sliver of metal from its hiding place.

The City of David

While in Tehran hard-line Iranian lawmakers interrogate the country's foreign minister about deviating from the Republic's official line on the Holocaust, referring to an interview that Mohammed Javad Zarif participated in with German media where he called the Holocaust a "horrifying tragedy" that should never re-occur though the regime denies it ever did, in Jerusalem an Israeli archaeologist claims the discovery of the legendary King David citadel dating to the capture of Jerusalem.

Validating in one instance, meticulous records maintained by the German Fascists in detailing the atrocities they visited upon European Jewry, and on the other the veracity of Biblical passages as a guide in identifying ancient ruins. Eli Shukron's claim has been criticized. As have been other announcements by Israeli archaeologists who have unearthed palaces of the biblical king, revered in Jewish tradition for establishing Jerusalem as Judaism's central holy city.

Eli Shukron, an archeologist formerly with Israel's Antiquities Authority, walks in the City of David archaeological site near Jerusalem's Old City on May 1, 2014. Photo by AP

 

The costly ($10-million, U.S.-funded) excavation took place within a currently Arab-dominated neighbourhood of East Jerusalem where such news runs counter to Palestinian demands that the Old City be recognized as the capital of a nascent Palestinian state. The archaeological dig was financed by an organization settling Jews in areas of East Jerusalem whose aim is prevention of dividing the ancient city.

"This is the citadel of King David, this is the Citadel of Zion, and this is what King David took from the Jebusites", said Mr. Shukron who worked on the excavation at the City of David site for almost two decades, believing that the evidence he uncovered had the effect of supporting his theory. "The whole site we can compare to the Bible perfectly."

The dig, initiated in 1995, uncovered a massive fortification comprised of five-tonne boulders stacked six metres wide. Shards of pottery were used to date the fortification walls as being 3,800 years in vintage. The fortifications represent the largest walls ever discovered in the region from the era of King Herod, and the presence of the Second Temple of Solomon, almost 2,100 years ago.

It had been built 800 years before King David would have wrested it from its then-Jebusite rulers. Mr. Shukron insists that  his discovery provides ample clues identifying this particular fortification as David's entry point into Jerusalem, conflating with the second Book of Samuel where David orders the walled city captured through entry at the location of a water shaft.

Fittingly enough, the excavation revealed a narrow shaft where spring water flowed into a carved pool, representing a place where people who lived at that time in history would gather to access their potable water. No other structure in the area of ancient Jerusalem appears a match to the biblical account naming it the "Citadel of David" and the "Citadel of Zion".

Claims that will be vociferously debunked by the Palestinian Authority and the greater Muslim world both of which discount entirely the presence of an ancient Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount over which Islam built their golden-domed Dome of the Rock where the Prophet Mohammed is held to have ascended to Heaven riding a white stallion. For Muslims that represents the third most holy site in Islam. The very concept of validating a Jewish prior presence is anathema to them.

Dome of the Rock, East Jerusalem

For Jews, the Temple Mount alongside of which remains the only portion of the fabled Temple of Solomon to have survived extant as the Wailing Wall, it is the first most holy site venerated in Judaism. A site forbidden for Jews to enter, to pray, to view, when it was under the control of Arabs when Jordan held the area. A site which is open to all under Israeli jurisdiction; Muslim, Christian, Jew.

And which Jews aspire to continue having access to, which would be denied them should the Palestinian Authority ever dominate it as their capital. Even under the protection of Israel, Muslim extremists in Israel riot violently when Jews ascend to the Temple Mount; Arabs refusing to allow Jews access to their most holy site. Israel remains sensitive to Muslim sensibilities; Muslims run roughshod over Jews'.

The Muslim proclivity for building mosques over the places of worship of other religions is legendary. The Islamist penchant for destroying sacred symbols of other religions represents the atrocious reality of fundamentalist intolerant rejection of equality in religious freedom.

Calls to Fire Internal Security Minister Over Temple Mount Riots

MK Moshe Feiglin calls for heads to roll after Hamas terrorists seize control of Temple Mount.

