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Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.

Love Yehuda Lave

The Chasom Sofer wrote 200 years ago; the year 5780(2020) will be very harsh. The year 5781(next week) will be a wonderful year, for 5781 in Hebrew is אשפה. He referenced to the sentence in Hallel, מאשפת ירים אביון " He raises from the trash heaps the distressed."A good healthy year

Shofar Blowing in the Old City Golden Gate (Mercy Gate)

Gate of Mercy: This gate, in the eastern Temple-Mount

wall, maybe the best-known of them all. Also called the Golden Gate or the Eastern Gate, it has been blocked for centuries, and is said to be awaiting a miraculous opening when the Messiah comes and the dead are resurrected.

The Golden Gate, as it is called in Christian literature, is the only eastern gate of the Temple Mount and one of only two that used to offer access into the city from that side. It has been walled up since medieval times. The date of its construction is disputed and no archaeological work is allowed at the gatehouse, but opinions are shared between a late Byzantine and an early Umayyad date.

The Hebrew name of the Golden Gate is Sha'ar HaRachamim (שער הרחמים), Gate of Mercy (Arabic: باب الرحمة). In the Mishnah (Middot 1:3), the eastern gate of the second Temple compound is called the Shushan Gate. If the Golden Gate does preserve the location of the Shushan Gate, which is only a presumption with no archaeological proof, this would make it the oldest of the current gates in Jerusalem's Old City Walls. According to Jewish tradition, the Shekhinah (שכינה) (Divine Presence) used to appear through the eastern Gate, and will appear again when the Anointed One (Messiah) comes (Ezekiel 44:1–3) and a new gate replaces the present one; that might be why Jews used to pray in medieval times for mercy at the former gate at this location,^[another possible reason is that in the Crusader period, when the habit was first documented, they were not allowed into the city where the Western Wall is located. Hence the name "Gate of Mercy".

In Arabic, it is known as Bab al-Dhahabi,^[ also written Bab al-Zahabi meaning "Golden Gate"; another Arabic name is the Gate of Eternal Life. Additionally, for Muslims, each of the two doors of the double gate has its own name: Bab al-Rahma, "Gate of Mercy", for the southern one, and Bab al-Taubah, the "Gate of Repentance", for the northern one. Similar to Christians, Muslims generally believe this was the gate through which Jesus as Messiah, entered Jerusalem.

IThe gate represents a rectangular stonework structure with two decorated facades. Unlike other gates in the al-Aqsa enclave, the eastern the facade was not built as part of the wall of the enclave, but was shifted 2.00 meters out off the wall. Bab al-Rahmah is a double gate. The two bays are reflected in its plan and main elevations; two doorways are followed by a double passage covered by three pairs of domes. Originally, the eastern facade of Bab al-Rahmah has two large doorways, separated by a column. Each doorway measures 3.90 meters in width, supporting a semicircular arch with a decorated frieze. The doorways in the eastern facade were blocked up in the Ottoman period. It is noticed that some features in the decoration of Bab al-Rahmah bear a close resemblance to the decoration in other non-Muslim buildings that existed in Historical Syria. The openings of Bab al-Rahmah lead to a rectangular domed vestibule, measuring 20.37 meters in length and 10.50 meters in width. At that time, the hall consisted of six shallow domes, which have elliptical shapes, two of which were changed later. These domes are separated by arches of an elliptical shape springing from two pilasters at the entrances and two central columns. Each dome in Bab al-Rahmah is constructed over a square plan, so special stones are required to form the successive stone circles that form the dome. Architecturally, the spatial treatment of the gate is somewhat interesting; shifting the facade 2 meters out of the wall indicates a clear definition of its location. The most important question concerning this gate is a matter of motive.

The Three Musketeers at the Kotel

This afternoon we will blow the shofar at the historic Shofar-Blowing Spot at the Hulda Gate. This is the spot at which they used to sound the horns in order to declare the beginning of the Sabbath or a Holiday.

Join us today, Tuesday, September 15th, meeting at 5 PM (Israel

Daylight Time) just inside the Dung Gate. If you can't join us in

person, follow the event on our Facebook live at 5:30 PM.

Caught on video: Maskless Nancy Pelosi gets hair done

he San Francisco salon owner told Fox News that Pelosi's trip was 'disturbing' and 'a slap in the face.' #FoxNews #Tucker Subscribe to Fox News! https://bit...

Charles Jacobs Video: The Failure of Jewish Leadership Today-interview from FrontPage Magazine

The leadership of major Jewish organizations is failing to protect the community. Why?

