Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on August 20, 2021

There is plenty of demagoguery, ignorance and propaganda when it comes to the concept of Zionism in the Arab world. Arab views on Zionism are first and foremost the result of the vile lies and conspiracies propagated by Arab governments and their state medias for over 70 years. Constant incitement and demonization of Israel and the Jews, and especially of Zionism, has made most Arabs believe that Zionism is like Nazism, or worse.

In his book based on his dissertation, Mahmoud Abbas, chairman of the Palestinian Authority, writes: Nazi ideology is the equivalent of the ideology of Zionism the same thought and belief. The title of the book and cover illustration convey the general argument that emerges even before it is read; Nazi ideology is the equivalent of the ideology of Zionism. The two faces with the helmets of two soldiers, one with the Nazi symbol, and the other with a Star of David, allow no room for doubt that the author of the book is trying to send a message that an Israeli soldier is the equivalent of a...

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Zionism and the Arabs: A War of Words - Israel Today

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Posted By admin on August 20, 2021

AFTER ISRAELTowards Cultural Transformationby Marcelo Svirsky256 pp. Zed Books, $28.75

In his recent article My grandfathers Nakba, Emad Moussa referred to Marcelo Svirskys 2014 book After Israel: Towards Cultural Transformationin connection with the active forgetting practiced by most Israeli Jews. My curiosity piqued, I read the book and am highly impressed. Although it was nominated and short-listed for a Palestine Book Award, it does not seem to be widely known outside the community of scholars in Settler Colonial Studies. It has been reviewed neither on Mondoweiss nor on The Electronic Intifada. Hence my belated review.

The author, a former Israeli high school teacher who now lectures at the University of Wollongong in Australia, views Zionism not as a political ideology and movement in the narrow sense but as a system of practices or way of life that permeates all spheres of Jewish-Israeli culture and society. It can therefore be overcome only by means of a deep cultural transformation that will equip Israeli Jews to live and work together with Palestinians in a shared homeland, after Israel.

Professor Svirsky has no truck with the delusion of post-Zionism. Zionism remains firmly entrenched as the dominant paradigm of Jewish-Israeli life. At the same time, he sees promising signs of the beginnings of resistance to Zionism among Israeli Jews. Like Zionism itself, such resistance need not be openly political in nature. For example, some Mizrahi youngsters evade the draft in order to earn money to help their families, but their non-political motive does not deprive their draft evasion of meaning or value.

The author starts with a theoretical introduction. Then he applies his approach in successive chapters to four facets of Israeli life represented by the figures of the hiker, the teacher, the parent, and the voter. In the process we learn a great deal about the education that Israeli Jews receive in school, in the family, and in Zionist youth movements and how closely it is geared to Zionist indoctrination and to preparation for military service.

The conceptual structure that Professor Svirsky erects in his introduction is a complicated one. Is it perhaps unnecessarily complicated? He is aware that it may put off non-academic readers, whom he invites to skip the introduction or read it last. If, however, it can be read last, why not change the title to Theoretical implications and place it last, where it is less likely to put people off?

Of special interest to me was the chapter on hiking. No other author of whom I am aware provides a detailed account of the Zionist hiking expedition and analysis of the role it continues to play in conquering the land. (Meron Benvenisti has a few pages of nostalgic reminiscences about hiking expeditions in his memoir.) [1]

I feel a personal connection with this topic, though for me it was part of an anti-Zionist education. When I was about ten my parents visited Israel for the first time, leaving my sister and me with an aunt. Upon their return I asked my mother for her impressions and was astonished at her reply: This is our [i.e., Jewish] fascism. She then talked about the presence everywhere of armed soldiers another focus of Svirskys reflections and the exhausted young hikers she had watched marching along the road in the heat. A few years later I myself went hiking in Israel, on my own, and chanced upon the ruins of a deserted village that suddenly revealed to me the dirty secret of the Jewish state.

[1] Sons of the Cypresses: Memories, Reflections and Regrets from a Political Life (University of California Press, 2007).

Mondoweiss is a nonprofit news website dedicated to covering the full picture of the struggle for justice in Palestine. Funded almost entirely by our readers, our truth-telling journalism is an essential counterweight to the propaganda that passes for news in mainstream and legacy media.

