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we are all Pogromists

Donnerstag 19. Juni 2014 - 16:46

 

Dear Friends,

 

Rabbi Yaakov Mazeh (1859-1924) was one of the people who helped acquit Menachem Mendel Beilis in the Beilis Trial, which took place in Kiev in the years 1911-1913. As the Chief Rabbi of Moscow, he was called upon as an expert witness to prove that there is no such thing in Judaism as using the blood of Christians for matzah baking.

At one of the court sessions, when Rabbi Mazeh was asked to describe the variety of Jewish people, he said: “There are the Sabbathists – who come every Shabbat to Shul. There are the Yomtovists, who come about five times a year to Shul – on the holidays. There are the Yahrzeitists, who come twice a year to say Kaddish. And there are also the Pogromists, who come every time there is a pogrom; that’s when their Jewish spark that loves its nation and its homeland awakens.”

We – all of us – are going through difficult times since last Friday, when we first heard that three teenage boys had disappeared. We didn’t know yet that they had been kidnapped, but we read and heard that the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense, the Chief of staff and the head of the Israel Security Agency (known as the Shabak) had been sitting together in a room for three hours already, and it was clear that something very serious was happening.

It’s six days already that the nation, usually so divided into different factions and styles, has been standing together, with one prayer going through all of our minds and expressing itself in prayer: “Shuvu Achim” – Return, brothers. This reminds me of Rabbi Mazeh’s Pogromists. When the question is the unity of the Jewish People, I think we are all Pogromists. In times of trouble we know to set aside our differences, wake up and connect with our inner Jewish spark, that spark that does not differentiate between right-wing and left-wing and between religious and non-religious. This inner spark sees that all of us belong to the same nation, and from this feeling of unity it cries out: “Shuvu Achim!”

Gil-Ad, Naftali and Eyal were strangers to most of us until a week ago, and now we all know who they are, who their parents are, and we even know their special neighbors.

And I just ask myself quietly, will we know to be Pogromists even without a pogrom?

 

May we have a Shabbat of good news,

 

Zalman Wishedski

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