Report: ‘Millions’ of Jewish American Dollars Paid to Raise Percent of Arab Vote By Hana Levi Julian and Kol Nidre - Al Jolson, The Jazz Singer (1927) whose Yarseit is today 13 Marcheshvan TISHA B’AV IN THE WARSAW GHETTO 1942 written by Larry Domnitch and PRE-WORLD WAR II SYNAGOGUE IN POLAND CLOSED AND FACES IMMINENT DEMOLITION and Life expectancy in the U.S. fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021, the sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years, largely because of Covid.

View in browser 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 Join my blog by sending me an email to YehudaLave@gmail.com 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. Report: 'Millions' of Jewish American Dollars Paid to Raise Percent of Arab Vote By Hana Levi Julian A bombshell report Saturday night on Israel's Channel 13 News claimed millions of American dollars were used to increase the Arab vote in Tuesday's Israeli elections. The information was made public by Israeli Arab candidate MK Sami Abu Shehada, chair of the Balad party. Balad failed to cross the electoral threshold and will not be part of the 25th Knesset as a result. Biden Administration officials and leaders of the liberal American Jews communities expressed deep concern prior to the election that Israel would be led by right-wing "extremists" in the upcoming government. Their concerns were focused primarily on the inclusion in the cabinet of Religious Zionism party chair MK Bezalel Smotrich and Otzma Yehudi party chair MK Itamar Ben Gvir. A fellow journalist on the newscast noted, "This is the second time – the first being in 2015 – that money from the United States and European Union, foreign governments and NGOs, has been used to interfere in Israeli elections" with the goal of preventing Netanyahu from leading the country. Abu Shehada told Channel 13 anchor Ayala Hasson in an interview, "A lot of American Jewish money went into Arab society to prevent Netanyahu from returning to power." The Balad chair said the money "went to Ra'am, and to [Hadash-Ta'al faction leader Ahmad] Tibi and others via all kinds of NGOs in order to increase the vote in [Arab] society." Abu Shehada expressed wonder at the phenomenon, asking, "Why would an American Jew, who doesn't know us at all, and doesn't know where we live, and in fact we are of no real interest to him, intervene with millions of dollars? What's his interest?" According to the Balad leader, the money was invested in various efforts to raise the Israeli Arab voting percentage with "buses in the Negev, house-to-house campaign workers, etc… we're talking about millions of dollars." It is possible to check this out, he said, because the parties are required to file documents detailing their finances. Kol Nidre - Al Jolson, The Jazz Singer (1927) whose Yarseit is today 13 Marcheshvan Life expectancy in the U.S. fell precipitously in 2020 and 2021, the sharpest two-year decline in nearly 100 years, largely because of Covid. Early data from the CDC shows a drop of nearly one year from 2020 to 2021, thanks largely to the COVID-19 pandemic. By Steven Ross Johnson| Based on "nearly final" data, a report from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics shows that life expectancy at birth in the U.S. fell to its lowest level since 1996 last year, dropping from 77.0 years in 2020 to 76.1 years. Average life expectancy in the U.S. dropped for a second straight year from 2020 to 2021, according to new provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with the COVID-19 pandemic once again playing an outsize role in the decline. Based on "nearly final" data, a report from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics shows that life expectancy at birth in the U.S. fell to its lowest level since 1996 last year, dropping from 77.0 years in 2020 to 76.1 years. The year-over-year decline is the second in a row and contributed to the largest two-year drop in life expectancy since the early 1920s, officials said. In 2020, the U.S experienced its largest one-year drop in life expectancy since World War II, with a fall from 78.8 years in 2019 to 77 years. The latest figures highlight a disturbing downward trend tied to the pandemic: Since 2019, U.S. life expectancy has fallen by more than 3%, with deaths from COVID-19 tied to nearly 74% of the decline from 2019 to 2020 and to nearly half of the drop from 2020 to 2021. Researchers attributed increased fatalities from unintentional injuries, or accidents, to 16% of the decline in life expectancy from 2020 to 2021, with CDC officials noting in a release that drug overdoses account for roughly half of deaths from unintentional injury. The most recent provisional data reported by the National Center for Health Statistics shows that more than 104,500 overdose deaths have been reported over the 12-month period ending this past March. Other causes of death contributing to the decline in life expectancy last year, according to the report, include increases in mortality tied to heart disease, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, and suicide. "The decline in life expectancy would have been even greater were it not for the offsetting effects of decreases in mortality" due to conditions such as influenza and pneumonia, chronic lower respiratory diseases and Alzheimer's disease, according to the report. The gap in life expectancy between women and men widened in 2021 to 5.9 years compared with 5.7 years in 2020, according to the study, marking the largest gap between the genders since six years in 1996. Life expectancy at birth among males was 73.2 years in 2021, a one-year decline from 2020, while female life expectancy saw a 0.8-year decline to 79.1. Among racial and ethnic groups, American Indian or Alaska Native