Breaking news: US will end Covid-19 testing requirement for air travelers entering the country and Why Russia has once again turned on the Jews and Schindler’s secretary, who typed up list of Jews to save, dies at 107 and Victor Moore, Edward Arnold in the Ziegfeld Follies (1945) Pay the Two Dollars and Unique Sites of Israel: Be’er Sheva By Nosson Shulman and yesterday's Parsha
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.
US will end Covid-19 testing requirement for air travelers entering the country
The Biden administration is expected to announce Friday that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will lift its requirement for travelers to test negative for Covid-19 before entering the US, according to a senior administration official and a US Centers For Disease Control and Prevention official.
The move, which CNN was first to report, will go into effect for US-bound air travelers at midnight on Sunday, the officials said.The CDC is lifting the restriction that the travel industry had lobbied against for months after determining it was no longer necessary "based on the science and data," the senior administration official said. The CDC will reassess its decision in 90 days and if officials decide they need to reinstate it, because of a concerning new variant, for example, will do so. The measure has been in place since January 2021.
That official said the Biden administration plans to work with airlines to ensure a smooth transition with the change, but it will likely be a welcome move for most in the industry.
In a statement to CNN, the CDC said, "The Covid-19 pandemic has now shifted to a new phase, due to the widespread uptake of highly effective Covid-19 vaccines, the availability of effective therapeutics, and the accrual of high rates of vaccine- and infection-induced immunity at the population level in the United States. Each of these measures has contributed to lower risk of severe disease and death across the United States."Travel industry officials have been increasingly critical of the requirement
in recent weeks and directly urged the Biden administration to end the measure, arguing it was having a chilling effect on an already fragile economy, according to Airlines for America chief Nick Calio, whose group met recently with White House officials. The travel industry, and some scientific experts, said the policy had been out of date for months.
Lawmakers, including Democrats, had also advocated for lifting the requirement in recent weeks. Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said, "I'm glad CDC suspended the burdensome coronavirus testing requirement for international travelers, and I'll continue to do all I can to support the strong recovery of our hospitality industry."White House officials met last month with travel industry officials, who pressed the Biden administration to end its requirements that vaccinated international travelers take a coronavirus test before flying to the United States.Airlines for America said its members -- including American Airlines, United Airlines, Southwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines -- had believed lifting the requirements would lead more foreigners to visit the US.The trade association told CNN that in mid-May, domestic travel came within 7 percentage points of pre-pandemic levels, but international travel lagged at 14% below normal.US Travel Association President and CEO Roger Dow praised the decision."Prior to the pandemic, travel was one of our nation's largest industry exports. The lifting of this requirement will enable the industry to lead the way toward a broader US economic and jobs recovery," Dow said in a statement.The industry has criticized the policy as out of date for months, and some medical experts have also questioned its utility.Testing international arrivals doesn't make much sense to Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious diseases specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
"I've been bemused about that for a long time because we've got plenty of Covid here! It's not as though we're trying to keep Covid out,"
Schaffner told CNN in March. "It's here already."This story has been updated with additional reporting.
CNN's Elizabeth Cohen contributed to this report.
The Three Musketeers at the Kotel
The Three are Rabbi Yehuda Glick, famous temple mount activist, and former Israel Mk, and then Robert Weinger, the world's greatest shofar blower and seller of Shofars, and myself after we had gone to the 12 gates of the Temple Mount in 2020 to blow the shofar to ask G-d to heal the world from the Pandemic. It was a highlight to my experience in living in Israel and I put it on my blog each day to remember.
The articles that I include each day are those that I find interesting, so I feel you will find them interesting as well. I don't always agree with all the points of each article but found them interesting or important to share with you, my readers, and friends. It is cathartic for me to share my thoughts and frustrations with you about life in general and in Israel. As a Rabbi, I try to teach and share the Torah of the G-d of Israel as a modern Orthodox Rabbi. I never intend to offend anyone but sometimes people are offended and I apologize in advance for any mistakes. The most important psychological principle I have learned is that once someone's mind is made up, they don't want to be bothered with the facts, so, like Rabbi Akiva, I drip water (Torah is compared to water) on their made-up minds and hope that some of what I have share sinks in. Love Rabbi Yehuda Lave.
The Portion of Beha'alotchah
The Trumpets
How are the different groups of the Children of Israel gathered together?
The Children of Israel are commanded to make silver trumpets which are intended to gather the groups or their leaders as needed. The different sounds which emanate from the trumpets are recognized by each group as calling upon them to assemble in front of the Tent of Meeting. Additionally, the call of the trumpets is also the call to gather the tribes to continue on their journey to the Promised Land.
Upon entering the Land of Israel, the sound of the trumpets will remind the people that it Almighty G-d who delivers them from their enemies.
On top of the letters "tzadi" in the words "hatzar hatzorer" (the enemy who is oppressing you) there are additional crowns, an allusion to "an evil enemy the wicked Haman".
