Rejuvenation: Greece is a Time, a Place, an Emotion

[Music] hi everybody it is almost May 26 2009 teen already the 20th day they are 6779 you're listening to ETA Rho on rejuvenation for the Land of Israel Network hope everybody's doing well this is gonna be just like a little catch-up schmooze with you guys because I've been doing some interviews and then some of the things that I want to say just gets pushed out and so I'm gonna just take a few minutes today to fill you in with what's been going on in my life and in my brain for the last couple of weeks some unpaid public service announcements at first so that I don't forget in two weeks we're gonna have we meaning the network is going to have what I hope is a marvelous shove what weekend at the Mount Zion hotel if you're going to be in Israel if you're gonna be in Jerusalem and you want to stay at the hotel there's just a few rooms left but if you're going to be in the city and don't need a place to stay you can certainly join us for some or all of the programming you could write to me evil individual comm if you haven't gotten an email about it and happy to pass your information along I will be on Sunday which is chevre lot I will be at the lunch I'll be hosting the lunch I'll be also giving a class right after lunch and doing a walking tour of the area of ketchup you know and when it gets a little bit cooler like around 5:15 5:30 and also on Monday which for those who just keep one day of shovel watch will already be what we call extra clog the day after shovel what so Monday there is going to be a bus tour I am going to be guiding Herodian in the morning and then there'll be lunch at stay bar with Rev sphere Eamon who's just awesome then a few hours out at the ranch with our very own ari and Jeremy and ending the day with none other than Josh hastin at the overlook in the daytime yell so even if you can't join us for all or part of the weekend see if you can come on Monday and it should be really great partnering with rafi got some incredible torii teachers down and of course all night learning for shovel what some great food jerusalem on shovel ought I mean really what could be better so I hope that I see at least some of you there I'm speaking of Mizrahi just three weeks ago I was in the States and Merrick Long Island for the Mizrahi Shabbat after Pesa and that was really a wonderful weekend to want to just give a public shout out and thank you to the to the synagogue will have Shalom had a really a beautiful Shabbat spoke quite a few times the people there just marvelous interested questions love Israel love Judaism and and especially I would like to thank rabbi IRA Evan the rabbi of the community who was just so wonderful and committed and made sure everything ran beautifully even though his father was quite ill in the hospital and actually passed away just a few days after that Shabbat so first of all condolences to Rabbi Evan the synagogue there is quite lucky to have a spiritual leader on that level and I really felt so welcome it was just just a beautiful Shabbat and Sunday morning I was at Enoch at rabbi Stephen Pierzynski synagogue Banega Shirin and since it wasn't Shabbat did a PowerPoint and I had a nice crowd so altogether it was a quick but I think really important trip to to the New York area to talk about Israel's talk about yachtsman about our independence and you know just share some of what I do here with with people wherever I go the next trip I'm planning is going to be the very beginning of September not planning anything during the summer one of my daughter's is due to give birth at the end of July so I'm kind of hanging around the Holy Land don't want to go too far but but at the beginning of September now getting things underway you can always go to my website Eve here my newsletter which I promise will not inundate you I think you're gonna get it maybe four times a year just writing up the next one with my summer plans so you could sign up for that and just see what I'm up to and just writes me in response to any of the shows I've written it any thoughts that you have any future things you'd like to see which I love to try and fit in and and you know just be in touch that's really the most important thing to me so after the Emmys Rafi Shabbat came back to Israel for a few days and then took a personal trip to sell a Nicki to Greece with my husband and our two oldest granddaughters who are 11 and 13 wants it a little just one-on-one with them or four-on-four or whatever just some just some special time with them and some of you may remember last summer we were in Athens and I was really for the first time exposed to it learning and learned about of course because the piqued my curiosity Greek jewelry where where the Jews were in Greece the Jews who don't get along with the husband Ian's about 2200 years ago of course go out into other parts of the Greek Empire Intel exam via into today's Athens and and so that kind of whetted my appetite for Greece and so that's what we decided to go back and from Israel it is so close it was a two and a quarter hour plane ride like really really close it's this whole little Mediterranean is just which at some point was the ancient world and then in today's parlance or it with today's traveling it's just like around the corner I spend more time at the airport waiting for the flight then I actually did on the fight itself but so the Nicki was interesting because sometimes known as the Salonika it different than Athens we took a trip one day out to the countryside to see were philip ii but the father of Alexander the Great was married they did a really great job in reconstructing the tomb what's called like a tomb you light it's essentially a little mound and that's how they buried people back in the day so they found his grave and you go underground into this little mound and that's where they have so they've incorporated part of the tombs not just his but other tombs that they found there with the exhibits with things in the cases that they found one of the things that is just so astonishing is the respect and the wealth when Alexander the Great or as we call him in Hebrew actually Alexander the Macedonian because that is the area of Macedonia seems to be a little bit of a kerfuffle these days with North Macedonia which is a fairly new