Daily Archives: September 3, 2005

A New Orleans Shliach’s Diary

This morning (Thursday) Rabbi Chaim Lazaroff took Rabbi (Zelig) Rivkin and myself to the Astrodome, the staging ground for the evacuees, where we spent several hours searching for familiar faces and counselling people. We also had a chance to network with the Red Cross and other groups that are heading up the relief effort in Houston. We met a New Orleans Times Picayune reporter who is Jewish and spent some time with him.Meanwhile, Bluma, Malkie and Yosef Rivkin have been manning the phones trying to contact people and follow up with the myriads of messages from people who want to locate loved ones, offer help etc.

Why Does the Left Hate Israel?

For decades, most American Jews have believed there were far greater threats from the fringe right than the fringe left in this country. While this view may have been reasonable in the past, it is certainly not so today. The fringe right still exists- the neo-Nazis in Northwest Idaho, Matthew Hale, and David Duke, and the remnants of the KKK. But the views of the fringe right have been marginalized by their repudiation by virtually all mainstream elements on the political right.

The fringe left, on the other hand, has evolved into a broader left, and become more mainstream. The political perspective of this new left is vehemently anti-Israel, and the power and reach of this movement represent a real threat to Israel, and by extension to Jews who support Israel.

Jewish gravestones vandalized in Hartford

A Jewish congregation says dozens of monuments have been broken and overturned by vandals in a burial plot in Hartford.

The West-Hartford based Congregation Agudas Achim discovered the damage yesterday. They say it’s not the first time damage has happened at the Zion Hill Cemetery.

Damage has also happened din 1985, 1990, 1995 and 2000. That has many congregation members questioning if the acts have been random.

‘A History of the Jews in the Modern World’:
The Best of Times?

Nearly all Jewish historians typically treat the modern age as the best of times and the worst of times — and these seemingly mutually exclusive propositions are both, in one way or another, true. Beginning in the late 18th century with the emancipation conferred by the French Revolution, no other group in the West has benefited so much from modernity, with its emphasis on education, social mobility and individual success. Jews worldwide increasingly saw civic and political freedom as inevitable, as part of the contemporary world’s largess. The exemplars of the modern age are disproportionately Jews: the Rothschilds, Marx, Einstein, Freud, Kafka and George Soros.