Who are the Israelis?

[Mindful]

Palestinian: My View of the Conflict Changed After I Met Israelis.

Shalom/Salam!

Palestinian: My View of the Conflict Changed After I Met Israelis

A user on Reddit has posted this hopeful message, which shows that we might just one day get to peace. At least that's the hope.

www.israellycool.com

 

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First trilingual street library to open in Jerusalem
The only Jerusalem library in a ‘mixed’ neighborhood may provide another venue for Jewish, Arab co-existence

Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion is set to inaugurate the first street library in the mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood of Abu Tor, also designed to be the first trilingual street library in the capital city, with sections for books written in English, Hebrew and Arabic.

The concept for the library started at the time of the first lockdown due to the coronavirus in late winter 2020, when Lauri Donahue, who is part of the campaign to send books to Gaza, was left with extra books after the operation was halted due to the pandemic. She did not want the books to go to waste, so she went on her Abu Tor neighborhood WhatsApp group and asked if anyone wanted books. She then started making deliveries to people who lived within 100 meters of her home.

“I would take orders for people, like for people who wanted mysteries or reading for a 6 year old, and I would drop them off on Friday morning and ring the doorbell. I did that for a couple of weeks and then I thought: There has to be a better way of doing this. I set up the first version of the library with two yellow book crates on a park bench with a sign explaining what it was,” she told The Media Line.

Donahue said that initially she did not know what the response to her book-filled crates would be, “but people seemed to respond positively.”

She said that the books in the open crates got dusty and she had to bring them home when it rained. “Then someone brought a filing cabinet and I found a dresser drawer and then got an Ikea shelf and it kept growing,” she said.

Donahue started a coalition with Good Neighbors, a group from Abu Tor that organizes interfaith activities, and other Abu Tor residents who decided they wanted a street library like the approximately dozen or so scattered throughout Jerusalem. They agreed that the location should be in their neighborhood park.

First trilingual street library to open in Jerusalem

The only Jerusalem library in a ‘mixed’ neighborhood may provide another venue for Jewish, Arab co-existence

www.jpost.com

 

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Live: Holocaust Remembrance Day opening ceremony at Yad Vashem

Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes Remembrance Day is observed this year starting Wednesday through Thursday. The official State Opening Ceremony for Holocaust Remembrance Day take place on Wednesday at Warsaw Ghetto Square, Yad Vashem, on the Mount of Remembrance in Jerusalem.

Israel’s President H.E. Mr. Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister H.E. Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu will both deliver remarks at the Opening Ceremony. Yad Vashem’s Acting Chairman Ronen Plot will kindle the Memorial Torch. Six torches will be light by six torchlighters in memory of the six million Jewish men, women and children murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Roza Bloch will speak on behalf of the survivors.

Yad Vashem will broadcast the State Opening Ceremony live, conducted in Hebrew, with simultaneous translation into English, French, German, Russian and Spanish, via its websites in their respective languages. Additionally, for the first time, Yad Vashem will offer simultaneous translation in Arabic available on the Yad Vashem YouTube Channel in Arabic. The live feed will also be accessible via Facebook (only live in English and Hebrew).

 

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Missing Reality: The Diary Revealed Tap in the Holocaust of North African Jews

Parts of a diary written in a concentration camp in Libya and put mold in a closet in Holon were found, deciphered and translated. An important contribution to the recognition of North African Jews as Holocaust survivors

Thanks in no small part to Yossi Sokrei's successful novel, "Benghazi-Bergen-Belsen" (Am Oved, 2013) and the interviews conducted with him, many Israelis were exposed to the long silence surrounding the Holocaust of Libyan and North African Jews. Sokeri's book helped shatter the erroneous myth that it was solely the Holocaust of European Jewry, in other words, an almost exclusive Ashkenazi tragedy.

Sokeri's book was also preceded by studies, including that of the historian Yaakov Hajaj-Liluf, a display dedicated to North African Jewry at the Yad Vashem Museum, and three documentaries screened in Israel eight years earlier: "The Unknown Holocaust of North African Jews" directed by Yifat Kedar, "From Tripoli to Bergen-Belsen", a film by Marco Carmel, and "A Common Fate" directed by Serge Ankry.

Journalist Shlomo Abramovich's new book on Libyan Jewry during World War II is now being published, including the diary of Yosef Dadush, written while he was a prisoner in the Jado concentration camp, where 2,600 Jews were imprisoned for more than a year. The diary, which had been stored for 75 years, was secretly written in Italian, in a kind of encrypted writing (dense lines and connected letters written in pencil in a notebook of absorbent paper), all in order to make it difficult for camp guards to decipher if caught. But all this later made it difficult for his son, Shimon Doron, to find the diary hidden in the closet. It would be several years before a savior came to him in the person of Dr. Yaakov Lats, a former lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and an expert on ancient Italian writings, who succeeded, after completing a Sisyphean translation work, in translating the part of the surviving diary into Hebrew.

