Jews, Jerusalem and Yom Kippur

...Tomorrow in synagogues throughout the world, Jews will be remembering Jerusalem and its central role in our lives, exactly as they have for thousands of Days of Atonement before this year's. Perhaps we ought to invite along some analysts and journalists. Or some PA officials.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
13 September '13..

Most Israelis, by far, want to see peace with the Arabs in general, with the Palestinian Arabs in particular, and are willing to make sacrifices and compromises so that it can happen. We're not open to disagreement on this. Anyone who knows Israelis in whatever degree knows this is true. The arguments about it are all in relation to detail.

This being so, we are endlessly astonished at how little criticism (relatively speaking) the Mahmoud Abbas-operated Palestinian Authority gets. It is a terrorism-friendly, corrupt and hateful political organization, led by a man whose academic career was built on Holocaust-denial. Review its activities in the two decades since the Oslo Agreement and you grasp why people continue to suffer and die in the course of the war the PA has waged against Israel's.

Now keep those two preceding paragraphs in mind while we put them into a specific context.

At sunset today, the Jewish world goes into Yom Kippur mode. While there are many people, and some Jews among them, who mistakenly believe its significance is in being the anniversary of a war of the same name, Yom Kippur is in reality the centerpiece of Jewish synagogue life - and has been for as long as there have been Jews. It's a day marked by holiness. Even Jews with relatively weak connections to their people's roots know about and respect Yom Kippur at some level. In religious terms, it's one of the great equalizers of the Jewish people: almost all of us do it.

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