country and the fact that they took the name it's kind of bothered Greeks every country right and I said I get that I get that little name stealing identities feeling thing we've got that going on here but in any event he it buries his father with an extraordinary amount of wealth and and the like the outfits that they wore in the gold and the crowns and his last wife is also buried with him apparently she gets burnt alive when he dies that's part of but it's considered the honor because then she follows him in the world to come that's what they did they burned everything because I guess in the smoke and in the sense that that's how you go into the world to come in in you know and then in their religion or how they felt at the time so that was really fascinating in it and I was saying to the girls because when you learn let's say Hanukkah right the big story that has to do with the Greeks in Judaism so what we were seeing there was what we were up against so we talked about the Greek culture and the Hellenistic culture and how it had come here as the Empire spreads and how many of the Judeans living here were attracted to that and as usual and nothing changes and you have the same thing today the battle between the people who are more god-fearing and those who are more reduced if you will by the Western culture with at the time then is Greek culture when when I was with the girls and I'm explaining to them my granddaughters that this is what we were up against so we learn it from our perspective and then you go out and you see other parts of the Greek Empire and you see wow this is the wealth this is the strength and then get a different appreciation of what our ancestors are going through the risks that they took how difficult it must have been so in the case of the Maccabees they win the battle takes 25 years but they are able to push the Greeks out although of course as we see not completely and eventually the Hasmoneans fall to that same Greek culture that they were initially had pushed out of the Land of Israel but you you just you go back into that time and into that time period and see of course you know what else is happening Alexander the Great is out here way before the Hasmoneans - 3 3 3 is when he really conquers as part of the world that has minions not until about 60 or so years later that you kind of see the process and how that's going and it's so important because most of us just learn things from one perspective which is natural that's whatever perspective the country we're living in the culture we're living in the religion that we're dealing with is going to teach us if it's so important to - if you can try and see the other side it shouldn't be threatening it doesn't mean you're gonna go fall to the other side and say oh wow like I see that they had a point and even if you do that's okay very few things black and white in this world but to be able to in truly a privilege and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to be able to do that to go out and some of these ancient cultures like the Greek culture like the Roman culture which is of course a little bit later and and destroys our temple and then takes over the Land of Israel for hundreds of years to go and see it for from their side of things and and I spoke about this has it been to Italy a few times the how difficult it is to walk around Rome to see that the beautiful buildings the Colosseum and the major signs of the Roman Empire very often came at the cost to my people the Colosseum built with money that was taken from the temple the gladiator games were my ancestors who had to fight there which is as I said at the time when I think I spoke about this in an earlier show why I had my family learn Torah in the Colosseum because the sages at the time said that where the Romans play their evil games we will one day learn Torah and of course at the time everyone's like yeah right you got to be kidding the Romans are so strong but here we were we we played a long game and we are still here and we do still have our faith and we are still learning our Torah and see there's a these are little things maybe they're they don't mean much but they're symbolic in my personal life and that's really what I can do I can't go after the big-ticket items like that I'm not an emperor I'm not a president and I'm not a queen not gonna make changes on a major level because I can make changes in in my personal life and with my family and bring some symbolism in and you can all do that we can all do that then that also is meaningful and and can change something I hope and and as I said even if for the feeling that okay so these cultures were here and they tried to destroy us and where are they now and here we are back in our land still with fidelity to the same God and to his Torah and those are the things that when when situations get rough need to keep us through so that was fascinating in terms of Sola Nicki and Macedonia and Alexander the Great and we took a summoning key itself I was not impressed with it is not a pretty city at all and my there's little pockets there's little old streets at little quaint neighborhoods but in general the architectures was very nondescript and before they got a hold of themselves and apparently you know they took down a lot of their beautiful buildings and what you see there is not impressive and also what's very distressing and the same thing I had seen in Athens was graffiti everywhere and it made me think about New York and how a few years ago they really cleaned up New York and took the graffiti off the subways and crime went down and I could see that because you have this graffiti and you have okay yeah there are some really artistic things but most of them are just scrawling and even in the parks where the kids play four-letter words all over them the swings and the slides and it just really gives a sense of and it's not true but it gives a sense of the whole city being a slum or the whole city being a place where people don't really care where no one's in control where anybody of the spray-paint can can just go and to face anything they want and it just it's very unsettling saw the same thing in Athens acts the explanation that we got in Athens I don't know if it's the same for sulla nikky is that the leaders when the Greek economy pretty much tanked