Dadush never tried to recover the diary and publish it, thus trying to become a kind of Anne Frank of Libyan Jewry. Instead, he imprisoned him in a closet at his home in Holon, where he settled after immigrating to Israel in 1949, where the diary raised mold until it was partially erased. The question of why such an important and authentic diary, written in the midst of the tragic occurrence and allowing a rare glimpse into the harsh realities of the concentration camp, has been stored for so many years is troubling. Perhaps Dadush despaired of the alienating attitude of the representatives of the institutions in the country, who repeatedly repulsed his appeals to them so that they would finally recognize the Holocaust of Libyan Jewry. And perhaps he himself did not understand the magnitude of the value of the diary, though he later used to lecture on the subject.

Abramovich testifies that such a diary is in fact the dream of every historian. This is indeed a historical document, documenting not only the personal distress of the prisoner Yosef Dadush but also the plight of the camp inmates. In his book, Abramovich tells the story of the experiences of Libyan Jews at the time, and anyone who reads the diary and the book will no longer doubt that the Jews of North Africa were also victims of the Nazis.

(Yosef Dadush in an official document from 1947, not long after the diary was written)​

Holocaust of the Jews in Lybia
33,000 Jews lived in Libya at the outbreak of World War II, and they lived in several cities of the country, which had been under Italian control since 1911. When the Duchess Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy, Libya's Jews were not initially in danger. Mussolini even once visited the Jewish Quarter in Tripoli and pledged to the Jews to respect their tradition. The Italian governor of Libya, Marshal Italo Bravo, also saw the Jews as a "positive element" in his words, but since they belonged to an established middle class and were an important factor in the country's economy, they were obliged to open their businesses on Saturdays and holidays.

Later, when Mussolini tightened his alliance with Hitler and even finally joined the axis of evil, the status of Jews also changed for the worse in the Italian colonies in Africa, including Libya, and they were subject to racial laws. Their rights were curtailed and some of their property was confiscated. In February 1942, Mussolini succumbed to Hitler's pressure and ordered what he called a "dilution of the Jewish population on the front lines." The Jews of the Kyrenia district near the border with Egypt, which was controlled by the British army, were transferred to the Jado concentration camp, a former military barracks.

The transfer of the Jews to the concentration camp and their imprisonment there for 13 months, was the culmination of a drama in several systems, in which the district passed suits from Italian control and the Nazis to British control, who captured it from their hands and returned again and again. The Jews of Kyrenia became a kind of game ball in the war between the powers, moving between hope and despair. The Nazis pressured the Italians to send the Jews to Europe, as they planned to kill them as part of the final solution. Only the British occupation actually saved them from extermination, as happened to many Jewish communities in Europe. The fact that Palestine Jews served in the British army also played in their favor in the upheavals in the province of Kyrenia during the war.

The bombing from the air intensified, the homes of many Jews were destroyed by bombing, and when control of this area returned for the third time to Rommel's army, Hitler insisted and the Italians sent hundreds of Jews to Italy, from where they were transferred to two concentration camps, Bergen-Belsen and Innsbruck-Reichenau. 'Edo, when the Nazis expect that they too will be sent to Europe later.

Hunger, disease and forced labor
"In the Jado camp, people were not systematically destroyed, they were not put in kilns and they were not murdered in the showers," Abramovich writes, "and yet, the Jado camp turned out to be hell." So does Dadush in his diary, that Abramovich quotes from time to time and appears in full in the last part of the book, after the historical chapters, which sometimes suffer from repetitions. "Oh Jado… We have reached hell. A road with lots of ups and downs and a blazing and dazzling sun," Dadush writes, in his rich and picturesque language. "The camp is full of commanders and sub-commanders as well as managers who are unable to manage. They only know how to scream. We found hell on earth here (175)."

Dadush could have spared himself this hell, but he chose not to accept the privilege offered to him by a local employer, with whom he had worked faithfully for a long time. This offered him to save him from his fate and remove his name from the list of those destined for deportation. "To the place to which all my Jewish brethren go - I will also go (p. 14)," Dadush replied bravely. In the camp, Dadush became the leader of the Jewish prisoners, and even secretly documented all his pains and pains, the tragedies, hunger, suffering and the outbursts of harassment and violence they suffered, as well as rare and brief pauses of contentment, when the Italians allowed him to stage a play, "Saul and David" in which he played the main part.

