Ha’aretz reports that nearly 200 books destined for the Jewish community of Sumy, Ukraine were thrown away by customs agents at the border with Russia. The books were couriered from Russia, but the deliveryman did not have enough money to pay customs. The books were therefore left with customs until the amount for their transfer was paid. The courier notified the customs office that he had abandoned the books. At least one book was sold, and the rest were to be transfered to the Jewish community of Ukraine despite the payment never being made. However, instead of delivering the books, they destroyed them. A complaint was issued with the European Parliament and the case is now being investigated; prosecutors confirmed the books were destroyed.
Rabbi Yechiel Levitansky, the rabbi of the Sumy Jewish community,said that around 40 people come to daven each shabbos, and they must share siddurim–the shipment was badly needed.
It is shameful to destroy religious books, any books at that. This is just plain old, historic anti-Semitism. I am sure that the investigation will amount to little more than appeasement and a charade, but it says something that they will send prosecutors after the culprits. We may not have moved beyond Jewish books being destroyed for no good reason in places like Ukraine, but at least Jews can safely and successfully report such an abuse AND get some results.
Anyone got a few dozen Ukrainian siddurim laying around?
Interfax, the Russian state media, says ‘Yes!’ According to the report, “Congress of the Jewish Religious Organizations and Associations in Russia believes, when Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili initiated military operations in South Ossetia, he committed the sin of Babylon king Nebuchadnezzar…” Nebuchadnezzar is the Babylonian king who destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem. Here’s the whole text of the report (it appears to be a rather poor translation): More »
I cannot help but notice that the Russian assault on Georgia goes unmentioned on Jewschool.
A little background: For the last couple of months there have been border clashes between Georgia and South Ossetia, a breakaway region between Georgia and Russia. Georgia is, of course, a former Soviet satellite state. On the morning of Friday, August 8 Georgia invaded and by the end of the day controlled most of South Ossetia. The evening of August 8 Russia responded with heavy attacks and were bombing in sovereign Georgian territory. On Sunday, August 10 Russia began a steady bombing campaign on Tbilisi, the Georgian capital and opened a second front from the Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia. Russia is being accused of exanding its war technologically. The US has been very firm in its reprimand on the Russian invasion. Putin says, ‘shove off.’ The newsmedia is, of course, just an easy search away.
Bohdan Khmelnytsky with Tuhaj Bej at Lviv painted by Jan Matejko, 1885
As Shabbos descends and Tisha b’Av arrives thereafter, Jews in golus and eretz yisroel will commemorate the destruction of the beys hamikdesh with a 24 hour fast and the recitation of Eicha, the Book of Lamentations and kinnos, liturgical poems that lament tragedies that occurred throughout our history.
One of these tragedies, the Gezeyres Takh Vetat, the Evil Decrees of 1648-1649, is a fascinating example of how Yiddish-speaking Jews understood themselves, the non-Jews who lived around them, antisemitism and how they intertwined. (The term is derived from the Hebrew dates of the tragedy, 5408 and 5409). Here’s an abridged rundown of what went down:
In 1648, the Ukrainian lands were part of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. While most of this land was owned by wealthy Catholic nobility, the people who worked it were mainly Eastern Orthodox Ukrainian peasants. The Polish nobility heavily taxed the peasants working their land. About 1/3 of Eastern European Jews lived on Ukrainian land during this time. In the regional cities, there was a ethnic mix of Jews, Poles and other groups, and in southern Ukraine, Christian Cossacks and Muslim Tatars mingled in the Ottoman borderlands. With the economy booming, the Cossacks protected the interests of the nobility by fighting Tatars, who often plundered peasant communities and lived off the spoils.
Some Jews made a living off collecting taxes from peasants on behalf of Polish nobility. Consequently, they were often perceived by the Ukrainian peasants and their Cossack protectors as part of the landowner’s oppressive system.
