I met Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach when  I was 10 years old.

Our  Hebrew school teacher in Philadelphia brought him to sing for our fifth grade class.

It was more than singing that concerned our teacher.

Our teacher had become a devotee of Chabad-Lubavich and was concerned while we were Jewish in our fifth grade class in Philadelphia, he was concerned that we really know too much about Judaism.

He wanted to excite us and we had a special request.

The special request was that Christmas was coming  and we were always forced to sing Christmas carols in public school and we wanted to learn some Jewish songs.

All we knew was Hava Nagila and Zoom Gali Gali.

So he brought us Shlomo Carlebach to teach to teach us a couple sessions He taught us Borchi Nafshi, Vechulom Mekablim, Essa Einai,  were very nice songs.

But more than that he got a spirit into us, which was very important.

To sing with our soul. Over the years I got to know him and all kinds of different contexts.

When I worked with youth, I would bring Shlomo to work with me.

A month before he died, Shlomo  spent Shabbat near us in Efrat where we live. I brought my then 12 year old son, Noam, to meet Shlomo to ask him if he would be the cantor when Noam would soon become Bar Mitzvah. Shlomo ready agreed. And then it occurred to me In my 34 years of knowing Shlomo, I had never asked him a  question. How do you get started?

I got the answer. Perhaps this was the last interview with Shlomo

Shlomo  told got involved with all this outreach.

He mentioned that his father brought him to a DP camp after World War II, where they organized an improvised Succah for  people from the DP camps who had survived the concentration camps. It  was a very exciting week  of Succot. During that stse holiday, a distressed man  stood outside , screaming at the succah, even throwing rocks, very upset about what was going on.

At the end of Sukkot, Shlomo approached the   distressed follow   in the DP camp who had disrupted the sukkah and asked him:  Why didn’t you come in? He said that he  stood outside the sukkah because at no one  asked him  to come in.

Shlomo said that he  realized that he made a mistake that would carry him  for his entire  life.

Shlomo  said that he must  not be  like  Job, who was very hospitable and known for his hospitality, and wait for people to come and see you.

Shlomo said that it was then that he understood then that you must be  like Abraham and sit outside of the tent event and bring people in. And that is the how Shlomo learned his first lesson of outreach.

Unless you invite people to come in, they will stay away.

That distressed man in the DP camp helped Shlomo start  h**is career which became a legacy.

Shlomo would not make it to Noam’s Bar Mitzvah. I once asked Noam what e remembered from that encounter. “He kissed me on my forehead. I never forgot that”

Excerpted from DAVID BEDEIN’s forthcoming book, FIFTY ENCOUNTERS IN FIFTY YEARS

It can be claimed with nearly 100% certainty that no People/Nation has been blamed more often for more baseless reasons than the Jews.

From the dawn of Jewish history, which we started to read about in our weekly Torah portions this week, right up until the latest news headlines circulating in the media, the blame game continues unabated.

Mutating in every generation, this compulsive urge to blame Jews for each and every evil in society has survived all attempts to combat and eradicate it. Rational logic would have predicted that following the Shoah and genocides associated with that period any vestige of irrational hate might have been purged from the infected masses.

Unfortunately, this virus cannot be suppressed, and that is why, despite years of attempted educational enlightenment and millions spent on memorials and museums, “blame the Jews” has made a spectacular comeback.

At first, those accusing Jews of modern-day blood libels tried to hide their hate behind a façade of anti-Zionism. This only fooled those who wanted to avoid the obvious for a short time. Now we are faced with full-blown Jew hate of the original lethal kind. It has emerged from the sewers worldwide precisely because those engaged in the Israel, Zionist, Jew blame game know that there will be no serious consequences for their actions.

The axis of evil nations support, fund and spread this tsunami. They are aided and abetted in this campaign by corrupted international organizations which have been subverted and neutered. In the face of a moral collapse and blatant falsehoods by most of the diminishing democracies, Jews and the Jewish State are branded guilty of almost every sin known to humanity.

In the not-so-distant past, outbreaks of diseases that decimated swathes of European countries were blamed on Jewish communities.

These libels were swiftly followed by devastating pogroms and massacres. Even well before the advent of social media and modern forms of communication, somehow, the notion that Jews were responsible for plagues and similar disasters spread tsunami-like throughout the continent and even beyond it.

Nowadays, updated versions of these slanders spread in an instant are facilitated by willing representatives of so-called legitimate international bodies. Thus, you have officials of UNRWA making wild claims of evil Israel causing mass starvation in Gaza, which will result in the alleged genocide of the local population. Intentionally ignored and indeed deliberately distorted is the plain fact that the vast majority of aid, whether food or materials, is hijacked by Hamas terrorists. The obvious facts are covered up In a frenzy to brand Israel and, by extension Jews, as complicit in deliberate starvation tactics.

Having been tarred with heinous accusations the mud sticks and no amount of facts and realties will expose the truth to those who think they know everything there is to learn about the perfidious Israelis. The default position of international funders is to ignore the fact that UNRWA has perpetuated the Arab refugee scandal for more than seven decades. During this time it has inculcated generations of Arabs in their schools with hatred of Jews and Israel. The normal reaction from the international community is to turn a blind eye to UNRWA schools and clinics hosting Hamas terror tunnels and being complicit in giving sanctuary to those storing and firing rockets from their premises.

