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July 3, 2008

Rabbi Dr. Abraham J. Twerski: A spiritual budget (TOUCHING!)

Jeff Jacoby: Israel still paying for its defeat

JWisdom:: Re-Jew-venating prayer, Part IV by Rabbi David Aaron

July 2, 2008

Jonathan Tobin: Appeasers Make Poor Patriots

The Kosher Gourmet By Kathleen Purvis: Slaw, y'all: For BBQs or Sabbath dinner, these southern recipes are something else!

JWisdom:: Rabbi Mordechai Becher: Jewish Rx for A Simpler Life

July 1, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q. I think it's important to leave a legacy to my children. How much should I save towards this end?

Paul Greenberg:A President who is history deficient?

JWisdom:: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Poland's Unique Antisemitism

June 30, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: Remembering the architect of Torah Judaism for the modern world

Abe Novick: Hulk: Still a Jew?

JWisdom: : Putting the Spirit Back into Spirituality, Part 2: The Abandoned Child

June 26, 2008

Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski: Quantum leap to evil

Caroline B. Glick: Victimized families must not be allowed to dictate policy

June 25, 2008

Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Today in Biblical History: King Jeroboam of Israel prevents pilgrimage to Jerusalem

Jonathan Tobin: Real Friends and Real Enemies

JWisdom: Raping of reason By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

June 25, 2008

Steven Emerson: Kristof: Never Mind the Terrorists

Stratfor Intelligence Briefing: Mediterranean Flyover: Telegraphing an Israeli Punch?

JWisdom: Rabbi David Aaron: Re-Jew-venating prayer, Part III

June 24, 2008

Caroline B. Glick: What were they thinking!?

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.: Guilty knowledge

JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Warping Innocence

June 23, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Diploma dilemma

Jeff Jacoby: A world without children

JWisdom: Rabbi Dovid Gross: Putting the Spirit Back into Spirituality --- Introduction

June 20, 2008

Rabbi A. Henach Leibowitz: Man: The Crowning Glory of Creation

Caroline B. Glick: Israel's darkest week

JWisdom: We aren't worthy? by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

June 19, 2008

Rabbi Elazar Meisels: The saints who don't come marchin' in

Chris Christoff: Muslim woman demands an apology from Obama after camera snub

June 18, 2008

Jonathan Tobin: Still Dancing Around Jerusalem

The Kosher Gourmet by Steve Petusevsky: Chilled fruit and vegetable soups

JWisdom: Souls Need A Check Up? by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

June 17, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: Baby Einstein

Caroline B. Glick: Bush's rhetoric, Bush's policies

JWisdom: Re-Jew-venating prayer, Part II by Rabbi David Aaron

June 16, 2008

Varda Branfman: Bob Dylan, won't you please come home?

Diana West: Academic dares to question the 'religion of peace'

JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Positive Backfire

June 13, 2008

Rabbi Berel Wein: Trading manna for whine

Caroline B. Glick: Peace with friends

JWisdom: From the mouths of … by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

June 12, 2008

Michael Feldberg: Meet Paul Revere's pal, the Orthodox Jew who played a key role in laying Boston's cultural and business infrastructure

The Kosher Gourmet by Kathy Manweiler: No need to be tempted by Wendy's mandarin chicken salad

JWisdom: Re-Jew-venating prayer, Part I by Rabbi David Aaron

June 11, 2008

Rabbi Avi Shafran: What would Hillel say?