By Hezki Ezra and Ari Soffer

First Publish: 4/22/2014, 5:28 PM

Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich

Flash 90

 

Likud MK and Knesset Deputy Speaker Moshe Feiglin has called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to investigate the recent riots by Muslim extremists on the Temple Mount, and to take action to put an end to intimidation and violence against Jews on Judaism's holiest site - action which he says should include firing Internal Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovich.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, Feiglin branded the string of riots over the Pesach (Passover) holiday as a "Hamas takeover on the Temple Mount."

He described how "Hamas flags were flown on the Mount", as Islamists succeeded repeatedly in blocking Jews and tourist groups from visiting the holy site, and said the "sheer helplessness of the Israeli Police" marked a security failure so severe that it was impossible to overlook.

"We are talking about a loss of sovereignty in the heart of hearts of the capital of Israel, in the holiest place for the Jewish people, and the handing over [of sovereignty] to a terrorist movement which inscribes [calls for] the destruction of the State of Israel on its flag."

MK Feiglin went further, claiming that the Muslim riots were pre-planned and that the police were fully aware of them in advance - but were prevented from acting by directives forbidding them from operating within the Al Aqsa Mosque complex itself, for fear of offending Muslim sensibilities.

Indeed, Islamist youths barricaded themselves inside the Al Aqsa Mosque for several hours on more than one occasion, hurling rocks and launching fireworks at riot police with impunity.

Those directives, he said, came from the Internal Security Ministry, and therefore the blame for the total collapse of security on the Temple Mount rests squarely on the shoulders of ministry head Yitzhak Aharonovich.

Those claims follow similar allegations by Temple Mount activists, who accused police of "collaborating" with Islamist rioters.

Aharonovich "did not issue the correct guidelines and did not act to combat the (openly) stated aims of terrorist groups, who are now celebrating their victory," Feiglin said.

Following such a grave failure, he continued, there was simply no way Aharonovich could be allowed to retain his post.

He called on the Prime Minister to "conduct a comprehensive and thorough investigation of the matter, and to draw the necessary conclusions - even if we are talking about personal conclusions about the leadership of the police, or indeed the Internal Security Ministry."

Despite being Judaism's holiest site, Jewish visits to the Temple Mount are severely restricted, including a blanket ban on prayers or any other forms of worship.

Jewish Temple Mount groups have slammed the measures as draconian, and a capitulation to the demands of the Waqf Islamic trust which administers the site, as well as threats by Islamist groups including Hamas.

Muslim extremists often attack or intimidate Jewish visitors in an attempt to drive them from the site, while those Jews suspected of breaking rules banning all forms of worship on the Mount are regularly arrested.

A Knesset bill is currently being considered which would instate equal prayer rights for Jews and Muslims on the Mount - a proposal which is fiercely opposed by Muslim MKs and Islamist groups.

France’s former first lady is ‘crazy about Israel’

French-Italian singer Carla Bruni performs during the Echo music awards ceremony in Berlin. (File photo: Reuters)

AFP -- Al Aribaya
Sunday, 13 April 2014 

 

France’s former first lady Carla Bruni declared herself “crazy about Israel” and talked about Jewish family ties in an interview published by an Israeli daily on Friday.

Ahead of a May 25 concert in Tel Aviv, the singer, guitarist and former model told the Hebrew-language Yediot Aharonot that she hoped to bring both her husband, former president Nicolas Sarkozy, and her son Aurelien with her.

Italian-born Bruni, 46, told the newspaper that her father was Jewish and that while Sarkozy had a Jewish grandfather he also has a Jewish grandson, Solal, through his son Jean’s 2008 marriage to Jewish heiress Jessica Sebaoun.

“Jean married Jessica, who is Jewish and is the only observant one in her family,” she said.
Aurelien was born in 2001 from her relationship with philosopher Raphael Enthoven, and both circumcised and baptized, she added.

“His father is Jewish and I give him the gift of both heritages,” she told Yediot Aharonot.
Bruni said that she had visited Israel twice before; once as a model and once with her husband on a state visit.

“I’m crazy about Israel,” she said. “It’s full of life.”

“Maybe if my husband comes we’ll stay for a couple of days more. I want to bring my son to Israel for him to get to know it.”

