IDF slide and video report on Hamas' use of civilians as human shields
This is a very well done presentation, although I am sure I will hear from people on Twitter who will claim that it's 'lies.' Well, whom are you going to believe? Hamas or your lying eyes? Look at the slides, see the videos (there are several) and decide.
Yasser Arafat was fond of saying that he'd sacrifice a million 'martyrs' for Jerusalem (never including himself of course). On Friday, a Hamas Imam preaching from what was left of a Gaza mosqueammunition dump, called for two million 'martyrs' (not including the Hamas leadership, of course).
Video: IDF destroys terror tunnel under 'holy mosque'
We keep hearing from Muslims how 'holy' their mosques are. But would you use something holy for a profane purpose like weapons storage and terrorist transport?
On July 30, a joint IDF task force uncovered a tunnel entrance on the
ground floor of a mosque that had been used by Hamas terrorists to
attack Israeli soldiers. The extent of the tunnel is revealed by amazing
aerial footage of its demolition. But first, a guided tour....
Let's go to the videotape.
Unfortunately, it seems that the explosion itself was omitted.
Like every town and neighborhood that borders a Muslim area, our neighborhood (which shall remain nameless) is disturbed each morning about an hour and a half before sunrise (around 4:15 am these days) with the loud call of the minaret. Worse, here in Jerusalem, most mosques that are near concentrations of Jews have pointed the minaret toward the Jews - resulting in disturbed sleep patterns. (I have a theory that one of the reasons strict Muslims are violent all over the world is because having to be at prayer five times per day from very early in the morning to late at night causes them to be sleep-deprived and therefore unable to control their tempers as well as might be the case otherwise).
In Jerusalem's Armon HaNetziv neighborhood - on the southern end of the city - they had a great idea to give their Arab neighbors a taste of their own medicine.
Let's go to the videotape.
The Jewish residents of Armon HeNetziv aren't just doing this to give the 'Palestinians' a taste of their own medicine. There's another goal.
Jews all over Israel find themselves routinely harassed by noise
pollution from Muslim neighborhoods in recent years. This less-known
“intifada” by Arabs involves fitting loudspeakers on minarets in mosques
– which for centuries made do with unamplified muezzin calls for
prayer.
The Jerusalem Municipality reportedly embarked on a process to investigate and limit the noise pollution by local mosques, in January. According to the move, initiated by nationalist Councilman Aryeh King, the prayer call of 200 mosques in the eastern part of Jerusalem will be measured to see if the decibel level violates the law.
King made the fight against Muslim noise pollution a priority when
he was elected last November. At the time he stated "just like it's
forbidden for us (Jews) to make loud noises after 12 at night it will be
forbidden for them."
200,000 shekels have reportedly been allocated for the pilot program,
in which the volume of the prayer calls emanating from two mosques in
the south of the city will be measured. Mosques that disturb the public
peace with their amplified prayer call will be put on a "black list" by
the city.
Mosques on the list will be ordered to turn their loudspeakers to
face the center of the Arab neighborhoods and villages, to try and
prevent disturbances to the rest of the city. If that step isn't enough,
a technological solution will be installed to screen and reduce the
noise dramatically.
I am sure that those of you who live abroad have at some point heard Israel attacked because we attacked a mosque or a 'place of worship.' Well, there's a very good reason why Israel attacks mosques: Because Hamas uses them as weapons depots.
Hamas has been hiding its headquarters and arsenals in a new type of
building, a special report from the Center for Intelligence and
Counterterrorism revealed Tuesday.
Mosques and minarets in Gaza have been converted to centers of war,
according to the report, which was penned after Hamas officials leveled accusations
against Israel after the Israeli Air Force (IAF) struck the mosque in
the Alfaruk Nuseirat "refugee camp" in central Gaza.
...
Hamas officials claim that attacks on the mosques are "barbaric," masking their uses as terror centers.
"This is the true face of the Israeli Occupation," Dr. Hassan Aldifi,
Deputy Minister of Religious Endowments in Gaza, insisted to foreign
media. Sheikh Yousef Aldais, Religious Endowments Minister in Ramallah,
called the attacks "war crimes" and complained over "religious and
cultural persecution."