Jonathan Tobin: UNRWA and NGOs: The Real U.N. 'Insult'

JWisdom: Sara Yoheved Rigler: Greatness Made Simple: How a momentary decision shifted life's course and destination

June 6, 2008

Rabbi Pinchas Stolper: Revelation: The basis of faith

Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Mere hours after becoming Israel's new 'best friend' Obama backtracks on status of Jerusalem

Caroline B. Glick: UN choosing to protect rogue nuclear programs

JWisdom: Sameness in difference by Rabbi Sroy Levitansky

June 5, 2008

David Lightman: Now Obama wants to be Israel's newest 'best friend'

Obama's remarks to AIPAC policy conference

The Kosher Gourmet By Ethel G. Hofman: Shavous cuisine: Ruby Fruit Soup, Lokshen Kugel with Cheese, Key Lime Curd, Calsone Casserole Frittata with Wild Mushrooms, Sun-dried tomatoes and Olives, Baked Tilapia with Pepper Cheese Cream and Brown Sugar Shortbread

JWisdom: Why a Jewish Jerusalem makes so many nervous by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

June 4, 2008

Jonathan Rosenblum: A different sort of 'religious broadcaster'

Jonathan Tobin: Misgivings on the Road to Damascus

JWisdom: 44 Years Without An Argument? by Sara Yoheved Rigler

June 3, 2008

Daniel Pipes: Obama vs. McCain on the Middle East

Everything's Relative: There is a crisis growing in Orthodox synagogues worldwide, reveals Jordan "Gorf" Gorfinkel

JWisdom: White Facades; Black Secrets by Rabbi Mordechai Becher

June 2, 2008

The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Q: Lie to outsmart discriminator?

He writes the songs that make our souls sing:Gavriel Aryeh Sanders interviews Jewish music legend Ben Zion Shenker; includes stirring, uplifting song

JWisdom: Holocaust in the Perspective of Faith by Rabbi Nosson Scherman: Of laws and lives

March 22, 2007

J-Rhythms with Avraham Rosenblum: JWR's cutting-edge music program showcasing performers -- singers, song writers, musicians, and bands -- who learn and live the Torah lifestyle (OUR NEWEST IGODCAST !)

Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Week of 20 Sivan

Nemirov massacres and the Chmielnicki uprising

By Rabbi Yonason Goldson


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Medieval Europe offered its inhabitants little in the way of prosperity or security, especially the Jews unfortunate enough to live there. In 1096, a mere three months into the First Crusade, the ragtag army of Urban II obliterated Jewish communities up and down Germany's Rhine River, communities guilty of nothing other than lying in the path of Crusaders who sought distraction from the tedium of the road. Two centuries of Crusading, undertaken to free the Holy Land from heretical Moslems, inflicted a steady fallout of collateral damage upon Jews from Paris to Jerusalem.


In the 14th Century, the Black Plague that wiped out over a third of Europe struck Jews less than half as often as gentiles, ostensibly because of Jewish dietary standards and hygiene. Knowing nothing of germ theory, however, superstitious Europeans assumed that the Jews had poisoned or cursed their well water and responded, predictably, with violence. Blood libels, pogroms, and expulsions left tens of thousands of Jews dead, with the survivors emotionally and spiritually traumatized.


But there seemed to be a faint ray of hope on the eastern horizon. As early as 1334, King Casimir III of Poland invited the Jews to settle in his country, and by 1500 the Golden Age of Polish Jewry had begun. Over the next century, the Jewish population tripled to 150,000 as Polish Jews established a successful merchant class, while the talmudic academies and scholars of Poland rivaled any throughout the Diaspora.


In a tragically familiar pattern, the financial success of Polish Jews precipitated an eventual decline in their piety and spiritual commitment. Materialism, arrogance, factionalism, and corrupt business ethics eroded the Torah foundations of the community, while persecution by the Church and resentment from an impoverished peasantry made the position of the Jews ever more precarious.


In the 1630s, a series of Cossack uprisings in the Ukraine sparked a wave of unrest throughout Eastern Europe. The Cossacks, warlike descendants of Russian serfs renowned for their skill as horsemen, had been recruited by the kings of Poland in the previous century to repel Tartar invaders from Crimea to the East. So well had the Cossacks performed their duties that, with the threat of the Tartars eliminated, the Polish government revoked the privileges and autonomy it had granted the Cossacks as payment for their services.