Last Update: Sunday, 13 April 2014 KSA 16:16 - GMT 13:16

JTA The global Jewish news source

Greece’s Romaniote Jews remember a catastrophe and grapple with disappearing

By Gavin RabinowitzApril 1, 2014 

The members of the Ioannina Jewish community, foreign diplomats and local dignitaries take part in a memorial service inside Ioannina’s Kahal Kadosh Yashan synagogue to mark 70 years since the Nazi deportations. (Gavin Rabinowitz)

IOANNINA, Greece (JTA) — When the Jews of Ioannina gathered in their whitewashed-stone synagogue over the weekend, it was to commemorate 70 years since the Nazis destroyed their community.

But the March 30 gathering also served to highlight a source of present-day sadness: the withering of the unique 2,300 year-old Romaniote Jewish tradition.

Ioannina, a postcard-pretty town in northwestern Greece with a medieval fortress perched by a bright blue lake and surrounded by snow-capped mountains, once was the center of Romaniote Jewish life. Today, however, the community in Ioannina numbers fewer than 50 members, most of them elderly. The last time the community celebrated a bar mitzvah was in 2000.

The community’s leaders fear for its future.
“It is very difficult,” said Moses Elisaf, the community’s president. “We try to do our best to keep the traditions, but the numbers are very hard.”

“I don’t like to think about the future. It is very hard to be optimistic,” he said, standing on the peaceful lakefront Mavili Square, where the Nazis loaded the town’s Jews onto trucks to be shipped to Auschwitz.

The Romaniote Jews, neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardic, emerged from the first Jewish communities of Europe. Records indicate the first Jewish presence in Greece dating back to 300 BCE. A ruined second-century BCE synagogue on the Aegean island of Delos is believed to be the oldest discovered in the Diaspora.

These Jews became known as the Romaniotes, speaking their own language, Yevanic, or Judeo-Greek, a version of Greek infused with Hebrew and written with the Hebrew script.

Auschwitz survivor Zanet Nahmia-Sevi (center) lights a candle in memory of the residents of Ioannina who were killed in the Holocaust. (Gavin Rabinowitz)

Romaniote synagogues had a unique layout. They had their own religious traditions and prayer book, the Mahzor Romania. Much of the worship was in Yevanic, and the tunes, including for reading the Torah, were heavily influenced by Byzantine music.

“The Romaniote tradition is hugely important. It is a pre-Diasporic tradition based on the Talmud Yerushalmi,” said Zanet Battinou, the director of the Jewish Museum of Greece and herself a Romaniote who grew up in Ioannina.
But it is a community and a tradition that has long been in decline.

Following the expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492, many Sephardic Jews found refuge in the Ottoman Empire that then ruled Greece. Soon, major Sephardic communities sprang up, most notably in Thessaloniki, known as the Jerusalem of the Balkans.

The preexisting Romaniote communities often were absorbed into the larger, wealthier Sephardic Ladino-speaking ones that eventually became largely synonymous with Greek Jewry.
“People don’t know about the Romaniote ancient Jewish community,” Battinou said. “Thessaloniki was so massive and successful, it overshadowed everything.”

It was only on isolated islands and in the rugged mountains of western Greece that the Romaniotes remained the dominant tradition, and Ioannina was the largest of these communities.
By the start of the 20th century, some 4,000 Romaniote Jews lived in Ioannina. But amid the economic hardship and the turmoil that accompanied the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, many joined their Greek compatriots and emigrated.

Most went to the United States and Palestine, setting up Romaniote synagogues in New York City and Jerusalem. Later, a third was established in Tel Aviv. At the start of World War II, about 2,000 Jews remained in Ioannina.

On March 25, 1944, the German Nazi occupiers rounded up the Jews of Ioannina. As snow fell, they were put into open trucks and taken to a nearby city. From there, a nine-day rail journey took them to Auschwitz.

The names of the town’s 1,832 Jews who were murdered are carved on marble tablets on the walls of the synagogue. Among the dead were more than 500 children under the age of 13.

One of the marble tablets on the walls of the synagogue engraved with the names of the 1,832 Jews of Ioannina who perished in the Holocaust. (Gavin Rabinowitz)

Only 112 Ioannina Jews survived the death camps. Another 69 escaped the roundup, hiding with Christian families or fleeing into the mountains, where some fought with the Greek resistance. When they returned to Ioannina, many found their properties looted and homes occupied.