people experienced the biggest decline in life expectancy, seeing a drop of 1.9 years from 67.1 in 2020 to 65.2 in 2021. From 2019 to 2021, life expectancy among the American Indian or Alaska Native population has declined by 6.6 years, according to the study. The second-biggest decrease in life expectancy by race and ethnicity from 2020 to 2021 occurred among the white population, which saw a one-year decline from 77.4 years to 76.4 years. Life expectancy among Black individuals saw a 0.7-year drop from 71.5 years in 2020 to 70.8 years in 2021, while the Asian population experienced the smallest drop in life expectancy, from 83.6 years to 83.5. The Hispanic population experienced a 0.2-year decline in life expectancy, from 77.9 years in 2020 to 77.7 years in 2021. The data appears to point to a narrowing or shift in the disparate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities of color. While whites in the U.S. experienced a drop of 1.4 years in life expectancy from 2019 to 2020, for example, the Black population saw a drop of more than three years and life expectancy for the Hispanic population dropped by four years. In 2021, though, the drop among whites was greater than the drops in life expectancy for both Blacks and Hispanics. "This may have something to do with where the pandemic was most prevalent during 2021," says Robert Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch at the National Center for Health Statistics. Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Population Health at Virginia Commonwealth University and director emeritus of the school's Center on Society and Health, says such shifts may involve differences in attitudes between white Americans and minority groups toward pandemic safety precautions such as social distancing, mask-wearing and vaccinations. Woolf co-authored a separate study published earlier this year that also found white Americans had larger losses in life expectancy between 2020 and 2021 than the Black or Hispanic populations, after the reverse had played out between 2019 and 2020. Woolf says there is evidence that Black and Hispanic communities, despite early concerns about vaccine hesitancy, have more readily sought out vaccinations and been more likely to wear masks and take other precautionary measures, in part in response to the deaths and illnesses those populations incurred from COVID-19 in 2020. Woolf says in areas of the country where there has been more skepticism about the science around COVID-19 and vaccines, a large portion of those populations are predominantly white, which he contends has led to a greater loss of life within those populations than otherwise would have been expected. "Based on the actual epidemiology of this disease as we saw during 2020, the Hispanic and Black populations are at … higher risk of getting infected, developing complications, getting hospitalized and dying from COVID-19 than the white population," Woolf says. "So, the epidemiology would not be able to explain why white people are dying at higher rates except for the fact that the protective measures that are available may not be as popular in the white population." Woolf's study also showed how the U.S. fared poorly in terms of life expectancy compared with other peer countries from 2019 to 2021, and a separate New York Times analysis published in early February showed that America had the highest number of COVID-19 deaths per capita between the onset of the pandemic and Jan. 31 of this year when compared with a group of other high-income countries. From the beginning of the omicron variant wave in December 2021 through January, the U.S. was the only wealthy nation to post a death rate well above 20 deaths per 100,000, according to the Times analysis. "During 2021 when this additional decrease in life expectancy occurred, other countries recovered much of their losses and some actually achieved a net increase in life expectancy," Woolf says. "So the rest of the industrialized world has been getting back to normal during the year when the U.S. life expectancy was continuing to fall further. "This is clearly an indication of something very critically wrong with how the U.S. handled the pandemic." PRE-WORLD WAR II SYNAGOGUE IN POLAND CLOSED AND FACES IMMINENT DEMOLITION The owner of the synagogue building, a local real estate developer, "doesn't want us there," said community member David Gurfinkel. The 120-year-old Reicher Synagogue in Lodz, Poland. Credit: Wikipedia. (JNS) A synagogue that served as a Jewish house of worship in the city of Lodz, Poland, before World War II and, in recent years, has once again been used by members of the Jewish community there was abruptly shut down. According to a report in the Israeli media outlet Ynet, members of the Lodz Jewish community said the locks to the 120-year-old Reicher Synagogue were abruptly changed, and that the building's owner told them they could no longer enter because of safety concerns due to the building's age. The synagogue is one of the few to have survived the Holocaust and has continued to serve as a prayer spot for members of the small Jewish community in Lodz—the second-largest Jewish community in Poland before the war—and which saw a ghetto established there during the war. The existing Jewish community volunteered to renovate the structure, but the owner declined, leaving many convinced that the owner plans to demolish the building to put up a residential complex instead. The owner of the synagogue building, a local real estate developer, "doesn't want us there," said community member David Gurfinkel. The leader of "Hakoach Lodz," a group that seeks to promote Jewish culture in the city, Gurfinkel told Ynet that the Reicher Synagogue once saw 20 to 30 worshippers daily. Those figures vary based