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HAPPY FESTIVAL OF PURIM!

 

 

 

Purim 5776: Baruch Cohen, CIJR, Mar. 24, 2016— The Purim holiday gives us the courage and strength to overcome and survive the darkest times.

Purim – the Festival of Masks: Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, Jewish Press, Mar. 22, 2016— Purim is different. While other Jewish holidays can be serious and solemn, Purim has fun, games, and even clowning.

What is Canada Doing About ISIL’s Genocide Against Christians?: Matthew Fisher, National Post, Mar. 17, 2016— The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is hell-bent on exterminating ancient Christian communities across the Middle East.

Call it a Genocide of Christians: Clifford D. May, Washington Times, Mar. 15, 2016— In the Yemeni port city of Aden earlier this month, Islamists attacked a Catholic home for the indigent elderly.

 

On Topic Links

 

Purim Guide for the Perplexed 2016: Yoram Ettinger, Jewish Press, Mar. 22 2016

2,400 Years Later, God Continues to Save and Protect the Jews: Rivkah Lambert Adler, Breaking Israel News, Mar. 24, 2016

Jesus at the Checkpoint: Barry Shaw, Jerusalem Post, Mar. 8, 2016

ISIS Is Guilty of Anti-Christian Genocide: Demetrios of Mokissos, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 11, 2015

 

PURIM 5776

Baruch Cohen

CIJR, Mar. 24, 2016

 

 

                                                                                                                        In Loving Memory of Malka z”l

 

The Purim holiday gives us the courage and strength to overcome and survive the darkest times. The Book of Esther is a story describing not just one period of Jewish history, but all periods of Jewish life. It is the story that remains forever new.

Purim gives us: the hope, the Tikva, that we will see the downfall of all the Amaleks who came to destroy us. The “Grager News” will forever proclaim Hashem’s victories against the enemies of Am Israel!

 

AM YISRAEL CHAI!                                                                                                                      

“The People of Israel Live!”

 

Hag Purim Sameach                                                                                                                  

Happy Festival of Purim!

 

(Baruch Cohen is Research Chairman of CIJR, and a member of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Center)

 

                                                                        Contents

PURIM – THE FESTIVAL OF MASKS

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

Jewish Press, Mar. 22, 2016

           

Purim is different. While other Jewish holidays can be serious and solemn, Purim has fun, games, and even clowning. For many generations, Purim has been considered the festival of masks. While there may have been outside influences, the masks seem to grow out of the very essence of the festival. The entire Book of Esther can be defined as a story of masks. The Book begins with a wine-drinking banquet. From that point on, the atmosphere of a drinking feast continues to reign in all the events and episodes of the story.

 

Some of the masks in the Book of Esther are explicitly described, while others are supplemented with Midrashic stories. Esther wears a mask from the beginning until practically to the end: she arrives at the king’s palace, and lives there for an extended period, incognito. The king and his ministers see only her mask. None of them knows who she really is. Mordechai, too, is a masked figure, partially revealed and partially hidden. While he openly sits at the gates of the king’s palace, his relationship with Esther – an important part of the plot – is hidden. Even when he saves the king’s life by uncovering an assassination plot to kill him, the king still has no idea who he is.

 

Haman, too, is a two-faced figure. Our Sages explain his relationship with Mordechai by positing that the two had known each other much earlier in their lives, when both were insignificant. They also tell us that Haman was a hairdresser and bath attendant in a small village.

 

At first, this Midrash seems quite odd. However, as we examine our history, we discover that many Jew-haters began as small, unimportant figures. Once they reached positions of power, they could reveal what had always been seething within them: Jew-hatred. Even the overt aspects of Haman’s story – such as his insistence that everyone bow down to him, and his inability to overcome his humiliation when Mordechai did not comply – create an image of a very small human being. Haman could not contain his own greatness, and was therefore insulted by a person who should have meant nothing to him.

 

Our Sages say something similar about Memuchan, one of King Ahasuerus’ most important ministers – the King’s supreme legal advisor. They say that he suffered greatly at his wife’s hands. That was why he was so eager for a royal decree giving him the right to rule over her. (Although it is unlikely that even the King’s decree, written, sealed and sent to all the corners of the kingdom, availed him at all).