Instead of dealing seriously with this situation western countries which fund UNRWA prefer to look the other way. When UNRWA graduates join the terrorists and hostage-takers, denial of responsibility kicks in automatically. Rather than demanding accountability the Governments of New Zealand, Australia, Canada, USA, UK and the EU pour more money into a bottomless bucket and blame Israel for the situation. Listen to the howls of hypocritical rage as Israel finally and belatedly refuses to go along with this charade.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, Jews were accused of deicide. Witnessing the convulsions revolving around Israel declaring UNRWA persona non grata one could believe that once again Jews are guilty of some sort of theological crime. This time, it is over a sacred holy cow that is protected by some sort of saintly status and divinely anointed by the UN.

The same sort of selective blame is also being hurled against Israel over the scandalous failures of an ironically misnamed UN “peace keeping” force stationed in south Lebanon. Created in 1978 to “restore international peace and security and assist the Lebanese Government in restoring its effective authority in the area” this force has failed spectacularly in enforcing its UN mandated objectives. One of its most vital tasks was the withdrawal of terror groups from the area and ensuring that they did not create any threat to Israeli civilians living across the border.

More than forty years later, UNIFIL has not only failed miserably to achieve any of its objectives but has also now been exposed as complicit with Hezbollah in facilitating the establishment of a terror infrastructure intended to murder Israelis. Far from restoring Lebanese Government authority in the area the opposite has actually occurred. Lebanon has been subverted by Iran and its proxy terror representatives while the UN force has been relegated to a compliant group which sees nothing, hears nothing and pretends that they are keeping a fake peace.

During their watch, Hezbollah has built an extensive network of terror tunnels, established storage facilities in homes, hospitals, mosques and schools for rockets, missiles, drones and ammunition. Over a period of four decades under the very noses of UNIFIL which claimed that nothing was amiss, the terrorists prepared the infrastructure for an October 7 type invasion of northern Israel and subsequent massacres. This has been clearly and unambiguously revealed as the IDF discovers and demolishes these sites and continues to clear out the terror network embedded in south Lebanon.

Not to be overlooked is the stark reality that also, over this period, Hezbollah has amassed, with the help of Iran, hundreds of thousands of lethal rockets, missiles and drones. Thousands have been fired at Israeli civilians on a daily basis since 7 October 2023.

For more than 40 years, the UN ignored what was occurring, and UNIFIL continued to be passive bystanders as the terrorist groups openly boasted about their intentions. Israel, no doubt hoping that eventually the UN might act also did nothing to sort out this disgraceful situation. As usual when hard decisions are kicked down the road the inevitable fallout has proven worse than ever.

Has the international reaction to all these realties been supportive of Israel’s delayed actions to eliminate the terror threats against it?

Of course, it has been not. The automatic blame game immediately kicks in with a vengeance. One does not expect those countries supporting Tehran such as China, Russia, North Korea and cheer leaders for jihadist terror such as Spain and Ireland to issue messages of solidarity with Israel. One certainly does not expect the UN and its associated bodies to admit their abject failures and so it has proven.

The least we could expect from our democratic friends is some sort of wholehearted support and understanding especially now that the sordid details of Hezbollah’s tactics have been revealed.  Unfortunately this has proven to be a forlorn hope. Expressions of tepid acknowledgment have been hedged with the usual barrage of moral equivalence and double standards. The reaction of New Zealand’s Foreign Minister is typical of how moral cowardice and unwillingness to condemn UN failures combine. His statement that “Israeli action against UN peacekeepers is unacceptable” encapsulates the sordid collapse of a will to stand against jihadist terror which is now a feature of international blame policies against the Jewish State.

On 9 November, Jewish communities worldwide will once again commemorate the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass when Synagogues, Jewish businesses and homes in Germany & Austria were attacked and burnt down. It also marks the rounding up of Jews (my grandfather among them) and their deportation to Dachau.

As a prelude to the implementation of the “final solution” it stands out as a stark reminder of the catastrophic failure by the League of Nations and democratic countries to counter and prevent the genocidal campaign against the Jews which had already started in 1933. Five years of inaction and appeasement convinced the Nazis that they could get away with mass murder and the refusal of nations to grant sanctuary to fleeing Jewish refugees merely confirmed that nobody cared about the fate of Jews and other “undesirables.”

As speakers this year intone the usual platitudes it should be made plain that history is once again repeating itself. Just as the League of Nations failed, so is the United Nations. The same refusal that saw Nazi Germany and its willing band of helpers facilitating the destruction of Jews now manifests itself in a refusal by democratic countries today in taking down Iranian plans to destroy Israel. Hitler and his gangsters made no secret of their ultimate intentions. The mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran likewise are open about their ambition to wipe the Jewish State off the world map.

Instead of helping to thwart Nazi goals the Chamberlain UK Government and the Roosevelt Administration cautioned Jews to stay quiet and lie low. Today’s successors blame Israel for fighting back and refusing to be sacrificial lambs.

Politicians love to eulogize dead Jews without accepting any responsibility for their predecessors’ failed actions.

It is time to put the blame where it rightfully should be placed and defeat terror before it is once again too late.