By:Rabbi Steven Pruzansky Wednesday, May 7, 2008 The establishment of the State of Israel sixty years ago, on 5 Iyar 5708 (May 14, 1948), was by no means inevitable. From the moment the United Nations passed the partition resolution the previous November 29, the Arabs, desperate to thwart its implementation, ruthlessly intensified their attacks on […]

By:Y. E. Bell Tuesday, May 13, 2008 Germans to the right, Byelorussians to the left. Lithuanians in the front, Into the wilderness of the Byelorussian forest fled the 20-year-old Lola Hudes… (Adapted from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s, “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”) Lola survived the Nazi genocide and with Yehuda Bielski went to Palestine. In […]

by Hillel Fendel (IsraelNN.com) Israel’s Independence Day begins Wednesday night and continues on Thursday. With the holiness of the holiday under attack from right and left – the hareidi-religious public, the secular public, and even parts of the Disengagement-stricken religious-Zionist public – celebrants of the day wish to emphasize its basic principles. Rabbi Eliezer Melamed […]

By: Zechariah Schwarzberg Wednesday, April 16, 2008 Warsaw Ghetto: a name, a phrase, familiar to most people today only as a matter of history. Important history, yes, but dry and impersonal just the same. Because even the most vivid of photographs and the most descriptive of texts, whether found on the pages of books or […]

By:Dr. Yitzchok Levine Wednesday, April 9, 2008 Note: This essay is based on “Crypto-Jews in Mexico during the Sixteenth Century” by Arnold Wiznitzer, American Jewish Historical Quarterly, 51, 1962 ( www.ajhs.org/reference/adaje.cfm). Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from the Wiznitzer article. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Catholic Church did its utmost to root […]

Cecil Bloom Almost seventy years after his death, the stormy petrel of Zionism and one of the most flamboyant personalities in modern Jewish history remains a controversial figure on which Jewish historians take up remarkably opposing positions. His followers worshipped him and regarded him as a prophet commanded by God to go forth and lead […]

By Dalia Karpel With its lovely stone buildings, red-tiled roofs, old pine trees and picturesque alleyways, Jerusalem’s German Colony is an enchanting area. But in the 1930s, a branch of the Nazi Party operated openly in this pastoral neighborhood, established by the Templers, who belonged to a messianic religious cult that came to the Holy […]

by Gavriel Horan http://richards-creations.net/Pages/8/_Irena-s_Children.html Irena Sendler Irena Sendler is a 97-year-old Polish woman who saved 2,500 Jewish children during the Holocaust. She takes the crying baby into her arms, turns her back on the hysterical mother, and walks off into the night. If she’s caught, she and the baby will die. “Promise me my child […]