Would Jew Believe This? The Story Of Passover.

By Findalis
Monkey in the Middle

For my regular readers:

I have been in the hospital for the last 5 days, missed the first Seder night, and haven't been able to post in all that time.  So I'm posting these old posts for the holiday of Passover.

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A young boy returned home from Hebrew school, washed his hands and sat down to dinner.

His father asked him what he learned that day in school.

The boy replied that the Rabbi told his class the most amazing story of how the Jews were rescued from the Land of Egypt and brought to the Land of Israel.

His father smiled and asked his son to relate the story the Rabbi told them.

"Sure Dad," the boy said.  "Now this story happened a long time ago, before the time of CNN.  Before the time of computers, and cell phones.  Before even TV.  I think it was in the 1920s or so it happened.

"Egypt was ruled by this guy named Pharaoh.  I think it means "Nasty Egyptian". And we Jews were his slaves. We didn't like being slaves and prayed to G-d to set us free. G-d heard our prayers and sent us a miracle.

"G-d  sent the IDF back in time to rescue the Children of Israel (I think they rescued the parents too.).  The Commandos diverted the Egyptian Army while the Children and their parents fled to the Red Sea (It was red because G-d turned the water to blood like in Zombie Killers 3.).  There the IDF built Pontoon bridges across the Red Sea for the people to go across.  When the Egypt Army tried to follow, the IDF blew up the bridges.

"Then this guy named Moshe Dayan (He is the head of the IDF, I think. Rabbi said he was G-d's greatest profits.) lead the Children of Israel (and their parents) to Mount Sinai where Moshe lays down the law, destroys the Golden Calf and leads them to Israel.

"But it took them 40 years because nobody had a GPS and Moshe would not ask for directions."

His father had a look upon his face that was a cross between total astonishment and WTF.  "Is this what the Rabbi taught you?"

"No Dad,"  the boy said.  "But you wouldn't believe the crazy story he did tell."

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Actually I'm not sure that is not the correct story.  It could be giving that a certain Time Lord, his TARDIS and a few units of the IDF could have pulled it off.

But perhaps G-d did it this way:

From Chabad

After many decades of slavery to the Egyptian pharaohs, during which time the Israelites were subjected to backbreaking labor and unbearable horrors, G‑d saw the people's distress and sent Moses to Pharaoh with a message: "Send forth My people, so that they may serve Me." But despite numerous warnings, Pharaoh refused to heed G‑d's command. G‑d then sent upon Egypt ten devastating plagues, afflicting them and destroying everything from their livestock to their crops.

At the stroke of midnight of 15 Nissan in the year 2448 from creation (1313 BCE), G‑d visited the last of the ten plagues on the Egyptians, killing all their firstborn. While doing so, G‑d spared the Children of Israel, "passing over" their homes-hence the name of the holiday. Pharaoh's resistance was broken, and he virtually chased his former slaves out of the land. The Israelites left in such a hurry, in fact, that the bread they baked as provisions for the way did not have time to rise. Six hundred thousand adult males, plus many more women and children, left Egypt on that day, and began the trek to Mount Sinai and their birth as G‑d's chosen people.

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Or maybe not.  Any way that G-d performed the miracle of the Passover was the correct story. 

A Dark Passover

From Family Security Matters.

