JACOB JR. - BENLEUMI NEWS יעקב ג 'וניור. הבינלאומי חדשות

Shalom! World. By MICHAEL M. COHEN 25/04/2010 06:31 What do they all have in common? Zionism. For the last 34 years of his life, Albert Einstein was the most famous spokesman and advocate for the Zionist movement. Many may find it surprising that a pacifist and opponent of nationalism like Einstein was the champion of the Zionist cause in the decades leading up to the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948. That involvement with Zionism, however, also serves as a cautionary tale, adding light on the present relationship between US President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Einstein’s support of the Zionist enterprise was absent during the first four decades of his life. It was after he moved to Berlin in 1914 that he said, “I discovered for the first time that I was a Jew, and I owe this discovery more to the gentiles than to the Jews.” Tied to that awakened identity was his growing awareness “of our precarious situation.” With that new o...

There is no better time than the days between Passover, the holiday of freedom and the formation of the Jewish people, and Independence Day, the holiday of freedom and the formation of the State of Israel, to discuss personal and national freedom. Shalom! World. The Jewish people have been refugees throughout history: as slaves escaping Egypt, Holocaust survivors who help build Israel, or Jewish refugees from Arab countries. The Israeli media has also focused on refugees recently. Not on Jewish refugees, thank G-d, but on others that have been knocking on Israel's doors, such as the African refugees, foreign workers and some that have lived amongst us for years. At the same time, no one in Israel seems to be discussing another type of refugees – the Palestinian refugees. No one has mentioned it, because those who speak do so in order to condemn the State of Israel, threaten it with "the right of return," and delegitimize it. But this silence does not eras...

Shalom! World. We must work to uphold the Torah of universal human rights. Holocaust Remembrance Day memorializes the victims of the Nazis. Observance of this day, though, is also meant to inspire a response from us about how to ensure that such horrible atrocities never occur in our world again. Noted philosopher and theologian, Rabbi Emil Fackenheim z”l, taught that the Holocaust defies any attempt to locate meaning in it. Indeed, it would be scandalously disrespectful to the victims to “justify” their murder by extrapolating some higher meaning from the Shoah’s happening, a blasphemy to find some purpose or reason to the presence of such radical evil in God’s world and in the capability of human beings – created in God’s own Image – both to enact such evil and to be victimized by it. And yet, Fackenheim noted, a particularly Jewish response to the Shoah is nevertheless imperative. A universal response of all humanity to the Holocaust is no less obligatory. IT IS inter...