However, as the report established, Hamas regularly uses mosques to mask terrorist activity.
"The mosque in Alfaruk is no exception," the report states. "Hamas
and other terrorist organizations systematically use them for military
and political uses throughout Gaza."
Their conversion to terror centers even finds legitimization in Islam, according to the report.
"The root of the military use for mosques is found in the views of
both Sunni clerics and Shi'ite officials, among them Sheikh Aldais, that
the use of mosques for jihad (a holy war) is legitimate," it says.
"This perception is based on Islamic tradition (hadith) which
states that the Prophet Mohammed, himself, used a mosque for military
and political purposes - not just as a house of worship."
I'm shocked. So totally shocked. You mean the lying 'prophet' did that? Oh my....
Ramadan Kareem: 200 civilians trapped by Assad's troops in suburban Damascus mosque
200 civilians are trapped inside a mosque in the Damascus suburb of Qaboun, where they are being fired upon by Bashar al-Assad's troops.
Syria's main Western-backed opposition said Sunday that 200 civilians
are trapped in a mosque in a suburb of the Syrian capital as fighting
rages outside between rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar Assad.
Meanwhile, Syrian activists said mortar shells landed in three separate
Damascus districts, killing one person and wounding several others. The
attacks coincided with Syrian army strikes on the Yarmouk camp for
Palestinian refugees on the edge of the city, according to the
Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
...
The Syrian Coalition called on the United Nations in a statement to
send "a strong warning" to Assad that he "must immediately release" the
civilians trapped in the mosque in the Damascus suburb of Qaboun.
It did not say if the 200 had sought refuge in the mosque or were already there praying when fighting began.
It warned that thousands of civilians in Qaboun could be "massacred" by
Assad's army, as armoured vehicles and elite forces move into the
neighbourhood.
200 civilians trapped in a mosque and the UN Security Council hasn't so much as even called a meeting. Remember how many meetings there were when 'Palestinian' terrorists holed up in the Church of the Nativity and Israel surrounded the place without opening fire?
I'm telling you - no one gives a damn when Muslims kill Muslims. Only when Jews are involved.
As you might have suspected, the riots in Istanbul over the past few weeks aren't just about a park. They're about the efforts of President Obama's Best Friend Forever, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to erase secularism from Turkey's history.
The government’s plan to destroy Gezi Park, a section of Taksim Square,
and build a replica Ottoman Army barracks and mall set off weeks of
violent street protests, presenting Mr. Erdogan with the greatest
political crisis he has faced in more than a decade in power. But the
plan to build a large mosque in the square is, in the eyes of many
analysts here, the real nub of the dispute.
The building of such a mosque is a decades-old hope of Turkey’s
Islamists, and even played a role in the last military intervention in
Turkish politics in 1997, when army generals maneuvered to overthrow an
Islamist prime minister.
Now that the people — rather than the army — have risen up against the
current Islamist government’s urban development plans, analysts have
suggested that one of the consequences of the unrest is that Mr. Erdogan
will ultimately be unable to realize his vision for Taksim.
If so, it will represent the second time he has tried and failed to
build the mosque, and at serious political costs. As the mayor of
Istanbul in 1997, he saw the same dreams dashed by the military’s
intervention.
Not that he has given up. As the protests engulfed his government, Mr.
Erdogan backed off from the plans for a shopping mall in Taksim, but he
continued to promote the mosque.
“A mosque will be built in Taksim,” he said, in a recent speech. “I do
not need permission from the main opposition and a few looters. We have
been granted authority by those who voted for us at the ballot box.”
In the 1990s, under Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister, Necmettin
Erbakan, Mr. Erdogan oversaw a local commission in charge of the mosque
project, but the idea was anathema to Turkey’s secular elite, who could
still count on the military to safeguard the country’s secular
underpinnings.
A local news article published in January 1997 reported that secular
Turks objected to the mosque because it would “symbolize the power of
the Islamists over Taksim as well as the whole country.” Those words
could easily be spoken by today’s protesters.
Ayse Hur, a historian and columnist for the newspaper Radikal, said,
“The circles that oppose the project of a mosque at Taksim or the
barracks may be interpreting this as an attempt to rewrite the official
secular history.”
