alwaysperfectlywrite

The young Israeli soldier has spent the past three years in a horrible Gazan jail and is about to mark his 23rd birthday there. Let’s work to ensure next year he celebrates in freedom.

msniw

 The acceptable face of Fascism?

In a few weeks time, football hooligans, far right extremists, Jew-haters and Islamophobes will descend on Luton with one simple goal - to whip up fear, religious tension and violence.  And you won’t be surprised to hear that the BNP are involved.

I’ve sent a message to the people who can stop this violent gathering - the Home Secretary Alan Johnson and Bedfordshire’s Chief Constable Gillian Parker calling on them to stop the protest.  It will take you less than a minute to send a message - all you need to do is click here:

http://action.hopenothate.org.uk/luton

Readers accustomed to my writing style will appreciate that I did not compose the above message and have simply  edited it slightly so I may help publicise the cause. It doesn’t matter. I share the sentiments of “Hope Not Hate” in every possible way so long as those involved do not themselves become violent.

msniw

Hmm. Well, I’m the first to say that history and its personalities are always being – and sometimes actively need - to be rewritten. Revisionism need not carry the pejorative tag it invariably bears.

Just to remind you: President Obama has been fiercely criticised by Israel supporters for awarding  Former Irish Prime Minister Mary Robinson the US’s highest civilian honour – the Medal of Freedom.

But  Mrs Robinson has retorted (please watch below) that she is an opponent of antisemitism,  and has rejected criticism of her role in the 2001 Durban United Nations Conference.

The former Human Rights Commissioner said she and the conference have been misjudged by history.

“Everybody there knows that I played a huge role in trying to fight the antisemitism. I was almost on my own in trying to do it,” she said. “But that is a story that has to come out objectively.”

She argued that there should be an “independent analysis of what happened in Durban.”

“I think I am owed it,” Robinson said. “I have been judged by people who have never met me.”

She added that the US would benefit from an analysis “because we have to continue to fight antisemitism wherever we find it.”

Robinson implied that the South African location of the conference contributed to “emotional antisemitism” and that as Human Rights Commissioner she did not have the capacity to control the conference’s tone. 

Further, she insisted that she was responsible for minimising the anti-Jewish, anti-Israel message emanating from Durban.

She also denied agreeing with the notorious conference clause which equated Zionism with racism.

“Of course not,” she said emphatically. “I have been fighting antisemitism all my life. And everybody knows that who knows me.”
“There was no antisemitic language in the final document,” she said. “But people don’t know that because there has never been a proper accounting.”

Now watch the clip and tell me what YOU think!

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5240108n

msniw

Blow me, there were at least two wonderful Jewish weddings in London last week but I find myself starting this post with a video of the zaniest and possibly most life-enhancing church nuptials most of us will  ever view.

Jill, Kevin and assorted friends are shown jigging  through a church entrance in Minnesota, USA, to the strain of Forever,  much to the bemused delight of the presiding lady vicar. The couple hope viewers will be persuaded to make donations to the Sheila Wellstone Institute which campaigns against domestic violence.

Knowing how this terrible issue affects the U.K. Jewish community as much as the wider world, first I wish the American  lovebirds a “hearty mazel tov and kol kavod – hearty congratulations and all strength to your wonderful campaign”.

I could not think of a nobler, less selfish or disarmingly engaging way of starting married life while entertaining friends and family.

All of which returns me to the grand affair hosted by singer, Rachel Stevens and Alex Bourne at  Claridge’s Hotel.

I understand that their chuppah (wedding ceremony) was conducted under the same mainstream Orthodox Jewish auspices as that of my  niece, nee Leora Wood and her groom, Sam Bennett at Stock Brook Country Club, Essex some days later. Otherwise, the two Jewish events shared about as much in content and values  as did either with the church event.

While Rachel and Alex held a much vaunted celebrity bash where style reigned supreme, the new Mr and Mrs Bennett were “king and queen” at a Hassidic-type event where even they were subservient to strict religious rules of separation and modesty.

