Politics, and media coverage of politics, is powered by conflict and spectacle. But the social scientist Andrew Markus wants to focus on something quieter: the resilience and optimism of Australians during a crisis; a country under duress that chose not to fracture.

Markus is the principal researcher on the Scanlon Foundations annual Social Cohesion report a project that has mapped a migrant nation since 2007. The report published on Thursday is a snapshot of a country managing a once-in-a-century crisis.

The research (sample size 3,090 respondents) is normally conducted in July. Given Australia was at that time about to tip into a second wave of coronavirus infections in Victoria, and had slipped into the first recession for 30 years, the Monash University emeritus professor was puzzled when many of the snapshots of community sentiment were positive.

That seemed counterintuitive.

To be certain of the findings, a second survey of 2,793 respondents was conducted in November. In November, we again got very positive data, he says. By positive data, this is what Markus means. Stepping through his findings, a supermajority was on board with Scott Morrisons response to the crisis, and the level of trust in government in Australia hit the highest point in the history of the survey.

People had confidence in the public health response. More than 90% of respondents in the five mainland states said lockdowns to suppress transmission were definitely or probably required. While the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, endured a period of being flogged by the Murdoch media for locking down the state, 78% of respondents backed Andrews, and when they were asked whether the lockdown was required, 87% said yes.

While America and Britain battled resurgent nativism, the inward turn triggered by the global financial crisis of a decade ago, Australians, walled in behind a preemptive international border closure, and marooned periodically behind hard state borders, continued to look to the world.

The survey asked respondents whether globalisation was good or bad. More than 70% of respondents in the two surveys said good. While protectionism was back in vogue, and the global economy convulsed because of a trade war between a real autocrat in Beijing and an aspirational one in Washington, in 2020, Australians looked through the static and continued to believe trade with the world was good for the country.

As governments put businesses into hibernation around the country during the first wave, the economy tanked and consumption stalled, one in four respondents had their jobs impacted jobs lost, hours wound back.

This cohort was more inclined to pessimism about the future than other respondents, and less sanguine about the health of their household balance sheet. But 73% of respondents remained satisfied or very satisfied with their financial outlook a result up almost 10 points on that recorded in mid-2019. Canberra rolled out income support and the household savings ratio notched up a record rise.

Young people bore the brunt of the crisis. Reflecting that reality, Australians under 24 in the survey were less optimistic about the future than people over 24. A couple of indicators bear this out: 58% of respondents aged between 18 and 24 say they are optimistic compared with more than 70% of respondents aged from 25 to 74, and less young respondents agree with the proposition that Australia is a land of economic opportunity where hard work yields a better life (61% compared with 72% of the 25-34-year-old cohort).

But rather than blame outsiders which is a common default during times of high unemployment young Australians remain more positive about immigration, multiculturalism and ethnic diversity than older Australians. Only 18% of people aged between 18 and 24 agree with the idea that immigrants take away jobs from Australians, while 30% of people in older cohorts agree.

Australians continue to support multiculturalism. The idea that multiculturalism has been good for Australia is strongly supported, with 84% of the sample agreeing in 2020, up four points in a year. But while Australians strongly support a diverse society at a time when multiculturalism is regarded as a failed project in some parts of the world, there is a flipside. We profess to support multiculturalism but Australians can also harbour negative sentiment about Africans, Asians and people from the Middle East. The survey terms this a hierarchy of ethnic preference.

With Donald Trump adding the Chinese virus to the lexicon, 59% of Chinese Australians surveyed observed that racism in Australia during the Covid crisis was either a very big problem or a fairly big problem. The Scanlon Foundation also undertook a separate survey between May and June, tapping sentiment from 500 Chinese Australians on WeChat. Asked whether they had experienced discrimination during the crisis, 27% said yes and a further 20% declined to answer the question.

Markus says he has reflected on why many Australians have experienced one of the toughest years of their lives, but have remained largely positive. Australia was not in such a bad position prior to the pandemic when you compare Australia with England and the United States.

Both of those societies were seriously fractured prior to the pandemic. Brexit sharply divided England, as did Donald Trump in the United States, he says.

There have been times when Australia has been much more fractious under the leadership of Tony Abbott as opposed to the leadership of Scott Morrison, and I think Anthony Albanese can struggle to position himself but he is basically a consensus figure.

This made it possible for Australia to respond to the pandemic quickly and in a cohesive way. To me this is the key point: we possibly undervalue the good things about Australia and how Australians will respond in a crisis, Markus says.

This, for me, is a really big takeaway and its important because it is probably not acknowledged. What we get in the media is the cut and thrust of politics rather than the long-term fundamental understanding of what works in Australia and what doesnt work.

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Toughing out Covid: how Australias social fabric held together during a once-in-a-century crisis - The Guardian

Keely Jordan, Todd P. Lewis & Bayard Roberts

Abstract

Background

There is a growing concern that the quality of health systems in humanitarian crises and the care they provide has received little attention. To help better understand current practice and research on health system quality, this paper aimed to examine the evidence on the quality of health systems in humanitarian settings.

Methods

This systematic review was based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol. The context of interest was populations affected by humanitarian crisis in low- and middle- income countries (LMICs). We included studies where the intervention of interest, health services for populations affected by crisis, was provided by the formal health system. Our outcome of interest was the quality of the health system. We included primary research studies, from a combination of information sources, published in English between January 2000 and January 2019 using quantitative and qualitative methods. We used the High Quality Health Systems Framework to analyze the included studies by quality domain and sub-domain.

Results

We identified 2285 articles through our search, of which 163 were eligible for full-text review, and 55 articles were eligible for inclusion in our systematic review. Poor diagnosis, inadequate patient referrals, and inappropriate treatment of illness were commonly cited barriers to quality care. There was a strong focus placed on the foundations of a health system with emphasis on the workforce and tools, but a limited focus on the health impacts of health systems. The review also suggests some barriers to high quality health systems that are specific to humanitarian settings such as language barriers for refugees in their host country, discontinued care for migrant populations with chronic conditions, and fears around provider safety.

Conclusion

The review highlights a large gap in the measurement of quality both at the point of care and at the health system level. There is a need for further work particularly on health system measurement strategies, accountability mechanisms, and patient-centered approaches in humanitarian settings.

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Quality in crisis: a systematic review of the quality of health systems in humanitarian settings - World - ReliefWeb

Every year, my synagogue builds a magnificent sukkah, four walls of wood, greenery galore for its roof, and enough space to seat 150 people or more. But not this year.

Because due to the concerns of COVID and the need to provide for greater air circulation, this year, we've decided to build a sukkah of just three walls, to leave one side wide open so that those who sit in our sukkah will be safer.

But is a three-walled sukkah "kosher?"

According to the Code of Jewish Law (OC630:2), not only is a three-walled sukkah kosher, but even a two-walled sukkah with just a portion of a third wall is perfectly fit. Of course, that is, as long as the roof, with its greenery (schach), still offers more shade than sunlight.

How can that be? Would just three cups of wine on Passover be enough? Would three fringes on a tallitbe sufficient? Of course not! So why would three walls be perfectly good-even by the strictest of standards?

According to the Jerusalem Talmud (Sukkah 1:1), the answer is found in verse from Isaiah (4:6), which describes three functions of a sukkah, ergo the three walls. This is also the position of the rabbis in the Babylonian Talmud (Sukkah 6b).

But there may be another reason why a missing wall is not a problem, one which harks back to a Talmudic debate over the reason for this holiday. According to the second-century sage, Rabbi Eliezer, we observe Sukkot as a remembrance of the "clouds of glory" which escorted and protected the Jews through their 40 years of wandering. On the other hand, the famous Rabbi Akiva said that we observe Sukkot to commemorate the huts the Jews lived in during their years in the desert (Sukkah 11b).

Asked the nineteenth-century sage, Rabbi Yechiel Michel Epstein (Aruch HaShulchan OC 625); according to Rabbi Eliezer, we can understand the reason for Sukkot - to remember the God's miraculous protection of our people. But according to Rabbi Akiva, why establish a holiday to remember structures in which we lived?

The answer he wrote explained that remembering how we lived in the desert is a tribute to the faith of the Jewish people, who, despite the dangers, despite the uncertainty, were willing to follow Moses for 40 years.

According to Rabbi Akiva, Sukkot celebrates the miracle of faith, a miracle of a people who, despite all that they lacked, despite never knowing what the next day would bring, nor where they would be the next day, had faith.

This is symbolized by a sukkah - not a perfect structure, but an imperfect one. For this reason, a sukkah of three walls is perfectly fit to be used, not in a de facto sense, but de jure. Because the sukkah celebrates our faith despite uncertainty and reminds us that while life may be imperfect, it must still be celebrated.

For, in reality, no one has all four walls of life intact. In varying degrees, we all experience measures of sorrow or failure, loss, or disappointment. No one is exempt; no one is alone; because in life, a three-walled sukkah is the rule and not the exception.

This is a lesson we must recall in these unusual times when our world has been turned upside down, and we find ourselves living lives very different than we ever imagined. On the one hand, we could mourn the loss of our fourth wall - of social interactions that are now limited, and the health risks we must face. Or we can remember the message of Sukkot, which our Torah identifies aszman simchateinu(a holiday of joy), and celebrate the three walls that are still intact, the imperfect world in which we live.

For me, this year's three-walled sukkah will be a sight for sore eyes. It will be a sign that we remember but an opportunity to celebrate that God will protect us if we continue to move forward with faith and confidence that even in the uncertainty of these times, God will "spread His sukkah of peace over us and of His nation Israel."

Rabbi Leonard A. Matanky, Ph.D., is the Dean of Ida Crown Jewish Academy.

See the article here:

JUF News | Less-than-perfect? Perfectly fine: The lesson of the three-walled sukkah - Jewish United Fund

If you are someone who wants to take part in intriguing conversations about how Jewish texts are relevant in our daily lives, then you should check out Torah talk classes being offered by the Culture and Learning Center at Bnai Shalom in West Orange, NJ. All classes are free (except as noted below) and are open to the community. People are welcome to come to any session that they can attend.

