Yaffa Eliach, A”H
I was saddened to read in last week’s Jewish Press about the recent passing of Yaffa Eliach. I had the privilege of taking many of her courses while majoring in Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College. Not only was she a brilliant scholar, author, and historian, she was also a captivating professor whose lectures inspired and educated many on the horrors of the Holocaust.
She was a living role model and I am proud to have been one of her many pupils. I highly recommend her book There Once Was a World to anyone who wants to learn more about the beauty of prewar shtetl life.
Ita Yankovich
Brooklyn, NY
Same Old Song?
The promise of Donald Trump to move the U. S. embassy to Jerusalem reminds me of the words from a Frank Sinatra classic – “I’ve heard that song before, it’s from an old familiar score.”
Certainly the promise has been made by previous presidential candidates and presidents but has always been reneged on. The old excuse is that such a move would harm negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. That view, endorsed by our State Department, ignores the fact that meaningful negotiations are almost never a factor during any presidential administration.
Nelson Marans
(Via E-Mail)
The Triumph Of Arab Lies
As Sara Lehmann so well noted (“The Right Angle” column, Nov. 18), UNESCO has entirely endorsed Muslim claims while totally rejecting Jewish, and by extension, Christian, connections to Judaism’s holiest sites in Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and Western Wall.
What, though, could possibly have made those sites so special, a full millennium before Christianity, and a further half millennium prior to Islam? How could those diabolically clever Jews have woven such fantastic fables about Jewish kingdoms and two magnificent Temples, planted fake artifacts from these storied periods in anticipation of their much later discovery, and even enlisted the Romans into this scam, with their depicted Temple Menorah on the Arch of Titus?
How were they so able to fool themselves into suffusing Jewish prayer with repeated references to Jerusalem and those Temples, even descending into deep mourning for them every midsummer?
As for Christians, why did they waste so much blood and treasure seeking to capture sites seemingly of no significance to them? Why is there, further, no mention in vast historical records of any background “native” Palestinians, but voluminous references to the Jews in early Common Era histories?
Rhetorical questions all, but highly revelatory, exposing the Palestinian “narrative” for the utter fraud that it is. Absent concerted pushback, however, the Palestinians and their allies have managed to convince too many among the gullible, and have bullied many countries into either supporting or acquiescing in their blatant lies.
With no credible arguments whatsoever, they nonetheless have proven themselves the world’s premier propagandists.
Richard D. Wilkins
Syracuse, NY
Alternate Reality
You are absolutely correct (“The Fictive Reality Grows,” editorial, Nov. 11) that “It seems clear…the Palestinians are bent on using their instant majority at the UN and its popular agencies to manufacture a version of reality more supportive of their political narrative than the actual historical record” with their “demand that UNESCO pass a resolution calling on Israel to turn over the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Palestinians.”
Maybe they will next press for a UN Security Council resolution demanding that Jews throughout the world be condemned for using the words “Hama’ariv Aravim” – a “clearly racist” praise of the Almighty that “obviously” means “mixes up the Arabs” – and that contrasts sharply with the “chauvinist” conclusion of the next paragraph, “Ohev Amo Yisrael” (“Who loves His people Israel.”
Martin D. Stern
Salford, England
When Leftists Supported Israel
To me, one of the most interesting things about the Bergson Group, which did so much for the Jewish people during the years prior to Israel’s war for independence, is how much support they gained from people on the left, liberals as well as radicals.
Those many left-wing supporters included Max Lerner, Pierre Van Paassen, Paul O’Dwyer, Harold Ickes, Adlai Stevenson, Lord Wedgewood, and Eugene O’Neil.
Max Lerner put it this way:
“As it happened I worked with a group…which refused to admit of Jewish powerlessness…. it was led by Peter Bergson and a small group of Palestinian Jews…. the trouble was that the Palestinian Jews were Irgun members who worked with Jabotinsky’s revisionist Zionists. That was enough to damn them in the eyes of the Jewish establishment. I was a gulf apart from them politically. But I thought first things first, and the first thing was to arouse America to action.”
Pierre Van Paassen was so far left that he thought many of the pre-World War II policies of the European powers were aimed at getting Germany to invade the Soviet Union. But he was a champion of the kibbutz in pre-state Israel and was the first national chairman of the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews. This was a leftist supporting what was supposed to be a conservative group.
Paul O’Dwyer was a labor lawyer whose politics were not middle-of-the-road liberal but, rather, decidedly leftist. However, in response to an ad Ben Hecht had placed in a newspaper, he got involved with supporters of the Irgun. In fact, O’Dwyer smuggled guns to the Irgun in pre-state Israel.
As a lawyer, O’Dwyer successfully defending people arrested for smuggling arms to both the Haganah and the Irgun. His tactic was simple. He would compare the struggle of the Jews in the land then called “Palestine” to the struggle for American independence in 1776.
In these highly partisan political times, many of us are too quick to forget the contributions made by liberals and leftists to the resurrection of a sovereign Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael.
Reuven Solomon
Forest Hills, NY
