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Every Israeli child knows these lines by heart: “He (Bar Kokhba) was a hero, he struggled for freedom, the whole nation loved him. Hero!”. Written by Levin Kipnis in 1930, this children song depicts Bar Kokhba as a Jewish version of Che Guevara – tall, handsome, riding a roaring lion, wasting Romans in one hand, holding a flag of liberty in the other. Soon the song became popular in almost all Zionist youth movements and young pioneers were raised admiring the might of Bar Kokhba, who became, along with Mattathia and his sons the Hasmoneans – a national Jewish hero. Almost[…]

After the Nazis came to power in Germany 1933, some half a million German Jews were gradually leaving Germany. The vast majority of those descendants of Ashkenazi communities, who lived along the Rhine since the ninth century fled to America and Great Britain, while a small 10% chose to immigrate eastwards to the Land of Israel. They were welcomed not only by mosquitoes and swamps, but also with humiliating and condescending attitude from the veteran Israelis. Much like Jews from Arab lands, who were given offensive nicknames, German immigrants too suffered mocking insults. They were called “The Yekkes”, one interpretations[…]

In 1903 the young poet Chaim Nachman Bialik was sent to Kishinev, Russia, to cover the pogroms there. He faced horrible sights: 49 brutalized dead bodies, 92 severely wounded, dozens of Jewish shops ruined and looted. But what upset him even more were the humiliation, the helplessness, the shredded self-respect of the Jews – these scarred the young man’s soul forever. He expressed his rage and frustration as to the passive, weak reaction of the Jews, in the sarcastic poem In the City of Slaughter בעיר ההריגה, which became his life’s work. The poiema, which included harsh accusations against the[…]

There are so many Jewish jokes and tales out there, with hardly anything to do with real events or people. Take for example the case of the wise men of Chelm: though Chelm is an actual city, it had a perfectly normal population of both wise and stupid. No one really knows why Chelm entered folklore as a fool’s town. And on the contrary, the figure of Juha – the protagonist of jokes and tales in Muslim countries, was not an actual person as far as we know, yet was widely used as a literal joker by both Jews and[…]

It was a cold night in January of 1943. Two friends were walking in the fifth avenue in New York. Children were making snow men on the sidewalks and the showcases still had remains of bright neon lights decoration from New Year’s Eve celebrations. Then the two men sat on a bench under a street light and one of them pulled out a week old Swiss newspaper. He read out loud in his friend’s ear; it was an item about a proposal made by the Romanian government to Britain and U.S.A. to allow 70,000 Jews from Transnistria to flee from[…]

In 1963 the Israeli foreign ministry invited Johannes Bogaard, a Dutch farmer, to Israel on an official visit. He was awarded the “Righteous Among the Nations” title by Yad Vashem, the National Holocaust Memorial Authority, for saving some 300 Jewish children from certain death during the Holocaust, between 1941 and 1945. The ceremony included planting a tree in his honor. Bogaard was born in 1891 in a small village called Nieuw Vennep in Holland. He had hardly any formal education, just two years in elementary school, then since the age of 8 he worked at the family’s farm, and as[…]

During the Holocaust a number of incredibly brave individuals risked their lives to save those of their friends, neighbors, or even the lives of strangers. One of the most remarkable stories of courage and creative thinking in the face of danger is that of Dr. Eugene Lazowski, who managed to create an entire typhus “epidemic” in order to keep the Nazis at bay. Dr. Lazowski (whose original name was Eugeniusz Sławomir Łazowski) was born in Częstochowa, Poland in 1913. In 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, Dr. Lazowski was a young physician who had recently finished medical school and who[…]

As Prof. Israel Yuval was standing with his three daughters at the bottom of the deep cistern under the famous basilica in the German town of Trier, he felt it was a life changing moment for him. 900 years beforehand, at that very spot, Jewish parents were willing to throw their children into the pit before the crusaders walk into town. The awe that held him as he was picturing the horrid view, set Prof. Yuval on a pioneering research journey at the end of which his article “Revenge and Curse – Blood and Libel” was published, in 1994. It[…]