Antisemitism is rising across the globe. Even in the United States, where every Jewish building requires security, where Jews have been murdered, are constantly being physically attacked and verbally abused on campuses and in their own neighborhoods. The Jewish community is under assault from at least three directions: The Left, The Radical Right and the Islamist's, yet the leadership of major Jewish organizations have failed to understand the nature and extent of the threat and is not protecting the community. Jews are getting worried, but very few are willing to point out this failure.

Dr. Charles Jacobs

Americans for Peace and Tolerance is headed by Dr. Charles Jacobs, named by the Forward as one of America's top 50 Jewish leaders. Jacobs has founded and led several highly successful organizations characterized by groundbreaking ideas and initiatives. In 1989, Jacobs co-founded the Boston branch of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. In 1993, together with Muslim and Christian Africans, Jacobs founded the American Anti-Slavery Group, dedicated to bringing international attention to the enslavement of black Africans in Sudan. For his efforts, Jacobs was presented with the Boston Freedom Award by Coretta Scott King and the Mayor of Boston.

In 2002, Jacobs co-founded The David Project, which has since grown into a premier international educational institute that works to bolster the Jewish community's response to the ideological assault on Israel with educational programs, advocacy training, and easy to implement campaigns on campuses, in high schools, churches, the media, and in the general community.

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) is an American non-profit pro-Israel media-monitoring, research and membership organization. According to its website, CAMERA is "devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East."The group says it was founded in 1982 "to respond to The Washington Post's coverage of Israel's Lebanon incursion", and to respond to what it considers the media's "general anti-Israel bias"^.

CAMERA is known for its pro-Israel media monitoring and advocacy. CAMERA releases reports to counter what it calls "frequently inaccurate and skewed characterizations of Israel and of events in the Middle East" that it believes may fuel anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice. The group mobilizes protests against what it describes as unfair media coverage by issuing full-page ads in newspapers,organizing demonstrations, and encouraging sponsors to withhold funds.CAMERA reports it has over 65,000 paying members and that 46 news outlets have issued corrections based on their work.

History

CAMERA has chapters in major US cities and Israel, including New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Miami, and in 1988 a Boston chapter and headquarters, founded and led by Andrea Levin; Charles Jacobs became deputy director of the Boston chapter.

In 1991, Levin succeeded Winifred Meiselman as executive director of CAMERA. According to the organization's website, CAMERA's membership grew from 1,000 in 1991 to 55,000 in 2007.The director of the Washington office of CAMERA is Eric Rozenman.

In 2002, The Jewish Daily Forward named CAMERA executive director and regular Jerusalem Post contributor Andrea Levin America's fifth most influential Jewish citizen, saying "Media-monitoring was the great proxy war of the last year, and its general is Andrea Levin."

In 2008 CAMERA launched a campaign to alter Wikipedia articles to support the Israeli side of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The campaign suggested that pro-Israeli editors should pretend to be interested in other topics until elected as administrators. Once administrators they were to misuse their administrative powers to suppress pro-Palestinian editors and support pro-Israel editors.Some members of this conspiracy were banned by Wikipedia administrators.

Structure, staff, and activities

On its official website, CAMERA describes itself as "a media-monitoring, research and membership organization devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East" which "fosters rigorous reporting, while educating news consumers about Middle East issues and the role of the media." CAMERA further describes itself as a "non-partisan organization" which "takes no position with regard to American or Israeli political issues or with regard to ultimate solutions to the Arab–Israeli conflict."CAMERA complained in 2008 that the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (of which it is a member) did not consult it before disinviting Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin to an anti-Ahmadinejad rally. CAMERA has also criticized the Israeli non-governmental organization B'Tselem for some of its reporting on Israel.

When CAMERA perceives an inaccurate statement in the media, it says it gathers information, and sends findings asking for a printed or broadcast correction. CAMERA lists 46 news outlets which it says have issued corrections based on their work. The organization also publishes monographs about topics relating to the Arab-Israeli conflict. A 2005 Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs interview with the director of CAMERA Andrea Levin says CAMERA has 55,000 paying members and thousands of active letter writers.

CAMERA is a member of the Israel Campus Roundtable, which includes the Anti-Defamation League, The David Project Center for Jewish Leadership, and other pro-Israel organizations. As a member of this Campus Roundtable, CAMERA operates on college campuses to combat what it perceives as "propagandistic assaults on Israel ... creating harmful misperceptions of Israel" and is active on about 50 college campuses.

CAMERA runs a student-focused site containing specialized information available for countering misinformation. CAMERA also provides one-on-one assistance to students who encounter Middle East distortions in campus publications, flyers, rallies and classroom teaching. CAMERA has offered student representative positions which include compensation and training in Israel.