Our Torah talk programs offer a comfortable learning environment that is easy to join and welcoming to learners of all backgrounds, said Rabbi Robert Tobin, spiritual leader of Bnai Shalom.

Rabbi Tobin offers conducts Talmud Mondays classes weekly via Zoom. Participants read portions from the Talmud and are guided by the Rabbi to seek out their relevance to modern times. Classes start on Monday, October 19, from noon to 1 p.m.

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He also offers meaningful and mind-stretching Shabbat Mincha Study that delves into the prophets Prophets every Shabbat during the quiet time between the end of afternoon services (Minchah) and the beginning of evening services (Maariv) and Havdalah.

Torah Study with Janice Colmar-Michaelis begins on October 25 at 11 a.m. via Zoom. Her always interesting insights into Judaisms most sacred texts continues at the same time on November 8th and December 20th.

Rabbi Andrew Warmflash, Rabbi Emeritus of Hewlett East Rockaway Jewish Center and now a member of Bnai Shalom, will lead a class on the Book of Exodus that will explore the Jewish peoples journey from slavery to freedom. Class begins Tuesday, October 12 at 11 a.m. via Zoom.

The provocative and timely Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) Community Learning Experience online course, The Ethical Life: Jewish Values in an Age of Choice will begin on October 22. Each of the 5five- sessions will be presented via Zoom. Facilitated by Rabbi Richard Fagan, this course will feature world-class scholars from the JTS faculty. The scholars for the opening class on The Sources of Jewish Ethics willEthics will be Rabbi Gordon Tucker, Rabbi Elliot Dorff, Dr. Eitan Fishbane and Dr. Michal Raucher.

For information about these classes and to get the Zoom link, call Leslie Gleaner at 973-731-0160 ext. 207 or email her at programs@bnaishalom.net. Registration is needed for the Ethical Life course. To learn more and register go to https://clc.bnaishalom.net/register.php. (there is a $25 fee for non-members). When you register, you will receive the Zoom link in response.

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Conversations with Jewish Texts Offered by B'nai Shalom's Culture and Learning Center this October - TAPinto.net

Simhat Torah is one of the most beloved holidays on the Jewish calendar, but it is also an anomaly. The festival, which celebrates the completion of the yearly cycle of public Torah reading, doesnt appear in the Bible or even the Talmud. Instead, the holiday that appears on this date is Shmini Atzeret, a one-day festival that immediately follows Sukkot and completes the holiday season.

By late antiquity, an order was established for the weekly public readings, yet the two major centers of Judaism differed on how to apportion them. Communities in Israel divided the Torah into over 150 sections. As such, the idea of an annual holiday to celebrate the Torahs completion was impossible, since it took three to three-and-a-half years to complete the reading! Instead, each community, reading at a different pace, would hold its own celebration upon completing its local cycle.

Seeking to complete the Torah each year, Babylonian communities uniformly divided the Torah into 54 portions (parashot in Hebrew), the maximum number of non-festival Shabbatot that can occur in a Jewish leap year. (Non-leap years include the reading of double parashot, with two portions read in one week.) By completing the cycle after Sukkot, as opposed to before Rosh Hashanah, these communities were able to time Deuteronomys major speeches of admonition to be read before the High Holy Days. Additionally, Mosess concluding blessing to the nation provided a fitting conclusion to the Tishrei holiday season. While the custom from the Land of Israel survived until the early Middle Ages, the Babylonian practice, as with many matters, ultimately won the day.

The completion of the Torah cycle on Shmini Atzeret, however, was potentially problematic, since each holiday demands its own thematically appropriate reading.

Like all Diaspora communities, Babylonian congregations observed two days of each festival, providing an easy solution. On the first day of Shmini Atzeret, the holiday portion is read, while on the second day (colloquially known today as Simhat Torah), the congregation reads the last portion of Deuteronomy, called Vezot Habracha.

With only one day in Israel, priority has amazingly been given to the Simhat Torah reading, with recognition of Shmini Atzeret the biblical holiday! relegated to the brief maftir reading and the Amida prayer.

Combining two days of rituals into one also means that the festive dancing in honor of the Torah is followed by two prayers customarily recited on Shmini Atzeret the somber Yizkor memorial service and the solemn Prayer for Rain.

Another distinctive element of Simhat Torah is that in addition to reading the days portion and its maftir, we take out a third Torah scroll to begin Genesis. As Avraham Yaaris chronicle of Simhat Torah documents, this was not the practice in Babylonia. Rather, 12th-century European communities began reciting the first verses of Genesis (frequently orally or from a Bible, not a Torah scroll) to display their love of the Torah and eagerness to study it afresh. The unique reading arrangement and the days joyful occasion gave rise to honoring communal figures to chant the major readings and to repeating Vezot Habracha continually until every male community member receives an aliyah.

Another feature of Simhat Torah is joyful dancing which is normally forbidden on the festivals but was permitted by the earlier medieval authorities in commemoration of this celebration. Originally the custom was to circle the Torah scrolls on the reader platform, known as hakafot, copying the hoshanot ritual of circling the ark with lulavim on Sukkot. In later generations, Jews came to dance with the Torah scrolls in their hands.

WHAT ARE our options, given the requirements of social distancing as well as the need to avoid lengthy services?

As always, priority must be given to the core requirements of the day, including the public recitation of the Amida prayers and the Torah reading. Cantorial singing of the prayers including the Yizkor memorial rite, the Prayer for Rain, and the special blessings offered to the recipients of special aliyot such as hatan Torah should be significantly curtailed.

As weve seen, the celebratory dancing is a custom which is not required to fulfill any of the core obligations. While spacious, outdoor prayer spaces might allow for separation between worshipers, its not clear that the necessary distancing will be maintained over a long period of dancing. Accordingly, the dancing may be eliminated, if absolutely necessary, or significantly curtailed in its duration, with short, stationary singing the preferred option.

Similarly, the number of extra aliyot should be eliminated or significantly curtailed. Groups of worshipers may receive an aliyah together, so to speak, by listening to the oleh and replying together with an amen (Mishna Berurah 669:12).

While for some people this abridged service may take away from the joy of the day, we should look for other ways to celebrate the Torah in our homes. Most importantly, we should remember that the point of all these festivities is to give honor to the Torah. This year, that entails fulfilling our ritual requirements in a way that gives honor to the Torahs prioritization of public health. The author is the co-dean of the Tikvah Online Academy and directs the Jewish Law Live Facebook group and YouTube channel.

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Simhat Torah in the corona age - The Jerusalem Post

TheTorah columnis supported by a generous donation from Eve Gordon-Ramek in memory of Kenneth Gordon.First day of SukkotLeviticus 22:2623:44

Its the first day of Sukkot and the Rabbi of Chelm, the city of holy fools, is sitting in his sukkah with just a few masked guests sitting 6 feet apart. Its a month before Election Day and, my oh my, have words been flying. He is in the sukkah because of todays Torah reading:

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Say to the Israelite people: On the 15th day of this seventh month there shall be the Feast of Booths to the Lord, [to last] seven days. The first day shall be a sacred occasion: you will not work at your occupations; seven days you will bring offerings by fire to the Lord. On the eighth day you will observe a sacred occasion and bring an offering by fire to the Lord; it is a solemn gathering: you will not work at your occupations (Leviticus 23:33-36).

Sukkot, a favorite annual event, is filled with hospitality. Normally he welcomes friends, family and the community into the sukkah.

The guests ask, through their masks, Where is everyone?

The Rabbi of Chelm explains, This year, because of the overriding mitzvah of pikuach nefesh, the preservation of human life, there are not many guests. We learn this from the Talmud, Yoma 85b, interpreting Leviticus 18:5: You will keep My laws and My rules and live by them, and so our sages taught, One will live by them, and not die by them.

The Talmud likes facts, the rabbi continues. If a person is starving on Yom Kippur, you feed that person. If a mask preserves life, you wear a mask. Pikuach nefesh is an enduring understanding.

The guests ask, But is not an argument from opinion, or a different political viewpoint?

Aha! says the Rabbi of Chelm. A sukkah does play a part in another enduring understanding: These and these are the words of the living God, eilu veilu divrei Elohim chayim.

In the Talmud (Eiruvin 13b) we read: Rav Abba said in the name of Shmuel: For three years House of Shammai and House of Hillel argued. These said: The law, the halachah, follows us; and these said: the halachah follows us. Finally, a Bat Kol, a heavenly voice, issued forth and declared: Both these and these are the words of the living God, eilu veilu divrei Elohim chayim, but the halachah follows the rulings of House of Hillel.

The guests ask, Arent the laws of the Torah perfectly understandable?

The rabbi responds, We learn from Nissim ben Jacob of Tunisia, and Yom Tov ben Avraham Asevilli of Seville, that, from the moment of the giving of the Torah, one could find more than one possible understanding. The living Jewish people reach an understanding in their own day and still the diverging opinions may have their place in another time. So, we say, all the words are the words of the living God.

The guest asks, But the why does the halachah follow the House of Hillel?

The Talmud continues: If someones head and the majority of the body were in the sukkah, but the table was in the house, the House of Shammai says this not sitting in a sukkah! The House of Hillel says, no, its OK. We know this because once the elders of Bet Shammai and the elders of Bet Hillel went to visit Rabbi Yohanan ben Hahoranit, and found him sitting with his head and the majority of his body in the sukkah but his table in the house.

The guests: What does that prove about the House of Hillel?

Because, the Rabbi of Chelm explains, the House of Hillel always included the House of Shammai in their teachings, even mentioning them first. Thats why college campuses have Hillel houses. Everyone is included. By the way, the House of Hillel agreed with the House of Shammai. Keep your mask on, head and body and table inside the sukkah.

The Talmud concludes with these words for today:

One who raises themselves up, Ha Kadosh Baruch Hu, lowers.