A Dark Passover


When families gather around the Seder table, many recall the dark Passover of 1943 and the climax of the months-long battle in which the small number of men and women remaining in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against the Nazi murderers. They knew they were doomed but they were determined to go down fighting. We honor them as heroes.
There are many ways to be heroic. Because of tradition and circumstances Jews were not bred to be fighters. They were thinkers, readers, writers. And among the most heroic of those trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto was a historian named Emanuel Ringelblum, who determined to record life in the Ghetto in its reality, not as it might be misrepresented later in elegiac memorials or accusations of passivity by those who would not know what it had been like.
In the interwar years Ringelblum had been one of the leading historians of Jewish life in Poland from the earliest times of settlement to the present, when a renaissance of learning and cultural creativity was taking place among the Jews of cities like Vilna, Lodz, and Warsaw. At the time, the greatest number of Jews anywhere in the world lived in Poland. And Warsaw, the largest Jewish community in Europe, was their intellectual center.
The movement from the isolated world of the market-town shtetlech to the cities, to acquaintance with past and present secular learning, resulted in the flowering of a vibrant culture in both Yiddish and Hebrew. The Jewish intelligentsia produced poetry, novels, plays on the one hand, scholarship on the other. All this would be destroyed by the middle of the twentieth century along with the men and women who had created it – except for the records created and left behind under the shattered buildings of the Ghetto, to be recovered only decades later.
Ringelblum, born in a small Galician town in 1900, grew up amid the often antagonistic worlds of the socialist Yiddish-speaking labor Bund; the Marxist/Zionist Poalei Tsiyon, the party to which he became attached; and the Hasidic rebbes who retained their traditions and their way of life. By the time he arrived in Warsaw in 1919 he had defined his future as an historian and political activist. He joined YIVO, the new research institution devoted to scholarship in Yiddish. Ringelblum saw Yiddish as the living language of a nation, not as the jargon of an impoverished religious group. And he set out, with YIVO, to encourage the Jewish masses to gather (zaml) documents of the everyday life of the Polish-Jewish poor, workers as well as entrepreneurs, to “democratize” their history. He saw his mission as developing a sense of Jewish national identity through historical consciousness.
He supported the establishment of modern Yiddish secular schools, wrote articles for the Yiddish press on Yiddish culture and its threatened loss through assimilation, joined street demonstrations against the British White Paper of 1939 limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine, and attended the Zionist World Congress in Geneva, returning to Poland just days before the outbreak of World War II.
Although Jews in Poland considered themselves Polish and had willingly fought alongside Poles in World War I in the service of their common country, relations between them had not been without prejudice and rancor. But nothing prepared the Jews for what awaited them at the hands of the Nazis once they had subdued and entered Poland. Nazi strategy in the war against the Jews was based on secrecy, lies, and surprise, and was carried out in stages, little by little.
In November 1940 a wall topped with barbed wire was constructed around an area of the city, and all Jews were required to live within its boundaries. Those who lived in other parts of the city were forced to move until all 450,000 thousand of Warsaw’s Jews had been packed into the densely overcrowded space in which about 1,500 Poles had lived. Jews had met persecution before, and there was no obvious reason in 1940/41 to suspect that this time would be different. It would mean hard times, but then the war would end and life would begin again, as before…
At first, efforts were made to construct as normal a life as possible in the Ghetto. Committees were formed in apartment buildings, schools were opened, lectures were given, plays and concerts were performed. Soup kitchens were set up to offset the starvation rations permitted by the Germans, smuggling food from the Aryan side flourished, and underground bunkers were built as hiding places. But food was increasingly scarce, hunger and disease soon prevailed, and random killings by the Nazis accompanied the herding of Jews at the Umschlagplatz, the space beside the railroad station from which men, women, and children, young and old, were shipped east for “resettlement.”