about ten years ago and they still haven't come out of it they're hoping but just as a segue the guy that I hired to drive our van to take us out to the countryside one day it's like is I think it's like a chemical engineer he's some kind of engineer but the company closed and now he's he's driving for a living so you could see that they're still not where they want to be in the economy still hasn't recovered a lot of the young people have left the country and it's really still trying to pull its way out of that but we were told that part of the reason for the graffiti is to give the young people a place to vent and if maybe if they're spray-painting buildings then they won't riot or they they won't show how upset they are in other ways so maybe that's true but it doesn't seem to have it doesn't draw you in and it doesn't seem to you know leave you with the feeling of again that this place somebody's in charge of this place so that was upsetting that we had a Jewish tour one day and all day tour and that was really very very sobering the history of Saloniki there's an old Jewish history there Jews there since again since you know the time where there is a Greek Empire Jews going there you have Jews that also came there from Ashkenazi during the Crusades the Jews who were having a rough time of it let's say in France came there later on especially during the Inquisition you have a lot of Jews who are fleeing the Inquisition in the Iberian Peninsula who also come there at different points in its history Jews were the majority of the population Saloniki as recently as the last century close to 70% ben-gurion goes there the port was so met worked so many Jews worked in the port of Saloniki that it was closed on Shabbat and ben-gurion went there in the in the late 1930s he wanted it build the ports of Haifa and of Tel Aviv here in of Israel and he went to look for Jews who know how to build and work at ports and so you he went to Saloniki some of the Jews didn't want to come to land visit all that the Arabs were rioting imagine in the 30s before settlements before the State of Israel the the Arabs here have pogroms 1929 massive pogroms 1936 to 1939 rioting killing Jews has nothing to do with anything that you've been told it's obviously clearly a religious war this is not about land that's for a different time a different show but anyhow so some people wouldn't come and ben-gurion they were afraid but a few thousand people did come with him and they were saved from the Nazis because they were safe in the Land of Israel one of the points to ponder of a few that I'm going to be throwing out at you in the next few minutes the Jews of salah nikki really hadn't suffered from anti-semitism or from the crusades from a lot of things during the years fascinating history some of the things that I have learned over the years the followers of schapp tights v what we call sub t anism in the 17th century the false messiah many of them from their 300 families which at the time when you talk about a family you're talking about really a large extended family it's like 10,000 people and they built a mosque there because eventually spoiler alert a shop tight speak and converting to islam very charismatic person said he was messiah ends up being converting to islam at the pain of death and a lot of his followers follow him into islam and the mosque that is built in southern icky it is a mosque but it also has Stars of David on it and you can see that there like it the work what they were called at the time was the Greek word for what we would call shwarma which is me that turns around on a spit so the term was given to them because they turned around so you could see that at the time when they were still in solo Nicky they were technically Muslims but they were still doing a lot of things that were Jewish what happens at some point a few years a few years later I believe in the 18th century there is a population exchange with Turkey the turkey expels Christians who go to Greece and Greece sends over the Moslems from there who a population exchange if you will the religious population exchange who go to Turkey the Jews then these Jews so it converted to Islam then go to Turkey and then they're completely lost and there's no more even traces of Judaism there they completely go into into Islam so if you're ever in Turkey and you know they're definitely Jewish DNA sourced out X Jews among the population so a lot of really really interesting history but where it of course ends is in 1943 the Nazis come there and this is the highest rate except for a small area of Lithuania these are the highest percentage of Jews that are killed by the Nazis ninety six percent of the Jews of Salonika are murdered by the Nazis just like just an absolutely enormous number and the guide that took us around that day her family is her father was one of the few people who did survive the camps she gave us a few reasons for that we went around there was a small neighborhood that was built right near where the train station was for the Jews living in the port many of whom were were not wealthy at all they many of the Jews there were poor there was a massive fire in 1917 which burnt a large part of the city and many of the Jewish homes were burned and a lot of the Jews were left homeless and so this little neighborhood was built for them a couple of neighborhoods were built for them so they would have a place to live apropos of course connecting with the fires that we had here in Israel on Thursday and on Friday were a good part of me vomo Dean of the community the Carlebach community I think 40 out of 50 homes there were burned town and another any kyboots was burnt so and it's just devastating and we're already people already collecting money and doing things to help these people rebuild their homes and at least have some clothes now or get back on their feet a lot of people that I know know people who live there and there's just a tremendous wave of support but these fires even today when we have modern firefighting equipment and a lot of countries around here including Greece in equipment and planes to help Israel fight the fires we Egypt also Croatia we really got some help from a lot of the neighbors around here as Israel gives help when needed and that's so important but these fires can can be