Visitor Questions and Comments

Dear Dov,

I think you are ignoring an important aspect of Jewish history. More than three thousand years after the giving of the Torah, we are still keeping and believing in the same Torah that G-d gave to Moses at Sinai. There is no other people in the world who have held onto their faith, unchanged, despite so many persecutions, massacres and expulsions. It is an amazing fact.

But we have to know that this did not happen by itself. The Jewish people has withstood many internal attempts to reform and alter its beliefs and practices. Large segments of the Jewish people did indeed go off the path of Torah and follow these movements. We Jews today are the descendents of those who remained staunch in their emunah and fought against the heretics and reformers. Sometimes those fighters were relatively few in comparison to the heretics.

Just open up the Tanach and read about the Jews who worshipped idols  Baal and Asheirah  during the first Temple period. Eliyahu Hanavi said, I am left the only prophet of Hashem, while the prophets of the Baal are four hundred and fifty (Melachim I 18:22). Hashem said that there were only 7000 Jews left who did not bow to Baal, and only they would be left over (ibid. 19:18). Today, we have to thank Eliyahu that true Judaism still exists.

The heretical Sadducees in the times of the Second Temple were no less dangerous. Under their influence, the kings Yannai and Herod carried out massacres of all the true Jewish sages (Kiddushin 66a and Bava Basra 3b). Yet we today are descendents of those sages and their followers, not of the Sadducees. Today, we have to thank those sages who disputed with the Sadducees and had the courage to stand up to them.

350 years ago, the Jewish people faced the challenge of the Sabbatean heretical movement. The movement quickly swept up most of the Jews of Europe with its messianic hope, and those rabbis who remained skeptical were ridiculed and persecuted. For a century after the false messiah died, his movement continued on in secret in various forms. The field of Kabbalah, the study of the hidden Torah, was littered with works that seemed authentic to the untrained eye, but were actually filled with Sabbatean heresy. It required great scholars like Rabbi Yaakov Emden to take it apart and expose the heretics. It is thanks to him and other zealots that true, authentic Judaism survives to this day.

You have to realize that Hashem promised us that the Torah will never be forgotten from the descendents of the Jewish people (Devarim 31:21), and Hashem keeps that promise by making sure that there are always Jews who refuse to let the Torah be changed and will continue to speak out against the heretics and reformers, no matter how numerous they are. We are confident that in the end, the truth will prevail. Future generations will look back in disbelief at the masses of religious Jews who fell into the net of Zionism, and they will thank those few who stood up against Zionism in our time.

Usually, the Jewish peoples struggles against heretical movements are an internal matter. Eliyahu Hanavi didnt need to go around to the gentile nations of his time and tell them, True Jews dont worship the Baal. But in our time, the Zionist movement has caused a large part of the worlds population to be angry at Jews. When there are religious parties in the Israeli government, whatever reasons they have for being there, the world sees religious Jews as part of the movement that angers them. At such a time, we cannot be silent or keep the struggle internal. We have to inform them that these religious Zionist parties do not represent true Judaism.

Sincerely,

Hersh Lowenthal

Dear Dave,

For your article to be accepted and not to reflect badly on Jews and on yourself relative to Jews, the crucial thing is to sound pro-Jewish. Portray the Zionists as bad for the Jews, endangering the Jews.

As material for your article, you could use some of the following things we published:

It is a mistake for the Zionists to think that with military force they can subdue Hamas. The suicide bomber goes on his mission with the knowledge that he will die, and therefore the threat of death does not scare him. The Hamas militants are not getting any weaker because the Zionists killed a few of them or even a few hundred of them or even a thousand. On the contrary, they are getting stronger due to this attack, because every civilian casualty they suffer gains them more sympathy in the world and makes the Zionists look worse.

Israeli violence leads to anti-Semitism throughout the world.

