Correction

I just removed a post, I received a link from a reliable source, but on further investifation I realized that the video dates back to 2009, so cannot be related to recent events in Ashdod.

My aplogogies

If you can't beat 'em, mock 'em

Given that the Hamas PR guys seem so much better at selling their (false) message than the Israelis, at least a group of creative people managed to put together this song...

Flotilla Choir presents: We Con the World

I love this quote...

Life in Israel has this great quote from MK Eliezer Moses (UTJ) during yesterday's debate in the Knesset:

When Moses took his turn to speak, he said the following, "It is told that Shchem ben Chamor took Dina the daughter of Yaakov. The sons of Yaakov decided to fight them with trickery, and convinced them to circumcise themselves. On the third day after the circumcisions, at the height of their pain, the children of Yaakov killed them all to save their sister.

The question is asked why did they convert them to Jews?

The answer is that if the children of Yaakov had killed them when they were still non-Jews, the Security Council would have screamed out and the UN would have screamed "Gevald!" - but to kill Jews? nu nu, that can be let go without superfluous commissions of inquiry.

Letter to the Minister of Agriculture

Below is a letter that I just sent to the New Zealand Minister of Agriculture.

I will keep you posted if I get a response…

Hon David Carter,
Minister of Agriculture,
d.carter@ministers.govt.nz

Dear Mr. Carter,

I read with dismay news reports of the new code of welfare for commercial slaughter which came into effect 28 May 2010.

According to the MAF web site (http://www.maf.govt.nz/mafnet/press/2010/270510-commercial-slaughter-welfare-code.htm ), all commercially slaughtered animals will require stunning before slaughtering.

As the minister is no-doubt aware, this will make Shechita (Kosher slaughtering) impossible in New Zealand, making New Zealand the only country in the world with a Jewish Community where kosher meat cannot be slaughtered locally or imported from neighbouring countries at a reasonable cost.

This issue has already received a lot of negative publicity globally, particularly in the Jewish and Israeli media.

As a New Zealand born Orthodox Jew who has elderly parents living in New Zealand who only eat kosher meat, I found it very distressing to hear that New Zealand, which has always prided itself on tolerance and acceptance of minorities, is now in effect making it practically impossible for people to observe the Jewish religion in the country. This will have a large impact on the daily life of my parents.

This is a sad break with the warm welcome that the New Zealand Jewish community has experienced in New Zealand for over 150 years, and is especially distressing in light of the high number of Jewish tourists or potential immigrants who will now feel unable to visit New Zealand without compromising their religious standards or being forced to adopt vegetarianism.

I realise that it is legal to import kosher beef (but not chicken) from Australia, but the Minister must be aware that the cost of imported meat is prohibitive and not a realistic option for many kosher-observant families in New Zealand.

As far as I am aware, there is no solution at all for Kosher poultry in New Zealand.

I hope that the minister will implement a clarification or solution which will safeguard the rights of the New Zealand Jewish community.

Yours sincerely,

 

Michael Sedley
Modi’in, Israel

Something’s not quite Kosher in New Zealand

Growing up in New Zealand, from time to time I would work as a Mashgiach for the schichta of chickens.

Every few months I would drive up to a large industrial chicken processing plant together with the Shaliach (who was also a shochet) and a few other individuals, and in the course of the morning we would process about 1000 kosher chickens which would serve the needs of the Jewish community for the next several months.

There were a few times that I also watched cows being processed (although not shechted) when the regular mashgiach was unavailable.

There is only a small kosher community in New Zealand (which includes my parents), however according to news reports (and in the JPost) recent legislation that just went into effect will make kosher chickens completely unavailable in New Zealand and kosher beef or lamb would have to be imported from Australia, making it prohibitively expensive (details of legislation here).

According to the reports, Shcheta will be completely banned in New Zealand, and the import of chickens will continue to be banned. There will be no exceptions, in spite of the fact that page 45 of the new regulations notes that:

NAWAC (the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee) is obligated under s. 73 of the Animal Welfare Act 1999 to take into account "the requirements of religious practices or cultural practices or both."

It is also agains the2001 recommendations of the National Animal Welfare Advisory Committee (which is under the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry).

There are currently very few Western countries that have banned Shechita, and the few countries with Jewish Communities where kosher meat is not available locally, such as Norway and Sweden, are able to import kosher meat from neighbouring countries at a reasonable cost.

