Here are overlooked facts in the current Middle East situation.
These were compiled by a Christian university professor.
BRIEF FACTS ON THE ISRAELI CONFLICT TODAY....
( It takes just 1.5 minutes to read!!!! )
It makes sense and it's not slanted. Jew and non-Jew -- it doesn't matter.
1. Nationhood and Jerusalem . Israel became a nation in 1312 B.C.E. Two thousand years before the rise of Islam.
2. Arab refugees in Israel began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1967, two decades after the establishment of the modern State of Israel.
3. Since the Jewish conquest in 1272 B.C.E., the Jews have had dominion over the land for one thousand years with a continuous presence in the land for the past 3,300 years.
4. The only Arab dominion since the conquest in 635 C.E. Lasted no more than 22 years.
5. For over 3,300 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital. Jerusalem has never been the cap ital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem , they never sought to make it their capital, and Arab leaders did not come to visit.
6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in Tanach, the Jewish Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in th e Koran.
7. King David founded the city of Jerusalem . Mohammed never c ame to Jerusalem .
8. Jews pray facing Jerusalem . Muslims pray with their backs toward Jerusalem .
9. Arab and Jewish Refugees: In 1948 the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews . Sixty-eight percent left without ever seeing an Israeli soldier.
10 The Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab lands due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms.
11. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is estimated to be around 630,000. The number of Jewish refugees from Arab lands is estimated to be the same.
12. Arab refugees were INTENTIONALLY not absorbed or integrated into the Arab lands to which they fled, despite the vast Arab territory. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, theirs is the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into th eir own peoples' lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel , a country no larger than the state of New Jersey .
13. The Arab - Israeli Conflict: The Arabs are represented by eight separate nations, not including the Palestinians. There is only one Jewish nation. The Arab nations initiated all five wars and lost. Israel defended itself each time and won.
14. The P.L.O.'s Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. Israel has given the Palestinians most of the West Bank land, autonomy under the Palestinian Authority, and has supplied them.
15. Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were desecrated and the Jews were denied access to places of worship. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian sites have been preserved and made accessible to people of all faiths.
16. The U.N. Record on Israel and the Arabs: of the 175 Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel .
17. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel .
18. The U.N was silent while 58 Jerusalem Synagogues were destroyed by the Jordanians.
19. The U.N. Was silent while the Jordanians systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives .
20. The U.N. Was silent while the Jordanians enforced an apartheid- like a policy of preventing Jews from visiting the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.
These are incredible times. We have to ask what our role should be.
What will we tell our grandchildren we did when there was a turning point in Jewish destiny, an opportunity to make a difference?
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Friday, August 22, 2008
the runner-up for the Nobel Peace Prize
Have you heard the story about the runner-up for the Nobel Peace Prize?
Irena Sendlerowa
1910-2008
May 12 marked the death of a 98-year-old lady named Irena.
During WWII, Irena received permission from the Nazis to work in the Warsaw ghetto as a plumbing/sewer specialist.
She had an ulterior motive...
Being German, she knew the Nazis' plans for the Jews and smuggled infants out in the bottom of the large tool box she carried. Larger children were placed in a burlap sack in the back of her truck. Also in the back was a dog that she had trained to bark each time the Nazi guards allowed her out of the ghetto and back in.
The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog, and its barking covered any noise made by the infants and small children Irena managed to smuggle out approximately 2,500 children before she was finally caught. When she was captured, the Nazis beat her severely, breaking both her arms and her legs.
Irena kept a record of the names of all the children she smuggled out of that Warsaw ghetto and kept them in a glass jar buried under a tree in her back yard.
After the war, she tried to locate any parents who may have survived so she might reunite the child with its family. Most, of course, did not survive the Holocaust, and the vast majority of the surviving children were placed in foster homes or adopted.
Last year Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but she lost to Al Gore, who won the award for presenting a slide show on Global Warming.
Irena Sendlerowa
1910-2008
May 12 marked the death of a 98-year-old lady named Irena.
During WWII, Irena received permission from the Nazis to work in the Warsaw ghetto as a plumbing/sewer specialist.
She had an ulterior motive...
Being German, she knew the Nazis' plans for the Jews and smuggled infants out in the bottom of the large tool box she carried. Larger children were placed in a burlap sack in the back of her truck. Also in the back was a dog that she had trained to bark each time the Nazi guards allowed her out of the ghetto and back in.
The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog, and its barking covered any noise made by the infants and small children Irena managed to smuggle out approximately 2,500 children before she was finally caught. When she was captured, the Nazis beat her severely, breaking both her arms and her legs.
Irena kept a record of the names of all the children she smuggled out of that Warsaw ghetto and kept them in a glass jar buried under a tree in her back yard.
After the war, she tried to locate any parents who may have survived so she might reunite the child with its family. Most, of course, did not survive the Holocaust, and the vast majority of the surviving children were placed in foster homes or adopted.
Last year Irena was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but she lost to Al Gore, who won the award for presenting a slide show on Global Warming.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit
From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit By JAMES BARRON
New York Times: April 30, 2008
The back story of how a Torah got from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to the ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street is one the pastor of the Lutheran church down the street sums up as simply “miraculous.”
It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim who buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed in and later renamed the city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewish prisoners who sneaked the rest of it — four carefully chosen panels — into the concentration camp.
It is the story of a Polish Catholic priest to whom they entrusted the four panels before their deaths. It is the story of a Maryland rabbi who went looking for it with a metal detector. And it is the story of how a hunch by the rabbi’s 13-year-old son helped lead him to it.
This Torah, more than most, “is such an extraordinary symbol of rebirth,” said Peter J. Rubinstein, the rabbi of Central Synagogue. “As one who has gone to the camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the Holocaust, this gives meaning to Jewish survival.”
On Wednesday, the restored Torah will be rededicated in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which for more than 20 years the congregation of Central Synagogue has observed in conjunction with its neighbor, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, at Lexington Avenue and 54th Street. The senior pastor, the Rev. Amandus J. Derr, said that next to Easter, the Holocaust memorial is “the most important service I attend every year.”
The Torah from Auschwitz “is a very concrete, tactile piece of that remembrance — of what people, some of whom did it in the name of Christ, did to people who were Jewish,” Pastor Derr said, “and the remembrance itself enables us to be prepared to prevent that from happening again.”
A Torah scroll contains the five books of Moses, and observant Jews read a portion from it at services. Its ornate Hebrew must be hand-lettered by specially trained scribes, and it is considered unacceptable if any part is marred or incomplete. For years, Jews around the world have worked to recover and rehabilitate Torahs that disappeared or were destroyed during the Holocaust, returning them to use in synagogues.
This Torah remained hidden for more than 60 years, buried where the sexton had put it, until Rabbi Menachem Youlus, who lives in Wheaton, Md., and runs the nonprofit Save a Torah foundation, began looking for it about eight years ago. Over two decades, Rabbi Youlus said, the foundation has found more than 1,000 desecrated Torahs and restored them, a painstaking and expensive process. This one was elusive. But Rabbi Youlus was determined.
He had heard a story told by Auschwitz survivors: Three nights before the Germans arrived, the synagogue sexton put the Torah scrolls in a metal box and buried them. The sexton knew that the Nazis were bent on destroying Judaism as well as killing Jews.
But the survivors did not know where the sexton had buried the Torah. Others interested in rescuing the Torah after the war had not found it.
As for what happened during the war, “I personally felt the last place the Nazis would look would be in the cemetery,” Rabbi Youlus said in a telephone interview Tuesday, recalling his pilgrimage to Auschwitz, in late 2000 or early 2001, in search of the missing Torah. “So that was the first place I looked.”
With a metal detector, because, if the story was correct, he was hunting for a metal box in a cemetery in which all the caskets were made of wood, according to Jewish laws of burial. The metal detector did not beep. “Nothing,” the rabbi said. “I was discouraged.”
He went home to Maryland. One of his sons, Yitzchok, then 13, wondered if the cemetery was the same size as in 1939. They went online and found land records that showed that the present-day cemetery was far smaller than the original one.
Rabbi Youlus went back in 2004 with his metal detector, aiming it at the spot where the g’neeza — a burial plot for damaged Torahs, prayer books or other papers containing God’s name — had been. It beeped as he passed a house that had been built after World War II.
