Helped by Christians after Escaping the Nazis, a British Peer Now Works to Save Christians from Islamic State

In 1938, at the age of nineteen, George Weidenfeld fled Nazi-occupied Austria for Britain, where the Plymouth Brethren, a Christian organization, helped him settle. Now Lord Weidenfeld, who is the founder of a major British publishing house, is partnering with the UK Jewish National Fund [JNF] to help rescue Middle Eastern Christians. Jenni Frazer writes:

The honorable repayment of a debt from the Holocaust was a prime motivator for Weidenfeld. “In the 1930s thousands of Jews, mainly women and children, were helped by Christians who took enormous personal risks to save them from certain death. We owe a debt of gratitude,” [he] said. . . .

[T]here had been internal discussion as to whether humanitarian rescue was the right sort of project for the UK Jewish National Fund, an organization that is known for its work in . . . developing the land of Israel, as well as for Zionist education and advocacy.

“[W]e felt that . . . once we had been approached, we could not say no,” said Michael Sinclair, the vice-chairman of the British JNF. “We thought about how we would have felt if we had learned that a Christian group had had the opportunity to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust and turned that opportunity down.” . . .

Under conditions of great secrecy, the 42 families—149 people in all—were flown from Beirut to Warsaw, where many of them have asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation against [their] relatives still in Syria. The Polish government offered entry visas, and temporary accommodation in Poland has been provided by a Warsaw-based charity.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Holocaust, ISIS, Jewish-Christian relations, Middle East Christianity, Philanthropy, United Kingdom

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society