ORGANIZATIONS
Federation Star
April 2021
31
JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF SWFL
www.jhsswf.org / 239.566.1771
Jewish lives matter since before the flood By Marina Berkovich, president
Marina Berkovich JHSSWF President
H
istory is a study of past events and the impact they have on human affairs. Jewish history, from its biblical origins forward, is a study of surviving the adverse human conditions that repeated destructions of civilization bring. “Civilizations vanished, but the Jewish people have not,” is an entire history lesson in itself that is taught at every Passover table and in many gentile homes through learning the Exodus chapter of the bible. I believe the core of our survival is deeply rooted in those Jewish people, who, despite direct threats, danger, fear, persecution and corruption, were able to preserve the values and practices of everyday Judaism for us, as pristinely as humanly and historically possible, through the millennia of change. Our generation, with our ease of information and communication accessibility, is trusted to help carry our small personal share of that responsibility. Easy-peasy, you’d think. There are 195 countries in the world now; 193 of them are members of UN; Vatican and “The State of Palestine” are not. Iran, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Yemen now ban Jews from entering, but before the radical Islamists resurgence of the mid 1970s, these countries had thriving Jewish communities for a doubledigit number of centuries. Not without periodic pogroms, of course. Note, I reserve the word “pogrom” in its traditional meaning of rioting and killing the Jews in acts of mass violence.
Rare is the spot in the world that did not have these periodic pogroms. Modern day pogroms are institutionalized and systemic. In 2020, Israel was condemned by the UN 17 times, triple that of other nations. Everything is upside down lately, and the Jews, the under 1% of people in the world, are again frivolously called aggressors, oppressors and worse by the much more numerous groups, whose plight Jews have frequently championed. As a Jew who understands the development of history, I fear that century XXI worldwide persecution of Jews is now a fete accompli, and it is only a matter of time before acts of overt antisemitism will spread to local communities. The quest I am on is to educate our people and our people’s neighbors about us and our essential role in our local area. Perhaps, it could be a deterrent, should we be faced with neighbors denouncing their neighbors again. Perhaps, it is a quixotic quest that would not play in a bigger game. I try, and I implore you to try with me. In my own humble eyewitness opinion, it is a much more realistic expectation to continue building up Jewish communities of the New World, where there is still a chance that human decency will prevail, than to funnel support into historically proven failures of the Old World, where, no matter the era, the Jewish money was always used to ultimately destroy their local Jews. Plenty of historical evidence supports this point. All Jewish lives matter — from agnostic and cultural to the ultra orthodox. No Jewish leader, however large or small their group, has a right to disparage that. The Jewish Historical Society of Southwest Florida is home to the history of all Jews comprising our area’s Jewish population.
Jewish Federation of Greater Naples
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