Yehuda Lave, Spiritual Advisor and Counselor

Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works  with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money,  and spiritual engagement

Learn To Forgive

 

Consistently happy people are either in one of two conditions. Either no one has ever wronged or slighted them in any way. Or else they have forgiven those who have. Since it is almost impossible not to have been wronged or slighted, if you want to master happiness, you need to learn how to forgive.

Forgiving is like floating on water. You don't need to do anything. You just need to let go. When you were a young child of five or six, you became angry at your brothers, sisters, friends, and classmates. You might have even said, "I won't forgive you." Now when you look back at the vast majority of those situations, you will see that they were trivial. It is at present easy for you to forgive someone for not giving you a bite of their ice cream, not letting you play with their toys, or grabbing your ice cream or toys. Just as you have already forgiven them, you will be able to forgive others for more recent events when you realize that most things are trivial when compared to your emotional and spiritual well-being.

We all need our Creator's forgiveness. By forgiving others we elevate ourselves and render ourselves more worthy of being forgiven. When you find it difficult to forgive, pray with your own words for the strength to forgive

Love Yehuda Lave and happy July4

Fourth Of July Events In Jerusalem Zev Stub

American Independence Day is July 4. Here are some events happening around Jerusalem to celebrate: 
July 4 at First Station

4th of July BBQ at Abraham's Hostel

 Born on the Fourth of July at AACIKaraoke Night -

July 4th Family FunJuly 4th Chili Dogs at Nitzanim

Contra Dance (Baka)
And there's always the Lights Festival and the IDF exhibit

Thursday, July 11

Redeeming Eretz Yisroel

Today we have a rare opportunity to witness the glorious and heroic redemption of our beloved land.


First, we will be the guests of "Ateret Cohanim" in Yerushalayim.We will visit the recently redeemed Jewish properties and the brave heroes of Abu Tor and the expanding Jewish presence in the historic"Yemenite Village"

.Very few have visited the growing and revolutionary Jewish presence in this special place.
Due to its isolated location, we will visit the brave pioneers of the Yemenite Village. accompanied by a security team.

In the afternoon we will travel to "Bet Bracha".This large tract of land was bought from an American Protestant missionary/hospital on the road from Gush Etzion to Hevron.

The story of its purchase and plans for its development are an amazing one. Few even know about this long kept secret purchase. We will again be amongst the first.

We will end our day with a visit to the little known memorial site where the Six Day War first  broke out in Yerushalayim
Depart from the Inbal hotel at 9:00

Return at 5:00

Cost - 220 shekels

The ramparts of the Walls of Jerusalem 070219

On a beautiful summer day in Jerusalem, we head with Shalom Polock to the Damascus gate to see the Roman Fortress underneath. On the way, we take the Ramparts walk seeing all the beauty around the old city of Jerusalem

BoringPhone created to save you from your mobile addiction

How healthy our digital habits are is the subject of much debate right now, with even Apple and Google building "digital well-being" tools into their mobile operating systems. Now there's the BoringPhone, a crowdfunded device designed so you spend less time staring at a small screen in your hand.

The BoringPhone is essentially a fairly simple Android handset – the 5.5-inch Xiaomi Mi A1 – with custom-built software loaded on top. That software gives you some of the key features of a phone while cutting out three of the biggest distractions: email, the web, and social media.

In fact there's no app store at all on the BoringPhone. You've got what comes on the phone and that's it. The preinstalled apps include a phone dialer, a messaging app (Signal), a camera, a mapping app, a podcast manager, a music player, and a syncing tool for your contacts and calendars.

On top of that you also get a calculator, gallery app, a notepad tool, a clock, a voice recorder, a torch and an FM radio app. These are all free, open source or custom-built alternatives to the usual apps you'd get from Apple, Google and others.

The idea is that you're not constantly bombarded with notifications and distracted by the likes of WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, but at the same time you have features that you wouldn't get on a basic feature phone – primarily maps, a camera, and the ability to play music and podcasts.

We were given a preview BoringPhone to have a look at, and based on a few days of use, it does a really good job of succeeding at its goals. You don't get tempted to open up Twitter or Snapchat, because they're just not there (and can't be installed). It's a refreshingly easy way to stay away from digital temptation without having to set up app timer limits.

The apps that the makers of the BoringPhone have chosen to include, such as AntennaPod and OsmAnd, aren't quite as polished as some of the better-known alternatives, but they do their jobs perfectly well, and we had no complaints in terms of features or functionality.

Of course these apps are cut off in many respects – you don't get access to all the places you've saved in Google Maps, for instance – but that's sort of the point. As an extra privacy bonus, the big tech companies aren't tracking your every move either.

