During the week covered by this review, we received 11 articles on the following subjects:
Messianic Jews
Christians and the Holocaust
Anti-Semitism
Archeology
Jewish Law
Messianic Jews
Yediot Aharonot [X2], April 10, 2013
Several papers reported on the sentencing of convicted Jewish terrorist, Yaacov Tytell, which was handed down by the Jerusalem District Court on Tuesday. Tytell was given life in prison “for an 11-year terror spree that included the murder of two Palestinians and attempted murders of a left-wing professor, a Messianic Jewish teenager [Ami Ortiz], a Christian monk and other Arabs,” Haaretz reports. In their verdict, the judges wrote: “It was proved before us that hatred and frustration motivated the accused and he committed his crimes while sacred principles were trampled into dust under his feet . . . Jewish tradition commands, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but the accused closed his ears and eyes, murdered and tried to murder in cold blood.”
In addition to the life sentence, Tytell was ordered to pay a financial compensation to the families of those he murdered as well as those he tried to murder. And yet, Yediot Aharonot reports that Ami Ortiz is the only one of Tytell’s victims who will receive no financial compensation at all, “because both the perpetrator and the victim are Jewish.” Israel’s National Insurance has informed the Ortiz family that they will not recognize Ami as a victim of a terrorist attack “because the law recognizes [terror victims] as such only when an Arab attacks a Jew or the other way around – and not when a Jew attacks another Jew.” Ami responded by saying that he “doesn’t understand how there are people who refuse to see us as Jews, but when it comes to Government assistance, suddenly they tell us we are not eligible because we are Jewish.” According to the Ortiz family lawyer, this is an act of discrimination.
Christians and the Holocaust
The Jerusalem Post, April 7, 2013
Krysztof Jasiewicz, professor at the Polish Academy for Sciences and expert on Polish-Jewish relations, caused outrage when he said in an interview (marking the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising) that the Jews were actively involved in their own murder during the Holocaust. Jasiwicz is quoted as saying that “this nonsense about Jews being killed mostly by Poles was created to hide the biggest Jewish secret. The scale of the German crime was only possible because the Jews themselves participated in the murder of their own people . . . For many generations, the Jews, not the Catholic Church, worked to bring the Holocaust about.” Jasiewicz went on to say that modern-day Jews have a problem “because they are convinced they are the chosen people. They feel that they are entitled to interpreting everything, including Catholic doctrine. They will always criticize whatever we did or will do. It will never be enough, it will always be wrong and not generous enough. I am convinced that there is no point in dialogue with the Jews.”
The editor-in-chief of the magazine that printed the interview (Focus) said he decided to print it to show that “anti-Semitism among scientists doesn’t just belong to the past, but still exists today. We could not refrain from writing about it.”
The Jerusalem Post, April 8, 2013
On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, Jurgen Buhler, executive director the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, reflects on what went wrong in Germany during the Holocaust, and why millions of ostensibly Christian Germans did not know what was the right thing to do in that situation. “One reason,” writes Buhler, “was because many Christians in Germany were Germans first, and then Christians. Their ethnic and nationalist feelings overrode any biblical values that might have been instilled into them.” Another reason, according to Buhler, is that long before the Holocaust, “German universities became the breeding ground for what was known as ‘liberal theology,’” whereby scholars “developed a flexible concept of God as being shaped in each man’s own image rather than the biblical view that all humans were created in the image of God. Both Tanach and the New Testament were stripped of everything supernatural and divine,” causing the scriptures to be “downgraded to a mere human document rather than God-inspired.” Consequently, the Bible was stripped of its Jewishness. Thus, “most liberal theologians of that time . . . undermined the foundations of the Judeo-Christian ethic which had served to safeguard society.”
Buhler describes how this ethic is was spurred his German grandparents to acts of kindness towards and Jews during WWII and also gave them the courage to stand up to the Gestapo. “It was my grandparents’ strong belief in a God in heaven which gave them the courage to make the right decisions.” Reflecting on the increase in anti-Semitism across Europe today, Buhler concludes that “we need our conscience sharpened once again.”
Anti-Semitism
Haaravot, April 9, 2013
In this two-page article, Semyon Vinokur lays out six paradoxes that define Jewish existence and explain why “nobody likes us.” Of interest are references he makes to Christianity in the first, second and third paradoxes. The first paradox, titled: “Everyone blames everything on us,” explains how the Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus (“because we are the sons of the devil”) as well as the Black Plague (“because we drink the blood of Christian children”). In the second paradox Vinokur highlights the many ways in which the world is ungrateful for what the Jews have given to it, including the Bible – the foundation of the world’s largest monotheistic faiths. Christians are also referred to in the third paradox, where Vinokur examines intellectual anti-Semites, including in his list John the Baptist and Luther “who called us sons of the devil and a plague of fleas.”
Archeology
Nachon LeHayom, April 10, 2013, Makor Rishon, Yated Ne’eman, April 11, 2013, Hamodia, April 11, 2013
A rare mikveh (a bath for ritual immersion) from the Second Temple period has been discovered at an archeological dig in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Kiryat Menachem. Though many mikvehs have been unearthed in archeological digs throughout the city, this one is unique in its complex and elaborate structure.
Jewish Law
Shabat beShabato, April 5, 2013
In this short snippet, Baron Dasberg looks at the saying of Jesus: “It is not what goes into the mouth of a person, but what comes out of the mouth,” and the way Jewish oral law has traditionally “interpreted” Jesus’ words (albeit indirectly). “It seems,” writes Dasberg, “that ‘that man’ focused on the difference between religion and Jewish culture as opposed to Western culture . . . While we focus on the inner life of the man, the other culture focuses on man’s exterior life, with ‘what comes from the mouth.’”