One who pursues greatness, greatness flees.

One who flees from greatness, greatness pursues.

One who tries to force time, thinking that with sufficient efforts they will immediately succeed, they find themselves forced back by time and unsuccessful.

One who is patient and gives way to time, will find time giving way and standing for them, eventually bringing success.

By the way, the Rabbi of Chelm thinks that Rabbi Yohanan ben Hahoranit was the ancestor of Chelm. Who else would sit like that in a sukkah?

Read more:

Under the sukkah with the Rabbi of Chelm, the city of holy fools J. - The Jewish News of Northern California

The Torah demands of us: Justice, Justice, you shall pursue (Deuteronomy 16:20). We are not told to sit back and wait for justice to come to us. In fact, midrash in Sifrei Devarim explains that this biblical verse means that we should strive to achieve justice specifically through the finest of courts.

As our nation continues to mourn the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a feminist icon who spent her entire career fighting for gender equality, President Trumps nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, has sparked the latest fight to define what justice looks like in this country. Barretts views are antithetical to my own, and certainly the polar opposite of what Ginsburg stood for. The President has a constitutional right to nominate a replacement and the Senate is also required to hold confirmation hearings and vote.

We know that this seat will greatly shift the make-up of the highest court in the land for a generation and issues that are at the core of what I believe as a progressive rabbi, such as access to affordable healthcare, reproductive rights, marriage equality, and treating immigrants humanely, may very well be upended. News that Saturdays press conference announcing Barretts nomination may very well have been a coronavirus super spreader event may delay the confirmation process, especially if Senators and Barrett herself need to quarantine following President Trumps positive COVID test. Still, with justice hanging in the balance, many Democratic strategists are contemplating whats next.

One solution Democratic activists have offered is to expand the size of the Supreme Court if the party takes control of the White House and both houses of Congress. There is historical precedent for this: The Supreme Court began with six justices in 1789 and at different times the size has increased and decreased to seven, nine, 10, back to seven, and back to nine, where it currently stands. There is no mandate requiring a certain size of the court. Rabbinic tradition would side with these Democratic activists, suggesting that expanding the court helps us pursue justice.

Tractate Sanhedrin, the section of the Talmud that focuses on legal systems and court structures, begins with a declaration that the most basic cases are decided by a court of three. Some cases are debated with five or seven judges. More extreme cases are decided by a court of 23 judges. The most important cases were determined by the Great Sanhedrin, a court of 70 judges. When determining the makeup of the court, be it three judges or 70 the rabbis understand the importance of balance. In the third chapter of this tractate, the Talmud clarifies that in a three person court, one judge is picked by each side and the third and final judge is picked by the other two judges.

The Supreme Court is not balanced. It has become increasingly right-wing in the past 20 years, which doesnt accurately represent this country. Two-thirds of the justices (including the current nominee to fill Ginsburgs seat) were nominated by Presidents that did not win the popular vote. The Republican-majority Senate which is determined to confirm Barrett before election day received 12 million fewer votes than their Democratic counterparts. The right-wing court doesnt represent the will of the people and certainly doesnt represent our biblical command to pursue justice. Only a true balanced court does that.

The beit midrash learning style of chevruta pairs, learning partners, suggests that one should learn with another person who holds a different perspective. Tractate Taanit (7a) explains that two Torah scholars sharpen one another. By learning with something who has different life experiences and may hold a different perspective and worldview allows one to gain a new understanding of the text and see Torah in a new light. Being surrounded by those that agree with you doesnt accomplish that. Only by learning with a sparring partner does one truly understand the text. If this is true for Torah, then it must also be true for the United States Constitution.

When judges are added to the court that share the same perspective, and the court tilts to extremes, that denies those justices the ability to firmly understand and comprehend the truest meaning of the sacred founding documents of our nation. Only a balanced court does that.

Expanding the court isnt radical or unprecedented. It is just! And when Republican Senators make up their own rules to sway the court in a direction that is contradictory to the views of the majority of Americans, then any change in court structure that focuses on a more balanced system, and in the process pursues a more just society, should be applauded and encouraged. Even if it expands the court to 70 judges like the Great Sanhedrin!

Rabbi Jesse Olitzky is based at Congregation Beth El, South Orange, New Jersey.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.

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Jewish tradition supports expanding the Supreme Court - Forward

By: Rabbi Shraga Simmons

Imagine you throw a huge party and invite everyone you know. But this is no regular party: Its one solid week of food, music and fun. Eventually things wind down and people begin to leave. As the host, you quietly go over to a few of your best friends and whisper: Stick around after everyone else leaves thats when Im breaking out the good stuff.

Each year God has a weeklong celebration called Sukkot. In ancient times in Jerusalem, the service in the Holy Temple during the week of Sukkot featured a total of 70 bull offerings. This, the Talmud explains, corresponds to each of the 70 nations of the world. The Temple was not just for Jews. When King Solomon built the Temple, he specifically asked God to heed the prayer of non-Jews who comes to the Temple (1-Kings 8:41-43). And the prophet Isaiah refers to the Temple as a House for all nations (Isaiah 56:7).

The Temple was the universal center of spirituality, a concentrated point where God-consciousness filtered down into the world. In fact, the Talmud says that if the Romans would have realized how much benefit they themselves were getting from the Temple, they never would have destroyed it!

And then, at the end of Sukkot, God added a special day. Its called Shmini Atzeret, literally the Eighth Day of Assembly. On that day, only one bull was offered representing the Jewish people. It is a day of great intimacy with our Creator, as He asks His Jewish children to remain with him for extra personal time together. (Talmud Sukkot 55b)

Shmini Atzeret is a full public holiday, as described in Leviticus 23:36. Even though it immediately follows the seven-day Sukkot festival and is often considered part of Sukkot, it is, in fact, a separate holiday. This means that the Shehechiyanu blessing is recited, and the obligation to sit in the Sukkah does not apply.

TAPESTRY OF SEVENS

Nachmanides (12th century Spain) explains a beautiful kabbalistic concept: Seven is the number of the natural world. There are seven days in the week, seven notes on the musical scale and seven directions (left, right, up, down, forward, back and center). Seven represented by the seven days of Sukkot is the world of nature. Eight represented by Shmini Atzeret is that which is beyond nature.

The Jewish people, says the Talmud, are beyond nature. We have survived every imaginable persecution, exile, hardship and expulsion. And still, we have achieved and thrived far beyond our numbers. As Mark Twain wrote: All things remain mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

The secret, as we know, is the special gift that God gave to the Jewish people: The Torah. As Rabbi Emanuel Feldman writes:

Torah is the mysterious bridge which connects the Jew and God, across which they interact and communicate, and by means of which God fulfills His covenant with His people to sustain them and protect them.

Therefore it is no coincidence that on Shmini Atzeret we also celebrate the completion of the yearly cycle of Torah readings and the beginning of a new cycle. This event is lovingly referred to as Simchat Torah, literally Rejoicing of the Torah. (Outside of Israel, Simchat Torah is celebrated the day after Shmini Atzeret.)

Why are we accustomed to both finish and re-start the reading of the Torah on the same day? The Sages explain: To show that the Torah is beloved to us like a new object and not like an old command which a person no longer treasures. Since it is brand new to us, we all run to greet it. We sing and dance for hours around the bima (the platform where the Torah is read), carry the Torah Scroll, and express our joy at having the opportunity to come so close to God.

On Shmini Atzeret, as we complete this holiday season, we offer a special prayer to God for rain. Rain represents the blessings of growth and abundance. Through all the hard work of Elul, Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Sukkot, we have come a long way. Our task now is to carry that energy throughout the year.

(Aish.com)

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Shmini Azeret and Simchat Torah - The Jewish Voice

So, you found out someone whom you detest is sick. Maybe its a political opponent. Maybe it is someone who you think is downright evil. Maybe theyre sick with COVID-19 or maybe its the flu. Or maybe it was just some bad sushi. Regardless of who is sick or what theyre sick with, if its someone who you detest, youll be faced with a choice: Should you pray for their recovery? Or can you sit this one out and, given your severe distaste for the person, let the illness run its course?

There is a rich tradition in Judaism of praying for those who are ill. Tending to those who are sick is one of the few commandments which we are rewarded for both in this world and in the next world. A part of the responsibility of caring for those who are sick, the Talmud explains, is praying for their recovery. Ever say gesundheit or labriyut or God bless you after a sneeze? That counts too.

But does the obligation to tend to the sick apply to those you hate? Rabbi Moshe Issereles (1530-1572), known by his acronym Ramah, cites two opinions in his classic codification of Ashkenazic Jewish law. Some say that you can tend a sick enemy, he writes. This, however, doesnt appear cogent to me, the Ramah goes on, for the simple reason that a person visiting an enemy while that enemy is sick could give the appearance of gloating, and this would only bring more pain. The Ramah recommends abstaining from such a visit.

But not everyone agrees with this ruling. One commentary on the Ramah, Rabbi Shabtei HaKohen, known as the Shach, makes an important distinction: You may attend an enemys funeral, since no one would suspect such a person of gloating, since this is how all lives end.

Its a haunting consideration, even if in practice weve seen people sink to lower levels of human decency and graciousness than the Shach could imagine. Underlying this distinction is a hopeful acknowledgment that the great equalizer death itself would prevent someone from having (or being perceived to have) some sense of glee at anothers death. Still, the Shach concludes, it all depends on the level of hatred.

Indeed, as our contemporary discourse has reminded us, hate will find a way.

But what about someone who isnt just an enemy but truly evil? Certainly, a neighborly disagreement, even a serious communal rift, may tatter those ever so flimsy social ties that bind us, but what about someone who is worthy of severing those very connections? Surely there is a level of evil that merits such spiritual retaliation.

Cant we ever pray for evildoers to die?