From the beginning, Ringelblum was involved in the self-help organizations (Aleynhilf) that sprang up. He determined to go on working on his history of the Jews in Poland and in addition decided to record daily life in the Ghetto for posterity. He called his group of memoirists Oyneg Shabes, the Joy of Sabbath, because they met on Saturday afternoons. He recruited not only former journalists, writers, and teachers, but also ordinary people, zammlers, to write about their observations and experiences. Thousands of pages were produced, collected, and hidden, recording first-hand the efforts to stay alive in the face of starvation, overcrowding, and rampant contagion, the threat of random German brutality, and the increasing number being rounded up for transport in boxcars to the unknown. Everything was described. The corruption of the Judenrat, the official Jewish leadership body; the cruelty of the Jewish Police – nothing was left out. There were acts of heroism as well as betrayals, suicides as well as helpless children left behind when their parents were seized.
By early 1942 the truth of the “resettlement” trains’ destination was revealed. Escapees from Treblinka had surfaced to tell the story of what awaited at the end of the line. Members of the various youth groups turned from discussions of the future to plans for resistance in the present. Then in July 1942 the Nazis announced the Great Deportation, making it clear that they intended to destroy the Ghetto and everyone in it.
The resisters were led by a twenty-four-year-old member of the socialist-Zionist group Hashomer Hatzair named Mordecai Anielewicz. They had few arms, no help could be expected from the Polish Home Army and hardly any from the Polish Underground. It was clearly a hopeless cause. But handguns and a few other small arms were procured somehow from the other side of the wall and attempts by German officers to enter the Ghetto were finally met with fire and their surprised retreat. Sporadic raids continued until September when there was a halt – temporary, as it turned out – to the deportations.
Vastly outgunned and outnumbered, the Ghetto fighters hid in bunkers, emerging at crucial moments to fire on the Germans while the women fighting alongside them threw homemade bombs. It was clear that the end was near. The Nazis were bent on the destruction of the Ghetto and the extermination of all those who were left. During these last days Ringelblum and the remaining members of the Oyneg Shabes group worked frantically to sort and pack the archive in metal boxes and milk cans, the best they could do against the future ravages of moisture and seepage, and bury them beneath what would soon become the rubble of the buildings in which they had lived for three years in fear and suffering, hope and despair. Now they sent their last message to the outside world – This is what mass murder was like. Remember us.
To those who after the war accused the Jews of going “like sheep to the slaughter,” the answer lies in the secrecy, the slow insidious weakening through starvation and disease, the demoralizing presence of emaciated corpses dead of starvation or typhus that lay in the Ghetto streets, the daily humiliations of de-lousings and beatings, the tiny orphaned children begging for food when there was none. There was the hope of outliving the war, and reluctance to take action that would result in brutal mass retaliation on fellow Jews. It was a miracle that there was any resistance at all by the spring of 1943.
On Sunday, April 18, the eve of Passover 1943, the last battle took place. Ringelblum, the recorder of the vibrant Polish-Jewish culture, witnessed its destruction as he sat, still writing, in the corner of an underground bunker. The Germans had destroyed the intellectuals, the writers and teachers, and the only traces that were left of the Jewish experience in Poland were stuffed into around twenty tin containers in the ground. An escape plan was offered to Ringelblum but he would not leave his wife and young son. Their hiding place was betrayed and they disappeared into the common void with the rest of his people, including young Anielewicz, dead in the fighters’ command bunker in May 1943.
David Graber helped to bury the boxes and included his own message in one of them. It read in part:
“What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground….So the world may know all….We would [have been] the fathers, the teachers and educators of the future….But no, we shall certainly not live to see [the recovery of the archive], and so I write my last will. May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened…in the twentieth century….We may now die in peace. We fulfilled our mission. May history attest for us.”
David was nineteen years old. He was one of those who fought their battle with words, their only weapons, hoping to win in the far-off future.
Who Will Write Our History? is the title of Samuel D. Kassow’s detailed account of Ringelblum’s Oyneg Shabes record of life and death in the Warsaw Ghetto (Indiana University Press, 2007). Years before, the journalist and novelist John Hersey had written a best-selling novel, The Wall, about the Ghetto uprising, based largely on the facts known at the time. But Hersey’s well researched and well written fiction (like the popular Mila 18 by Leon Uris) pales almost into invisibility next to Kassow’s account, rich in historical context and told largely in the voices of the men and women actually living through the moments, days and years they are writing about. They seem to live again, individuals with faces and feelings, as we read their words. And in bringing them to life again in their reports, poems, letters, notes, diaries, memoirs, photographs, and artifacts, Kassow, like Ringelblum before him, joins the line of historians who have kept our past before us in order that we may better know ourselves.