Ms. Hur added, “We know how the government adores Ottoman history and
how hostile they are toward the history of the republic.”
So, Ms. Hur and others say, it was mere happenstance that the
antigovernment protests that have shaken Turkey over the last several
weeks began with a sit-in to save Gezi Park, which was never a
particularly special place for most Istanbul residents, and was thought
to be dangerous and a nighttime hangout for drug users.
But as the government began bulldozing trees, it came to symbolize for
thousands of aggrieved citizens the hubris and rising authoritarianism
of a government now in power for more than a decade and determined to
forge ahead with the even more controversial mosque project.
I think I've mentioned before that a couple of years ago, a large mosque was built in the heart of the Jewish neighborhood where I normally stay when I'm in Boston. Boston's Jewish community had attempted to buy the property to build a school on it and was rebuffed by the owner.
But that mosque - about which I know nothing more - is far from being the only mosque in the Boston area. Significantly, there are two huge mosques in Boston and Cambridge that belong to the Islamic Society of Boston, which is the local branch of a group that federal law enforcement officials have described as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood (Hat Tip: NY Nana).
Referring to the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge,
Jacobs said, “The founder of that mosque, blocks from where the
Tsarnaevs lived and where they prayed, was Abdulrahman Alamoudi.. He is
the model of deception in American-Muslim history…
“He…convinced President Clinton and also President George W. Bush
that he was precisely the kind of moderate Muslim leader that America
was looking for,” Jacobs said. “In fact, he deceived everyone. He’s now
in jail for 23 years for giving money, for funding al Qaeda.
Other worshippers at the Cambridge mosque have included an al Qaeda
member convicted of plotting attacks on New York City and a man
sentenced to 17 years in prison for planning a shooting spree on a
Boston-area shopping mall.
One former trustee of the mosque is Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a
Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader and terrorist supporter who’s banned
from entering the United States.
The explosive material found in the mosque is not new.
One moderate Muslim leader who visited the mosque 10 years ago told CBN.
“We go upstairs and I find the library and it’s full of flyers, full of
newsletters in Arabic,” Dr. Ahmed Mansour of the International Quranic
Institute said. “And they call for jihad against America and against the
Jews and against the Christians.”
The Muslim Brotherhood in the United States hides under the name
Muslim American Society (MAS), which the Muslim Brotherhood founded in
1993. and which federal prosecutors have called “the overt arm of the
Muslim Brotherhood in America.”
MAS opened up another mosque four years the Boston neighborhood of
Roxbury and goes by the lovely-sounding name of the Islamic Society of
Boston Cultural Center.
It cost $15,5 million to build. Getting money was no problem. More
than half of it reportedly came from Saudi Arabia, the country whose
terrorists pulled off the 9/11 terrorist attack.
Both mosques are run by the same leadership and have the same ideology, according to Jacobs.
Massachusetts politicians endorsed the Roxbury mosque although two
months earlier, the mosque’s cleric incited Muslims who had been
arrested for terrorism.
One morning, they're going to wake up in Boston and in a lot of other American cities and discover that they look a lot more like London or Berlin or Riyadh than they look like the Boston or New York in which I grew up and went to college. And by then it will be too late.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu condemned the attack, calling the assailants "intolerant and irresponsible lawbreakers" and said they would be brought to justice.
"Condemnation is not enough," said Abbas. He [Netanyahu] must stop this aggression against our places of worship and people by holding those who perpetrate these acts accountable," Abbas's spokesman Nabil Abu Rdaineh said.
If you read the whole thing, you will see that Israeli officialdom across the board has condemned the attack. But that's not enough says Abu Mazen. The 'Palestinians' want someone arrested and convicted of the crime, and thrown in jail. Whether or not they did it. Just like in 'Palestine.'
A mosque was vandalized overnight and the media and the politicians are rushing to blame the revenants, with one government minister going so far as to call it 'terrorism.'
"Price tag" assailants burned a mosque in Jab'a village, near Ramallah sometime overnight Monday, police said Tuesday.
The attackers also sprayed graffiti on the mosque, including the words "Ulpana war," indicating that this was a price tag attack- an act of violence by right-wing activists against Arabs aimed at deterring Israeli leadership from acting against the settlement enterprise.