Following a public bridal veiling or beddeken for Leora and an outdoor chuppah where the canopy was draped in tallitot (prayer shawls) male and female guests dined separately – divided by a mechitza (screen) - which was also used during separate dancing.

Orthodox Jewish couples  often marry on a Tuesday but Leora and Samuel chose Wednesday 05 August as the secular date co-incided with the 15th of the Hebrew month of Av, known as Tu B’Av.

By tradition on this  day  in ancient times the maidens of Israel would dance in the vineyards while their potential bridegrooms looked on and chose a partner from among them. Thus, Tu B’Av was the day when marriages were made.

Some readers may join me in seeing a contradiction here but this was but one among many other differences in custom from those I’ve seen at a host of  ‘regular’ Jewish weddings.

My semi-educated guess is that Leora’s was the first ultra-Orthodox – even Hassidic-type wedding - to have been held in our immediate family for several generations. All her paternal great-great-grandparents - who were of Lithuanian origin -  became anglicised while retaining a strong Jewish identity and maintaining a deep involvement in communal affairs.

This time last year, when Leora became 18, I posted comparative pictures of her and her late paternal grandmother, nee Selina Saltman at roughly the same age  during the 1940s.

Here I present a shot of Leora and Sam taken last week -

alongside one of Grandma Selina and Grandpa Louis Wood when they married at Birmingham Hebrew Congregation, Singer’s Hill in October 1952.   

So we have it: In barely 60 years the next generation fairly aches to return to its  spiritual    Eastern European heime (homeland). But I am left to wonder how much of  this is a channelled romantic yearning for a world they’ll never know and one which may  have existed only in the hearts of those who believed they created it - ‘forever’!

Meanwhile, back in the prosaic world of every-day Israel,  proposed legislation will allow couples not belonging to any recognised religions there to register in a civil union and enjoy the same rights as those in a legal marriage. The bill would solve the troubles of 300,000 Israeli citizens, an overwhelming majority of them immigrants to Israel (olim) who can’t marry there  because they have no recognized religion.

This is because while they have Jewish family and have immigrated under the Law of Return,  their mother is not Jewish and therefore they do not have official Jewish status.) In action, says The Israel Religious Action  Centre this law will fail to achieve its intended goal and will barely provide an impractical solution to the depressing problem of tens of thousands of couples that aren’t allowed to marry in Israel because they don’t fit the narrow parameters of the State.

But let us not think for one moment that problems of internal  divisiveness are unique to Jewry. Only today as I was about to close this post, news bulletins highlighted the story of Whitechapel, East London Labour MP Jim Fitzpatrick and his wife, Sheila who walked out of the strictly segregated  wedding celebrations of some Muslim constituents.

Mr Fitzpatrick,  minister for food and farming, claimed the custom  threatened local community cohesion. He added that he and Mrs Fitzpatrick had attended many mosque weddings before but had previously never  witnessed such an arrangement.

I often point to the many social customs that Jews and Muslims share broadly if not exactly. Some dietary rules are similar as are the rituals of circumcision and speedy burials. We certainly have more to unite than to divide us if only the extremists on both sides would allow it to happen. But first both communities will have to set their own houses in order.

The irony of Whitechapel having once been home to thousands of immigrant Jews desperate to claw their way out to  posher North London suburbs and become integrated ‘Anglo-Jewish’ was not lost on me. Neither, I’m sure, will it be lost upon the Fitzpatricks, who appear to be  commendably intelligent, sane and sensitive.

msniw

msniw

AP – This photo taken Aug. 10, 2009 shows an ultra-Orthodox Jew blowing a horn on a flight circling over Israel. …

(Yes, but it most emphatically is NOT a shofar – a ram’s horn! – msniw)

Tue Aug 11, 2:26 pm ET

JERUSALEM – A planeload of Israeli rabbis and Jewish mystics held an airborne prayer meeting in the belief that it could help check the spread of swine flu in Israel, an Israeli newspaper reported Tuesday.

The Yediot Ahronot daily said a plane with 50 people on board circled over Israel on Monday, with the passengers chanting prayers and sounding the ritual ram’s horn.

