Brit-Am Ephraimite Forum no. 88
Brit-Am Ephraimite Discussion. News and Issues concerning the Lost Ten Tribes and Judah in the World Today.
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no.88
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Ephraimite Forum-88
Contents:
1. Archaeology: The Tribe of Dan and
Ancient Soul-Power
2. The Holocaust: Jews Saved and Jews Abandoned to Die
3. Zionism: De-Bunking the Socialist "Pioneer" Myth
1. Archaeology: The Tribe of Dan and Ancient
Soul-Power
Found: An Ancient Monument to the Soul
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/science/18soul.html?_r=2&8dpc
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Extract:
In a mountainous kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey, there
lived in the eighth century B.C. a royal official, Kuttamuwa, who oversaw the
completion of an inscribed stone monument, or stele, to be erected upon his
death. The words instructed mourners to commemorate his life and afterlife with
feasts "for my soul that is in this stele."
University of Chicago
DISCOVERY
An inscription on a stone monument in Turkey from the eighth century
B.C. indicated a belief that the body and soul were separate.
Robert Koldewey
KINGDOM PAST A geomagnetic map of the ancient city of Sam'al, which was
excavated this summer by David Schloen, an archaeologist, below, and Amir Fink,
a student.
University of Chicago archaeologists who made the discovery last summer in ruins
of a walled city near the Syrian border said the stele provided the first
written evidence that the people in this region held to the religious concept of
the soul apart from the body.
See also:
Unveiling the Past:
the Incirli Trilingual Inscription
http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/religion/arc/incirli/index.htm
Extract:
Written in the first-person narrative by a local potentate named
Awarikku, leader of a people known as the Danunites, this profound discovery
contains inscriptions in Assyrian, Phoenician, and an ancient language known as
Luwian. Dating to the 7th - 8th centuries BCE, this incredibly significant find
could teach us much about the history of the ancient Assyrian city-states and
the history of religion.
Brit-Am Comment:
Were the Danunu Danites as Brit-Am Claims?
Did they practise human sacrifice as claimed above and as other Israelites did?
2. The Holocaust: Jews Saved and Jews
Abandoned to Die
Extract:
From: Yocheved Menashe <menashe@MAIL.H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Subject: H-AS SPARK: (RUBINSTEIN) FDR and the Holocaust
EXPLORATIONS AND RESPONSES
RESCUE OPPORTUNITIES DURING THE HOLOCAUST:
THE GUEST EDITORS RESPOND
More than 26,000 European Jewish refugees reached Palestine between
1941 and 1944 in transports organized by Zionist activists. An
estimated 27,000 Jewish refugees escaped to Switzerland and were
granted haven during the war years, though tens of thousands more
reached the Swiss border but were turned back. More than 7,000 Danish
Jews were smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Denmark to safety in Sweden
in 1943. Thousands of French Jews escaped the 1942 deportations by
fleeing to Spain. Thousands more reached Allied-liberated Italy.
There was a myriad of ways to save Jews within Europe. In 1944,
pressure by the U.S. government 's War Refugee Board convinced Rumania
to move 48,000 Jews out of the path of the retreating German Army.
The W.R.B. also financed operations to help refugees survive in
France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, including
bribing German officials, providing supplies and forged documents,
and sustaining 8,000 Jewish orphans hidden in France. The W.R.B. also
mobilized the international pressure that stopped the deportation of
Jews from Budapest to Auschwitz in 1944, and Raoul Wallenberg, who
was financed and assisted by the Board, saved many thousands in
Budapest. As a result, some 120,000 Jews were still alive in Hungary
at war 's end.
There were also countless opportunities to save Jews that were
squandered. For example, Rumania offered in early 1943 to allow
70,000 Jews to leave Transnistria; the Allied governments ignored the
offer. The W.R.B.'s plan for pressuring Spain to shelter more
refugees was blocked by the U.S. ambassador in Madrid, Carlton Hayes.
More than 200 rabbis held in the Vittel internment camp in France
were deported to their deaths in 1944 because the U.S. State
Department stalled for seven weeks before asking U.S. allies to vouch
for the rabbis questionable Latin American passports.
3. Zionism: De-Bunking the Socialist
"Pioneer" Myth
Hijacking History
by Daniel Doron
[Source: Jerusalem Post, UPFRONT,
November 21, 2008]
As is our habit we, we celebrated the 130th anniversary
of Petah Tikva - the first Jewish settlement that realised the Zionist vision of
renewing life in the Land of Israel - with a controversy.
The anniversary marks the day when four Orthodox Jews from Jerusalem - Zerach
Barnett, David Gutman, Yoel Saloman and Joshua Stampfer - rode with a Greek
doctor to the land they had purchased-for building Petah Tikva.