He dug near the house and found the metal box. But when he opened it, he discovered the Torah was incomplete. “It was missing four panels,” he said. “The obvious question was, why would the sexton bury a scroll that’s missing four panels? I was convinced those four panels had a story themselves.”
They did, as he learned when he placed an ad in a Polish newspaper in the area “asking if anyone had parchment with Hebrew letters.”
“I said I would pay top dollar,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The response came the next day from a priest. He said, ‘I know exactly what you’re looking for, four panels of a Torah.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
He compared the lettering and the pagination, and paid the priest. (How much, he would not say. The project was underwritten by David M. Rubenstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group. Mr. Rubenstein was tied at No. 165 on the Forbes 400 last year with a reported fortune of $2.5 billion; in December, he paid $21.3 million for a 710-year-old copy of the Magna Carta, a British declaration of human rights that served as the foundation for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.)
The priest “told me the panels were taken into Auschwitz by four different people,” Rabbi Youlus said. “I believe they were folded and hidden.” One of the panels contained the Ten Commandments from Exodus, a portion that, when chanted aloud each year, the congregation stands to hear. Another contained a similar passage from Deuteronomy.
The priest, who was born Jewish, was himself an Auschwitz survivor. He told Rabbi Youlus that the people with the four sections of the Torah gave them to him before they were put to death.
“He kept all four pieces until I put that ad in the paper,” Rabbi Youlus said. “As soon as I put that ad in the paper, he knew I must be the one with the rest of the Torah scroll.” (Rabbi Youlus said that the priest has since died.)
Rabbi Youlus said that nearly half the Torah’s lettering needed repair, work that the foundation has done over the past few years. Thirty-seven letters were left unfinished: 36, or twice the number that symbolizes “life” in Hebrew, will be filled in by members of the congregation before the service on Wednesday, the 37th at the ceremony.
Rabbi Youlus called it “a good sturdy Torah, even if it hasn’t been used in 65 years.” The plan is to make it available every other year to the March of the Living, an international educational program that arranges for Jewish teenagers to go to Poland on Holocaust Remembrance Day, to march from Auschwitz to its companion death camp, Birkenau.
“This really is an opportunity to look up to the heavens and say, he who laughs last, laughs best,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The Nazis really thought they had wiped Jews off the face of the earth, and Judaism. Here we are taking the ultimate symbol of hope and of Judaism and rededicating it and using it in a synagogue. And we’ll take it to Auschwitz. You can’t beat that.”
New York Times: April 30, 2008
The back story of how a Torah got from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to the ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street is one the pastor of the Lutheran church down the street sums up as simply “miraculous.”
It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim who buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed in and later renamed the city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewish prisoners who sneaked the rest of it — four carefully chosen panels — into the concentration camp.
It is the story of a Polish Catholic priest to whom they entrusted the four panels before their deaths. It is the story of a Maryland rabbi who went looking for it with a metal detector. And it is the story of how a hunch by the rabbi’s 13-year-old son helped lead him to it.
This Torah, more than most, “is such an extraordinary symbol of rebirth,” said Peter J. Rubinstein, the rabbi of Central Synagogue. “As one who has gone to the camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the Holocaust, this gives meaning to Jewish survival.”
On Wednesday, the restored Torah will be rededicated in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which for more than 20 years the congregation of Central Synagogue has observed in conjunction with its neighbor, St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, at Lexington Avenue and 54th Street. The senior pastor, the Rev. Amandus J. Derr, said that next to Easter, the Holocaust memorial is “the most important service I attend every year.”
The Torah from Auschwitz “is a very concrete, tactile piece of that remembrance — of what people, some of whom did it in the name of Christ, did to people who were Jewish,” Pastor Derr said, “and the remembrance itself enables us to be prepared to prevent that from happening again.”
A Torah scroll contains the five books of Moses, and observant Jews read a portion from it at services. Its ornate Hebrew must be hand-lettered by specially trained scribes, and it is considered unacceptable if any part is marred or incomplete. For years, Jews around the world have worked to recover and rehabilitate Torahs that disappeared or were destroyed during the Holocaust, returning them to use in synagogues.
This Torah remained hidden for more than 60 years, buried where the sexton had put it, until Rabbi Menachem Youlus, who lives in Wheaton, Md., and runs the nonprofit Save a Torah foundation, began looking for it about eight years ago. Over two decades, Rabbi Youlus said, the foundation has found more than 1,000 desecrated Torahs and restored them, a painstaking and expensive process. This one was elusive. But Rabbi Youlus was determined.
He had heard a story told by Auschwitz survivors: Three nights before the Germans arrived, the synagogue sexton put the Torah scrolls in a metal box and buried them. The sexton knew that the Nazis were bent on destroying Judaism as well as killing Jews.
But the survivors did not know where the sexton had buried the Torah. Others interested in rescuing the Torah after the war had not found it.
As for what happened during the war, “I personally felt the last place the Nazis would look would be in the cemetery,” Rabbi Youlus said in a telephone interview Tuesday, recalling his pilgrimage to Auschwitz, in late 2000 or early 2001, in search of the missing Torah. “So that was the first place I looked.”
With a metal detector, because, if the story was correct, he was hunting for a metal box in a cemetery in which all the caskets were made of wood, according to Jewish laws of burial. The metal detector did not beep. “Nothing,” the rabbi said. “I was discouraged.”
He went home to Maryland. One of his sons, Yitzchok, then 13, wondered if the cemetery was the same size as in 1939. They went online and found land records that showed that the present-day cemetery was far smaller than the original one.
Rabbi Youlus went back in 2004 with his metal detector, aiming it at the spot where the g’neeza — a burial plot for damaged Torahs, prayer books or other papers containing God’s name — had been. It beeped as he passed a house that had been built after World War II.
He dug near the house and found the metal box. But when he opened it, he discovered the Torah was incomplete. “It was missing four panels,” he said. “The obvious question was, why would the sexton bury a scroll that’s missing four panels? I was convinced those four panels had a story themselves.”
They did, as he learned when he placed an ad in a Polish newspaper in the area “asking if anyone had parchment with Hebrew letters.”
“I said I would pay top dollar,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The response came the next day from a priest. He said, ‘I know exactly what you’re looking for, four panels of a Torah.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
He compared the lettering and the pagination, and paid the priest. (How much, he would not say. The project was underwritten by David M. Rubenstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group. Mr. Rubenstein was tied at No. 165 on the Forbes 400 last year with a reported fortune of $2.5 billion; in December, he paid $21.3 million for a 710-year-old copy of the Magna Carta, a British declaration of human rights that served as the foundation for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.)
The priest “told me the panels were taken into Auschwitz by four different people,” Rabbi Youlus said. “I believe they were folded and hidden.” One of the panels contained the Ten Commandments from Exodus, a portion that, when chanted aloud each year, the congregation stands to hear. Another contained a similar passage from Deuteronomy.
The priest, who was born Jewish, was himself an Auschwitz survivor. He told Rabbi Youlus that the people with the four sections of the Torah gave them to him before they were put to death.
“He kept all four pieces until I put that ad in the paper,” Rabbi Youlus said. “As soon as I put that ad in the paper, he knew I must be the one with the rest of the Torah scroll.” (Rabbi Youlus said that the priest has since died.)
Rabbi Youlus said that nearly half the Torah’s lettering needed repair, work that the foundation has done over the past few years. Thirty-seven letters were left unfinished: 36, or twice the number that symbolizes “life” in Hebrew, will be filled in by members of the congregation before the service on Wednesday, the 37th at the ceremony.
Rabbi Youlus called it “a good sturdy Torah, even if it hasn’t been used in 65 years.” The plan is to make it available every other year to the March of the Living, an international educational program that arranges for Jewish teenagers to go to Poland on Holocaust Remembrance Day, to march from Auschwitz to its companion death camp, Birkenau.
“This really is an opportunity to look up to the heavens and say, he who laughs last, laughs best,” Rabbi Youlus said. “The Nazis really thought they had wiped Jews off the face of the earth, and Judaism. Here we are taking the ultimate symbol of hope and of Judaism and rededicating it and using it in a synagogue. And we’ll take it to Auschwitz. You can’t beat that.”