Because of the geographic isolation of New Zealand, importing meat from Australia in the small quantities required for the Jewish community is unreasonably expensive. I cannot even imagine what the cost would be in running an event like a Bnei Akiva Shabbaton or camp, or a communal seder for the thousands of Israeli tourists who visit New Zealand each year.

That the New Zealand government would pass such legislation without considering the needs of a small minority of its citizens is nothing short of outrageous.

The New Zealand Jewish Council and the local rabbinate are currently appealing the law, I certainly hope that the government backtracks on this decision and an apology, or at least a clarification is forthcoming.

3000 Years New

You’ve gotta hand it to Haaretz for continuing to lobby against Jewish history.

In a shocking editorial on Yom Yerushalayim, which criticizes Bibi for visiting Merkaz Harav on Yom Yerushalayim (but failed to mention that almost all senior politicians have been at Merkaz Harav every year on Yom Yerushalayim, including such radical right wing extremists as Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak).

However the most shocking quote was the following which actually criticized the Minister of Education for encouraging schools to visit Yerushalayim (emphasis added):

… Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar, [has] doubled the number of schoolchildren visiting the Temple Mount and the City of David, from 200,000 two years ago to 400,000 since the start of the current school year. Under a new program drafted by the Education Ministry on the minister's orders, students are obligated to visit Jerusalem at least three times during their 12 years of school.

In theory, there is nothing wrong with this. Yet the visits tend to focus on sites like the Old City's Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall tunnels, Zion Gate and the archaeological excavations of the Temple Mount's southern wall - all disputed areas that are on the agenda during negotiations with the Palestinians, and are also associated with new Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. 

Got that – the Jewish Quarter of the Old City is associated with “New Jewish Settlement”.

In case Haaretz really have no clue of Jewish History, Jewish Settlement in the current Old City dates back to the Second Temple period (it is much older in Ir David [Silwan] just to the south which Haaretz didn’t mention).

With the exception of a few years after the destruction of the city in 70 CE, a brief period during the Crusader Period when non-Christians were barred from the city, and the 19 years from 1948-1967 when Jordanians forbade Jewish access to the city (in breech of the Ceasefire agreement) there has been a continual Jewish presence in the city for over 3000 years.

If Haaretz was to describe the American presence in Washington or even the British presence in London as “New Settlement”, this would be closer to the truth than to describe Jews as newcomers to Jerusalem.

Whether the city should be divided is a political question that can be debated (although until recently there was a consensus in Israel on the topic), however to deny basic History can only lead to hardened positions by those who wish us harm, and makes any chance of a negotiated peace deal even more remote.

A tribute to my Grandmother

Tonight my niece is celebrating her Bat Mitzvah.

She is named after my paternal grandmother, Susan (Zsuzsa) Jane Cegledy, better known to my siblings and me as “Anya”. My brother asked me to say a few words about her at the dinner tonight.

I was always close to Anya. As a teenager I often walked over to her place on Shabbat afternoons, just to talk. Towards the end of her life, when she was interviewed by the Hungarian Consul he asked her about the Best memory of her life, she replied:

One of my best memories was when my second grandson just dropped in on a Saturday afternoon, just to talk to his grandmother. He might have been about 15, and he just dropped in. When they were little they liked to come and stay here. He doesn't travel on Saturday, but they don't live far, so he just dropped in.

Q: What do you talk about?

This particular grandson loves to hear about my memories, about old times. This was such a lovely experience.

One of my regrets is that I didn’t spend more time with both my grandmothers, recording their recollections of history.

Anyway – here is the tribute that I plan to share with my niece at the Bat Mitzvah in a few hours….

Shani,

Anya, your father’s grandmother, your great-grandmother, whose name you carry was a very special person.

Anya was born December 12, 1905 at the beginning of the 20th century in Budapest Hungary. One of four sisters Anya was to see worlds destroyed and rebuilt within her lifetime.

Anya’s family were almost pioneers in women’s education. Her older sister Ella was one of the first Jewish women to be accepted to the Gymnasium, (High school that teaches Latin and Greek). Five years later when Anya was high school age it was already more acceptable for Jewish girls to go to high school.