Criticism by CAMERA

See also: National Public Radio § Criticism, Encarta, Munich (film) § Controversies, and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy § Criticism

Among the organizations and works that have been criticized by CAMERA are:

ABC News anchor Peter Jennings

"We've long considered him anti-Israel", CAMERA's founder Andrea Levin has commented of Peter Jennings, after an incident in which CAMERA, and eventually also the Columbia Journalism Review, took issue with Jennings and ABC News for refusing to correct an alleged misquote of Benjamin Netanyahu.

National Public Radio

CAMERA's report, "A Record of Bias: National Public Radio's Coverage of the Arab–Israeli Conflict: September 26 – November 26, 2000" (2001) asserted that National Public Radio's "coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict has long been marred by a striking anti-Israel tilt, with severe bias, error and lack of balance commonplace." CAMERA supported a boycott of NPR, and demanded the firing of NPR's foreign editor, Loren Jenkins. CAMERA said that Jenkins had a long record of partisanship in favor of Palestinian views, and let his personal views tilt NPR's coverage. CAMERA also said Jenkins compared Israel to Nazi Germany in his writings, and referred to it as a "colonizer".

NPR's then-Ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, said in a 2002 interview that CAMERA used selective citations and subjective definitions of what it considers pro-Palestinian bias in formulating its findings, and that he felt CAMERA's campaign was "a kind of McCarthyism, frankly, that bashes us and causes people to question our commitment to doing this story fairly. And it exacerbates the legitimate anxieties of many in the Jewish community about the survival of Israel."

Encarta

In an article originally published in The Jerusalem Post and posted on the official website of CAMERA, Andrea Levin, the Executive Director of CAMERA, describes Microsoft's digital multimedia encyclopedia Encarta as "a troubling mix of solid information, bias and error." In particular, Levin points to the articles written by Shaul Cohen of the University of Oregon, which Levin says "blurs Arab aggression against the Jews from the Mandate period to the present, repeatedly equating the violence by the parties."

Steven Spielberg's film Munich

In her film review of Munich (2005), posted on the official website of CAMERA, Andrea Levin states that the film (a collaboration of director Steven Spielberg and playwright–screenwriter Tony Kushner) promotes "its thesis of Israeli culpability" and that "Israel's action battling its adversaries is cast as aberrant, bloody and counterproductive." Levin continues: "indeed, it is stunning to watch Munich and realize that its director [Spielberg] brought Schindler's List to the world. Where that was artistry drawn from truth, Munich is cinematic manipulation rooted in lies."

Mearsheimer and Walt

CAMERA published Alex Safian's detailed critique of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a paper written by Harvard University professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer. Safian argued that the paper is "riddled with errors of fact, logic and omission, has inaccurate citations, displays extremely poor judgement regarding sources, and, contrary to basic scholarly standards, ignores previous serious work on the subject. The bottom line: virtually every word and argument is, or ought to be, in 'serious dispute.' In other words, a student who submitted such a paper would flunk."

God's Warriors

CAMERA published a critique of Christiane Amanpour's CNN documentary series God's Warriors, calling it "one of the most grossly distorted programs to appear on mainstream American television", "false in its basic premise", and "a perfect illustration of classical propaganda techniques".Amanpour has responded that the documentary is not meant to compare religions, but rather to show "that each faith has their committed and fervent believers, and we're showing how each of those are active in the political sphere in today's world."

"Israel's Jewish Defamers"

In October 2007, CAMERA organized a conference entitled "Israel's Jewish Defamers," in which a panel of discussants accused selected Jewish critics of Israel, as well as one of Israel's leading newspapers, Haaretz, of distortions and falsehoods about Israel. CAMERA director Andrea Levin described the Jewish critics—who included Princeton University's Richard Falk, writer Norman Finkelstein, New York Review of Books contributor Henry Siegman, former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, Trent University professor Michael Neumann, and Tikkun magazine publisher Michael Lerner—of being guilty of "demonstrably false and baseless defaming of Israel, wildly distorted out of context accusations against Israel." Among the panelists were writer Cynthia Ozick and Harvard psychiatrist Kenneth Levin, who likened the Jewish critics to chronically abused children.

In response, Anthony Lewis told the New York Sun that the conference was "about a nonexistent phenomenon," noting that Jewish criticism of Israeli policies was not necessarily defamatory. Haaretz's editor-in-chief, David Landau, refused to comment on the conference, citing that "it was "a matter of policy and principle" not to respond to CAMERA, which Landau described as "McCarthyite." Tikkun editor Lerner also rejected the notion that he was anti-Israel.