 

Of all the protagonists of the Book of Esther, perhaps the only one whose outer appearance matches his inner essence is King Ahasuerus. The Book of Esther tells us that he knew the contents of this scroll. The Book, therefore, could not possibly contain any negative or mordant remarks about him. Even so, the book does express hidden – though highly elegant – scorn toward the king. It is seen in the gap between Ahasuerus’s real nature – a drunkard, profligate individual – and his external image as a stable, authoritative ruler.

 

This is evident from the beginning. In the first chapter, Ahasuerus does something that is quite unbecoming of a king: he demands that his wife be displayed in public (dressed or naked, according to different commentaries.) When she refuses, he asks his most senior jurist for legal counsel on how to handle her.

 

Later on, Ahasuerus is willing to condemn all the Jews – about whom he probably knows very little – to total annihilation, and then he changes his mind about it while, with uncharacteristic generosity, he also cedes the very generous compensation offered him by Haman. And all this happens as a gesture made at yet another wine-drinking banquet. The scene pegs him as a very unstable person who affects the lives of an entire people with little or no thought. Later on, however, he says that he cannot annul his earlier decrees regarding the Jews, by which he wishes to present himself as a law-abiding monarch who cannot budge an inch from the laws he had made.

 

The protagonists of the Book of Esther are not the only ones who wear masks: on a deeper level one can say that the entire Book of Esther is, in essence and content, a masked story. For one thing, while there is not a single supernatural event in the entire book, all the events described in it are inter-related, and their miraculous nature is quite obvious. The supernatural aspects of the story are explicitly revealed, both in Mordechai’s appeal to Esther and in her decision to fast and pray for three days in order to annul the wicked decree. Our Sages add (Hullin 139b) that even Esther’s name (which in Persian is the name of a star) alludes to the Biblical verse (Deuteronomy 31, 18) “and I will surely hide My face” (which in Hebrew reads va’anokhi haster astir panai – reminiscent of the name Esther).

 

And with no mention of God’s Name in this book, it seems that even God Himself is hiding His face behind a mask. This Divine hiding of the Face, this Godly mask, is the very heart of the festival of Purim. In the history of the Jewish nation, which is so full of tribulations, Haman’s decree is the most terrible: to annihilate the entire Jewish people. When that decree was sent to all the corners of the kingdom, every Jew must have surely felt that the Divine Face was one of fury, that this might indeed be the end of the Jewish nation. However, at the end of the story, this hiding of the face was no more than a mask. Once removed, it revealed a smiling countenance.

 

The Purim story, then, is a kind of game; in the beginning one sees a frowning face, but eventually one sees that it is nothing but a mask. The terrifying threat not only vanishes, it turns into joy and salvation. Since Purim is a festival of the hiding of the Face, it ought to be celebrated by wearing costumes and masks. In this way we express the essence of Purim as a festival marked, from beginning to end, by concealing and revelation.

Contents

WHAT IS CANADA DOING ABOUT ISIL’S GENOCIDE AGAINST CHRISTIANS?

Matthew Fisher                                        

National Post, Mar. 17, 2016

 

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant is hell-bent on exterminating ancient Christian communities across the Middle East. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry finally confirmed this Thursday when he declared ISIL was guilty of genocide against Christians and other minority groups in Iraq and Syria. This follows a similar declaration by the European Union last month.

 

Raped and resold in same day: Yazidi girls tell of lives (and suicide attempts) as jihadist sex slaves

 

Yazidi girls – some as young as eight – were raped by jihadists and then resold, says a report compiled by Human Rights Watch. The most harrowing account yet of what became of Yazidi females abducted by ISIL comes after the rights group interviewed 20 women and girls who managed to escape after their ethnic minority sect was targeted by ISIL last summer. They described how the hostages became the victims of a mass program of sexual slavery, with girls as young as eight being traded between the jihadists or given as gifts.

 

ISIL’s outrages against Christians in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen had created a political firestorm on Capitol Hill the Obama administration clearly felt compelled to respond to. Regrettably the violent persecution of Christians across the Islamic world never seems to cause a sustained stir in Canada. The lack of interest in actively defending Christians and other minorities in Iraq from harm was underscored by the Trudeau’s government decision last month to withdraw Canadian warplanes from combat operations against ISIL. It presumably explains why Global Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion has been non-committal about whether to close the Office for Religious Freedom or appoint another ambassador to oversee it when its mandate and funding run out in two weeks.

