In his first lecture on Rav Elchanan Wasserman for Torah in Motion, Marc Shapiro says: “Yiddish was the first language of every Jew in eastern Europe except for very assimilated Jews in Warsaw. You had some who raised their children to speak Polish because they wanted them to completely assimilate. [Jewish] culture was Yiddish culture.
“This was not the case in Hungary. They spoke German and Hungarian in Budapest. In Poland and Russia, Jews didn’t feel a part of society. In France, Germany, Hungary, Jews felt French, German and Hungarian. No Russian Jew felt Russian. No Lithuanian Jew felt that they were a part of Lithuanian culture. In Poland, only a tiny percentage of Jews felt Polish. Everyone knew they were different. They felt they were visitors. They never felt any nationalism or any sense of identification with the country. They had their own language. Gypsies had their own language. Armenians had their own language. Jews were their own nationality.”
Posted inYiddish|Comments Off on Yiddish Was The First Language Of Every Jew In Eastern Europe
Reader posts: As the percentage of the non-white vote grows at each election cycle both in the US and in the UK, and as boomers die off and more and more millennials become eligible to vote each year, how long till the Republican and the Conservative Party become unelectable on the national level in both countries? Keep in mind that both Trump and Brexit won by paper-thin margins and that Texas and Florida for example are just some years away from turning into California — and once it happens (and it’s not a matter of if but when), the US will become, as far as the White House is concerned, a one-party country. Then what? The coming inviabilization of rightwing political parties on a national level in both the US and the UK: this topic is not much discussed in the Alt Right but that’s the situation we’ll find ourselves in pretty soon. Personally, I have a feeling that in the next decades what we call Alt Right is headed to become what the Communist Party was between the mid 1800’s and the mid 1900’s, complete with brutal state persecution on a global scale. Will we be ready for that?
Posted inAlt Right|Comments Off on The Future For The Right
In his part two lecture on the Ben Ish Chai at Torah in Motion, Marc B. Shapiro relayed what he learned by interviewing a woman (Mrs. Berkowitz) on the plane next to Rav Hutner in the famous 1970 TWA hijacking: “It was not true that Rav Hutner was taken to a different area. He was there the whole time. The problem is that we have this idea of Gedolei Yisrael (great rabbis)… Rav Hutner wanted nothing to do with the other passengers. He refused to be a leader. People were coming over to him. They had nothing to eat. So they were given food by the terrorists. People were coming over to Rav Hutner and asking if they could eat this or that. And he refused to answer. ‘I don’t want to get involved.’ Mrs. Berkowitz asked him, ‘How can you not answer them? People need to know the halacha.’ He said, ‘Don’t ask me questions because if you do, the terrorists will look at me as someone important.’
“Sometimes people we expect to be the leaders don’t want that role and people we don’t expect will rise to the fore. He disappointed everyone on the plane. He decided to be for himself. He didn’t do anything bad. He simply showed that he didn’t measure up…”
“She heard him tell the hijackers that if they release him, he will make sure they get a lot of money. His students in America were doing the same thing… They were willing pay a million dollars to get Rav Hutner out. This went to R. Moshe Feinstein [and some say R. Yaakov Kamenetsky] and he said no, it is forbidden to ransom him. We’re not going to favor a rosh yeshiva.
“Can you imagine the Hillul HaShem (desecration of God’s name) if you take out the rosh yeshiva? People would say, ‘This is Torah? The great rabbi doesn’t remain with everyone else. He saves his own skin.’ If Rav Hutner was ransomed, that would have been the end of his reputation.”
“Some of the passengers on the plane came out with very negative feelings about Rav Hutner. David Raab was interviewed and he said that didn’t come out with negative feelings. He quotes in the book a crazy thing, the passengers were giving out sodas, and Rav Hutner said, ‘Can I have a cold one?’ People were flabbergasted.”
“We have gadolim who were afraid. Rav [JB] Soloveitchik was afraid. R. Yechiel Yaakov Weinberg was afraid… Did the Belzer Rebbe [in the Holocaust] need to stay and die with everyone? Some rabbis thought they should stay and others thought no. The Hasidim thought the rebbe should go.”
“We never hired him to be a leader under fire. We hired him to teach Torah… Yehezkiel says it will be on Failed Messiah. Let it be on Failed Messiah. I hope he puts it on. He doesn’t listen… I don’t think this is bad [about Rav Hutner]. People assume a lot worse. This should get the record out.”