Our news and analysis is available to everyone which is why we need your support. Please contribute so that we can continue to raise the voices of those who advocate for the rights of Palestinians to live in dignity and peace.

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Zionism as a way of life Mondoweiss - Mondoweiss

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Posted By admin on August 20, 2021

On September 22, the United Nations will waste a day celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Durban Declaration, adopted at the UNs 2001 World Conference against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa.

In a just world, the UN would mourn this debacle, for reducing an anti-racism conference into an antisemitic hatefest.

As a preemptive strike, on September 19 in New York, Touro College, CAMERA and Human Rights Voices will sponsor an in-person conference called Fight Racism, Not Jews: The United Nations and the Durban Deceit.

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I will attend as a human rights activist, outraged that as one African colleague noted many attendees preferred yelling about Israel and the Jews than facing the racism issue.

Durban confirmed many African-American leaders fears about the UNs 1975 Zionism is Racism resolution that racism would be drained of its meaning, reduced to a weapon for bashing non-racist democratic Israel.

I will attend as a Zionist and a Jewish citizen, because too many have forgotten this pernicious conference which reinvigorated the Zionism is racism lie and unleashed anti-Israel genies now bewitching some Jewish intellectuals, too.

Most of all, I will fly so far and despite such inconvenience because theres a particular (unofficial, heavily Americanized) Israeli accent needed in combating Durban and in the broader fight against Jew-hatred.

TWENTY YEARS ago, as Palestinian terrorism revived against Israel, Iranian and Arab diplomats hijacked the UNs flagship anti-racism conference to denounce the racist practices of Zionism.

The parallel NGO Forum launched the Durban Strategy, accusing the Israeli racist system of acts of genocide, and demanding the boycotting of Israel as an apartheid state.

Some Durban delegates distributed a booklet caricaturing Jews with hooknoses and fangs dripping blood. Seventeen thousand anti-Zionist protesters rallied, with some waving the banner: Hitler Was Right! Other posters wished Hitler had finished the job.

In demonizing Israel, Zionists, and the Jews, these haters showed how antisemitism and anti-Zionism overlap.

Especially since so many people since this May have swallowed the lies deeming Israel racist, genocidal and guilty of apartheid, lets use this Durban rerun to repudiate the Zionism is Racism charge.

These demonizing, delegitimizing accusations are not fact-based the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is national, not about skin color and not anything like Americas racial conflict.

The charges are bloodthirsty they encourage calls to destroy the Jewish state and kill Israelis They reek of Jew-hatred, with the Jews now collectively lumped together in one state found guilty of the most heinous and unpopular crime of the moment.

The accusers are also hypocritical, making peace harder to obtain, despite their social justice rhetoric. If the Israel-Palestinian fight is about borders and land, everything is negotiable, were essentially asking how can we live together? If, as in Durban, the fight is about opponents deeming Israel racist, apartheid or genocidal, meaning evil, its existential, essentially asking how can we kill Israel? making compromise impossible.

From Israel its clear: such Jew-hatred isnt about Palestinians or borders or Left-Right its right-wrong, and its about survival. An increasingly vocal cadre of elite American Jews not only calls Israel racist and apartheid, but tries cleansing these terms of their Jew-baiting pedigrees or their genocidal implications against Israel. Few Israelis fall for such nonsense.

Its self-defeating to claim to oppose antisemitism while overlooking one of its most popular forms today namely, anti-Zionism. Jew-hatred often mutates, attacking Judaism, Jews as a nation, and now Israel, the Jewish state. Refusing to fight Jew-hatred on all fronts is like vaccinating only strangers, not friends, against COVID-19.

An influential minority of American Jews today still view antisemitism through partisan prisms. Durban is inconvenient ideologically. It disrupts the preferred American Jewish narrative treating antisemitism as right-wing. According to the American Jewish Committee, 89% of American Jews recognize the extreme Right as antisemitic, but only 61% say the same about the extreme Left. Durbans parallel NGO meeting, which became a festival of Jew-hatred, with social-justice-seeking do-gooders lustily demanding Israels destruction, proves that antisemitism festers on the Left, too.