 

The office, established by the Harper government in 2013, has funded programs to encourage religious tolerance in Indonesia, Pakistan and Iraq. Sadly, it has not succeeded in making Canadians much more aware of this growing problem, which, it should be stressed, does not only afflict Christian minorities but many other religious groups. First among them are Iraq’s horribly abused Yazidis, whose fate was mentioned Thursday by Kerry. Yazidi men and boys have been slaughtered. Yazidi women have been forced to become sex slaves and are being bought, sold and traded by jihadists.

 

Those being persecuted elsewhere include Muslims who have been attacked by Buddhists in Myanmar, Hazara Shias in Afghanistan, Sunnis in Iran and Shias in the Persian Gulf states, Sunnis and Shias in Iraq and Syria, and the few Sephardic Jews who are still brave enough to live where their ancestors have for many centuries across the Middle East.

 

Christians are at greatest peril in Iraq and Syria, but they are also at grave risk from Sunni extremists from Tripoli, Cairo and Aden to Baghdad. Egypt’s Copts, long the most numerous Christian group in the Middle East, and the still vibrant multi-denominational Lebanese Christians, may survive. But other Christian enclaves in and near the Holy Land are being bludgeoned to death or slowly fading away.

 

Further afield, Pakistan’s two million Christians are back on their heels. Their churches, homes and schools have often been burned down and they find it increasingly difficult to find work. Christians in sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia and Sudan face similar difficulties. In one of the most heinous acts, ISIL overran a compound last month in Yemen where sisters from Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity cared for the elderly. Four nuns and 12 others were bound and shot in the head, then a priest was kidnapped. As many as 28 Ethiopian Christians were shot or beheaded by ISIL last year in Libya

 

The Roman Catholic Knights of Columbus and another group which calls itself In Defense of Christians, demanded in a recently published report the U.S. declare what is happening to Christians in Iraq and Syria was genocide. Of the two million Christians who lived there at the turn of the century, only 300,000 remain.

 

My first brush with violence against Christians occurred in 2003, when I attended mass at a Chaldean Catholic church in Baghdad. U.S. troops had erected barriers to stop suicide bombers in vehicles and built a heavily fortified bunker across the street. Mothers inside the church were not shy about approaching foreign Christian males to ask if they might wish to marry their daughters, and spirit them and their kin out of the madness that was closing in on them.

 

A few years back, I visited the hauntingly beautiful churches and monasteries carved into a hillside of Maaloula, not far north of Damascus. One of the last pockets in the Middle East where Aramaic, the language of Jesus, was still spoken, the town is now back under Syrian government control after having been plundered, its architectural treasures and Christian relics blasted apart by al-Nusra Front, another Sunni extremist group.

 

Several times in 2014 and again last year, I met panicked Christians from Mosul and the historically Christian plain that surrounds the city, who had taken refuge on church grounds in the Iraqi Kurdish capital, Erbil. One young fellow with a cross tattooed on his hand told me the best he could have hoped for if ISIL had spotted the cross was to have his hand lopped off. It is far more likely he would have lost his head. Such ghastly abominations are a reality of Christian life in the Middle East. It is perverse that other than occasional bland platitudes few Canadians appear to be moved by such horrors.

 

Contents

                                     CALL IT A GENOCIDE OF CHRISTIANS

                                                        Clifford D. May

          Washington Times, Mar. 15, 2016

 

In the Yemeni port city of Aden earlier this month, Islamists attacked a Catholic home for the indigent elderly. The militants, believed to be soldiers of the Islamic State, shot the security guard, then entered the facility where they gunned down the old people and their caregivers, including four nuns. At least 16 people were murdered.

 

Such atrocities are no longer seen as major news events. Most diplomats regard them — or dismiss them — as “violent extremism,” a phrase that describes without explaining. On America’s campuses, “activists” are deeply concerned about “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions.” Massacres of Christians in Muslim lands, by contrast, seem to trouble them not at all.

 

But honesty matters — or should. And accuracy is a prerequisite to sound policymaking. Christianity was born in the Middle East. Christians have survived — not without difficulty — under Muslim empires, caliphates and dictators for more than a thousand years in the Middle East. Now they are being wiped out by self-proclaimed jihadis in the Middle East. That’s genocide.

