ISRAEL THIS & THAT

Hi, have been off line for a while, harddrive problem, on line again.  Also saw the dentist, had an appointment, found I now have a dry socket where too was pulled out from, so am a little sore.  Jen

Van: Aukina4Israel1
Bericht 1 in discussie

Dozens of young people are being held for “crimes” of absurdity. What kind of
Jew does it take to imprison and besiege 40,000 peaceful protesters? What kind
of Jew imprisons mothers and babies, rabbis and teachers with barbed wire? What
kind of Jew will it take to implement Ariel Sharon’s expulsion plan. ....  What
kind of Jew can go into a synagogue and blow it up?  This is the government
Sharon has established ...



What would my grandfather say?
By: Paula R. Stern  
Isralert.com source: New Isralert subscriber/commentator Paula Stern in Israel



My grandfather lived in a world that did not understand or care about his
religion and so he was forced to choose between observance and feeding his
family, abandoning much of what he’d learned as a child in Poland in order to
raise a family in America while trying to save his mother and sisters from the
clouds of darkness spreading across his native Poland. 

His world came crashing down with the knowledge that the storm broke too soon
and his family perished in Auschwitz. As I grew up, he often spoke about Israel
and we shared a dream of coming here together one day. He was a father and
grandfather, a house painter, a simple man in many ways, but most of all, he was
simply a Jew. 

As I raise my children in the Jewish state he loved, as I try to shape the
people they are becoming, we have reclaimed the Jewish Sabbath, and brought back
to life the pride he once felt. We no longer need the world’s permission or
approval to practice our religion. 

My daughter and I returned to Poland to walk the streets of my grandfather’s
youth with pride and anger. We held our heads high in Auschwitz. We were the
survivors, proud Israelis come to tell the world that never again would Jews be
at anyone’s mercy. 

Never again, would there be a Holocaust on our watch, no ghettos, no synagogues
destroyed and people shipped off to death camps. I spoke to the memory of my
grandfather often while in Poland. I told him that he could be proud, he could
rest in peace. Jewish communities and houses of worship, cemeteries and schools
were finally safe.

Israel would protect all Jews everywhere from the hatred that drove him out of
Poland and murdered his family. Often as I toured Poland, I asked myself what
kind of person could have committed these horrors, what kind of person ordered
these crimes of murder, destruction and desecration?

And now, as the bitter countdown continues towards one of the most disastrous
and dangerous decisions any Israeli government has ever thrust on our nation, I
am haunted by the simple question, what kind of Jew will it take to implement
Sharon’s madness?

What kind of Jew does it take to incarcerate 14-year-old Chaya Belogorodsky who
is accused of standing on a sidewalk while her friends blocked traffic. Not
content to arrest her teenage friends, a female police officer warned Chaya to
leave the area. Chaya responded that she was standing on the sidewalk and had a
legal right to do so. She was then arrested and has spent the last four weeks in
jail. 

Here in Israel. Impossible to imagine, and yet there sits Chaya. And she is not
alone. There are literally dozens of other young people being held for similar
“crimes” of absurdity. This is the government Sharon has established, the
justice system of Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, the police force of
Commissioner Moshe Karadi and ultimately, the army of Defense Minister Shaul
Mofaz and Chief of Staff Dan Halutz. 

What kind of Jew does it take to imprison and besiege 40,000 peaceful
protesters? What kind of Jew imprisons mothers and babies, rabbis and teachers
with barbed wire? What kind of Jew will it take to implement Ariel Sharon’s
expulsion plan? And, as if those weren’t hard enough questions to answer,
another one creeps into my mind and refuses to leave. What kind of Jew can go
into a synagogue and blow it up? 

I first thought of this question on a Friday night in Neve Dekalim a few weeks
ago as I listened to the rabbi speaking. He spoke about his community, about
Jews fighting .Sharon’s evil plan peacefully and with no violence. He talked of
life in Gush Katif, what they had built, why they had come, and how much they
loved what they had created. 

Paradise, he called the place. And as the rabbi spoke, I found myself looking
around the large room, at the windows, at the people, at the books. It shouldn’t
happen. It can’t happen. They have such faith that it won’t happen. Please let
them be right, let Ariel Sharon come to his senses before he rips people from
their homes in exchange for nothing, before he tears a society to pieces.

In the morning, I went to a different synagogue. This one also beautifully
designed and decorated, filled with books and light and air and again I
wondered. What kind of Jew, a soldier in our army, a son of Israel will blow
them up? 

When the soldiers come, the people will be gone, the bookshelves empty. The
Torah scrolls will be removed from the Holy Ark. They will walk into the empty
synagogue, their boots echoing off the empty walls. They’ll have to look
straight up to see the high ceilings, but will they notice the way the architect
designed it so that the morning light shines into the large room, or how one of
the synagogues is shaped like the Star of David? 



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Will they realize that they are doing something that no Jew has ever done, that
no Jew should ever do? They will calculate, as they have been taught to do,
where to place the explosives to maximize the damage, to bring the ceiling down
and make the walls crumble. They have been ordered to destroy a place of
learning, of prayer, of respect, the very essence of why we have come to live in
this land.

These buildings are why they hate us, why they hound us, why we need a land of
our own. If we destroy who we are, there is nothing left. We are not the same
people we were when my grandfather had to choose between desecrating the Sabbath
and trying to raise money to save his family. 

Don’t do what other nations have done to us, don’t destroy a Jewish house of
prayer, don’t expel Jews from their land. In the entire history of our people,
when have we ever destroyed our own places of worship? This is what they did to
us in Europe, in the pogroms, the crusades, the Holocaust. This is what our
enemies have tried to do all along, to erase who we are. This is not something
that a soldier of the Jewish army should do. 

I can’t help but wonder what my grandfather would say if he knew that this time,
it will be the Jews themselves who plan to destroy the Houses of God.