The new Israeli government is putting politics aside when confronting our enemies. We need zero tolerance for Jew-haters and all bigots. We dont accept useful Jew-haters conservatives who claim to be pro-Israel yet hate Jews or well-meaning Jew-haters, progressives who hide their Israel-obsession behind human rights talk. Durban showed that fighting Jew-hatred requires clear redlines, broad coalitions and a laser focus, refusing to be duped by side issues or fake friends.

Israel also has the heartbreaking honor of representing the largest concentration of victims of Jew-hatred. They include Holocaust survivors, refugees expelled from Arab and Muslim lands, Russian Jews, Ethiopian Jews, French Jews, and those killed by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, lone wolves and other terrorists inflamed by anti-Zionist antisemitism.

Most American Jews recognize as President Joe Biden does that anti-Zionism and antisemitism overlap. But many wont connect the dots, refusing to acknowledge that Israel-bashing at the UN and elsewhere feeds Palestinian violence and rejectionism.

Antisemitism has grown and continues to grow, Theodor Herzl noted, and so do I. Fighting bigotry diminishes too many, making them pinched, angry, defensive, narrow-minded.

Israelis master Jew-jitsu, turning outsiders hatred into binding energy that unites us as a nation. The Jew-haters win when, by targeting us, they exacerbate divisions. The Israeli way is to see your enemy, unite our people, fight like hell, then argue about everything and anything once weve handled the threat.

The writer is a distinguished scholar of North American history at McGill University, and the author of nine books on American history and three on Zionism. His book Never Alone: Prison, Politics and My People, coauthored with Natan Sharansky, was just published by PublicAffairs of Hachette.

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How Israelis can fight the Durban conference's Jew-hatred - opinion - The Jerusalem Post

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Posted By admin on August 20, 2021

In 1985, I stood in the corner of a crowded meeting room at the Wayne State University Student Center, stone-faced, while people I did not know lined up at a microphone to denounce me before the Student Newspaper Publications Board.

I dont think Howard Lovy should be editor of The South Endbecause he is biased toward Israel, said one, referring to the student newspaper, where I was up for the editors position.

The board would decide if I should take the top job. By virtue of my role at the paper, I was in a position to assume the top editor slot.

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Howard is a Zionist, said another critic, so he should be disqualified from this important job as editor of The South End.

Some of them said something about the racist rabbi, Rabbi Meir Kahane. Another said something about the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon three years previously by an Israel-allied militia group and with the knowledge of the Israeli army. Apparently, I was responsible for all these things and people. I should not have been surprised.

A few anti-Zionist students had targeted me months earlier, not only peppering the paper with letters to the editor about me but showing up at The South End office specifically to harass and threaten me.

But at this hearing, there were not dozens but hundreds of people I had never met telling the board about what a lousy journalist I was because I had written pieces on the opinion page in support of Israel. The Student Newspaper Publications Board, wary of controversy because of a previous editors anti-military activism, rejected me, and I did not get the job.

I was 19 years old at the time. Im 55 now and over the shock, but I look back on it as a key event in my development as a Jew and as a journalist. It was an important lesson for me in how isolating antisemitism could be.

It was difficult for me to explain to my friends and colleagues that this even was antisemitism at all. I mean, it seemed perfectly reasonable to many that my bias in favor of Israels existence compromised my impartiality. But what was the other side I was supposed to take equally? Israels nonexistence? In 1985, at the age of 19, I lacked the words to explain to anybody that I was being targeted for harassment specifically because I was a Jew.

The AMCHA Initiative has been tracking antisemitic incidents and activities on U.S. college campuses since 2015. Out of curiosity, I punched Wayne State University into their database and found 16 incidents of antisemitic expression and activity in support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel from March 2016 to June of this year. (Different groups use different standards to identify antisemitism. Another monitor of antisemitic activity, the Anti-Defamation League, did not record any incidents at Wayne State during that time. The ADL recently announced a partnership with Hillel International to better understand antisemitism on campuses.)

The argument, of course, can be made that all these events are not antisemitic, that they simply express solidarity with Palestinians. And if youre not a Jew on campus and dont see and feel for yourself how these things manifest themselves in reality, it is difficult to explain this gray area between pro-Palestinian activism and antisemitic hate speech. You just know it when you feel it.

