Having just finished Yom Kippur in Israel, I read a thoughtful internet news column by a Rabbi Rami Shapira, who appealed to South Florida’s Jewish community to respect Yom Kippur more than the baseball playoffs that took place on the same day between the Florida Marlins and the Atlanta Braves.

As an observant Jew, I would agree that Rabbi Shapira’s point is well taken, except that the Rabbi goes on to make an inappropriate comment, which is that, after all, “baseball is not a religion”.

I beg to differ.

On the eve after Yom Kippur, the time has come for some true confessions.

Yes, I have sinned with my mitt and scorecard in place.

You see, I grew up in Philadelphia, a place where the Phillies never won. Prayers never helped. And then 1964 came, the year after my Bar Mitzvah, when my chabad teacher had told me that it was now up to me to keep Mitzvot or not. I was of age.

The Phillies looked like they were going to win.

I put in a special prayer for the Phillies on the first day of Rosh HaShanah, reciting the lineup and even the bullpen when the ark was open for special prayers.

But I decided that the second day of Rosh HaShanah would require a personal pilgrimage to Connie Mack Stadium.

So after I heard the Shofar at Overbrook Park Congregation I quietly moved to the back of the schule, feigning a tummy ache to my little brother and sister.

I had five crisp one dollar bills that wouldn’t jingle, which I had saved from my summer paper route for the Inquirer and I looked this way and that, feeling like Moses who had just killed the Egyptian and made a dash from the bathroom near the old men who were talking in the back, and calmly walked two blocks to the bus that took me to 69th street and then the subway.

Wearing my bar mitzvah suit, I was on my way to Connie Mack, in line for great unreserved seats behind home plate.

I had thought of everything: My Phillies Hat was in my Talis bag.

I kept the machzor with me and had it set next to my score card. The Phillies were playing the hapless Mets. 12 games left in the left in the season. six and a half games ahead. In the Fifth inning, mincha time, Frank Thomas, The Phillies much-needed right handed power whom they had recently acquired, was on first. Thomas routinely sprinted to second base on an infield ground ball.

Suddenly, Frank Thomas slides head first into second base, breaking his finger. That never happens.

I heard Richie Ashburn, say on the radio that the Thomas would be out for the season. Ashburn, the Phillies star turned play by play announcer who died last month, has been a Whiz Kid in the last Phillies victory and he represented the past and the future for the Phillies. Richie died last month, and that reminded me of 1964.

The Phillies lost. I made it back for Maariv to Overbrook Park. Or that is at least what I told my mother.

Little did I know that this would be the beginning of the Phillies ten game loss, and I felt that I had junxed them, since it began on the second day of Rosh HaShanah. Everything that could go wrong in those ten days went wrong for the Phillies. By Yom Kippur, there was no joy in Philly mudville. I remember my despondency that Sukkot, when the World Series Yankees of on Mantle, Maris, Berra and Ford were not facing our holy Phillies. So I phoned a call in show on WCAU, then the CBS affiliate in Philly, to ask the last Richie Ashburn what had gone wrong. Ashburn gave me an answer that I felt like a reproach for going to the ball game on second day Rosh HaShanah. Richie said that a great lesson is never to be overconfident and not to do things that you shouldn’t do. He was referring to Phillie manager Gene Mauch overplaying his star pitchers, Jim Bunning and Chris Short.

I thought he was referring to my Overbrook Park Congregation escape to Connie Mack stadium.

Baseball as a religion? It has all the trappings.

Did Shimon Peres make a deal with the Vatican?

Consider the evidence:

• On Sept. 10, ’93, just three days before the signing of the Declaration of Principles in Washington, the Italian news magazine La Stampa reported that part of the peace deal was an unwritten understanding that the Vatican would receive political authority over the Old City of Jerusalem by the end of the millenium. The newspaper reported that Shimon Peres had promised the pope to hand over the holy sites of Jerusalem the previous May and that Arafat had accepted the agreement.
• In March ’94, the Israeli newsmagazine Shishi published an interview with Mark Halter, a French intellectual and close friend of Shimon Peres. He said he delivered a letter from Peres to the Pope the previous May, within which Peres offered the Vatican hegemony over the Old City of Jerusalem. The article detailed Peres’s offer which essentially turned Jerusalem into an international city overseen by the Holy See.
• In March ’95, the radio station Arutz Sheva announced that it had seen a cable sent by the Israeli Embassy in Rome to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem outlining the handover of the Old City of Jerusalem to the Vatican. Two days later Haaretz published the cable on its front page. The Foreign Ministry explained that the cable was genuine but someone had whited out the word “not.” ie We will not transfer authority to the Vatican. Incredibly, numerous Bnei Brak rabbis who had cancelled Passover meetings with Peres over the issue of the cable accepted the explanation and reinvited him to their homes.

The Foreign Ministry’s Legal Affairs Spokesperson, Esther Samilag, publicly complained about “various capitulations” to the Vatican. She was immediately transferred to a post at the Israeli Embassy in Katmandu, Nepal.

MK Avraham Shapira announced in the Knesset that he had information that all Vatican property in Jerusalem was to become tax exempt and that large tracts of real estate on Mount Zion were given to the pope in perpetuity.

Jerusalem’s late Deputy Mayor Shmuel Meir announced that he had received “information that properties promised to the Vatican would be granted extra-territorial status.”

Beilin was forced to answer the accusations. He admitted, “Included in the Vatican Agreement is the issue of papal properties in Israel that will be resolved by a committee of experts that has already been formed.” If so, this committee has not since released any proof of its existence.

With all this in mind, how do we interpret the Vatican’s current position on Jerusalem?