But it was not just the people who were wiped out. Centuries of tradition disappeared, too.
“Oral tradition is very dependent on the third generation — all the grandfathers and grandmothers disappeared, were murdered, all at once,” Battinou said. Among the few survivors was her grandmother Zanet, after whom she is named.

“The youth who survived only perpetuated what parts they remembered,” she said.

While Ioannina was the largest and the most iconic Romaniote community, several other small communities that identify with the Romaniote tradition continue to exist in places like Chalkida and Volos. But today, most of the remaining Romaniote Jews, like their Sephardic compatriots, live in Athens, Greece’s largest Jewish community. Athens has one Romaniote synagogue, built in 1906, but it is used only on the High Holidays.

Meanwhile, the Romaniote Jews who moved to the United States and Israel have intermingled with the larger Jewish communities.

Youth from Ioannina’s Greek community, in traditional dress, hold candles to be lit in memory of the more than 500 children who were deported to Auschwitz. (Gavin Rabinowitz)

Several Israeli Romaniotes attended the anniversary commemorations, drawn by family ties.
Yosef Baruch came with his brother and his uncle at the behest of his 90-year-old grandmother who survived the Nazis and moved to Israel after the war. Baruch says he has never prayed at the Romaniote synagogue in Jerusalem.
“It’s a tradition that was destroyed in the Holocaust,” he said.

None of the American Romaniotes attended the memorial ceremony.
In Greece, with the Jewish community so devastated after the war, there was no place for separate communities. Most religious services are now held according to Sephardic rites.

Today, only Cantor Haim Ischakis, who led the memorial prayer service, knows how to chant the Torah in the Romaniote tradition — something he learned from his father, also a cantor, who survived the camps.

“I am the only one left,” Ischakis said. He is teaching his two sons, but if they don’t take up his profession, the only examples left will be recordings on YouTube.

In fact, the Internet is emerging as the most likely tool for preserving Romaniote tradition. And the impetus for this online push has come from an unlikely source.

The Canadian ambassador to Greece, Robert Peck, who was instrumental in helping organize the commemorations, with Canada heading the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, noted the lack of available information about the Jews of Ioannina.

At his behest, the New Media Lab at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University designed a website detailing Ioannina’s Jewish history, and a soon-to-be-launched app will let people explore Jewish sites in the town and listen to survivor testimonies.

“I came to Ioannina and visited the synagogue, and I felt it was very important to carry beyond the borders of Greece what Ioannina represents, the legacy of the Jewish community here,” Peck said.
Still, the Romaniote Jews hope that through their efforts and dedication, something of their legacy, their community, will survive in the real world.

“It is very precious to me, and I try to pass it on to my children and hope they appreciate that from their mothers’ side, they inherit such a unique tradition,” Battinou said. “It is still alive, it is not extinct, yet.”

What Jews and the Chinese have in common

By Michael Goldfarb Writer and broadcaster -- BBC News online 

Like most people on their first trip to China, I felt like an ocean swimmer trying to get back to shore pulling against a particularly vicious riptide, overwhelmed and slightly panicked.

It was not just the gigantism - the number of people, the epic infrastructure projects, the impenetrable air pollution.

It was that the place in many ways looks familiar - but just off-kilter, as in a dream - all those Western brand names on advertising hoardings, but you cannot read the ads because they are all in Chinese.
I had this strange feeling of knowing but not having a clue most intensely when I visited Shandong University in Jinan recently.

Shandong reminded me very much of the University of California at Berkeley in the US, only with 57,000 students - instead of 35,000 - buzzing and biking purposefully around from class to class, and they were much, much more earnest.

At the heart of the campus is a newish 27-storey building with a giant clock on the top, which houses the department of religious studies. 

Religion was the reason I had come to Shandong. I was making a programme about the simultaneous origins of Buddhism and Confucianism; Shandong is close to Qufu, Confucius' home town and a centre of modern Confucian scholarship.

The university's religion department also houses the Centre for Judaic Studies, China's one and only department of Jewish studies.

Its existence is one of those off-kilter things. Sure, American and British universities have Jewish study programmes, but in China? I was surprised.

But the man who runs the centre, Professor Fu Youde, told me I should not be. Confucian and Jewish culture have much in common.

"The core of Confucianism and Judaism is ethical," he explained.

"They both stress the importance of the relationship between man and man, and are based on the Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you," he added. 

