Effective Israel advocacy begins at home
+ enlarge image
Allyson Gall staffs Morristown Jewish Center Beit Yisrael’s pro-Israel booth at the Morristown Fall Festival on the Green, Sept. 30, 2012.
Photo courtesy CRC of Greater MetroWest
The summit
The Israel Advocacy Summit will take place Sunday, Feb. 3, 9 a.m.-1 p.m. at the Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus, Whippany.
Sponsored by the Community Relations Committee of Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ and NJ American Jewish Committee in partnership with area synagogues and organizations, the summit is free and open to the public.
Registration is requested; visit www.jfedgmw.org/summit or call 973-929-3064.
Advertisements
January 23, 2013
On Jan. 7, 35 religious leaders from across the United States representing Christian denominations — including Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Roman Catholics — signed a letter to President Obama urging him to make peace efforts between Israelis and Palestinians a priority. The good news? They recognized that it is an Arab-Israeli-Palestinian conflict and they clearly want a two-state solution. They also wrote that recent rocket attacks from Gaza into southern Israel are a “morally unjustifiable use of indiscriminate force against civilians.”
However, they also stressed that Israeli occupation and expansion in the West Bank “compromise the territorial viability of a future Palestinian state.” And there is no mention that Israel has no partner for peace, as the Palestinians are coming not to the peace table but to the UN, and that Hamas and others in the Arab world are working against establishing a Palestinian state next to Israel.
Also in January, over 400 Christian, Jewish, and Muslim organizations signed on to a letter to the president that blatantly blames only Israel for the lack of peace and calls for an end to the “siege of Gaza,” an end to the U.S. veto at the UN protecting Israel, an end to the “occupation,” etc., etc., etc. See endtheoccupation.org and prepare for your blood pressure to rise.
Finally, the Palestinian Authority’s secretary for religious affairs declared soon after Hanukka that Jews had no religious connection to the Western Wall until the 1917 Balfour Declaration.
I offer these three news items to make the case that you and I are needed more than ever in the battle for the hearts and minds of our friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, and elected officials.
We must do more than read and write to each other and wring our hands in frustration. We need to help others understand Israel — its size, its diversity, its story, its accomplishments, and its challenges (both from within and from outside). We must understand Israel’s efforts for peace.
Last year members of over 40 congregations in our area participated in Step Up For Israel programs coordinated by the Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ. Some were learning the history for the first time. Some were reinforcing what they already knew, so that the facts could be at the ready when needed. Some were learning how to share their feelings and knowledge with Christians who either don’t care or don’t know much about Israel.
The goal must be to reach out to others, whether in a casual conversation at work, a meeting with your member of Congress, a family gathering, or a dialogue with a local church.
We at Morristown Jewish Center Beit Yisrael participated in SUFI last year with a series of talks and activities. As a result, our community became more empowered to speak out on Israel and more activated in the community at large. Our members sponsored a booth about the synagogue and Israel at the Morristown Fall Festival on the Green. Some congregants will travel to Washington for the annual AIPAC conference. And, in 2013, some will reach out to our neighboring churches.
Join us on Sunday, Feb. 3, at the Aidekman Jewish Community Campus in Whippany when the CRC and the American Jewish Committee cosponsor the second Step Up For Israel Advocacy Summit. You will hear Itamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch, whose group brought to light the PA official’s quote about Israel. You will hear Michael Curtis, Rutgers professor and author of Should Israel Exist? A Sovereign Nation Under Attack by the International Community. Representatives of more than a half-dozen Israel advocacy groups will also participate.
You will be with hundreds of others who care about Israel, and you will learn skills and facts from experts for your own advocacy efforts. The program, which will run from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., is an interactive one that will afford you the opportunity to engage with the speakers.
“If not now, when?” I know, I know. The phrase from Hillel has become almost trite. But it really is time for each of us to take some action other than writing a check and sending e-mails to each other. We must do what we can in our own backyard.
Comments
dancingcat
January 24, 2013
AIPAC may once have been pro-Israel but it has moved far to the right and is now basically pro-Likud. If you really care about the long term fate of Israel as both Jewish and Democratic, support J Street instead and go to the J Street annual meeting in Washington. That’s where the action is today. It’s a much more diverse and progressive than the 80 year old white guys that run the rest of the American Jewish establishment.
AIPAC is so yesterday.
ROSENBERG
January 27, 2013
As the child of parents who survived the concentration camps I have dedicated a my academic career and my clerical calling to educate the next generation to learn the lessons of the Nazi horrors. The first lesson of the holocaust is that the murder of6 million Jews in 21 nations did not begin with an edict to cast the Jews into the ovens. It began with a policy of demonizing the Jews as if they were less than human. Throughout WWII, the exiled Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin Al Husseini, operated out of Hitler’s bunker and broadcast and rantings that called for the murder of the Jews on Nazi radio, in the Arabic language, a daily radio message that was beamed to the middle east, while the Mufti actively recruited Arabs to join SS units that systematically rounded up and executed thousands of Jewish families in the Balkans.
