"Free books" advertises a handwritten note. "These are ones nobody seems to read," she says with a hint of regret.

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This library houses one of the largest collections of Jewish books in Denver, Colorado. It is located inside the city's biggest Reform shul. My family is here for private Hebrew lessons with an Israeli tutor.

When my children's lesson begins, I excuse myself to thumb through the books. This collection of Jewish literary and historical flotsam and jetsam is overflowing. As I browse the titles, it starts to feel as if there is a puzzle to piece together.

I first save from uncertain fate Alan Dershowitz's "The Vanishing American Jew." In this 1997 book, he sounded the alarm about the demographic winter facing non-Orthodox American Jews. It has been 22 years since he wrote the book. Did he get it right?

Unfortunately, yes. Since Dershowitz's book, non-Orthodox American Jewish families are having even fewer Jewish babies. Assimilation is also worse. Today, nearly a third of secular, Reform, and Conservative Jewish women are spending their lives alone, without husbands or children.

Dershowitz's 1997 volume reprinted the famous "Will your grandchildren be Jewish?" chart. Following 22 years of additional data, a second chart is needed for the next edition: "Will you have any grandchildren at all?"

Unlike their Israeli counterparts, non-Orthodox millennial American Jews do not seem to embrace the call to be fruitful and multiply. The fertility and assimilation numbers are so dismal that our community is scheduled to lose almost one-third of its strength by the next generation.

This Denver congregation is the demographic group that is most impacted by Jewish childlessness. It is therefore ironic that Dershowitz's warning is literally being tossed out.

The next book I save from the cart is a reprint of Rabbi Israel Friedlaeder's seminal essay "The Problem of Judaism in America." It is in a 2004 issue of the now-defunct journal, Conservative Judaism.

Rabbi Friedlaeder wrote in 1909 that "the Jewish education of the children, which formed the cornerstone of our heritage was being dwindled down to Sunday school experiments." The children of Israel today "know of Judaism and their people no more than what they are told by Israel's enemies."

I think of an agonizing affliction among many American Jews today. Untrained in their own history, they are shilling for people who would have our heads if they could. Victims of their own ignorance, these Jews describe Israel as an apartheid state and some support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. How did we get here?

The first answer is that an unprecedented number of American secular Jews already have one or both feet outside our tent. Their parents or grandparents, who made the choice to disengage, are not reliable homeschoolers. While there are abundant free and effective online resources for teaching children and young adults about Jewish history and Zionism, the problem is their willingness, not ability, to consume them.

Accordingly, hundreds of thousands of Hebrew school-age children, young adults, and college-age secular Jews have not had the faintest brush with their history. This is the largest and fasted-growing category of non-Orthodox Jews in America.

Compounding this problem are mixed messages – and occasionally even isolated cases of hostility – toward contemporary Israeli history and Zionism among some teachers at today's Reform synagogues.

It is, therefore, no wonder that we are now facing the largest-ever group of under-educated, befuddled, and bewildered young Jews. They make easy targets.

Ironically, the next find on the rack is Mordecai S. Chertoff's wonderful anthology, "Zionism: A Basic Reader," published in 1975. It contains short but powerful translated works by Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Abba Eban, and about 20 other luminaries of Zionism. For the Israeli reader, this is canonical stuff. For prior generations of American Jews, it was required and exciting reading.

Had these BDS-supporting secular and Reform Jews read Zionism would they have learned enough about the Jewish people to remain true to themselves? Would the facts and worldviews shared by Herzl, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, and Eban make an impact upon them? Would the modern history of our people successfully crowd out the noise of their Facebook feeds?

I think so. Truth is like sunshine. But first, you need to wake up and open your eyes.

After Rabbi Friedlaeder's essay, I turn to Israel Prize winner Charles S. Liebman's article, "Boundaries of the Religious Marketplace" in the same book. Some shuls are becoming too consumer-oriented, he writes. Many congregations forsake essential building blocks to pursue fads and popular causes.

