Friday 11 April 2014

Baruch Dayan Ha'Emet - Jacob Birnbaum -2

From Guest Blogger
Rav Dov Fischer

«I knew him very well in the 1970s, at the height of the Soviet Jewry movement.  He was one of the most righteous souls I ever met.  Together with Glen Richter, the work he did was of historic proportions.  What began as a unique fight for freedom in the annals of history would ultimately, through Divine hashgachah, achieve not only the freedom of millions of Jews, but also would lead to a change in the face of Israel and to the downfall of the Soviet Union.  
 
The numbers of Jews who would emigrate to Israel over the next half century would change the demographic balance that assured permanent retention of Judea and Samria, even as it contributed to enhancing Israel's place as a world technological power.  At the same time, it showed people in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Baltics, and the rest of the U.S.S.R. that the Soviet Union's repressive power could be broken.  With the subsequent confluence of great anti-Soviet leadership from three determined non-Jews in the 1980s — Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II — the downfall was completed.
 
But Yaakov Birnbaum began it all.  And through it all, there never was a kinder, gentler, humbler, more dignified and sweet human being. In later years, he sustained phsyical setbacks in his health.  Millions — Jews, non-Jews — owe a real part of their freedom to him.  He was that great.
~ Dov Fischer»

Jacob Birnbaum
Y'hee Zichro Baruch


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Shalom and Best Regards,
RRW

Pathos, not reason, is more and more accepted as the way to live a normal life.

~ Steve M.

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