The Neturei Karta Effect

The Neturei Karta Effect

On December 11, 2006, just 60 years after WW2 and the attempted genocide against the Jewish people, President Ahmadinejad of Iran held a conference to discuss the “myth” that 6 million Jews were exterminated. The President claimed that “more research” is needed on what events took place. The fact is that WW2 is probably the most documented event in human history; there is still living proof of its occurrence; there are still survivors who lost their families with us today. If that is not enough there are thousands of pictures, videos, recordings, and the death camps are still there.

To be honest, I was not extremely surprised that a conference was being held about this issue. The Jewish people have been discriminated against for the past 3000 years; there will always be people who are stubborn and so full of hate that no matter how much proof you present to them they will never change their views. Why should the year 2006 be different? What really got to me that day were the members who attended the Holocaust denial meeting. There were 67 atrocious people, mostly anti-Semites who attended that day, including former Klu Klux Klan grand wizard, David Duke, who I would expect to attend. But the people I didn’t expect to see there was five Orthodox Jews, who had the traditional Hasidic look with their distinctive hats, beards and peot. (Side locks)

These five men who attended are part of a small group of Jews which consist of less than 300 men located mostly in Jerusalem and upstate New York; they call themselves Neturei Karta. This phenomenon started in 1935,in a way to spread their “message” against Zionism, against the idea of the Jewish people having a land to call their own, without the fear of mass extermination. They believe that the Jewish Nation, according to the Torah should be in exile until the messiah arrives and leads the Jews to the holy land, Jerusalem. Although this theory has been disproved, they continue to express their ideology by using extreme movements throughout the world. Gaining mass amounts of popularity, with the stunt they pulled in Iran. The Neturei Karta present an unfathomable problem to the Jewish people, which is nearly impossible to counter.

One of the worst negative commandments a Jew can do in this world is a concept called hillul hashem, which means to desecrate or defile G-ds name in public for the world to see. This sin is so powerful that G-d will reject a Jew from entering the next world to a person who commits this dire deed. Now, with respect to the “opinion” that the Neturei Karta have on the issue of a Jewish governed land during exile, what business do they have attending a conference about denial of the Holocaust? What possible reason could they give to attend this horrific event? Billions of people world wide, who saw the meeting take place in Iran, eye witnessed 5 rabbis appearing at a conference that is trying to denounce the Holocaust! I can only imagine the thoughts racing in gentiles mind that day. Many people viewing the event understood that “Orthodox Jews also deny the Holocaust, and if they deny the Holocaust who knows maybe it is a myth.” It also gave a scapegoat for many anti-Smites to claim that they “don’t hate Jewish people, just Zionists, we like Neturei Karta,” which consists of just a tiny portion of Jews. The Neturei Karta have rallies in Washington regularly against the Israeli Govt. claiming that they are murdering innocent Palestinians and are committing a Holocaust against the Palestinian people. What kind of image are they portraying to the world about the Jews? They are showing the world, that many Jews are against the Israeli Government as well. These people have met publicly with former PM of the Palestinians, Yassir Arafat numerous times to discuss the “barbaric” attacks against the Palestinians.

All these actions fall in the category of 100% being hillul hashem. Even if the Neturei Karta are correct and being in Israel is against the Torah, which I highly doubt, expressing their views radically and publicly against their own people regularly for media coverage is in G-ds eyes intolerable.

The Neturei Karta received tons of criticism from the Jewish communities after their stunt in Iran, which included two wives out of the five men leaving their husbands; they were also put in cherem (Isolation) by all Jewish communities around the world. However, nobody sees these events in the media. They only see irrational acts of the Neturei Karta. These men are so foolish and radical that even after all the objection by the Jewish communities, they presented Ahmadinejad with a silver grail as a sign of friendship. Again, what does being friends with the man who denies the holocaust show the world?

The acts that the Neturei Karta has done in the past couple of years are just incomprehensible. They are appalling, and do nothing but cause more hate, and misconception about the Jewish people. These people actually wear tie clips of Palestinian flags on their orthodox black robes at all public events. From where to where? It is one thing to have an opinion about Israel, and it is another to go out publicly against your fellow Jew and flaunt it to the rest of the world. The Neturei Karta follows in the path of representing the Jews in a thoughtless manner, it is amazing how a nominal amount of Jews, 5, could cause so much attention in the gentile world.