IDF Cancelling All Passover Leaves

Some thing's up.  Chief of Staff Benny Gantz has done something that hasn't been done in many years.  He has cancelled ALL leaves for Passover.

Chief of Staff Benny Gantz has ordered all IDF units to cancel their traditional Passover breaks so that they can operate in full capacity over the upcoming holiday, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Wednesday.

The implication of the decision is that for the first time in many years, all IDF units will maintain their regular operations and remain on full alert throughout the holiday.

As result of the unexpected decision, thousands of soldiers at various IDF headquarters and bases will have to report for duty as usual in order to allow their units to operate with no interruption.

IDF officials dismissed suggestions that the decision is related to operational circumstances or preparations for military maneuvers. The army said Chief of Staff Gantz made the call after asserting that he does not accept the notion of an army-wide Passover vacation.

However, IDF soldiers who received the news Tuesday could not be convinced that the timing of the decision was arbitrary.

Notably, German Defense Minister Thomas de Maiziere on Tuesday said that after meeting Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak, he was more concerned about the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran.

Over the years, an army-wide break during Passover became a tradition followed by all major military units, including the Air Force, Navy and intelligence corps. The IDF's headquarters in Tel Aviv is also traditionally deserted during the holiday.

But as noted, the longtime tradition will be broken this year, as soldiers will have to divide their vacation days among themselves in order to ensure that their units maintain their full capacity to operate if needed.

Source

Every military man will tell you that if you want rumors to run rampant you cancel all leaves.  I could speculate for hours on this but I won't.  I'll let you, my truth seekers to put 2+2 together.  I hope it equals 4.

The Water Turns To Blood

For those people looking to signs from Heaven pointing to an upcoming Apocalypse, this might point the way.

Beirut River Mysteriously Runs Blood Red

BEIRUT: The Beirut River mysteriously turned blood red Wednesday after a stream of unidentified red liquid began pouring from the southern bank of the river in Furn al-Shubbak. The source of the liquid had yet to be determined Wednesday evening, as the river continued to empty the red-colored water into the Mediterranean Sea.

Government and local officials rushed to the scene at the Chevrolet crossing of Furn al-Shubbak Wednesday morning in an attempt to locate the sewage canal that was dumping the red-colored water but they were unable to locate the source. Accusations were traded among officials from the municipalities of Hadath, Hazmieh, Sin al-Fil, Furn al-Shubbak and Shiyah.

Eyewitnesses working in the area told The Daily Star this was not the first time the river had turned a different color. Several business owners around the Chevrolet crossing said that colored water pours into the river roughly every two months but no one pays attention to it.It was the quantity and brightness of the red liquid that grabbed the attention of many passersby and commuters on different bridges in the city Wednesday.

Environment Minister Nazem Khoury said the source of the water was likely from Hazmieh or Baabda.

“I call on the municipalities of Hazmieh and Baabda to cooperate swiftly to find the source of the pollution and its type,” Khoury said in a statement.

Earlier in the day, Khoury sent an environmental team to the area to examine the water. The team, headed by ministry official Bassam Sabbagh, took a sample of the water to determine its composition and whether it contained dangerous pollutants.

The samples will be examined Thursday because state laboratories were already closed by the time the sample was taken. “The sample we took will be examined tomorrow [Thursday] morning ... and we will know whether it is blood being mixed with water or if it is some sort of a color dumped in it,” said Sabbagh.

A similar incident took place in the Chinese Jian River last December after a factory illegally dumped red dye into the river, which is located in the northern Chinese province of Henan.

Some cities use non-toxic dyes to color rivers on special occasions. In Chicago, the river is dyed green every year in the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.

According to Sabbagh, test results will help the ministry determine whether the substance is a chemical pollutant or blood from a nearby slaughterhouse.

“First we thought it was blood, but it seems like it is a kind of coloring dumped by a factory,” said Sabbagh, who also said that the test to determine the type of the chemical would take a week.

Sabbagh said the municipality and other ministries should help the Environment Ministry in its investigation. “We need the help of the local officials to have a clear idea of the sewage network in the region,” he said.

According to Sabbagh, who heads the ministry’s Environmental Pollution Control Office, maps of the sewage network would help officials locate the source of the red-colored water.

“After finding the source, it would be a matter of hours to get to the factory and the area where the [colored] water is originating,” said Sabbagh adding that swift action would be taken against those responsible for it.

Saad Elias, an adviser to the environment minister, did not rule out the possibility that a slaughterhouse could be behind the red color.

“After going through several phases of butchering at the slaughterhouses, they store huge amounts of blood and animal parts in containers ... they might have dumped them into a sewage canal,” said Elias.

“The ministry will definitely investigate this matter because our role is to prevent pollution,” he added.

Meanwhile, local officials in the area suggested that a paint factory could be responsible for the incident. “There are several paint factories in Hadath,” said an official from the Shiyah municipality.

As officials tried to determine the source and the nature of the substance in the river, the Beirut prosecutor assigned the Internal Security Forces to launch an investigation into the matter.

Source

The Lebanese should prepare for the next 2 plagues:  Frogs and Lice.  And they should discover fast what the Jews want from them.  And then give it to them.

By Findalis of Monkey in the Middle