Everyone's digital habits are different, and it might be that using the screen time limiting options that are on board your existing Android phone or iPhone are a better option for you. Maybe you just don't have a problem with checking your phone too often in the first place. But if you are worried about how much of your day you spend glued to your smartphone display, the BoringPhone is an intriguing option.

It also makes a really good phone for kids – everything they need to stay in touch, get around and listen to music, without access to the web or any social media tools. In fact the BoringPhone might be even more appealing to parents buying for their children than smartphone users in general.

There are some downsides. Not having instant access to your contacts and your calendars, like you do when you sign into Android or iOS, is one mark in the negative column (you can sync this information over, but it takes a few minutes to do).

Personally, I missed access to my Spotify playlists and mixes, and being able to look up something quickly on the web (or via Google Assistant). I wasn't too bothered about not being able to check my emails, but if you need anything from your inbox – like a cinema eticket, for example – then the BoringPhone can't help you.

Another area where your mileage may vary is in video playback. While I don't use Netflix or YouTube much on my daily phone, I do use those apps to cast content to a Chromecast, and that's something that you can't do with this stripped-down device.

The BoringPhone isn't really about the hardware, the speed of the Xiaomi phone and the camera performance is more than satisfactory (there's a Snapdragon 625 CPU, 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage under the hood, if you were wondering). It's also light, and feels comfortable in the hand.

What's more, the lack of apps and the monochrome color scheme mean that battery life is excellent – I've been getting well into two days of use between charges, though I was using it less than I use my normal phone... just as the developers intended.

It's a really interesting idea to put together a phone that cuts out the apps that are the biggest timesinks, while keeping the ability to take photos, get directions, listen to (locally stored) music and take down some quick notes.

Again, it seems a particularly good option for kids, but it's hard to assess just how many other people will want to add a BoringPhone to their lives. It's likely that for most smartphone owners who want to cut back on their screen time, just uninstalling apps like Twitter or Facebook is more straightforward way of doing that.

Our devices are now, more than ever, part of a wider ecosystem as well – accessing files in the cloud, controlling smart home devices, syncing information about schedules and so on – and the BoringPhone doesn't allow any of that. If that's fine with you, it could well be for you.

The makers of the BoringPhone are looking for NZ$20,000 (about US$13,440) before July 12, and at the time of writing are almost up to three-quarters of that. The cheapest Kickstarter pledge is NZ$349 (about US$235). If the project gets funded, and everything else goes to plan, shipping is estimated to start in December. The video below has more.

Source: Kickstarter

Judenrein Europe For millennia Europe was the center of diaspora life but as Jews continue fleeing the continent, by the end of this century all that’s left will be a Jewish graveyard By Joel Kotkin

Some people go their whole lives without seeing a ghost; me, I see them all the time.

Detective Bernie Gunther in Phillip Kerr’s Greeks Bearing Gifts

 

Last month the German commissioner for “Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism” used his impressively titled office to advise German Jews against wearing kipahs in public.

The commissioner’s response to a surge of anti-Semitic violence in his country was a sheepish acknowledgment that Germany is once again a dangerous country for Jews. And as Germany goes, so goes Europe. For millennia, following the destruction of the Second Temple and the beginning of the diaspora, Europe was home to the majority of the world’s Jews. That chapter of history is over. The continent is fast becoming a land of Jewish ghost towns and graveyards where the few remaining Jews must either accept an embattled existence or else are preparing to leave.

In his earliest speeches Adolf Hitler made clear that his primary mission was to make Germany, and then all Europe, judenrein—free of Jews. He failed only because of the Allied victory but today, slowly, inexorably and, for the most part, legally and largely unconsciously, Europe is fulfilling the Nazi aspiration. It is not only in Germany but in England, France, Hungary and elsewhere across the continent, that the many forms of European anti-Semitism—far right, left-wing anti-imperialist, and Islamist—are not only multiplying but moving closer toward controlling the official levers of power.

Progressives and the media prefer to blame anti-Semitism primarily on Europe’s deplorables, but the far right does not constitute the only, or even the primary threat, to European Jews. A detailed survey from the University of Oslo found that in Scandinavia, Germany, Britain, and France, most anti-Semitic violence comes from Muslims, including recent immigrants. Similarly a poll of European Jews found the majority of incidents of anti-Semitism came from either Muslims or from the left; barely 13% traced it to right-wingers. Violence against Jews is worst in places like the migrant dominated suburbs of Paris or Malmo in Sweden. 

