Travel / Poland from a Persian Tourist's Perspective [269]


It's clear you've made up your mind. You make allegations based on anti-israel propaganda and when you can't prove your allegations you call the other side close-minded. Your world-class education seems to be lacking something.

History / Israeli wants to wipe Poland off the map! [198]

You people are all crazy! Why would Israel bomb Poland? Why not Portugal or Mauritius? Look how a stupid quote taken out of context from an article written in 2003 about something else has generated so many comments.


This quote is totally manufactured. If you believe that Menachem Begin actually said this then you are an idiot. Where is your source, Stormfront?

Travel / Poland from a Persian Tourist's Perspective [269]


So that's Grunwald's proof of Israelis raping palestinian women!? In the case you brought up from 2006, an Israeli girl, the daughter of an Israeli officer on an airbase was having sex with soldiers on the base. She was a minor and this was a sex crime. The case was investigated by both the police and the military police. The soldiers were punished. You've proven the obvious fact that Israel, like any society in the world, has cases of sex crimes. The good news is that we have a police and justice system that prosecutes offenders.

But where are the israeli soldiers raping palestinian women that the persian is so certain of?

Travel / Poland from a Persian Tourist's Perspective [269]

Now I opened the other 2 links. One is identical to the first one about the case of the girl on the airbase and nothing to do with palestinians. And one indeed talks about Israeli interrogators raping palestinian prisoners. The source is Turkish quoting palestinians, so I'm skeptical about the truth of the report. Is there any corroboration of the report from any other source?

The accusation was made in 2004, six years ago. If this turned out to be true, it's hard to imagine that no one would know about it here where everyone talks about everything and everyone knows someone in the Shabak. The left wing press lives to expose scandals like this and would have put it on the front page of every newspaper, and yet I've never heard anything about it. So I doubt that it's true.

Travel / Poland from a Persian Tourist's Perspective [269]


Most Israelis are patriotic but not fanatical about it. I don't know any Israelis who think supporting rapists will help preserve the homeland. Is that the way people think in Iran?

Travel / Poland from a Persian Tourist's Perspective [269]

I just came across an interesting article that should put an end to the nonsense about Israelis raping palestinian women, whether in prison or elsewhere:

jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=172472

The key sentence is this statement by female prisoners:
"Those who think that a Palestinian female prisoner is raped when she's arrested are living in an illusion and are mistaken," the female prisoners said. "There has never been such a case. Nor have we heard of a Palestinian family that killed their daughter after her release."

Travel / Poland from a Persian Tourist's Perspective [269]

The source is the palestinian prisoners themselves. I see you don't believe that the Jerusalem Post is capable of writing a factual news story and must have made up the quote. So here's the story from the site of the Palestinian news agency Maan:

News / Changing Face in Poland: Skinnhead Puts on a Skullcap [90]


Which people do you think an orthodox jew in Warsaw is going to harass? Why do you have to judge everyone badly? I don't know this person or his personality, but I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt. If the story is true and he was confronted suddenly with the truth about his identity he could have reacted in much less constructive ways. Instead he undertook to change his life and try to repent. I hope he succeeds and that you all stop being so cynical.


...and here you're using circular reasoning.
First you claim that orthodox jews are backward and have dark age traditions (an odd accusation coming from a pagan). Then when confronted with the fact that many orthodox jews are wonderful, progressive people, you state that this makes them no longer orthodox – because they don't meet your definition of "orthodox".

News / Changing Face in Poland: Skinnhead Puts on a Skullcap [90]






A simple story about a skinhead turning into the very person he used to hate – sounds like a good human interest story. But on Polish forum this creates a frenzy of nasty comments about Israel, Jew and Zionism and calls by Sokrates to kill Israelis. You're a sick lot of losers.