The newspaper report carried a picture showing bearded and black-clad Orthodox Jewish men standing on the steps of an aircraft of Israeli short-haul airline Arkia. Airline officials could not be reached for comment.

“The purpose of the flight was to stop the (swine flu) epidemic so that people will not keeping dying from it,” Rabbi Yitzhak Basri, one of the participants, told the newspaper.

Israel’s Health Ministry has confirmed more than 2,000 cases of swine flu, with five fatalities in the country so far.

————–

Meanwhile, Alwaysperfectlywrite’s own health correspondent has been privy to a ‘leak’ from Jewish sources in Manchester, U.K.

We can report, more or less exclusively, that after a long, closed session of the local Beth Din (Ecclesiastical Court), the following ruling was released:

• The condition, if named at all, must in future be referred to only as “Sw’ne ‘Flu”.

• It must never be mentioned in the presence of women.

• Women are forbidden from developing the disease.

• Men and women must now  lead completely separate lives, bar women cooking, washing and cleaning for their husbands.

• Food and clean laundry must be passed over a mechitza – or dividing wall.

• While the pandemic continues, all rabbis who previously ate in public from the same dishes they deemed kosher for their congregants, must cease with immediate effect.

• Annual services for New Year and the fast day, Yom Kippur have been cancelled and re-arranged for Chanucah.

A spokesman said: “We hope to throw further light on this later in the year”.

msniw

This space is not known for its love of sport, where invariably it’s  dismissed briefly as ‘exercise’.

Your correspondent is blessed with neither a ‘true eye’, a sense of balance nor indeed any interest in doing much other than getting off the sofa to make the occasional cup of tea.

Otherwise, in between bouts of sleep long enough to make a dormouse  weep, she provokes her husband and brother about their perpetual semi-mourning for the glory days of Manchester City Football Club.

However, she does recall the late  Neville Cardus, who made elegiac music  from the cliched thwack of leather on willow.

Now it appears that Michael Laskey, founder of the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, has discovered those parts that the English X1 is currently failing to reach.

His poem, On Giving Up Cricket has been used by the BBC on radio and television trailers for The Ashes .

If this be the poetry of cricket – play on!

On Having Given Up Cricket

I shall play cricket in heaven
in return for the afternoons
gladly given to the other
pleasure of others’ leisure.

I shall walk, without haste, to the wicket
and nod to the angels kitted
in their whites waiting to discern
the kind of batspirit I am.

And one stroke in heaven, one dream
of a cover drive will redeem
every meeting of bat
and ball I’ve done without.

And I’ll bowl too, come on to bowl
leg-breaks with such control
of flight and slight changes of pace
that one over will efface

the faint regret I now feel.
But best of all I shall field:
alert in the heavenly deep,
beyond the boundary of sleep.

From Thinking of Happiness, 1991

* The International Aldeburgh Poetry Festival runs this year from 06 – 08 November.

msniw

You may be aware of the growing trend for charity shops to snatch business  from the genuine second hand book trade. Indeed, it has become so bad in the U.K. that last week it  hit the news headlines.

Now my lovely friend ‘B’, who’s been a bookseller longer than he cares to remember, has just told me that an Oxfam representative contacted him, explaining that they were due to open a branch near his new shop and requested that he value some of their stock – gratis. He couldn’t resist the temptation to decline!

Oxfam Bookshops describe themselves thus:

“Oxfam is the largest retailer of second-hand books in Europe, selling around 11 million books every year. Most of the 700+ Oxfam shops around the UK sell books, and more than 100 shops are specialist bookshops or book and music shops.

So whether you are searching for a Folio Society edition of Hardy’s ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’, a 1970’s Beano Annual, or a good holiday read, Oxfam is a great place to look.

Books are donated direct to shops by the public, or through more than 700 Oxfam book and music banks in convenient locations around the country”.

As a charity – often doing wonderful work for corrupt third world regimes but never helping Jewish Israelis – I suppose Oxfam feels it has the ethical high ground and can exercise moral blackmail on anyone in its way.

msniw

Funny that people like George Galloway and Tony Benn aren’t out on the streets crying havoc after watching testimony like this.

msniw

Today I write as someone with an openly, proudly gay young cousin. I write knowing my relative is a first-class son and  equally was a deeply caring and loving grandson whom his late grandmother adored.