The fact that there is a total of ten crowns is an allusion to the ten sons of Haman. (Rimzei Yoel)
Why Russia has once again turned on the Jews
This reversal of truth and lies, victim and aggressor, right and wrong is the hallmark of Soviet propaganda.
Melanie Phillips
Why Russia has once again turned on the Jews
This reversal of truth and lies, victim and aggressor, right and wrong is the hallmark of Soviet propaganda.
(JNS) Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, caused outrage earlier this week after he was asked on Italian TV how Russia could claim to be "de-Nazifying" Ukraine when its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is Jewish.
Lavrov replied: "I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood. That [Zelenskyy is Jewish] means absolutely nothing. Wise Jewish people say that the most rabid anti-Semites are usually Jews."
After Israeli politicians reacted with fury to the suggestion that the Jews were responsible for their own victimization in the Holocaust, Russia's foreign ministry doubled down by asserting that the uproar explained "to a large extent why the current Israeli government supports the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv."
Lavrov's preposterous attempt to make Jews and Nazis interchangeable was prompted by the fact that Zelenskyy's Jewish identity exposes as a lie Russia's claim to be de-Nazifying Ukraine.
However, the foreign minister's comments contributed to fears that Russia is reviving Soviet-era anti-Semitism as a response to the crisis provoked by its aggression.
Israel was shocked by Lavrov's remarks because it believed Russia's President Vladimir Putin to be well-disposed towards the Jewish people.
Jewish communities in Russia have been allowed to flourish. The Chabad-Lubavitch movement has hosted special Hanukkah concerts at the Kremlin, menorah-lightings throughout Moscow, and Putin has met, talked, toured and posed with Russia's Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar on Jewish holidays and at other times.
But Israel ignored the fact that Putin has also frequently cited anti-Semitic Russian thinkers in his speeches, and in his attacks on Crimea and Ukraine has teamed up with anti-Semitic thugs such as the Night Wolves and the Wagner Group.
Ksenia Svetlova, director of the Israel-Middle East program at Mitvim‒The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policy, has observed that anti-Semitism in Russia always simmers just below the surface, particularly around the Russian Orthodox Church, and erupts in times of crisis.
After a horrific 2018 fire in a Kemerovo trade center, for example, various Christian circles argued that the Jews were behind the tragedy as it coincided with a Jewish holiday.
Professor Michal Bilewicz, director of the Centre for Research on Prejudice at the University of Warsaw, has noted that Putin's recent references to a "fifth column" and "traitors to the nation" have sinister echoes. They almost exactly replicate language used by the Soviets in the 1940s and 1950s preceding anti-Jewish purges, and by Polish Communist leader Władyslaw Gomułka in a 1967 speech that preceded his own regime's purge of Jews.
Bilewicz writes: "The paradox of Putin's rhetoric is that he accuses Ukraine of 'Nazism' while simultaneously using anti-Semitic tropes to stigmatize Russians who oppose his war and support Ukraine."
This, he said, was reminiscent of the slur Zhidobanderovtsy, or "Kike-Banderites," used by pro-Russian activists during Moscow's 2014 war in the Donbas to link Jews and followers of Stepan Bandera.
This linkage was absurd because Bandera led a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist organization that collaborated with the Nazis and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews. "Yet it made sense to the followers of conspiracy theories," observes Bilewicz. "There is no logic in their thinking."
In a similarly nonsensical vein, Russia has also accused the Swedes of being Nazis in response to Sweden preparing to join NATO because of Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Ads have been appearing at Russian bus stops depicting various Swedish national heroes as Nazis with the slogan: "We are against Nazism, they are not."
The word "we" is in the color of the Russian flag and "they" in the colors of Sweden's flag. Selective quotes appear next to each picture purporting to paint the figure as a Nazi. These include Astrid Lindgren, the children's author who created the character Pippi Longstocking; Ingvar Kamprad who founded Ikea; and Sweden's King Gustaf V.
In claiming to be fighting Nazis, Russia is trying to channel the Soviet Union's undoubtedly heroic resistance to Nazi Germany. Ignoring the inconvenient fact that the Soviet Union had first allied with Nazi Germany and thus started World War II, its stand against Nazism is a key element in Russia's mythic sense of itself.
As a result, it thinks that claiming to be standing once more against Nazism casts it again in a heroic light. For these purposes, it has turned Nazism into a synonym for unspecific evil.
Exactly the same perverse rationale fuels the anti-Zionist claim that Israelis are Nazis. For just as Russia seeks to rewrite its aggression against "Nazi" Ukraine as heroism, so anti-Zionists rewrite their exterminatory anti-Semitism as a heroic stand against "genocidal" Israel.
