NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Fighting racial intolerance in New Zealand and beyond
Hi Christchurch Folk, there is a new bible study that has started up which explores the Hebrew roots of the bible both Old and New Testaments.
Meeting on Wednesdays, well-researched and thought-provoking, this study program will give you access to many useful resources.
For more details, contact our secretary Rebecca Marchand: rebecca.marchand@nzfoi.org.
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Israeli superstar Gal Gadot radiates positivity. Interviewer Nancy Jo Sales describes how Gadot has the “happiest smile I think I’ve seen on anyone since the start of the pandemic. I wonder about that smile, and how Gadot manages to stay so happy. I wonder if it’s because she seems so aware of how lucky she is.”
Throughout the interview, Gadot describes herself as lucky. She’s lucky for her family, lucky for health, lucky she has the opportunity to play Wonder Woman on screen.
She is also very grateful to God for her good fortune. “In the Jewish culture there’s a prayer that you’re supposed to say every time you wake up in the morning to thank God for, you know, keeping you alive,” Gadot explains, referring to the Jewish prayer, Modeh Ani. “You say ‘modeh ani’, which means ‘I give thanks’… So every morning I wake up and step out of bed and I say ‘Thank you for everything, thank you, thank, you, thank you…Nothing is to be taken for granted.”
NZFOI: R Lord Jonathan Sacks has been a credible voice of reason and wisdom in a world that faces increasing chaos and division. Our thoughts and prayers are with him and his family.
Former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, has been diagnosed with cancer and is currently undergoing treatment to aid his recovery.
A spokesperson for The Office of Rabbi Sacks said that the Rabbi “remains positive and upbeat and will now spend a period of time focused on the treatment he is receiving from his excellent medical team. He is looking forward to returning to his work as soon as possible.”
“For those who wish to include Rabbi Sacks in their prayers and thoughts, his Hebrew name is HaRav Ya’akov Zvi ben Liba,” the spokesperson concluded.
After last Yom Kippur, as the community members of Chabad of Auckland, New Zealand, gathered together to break the fast, one congregant rose, telling those gathered: “If it weren’t for Chabad, I wouldn’t have been at synagogue today. I would have been at work.” Another remarked that while he’d been going to synagogue for 83 years, this year’s service was better than all the others combined.
Fast-forward seven months and one coronavirus pandemic later to Lag BaOmer. With the approach of the holiday, which is traditionally celebrated outdoors—a gorgeous time of year in New Zealand, with the warmer weather stubbornly clinging on, and the trees beginning to shed their red and orange leaves—Rabbi Mendel Hecht, director of Chabad of Auckland, was determined to celebrate with the community, social-distancing-style.
While encouraging everyone to stay in their own backyards for kosher Kiwi barbecues and roasted marshmallows, the young rabbi—who arrived with his wife, Esther, to far-flung New Zealand just a year-and-a-half ago, their young daughter in tow—and the Auckland Jewish community took part in a first-ever trans-Tasman Lag BaOmer celebration at the start of the holiday on Monday evening, May 11, with their Australian counterparts across the ditch.
As with every Shabbat and Jewish holiday, New Zealand Jews have the privilege of being the very first Jewish community in the world to usher in the holiness of the day.
Jews went a little bit nuts this week.
Not because two and a half thousand of us turned out for a funeral at the epicenter of this country’s coronavirus pandemic but because after the cops broke things up New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted:
“My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”
Whereupon the Twitterverse exploded.
“Hey @NYCMayor,” tweeted ADL president Jonathan Greenblatt, “there are 1mil+ Jewish people in #NYC. The few who don’t social distance should be called out — but generalizing against the whole population is outrageous especially when so many are scapegoating Jews. This erodes the very unity our city needs now more than ever.”
“This has to be a joke,” tweeted New York City Councilman Chaim Deutsch, a Brooklyn Democrat who is an Orthodox Jew. He added, “Every neighborhood has people who are being non-compliant. To speak to an entire ethnic group as though we are all flagrantly violating precautions is offensive, it’s stereotyping, and it’s inviting anti-Semitism. I’m truly stunned.”
“So, as has been true with moral ciphers from time immemorial, you decided to seek your jollies by attacking Jews,” wrote John Podhoretz in the “New York Post.”
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II, File)
Really?