Mahmood Abbas, the leader of what the UN has defined as the State of Palestine, issued a speech in which he praised the legacy of the Mufti of Jerusalem and of slew of Arabs who have murdered Jews over the past generation. To ignore Abbas’s message is ignore the first lesson of the holocaust, which is that anyone who glorifies hose who murder Jews is to be held culpable in the advocacy of mass murder/.
It is therefore incumbent on every person of conscience to condemn Abbas and to break off all relations with him and the entity that he represents.
I await a response from the representatives of every Jewish organization and from every responsible cleric.
There is a adage in the Talmud which is that SILENCE IS AGREEMENT. RABBI DR. BERNHARD ROSENBERG. president ISRAEL ADVOCACY TASK FORCEhttp://israelbehindthenew…
ROSENBERG
January 27, 2013
Cementing Hate on Holocaust Memorial Day
January 27, 2013 15:26 | by Simon Plosker
This cartoon published in The Sunday Times (subscription-only: http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/multimedia_library/Image_Bank/?tab=8) would be offensive at the best of times. That it has appeared on Holocaust Memorial Day is doubly so.
Penned by Gerald Scarfe (the cartoonist behind Pink Floyd’s The Wall), the caption reads: “Israeli Elections… Will Cementing Peace Continue?”
A hideous looking PM Benjamin Netanyahu caricature builds a wall cemented with blood, crushing Palestinians including women and children.
Israel’s security barrier (of which the vast majority is a fence and not a wall) is meant to protect Israeli civilians against Palestinian terrorism. In any case, the imagery of this cartoon amounts to a blood libel on a day when the millions of victims of the Holocaust are remembered.
In response, The Commentator’s Raheem Kassam states:
In conversation with a friend of mine recently, I was asked, “Do you think in 200 years time, people will have forgotten the Holocaust, or believe that it was a myth?” I naively responded, “No. I believe there are enough good people in the world to ensure that doesn’t happen.” At the time, I would never have thought the editors of the Sunday Times were in amongst those who would seek, in true Der Sturmer fashion, to use Holocaust Memorial Day to publish a blood libel, and knowingly undermine the memory of one of the worst genocides ever.
HonestReporting CEO Joe Hyams said:
Holocaust Memorial Day is an opportunity to remember the most appalling atrocities carried out in modern history. It should also be a day when the media remembers that Israel’s actions to defend its citizens bear no relation whatsoever to the genocidal crimes of the Nazis. On any day, this cartoon’s imagery is an assault on the real victims of genocide, demeans their suffering and insults their memory. The Sunday Times should be mindful that what started as cartoons in the 1930′s ultimately led to violence and unspeakable tragedy.
ROSENBERG
January 27, 2013
. I have bowed out of the local interfaith Holocaust service, because it was a custom to include Hatikvah at the end, but now some Christian groups object as they support the Palestinians and the Muslim Imams would either sit or leave during the Hatikvah. Perhaps interfaith Holocaust programs no longer make sense, at least to me. I do not need the stress of seeing disrespect being afforded to Israel and nor do I wish to compromise by leaving Hatikvah out. This is a personal choice and I DO NOT ADVOCATE ANYONE NOT PARTICIPATING IN ANY INTERFAITH HOLOCAUST SERVICE. I INTRODUCED INTERFAITH HOLOCAUST SERVICES IN 1974 AND WAS ONE OF THE FIRST IF NOT THE FIRST TO DO SO. This was a difficult decision for me based on personal principle. The interfaith Holocaust memorials started as well intentioned way for the Jewish people and other groups to pause and reflect on man’s capacity to perpetuate unbelievable cruelty against his fellow and to commiserate as a group and others, with the Jews and hopefully prevent this nightmare from reoccurring. Over the years it was understandably modified to include other victims of genocidal mass killings, though these mass killings were not really analogous, as the Nazis were obsessed at not just killing Jews as a competing group, but Hitler desired to eliminate our creed and it’s pervasive influence on humanity, particularly Christian doxy. As a result of Muslim participation and twisted liberalism, this is morphing into a twisted canard where Israel is being blamed for perpetuating ethnic killings against the Palestinians as the Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. One can understand the Islamo-Nazis belief system with a quote from the Talmud. We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. RABBI DR. BERNHARD ROSENBERG, CHILD OF Holocaust survivors and a refugee born in a D.P. camp.