Today in Jewish History

[phkrause]

5 Shevat

Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter (1847-1905), leader of the Ger chassidic dynasty. Rabbi Alter is better known as the "Sfas Emes," the title of his book of insights into the Bible, Jewish thought and holidays. Sfas Emes was orphaned as a baby and raised by his grandfather, the saintly Chiddushei HaRim. At age 23, Sfas Emes was selected by the chassidim to become their "rebbe," or spiritual leader. He built up Ger as the largest chassidic group in Poland prior to the Holocaust, numbering 250,000. The son of Sfas Emes escaped the Nazis, and came to Israel, where he oversaw the rebuilding of the Ger community, which remains vibrant till today.

pk

[phkrause]

6 Shevat

In 1393, following a massacre of Jews at Majorca, an edict was issued guaranteeing the Jews protection. (Majorca is one of the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea.) In just a few short years the protective decree was forgotten; persecution of the Jews began again in 1413. By 1435, the Jewish community had been completely destroyed, with many Jews forcibly converted to Christianity. These forced converts retained Jewish practice in private, but they publicly boiled pork lard in large pots, as a way to appear non-Jewish. (Hence these Jews were nicknamed Chuetas -- "pork lard.")

"And we wonder why Jews hate Christians and don't want to hear about Jesus. Like Pastor Alex Schuesler, told me once that every time a Jew in his family heard someone mention the name of Jesus they would all spit."

pk

[phkrause]

Today In Jewish History

Shevat 7

In 1943, plans were finalized to deport the Jews of Athens, Greece. From 1941-1943, Greece was under control of the Italians, who by and large protected the Jews against the Germans. But in 1943, things changed for the worse; as punishment for Greece's fighting against the Axis, freedom of movement was restricted for all Jews. Some Jews fled and hid in the countryside, but most were deported to Auschwitz. Jews had lived in Athens since the 3rd century BCE -- the longest continuous Jewish presence in Europe; the remains of an ancient synagogue were found at the foot of the Acropolis. In the Holocaust, 77 percent of Greek Jewry were murdered -- 60,000 Jews.

pk

[phkrause]

Shevat 8

On this date in 1960, Jonas E. Salk finalized a proposal to build the Salk Institute for Biological Studies near San Diego. Salk (1914-1995) had achieved fame as the physician who discovered the first polio vaccine while working at the University of Pittsburgh. Polio was a widely-feared disease that caused paralysis and oftentimes death. A polio outbreak in 1916 left 6,000 Americans dead and 27,000 paralyzed. (President Franklin Roosevelt had contracted polio at age 39.) In 1952, some 57,000 cases of polio were recorded in the U.S. After the vaccine became available, the numbers dropped by 90% in two years. (Another Jew, Dr. Albert Sabin, developed the first oral polio vaccine.) Since its founding, Salk's Institute has focused on molecular biology and genetics, and has trained more than 2,000 scientists including numerous Nobel Laureates.

pk

[phkrause]

9 Shevat

Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Eliezer Silver (1882-1968), who served the Jewish community of Cincinnati for four decades. Rabbi Silver is best known for spearheading efforts to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. As head of the "Agudas HaRabbanim," he tirelessly raised millions of dollars. He used the funds to produce counterfeit documents and pay off smugglers -- in the end directly saving at least 10,000 Jewish lives. In October 1943, Silver organized a rally of 200 rabbis in Washington; the effort prompted President Roosevelt to form the War Refugee Board, which rescued tens of thousands more from Hitler's ''Final Solution.'' After the war, Rabbi Silver traveled to DP camps to help Holocaust survivors start a new life. He also sought out hundreds of Jewish children who had been placed by their parents in Catholic orphanages, to spare them the horrors of the concentration camps. Often, the parents were killed during the war and there was no one to claim them. Rabbi Silver discovered that the priests operating the orphanages were often unable (or refused) to identify which children came from Jewish families. So Rabbi Silver had a solution: He strode into the lunchroom, stood on a chair, and proclaimed in his loudest voice: "Shema Yisrael, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!" Suddenly, the orphanage was filled with children's cries for their mother. Rabbi Silver looked at the priest, and said, "These children are mine."

pk

[Kevin H]

Lately there has been more openess by Jews when it comes to Jesus. Traditonally they would say "That Person Jesus and that demon Paul" but this reacclmation of Jesus has lead to a re-eximation of Paul and a much more friendlier approach to Paul where some Rabbis are becoming scholars of Paul and loving him.

In church Sabbath the pastor was saying that he wishes that he did not have to be at atleast one of his churches each Sabbath, as he'd like to visit synogogues, that there is a huge ministry to, not convert Jews, but to help them understand the Bible better to to help them become excited for God and that the Seventh-day Adventist church is in a unique positon to share with them. He mentioned that one of our professors is not only an ordained Seventh-day Adventist minister, but has also become an ordained Jewish Rabbi working with synogogues near Andrews.

