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Jewish Commentary»
Judaism
In 1917, there were 30 synagogues in Samarkand, by 1935 just one. Nonetheless, underground movements and a deep commitment to Judaism that had helped Jews maintain their identity for thousands of years once again set in to get Jews through Communism. The 1970 Soviet census showed 103,000 Jews in Uzbekistan. (Photo by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, c. 1909-1915)
Rabbi Berel Wein
One of the more amazing predictions regarding the Jewish people that appears in the Torah is that numerically speaking we will always be a small nation. That certainly has been the case over our long history. At the time of the destruction of the Second Temple the Chinese were twice our numbers. Almost two millennia later the Chinese are approximately one hundred times our numbers.
In 1939 on the eve of World War II there were nineteen million Jews in the world. Today, seventy years later, we are at least four million under that number. There should be, simply by natural growth, sixty million Jews in the world but there is not nearly that number extant. This has been the price of what the modern world has inflicted upon us - from the Holocaust and its attendant generational impact, assimilation, intermarriage, the reduction of marriage and family which are viewed as subservient to other so-called life values, a very diminished birth rate outside of the Orthodox community, a general tendency to avoid marriage or to marry later in life, and the accepted practices and lifestyles of homosexuality.
All of this means that there are less Jews and less Jews means a weakening of Judaism and Judaic values. Tragically many Jews are more interested in saving the planet (whatever that may mean) than in creating a family themselves and insuring Jewish survival for the future.
Karl Marx, the apostate self-hating Jew, wrote a vicious anti-Semitic pamphlet entitled “A World Without Jews.” He predicted that such a world would be utopia incarnate. Unfortunately much of the world, including a significant number of Jews as well, took him seriously.
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