Liebman writes: "More and more synagogues are conducting self-surveys that ask members to report what it is they want the synagogue to be doing. Nobody, to the best of my knowledge, finds this remarkable."

Fifteen years after Liebman's concern, it seems worse than ever. Many Reform shuls seem like the central headquarters of a political party. Coordinated activism and fundraising include Trump "resistance" signs, Syrian refugee relief, efforts to prevent climate change, support for abortion and biodiversity, and whatever other issues of the day burn in the hearts of members.

Reform rabbis usually permit this. Many encourage it. They do so without any thought to their conservative, libertarian, and classically liberal members (often one of the shul's larger donor groups). These marginalized members bite their tongues or opt out of the partisan carnival.

It has crossed my mind that this could be a business decision of sorts by the Reform movement. After generations of Jewish educational malpractice, are left-wing domestic politics and kugel cook-offs the last common denominators that unite Reform congregants?

It is true that political questions are often valued questions. A religion that has nothing to say about them also risks feeling irrelevant. Yet our traditional approach to politics in the temple invites reasoned argument and understanding. As the old saying goes, put two Jews in a room and expect to get at least three opinions.

Imposing political purity tests upon the most interesting and politically diverse group of people on the planet is not only morally wrong but it makes visits to the shul dull and intellectually unsatisfying. This applies to both the Left and Right.

When I reach the final page of Liebman's essay, a folded document drops out and sails to the floor. I pick it up and discover a letter. It is a cover letter from writer and entrepreneur Scott Shay to the Reform congregation's rabbi. He sent a courtesy copy of his 2006 book, "Getting Our Groove Back: How to Energize American Jewry."

There is good news at last. Shay's book is not on the chopping block. It is safely on the library's shelves.

Nine years after Dershowitz's magnum opus on the subject, Shay's solution-oriented book on the American Jewish demographic winter is even more compelling. It is brimming with data and graphs as you would expect from a preeminent banker who craves facts and raw data.

Shay also addresses the fertility crisis. American Jewish women are the best-educated and highest-credentialed group of women on the planet. His idea is that they should have children between college and graduate school, not afterward. By doing so, they will still enjoy the most important and lucrative stage of their career which occurs after completing graduate school.

This advice is sage. The exciting aspect of demographics is that if Shay's advice can become a trend, then the American Jewish community's dismal future can suddenly look bright again.

While my heart warms to Shay's positive thinking, I still have a sinking feeling. Is the window of opportunity still open? If it is, should every Jew who can get airtime on the left-leaning US television networks be talking about this? The members of our community who need to know about our dismal demographic future are clearly not reading our books and articles.

Shay's book was the last piece of this puzzle for me. The picture is complete. The image that has emerged from the pieces is unfortunately not a happy one.

It is a scene at almost any America college campus. A group of Palestinian activists is handing out fliers. They contain the usual anti-Jew hatred and lies and encourage the public to boycott Israel. A young Jew walks by. He takes a flyer and reads it. Yet he is not angry. He just looks confused.

The post Can American Jews get their groove back? appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

Socialism is enjoying a resurgence in the United States. According to the most recent Gallup poll, 57% of Democrats now view socialism favorably.

Since 1918, socialism has been tried in 64 countries. With over a century of experience, evidence, and history it is time to ask: Has any one of these experiments been good for the Jewish people?

First, a trip back down memory lane. It is just after midnight, July 17, 1918. Russian Czar Nicholas II and his family, now prisoners of the Bolsheviks, are under guard in a secret location east of the Ural Mountains.

Yakov Yurovsky, a 40-year-old yeshiva drop-out, awakens Nicholas. Now regional commissar for justice, Yurovsky tells the czar to stir the rest of the royal family.

An hour later Yurovsky and 10 other revolutionaries are waiting for them. The captors position the Romanovs and their five servants against a wall. The thin, goateed, curly-haired, and mild-mannered Yurovsky announces that he has official orders. He reads them to the czar.

