Pesach Greeting

Passover celebrates Freedom

Israel is fighting for freedom again.

Freedom from rockets. Freedom from terrorism. Freedom from kidnapping.

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Robert Sklar
Editor

Metro Detroit Co-Chairmen

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Registered Representative

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April 9 2009

This Pesach, I'm reminded — once more
— that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency
for Palestinian refugees is anything but
a nonpartisan, neutral watchdog in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
UNRWA routinely exceeds its man-
date, plays politics and blames Israel
for the suffering while dismissing the
Palestinian violence that helps ignite it,
the Jewish Telegraphic Agency confirmed
in a compelling report last week.
During the recent Gaza war, the JTA
reported, UNRWA issued context-free
criticism of Israel. It accused the Jewish
state of violations of international law,
but was near-silent about Palestinian
rocket launchers who fired from schools,
playgrounds, mosques and homes, using
UNRWA!s own clients as human shields.
UNRWA's politicization is a byproduct
of the sorry state of its parent, the United
Nations, which has relegated Israel to
whipping-boy status and the trigger for
all the Middle East ills.
Pesach, which began at sundown
Wednesday, April 8, with the first seder,
runs eight days in the diaspora. It appeals
to more Jews than any other Jewish
holiday, even the High Holidays. That's
because it's all about family and is cel-
ebrated at home around the seder table
without judgment. Even Jews who aren't
regular synagogue goers or involved in
a Jewish organization find resonance in
the story of our liberation from slavery
in Egypt 3,321 years ago. Religious free-
dom, limited in many parts of the world,
is at the core of what unites the Jewish
people. Our collective will keeps us whole
and fighting for the weak, vulnerable or
oppressed among us.
The springtime holiday is a testi-
monial to the power of God's blessing.
American Jews now enjoy the greatest
religious freedom ever in Jewish his-
tory, even exceeding that during the
Golden Age of Spain. But we can't ignore
the waves of anti-Semitism in much of
Europe, certainly in the Middle East and
even in neighboring Canada, which is
experiencing its worst anti-Semitism in
25 years. We know the torture and tor-

ment that Israelis potentially feel daily as
they strive to preserve the Jewish ances-
tral homeland.
If you don't have students at schools of
higher education, you also may not know
that more and more U.S. campuses have
become hotbeds of Jew-bashing, Israel
propaganda and anti-Zionism.
Pesach is a universal reminder that
Jews through the ages were delivered by
God from Egyptian slavery just as the
Israelites were. American Jewry must
be ever vigilant, and not let our relative
wealth and security insulate us from the
tides of discontent and hate toward Jews
crashing elsewhere.
It was never God's plan for Jews to live
independent of one another. It's through
our oneness that we thrive, dream and
embrace the ideals of a better world
— always with encouragement and hope
distilled from what ultimately binds us:
our sacred Torah.
As we read about our fight for freedom
in the Haggadah this week, remember the
hurdles that UNRWA has thrown up.
As the New York-based JTA tells it:
The United Nations created UNRWA
in 1949 to care for 914,000 documented
Palestine refugees. In the early 1950s,
though, the U.N. expanded the refu-
gee definition to include descendants,
something never done for the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees, the U.N.
agency that handles all other refugees.
Three generations later, UNRWA's rolls
number 4.6 million — and are growing.
While UNRWA today provides critical
health, education, food and other welfare
to a largely impoverished population,
less known is the inherent non-neutral-
ity. As the UNRWA Web site relates, of
24,000 staff, "more than 99 percent are
locally recruited Palestinians, almost all
of them Palestine refugees:' Ample evi-
dence suggests many either sympathize
with Hamas or are leery of speaking out
against the terrorists in their midst.
Jews as a people are essentially free. But
that does not mean all Jews are secure in
their freedom. Remember that this Pesach.
Religious freedom can, and is, fleeting
for many of us. The protective layers in
any one place require nourishment from
the sweep of who we are collectively.
Chag kasher Pesach Vsameach and
Shabbat shalom!

