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This High Holiday pastry connects me to the relatives I loved and the ones I lost

(JTA) – There was a small bedroom in my Zeyde’s house on State Road in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, that had no radiator. It was called “the cold room.” It was crammed with furniture: two twin beds and a couple of dressers. On Rosh Hashanah, you would find a large baking dish covered with a dish towel sitting on top of one of those dressers. Take a peek under the towel, and there it was: Fluden.

Fluden is a holiday dessert that resembles a sweet lasagna: layers of prune, orange and pineapple filling between four layers of rolled-out dough, with a crunchy, cinnamon and nutty topping. My aunts would prepare it each year, in a ritual that was just as much a part of the season as tossing stones into the Housatonic River for tashlich, or hearing my zeyde, Rabbi Jacob Axelrod, blow the shofar in his synagogue up the hill, or catching games of the World Series between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The fluden would sit on the dresser and never had to be served, because there was a knife in the dish and you could cut off a slice of the pareve delicacy whenever the spirit moved you. Over the course of the holiday it would gradually shrink, until someone would announce that it was all gone. Fertig.

Never did I see this dish in any bakery, or in anyone else’s home. And yet it was integral to our holiday experience, even more than the teyglach we would sometimes buy from Michelle’s bakery near our home in Plainview, Long Island: little hard balls of cookie dough piled into a pyramid the size of a hat, drenched with honey and nuts and maraschino cherries. This was fun and messy to pick apart. But for flavor and comfort, nothing could beat fluden.

Though my aunts were the bakers, it was my mother, Peggy — their sister-in-law — who preserved the recipe for posterity in written form. Mom later described how she watched and took notes as her mother-in-law, Beile, step by step mixed and rolled the dough, chopped and pulverized the filling and assembled the layers one by one. There were no accurate measures: as my mother recalled, Beile just took pinches of this or that, cups of this or that. The result would be this holiday delicacy that everyone craved.

However, there was a downside to fluden, and it was the reason why it would take a few days for it to disappear. There was a general understanding that you didn’t want to eat too much of it at once. All I need to say here is: prunes.

Just up the street from the house was my zeyde’s synagogue, Ahavath Sholom, where about 100 worshippers could gather. He had been hired as rabbi in 1927, two years after he emigrated from Poland. On the shul’s hard wooden pews were long cushions covered in faded red fabric. There was no mechitzah separating men from women — family legend has it that Beile had ripped it down, since no one had felt responsible to keep it clean and tidy.

I don’t have many memories of my baba, Beile, but certainly she was a great baker. I distinctly recall the oohs and ahhs as her huckleberry pies or little challah rolls were brought to the table, held seemingly way above me and handed around. Baba died before I turned five, of complications from diabetes.

I remember my zeyde only without her. On the holiday, he would lead the service from a small lectern, occasionally slamming his hand down to stop the chattering in the background. The windows in the small sanctuary were always kept shut, as zeyde would refuse to continue the service if he sensed a breeze.

The author poses with pieces of her latest batch of fluden and a photograph of her grandmother, Beile Lichtenstein Axelrod. (Courtesy of Toby Axelrod)

In order to get some air, you would have to “take a break” and walk down the hill past zeyde’s little kosher store. From there you might pass his garden, pass clothesline and the shed that doubled as a sukkah, enter the house via the kitchen, slip through the dining room and into the living room, then make a hard left between the couch and the bookshelf holding zeyde’s “Vilna Shas” Talmud, into the cold room for a bite of fluden.

In 1966, my aunt Edith shared the recipe in the “Mother’s Way Cookbook,” published by the Hebrew Ladies Aid Society of Ahavath Sholom Synagogue and the Hadassah Chapter of Great Barrington. It’s on page 36, between Helen Natelson’s “Speedy Sponge Cake” and Blanche Bradford’s “Spice Cake.” As with other aspects of transplanted European Jewish culture, like the Yiddish language itself, Americanisms crept into the list of ingredients. I am sure there were no cornflakes in my ancestors’ shtetl, Luboml, and no canned pineapple, either.