The following report, circulated by MSANews may shed some light on that:

Vatican City, Jun 14, 1997 (VIS) – Archbishop Renato Martino, apostolic nuncio and Holy See permanent observer to the United Nations, spoke June 9 on the status of Jerusalem at the New York headquarters of the Path to Peace Foundation. The archbishop addressed members of this foundation as well as U.S. members of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. He began by briefly summarizing the “well-known and long-standing position of the Holy See with regard to Jerusalem. He stated that Jerusalem “for us, of course, along with the rest of the Holy Land, is that special link between heaven and earth, that place where God walked and ultimately died among men. And of course we recognize that others revere Jerusalem as the city of David and the prophets and the city known to Mohammed…. It is a spiritual treasure for all of humanity, and it is a city of two peoples, Arabs and Jews, and of the three monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam.”

Archbishop Martino added that “in recent years it has been increasingly difficult to break through the political and media-imposed stranglehold on the question of Jerusalem.” he recounted Jerusalem’s recent history, recalling in particular the UN’s General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947 calling for Jerusalem to be considered a ‘corpus separatum’ under the Trusteeship Council of the United Nations,” a resolution which Israel accepted. He pointed out that, in addressing the gridlock which has resulted from the 1967 Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, “the Holy See has therefore advocated the granting to Jerusalem of an ‘internationally guaranteed special statute. That is the phrase used by Pope John Paul II in his 1984 Apostolic Letter ‘Redemption is Anno’.”

This statute “asks that regardless of how the problem of sovereignty is resolved and who is called to exercise it, there should be a supra-national and international entity endowed with means adequate to insure the preservation of the special characteristics of the City, its Holy Places, the freedom to visit them, its religious and ethnic communities, a guarantee of their essential liberties, and its city plan’.”

The apostolic nuncio recalled the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel in 1993, when both signed the ‘Fundamental Agreement.” He noted Article 4 of this agreement where “both the Holy See and Israel affirm their continuing commitment to the ‘Status quo’ in the Christian Holy Places.”

He also spoke of the problems sparked by Israel’s recent authorization of “a project for the construction of settlements in occupied territory in East Jerusalem” for which “there was wide-spread international condemnation.” This issue, he reminded those present, was brought before the UN Security Council on March 7 and March 21 of this year, but without resolution “because the sole country on the Security Council which opposed the Resolution was the United States.”

An Emergency Session of the General Assembly, “organized only nine other times in the history of the United Nations” was held on April 24-25. The Holy See delegation was contacted and asked for suggestions for a Resolution, Archbishop Martino said. And he recounted the meetings, rough drafts of proposals and negotiations which followed.

The approved texts of the eventual Resolution, he underlined, contained “those points championed by the Holy See…. The General Assembly has here called for ‘internationally guaranteed provisions’ – the equivalent of the ‘internationally guaranteed special status’ called for by Pope John Paul II. This is particularly noteworthy because in this case, the Arab delegations all voted for this Resolution and therefore for this provision.”

“The Holy Places within Jerusalem,” concluded Archbishop Martino, “are not merely museum relics to be opened and closed by the dominant political authority, no matter who that might be at any given moment. They are living shrines precious to the hearts and faith of believers.” DELSS/STATUS JERUSALEM/UN:MARTINO VIS 970616 (640)

Could that supra-national entity which will oversee the international city of Jerusalem be the Vatican just as Peres promised? And how do we react to Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert’s recent announcement that he will begin negotiations with the Vatican, but “only over holy sites?”

What most distressed veteran US diplomat Madaline Albright on her maiden sojourn Secretary of State to the Middle East was the depth of the crisis of confidence that now exists between Israelis and Palestinians.

The current dynamics of the Oslo peace process are such that if you light a match, you might kindle a tinderbox that will devour any of the deteriorating relationship that remains between the state of Israel and the new Palestine Authority.

The trust that had been fostered over four years of the intensely negotiated Oslo Middle East Peace Process between Israel and Yassir Arafat had essentially ground to a halt on August 20, 1997, the day that Arafat’s Palestine Authority announced a formal working alliance. The Hamas bombings in Jerusalem’s crowded Machane Yehudah marketplace on July 30 and on Jerusalem’s crowded Ben Yehudah mall on Sept 4 and Arafat’s refusal to take any action against Hamas signaled that this was a new turn in the peace process that few had expected.

On Monday, September 15, 1997, Israel prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu dispatched an Israeli intelligence official to testify before the Israel Knesset Intelligence Committee that Arafat had not taken any concrete steps to dismantle the Hamas terror infrastructure. The official added that the Israeli public should brace itself for more Hamas terror attacks, which are to be expected imminently, adding that Arafat must immediately do what he is supposed to do – to dismantle terror operatives before they go into action. However, he added, Israel held no illusions that Arafat would do so.

All week long, the Israel’s Defence Forces went on high alert, sending Israeli intelligence units to conduct a massive preventive surveillance operation to stop terror groups that may infliltrate any part of Israel at any minute. The operation bore fruit, when the IDF announced on Friday, the apprehension of a terror group en route to kill the Mayor of Jerusalem.

On the very night that the IDF began its massive sweep to seek out and prevent new Hamas terror operations in Jerusalem, several Israeli families made it a point to establish their first small community on Ras El Amud.

What upset Netanyahu about Ras El Amud was its timing, not its substance. The issue of confidence building measures has also fallen victim to the crisis of the current Middle East crisis.

Jerusalem had always been a subject that would be the final stage of negotiations. A gentleman’s agreement had it that Israel would take no more unilateral motives. In the current stage of the Oslo process, gentleman’s agreements are off.