In 1648, a leader rose up among the Cossacks in the person of Bogdan Chmielnicki, who unified a band of former serfs, robbers, and escaped criminals into a devastating military force. Assuming the title of Hetman, or Captain, Chmielnicki allied himself with his former adversaries, the Tartars, then launched a revolt against the Polish nobility, routing 8000 soldiers of the Polish army.


Celebrated by the peasants and serfs as a hero and savior, Chmielnicki incited a peasant rebellion against the nobles. Whipped into a frenzy of violence and vengeance, the peasants struck out at the most accessible object of their oppression -- the Jewish tax collectors and moneylenders who, in their minds, represented all the injustice of the Polish system. Grateful for the opportunity to allow the rabble vent their anger against the Jews, the Polish nobility did nothing to defend them.

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A wave of massacres broke across Poland as the Cossacks drove the uprising from town to town and subjected their victims to almost unimaginable brutality. The historian Nathan Nata Hanover in Yeven Metzula records: "Some were skinned alive and their flesh thrown to the dogs. The hands and feet of others were chopped off and their bodies flung into he roadway where wagons ran them over and they were trampled by horses... Children were slaughtered at their mothers' breasts, and they were sliced open like fish... no form of unnatural death in the world was not inflicted upon them." And although Jews were the primary target of violence, the rebels ravaged and beheaded Roman Catholic clergy, while churches were pillaged and set aflame.


In what has become known as the Gezeiras Tach V'Tat (the evil decree of the Jewish years 5408 -- 5409, but which continued for an additional three years), an estimated hundred thousand Jews lost their lives, and hundreds of communities disappeared. But amidst the long travail of savagery, one day stands outs beyond all the rest.


On the twentieth day of the month of Sivan, 1649, the rebels fell upon the Polish town of Nemirov. In a single day, Chmielnicki's Cossacks slaughtered 6000 Jews until the Bug River turned red with Jewish blood. The following year, the Council of the Four Lands, an autonomous Jewish governmental body over Eastern Europe, established the date as a day of fasting and lamentation. In some communities, the mournful Selichos prayers are still recited in commemoration of the massacres.


With his forces widely scattered and the Tartars having betrayed him by allying themselves with the Poles, Chmielnicki negotiated a treaty in August 1649, only to reignite his rebellion in 1652 when the Tartars switched their allegiance back to the Cossacks. During the interim, the Jews of Poland found themselves victims of violence from the Poles who, incomprehensibly, accused them of collaboration with the Cossacks. Further ravaged by a cholera epidemic in the summer of 1652, many Jews fled Poland for Germany, Lithuania, Russia, or the Balkans.


The aftermath of the Chmielnicki massacres, however, was even more far-reaching. Demoralized and disillusioned, the Jews of Europe cast about for some way to make sense of the devastation that had left so many dead and so many more with shattered lives. Surely, G-d would not have subjected them to such senseless pain and suffering unless it were part of a greater plan. Surely, there had to exist some divine method behind the madness. Surely, a tragedy of this scale could only be explained as the chevlei Moshiach, the prophesied and long-awaited birth pangs of the Messiah.


Seeking to make sense out of insanity, the Jews of Europe assuaged their scarred psyches by indulging hope in the coming dawn of messianic redemption. Barely a decade later, many of them would believe their faith rewarded with the appearance of the charismatic leader Shabbsai Tzvi, who convinced much of European Jewry that he was indeed their prophesied Redeemer.


The catastrophic rise of this false messiah and his eventual conversion to Islam left an already broken Jewish people even more bereft of hope and faith. It began an era of spiritual darkness for the Jews of Europe from which they would only begin to emerge with the birth of the Chassidic movement half a century later.


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JWR contributor Rabbi Yonason Goldson teaches at Block Yeshiva High School in St. Louis. Comment by clicking here.


Previously:

Independent Judea under Shimon HaMaccabee
The Great Revolt begins
Dedication of new walls of Jerusalem

© 2006, Rabbi Yonason Goldson