Raider of the Lost Arks
HE TRAVELS TO STRANGE PLACES, MAKES DEALS WITH DANGEROUS CHARACTERS, SPENDS MONTHS DOING RESTORATIONS. HE’S THE RABBI WHO RESCUES TORAHS.
 | |
| With the aid of a magnifier, Rabbi Menachem Youlus refurbishes lettering on a 120-year-old Torah found hidden behind a panel in a church in Boboweig, Poland. Photo by Roy Howell |
By Susan Seliger
Seated across from me in a noisy kosher restaurant in Wheaton is Rabbi Menachem Youlus, a man who goes around the world, like Indiana Jones, digging up Torahs that have been lost or stolen. Just before the 9/11 attacks on America, he rescued from a mass grave in the Ukraine the Torah that my small congregation now possesses.
He has been beaten up, thrown in jail, and gone $175,000 in debt to bring these holy scrolls out of less-than-friendly places back to safety and a new life. He has brought Torahs out of Syria, Iran, India, and China as well as Eastern Europe, often facing hostile people and governments along the way. He is now in the middle of another secret, potentially dangerous deal to recover hundreds of lost and stolen Torahs. Undaunted by long odds, he is, as he will tell you, “a man on a mission.”
He couldn’t look less like Indiana Jones. His black yarmulke glistens after our four-block walk in the rain from the bookstore—that’s his day job. His slender body and high, sweet voice make him seem more like a boy than a 43-year-old father of seven. But as he takes off his glasses to wipe away the droplets, his blue-green eyes sparkle with energy—a hint that looks don’t begin to tell the story.
“I rescue Torahs—that’s what I have been doing since 1985,” he says.
Between bites of a big lamb-pepper-and-onion sandwich doused in tahini oil, Rabbi Youlus (“No, it’s Menachem,” he insists repeatedly, and in fact everyone calls him by his first name) tells me about my congregation’s Torah. I’m having trouble understanding why he puts his life in danger to go after what looks like just a big book.
“It is not just a book,” he says. “A congregation without a Torah is a congregation without a bond between them and God.”
A Torah is also, in many of the Eastern European towns he visits, the only tangible remains of communities that were wiped out in World War II. So he is doing more than commemorating those whose lives were lost—he is bringing survivors back to life.
The Torah, also called the Tree of Life, consists of the five books of Moses—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—etched by hand in Hebrew on parchment derived from a kosher animal that has not been killed for its hide alone.
Each of the more than 300,000 ornate letters must touch the top of an almost-invisible line and be drawn with a kosher quill (usually a turkey feather) or reed, in a perfectly flowing hand.
The scribe must not be distracted from the singular thought of serving God as he writes each letter, lining them up in 245 columns of 42 lines each.
Each page, or panel, is hand sewn to the next and rolled up like a scroll. No one other than the scribe can touch the finished pages directly or use any metal that can be used to forge weapons of war, which is why Torah pointers often are made of silver or gold.
The scrolls are kept in a cabinet called an ark, as in the Ark of the Covenant. A full-size Torah, unrolled, will extend almost the length of a football field. It can take a scribe three years to complete one.
EVERY TORAH HAS A STORY
“The Torahs are all over the world,” Menachem says. “The Polish Catholic Church has some; some are buried or hidden in outhouses, garages, warehouses. The one your congregation has, which was rescued from a grave in the Ukraine just before 9/11; that one I found totally by accident,” he says, putting his sandwich down. His eyes begin to dance—you can tell he loves every twist and turn in the tale.
He had been negotiating for three months for a Torah with an “antiques dealer” in the Ukraine. “Let me tell you,” he says, “the difference between an antiques dealer and a thief is not much. It depends on which day of the week it is, which hat they are wearing. So this guy says I have to come to the Ukraine to do the deal.”
Menachem gets on a plane, hires a driver in Budapest, and drives three hours into the countryside, over the border to a town called Kamenets-Podol’skiy. After several hours of bargaining, the dealer says, “No deal.”
Menachem’s driver offers to roll up his sleeves and show the dealer how to close a deal, but the rabbi calmly tells the man with the Torah that he will be back in two hours to resume talks.
“As I was coming out of the house, this farmer in a horse and cart across the street is looking at me, looking at my yarmulke, and he comes over.
“ ‘Are you Jewish?’ he asks.
“ ‘Yes I am.’
“ ‘Then I have a map to sell you,’ he says.
“ ‘What is it?’
“He says, ‘I don’t know for sure, but my father said if I ever saw someone with a special hat like yours, sell him the map.’ ”
Menachem does some fast calculations and realizes that the man, now in his sixties, would have been very young during World War II. He probably didn’t know much of what happened.
“So I ask him, ‘How much?’
“ ‘One thousand, five hundred dollars,’ the farmer says.
“I say, ‘That’s a lot for a map.’ I try to bargain, but he says, ‘Take it or leave it.’ ”
Menachem took it.
“I have been in Eastern Europe long enough to know to trust my gut,” he says. The farmer had been told by his father that this map was his inheritance and that it would be considered valuable by Jews.
The farmer handed over an old map of his farm, on which an X had been circled. Menachem handed over $1,500 from his money belt full of gold coins. “They don’t deal in dollars” in Eastern Europe, he says. Gold is nontaxable and untraceable.
When the farmer led them to the spot where they were supposed to dig, he told Menachem he could not dig.
“This map is no good unless I can dig,” Menachem said. “Well, it will cost you,” the farmer said.
“How much?” Menachem asked, knowing the answer.
“One thousand, five hundred dollars,” the farmer told him.
Menachem shakes his head and shrugs. “Thank God that was the highest he could count. So I gave him another $1,500 for the right to dig—for that, he threw in two shovels.”
With the deal sealed, Menachem and his driver began to dig. “My driver is a big guy—he can dig. I am no slouch either,” he says. “I work for two burial societies.”
At about four feet down, Menachem and the driver hit bones. After unearthing three bodies, Menachem knew what they had. He called a well-connected friend and rabbi in St. Petersburg—“and I don’t mean Florida,” he says. Within hours, the friend had sent two backhoes and arranged for the permits to dig.
“Everything you do in Eastern Europe requires a permit. It’s a nice way to say schmear money,” Menachem says with a laugh, explaining that he spreads gold as liberally as he smears cream cheese on a bagel. “We were supporting the local economy in a big way.”
They dug for the rest of the day and through the night. “I am not sure whether there were 262 or 263 bodies,” Menachem says. “It’s not because I can’t count—we found parts of bodies that we couldn’t put back together.”
Halfway through the unearthing of the mass grave, Menachem says, they found what looked like two small bodies wrapped in tattered clothes with Jewish stars on them. They were Torah scrolls.
“I could not save the covers on the Torahs—they had pieces of bone and hair. According to Jewish law, they had to be buried when we reburied all the bodies,” he explains. “But we could save the Torahs. One of those is the Torah your congregation now has,” he says, pleased to have finished the story and his sandwich at nearly the same time.
THE DEAL THAT CHANGED HIS LIFE
We walk back to the Jewish Bookstore of Greater Washington, formerly known as Abe’s Bookstore, nestled in a strip mall on Georgia Avenue in Wheaton. Menachem runs the store along with his father, Joshua Youlus; his brother-in-law Ayson, a Torah scribe; and other family members and friends.
The front room is filled with books on Jewish history, the Holocaust, Jewish humor—175,000 titles in all. The store’s motto: If it’s Jewish, we have it.
The rear part of the store is jammed with gifts of all sorts, menorahs, jewelry, prayer shawls, and more.
I notice what looks like a rabbi doll on a top shelf. Menachem takes it down, claps at it, and the doll starts dancing the hora and singing Hava Nagila.
In an alcove near the back of the store, floor-to-ceiling shelves are filled with Torahs, some waiting to be repaired, others to be sent out. The mailing labels reveal their destinations—France, Russia, Belarus, North Dakota.
There are Jews in North Dakota who need a Torah?
Menachem smiles and fills me in on a few other things—including how he got started rescuing Torahs.
“About 20 years ago I was a CPA working in New York,” he says. Even though he was ordained as a rabbi, his grandmother always told him to have a second degree as a fallback, and he was doing pretty well in the tax business.
“One Sabbath, my uncle tracked me down with news: ‘Come home now. There’s been a terrible accident.’ ”
Menachem’s father and his sister’s fiancé were coming out of a synagogue a few miles from the bookstore in Wheaton when they were hit by a car. The doctors did not believe the two men would live until morning. The relatives said, “Menachem, go buy burial plots.”
“But that night I made a deal with God,” he says. “It wasn’t a promise, it was a deal. If He would heal my father and brother-in-law, I would devote a year—my first year of marriage—to the study of the Torah, God’s word.” He shrugs.
