Portal:Judaism

Night is a work by Elie Wiesel (pictured) about his experience with his father in the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945. In just over 100 pages of a narrative described as devastating in its simplicity, Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own increasing disgust with humanity, reflected in the inversion of the father-child relationship as his father declines to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful caregiver. He was 16 years old when Buchenwald was liberated by the U.S. Army in April 1945, too late for his father who died in the camp after a beating. After some difficulty finding a publisher, Wiesel's work appeared in Yiddish in 1955 and French in 1958, and in September 1960 was published in English by Hill and Wang. Fifty years later it is regarded as one of the bedrocks of Holocaust literature. It is the first book in a trilogy—Night, Dawn, Day—marking Wiesel's transition from darkness to light, according to the Jewish tradition of beginning a new day at nightfall. "In Night," he said, "I wanted to show the end, the finality of the event. Everything came to an end—man, history, literature, religion, God. There was nothing left. And yet we begin again with night." (Read more...)

Did you know...

• ... that in the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations (pictured), names of the Holocaust rescuers are engraved on Walls of Honor according to country?
• ... that Rabbi Akiva Ehrenfeld, founder of Kiryat Mattersdorf, Jerusalem, was the guest of honor at an official reception hosted by the President of Austria in Vienna's Hofburg Palace in 1995?
• ... that Steve Pestka resigned his judgeship to run the real estate business his father developed after surviving the Holocaust?
• ... that the daughter of Candice Cohen-Ahnine is a Jewish-Saudi princess whom French President Nicolas Sarkozy attempted to bring to France, but failed?
• ... that 1930 Wimbledon Championships mixed doubles runner-up Daniel Prenn was of Jewish origin and thus got expelled from the Germany Davis Cup team and subsequently moved from Nazi Germany to England?

The Rhodes blood libel was an 1840 event of blood libel against Jews, in which the Greek Orthodox community accused Jews on island of Rhodes (then part of the Ottoman Empire) of the ritual murder of a Christian boy who disappeared in February of that year. Initially the libel garnered support from the consuls of several European countries, including the United Kingdom, France, the Austrian Empire, although later several supported the Jewish community. The Ottoman governor of Rhodes broke with the long tradition of the Ottoman governments (which had previously denied the factual basis of the blood libel accusations) and supported the ritual murder charge. The government arrested several Jewish subjects, some of whom were tortured and made false confessions. It blockaded the entire Jewish quarter for twelve days.

The Jewish community of Rhodes appealed for help from the Jewish community in Constantinople, who forwarded the appeal to European governments. In the United Kingdom and Austria, Jewish communities gained support from their governments. They sent official dispatches to the ambassadors in Constantinople unequivocally condemning the blood libel. A consensus developed that the charge was false. The governor of Rhodes proved unable to control the local fanatical Christians and sent the case to the central government, which initiated a formal inquiry into the affair. In July 1840, that investigation established the innocence of the Jewish community. Finally, in November of the same year, the Ottoman sultan issued a decree (firman) denouncing the blood libel as false. (Read more...)

• Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, former Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth and member of the House of Lords, dies (7 November 2020)
• The Pittsburgher Rebbe, Mordechai Yissachar Ber Leifer dies of COVID-19
• A peace agreement is reached between Israel and the UAE (13 August 2020)
• Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz dies, editor of the Steinsaltz Talmud (7 August 2020)

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