Tishrei 9, 5777
October 11, 2016
SPECIAL NOTICE
Yom Kippur begins at sundown this evening and continues until three stars appear tomorrow evening. Accordingly, there will be no israelstreet blog tomorrow. To all of you who fast, your humble servant wishes you a tsom kal (easy fast).
Palestinian terror in the last 24 hours
IDF soldiers came under attack in a number of locations yesterday. In the A-Ram section of Jerusalem, one soldier was wounded by an IED; in Abu Dis, terrorists threw grenades at an IDF patrol.
Palestinian terrorists threw Molotov firebombs and “rocks” at buses and cars at the Hizma checkpoint, Kiryat Arba, Abu Sneineh in Hevron, Gush Etzion, Halhul, the Husan Bypass Road, Mt. Hevron, Mitifriam, Beit Ummar, and Jalazun–not to mention about 15 other locations. Numerous Israelis were treated for shock, but there were miraculously no physical wounds.
Meanwhile, Palestinian mobs attacked security forces in Silwan, Ras al-Amud, Joseph’s Tomb, and Silwad.
Since the beginning of the new year, ten days ago, there have been more than 250 terror attacks: 2 Israelis have been murdered, and 21 have been badly wounded.
The future Europe
With the permission of the Swedish government, Iran is setting up conversion centers in Sweden to help the growing number of Swedes who want to convert to Islam.
According to Tehran, the centers are being established so that the potential converters will not have to travel to Iran and spend so much of their money on flights, hotels, etc.
Yom Kippur preparations
There has been a massive deployment of police and Border Guards throughout the country. Judea and Samaria are closed. All crossings into Palestinian Gaza are closed. Public transportation will cease at 2:00 pm this afternoon. Teams of MADA emergency medical personnel have been prepositioned to address emergency issues.
Yom Kippur begins at 5:31 pm this afternoon in Jerusalem and ends at 6:46 pm tomorrow.
TODAY’S BLOG
JUDENBURG (PART 6)
From a week ago:
As regular readers of israelstreet know, there were no blogs during most of September as your humble servant and my wife made our way through Europe. What you did not know was that the trip took us through 17 countries from Lisbon, Portugal to Russia via trains, buses, ferries, and ships.
In many ways, it was an exhilarating journey, but in others it was utterly depressing, especially as we encountered the desolate remains of Jewry all over the continent culminating in a visit to Auschwitz and Birkenau. For the next few weeks I will share with you, dear reader, some of what we encountered–often by chance.
Today:
Lisbon, Barcelona, Chambery, San Marino, Venice: flourishing communities of hundreds of thousands of Jews all gone . . .
From Venice we headed north, first through the verdant high Alpine country of Austria then down into Vienna and on into Budapest.
In this series, I will not dwell on Hungary except to say how surreal it was to be stopped at the door of the Great Synagogue on Dohany Street by a Christian doorkeeper who adamantly refused to let me take off my baseball cap and put on one of the cardboard kipas that was in a basket.
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A war of words ensued, finally resulting in his going outside the front door, rummaging around in a garbage can for a discarded kipa, and thrusting one at me that he found. I politely demurred.
It should be pointed out that the Great Synagogue is indeed grand: huge, ornate, with an extremely moving memorial garden outside. Huge numbers of tourist groups, both Jewish and Christian, swarmed inside and out.
As for the actual Jewish community, it of course was virtually wiped by the Nazis; what wasn’t wiped out is now being wiped out by assimilation–among the some 10,000 “self-identified Jews” remaining in Hungary, the intermarriage rate is more than 60%.
Which leads me to a restaurant at which we ate lunch after visiting the synagogue. Here is one page of the menu:
One page of a menu at a restaurant near the Great Synagogue.
Obviously, the only people who would be ordering kosher food are the few orthodox Jewish tourists coming to Budapest–and most of them are from Israel.
From Budapest we continued north to Slovakia, and as we neared the Polish border, I was struck by this sign:
Note the name on the sign on the building to the left.
It was a foreboding of things to come.
About an hour later we entered Poland. And just over the border, what was the first graffiti that we saw:
The Star of David with the line through it is all over southern Poland.
It turns out that this graffiti is everywhere in the Krakow area. When I asked a local Pole about it, I was laughingly told “It is not anti-Semitic; it refers to one of the Krakow soccer teams called “the Jews” because they come from the neighborhood where the Jews used to live.”
Used to live.
Of course, his chuckling explanation didn’t explain why most of the time, this graffiti is accompanied by such phrases as “Jews to the gas chambers” or “Hitler should have finished the job.”
Krakow, despite its lively market in the Jewish Quarter was intensely depressing as we walked somberly through Jewish cemeteries and the Oscar Schindler factory. At least Chabad is having services in the only one of the four synagogues still functioning. But, as we were told, these services were mostly not for Polish Jews.
How will I remember Krakow?
As a cemetery, overgrown with weeds like this one beside a never-used synagogue that we paid Christians to enter:
Krakow.
But Krakow was not the reason that we came to Krakow.
Our minds were on what was to come the next day: Auschwitz and Birkenau.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.