Yurovsky, a failed clockmaker who converted to Christianity 13 years earlier, received his commands from Filipp Goloshchyokin, 42, who is also a lapsed Jew. Goloshchyokin received the orders from 33-year-old Yakov Sverdlov, who is Jewish and a close colleague of Lenin (who is one-quarter Jewish). The orders are to execute the Romanovs.

Yurovsky reads the death sentence aloud. Nicholas accepts the verdict with composure. Yurovsky selects a Colt M1911 semiautomatic pistol from among 12 weapons present. Yurovsky fires three 45-caliber slugs into czar's chest. His compatriots follow, unloading the other pistols. They kill the royal family, their family doctor, four servants, and even the czar's French bulldog.

Today, we can debate about whether the chain-of-command behind the order to execute Nicholas was comprised of Jews, lapsed Jews, self-hating Jews, "non-Jewish Jews," non-Jews, or whatever complex phrase fits. However, there is no arguing that socialism and Marxism are forever associated with our people.

Have we benefitted? Let's take a data-driven approach. Consider our fate in nearly every socialist country inhabited by a meaningful number of Jews:

In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the planet's first large-scale experiment with socialism, our status as founding members of the revolution did not help us. Once established, rabbis were arrested, Jewish property was seized, and entire Jewish neighborhoods were dissolved. The teaching of Hebrew and the observance of Shabbat was unlawful. Practicing Jews were removed from their jobs and often imprisoned. Even nonpracticing Jews faced social pressure, scorn, public ridicule, and intense discrimination in higher education and in the workforce.

These methods worked. From 1918 until 1989, over 1 million Soviet Jews were forced to abandon Judaism. There is no way to describe this other than the forcible conversion of Jews and Jewish families from Judaism to Marxism. This is a loss far greater even than the forcible conversion of Jews to Catholicism during the Spanish Inquisition.

These Jews vanished not in gas chambers but when their ancient intellectual inheritance was outlawed, their books (including the Torah) were banned, their synagogues were closed, destroyed or repurposed, and their rabbis were sent for re-education.

Socialist states usually have a quasi-religion and not just atheism. It is worship of the state itself. It tolerates no competition.

The Soviet's treatment of Jews internally was consistent with their treatment of the newly formed Jewish state. After one of the shortest diplomatic romances in history, the Soviets became deadly archenemies of Israel. Their weapons, policies, and support of Jew-hating Arab dictators led to the slaughter of thousands of us. We should forever remember the image of Soviet-made Sagger anti-tank missiles and their Soviet-trained Egyptian operators killing Israeli tank crews during the Yom Kippur War.

The fate of the Jews in every European socialist country followed a nearly identical path: ostracism, persecution, illegality, discrimination in the workplace, and forcible conversion to Marxism. Between 1959 and 1989, the Jewish population declined precipitously in Belarus (-25%), Estonia (-14%), Georgia (-52%), Latvia (-37%), Lithuania (-50%), Moldova (-31%), and Ukraine (-35%).

As in Soviet Russia, the majority of these declines were due to subjugation, the outlawing of Judaism, forcible conversion, and no-choice assimilation, not emigration and Aliyah which flourished only after these socialist regimes fell.

Conditions were slightly better in the Socialist Republic of Romania and the Hungarian People's Republic. In Romania, the fledgling Israeli government and Jewish philanthropists bribed the socialist leadership to free our people. They provided military hardware, oil drilling and pipeline equipment, technology transfers, loans, and hard cash. In exchange, Romania issued Jewish visas in large numbers. The price tag was $2,000 a head for average Jews and $25,000 for Jewish doctors, scientists, and those with advanced degrees. Approximately 94% of Romania's postwar Jewish population of 356,000 fled the country.

The Hungarian People's Republic lost 43% of its Jewish population during its period of socialist rule. While there was Jewish suffering in Hungary, most Jews successfully emigrated.

The Polish People's Republic lost 80% of its Jewish community, nearly all of them Holocaust survivors, but not before the socialist government confiscated nearly all of their property.

Has our experience has been different in present-day "democratic" socialist countries where voters elect their Marxist leaders?