Eighty Jewish families were gathered inside each of the camp pavilions, which was surrounded by concert halls. Each was given a narrow hell plot, within which she had to make ends meet. They lived in terrible overcrowding and terrible sanitary conditions, which later brought upon them the plague of disease. The food was bad, half a bun a day, a hundred grams of rice for two weeks, some sugar and oil. With that they had to for a week, unless they managed to purchase some groceries with the meager money they brought with them after hastily selling all their belongings before deportation. The men were taken during the day to forced labor, or required to clean up the camp. "All the pavilions participated in the hard work, crumbling the rocks in the mountain and tidying up the ground… I felt sad and frustrated because of the way of life, because every day the money runs out and we do not know when we will be released… Every morning we get up, pray… read some Psalms" (182).

The description of the spread of the typhus epidemic, which killed many Jews (562 Jews perished in total in the camp and for various reasons), is an indictment against the Italians. "The camp was quarantined because of the typhus epidemic. The nurses did not care about the patients. Ignore who fell ill and also who died. "Men who will make a minyan and accompany the dead. A man thinks to himself: Today it is not my turn to die, maybe tomorrow. Maybe soon (189)," Dadush writes in his diary.

Arab gangs kill survivors
Dadush eventually survived, but his toddler daughter Ada died of the plague. In a special and touching chapter he describes how he dug her grave with his own hands, while two Italian carabinieri smoke and chat. "I dug, prayed and cried, but mostly I apologized from the dead. Did I do everything I could to save her?" (24). For a moment, Dadush may have regretted rejecting the offer of his employer who wanted to do better with him. "Did he sentence his daughter Ada to that?" (25).

The British finally liberated the camp, and the prisoners returned to their homes and heard the terrible news that had come from Europe about the extermination of the Jews of their country in Bergen-Belsen. They were forced to suffer riots by Libyan Arabs, in which 133 Jews were murdered. Soldiers from Palestine managed to rescue 150 Jews, who were in danger of death, from the rioters.

Abramovich expands on the exciting encounter between the soldiers and the survivors. He also quotes from two books, those of Moshe Mosinson and Meshulam Riklis, who served as the driver of Rabbi Ephraim Elimelech Orbach, the rabbi of the Jews of the Middle East in the British army, describing such meetings, including the Passover Seder. The Israeli soldiers even helped Libyan Jews immigrate to Israel, also through fictitious marriages with Jewish young women.

Although the Jado camp was not a satanic planet like Auschwitz, it is still a hell that justifies historical documentation and recognition of Libyan Jews as Holocaust survivors. Abramovich writes in his opening remarks that "the research and exposure (of the diary; XI) is intended first and foremost for the younger generation" (15). A unique document that combines the personal and the historical.

(Translated from Makor Rishon)

 

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IDF soldiers stand at attention as they participate in the Holocaust Martyr's and Heroes Remembrance Day ceremony in Jerusalem.

NEWSRAEL

 

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Sirens Wail Across Israel in Honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day

 

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The Jewish people have fought hard for a country in which they are not persecuted for their religion, and have a strong military to protect its citizens. Never again.

Nefesh B'Nefhesh

 

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Gen. Aviv Kochavi: Survivors represent the light that shone in the darkness

We, the commanders and the soldiers of the IDF, will do what we have been commanded to do: pass on to the next generation the description of what was perpetrated and fulfill our obligation to preserve our independence and defend ourselves.

Soldiers, commanders, and employees of the Israel Defense Forces – Holocaust Remembrance Day silences Israel and envelopes our country's streets in quiet.

The day causes us to stop our daily routines and devote some thought to the most painful and brutal chapter of history as a whole and our people's history, in particular. It also reminds us that we cannot take anything for granted – not that we live in security and not the existence of Israel, a country that is the fulfillment of a dream of generations, a safe country, the national home of the Jewish people.

The concentration camp has been replaced by freedom; the walls of the ghetto by defended borders; the languages of the Diaspora by Hebrew, and the prison clothing by IDF uniforms. We overcame, we won, and we were rewarded with independence, but our ability to keep the memory alive comprises an inseparable part of that victory.

We remember the 6 million of our people who became Holocaust victims, pulled out of their homes, cut off from their families, stripped of their rights as free people until their identities were erased and they were marched, defenseless, toward death.

We remember the partisans, the rebels of the ghettos and the fighters in the Jewish Brigades who demonstrated immense courage and fought devotedly, willing to sacrifice themselves. We remember the Holocaust survivors who made aliyah and immediately entered the War of Independence and were killed in the battle to found and defend the state of Israel. We remembers the fighters who swore to rise from the ashes like the phoenix and drew on all their strength to fight in battles all over Israel, in every way, and gave their lives so we could have freedom.

