by Rabbi Uziel, Israel’s first Sephardic Chief Rabbi the State of Israel.
On the State of Israel as a fulfillment of Biblical Prophecy
The first stage to redemption is removing the Jewish people’s subservience to the nations of the world. This messianic stage is taking place before our eyes, as we well know that our past subservience to the nations has caused us great harm, but now, with the return of the Jewish people to their land and the building of our own state, we are no longer subservient to the nations. Despite all of the dangers we are encountering in realizing this messianic stage, we nevertheless see an awakening of God’s will for the Jewish people to settle in their own homeland. This Divine awakening is what inspired us towards the Declaration of Independence of our own Jewish state. We live in an era where we are witness to the fulfillment and realization of the vision of our prophets.
Israel Awards Michael Douglas $1 Million Prize Dubbed 'Jewish Nobel'
Actor awarded Genesis Prize for his commitment to Judaism and Israel
Michael Douglas on December 2, 2014 in New York City. ( Alex Goodlett/Getty Images)
Michael Douglas, the actor who last year suffered a hora-related injury at his son’s bar mitzvah then bravely continued the coming-of-age celebrations with a trip to Israel, has been awarded the second-ever $1 million Genesis Prize for his commitment to Judaism and the State of Israel.
1910: The Angel Island Immigration Station opened today.
Prior to the opening of the Immigration Station, immigrants landed directly in San Francisco.
Jews immigrated through Angel Island primarily in two waves:
in the 1920s from Russia to escape the Bolshevik revolution,
and between 1938 and 1940, when German and Austrian Jews crossed Asia to flee the Nazis.
In some ways, Angel Island was the Ellis Island of the West.
But because of the politics and laws of its time, unlike Ellis Island,
many immigrants were detained on Angel Island for weeks or months at a time,
particularly Chinese and other Asian immigrants.
The historic Jewish cemetery in Ioannina, Greece
suffered serious damage in a severe storm that struck Saturday, Jan. 3.
According to local media reports and representatives of the local Jewish community,
gale force winds uprooted a number of trees, including a tall cypress tree that toppled onto the tahara house
and also damaged the surrounding pavement.
A number of graves, particularly in the oldest section of the cemetery, were also reported to be damaged.
We publish here photos sent by Moses Eliasaf, President of the Jewish Community in Ioannina,
to Marcia Haddad Ikonomopoulos, museum director at the Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue in New York,
which is spearheading a drive to raise money for repairs (estimated, Marcia says, at more than $50,000).
Kehila Kedosha Janina had already been working to fund-raise to restore the cemetery,
which in 2012 was designated an historical landmark.
The cemetery has suffered several vandal attacks over the years.
As many of you know, a severe storm in the beginning of January severely damaged the Jewish Cemetery of Ioannina.
Trees were uprooted, pathways demolished and many tombstones severely damaged.
Needless to say, the small Jewish community in Ioannina cannot possibly repair the cemetery on their own.
Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue will spearhead a drive to raise money
for repairs(estimated at over $50,000).
This is not the first time we have done this.
For those of you living in the United States, send your checks to
Kehila Kedosha Janina Synagogue, 280 Broome Street, New York NY 10002.
The Association of Friends of Greek Jewry will absorb the costs of bank transfers
so that every dollar raised will go directly to the Jewish Community of Ioannina.
For those of you outside the United States
who wish to make bank transfers directly to the Jewish Community of Ioannina,
contact us atkehila_kedosha_janina@netzero.net
and we will send you the bank information for the community in Ioannina.
We sincerely thank those who have already given.
Please encourage your family and friends who have not yet given to do so.
Marcia Haddad Ikonomopoulos
Museum Director
Kehila Kedosha Janina
280 Broome Street
NYC, NY 10002
Friends of Yoav Hattab, the son of the Tunis chief rabbi who was killed in the attack on the Hyper Cacher market, describe his love of Israel.
Most friends who meet on Birthright Israel trips get to look forward to lifelong connections with their fellow participants.
Yoav Hattab never got that chance. The son of the Chief Rabbi of Tunis, who traveled to Israel on Birthright last month, had only been back in Paris for a few weeks when he was gunned down by the terrorist who laid siege to the Hyper Cacher supermarket on Friday.
The 21-year-old, Hattab was a student when he signed up for one of the free Birthright tours to Israel offered to young Diaspora Jews around the world. Hattab grew up in La Goulette, a coastal town in the suburbs of Tunis, the Daily Mail reported, but had moved to Paris to study marketing and international trade.
