Today is Yom HaShoah and Ghetto Uprising Remembrance Day, the 27th of Nisan.
The first Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel took place on December 28, 1949, following a decision of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel that an annual memorial should take place on the Tenth of Tevet, a traditional day of mourning and fasting in the Hebrew calendar. The day was marked by the burial in a Jerusalem cemetery of ashes and bones of thousands of Jews brought from the Flossenbürg concentration camp and religious ceremonies held in honor of the victims. A radio program on the Holocaust was broadcast that evening. The following year, in December 1950, the Rabbinate, organizations of former European Jewish communities and the Israel Defense Forces held memorial ceremonies around the country; they mostly involved funerals, in which objects such as desecrated Torah scrolls and the bones and ashes of the dead brought from Europe were interred.
In 1951, the Knesset began deliberations to choose a date for Holocaust Remembrance Day. On April 12, 1951, after also considering as possibilities the Tenth of Tevet, the 14th of Nisan, which is the day before Passover and the day on which the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943) had begun, and September 1, the date on which the Second World War had begun, the Knesset passed a resolution establishing the 27 Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, a week after Passover, and eight days before Israel Independence Day as the annual Holocaust and Ghetto Uprising Remembrance Day
As it is not that long past Pesach, Shimshon my puppy and I recently watched the movie The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston. For a few reasons I wanted to see this movie again. It really is still an amazing movie. In an age of Star Wars effects, the Ten Commandments special effects still awe me. But in the substance department, well, there is no comparison. What I do not remember ever seeing though was the opening.
And I think that is a question well worth considering in this day and age. Will we be ruled by G-d’s laws or the whims of a dictator? There are many in this divided country that very much want to see a President elected by the people deposed through any means, but all of them foul. They want power, and they planned to rule over us and his election upset their apple cart. Those forces have much help from the media, the useful idiots like #MoneyHogg and they will push their agenda of socialism and communism at all costs.
That movie I’ve “seen”.
From the Chabad web site I’ll give you an excerpt from the article The 1929 Struggle to Send Matzah Into the Soviet Union
“According to reports that have come from the entire breadth of the Soviet Union … central Russia, White Russia, Ukraine, Volhynia, the Caucasus, Bukhara, Georgia, Dagestan, the Donetsk Basin—flour for matzah cannot be found,” he wrote. “ … This year marks a new era in the lives of the Jews of Russia, a bitter era, one that has not occurred since the beginning of this deluge of suffering and troubles—G‑d should have mercy—and at this time the question of kimcha dePischa [“flour for Passover”] is a burning question.”
The Soviet grain shortage was not unintended. In a process that began slowly in 1925 and now, at the end of 1928, was picking up steam, Joseph Stalin was forcing through his national collectivization campaign and introducing his first Five-Year Plan for the economy. Farmers and peasants who had worked the land and fed Russia for generations were being forced into state-run collectives, with countless arrested, exiled or executed for resisting or to make an example for others. Productivity inevitably plummeted, bringing about food shortages, but it was not an accident.
“Coercion was the only way to attain wholesale collectivization,” writes historian Stephen Kotkin about Stalin’s position, which he took as a believing Marxist-Leninist. “The extreme violence and dislocation would appall many Communists. But Stalin and his loyalists replied that critics wanted to make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
You can hear #LipstickLenin (Alexandra Occasional-Cortez) or “Feel the Bern” millionaire Sanders saying that way all in the past, it just wasn’t perfected yet. It was in infancy.
Let’s take a look at what a reporter from MSNBC let slip. I have no idea if he still has a job or not.
MSNBC Venezuela Coverage Shows Why U.S. Founders Wanted Armed Citizenry
While covering Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro’s efforts to hold power, MSNBC reporter Kerry Sanders noted Maduro has the advantage of guns against an unarmed populace.
The MSBNC segment, published by The Washington Free Beacon, begins with anchor Andrea Mitchell expressing surprise that Maduro is still holding on.
Sanders responds, “Not only hanging on, but he appears to still control the military. You have to understand in Venezuela, gun ownership is not something that is open to everybody. So if the military have the guns, they have the power.”
Sanders adds, “So as long as Nicolás Maduro controls the military, he controls the country.
The average citizen of Venezuela lost around 19 lbs in 2017 and 24 lbs in 2018 I believe is what I heard.
Food, it’s such a great way to control a populace. Cow farts must be eliminated or the earth will self destruct in 10 or 12 years. Depending on if it’s Lipstick Lenin or Bozo O’Rear. Demonize food, demonize those that produce it, and how they do so, and then regulate them into starvation production.
Ruled by the whims of a dictator the citizens are reduced to attacking by hand and Molotov cocktails if the supplies can be procured. They are attacked and literally run over by the dictators troops and tanks.
Ari Fuld HY”D pointed out in a 2016 radio broadcast that “Never Again” doesn’t mean anything. Because “diplomacy” triumphs over “decency and morality”. How many countries signed peace treaties with hitler? How many dead Jews since Oslo was signed? More than in all the years before it. Not even the US would bomb the train tracks into Auschwitz. People place diplomacy above morality and doing the right thing. But you can hear the whole podcast. Fools who want peace but get war.
In these days of anti-semitic cartoons and condemnation of Israel by left-wingers of all strips, countries and religions I found Moshe Feiglin of Zehut’s Yom HaShoah post very very powerful and moving. Ari pointed out how many Jews tried to reach the safety of Israel in those horrible days before and during the holocaust only to be turned away by the British. They were sent back to be murdered by the nazis. Israel, their home, the home that had lived in their hearts and the desire of their souls to return there always burned through every generation. It’s part of our identity. Here is his post translated into English.
The Holocaust is threatening us with our Jewish identity.
In the wagons to Auschwitz, the complete assimilationists from the west were crowded together with the ultra-Orthodox from the east.
When the doors opened to the smoke rising from the chimney, they realized that the decorations of heroism from the First World War would no longer benefit the civilian identity they had adopted –
And these – because here prayers and mitzvot will no longer benefit, will not be religious identity.
They took their names from them and turned them into numbers, took the family, the honor, the clothes, the hair, the human image.
In the gas chambers, devoid of any other identity, there was only one, final, absolute and unifying – like death alone, Jewish identity.
Germany, where we lived in that “gun-free” (except for the special friends) utopia where we died at the dictator’s whims.
H/T to my friend Aryeh from Zehut.
HaTikvah, The Hope.
