Father Patrick Desbois is one of the leading scholars of the Holocaust in Europe. Fully a quarter of the Holocaust's six million Jewish victims never made it as far as a death camp. Instead, these 1.5 million people were shot, stabbed, mutilated and stacked in pits by savage German soldiers and their allies.
Visiting Eastern Europe many times over the years, this priest from Lyon learned the tales of murder and studied the burial sites. "There is only one human race - a human race that shoots two-year old children." "Ristance in the face of evil" is a moral obligation we too often fail to fulfill. "
???We cannot give a posthumous victory to Nazism. We cannot leave the Jews buried like animals, Men, women, and children without tombs or burial places appeared ... as the supreme token of dehumanization.???
Father Desbois has recently written a book "The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews." His book comes out in August.
There's no consensus on how to respond to intermarriage across the Jewish spectrum. Reform Judaism would be more open to intermarried couples, Orthodox Judaism the least open. Even within denominations, differences exist. Boston has a metro wide policy of welcoming couples, and apparently has had great success, with 60% of intermarried couples raising their children Jewish, double the national average.
The Passover Test
What the Passover Seder reveals about interfaith couples.
My Question Is: One hears a great deal about intermarriage, but what about Jewish non-Marriage? I know from anecdotes and statistics that Jews are less likely than non-Jews to marry. When Jews marry, they marry later in life. One would think that non-marriage is a greater dilemma, but why doesn't one hear about it more?
Corroborating Statistics on Late Marriage:
Here
Saudi Arabia officially prohibits the importation of any non-Muslim religious objects, so calling for the temporary importation of non-Muslims is a step forward.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/968247.html
]]>As wide as its denominational breadth is, the biggest differences between Christians are withindenominations, not between them. Liberal Protestants might get along better with liberal Eastern Orthodox than they do with conservatives of their same denomination.
http://www.economist.com/world/international/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=10740242
]]>http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080227/ts_alt_afp/usislamreligionethics
Gallup's poll shows that 93 percent of Muslims condemn the 9/11 attacks. Of the 7 percent who support the attacks, most gave political reasons for supporting them, not religious ones.
Though the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not radical, having 7 percent who are radical translates into tens of millions of radicalized people. The radicals are wealthier and better educated than moderates and are more likely to see a positive future for Islam.
The poll is part of Gallup's world survey. The results are being released in a book called "Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think" by John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed.
http://www.gallup.com/press/17473/Gallup-Press.aspx
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The Tridentine mass was the official mass of the Roman Catholic Church from the Council of Trent (from which it takes its name) in 1570 to Vatican II in the 1960s.
The Latin mass has grown in popularity in the last few decades and in 2007 Pope Benedict XVI announced that Catholic congregations could celebrate the mass in Latin without Vatican permission.
Now, a year later, Benedict XVI and the curia have decided to make a change to the version of the Latin mass that is used on Good Friday. The change comes to a section that mentions Jews.
Previously, the mass had called the Jews ???blind??? and had asked G-d to ???lift the veil from their hearts.???
Pope Benedict???s new mass reads:
???Let us pray for the Jews. May the Lord Our God enlighten their hearts so that they may acknowledge Jesus Christ, the savior of all men.
Almighty and everlasting God you who want all men to be saved and to reach the awareness of the truth, graciously grant that, with the fullness of peoples entering into your church, all Israel may be saved.???
This new language is doubly controversial. It???s controversial to Jewish people who don???t like being asked to convert. It???s controversial to Catholic traditionalists who believe that Catholicism is the one true faith, and therefore that non-Catholics should convert.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/06/world/europe/
Adolf Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, planned a massive museum of Judaica - a "museum of an extinct race." One item that they coveted was the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a superb illuminated manuscript from the days of Islamic Spain.
Dervis Korkut was a librarian at the Sarajevo Museum. Coming from a long line of Muslim scholars, he was fascinated by the lives of Bosnia's minorities. When the Nazis came to Sarajevo Korkut saved the precious Haggadah. He told the commanding German officer that the museum had already turned over the Haggadah to another German. Dervis then hid the Haggadah among Korans at a tiny, provincial mosque.
Dervis later saved the life of a Jewish girl.
The whole article is only available in the New Yorker's print edition, but an abstract is available here.
]]>See article Major N.Y. Islamic center honors Orthodox rabbi at annual event from HaAretz.
]]>Boteach says that "old" is a pejorative meaning "stodgy, musty and out-of-date." Since, as Boteach argues, the values of the Hebrew Bible inform American society more than the values of the New Testament/Christian Bible, the term "Old Testament" is inappropriate.
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