A special Rabbi who died this week.

I had the honor of a special relationship with Rav Dr. Avraham Twersky z”l , which intensified during the four special years that he was our neighbor in Efrat for an unusual reason: My adviser for more than a decade was Jack Padwa, a cousin whom Rav Twersky adored.

I would often bring messages to the Rav from Jack, a veteran Zionist activist who helped me get to see the movers shakers of Tel Aviv.

When Jack held a screening in Jerusalem of the film he produced in 1953, he was honored to bring his cousin.

This is that film https://israelbehindthenews.com/2020/09/24/hill-24-doesnt-answer-first-first-film-produced-about-israels-war-of-independence-produced-by-my-friend-jack-padwa-zl-1953-winner-in-cannes-film-festival-1955

A seminal encounter with Rabbi Twersky that forever impacted yours truly occurred in August, 2000. The Rabbi was always the first one to arrive in schule, which allowed time to speak with such an important person. He saw on my face that I was distressed about something and asked what was wrong.

I explained that the distress emanated from coming back from Ramallah with the new Palestinian Authority school books which had just been introduced into the PA/UNRWA school system.

This was the first set of Palestinian produced school books, which was supposed to be the panacea of the peace process.

Except that a cursory glance at the new PA school books, which we were about to hand over to Phd’s to examine an translate, carried a message of indoctrinating the next generation for total war on the Jews. What was upsetting was that no one wanted to look at these new texts of war in the middle of a peace process.

Rabbi Dr. Twersky conveyed soft words of encouragement from his professional experience in the treatment of substance abuse. I can still hear him taking me aside to say that “You have to wait for the crisis to hit – for people to take to you seriously. That is what I went through for years, warning of substance abuse in the Orthodox world. Only when the son of a Rosh Yeshiva OD’d and died of narcotics overdose was I able to get the budget that I needed.

So wait for the crisis to hit. That is when people will listen, advised Rav Twersky….And six weeks later, when seeming PLO peace advocates launched blood curdling riots did people wake up and listen to the evidence of what the PLO was really all about.

The Rabbi was correct

Then again …
the only Rabbi to writer a commentary on the Peanuts cartoon.
tinyurl.com/4jl45etb

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David Bedein
David Bedein
David Bedein is an MSW community organizer and an investigative journalist.   In 1987, Bedein established the Israel Resource News Agency at Beit Agron to accompany foreign journalists in their coverage of Israel, to balance the media lobbies established by the PLO and their allies.   Mr. Bedein has reported for news outlets such as CNN Radio, Makor Rishon, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, BBC and The Jerusalem Post, For four years, Mr. Bedein acted as the Middle East correspondent for The Philadelphia Bulletin, writing 1,062 articles until the newspaper ceased operation in 2010. Bedein has covered breaking Middle East negotiations in Oslo, Ottawa, Shepherdstown, The Wye Plantation, Annapolis, Geneva, Nicosia, Washington, D.C., London, Bonn, and Vienna. Bedein has overseen investigative studies of the Palestinian Authority, the Expulsion Process from Gush Katif and Samaria, The Peres Center for Peace, Peace Now, The International Center for Economic Cooperation of Yossi Beilin, the ISM, Adalah, and the New Israel Fund.   Since 2005, Bedein has also served as Director of the Center for Near East Policy Research.   A focus of the center's investigations is The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In that context, Bedein authored Roadblock to Peace: How the UN Perpetuates the Arab-Israeli Conflict - UNRWA Policies Reconsidered, which caps Bedein's 28 years of investigations of UNRWA. The Center for Near East Policy Research has been instrumental in reaching elected officials, decision makers and journalists, commissioning studies, reports, news stories and films. In 2009, the center began decided to produce short movies, in addition to monographs, to film every aspect of UNRWA education in a clear and cogent fashion.   The center has so far produced seven short documentary pieces n UNRWA which have received international acclaim and recognition, showing how which UNRWA promotes anti-Semitism and incitement to violence in their education'   In sum, Bedein has pioneered The UNRWA Reform Initiative, a strategy which calls for donor nations to insist on reasonable reforms of UNRWA. Bedein and his team of experts provide timely briefings to members to legislative bodies world wide, bringing the results of his investigations to donor nations, while demanding reforms based on transparency, refugee resettlement and the demand that terrorists be removed from the UNRWA schools and UNRWA payroll.   Bedein's work can be found at: www.IsraelBehindTheNews.com and www.cfnepr.com. A new site,unrwa-monitor.com, will be launched very soon.

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