“They lived. Baruch Hashem [thank God]. Nobody thought they would, but they lived. And when I got married three years later, I went to Jerusalem to study.”
Giving up a CPA career after five years of working his way “up the big ladder” wasn’t easy, Menachem acknowledges. Uprooting his life to study in a foreign country, with a new wife and no savings, was not what he had set out to do. But for Menachem, a deal is a deal.
His father told him if he was going to study, he might as well get a “real” ordination. So the CPA enrolled in two rabbinical programs, at two schools side by side. “They never allow that and probably would have excommunicated me if either had known,” Menachem says. He took a class in Torah writing at night.
“It was a gift from God that I was able to do the Torah writing,” Menachem says. It takes not only artistic talent to reproduce the calligraphy but also a kind of meditative spirituality.
“My teacher told me it was very good that I became a scribe—otherwise I could have made an excellent living as a forger,” Menachem says.
“Your heart must be pure when you write the Torah, each letter, you must be focused—only—on—serving—God,” he says, pronouncing each word distinctly, as if he has entered the trancelike state one must achieve to write the word of God. “You cannot lose your focus, or the Torah is not kosher, even if it looks perfect.”
There are rituals one must perform while writing. “We are required to immerse in the mikvah [the ritual baths] every morning before we write, and if you write four Hebrew letters of God’s name [YHVH, pronounced Yahweh], you have to get up and immerse again,” he explains. There is one section of the Torah in which the scribe has to write the name of God ten times close together—making the process of getting up, undressing, immersing in the water, getting dressed again, and returning to the text seem like an Olympic event.
“Others say the baths are for purity,” Menachem says, but he has his own take on the matter. “I think God makes you ritually immerse to remember you are human—you take off your clothes, you are like everyone else, naked. It is a humbling experience.”
When his evening classes let out, Menachem met many people doing night jobs in Jerusalem. He befriended Russians and Eastern Europeans who had emigrated as professionals but in Israel were performing menial jobs—flipping burgers and cleaning bathrooms.
“I decided—with the help of my whole family—to establish a teaching institute for these emigrants that would help them become Torah scribes.” To do so, a student must study to become a rabbi and then go on to see if they have the talent and temperament to become a scribe. Finding recruits required the right incentives. “We guaranteed that we would pay for the schooling and two years’ wages to anybody who graduated,” Menachem says. The school, Tikkun Sofrim [Fixing Scribes], was launched in Jerusalem in 1987 and has graduated more than 500 scribes.
As proof that no good deed goes unpunished, the success of the school put Menachem in a bind. “I had to support my habit—I had to find Torahs for these students to work on and restore,” he says. That’s when he began making trips to Eastern Europe. Today he has expanded his solo operation into a network that includes 20 spotters worldwide (for their protection, he keeps their identities secret) who investigate leads, maintain safe houses and access to money, take photos, and set up deals when Menachem cannot be there.
Rescuing Torahs did not come cheap. “For the first 18 years I used my own money to finance these trips and the school,” he says offhandedly, as if anyone else would have done the same. Much of the money he borrowed. Besides the costs of travel and acquisition, Menachem maintains a warehouse in northwest Baltimore where the chemical treatments involved in restoring damaged parchment are done, and he keeps five to seven scribes busy cleaning, lettering, stitching, rolling, and otherwise making the scrolls kosher, or usable, again.
He does not divulge financial details until pushed. Finding and restoring an old Torah can cost $17,000 to $20,000, including “schmear money.” A new Torah can run into the tens of thousands of dollars—if you buy it from others in the business. From Menachem’s scribes, committed not to make any profit from this enterprise, it can run from $10,000 to $20,000.
“If a congregation is poor, I often tell them it only cost me $6,000,” he says. That is what he told my tiny congregation when he offered us our Torah.
“I think it is a lie that God will allow me,” he says.
Menachem’s mission to save Torahs and return them to their rightful owners or to deserving synagogues has put him and his family—this has always been a family affair—into serious debt. But in the last few years he has accepted the advice of a financial expert who shares his dream and launched a foundation, Save-a-Torah, to reduce his debt and perhaps expand his operations.
“He’s a true mensch, committed and dedicated,” says Rick Zitelman, cofounder of the Save-a-Torah foundation and president of the Zitelman Group, an investment and merchant banking firm in Rockville. “For all the wonderful things he’s doing, he only thinks about how much more there is to do. He’s not going to stop until it’s done.”
He’ll tackle jobs that others would give up on. A Torah dug up in a cemetery in Hungary was in poor condition—it had boot prints and a footprint on the back of it. “Some Nazi deliberately stepped on it,” says Sue Korman, a teacher in Goldsmith Early Childhood Education Center in Baltimore. Menachem was able to repair the Torah and get rid of the bootprint. “But you can still see the footprint—the toes, the heel, the whole foot,” adds Korman, a member of Chevrei Tzedek congregation in Baltimore that uses the Torah every week.
“This is not a for-profit business,” Menachem says, laughing at the understatement. “It is a labor of love.” Any profit goes to maintaining the cemeteries in which the bodies from the mass graves are reburied. “We have 12 cemeteries to maintain in towns with no Jews living there,” Menachem says. “And, of course,” he adds, “it is a mitzvah [a blessed act] to give the bodies in those graves a proper Jewish burial.”
FROM EASTERN EUROPE TO THE PENTAGON
Jewish laws about burial are strict and complex. Menachem became acquainted with them in his work abroad. So he was ready to help when he was called as a member of a Jewish burial society in Washington to go to the Pentagon after the attacks of 9/11.
He donned a protective suit and, because he was “a little guy,” he says he went into places others couldn’t go. “But it was so hot I could only go in for a couple of minutes at a time.” His mission was to collect every fragment of the Jews who were among the 189 people killed at the Pentagon. He had to call many funeral homes to come up with the 40 shrouds he thought would be needed, he says. It was later discovered that only eight or nine Jews perished.
“The first body I identified was actually a customer of my store,” he recalls.
By the end, he says, “everybody clicked in these emergency teams. Everybody pitched in—it didn’t matter which religion you were. Everybody rolled up their sleeves. We worked together.”
Everybody working together—that is part of Menachem’s dream.
“He has single-handedly helped to bring the Jewish people together—he is so nonjudgmental, he can talk to everyone,” says Judith Levy, executive director of the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue in DC. “He recognizes how much different branches of Jews have in common and how much we can take part together. He makes a place for everyone in his heart.”
“He thinks about everyone else besides himself,” says Jill G. Epstein, director of education for B’nai Shalom of Olney. “It doesn’t make any difference what your religion is—his goal is much bigger than what synagogue you go to and how much money you have. You’ll never meet another person like him.”
NO STRANGER TO DANGER
Three years ago, “in a country I cannot name except to say it used to be divided by a famous wall that came down,” Menachem was rescuing a Torah that had been in Auschwitz. The Torah was being advertised over the Internet, and the seller wanted $17,000. “He said he would only offer this Torah for two weeks, and if it was not sold, he would put up pictures of it burning.”
From the pictures on the Web, Menachem did not think the Torah was worth $17,000. But he could not allow it to be burned. He arranged a meeting in the man’s country.
“This fellow was in his eighties—he had a mean look to him,” Menachem says. “He kept throwing epithets at me—he did not like me, and the feeling was mutual. He was a Nazi who showed no remorse.”
When Menachem pulled out his bank check for $17,000, the old man told him that it was no good—he would take only gold. “By the way,” he added, “you have only 24 more hours before the two weeks is up.”
He called a friend and got the $17,000 in gold the next day. “I asked the fellow who gave me the gold to remain at the bottom of the stairs of the building,” Menachem says. “The old man actually threw the Torah at me. And when I got downstairs, I literally flipped the Torah to my friend.” Menachem went his way, the friend went another—with the Torah.
On the way to the airport, Menachem’s car was pulled over. “Two men beat the living daylights out of me, and they kept asking me, ‘Where is the Torah?’ ” he says. “I lost two teeth and had to have bridgework when I came back.” But he and his friend got the Torah out of the country.
Now he is getting martial-arts training. “My teacher says I am not an easy student—I should probably just stick to the Talmud.”
Another trip—this one to the Soviet Union—early in his Torah-hunting career taught him some valuable lessons. “Before the Cold War was finished, I was taking out a Torah, but I didn’t grease the right palms.” That was lesson number one. He also tried to take the Torah out whole, which became lesson number two: Any country that does not want to cooperate in returning stolen artifacts can declare a Torah a “national treasure” and make it illegal to take it out of the country.