Many years later, my mother excitedly reported that she had found a recipe for fluden in “The World of Jewish Cooking,” by Gil Marks. Up to then, no Jewish cookbook had completely satisfied her, since she had never found fluden in the index.

But there it was, on page 339: Fluden, Ashkenazic layered pastry. According to Marks, the dish could have various fillings, and was sometimes even made with cheese. The first recorded reference dates back to around the year 1000 C.E., when Rabbi Gershom ben Yehudah of Mainz, Germany, describes an argument between two rabbis about whether one could “eat bread with meat even if it was baked in an oven with a cheese dish called fluden.”

The layers, Marks writes, “were symbolic of both the double portion of manna collected for the Sabbath and the lower and upper layers of dew that protected the manna.” Fruit and nut fillings were most common on Sabbath, he adds. Today, a similar, layered fruit pastry called apfelschalet is served by Jews from the Alsace region. In Hungary, there is a layered desert called flodni, and in parts of Eastern Europe there is a layered strudel called gebleterter kugel.

Fluden is much more than a holiday dessert for me. It is a symbol of generational continuity despite the Holocaust, which ripped a hole in our family history. It connects me to the women who were the carriers of tradition – the doers and the recorders. And, in its glistening, fragrant glory, it is also a key to the door of memory, which opens with a creak of rusty springs and reveals the scene unfolding.

The kitchen, the rolled-up sleeves, the aprons, the rolling pin, the gossip. Zeyde in his slippers and robe shuffling through. The two ovens, both working overtime. Children under foot. The light switch cord hanging down over the table, with its bobbin-like pull. Next to the sink, the window with its filmy curtains, looking out across the yard and vegetable garden, toward the shul.

For us, the dish was a once-a-year treat. I have prepared my baba’s recipe several times, and will try my hand at it again this year, with quite a bit less sugar than suggested. (I inherited the diabetes, too.) My kitchen is just a couple of miles away from where my zeyde and baba’s house once stood. On that spot, there is now a sporting goods shop that my sister likes to call “Zeyde’s Bike and Board.” The older generation is nearly all gone, buried in the Ahavath Sholom cemetery on Blue Hill Road. We have inherited many traditions, keeping some, eschewing others. But in my family, where there is fluden, there will always be followers, ready to cut a slice — a small slice! — for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

The author’s aunt’s fluden recipe, from “Mother’s Way Cookbook.” (Courtesy of Toby Axelrod)

Mrs. Axelrod’s Fluden
Edith Axelrod Reder
Pittsfield, Mass. 

Beat together until light and fluffy:

3 eggs
1 c. sugar
Pinch of salt

Add: 

¾ c. oil
3-4 c. flour sifted with
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. vanilla
Pineapple jJuice (from filling)

Filling: 

Grind together
2 lbs. sour prunes
1 orange
1 lemon, add:
# 2 can drained, crushed pineapple
Jam and sugar to taste
Cinnamon and sugar
Chopped nuts
Crushed cornflakes

Mix the dough and knead into 4 balls. Roll out each ball to fit a 8 x 12 x 2 inch pan. Start with a layer of dough, one of fruit filling, spread a little oil on the fruit. Sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar, cornflake crumbs, chopped nuts. Repeat the layers until the balls of dough are used. Cut the dough into squares before baking. Oven set at 350 degrees for 35-40 minutes. 

From “Mother’s Way Cookbook” (Hebrew Ladies Aid Society of Ahavath Sholom Synagogue and the Hadassah Chapter of Great Barrington)


The post This High Holiday pastry connects me to the relatives I loved and the ones I lost appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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We Are a Nation of Life, and So We Lift Our Heads

A general view shows thousands of Jewish worshipers attending the priestly blessing on the Jewish holiday of Sukkot at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City, Sept. 26, 2018. Photo: Reuters / Ammar Awad.

Waiting for the elevator at Bloomingdale’s, I was noticed by a stranger who saw my Star of David, my “Bring Them Home” necklace, and a yellow ribbon pin.

“Shabbat Shalom,” he said with a smile. I smiled back, grateful for that unspoken Jewish connection.