Consider the case of Venezuela, whose socialist regime was established in 1999. Venezuelans are not historically anti-Jewish. Yet suddenly their government was. Hugo Chávez adopted anti-Semitic rhetoric and policies including support for Iran, Syria, even Hamas. Between the government's newly discovered Jew-hatred and a tanking economy in which toilet paper has become a luxury, Venezuela's Jewish population has dropped from 22,000 at its peak to 6,000 now.

What about Cuba? Before socialism, there were 24,000 Jews in Cuba's historic Jewish community. Many traced their roots back hundreds of years. Today, there are fewer than 1,500 Jews, a 94% decline. Cubans were not anti-Semites. Yet Fidel Castro was. Between 1967 and 1970, Cuba sent military assistance to Egypt during the War of Attrition against Israel. Cuba severed diplomatic relations with Israel in 1973 and subsequently sent troops and equipment to Syria. The Cuban government seized billions of dollars in Jewish land, property, and businesses. Jews who wanted to emigrate were refused visas until 1995.

Bolivia's Jewish community, once 7,000 strong has declined over 90% to less than 700. In January 2009, the socialist government broke ties with Israel calling it a "terrorist and genocidal state." Most Jews emigrated due to socialism's impact on the economy, not anti-Semitism. Likewise, Uruguay lost over 60% of its 50,000 Jews as a result of socialist economic mismanagement.

Is there a single example, in any of the 64 experiments, of Jewish communities growing and flourishing under a socialist regime? No.

It has been over 100 years since the first socialist experiment began in Russia. Yet since then each of the 64 implementations of socialism has resulted in severe Jewish people. The evidence is indisputable.

For the Jewish people, a socialist or Marxist regime at best is a threat to Jewish religious practice, our property and jobs, and the stability of our families and the local economy. At worst, a socialist or Marxist takeover is a death warrant for some yet-to-be-determined percentage of Jews trapped behind the barbed wire and the end of Jewish religious practice in that country.

In its 100 year history, socialism and Marxism have caused the deaths of over 100 million human souls, including a large number of us. The even higher price paid by our people was due to forced conversions and no-choice assimilation. Had Marx, Yurovsky, Goloshchyokin, Sverdlov, Trotsky and thousands like them failed, Israel today might be a nation with several more millions who simply would have packed their bags after World War II and voted with their feet.

This battle will unfortunately continue. Yet 100 years after Yurovsky discharged his pistol in the czar, the historical record is not open to reasonable dispute. When will our brethren, whose lives have been enriched by free markets, free discourse, and free societies, finally learn these painful lessons?

The post Has socialism been good for the Jews? appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

For years, we have watched these videos with sadness and anger. The indoctrination of innocent children leaves us with a sense of foreboding. If this is a harbinger of our future, how will we best stave off another generation of forever war?

As a people, we have seen this pattern through the ages and long before Gaza's UNRWA schools started inculcating Jew-hatred. Children are not born anti-Semitic or with genocide in their hearts. They are poisoned in a cycle of transgenerational anti-Semitism that is all too familiar to us.

We suffered through this in Europe, in czarist Russia, in Nazi Germany, in North Africa, and in a hundred other places. In pre-war Germany, we watched helplessly as platoons of Hitler Youth children marched through Jewish neighborhoods singing about our coming slaughter.

The scene of children singing about Jewish death and suffering has just played itself out again, but not in Gaza. At the end of April, it came to the United States for the first time.

The joyful voices of schoolchildren at the Muslim American Society of North Philadelphia came together to sing about the "blood of martyrs," "chopping off their heads," "liberating the sorrowful and exalted Al-Aqsa Mosque" in Jerusalem, and "subjecting them to eternal torture."

For the uninitiated, "them" and "their" means us, the Jews. Such an open call in the U.S. before an audience largely composed of American teachers, parents, and community members is unprecedented in the U.S. and shocks the conscience.

Following the performance, the center's staff posted the video on their official Facebook page for parents, as if it were just another school performance.