Ultimately, Jews are gaslighted with the phrase Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism, which creates a nonexistent caricature of a Jew who takes offense at every criticism of Israel.

It was The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the infamous czarist-era Russian forgery that sets out the Jewish plan for world domination. The Hillel director knew I wrote about Jewish issues, so he challenged me to write a story about this.

It doesnt matter if the Protocolsare fiction. Maybe they are, maybe they arent, the head of the Muslim Student Association told me in an interview at the time. But you cannot deny that many of the prophecies in this book have come true. Jews run the financial systems.

This student became my nemesis. Every time Id write anything in The South End, there he was to refute it. Not only that, but it became a campaign. The Muslim Student Association began tracking everything I wrote. Once I ran into one of its members while shopping at Detroits Eastern Market. I heard him say Zionist as I walked by.

OK. Yes. That was, and is, true. I am a Zionist. So how do you describe to non-Jews that for anti-Zionists, Zionist is the equivalent of saying dirty Jew? How do you tell people that this was not just criticizing Israel when its part of a coordinated campaign to attack everything a Jew writes and, ultimately, prevent him from attaining the editors position?

I was alone in 1985, but today, Jewish students can find solace in online communities. Julia Jassey, a University of Chicago student who runs a group called Jewish on Campus, is emerging as a leader among young people on campus fighting back against antisemitism that masquerades as anti-Zionism.

Of course, none of those things were available to me in 1985, so I did the next best thing: I interned for the Detroit Jewish News, which also ran a version of my story about the Protocols. This unexpectedly led to my career as a Jewish journalist and, years later, as managing editor at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Today my college experience is wrapped into a lifetime of experiences in recognizing the various shades of antisemitism. It is difficult, I know, for college students. But I am also optimistic that even though it may look worse than it was in my day, young Jews are working together to help define and fight the problem of campus antisemitism.

This article first appeared in the Detroit Jewish News.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.

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When I faced antisemitism, I was alone. Now, students have each other - The Jerusalem Post

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Posted By admin on August 20, 2021

Join us to mark the closing of Dana Arielis virtual exhibition,The Zionist Phantom, organized by Brandeis Universitys Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. This live conversation will expand upon the themes emerging from the exhibition, suggesting new and exciting connections between international artists, ideas and creative projects that explore collective histories, personal traumas and their presence in public spaces.

Professor Adriana Katzewwill present her photographic work in conversation withDr. Shayna Weiss. Katzew has been unearthing stories and memories of people, moments and places, inspired and driven by the history of her own Mexican-Jewish family.Professor Dana Arieliwill then join the discussion to address some of the similarities and differences between their works. Moderated by the exhibition curator Dr. Rotem Rozental.

About the exhibition:

In The Zionist Phantom, Dana Arieli shapes a panoramic view of a landscape defined by the uneasy presence of its missing limbs. With dozens of photographs captured across Israel from the 1980s to the present, the exhibition presents abandoned and active spaces, unfinished buildings, military presence in civilian areas, sites of collective remembrance and personal loss, exhuming the past lives of the sites, of what will never return.

Fact Sheet

When

Tuesday, September 14, 2021, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

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"The Zionist Phantom" Closing Event | JewishBoston - jewishboston.com

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Posted By admin on August 20, 2021

The trigger for the following is the short piece written on July 30 by Haaretz senior publicist Oudeh Basharat. It would be one thing to address a casual columnist writing for this anti-Zionist newspaper. It is quite another thing to address something a senior staff member has written and which genuinely reflects the position of the Israeli Left as a whole. Basharat, a Christian Arab Israeli, comes from a family that lived in the village Maalul that was destroyed during the 1948 War of Independence.

In this piece, Basharat (read: Haaretz) laments the fate of Maalul, whose lands were bought by the evil Zionist Yosef Weitz, who from the 1930s played a major role in land acquisition, a policy that was bitterly contested by those Jews who believed the land should be conquered. The buying of land, often at exuberant price, was called by Jews redemption, and characters like Weitz were called land redeemers. Thats how esteemed they were in the eyes of the early Zionists.

But...