“Rav Hutner never recovered psychologically.”
Wikipedia: “In the late 1960s he began to visit Israel again, planning to build a new yeshiva there. On 6 September 1970, he and his wife, daughter, and son-in-law Yonasan David were returning to New York on TWA Flight 74 when their flight was hijacked by the PFLP Palestinian terrorist organization. The terrorists freed the non-Jewish passengers and held the Jewish passengers hostage on the plane for one week, after which the women and children were released and sent to Cyprus. The hijacked airplanes were subsequently detonated. The remaining 40-plus Jewish men – including Rabbi Hutner, Rabbi David, and two students accompanying Rabbi Hutner, Rabbi Meir Fund and Rabbi Yaakov Drillman – and male flight crew continued to be held hostage in and around Amman, Jordan; Rabbi Hutner was held alone in an isolated location while Jews around the world prayed for his safe release. The terrorists tried to cut off his beard, but were stopped by their commanders. Rabbi Hutner was reunited with the rest of the hostages on 18 September, and was finally released on 26 September and flown together with his family members to Nicosia, Cyprus. Israeli Knesset Member Rabbi Menachem Porush chartered a private plane to meet the Hutners in Nicosia, and gave the Rav his own shirt and tallit katan, since Rabbi Hutner’s tallit, tefillin, shirt, jacket and hat had been confiscated during his three-week ordeal. Rabbi Porush reported that Rabbi Hutner had also lost 20 kilograms (44 lb), and his students appeared similarly emaciated. On 28 September Rabbi Hutner and his group were flown back to New York via Europe, and were home just in time for the first night of Rosh Hashana.[9]”
Posted inMarc B. Shapiro, Rabbis|Comments Off on Rav Isaac Hutner & The TWA Hijacking
From S7E3 of Game of Thrones on Sunday, Little Finger tells Lady Sansa: “Don’t fight in the north or the south. Fight every battle everywhere always in your mind. Everyone is your enemy. Everyone is your friend. Every possible series of events is happening all at once. Live that way and nothing will surprise you. Everything that happens will be something that you have seen before.”
According to the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia entry on David Sassoon: “his business, which included a monopoly of the opium-trade, extended as far as Yokohama, Nagasaki, and other cities in Japan. Sassoon attributed his great success to the employment of his sons as his agents and to his strict observance of the law of tithe.”
When the Treaty of Nanking opened up China to British traders, Sassoon developed his textile operations into a profitable triangular trade: Indian yarn and opium were carried to China, where he bought goods which were sold in Britain, from where he obtained Lancashire cotton products. He sent his son Elias David Sassoon to Canton, where he was the first Jewish trader (with 24 Parsi rivals). In 1845 David Sassoon & Sons opened an office in what would soon become Shanghai’s British concession, and it became the firm’s second hub of operations.
In 1844, he set up a branch in Hong Kong, and a year later, he set up his Shanghai branch on the Bund to cash in on the opium trade.
“In Jewish history books, David Sassoon, an observant Jew, is remembered mostly for his philanthropy.”
On November 7, 1864, businessman David Sassoon, founding father of the Sassoon business dynasty, died in Pune, India. The trading empire he created spanned the globe, from what is now Mumbai on the western coast of India, via Shanghai and Hong Kong in China, all the way to London, England. It dominated world commerce in a number of commodities – most significantly opium – over the second half of the 19th century.
Sassoon was born in Baghdad in 1832 to Saleh Sassoon, a businessman and leader of that city’s Jewish community (the clan claimed descent from a Spanish family, the Ibn Shoshans). When David Sassoon, who like his father served as treasurer to the governors of Baghdad, clashed with one of them, Daud Pasha, he moved his family to Persia in 1826, and then to Bombay by 1832.
Sassoon initially owned a counting house and a carpet warehouse, but soon began trading in everything he could, including, most profitably, opium. When China’s emperor tried to outlaw the drug, which cut a wide swathe of destruction through the population of the country’s coastal regions, the British responded with war. The result was the 1842 Treaty of Nanking, which earned the United Kingdom a free hand in selling opium in China.