One Talmudic story tells of a Rabbi being persecuted by a heretic. The rabbi, intent on cursing the heretic and ending his misery, stayed up all night waiting for the precise moment a prayer for the heretics death would be assured to be effective: the moment each day when God is angry. The moment came, the Rabbi fell asleep. Its not proper conduct, to discharge such dastardly prayer. His mercy is over all of his creations, (Psalms 145:9), the Talmud concludes.

Of course, someone actively murdering people, like Hitler, for instance, can be stopped at any means. In a 2017 essay, Yuval Harari, a professor at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, recounts a 1942 plot by Jerusalem Kabbalists to assassinate Hitler through prayer. But the focus of the prayers seemed to be less about retribution and more concerned with stopping the organized execution of the Jewish people. Theres a difference: We dont ask God to punish evildoers, but we can pray to God to stop evil.

In a fascinating series of responsa, a witness of Hitlers evil, Rabbi Menashe Klein, contended with the idea of cursing or praying for our enemies to die. Rabbi Klein (1924-2011) was a Hasidic leader known as the Ungvarer Rebbe who survived Auschwitz along with his lifelong friend Elie Wiesel. Generally, the responsa of Rabbi Klein, titled Mishneh Halachos, are not known for being moderate. His rulings were sometimes seen as overly strict, even in the Orthodox community. Some derisively called his work, Meshaneh Halachos the Changer of Jewish Law. But his collected writing about cursing and praying for those you hate are quite emphatic in their radical empathy.

Learning to expand your sense of love and empathy for others, especially those who rightfully deserve retribution, does not come easily. A lot, a lot, a lot of energy I have expended in this characteristic, writes Rabbi Klein.

Rabbi Klein lived through unspeakable horrors. But maybe that is what gave him the strength to be so adamant about choosing empathy over hate.

Prayer is a reflection of our deepest sense of values and ideals. And after living in a world with so much hate and pain, Rabbi Klein insisted that our prayers should only be used to cultivate more spirituality and love in this world.

Prayer is how we fashion who we are as individuals and as a society. And this world needs more prayer.

Lets pray together for healing.

David Bashevkin is the director of education for NCSY, the youth movement of the Orthodox Union, and the author of Sinagogue: Sin and Failure in Jewish Thought. You can find his narishkeit on Twitter @dbashideas.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.

So someone you hate is sick. What Jewish tradition says about praying for them.

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So someone you hate is sick. What Jewish tradition says about praying for them. - Forward

We often think of cancel culture as a contemporary phenomenon, driven by social media and rife in our hyper-connected world.

But really, punishing people for their ideas and opinions has been going on for as long as people have been thinking.

Take the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. In the mid-17th century, Spinoza was charged with heresy and cast out from his Amsterdam Jewish community.

Since then, he's gone on to be canonised as one of the great Enlightenment thinkers and even embraced as a hero of Judaism.

But un-cancelling a cancelled philosopher is harder than you might expect, and three centuries later, there are still plenty of people who would prefer to see Spinoza hang onto his outcast status.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632 and raised in the city's Talmud Torah congregation.

He had a traditional Jewish upbringing and education, attending the local yeshiva until the age of 17, when he went to work in his father's importing business.

Yeshiva: Jewish educational institution, focussing on the study of religious textsCherem (hrem): the total exclusion of a person from the Jewish community Zionism: ideology and nationalist movement that supports an independent Jewish state

But Spinoza remained a scholar, and over the next few years, he began to lay the intellectual foundations for what would become one of the most celebrated bodies of work in European philosophy.

At the time, however, Spinoza's ideas weren't being celebrated within his own community.

While Spinoza's exact heresies weren't documented, rumours began to swirl of his unorthodox views, and he started clashing with the local religious authorities.

It's said that at one point, a fanatic shouting "Heretic!" attacked Spinoza with a knife on the steps of the local synagogue.

Things finally came to a head on July 27, 1656, when the congregation issued a writ of cherem or excommunication against the 23-year-old philosopher.

Spinoza is vaguely accused of "evil opinions", "abominable heresies" and "monstrous deeds", but what religious wrongs did he actually commit?

His later philosophical work particularly the Ethics, published posthumously in 1677 could offer some answers.

In it, Spinoza articulates a conception of God that would have been highly offensive to any observant Jew at the time.

Spinoza's God lacks all the attributes of the God of the Torah, having no will or emotions, no psychological traits or moral character. His God makes no plans or judgments, issues no commandments, and possesses no wisdom or goodness.

Spinoza's God is neither transcendent nor supernatural, being more or less reducible to Nature. Indeed, Spinoza's preferred term for this entity is "God or Nature".

It's all a far cry from the God of Abraham and Moses, who led the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt and hardly surprising that Spinoza's ideas landed him in such hot water with the religious authorities of his day.

What's more surprising is that Spinoza has, over the centuries, gone on to become a highly regarded figure in contemporary Judaism, if still a controversial one.

David Rutledge interviews Spinoza scholar Stephen Nadler on The Philosopher's Zone.

But not all modern Jews have adopted his ideas or extracted a definitive theology from them.

Certainly, from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, Spinoza remains as problematic today as he did in the 17th century.

But even anti-Spinozans will admit that many of the big questions that lie at the foundations of modern Judaism What does it mean to be a Jew? What must Jews believe? Is it possible to have a secular Jewish identity? are either direct responses to Spinoza, or spring from the history of his interpretation.

Spinoza has even been hailed as a proto-Zionist.

The documentary evidence for this is slim largely based on his assertion in his text Tractatus Theologico-Politicus that the Jewish people would "one day ... establish once more their independent state", provided they could summon the requisite "manliness" to do so.

The passage is more of a loose speculation than a prescient endorsement of a Jewish state, but 19th-century European Zionists took it to mean that Spinoza had envisaged a Judaism based on nationalism.

Elsewhere in his work they found a champion of the kind of Jewish identity that they saw in themselves and their project: reason-based, democratic, and at pains to separate rabbinic authority from political governance.

And this notion of Spinoza as a secular saint of Zionism carried through to the birth of the modern state of Israel in 1948.

Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, called Spinoza "the first Zionist of the last 300 years", embracing him as not just a philosopher who happened to be born a Jew, but a profoundly and definitively Jewish philosopher.

So taken was Ben-Gurion with Spinoza that in 1953, he published a laudatory article about the philosopher that kicked off a raging debate about the justice of his excommunication three centuries earlier.

Calls rang out within the Israeli parliament and the international Jewish press to have the original cherem rescinded, and opinions were sought from chief rabbis worldwide.

The debate remained inconclusive, largely because neither David Ben-Gurion nor most of the world's Jewish leaders had the authority to reverse the original decision.

According to Steven Nadler, a long-standing Spinoza scholar and philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the only people authorised to lift the cherem against Spinoza is the community that issued it in the first place the Talmud Torah congregation of Amsterdam.

As it happens, the Amsterdam congregation still exists.

In December 2015, they held a symposium to debate the proposition that the ban should be lifted.

Scholars from four continents were invited to the symposium, to act as an advisory committee. One of the scholars was Professor Nadler.

"They didn't want us to express an opinion as to whether the cherem was good or bad," he recalls.

"They wanted to know: what were Spinoza's philosophical views, what were the historical circumstances of the ban, what might be the advantages of lifting the cherem, and what might be the disadvantages?"

The debate was held before an audience of over 500 people and, at its conclusion, the current rabbi of the congregation handed down his opinion: that Spinoza should remain where he was, officially cancelled, and (to quote the 1656 decision) "expelled from the people of Israel".

Despite the ruling, Professor Nadler says most members of the community would have liked to see the cherem lifted.

"It would have been a great PR move," he says.

"[To annnounce,] 'Look, we're not the intolerant community of the 17th century, Spinoza is one of us and we're proud to own him.'"

But the rabbi thought differently.

Professor Nadler says the religious leader asked: "Who am I to overrule my 17th-century predecessors? Am I that much wiser than them?"

The rabbi also held that Spinoza's religious views, considered beyond the pale in 1656, had not really been made any less problematic by the passage of time.

Once a renegade, always a renegade particularly when the renegade in question remained proud and unrepentant in his heresy.

"Spinoza knew the rules of the game," says Professor Nadler.

"The rabbis warned him, and his response was 'Hey, you know what? I'm leaving anyway.'

"So you can't call the cherem a terrible miscarriage of justice."

So Baruch Spinoza, rebel philosopher and abominable heretic, remains officially cancelled for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately for philosophers and secular Jews, but also for Orthodox Jews who welcome a provocative challenge to their theology his works remain.

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The Jewish philosopher Spinoza was one of the great Enlightenment thinkers. So why was he 'cancelled'? - ABC News

Creating a global inter-parliamentary task force to combat digital antisemitism a few weeks before a presidential election isnt credible, and thats putting it mildly. And besides, what can any task force do against hatred that comes from the kernel of human nature? It would be more successful fighting against gravity than against antisemitism.

On September 29, Jewish Insider published a story titled Members of Congress launch international task force to combat online antisemitism. According to the story, the task force is to focus on raising awareness about online antisemitism and establishing a consistent message in legislatures across the world to hold social media platforms accountable. It is a hopeless task, and right before the elections, it is nothing more than lip-service.

You cant eliminate antisemitism just as you cannot eliminate pain until you heal the sore that causes it. In the case of antisemitism, the sore is the fact that Jews arent uniting among themselves and leading the world after them to unity and solidarity.

That sore was not born in America, nor in Nazi Germany, or even in Christian Europe. It dates back to the beginning of the Jewish people, when the fugitives from Egypt pledged to unite as one man with one heart, established their nationhood, and were immediately tasked with being a light unto nations, meaning with sharing their unity by way of example.

For nearly two millennia afterwards, our ancestors struggled with their internal conflicts and frictions. They were exiled and returned, fought each other and reunited, until they finally lost the battle against internal hatred and were banished from their land.

But the mission they had been given back at Mt. Sinai was never abrogated. Two thousand years ago, The Book of Zohar wrote about how the Jews should bring about world peace by setting an example: Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to also sit together. These are the friends as they sit together, and are not separated from one another. At first, they seem like people at war, wishing to kill one another then they return to being in brotherly love. And as you were in fondness and love before, henceforth you will also not part from one another and by your merit, there will be peace in the world.