When the elevator arrived, he asked loudly, “Are you Israeli?” As others entered, I replied, “No, but I am Jewish.” Suddenly, he pressed his fingers to his lips — “shhh” — a gesture familiar to me as a Soviet Jew. Moments earlier, he’d wished me “Happy Shabbos” when we were alone. But now, surrounded by strangers, fear took over him.

I left shaken — not by an immediate threat of antisemitism, but by his quiet warning, as if to protect us both.

Judaism — with its single G-d — altered how future generations would view morality and codify it into law. The Ten Commandments outline foundational principles, but the tensions lie between the lines. Jewish wisdom reconciles contradictions with questions. Strangers to our faith may feel uncomfortable with that. Jews, given the blueprint of values, had to learn how to become a nation by making mistakes.

The Torah has shaped us into a nation of contradictions — yet also guided by reason. Six million Jews perished in the Holocaust, and today, the global Jewish population remains just 0.2% of the world’s total. We have fought for survival, yet never sought converts. Jewish tradition makes conversion difficult. As Rabbi Tzvi Freeman explains, Judaism is a covenant, not merely a religion: belonging is not defined by belief alone.

But why are non-practicing Jews still considered Jewish, while committed non-Jews must convert? The answer lies in the fact that Jews were bonded first by covenant, not religion. This covenant was not solely between the nation and their G-d; it was an intra-communal bond.

At Sinai, they accepted the laws directly from Him. From that moment onward, they could choose to carry the Torah’s voice through history — or not — but what became irreversible was the creation of a nation bound by shared values. Whether they upheld the commandments or not, their primary common denominator remained the values inscribed in those laws.

The acceptance of the Ten Commandments forever bound every Jewish individual to one another and to G-d, thereby creating the Jews — a nation whose Judaism resided in the fabric of its community, not solely in its religion. Rabbi Freeman captures this perfectly: “In religion, you belong because you believe. In Judaism, you believe because you belong.”

We are who we are, whether religious or not. Our very essence belongs to the Jewish nation because we are bound by that ancient covenant.

Yet one cannot simply decide to become Jewish by learning religious laws and traditions. Herein lies the difficulty of conversion: to become one with the Jewish nation, one must become a ger — “a stranger who comes to sojourn among us.”

The word Hebrews means “on the other side” or “an outsider.” Perhaps the fate of always being the “other” was predetermined by this very word. For centuries, we built worlds within worlds: ghettos, shtetls, synagogues. We lived beside, but never fully part of, the gentile world.

The paradoxes within Jewish faith have never ceased to unsettle me. Shouldn’t religion bring peace? Not Judaism — because it is not solely a religion but a self-identity. Our Jewish “I” exists outside conventional religion.

We revere numbers in math and in trade, yet the Torah frowns upon counting people. Though it acknowledges counting for specific purposes — a minyan, mitzvot, or a census — the Torah teaches that we are never reducible to mere numbers, as the Nazis believed when they tattooed digits onto our flesh, stripping Jews of their humanity and individuality. Thus, it commands: Nasso Es Rosh — “Lift the Head.”

This is Jewish self-identity: unapologetic, unerasable. We declare our identity by lifting our heads. Our Jewishness is the source of our pride because within it, we find life. And so, we have never been — and never will be — victims.

Growing up in the Soviet Union, surrounded by its cynical antisemitism — which worked tirelessly to suppress the minds and erase the identities of so many Soviet Jews — I never imagined that one day in America, I would encounter mainstream antisemitism, or that it would be facilitated by members of my own Jewish community, whose Jewishness and Zionism have been hijacked by various progressive ideologies that frame Western Jews — and Israeli Jews in particular — as white colonial oppressors.

Yet antisemites must know this: we are here to stay. Antisemitism lingers like a virus, but it is no longer a death sentence, thanks to those who say: “NO MORE!”