“I was thrown in a cell—a Soviet jail is not a pleasant place, even for 24 hours,” Menachem says. “You are guilty until proven innocent.” After getting money wired, he spread it around liberally. Then he found a loophole to lesson number two: If you unstitch the Torah pages and take them out individually, you no longer have a “national treasure.” It is a tactic he has used many times since.
THE LEGEND OF THE 36
Menachem is currently at work on a secret project that could be the most difficult of all. He has discovered an unprecedented cache of Torahs and other Judaica. So far discussions are cordial. But he is worried that if too many people get wind of the operation and try to get in on it, for profit or political motives, he might not be able to save the holy books and bring them out to be restored and used by living congregations.
“Just because you find them doesn’t mean you can get them out—some of these countries are resistant to having Torahs leave,” Rick Zitelman says. “The stars have to line up just right—to find it, buy it, see if they are repairable, and get them out.”
Will he do it? Avis Miller, a rabbi at Adas Israel Congregation in DC, echoes a sentiment I heard from Menachem’s friends over and over, each voiced with the same caveat: Menachem will be embarrassed by my saying this. “There is a Hebrew legend that there are 36 righteous people in every generation, the Lamed Vov, by whose merit the world is sustained,” Miller explains. As long as these righteous people do good in the world, God will continue to bless and sustain the Earth, the legend goes.
“Menachem is one of those righteous 36,” Miller says.
“Torahs cry out to be read and studied and used,” Miller says. “There is a divine hand, a divine voice, in the words in that scroll. Menachem hears those cries.”
ALL MENACHEM’S BABIES
At the bookstore Menachem takes me over to the floor-to-ceiling shelves of Torahs that are works in progress. He reaches up to pull down a tiny Torah, half the normal size. He unrolls it. “It’s soft and fuzzy, yes? Like a baby’s skin.” I touch it—yes, like a baby’s skin.
He found this Torah in a Polish Catholic Church. It is lambskin. He returns it to its place and casts his eye up and down the shelves.
“I consider all these Torahs to be my babies,” Menachem says. “I am finding them good homes. There is a special holiness to a Torah—it’s not just a book.” He repeats the same phrase he uttered when we first met, to make sure I absorb the message. In many communities, there is a tradition that when the group is one short of a minyan—the ten people required to constitute an official congregation—the Torah can be considered the tenth person. So finding Torahs in mass graves is akin to bringing something that was once living back to life, a symbol of resurrection in the face of war’s destruction.
There is not much time left in the Torah-rescue business, Menachem says. “The next five years is a turning point. If the disrepair continues, I would say that for 95 percent, the deterioration will not be reversible.” Parchment, which comes from an animal, cannot withstand too many years of exposure to cold and heat, rain and mildew, mites and rodents.
“There are many more mass graves to find,” Menachem says. “Toward the end of the war the Germans couldn’t kill them fast enough—they didn’t transport them to camps. They killed them where they lived.” Often the victims took the most valuable possession in the village, the Torah, to the grave with them. He believes there are more than 2,000 Torahs buried in Eastern Europe alone.
How does he expect to find so many graves?
“How do I find them? How do I find them?” he says.
“The answer is, it is really God’s work,” he says, giving his familiar shrug. “I don’t go looking for a mass grave. It finds me.”
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
The Mystery of Hate
The following article was written by a Israeli journalist....
The Mystery of Hate
by Yair Lapid
Hundreds of years of fighting, six and a half wars, billions of
dollars gone with the wind, tens of thousands of victims, not including
the boy who laid down next to me on the rocky beach of lake Karon in
1982 and we both watched his guts spilling out. The helicopter took him
and until this day I do not know whether he is dead or survived. All
this, and one cannot figure it out.
And its not only what happened but all that did not happen -
hospitals that were never built, universities that were never opened,
roads that were never paved, the three years that were taken from
millions of teenagers for the sake of the army. And despite all the
above, we still do not have the beginning of a clue to the mystery of
where it all started:
Why do they hate us so much?
I am not talking about the Palestinians this time. Their dispute with
us is intimate, focused, and it has a direct effect on their lives.
Without getting into the 'which side is right' question, it is obvious
that they have very personal reasons not to stand our presence here. We
all know that eventually this is how it will be solved: in a personal
way, between them and us, with blood sweat and tears that will stain
the pages of the agreement. Until then, it is a war that could at least
be understood, even if no sane person is willing to accept the means
that are used to run it by.
It is the others. Those I cannot understand. Why does Hassan
Nasralla, along with tens of thousands of his supporters, dedicate his
life, his visible talents, his country's destiny, to fight a country he
has never even seen, people he has never really met and an army that he
has no reason to fight?
Why do children in Iran , who can not even locate Israel on the map
(especially because it is so small), burn its flag in the city center
and offer to commit suicide for its elimination? Why do Egyptian and
Jordanian intellectuals agitate the innocent and helpless against the
peace agreements, even though they know that their failure will push
their countries 20 years back? Why are the Syrians willing to stay a
pathetic and depressed third world country, for the dubious right to
finance terror organizations that will eventually threaten their own
country's existence? Why do they hate us so much in Saudi-Arabia? In
Iraq ? In Sudan ? What have we done to them? How are we even relevant to
their lives? What do they know about us? Why do they hate us so much in
Afghanistan ? They don't have anything to eat there, where do they get
the energy to hate?
This question has so many answers and yet it is a mystery. It is true
that it is a religious matter but even religious people make their
choices. The Koran (along with the Shariaa - the Muslim parallel to the
Jewish Halacha) consists of thousands of laws, why is it that we occupy
them so much?
There are so many countries who gave them much better reasons to be
angry. We did not start the crusades, we did not rule them during the
colonial period, we never tried to convert them. The Mongolians, the
Seljuk, the Greeks, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Ottomans, the
British, they all conquered, ruined and plundered the whole region. We
did not even try, so how come we are the enemy?
And if it is identification with their Palestinians brothers then
where are the Saudi Arabian tractors building up the territories that
were evacuated? What happened to the Indonesian delegation building a
school in Gaza strip? Where are the Kuwaiti doctors with their modern
surgical equipment? There are so many ways to love your brothers, why
do they all prefer to help their brothers with hating?
Is it something that we do? Fifteen hundreds years of anti-Semitism
taught us - in the most painful way possible - that there is something
about us that irritates the world. So, we did the thing everyone
wanted: we got up and left. We have established our own tiny little
country, where we can irritate ourselves without interrupting others.
We didn't even ask a lot for it. Israel is spread on a smaller
territory than 1% of the territory of Saudi-Arabia, with no oil, no
minerals, without settling on another existing state's territory. Most
of the cities that were bombed this week were not plundered from
anyone. Nahariya, Afula, and Karmiel did not even exist until we
established them. The other katyusas landed on territories over which
no one ever questioned our right with regards to them. In Haifa there
were Jews already in the 3rd century BC and Tiberias was the place
where the last Sanhedrin sat, so no one can claim we plundered them
from anyone.
However, the hatred continues. As if no other destiny is possible.
Active hatred, poisoned, unstoppable. Last Saturday the president of
Iran , Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, called again 'to act for the vanishing of
Israel '' as if we were bacteria. We got used to it so much that we
don't even ask why.
Israel does not hope and never did for Iran to vanish. As long as
they wanted, we had diplomatic relations with them. We do not have a
common border with them or even any bad memories. And still, they are
willing to confront the whole western world, to risk a commercial
boycott, to hurt their own quality of life, to crush what's left of
their economy and all that for the right to passionately hate us.
I am trying to remember and cannot: have we ever done something to
them? When? How? Why did he say in his speech that ' Israel is the main
problem of the Muslim world'? more than a billion people living in the
Muslim world, most of them in horrible conditions. They suffer from
hunger, poverty, ignorance, bloodshed that spreads from Kashmir to
Kurdistan, from dying Darfur to injured Bangladesh . How come we are the
main problem? How exactly are we in their way?
I refuse to accept the argument that claims 'that is just the way
they are'. They said it about us so many times that we have learned to
accept this _expression. There must be another reason, some dark secret
that because of it, the citizens of South Lebanon allow to rouse the
quiet border, to kidnap the soldiers of an army that has already
retreated from their territory, to turn their country into a wasteland
exactly at the time they finally escaped twenty years of disasters.