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Against All Odds, the Zionist Projects Have Been Successful - Israel Today

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Posted By admin on August 20, 2021

LYD, PALESTINE One of the toughest challenges facing those who fight for justice in Palestine is breaking the Zionist paradigm, which limits the name Palestine to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. These two delineations of territory have no historical meaning and no geographical significance. They are no different from other parts of Palestine except that they were drawn by Zionists who, after the murderous 1948 campaign of ethnic cleansing, decided that they would not include those two areas within the boundaries of the Zionist state.

In 1967 the State of Israel occupied these two areas, and today the West Bank exists only in peoples imagination, while the Gaza Strip operates as a prison. After the disastrous Oslo process began in 1993, and the Palestinian Authority came into being, these two areas became known to the world as the State of Palestine.

In July 2021, I visited the city of Lyd, where I met with Councilwoman Fida Shehada, a Palestinian member of the Lyd City Council who was kind enough to spend a day with me in her city. She gave me a tour of the town before we sat down for a lengthy and detailed interview, which will soon be posted to my Patreon page.

Lyd has archeological sites that show it is as old as the city of Jericho, Shehada told me. However, the state and the municipality refrain from excavating because these sites have no value to the Zionist narrative. Lyd is perhaps most famous for being home to the Church of Saint George. The church was built over the grave of the famous Saint George of Lyd, who was buried in the city of his Palestinian mothers birth after he was martyred in the early fourth century.

The world-renowned hip hop band Dam is also from the city of Lyd. According to their website, Struck by the uncanny resemblance of the reality of the streets in a Tupac video to the streets in their own neighborhood in Lyd, Tamer Nafar, Suhell Nafar and Mahmood Jrere were inspired to tell their stories through hip hop.

It is becoming clear today that the city of Lyd may well have been the site of the worst massacres by Zionist militia in 1948. In a move more cynical than can be imagined, the municipality of Lyd was renamed Lod in Hebrew, and a plaza was built to commemorate the Palmach right in front of the Dahmash Mosque. The Palmach was the largest of the Zionist militias and was responsible for committing massacres in the city.

The mosque itself was the site of a horrifying bloodbath when citizens from the city, who were fleeing the shooting, crowded into it seeking shelter from the violence. But a Zionist militia headed by Moshe Dayan and Yitzhak Rabin took no pity on those seeking refuge and massacred everyone in the mosque. More than 150 men, women and children were gunned down.

Those who were not gunned down at the mosque or on the streets were forced to leave the city, and an estimated 40,000 men, women and children were made to take part in what became known as The Death March.

In her book Palestinian Women, Narrative Histories and Gendered Memory, published in 2011 by Zed Books, Dr. Fatma Kassem recorded the testimonies of Palestinian women from Lyd who survived the massacres and the forced expulsion.

Some of the women whom Dr. Kassem interviewed had witnessed the massacre at the mosque. One recalled:

The first days when the Jews came in, people went inside the mosques, they thought that the Jews would not kill them in the mosques. But they killed everyone who was inside.

Another woman remembered:

My father and many others went inside the mosque to protect themselves. He was not fighting. He was an old man. My father and my cousin pushed them into the mosque and [the militia] shot all of them.

In 2017, the Knesset passed legislation cracking down on illegal construction. The provisions of the new law were based on a report written by Deputy Attorney General for Civil Law Erez Kaminitz. According to Fida Shehada, this law has resulted in over 40,000 demolition orders for Palestinian homes in the north and central parts of the country alone this does not include the Naqab, Jerusalem or the West Bank. The Kaminitz Law is one of many racist laws designed to keep Palestinian citizens of Israel from building homes.

I remember one day I saw seven homes being demolished all at the same time, at the same minute, Shehada told me. I wanted to understand why this was happening and how to prevent this from happening in the future.

This drove Shehada to study urban planning. But, she said, then I saw that when they draw plans for the city, they only have plans for the Israeli population, not the Palestinians. The city does not account for the growth of the Palestinian population, which makes up about 30% to 40% of the citys population.

We have 30% Palestinian population, but 40% of the school children, Shehada said, and smiled as she saw the puzzled look on my face. Officially, on record, the Palestinians make up 30%. Still because of another racist law, called the Citizenship Law, which limits the rights of Palestinians to wed other Palestinians some are Palestinian women who are married to Palestinian men are deprived of citizenship.