Before 1648, Ukrainian peasants and Cossacks had rebelled against the nobility many times, destroying Jewish and non-Jewish communities as they made their way from Ukraine to Poland, but now a large scale uprising had begun and forces lead by Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi moved towards Lithuania and central Poland, murdering many Jews and razing their towns as they fought Polish forces. In many Jewish communities, organized defense forces were created.
According to scholarship on the event, there is no evidence that there was a plan to specifically murder Jews, nor is there any exact accounting of the number of casualties. What is clear is that Jews who commemorate the event understood it in spiritual ways relevant to Tisha b’Av. More »
From The Independent, also in JTA and Reuters, Britain’s first Muslim minister Shahid Malik has said that many Muslims feel like “the Jews of Europe”:
“I think most people would agree that if you ask Muslims today what do they feel like, they feel like the Jews of Europe,” he said. “I don’t mean to equate that with the Holocaust but in the way that it was legitimate almost – and still is in some parts – to target Jews, many Muslims would say that we feel the exact same way.
“Somehow there’s a message out there that it’s OK to target people as long as it’s Muslims. And you don’t have to worry about the facts, and people will turn a blind eye.”
MP Malik speaks to a big truth – a plus ca change truth. Let’s play with this for a sec:
No, Muslims are not having their rights to property or occupation taken away (even if their rights to wear hijabs are under constant threat), even if people do eye them suspiciously. The animosity towards the Islamic bloc countries is rooted also in a fear of East vs. West geopolitical conflict — something the Jews never could claim to have. Further, terrorist acts on a grand scale are also missing from the early 1900s history of Jews and Europe. One might more accurately say that Muslims might be the new Russians. Or the new Communists.
All that being said, does it matter if Islam actually can declare war on the West — or if we just think it has? Jews were accused of running the world, manipulating finances, and so on, which were exaggerations and lies. The “Islam against the West” line is also a bit hazy in the facts area, yes? Islamophobia is a tiny hop, skip and jump away from anti-Semitism, in its pervasive nature, it’s reliance on cultural myths, and appropriation of populist fears. It is a disease of the logic, backed up by credibility and “research.” The target people is different and the trappings are green-tinted not blue, but the portrayal and useage of it is the same.
This statement is more than interesting to Jewschool because it happens to have “Jews” in the article. And this issue is more important than an exercise in backing up or debunking the similarities between Jews and Muslims in Europe. MP Malik’s statement is a hot poker in the butt of the Jewish people asking us if we (and our societies) have not fallen into the same mental traps as our predecessors’ oppressors. And what, other than decrying or debunking the comparison, we’re going to do to prevent the accusation from going any further.
This is somewhat old news but it provides a new way to beat a dead scarf, so why not.
A few days ago I spotted a young German man on the Berlin subway wearing a Kaffiyeh Yisraelit. I mentioned this to a German friend. My friend did a quick google search and turned up this gem: The Kaffiyeh Feygele. It seems a gay or two on the “anti-German” left has now appropriated Rachel Ray’s favorite scarf.
In the place of the classic Levantine pattern, the Kaffiyeh Feygele has hearts, butt plugs, condoms and hammers and sickles. Also, it has stars of David in the corners. This is an article in the German paper Taz on the phenomenon.
Are you tired of doing the NY Times crossword puzzles or sudoku puzzles (at the evil level) during the summer? Here is a puzzle you might want to consider working on while on the beach or in Vermont. It comes from someone who has just visited Russia. She wants to know what the accompanying text is (part of her letter to me is underneath). If anyone has some success in solving the text, let me know. There is no prize, but the “winner” will be acknowledged with great acclaim at the next Bible Dept Lunch.
Good luck!
- DM
[email from person who found the book]
Recently while visiting on of the countries of the former USSR I was approached by someone with a question: the family was in possession of what they believe is an ancient Jewish religious book/scripture and they were interested in finding out exactly what this book meant. Several experts from Russia attest that the language is neither Arameic, nor Hebrew, and that the red frame around the words is uncharacteristical of ancient Jewish religious writings. And this is as far as anyone got… The cover of this book is wooden and the pages appear to be made out of pergament.