We got used to telling ourselves worn expressions - 'it's the Iranian
influence', or ' Syria is stirring behind the scenes' - but it is just
too easy explanation. Because what about them?
What about their thoughts?
What about their hopes, loves, ambitions and their dreams?
What about their children?
When they send their children to die, does it seem enough for them to
say that it was all worth while just because they hate us so much?
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Jews In The American Revolution
THIS BIT OF HISTORY WON'T CHANGE YOUR LIFE; BUT I THINK IT'S WORTH KNOWING.
A while ago, at the
display about Hyam Salomon and the Revolutionary War. He died
penniless, having used all his resources to aid the newly formed and
poorly supplied American Continental Army. George Washington's
financial advisor and assistant was a Jewish man by the name of Hyam
Salomon.
During the cold winter months at Valley Forge when American soldiers
were freezing and running out of food, it was Hyam who marshaled all
the Jews in
stranded American troops and turned the course of history. Without
this help,
Colonies would have perished before they could have defeated the
British. If! ! you take a one dollar bill out of your pocket and look at
the back at the Eagle, the stars above the Eagle's head are in the six
point Star of David to honor Jews. If you turn the Eagle upside down
you will see a configuration in the likeness of a Menorah (Candle
holder)....both at the insistence of George Washington who said we
should never forget the Jewish people and what they have done in the
interest of
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Priest Methodically Reveals Ukrainian Jews’ Fate
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
PARIS, Oct. 5 — His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.
They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine, shot dead and buried throughout the country.
He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style — and his clerical collar.
The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold.
Knocking on doors, unannounced, Father Desbois, 52, seeks to unlock the memories of Ukrainian villagers the way he might take confessions one by one in church.
“At first, sometimes, people don’t believe I’m a priest,” said Father Desbois in an interview this week. “I have to use simple words and listen to these horrors — without any judgment. I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop.”
Over four years, Father Desbois has videotaped more than 700 interviews with witnesses and bystanders and has identified more than 600 common graves of Jews, most of them previously unknown. He also has gathered material evidence of the execution of Jews from 1941 to 1944, the “Holocaust of bullets” as it is called.
Often his subjects ask Father Desbois to stay for a meal and to pray, as if to somehow bless their acts of remembrance. He does not judge those who were assigned to carry out tasks for the Nazis, and Holocaust scholars say that is one reason he is so effective.
“If a Jewish taker-of-testimony comes, what would people think — that this is someone coming to accuse,” said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “When a priest comes, people open up. He brings to the subject a kind of legitimacy, a sense that it’s O.K. to talk about the past. There’s absolution through confession.”
Unlike in Poland and Germany, where the Holocaust remains visible through the searing symbols of the extermination camps, the horror in Ukraine was hidden away, first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets.
“There was nothing to see in Ukraine because people were shot to death with guns,” said Thomas Eymond-Laritaz, president of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Ukraine’s largest philanthropic organization. “That’s why Father Desbois is so important.”
The foundation helped underwrite a conference on the subject at the Sorbonne this week — the first to bring together Western and Ukrainian scholars — and has begun contributing funds to Father Desbois’s project.
Some of the results of Father Desbois’s research — including video interviews, wartime documents, photographs of newly uncovered mass graves, rusty bullets and shell casings and personal possessions of the victims — are on display for the first time at an exhibit at the Memorial of the Shoah in the Marais district of Paris.
The exhibit shows, for example, images of the 15 mass graves of several thousand Jews in a commune called Busk that Father Desbois and his team discovered and began excavating after interviewing several witnesses. Among hundreds of other items on display is a black-and-white photo from 1942 that shows a German police officer shooting naked Jewish women lying in a ravine in the Rivne region.
Traveling with a team that includes two interpreters, a photographer, a cameraman, a ballistics specialist, a mapping expert and a notetaker, Father Desbois records all the stories on video, sometimes holding the microphone himself, and asking questions in simple language and a flat tone.
In Buchach in 2005, Regina Skora told Father Desbois that as a young girl she witnessed executions.
“Did the people know they were going to be killed?” Father Desbois asked her.
“Yes.”
“How did they react?”
“They just walked, that’s all. If someone couldn’t walk, they told him to lie on the ground and shot him in the back of the neck.”
Vera Filonok said she was 16 when she watched from the porch of her mud hut in Konstantinovka in 1941 as thousands of Jews were shot, thrown into a pit and set on fire. Those who were still alive writhed “like flies and worms,” she said.
There are stories of how the Nazis drummed on empty buckets to avoid having to listen to the screams of their victims, how Jewish women were made sex slaves of the Nazis and then executed. One witness said that as a 6-year-old he hid and watched as his best friend was shot to death.
Other witnesses described how the Nazis were allowed only one bullet to the back per victim and that the Jews sometimes were buried alive. “One witness told of how the pit moved for three days, how it breathed,” Father Desbois recalled.
Father Desbois became haunted by the history of the Nazis in Ukraine as a child growing up on the family farm in the Bresse region of eastern France. His paternal grandfather, who was deported to a prison camp for French soldiers in Rava-Ruska, on the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, told the family nothing about the experience. But he confessed to his relentlessly curious grandson, “For us it was bad, for ‘others’ it was worse.”
There were other family links to the German occupation of France. One maternal cousin who carried letters for French resisters perished in a Nazi concentration camp. Father Desbois’s mother told him only recently that the family hid dozens of resisters on the farm.
After teaching mathematics as a French government employee in West Africa and working in Calcutta for three months with Mother Teresa, he joined the priesthood. His secular family was horrified.
He started as a parish priest, studying Judaism and learning Hebrew during a stint in Israel. He asked to work with Gypsies, ex-prisoners or Jews, and was appointed as a bridge to France’s Jewish community.
It was on a tour with a group in 2002 that, visiting Rava-Ruska, he asked the mayor where the Jews were buried. The mayor said he did not know.
“I knew that 10,000 Jews had been killed there, so it was impossible that he didn’t know,” Father Desbois recalled.
The following year, a new mayor took the priest to a forest where about 100 villagers had gathered in a semicircle, waiting to tell their stories and to help uncover the graves buried beneath their feet.
He met other mayors and parish priests who helped find more witnesses. In 2004, Father Desbois created Yahad-In Unum, an organization devoted to Christian-Jewish understanding run from a tiny office in a working-class neighborhood in northeastern Paris, backed and largely financed by a Holocaust foundation in France and the Catholic Church.
To verify witnesses’ testimony, Father Desbois relies heavily on a huge archive of Soviet-era documents housed in the Holocaust museum in Washington, as well as German trial archives. He registers an execution or a grave site only after obtaining three independent accounts from witnesses.
Only one-third of Ukrainian territory has been covered so far, and it will take several more years to finish the research. A notice at the exit of the Paris exhibit asks that any visitor with information about victims of Nazi atrocities in Ukraine leave a note or send an e-mail message.
“People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years didn’t exist,” Father Desbois said. “Some ask, ‘Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you.’”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
PARIS, Oct. 5 — His subjects were mostly children and teenagers at the time, terrified witnesses to mass slaughter. Some were forced to work at the bottom rung of the Nazi killing machine — as diggers of mass graves, cooks who fed Nazi soldiers and seamstresses who mended clothes stripped from the Jews before execution.
They live today in rural poverty, many without running water or heat, nearing the end of their lives. So Patrick Desbois has been quietly seeking them out, roaming the back roads and forgotten fields of Ukraine, hearing their stories and searching for the unmarked common graves. He knows that they are an unparalleled source to document the murder of the 1.5 million Jews of Ukraine, shot dead and buried throughout the country.
He is neither a historian nor an archaeologist, but a French Roman Catholic priest. And his most powerful tools are his matter-of-fact style — and his clerical collar.
The Nazis killed nearly 1.5 million Jews in Ukraine after their invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But with few exceptions, most notably the 1941 slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews in the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, much of that history has gone untold.
Knocking on doors, unannounced, Father Desbois, 52, seeks to unlock the memories of Ukrainian villagers the way he might take confessions one by one in church.
“At first, sometimes, people don’t believe I’m a priest,” said Father Desbois in an interview this week. “I have to use simple words and listen to these horrors — without any judgment. I cannot react to the horrors that pour out. If I react, the stories will stop.”