But one of his Birthright companions said his ultimate aim was to move to Israel, even though the Birthright trip was his first time in the country.
We are called settlers, occupiers and much worse. While the Palestinian Authority incites violence against Israelis, the media brings legitimacy to the terror.
The world is divided between people who believe Israel is the home of the Jewish people and people who believe Jews have invaded the land and forcibly expelled the true Palestinian people. Who is correct?
Media outlets such as CNN, BBC, CBS and many others have been telling a tragic story about Palestinians who were forced out of their homeland and into a harsh life in which they are refugees living under brutal oppression. The oppressors are the vicious Zionists, the many thousands of Jews who manufactured a story about a Holocaust in order to inhabit Palestinian land. The claim is that the Zionists have no claim to the land, having abandoned it over 2000 years ago. Bear in mind, there are those who say the Jewish people have no link to “Palestine” at all. These same people often refer to the Holocaust as the “holohaux” and who portray Hitler as a hero. When confronted by archaeological proof about the Jewish connection to Israel, they say that the Jews of today are not the same as the Jewish people who lived over 2000 years ago. Where are those Jews? Dead. Assimilated. The answers vary.
Washington-area Sephardic Jews share traditional foods and converse in the disappearing language of their ancestors
[Podcast audio below.] It all started back in 2001, when Sarajevo-born folk singer Flory Jagoda invited roughly a dozen other Sephardim in the Washington area to join her for conversation over burekas and bumuelos (fritters, or doughnuts). More specifically, she invited them for conversation in Judeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino, the language spoken by Jews in medieval Spain and later in the far-flung lands to which they fled after the expulsion in 1492.
Today, the language is all but forgotten, except by those like Jagoda who spoke it growing up. The group has grown to include more than 20 participants. At their monthly meetings—which members call vijitas de al’had, or “Sunday visits,” after a centuries-old tradition from the Old Country—the men and women eat Sephardic treats, sing songs, and study a Judeo-Spanish reading exercise, complete with vocabulary lists. Vox Tablet’s Julie Subrin visited their annual Hanukkah gathering in 2008 for this audio postcard from our archives.
The Museum of the City of New York and YIVO Institute for Jewish Research premiere Letters to Afar: By Péter Forgács, music by the Klezmatics, an immersive video art installation based on home movies made by Jewish immigrants who traveled from New York back to Poland during the 1920s and 30s. Letters to Afar opened on Wednesday, October 22, and remains on view until Sunday, March 22, 2015.
The individual films, interpreted as “letters” and knitted into a single work of art, document poignant family reunions and everyday life in cities, small towns, and villages throughout Poland in the years before the Second World War, capturing a culture on the brink. Internationally acclaimed Hungarian artist Péter Forgács created the audiovisual art installation under a commission by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. With a haunting soundtrack by the New York-based band, The Klezmatics, these films bring a lost world to life in startling and moving detail.
“Letters to Afar provides a glimpse of life in Poland prior to World War II, and poignantly speaks to the complex dual identity that is fundamental to the New York immigrant experience and essential to our understanding of the dynamism, creativity and progress of New York City,” says Susan Henshaw Jones, the Ronay Menschel Director of the Museum of the City of New York. “This innovative art installation powerfully evokes the emotional as well as historical reality of Polish New Yorkers who loved both their homeland and their adopted city. It embodies a core aspect of the New York identity, and I am sure it will deeply move and educate the diverse visitors who come to our museum.”
“Drawn from the collections of the YIVO Institute, Letters to Afar is a magical work of synthesis, both history and imagination, a window onto a largely forgotten past whose vibrant and varied existence gave birth to American Jewry,” said Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Filming for their families back in New York in the 1920s and 30s, amateur filmmakers recorded Polish relatives and friends in their daily surroundings. Unknowingly, they also provided extraordinary documentation of joyous family interactions in interwar Poland. In Letters to Afar, acclaimed filmmaker and video artist Péter Forgács, who specializes in working with archival footage, adapted these home movies or “letters” for the 21st century museum visitor. Avoiding a broad historical narrative, Letters to Afar captures intimate human behavior—a look, a gesture, an interaction—replayed at different speeds set to a score of traditional Jewish music, and accompanied by captions and spoken text drawn from memoirs, letters and literature. As a result, viewers are offered more than a historical perspective on prewar life; they experience the longing and complex forces that drew New York immigrants back to revisit their homeland, family and friends.
At once particular and universal, Letters to Afar documents a lost society while highlighting the immigrant experience of being caught between two worlds. In 2013, the installation opened at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.
