Geulah

Nefesh B’Nefesh: Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau

Hanukkah With The Duke Copyright © 2016 Sharona Butterfield

Hanukkah With The Duke Copyright © 2016 Sharona Butterfield

The Ten Lost Tribes

“We have not taken foreign territory or any alien property, but have occupied our ancestral heritage, for some time unjustly wrested from us by our enemies; now that we have a favorable opportunity, we are merely recovering our ancestral heritage” (Maccabees 1, 15:33-34).

We weathered the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Spanish Inquisition, the Nazis and the Communists. We’re still here and they’ve all disappeared. It seems that the oppressors of today want to join them. They’ll never learn. Meanwhile, we’re not budging.

IM Tirtzu- Building the Zionist dream

The only hope we have is Hashem with Emunah and by listening to the Gedolim.

Emuna, OK... Monday, 12 December 2011

When things turn out OK, that’s no sign of emuna.

When we’re OK with whatever way things turn out, that’s emuna.

The Maccabeats – Home (Medley) – Israel

Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

‘Academia is Greek culture in disguise’

Rosh Yeshiva of Or Yisrael says academic studies are Greek culture in disguise and must be avoided.

Arutz Sheva Staff, 26/12/16 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/222311
Rabbi Yigal Rosen, the Rosh Yeshiva of the Or Yisrael Yeshiva in Petah Tikva, slammed the academic study of haredi students, calling academic studies ‘pagan’ and ‘Greek’ on the second day of Hanukkah, when the Jewish people celebrate their victory over the Syrian Greek invaders who wished to supplant Jewish culture with the culture of ancient Greece.

 

“Greek culture causes a man to constantly reach for another degree and another degree, whether it be called doctor or whether it be called professor. The idea is greater than the person. Greek culture is a forgery of the Torah of Israel. It takes the hidden things and makes them external.” Rabbi Rosen told his students.

 

Rabbi Rosen stated that the economic motive is not a factor in matters related to spirituality. “The ones who began [academia] were the Greeks. It is Greek culture. The word ‘Akademos’ is a Greek word which belongs to their culture [and means] to elevate the idolatry of wisdom – ‘you become greater with a degree.’ This forgery began to penetrate our culture by appearing in the guise of livelihood, but in truth it is Greek culture.”

 

While Rabbi Rosen stated that the need to make a living cannot be discounted, he compared learning in academia to make a living to ringing church bells to make a living.

 

A special conference on setting up seminars for the haredi community was held last week at the Pais Arena in Jerusalem. Sveral speakers from the conference said that contact with the secualr world through academic study was lowering the spiritual level of haredi women.

 

Calls were made at the conference to establish seminars for haredi women which would be free of the influence of academia.

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#CHANGE Time for an Israeli victory

January 01, 2017 http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2017/01/change-time-for-israeli-victory.html

 Netanyahu and Pope Francis with Hanukah Menorah asking for the Beit Hamikdash Menorah back

Netanyahu and Pope Francis with Hanukah Menorah asking for the Beit Hamikdash Menorah back

It’s the last day of Chanuka, so I couldn’t resist the graphic.

Some 2,300 years after the Hasmonean’s Chanuka military victory (caused by some miracles from God), Daniel Pipes argues it’s time for another Jewish victory.

 

I propose an Israeli victory and a Palestinian defeat. That is to say, Washington should encourage Israelis to take steps that cause Mahmoud Abbas, Khaled Mashal, Saed Erekat, Hanan Ashrawi, and the rest of that crew to realize that the gig is up, that no matter how many U.N. resolutions are passed, their foul dream of eliminating the Jewish state is defunct, that Israel is permanent, strong, and tough. After the leadership recognizes this reality, the Palestinian population at large will follow, as will eventually other Arab and Muslim states, leading to a resolution of the conflict. Palestinians will gain by finally being released from a cult of death to focus instead on building their own policy, society, economy, and culture.
While the incoming Trump administration’s Middle East policies remain obscure, President-elect Trump himself vociferously opposed Resolution 2334 and has signaled (for example, by his choice of David M. Friedman as ambassador to Israel) that he is open to a dramatically new approach to the conflict, one far more favorable to Israel than Barack Obama’s. With his lifelong pursuit of winning (“We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning”), Trump would probably be drawn to an approach that has our side win and the other side lose.
Victory also suits the current mood of Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. He’s not just furious at being abandoned in the United Nations, he has an ambitious vision of Israel’s global importance. Further, his being photographed recently carrying a copy of historian John David Lewis’s Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History signals that he is explicitly thinking in terms of victory in war: Lewis in his book looks at six case studies, concluding that in each of them “the tide of war turned when one side tasted defeat and its will to continue, rather than stiffening, collapsed.”