These schoolchildren were also not Palestinians but mostly natural-born U.S. citizens. They are the sons and daughters of Muslim immigrants. The majority of their families recently arrived from Arab and North African countries. Along with an estimated 3 million others, most of the U.S.'s Muslim community immigrated to the United State in just the past 25 years.

Another crowning disgrace of this episode is its location. Philadelphia is home to one of America's oldest Jewish communities. It predates the republic itself. The community is today one of the largest in Diaspora. The Philadelphia Muslim American Society is located just miles away from dozens of synagogues and tens of thousands of Jewish homes.

On May 6, 2019, Muslim American Society Executive Director Ayman Hammous called the video "disturbing" and blamed a "vetting" problem within his Philadelphia Chapter. He also now admits that he may have a problem with the entire leadership of the Philadelphia Chapter.

Yet we have seen this identical set of facts a thousand times before, right down to the director's contrition. The problem is that some meaningful percentage of Hammous' organization and its membership are apologetic not for the jihadi performance. They are apologetic for getting caught.

The Philadelphia Islamic center incident must be considered side by side with the April 27 Poway, California synagogue shooting in understanding the growing and rapidly evolving threat to the American Jewish community. I cannot underestimate the hardship, suffering, violence and possibly murder that our children we will face 20 years hence here in the U.S. We must stop Old World jihadis from passing on to innocent American children Jew-hatred and violence. If we fail, it will be at our peril.

Unlike Gaza, we have recourse and options in the U.S. to fight the poisoning and indoctrinating of Muslim youth. Recent immigrants and naturalized Americans who import and seek to transfer jihadi violence must be dealt with swiftly and severely.

The easiest cases are those in which recent immigrants have yet to be naturalized. Muslim extremist immigrants who attempt to teach U.S. children jihad must be deported. Deportation hearings for offenders like these should start occurring via video conference from the offender's home country.

Haters who have regrettably been naturalized as U.S. citizens – to the shame of the State Department and Department of Homeland Security – will need to be dealt with in the criminal justice system. There appears to be an applicable state crime: contributing to the delinquency of a minor (CDM). All 50 states have CDM statutes.

State CDM laws implicate the type of vile conduct we saw at the Philadelphia Islamic center. A teacher or religious school staff member who grooms an American child to become a jihadi or who tries to fill a young heart with Jew-hatred is a criminal. Some CDM laws are serious felonies. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner should bring the crime that occurred at the Philadelphia Islamic center to the grand jury now.

State and municipal child protective agencies should also take note. They should use CDM statutes and civil injunction to protect Muslim children and the Jewish community. State legislatures can also expand the reach of CDM statutes to give standing to Jewish and Muslim advocacy and community groups.

The incident in Philadelphia must be the last one of its kind on U.S. soil. The alternative is in plain view in Gaza. Will this be the beginning of another forever war, this time with America's fastest-growing demographic group? Or will Jews, Muslims, and government agencies in America work to break this soul-destroying cycle of Jew-hatred and violence from embedding itself in America?

The post Jihadi hatred in the City of Brotherly Love appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

In the winter of 1974 – 45 years ago this week – these mountains were snow-capped. The weather had even halted service on a narrow gauge steam rail line that brings visitors from the Syrian capital.

Yet even if the train had been running, travel by rail was not possible for the four young women from Damascus' Jewish Quarter.

The Syrian police, agents of the sadistic Mukhabarat secret intelligence service, and any Syrian, for that matter, might spot them.

The Jewish travel ban was in effect. If caught on the move, the women would be interrogated and jailed. Syrian police often deliberately locked Jews up with hardened criminals. A short stay in a Syrian prison could be a death sentence.

Thus, Lulu Zeibak, 23, and her sisters, Mazal, 22, and Fara, 24, were traveling in disguise. They were escorted by a group of smugglers. With them was the Zeibak's cousin, Eva Saad, 18. They were in the Zabadani Mountains because of what lay only 10 kilometers away: the Lebanese border.

Prior to this journey, the Zeibak and Saad families engaged in months of painful, angry and tearful discussions. These same conversations were being held in nearly all of the remaining 100 Syrian Jewish households. Yes, by 1974, 100 families were all that remained of the ancient Syrian Jewish community. It was a community that dated back to the first century BCE. It was once over 30,000 members strong.