In reaction to the Mumbai attack, Levi Sokolic wrote in the Jewish Press of Dec. 24 2008:

It ought to be painfully obvious to every Jew in the world - whatever the level of his religious affiliation - that had he been in the Chabad House in Mumbai at the time of the attack, he too would have been tortured and killed for being Jewish.

Indeed, even a Jew who marches in support of the Palestinians and who hates Israel and all things Jewish would have been killed for being Jewish, had he been there.

Any Jew is a legitimate target to these depraved people. The Mumbai Chabad House was not in Israel, and the Jews in Mumbai had nothing to do with Zionism. They were about Shabbat, kosher food, prayer, and learning Torah.

Our reaction to this is: Yes, but Zionism was the cause for these people hating Jews and targeting Jews. They said so explicitly.

Before Zionism, Jews and Arabs lived in peace:

In his book With the Turks to the Suez Canal" WWI German general Friedrich Frieherr Kress von Kressenstein writes:

A phenomenon that was extremely odd was how the war caused an unprecedented upsurge in the battle between Zionists and non-Zionists, a battle that turned ugly and did little to promote Jewish interests in general. At the same time, the non-Zionists - i.e., the Jews without political goals, mainly belonging to the Orthodox stream - were the overwhelming majority in Palestine. The Zionists living in Palestine scarcely made up five percent of the population, but they were very active and fanatical, and terrorized the non-Zionists. During the war, the latter tried to free themselves from this terror with the help of the Turks . They feared, justifiably, that the activities of the Zionists would ruin the good relations that existed between the long-time Jewish inhabitants of Palestine and the Arabs, and that the Turks might adopt hard-line policies that would harm them, too."

Rabbi Baruch Kaplan, who studied in the Hebron Yeshiva in 1929, wrote:

The Arabs were very friendly people, and the Jewish People in Hebron lived together with them and had very friendly relations with them. They worked for Jews, and everybody got along just fine.

Naim Gileadi, a Jew who grew up in Iraq before WWII, wrote:

I could not have recounted any personal grievances that my family members would have lodged against the government or the Muslim majority. Our family had been treated well and had prospered, first as farmers with some 50,000 acres devoted to rice, dates and Arab horses. Then, with the Ottomans, we bought and purified gold that was shipped to Istanbul and turned into coinage. The Turks were responsible in fact for changing our name to reflect our occupation-we became Khalaschi, meaning "Makers of Pure."
Britain's pro-Zionist attitude in Palestine, however, triggered a growing anti-Zionist backlash in Iraq, as it did in all Arab countries. Writing at the end of 1934, Sir Francis Humphreys, Britain's Ambassador in Baghdad, noted that, while before WW I Iraqi Jews had enjoyed a more favorable position than any other minority in the country, since then "Zionism has sown dissension between Jews and Arabs, and a bitterness has grown up between the two peoples which did not previously exist."
People think the Zionists are saving Jewish lives with their wars.

Rabbi Avigdor Miller used to say, If you see a sign on a store saying Save 20%, then dont go in and youll save 100%. In the same way, people who are caught up in the present and miss the big picture say, Israel is doing the right thing by defending itself. But the big picture is that Israel would save far more by not existing as a state in the first place.

Throughout the history of Zionism, a consistent pattern emerges. The Zionists have focused too much on their short-term goal, while the greatest rabbis in their wisdom have viewed the big picture. In the late 1800s the Chovevei Zion claimed to be settling the land through peaceful land purchase, but the rabbis warned that their activities would lead to confrontation with the Turks. Theodor Herzl claimed to be negotiating with world leaders for a Jewish national home, but the rabbis saw that his movement would portray the Jews as a foreign and disloyal element within their home countries. In 1937, the Zionists accepted the Peel proposal to partition Palestine, forming a Jewish state and an Arab state, but the Brisker Rav cried out, How can any religious Jew contemplate this idea? We know that the Arabs will not let the partition be carried out peacefully; there will be wars and bloodshed. And it is forbidden to sacrifice even one Jewish life for the sake of founding a state. In 1947, as a large part of the Jewish world rejoiced over the UNs recommendation to partition Palestine and create a Jewish state, the Brisker Rav again reiterated that the entire concept of a Jewish state is one of constant warfare. In 1967, as most Jews rejoiced over the Zionist victory, the Satmar Rebbe cried over the Jewish soldiers who had died in battle. He wrote a book explaining that the entire war could have been avoided.