2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict

In response to coverage of the 2008–2009 Gaza War, CAMERA criticized the reporting of the Los Angeles Times,CNN,Haaretz,NPR, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency,[41] and Norwegian doctors being funded by the Norwegian ministry who appeared on media outlets such as the BBC and CBS.CAMERA said that in its view reporting from the Los Angeles Times "consistently omitted key information about Gaza Strip sites targeted by the Israeli army" and "gives the false impression that Israel doesn't aim to prevent civilian deaths." CAMERA criticized Haaretz for "confusion and misinformation on the medical issue" in its "outlining what medical supplies Gaza is reportedly lacking and ignoring all incoming medical aid".

Quotation misattributed to Moshe Ya'alon

In early 2009 CAMERA began investigating the dissemination of a quotation widely misattributed to Moshe Ya'alon, "The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people", after the quotation was cited by Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor, in an op-ed article in The New York Times.The quotation, and variants, had previously been repeated throughout the world by news broadcasts, blogs, and in reputable publications such as the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Toronto Star, Time, and the London Review of Books. The belief that Ya'alon, a high-ranking Israeli military official, had expressed disregard for Palestinian people in this manner reinforced an opinion among some readers and commentators that Israel was the aggressor and Palestinians its victims.However, Ya'alon did not make the statement in the 2002 Haaretz interview generally cited as its source, and appears never to have made the statement at all. In part due to CAMERA's campaign, a number of international newspapers, including the New York Times, issued corrections.

The New York Times' coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict

In a 2012 monograph of its study of The New York Times, CAMERA asserted that the newspaper shows a clear preference for the Palestinian narrative. It further says that The New York Times treats Israel with a harsher standard and omits context.The study called "Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian–Israeli Conflict – A July 1 – December 31, 2011 Study" is part of the Monograph Series. In the executive summary senior CAMERA research analysts Ricki Hollander and Gilead Ini, say that the dominant finding of the study was a disproportionate, continuous, embedded indictment of Israel that dominated both news and commentary sections. It further states that "Israeli views are downplayed while Palestinian perspectives, especially criticism of Israel, are amplified and even promoted."According to Rick Richman, writing in Commentary magazine, the CAMERA study examines all news and editorial sections in the print version of the newspaper directly relating to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (July 1 – December 31, 2011).

Star Spangled Banner As You've Never Heard It

A story of how our national anthem came to be.

I was asked by someone to put a video together for this audio and upload it, so here it is. I was never expecting it to get so many views.

Here's a link to one of many sources for info on the true story: https://tinyurl.com/yb6laets

Hope you enjoy the message of this video though. God Bless America

Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto.

The Pope, the Jews, and the Secrets in the Archives

Documents reveal the private discussions behind both Pope Pius XII's silence about the Nazi deportation of Rome's Jews in 1943 and the Vatican's postwar support for the kidnapping of two Jewish boys whose parents had perished in the Holocaust.

by David I. Kertzer, THE ATLANTIC

In early 1953, the photograph of a prominent nun being arrested was splashed across the front pages of French newspapers. Over the next several weeks, other French clergy—monks and nuns—would also be arrested. The charge: kidnapping two young Jewish boys, Robert and Gérald Finaly, whose parents had perished in a Nazi death camp. The case sparked intense public controversy. Le Monde, typical of much of the French media, devoted 178 articles in the first half of the year to the story of the brothers—secretly baptized at the direction of the Catholic woman who had cared for them—and the desperate attempts by surviving relatives to get them back. It was a struggle that pitted France's Jewish community, so recently devastated by the Holocaust, against the country's Roman Catholic hierarchy, which insisted that the boys were now Catholic and must not be raised by Jews.

What was not known at the time—and what, in fact, could not be known until the opening, earlier this year, of the Vatican archives covering the papacy of Pius XII—is the central role that the Vatican and the pope himself played in the kidnapping drama. The Vatican helped direct efforts by local Church authorities to resist French court rulings and to keep the boys hidden, while at the same time carefully concealing the role that Rome was playing behind the scenes.

There is more. At the center of this drama was an official of the Vatican curia who, as we now know from other newly revealed documents, helped persuade Pope Pius XII not to speak out in protest after the Germans rounded up and deported Rome's Jews in 1943—"the pope's Jews," as Jews in Rome had often been referred to. The silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust has long engendered bitter debates about the Roman Catholic Church and Jews. The memoranda, steeped in anti-Semitic language, involve discussions at the highest level about whether the pope should lodge a formal protest against the actions of Nazi authorities in Rome. Meanwhile, conservatives in the Church continue to push for the canonization of Pius XII as a saint.