The occasion is celebrated with the wonderful, popular, ballad by Yoram Tehar-Lev
that relates how Saloman unable to persuade friends ignore the admonition of the
Greek doctor to leave the spot cursed with malaria, stayed put while his friends
left.
Scions of the Gutman and Starnpfer families challenged
the veracity of the ballad, which is taught as history. Salomon, they objected,
was the one who left and never ever settled in Petah Tikva. The "fleeing" trio
actually came back and settled there.
The media's fanning of the controversy focused attention
on the anniversary. Otherwise, who would have paid attention-to an event
commemorating Zionism's heroic past?
As for the controversy, myths are not history; they are
legends woven from historical material. By capturing our imagination, myth
shapes our consciousness. So we should enjoy the beautiful ballad without
worrying too much about its historical accuracy. As it is, Tehar-Lev himself was
honest enough to end his ballad with the line "perhaps (all this) was just a
dream, perhaps only a legend."
THE CONTROVERSY over the ballad diverts attention from a much more pernicious
myth about Petah Tikva, a myth propagated by Socialist Zionism: In its effort to
crown the collectivist settlements - the kibbutzim and moshavim - as the first
pioneers who renewed agricultural life in Palestine, it argued that the farmers
who settled Petal Tikva on their own private initiative, three decades before
the first kibbutz was ever established, should not be considered true pioneers.
They do not deserve the title because of accusations that they were money
grubbing landowners who employed cheap Arab labor, refusing to hire Jewish
workers.
As a half truth, it is worse than a lie.
True, the Petah Tikvah volunteers employed Arab workers for seasonal work. Not
only were these workers readily available and cheaper (economic
considerations had to dictate the practices of these farmers - who unlike the
kibbutzim and moshavim were not handsomely subsidized by the Jewish Agency - or
they could not survive), they were adept in agricultural work.
Nevertheless, in the 1920s Petah Tikva alone employed several thousand Jewish
agricultural workers, three times the number of those employed in all the
collectivist settlements - and its output was far higher than that of all the
latter combined.
. It employed "pioneers" even though many were unsuited to the rigors of
agricultural work and some were not even devoted workers, since as radical
socialists, they felt "exploited" by the farmers against whom they were
committed to a class struggle and against whom they fomented violent strikes.
To establish the primacy of the socialist pioneers and to
promote the hegemony of Socialist Zionism (and also for fund-raising purposes,
since the collectivist settlements were always dependent on heavy subsidies from
the Zionist organization and the Jewish Agency), the Labor-dominated Zionist
organization simply re-wrote history. It glossed over the role of the Orthodox
Jews and of early Yemenite settlers who were the real first pioneers.
Against all odds these first pioneers put roots in the land, relying on their
own resources and their private initiative. At first they almost failed. They
lacked agricultural training. More ominously, Turkish Palestine was not only a
dangerous place choked by a brutal administration, it was also the "prince of
desolation" as Mark Twain described it circa 1860, unsuited for agricultural
development. Luckily Baron Edmund de Rothschild came to their rescue and
generously assisted them in overcoming immense difficulties. By the time of the
Balfour Declaration, they had developed 28 prosperous settlements, from which
all the institutions of modern Israel first evolved.
THE ZIONIST organization and the Jewish Agency ignored
these spectacular achievements. Instead, they financed only collectivist
settlements and promoted the myth that the pioneers of the Second Aliya were the
true pioneers. But these late-arriving "pioneers" were really only a tiny
minority of several hundred shiftless youngsters among the 35,000 olim who
arrived between 1900 and 1914.
They established only three settlements, one of which
lasted. Even the collectivist settlements established later on were never social
or economic successes. Despite true idealism, great devotion and extreme effort
on the part of many of the members and despite the plentiful subsidies they
received (perhaps because of them), they went bankrupt every decade since their
establishment in the 1920s.
They also suffered from fierce political fragmentation
and internal conflicts and repeatedly had to be bailed out. Finally in the
1970s, the withdrawal of massive subsidies by the Begin government exposed their
fundamental social and economic weaknesses.
In the novel T'moi Shilshom (Yesterday and Yesteryear), S.Y. Agnon's hero
castigates a new immigrant: "You recognize only Messers, Ploticiansky,
Politisovitz and Politisohn, who have arrived to enjoy a meal that others
prepared for them, you are generation of ingrates who do not know who your true
builders were. If not for Barnett and his friends (the Petah Tikva pioneers),
you would not even have a place to sleep here... " Some fiction is evidently
better than "history".
Daniel
Doron
[the author of this article] is Director of The Israeli Center for Social and
Economic Progress and (in the interest of full disclosure) a scion of
Zerach
Barnett.
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