October 15, 2023

As the world learns of the savagery being unleashed in Israel, those who have studied Jewish history sadly know that this is not a novel occurrence for the Jewish people.

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In late 1914, S. Ansky, the influential Jewish-Russian journalist, playwright, and politician received a commission to organize desperately needed relief for Jews on the borderlands, caught between the warring armies of Russia, Germany, and the Austrian Empire.

Thus, began a four-year journey through the Pale of Settlement where Jews had long been restricted by the Russian czars.  In Ansky’s daily chronicles, edited and translated by Joachim Neugroschel, we learn of the devastation and slaughter committed against Jews during World War I. 

It was a “campaign of brutalization by the Russian army that involved wholesale expulsions and massacres despite the presence of half a million Jews serving in the czar’s army.”  Approximately 600,000 Jews were deported from their homes. 

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Ansky provides a “catalogue of barbarism: commonplace rape and looting; expulsions of whole villages and towns; scorched-earth withdrawals; humiliations, lynchings, kidnappings, torture; and massacres.”

In essence, Ansky witnessed the “complete breakdown of civilized life resulting in a wasteland of rubble, famine, hollowed-out, half-collapsed buildings, people missing limbs, tribes of orphans.”

It was open season on Jews.  It was also a turning point for those Jews who had what Neugroschel calls “the affliction of the assimilated modern Jew” who is never quite at home either in the secular world or among traditional religious Jews.     

Remember that Israel was not an established state at that time.  Other than in the hearts of Jews, there was no Jewish homeland even though Jews had lived in Eretz Israel (Land of Israel) from time immemorial.                                                                                                                             

Hamas and the other Islamic terrorist groups are the present-day embodiment of this loathing of Jews with the added religious component of radical Islam.

Their ultimate goal is to eradicate world Jewry and, of course, their first target is Israel while also chanting “Death to America.”  To understand the mindset of radical Islamists, one need only see this 2005 movie titled Obsession.