just devastating and totally destroy not just homes but can really destroy civilizations it's one of the theories of how the Bronze Age ended and the Iron Age began in the Mediterranean area were droughts and famine and fires so and anybody who lived in London or knows the history of London of course or of San Francisco just to name two places where fires really devastated things so here we had that in Israel thank God no loss of life but in salah nikki they have that in 1917 and many of the jews lost their homes and we're living in this these little neighborhoods so one of the neighborhoods is near the train station and there was kind of a perfect storm of terrible things that happened one of them was the rabbi at the time who was a Nazi collaborator and who said to the Jews you shouldn't worry you're just gonna get resettled and so nobody's guard was up and they were kind of lulled into feeling that it was okay to go where the Germans said to go and now of course was a horrific thing that he did he ends up surviving the war but dying of typhus apparently just a little bit after world war ii was over another thing that also led to such a high percentage of jews being killed is that their families were very close-knit and as a result people who might have been able to escape earlier did not they stayed together and and of course until it was too late did the neighbors help well there were some righteous Gentiles in Greece we learned about that last year when we were in the area of Athens about Christians who took the Jews up into the hills and hid them really at the risk of their own lives not so much insulin icky they really didn't do that the Nazis also worked a lot of propaganda before they took the Jews out and even in a place where as I said the Jews were really part and parcel of the town very much the fiber of the town already these anti-semitic feelings the other points of under had already infiltrated into the local population and so they weren't as quick perhaps to help as they might have been a few years earlier another thing that wasn't good for them is that they only spoke one language they spoke Ladino which is a mix of Greek and if he broke out of a personal language for the Jews but as a result when the Nazis took them to the camps they couldn't understand what the Nazis were saying they couldn't understand the orders they didn't know what was going on and so they were of no use to the Nazis in terms of slave labor so they killed many of them the guide that we had feels that her family survived because they also spoke German and so they were kept alive so that they could do some translating but also because they had some value to the Nazis and so there were a few things that were going on here but the numbers are really just astronomical and here you have a community that it existed on and off numbers bigger numbers smaller for a good two and a half millennia that in between March just between March and August in 1943 disappears and now you have about a thousand maybe 1,200 Jews that are living there some who you know who survived and came back but you don't have much in the way of Jewish life there's one there's one synagogue there that that the original synagogue from before the war that many synagogues this was one that the Nazis didn't destroy because the Red Cross turned it into their headquarters there's another synagogue that's in it's in use that was built it's actually an office building now because the land was valuable in order to fund the synagogue so the Jews sold the land and office building was built there and then they got a little area there that they have as their synagogue but many of the people some of the people that we met there their children are intermarried they they're not even though there is a day school there a lot of them are just not involved really in the tour world which is just so disheartening just one of the the saddest things of all but so it's an interesting place to visit understand if you go what you're going to be hearing and maybe the most difficult thing of all because we also we into the trains we saw how the Jews were walked from this little neighborhood which became like a transit camp and then by the time they get on the trains which are of course are just cattle cars they realizing they're not just being transported and something terrible is going on here but they can't it's too late to escape and and so the trains are there and you see the tracks and you see the proximity and there's plaques up and you understand and you understand you know what the last moments in Intel Aniki were like that's really the only time that day that I broke down out because I said I said to one of my granddaughters so if we had been here I would have told you to run run run faster on far never forget that you're a Jew tell everybody what happened here and um so just thinking about possibly a situation just like that in that same scenario but it was too late to run it was too hard to run or whatever it is and they all they all go to their deaths together but you see you see the signs around everywhere you go even if you just take a regular walking tour although Nicky there's signs everywhere this is where the Jews had this and this is where there was a storm really really like I said before part of the fiber of the town but then we went to Aristotle University which the campus is on and there's another University there too the campus is about 80 football fields it's an enormous campus and it's built on the ancient Jewish graveyard of close to 350,000 graves we're not talking about Holocaust graves because they're not buried these are the the many many many centuries of Jews that live there and that were buried there and the Nazis apparently gave the Jews six days to move the cemetery to reinter which is ridiculous and that's nothing and obviously they weren't able to do that the rest of the work of this ethnic cleansing because there's no other word for it was done after the war and not by the Nazis but by the locals apparently there are buildings all over Sanne Nicki that their floors are made out of Jewish gravestones just piled up everywhere so we went there there's one brave that's that's left and that's it and you look around this campus and the students and the buildings and all of it is built on desecrated