Statistics
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Hostages taken into Gaza: 251
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Hostages remaining in Gaza: 73, including 3 taken before Oct. 7, 2023
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Hostages in Gaza believed to be dead: 36, including one from before Oct. 7, 2023
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Director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Irving M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. ↩︎
500 Days of Captivity - Bring Them Home
Yechiel (Michael) Leiter, Israel’s new ambassador to the United States, speaking at Washington Hebrew Congregation and praying for the release of all hostages. It’s been 500 days.
Understanding the Magnitude of the Holocaust
The emphasis on deportations to death camps, particularly from western Europe and particularly to Auschwitz, overshadows the benighted experience of Jews in Polish ghettos. Yet the number of Jews incarcerated in the ghettos of Warsaw and Lodz in 1940–1 exceeds the combined Jewish populations in France, Belgium and the Netherlands at the same time. More Jews died in Warsaw than were deported from France to the killing sites of eastern Europe. More Jews were shot within walking distance of their homes in Kiev on 29–30 September 1941 than were forced to endure the horrendous five-day journey in box-cars from transit camps in Belgium to death camps in Poland. Yet one of the most typical Holocaust memorials is a freight car mounted on a segment of rail track.
Cesarani, David (2016-11-07T22:58:59.000). Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949 . St. Martin’s Press. Kindle Edition (footnote omitted)
Almost Half of World Jewry Now Lives in Israel
Alvin H. Rosenfeld1 writing in Tablet:
There will be no Jewish future worthy the name without the State of Israel. At present, something like 47% of world Jewry lives in Israel. That’s almost one out of every two Jews alive. Were Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and their allies ever to succeed in liquidating Israel, the loss would be immeasurable and irrecoverable. Most Jews still alive elsewhere would be physically imperiled, psychologically traumatized, and spiritually enervated to the point of collapse. That might have been the Jewish condition after the Holocaust, were it not for Israel’s founding only three years after the liberation of the death camps—an act of collective revival that demonstrated a level of national resilience and spiritual rebirth almost without parallel in history. But far from recognizing the Jewish people’s reestablishment of national independence and political sovereignty in its ancient homeland in positive terms, some of Israel’s neighbors have seen the existence of the Jewish state as an intolerable affront that needs to be reversed.