For more than eighteen hundred years
Israel tried living in the Diaspora
Chased from one town to the next
Pogroms there were more and more of
Jews now live in their own land
Finally responding to pogroms
They’re accused of genocide
Don’t you dare fight back! says the world
~ Instead, commit suicide
‘I shall multiply your seed as the stars of heaven
and as the sand on the seashore’*
As if Father Abraham could count them all --
at that very moment he stood so tall
And now we, his descendants, over 4,000 years later
yearning for this promise of God to be fulfilled
Midst pogroms and holocausts down through the ages
Israel’s faithful have ever stood ...
... arm-in-arm, awaiting the population explosion
God promised Abraham, our father, long ago chosen
___________________________________________
*Genesis 22:17
Clownish yaw engines
Spin us about
The blue sphere we inhabit
Its future in doubt
Our cumulus cloud shroud
Conceals the pain
Of tanks, missiles and pogroms
And unburied slain
god is
what I don't know
high Gothic arches pierce the sky
to commemorate a body
washed ashore on the bank of the Rhine
that inspired a wave of pogroms in 1287
a body, that became a saint
a body, that became a pilgrimage
a body, that became an apology in 1996
for
"...the curse that we wrongly
put on the name of the Jew...
because we didn't know what
we were doing." *
so, you can know god
but not know what you are doing
for fifteen hundred years
* John XXIII: Penitential Prayer "We Recognize..." Spoken June 3, 1963 at Vatican II
Women in my family
Who remember the morning Grandma passed
Recall a loving woman with no malice
Who left a void that would last and last
From the pogroms she fled as a girl of eight
Helping nurse sea-sick refugees aboard ship
Receiving such steadfast love became our fate
She gave strength when we were losing our grip
With Grandma around, arguments never turned to hate
Despair and angst were eased with her smile
She introduced common sense; our non-sense could wait
All about was her wisdom and guile
It is now sadly apparent how Grandma's role
Had once kept our family happy and whole
FANNY CITRIN
1872-1955
7/1/22
History cried out at a heinous cost
'Twas when millions of Jews their lives had lost
Dead bodies in concentration camps filled
In the name of Anti-Semitism, killed
Pogroms, mass shootings to annihilate
Gas chambers and vans to asphyxiate
Germans, they thought they were superior
Slew the Jews with motives ulterior
Forced to work in extermination camps
Labour till death his sickle around tramps
God's chosen race fighting for every breath
Nazis became the harbingers of death
{The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the World War II genocide of the European Jews. Between 1941 and 1945, across German-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination through work in concentration camps; and in gas chambers and gas vans in German extermination camps, chiefly Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibór, and Treblinka in occupied Poland}
09.19.2020
For William Kekaula's "A Historic Event" poetry contest
The anti this…
We can be anti this and anti that
say, our hatred of Muslims is there but not deep
and is often based on ignorance.
But we have to face the fact that anti-Semitism
is in the psyche in the western mind.
Here we have to differentiate between Israel and
the Jews as there is not many of them
in that state of Israel, the sitting government
there are Zionists.
What worries me way anti-Semitism is deep-rooted,
we have to be aware of our feelings at all time
but why is it so?
Of course, the Jews are successful people who
tend to come on top in economic matters, if our
hatred is based on envy we should be ashamed
and clean our souls.
After the war and the pogroms faced by the Jews
in my country to behave Jewish still denote
a negative emotion, like greed, and underhand
as being Jewish when it is not.
I blame Christianity too, over the years, has put
fuel to the fire with Jewish rhetoric.
We must come to the understanding that a Jew
is a fellow man with good and bad qualities
as I have a look at facts and not the myth.
True Love bless and pray for the first lost sheep under the groaning oak not hate curse or beat Enemies for Gospel sake but chosen A cold crystal night the glass was broken Jesus laid down His life for you regimes Jews recieve the blame stricken to extremes under boots of pride they are battered
Night of infamy march the shattered to final solution a holocaust Jesus for all lost paid in full the cost so you better not get with their pogrom pray for those lost in the cold dusk to dawn - By john Beam - Based on The Night of broken Glass, On the night of November 9, 1938, violence against Jews broke out across the Reich. The pogroms became known as Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass," - and from ROBERT CAWDREY
A TABLE ALPHABETICALL OF HARD USUAL ENGLISH WORDS (1604)- crystaline, (g) cleere like glasse, or christall.
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