Over four years, Father Desbois has videotaped more than 700 interviews with witnesses and bystanders and has identified more than 600 common graves of Jews, most of them previously unknown. He also has gathered material evidence of the execution of Jews from 1941 to 1944, the “Holocaust of bullets” as it is called.
Often his subjects ask Father Desbois to stay for a meal and to pray, as if to somehow bless their acts of remembrance. He does not judge those who were assigned to carry out tasks for the Nazis, and Holocaust scholars say that is one reason he is so effective.
“If a Jewish taker-of-testimony comes, what would people think — that this is someone coming to accuse,” said Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. “When a priest comes, people open up. He brings to the subject a kind of legitimacy, a sense that it’s O.K. to talk about the past. There’s absolution through confession.”
Unlike in Poland and Germany, where the Holocaust remains visible through the searing symbols of the extermination camps, the horror in Ukraine was hidden away, first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets.
“There was nothing to see in Ukraine because people were shot to death with guns,” said Thomas Eymond-Laritaz, president of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, Ukraine’s largest philanthropic organization. “That’s why Father Desbois is so important.”
The foundation helped underwrite a conference on the subject at the Sorbonne this week — the first to bring together Western and Ukrainian scholars — and has begun contributing funds to Father Desbois’s project.
Some of the results of Father Desbois’s research — including video interviews, wartime documents, photographs of newly uncovered mass graves, rusty bullets and shell casings and personal possessions of the victims — are on display for the first time at an exhibit at the Memorial of the Shoah in the Marais district of Paris.
The exhibit shows, for example, images of the 15 mass graves of several thousand Jews in a commune called Busk that Father Desbois and his team discovered and began excavating after interviewing several witnesses. Among hundreds of other items on display is a black-and-white photo from 1942 that shows a German police officer shooting naked Jewish women lying in a ravine in the Rivne region.
Traveling with a team that includes two interpreters, a photographer, a cameraman, a ballistics specialist, a mapping expert and a notetaker, Father Desbois records all the stories on video, sometimes holding the microphone himself, and asking questions in simple language and a flat tone.
In Buchach in 2005, Regina Skora told Father Desbois that as a young girl she witnessed executions.
“Did the people know they were going to be killed?” Father Desbois asked her.
“Yes.”
“How did they react?”
“They just walked, that’s all. If someone couldn’t walk, they told him to lie on the ground and shot him in the back of the neck.”
Vera Filonok said she was 16 when she watched from the porch of her mud hut in Konstantinovka in 1941 as thousands of Jews were shot, thrown into a pit and set on fire. Those who were still alive writhed “like flies and worms,” she said.
There are stories of how the Nazis drummed on empty buckets to avoid having to listen to the screams of their victims, how Jewish women were made sex slaves of the Nazis and then executed. One witness said that as a 6-year-old he hid and watched as his best friend was shot to death.
Other witnesses described how the Nazis were allowed only one bullet to the back per victim and that the Jews sometimes were buried alive. “One witness told of how the pit moved for three days, how it breathed,” Father Desbois recalled.
Father Desbois became haunted by the history of the Nazis in Ukraine as a child growing up on the family farm in the Bresse region of eastern France. His paternal grandfather, who was deported to a prison camp for French soldiers in Rava-Ruska, on the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, told the family nothing about the experience. But he confessed to his relentlessly curious grandson, “For us it was bad, for ‘others’ it was worse.”
There were other family links to the German occupation of France. One maternal cousin who carried letters for French resisters perished in a Nazi concentration camp. Father Desbois’s mother told him only recently that the family hid dozens of resisters on the farm.
After teaching mathematics as a French government employee in West Africa and working in Calcutta for three months with Mother Teresa, he joined the priesthood. His secular family was horrified.
He started as a parish priest, studying Judaism and learning Hebrew during a stint in Israel. He asked to work with Gypsies, ex-prisoners or Jews, and was appointed as a bridge to France’s Jewish community.
It was on a tour with a group in 2002 that, visiting Rava-Ruska, he asked the mayor where the Jews were buried. The mayor said he did not know.
“I knew that 10,000 Jews had been killed there, so it was impossible that he didn’t know,” Father Desbois recalled.
The following year, a new mayor took the priest to a forest where about 100 villagers had gathered in a semicircle, waiting to tell their stories and to help uncover the graves buried beneath their feet.
He met other mayors and parish priests who helped find more witnesses. In 2004, Father Desbois created Yahad-In Unum, an organization devoted to Christian-Jewish understanding run from a tiny office in a working-class neighborhood in northeastern Paris, backed and largely financed by a Holocaust foundation in France and the Catholic Church.
To verify witnesses’ testimony, Father Desbois relies heavily on a huge archive of Soviet-era documents housed in the Holocaust museum in Washington, as well as German trial archives. He registers an execution or a grave site only after obtaining three independent accounts from witnesses.
Only one-third of Ukrainian territory has been covered so far, and it will take several more years to finish the research. A notice at the exit of the Paris exhibit asks that any visitor with information about victims of Nazi atrocities in Ukraine leave a note or send an e-mail message.
“People talk as if these things happened yesterday, as if 60 years didn’t exist,” Father Desbois said. “Some ask, ‘Why are you coming so late? We have been waiting for you.’”
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
Monday, January 7, 2008
A boycott of Israel?
Following a decision by the national union of journalists in the UK ( a trade union) to boycott Israel , many British journalists across the board ridiculed the decision, some even canceled membership, but by far the most interesting article to come out of all this is the one below.
This was in The Daily Sport - British version of New York Post
Subject: If you're going to boycott Israel - do it properly!
OK. So I understand that you are ticked off at Israel , and in love with the Palestinians. That's fine with me, as long as you have truly
weighed all the facts. So, you want to boycott Israel ?????
I'll be sorry to miss you, but if you are doing it - do it properly.
Let me help you. Check all your medications. Make sure that you do not have tablets, drops lotions, etc., made by Abic or Teva. It may mean that you will suffer from colds and flu this winter but, hey, that's a small price for you to pay in your campaign against Israel , isn't it?
While we are on the subject of your Israeli boycott, and the medical contributions to the world made by Israeli doctors and scientists, how about telling your pals to boycott the following.....
An Israeli company has developed a simple blood test that distinguishes between mild and more severe cases of Multiple Sclerosis. So, if you know anyone suffering from MS, tell them to ignore the Israeli patent that may, more accurately, diagnose their symptoms.
An Israeli-made device helps restore the use of paralyzed hands. This device electrically stimulates the hand muscles, providing hope to millions of stroke sufferers and victims of spinal injuries. If you wish to remove this hope of a better quality of life to these people, go ahead and boycott Israel ..
Young children with breathing problems will soon be sleeping more soundly, thanks to a new Israeli device called the Child Hood. This innovation replaces the inhalation mask with an improved drug delivery system that provides relief for child and parent. Please tell anxious mothers that they shouldn't use this device because of your passionate cause.
These are just a few examples of how people have benefited medically from the Israeli know-how you wish to block. Boycotts often affect research. A new research centre in Israel hopes to throw light on brain disorders such as depression and Alzheimer's disease. The Joseph Sangol Neuroscience Centre in the Sheba Medical Centre at Tel HaShomer Hospital , aims to bring thousands of scientists and doctors to focus on brain research.
A researcher at Israel 's Ben Gurion University has succeeded in creating human monoclonal antibodies which can neutralize the highly contagious smallpox virus without inducing the dangerous side effects of the existing vaccine.
Two Israelis received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Doctors Ciechanover and Hershko's research and discovery of one of the human cells most important cyclical processes will lead the way to DNA repair, control of newly produced proteins, and immune defence systems.
The Movement Disorder Surgery program at Israel 's Hadassah Medical Centre has successfully eliminated the physical manifestations of Parkinson's disease in a select group of patients with a deep brain stimulation technique.
For women who undergo hysterectomies each year for the treatment of uterine fibroids, the development in Israel of the Ex Ablate 2000 System is a welcome breakthrough, offering a non-invasive alternative to surgery.
Israel is developing a nose drop that will provide a five year flu vaccine.
These are just a few of the projects that you can help stop with your Israeli boycott. But let's not get too obsessed with my ducal research, there are other ways you can make a personal sacrifice with your anti-Israel boycott.
Most of Windows operating systems were developed by Microsoft-Israel.
So, set a personal example. Throw away your computer! Computers should have a sign attached saying Israel Inside. The Pentium NMX Chip technology was designed at Intel in Israel . Both the Pentium 4 microprocessor and the Centrum processor were entirely designed, developed, and produced in Israel.