on the number of Israeli tourists and the time of year, he said, adding that the population of the local Jewish community has risen in recent months due to the influx of Ukrainian Jews. TISHA B'AV IN THE WARSAW GHETTO 1942 written by Larry Domnitch Before the Germans captured the city of Warsaw in the 1939 Blitzkrieg, there were 360,000 Jews in the Polish capital. Its Jews were forced into the Warsaw Ghetto, which was enforced by the Nazis on November 15, 1940. Many of the ghetto's inhabitants perished from disease and starvation, but the population was maintained by the continual influx of Jewish refugees. Warsaw's Jewish population soon reached 460,000. The Jews of the Ghetto were initially unaware that they were being forced into what was a holding pen for the death camps, most to the slaughterhouse – Treblinka, which would execute eight hundred thousand people, the vast majority of whom were Jews, within the span of months. On July 22, the eve of Tisha B'Av 1942, the death sentence for Warsaw's Jews was issued. In the early morning hours the Judenrat (Jewish police) was convened and the authorities for 'Resettlement Affairs' ordered the "resettlement in the east of all Jews residing in Warsaw regardless of age and sex." The order called for six thousand Jews per day to be rounded up and deported. A week before the announcement of deportations, rumors had already spread in the ghetto, and the Jews were gripped with terror. The head of the Judenrat, (the Jewish police) Adam Czerniakow asked Nazi officials for an explanation, but received nothing but denials. On the 22nd of July, at 7:30 in the morning, Czerniakow, along with the members of the Judenrat, were told that the deportations were to begin the next day – which was Tisha B'Av — and the expulsions would include children. He immediately realized the gravity of such an order and that his previous cooperation with the Germans was a grievous error. This was an order he would not sign. The night following the first deportation, he took his own life, leaving a note, "I am powerless my heart trembles in sorrow and compassion. I can no longer bear all this." In a diary on the Warsaw Ghetto, Scroll of Agony, by Chaim Kaplan, he foresaw the doom that awaited the Jews of Warsaw with the issuance of the deportation decree. He had surmised that the deportations can only be a death sentence and those who deny it, "grasp at straws." In a July 26 entry, Kaplan wrote, "We, the inhabitants of the Warsaw ghetto are now experiencing the reality. Our good fortune is that our days are numbered –that we shall not have to live long under conditions as these." The decree ordered all Jews to be deported except those who worked in German industries and the Judenrat. Over the next nine days 66,701 Jews were deported to Treblinka. KPLn recorded that at Treblinka, a sign displayed at the entrance intended to maintain calm stated, "Do not worry about your future. … all of you are headed for the east, to work; while you work, your wives shall take care of your houses. But first you must bathe and your clothes must be cleaned of lice." Only moments later, after merciless beatings by SS and Ukrainian guards, the victims were sent to their execution. On July 29, the next round of Warsaw's deportations began. The SS, along with Latvian and Lithuanian troops, closed off individual blocks and forced people from their homes. Many were shot on the spot; others were savagely beaten. When the crowds' numbers reached a few thousand, they were herded off to the "Umschlagplatz"—a deportation railway yard, to be transported. Every morning and evening, the roundups took place. Over the month of August, 142,525 Jews were deported, with 135,120 being sent to Treblinka. By mid August, it was widely understood that "resettlement" was a myth as evidence had already reached the ghetto by witnesses to Nazi atrocities. By October 3, 310,000 Jews were deported, including most members of the Judenrat. Many were deported on September 21–Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Dr. Hillel Seidman wrote in an entry in a Warsaw Ghetto diary entitled The Night of Tears, "As Night falls I finally reach home, my brain bursting with terrifying images. Crossing our courtyard I notice our small shtiebl. About twenty men sit on upturned benches – it's Tisha B'Av tonight! Two flickering candles dimly light up the bent heads, with their eyes staring into the far distance, as that heartrending tune wells up: "Eichah…" (The book of Lamentations by the prophet Jeremiah traditionally read of Tisha B'Av.)"The tune that was perhaps first composed at the exile from Jerusalem and has since absorbed the tears of generations. "We Jews of Warsaw, sons of those exiles, sit on the ground to mourn our own personal churban 1 , the destruction of a major kehillah (Jewish community) – the largest and most vigorous in Europe – which resulted from that earlier Churban (Destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans) We weep at our fate, a nation without a land, within the grasp of our fiercest enemy and condemned to death. We grieve both for the loss of the Beis Hamikdash (the Holy Temple of Jerusalem) and the extinction of our lives." On Tisha B'Av 1942, the well-organized Nazi killing machine whose horror knew no bounds was set into high gear in the city of Warsaw. A chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto, Emanuel Ringelbaum, called the eve of that Tisha B'Av in 1942 "The blackest day in Jewish history in modern times." See you tomorrow bli neder We need Moshiach now! Love Yehuda Lave Yehuda Lave, Spirtual Advisor and Counselor Jerusalem, Jerusalem  Israel 972-585043210 YehudaLave@gmail.com You received this email because you signed up on our website or made a purchase from us. Unsubscribe