The fifth commandment enjoins Jews to honour their fathers and mothers. Confucianism also emphasises filial piety - but in a way Jewish parents can only dream of.

We were seated in Prof Fu's 17th-floor office, the neatest academic environment I have ever visited. The leaning towers of books and papers that characterise most senior academics' habitats were completely absent.

On his surgically sterile desk was a copy of Roget's thesaurus.
The thesaurus is a useful tool for the professor's work as a translator. Among the Jewish classics he has translated into Chinese - via translation into English from the original Hebrew, Latin and Arabic - are Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed as well as Benedict Spinoza's Hebrew Grammar.

It was Spinoza who provided Prof Fu with the connection to Judaism because of "the tolerance and generosity in his work".

 

The professor himself grew up in a time notably lacking in both qualities. The son of farmers, he was born in a mud-walled agricultural commune in 1956, just as Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward campaign was getting under way. 

That disastrous attempt to collectivise Chinese agriculture led to famine and the deaths of anywhere between 20 million and 45 million people.

He graduated from high school in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. Universities were shut, and he spent five years working in a factory for one yuan a day before finally being allowed to attend university.

Prof Fu is an impressive man and had a remarkable grasp of Jewish history and religion but there was one element of Jewishness he seemed not to get: the jokes.

The Chinese are a very serious people but they do laugh. There are stand-up comedy clubs in China and a comedy channel on TV.

  

I spent an hour watching a television comedy channel. Everything was the same, the behaviour of the comedian at the mic, the cutaway shots of people in the audience laughing - only it was in Chinese, so I do not know what the jokes were about.

Anyway, I wonder if the Chinese can get the core of Jewish humour, its bitter irony. Heinrich Heine, 19th Century poet and essayist, described it best: "I try to tell my grief and it all becomes comic."
Prof Fu does not think humour matters.

"Jokes are important for Jewish literature," he said. "But as a culture, the core of Judaism is the law, as given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai."

"Well, I am not so sure about that," I replied, "Jewish culture is not simply the law. The culture has been shaped by how Jews have responded to persecution over the 2,500 years since the law was first written down in the form we know it."

Which, come to think of it, was in the same century when Confucius was formulating his teachings. So the Jews and Chinese are linked by historical coincidence, in addition to filial piety and the Golden Rule.

A Chinese chicken soup in New Hampshire, inspired by a Jewish recipe

 

We carried on into the afternoon discussing our people's cultural affinities.
"Jews love Chinese food," I pointed out.

"Also Chinese medicine," Prof Fu added. "I know foreigners who say 'I do not want to take Chinese medicine.' But my Jewish friends, many of them accept Chinese medicine."

This lead me to tell him a story about an Israeli acupuncturist, a Jewish Buddhist, who had treated me in India the previous week. But I will tell you that story another time.

Islamic Waqf Revises History: 'Temple Mount, Kotel are Muslim'

Muslim group supervising Temple Mount makes new claims: King Solomon was Muslim, and the Western Wall is holy to Islam.

By Maayana Miskin -- Arutz Sheva 7

First Publish: 1/21/2014, 7:59 PM

A page from the Waqf's new guidebook

Israel news photo: Rabbi Chaim Richman

 

The Islamic Waqf, which supervises the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest site, has issued a pamphlet that makes new claims regarding the Mount - arguing, among other things, that King Solomon was a Muslim and that there is no Jewish connection to either the Temple Mount or the Western Wall (Kotel).

Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute supplied Arutz Sheva with a copy of the pamphlet, which is currently being distributed to visitors to the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Temple Mount.
In one section, titled, “Al-Buraq Wall and NOT the Wailing Wall,” the pamphlet teaches, “Al-Buraq wall is part of the western wall of the Al-Aqsa mosque.” The pamphlet goes on to link the wall to Islam, stating that it is known as the site where Mohammed “tied his winged steed, Al-Buraq.” (According to Islamic legend Muhammed did not die but flew to heaven on a winged horse called Al-Buraq.)

“Jews and some Christians, while falsely claiming it is part of their so-called ‘Temple,’ have made a ritual of standing in front of it, and wailing over the power they say was lost to Muslims. Despite the lack of a shred of proof to support these claims, they have turned it into a Jewish shrine since occupation in 1967, and have been conducting so-called archaeological excavations beneath it… in preparation for laying hands over the whole Mosque,” the pamphlet continues.