The treatment of the Jews in Syria was brutal but consistent with what Jews in all Arab lands endured. Every Jew today must learn and remember the Quranic concept of the "dhimmi." In 20th-century Syria, a culture of institutionalized "dhimmitude" subservience was energized by Arabification and later Nazification. The results for Jews were horrifying.

In Syria, it started with forced military conscription (1909), then Nuremberg-type anti-Jewish laws (1930s), forced Arabization of Jewish schools (1945), laws prohibiting the ownership of real property, the shunning of Jewish businesses and boycotts (1948) and the freezing and then seizure of Jewish bank accounts (1949).

The emotional impact of some of these measures was magnified, occurring just 36 months after the crematoria had cooled at Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and the rest. Nor was this timing coincidental. Syria and its Vichy French puppet masters were on the side of the Nazis. They permitted the Luftwaffe to use Syria's airbases. Nazi war criminals even sought refuge in Syria after the war. Posters in Arabic stating "In heaven, God is your ruler. On earth, Hitler" were frequently displayed in shops in the towns of Syria.

And then there were the pogroms. In 1944, the Damascus Jewish Quarter was twice sacked by mobs. Over 150 Jewish shops were looted and destroyed in Aleppo in 1947. Less than two years later, in 1949, organized attackers threw grenades into the Al-Menashe synagogue in Damascus, killing 13 and wounding 32.

In 1950, many Syrian Jews were ejected from their homes, some of which had been in their families for centuries. In 1967, anti-Jewish violence erupted again in response to the Six-Day War. "Slit the throats of the Jews!" chanted the mob. Even more chilling: "First the Saturday people [Jews], then the Sunday people [Christians]." Fifty-seven more Jews perished in the violence.

Jewish emigration from Syria came in waves. It was largely unrestricted until 1951. Then, the Syrian government cut it off. For a short period in 1954 and again in 1958, the emigration ban was lifted, at least for Jews who could pay a hefty departure ransom. Fortunately, Syria was a porous country. Illegal emigration was a thriving dark art.

Sneaking away from a repressive police state is still perilous. In 1958, Murad Guindi, 17, attempted a clandestine dash for the border. He made it only to be discovered and arrested by Lebanese police who extradited him back to Syria. Once in custody, he was interrogated, savagely beaten and tortured.

By 1974, only 500 Jews remained. In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, this tiny Jewish enclave alone shouldered the rage and the retaliation of humiliated Syrian President Hafez Assad and his defeated people. Men who could not beat Jews in a cowardly surprise attack on Yom Kippur turned to beating defenseless Jews in the homes and on the streets. Assaults were commonplace and Syrian assailants were immunized from prosecution.

The Syrian government cut Jewish phone lines, confiscated their radios and denied them access to the mail. Most were then removed from their jobs in the professions, at schools and even in remedial posts.

Those who stayed in Syria started to realize that the smaller the Jewish community became, the greater the chance that gratuitous or preplanned mob – even government – violence would visit upon its remaining individuals. At some point, the risk of violence is so high that it forces a decision. Is it better to ride out the Syrian storm or to put your family at risk on the open road in an attempt to escape?

Should we stay or should we go? These two questions are usually posed in unison. Our people have asked these questions in nearly every language we have ever spoken. The answers are often given in whispers, in dark rooms, in attics, or basements, and between anguished tears.

In 1974, the Mossad and various Jewish charities were working overtime to clandestinely smuggle Jews out of Syria. Relationships, networks and smuggling routes were established. Israeli and diaspora money was effectively deployed. Judy Feld Carr, a Canadian Jew, and her supporters, helped smuggle over 3,000 Jews out of the country. The Mossad was running constant operations as well, many in cooperation with the Israeli Defense Force.

Regrettably, the Syrians caught on quickly. They increased the number of men and arms at the border. The feared Mukhabarat was put on high alert. A Jewish boy was shot in the leg by a Syrian soldier while crossing the border with a Mossad handler. Two other boys, Natan Shaya and Kassem Abadi, seemingly vanished on their attempt at freedom.

