The
Emor
Celebrating Hatzalah
May 17, 2019 12 Iyar, 5779
Vol 18, No 18
STAR
Serving LI’s Orthodox communities
The Jewish Star / Ed Weintrob
JEWISH Once again, several hundred members of the Five Towns and Far Rockaway communities turned out to salute and support the life-saving work of Hatzalah of the Rockaways and Nassau County, Sunday night at Sands Atlantic Beach. Kavod was given to Hatzalah’s tireless volunteers, and the loss last December of Dr. Richie Friedman, a longtime anchor of Hatzalah organizations in the metropolitan area, was sadly noted.
Fake history HowarD breSSler
H
istory may be open to interpretation, but not wholesale revision. Enter Rep. Rashida Tlaib and the tale of Palestinian Arabs as the benefactors of persecuted Jews. In 2015, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu drew a whirlwind of criticism over his claim that, at the time of their initial meet-
ing, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and national leader of Palestine’s Arabs, urged Adolph Hitler to exterminate the Jewish people, at a time when Hitler was still debating whether to undertake such a wholesale murder campaign or simply banish European Jewry from the domains he conquered. While Netanyahu’s chronology may have been inaccurate (and he ultimately backtracked on some of his statements), there should have been no debate over the fact that Husseini favored the extermination of the Jews, and that his genocidal views long predated the Holocaust or even Hitler’s rise
Don’t focus on whether the Shoah ‘calms’ Tlaib but on her lies about Israeli history and Palestinians’ historic wish to see Jews dead.
to power. Indeed, it was Husseini’s inflammatory, fallacious speeches contending that the Jews of Palestine were seeking to conquer the Temple Mount and attack the al-Aqsa mosque (an oft-recycled prevarication with a seemingly limitless lifespan, notwithstanding its baselessness) that led to the slaughter and mutilation of scores of Jews in Hebron in 1929 and the ultimate elimination of that millennia-old Jewish community. He spent the war years in Germany as Hitler’s guest, and sought to create an Auschwitz-style death camp near Tel Aviv, to do to the Jews of Palestine what Hitler was doing to the Jews of Europe.
H
usseini was not alone in his genocidal inclinations and his vehement opposition to a Jewish state — of any size — in any part of Palestine. While much of the Arab population of pre-1948 Palestine could fairly be characterized as being “caught up in events” surrounding the founding of the modern State of Israel — fleeing, or in some cases being forced from their homes, and not participating in open hostilities — many Palestinian Arabs took an active part in the violent attempt to prevent Israel from coming into existence ab initio, driven both by nationalism and the hope of sharing in the spoils of war. In See Fake History on page 19
Hasidim in Poland in a Polish photog’s eye By Eric Berger
Sponsored by the Polish Cultural Institute NY
When New York natives Duvid and Naomi Singer went to Poland about a decade ago and spent some time visiting the gravesite of a revered Hasidic rebbe, they spotted something unusual beyond the 30 or so Jews reciting Psalms in the Bobowa cemetery. “We were a little surprised to see this woman with a camera,” said Duvid Singer, who leads tours of Poland primarily for American Hasidic Jews, including Bobovers like himself. “We were kind of staring at her, and she came over to us and started asking questions.”
Hasidim gather for morning prayers at an old synagogue in Lancut. Agnieszka Traczewska
Naomi asked her if she was Jewish. She wasn’t. The woman turned out to be Agnieszka Traczewska, a Polish photographer and film producer working on a project to photograph Hasidic Jews visiting historic sites in Poland. The idea was to pay homage to the history of Jews in Poland — something most Poles today overlook, she said. “My education left me with unbelievable gaps, and one of the most significant gaps was the story of the Jewish nation, which lived with the Polish nation side by side for a thousand years and vanished in the Holocaust,” Traczewska said. The result of her decade-long effort is a collection of photos, titled “Returns,” that See Hasidim on page 6