Well, to be fair, the Warsaw Jewish population was Ashkenazi, not Sephardic Jews like Yitzhak Yosef. For non-Sephardic Haredi/ultra-Orthodox, I don’t know.
Since the Likud has been blowing this horn lately, let me be crystal clear that my low opinion of Yosef is due to his being a religious fanatic and a refusnik, not due to his Sephardic status.
More that the soldiers need God’s help directly on the battlefield, and that he won’t help without all the rabbis and rabbinical students and such asking him to.
More generally, prayer hasn’t done much for us for 2,000 years; they honestly expect us to believe that our fortune turned right when we got an army because suddenly prayer works?
Not to be trite, but mostly dying. A handful of their chief scholars were smuggled out of Europe or to Switzerland as they were viewed as embodiments of the Torah by their followers. Today the two biggest populations (by far) are in Israel and New York.
By the way, I wish I were making this up, but since some of you asked, where would they go if they left Israel?
He suggested Uzhhorod, Ukraine 
Do they need bus fare? I’ll chip in.
I did not see that coming. That made me look him up with regards to Ukraine and I found this from two years ago. Maybe he sees a house swapping arrangement.
Last week, Chief Rabbi of Israel Yitzhak Yosef called for the Jews of Ukraine to immigrate to Israel in the face of the escalating security threat from Russia. Rabbi Yosef addressed the published letter: “To our dear and beloved Jewish brethren… especially in Ukraine.” He went on to say: “At times when the voices of war are heard… it is the sacred duty of every Jew… to hasten his journey to the Holy Land.”
This is very interesting, and possibly very big: Senate Majority Leader Schumer is calling for new elections in Israel.
“As a lifelong supporter of Israel, it has become clear to me: The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7. The world has changed, radically, since then, and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past,” said Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in America.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/14/politics/chuck-schumer-israel-election-comments/index.html
More in the WaPo
Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the United States and a staunch ally of Israel’s, said he thinks Israelis understand “better than anybody that Israel cannot hope to succeed as a pariah opposed by the rest of the world” and would choose better leaders if elections were held.
“I believe that holding a new election once the war starts to wind down would give Israelis an opportunity to express their vision for the postwar future,” Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday, in remarks that did not set an exact timeline for a new election. Schumer, who opened his speech saying he felt “immense obligation” as a Jewish American to speak, stressed that the outcome of that election would be up to the Israelis — not Americans.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/14/israel-elections-netanyahu-charles-schumer/
Good for Schumer. Netanyahu and his allies are enemies of peace.
The bolded part is the problem.
For once, I agree with Mitch. We don’t need to be telling our allies how to govern themselves, even though they behave like jerks.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that, under Netanyahu, Israel is not an ally of the US. Ally of Trump and the Republicans, perhaps, but not the United States.
Nonetheless, I don’t believe we should be telling Israelis who to vote for.
Time until Marjorie Taylor Greene calls him antisemitic, 5…, 4…, 3…
This is the US showing how much they value Israel as an ally. Any other country, and we’d just send in the CIA for a little coup.
Goes both ways of course.
Eh, I’ll give as much “respect and not undermining it” as Bibi gave to the Obama administration in 2015.
Indeed. That was my point actually.
Someone above asked what we thought the US should be doing. Here’s my less-unlikely-to-work-than-any-alternative plan, which the US should be leaning hard on Israel to go along with.
Immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of all IDF troops from Gaza and the West Bank.
They should be replaced by a multinational force, ideally consisting mainly of troops from Arab countries which recognize Israel, such as Egypt. These troops wouldn’t pursue the goal of “destroying Hamas”, which is clearly impossible without causing unacceptable suffering to civilians. Rather, the new goal is to make Hamas an (pardon the pun) entirely underground organization. We don’t actively go looking for them, but if they show their faces in public and try to act like they’re still running the place, we shoot them. In the West Bank, on the other hand, the main military objective will be to protect Palestinians from extremist settlers. This occupation may need to last decades, until democracy seems firmly enough entrenched in Palestine that they can be trusted to run their own military.
The new civilian government of Palestine (yes, we’re dumping the useless and corrupt PA while we’re at it) will be run by apolitical technocrats appointed by international agencies, pending elections in a year or two. Both sides will be told in no uncertain terms that failure to elect governments committed to a peaceful two-State solution will result in their nation becoming a pariah State.
The main obstacle I see here is that it requires the international community to spend huge sums of money and put their troops in harm’s way. I’m not optimistic that that will happen, but I think it’s less realistic to think that these people are at all capable of working out their differences in a non-genocidal manner without extensive outside intervention.
In the short term, I would favor an immediate embargo of all US aid to Israel, the funds not to be released until Israel elects a government which doesn’t include people like Smotrich and Netanyahu. Sorry, but if you can’t vote any more responsibly than that, you deserve to get treated like a banana republic.
I believe most Arab countries hate Israel and would support terrorists.
Arabs working for the UN participated in murdering, raping and abducting Israelis.
I brought up this logistical question in another forum but that thread is mostly an outrage thread so I didn’t get any good responses on it. Can the US actually cut Israel off?
The reason I ask is because of a deal Canada made back in the day with the Saudis. Canada had an agreement to sell them some APCs. The Canadian government changed hands and it dawned on the new government that the Saudis were eager to do some dissident-squashing with their new Canadian wheels. But the Saudis had set the deal up in such a way that cancelling out of it would be more costly than just giving them what they were promised. Canada ended up sticking to the deal and just released a report saying basically “we can’t prove they squashed any dissidents (because we didn’t look all that closely and they may have backed over them a few times to grind them into a fine paste which when mixed with desert sand is basically indistinguishable from mud) so I guess it all worked out in the end”. The media found other things to outrage about and everyone forgot that it ever happened.
So bearing that in mind, does Israel have similar deals with the US? Like, if Biden cut them off right now does that mean shipments stop after the last contractually obligated one currently scheduled for the year 2068? (Although it should be obvious, I made that number up since I don’t know how these things are actually structured. But if the obligations extend more than a couple of months or perhaps even weeks at this rate, the Palestinians are still screwed, no?) Would it be more expensive to cancel out of these aid deals than it would be to honor them? Apparently they can be set up this way and if so, the Israelis would be fools not to do so.
I also saw a Wiki article that said Obama cut the Israelis off ten years ago when they were doing the previous “pound Gaza into dust” campaign. The Israelis apparently reacted by saying “we don’t need your shit anyway (although we will take it so long as you are dumb enough to keep giving it to us), we can stockpile ammo and money and if ever we need to flatten Gaza again, we’ll do it ourselves thank you very much.” So does Israel even need US help here? Would cutting off aid be an empty gesture since it seems Israel has been preparing for ten years now? And why did Obama cut aid off in 2014 for a less intense campaign while Biden won’t cut it off despite a much higher rate of civilian casualties?