 

Members of Congress have been calling on President Obama to use that term no later than March 17 — a deadline that administration spokesmen now say may not be met because a legal review has yet to be completed. The legal definition of genocide: “Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

 

Adding a bit of pressure, the House on Monday passed, by a vote of 393-0, a resolution condemning the Islamic State’s “genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity” targeting Christians, Yazidis, Kurds and other religious and ethnic minorities. “ISIS is guilty of genocide and it is time we speak the truth about their atrocities,” said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce. “I hope the administration and the world will do the same, before it’s too late.” A second House resolution passed on Monday calls for an international tribunal to hold the Bashar Assad regime in Syria, client of both Iran and Russia, accountable for its numerous and egregious war crimes.

 

It should not go unremarked that the “cleansing” of ancient Christian communities from the Muslim world follows by an historical blink of the eye the expulsion of even more ancient Jewish communities from the same lands. In the years after World War II and the Holocaust, Jews throughout the Middle East were subject to intensified persecution.

 

Some will argue this was a reaction to Israel’s declaration of independence. But wouldn’t the best argument against the rebirth of a Jewish state have been to demonstrate that there was no need — that Muslim-majority countries would never countenance genocide as had so many Europeans, that tolerance would be extended to Jews and other minorities?

 

Close to a million Jews soon fled Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and other corners of the region. Before long, these Jewish refugees and their descendants constituted more than half the population of Israel — the only nation in the Middle East that today guarantees minority rights, the only nation in the Middle East that today has a growing Christian population.

 

Despite that (or perhaps in part because of it), Israel’s neighbors still hope to destroy it. Last week, Iran test-fired two ballistic missiles. Along the length of one was written in both Hebrew and Persian: “Israel must be erased from the face of the Earth.” You have to give the jihadis this: They are candid about what they believe and what they intend. Osama bin Laden frequently spoke and wrote of the obligation to fight “Jewish and Christian Crusaders.”

 

Justifying the jihad as defensive is a clever — though hardly original — tactic. In 1996, in the first al Qaeda fatwa declaring war on the United States, bin Laden wrote of the “fierce Judeo-Christian campaign against the Muslim world,” urging Muslims to “repel the aggressive enemy that corrupts the religion and the world. Nothing deserves a higher priority, after faith, as the religious scholars have declared.”

 

No, America, Israel and Europe are not at war with Islam. But, yes, there are those within the Islamic world determined to kill Christians, Jews, Yazidis, Hindus, Buddhists and others — “the greater Kufr,” as bin Laden called them, a term of derision for those who do not embrace Islam as the one and only true religion.

 

Soldiers may fight with more zeal if they hate their enemies or at least see them as less than human. But Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and inspires Iran’s current rulers, was not alone in regarding the slaughter of non-Muslims as an act of kindness…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]

 

On Topic

 

Purim Guide for the Perplexed 2016: Yoram Ettinger, Jewish Press, Mar. 22 2016—The 586 BCE destruction of the First Temple (on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount), by the Babylonian Emperor, Nebuchadnezzar, triggered a wave of Jewish emigration to Babylon and to Persia, which replaced Babylon as the leading regional power.

2,400 Years Later, God Continues to Save and Protect the Jews: Rivkah Lambert Adler, Breaking Israel News, Mar. 24, 2016 —As told in the Biblical Book of Esther, the lives of Jewish people in 127 provinces, from India to Ethiopia, were miraculously saved from the hands of Haman who vowed to exterminate the Jewish nation. Each year at this time, Jews around the world celebrate Purim to remember the miracle that allowed the Jews to defend themselves against their enemies.

Jesus at the Checkpoint: Barry Shaw, Jerusalem Post, Mar. 8, 2016—It’s that crazy Christian time of year in Bethlehem when traditional beliefs are thrown out of the church window. March 7-10 will see the fourth rendering of that anti-Israel libel “Christ at the Checkpoint” played out yet again.

ISIS Is Guilty of Anti-Christian Genocide: Demetrios of Mokissos, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 11, 2015—Christians throughout the world will mark Monday, Feb. 15, as a day to remember the courage and religious fortitude of 21 Coptic Christians who were executed one year ago by Islamic State terrorists in Libya.

 

 

 

 

                        

 

 

 

                  

 

 

 

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