Voice mail technology was developed in Israel.
The technology for the AOL Instant Messenger ICQ was developed in
1996 in Israel by four young Israeli whiz kids.
Both Microsoft and Cisco built their only R. & D. facilities outside the US in Israel ..
So, due to your complete boycott of anything Israeli, you can now have poor health and no computer.
But your bad news does not end there. Get rid of your cellular phone.
Cell phone technology was also developed in Israel by MOTOROLA which has its biggest development centre in Israel . Most of the latest technology in your mobile phone was developed by Israeli scientists.
Feeling unsettled? You should be. Part of your personal security rests with Israeli inventiveness, borne out of our urgent necessity to protect and defend our lives from the terrorists you support.
A phone can remotely activate a bomb, or be used for tactical communications by terrorists, bank robbers, or hostage-takers. It is vital that official security and law enforcement authorities have access to cellular jamming and detection solutions.
Enter Israel 's Net line Communications
Technologies with their security expertise to help the fight against terror.
SO ALL THE NOISE ABOUT THE USA LISTENING TO OUR PRIVATE TELEPHONE CALLS, YOU SHOULD KNOW IT IS ISRAEL WHO IS DOING THE LISTENING FOR US.
A joint, non-profit, venture between Israel and Maryland will result in a 5 day Business Development and Planning Conference next March.
Elected Israeli companies will partner with Maryland firms to provide innovation to the US need for homeland security.
I also want you to know that Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees to the population in the world.
Israel produces more scientific papers per capita - 109 per 10,000 - than any other nation.
Israel has the highest number of start-up companies per rata. In absolute terms, the highest number, except the U.S. , Israel has a ratio of patents filed.
Israel has the highest concentration of hi-tech companies outside of Silicon Valley. Israel is ranked #2 in the world for venture capital funds, behind the USA .
Israel has more museums per capita.
Israel has the second highest publication of new books per capita.
Relative to population, Israel is the largest immigrant absorbing nation on earth.
These immigrants come in search of democracy, religious freedom or expression, economic opportunity, and quality of life.
Believe it or not, Israel is the only country in the world which had a net gain in the number of trees last year.
Even Warren Buffet of Berkshire-Hathaway fame has just invested millions with Israeli Companies.
So, you can vilify and demonize the State of Israel. You can continue your silly boycott, if you wish. But I wish you would consider the consequences, and the truth.
Think of the massive contribution that Israel is giving to the world, including the Palestinians - and to you - in science, medicine, communications, security.
Pro rata for population, Israel is making a greater contribution than any other nation on earth.
What do you think the Palestinians have contributed to the world?
This was in The Daily Sport - British version of New York Post
Subject: If you're going to boycott Israel - do it properly!
OK. So I understand that you are ticked off at Israel , and in love with the Palestinians. That's fine with me, as long as you have truly
weighed all the facts. So, you want to boycott Israel ?????
I'll be sorry to miss you, but if you are doing it - do it properly.
Let me help you. Check all your medications. Make sure that you do not have tablets, drops lotions, etc., made by Abic or Teva. It may mean that you will suffer from colds and flu this winter but, hey, that's a small price for you to pay in your campaign against Israel , isn't it?
While we are on the subject of your Israeli boycott, and the medical contributions to the world made by Israeli doctors and scientists, how about telling your pals to boycott the following.....
An Israeli company has developed a simple blood test that distinguishes between mild and more severe cases of Multiple Sclerosis. So, if you know anyone suffering from MS, tell them to ignore the Israeli patent that may, more accurately, diagnose their symptoms.
An Israeli-made device helps restore the use of paralyzed hands. This device electrically stimulates the hand muscles, providing hope to millions of stroke sufferers and victims of spinal injuries. If you wish to remove this hope of a better quality of life to these people, go ahead and boycott Israel ..
Young children with breathing problems will soon be sleeping more soundly, thanks to a new Israeli device called the Child Hood. This innovation replaces the inhalation mask with an improved drug delivery system that provides relief for child and parent. Please tell anxious mothers that they shouldn't use this device because of your passionate cause.
These are just a few examples of how people have benefited medically from the Israeli know-how you wish to block. Boycotts often affect research. A new research centre in Israel hopes to throw light on brain disorders such as depression and Alzheimer's disease. The Joseph Sangol Neuroscience Centre in the Sheba Medical Centre at Tel HaShomer Hospital , aims to bring thousands of scientists and doctors to focus on brain research.
A researcher at Israel 's Ben Gurion University has succeeded in creating human monoclonal antibodies which can neutralize the highly contagious smallpox virus without inducing the dangerous side effects of the existing vaccine.
Two Israelis received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Doctors Ciechanover and Hershko's research and discovery of one of the human cells most important cyclical processes will lead the way to DNA repair, control of newly produced proteins, and immune defence systems.
The Movement Disorder Surgery program at Israel 's Hadassah Medical Centre has successfully eliminated the physical manifestations of Parkinson's disease in a select group of patients with a deep brain stimulation technique.
For women who undergo hysterectomies each year for the treatment of uterine fibroids, the development in Israel of the Ex Ablate 2000 System is a welcome breakthrough, offering a non-invasive alternative to surgery.
Israel is developing a nose drop that will provide a five year flu vaccine.
These are just a few of the projects that you can help stop with your Israeli boycott. But let's not get too obsessed with my ducal research, there are other ways you can make a personal sacrifice with your anti-Israel boycott.
Most of Windows operating systems were developed by Microsoft-Israel.
So, set a personal example. Throw away your computer! Computers should have a sign attached saying Israel Inside. The Pentium NMX Chip technology was designed at Intel in Israel . Both the Pentium 4 microprocessor and the Centrum processor were entirely designed, developed, and produced in Israel.
Voice mail technology was developed in Israel.
The technology for the AOL Instant Messenger ICQ was developed in
1996 in Israel by four young Israeli whiz kids.
Both Microsoft and Cisco built their only R. & D. facilities outside the US in Israel ..
So, due to your complete boycott of anything Israeli, you can now have poor health and no computer.
But your bad news does not end there. Get rid of your cellular phone.
Cell phone technology was also developed in Israel by MOTOROLA which has its biggest development centre in Israel . Most of the latest technology in your mobile phone was developed by Israeli scientists.
Feeling unsettled? You should be. Part of your personal security rests with Israeli inventiveness, borne out of our urgent necessity to protect and defend our lives from the terrorists you support.
A phone can remotely activate a bomb, or be used for tactical communications by terrorists, bank robbers, or hostage-takers. It is vital that official security and law enforcement authorities have access to cellular jamming and detection solutions.
Enter Israel 's Net line Communications
Technologies with their security expertise to help the fight against terror.
SO ALL THE NOISE ABOUT THE USA LISTENING TO OUR PRIVATE TELEPHONE CALLS, YOU SHOULD KNOW IT IS ISRAEL WHO IS DOING THE LISTENING FOR US.
A joint, non-profit, venture between Israel and Maryland will result in a 5 day Business Development and Planning Conference next March.
Elected Israeli companies will partner with Maryland firms to provide innovation to the US need for homeland security.
I also want you to know that Israel has the highest ratio of university degrees to the population in the world.
Israel produces more scientific papers per capita - 109 per 10,000 - than any other nation.
Israel has the highest number of start-up companies per rata. In absolute terms, the highest number, except the U.S. , Israel has a ratio of patents filed.
Israel has the highest concentration of hi-tech companies outside of Silicon Valley. Israel is ranked #2 in the world for venture capital funds, behind the USA .
Israel has more museums per capita.
Israel has the second highest publication of new books per capita.
Relative to population, Israel is the largest immigrant absorbing nation on earth.
These immigrants come in search of democracy, religious freedom or expression, economic opportunity, and quality of life.
Believe it or not, Israel is the only country in the world which had a net gain in the number of trees last year.
Even Warren Buffet of Berkshire-Hathaway fame has just invested millions with Israeli Companies.
So, you can vilify and demonize the State of Israel. You can continue your silly boycott, if you wish. But I wish you would consider the consequences, and the truth.
Think of the massive contribution that Israel is giving to the world, including the Palestinians - and to you - in science, medicine, communications, security.
Pro rata for population, Israel is making a greater contribution than any other nation on earth.
What do you think the Palestinians have contributed to the world?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)