כג הֲיַהֲפֹךְ כּוּשִׁי עוֹרוֹ, וְנָמֵר חֲבַרְבֻּרֹתָיו; גַּם-אַתֶּם תּוּכְלוּ לְהֵיטִיב, לִמֻּדֵי הָרֵעַ. כד וַאֲפִיצֵם, כְּקַשׁ-עוֹבֵר, לְרוּחַ, מִדְבָּר.
ירמיהו יג, כ"גCan a Kushite [African] change his skin? or a leopard his spots?
MEMRI and Arutz 7 are reporting that individuals in the Muslim World are again recycling an old, somewhat ridiculous claim that PEPSI is owned or controlled by “The Zionist”, and the name PEPSI stands for “Pay Every Penny to Save Israel”.
This claim has been around for a while and it is laughable for a few reasons. I remember when I was younger Pepsi wasn’t available in Israel and the assumption was that they were boycotting Israel (it was “well known” that “Coke was for Jews", Pepsi was for Arabs”)
To add to the claim, people pointed to the “Anti-Zionist” Satmar Rebbe favourite drink was Pepsi.
People even claimed that Tempo cola was owned by Pepsi (which it is and their logos were similar), but Pepsi didn’t want to sell under their own name in Israel as they were worried about losing the Arab Market.
I don’t believe that there was any truth to the rumours, the reality was that the Israeli market was probably too small for more than one major soft drink manufacturer. At that time Pepsi Cola was also not available in New Zealand.
What people may have forgotten is that the Soft Drink company that was boycotting Israel until 1966 was Coca Cola and ironically they were only forced to start selling in Israel when an Egyptian businessman found a bottle of Coke with Amharic writing and mistaking it for Hebrew accused Coke of selling to to the Zionist. Coke quickly denied selling to Israel, which prompted questions from the American Jewish community as to why not, which eventually forced Coke to open a plant in Israel.
Snopes has a the story…
Successfully doing business in the Middle East often depended upon not doing business in Israel. The Arab League was quick to boycott, and multinational concerns were forced to choose between the smaller market of Israel and the much larger market of the combined Arab states. For firms caught in the middle, it was a "no win" situation.
Coca-Cola's turn in the harsh spotlight of public opinion came in 1966.
April 1 1966: At a press conference in Tel Aviv, businessman Moshe Bornstein accused Coca-Cola of refusing to do business in Israel out of fear of reprisals and loss of profits in the Arab soft drink market. A week later in New York, the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith released a statement backing up the charges, triggering headlines across the U.S.A. Coca-Cola was in hot water, and the American public was demanding answers. It was also rejecting the answers it was getting.
In 1949 Coca-Cola had attempted to open a bottling plant in Israel, but its efforts had been blocked by the Israeli government. As long as no one questioned the company too closely, the failure of this one stab at the Israeli market appeared to provide a satisfactory answer for Coca-Cola's conspicuous absence from the Israeli market. In the meanwhile, Coca-Cola was content to continue quietly serving the much larger Arab market, a market it was likely to lose if it began operating in Israel.
In 1961 an incident in Cairo involving civil servant Mohammad Abu Shadi momentarily shattered the quiet. Shadi had come into possession of a Coca-Cola bottle manufactured in Ethiopia, mistaken the Amharic lettering on its label for Hebrew, and publicly accused Coca-Cola of doing business with Israel.
The manager of Coca-Cola's Egyptian bottling operations wasted no time (and little thought) in assuring the press that Coca-Cola would never allow the Israelis a franchise. With their hands forced by their bottler's impolitic statement, company officials quickly invented the explanation that Israel was too small to support a franchise and gave their reasons for staying away as purely economic, not political. For the time being, this seemed to keep a lid on the brewing storm.
It wasn't until 1966 that people began to wonder openly why it was that nearby Cyprus had no difficulty supporting its Coca-Cola franchise despite their having only one-tenth the population of Israel. The comfortable aura of quiet was shattered by Bornstein's charges and the subsequent uproar they raised in the U.S.A.