Today, as Israel fights an existential battle, as its most ethical army in history removes — with surgical precision — some of the world’s greatest evils one by one, and as the Jewish nation defends not only every Jew in the Diaspora, but also every person who yearns for a free society, every Jew must lift his or her head and reaffirm their Jewishness through that sacred covenant forged millennia ago in a scorching desert, on the journey to the Promised Land.

Anya Gillinson was born in Moscow, Russia, into the family of a renowned physician and a concert pianist. When she was thirteen years old, her father was killed during a botched robbery on his first and last visit to New York. Two years after his death, Anya moved to New York with her mother and younger sister and went on to graduate from high school, college, and eventually law school. She considers it a privilege to practice law and to be able to be useful to people, but literature has always been her true calling. In 2015, she published a volume of poetry in Russian, Suppress in Me the Strive To Love. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

The post We Are a Nation of Life, and So We Lift Our Heads first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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‘Scholasticide’ Is Creating Divisions, Not Solving Them

Graphic posted by University of California, Los Angeles Students for Justice in Palestine on February 21, 2024 to celebrated the student government’s passing an resolution endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. Photo: Screenshot/Instagram

With the Jewish community still reeling from the recent violent assaults on Jewish individuals in Washington, DC, and Boulder, Colorado, it is deeply troubling to see ongoing efforts by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) to partner and forge coalitions with the very groups who have been fueling a broader climate of incitement against Jews and Israel.

As Jewish educational professionals who have worked in academia, we are deeply disturbed by the AAUP’s decision to not only embrace anti-Israel groups, but to give them a seat at the table — to the exclusion of Jewish voices.

The latest development on this front is the AAUP’s launch of its “Organize Every Campus” campaign, including a Summer Institute at Morehouse College in Atlanta in July. While details remain vague, the exclusionary tone of earlier events, such as the April 17 “National Day of Action,” which promoted a disturbing range of anti-Israel activity, raises doubts that these programs will be welcoming to Jewish members.

At over 200+ campuses nationwide, the AAUP has turned protests against what it described as government overreach into events that marginalized its own Jewish members, many of whom view their connection to Israel as very important.

In the name of protecting academic freedom, the AAUP has partnered with organizations whose rhetoric and activism drives Jewish and pro-Israel faculty and students to the margins.

How exclusion is being built into AAUP’s machinery

Exclusion is being manifested in AAUP’s structure in several ways. First, the organization made a formal retreat from its decades-long taboo on academic boycotts.

Last summer, the AAUP abandoned its categorical opposition to boycotting academic institutions and scholars — an about-face that implicitly validated embargoes on Israeli academics and on anyone unwilling to denounce Israel. The reversal risks eroding intellectual exchange across higher education and further exacerbates the shunning of Israeli scholars.

Second, the group has presented one-sided programming that demonizes Israel. On March 6, the association promoted a webinar titled “Scholasticide in Palestine,” charging that Israel aims to eradicate Palestinian education.

Five mainstream Jewish and academic bodies — ADL, AEN, AJC, Hillel, and JFNA — wrote to the AAUP leadership, urging them to host a balanced follow-up program and to train staff on antisemitism. Ten weeks later, there has not even been a courtesy acknowledgment of the letter’s receipt.

Third, AAUP is partnering with groups — including JVP, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism, and Faculty for Justice in Palestine — whose record is openly hateful to Israelis and their supporters. In its recent campus campaign, the AAUP has demonstrated that it is only interested in engaging with virulently anti-Israel groups that, ironically, work against the very academic principles of open inquiry and academic freedom that the AAUP and its “National Day of Action” claims to champion.

AAUP placed its own logo beside these anti-Israel groups’ logos on every flyer, giving them and their stances legitimacy. The downloadable toolkit from the campaign’s website urged professors to chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” stage “die-ins,” and “target any senator” deemed friendly to Israel.

Faculty who believe in Israel’s right to exist — or who simply oppose its demonization and delegitimization — were told, implicitly but unmistakably, to stay away. What’s coming this summer and fall could be even more divisive if the AAUP refuses to heed these concerns and continues down a path that sidelines Jewish voices rather than includes them.