Whenever and wherever there is division, the Jews are blamed for it because people feel (even if they cant verbalize it) that had the Jews done their job, they wouldnt be fighting one another. Even our own Talmud admits that No calamity comes to the world but because of Israel (Yevamot 63a), so what can we expect from other nations?

If we want to eliminate antisemitism, we should do our task, unite above all our (countless) divisions, and be a role model to humanity. Then the force that drives antisemitism will turn the hatred around as the nations will see that they are finally getting from the Jews what they always felt the Jews should have given them: an example of unity and solidarity.

Michael Laitman is a PhD in Philosophy and Kabbalah. MSc in Medical Bio-Cybernetics. Founder and president of Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education & Research Institute. Author of over 40 books on spiritual, social and global transformation. His new book, The Jewish Choice: Unity or Anti-Semitism, is available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Choice-Anti-Semitism-Historical-anti-Semitism/dp/1671872207/

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A Task Force to Combat Online Antisemitism? Get Real - The Times of Israel

Despite a raging pandemic, colleges and universities took advantage of mature technologies to transition online, preserving the safety of students and faculty while maintaining true to our educational goals.

Understandably, many participants in this bold enterprise lamented what was lost, even temporarily, myself included. The digital divide, Zoom fatigue, and the annoying experience of teaching and learning while masked were common complaints. But let there be no doubt: we are at the cusp of a bold new era in education, particularly tertiary education.

But weve been here before. Twice, at least.

The first time educators encountered this phenomenon was in the ancient world, when the technology of recording the spoken word became widespread. Clay tablets incised with wedge-shaped script, friable inked papyrus, and of course scrolls from animal skins preserved instruction for generations, the first global experiment in distance learning.

Socrates subjected the educational value of writing to withering criticism, saying that writingis very like painting. The creatures in a painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. Writing lacks synchronous interactivity with an instructor, and is therefore critically impoverished. That said, Socrates argument is undermined by the fact that we receive his words only because his student Plato (ahem) wrote them down.

And with synchronous Zoom classes, Socrates argument is rendered moot.

Related concerns were raised by the Sages regarding the commitment of the Oral Torah in textual form, and the Talmud was only rendered in its current form after strenuous debate.

So despite the objection of the early Greek philosophers, western civilization marched ahead with writing anyway, considering this technology an invaluable add-on to in-person instruction, not its replacement.

The next major challenge came some 2100 years later, with the advent of cheap printing technologies. Long accustomed to beautiful Arabic calligraphy, the Islamic world largely rejected the poor quality mass-produced equivalent, inadvertently missing an opportunity to participate actively in the scientific revolution that would give Christian Europe a distinct advantage entering the modern era. But not all Europeans were pleasedHieronimus Squarciafico, himself an employee of an early Venetian print shop, panned the new technology in 1477, writing already abundance of books makes men less studious; it destroys memory and enfeebles the mind by relieving it of too much work. Better, argued Squarciafico, to learn more deeply with expensive handwritten texts than read lots of cheap printed books.

But the printers won that debate. Five centuries later, it is increasingly rare for instructors to assign bound physical books, let alone manuscripts on vellum or parchment. No one will doubt the diminished aesthetic value of a mass-produced book when compared to a hand-written work, painstakingly completed by a human scribe. The value of increased access, however, widely overwhelmed the sacrifice of artistic beauty of individually produced written works. And just as Socrates objection to writing was recorded in text, so too was Squarciaficos lament preserved in a printed book.

And with synchronous Zoom classes, the increasing range of personal customizationsvirtual backgrounds, gallery vs. speaker views, filters and so onsuggest that even the aesthetic features of remote learning may be overcome to meet individual tastes.

Historians are notoriously unreliable when speaking about the futurewe tend to do our jobs best when we are looking backwards, not forwards. But that rear-view perspective suggests that if 2020 is anything like 400 BCE, or like 1500 CE, the Zoom revolution in higher education will certainly not eliminate live, in-person education: we will take these new digital tools to expand, not diminish, our pedagogic power.

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Welcome to the Future, Third Time Around | Lander College of Arts & Sciences - Touro College News

And now we arrive at the point where Jewish practice attains the apex of a rich and beautiful theater of the absurd. This Simchat Torah, a Jew will take a book off the shelf, kiss it, dance with it, jump, twirl and holler with it. Alone.

Rabbi Adin Even-Israel (Steinsaltz), whose presence will be missed this Simchat Torah, once pointed this out. This is a Jew! he declared. One who kisses a book when he puts it down after reading from it.

Yes, so poignant. But how about dancing with a book? Is that typical human behavior? Scrolls are books, arent they? And this year, no synagogue, no scroll, no circles of Jews whirling and twirling together, dancing with the Torah. Nopejust you and your lonesome, in the privacy of your own home, dancing with whatever book of Torah you might pick up off the shelf.

Seriously, before committing this absurdity, lets think this through. Whats behind this notion of dancing with a book?

Having lived a Jewish life of books, I totally get it. The home of my childhood was not quite religious, but certainly drenched with Jewish values. My dad would visit the public library once in two weeks and snatch books off the shelf like a lion tearing at his prey. The entire back seat of the car was literally filled with them. Within a day, they would be strewn throughout the house.

My mother would complain, Cant you put them back in place?

To which he would respond, That is their place. This is a Jewish home, and a Jewish home has to have a book everywhere.

Of course, only on tables and other respectable surfaces. If a book was seen on the floor, my father would chide us, Books are people! Treat them with respect!

Yes, books are people. Real book lovers dont say, Im reading Grapes of Wrath. No, its Im reading Steinbeck.

Much as a Jew studying Mishneh Torah will tell you hes learning Rambam. RambamRabbi Moshe ben Maimonthats a person. You get into his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah, ask the right questions, scratch your head, read all the little men lined up around the page, argue your arguments, pound your fist on the table, and scratch your head some moreand youre not just studying what he wrote. Youre learning him, the person, very deep into the person.

I once asked my uncle, a successful actor, Tell me, Uncle: Who are you really? The person I am meeting now, or the person acting on set?

He thought for a moment, and then answered, Actually, it sounds crazy, but I feel most myself when I am acting as someone else. And after another pause, he added, Especially someone very different from myself.

Yes! The artist is most found in the act of his art. So too, in the book, we have the author far more, far deeper, raw and undiluted, than we have him in person.

And so too with the Author of the Torah we hold in our handsyes, we hold Him in our hands when we hold that Torah Scroll. Or book.

Including a Talmud, a Midrash, or any work of any dedicated student who struggled night and day with the words and teachings of this divine wisdom we call Torah. Because that struggle itself is divineso that inside that struggle, too, is the original Author Himself.

And its such a different experience thenwhen it's the author you hear inside. Like when I heard Liona Boyd the second time around.

I was a teenager. The Classical Guitar Society had just started up in my hometown of Vancouver. We brought out Liona Boyd for a concert and a workshop. So I heard her play. Not bad. Not my style, but good technique.

Then she gave a workshop. After the workshop, I got to chat with her. Like, here I was, half the age of the next youngest in the room, and Liona Boyd is sitting and talking things out with me as though I were her peer, really listening, really being a real person, really ignoring everyone else.

Then Liona gave another concertand that second concert I heard from her was the first time I heard her play. Now I heard Lionanot her music, not her guitar. I was listening to a good friend I had just made. I was discovering something deeper about her than I could have known from any conversation between us.

Neat discovery, Freeman. But here were not talking about a chat with a sweet lady. This is about a deep meaningful interaction situated at the vortex of the universe.

When you do a mitzvah, youre a servant of the Supreme Being doing His bidding, fulfilling the mission assigned to your soul in this world. When you learn Torah, youre Gds child, sitting with Him at one small table, discussing with Him His thoughts.

Child and parent, thats so much tighter than any conversation with any friend. No outsider can ever understand whats really going on between them. The parents best student may know more, but the child can empathize with a parent in a way no outsider ever could.

So that in this conversation, it becomes impossible to distinguish between the words of the parent and the words of the child. The parent speaks words only the child could understand, and the child speaks words the parent hadnt realized he wanted to say. This is a conversation in which Dad says, My child, youve got me there again!

Because inside they are really one, just that one is the child, the other the parent.

Its a communion in some ways deeper than prayer. Prayer is about you, about sharing with Gd whats in your heart, where youre at right now. Learning Torah is about Himdiscovering Him within His thoughts about this world, within the meaning of all those mitzvahs He gave you, working all that through with Him.

So thats where you discover theres something beyond ideas over here. Someone inside.

Sometimes, after racking your brains to disentangle a debate in the Talmud, or clawing desperately into the meaning of a story, or deciphering the encoded message of a mysterious passage of Zohar, or clarifying the application of a Halachah in your particular situationsometimes you just have to sit back and say, Oh wowthat is sooo beautiful! Oh wow! I gotta tell this to somebody! Anybody!

And sometimes you feel like Abraham when he got wind of the Sodom and Gomorrah elimination decree. Like you cant help but say, Please, Dad, I really hope you dont mind me asking, butwhy? Why? How could You want such a thing?

Abraham asked. Moses asked. Rabbi Akiva asked. The Baal Shem Tov asked. The Rebbe asked. Sometimes they found an answer. Sometimes they worked out a deal. Sometimes they had to walk away and say, So I dont understand. There are many things I dont understand. Whats the big deal that a mortal meat-patty with eyeballs cant understand the Creator of Heaven and Earth?

And you too must ask. Because, if you dont ask, in what way is this Torah? If you cant ask, in what way are you Gds child?

Now you have begun to dance with Gds Torahas we Jews have done for 3, 333 years this year since we started learning it with Moses. Sometimes we pull together, sometimes we distanceand then we return again. And it is in that back and forth, pull and push, close and far, that we discover there is something here beyond our understanding, beyond any understandingeven if understanding comes from there. Inside here is Gd.