We remember the Holocaust survivors who still live among us, the ones who experienced the devastation and were part of the resurrection, and who are privileged to see the home they built, the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who now live in peace and quiet in Israel – and are experiencing the great light that grew out of the darkness.

When the siren sounds, we IDF commanders and soldiers will stand strong alongside the survivors, proud of our uniform, proud of our job, and proud of the country. After a year in which we were unable to meet face to face, we will once again be offering a shoulder, a hug, and be able to look them in the eye and hear their personal stories and tales of courage firsthand. We will do what we have been commanded to do: pass on to the next generation the description of what was perpetrated and fulfill our obligation to preserve our independence and defend ourselves. We will continue to stand guard and ensure their vision of an independent, secure, prosperous country rooted in values.

May the memory of the 6 million be a blessing.

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/survivors-represent-the-light-that-shone-in-the-darkness/

 

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Tombstones of the Lost Communities of the Holocaust are Coming Back to Life:

In the 60's, Holocaust survivors built commemoration tombstones to the lost families and communities of the Holocaust. With the years, these tombstones and commemoration sites were forgotten, but recently youth members are volunteering to rejuvenate them to maintain the commemoration of the victims from these towns. "They are gone, but these remembrance stones will continue telling their story".

NEWSRAEL

 

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Holocaust Survivor Manya Bigunov: Israel was our dream for many years
Watch: Holocaust Survivor Manya Bigunov tells her story. Manya lit one of the torches at the official ceremony at Yad Vashem.

 

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Beyond Hollywood’s Casablanca: North Africa and the Holocaust



Arabic:

 

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Israel will not need to choose between its identities
The unfounded assumptions behind arguments seeking to convince the "stubborn and self-destructive Israelis" to save themselves from imaginary doomsday scenarios.

Read on Israel Hayom

 

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15 Israeli flags on new Jewish homes in the Shiloah village: Dozens of settlers entered this morning 15 new homes whose purchase was recently completed in the Shiloah village (Silwan). According to sources in the Jewish settlement, Ateret Cohanim is the one that purchased the four new housing complexes.

The Jewish houses lit with Magen David stars at night

 

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These are the contenders in the World Bible Quiz

The Ministry of Education announced the contenders for the 58th Jewish Bible Quiz for Jewish Youth to be held on Independence Day at 11 a.m. in Jerusalem.

Gilad Avrahamoff Uriel Binyamini Dvir in Rahad and Amit Algzer from Israel, Ronit Buinus from Argentina, Yaakov Widman from Canada, Orly Mairovich, Leah Kalmos and Sara Solomon from England, Gila Sethon from Argentina, Ariel Chicorel from Mexico, Shiri Kaplan from South Africa, Ilana, Ilana Shea from the US and Gabriel Charm from Mexico.

The director general of the Ministry of Education, Amit Edri, said after the two-week national Bible quiz ceremony, "The Bible, the book of books, has shaped the spiritual, political and cultural image of the Jewish people. He shaped his values that have become the connecting glue throughout history. Even today, when we hear the voices of controversy, they do not challenge the connecting and sharing between us all. The Bible quiz takes place two days before Seder night.

That evening which is part of the core story of our people. You are the contestants and you contestants continue the story. Even in the complex conditions of the corona, you did not give up. You persevered and came to this moment. You have plunged into the great ocean of wisdom. You pumped it with love and eagerness. You have invested in Bible study for months, so each and every one of you deserves the honorable title of Bible scholar. The knowledge you have acquired is an iron-clad asset that will serve you at all times. It is a great gift, the fruits of which will be picked over the years. "

'Arutz Shev'a

 

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PHOTOS: Tens of thousands gather to commemorate Yehoshu'a Bin-Nun's Hilullah (Yehrtzeit)

Long traffic jams dragged on, thousands of Jews flocked, this is the most impressive mass gathering at Yehoshu'a Bin-Nun's tomb ever.

 

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Abstaining from food in honor of the Holocaust

 

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'Eden Ben Zaken - V'hi Sh'amdah (And That Which Stood)

(From the Hagadah, composed by Yonatan Razael)

And the Holy be Blessed saves us,
Saves us from them

And that which stood for our ancestors
And that which stood for our ancestors applies as well to us
For not only one stood against us to destroy us, stood against us to destroy us

And the Holy be Blessed saves us, oy saves us from them
And that is which stood for our ancestors.

 

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Mush Ben Ari - Yored L'Sinai (Going Down To Sinai)

"...I go down to Sinai
To get some quiet
And talk to G-d
The desert is calling to me
So I'm go down to Sinai again..."

 

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