Back at their homes in the Jewish Quarter, the Zeibak and Saad families' discussions had concluded. Now the conversation shifted to strategies and plans. Slip away at night? Or try and fade away on a trip to the market? How long before the Mukhabarat or a nosy neighbor notices our absence? What can they take with them? Family photos, heirlooms, keepsakes? Or just a small bag with cash and other items that can be easily converted to cash?

It was the fear of premature discovery, as well as their daughters' zeal to start anew in Israel as soon as possible, that led them to send the young women first. Lulu, Mazal, Fara and Eva would rendezvous with a group of smugglers. The smugglers had been recommended by two of their friends in the Jewish community. It was all arranged. Perhaps the cold and rainy weather would be a benefit, keeping border patrols to a minimum as temperatures dropped into the 20s.

We can imagine the scene as the women departed. For thousands of years, our people have often had to say goodbye in circumstances which make reunions uncertain. The family's handoff of their daughters to Syrian smugglers was an agonizing moment for the women's parents.

The trip into the mountains may have started well. As they left the confinement of the Jewish Quarter they would have passed valleys, brooks, waterfalls, caves and Roman ruins that dot the region. It may even have been possible for the women to begin to anticipate long-awaited freedom as they neared the Lebanese border. Lulu, Fara, Mazal and Eva doubtless imagined what life in Israel would be like for them. We will never know.

The women's bodies were found on March 2, 1974. They were discovered in a cave outside Al-Zabadani. They had been raped before they were murdered. Their bodies were hacked to pieces and burned by acid almost beyond recognition. They had also been robbed. A finger of one of the young women had been cut off in order to remove a ring.

Syrian police returned the women's remains to their families in burlap sacks. They cavalierly deposited the sacks in front of their parents' homes on Purim.

The bodies of Natan Shaya and Kassem Abadi were also discovered in the cave. They were likely victims of an earlier massacre. The boys were also attempting to reach freedom in Israel. While the official statement of the Syrian government is that smugglers were responsible, some people believe the atrocity was committed by Syrian soldiers.

A member of the Zeibak family said that to this day the Syrian government has concealed all facts from them.

The last three Syrian Jewish refugee families were smuggled out of the country in 2016. Today, not a single Jew lives in Syria.

The Jews' escape from over 1,000 years of Islamic oppression, murder, humiliation and dhimmitude is not a story only of suffering. It is a story of risk, planning, freedom, reunification, triumph and love. While tens of thousands of Jews died in the great 20th-century exodus, most survived and thrived. This is a story to tell our children. It is a story of a modern Exodus.

Yet the hard-won success of the Jews is mostly an untold story in the U.S. Most American Jews know nothing about the 850,000 Jewish refugees who lost everything except their lives. Most do not know that Jews once lived in Yemen, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon and Jordan. They do not even have a footnote in most American Hebrew school curricula.

The fact is, most American Jews do not even know that Jewish skin comes in all shades, that some of us speak Arabic and that we have more in common genetically with our Mizrahi and Sephardi cousins than with white Americans. These are facts that should be celebrated and shared.

On the 45th anniversary of Mazal, Fara, Lulu and Eva's murders, it is appropriate to remember their bravery, innocence and beauty. We are also reminded to nourish and protect the freedom that they yearned for but never found. They did not see Israel. But Israel sees them.

Mazal, Fara, Lulu and Eva did not reach the border. But they have reached our hearts and our history forever.

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Al Sharpton first came to my attention in August 1991 when he helped incite a three-day race riot in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.

A motorcade transporting the Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was driving to a cemetery. The rebbe had a police escort. One of the vehicles in the motorcade was involved in an accident that killed a 7-year-old African-American child, Gavin Cato, and severely injured his 7-year-old cousin, Angela Cato.

In response to this tragic accident, Sharpton organized angry protests. He next delivered a stinging anti-Semitic eulogy at the boy's funeral. He railed against Jewish "diamond merchants" and later told a crowd that "if the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house."

