It was all so sickeningly familiar: the happy crowds, the sudden ear-shattering explosions, the dazed and wounded lying bloodied on the ground. Like every Israeli who lived through the nightmare years following the Oslo Accords, which allowed terrorists free access to our cities and countryside, I can recall weeks and months when such scenes seemed like an almost daily occurrence.

To see these scenes repeated in Boston filled me with a terrible sadness.

After my birthplace, New York, Boston is my favorite city in America, one with which I became intimately familiar when my son was at Harvard a few years back.

A college town filled with ambitious young people, a town of libraries and bookstores and institutions of higher learning, it’s a cultured place, a city ...

...continue reading The Virgins

This video is absolutely the best thing I’ve ever seen about those who would boycott Israel!

Please watch and please forward it to your friends. It starts with an advertisement in Hebrew (which you can skip) and then some Arabic text, but don’t worry, keep going. It’s in English with Hebrew subtitles.

Click and enjoy!!

http://youtu.be/MhtJxC6NwFw

First, the siren goes off for Holocaust Memorial Day. It stops traffic. We get out on the highway, eyes closed, hearts heavy. The scenes rip through our souls: emaciated bodies in piles, starving children in rags, family members ripped apart and sent to their death in factory-like settings conceived by meticulous Germans with their talent for efficiency. We are there, all of us, the devout and the atheist, dressed in black gabardine and the latest Paris fashions, stuffed altogether into box-cars, locked in, helpless. Jews.

The siren seems to go on forever. Then it stops. We breathe again. We go back to ...

...continue reading Two Minutes

This is what I suggest:

...continue reading Protest Anti-Israeli Bias at the Jerusalem US Consulate

Remember that scene in “Not Without My Daughter” when Sally Field sees the American flag waving over the American Embassy in Istanbul as she flees Iran? “We’re home baby, we’re home,” she tells her daughter.

Every American abroad knows that feeling. Unfortunately for us Jewish Americans forced to use the American Consulate in Jerusalem, it hasn’t felt like home for some time.

It started during the intifada, when, despite daily terrorist threats in the streets of Jerusalem aimed at Jews, the Consulate forced us to go to east Jerusalem to renew our passports and even to bring our newborns there for birth certificates. It literally felt as if a person was taking her life into her hands. Once there, she took her place outside ...

...continue reading An American in Israel

On Tuesday, January 22, Justice John G. Ingram of New York’s State Supreme Court sentenced convicted child molester Nechemya Weberman to 103 years behind bars for 59 counts of sexual abuse against a little girl sent to him by her school, the UTA Satmar, for religious counseling. In passing sentence, the judge praised the young victim for her “courage and bravery in coming forward.”

After speaking to her briefly on the phone last week and having a long talk with her older brother, who lives here in Jerusalem, I must say I believe she heartily deserves this compliment. I now have ...

...continue reading Crime and Punishment

All over the world, when it snows, most of the time people take it for granted.  But not in my city, Jerusalem.

When it snows in Jerusalem, people in Petach Tikva and Tel Aviv pile into their cars and head towards the capital.

Old folks (like me) go out at 11 PM to throw snowballs at their husbands and to sit drinking hot cider in the only café open for business.

Your kids call you from far away Rechovot begging to spend the night.

You clean off your windowsills and put some of the snow in the freezer, to remember when the skies turn hot and blue ...

...continue reading When It Snows in Jerusalem

The case was horrific. A 17-year-old girl from the Satmar community in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn testified that she was forced by her school to attend “counseling sessions” from age 12 to 15 because she wore stockings that were too thin and asked too many questions about God. Instead of religious mentoring, three times a week she found herself behind a thrice-locked door with a bed, face to face with a fifty-ish, overweight, unlicensed “counselor,” a father of ten who forced her to watch pornographic movies and perform sexual acts.

The defendant, Nechemya Weberman, had risen from the humble post of driver for the Satmar Rebbe to the go-to ...

...continue reading No More Room Under the Carpet

Tell me, who gets on a plane and heads deliberately into a war zone where some of the world’s biggest homicidal maniacs and savages are tossing rockets and missiles toward shopping malls, schools and apartment buildings? This was the question I asked myself on November 19 when boarding El Al flight 324 out of Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport in the middle of Hamas’ frenzied orgy of missile-firing. I understood why I was on that flight: I was going home where my husband, children and grandchildren awaited me. But what of the others? The first person I asked this question was waiting on the check-in line. We smiled at each other like conspirators as we waited ...

...continue reading Flying Home

“‘What do you want, I asked him.  Money, food?’ I got up. He told me to get down on the floor. I knew I wasn’t doing that.”

And so began a fight to the death between an unarmed 39 year-old mother of four and an armed terrorist in Sde Avraham, a moshav in southern Israel’s Eshkol region near Gaza; a mother who knew ...

...continue reading Israeli Mother Vanquishes Knife-Wielding Terrorist Scum