Anger is a legitimate emotion in the face of injustice. Passive acceptance of evil is not a virtue.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The British supreme court ruled on Wednesday that a London Jewish school was guilty of racial discrimination by refusing entry to a boy whose mother was a Jew by conversion and not by birth.
<span>Maxim Ghilan's "How Israel Lost its Soul" (1974) has a chapter on "Racialism in Israel", with examples of this type of discrimination, including the following -</span><span><span>
"Yaakov Markus was born in Berlin on 22 November 1927 to a non-Jewish mother named Mathilde Markus and to a Jewish father. He came to Israel and in the fifties was drafted to serve in the 1956 Sinai campaign. He was killed there and buried provisionally at the Shelah Military Cemetery. Later this cemetery was abolished and the dead were transferred to other permanent graves. Yaakov Markus's bones were to be interred - as Jewish custom stipulates for Gentile dead - 'beyond the pale', that is, behind a small stone fence cordoning off a piece of the Haifa cemetery. "In this plot were buried other non-Jewish fighters, pilots and technicians who lost their lives helping Israel win her independence in 1948 and preserving it in the years that followed. Markus's parents did not accept the Rabbinate's ruling. They wanted their son to be granted the same honour as the rest of his fallen friends - burial in the Military Cemetery. General Goren, the Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Army - a visionary racist who wanted the conquest of both banks of the Jordan, advocated a religious state and tried to modernize religion for that purpose - was not in the country. The bereaved parents appealed directly to the Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, who had to make a special ruling for them. Markus was finally buried in the same row as his fallen friends. But so that 'his bones should not be mingled with theirs', as Meshulam Shlesinger, Director of the Military Cemetery, put it, his grave was set somewhat apart. "Meshulam Shlesinger officially stated that the corpse of Yaakov Markus had been circumcised after his death, to allow it to lie beside the Jewish fighters. This was later denied no less officially by the Ministry of Defence. But the grisly and macabre atmosphere surrounding the case has done much to deepen public concern." </span></span>
<span>Maxim Ghilan's "How Israel Lost its Soul" (1974) has a chapter on "Racialism in Israel", with examples of this type of discrimination, including the following -</span><span><span>
ReplyDelete"Yaakov Markus was born in Berlin on 22 November 1927 to a non-Jewish mother named Mathilde Markus and to a Jewish father. He came to Israel and in the fifties was drafted to serve in the 1956 Sinai campaign. He was killed there and buried provisionally at the Shelah Military Cemetery. Later this cemetery was abolished and the dead were transferred to other permanent graves. Yaakov Markus's bones were to be interred - as Jewish custom stipulates for Gentile dead - 'beyond the pale', that is, behind a small stone fence cordoning off a piece of the Haifa cemetery.
"In this plot were buried other non-Jewish fighters, pilots and technicians who lost their lives helping Israel win her independence in 1948 and preserving it in the years that followed. Markus's parents did not accept the Rabbinate's ruling. They wanted their son to be granted the same honour as the rest of his fallen friends - burial in the Military Cemetery. General Goren, the Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Army - a visionary racist who wanted the conquest of both banks of the Jordan, advocated a religious state and tried to modernize religion for that purpose - was not in the country. The bereaved parents appealed directly to the Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, who had to make a special ruling for them. Markus was finally buried in the same row as his fallen friends. But so that 'his bones should not be mingled with theirs', as Meshulam Shlesinger, Director of the Military Cemetery, put it, his grave was set somewhat apart.
"Meshulam Shlesinger officially stated that the corpse of Yaakov Markus had been circumcised after his death, to allow it to lie beside the Jewish fighters. This was later denied no less officially by the Ministry of Defence. But the grisly and macabre atmosphere surrounding the case has done much to deepen public concern." </span></span>
Thanks Jemmy. That's the "beauty" of religion, in this case Judaism..Not only it defies common sense also the sense of basic human dignity.
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