Anya married Apa in 1930, but soon after their marriage their world was turned upside down. When they married, Anya and Apa lived what could be described as a middle class life. They lived in a respectable neighbourhood and had access to Anya’s parent’s summer house just outside the city in Matyasfold (not to be confused with Mattesdorf), however the Great Depression, combined with war reparations after World War One destroyed the Hungarian economy. Soon after they got married, Apa lost his job, and went through a series of less prestigious jobs until the anti-Semitic laws of the late 1930s made it illegal to employ Jews. At that time Apa set up a small business selling household products, like toothpaste, soap, and cleaning products, selling these to little corner stores who would not be big enough to have an account in their own directly with the manufacturers

During the NAZI occupation of Budapest, when Apa was taken away to a labour battalion and later to Mauthausen Concentration camp, Anya had to watch over her two young sons (your Grandpa and Uncle Janos) as well as care for her parents.

In the final months of the War, Eichmann made it a personal priority to destroy the last remnants of Hungarian Jewry. At that time Anya was called to report to a brick factory in Obuda (October). From there they rounded up the Jewish women who reported for work and marched them Eastwards in the general direction of Auschwitz.

By that late stage in the war, the trains were no longer running, but Eichmann’s plan was to march as many Jews as he could in the direction of Auschwitz until they died of exhaustion.

Anya and her friend Malvin (my Godmother) survived this death march together. For a few nights they were billeted in a barn or pig sty of a peasant in the town of Kophaza, some 200 km outside Budapest. One of Anya’s few memories that she shared with us of those years is that the peasant woman on whose property they were staying risked her life to sneak them food in the middle of the night. Had she been caught, she would almost certainly have been executed. What impressed Anya was not that this woman risked her life to bring them food, which probably saved their lives, but the fact that she made a point of brining the food a new bucket, one that had never been used to feed the pigs and treated them with respect and dignity. It was this act of humanity that impressed Anya and she stayed in touch with the woman for many decades after the war.

From Kophaza they were marched to the town of Lichtenwörth in Austria, about 40 km away, where the NAZIs had set up a temporary camp in a warehouse. It was in this concentration camp that Anya spent the remainder of the war until her liberation by Soviet soldiers on April 2, 1945. Over 2000 Jewish women were taken to Lichtenwörth Concentration Camp, only about 400 survived.

Anya and Malvin were amongst the survivors (Your grandma’s aunts, Liza and Klari, Helen’s mother were also there. Liza survived emotionally damaged, Klari died of typhus after liberation). Anya and Malvin gradually made their way back to Budapest where they found that both her children and her parents had survived. Later she was to find out that Apa was amongst a handful of survivors of Mauthausen. An entire Jewish family surviving the war was almost unheard of in Hungary, or anywhere else in Eastern or Central Europe.

After the war, Anya and her family left Europe behind to start a new life in New Zealand, the furthest corner of the World.

They arrived in New Zealand with almost no money and Anya was the only one in the family who spoke English. However it was Anya’s optimism and determination that helped them re-establish themselves in this strange land. When their belongings were held up in Antwerp because of the currency restrictions, Anya personally called the office of the Minister of Finance, Walter Nash, to get him to intercede on behalf of their belongings (which he did, on the condition that the belongings were shipped to New Zealand on a New Zealand ship).

Anya and Apa began their new lives in Palmerston North where they established a large circle of friends and often hosted guests in their home.

As the boys grew and your Grandpa went to university, they moved to Wellington in 1954.

In 1976 Apa departed this world and left Anya on her own. After his death Anya took up travelling, making a trip to Janos in Japan almost every year and also visiting her sisters in New Jersey and Budapest. After Janos settled in Japan, Anya started learning Japanese through the Correspondence School, making her the oldest high school student in the country.

In spite of the difficult times that she lived through, Anya was the ultimate optimist. In an interview in 1990 she summarized her life as follows:

It seems like boasting if I say I'm lucky, but I'm lucky. My children married well, I have lovely grandchildren. My husband was 75 years old when he died. I was only 70, but people were left on their own as widows at a younger age. I've had a fortunate life. I never expected much, but I had a fortunate life. I have always appreciated what I had. I had a lovely childhood. I had this positive outlook; you have to be born that way. But my sisters are also like that. We had a good childhood, and we are still alive.

On February 11, 1993, כ׳ בְּשְׁבָט תשנ״ג a few weeks after her eldest grandson, your Aba got married, Anya returned her soul to her Creator. She will always be remembered fondly.

May Her Soul Be Bound in the Bonds of Eternal Life.