I didn’t want to write this article.
Not for an absence of thoughts, or feelings. So many feelings.
Because it’s exhausting to feel this heavily. This frequently.
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Last Tuesday was Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.
As I stood in my synagogue, our lips uttered prayer in unison for “the souls of the holy and pure who were killed, murdered, slaughtered, burned, drowned and strangled for the sanctification of the name”.
For those who lost their lives to antisemitism over the ages: those who perished at the hands of the Babylonians in Jerusalem in 586BCE, and the Blood Libels of the late 1100s, and the Eastern European pogroms of the 19th and 20th century, and the Farhud of Baghdad in 1941.
And Hitler’s Holocaust.
Millions of Jewish women, children and men murdered over thousands of years. Targeted for nothing more than being Jewish.
And antisemitism endures.
Just a few days after we prayed together last week, rapper, Ye – formerly known as Kanye West – entered the conversation.
After fellow rapper, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sent a private SMS to Ye, pleading for him to “stop” after unveiling his shameful ‘White Lives Matter’ t-shirts at his Paris Fashion Show, Ye accused Diddy of being controlled by Jewish people.
Read the article by Rebecca Davis on Mamamia.