Back when I was at Andrews, the former Conference President of the Israeli mission was working on his doctorate. A Synogue in Benton Harbor had a Rabbi leave and it was going to be a number of weeks before the new Rabbi would arrive. They asked our former confernce president to cover until the new Rabbi could come and for the first few weeks as the new Rabbi settled in.

We need to work with Jews where they are. They see Hitler as trying to destroy Jews by killing them and Christians trying to destroy Jews by converting them, either way they see it as the same purpose, to destroy the Jews. We need to work with these open wounds. My dream is that we will. My dream is that Rabbis will like it when our Evangelists come to town because we'd help some back slidden Jews return to worshiping God, and that if the rabbi was to wake up Sabbath morning with a sore throat that he'd call the local Adventist pastor and ask if he could send someone over to preach the sermon.

Pkrause, I very much appreciate what you are doing here. Are you visiting Synogogues? And please pray for me as the pastor has asked me to prepare to be able to go to synogogues as a Jewish ministry. Much of our evangelism work is to make converts to our church. But the Jewish work is different. To be successful it has to not be an evangelistic thrust, but very much a ministry to and out reach to the Jews to help them in their Jewishness and their building a relationship with God and knowing the Bible better.

[Kevin H]

I don't know if I'll be able to yet, but I will see what will happen. I'll be working with the pastor on this. I'm mostly sharing this for people here to think about maybe learning and doing this where they live.

[phkrause]

Lately there has been more openess by Jews when it comes to Jesus. Traditonally they would say "That Person Jesus and that demon Paul" but this reacclmation of Jesus has lead to a re-eximation of Paul and a much more friendlier approach to Paul where some Rabbis are becoming scholars of Paul and loving him.

In church Sabbath the pastor was saying that he wishes that he did not have to be at atleast one of his churches each Sabbath, as he'd like to visit synogogues, that there is a huge ministry to, not convert Jews, but to help them understand the Bible better to to help them become excited for God and that the Seventh-day Adventist church is in a unique positon to share with them. He mentioned that one of our professors is not only an ordained Seventh-day Adventist minister, but has also become an ordained Jewish Rabbi working with synogogues near Andrews.

Back when I was at Andrews, the former Conference President of the Israeli mission was working on his doctorate. A Synogue in Benton Harbor had a Rabbi leave and it was going to be a number of weeks before the new Rabbi would arrive. They asked our former confernce president to cover until the new Rabbi could come and for the first few weeks as the new Rabbi settled in.

We need to work with Jews where they are. They see Hitler as trying to destroy Jews by killing them and Christians trying to destroy Jews by converting them, either way they see it as the same purpose, to destroy the Jews. We need to work with these open wounds. My dream is that we will. My dream is that Rabbis will like it when our Evangelists come to town because we'd help some back slidden Jews return to worshiping God, and that if the rabbi was to wake up Sabbath morning with a sore throat that he'd call the local Adventist pastor and ask if he could send someone over to preach the sermon.

Pkrause, I very much appreciate what you are doing here. Are you visiting Synogogues? And please pray for me as the pastor has asked me to prepare to be able to go to synogogues as a Jewish ministry. Much of our evangelism work is to make converts to our church. But the Jewish work is different. To be successful it has to not be an evangelistic thrust, but very much a ministry to and out reach to the Jews to help them in their Jewishness and their building a relationship with God and knowing the Bible better.

No Kevin I'm not visiting any Synagogues. I actually started out a while ago being very interested in my Jewish heritage. My father, may he rest in Jesus, spent 5 years in 3 different concentration camps. Never wanted us to have anything to do with God and jewdism. But my mother started taking bible lessons from a german bw from the brooklyn german sda church. Through her she found a jewish sda church in the bronx where we lived. So we started to go there and eventually my father started going with us. He died loving his savior JC. But a few years ago a Jewish Pastor from florida came up to SNEC meetings and I went to his lectures. He has a Jewish sda church and a regular sda church. Here's a link to the Jewish Temple: http://www.btvfl.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=4781aeadb3a4fd81ffdfb794fe32ad31

So I've been kind of looking around but haven't done anything as of yet.

pk

[phkrause]

10 Shevat

Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Shalom Sharabi (1720-1777), known by the acronym of his name, Rashash. Sharabi was born in Yemen, and became the chief rabbi of Egypt, before finally settling in Israel. He was a master kabbalist, and his prayer book, Nehar Shalom, includes mystical meditations on various prayers and mitzvot. He is buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

pk

[phkrause]

Shevat 11

On this day in 1601, Hebrew books that had been confiscated by Church authorities were burned in Rome. This was an unfortunate theme throughout the Middle Ages: In 1592, Pope Clement VIII had condemned the Talmud and other Hebrew writings as "obscene," "blasphemous" and "abominable" -- and ordered them all seized and burned. Centuries earlier, Pope Gregory IX persuaded French King Louis IX to burn some 10,000 copies of the Talmud (24 wagon loads) in Paris. As late as 1553, Cardinal Peter Caraffa (the future Pope Paul IV) ordered copies of the Talmud burned in the Papal States and across Italy. Yet despite all attempts to extinguish our faith, the light of Torah shines brightly till today.

Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Noah Weinberg, the founder and dean of Aish HaTorah. Rabbi Weinberg is widely regarded as the "father of the baal teshuva movement" that has profoundly transformed the Jewish people and the world. He began Aish HaTorah in 1974 with five students in a small apartment in Jerusalem's Old City. Under his tutelage, Aish HaTorah grew to branches on five continents with innovative educational programs like the Discovery Seminar, Jerusalem Fellowships leadership program, Hasbara Fellowships for Israel activism, HonestReporting.com, and of course, Aish.com. His warmth, wit, extraordinary wisdom, sense of responsibility, positive message and love for all people helped tens of thousands get more meaning out of life and experience a relationship with God. Much of his wisdom is encapsulated in the widely-circulated tape series, "48 Ways to Wisdom."

pk

[phkrause]

In 1945, the Russian army liberated the Auschwitz concentration camp. The gas chambers of Auschwitz II (Birkenau) were blown up by German troops in November 1944 in an attempt to hide their crimes. In January 1945 the Nazis began to evacuate the facility; most of the prisoners were ordered on a death march, which lasted for weeks in the cold and snow. In the end, some7,000 people survived Auschwitz; over one million perished.

pk

[phkrause]

Shevat 13

In 1790, France granted full and equal citizenship to Sefardi Jews. (Ashkenazi Jews gained citizenship a year and a half later.) The French Revolution, born of the ideals of Enlightenment, had become the first society to emancipate the Jews, permitting them to enter the highest levels of government and finance. In 1807, Napoleon created the French Sanhedrin -- a Jewish communal structure sanctioned by the state. (The French Sanhedrin sat in a semicircle, following the custom of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem that served as the Jewish supreme court during the times of the Holy Temple.) Despite these liberties, anti-Jewish measures were passed in 1808: Napoleon declared all debts with Jews annulled, which caused the near ruin of the Jewish community. Restrictions were also placed on where Jews could live in an effort to assimilate them into French society. The invective reached a head in the 1940s when the French Vichy regime took the initiative to round up and hand over 61,000 Jews to the Nazis.

pk

[oldsailor29]

Lately there has been more openness by Jews when it comes to Jesus.

Openness doesn't quite cut it. Jesus is looking for conversion.

C o n v e r s i o n

[Guest]

That's true oldsailor.

[phkrause]

Shevat 14

Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Yaakov Yehoshua Falk (1680-1756), better known as the "Pnei Yehoshua," the title of his brilliant book of Talmudic commentary. Shevat 14 is also the yahrtzeit of Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan (1934-1983), an American author and scholar who inspired thousands of Jews to return to Jewish observance. Rabbi Kaplan was a physicist, and applied the same analytical approach to the study of "metaphysics." He possessed an encyclopedic command of Jewish literature, and he produced 50 books on philosophy, Jewish law and kabbalah. The Jewish world mourned his untimely death at the age of 49.

pk

[phkrause]

Shevat 15

Today is Tu B'Shvat, the New Year for the Trees. This is technically the day when trees stop absorbing water from the ground, and instead draw nourishment from their sap. In Jewish law, this means that fruit which has blossomed prior to the 15th of Shvat could not be used as tithe for fruit which blossomed after that date. The custom on Tu B'Shvat is to eat fruits from the seven species for which the Land of Israel is praised: "...a land of wheat and barley and (grape) vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and (date) honey" (Deut. 8:8).

On this date in 1925, the Technion opened in Haifa, becoming Israel's first modern university. Albert Einstein served as president of the first Technion Society. Today, Technion graduates comprise the majority of Israeli-educated scientists and engineers, and Israel is now home to the greatest concentration of high-tech start up companies anywhere outside of the Silicon Valley. High-tech industry accounts for more than 54% of Israel's industrial exports. In Israel, nine out of every 1,000 workers are engaged in R&D, nearly double the rate of the U.S. and Japan. More achievements: The Technion is credited with the birth of fiber-optics. In 1998, the Technion became the fifth university worldwide to successfully design, build, and launch its own satellite. In 2004, two Technion professors received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their research in the protein breakdown in cells.

pk

[phkrause]

Not sure how those TU got into that last post! That is really weird.