And now that we know Him from His book, now we can find the Infinite everywhere, in all things.

Is it absurd to dance with a book? Is it absurd to dance with the Maker of Heaven and Earth?

Yes, certainly. So close the door and nobody will see. Dance alone with Gd.

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On Simchat Torah, a Jew Never Dances Alone - The Absurdity of a Quarantined Simchat Torah - Chabad.org

Schools in Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks will again be closed for in-person classes starting Tuesday though businesses will remain open for now, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Monday.

The governor additionally announced that the state was rolling into the city to take the reins on enforcement using city personnel for coronavirus infractions in those areas, and put religious institutions on notice about large gatherings in houses of worship.

Cuomo dropped the bomb during a Midtown Manhattan press briefing one day after Mayor Bill de Blasio sought his blessing to shut down nine ZIP codes in the boroughs wholesale, closing not just schools but non-essential businesses and dining at restaurants.

The governor, however, said only schools would be closing for now.

These clusters have to be attacked, he said. New York City has clusters.

I would not send my child to a school in a hot-spot cluster, Cuomo continued with respect to the school closures. I am not going to recommend or allow any New York City family to send their child to a school that I wouldnt send my child.

Both public and private schools within nine ZIP codes experiencing outbreaks will be closed to in-person classes starting Tuesday. The governor did not give a reopening date.

Cuomo said that he made the decision following a good, collaborative conference call with de Blasio, city Comptroller Scott Stringer, City Council President Corey Johnson and Michael Mulgrew, president of the powerful United Federation of Teachers union.

Cuomo partially approved de Blasios plan less than a week after rapping the city for not doing enough to tamp down on the burgeoning outbreaks, a point he again stressed Monday without specifically naming the target of his remarks.

Enforcement is kind. You know why? Because enforcement saves lives, Cuomo said. Any rule is only as good as the enforcement.

Too many local governments are not doing enforcement, he continued. Warnings are not enforcement.

He announced that a joint task force between the state Department of Health and State Police would soon roll into the hot spots to take the lead on enforcement, staffed by local authorities.

Local governments will need to assign people to that task force who are supervised by that task force, deputized by that task force to give out state summonses, Cuomo said.

To illustrate how targeted enforcement could work, Cuomo offered the example of a church required to restrict its capacity to 50 percent.

When 50 percent enter the church, [theres] a person there who says to the pastor, You agreed to follow the rules, thats 50 percent. Thats it or we close it down, he said. It does not work without enforcement.

In the five boroughs, the sheriffs department had been taking the lead, augmented by the NYPD, city Department of Health and other municipal agencies.

But Cuomo derided City Hall for recently touting just 26 violations and 883 warnings issued among 2,000 inspections in the hot spots as a success story

Cuomo also noted that de Blasios plan left untouched religious institutions, even though many of the areas experiencing flare-ups are home to sizable Orthodox Jewish populations, with which the citys outreach efforts have struggled to connect.

Cuomo said he would meet Tuesday with leaders of the community both from the city and in Rockland and Orange counties, which also seeing outbreaks.

He said that he would again attempt to get them to see the light on abiding by pandemic precautions, but was prepared to shutter synagogues if ignored.

Were not going to make the same mistake twice, he said.

But some local leaders did not see Mondays announcement as an olive branch.

Closing down our schools is the most devastating thing you can do to our community, said Rabbi Bernard Freilich, a longtime community leader in Borough Park.

We tried this in March and April and it did not work. With Jewish studies in particular, it has to be done as a group, in person. Children cannot learn the Talmud alone.

Parents also said they were blindsided by the school closures.

It makes me sick to my stomach, because its a hardship on the parents, said Robyn Thompson, a mom to two kids, 11 and 8, at St. Edmunds Elementary School in Homecrest, Brooklyn. Theres no way a third-grader, a second-grader, a first-grader can do online school by his or herself. You have to sit there all day long, and Im not a teacher. It means I also cant work.

De Blasio had also requested that non-essential businesses within the affected ZIP codes be shuttered by state order, a step Cuomo stopped short of taking.

The governor explained Monday that he didnt feel ZIP codes were sufficient guidelines for outlining outbreaks, as they might punish stretches abiding by the rules while missing trouble spots just outside the ZIP code limits.

He said that closures of non-essential businesses are still in play, once a more surgical method of identifying problem areas is found.

The nine ZIP codes targeted for their 3-percent coronavirus positivity rate over the past seven days are:

Additional reporting by Sam Raskin and Reuven Fenton

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NYC schools in COVID-19 hot spots will close starting Tuesday: Gov. Cuomo - New York Post

Local Los Angeles Rabbi RBO Bat-Or, passed away on Oct. 1 after a five-year battle with cancer.

The Journal spoke with RBO just over a year ago and you can read about per life and work in that interview here.

JQ International issued the following statement shortly after RBOs passing:

Condolences: May Per Memory Be A Blessing

Rabbi RBO Bat-Or, a beloved parent, grandparent, friend, colleague, educator, LGBTQ+ activist, therapist and founder and director emeritus of the JQ Helpline & Inclusion Services, passed away on Thursday, Oct. 1 after a brave five-year battle with cancer.

Rabbi RBO leaves a legacy any of us would be lucky to achieve one marked by a deep drive to make the world a more just and equitable place. RBO will be remembered for fierce advocacy on behalf of LGBTQ+ people and unparalleled gentleness and kindness. A devoted educator and a rabbi ordained by the Ziegler School of Rabbinics, RBO spearheaded the launch of the JQ Helpline in 2014, which continues to be a literal life saver for thousands of community members in need.

Over the course of per life, Rabbi RBO helped transform countless communities through LGBTQ+ inclusion education. (As a non-binary gender fluid human, Rabbi RBO used the gender pronouns per and pers.) Last year, the Jewish Journal did a feature story entitled RBO The Rabbi who Eschews Conventional Gender Pronouns.

The Talmud teaches that if you save a single life, it is as if you have saved the entire world. By that measure, Rabbi RBO saved our world over and over and over again. We grieve for a true luminary of our time, a role model and friend.

Rabbi RBO is survived by son Michael, daughter-in-law Jennifer and grandchildren Sam, Owen, and Ava. Memorial arrangements are pending and we will post plans on our website once they are finalized. Messages to Rabbi RBOs family can be sent to [emailprotected].

May per memory be a blessing.

RBO will be buried in Connecticut on Oct. 8. Zoom memorial and shivah arrangements will be held after the Simchat Torah holiday, which ends on the evening of Oct. 11

JQ is here for you at this moment of grief and always. If you need support, please reach out to our Helpline at 855-JQI-HLPS or [emailprotected].

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Jewish Community Mourns the Passing of Rabbi RBO Bat-Or - Jewish Journal

Coronavirus has left countries such as Tunisia facing serious economic hardship and unemployment, while others, including Libya, are dealing with the effects of war. That's led to an increase in sea arrivals this year in countries including Italy and Malta, according to figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Arrivals in southeastern Europe are also up on 2019, mostly from Syria, followed by Morocco and Iraq.

But European responses have often been brutal. Humanitarian organizations say pushbacks at borders in countries such as Greece, an absence of sea rescues in the Mediterranean and unhealthy quarantine arrangements have created huge challenges. And it comes at a time when movement is harder and more dangerous thanks to travel restrictions and the closure of transport routes and processing centers.

Last week, a man was found dead on Sangatte beach, near Calais in northern France. He and a friend had tried to cross the English Channel, one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, in an inflatable dinghy with shovels for paddles. The friend said he was just 16, but French authorities said his papers belonged to a 28-year-old Sudanese migrant and an autopsy showed he was an adult. He couldn't swim, his companion said.

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel said the "tragic loss" was "a brutal reminder of the abhorrent criminal gangs and people smugglers who exploit vulnerable people."

The news came on the same day that at least 45 migrants perished in the deadliest recorded shipwreck off the Libyan coast this year, according to the UNHCR and International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The organizations said there was "an urgent need to strengthen the current search and rescue capacity."

"Delays recorded in recent months, and failure to assist, are unacceptable and put lives at avoidable risk," they added.

Journeys in a pandemic

Almost 4,900 people have crossed the Channel in small boats since lockdown began, more than double the amount thought to have crossed in the whole of 2019, according to analysis by PA Media.

"We know that smugglers and traffickers have obviously been impacted by the pandemic and the restrictions that were put in place. But we also know they're very adaptable," UNHCR spokesman Charlie Yaxley told CNN.

"That's a big concern for us because it also means that the refugees and migrants who are taking these journeys are taking more dangerous and more risky routes."

He said migrants were facing torture, rape and other abuse during land journeys to Libya "by smugglers, traffickers, militias, but also state officials."

Yaxley said there were currently no rescue ships on the central Mediterranean, or EU programs as in previous years, so migrants leaving Libya by boat were often taken back to Libya by the coastguard to face detention or other rights violations.

But the response from European countries burdened by coronavirus has been icy, with migrants forced back or detained in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions.

Felix Weiss, from the German NGO Sea Watch, told CNN he understood the anger from businesses already struggling during the pandemic.

"But this is stuff that you could definitely avoid," he said. "Just disembark them, and then find a solution where they can go in Europe.

"There has to be a European solution," he added. "This is a European failure."

'Nightmare' situation

Weiss said conducting rescues had become "a nightmare" during lockdown because of countries including Italy and Malta blocking boats and refusing to act themselves.

Officials say migrants should quarantine for 14 days on ferries, but some have been kept on unsuitable pleasure boats or oil tankers. Migrants with health issues who have endured detention in inhumane conditions have been stranded for up to six weeks, said Weiss.

"People are traumatized," said Weiss. "The Ocean Viking can take persons for a few days ... but we [rescuers] are not trained to have really bad psychological cases."

Italy's Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese said at a news conference on August 15 that families facing economic crisis in Tunisia were "leaving in search of better life conditions."