Nor is the hollowing out of Europe’s Jews confined to one region or type of country. The rate of exodus differs in Russia compared to France, and the sources of insecurity in Belgium are not identical to those in England. But, taken together, the phenomenon of Jewish flight crosses borders and applies to Eastern and Central Europe as well as the countries of the West.

 

Cities of Ghosts

In 1920 Europe was home to over half of world Jewry and many of its most creative, dynamic communities; today it contains barely 10% of the world’s Jews. The devastation wrought by the Holocaust is not, on its own, sufficient to explain this loss. In 1939 there were 9.5 million Jews living in Europe; at war’s end in 1945 only 3.8 million remained. But today, more than half a century after the Holocaust, there are barely 1.5 million Jews left in Europe.

Cities once among the pearls of Jewish life—Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Lublin, Riga, Kiev, Prague—have Jewish populations that would fit neatly into a Texas suburb. Even the last great redoubts of Jewish life in Europe, Paris, and London, are threatened  both by right-wing anti-Semitism, assimilation, and the pernicious new hybrid that joins leftist and Islamist hatred. Today Europe boasts only three of the world’s twenty most heavily Jewish cities—Moscow, London and Paris; the rest are all in the New World or Israel.

France, with the largest European Jewish population, has been sustained largely by the mass migration from North Africa. But it still has fewer Jews than it did in 1939 and seems destined to continue shrinking. Eastern Europe, the center of the Jewish world in 1939 with its 8 million Jews, has less than 400,000 today. Germany, home to 500,000 Jews in 1933, now has as little as a third of that, with most originally refugees from Eastern Europe. Fewer than 15,000 of the Jews living in Germany today can trace their roots to the pre-Nazi era.  

In much of Europe, the artifices of Jewish life are being reduced to historical relics. The great capital city of Vienna, chosen home of Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodore Herzl, and Billy Wilder as well as the birthplace of Arnold Schonberg, was home to over 200,000 Jews in 1923. Today  there are barely 10,000 among Vienna’s 1.7 million residents, many of them refugees from the old Soviet bloc.

The early Hapsburgs, rulers of Central Europe’s last great empire, barely tolerated their Jewish subjects, treating them as “living fossils,” sometimes expelling them and other times allowing them a limited ghetto existence. But after their emancipation in 1867, noted historian Carl Schorske, Jews played an oversize role in the empire. The city’s elegant Ringstrasse apartments were often both designed and inhabited by the Jewish upper crust. Some of these are now luxury hotels, catering to Vienna’s tourist trade. Former Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society official Walter Juraschek, a 60-something child of Eastern European refugees, estimates that out of the current population of Viennese Jews a mere 500 are native Austrians. Most of the rest come from outside the country: Orthodox and entrepreneurs from Israel, or the descendants of refugees from the east.

Austria has not fully confronted its Nazi past. The country, Juraschek suggests, still indulges the fanciful notion that it was “the first victim” of Nazism even though it largely welcomed the Anschluss, the unification with Hitler’s Germany, in 1938. Vienna incubated the anti-Semitism that so influenced Hitler, himself an Austrian, who lived there under the city’s famously anti-Jewish Mayor Karl Lueger. Adolf Eichmann, another native of the country, ran the Austrian Holocaust from the former Rothschild Palace on the elegant Prinz Eugen-Strasse.

“When I was growing up, Austrians never talked about this at all,” Juraschek recalls at a small Jewish coffeehouse not far from Judenplatz, the historic center of the city’s small Jewish community. “It only became public in the late ’80s when Kurt Waldheim [former U.N. secretary general and briefly Austria’s president] was unmasked as a former Nazi.” Nor have Austria’s far-right tendencies disappeared. Until last month, the Freedom Party, founded by former SS officers, functioned as part of the country’s conservative government.

When my wife and I were staying in Vienna recently we saw large groups of Jewish tourists visiting the city’s restored old Orthodox temple, most of them visitors from North America and Israel. Such tours are now common through the old centers of Eastern and Central Europe, where visitors gaze at memorials to what were once the vital centers of Jewish communal life. Like Vienna, many once great Jewish cities with communities numbering over 100,000 members—cities like Lodz, Kiev, Warsaw—only tiny residues remain. The chances of such vibrant Jewish communities coming back to life in these cities are as likely now as the actual blue and gray returning to American Civil War battlefields.

Like Vienna, Budapest once was a dynamic center of early 20th-century Jewish life. A boomtown—the fastest growing in fin de siècle Europe—it attracted Jews from throughout Eastern and Central Europe and became one of the most Jewish cities outside the czarist empire. In 1913, the Jewish community in Budapest exceeded 200,000 people, accounting for more than 20% of the city’s estimated 1 million residents. The city, scathingly labeled “Judapest” by Vienna’s Mayor Lueger, once boasted some 47 synagogues.