In every game that the Zionists have played to achieve their goals, they have been apparently successful in the short run, but look at the big picture: why are they playing these games to begin with? Since when has the Jewish people valued a piece of land more than Jewish lives?

What would we like to see? A single state in Palestine under which Jews and Palestinians have completely equal rights, and Palestinians have the majority. This could be easily accomplished now with the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, 1.5 in Israel proper, 1.5 in the West Bank and 2 million returning refugees. Furthermore, I can imagine some Israeli Jews would want to leave and the UN should provide a mechanism to help them to find places to live.

Dear Abdul,

1_ can you tell me if the Israel represent all the jews in the world?

Of course not. First of all, let me explain that there are active anti-Zionists like our organization, whose associated groups and supporters number about 150,000 Jews worldwide, and then there are non-Zionist Orthodox Jews, which number far more. Non-Zionist Orthodox Jews includes the entire yeshiva world and its supporters, and the entire Chassidic world. They make up about 10% of the Jewish population of the state of Israel - about 500,000 - and about 10% of the Jewish population of the United States. These non-Zionist Jews do not see Zionism and the state as an ideal, they did not work to create and fight for the state. On the other hand, some of them for practical reasons (i.e. to get money for their schools) will vote in the Israeli elections. Still it is important to remember that these people still continue in the ancient ways of Judaism, they still consider themselves to be in exile, and it does not make any difference to them if they are living under the exile of the Zionist government or the exile of the U.S. government or any other government. If anything, they will say that the Zionist exile is worse, because instead of secular gentiles it's secular and anti-religious Jews.

About 75% of Israeli Jews are secular, that is, they do not subscribe to any version of Judaism. Most of them are Zionist and support the continuation of the state. However they do not even claim to be speaking in the name of Judaism since they do not believe in Judaism or the Torah. In America the percentage of secular Jews (out of those 5.2 million who acknowledge that they are of Jewish descent) is even higher.

Then you have a group in between called religious Zionists, comprising about 15% of Israelis and somewhat lower in America. These people are the real Zionists, because they claim that their Zionism is a valid form of Judaism.

2_ Israel was created in 1948 by displacing the people from their homes and making them refugees and kiiling civilians in its course. Looking at these facts is Israel a legitimate state?

Judaism does not allow Jews to displace other people, steal their land, kill them. These are all serious crimes under Torah law. Actually, however, the Torah forbids any Jewish state, even if it were created peacefully without taking anyones land. G-d in His wisdom foresaw that Zionists could always try to wiggle out of arguments that they were killing and stealing by claiming self-defense or they left on their own so He did not make the prohibition of a state contingent on that. It is prohibited no matter what. The state of Israel is not legitimate in the eyes of Jewish law.

3_ Who are these leaders of Israel, are the Zionist?

Yes, by definition that is so. Anyone who is a leader of the state of Israel is a Zionist.

4_ Is ISrael a racist state?

Racism is the belief that some people are superior to others merely because of their ancestry, often marked by some physical characteristic. The Jewish people, however, is not defined by its race but by its religion, beliefs and practices. Any human being of any race can become a Jew, follow the Torah and be considered just like any other Jew. On the other hand, a Jew who does not follow the Torah is for all intents and purposes not really a Jew, except that technically if he repents he does not have to go through any conversion process.

The Zionists, on the other hand, defines a Jew by his ancestry. A person is considered a Jew by them even if he is an atheist and keeps nothing. They give automatic citizenship to any such Jew, but not to others  I would consider this racism.

Hersh Lowenthal