Author: Glen Berd

An interesting and powerful article posted on FaceBook by Bruria Efune Co-founder at Aleph to Zee Co-Director & Pioneer Family at Neve Chabad Lives in Beersheba, Israel I got told to go back to Europe. I’m not from Europe. But the Twitter warrior didn’t care, and just ranted on about the Jews leaving “Palestine” alone, and going back to wherever they came from. So let’s talk about this. Where are the Jews from? Take my family for example. I’ll start at an easy point: My grandparents on my dad’s side are from Iraq. We don’t have any family left there, because they were all either chased out, or murdered for being Jewish. Family records show that despite on and off persecution, they had lived there since the Babylonian expulsion, over 2,000 years ago. My mom grew up in Argentina, where her parents were born. Most of their parents trace back to Ukraine, which they had fled during the 1918 pogroms that killed tens of thousands of Jews. It’s likely...

LAST CHANCE to Register for our super Chanukah Party on Sunday 5th December - 4pm till 7pm. In the Daniel Rose Hall in the Shul Hot (Meat and Vegetarian) 3 course Supper and a Comedy Entertainment.   ...

  https://us16.list-manage.com/survey?u=461c6093961ce6d34e1ed1163&id=4e960e8030&attribution=false Thank you for being a part of our last project “Connecting Small Histories” I am pleased to let you know that our final report has been approved and the project is complete. We also received some particularly complementary comments from our funder National Lottery Heritage Fund. The JSCN HERITAGE HUB is the active legacy of Connecting Small Histories. As well as being a fantastic archive of the work of our volunteers, it continues to be added to and will form part of our new project. Now please help us create our new project...  "Vibrant Histories" ...by taking 2 minutes to complete our short survey Click here: https://us16.list-manage.com/survey?u=461c6093961ce6d34e1ed1163&id=4e960e8030&attribution=false Please complete by FRIDAY 3rd DECEMBER THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME ABOUT Vibrant Histories brings communities and artists together to collect personal stories of Jewish Heritage in small communities, and bring to them life through artist-led activities in the visual or performing arts. A group of volunteers will be trained to find and record personal and other histories, led by historians at Swansea University. Three artists...

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The Genesis Prize Foundation honoured the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks with the Genesis Lifetime Achievement Award. The award recognizes Lord Sacks for his extraordinary role in inspiring the next generation of Jews, and his illustrious life-long work as a teacher of Jewish values and an advocate of inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue. The President of Israel Isaac Herzog presented the award to Lady Elaine Sacks at a special event celebrating the life and legacy of Rabbi Sacks, organized by The Genesis Prize Foundation in London around the first anniversary of his passing.   https://youtu.be/113xZqnkMnc...

22 Elul - Krakow & Oskar Schindler - 1939 On this day in 1939, the Nazis took control of the town of Krakow in Poland.  The city surrendered immediately avoiding the destruction that befell other Polish cities like Warsaw, Bialystok, and Levov. Krakow had been a strong Jewish community since the 13th century and was home to many great rabbis including R’ Moshe Isserles better known as the Rama who wrote the Ashkenazi glosses to the Code of Jewish Law. In 1939, there were around 70,000 Jews in the city.  In May 1940 the Nazis forced mass deportation leaving behind 15,000 Jews in the city’s overcrowded Jewish ghetto where everyone was crammed into 3,000 rooms.  One of the many German businessmen who took advantage of the slave labour from the Krakow ghetto was Oskar Schindler. Oskar Schindler at first sought cheap labour in coming to the ghetto.  Eventually, he became disgusted with the actions of his own Nazi party.   He used his connections...

The Jewish Chronicle : Television review: Valley of Tears Josh Howie    November 21, 2021  This drama about the Yom Kippur war is like a Woody Allen film transposed to the Golan Heights. The 10 part series is showing on More4 (Photo: HBO) With cinema and television placing ever more import on representation, you’d think the one genre an ethnic group would be happy not being overly featured in is war. Yet still, whenever a Jew does pop up, it makes an impact. Not that there are many examples; the guy who gets stabbed in the heart in Saving Private Ryan, the Star of David gravestone in the same film, the translator in Band of Brothers. If not for Spielberg’s efforts highlighting that we didn’t play only one part in WWII, that’d pretty much be it apart from the underrated Biloxi Blues, where the two Jewish protagonists never get beyond the training camp. So, in the ten-part Israeli drama Valley of Tears, when faced with an entire army of Jews, the...