Most of Budapest’s Jews lived in highly dense urban neighborhoods, but the upper crust, like their Viennese counterparts, lived in large apartments along streets like Andrassy Avenue. They thrived in part, notes historian John Lukacs, due to the dominant Magyar aristocracy’s relative inattention to business.

The magnificent Dohany Street Synagogue, third largest in the world after the Betz Great Synagogue in Jerusalem and New York’s Temple Emanuel, testifies to the vitality and great wealth of Budapest’s Jews. Its continued presence in the historic Jewish quarter of the city reflects the community’s complex history. Hungary’s Jews survived largely unscathed until 1944 due to the unwillingness of the country’s fascist dictator and Hitler ally, Admiral Miklos Horthy, to exterminate a population that, while discriminated against, still made significant contributions to the country’s productive economy. It was only in March 1944, when the Nazis installed more rabidly anti-Semitic elements inside Hungary, notably the fascist Arrow Cross, that the exterminations started.

Even then, the Dohany Street Synagogue managed to survive, in large part because it served as Eichmann’s headquarters. The Nazi architect of mass slaughter cynically knew the Allies would be loath to bomb a building located amid the Jewish ghetto. The late date of the extermination campaign—and the intervention of brave gentiles like Swedish Count Raoul Wallenberg allowed many Hungarian Jews to survive the war—some 100,000 in Budapest alone.

Of the Jews who remained in Budapest after the war, many would leave following the failed 1956 uprising against the Soviets. Today demographic experts estimate that around 47,000 Jews are left in Hungary, although counts vary and some top 100,000. It’s a far cry from the past but more than a trace. There remain 17 synagogues in the city.

This relatively robust Jewish community is located, ironically, in a country ruled by the autocrat Viktor Orban who has been widely criticized as fascistic and anti-Semitic. Orban has used thinly veiled anti-Semitic memes to attack his nemesis, George Soros. But even some Orban critics, like blogger Ádám Szedlák, see his attacks on Soros—a devoted atheist who has often been cold, if not hostile, toward both Israel and Jewish communal life—as exercises not of anti-Jewish or proto-fascist ideology but of “political opportunism.”

Ironically, Orban is far more pro-Israel than European leaders widely celebrated as standard bearers of the liberal international order, like France’s Emmanuel Macron or Germany’s Angela Merkel. He is close to Prime Minister Netanyahu and maintains particularly strong ties to the Hasidic Jews of Budapest’s thriving Chabad community. Orban’s regime has also made Holocaust denial illegal, established an official Holocaust Remembrance Day, and refused to cooperate with the anti-Semitic, far right Jobbik party.

Some local Jews endorse Orban because his strongman nationalist approach has included a ban on Middle Eastern migrants into Hungary. Longtime Jewish activist Anni Fisher, the child of Holocaust survivors, dislikes Orban’s nativist rhetoric but argues that his immigration policies have prevented the virulent Islamism all too common in other European capitals from taking root in Budapest. “The Jews here live well, not bad,” she says. But even so, Fisher does not see much of a future for the community. “The young people are not staying. All we get are Israelis and the elderly who come here to retire.”

Yet for now, in contrast to other European cities, Budapest’s Jewish quarter remains lively. You can find traditional Jewish food and klezmer music in popular hangouts like Café Spinoza. Some nominal Christians such as Kristof Molnar, a 32-year-old business development executive, are rediscovering the hidden Jewish heritage of their grandparents, and have participated in trips to Israel.

Although he sees no religious reawakening on the horizon, Molnar believes there is a modest restoration of the Jewish role in Hungarian life. “This is a new beginning,” he says. “It’s not like the old generation who only think of the Holocaust and memory. Among those of us in their 20s or 30s, there’s a desire to recommit to our own past and to that part of our Hungarian heritage that remains rooted in being Jewish.”

 

The New Threat in the West

In the past, the Jews of Hungary and other countries of Eastern Europe might have looked west for inspiration. Yet today the Jewish populations in Western Europe are themselves threatened and their populations seem likely to decline in the coming decades.

The decline of Western European Jewry is caused by a confluence of factors. The least lethal threat lies in assimilation, which impacts roughly half of all European and American Jews. Assimilation has also been especially impactful on Russian Jews, the source of much recent Jewish migration to Western Europe, since as many as 70% lose their affiliation in adulthood. But far more unnerving has been rising anti-Semitism. Some 90% of European Jews, according to recent surveys, have experienced anti-Semitic incidents. In France, anti-Semitic crimes were up by 74% in 2018 over the previous year.

Resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe has two faces, one familiar, the other of more recent vintage. A persistently weak economy, and the shrinkage of the middle class, have engendered, as in the last century, an explosive growth of right-wing populism across the continent. In some countries, notably Russia, Poland, Belgium  and parts of Germany, anti-Semitism of the traditional right-wing type has been mainstreamed, often by nationalist parties such as the ADF in Germany, the Freedom Party in Austria and Jobbik in Hungary.

These forces include some who minimize the Holocaust. Alexander Gauland, one of the leaders of Germany’s AFD, called the Nazi Holocaust: “a speck of birdshit in 1,000 years of glorious German history.” Though Gauland’s rhetoric may appear shocking coming from a German public figure, it comports with a significant segment of the German public. Just over half of Germans now believe that Jews overplay the Holocaust, according to 2015 ADL survey, while a third blame Jews themselves for rising anti-Semitism.

But the far right, as famed Nazi-hunters Serge and Beate Klarsfield explained to my wife, Mandy, and me almost two decades ago, are not nearly as powerful a threat to Jews as the alliance of Islamists and left-wing activists. Increasingly the assault on Jews reflects a larger kulturkampf being waged against Western civilization; if Hitler saw the Jews as dangerous outsiders to European culture, the left today blames them for being too linked to continental values.

As in the 1930s, anti-Semitism is reaching beyond the marginal and into the educated mainstream. Sixty percent of German anti-Semitic messages came from well-educated people, according to one study. Today barely half of Europeans think Israel has a right to exist. The generally middle class Green parties, which emerged as big winners in Germany and across the continent after the recent European elections, tend to support the BDS movement, which aims to demonize and eliminate the Jewish State. The German Greens regularly label Israel as an “apartheid” regime.

 

Jewry’s Post-European Future

Europe will not become completely judenrein in the near future. But the signs of decline are everywhere and the endpoint to which they lead appears inescapable. In Russia, the once huge Jewish population has fallen from 1.4 million in 1989 to roughly 400,000. The Israeli demographer Sergio della Pergola, an expert on Jewish populations across the world, recently pointed out that last year Russia witnessed 8,000 deaths of elderly Jews but only 600 births recorded to Jewish mothers.

In Great Britain the Jewish population has declined over the past half century. The prospect of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose long history of anti-Israel and Judeophobe associations is well known, becoming the next prime minister constitutes what Britain’s former chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks called, “an existential crisis.”  If Corbynism maintains its hold on British politics it could spark a mass exodus of British Jews. By century’s end, one study predicts, what remains in England will be a largely Orthodox community constituting the majority of the country’s Jews.

France, today home to the world’s third-largest Jewish community, appears to be following the same pattern of demographic decline. Though the French Jewish community was temporarily revived by mass migration from its former North African colonies, it has since been battered by a rising Islamist threat and a steady increase of anti-Semitic attacks. Since 2000 nearly 50,000 Jews have left France, mostly for Israel, the United States, and Canada. With no likely source of new immigration since the Middle East and North Africa are already largely judenrein, it’s difficult to envision how France’s Jewish population will grow in the future—the one exception to this being the Orthodox who can grow with above-average birth rates.

Taken together, the forces of history, politics, anti-Semitism and migratory patterns spell the likely demise of Judaism in Europe, particularly its more secular elements. The once widely spread tribe is rapidly concentrating in North America and Israel, together home to roughly 90% of all Jews. Yet even in America and Canada, both assimilation and resurgent anti-Semitism, not just among the far right, but in the universities and progressive political movements, including among Democratic members of Congress, may lead increasing numbers to feel they need to choose between  their Jewish roots and their political committments.

Over the long term, if current trends hold, the Jewish future could become predominantly Israeli, much as the French sociologist Georges Friedman predicted a half century ago. Beginning at the turn of the 20th century and continuing through recent decades, the Jewish population in North America grew by absorbing immigrants first from Central and Eastern Europe and later from places like the former Soviet Union, Iran, and North Africa. Today over 70% of diaspora Jews live in the U.S. and Canada but the aggregate numbers may decline because these Jewish communities will no longer be able to count on the infusion of “new blood” to keep them vital.

With close to a majority of all Jewish children living there already, Israel in the near future will become, for the first time since early antiquity, the home to a majority of all Jews. It marks the end of an epoch of Jewish life, and the beginning, however fraught, of a new one.

See you tomorrow

Love Yehuda Lave

Rabbi Yehuda Lave

PO Box 7335, Rehavia Jerusalem 9107202

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