Finally, the moment is right in terms of the larger trends of regional politics. That the Obama administration effectively became an ally of the Islamic Republic of Iran scared Sunni Arab states, Saudi Arabia at the fore, into being far more realistic than ever before; needing Israel for the first time, the “Palestine” issue has lost some of its salience, and Arab conceits about Israel as the arch enemy have been to some extent abandoned, creating an unprecedented potential flexibility.

Sounds like a plan.

Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Netanyahu: “Enough with the exile mentality”

The Prime Minister defended Israel’s response to the UN Security Council resolution, calling it “rational, resolute, and responsible.”
Nitzan Kedar, 26/12/16 18:58 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/222315
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Monday afternoon responded to criticism of his response to the UN Security Council resolution.

 

“This morning I read in several newspapers that the aggressive stand I took with the countries that voted against us has been accepted. Israel is a country with national pride, and we do not turn the other cheek. Our response was rational, resolute, and responsible. It was the natural response of a healthy country which makes clear that the United Nation’s action is not acceptable to us.”

 

“There is an ongoing importance to our response, even if there’s another attempt or two to hurt us in the coming month. But there is no substitute for a resolute response since it creates the basis for different treatment later. To describe our protest as a world war is ridiculous.”

 

“Enough of this exile (mentality),” said Netanyahu. “There is no political wisdom to being obsequious. Not only were our relations with the countries of the world not hurt by this event, but they will actually improve over time. Countries respect strong states that stand on their own and do not respect weak states that are obsequious and bow their heads. Israel under my leadership is a strong, proud country. We will continue to defend our country and we will continue to develop our country.”

Netanyahu’s remarks were made at a ceremony launching a new economic and social development program in the Galilee city of Maalot.

Q&A Session | Should I make aliyah? What if my Rabbi said not to?

Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

The Lies They Tell – Tuvia Tenenbom’s latest book

 "The Lies They Tell" by Tuvia Tenenbom ISBN-13 : 978-9652299116

“The Lies They Tell” by Tuvia Tenenbom ISBN-13 : 978-9652299116

A unique, funny and disarming man gets to the parts of America that Obama seems not to have noticed, even those populated by African-Americans.

Prof. Phyllis Chesler https://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/20212

“The Lies They Tell” by Tuvia Tenenbom ISBN-13 : 978-9652299116

Prof. Phyllis Chesler

The writer is a Ginsburg-Ingerman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, received the 2013 National Jewish Book Award,.authored 18 books, including Women and Madness and The New Anti-Semitism, and 4 studies about honor killing, Her latest books are An American Bride in Kabul, A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing and A Politically Incorrect Feminist.
More from the author ►

Many serious people have researched and written about anti-Semitism—but only a handful have attained a large, popular audience. This is understandable since the subject is sobering, even frightening.  Often, our most distinguished experts find themselves preaching to the converted or only to other scholars who specialize in this area. How can we wake civilians up if they glaze over at our footnotes, taste despair, not triumph, in our documentation, and fail to understand our complex analyses?

 

And then there are the gatekeepers who refuse to review such work—and if they do, make it a point to find just the right kind of critic, (often someone Jewish), who will mock and minimize the idea that contemporary anti-Semitism exists, or that it endangers Jews or the Jewish state. They tend to deem such work “hysterical,” “Cassandra-like,” lacking in nuance, utterly misguided.

 

Enter Tuvia Tenenbom.

 

Tuvia is a very funny man, a cosmopolitan showman, a chameleon, a clown, just as Chaplin or Falstaff were clowns, a roly-poly court jester, a man with a thousand disarming identities. Tuvia uses humor surgically, precisely, in order to lance pretentions and hypocrisy and, above all, to document Jew hatred in a way that has us laughing as we groan.

 

Tuvia loves people and traveling, has a great heart for the underdog, and knows no fear when it comes to exposing corruption and prejudice among both the powerful and the downtrodden. He is neither a liberal nor a conservative, neither left nor right. If he is, one cannot learn about it from his work. He pokes fun equally at Church-goers and atheists; Seattle and San Francisco sophisticates and rural, Western cowboys.

 

In his new book, The Lies They Tell (Gefen Publishing) Tuvia takes his readers along for the ride in the most intimate and conversational of ways. We learn what car he’s driving, how difficult it is to smoke in America, what the motels, food, weather are all like from coast to coast. But he’s a good companion to have on this journey.