Why this matters for scholarship

In our experience engaging with many faculty and staff members on US campuses, we have debated ideas that we strongly disliked — it was this intellectual exchange, not boycott, that has sharpened our thinking.

Israeli academics — drawn from a country of roughly 10 million people in a Middle East–North Africa region of about 500 million, barely two percent of the area’s population — contribute indispensably to physics labs, philosophy colloquia, and medical breakthroughs. Silencing their voices and preventing US-based academics from working and exchanging ideas with them impoverishes us all.

The AAUP once stood sentinel against such suppression. Today it risks becoming just another ideological guild, one that blesses intellectual embargoes as long as the target is Israel.

A constructive way forward for the AAUP would be to:

  • Acknowledge the growing alienation of its Jewish and Zionist members and respond publicly to the March 6 coalition letter.
  • Revisit its recent policy change regarding academic boycotts and provide opportunities for its many members who oppose these tactics to highlight how academic boycotts violate the freedom, intellectual exchange, and open inquiry that the AAUP was founded to defend.
  • Better vet and screen potential coalition partners: no group that equates Zionists with Nazis or calls for Israel’s destruction should be featured alongside the AAUP masthead.
  • Offer robust antisemitism education for staff and chapter officers.

Academic freedom can never truly be advanced when one community is forced to check its identity at the door to participate.

If the AAUP truly stands for intellectual freedom, it must stop enabling the ideological silencing of Jewish and Zionist faculty.

Andrew Goretsky is the Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League – Philadelphia. Raeefa Z. Shams is the Director of Communications and Programming at the Academic Engagement Network.

The post ‘Scholasticide’ Is Creating Divisions, Not Solving Them first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Why Is the Iranian Regime Not Looking After the People of Iran?

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, May 20, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS

This past week has been nothing short of historic. On June 12–13, Israel launched its first strikes deep inside Iran, targeting the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and multiple other sites tied to the regime’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

In addition, Israel conducted precision strikes against leading Iranian military officials and nuclear scientists, effectively decapitating Iran’s senior military command and scientific elite, seriously hampering Iranian efforts to respond.

Prime Minister Netanyahu called it a preemptive move against an existential threat. Iran responded with missile attacks of its own, breaching Israel’s much-vaunted air defenses and hitting residential areas, including a hospital in Beersheba.

And now — just days after this all began — President Trump has signaled his possible readiness to involve America directly in a war that, until recently, most believed was still more fantasy than reality. As I write these words, the situation remains highly fluid. By the time you read this, American B-2 bombers could have already dropped 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on Fordow, Iran’s most deeply buried nuclear facility.

But while military pundits and geopolitical analysts have been working overtime, parsing missiles and political statements, I’ve been thinking about something almost no one is addressing: What explains Iran’s religious stubbornness in the face of overwhelming hatred for its regime — both at home and abroad? Where is the reality check? Where is the ability to set aside ideological absolutism and protect the people of Iran?

Here is a country whose economy is in ruins, whose streets are teeming with young people who openly despise the ruling clerics, and whose neighbors — Sunni Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE — have shifted from cold neutrality to quiet coordination with Israel, united by a shared fear of Iran’s reckless ambitions.

The Islamic Republic is isolated, reviled, and increasingly cornered. And yet, its leaders plow ahead with terrifying conviction — as if righteousness alone will shield them from the consequences of their actions.

The answer is this, and it’s chilling: they genuinely believe they’re doing God’s will. And once someone believes that — with absolute certainty — they become very, very dangerous.

To understand this intransigence, you must go back to 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile — inexplicably enabled by France and US President Jimmy Carter — and ignited the Islamic Revolution.

Unlike Gamal Abdel Nasser, the secular nationalist leader of Egypt, who envisioned a pan-Arab future bound by language and culture, Khomeini offered something far more radical and dangerous: a transnational theocracy. In Khomeini’s worldview, there was no such thing as a “Persian” identity. There was only Islam — and only those committed to his uncompromising Shi’a vision of it.

“We do not worship Iran,” he declared. “We worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism.” In other words, faith erased nationhood. Resistance to the regime’s theology wasn’t merely political dissent — it was apostasy. And apostasy, in a system like Khomeini’s, is punishable by death.

