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An Israeli Baseball Star Inspires Our Community, and Unites All Jews
The Jewish sports world is abuzz after Assaf Lowengart signed with the New York Boulders of the independent Frontier League, making him the first Israeli-born position player to sign a professional baseball contract in the US. Lowengart signed on Feb. 9, and the local Jewish community of Rockland has already wholeheartedly embraced him.
The support Lowengart has felt from the Jewish community is one reason he is looking forward to joining the Boulders, who play in a county where roughly a third of the residents are Jewish, many of them Orthodox … “Being able to come back there with the big Jewish community, it’s going to be pretty amazing,” Lowengart said. “I’ve been in many colleges, and the Jewish communities usually weren’t that big. So it’s going to be a pretty cool experience being connected to the Jewish community this time, having them behind me, having them support me and being able to contribute back to them.”
This “pretty amazing” support of the heavily Orthodox local community for the secular and nonobservant Lowengart is a masterclass of the Jewish unity — or achdut — that we need so desperately. We’ve seen such achdut, with Israel at war; secular and religious, left and right have connected on the basis of their shared Jewishness as opposed to harping on their differences.
Admittedly, the Boulders are not the Yankees or the Mets; Rockland’s Jewish community is excited to have Lowengart in their county not because he’s a celebrity, but because he’s their brother. That some of these fans may be of a different religious strata than Assaf is of no consequence here, proving the phrase from the Shabbat prayer yekum purkan is alive and well: “kol yisrael achehem” — “all Jews are brothers!”
Rockland’s Jews are continuing a tradition of achdut and baseball. Shtetl Jews who immigrated to America in the early 20th century were known to support Jewish ballplayers with fierce attachment. Some didn’t understand or even like baseball, but if a Jew was in the lineup, they would go to support him. This came to a head in 1923, when the New York Giants baseball team had a problem. The cross-town Bronx squad, the Yankees, had Babe Ruth, the Sultan of Swat, whose towering home runs drew fans, ticket sales, and wins away from the Giants.
How to get fans and victory back to the Polo Grounds? Giants manager John McGraw explained: “We appreciate that many of the fans in New York are Jews, and we have been trying to land a prospect of Jewish blood.” They signed Mose Solomon, who set the minor league home run record that year, billed as “The Rabbi of Swat,” to compete with Ruth. And in his first week as a Giant, the plan was working as Mose batted .375 and drew tremendous crowds of Jews coming to see him. But that was it: one week, and Solomon was gone from the Majors forever, as his terrible fielding made him a liability. The Yankees went on to win their first World Series that year, have dominated the game ever since, and ran the Giants out of town to San Francisco.
But the Jews who came to watch Solomon in the two games he appeared in didn’t care that he was a clumsy outfielder. He was a fellow Jew. We wish Assaf Lowengart better luck on the field than Mose, and continued Jewish solidarity, love, and support.
The post An Israeli Baseball Star Inspires Our Community, and Unites All Jews first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Germany: 5 Killed, Scores Wounded after Saudi Man Plows Car Into Christmas crowd
Magdeburg Christmas market, December 21, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Christian Mang
i24 News – A suspected terrorist plowed a vehicle into a crowd at a Christmas market in the German city of Magdeburg, west of the capital Berlin, killing at least five and injuring dozens more.
Local police confirmed that the suspect was a Saudi national born in 1974 and acting alone.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his concern about the incident, saying that “reports from Magdeburg suggest something bad. My thoughts are with the victims and their families.”
Police declined to give casualty numbers, confirming only a large-scale operation at the market, where people had gathered to celebrate in the days leading up to the Christmas holidays.
The post Germany: 5 Killed, Scores Wounded after Saudi Man Plows Car Into Christmas crowd first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Syria’s New Rulers Name HTS Commander as Defense Minister
A person waves a flag adopted by the new Syrian rulers, as people gather during a celebration called by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) near the Umayyad Mosque, after the ousting of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, in Damascus, Syria, Photo: December 20, 2024. REUTERS/Ammar Awad/File Photo
Syria’s new rulers have appointed Murhaf Abu Qasra, a leading figure in the insurgency which toppled Bashar al-Assad, as defense minister in the interim government, an official source said on Saturday.
Abu Qasra, who is also known by the nom de guerre Abu Hassan 600, is a senior figure in the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group which led the campaign that ousted Assad this month. He led numerous military operations during Syria’s revolution, the source said.
Syria’s de facto leader Ahmed al-Sharaa discussed “the form of the military institution in the new Syria” during a meeting with armed factions on Saturday, state news agency SANA reported.
Abu Qasra during the meeting sat next to Sharaa, also known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Golani, photos published by SANA showed.
Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir said this week that the defense ministry would be restructured using former rebel factions and officers who defected from Assad’s army.
Bashir, who formerly led an HTS-affiliated administration in the northwestern province of Idlib, has said he will lead a three-month transitional government. The new administration has not declared plans for what will happen after that.
Earlier on Saturday, the ruling General Command named Asaad Hassan al-Shibani as foreign minister, SANA said. A source in the new administration told Reuters that this step “comes in response to the aspirations of the Syrian people to establish international relations that bring peace and stability.”
Shibani, a 37-year-old graduate of Damascus University, previously led the political department of the rebels’ Idlib government, the General Command said.
Sharaa’s group was part of al Qaeda until he broke ties in 2016. It had been confined to Idlib for years until going on the offensive in late November, sweeping through the cities of western Syria and into Damascus as the army melted away.
Sharaa has met with a number of international envoys this week. He has said his primary focus is on reconstruction and achieving economic development and that he is not interested in engaging in any new conflicts.
Syrian rebels seized control of Damascus on Dec. 8, forcing Assad to flee after more than 13 years of civil war and ending his family’s decades-long rule.
Washington designated Sharaa a terrorist in 2013, saying al Qaeda in Iraq had tasked him with overthrowing Assad’s rule and establishing Islamic sharia law in Syria. US officials said on Friday that Washington would remove a $10 million bounty on his head.
The war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, caused one of the biggest refugee crises of modern times and left cities bombed to rubble and the economy hollowed out by global sanctions.
The post Syria’s New Rulers Name HTS Commander as Defense Minister first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels
View of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) building in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib / Flash90.
i24 News – Sweden will no longer fund the U.N. refugee agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) and will instead provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza via other channels, the Scandinavian country said on Friday.
The decision comes on the heels of multiple revelations regarding the agency’s employees’ involvement in the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel that triggered the war in Gaza.
Sweden’s decision was in response to the Israeli ban, as it will make channeling aid via the agency more difficult, the country’s aid minister, Benjamin Dousa, said.
“Large parts of UNRWA’s operations in Gaza are either going to be severely weakened or completely impossible,” Dousa said. “For the government, the most important thing is that support gets through.”
The Palestinian embassy in Stockholm said in a statement: “We reject the idea of finding alternatives to UNRWA, which has a special mandate to provide services to Palestinian refugees.”
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel thanked Dousa for a meeting they had this week and for Sweden’s decision to drop its support for UNRWA.
“There are worthy and viable alternatives for humanitarian aid, and I appreciate the willingness to listen and adopt a different approach,” she said.
The post Sweden Ends Funding for UNRWA, Pledges to Seek Other Aid Channels first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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