The Essential Gift of Technology

The Essential Gift of Technology

Man, powered by his imagination and inquisitive character, has wondered the mechanisms of nature since the beginning of time. This quest for the truth: the ways in which his surrounding works, has led to many a scientific discoveries and innovations. Since the art of making fire and creating handcrafted tools, our civilization has come a long way. Technology is making advances at an amazing rate. From telephones to the internet, Facebook to Youtube, snapfish to BlogSpot, we are submerged in a sea of discoveries, inventions and ideas made possible by modern technology.

In the past 50 years of the technology boom, there has been a great contradiction to where exactly it is leading us. Most say this amazing technology we have gained has tremendously reduced human interaction and causes solitude. They have repeatedly suggested that modern technology is killing “family time”, destroying the world we live in and my favorite causing “ordinary daily life together [to be] diminished” (Winn 4). They complain social networking online is “the end of using the mouth to communicate”. I can sum all their comments in one word “POPPYCOCK”; modern technology, specifically internet is the greatest contribution and gift we have received. To communicate and interact socially with our peers has never been so easy.

One of the most acknowledged and prominent philosophers of all time once said “man is by nature a social animal” (Aristotle). Let us get one thought out of the way, there is nothing that could ever or will ever diminish human interaction in this world. Aristotle could not have said it any better, we are social animals. We strive for human interaction and to socialize with one another. One of each of our dreams is to throw a huge party to be able to socialize with all our friends at once. We love it and we can not get enough of it; for that reason Facebook and other social networks have been created, to make interaction easier and better.

The truth is how could someone possibly even suggest that these devices (i.e. Facebook, myspace, blogspot) are isolating or restraining social interaction? Besides being a social animal, everyone socializes whether they want to or not. We all have daily activities that force us to indulge in face to face human interaction. If it is employees to clients, co-workers to each other, or even teachers to students, we all mingle with one another for a large portion of the day. Face to face human communication is inevitable; it is our daily purpose and is vital in business, which we all are in. We socialize every day from 9 to 5. A person wakes up in the morning and goes to work has lots of co workers he makes conversation with every day, then they go to lunch together. That style of life will never change since it is encrypted in our genes as humans.

Besides for daily activities, an extremely strong disbeliever of my opinion, especially Marie Winn, might affirm that all this technology and social websites limits being social with friends and family outside our daily routine of social interaction. They believe it clearly limits household socialization. In their argument, all these modern devices prevent family interaction and hanging out with friends on a nightly basis. Nevertheless they come up short once again; it is clearly easier to contact and socialize with friends and family through social networks like Facebook.

A friend once reported:

There was this girl that I met through a friend of mine, she was so down to earth, so beautiful I just couldn’t stop thinking about her. The next day I was surprised and excited to see that she decided to “friend” me on facebook. Normally I would have probably never seen this girl again because the friend who introduced me for one thing wasn’t too close to me, I actually met him on the facebook group “football lovers” and he happened to live near me so we hung out once in a while. For another reason, the friend that introduced me barely knew the girl himself, so he couldn’t have helped much. As soon as I accepted the friendship on facebook I wrote on her wall a “break the ice joke” that occurred at our “never again” night out. From then on things just kept getting better. 3 weeks later we went on our first date. We’ve now been dating for 2 and a half months!

It is amazing how many doors and opportunities a networking site offers its users. How can a person even suggest it eliminates interacting with friends? Not only does it not diminish human interaction but promotes being social and gives people the opportunity to become close friends with peers that it would have been impossible to do without it. Facebook even has an application called “events” that allows the users to mark down on their personal calendar a party or social get together and it reminds them by e-mail a day before. This is just another reason why the world of modern technology only enhances a person’s social life. Back in the day, when a classmate decides to send a postcard to one of his peers, it has to be sent to a friend that he had an extremely close relationship with in school; you can’t just send a postcard to a classmate you on the odd occasion spoke to. Although with Facebook you can message an old classmate, who in school you ran in different circles but always seemed interested in.

It even brings shy personalities out of their shell. Lots of timid boys and girls express themselves freely online which makes them more comfortable to interact in a face to face conversation that may happen anytime during school. It is simply a perfect world to communicate and interact. You never know how much that relationship can grow, hundreds of strong and meaningful friendships have formed online; all the credit goes to modern technology that made it easier for us to do so.

There are so many ways this technology encourages contact and socialization. Take internet blogs and YouTube for example; their purpose is to express individual opinion to the world and organize events for people with common goals to take part in. Blogs, which are relatively new, is transforming the way we can communicate and interact. Just the website Digg.com alone has about 17.8 million users. Personally after researching about blogs online, I have opened a BlogSpot account and post all my papers that I have written throughout my college career. I rather share my papers interactively online with other users rather than just saved on my computer. I’m sure all college students do the same, express their opinion online about current events and more. By expressing opinions of the same interests, forms a contact that a person would not have dreamed in a million years.