Khomeini didn’t want to be the president of Iran, he wanted to be the guardian of a global Islamic revolution – a return to the early days of Islam when the Prophet Muhammad’s successors swept across the Middle East and beyond, to conquer with the sword and forced conversions.

The Iranian revolution was never meant to stop at Iran’s borders. In fact, borders were an annoying inconvenience. From the very beginning, the goal was to export this fundamentalist ideology — first to the Shi’a populations of Lebanon, Iraq, and Bahrain, and then to the wider Muslim world.

In that sense, Iran under Khomeini was less a state than a divine mission. The IRGC wasn’t merely a national military force — it was the revolutionary guard of a new Islamic order. And while his opponents talked about democracy and reform, Khomeini was focused on martyrdom, submission, and a mystical messianic destiny. He believed — as does his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — that if the regime stood firm in its theology, God would ensure its success, even against impossible odds.

This is the belief that animates Iran today. The leaders of the Islamic Republic are Khomeini’s ideological heirs, and they continue to behave as though religious certainty can substitute for military capability, economic solvency, or diplomatic credibility.

They believe they are right — and everyone else, including the entire global order, is wrong. And so, no matter what you throw at them, they persevere, they grandstand, they deny reality, and they wrap themselves in a cloak of religious righteousness, as if that alone will save them.

This delusional fusion of faith and fantasy is not new. In fact, according to several biblical commentators, it appears in Parshat Shlach, which tells the story of the twelve spies – meraglim – sent by Moses to scout the land of Canaan.

Ten of them return with a bleak, terrifying report: the land is unconquerable, and rather than embark on the conquest of the Promised Land, they insist the nation must remain in the wilderness. The people panic, and God responds by condemning that entire generation to die in the desert.

The commentaries debate the spies’ motives, with some suggesting that the meraglim were actually driven by religious conviction. According to the Sfas Emes, the meraglim were not defying God, rather they believed they were defending Him.

The meraglim were convinced that Torah could only be lived in the rarefied, otherworldly atmosphere of the desert — free from the political and material distractions that statehood would inevitably bring. They were not denying God’s plan — they were trying to improve on it. They were, in effect, trying to out-God Him.

Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin takes it one step further. In his Pri Tzaddik commentary, he explains that the meraglim actually saw the future — they foresaw a decline in religious observance, followed by exile, suffering, and destruction — and they wanted to delay it.

In a sense, they were trying to protect the Jewish people from pain by rejecting history itself. But in doing so, they substituted their own vision for God’s will. It wasn’t prophecy — it was hubris dressed up as holiness.

Which brings us back to Iran. Just like the meraglim, Iran’s leaders genuinely believe they are carrying out a divine mandate: to preserve religious purity, to confront falsehood, and to build an Islamic world order. But in doing so, they defy not only international norms, but Divine moral norms as well.

For spirituality and faith to thrive, there must be space for human freedom — the freedom to err, to choose, to engage. True divine service requires grappling with the world, not fleeing from it. Iran’s extremism doesn’t align with God — it usurps Him. And just like the meraglim, that hubris is destined to fail. Because God’s plan for the world includes the messiness of engaging with those who don’t meet your standards, and with the divine image that resides in every human being.

In the mid-1990s, while studying at UCL in London, I wrote my Jewish history dissertation on the Dead Sea sectarians — Jewish religious absolutists who withdrew to Qumran to escape what they saw as the contaminating halachic flexibility of the Pharisees in Jerusalem. They viewed compromise as heresy and nuance as betrayal. Their community thrived briefly, but ultimately vanished without a trace — destroyed by its own inability to adapt, doomed by the very purity it so zealously protected.

The same fate now threatens the Islamic leadership of Iran. Blinded by ideological certainty, impervious to reality, they cling to a vision that can only end in ruin. Let us pray they don’t take their entire country down with them.

The author is a writer in Beverly Hills, California. 

The post Why Is the Iranian Regime Not Looking After the People of Iran? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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