Except, of course, that there is no proof that the 'settlers' did it, nor has there been proof in the past that most of these attacks were carried out by 'settlers.' In fact, at least one such attack was proven to have been carried out by Muslims. But now that JPost has morphed into Haaretz lite, anything is possible.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu condemned the attack, calling the assailants "intolerant and irresponsible lawbreakers" and said they would be brought to justice.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak strongly also spoke out against the attack, calling it a "criminal act" and promising a swift response by the IDF.
"This is a grave and criminal act meant to destroy the social fabric in the region and distract the IDF from its missions, which include protecting Israeli citizens in the region," Barak said. "I have instructed the IDF and security forces to act with all available means in order to capture the perpetrators and to bring them to justice."
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon called the graffiti an act of "terror," adding that such activities harm not only Israel but also the settlement enterprise.
"Just yesterday I said at a Hasbara conference that price tag attacks are illegal, immoral, and gravely undermine the image of Israel and the settlement enterprise under the gaze of the international community," Ayalon wrote on his Facebook page. "And here, this morning, we hear about another price tag attack."
"We must not allow such acts of terrorism to continue," he said.
Terrorism? Really? How many people were killed? None. How many were wounded? None. So where is the terrorism? If this were an act of terrorism, they would have come to the mosque while it was full of people and opened fire with machine guns. That would be an act of terrorism.
Five times a day, mosques across Israel summon the faithful to prayer. My own home is probably 300-500 meters from a mosque, and while we definitely do not notice its chants during the day, we definitely do notice them - especially if we are up already - about an hour and a half before sunrise, which depending on the time of year could be just about anywhere between 4:00 and 5:00 am.
So that you all understand what we're talking about, I want to give you some idea of what it sounds like. As you listen to this video, keep in mind that it was filmed in the daytime, when there is a lot less echo from the surroundings than they there is at night.
Let's go to the videotape.
Pretty loud, isn't it? To be fair, if you live near it, you get somewhat used to it, and if you're really tired, you can sleep through it. But it can disturb people.
A bill being introduced in the Knesset would restrict the times of day at which the muzzein can be played (the muzzein is generally a recording of someone chanting). And you can guess who is upset about it.
According to the Knesset report, there are some 400 mosques in Israel, half of which are manned by state-employed clerics, and whose public address systems are under state regulation. The rest are not under government supervision.
Moreover, the study surveyed other countries' policies on the issue, and found that the Muezzin calls in Egypt are synchronized, and their volume is monitored. In Saudi Arabia, public address system use has been restricted as well. In Austria, the Muezzin sounds his voice only Vienna's Islamic Center, and only on Fridays.
Officials in the Arab sector lamented that the initiative is a direct affront to Islam.
"Those who come live in Jaffa are aware of the mosques and churches here," Sheikh Saliman Setel said. He noted that a few minutes of the Muezzin call does not compare to the noise that comes from traffic, police cars and ambulances.
Tel Aviv Councilman Ahmad Mashharawi equated the bill to a rash of legislation that has been promoted by the Right-wing Knesset members in recent weeks, and accused the lawmakers of being so "drunk on power they are willing to compromise the foundations on which the state was based."
"Islam was here before Anastassia Michaeli came to this country, and it will stay long after she's gone," he said.
Michaeli's ancestors were in this country long before there were Muslims, and her descendants will God willing be here long after there are Muslims. But that's not why I showed you this. I showed you this to point out the double standard.
Moreover, the study surveyed other countries' policies on the issue, and found that the Muezzin calls in Egypt are synchronized, and their volume is monitored. In Saudi Arabia, public address system use has been restricted as well. In Austria, the Muezzin sounds his voice only Vienna's Islamic Center, and only on Fridays.
And the Arabs will never agree to measures like that in Israel.
This reminds me of the argument over the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance being built on an abandoned cemetery.
In fact, the entire area of the Mamilla Cemetery had long been regarded by Muslim religious leaders as mundras -- abandoned. A cemetery not in use for 37 years is considered mundras and without sanctity. That explains why in 1946 the most prominent Islamic religious figure of the day, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, presented plans to build a Muslim university on a large portion of the Mamilla Cemetery itself (a rendering of which we presented to the court). Today, the concept of mundras is widely accepted and practiced in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories and throughout the Arab world.
