The Hope and Tragedy of the “Two-State” Deal of the Century
By Robert Leonard Berkowitz
“The Jews bring to the land the social dynamism and scientific method of the West; the Arabs confront them with individualism and intuitive understanding of life. Here then, in this close association, through the natural emulation of each other, can be evolved a synthesis of the two civilizations, preserving, at the same time, their fundamental characteristics. In each State, the native genius will have a scope and opportunity to evolve into its highest cultural forms and to attain its greatest reaches of mind and spirit. In the case of the Jews, that is really the condition of survival. …
By Robert Leonard Berkowitz
The word pogrom in Russian and Yiddish means “devastation.”
It derives from a Russian word that means to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.
Historically, it is mostly associated with violent outbursts against Jews that began in the 1880s and continued in sporadic waves over the five decades that followed.
Those pogroms occurred mostly in Russia, the Ukraine and Poland where the overwhelming majority of world Jewry resided.
They are mostly named after cities where they burst on to the scene — names like Warsaw, Kiev, Kishinev, Odessa, Bialystok, Lwow, and Kielce — and where they wrought the greatest destruction to life and property. …
Robert Leonard Berkowitz
This past November 11th I gave a lecture at one of the largest Jewish Federations in the nation. The occasion was the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the three-day “Night of Broken Glass” rampage against Jews in Germany and Austria that began on November 9th, 1938.
Kristallnacht was the worst pogrom in Jewish history and the first of several stepping stones along the inexorable path to the Holocaust.
In my presentation, I spoke at length about the lessons of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust, among them the need to speak out loudly and clearly against self-serving demagogues who cynically stoke the flames of fear, resentment and hate by demonizing and scapegoating religious, ethnic and racial minorities. …
By Robert Leonard Berkowitz
Delivered November 11, 2018 at a jointly-sponsored event by the Jewish Historical Society and Holocaust Council of New Jersey
Had I been living in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh on my way to the Tree of Life Synagogue two Sabbaths ago and were my mother still alive, I would begin by sharing a personal story that happened on the morning of 10/27 when a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi and white nationalist gunned down eleven innocent worshipers in the deadliest attack ever on the Jewish community in this country.
However, since I was sitting at my desk in Connecticut on that tragic Sabbath morning putting the finishing touches on this presentation, I am going to begin by sharing a personal story that happened on the morning of 9/11 in Lower Manhattan when three thousand innocent souls lost their lives at the hands of Al Qaeda terrorists consumed with blind hate of western democratic values, and espousing a virulent strain of anti-Semitism echoing back to the darkest days of Nazi Germany. …
By Robert Leonard Berkowitz
Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of man’s dignity and integrity — Rabbi Joachim Prinz
The murder of eleven innocent worshipers at the Tree of Life synagogue - the deadliest attack ever on the Jewish community in this country- occurred on the 80th anniversary of one of the most fateful events in Jewish history.
On that day in 1938, in what the New York Times described as possibly “the greatest mass deportation of recent times,” the Nazi government began deportation of seventeen thousand Polish-born Jews living in Germany and Nazi-occupied Austria. …
By Robert Leonard Berkowitz
Delivered September 11, 2018, the second day of the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah.
In the above letter written from Nazi-occupied Poland in February 1940, the author’s cousin, Ignacy Rotlein, a brilliant chemical engineer, makes an urgent request for care packages and transit visas for himself, his young wife Janina and his parents. Near the end of the letter, in a prophetic plea, he asks the author’s grandmother in America, “to please not forget us.”
September 11th!
On that pristine blue-sky morning seventeen years ago, I was in Grand Central Station on my way to a meeting at the World Financial Center, a complex of office buildings connected by pedestrian bridges to the Twin Towers. …
By Robert Leonard Berkowitz
Copyright © 2017 all rights reserved
In a letter from the outskirts of the Warsaw Ghetto my cousin Ignacy, a brilliant chemical engineer, made an urgent request for care packages and transit visas for himself, his young wife Janina and his parents. Near the end of the letter he asked that my grandmother, in America, “please not forget us.”
On May 15, 1942, years before I was born, my cousin Allie Stolz, a second-generation Jew from Newark, New Jersey, fought for the lightweight boxing title of the world at Madison Square Garden. More than 16,000 fans packed the Garden on 8th Avenue between 49th & 50th Streets. Nearly 4,000 came from Newark’s heavily Jewish Clinton Hill and Weequahic neighborhoods, where Allie grew up. As famed sportswriter Dick McCann wrote in the Daily News on the day of the fight, “Most of the fans will be traipsing across the Hudson from New Jersey where Stolz has staged most of his best fights.” …
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