Their children are citizens but cannot attend public schools, while their mothers are not allowed to study or work or leave their homes. So, if the father dies, the mother has to leave, and if she takes the children with her back to the West Bank or Gaza, they will lose their status which, with all its difficulties, is still better than that of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

Where Infrastructure Means Prisons: A Drive into the Naqab and the Illusion of Israeli Democracy

In an effort to instill the love of settlement activity in the hearts of Israeli Jews, religious Zionist settlers have made Lyd their home. They have their own municipal budgets and luxury apartments built for them exclusively, even as Palestinians struggle to find housing in the city. During the uprising of May 2021, over 500 armed settlers from the racist, violent Regavim movement moved into the citys municipality. They aimed to incite violence and terrorize the Palestinian population.

When Councilwoman Shehada questioned the mayor about this, he threatened to report her to the Shabak. The Shabak is the Israeli secret police, known for targeting, detaining and torturing Palestinian political activists. She had to remind him that the Shabak does not work for the mayors office.

The most surprising thing I saw or heard during my visit to Lyd was a comment by Councilwoman Shehada: I am very optimistic, she said with a grin. Things are changing, we have seen more Palestinians resist and organize, and I believe that we are facing a new reality today.

If there is room for optimism, Shehada certainly has a big role in it. I decided to run for mayor in the upcoming elections, she told me. Local elections are scheduled to be held in the fall of 2021. Even if the world hasnt come to terms with reality, Palestine stretches from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean and goes right through the ancient Palestinian city of Lyd.

Feature photo | Israeli police officers stand guard as the home of Hana al-Nakib and her four children is being demolished, in the city of Lyd. Yotam Ronen | Activestills

Miko Peled is MintPress News contributing writer, published author and human rights activist born in Jerusalem. His latest books areThe Generals Son. Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, and Injustice, the Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.

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My Visit to Lyd, Where Historical and Contemporary Zionist Oppression Meet - Mintpress News

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Rabbi, (Hebrew: my teacher or my master) in Judaism, a person qualified by academic studies of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud to act as spiritual leader and religious teacher of a Jewish community or congregation. Ordination (certification as a rabbi) can be conferred by any rabbi, but ones teacher customarily performs this function by issuing a written statement. Ordination carries with it no special religious status. For many generations the education of a rabbi consisted almost exclusively of Talmudic studies, but since the 19th century the necessity and value of a well-rounded, general education has been recognized.

Whereas rabbis assist at all religious marriages, their presence at most other ceremonies is not required. Nonetheless, they generally conduct religious services, assist at bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, and are present at funerals and sometimes circumcisions. In questions of divorce, a rabbis role depends on an appointment to a special court of Jewish law.

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Judaism: The role of the rabbis

After the defeat of Bar Kokhba and the ensuing collapse of active Jewish resistance to Roman rule (135136), politically moderate and quietist...

A rabbi also preaches on occasion and counsels and consoles as needs arise. A rabbi has responsibility for the total religious education of the young, but the extent of the rabbis participation, beyond the realm of general supervision, is dictated by local circumstances. Modern rabbis are likewise involved in social and philanthropic works and are expected to lend support to any project sponsored by their congregations.

In some cases, rabbis function on a part-time basis, devoting the major portion of their energies to a secular profession. Because rabbis do not have sacerdotal status, many functions that they normally perform may be assumed by others who, although not ordained, are qualified to conduct the religious ceremonies with devotion and exactitude.

By 100 ce the term rabbi was in general use to denote a sagei.e., an interpreter of Jewish law, and in early literature it appears in various forms. Jesus, for example, was sometimes called rabbi (John 1:49, 9:2) or rabboni (John 20:16) by his followers, while presidents of the Sanhedrins (Jewish councils in Palestine under Roman rule) were called rabban (our master). Similarly, Judah ha-Nasi, the codifier of the Mishna (c. 200 ce), the oldest postbiblical collection of Jewish oral laws, was called rabbenu (our teacher).

Gradually, salaried rabbi-judges and unsalaried rabbi-teachers (interpreters of Jewish law) came to perform routine services for their communities. From the 14th century, rabbi-teachers were receiving salaries (as rabbis generally do today) to free them from other obligations. Also in this period there began the tradition of submission of local scholars to their communitys rabbi.