pk

[phkrause]

Shevat 16

Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Shalom Mordechai Shwadron (1835-1911), also known by the acronym of his name, Maharsham. He wrote an 8-volume work of rabbinic responsa, covering 3,800 topics on all areas of Jewish life. He was known for his incredible dedication to Torah scholarship; on his death bed it was revealed that he had studied the entire code of Jewish law, "The Tur," 101 times. (Many rabbis do not manage to complete this book even once.) In addition to his scholarship, Rabbi Shwadron was of exemplary character; he set aside time every morning to go into his yard and throw crumbs to the waiting birds.

pk

ps: Gerry if you read this, check out the last sentence, this is how to feed birds. LOL

Looks like you have to have an exemplary character. LOL

pk

[phkrause]

Shevat 17

Yahrtzeit of Rabbi Chaim Palagi (1788-1868), a prolific author who wrote 72 books on all topics of Jewish life. The Turkish government accorded Rabbi Palagi the honor due to royalty. When asked to what he attributed his long life, he enumerated 10 acts that bring longevity -- including attending to one's parents, despite their mental infirmity.

pk

[phkrause]

18 Shevat

In 1980, following its peace treaty with Israel, the Egyptian parliament voted to end its economic boycott of Israel. The Arab boycott was formally declared in 1945, stating that Arab countries would not do business with Israel, nor with any company which sold products to Israel. (Officially, the boycott extended its blacklist one step further, to include any company that did business with a company that did business with Israel.) The objective of the boycott was to isolate Israel from the international community, and deny it the ability to build military and economic strength. In 1977, the U.S. Congress passed a law prohibiting American firms from cooperating with the Arab boycott. Companies such as Pepsi, which had long observed the boycott, now began selling in Israel. In recent years, with greater peace overtures between Israel and Arab neighbors, the boycott has withered in strength, though it remains official policy of most Arab countries.

In 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds after the launch of its mission, when an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster failed. All seven crew members were killed, including Judith Resnik, 36-year-old Jewish American. Challenger was one of two space shuttles destroyed during a mission, the other being Columbia in 2003 which included Israeli Ilan Ramon.

pk

[Kevin H]

I've heard a couple of places that Ilan Ramon loved God and the Sabbath and was looking forward to returning to earth so that he could do activities that he felt more comfortable with on Sabbath such as attending worship with his family.

[phkrause]

I've heard a couple of places that Ilan Ramon loved God and the Sabbath and was looking forward to returning to earth so that he could do activities that he felt more comfortable with on Sabbath such as attending worship with his family.

Interesting, I had not heard that.

pk

[phkrause]

19 Shevat

In 1349, Jews in Basle, Switzerland were burned alive in a wooden house, erected specifically for that purpose. The Jewish community of Basel had flourished until 1348, when they were accused of poisoning wells during the Black Plague. This triggered a variety of persecutions: Jewish children were forcibly baptized, 600 Jews were burned at the stake, and the remainder were burned alive in the wooden house. In modern history, Basel became better known as the host of the first Zionist Congress in 1897. Ironically, on this date in 1949 -- exactly 600 years after the massacre in Basle -- the State of Israel elected its first president, Chaim Weizman.

pk

[phkrause]

20 Shevat

In 1523, the first printed edition of Tzror HaMor, a Bible commentary by Rabbi Avraham Sebag, was published in Venice. Sebag had been expelled from Spain in 1492, and made the unfortunate choice of fleeing to Portugal, where he was persecuted and saw his two sons forcibly baptized and taken from him. He buried his manuscripts to save them from confiscation and destruction. (Alas, he never saw them again.) Sebag eventually made his way to Africa where he managed to rewrite some of his works. It was this edition of Tzror HaMor that was published in 1523. (source: Abraham Bloch)

pk

[phkrause]

Shevat 21

In 1948, a car bomb exploded in front of the Palestine Post (later the Jerusalem Post) on Havatzelet Street in Jerusalem. A stolen British police pickup loaded with half a ton of TNT pulled up in front of the Post building. Five minutes later, a second car pulled up: Its driver lit the fuse and drove away. Three people were killed and dozens injured. The bomb destroyed the printing press; its aim was to stop the growing international influence of Jerusalem's only English language newspaper. (Further, since most Israeli newspapers were published in Tel Aviv, the Post was the only source of news in Jerusalem during the Arab siege.) The bombing was perpetrated by the Arab militia, assisted by former British soldiers. As an act of ultimate defiance, the Post published an edition the next morning, albeit reduced in size to two pages. Arab violence intensified leading up to Israel's independence: A few weeks later, three trucks carrying explosives blew up on Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda Street, destroying buildings and killing 56 Jews; two weeks later another car bomb blew up at the Jewish Agency building in Jerusalem, killing 13 people.

pk