No matter in which way you look at it, all these modern conveniences are just a tool to be able to network with one another in a smooth and simple way. It is just a different way of presenting it, the bottom line is the internet is just another method in being able interact and socialize with all our friends. Despite all this evidence presented, the majority of people, mostly the elders, still assume that all this technology is bad for mankind, and disrupts family time. I don’t remember anyone ever criticizing the telephone in the home when it was introduced as preventing human interaction? It is the same concept, just different ways of reaching how we interact. In the end man is not able to stop socializing anyhow, it’s the way we live, it is what humans represent, we can’t stop ourselves, to put it simply; we are social animals!

The Silent Holocaust

The Silent Holocaust in America


There is a Holocaust taking place in America right now. We can't hear it, because there are no barking dogs; we can't see it because there are no goose-stepping Nazi soldiers or concentration camps; we can't smell it because there are no gas chambers. But the net result is exactly the same, if not worse. Jewish intermarriage in America is by far the worst tragedy occurring to the Jewish people as a nation in the last 50 years.

Yes, we have our own country and at the moment there is no genocide in affect to threaten our nation from existence. Nevertheless, it is sad to say that on the going rate, without any war against the Jewish nation taking place, out of the 6 million Jews in the U.S, it is projected that by the year 2051 there will be close 3.6 million Jews remaining. One Harvard study shows as low as just 1 million by the year 2071. The intermarrying of Jews in America is out of control. Since 1985, over 66% of Jews who married have done so outside the faith. This tells us that out of 10 Jews who wed after 1985; just 3 married a fellow Jew. The affect intermarriage is having on the United States Jewish population is just heartbreaking.

The current situation is impossible to ignore and can no longer be delayed, the facts are in black and white. If we don’t act now, we will cause our own demise. There must be a solution that will minimize the loss of Jews from the disaster of intermarriage. Fortunately, there is a community where the problem of intermarriage has been brought up and a resolution is in affect, with an overwhelming 98% of the youth marrying within the Jewish Faith. This community is in the heart of Argentina, where the Jews have a tremendous growing population in a land where assimilation and intermarriage is as common as America. Although this community is in Argentina, it borders on the same problem we have here in America, assimilation, intermarriage and the threat of Jewish existence outside Israel in the next 100 years. How can the facts be so flip-flip, with the majority of the American Jews (66%) will intermarry and a community in Argentina with as low as 2% intermarriage rate? The reason is just two words, Rabbinical Edict.

In 1927, a great and holy man named Rabbi Shaul David Setton Z’L foresaw the tragedy that would affect millions of Jews throughout the world. As head of the rabbinical court of Argentina, Rabbi Shaul David Setton placed a rabbinical edict to his community, refusing to allow converts to enter the faith of Judaism for the sake of marriage.

Rabbi Setton, having observed the conditions prevailing the general Jewish community, where some youth have left their faith and have assimilated with non-Jews, “sometimes without any effort to convert them, and other times an effort is made for conversion to our faith” ruled that it is “an action which is absolutely invalid and worthless in the eyes of the torah.” After this Takana, (edict) it was endorsed by all community organizations in Argentina, who enforced the Takana to its fullest.

This Edict changed the Jewish Community of Argentina tremendously; it went from a huge percentage of assimilation and intermarriage to less than 2% even trying to pursue an illegitimate conversion. This method of preserving the Jewish nation was a huge success; it was everything the community of Argentina could ask for, a growth of population rather than a decline.

After proving its achievement to the world only one community in America followed in their footsteps to create a Takana, clearly not enough. It times like today, an Edict is the only way to preserve and protect the Jewish communities of the world. After the Nazi-Holocaust in 1945 there were 11 million. While in the 13 years following the Jewish population grew by one million, it took another 38 years for it to grow another million. The worldwide Jewish population is now roughly 13.3 million Jews and Jewish population growth worldwide is close to zero percent. We are yet to match the number of Jews in existence in 1939, before the tragic Nazi Holocaust, 17 million.

All would agree that Jews in America are demographically endangered. In addition to the usual suspects of assimilation and intermarriage, the survey revealed that Jews in America are getting married later and having fewer children - so few that we are experiencing negative population growth. As the Chinese proverb says, "If we don't change our direction, we will end up where we're headed." If we fail to act now, if we fail to share with our young Jews the beauty and meaningfulness of Jewish life and Jewish heritage, there will be few Jews left in the next generation who will even know that there ever was a Nazi Holocaust of European Jews. The "silent Holocaust" will have done its job. Hitler will have emerged victorious.