David I. Kertzer: What the Vatican's secret archives are about to reveal

The newly available Vatican documents, reported here for the first time, offer fresh insights into larger questions of how the Vatican thought about and reacted to the mass murder of Europe's Jews, and into the Vatican's mindset immediately after the war about the Holocaust, the Jewish people, and the Roman Catholic Church's role and prerogatives as an institution.

I. A Secret Baptism

Fritz Finaly, a medical doctor, was 37 and his wife, Anni, was 28 when the Germans came for them. Having escaped from Austria following its annexation by Nazi Germany, in 1938, they had hoped to flee to South America, but like so many desperate Jews at the time they found it impossible to find passage there. Settling in 1939 in a small town just outside Grenoble, in southeastern France, they did their best to make a life for themselves, although Fritz's ability to practice medicine was hampered by the anti-Semitic laws installed by Marshal Philippe Pétain's collaborationist Vichy government following the German conquest of France in 1940. In 1941, Robert, the Finalys' first child, was born, followed by Gérald 15 months later. Despite a mounting official campaign against the Jews in France, the Finalys had both boys circumcised, in accordance with Jewish law, eight days after birth.

In February 1944, aware of the intensifying Gestapo roundups of Jews in their area, the Finalys placed their two small boys in a nursery in a nearby town. They confided the boys' whereabouts to their friend Marie Paupaert, asking her to look out for the children in the event of their own arrest. Four days later, the Germans took Anni and Fritz. The couple was transported to Auschwitz, never to be seen again.

Terrified by what had happened to her friends, and fearing that the Germans would come looking for the children, Marie took Robert and Gérald to the convent of Notre-Dame de Sion, in Grenoble, hoping that the nuns would hide them. Deeming the children too young to care for, the sisters took them to the local municipal nursery school, whose director, Antoinette Brun, middle-aged and unmarried, agreed to look after them.A little less than a year later, in early February 1945, with France now under Allied control, Fritz Finaly's sister Marguerite, who had found refuge in New Zealand, wrote to the mayor of the town outside Grenoble where Fritz had lived to learn the fate of her brother and his family. When she heard what had happened, she immediately secured immigration permits for the two boys to join her in New Zealand. Marguerite wrote to Brun to thank her for taking care of her nephews and to ask for her assistance in arranging for their travel. To Marguerite's dismay, Brun's reply was evasive and made no indication that she would help return the children to their family. At the same time, concealing her knowledge of the existence of any Finaly relatives, Brun got a local judge to name her the provisional guardian of the boys, now 3 and 4 years old. (A good chronology of the basic events of the Finaly case, as previously known, is found in the French historian Catherine Poujol's "Petite Chronique de L'affaire des Enfants Finaly," published by the journal Archives Juives in 2004.)The following year, the family made another attempt to have Robert and Gérald returned, this time by confronting Brun in person. Besides Marguerite, Fritz had two other sisters—one, Hedwig Rosner, living in Israel and the other, Louise, like Marguerite, living in New Zealand. Fritz had also had an older brother, Richard, who had remained in Vienna and perished in the Holocaust. But Richard's wife, Auguste, had escaped to safety in Britain. Auguste now traveled to Grenoble, and on the morning of October 25, 1946, she appeared at Brun's doorstep. It had been Fritz's wish, his sister-in-law told Brun, that if anything were to happen to him and Anni, his sisters would look after the boys. She pleaded with Brun to show pity for a family that had been so recently torn apart. To Auguste's shock, Brun grew hostile. "To all my prayers and pleas," the boys' aunt recalled later, "she had only a pitiless response, and she kept constantly repeating: 'The Jews are not grateful.' She would never give the boys back, she said."

Read: Why some Catholics defend the kidnapping of a Jewish boy

For many more months, Marguerite tried every avenue she could to retrieve her nephews. She sent pleas to the local mayor in France, to the French foreign minister, and to the Red Cross. At Marguerite's urging, the bishop of Auckland sent a request through the archbishop of Westminster to the bishop of Grenoble, asking him to look into the matter. In his reply, in July 1948, the bishop explained that he had had a long talk with Brun, but she remained firm in her refusal to give up the children to their family. He made no offer of help himself, perhaps influenced by the fact that he had learned what no one in the family yet knew: Four months earlier, Brun had had the two boys baptized, meaning that under canon law they would now be considered by the Roman Catholic Church to be Catholics, and under longtime Church doctrine could not be returned to their Jewish relatives. When the family learned of the baptism, they turned for help to a Jewish family friend who lived in Grenoble, Moïse Keller. Frustrated by the difficulty of effectively fighting their cause from the other side of the world, the sisters in New Zealand decided it would be best if Fritz's sister in Israel, Hedwig Rosner, took the lead.