The Temple Mount is Judaism's holiest site, and is widely recognized as the former site of the biblical Temple. The Mount is also the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.

The “informative” pamphlet is full of “utterly ludicrous, Kafkaesque lies,” Richman said. He noted that guidebooks to the holy site published by the Waqf in 1925, and again in 1950, recognized the site’s Jewish history, including the existence of the Temple built by King Solomon.

The updated pamphlet denies historical evidence that the Biblical King Solomon ever built a Jewish Temple, offering the following argument as proof: “Solomon was just another prophet of Islam, and therefore, he could not have the authority to build a structure for the worship of any other god but Allah.”

In a section titled “Marwani Prayer hall and NOT Solomon’s Stables” the claim that King Solomon was Muslim was reiterated.

“Solomon – peace be upon him - was one of the prophets of Islam,” stated the pamphlet, which accused “Jews and crusaders” of referring to an underground chamber near the Temple Mount as “Solomon’s stables” in a deliberate attempt “to try to lead people into believing that the structure is part of the so-called ‘temple.’”

Previous Waqf pamphlets, however, referred to Solomon’s Stables as “Solomon’s Stables.”
The pamphlet also repeatedly claimed the existence of Israeli schemes against the holy site. Regarding a continuation of the Western Wall – which the pamphlet claimed as a Muslim site called “Ribat al-Kurd” – the pamphlet warned, “Occupation authorities still endanger this and other parts of Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

Rabbi Richman, a long-time Temple Mount activist, noted that the Waqf’s outrageous claims could indicate success in the battle for Jewish rights at the holy site.

“The Muslim Waqf is terrified by the great increase in Jewish visits to the Temple Mount, and by the successful media campaign that the Temple Institute has waged in the international media clearly demonstrating the centrality of the location and its importance to the Jewish people,” he explained.
“In other words, we are winning, and they are trying even harder to undermine Jewish connection to the Temple Mount” as a result, he continued.

The latest anti-Jewish incitement regarding the Temple Mount follows a series of recent incidents in which Jewish visitors faced discrimination.

Jews were barred from bringing dried fruit onto the Mount last week, apparently due to fear that they would celebrate Tu Bishvat, and this week a religious Jewish woman was told she could not enter the site because her dress did not conform to Muslim standards of modesty.

On Monday, it was reported that Waqf officials have been violating Israeli laws to preserve antiquities by planting trash cans atop the Mount.

Jewish activists have countered with a push to end rules that discriminate against Jews at the holy site. Among other things, MKs from the Jewish Home party have put forth a bill that would allow Jews to legally pray at the site for the first time since 1967.

► ◄

Tags: Temple Mount, Waqf, Temple Mount organizations, Waqf Muslim Authority, Temple Mount discrimination

Restoring Heritage to Jews

 "It is unfortunate that Iraq is simply not prepared to openly chronicle this tragic history as a monument for the people of Iraq, towards a meaningful reconciliation, or towards the historical preservation of archives and other items that document the ancient heritage of Iraqi Jewry."
"There also ought to be justice for those who were forced to leave with nothing and have an opportunity to reclaim not only their irreplaceable personal property, but crucial pieces of a past that is so vulnerable to being forever lost."
"For the last Jews in Baghdad and their descendants in Canada and beyond, Iraqi Judaica is ultimately their history to preserve and cherish."
John Baird, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Canada

It would seem to make sense that the community which owned and cherished objects of personal meaning be given the opportunity to reclaim them. They did not, after all, abandon these objects deliberately. They had little choice. To preserve their lives they were forced to leave a country that they had lived in for well over two thousand years, a country of which they were citizens, and to which they pledged their loyalty. Unfortunately, that pledge was not reciprocated.

And while Iraqi Jews lived in great numbers in that country of their heritage through the greater diaspora when they were displaced from their own land of Israel in ancient times, they found refuge in neighbouring countries and there they lived throughout the millennia, and long before the appearance of Islam. In the 1930s about one-third of Baghdad were Iraqi Jews. For that population of 150,000 Jews there were 60 Jewish schools, and a Jewish hospital in the country's capital alone.