*Since 3 people on the listerv already figured it out, I wanted to see if any Jewschooler wants to try an solve it. The winner will have the option of writing a guest post related to archeology and modern relevance. (Here are someleads for you). The contest will end by Shabbat of next week. Go for it!
A children’s program in Yiddish very nearly aired on Swedish TV. Why, you ask?
Since Jews are one of five “national minorities” in Sweden, Yiddish is one of five official “national minority” languages. This means the government “supports Yiddish with view to keeping it alive.” This is pretty cool, though slightly misguided. Plenty of older people spoke Yiddish when I was a kid. Sadly most have passed. Few, if any, Swedish Jews under the age of 70 speak Yiddish at home.
Apparently efforts to keep Yiddish alive in Sweden at one recent point in time included plans for a children’s show in Yiddish. The show was killed when a Jewish woman saw the script and pointed out that a show in Yiddish about children on a pig farm was a little culturally off.
How do I know this? Well, I am on vacation in my native Sweden. I switched on the TV and stumbled on a live Q. & A. in the Swedish parliament with representatives from these five national minorities. One of the Jewish representatives related the story.
Hey kids, are you looking for a way to get out of studying for that English test? Take a page from some British Jewish students who boycotted the Shakespeare section of the national English test, and claim antisemitism!
The 14-year-old girls, whose actions were supported by their parents, The Independent said were protesting anti-Semitism in Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The exam questions they refused to answer were actually about The Tempest, a different work of Shakespeare’s.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. I was a physics major in college, and I busted my ass learning quantum mechanics when I could have skipped the test instead, on the grounds that Heisenberg was employed by Hitler.
Finally, I’m boycotting the Torah, because whoever (or Whoever) wrote it is clearly an antisemite (or a self-hating Jew). I mean, they go out of their way to portray Jews in an unfavorable light, reviving all the tired stereotypes. Look at the evidence: Jacob tricks Esau into selling his birthright for a bowl of lentil stew. The Israelites run off with the Egyptians’ gold and silver. And don’t get me started on “an eye for an eye”.
If you’re able to get to Tel Aviv tomorrow (Sunday) or Haifa next weekend, you ought to check out “South Coast.” I caught tonight’s screening at the Jerusalem Cinematheque and really got into it.
A feature length documentary, it explores the 25ish year history of hip hop in Brighton, England, comparing it to the scenes in the US (”east coast” and “west coast” America lend to the film’s “south coast” England title), London, and other parts of Europe. Listen to good music, watch some amazing break-dancing, see local writers and graffiti artists, and throw in a tonne of archival footage and interviews, and you too will be an expert on the south coast hip hop scene.
Thanks to the Hebrew subtitles, you can also chalk it up to an, um, educational viewing: learn new slang that you might otherwise miss out on. Learn the hip hop culture jargon - dis haters, curse, bboy and pop, and scratch - b’ivrit. (If only I’d brought a notepad!)
Opponents of Germany’s new smoking ban have appalled Jewish leaders by selling more than 1,000 “smokers’ T-shirts” that display a yellow Star of David and suggest that discrimination against nicotine addicts is like Nazi anti-Semitism during the Third Reich.
The controversial T-shirts went on sale on an internet site in the run-up to a smoking ban which came in to force in 10 of Germany’s 16 federal states on New Year’s Day. Its promoters insisted that Germany needed to be woken up to what it described as “disgraceful discrimination against smokers” in bars and restaurants and claimed that its shirts were “the most aggressive smokers’ resistance shirt available”
Photographs of the T-shirts show them displaying a yellow Star of David identical to the Judenstern, or “Jewish star”, that the Nazis forced all Jews to wear in Germany after they were elected to power in 1933. The word “Jude”, or “Jew”, which was inscribed in the centre of the Nazi stars, is replaced by the word raucher, or smoker..