Sassoon established a triangle of trade, bringing Indian opium and cotton to China, where he received silver, tea and silk in exchange. He then carried these products to England for sale. Finished products from Britain, as well as cash, were then brought back to India where they were used to buy more opium. By the 1870s, David Sassoon had come to dominate the trade of opium to China, having pushed the British firm Jardine Matheson and the “Parsi” traders of Bombay out of the business.
Sassoon’s eights sons all went into one branch or another of the family’s business empire, with the Sassoon presence being felt in Hong Kong, Shanghai (where they became major players in the realm of real estate), and India (where they had their own textile mills), among many other lands. The vast Sassoon Docks of Bombay, built by Sassoon’s son Albert Abdullah, were the first wet docks in the west of India.
In Jewish history books, David Sassoon, an observant Jew, is remembered mostly for his philanthropy, which included the construction of “Baghdadi” synagogues in Bombay (Magen David) and Pune (Ohel David), and also numerous schools and hospitals throughout India and other parts of Asia. David became a naturalized British citizen in 1853, although he continued to live in Pune.
His son Albert Abdullah moved to England, where he married into the Rothschild family and was elected to Parliament on the Conservative party’s ticket. Another son, Sassoon David Sassoon, was the father of Rachel Sassoon Beer, who became owner and editor of the Sunday Times at the turn of the century, and grandfather of the great poet of World War I, Siegfried Sassoon.
According to the 1944 Jewish Encyclopedia: “He employed only Jews in his business, and wherever he sent them, he built synagogues and schools for them. He imported whole families of fellow Jews…and put them to work.”
As British rule consolidated in India, there arose a greater need for employees to oversee their affairs. This need was a godsend for Bombay’s Babylonian Jews, who saw enormous financial potential in the opium trade. Transactions were discussed after prayers at the synagogues…
…it was his [David Sassoon’s] agents who set the prcies for the various types of opium products…
The location of Shanghai, along the Whangpoo River, together with David Sassoon’s Jewish genius and foresight — were what made possible the passage of steamships into the Chinese hinterland, carrying valuable cargoes of opium…
Wealthy Jews, such as Silas Hardoon, who had made his money in the opium trade and subsequently moved into real estate and respectability, built fabulous mansions in the most prestigious parts of the city [Shanghai]…
Opium, that staple drug of the Chinese people, infuriated the Chinese intelligentsia, who waged a stubborn battle against its use… [The Society to Combat the Opium Trade’s]…demands faced the open hostility of British government officials in India who regarded the destruction of the opium fields as a hard blow to teh country’s economy. These officials were joined by the opium traders of Calcutta and Bombay, most of them Jewish, who controlled two-thirds of the trade on the Calcutta exchange…
The Jews hated the rickshaw, which they considered immoral — forcing a man to do the work of a beast. (Pg. 44-46)
EIC [East India Company] trade as mentioned earlier was divided into many parts and a particular family owned a particular part. For example, the growing of opium and collecting taxes in India was owned by EIC and its paid officials or after 1837 by the British government itself. But the House of Sassoon’s handled the trading in opium and other goods in India. Thereafter, the House of Jardine and Matheson handled their distribution in China and the House of Inchapes handled the shipping of these goods. House of Openheimers/Rhodes handled the gold and diamond mining business. The American operations were handled by the House of Rockefellers, Seagrams, Sassoons, Japhets, Jardine – Mathesons etc. The Houses of Rothschilds and Warburgs coordinated the banking aspect of this trade. Apart from theses, Houses of Lloyds, Abes and Astors assisted these operations by insuring the business of EICs. Even today these houses control most of the MNCS we see. We do an in-depth study of Rothschilds and Rockefellers and at the end give a list of Indian MNCs, only to show how most of these belong to only one single group run by a single family which was associated with the EIC owners, by either business or marriage.
East India Companies had a unique managerial style. In any particular country, all trading, business and commerce was always handed over to one or at the most two business houses. They were given full control over a nation under consideration. From 1800 to 1947, the House of Sassoon controlled most of the trade within India: banking, trading, shipping, insurance etc., from their Mumbai headquarters. Most of them started moving out of India and to England from 1900. Wherever the MNCs were in operation, they followed the above rule. They developed local industrial/business house (India is a large nation so we may encounter multiplicity in case of India), through which they exploited the independent nations.
Posted inSassoon|Comments Off on Ben Ish Chai – 19th Century Baghdad Rep For Biggest Drug Dealing Family In History
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
