Tikkun Olam

Do you remember the lone high school student "Daniel," who went into a pro-Palestinian demonstration carrying a huge Israeli flag after the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010?  I wrote about him and posted the video in 2010, here , and here . He is bravely continuing  his activism again: by videotaping a message, in Farsi, to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in support of Israel and the Jewish people.  Daniel is from Persian (Iranian) descent, and his message in the language of the Iranian people is very powerful.  (Thank you to A Soldier's Mother for alerting us to this). First, in case you haven't seen it, here is the video of the interview of Daniel's infiltration into that anti-Israel demonstration, and the pro-Israel rally which was held six days later. Below is his message to the Iranian people.  From what I know, the Iranian people do not have a hatred of Israel: just their government and religious leaders do, and have threatened to anni...

As usual, it is immensely difficult for me to let go of a chag* . Purim ** came like a lion, and also went out like a lion (as opposed to a lamb)! The chag, for me, was filled with meaning and mitzvot, and great portent for the future, in the light of events and developments in Iran, who's evil leader Ahmadinejad has threatened Israel existentially. Although both my husband and daughter--D.H. and Toodles respectively--say that this is pish-tosh : like, Jews have been threatened in every generation and decade so, buddy, what else is new?! I understand where they're coming from, but my opinion differs. I think these times-- partially because of radical Islamists' terrorist attacks globally, the rise of antisemitism's ugly head all over the world, combined with nuclear weapons development and proliferation by rogue nations (read: Pakistan, North Korea, and now Iran)--are much more dangerous and have greater portent than in the past. So Purim, the story of the planned ...

To listen to President Obama speak about the Middle East, you'd think he was the fairest, most intelligent, reasonable leader the United States has had in a long time. All he wants is peace between the Jewish state and the Arab states, and in a civilized world, civilized man reasons intellectually with his fellow man rather than resorts to primitive actions such as physical violence. It sounds good, really it does. That is what one would expect from an intelligent, reasonable man or woman. I think he's forgotten one minor thing, though: reasoning has a smidgen of a chance of working only if both sides use reasoning towards conflict resolution . The so-called Palestinians don't. So at the first meeting between President Obama and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu in Washington D.C., there was a slight difference of opinion: Bama thinks Israel should stop the Judaisizing of the "occupied territories" (read: Yehudah & Shomron=Judea and Samaria) by stopping and dis...

So it turns out that my daughter was chosen to sing, not only the two songs I mentioned in my post of April 18th, Yom haShoah-Never Again (scroll down), but also a third one called in Hebrew Punar . I am ashamed to say that I had never heard of it. So I looked it up. It seems that between July 1941 and August 1944, near the railway station of Paneriai , a suburb of Vilnius, where the Nazis, (yimach shemam*) in their goal of murdering every living Jew in Lithuania, massacred 100,000 people, mostly Jews, along with Poles and Russians. The site--to which tours are brought to learn the history of what ensued there-- is referred to as the site of The Ponary Massacre . And we are oh so grateful that Ahmadinejad might have 'dropped' the Holocaust denial from his speech vilifying Israel. So grateful. . . Punar. *may their name be erased.