I report further that he cares a great deal about his Jewish heritage and has become, in part, the Woods’ self-appointed family historian.

I take time  to muse also that under other circumstances too terrible to imagine, let alone delineate, that he could have been among those involved in the shooting at the GLBT community centre in Tel Aviv on Saturday night.

I write further as someone who troubles much over the present Israeli Government but who is relieved to learn that Premier  Bibi Netanyahu has pledged that the murderer will be ‘prosecuted to the full extent of the law’.

I also pen these words relieved to discover that ‘ordinary’ Israeli residents have equated the killer with the terrorist Hamas organisation.

However, if relatively small communities like the Jewish world may serve as microcosms of wider society, so Israel reflects yet more intensely as a tiny but powerful mirror of our nature.

Every time we look up; speak to friends; watch, listen to or read news of the Jewish world it is to learn we are ridden with continuous self-hating factionalism. The unending stream of nonsense, for example over non-Orthodox entry to U.K. Jewish schools and the status of women refused religious divorces by their pantomimically vindictive ex-spouses, proves time and again that the Jewish world has yet to learn the most basic of Torah (Hebrew Bible) values - to live with itself in peace.

I intend to return to this theme again but meanwhile  let’s see what the hard-working Israel Religion Action  Centre reported on  behalf of the Israeli Movement for Progressive Judaism about the GLBT centre shooting:

“The Progressive Jewish communities in Israel bow their heads in sorrow for the loss of life and the pain of the wounded in the Saturday night shooting in the GLBT Community Centre in Tel Aviv.
The possibility that this shooting was a hate crime is appalling and sends a shockwave through our communities. It serves as a reminder of the destructive forces of hate and incitement that sadly still exist in our society.
We carry a prayer in memory of the victims and wish a speedy recovery to those wounded. We add to this prayer the necessity to continue to promote tolerance in Israeli society, expose hatred, and remain dedicated to the difficult struggle against discrimination, hand in hand with the Gay community in Israel.
We look to the arrival of the days that will embody the vision of these verses from the Book of Psalms: “There will be peace in your walls, tranquillity within your homes. For the sake of my brethren and friends, I wish peace for you.”

IRAC itself stated yesterday August 2, 2009/ 12 Av 5769:

“On behalf of the Progressive Jewish family in Israel, we would like to express our utter shock over the recent shooting in Tel Aviv. We bow our heads in condolence for these two young victims whose lives were brutally ended on Saturday night.

We join in the deep sadness of the family members and the Israeli GLBT community. The fact that this shocking murder cut short an innocent gathering of youth only deepens the pain and shock.
The possibility that this murder is a hate crime heightens our awareness of discrimination in light of the GLBT community overcoming hateful incitement and primitive opinions in Israeli society. Throughout the moments of great achievements in the struggle to prevent intolerance, the GLBT Community in Israel unfortunately knows countless moments of having to cope with the pains of exposing hate, incitement, and outright rejection. This difficult tragedy has intensified the urgent need for a mutual struggle against these nasty and menacing phenomena.
At this difficult time, the Progressive Jewish communities in Israel proudly stand with the members of the GLBT community in Israel.

We are here to provide the community with public, educational, and spiritual support. We call upon our rabbis and members of our community to take part in the memorials to pay homage to those who have been killed and support those who have been wounded. We will be present at the demonstrations that will follow these tragic murders. We hope that this participation will demonstrate our commitment to building a more tolerant society together, promoting respect of all people.

Our hearts go out to the young people killed and wounded on Saturday night and our lips carry a prayer for the days to come that will embody the verses of the prophet Isaiah: “They shall not hurt or destroy anywhere in My holy mountain.” (11:9)

Anat Hoffman
Executive Director, Israel Religious Action Center

Rabbi Gilad Kariv
Director, Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism”

“May He who makes peace in high places bring peace to us and all Israel”.

msniw