Hitler's fascism attracted the attention of a number of Middle East countries; Iran was named by Hitler as an Aryan nation, like Germany, and like Japan, an honourary Aryan nation, as a members of the Axis. The Arab Palestinian elite were enamoured of Nazi Germany and honoured by it. Although Jews were well integrated into the professional life of Baghdad, as teachers, doctors, lawyers, and had Muslim and Christian friends and colleagues, Arab nationalism responded to fascism.

All the more so when a pro-Nazi government took power in Baghdad in 1941, resulting in an anti-Jewish pogrom and Jewish civil rights being stripped, and successive Iraqi governments accusing the Jews of undermining Iraqi society. That was the signal for tens of thousands of Iraqi Jews to leave in the early 1950s to seek haven in Israel. Jews were never compensated for the property and belongings left behind, all left in the hands of the state.

During the American invasion of Iraq thousands of Jewish documents, books and artifacts were seized from the flooded basement of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's secret police headquarters in Baghdad by American Forces. The U.S. informed the Iraqi provisional government the items were to be transported to the U.S. National Archives in Washington. They would be restored, preserved and returned to Iraq at a future date.

A Hebrew Bible printed in Venice in 1568, recovered from the Iraqi Jewish Archive. Photo BEFORE treatment. (photo credit: The National Archives)

Some of the artifacts -- Torah scrolls, a Babylonian Talmud, Hebrew calendars, rabbinic commentaries, are being displayed at the Washington Archives. Much, much more, comprised of private individuals' belongings, like children's school report cards, marriage and bar-mitzvah certificates, have been catalogued online for an exhibit portraying Iraqi Jewish heritage. And the salvaged items are due to be returned to Iraq in 2014.

The 1568 Hebrew Bible DURING treatment. (photo credit: The National Archives)

"I have very few good memories of Iraq. I never ate in a restaurant, went to a movie theatre or slept over at a friend's. I went to my Jewish school and came straight home. Jews weren't allowed telephones, or passports. Every letter we received had already been opened. We carried yellow identity papers. My father, David, couldn't work for a Muslim, or hire a Muslim. All our neighbours in Baghdad were Muslims and Christian. But I don't ever remember talking to them. By the time I was old enough to be aware we were already so isolated as Jews. I was a little girl and I was always afraid. My parents, on the other hand, have some very fond memories of Iraq. My father was an accountant and worked for a Christian family until it became too dangerous for them to employ him."
Dr. Caroline Bassoon,-Zaltzman, Toronto

American and former Iraqi Jews now living worldwide are hoping the U.S. government will listen to their pleas to return the Jewish items to those to whom it rightfully belongs. On November 13, a petition signed by 47 members of Congress was delivered to Secretary of State John Kerry, insisting that the "Government of Iraq has no legitimate claim to these artifacts".

• A Hebrew Bible with Commentaries from 1568 – one of the oldest books in the trove;
• A Babylonian Talmud from 1793;
• A Torah scroll fragment from Genesis - one of the 48 Torah scroll fragments found;
• A Zohar from 1815 – a text for the mystical and spiritual Jewish movement known as "Kabbalah";
• An official 1918 letter to the Chief Rabbi regarding the allotment of sheep for Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year);
• Materials from Jewish schools in Baghdad, including exam grades and a letter to the College Entrance Examination Board in Princeton regarding SAT scores;
• A Haggadah (Passover script) from 1902, hand lettered and decorated by an Iraqi Jewish youth ; and
• A lunar calendar in both Hebrew and Arabic from the Jewish year 5732 (1972-1973) - one of the last examples of Hebrew printed items produced in Baghdad.

Thousands of waterlogged Jewish books and documents shortly after their discovery in a flooded basement of Saddam Hussein's former intelligence headquarters, May 2003. (Photo credit: courtesy The National Archives)

Reuters news agency was informed by an advisor to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki that the Jewish documents represent part of an "Iraqi legacy owned by all of the Iraqi people and belong to all the generations, regardless of religious, ethnic or sectarian affiliations". Quaint that notion is beyond belief; Jews are not wanted in the ancient land of their heritage, their very presence would represent an insult to Islam, and they would be in mortal danger.

The legacy of their presence over 2,500 years in Iraq and the objects they owned, another story altogether.