Chief rabbis came into prominence in medieval Europe but found little favour with the Jewish communities that they represented, because most of them held their posts as appointees of the civil government. Of the chief rabbinates that survive today, that in Israel has a rabbinic council with two chief rabbis, one representing the Sephardic (Spanish) rite, the other the Ashkenazi (German). There is no central rabbinate for Jewry as a whole.

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rabbi | Definition, History, & Functions | Britannica

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This article was co-authored by our trained team of editors and researchers who validated it for accuracy and comprehensiveness. wikiHow's Content Management Team carefully monitors the work from our editorial staff to ensure that each article is backed by trusted research and meets our high quality standards. This article has been viewed 98,127 times.

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To become a rabbi, you'll need to convert to Judaism if you're not Jewish by birth and have lived a predominantly Jewish lifestyle for at least 3 years. As a rabbi, you'll train and practice in a particular branch of Judaism, so take some time to study up on the 5 branches to determine which branch you're interested in. Once you've chosen a branch, you can apply to a rabbinical school that specializes in that branch. After completing your rabbinical training, you'll be able to look for a job as a rabbi of a congregation. To learn how to find a position as a rabbi, scroll down!

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How to Become a Rabbi: 9 Steps (with Pictures) - wikiHow

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Posted By admin on August 20, 2021

Martin Luther King Jr. (Photo by Santi Visalli/Getty images)

By Ron Kampeas

Rabbi Richard Hirsch spent the 1960s bringing Jews and Blacks closer in advancing civil rights in the United States. He spent the rest of his life bringing Reform Jews closer to Israel in advancing Zionism.

Hirsch died Monday in Boca Raton, Florida, his family said. He was 95.

The Cleveland native became the first director of the Reform movements Religious Action Center, serving from 1962 to 1973. Under Hirsch, the center became a lobbying powerhouse in Washington, D.C. Its Dupont Circle office became a locus for civil rights organizing: The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act were drafted in large part in its conference room. Hirschpersonally lobbied President Lyndon Baines Johnson on voting rights.

Hirsch was close to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and delivered the Jewish portion of the assassinated civil rights leaders eulogy in 1968.

At the RAC, Hirsch was an outspokenly pro-Israel Reform rabbi a relative rarity in the movement before 1967. He was close to the Israeli Embassy and to AIPAC, the prominent Israel lobbying group.

In 1973, Hirsch assumed the leadership of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, where one of his first acts was to move its offices to Jerusalem from London. The Reform movementdubbed the moveReform Judaisms most significant decision of the 20th century.

He became the leading advocate for Reform Zionism, affiliating the movement with the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency. During his more than 25 years at the World Union for Progressive Judaism, he helped found ARZA, the Reform movements Zionist affiliate (his son Ammiel, also a rabbi, led ARZA from 1992 to 2004), and spurred the founding of two kibbutzes in Israel. In 2010 he was the first Reform rabbi to light the torch during Israel Independence Day celebrations. His 2011 memoir was titled For the Sake of Zion.

Yet Hirsch, a dual U.S. and Israeli citizen, remained an advocate of a Diaspora Jewish voice in Israeli policies, particularly as the policies impinged on the rights of non-Orthodox Jews.

If Diaspora Jews have the right to speak out in internal policies affecting the fate of Argentinian Jews and Soviet Jews, do they not have the right to speak on issues affecting the Jews of the Jewish state? hesaid at a Reform conferencein 1983. Jews in the former Soviet Union and Argentina were facing persecution at the time.

Hirschs wife, Bella, a Russian speaker who helped him establish a Reform presence in the former Soviet Union, died in 2019. His children a daughter and three sons, including Ammiel, now the senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York said they plan to bury both their parents in Israel once the pandemic abates.

For the past few years, our parents resided in Florida, so that they would be closer to us, they said. It was a form of exile for our father.

His children alluded to the great 12th-century Jewish thinker and poet Judah Halevi: While he lived in the West, his heart remained in the East.

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Rabbi Richard Hirsch, Who Eulogized Martin Luther King Jr., Dies at 95 - Jewish Exponent

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