Roused by Sharpton's rhetoric, the mob rampaged. It pursued and cornered an innocent Jewish victim. Yankel Rosenbaum, 29, was an Orthodox student visiting Crown Heights from Australia. Sharpton's mob stabbed him to death.

Four years later, Sharpton was back again. He sent a team of professional agitators from his National Action Network to a Jewish-owned store in Harlem, New York. Sharpton's acolytes heckled the customers of Freddy's Fashion Mart. They called the store's owners and managers "the greedy Jew bastards killing our people." Sharpton personally referred to the Jewish owner and managers as "bloodsuckers" and "white interlopers." Store owner Fred Harari remembers the mob shouting, "Burn down the Jew store!"

On December 8, 1995, one of the protestors entered Freddy's. He shot four, set fire to the building and killed a total of seven people.

Even without these incidents, Sharpton is not an appropriate guest for a Jewish leadership conference. He is a profile in corruption, not leadership.

Sharpton refers to himself as a "reverend" but he never attended any seminary. He has attended a different cloistered institution: prison. Sharpton's convictions include tax-related offenses and criminal trespassing. He also famously appeared in an FBI criminal sting surveillance tape, where he appeared to negotiate a drug deal with an undercover federal agent.

After the sting, Sharpton worked as an FBI informant. Perhaps that is why he avoided subsequent imprisonment after siphoning money from a charity and dodging $4.5 million in back taxes.

In 2001, after the World Trade Center towers fell, some members of the U.S. Jewish community sought to pacify – maybe even befriend – Sharpton. His influence was growing. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach invited Sharpton to visit Israel and was surprised when he accepted.

Initial progress soon devolved into a mess. Sharpton was a no-show at a visit with Israeli survivors of the terror bombing at the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium. Who did he visit instead? Yasser Arafat.

Despite all of this, Sharpton became fast friends with then-U.S. President Barack Obama. During the Obama administration, Sharpton visited the White House a staggering 118 times. This friendship and the unending supply of free publicity helped Sharpton rehabilitate his image.

The con job was nearly complete. Many started calling Sharpton a civil rights leader. It was as if Sharpton's weapons-toting flash mob in Crown Heights was now morally equivalent to the nonviolent heroes who marched from Selma to Montgomery.

In 2015, a purged and lionized Sharpton landed a lucrative slot hosting his own political talk show on MSNBC, America's second most popular cable news channel. The show now airs every Sunday.

After a 40-year career, Reform Jews and the event organizers should evaluate Sharpton by his results, not his intentions. Are members of his community better off after being told to retreat to their respective racial corners instead of jumping feet first into America's great melting pot? Has Sharpton's brand of racial balkanization strengthened black families, schools and neighborhoods? Are the communities Sharpton says he represents safer, wealthier and more cohesive after being pushed to abandon the timeless American creed, e pluribus unum, in favor of its opposite, identity politics?

Not everything falls at Sharpton's feet. But ideas have consequences. And these ideas have poisoned part of one generation and are now infecting the next.

As to his historical anti-Semitism, some say Sharpton has outgrown his past. We could perhaps entertain that conclusion if Sharpton addressed his misdeeds and asked his victims for forgiveness during his Obama-era makeover. But this so-called "reverend" is not repentant. The best we can say is that after cable television executives insisted upon – and bought and paid for – Sharpton's good manners, he has had the good sense to stay bought.

So how can Sharpton be among Reform Judaism's guests of honor? Good question. I called Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism. He declined to comment. So I will.

Rabbi Jacobs and his leadership team are political with a fervor that exceeds anything they seem to devote to Hebrew or Torah study. They see Sharpton as a key bedfellow in the anti-Trump alliance as well as a bridge to the African-American community. Jacobs' team thus chooses to see Sharpton Version 2.0, the recently minted civil rights leader, celebrity and power broker. Sharpton's sordid past is off limits.

By contrast, we see and will always remember Yankel Rosenbaum. May his memory be a blessing.

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