Meanwhile here in Israel, the weather today is balmy. The beaches are full of happy bathers (arabs too). The streets of my town are full of shoppers, and the parks have kids playing. The Israeli economy is doing well. The wheat in the fields is being harvested and there's a nice smell of orange blossoms in the air. I drove out to Jerusalem last night for dinner and had a lovely time. Lots of tourists around. The view of the full moon over the hills around Jerusalem was beautiful. Thank G-d, life here is great.

Genealogy / THE MEANING AND RESEARCH OF MY POLISH LAST NAME, SURNAME? [4501]


Bachur in Hebrew means young man. (Bachura means young woman).
Maybe it made its way to Polish through Yiddish, where it is pronounced "Bochur".

News / Changing Face in Poland: Skinnhead Puts on a Skullcap [90]


There is no Jewish fraternity. And if there is, they haven't been telling me when the meetings are scheduled.

News / Changing Face in Poland: Skinnhead Puts on a Skullcap [90]


This is called "Polish Forum" not any other name. And you, a Pole living in Poland, said what you said. Is it anti-polish to quote you?

News / Changing Face in Poland: Skinnhead Puts on a Skullcap [90]


The problem is that you believe all the bullsht arab propaganda that says we stole their country. What country did we steal from? There was no arab country here. There were arab people, and there still are. And if you look west from here to gibralatar and to the east from here to iraq there are arab countries as far as the eye can see.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [639]


I have to correct you on the history. The word "Ashkenazi" in classical Hebrew simply means "German". The Ashkenazi Jews first formed a distinct identity in the rhineland in the early middle ages, and then spread to other parts of germany and france. In the late middle ages they started migrating Eastward to poland and later to Ukraine and Lithuania. The movement was from west to east until the 19th century when it reversed.

You can see this trend by looking at where the famous ashkenazi jewish scholars came from. Gershom Ben Yehuda was born in Metz in the 900s. A century later there was Rashi in Troyes and his grandchildren were the Tosafists who lived in Worms, Mainz and Speyer. (They were descendants of Jews who migrated from Italy and elsewhere.) Later scholars were in Rothenberg and Frankfurt. In the rennaissance period the big Jewish scholars were in Prague and German cities. You start hearing about big Polish and Lithuanian Jewish scholars in the 17th century. That's when the Hassidic movement was born. The greatest scholar of the 18th century was Elijah of Vilna. From then, the center of gravity for Jewish scholarship was Lithuania and Poland till WWII. During the 19th century Ashkenazim drifted to western europe the US and Palestine. The main centers of scholarship are now in Israel and the US, reflecting where most jews live.

History / Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki) started anti-Semitism? [101]


It's not as if everyone had one situation and the Jews had another one. In medieval times there was no such thing as a "regular Pole" and there was not one body of law that all were equally bound to except the Jews. People were either nobles, clergy, burgers, peasants... or Jews. We were a socio/religious/economic class. And each class had it's legal privileges and/or burdens. So there were privileges for Jews but there were severe limitations too. Jews didn't own land and neither did peasants. Jews had their own courts and so did the clergy.

So I don't think our "privileges" created anti-semitism. Anti-Jewish feeling was an ingrained part of European Christian culture and it needed no help from King Casimir.

History / Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki) started anti-Semitism? [101]


I find it odd too that there are so many threads about Jews. But I swear I'm not polonius or anyone else. I have only this one account and I don't start threads. When I see a comment about Jews or Israel, I react. You, on the other hand, Sokrates write more about Jews than anyone else. If you don't care, why do you have so much to say?

History / Question about Warsaw Ghetto (shared building?) and Monument [29]

The Law Courts building had an entrance from the Aryan side on Ogrodowa Street, and for the Jewish side on Leszno Street. I've never seen a picture of it.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [639]


I'll oblige.


I don't think you're anti-semitic. I think you have very superficial knowledge about Jews, our history and you get most of your information about Israel from biased sources. You have a lot of assumptions about jews that are based on stereotypes. To be fair, I know very little about Scotland and its history, but then I don't give my opinions on Scottish affairs.


