Beyond Hitler’s Grasp

A great many Jews know the story of how the Danes rescued 8,000 Jews from the Nazis by smuggling them to Sweden in fishing boats. Very few Jews know the story of how all 50,000 Bulgarian Jews were saved. Not a single Bulgarian Jew was deported to the death camps, due to the heroism of many Bulgarians of every walk of life, up to and including the King and the Patriarch of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.In 1999, Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, flew with a delegation to Sophia to meet the Bulgarian Prime Minister. He gave the Prime Minister the first Bulgarian-language copy of a remarkable book, Beyond Hitler's Grasp, written in 1998 by Michael Bar Oar, a professor at Emory University (a Bulgarian Jew who had immigrated to Israel and then to the USA). This book documents the rescue effort in detail. The ADL paid…

The book is available in some local libraries.

The Tent-Peg Business:Some Truths About CongregationsBy Rabbi Lawrence Kushner1.    If synagogues were businesses, their product would be Jews.  The more Jews they could manufacture from otherwise illiterate, assimilated, and un-self aware members, the more successful they would be.  That is (to continue the metaphor) the bottom line.  Simply getting together with other Jews may be ancillary and even indispensable to this ultimate goal, but it can just as easily be -- as is often the case when Jews get together to watch a movie, eat dinner, or play tennis -- a pleasant way to pass time.2.    Jews need one another, and therefore congregations, to do primary religious acts which they should not, and probably cannot, do alone.  Doing primary religious acts is the only way we have of growing as Jews.  Consequently, it is also the only justification for the existence of a congregation.  Everything else congregations do, Jews can…

I was watching an episode of Doctor Who called the Forest of the Dead. Doctor Who is an alien, the last of his people. He travels through time and space and solves problems and rights wrongs. In this episode, he comes across the universe's biggest library containing every book ever written until the 51st century. The library is somewhat sentient and has the collective knowledge of the evolved “Internet”. At some point the Doctor is threatened and rather than explain why he should be the last person to be confronted, he suggests that the other entity look him up in the library. This library is the ultimate memorial book of all who are alive or died. It has a Jewish soul; nothing and no one is forgotten.Last July when I started to populate this new TBS website, I was deeply disappointed that our previous host managed to lose our old…