"Managing the migrants' flow has been more difficult due to Covid emergency," Lamorgese added.

HRW said several asylum-seekers reported being picked up from Greek islands by the coastguard, forced onto inflatable rafts with no motor, and cast adrift near the border.

"Instead of protecting the most vulnerable people in this time of global crisis, Greek authorities have targeted them in total breach of the right to seek asylum and in disregard for their health," said Eva Cosse, Greece researcher at HRW.

Europe's responsibility

Many migrant camps and centers pose a major risk for the spread of coronavirus.

On July 30, 129 migrants tested positive for Covid-19 at a camp in Treviso, in Italy's Veneto region. Lampedusa's 90-person capacity camp currently has 1,300 residents, according to Weiss.

After more than 200 migrants ran away from a camp in Sicily last month, the region's governor Nello Musumeci warned in a statement of an "unsustainable situation," saying "the issue of migrants has also become a matter of public order and health."

It said that during lockdown, "inequality has been sharpened for transit communities, further limiting access to asylum, healthcare, adequate accommodation, and safety from brutal collective expulsions."

Yaxley said the situation was still "very manageable," but there needed to be "EU solidarity with those Mediterranean coastal states through relocation programs ... so that there's a sharing of the distribution of the responsibility."

"The ad-hoc approach simply inflames the toxic political narrative," he said.

"There's a real need for compassion and humanity."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated which NGO operates Ocean Viking. The vessel is run by SOS Mediterranee.

CNN's Livia Borghese, Valentina Di Donato, Martin Goillandeau, Alexander Durie and Eva Tapiero contributed to this report.

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Europe's migrant crisis is worsening during the pandemic. The reaction has been brutal - CNN

A tragic shipwreck in the Mediterranean, a lifeless boy on a beach, the fickleness of politicians, borders opening and shutting -- these are some of the enduring images of the summer and fall 2015 in Europe in the context of migration. We look at six pivotal moments that have defined the so-called migrant crisis and have been engraved in our collective memory.

On the night of April 18, 2015, a small blue trawler coming from Libya capsizes and sinks in the Strait of Sicily under the horrified eyes of the crew of the "King Jacob", a Portuguese freighter sent to help.

Only some 30 survive among the more than 800 migrants who had been crammed on board the trawler. The tragedy, likely caused by overcrowding and incorrect maneuvers, is one of the worst in recent decades in the Mediterranean.

The scale of the disaster and the chilling accounts of survivors provoke a wave of outrage and push the European Union to strengthen its presence off the Libyan coast. In 2016, an Italian court sentences the Tunisian captain of the trawler to 18 years in jail.

In March of this year, UN migration agency IOM estimates that the death toll of migrants who had tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea since 2014 has passed the "grim milestone" of 20,000 deaths.

Wearing a red T-shirt and blue shorts, the small lifeless body of a three-year-old Syrian boy lies on a Turkish beach. He drowned with at least four other people, including his mother, his five-year-old brother and two others on their rubber boat as they tried to reach a Greek island.

Theheartbreaking photographs of the toddler's body washed ashore in Turkey quicklymake global headlines, prompting international responses and sparking aflurry of donations for asylum seekers. Alan Kurdis death also becomes aglobal symbol of the plight of refugees at sea.

"It was as though themigrants' crisis, so often told through numbers, had found a human face,"news agency AFP wrote.

In total, more than a million people reach Europe via the sea in the year of 2015. Among them, more than 850,000 arrive on Greek shores, the majority are Syrians fleeing their war-torn country.

In 2019, German NGO Sea-Eyenamed its search and rescue (SAR) vessel Alan Kurdiafter the Syrian boy. It has since helped save thousands of lives in the central Mediterranean.

In March this year, a Turkish court sentenced three suspects to 125 years in prison each for the death of Alan Kurdi.

At dawn on August 15, 2015, German photographer Daniel Etter is waiting on the shores of Kos, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea mere kilometers away from mainland Turkey. Soon, a family arrives on the island on a sinking boat.

"Locals, who were there that morning, pulled them on the beach," Etter wrote on Twitter last month. "A visibly shaken man left the boat. As soon as he reached safety, his emotions took over and he gathered his family around him."

That man was Iraqi Laith Majid. In September 2015, it was discovered that the family was actually from Iraq, not Syria as initially reported. "Given the hierarchy imposed on refugees back then, their smuggler told them to pose for Syrian," Etter said.

The photograph was part of the New York Times entry that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in the Breaking News Photography category.

It's August 31, 2015. After visiting a camp for newly arrived refugees, German chancellor Angela Merkel attends a press conference, where she utters a simple sentence about taking in refugees that is now famous: "Wir schaffen das!" ("We will manage this!").

Merkel was addressing the fact that hundreds of thousands of refugees were expected to reach Germany that year.

Fearing a humanitarian crisis, she soon after took a stand and announced an open-door policy. Her decision is a landmark moment. In the year that follows, more than a million people claim asylum in Germany.

Dubbed "Mama Merkel", the chancellor is hailed by Syrian asylum seekers and praised by those who believe she has saved Europe's honor. But her decision also provokes a backlash in Germany and other European countries and helps to give rise to far-right parties including the Alternative for Germany (AfD).

Since 2015, the number of asylum applications has fallen steadily, with Syria remaining the main country of origin for asylum seekers and refugees in Germany.

Today, Germany is the country with the fifth highest refugee population worldwide, according to UN refugee agency UNHCR. By the end of 2019, there were 1.36 million people with protection status in Germany

Between 2015 and 2020, the German government took many steps to reduce the number of asylum seekers, including new laws that made getting asylum more difficult like supporting the EU-Turkey deal.

While many of them are still struggling, the overall trend for refugees and migrants in Germany is positive: 10% more refugees are employed today than in 2015.

Some 20 Eritreans, smiling under the flashes of photographers' cameras, board a plane in Rome. It's October 9, 2015. The men and women, rescued off the Libyan coast and taken to Italy, are now headed for Sweden.

The transfer initiates a "contentious European Union relocation program meant to help the union's front-line countries deal with the largest movement of refugees on the Continent since World War II," the New York Times writes pithily that day.

Italy and Greece are the first entry points into the then-28-nation bloc for hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and poverty in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

At the airport send-off ceremony, Italian and EU politicians proudly repeat that in the next two years, 40,000 refugees from Eritrea, Iraq and Syria would be resettled from Italy throughout member state countries, helping share Italy's burden.

Two months later, the result is meager. A mere 133 people of the 40,000 were relocated from Italy. Some countries drag their feet, others such as Poland and Hungary refuse to carry it out, despite its being compulsory.

In September 2015, a month before the scene at the Rome airport, European countries agree to a "relocation" plan to redistribute some 160,000 asylum seekers from the bloc's two main points of entry by September 2017. After officials found that fewer people were eligible under the scheme that first expected, the number was later revised to just under 100,000.

Ultimately, though, only 33,000 took part in the scheme across EU member states. "The plan, supposed to embody Europe's solidarity, becomes a symbol of division," AFP wrote.

As hundreds of thousands of migrants come into Europe in 2015, one of the most common ways for them to arrive in the EU is through the so-called Balkan route. Their path typically begins in Turkey and then wound through either Bulgaria or Greece. The migrants then make their way further north, eventually reaching Slovenia or Hungary on the path towards countries like Germany.

As spring 2016 approaches, however, the situation changes radically. Countries along the route, from Macedonia, to Croatia and Slovenia all the way to Austria, where a corridor allowing migrants to pass had been in place since summer 2015, all announce that their borders are shut. However, refugees frustrated by the closing of borders still manage to go along the route.

And on March 18, the European Union and Ankara reached a controversial accord ("EU-Turkey deal") to address "irregular migration" from Turkey into the European Union. Under the agreement, Turkey would be obligated to take back migrants who pass through its territory to prevent them from crossing into Greece illegally.

For every "irregular" migrant returned to Turkey, another migrant approved for asylum in the EU would be resettled in one of the bloc's 28 member states. In addition, the EU gave Turkey 6 billion ($6.6 billion) in financial aid to assist with the country's large refugee population, which is currently above 3.5 million.

Between 2016 and March 2020, Germany accepted almost 10,000 migrants and asylum seekers under the accord.

The outcome is a drastic drop in the number of arrivals in Europe, but tens of thousands of migrants find themselves stranded in Greece, raising fears of a humanitarian crisis and Erdogan using their situation for political gain. And Europeans remain divided over key refugee and asylum policies. Numerous initiatives such as a binding distribution quota for migrants have failed.

This article is based on a feature from AFP.

Continued here:

Six pivotal moments of the 2015 'migrant crisis' - InfoMigrants

With a smart black sweater and a clean-shaven face, Younes Qermoua recalls his first attempt to reach Europe five years ago, at the peak of the continent's refugee crisis.

Half a decade later, the world's attention has moved on but the 35-year-old Moroccan is back on the Balkan route, where traffic is picking up this summer even amid the coronavirus pandemic.

After years of bouncing back and forth across the region in attempts by boat, on foot and even tucked above the wheel of a truck, Qermoua's goal remains unchanged.

"I want to live in a country where I can work and get paid for my work, a country where the laws are respected, where there are hospitals, schools," he told AFP in a migrant centre outside Sarajevo, where he is catching some rest before continuing westward towards EU member Croatia.

In 2015, hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees traversed the Balkans in weary columns, reaching the peninsula through Greece before trundling northwards.

The route was officially shut down under a 2016 deal between Brussels and Turkey.

But in reality, the movement has never stopped.

While the numbers are lower, tens of thousands still flow through the region annually, escaping war and poverty in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

Qermoua, who in his first attempt never made it past Greece, is now making progress on a new route that bends west through Bosnia to avoid tighter controls in Hungary, which built a border fence in 2015.

He joins a summer surge of travellers in the Balkans who are on the move after the loosening in early spring of virus lockdowns, when movement was curtailed and some migrant camps were sealed shut.