Crucial to this infernal inversion of victim and aggressor is the belief by both anti-Zionists and Putinistas that they embody virtue, and so by definition, all who oppose them are evil. This mindset is a hallmark of totalitarian movements and has led to the oppression, persecution and mass murder of millions.
It was why Stalinism was supported by people in the West, who believed that they were thus supporting the creation of a more just world.
It was why so many "progressives" supported eugenics, the theory of manipulated breeding and racial improvement that derived from social Darwinism. Even though this ideology fueled Hitler's program to eliminate those he deemed sub-human, it was promoted until the Holocaust by those who thought of themselves as working for the betterment of humanity.
It's why those Muslims who hold that everything outside Islam is evil believe that when they blow Israelis or Westerners to kingdom come they are doing holy work. And it's why the Palestinian Arabs tell themselves—in a demonstrably ludicrous denial of both history and reason—that they were the indigenous people of the land of Israel, that Jesus was a Palestinian (he was a Jew) and that their murderous attempt to drive the Jewish people from its ancestral homeland is in fact an attempt to protect themselves from attack by the Jews.
This reversal of truth and lies, victim and aggressor, right and wrong is the hallmark of Soviet and Russian propaganda. It was no accident that the Arabs intent on destroying Israel developed modern anti-Zionism in cahoots with the Soviet Union.
The big anti-Zionist lie about Israel was created in the 1960s when the terrorist leader Yasser Arafat made common cause with the Soviet Union to rewrite history, demonize the Jewish state and thus subvert the West by twisting its collective mind and destroying its moral compass.
Israel's difficulties with Russia are growing.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu recently canceled a scheduled phone call with his Israeli counterpart Benny Gantz, which was intended to discuss the cooperation and security coordination essential for Israeli airstrikes on Iranian targets in Syria. Without that cooperation, Israel's defense against Iran on its Syrian border will be undermined.
More ominously still, Russia is further cozying up to Iran.
And meanwhile, it is ratcheting up its verbal aggression against Israel.
A spokeswoman for Russia's foreign ministry claimed earlier this week that Israeli mercenaries were fighting alongside the neo-fascist Ukrainian Azov regiment. In fact, Israel has sent no mercenaries nor supplied arms to Ukraine—a cause of bitter complaint by Zelenskyy.
But last week, a group thought to have close links with the Kremlin posted a list of 20 Israelis claiming that they were fighting as mercenaries in Ukraine.
Most of those names belonged to Israeli security guards, consular officials and employees of the Jewish Agency for Israel. They had merely been sent to bolster Israeli embassy staff who had been evacuated to Poland in order to aid the return of Israelis stuck in Ukraine.
"He who sups with the devil," it is said, "should have a long spoon." Israel is only now realizing that, in supping with Russia, its own spoon has been far too short.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for "The Times of London," her personal and political memoir, "Guardian Angel," has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, "The Legacy." Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.
Schindler's secretary, who typed up list of Jews to save, dies at 107
Sasha Weitman holds an old photograph of his mother, Mimi Reinhdard, April 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit) Email Print10 Comments
Reinhard was one of 1,200 Jews saved by Oskar Schindler.
By Associated Press
Mimi Reinhard, a secretary in Oskar Schindler's office who typed up the list of Jews he saved from extermination by Nazi Germany, has died in Israel at the age of 107.
Reinhard died early Friday and was laid to rest Sunday in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, her son Sasha Weitman confirmed.
She was one of 1,200 Jews saved by German businessman Schindler after he bribed Nazi authorities to let him keep them as workers in his factories. The account was made into the acclaimed 1993 film "Schindler's List" by director Steven Spielberg.
Reinhard was born Carmen Koppel in Vienna, Austria, in 1915, and moved to Krakow, Poland, before the outbreak of World War II. After Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, she was confined to the Krakow ghetto before being sent to the nearby Plaszow concentration camp in 1942.
Reinhard's knowledge of shorthand got her work in the camp's administrative office, where, two years later, she was ordered to type up the handwritten list of Jews that were to be transferred to Schindler's ammunition factory.
"I didn't know it was such an important thing, that list," she told an interviewer with Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in 2008. "First of all, I got the list of those who were with Schindler already in Krakow, in his factory. I had to put them on the list." Later she put her own name, and the names of two friends.
At the Brünnlitz labor camp, where Schindler's ammunition factory was housed, she was put to work in Schindler's office.
She said that although she worked in Schindler's office toward the end of the war, she had little personal contact with him.
"He was a very charming man, very outgoing," she recalled, decades after the war. "He didn't treat us like scum."
After the war, she made her way to the United States, where she lived until immigrating to Israel in 2007 at the age of 92.
Weitman, Reinhard's son, said that after coming to Israel she "became a kind of a celebrity" because of the Schindler's List film's popularity, something he said "pumped another 15 years into her life."
Victor Moore, Edward Arnold
Ziegfeld Follies (1945) Pay the Two Dollars
A strange kind of hell is depicted here. Very well done.