Though Judaism does not have a mundras concept, the Supreme Court noted in its decision that "despite the Jewish religious law prohibitions . . . to prevent the removal of graves or building on top of them, in practice, in cases where public needs required this, an agreed Jewish law solution has usually been found, and this allowed the building to be carried out in a way that minimized . . . the violation of the graves. . . . Jewish religious law also allows, as we have said, the removal of graves in a dignified manner. Balanced solutions of this kind were also proposed by the respondents [Simon Wiesenthal Center], and they even agreed to pay all the expenses involved in them."
I can't find a link right now, but during the course of the argument over the Mamilla cemetery, it came out that Muslim graves are moved to make way for public works projects everywhere in the Muslim world. But not in Israel. And the same will be true of any attempt to restrict the noise level coming from the muzzeins.
As America builds mosques, Islamic countries destroy churches
I don't recall whether I mentioned this on the blog, or just wrote it to someone privately, but during my last several trips to Boston a mosque has been built smack in the heart of one of the major Jewish communities. According to one of my sources there, the Jewish community attempted to buy the building - which was previously owned by Jews - but was not successful in doing so. So now there is a mosque in the middle of a heavily Jewish neighborhood (in fact, it's a couple of buildings away from one of the Jewish schools.
But while mosques continue to be built in America, Christian communities dwindle in the Middle East and elsewhere. It is almost impossible to build churches in Islamic countries (forget synagogues - there are almost no Jews left in most Islamic countries).
As Muslims prepare to erect a mega-mosque near the site of the 9/11 atrocities, it is well to reflect that the sort of tolerance, or indifference, that allows them to do so is far from reciprocated to churches in the Muslim world. I speak not of Islamist attacks against churches — such as the New Year’s Eve attack in Egypt that killed 21 Christians; or when jihadists stormed a church in Iraq, butchering over 50 Christians; or Christmas Eve attacks on churches in Nigeria and the Philippines. Nor am I referring to state-sanctioned hostility by Islamist regimes, such as Iran’s recent “round up” of Christians.
Rather, I refer to anti-church policy by Middle East governments deemed “moderate.” Consider: Kuwait just denied, without explanation, a request to build a church; so did Indonesia, forcing Christians to celebrate Christmas in a parking lot — even as a mob of 1,000 Muslims burned down two other churches. If this is the fate of churches in “moderate” Indonesia and Kuwait — the latter’s sovereignty due entirely to U.S. sacrifices in the First Gulf War — what can be expected of the rest of the Islamic world?
The best example of anti-church policy is Egypt, where the Middle East’s largest Christian minority, the Copts, lives. Even before Mubarak stepped down, “more than 1500 assaults on Copts have occurred, without any appropriate punishment given to criminals or compensation to the victims,” according to Coptic Solidarity.
Similarly, Egypt’s state security, which is now in charge, has a curious habit of disappearing right before Coptic churches are attacked — such as in the aforementioned New Year’s Eve attack. They also tend to arrive rather late after churches are attacked: it took security “hours” to appear when six Copts were murdered as they left church last year. Considering that weeks ago an Egyptian policeman identified and opened fire on Christians, killing a 71-year-old — while yelling Islam’s ancient war-cry, “Allah Akbar!” — none of this should be surprising.
Some of you may have been surprised last week to hear that UNESCO decided that Kever Rachel (Rachel's tomb) is a 'mosque.' The notion that Kever Rachel is a 'mosque' began to be invented by the 'Palestinians' in 1996.
Between 1993 and 1995, Palestinian groups committed terror and suicide attacks that killed 80 Israelis. In February 1996, the IDF feared that Rachel’s Tomb would furnish a convenient target for an attack of this sort, as it was situated on the main highway connecting Jerusalem and Hebron, with heavy Jewish and Arab traffic. Demonstrations of a nationalist Palestinian character erupted at Rachel’s Tomb as Muslims began to raise the argument that the site involved “Islamic soil.”