 

Tuvia has written two previous books:  I Sleep in Hitler’s Room about Jew-hatred in Germany and Catch the Jew! about Jew hatred in Israel which also depicts how European governments continue their anti-Jewish policies by funding Israeli and other NGOs in order to mislead the entire world with defamatory and untrue propaganda about the Jewish state. His books have the tremendous merit of avoiding all that is somber, or “heavy.”  One cannot put his books down. And one is laughing (and sighing) all the way to the last page.

 

These books were both bestsellers in Germany and in Israel. However, his German publisher backed out when Tuvia refused to remove what he’d written about Jews and Israel. (He hadn’t planned on writing about anti-Semitism at all but the subject kept coming up). Tuvia self-published the work and schlepped from city to city speaking, confronting his critics, charming his increasingly large audiences of readers. The Germans loved the book. European Jews were ashamed of “Tuvia the Jew”—until he was embraced by countless Christians in both Germany and Poland.

 

Tuvia’s latest book, The Lies They Tell, is about America. Yes, about We, the People. He traveled to more than 25 states. What he found was eye-opening.

 

He found that all those who believe that climate change is a crucial issue also believe that “Palestine” is as important. Thus, Americans who do not know where Palestine is on a map, who have never met a Palestinian, nevertheless believe that it’s an important cause. He also found that white people do not attend black Churches—where there is the best music and most soul.  He found that Americans are reluctant to tell you what they really think, especially if they harbor racist thoughts—and if you ask them for whom they voted—they’ll remain mum. Above all, Tuvia found the most entrenched poverty, racism, and of course, both old-fashioned anti-Semitism and the more new-fangled versions.

 

Tuvia is discouraged from visiting the Chicago district that first elected President Obama. Both white and black people insisted that it was far too dangerous for him to visit the primarily African-American Thirteenth District. He wants to see what Obama has “done for them. “ He takes the bus to the end of the line and then walks. Here’s what he found:

 

“A few people walk by. Most are black, some are Spanish. I start walking around. One word comes to my mind: hell. As I walk, all I can see is poverty staring in my face. Store after store is locked, forever shut and clearly abandoned; even churches. I walk for some time… stare at the poverty and despair that this place projects in a deadly gaze that never ceases, and I am shocked that this exists in the same city as the (Magnificent) Mile. I have not even encountered such images in the Third World. I want to scream: Is this America? Am I in America?”

 

He sees abandoned stores, abandoned businesses. Only a few stores still function:

 

“A Salvation Army station, a gas station, a check-cashing business, liquor and lottery stores, and then a couple of restaurants. I enter the restaurants and in each of them I am welcomed by poor lighting, broken toilets, dirty floors, broken chairs and dirty walls. And they are empty of diners, save for one of them that has two people.”

 

And then he talks to the residents. They tell him about the gang violence, the high body count, the robberies of vulnerable senior citizens. As he writes: He’s in “Hell.”

 

In Hawaii, Tuvia visits an “encampment.” There are no white people there. All Tuvia sees is:

 

“A city within a city, a state within a state, a reality within a reality. This encampment, my guide tells me, is just one of a number of encampments in Hawaii. What’s an encampment? I let my eyes answer. Lines of tents, one after another, on both sides of the road, packed with people who have no home, no address, no future and hardly a life. Here are the voiceless and the forgotten: American citizens, seniors and infants, men and women, all members of the Red Zone Society of America. I make my acquaintance with some of them, and they break my heart. Here are little kids, and here are old people. Some are less than one year of age, and some are quite old, but all are deep into homelessness and most will likely never get out of it.”

 

Tuvia interviews a man born in American Samoa who is “touched” that Tuvia has treated him like a human being. His name is “Mad Dog” and he clarifies that he is not “homeless, only houseless.” Apparently, there are:

 

“Between five hundred and one thousand people living in tents from Ala Moana Boulevard to the ocean and the JABSOM medical school nearby, depending on how many the authorities have been able to kick out of here in the last sweep. Yes, they do this here. From time to time the authorities, who want to make sure that no tourist encounters the poor, come and make a ‘sweep,’ during which they push the people out and sweep their tents away.”

 

Tuvia has often been attacked by left-wing critics who are not comfortable with his devastating exposure of “Fakestinian” victimhood and all those who are part of this vast, left-wing and Islamist conspiracy of dunces. His critique of left-wing Jews (often the first to criticize Israel but no one else), has won him no points among them and, in arguing Israel’s case, even in a low-key and humorous way, Tuvia has been treated as a “right wing-conservative.”