Almost as bad as all the “Bush & Olmert are Creating a New Holocaust” signs I saw last week.
Earlier this week, we posted a little American trouble for the Lubavitch (or perhaps it’s the end of the trouble, hard to know how to frame it).
Now, there’s more. Apparently this is their fifteen minutes. Or something.
First, England’s Jewish Chronicle notes that England’s Lubavitch movement is in some serious economic trouble: apparently because of pouring an enormous amount of money into a new club for young Jews that they opened this year. Apparently nearly all the donations they received this year went into said club, “including ‘almost all’ of this year’s £750,000 yield,” leaving them £1.5 million (that’s 2,959,951 dollars American) in debt - and of course, they’ve had to close the club, in addition to leaving their teachers unpaid since April (although donors have now stepped in to pay the teachers’ wages).
In Israel, though, they’ve got different problems. Or, perhaps it’s the same problems that they’ve got here. Apparently it’s just gotten out that there may be problems with the beliefs of some Lubavitchers regarding their former (or not) rebbe. The Jerusalem Post reports that a former FSU immigrant who was not Jewish , but was eligible under the law of return, had become interested in converting and studied in a meshichist Jerusalem ChABAD yeshiva.
About two weeks ago, he appeared before a beit din (rabbinic court) for his conversion. He had nearly finished, when one of the rabbis asked him if he believed that the rebbe was the messiah. He answered yes, that that was what he had been taught, and the court refused to convert him.
The JPost says, ”
… a source in the State Conversion Authority said that at least two leading religious Zionist rabbis ruled that messianic Chabad was beyond the pale of normative Jewish belief.
“They [messianic Chabad Hassidim] attribute to him supernatural powers years after he passed away. That is not Judaism. It’s something else.”
Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar will be asked to decide this weighty theological question and in the process pass judgment on thousands of members of the messianic stream within Chabad Hassidism who believe that Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who passed away in 1994, is the messiah.
This according to the article; I have heard an (unsubstantiated as of yet) rumour that, in fact, Rabbi Amar has ruled against the conversion applicant, and thus, essentially declared meshichist Lubavitch treif. I am curious as to what effect will this have on ChABAD: Is this a recognition that some beliefs are outside the pale, even if the holder of said beliefs has the outer appearance of Orthodox praxis? What effect will this have on the yeshivot that are still er, offering this perspective, either in Israel or the USA?
By the way, speaking of treif, Rubashkin (who is owned by the ChABAD Lubavitch Rubashkin family just to be on topic), has apparently had its teudat kashrut yanked by KAJ (HT to Failedmessiah)
British singer Lauren Rose has released a modern version of traditional Jewish song “Hava Nagila,” and gambling pundits have even given odds on the song to take the top spot in the U.K. Christmas pop charts.
According the British newspaper The Sun, bookmaker William Hill has given 17-year-old Lauren Rose a 16-1 shot at having Britain’s best-selling song on December 25.
The Sun also reports that Lauren’s father, Mark Goldberg, has quit his job as boss of Bromley Football Club to manage his daughter’s music career.
Lauren’s version of “Hava Nagila” is not the first by contemporary acts from both the pop and classical worlds. The list of musicians to perform the song includes Bob Dylan, Neil Diamond, Harry Belafonte, Julie Andrews, Ben Folds and violinist and conductor Andre Rieu.
The song, whose title translates as “Let Us Rejoice,” is de rigueur at Jewish celebrations, and is widely attributed to Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, who is believed to have penned the song at the close of World War One.
“Baby, just be free…
Now’s the time to do it,
Now’s the time to lose it…”
I set out from my apartment off the main street in the Old Town of Vilnius for the Choral Synagogue. It is the one synagogue that survives and is still in use in a city that once supported over two hundred houses of prayer. During the war the Nazi’s used this synagogue as an ammunition storehouse. Today, it is a beautifully restored building in the ubiquitous Moorish style. It’s beige exterior glows at sunset. People wait for the bus on its corner. A man shlings some Brandy down his throat across the street. Passersby stare bamboozled at the small group of rugged men hobbling on canes towards the Synagogue’s rusted gates.
