Fanatics, Madoff: The worst of the Jewish community

We as a people, are as noble as the greatest tsadik, as low as the worst of our villains. (I remember my mother always breathing a sigh of relief when she knew for sure that a criminal was not, in fact, Jewish.) Between goniffs like Bernard Madoff and anti-Israel pro-Messianic religious fanatics in Hebron are we losing the legitimacy of our claim that we hold the moral high ground?
Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme cost Yeshiva University $110 million; Hadassah $90 million; the endowment fund of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington more than $10 million; the Jewish Funds for Justice $3.9 million; the Forward (that other Jewish newspaper) a mere $355,000. If you’ve been doing your arithmetic you’ll see I’ve accounted for less than 10% of the $50 billion he’s reputed to have embezzled (or vaporized as far as anyone can tell). When I read in the Times last Week of a rich man, one of Madoff’s Judas goats who brought him clients, and then followed Max Bialystock’s guiding principle until Bernie’s scheme bankrupted even him, I didn’t cry. Schadenfreude is one of my minor sins. But cheating Hadassah? Yeshiva University?
If all that weren’t bad enough, he’s also handed a loaded shotgun to those who already despise us and want to see us dead. Here’s a sample from a blog with the innocuous sounding name, “The Truth will set you free”:

“Madoff was elected chairman of the board of [Yeshiva Universty’s] Syms School of Business in 2000…Does the ‘Jewish tradition’ taught at Yeshiva U. support giant ‘Ponzi’ schemes like the one run by their chairman? Is this the kind of business they teach the students at Syms? Cheat the ‘goyim,’ i.e. non-Jews, and steal their money? That is exactly what the Talmud teaches, make no mistake about it. It is the main reason that Jews have been despised and expelled from so many nations throughout history. Anyone familiar with the teachings of the Talmud, i.e. ‘Jewish tradition,’ will know that such anti-Christian schemes are at the heart of such an ‘education.’ This is why so many of the financial criminals involved in the current Zionist-produced ‘credit crisis’ are Jewish Zionists who have been indoctrinated in such ‘Jewish traditions.’ The Zionist criminals involved in 9-11 and the cover-up of the truth are all tied to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, which is a similar Zionist institution.”

Thanks, Bernie, for letting slip the dogs of anti-Semitism; if this is the first step towards welcoming back the Middle Ages, to accusations of us using Christian blood to make our matzah, you can look to Bernie for inspiring it. Fascists of all stripes who would destroy the Jews are out there. Read further for another example.
Have your read Josephus’ The Jewish War, his history of the struggle between Jews and Romans that reached its crescendo with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE and the suicides at Massada two years later? According to him, the slaughter of Jews in Jerusalem was by the Jewish zealots who objected to those Jews who would live amicably (if warily) with the Romans.
Earlier this month the Israeli Supreme Court ordered a disputed property in Hebron vacated until it could decide ownership. The army moved in, expelled the 200 or so zealots in occupation and then the fanatics went on a rampage—against Arabs. Their policy is called “Price Tag.” If the government wants to be conciliatory to Arabs, the price is these pogroms (not my term, nor the term of the Arab press, but one used by the Prime Minister of Israel). The hooligans shot Arab civilians, set fire to their homes, destroyed their crops and terrorized them. The Premier’s terminology sounds about right. He might also have called it an intifada.
Further to fan the flames of backlash, Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben-Gvir, two of the Ayatollahs who urge the young on their destructive rampage and then attempt to justify it, threatened to march with their troops bearing 100 Israeli flags through the Arab city of Umm al-Fahm near Haifa. Their group? It has the evocative name of “The Jewish National Front,” a name which immediately brings to mind fascists in France, Britain and the United States who call themselves the National Front and want to impose racist policies on their reluctant homelands.
Were not the fascists of Europe enough for the world? Have we learned nothing? Lord, what fools these mortals be.

Nous sommes tous Chabad de Mumbai!

Nous sommes tous Américains!” Thus the headline on September 12, 2001, Le Monde’s declaration of French solidarity with America in its time of wrenching agony. Our civilians had been hijacked, forced to become part of inhuman missiles. The World Trade Center had been converted into two dusty tombs for thousands of innocents and 10 demented mass murderers; the Pentagon was hit a glancing blow and brave passengers died having revolted in the air attempting to re-take a fourth pirated plane.

The comparisons to events in Mumbai are overt. Here parallel towers, there parallel hotels; here the financial capital of the United States, there the financial capital of India; here warnings were ignored, there warnings from us were ignored; here they flew in from the sky, there they sailed in on boats; here they were well organized Arabs, there they were (it would seem) well organized Pakistanis; here our response was poorly organized—and so was theirs; here president Bush’s term was beginning, now it is ending, bookending tragedy; here there was shock and anger, there there was shock and anger.

But there is one substantial difference. Jews. In the New York tragedy the murders let it be thought that the whole thing was an Israeli plot. Jews didn’t report to work that day, because they had been tipped off. Only the deliberately stupid believed the calumny. This time Jews were a target, perhaps for all we know the target, the other assaults mere diversions. Chabad Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg, 29, and his 28-year-old pregnant wife, Rivka, were killed, though the couple's son, Moshe survived after his nanny, Sandra Samuel escaped with him 10 hours after the hostage incident started. There is intense pressure to declare Miss Samuel a “righteous among the gentiles”. No less significant, though often over looked are 50-year-old Norma Shvarzblat Rabinovich of Mexico, Yocheved Orpaz, 60, who was traveling in India, Bentzion Chroman, 28, and 38-year-old Leibish Teitelbaum who were all killed as well—not in the cross fire, not with a spray of machine gun fire, but tortured to death in ways I cannot describe because I cannot know them. First the Indian coroner and later Israeli Zaka (Orthodox Jews who help to collect body parts after terrorist attacks in Israel) felt compelled to leave the room where the bodies were found, appalled by what they saw. As I write, two other Jews are in critical condition.

At about 2:00 on that pleasant Thanksgiving Day, Chabad rabbi Joshua Laufer called. He was trying to organize a prayer service for the hostages. I asked “What time?” and he said “4:40.” Our company was due at 4:30. But I said that we’d pray at home. As family and our guests sat at our groaning table, I distributed yarmulkes and asked my son, a fifth year cantorial student, to lead us in a prayer for hostages. He chanted Psalm 130 in Hebrew and then translated it: a truncated version follows:

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
Oh Lord, hear my cry!
Let Your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!
It is He who will redeem Israel from all their iniquities.

But while I heard those words of supplication, I was thinking others about the Deccan Mujahideen or Lashkar-e-Taiba or whoever it was that decided to slaughter innocent men, women, and children. It’s from another Psalm, number 94, not one of my favorites, normally, but parts of it seemed more than appropriate at the time: “God of retribution, Lord, God of retribution, appear! Rise up, judge of the earth, give the arrogant their deserts! How long shall the wicked exult, shall they utter insolent speech, shall all evildoers vaunt themselves? They crush your people, O Lord, they afflict Your very own; they kill the widow and the stranger; they murder the fatherless, thinking, ‘The Lord does not see it, the God of Jacob does not pay heed.’ Take heed, you most brutish people; fools—when will you get wisdom? Shall He who implants the ear not hear, He who forms the eye not see?”

The previous Shabbat the young Mumbai rabbi had been talking about the humane slaughter of animals Jewish law demands. The irony? Jews slaughter animals humanely, but the animals of the Deccan Mujahideen slaughter Jewish human beings by torturing them to death. “God of retribution, Lord, God of retribution, appear! Rise up, Judge of the earth, give the arrogant their deserts!”

Nous sommes tous Chabad de Mumbai!