Rabbi's Blog

Dear OZ family,

I just heard from the children’s home that Alisa and I work with every summer, Beit Elazraki. They were able to move from being a red zone to being a green zone, after 2 weeks. That means that the students can more freely move about outdoors. This lasted all of two hours. A new barrage of missiles just rained down on Israel from the North as well as from the South. How the morally corrupt professors, media elites and politicians think that any country can live like this, without doing everything it can to uproot its cause, is beyond comprehension. My 13 grandchildren are still not fully back in school. They have to go in shifts because they don’t have enough shelter rooms for all their students at once. Only the ones who are within 60 seconds of school can go. That’s the warning time they have to get to a shelter when they hear the sirens. Fortunately, 6 of them go to school down the block, but they have to run there.

And they have it easy. The ones who are in 10-15-20 seconds range from missiles have had to evacuate their homes altogether. Israel cannot settle for anything less than Chamas’s unconditional surrender and dismantling, no less than America insisted to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. No country can live with the threat of such barrages whenever Iran chooses to move the puppet strings for its many proxies at our back door. This enemy is every bit as vicious and monstrous as the Nazis, and in some ways even worse. The Nazis at least tried to hide their inhuman atrocities. In the very least there weren’t large swatches of world populations, then, that heard of tens of thousands of children gassed and some who burned alive, and rationalized that this is some form of worthy resistance.

Social media is already replete with claims that the unspeakable inhuman images that came out of Oct. 7^th, were fabricated by Israel! Many college professors are incapable of categorically calling what Chamas did as evil, arguing that it has to be understood in the context of 75 years of occupation. Howe these professors attained a higher degree while being so ignorant is amazing. Israel didn’t occupy anyone’s land until 1967, when in a defensive strike, came to administer lands inhabited by Arabs. When Arabs occupied lands where Jews lived, they uprooted tombstones, desecrated every holy place and banished all Jews from lands they controlled. For 19 years, Arabs living in Gaza under Egyptian control, and Arabs living in Yehudah and Shomron under Jordanian control, had no rights, no electricity, no running water, no schools, and no one clamored all those years for a Palestinian State.

Only when Israel began to administer those areas did the Arabs’ lives improve. The Arab world continues to cynically use the population of Gaza the same way they have used 4 generations of refugees, as pawns to intensify their hatred and vilification of Israel. No one ever brings up the close to one million Jews forced out of their homes in the Arab world after 1948 - from places where Jews had lived from well before the advent of Islam. All this can be explained as a function of Jew- Hatred. Only this time, we’re able to fight back. All the Jews killed in all the wars for Israel and in all terrorist attacks in Israel’s history amounts to 2-3 days of business at Auschwitz towards the end of the war. 1,400 Jewish lives were snuffed out on Simchat Torah in Israel. That number every day for close to 14 years is what Germany did to us. We were defenseless then, but we are not now.

There is much that we can do and we are doing it. I just spoke to Mark Zeiring, who was a member of OZ 30 years ago before he made Aliyah. His family just suffered the awful loss of their son, H”YD, and he told me to express to the community how important it is that we in the Diaspora keep Israel on our minds in our conversations, and to set the truth to counter the outrageous lies that abound. We will do that as we increase our attendance at minyan, at shiurim, at fundraising events, and Chesed activities. We will fight hatred with Chesed  and give comfort to a grieving nation. Alisa and I intend to spend some time during intersession at Beit Elazraki to help their depleted staff. There will be opportunities for others to do so over the coming weeks and months. Chazak!

Stay well and healthy.

Rabbi Allen Schwartz

Rabbi Allen Schwartz

Congregation Ohab Zedek

118 West 95^th Street | New York, NY  10025-6604

Phone 212.749-5150, ext 200 | Fax 212.663-3635

E-mail ras@ozny.org

Website:  www.ozny.org