When these issues came to light in 1966, they proved highly embarrassing to Coca-Cola. The administrators of Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan announced they would stop serving Coke, and the owners of Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Emporium on Coney Island followed suit. Faced with the prospect of a Jewish boycott in America, the company attempted to right the tipped canoe by announcing it would open a bottling plant in Tel Aviv.
…
Pepsi's entry into Israel in 1992 did not go smoothly — the evolution theme of its "Choice of a New Generation" ad campaign (in which man was portrayed as evolving from a monkey into a Pepsi drinker) angered the strictly observant haredi community. Though Pepsi pulled the campaign from Israel, it found itself in more hot water over a 1993 Michael Jackson tour. Jackson's unthinking flashbulb-popping arrival on a Sabbath was viewed by many observant Jews as a desecration. For a time Pepsi lost its kashrut (kosher) certificate because it was deemed to be promoting a culture that would corrupt the nation's youth through rock music concerts and advertisements featuring scantily-clad women.
…
Today you can get either Coke or Pepsi in anywhere in the Middle East, and the days of the boycott have faded into memory. Even so, there are still those who observe the stricture of "Coke is for Jews; Pepsi is for Arabs." Old wounds are not necessarily healed wounds.
1896: Born.Amazing that they missed trivial events like:
1901: Queen Victoria dies.
1912: Titanic sinks.
1919: End of Spanish flu pandemic, which killed up to 100 million people.
1924: James Ramsay MacDonald becomes prime minister.
1925: John Logie Baird invents his mechanical television system.
1928: Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin.
1930: Planet Pluto discovered.
1940: Winston Churchill becomes prime minister.
1945: Adolf Hitler commits suicide. Atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
1946: Nazi leaders are sentenced at Nuremberg. Mr Allingham celebrates his 50th birthday.
1948: NHS launched.
1954: First successful organ transplant.
1961: East Germany begins building Berlin Wall. Mr Allingham retires, aged 65.
1963: JFK assassinated. Sir Alec Douglas-Home becomes prime minister.
1967: Floppy disk invented.
1973: Three-day working week ordered by government to save electricity.
1977: Elvis dies.
1983: First commercial mobile phones available.
1986: Chernobyl power station explodes.
1996: Dolly the sheep born. Dunblane massacre. Mr Allingham turns 100.
1997: Diana, Princess of Wales, killed in car crash.
2001: Terrorist attacks on New York World Trade Centre and Pentagon.
2009: 65th anniversary of D-Day.
These pillars probably are from the Nea Church which was a large Church that stood during the Byzantine period and lies under the current parking lot and the Batei Machse square (you can see the remains of an Apse from the church outside the current walls).
Because of the ornate nature of these pillars, there is a good reason to believe that they pre-date the construction of the church and were built for a Roman-period building that pre-dated the Church.Given that the church was built in the 6th Century CE, it is quite probable that the pillars were brought to the site of the Church from the Temple Mount, less than a kilometre away and remains of the Beit Hamikdash would still have been present then. In other words, there is a real possibility that these pillars originally stood in the Beit HaMikdash.
Every time I walk through the square I stop to think about those pillars and try to imagine what they may have seen – the entire history of Jerusalem from standing proudly in the Beit Hamikdash, to be torn to the ground on Tesha B’av, to see the Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Crusaders, Mamluks, British, Jordanians, and others come and go, to be finally picked up again by the Jews, the same people that lovingly built those pillars more than 2000 years ago.So here’s my question, if these pillars (or any other artefacts) were part of the Beit Hamikdash, is there a prohibition to make use of them today?
For example, if we take shade or lean against the pillar, are we transgressing the prohibition of Me'ilah?I’m not a Rav or Halachic authority and have no idea if this is a real Halachic concern, I’m just thinking aloud here…
As we enter the month of Tamuz, may we all merit to see the Yerushalayim and the Beit Hamikdash returned to her former glory.