In June, the Western Balkans was the most active migratory route into Europe, while the first six months of 2020 saw a 73-percent increase in migrants detected at the borders compared to the same period last year, according to Frontex, the EU's border police.

For Lence Zdravkin, whose front porch looks out onto a railway track slicing through the centre of North Macedonia, there is a sense of deja vu.

When huge numbers of people started passing her doorstep during the crisis five years ago -- following the train tracks as a guide -- she became a local hero for collecting food, clothing and other donated aid for them.

This summer, the 53-year-old sits on her balcony with a bright light to help spot travellers who are again passing regularly, though fewer donations are coming in as the world's attention is focused on the pandemic.

"The refugees are facing the same sufferings, with the same journeys, with all the problems that accompany them from the beginning of their travel to its end," she told AFP.

The warm months always bring a new tide of migrants but this summer the numbers have "drastically increased", she said.

While North Macedonia built a barrier on its southern border with Greece in 2015, migrants can still slip in through a mountainous region where the barrier doesn't reach, said Jasmin Redjepi, from the Skopje-based NGO Legis.

Many then take the railway tracks, often hopping onto the links between the carriages of freight trains barrelling past.

According to data from the UN's refugee agency, arrivals in North Macedonia over the past six months have already topped last year's figures for the same period, reaching nearly 23,000.

"They want to cross during this period and get to Europe because they do not want to find themselves in autumn and winter with closed borders and quarantines again," Redjepi told AFP.

Some stretches of the Balkan route are more complicated than they were five years ago, with migrants forced to cross difficult terrain to avoid border barriers and boosted patrols.

Reports of violent pushbacks at the frontiers have also become commonplace, with migrants describing beatings, theft and other abuse at the hands of police.

After crossing Turkey's land border with Greece, Qermoua walked some 700 kilometres (435 miles), mostly alone he says to avoid detection, through Albania and Montenegro to reach Bosnia.

But the next leg of his journey may be even tougher as the country's northwest -- which flanks the border with Croatia -- once again becomes a dead end.

Local authorities have started blocking the entry of new arrivals to the region, where official camps are filling up and thousands of more migrants are sleeping rough in abandoned homes and factories.

While locals were initially receptive to the foreigners, some are now protesting against the influx, calling on authorities to "clear" the streets.

Local mobs have recently stopped buses and pulled off migrants and asylum seekers, leaving them stranded.

The mood has also soured in Serbia, where right-wing groups have become more vocally anti-migrant in recent years.

In a park near Belgrade's bus station, scores of foreigners gather on the grass, a common meeting point to link up with smugglers.

Many bear the same wounds from thwarted attempts to cross the Croatian, Hungarian or Romanian borders: gashes on their lower legs and smashed mobile phones they attribute to violent police expulsions.

After five years stuck in the Balkans, Arif, a soft-spoken 24-year-old from Pakistan, is one of those whose hope is fading.

"My mother and father keep calling me to come back home, and now I tell them, as soon as I get my papers, I'll be back".

Link:

Five years since the European migrant crisis, Balkans route still a hope for migrants - Deccan Herald

Five years after Germany controversially took in hundreds of thousands of migrants, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Friday she would do the same again as she rides a wave of popularity for her handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

"I would make essentially the same decisions," Merkel said at her annual summer press conference in Berlin, in response to a question about whether she regretted her 2015 policy to keep the border open to an influx of asylum seekers.

"When people are standing at the German-Austrian border or the Hungarian-Austrian border, they have to be treated like human beings," she said.

More than one million people filed asylum applications in Germany in 2015-2016 during a pivotal moment in Merkel's now 15-year tenure.

The influx deeply polarised Germany and fuelled the rise of the far-right AfD party, weakening Merkel's standing at home.

But as the veteran leader, 66, nears the end of her fourth term, her handling of the coronavirus pandemic has given her an unexpected popularity boost.

In a recent Infratest Dimap poll, 71 percent of respondents said they were very satisfied or satisfied with Merkel's work.

The AfD, on the other hand, has seen its ratings decline during the pandemic.

"It's amazing to see how quickly things can change," notes Hans Vorlaender, a professor of politics at the TU Dresden university. "As a rule, crises are always a make or break moment for those in charge."

Voters have been charmed by Merkel's "rationality, calmness and self-confidence" during the crisis, he observes.

Her understated pleas to the German public to help fight the virus were well received because they were "not a macho show of power, but filled with empathy", he said.

- 'Loss of control' -

Back at the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, Merkel at first seemed to have public opinion on her side, taking smiling selfies with the new arrivals and coining the now legendary phrase "We can do this!"

But the debate around migration became deeply divisive, eating into public trust in Merkel and even leading to a far-right party -- the anti-Islam, anti-immigration AfD -- gaining a meaningful presence in parliament for the first time since the Nazi regime.

Some authorities were overwhelmed and the chancellor was blamed for the "chaotic" situation, even within her conservative ranks.

Thomas de Maiziere, then interior minister, admitted recently that there had been a "loss of control" at times.

And then there were the damaging headlines. On New Year's Eve 2015, mass sexual assaults were committed against women in Cologne, mostly by men of North African origin.

A year later in December 2016, Anis Amri -- a rejected asylum seeker from Tunisia and known radical jihadist -- hijacked a truck and ploughed it into a crowded Christmas market in central Berlin. Twelve people died.

Events like these in turn fuelled right-wing anger, leading to demands from the AfD that "Merkel must go".

After the European Union made a controversial agreement with Turkey in 2016, the flow of migrants arriving in Germany slowed dramatically.

But Merkel was punished in 2017 federal elections when the AfD was voted into parliament as Germany's largest opposition party.

European and regional elections in 2018 confirmed the decline in Merkel's popularity.

At the end of 2018, she resigned as head of her party, the CDU, but said she intended to remain chancellor until the end of her fourth term in 2021.

Many doubted that she would make it that far -- until the pandemic came along.

- 'Not finished' -

Five years on from the refugee crisis, Germany "has become more diverse, more colourful, younger", according to the Pro Asyl migrants' association.

By the latest count, around half the migrants who arrived in Germany during the crisis are now employed -- a figure held up by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) as a success story.

Merkel on Friday pointed to successes in integrating refugees into the job market and German society.

"Nevertheless, the subject will continue to be of concern to us and will remain so in the years to come," she said.

"The subject of migration... is not finished. It will be a constant theme for the 21st century."

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Migrant crisis: Five years after refugee influx, Merkel 'would do the same' - RTL Today

Over 200,000 lone child migrants left to uncertain fates in Europe

Five years since the tragic death of Alan Kurdi, Save the Children is warning that Europe has failed to address the needs of migrant and refugee children

Brussels, September 2nd - Some 210,000 unaccompanied children sought asylum in Europe over the past five years, fleeing conflict, persecution or violence, a new report by Save the Children said today. The total number of children arriving is likely to be much higher, with many being forced into an existence in the shadows of Europe, at risk of exploitation and abuse.

In the same period, more than 700 children, including babies, lost their lives trying to reach European shores[i], during perilous journeys by sea.

While some of the children have been offered safety and protection, many struggle to get a refugee status, live in constant fear of being deported or detained, and are unable to reunite with family members living elsewhere in Europe , the report Protection Beyond Reach by Save the Children reveals.

Children, travelling alone or with their family, have unique needs and must be offered safety and protection, yet the EU responded with increasingly restrictive and dangerous measures, Save the Children said.

It is five years to the day since Alan Kurdi lost his life just off the Turkish coast, becoming a tragic symbol of the refugee crisis. European leaders were among the first to say: Never again, but ever since, they have only made routes more difficult and dangerous for refugees and migrants, said Anita Bay Bundegaard, Director of Save the Children Europe.

The way Europe has treated the most vulnerable children in their hour of need is unacceptable. On any given day since August 2019, an average of 10,000 children were stranded on the Greek islands, 60% of them are under 12 years old. While some efforts were made to relocate children out of Greece, thousands have been abandoned due to the unwillingness of some European countries to take in and care for some of the most vulnerable children in the world. Children continue to die on the EUs doorstep while European leaders look the other way, Bay Bundegaard continued.

Many children are fleeing from countries facing ongoing or protracted crises. With the conflict in Syria in its tenth year, half of the countrys eight million children have known nothing but war. The conflict in Afghanistan where most unaccompanied children in Europe are from remains among the deadliest for children, who make up almost a third of all casualties in the country[ii].

Many European countries responded to the migrant crisis by shutting their borders, facilitating detention of children or making it nearly impossible for children to be reunited with their parents - in Greece alone, some 331 children were in detention in March 2020.

Ahmed, a 15-year old boy who fled Syria and is now in Belgrade, Serbia, said: When we try to cross the borders we get beaten by the police, badly. They are often very rude. I think they want us to feel afraid to try again. I havent seen my family for a long time now, I left to go to Europe because there was nothing for me in Syria, or Lebanon, or Turkey."

Children suffer nightmares and other symptoms of trauma and depression, including self-harm because of their experience in their country of origin and the arduous journey, their permits of stay being under constant review and their fears of being deported[iii].

While some improvements have been made,[iv] these are overshadowed by harsh border policies and measures to prevent vulnerable children from entering Europe altogether. Europe needs to draw lessons from the past. New migration policies should not come at the cost of childrens lives, continued Anita Bay Bundegaard.

Based on data compiled by organisations such as Eurostat, UNHCR and IOM Save the Children found that:

Ahead of the EUs announcement on new measures on asylum and migration, Save the Children is calling for the rights of children need to be at the heart of those decisions and for the EU and its leaders to ensure that steps are taken to keep vulnerable children safe. They must ensure that children can immediately access asylum and protection once they arrive to Europe, instead of being pushed back. More and better legal migration pathways, including swift access to family reunification, could prevent more children from dying on their way to Europe.

ENDS

See more here:

Protection beyond reach - State of play of refugee and migrant children's rights in Europe - World - ReliefWeb