Cemetery of Jews and that's already not the Nazis that's the population afterwards so that definitely gives one pause well because a lot of times people will blame I couldn't do anything and I couldn't say anything and they were too strong but then what happened afterwards and really to destroy it a graveyard has to be just the most these people can't aren't defending themselves you know so and this ties into something that just happened last week here in the Land of Israel because of some people in there I don't know what but definitely not one of the smarter or best moments in modern day modern state Israel decided that the area of Jericho oh that was back in 93 with Oslo yes the area of Jericho should be given over to Palestinian Authority and as a result the largest graveyard that we know of from the Second Temple period because the Hasmoneans were very much based to get back to Hasmoneans in Jericho of thousands of Jewish graves caves and Jewish graves and and ossuary were desecrated ha shocking right we're desecrated by people who are trying to throw the Jews out of the land so why wouldn't they desecrate once again a Jewish graveyard and so these bones were gathered and were reinterred in cardamom which is a community halfway between Jerusalem and Jericho and so you see the same things over and over and over again it's not enough to try and and rid the world of living Jews but but the desecration of the cemeteries and of the dead Jews as well and the theft of whatever was there in the ossuary and it's um but this what happens here in Israel was and I was thinking about it because I just been to Selma Nicki and seeing this tremendous graveyard that is no more and it's just mind-boggling this is the fact that this happened on our watch here in Israel better or worse I'd leave you to answer that question on your own the same thing with destroying Jewish houses if they're destroyed by enemies of the Jewish people so is that better or worse than when the Jewish government sends the army to do that a few months ago I was up and to pull up with a group with a bus trip that I had for when Israel fund and we had lunch with with Raya Raya is she has a cafe and she's also the sister of Talia Kahana Benjamin and Talia Kahana who were murdered in front of their leaving six orphans many years ago and she and her family moved down from the Galilee to help raise their six kids who didn't have parents and another brother of her so his house was destroyed a few days ago in tupola because of whatever because of the lack of normal law in Judea and Samaria and even though we've been promised that Jewish homes won't be destroyed anymore so there went that and so it's fascinating to go out of the country it's fascinating to see other cultures to see where my people were were my people how my people survived or didn't survive in different places and then to come home to an incredible country strong country a country with a great future but a country that still needs a little tweaking and to understand that is to also understand the responsibility that we all who are alive in this time period have that certain mistakes have been made but maybe we shouldn't keep making them and sometimes you can't blame your enemies sometimes you need to look in the mirror or look around you and say no the buck really does stop here and and then there's things that we need to sort out and priorities that we have to get in in order and you know to keep this to keep this whole thing going so as usual my brain whirring with it whir are ing about the past about the president about the future about the lessons that we can learn from history the good things the bad things the leadership both religious and non and were they were the rabbi of Salonika completely failed his people in the early 1940s and would they have still gone to their deaths maybe but maybe some of them would have been saved and so that was a tremendously painful thing to learn about and so we have to just like again really really really learn from history and try to not to not do that again to collect to connect the dots again so I'm very very grateful that I have the opportunity to go to these places to learn the lessons there to bring them back to home and always always weave them integrate them into my guiding to get a greater understanding of what's happened and and how we can make sure that the future is definitely better than the past so that's it for now I'm tired I'm gonna I'm gonna go to sleep I have a long week ahead of me thank you all for listening and love again like I said to get your feedback Eve at the Land of Israel and I hope to see some of you like I said in a couple of weeks or at some point when you come through to Israel so take care everybody thanks to Ben and to Tabitha and everybody who keeps the Land of Israel Network going because it's not it's not easy and it's a really important thing to do and I'm just very privileged to UM be able to have a platform for the things that run through my brain so have a wonderful week everybody drink a lot let's keep those you know hopefully we're done with the fires here and in the time of the all mayor the time of the Oh mayor and the time of the farmers between the hail and the fires this is a very very difficult time especially for our the harvesters of the grains and and the weather and it just doesn't make it easy you work all winter work all winter on your fields and then in half an hour of a fire or of a hailstorm or whatever it is or of a dust storm of the tremendous heat wave it can all be lost and that's where you realize your connection to God and because we see him we see Hashem both in history which I've discussed and in nature and and to respect that and to work with that and pray that it's good and that all these things happen in their time so that's enough for now Eve Harrow rejuvenation on the land of his own network take care of your buddy good bye for now [Music] hi everybody yves herro host of rejuvenation join us on the land of israel network for the shovel what of a lifetime where i will be giving a special class that weekend and guiding Herodian on Monday as the bus goes out to the farm so join us for the shovel out of a lifetime in just a few weeks Thursday through Monday June 6 through 10 2019 at the Jerusalem Mount Zion hotel looking for