Lion of Zion recently asked whether Idan Yaniv wears Tzitzit - and if you look at this image from 2:32 of the video "את יפה", it certainly looks like he has Tzitzit sticking out the back of his shirt, even though he doesn't seem to be wearing a kipa, and this love song isn't exactly from Sefer Tehilim.
Firstly, I don't know Idan Yaniv, I have know idea what mitzvot he is careful with, and what mitzvot he is still working on, however the concept of someone wearing Tzitzit and not a kipa, especially with a Sfardi background does not surprise me at all. (And I would bet that even if there is not a kipa on his head, there is one in his pocket).
I think that one of the tragedies of the Ashkenzai world is that we seem to have divided ourselves into "Dati'im" and "Chilonom". I think that the division is false and causes a lot of unnecessary division in our people. There is (almost) no such thing as a Chiloni Jew – all Jews are Holy (opposite of Chiloni), there are some Jews who put more emphasis on some mitzvot than others, but (almost) all Jews are careful with some Mitzvot (think Matza on Pessach, Brit Mila, Mezuza, Chanuka Candles, etc).
This is even more true in the Sfardi world where almost all Jews are comfortable in a Beit Knesset or around a Shabbat table. I remember a number of years ago we attended a Chena of a friend of ours who was marrying an Israeli Syrian Jew. There were about 200 people there, all family (except for us), but very few had kipot on; many had piercings, tattoos, or spiky hair. At one point we asked the father of the Chatan if there were a few people who would be able to help us form a minyan for Ma’ariv. The Chatan’s father asked “why only a few people” – he gave the table a “clap”, called “ערבית” and almost every single male present came over to where we were making a minyan. All felt comfortable davening, many had kipot in their pockets, and almost all of them knew Ma’ariv by heart.
I don’t think that this is the reaction that you would get if you call “Ma’ariv” at an Ashkenazi “non-religious” event. We Ashkenazim have a lot to learn from the Sfardi community.
Pay extra attention as we read parshat Korach in shul tomorrow (or next week for those who find themselves in Chutrz L’artetz), I don’t think that Divisions within our small nation is something that we can afford.
שבת שלום
Men-only train cars sought in groping fearsTOKYO (Reuters) – Many women taking the crowded train in Tokyo opt for women-only carriages during the rush hour to avoid gropers.
Now, for fear of being accused of groping, some are asking for carriages reserved for men as well.
Ten shareholders of Seibu Holdings, which runs trains in the Tokyo area, have petitioned for carriages reserved for men.
(Rest of article here)
Back in the 80s I remember Yasser Arafat standing up in the UN with a picture of an Israeli 10 Agorot coin, claiming that it was a map of Greater Israel and was proof that Israel was planning to wipe "Palestine" off the Map.
The claim was ridiculous for several reasons - the image on the map was based on the remains of an ancient coin, and didn't really resemble a map of anything - if you were trying to impose a map over the shape of the coin, it would be a very strange map as Yes it would include parts of Jordan, but did not include the Galilee...What made the claim even more ridiculous was that while Arafat was speaking is his military uniform (complete with gun), on his sleeve was a clear map of 'Palestine" which clearly wiped Israel off the map, yet none of the World leaders in the UN though it polite to point this out.
Fast forward 20 years, recently the Palestine Solidarity Campaign proudly proclaimed victory for getting the London Underground to remove a poster promoting tourism to Israel for including a map which only faintly marked the 1949 armistice line (look carefully at the map, the “Green Line” is clearly marked in white. Photo courtesy of Greens Engage)
In spite of the fact that the Green Line is clearly marked on the map, and tourism to Israel would benefit both Jews and Arabs living here, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign were proud of their victory.
Now let’s take a quick look at the logo of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (on the left). Notice anything missing from the map of “Palestine”? Clue: it’s the World's only Jewish Country.