At the end of September 1996, the “Western Wall Tunnel Riots” broke out. After the attack on Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus and its fall to the Palestinians, hundreds of Arabs from Bethlehem and the Aida refugee camp attacked Rachel’s Tomb. They set on fire the scaffolding that was erected around the tomb as part of fortification work at the site and tried to break into the compound. Marching at their head was Muhammad Rashad al-Jabari, the governor of Bethlehem, an appointee of the Palestinian Authority. The IDF dispersed the demonstrators with gunfire and stun grenades. Scores were wounded, including Kifah Barakat, the commander of Force 17, the presidential guard of PA chairman Yasser Arafat.
With the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, Palestinians again attacked Rachel’s Tomb, and for 41 days Jews were prevented from visiting the site due to shooting incidents.
The Muslims also escalated their rhetoric. They stopped calling the site “Rachel’s Dome,” as they had done for hundreds of years, and began calling it the Mosque of Bilal ibn Rabah. The Muslim religious authorities (Wakf) first began to employ this name in 1996, and it eventually took root in Palestinian national discourse.
Bilal ibn Rabah, an Ethiopian by origin, is known in Islamic history as a black slave who served the household of the prophet Muhammad as the person in charge of calling the Muslims to prayer five times a day – the first muezzin. Upon the death of Muhammad, he went to fight the wars of Islam in Syria, was killed there in 642 CE, and was buried in Damascus. The Palestinian Authority raised the argument that, according to Islamic tradition, the Islamic conquerors of the country called the mosque that was established at Rachel’s Tomb after Bilal ibn Rabah.
Yet the Palestinian argument ignores the presumptive ownership that the Jews acquired at the site for many hundreds of years and from the firmans that the Ottoman authorities issued awarding Rachel’s Tomb to the Jews at the beginning of the 19th century.
The Palestinian arguments ignore even the accepted Muslim tradition that venerates Rachel and identifies the site as her burial place. Prof. Yehoshua Porat termed the claim of a mosque at Rachel’s Tomb as mendacious. He noted that the place was known in Arabic as “Rachel’s Dome – a Jewish place of worship.”
For many years in official publications of Palestinian national bodies, there was no reference to any other name for the site, including in the Palestinian Lexicon issued by the Arab League and the PLO in 1984, or in the Al-mawsu’ah al-filastiniyah published in Italy by the Palestinian Encyclopedia organization after 1996.
The book Palestine the Holy Land simply relates that “At the northern entrance to the city [Bethlehem] the Tomb of Rachel appears, the mother of the matriarchs, who died while giving life to Benjamin.” The book The West Bank and Gaza – Palestine also fails to mention the location of Rachel’s Tomb as a mosque. Despite this, the deputy minister of religious trusts and religious affairs in the Palestinian Authority defined Rachel’s Tomb as an Islamic site.
On Yom Kippur 2000, six days after the IDF retreated from Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus, the official PLO newspaper Al-Hayat al-Jadida published an article indicating Rachel’s Tomb as the next Palestinian target. “Bethlehem – Rachel’s Tomb or the Mosque of Bilal ibn Rabah is one of the stakes that the occupation government and the Zionist movement drove into most of the Palestinian cities... This grave is spurious and was originally a Muslim mosque.”
During the second intifada, Rachel’s Tomb was attacked by gunfire both from the direction of the Aida refugee camp between Beit Jala and Bethlehem, as well as from the rooftops of houses to the west, south and east. Palestinian Authority forces, who were presumably in charge of preserving order and should have prevented violence, not only did not prevent it but took an active part in the fighting. At one point, 50 Jews found themselves besieged at Rachel’s Tomb while a gun battle between the IDF and Palestinian Authority forces was taking place around them.
On April 2, 2002, the IDF returned to Bethlehem in the framework of Operation Defensive Shield and remained there for a protracted time. A bomb was thrown at Rachel’s Tomb on April 10, 2005, and another on December 27, 2006, while on February 10, 2007, scores of Palestinians attacked the site with rocks.
The High Court of Justice has recognized the clear security need of defending this holy site. On February 3, 2005, it rejected petitions by Palestinians who wanted to change the route of the security barrier near Rachel’s Tomb, ruling that the current location of the barrier preserved the balance between freedom of religion and the local residents’ freedom of movement.
To learn more about the history of Kever Rachel (which has been identified as such for about 1,700 years), read the whole thing.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