Inside, my friend Dovid is talking Yiddish to a very elderly man in the row across from me. Then Dovid gets up and says “Eli, would you mind accompanying this man home with me? He says his heart hurts.†Davening Mincha has not begun. I hop out of my seat and the old man wraps his left arm around mine. His other hand hold Dovid’s wrist. Dovid and I look at each other. Is this man going to die holding onto our arms? We will take him home, as he wishes.
We begin walking. He stops intermittently to rest. We ask him repeatedly in Yiddish if we should get him a doctor. We pass a cab. “Do you want a cab?†“Tonight is Shabbos!†he says, staring at Dovid. Then I remember my days learning in Jerusalem. “But sir, this is Pikuach Nefesh!,†I say. The Rabbis and the Rambam argued that it is permissible to break Shabbos if and when it becomes an obligation to save a life in jeopardy.
Then the old man leaned on Dovid and lifted his wrist, raised his thumb and said “Dos iz richtik!â€. This is correct! A smile bore a gleaming graveyard of four teeth. A Jewish concept in a formerly Jewish world! He talked to the cab driver watching three generations of Jews in front of a Vilna hotel. The driver explained he couldn’t take the man three blocks up the hill. He was waiting for a customer to leave the strip club across the street. The old man grit his teeth. Dovid and I were angry. The old man decides to go by foot.
So we walked up his hill. We learned on our frequent rest stops that he was nineteen years old in 1941. He was born in a shtetl two hundred kilometers from Vilna, close to what is today Belarus. He has the keys to the Vilna Gaon’s tomb in his apartment. He is the indigenous, Yiddish survivor who represents the world that much of world Jewry simply ignores. He stayed here. We arrive in a small building in a sprawling Soviet-era apartment block near the Vilnius train station. Blonde toddlers crawl in the dirt. He used to live with his son, but his son now works in Kaunas, formerly Kovno, over an hour away. He lives off a small pension and one check a month from a lady in America. A few people check up on him a couple times a week. He was born into the world of Lithuanian Jewry. In that world his heart, soul and feet have remained.
We ask him if we can get him some water, or if he needs help taking off his shoes. “What do you need?†He says “Tell that lady to write me a letter with her checks. A guten Shabbos. A Dank.†He shuts the door.
Dovid and I walk back to the Synagogue. We arrive. I’m sweating bullets. In a viscous Russian lilt, the minyan sings Lecha Dodi!
I know from British friends of mine that it is true that British anti-Semitism is a normal part of English culture there, nevertheless, the fervor with which the British have taken up boycotting Israel is both hysterical and counterproductive. Particularly since the targets of these boycotts have largely been parts of the Israeli culture that tend to be progressive and might actually (do) serve in the struggle for equality.
So it’s nice to see that Labor leadersin the USA have not jumped on the indiscriminate boycotting bandwagon.
According to a letter sent by the Jewish Labor Committee’s Arieh Lebowitz over two dozen U.S. labor leaders have denounced British unions’ support for boycotting Israel.
Their response comes in the wake of a decision by several unions, including the UK Transport and General Workers Union, to back economic, cultural and academic boycotts of Israel in protest against “the treatment of the Palestinian people.”
“Their resolutions have no purpose other than demonizing Israel,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Jewish Labor Committee, an organization of Jewish union leaders and supporters which is continuing to solicit support for their statement opposing these boycotts.
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A feature length documentary, it explores the 25ish year history of hip hop in Brighton, England, comparing it to the scenes in the US (”east coast” and “west coast” America lend to the film’s “south coast” England title), London, and other parts of Europe. Listen to good music, watch some amazing break-dancing, see local writers and graffiti artists, and throw in a tonne of archival footage and interviews, and you too will be an expert on the south coast hip hop scene.