Why would G-d be against Zionism? His prophets predicted our return to Israel more than 2000 years ago.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [639]

It's not clear what the conditions are. It would include repentance for having done idol-worship. Since we haven't touched the stuff since ancient times, I think that's been fulfilled. I think the main condition is that as soon as the geo-political situation made it possible for us to return en masse, we did.

I am also Orthodox. Most of the Orthodox groups that opposed zionism before the war changed their minds since then. Now it's a very small minority that opposes it actively. Their reasons are totally religious and have nothing to do with anyone's human rights. They see the zionist movement as a rebellion against the exile decreed by G-d. They have no doubt about our eventual right to the land, but they want to keep it in the realm of a supernatural messianic age. In my eyes, they are like a hostage who has been imprisoned so long that he is afraid to leave captivity and believes he is meant to stay like that.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [639]


They don't impact at all on religious freedoms. People here can follow whatever religion they like. Likud is politically center-right, but it includes both religious and secular people.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [639]


A few technical corrections:
B'ezrat Hashem is Hebrew, not Yiddish. It means "with G-d's help".

The word Hashem means literally "the name" and it refers to G-d whose name we don't say or write. It has nothing to do with Shem the son of Noah.

Hebrew is close to Arabic, but Yiddish, which is based on German, has nothing to do with Arabic. It uses Hebrew loan words but is not a semitic language at all.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [639]


Well done.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [639]


I remember you asked me that and I had never heard that word. But now that you mention that in Fiddler the rabbi says it and the people repeat it, I now realize what you mean. The word is "umain". That's "Amen", which is what you answer to a blessing. ("So be it.")

The Jews from Galicia and Hungary pronounce it "Umain". Jews from Lithuania pronounce it "Omain". Sefaradi Jews and Israelis say "Ahmen."

Another mystery cleared up.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [639]


They didn't tell me.


We're causing a diplomatic row?! Turkey sends 6 boats with anti-Israel activists to break our blockade of terrorist-ruled Gaza and their prime minister curses us day after day, and we're the ones starting a row? We should have sent home the Turkish ambassador, not the other way around. We only did not do it because we know that the Turkish army and many of it s citizens are friendly to israel. We don't want to break off relations with a country just because they happen to have a stupid prime minister right now who wants to use tensions with israel as a political tactic. This is all part of Erdogan's move away from Europe and toward the Arab world. He didn't do all this because of the flotilla or any concern for human rights.

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [639]


I never heard of this artist, although I did read the Ringelblum diaries. I'm not aware of any exhibits here in Israel but I see there's an exhibit in Warsaw: jewishinstitute.org.pl/en/wystawy/czasowe/5.html

Genealogy / Jewish Roots of Poland [639]


Now I've learned about this artist who i didn't know. Thanks.

Genealogy / Is your line of the Polish family noble? [74]


Ha! Shimon Peres was born in Poland.

History / Ghetto Uprising better known than Warsaw Uprising? [92]


There's no question that after the war Jews emphasized the heroic uprisings, (Warsaw, Kovno, Vilna, Sobibor, Treblinka, bands in the forests) rather than the masses that were killed with almost no physical resistance. It arouses pride and it's easy to explain. But was Janosz Korchak less of a hero than Mordechai Anilevitch? Was a father who stayed with his terrified kids instead of escaping the ghetto a coward? Can you say that the Jews from Hungary, who when they came out of the cattle trains were already inside the gates of Birkenau and were gassed within hours, were cowards for not organizing resistance within hours? So the real measure of heroism or cowardice is not so simple. I'm sure that many of the Poles who were murdered didn't die with a rifle in their hand either. Maybe that's why Poles emphasize the Warsaw uprising. Everyone wants to look like a hero.

Genealogy / Funny Polish surnames [63]


Excuse me? Hebrew is not a Jewish language?

History / Ghetto Uprising better known than Warsaw Uprising? [92]


I reserve the right to be unreasonable, argumentative and one-sided just like anyone else.