Message from R’ Schonfeld: R’ Yoel Schonfeld

It was a remarkable display of basic inhumanity on every level. An Israeli El Al passenger plane en route to Israel from Warsaw needed to make an emergency landing due to a sick passenger on board. The closest airport available to land under these conditions was in Istanbul, Turkey. This airport had been a regular stop for many Jewish passengers looking for a usually cheaper and more elegant way to fly to Israel. The airport itself is said to be a sprawling, beautiful mecca of (non-kosher) fine dining and shopping. Many people that I know, including friends and family, would fly with Turkish Air despite its stopover in Istanbul, due to its cheaper rates and stunning airport.

It was June 27, 1976, around the 200th birthday of the United States, when the awful news broke that an Air France jet flying from Israel was hijacked to Entebbe, Uganda. Dozens of Israeli/Jewish passengers were held hostage by Idi Amin’s hateful army. A passenger, Dorah Block, was killed during the takeover. Things looked very bleak for the remaining passengers.

I was recently sent an Instagram under the name Carlasesenco, in which a young Jewish woman with watery red eyes pitifully expresses how abandoned she feels as a Progressive Jew, which had been her world. As she states. “It is an incredibly sad and confusing time” for Progressive Jews.

The weather was perfect. The crowd was cheerful, enthusiastic, and sizeable. Aside from the ubiquitous but marginalized Neturei Karta members on Madison Avenue, there was a complete respite from pro-Hamas and pro-Palestinian harassment. Much of the credit goes to the organizers of the event and to the NYPD. Of course, the crowd itself gets a lot of credit, as we Jews are not the rowdy bunch that populates similar events. I wore my “Build Israel Great Again” red and white cap, which drew some thumbs up reaction and a request for a picture of the hat. So, all was well.

I would often half-jokingly tell my children that it’s good that Hashem made me a Jew, or I would have been the worst anti-Semite around. I also told them it’s good Hashem made me a rabbi, or I would have been a horrible rabbi critic.

Rabbi Moshe Hauer, Executive Vice President of the Orthodox Union, issued a weekly Shabbos message for last week that was quite remarkable for its candor.