http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsjIalSM4vM&playnext_from=TL&videos=Z3106wJbO60
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a12xEC4MnBg&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyofh0rg5WM&feature=related
Jews share a special bond with suffering people in Haiti, Darfur
By Barbara Yaffe, Vancouver Sun January 27, 2010
If solidarity is built through shared suffering, the state of Israel surely has a special bond with countries afflicted by crisis.
Israel, forged after the Holocaust, has been particularly quick to respond to the suffering of those affected by a genocide in Darfur, and more recently, the earthquake in Haiti.
Today marks the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, a Polish concentration camp where Jews were gassed, starved or worked to death for no other reason than because they happened to be Jewish. Others, non-Jews deemed enemies of Hitler's Nazi regime, also were tortured and murdered in such camps, built in the 1930s and 1940s throughout eastern Europe.
In 2005 the United Nations General Assembly declared Jan. 27 to be an International Day of Commemoration to Honour the Victims of the Holocaust.
The world's Jewish community, having lost six million in the Holocaust -- six million -- sadly, has an intimate understanding of genocide and loss.
Indeed it's now a core concept of Judaism that Jewish people, who today number fewer than 13 million across the globe (5.3 million live in Israeli; another 5.2 million in America), must not stand idly by when the blood of others is being spilled.
This is the essence of the Jewish mantra, Never Again.
And so, when news of the earthquake in Haiti hit with possibly 200,000 dead, Israel responded almost immediately.
"Israel wishes to express its solidarity with the Government and people of Haiti during this great disaster," said a statement posted on the Israeli foreign affairs ministry website, outlining the extraordinary assistance the tiny country was dispatching to Port-au-Prince following the Jan. 12 earthquake.
Within 24 hours, the Israel Defence Force had leased two El Al 747s to transport supplies for a 158-bed field hospital and 220 medical and search and rescue personnel, along with a canine contingent.
The IDF field hospital -- replete with imaging equipment and operating rooms -- was operational within 10 hours of its arrival, prompting one CNN reporter to ask how the Israelis, flying from the other side of the world, were medically up and running while a nearby U.S. field hospital was still in disarray.
Additionally, Jews in Canada quickly began organizing a special fundraising effort for Haiti, through the United Israel Appeal Federations Canada.
On yet another front, "The devastation of the Holocaust ... impels us all to act against the Darfur genocide," declared a Jan. 18 news release from the Canadian Jewish Congress Pacific Region.
Jews in synagogues across Canada last weekend marked a "Darfur Shabbat," reserving part of their Sabbath service to discuss and pray for an end to the Darfur genocide.
Canadian rabbis stated jointly: "On the eve of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the silence and indifference to the plight of Jews in the Holocaust remains all too fresh in our collective memory not to take a stand on Darfur."
Since 2003, some 400,000 Africans in Darfur, in western Sudan, have died in a campaign of ethnic cleansing by a Sudanese-backed militia, the Janjaweed. Another two million have fled their homes.
Would that "Never Again" would become a clarion call for all peoples in this world.
- Republican Mitch McConnell is the U.S. Senate minority leader, not the majority leader as I called him in Tuesday's column.
