Aryeh's Israel Outlook

A STORY FOR YOM HAZIKARON & YOM HA’ATZMAUT I would like to share with you a “coincidence” that happened in our family just before Pesach, as I believe the story has relevance to Yom Ha’atzmaut and the miracle of our living here. The hours of Yom HaZikaron will are dark ones, so I am hoping this story will offer some comfort. A few weeks ago, I got a phonecall from my parents’ friend Becky. Becky is now in her seventies, but my family first came to know her in 1939 when she and her parents and sister fled Germany and came to live in rented rooms on the upper floor of my grandmother’s house. My grandparents lived in Stamford Hill, London , which even then was a very Jewish area, but my grandparents were not observant Jews, not even traditional Jews. My grandpa had a grocery store and I am not even going to tell you what kinds of foods were for sale in that shop! My grandparents loved the refugee family living upstairs, and a warm friendship sprung up between them. S...

My wife Katie wrote this for Holocaust Remembrance Day (May 1 ’08) and I thought it worth sharing. I stood on our balcony with my daughter Michal that morning as the air-raid siren brought us to a stand-still. We listened to it as the birds, apparently unaware of the tradition to stand silently, sang and flew all around the garden – and as I looked out over the hills and valleys and houses around us, I thought “this is the best way to memorialize the millions – making Israel a vibrant, passionate testimony of ‘never again’….” A --------------- MRS. H. It is Yom HaShoah today - Holocaust Day. Last night I lit a memorial candle and placed it in my kitchen window. My tiny street was completely dark. The light from the candle flickered and bounced over all the doors and windows of the houses opposite. Such a little light, for such a big thing. I grew up in a community almost entirely comprised of German Jews. They were refugees who came over to England ...

Bush's Mideast U-Turn By BASSEM EID AND NATAN SHARANSKY Wall St. Journal - February 11, 2008; Page A19 On June 24, 2002, President Bush presented his vision for an Israeli-Palestinian peace. That we both would have greeted Mr. Bush's speech with the same enthusiasm may come as a surprise. One of us is a former Soviet dissident who spent nine years in the Gulag and, after joining his people in Jerusalem , spent a decade in Israeli political life, serving as a cabinet minister during most of that time. The other is a Palestinian who has devoted his life to exposing human rights abuses perpetrated against his people, regardless of whether the government committing those abuses was Israeli or Palestinian. One is a Jew convinced of his people's just claim to the Land of Israel . The other is an Arab convinced of his people's just claim to the same land. Yet while we have real disagreements that would make an historic compromise very difficult and painful, we are fully in a...

MIRACLE GIRL There are weddings and weddings in our lives. The weddings of ourselves, our relatives and our friends, and one generation later, the weddings of our children and our friend's children, which of course, are even more poignant than our own. There are the regular, every day, run of the mill weddings, the weddings where we ate too much or the music was too loud or we sat next to somebody's Relative From Hell, and then there are the other weddings - the one or two weddings, which for the rest of our lives, we will never forget. The wedding of Rachel Sharansky, the eldest of Natan and Avital Sharansky's two daughters, and Micha Danziger, a new immigrant from the United States, was one of those weddings. The Sharansky wedding at Kibbutz Ramat Rachel last Friday morning was never going to be, never could be, in any sense a normal wedding. During the coffee and cake reception before the ceremony, I observed among the hundreds of people there, two distinct groups: the y...