Letters to Afar at the City Museum was made possible with the generous support of the Kronhill Pletka Foundation, The Righteous Persons Foundation, The Seedlings Foundation and Sigmund Rolat. Additional support is provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
About YIVO
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded in Vilna, Poland, in 1925, and relocated to New York City in 1940 with the mission to preserve, study and perpetuate knowledge of the thousand-year history and culture of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Today, YIVO’s archival and library collections are the single largest resource for such study in the world. YIVO offers cultural events and programs throughout the year, educational programs, scholarly publications, and fellowships. www.yivoinstitute.org
About the Museum of the City of New York
The Museum of the City of New York celebrates and interprets the city, educating the public about its distinctive character, especially its heritage of diversity, opportunity, and perpetual transformation. Founded in 1923 as a private, nonprofit corporation, the Museum connects the past, present, and future of New York City. It serves the people of New York and visitors from around the world through exhibitions, school and public programs, publications, and collections. For more information, visit www.mcny.org.
Klara Marcus was a 30-year-old Auschwitz prisoner in 1944 when she was forced to strip naked and march into the gas chamber — only there was no more gas left.
“God was watching over me that day,” said Marcus, who is about to celebrate her 101st birthday, the Central European News reported.
“I was chosen towards the end of the day with a large group of other women and we were made ready for the gas chamber,” said Marcus, of Sighetu Marmatiej in northern Romania.
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“But when they put us inside and went to turn the gas on, they found they had run out,” she said. “One of the guards joked that it was our lucky day because they had already killed so many, they didn’t have any gas left for us.”
She then managed to escape from the infamous Nazi death camp in southern Poland, where more than a million people were killed.
“After I got free, I managed to make my way back to my home to look for my family,” said Marcus — but she discovered that they had gone.
Anton Rohian, a government representative, turned up at her home to mark her Jan. 1 birthday.
“I brought you a bunch of flowers, a bottle of champagne and an excellency diploma to thank you because you’ve returned to Maramures after all you’ve been through,” Rohian said, referring to her county.
“It’s important not to forget what happened in the past,” he said.
Kissing the Romanian flag, Marcus said: “I’ve had terrible experiences in my life, but this is a wonderful moment.”
Pic shows: Klara Marcus who survived a Nazi gas chamber is preparing to celebrate her 101st birthday. A woman who survived a Nazi gas chamber because it ran out of gas is preparing to celebrate her 101st birthday. Klara Marcus, 100, from the town of Sighetu Marmatiej in the northern Romanian county of Maramures was captured in 1944 and sent to the infamous Nazi death camp Auschwitz in southern Poland. Then aged 30, she was forced to strip naked along with hundreds of other women and marched into the gas chamber. She said: “I was chosen towards the end of the day with a large group of other women and we were made ready for the gas chamber. “But when they put us inside and went to turn the gas on, they found they had run out. “One of the guards joked that it was our lucky day because they had already killed so many they didnÄôt have any gas left for us. “God was watching over me that day.” She said that realising she had nothing to lose she had taken her life in her hands and managed to escape before they called for her again. She said: “After I got free I managed to make my way back to my home to look for my family.” It was then that she found that they too had gone and she had to rebuild her life alone. In celebration of her upcoming birthday on January 1st, government representative Anton Rohian turned up at her home. He said: “I brought you a bunch of flowers, a bottle of champagne and an excellency diploma to thank you because youÄôve returned to Maramures after all youÄôve been through. “ItÄôs important not to forget what happened in the past.” Kissing the Romanian flag, Klara said: “IÄôve had terrible experiences in my life, but this is a wonderful moment.” Over one million people were killed in Auschwitz which was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945.
It’s not much—in fact, it might feel like the shortest 88 seconds of your life—but the first trailer for director J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens is finally here, and they weren’t kidding when they called it a “teaser.”
“There’s been an awakening, have you felt it?” a voiceover bellows before cutting to shots of a soccer ball-shaped droid, Stormtroopers, and X-wing starfighters in flight. A dark cloaked figure wielding a red cross-shaped lightsaber treks through the snow as the voiceover continues “the Dark Side … and the light,” and then the money shot: the Millennium Falcon! It’s really happening!
(Side note: Does that voiceover sound an awful lot like Benedict Cumberbatch doing his Khan thing to anyone else?)
The trailer, which hit the web today and is playing in select theaters this weekend, ends by reminding us that this movie doesn’t come out until December 2015. So, like, a whole year from now. That’s a long time to wait, but it looks like it’ll be worth it.