An old (Jewish) friend of mine likes to say that Jews consider any statement by a non-Jew that begins with the words “Jews are” to be anti-Semitic if it’s not followed by something like “a community that puts a high value on learning and supporting the arts.” In other words, just about whenever a gentile lumps us all together it’s (for historically understandable reasons) a trigger — one that de Blasio certainly pulled.
But there’s more to it than that.
In the New York area, the epidemic has killed influential religious leaders and torn through large, tight-knit families.
Neighborhoods in Brooklyn with large Hasidic populations have some of New York City’s highest levels of positive Covid-19 test results.Credit…Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times
One of the first people Shulim Leifer knew who died of the coronavirus was his great-uncle. Then his grandmother fell ill, as did two of his cousins. The man who lived next door to his childhood home died on a Tuesday, and by Friday the neighbor on the other side was dead as well.
Each neighbor was given a small funeral, with a handful of mourners standing six feet apart on their front lawns in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park.
“There is not a single Hasidic family that has been untouched,” said Mr. Leifer, 34. “It is a plague on a biblical scale.”
This Passover, we won’t be attending synagogue, we won’t be participating in large raucous dinners and sharing our food with our extended family and friends, we won’t be welcoming strangers into our homes, as Jewish people are instructed to do, writes Juliet Moses.
Tonight, on what is hopefully the halfway point of our lockdown period, Jewish people in New Zealand will sit down at their Seder dinner tables and mark the start of the festival of Passover. As we do every year, we will ask “why is this night different from all other nights?” and recite the reasons.
Many of us will also be thinking about why this Passover is different from all other Passovers. This Passover, we won’t be attending synagogue, we won’t be participating in large raucous dinners and sharing our food with our extended family and friends, we won’t be welcoming strangers into our homes, as we are commanded to do; we will be sheltering in our homes, with the people we are self-isolating with. It’s just one of many sacrifices, of varying degrees of magnitude, we must all make at this time.
NEW YORK (JTA) — The day before the Hasidic folk band Zusha performed before a crowd of 300 in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights on the evening of March 9, the band’s manager thought about canceling the event.
The concert was to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim, a one-day festival marked by dressing in costume, communal dancing and feasting — often in crowded and raucous settings. But the incipient spread of the novel coronavirus in New York was giving the manager, Paltiel Ratzenberg, second thoughts.
No government body had advised against large gatherings — that would come nearly a week later — but the virus already was making its presence felt among New York Jews. An outbreak that began in late February in New Rochelle, a suburb just north of New York City, led to some synagogues canceling services and others announcing that they had nixed their Purim parties.
So Ratzenberg called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to ask for guidance. He also called a local rabbi.
Ratzenberg told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that both gave him the go-ahead. The band also wanted to play. So the show went on — with plenty of hand sanitizer available.
This is a very, very difficult time and it becomes really acute when we see it from the perspective of Pesach.
This year we’re clearly dealing with an enormous phenomenon. Just today, the General Secretary of the United Nations has called this “the greatest challenge facing humanity since World War II”.
So anything that I have to say, I say with absolutely humility and with hesitancy, because none of us know for sure what all of this means. But let me, in any case, share some thoughts with you.
“Your Hebrew name?” the head of the yeshiva asked, pencil and paper poised to take it down for my aliyah, the honor of reciting Torah blessings. It was my third week at his school, a place where I’d reluctantly agreed to study for a semester in a city where fully welcoming options for Jews like me were almost nonexistent.
“Erela,” I replied. My American tongue wrapped awkwardly around the “resh” — the Hebrew r that’s notoriously difficult for English speakers to manage. My parents hadn’t thought about that when choosing the name, nor the fact that “Erela” is an obscure variation on “Lion of God” that most people would hear as “Ariella” and I’d have to correct. But I digress.
“Bat?” he continued, referring to the Hebrew naming tradition of including one’s parents in the name.
“Ephraim v’Yehudit,” I answered.
My dad got his Hebrew name, Ephraim, the old-fashioned way, as a Jewish child born to two Jewish parents. My mom got hers from me a few years ago. I was starting rabbinical school and for the first time in my life was in an environment where people used their full Hebrew names with regularity. My mom happens to have an English name, Judith, that has a Hebrew equivalent: Yehudit. Ironically, it means “female Jew.”
I say ironically because my mom is a Quaker.
