The JEWISH Shabbos Chanukah / Miketz • Dec. 7, 2018 • 29 Kislev, 5779 • Torah columns pages 20–21 • Luach page 20 • Vol 17, No 47
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Israel confronts Hezbollah Bibi: Northern tunnels part of terrorist plan to seize the Galilee
A terror tunnel was built from Lebanon into tranquil Metula in northern Israel.
The Jewish Star / Ed Weintrob
Combined Sources Hezbollah is building tunnels “with direct support and funding from Iran” in an effort to capture northern Israel’s Galilee region, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday. “Capturing parts of the Galilee by Hezbollah is a concrete threat,” Netanyahu said in a televised news conference from the country’s defense headquarters in Tel Aviv after Israel announced an operation to shut down the tunnels. “The operation will continue until the outcome is achieved, however long that may take.” Netanyahu said the tunnels were being built by Hezbollah “with one purpose in mind — to attack and murder innocent Israeli men, See Tunnels on page 26
Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu on Nov. 19.
Flash90
Tourist delight: Tragedies dim Chanukah joy Jews Poland By Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA WARSAW, Poland — Shopping was the last thing on Sarah Hirsch’s mind this summer when she boarded a flight from Tel Aviv to this capital city. It started out as a Holocaust pilgrimage. Hirsch, 67, flew from Israel to with her husband, Naftali, and a friend to see where her older brother was murdered at the age of 3, along with three of her grandparents and all her uncles and cousins. “I told myself I would do nothing but study and mourn,” Hirsch, who was born shortly after World War II in what today is Romania, told JTA after touring Auschwitz. “It would be an inand-out,” she said of her and her husband’s first visit to Poland. Hirsch, a retired lawyer, also was antagonized after Poland passed a law early this year banning rhetoric that blames the See Poland on page 6
In 2016, Rabbi Moshe Gottesman lit a menorah at HANC that was dedicated in 2003 in his honor.
By The Jewish Star Two pillars of the South Shore Jewish community were lost over the weekend. •Dr. Richie (Nochum Tzvi) Friedman, 56, active in Hatzalah organizations for more than 30 years, was struck by a car in Lawrence while walking home from shul on motzei Shabbos. His levaya took place on Sunday at the Bobover Beis Medrash in Boro Park and at Yeshiva Darchei Torah in Far Rockaway. •The levaya for Rabbi Moshe Gottesman, 86, former dean of the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County, who was active in numerous See Tragedies on page 26
Richie Friedman, active in Hatzalah, was niftar after being hit by a car walking home from shul on motzei Shabbos.
Bush 41, Jews and Israel: It was complicated
President George H.W. Bush with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1992. Paul Richards/AFP/Getty
By Ron Kampeas, JTA WASHINGTON — George H.W. Bush, the one-term president whose public grappling with Jewish leaders made headlines while his private interventions helped bring tens of thousands of Jews out of danger, died Friday at home in Houston, less than a year after his wife Barbara. His failed 1992 re-election bid marked a low point in relations between Republicans and the Jewish community. Bush scored 11 percent of the Jewish vote, one-third of his share four years earlier in his victory over Michael Dukakis. The Bush presidency was marked by tensions both with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and American Jewish leadership. In 1991, the president lashed out at pro-Israel activists who flooded Congress in response to the
‘When you add up the Jews he saved, he will be a great tzadik’ president’s reluctance to approve loan guarantees for Israel to help absorb hundreds of thousands of Jews from the collapsed Soviet Union. Bush called himself “one lonely guy” battling “a thousand lobbyists on the Hill.” Jewish leaders resented the insinuation that the pro-Israel community was possessed of a power sinister enough to unsettle the leader of the free world. The “one lonely guy” comment haunted Bush thereafter, with even Republican Jews apt to use
the first Bush presidency as a signifier of how far they had traveled in attracting Jewish support. Yet that was hardly the whole story. Less remembered was how, as Reagan’s vice president, Bush quietly engineered pivotal efforts to bring Jews out of the Soviet Union, Ethiopia and Syria. “When you add up the Jews he saved, he will be a great tzadik,” Abraham Foxman, the AntiDefamation League’s former director, said. Bush was deeply involved in foreign policy as vice president, and Jewish leaders said he helped orchestrate the dramatic Seder hosted by Secretary of State George Schultz at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in 1987. He also ignored advice from his national security team in 1991 and approved American overtures to the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia that See Bush on page 7