 

This is ironic. Much of what he writes can easily have been written by a left-wing journalist. For example:

 

“The America I find is not the America I wished to find. It is racist, it is hateful and its citizens are bound to destroy themselves. Be they black and some Spanish who have nothing better to do with their time than shoot each other in the head; be they Jews who are possessed by a terrifyingly psychotic illness of self-hate; be they Indians who have given up any semblance of spirituality in exchange for acres and casinos; or be they all the others: whites, the rest of the Spanish, Muslims, Mormons and others who live in fear of one another.”

 

Or this:

 

“These American patriots, by a strange psychological coincidence, convince themselves that they are the only true guardians of culture and morality and therefore it is their duty to invade and bombard foreign countries that do not abide by their sense of morality and ethics…(Americans) have huge bombs and sometimes they like to drop them. America is also one of the strongest economies in the world, and at times the strongest of them all, but can humanity rely on this country? I wouldn’t.”

 

Left-wing, right-wing, wingless—I still hope this new book is also a bestseller.

Chabad Santa Monica (CA) Synagogue Vandalized During Hanukkah

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Santa Monica synagogue vandalized as Hanukkah begins

When Rabbi Boruch Rabinowitz arrived at his Santa Monica synagogue on the first day of Hanukkah, he made an unpleasant discovery.

The front window was smeared with feces and rice, in close proximity to a menorah display.

The vandalism, which occurred Saturday night or Sunday morning, did not include any anti-Semitic messages. But officials at the Living Torah Center Chabad on Wilshire Boulevard suspect the building was targeted for religious reasons.

“This seems kind of intentional,” Assistant Rabbi Dovid Tenenbaum said on Sunday morning. “With a religious artifact in the window, we have to assume so.”

The night before, the congregation had celebrated the start of Hanukkah with menorah lighting, latkes and doughnuts at Rabinowitz’s house.

Rabinowitz arrived at the synagogue a little before 8 a.m. on Sunday morning to prepare for a service and found the noxious substances on the window.

Santa Monica police officers came to the location and took a report, but there were no witnesses to the crime. Tenenbaum said the synagogue will soon install video cameras.

The congregation is accustomed to occasional anti-Semitism.

During a service about a month ago, Tenenbaum said, a man stood up and shouted “Heil, Hitler,” positioning his arms as if shooting a rifle. He ran away before anyone could catch him.

 

About a year ago, a letter left in the synagogue’s mailbox contained a swastika and a message: “Get out of here, you Jews.” Also last year, someone scrawled graffiti on a Sukkot hut at the synagogue.

The outline of a cross is still visible on the synagogue’s front window, etched by a vandal years ago.

Tenenbaum said he is not deterred by small acts of vandalism, considering the persecution suffered by Jews through the centuries.

“There are many times that others have wanted to annihilate the Jewish people,” Tenenbaum said. “The Jewish people have succeeded, and we’re still here to talk about it, thank God.”

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From The Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism

Jews targeted most in post-election hate crime spree – NYPD

Source: timesofisrael http://antisemitism.org.il/article/110390/jews-targeted-most-post-election-hate-crime-spree-%E2%80%93-nypd
The New York Police Department said it has seen a dramatic rise in hate crimes following the election of Donald Trump, with the majority of incidents directed at Jews.

There has been a 115 percent increase in bias crimes in New York City following Election Day, with Jews being targeted in 24 of the 43 incidents during that nearly monthlong period. The anti-Semitic incidents represented a threefold increase from November 2015, The New York Observer reported.

In total, hate crimes have increased 35% from 2015, the NYPD’s chief of detectives, Robert Boyce, said Monday morning.

“We had a huge spike right after Election Day, it’s somewhat slowed a little bit,” Boyce said. “We’re seeing across the board an increase right now.”

Besides Jews, other targeted groups included Muslims, whites and the LGBTQ community, according to Boyce.

Nefesh B'Nefesh: Live the Dream US & CAN 1-866-4-ALIYAH | UK 020-8150-6690 or 0800-085-2105 | Israel 02-659-5800 https://www.nbn.org.il/ info@nbn.org.il

Nefesh B’Nefesh: Live the Dream US & CAN 1-866-4-ALIYAH | UK 020-8150-6690 or 0800-085-2105 | Israel 02-659-5800 https://www.nbn.org.il/ info@nbn.org.il

It’s time to come home! Nefesh B’Nefesh: Live the Dream 1-866-4-ALIYAH UK 0800 075 7200 Come home to the Land of Emuna

The Israel Philharmonic (with Yedidya Wexler singing) playing the grandest version of Maoz Tzur you are likely to hear.

הדלקת נר – חגיגות ה-80 – הדלקת נרות עם הילד ידידיה וקסלר. מנצח: זובין מהטה

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