1 comments about Fraulein Rabbiner Jonas: The Story of the First Woman Rabbi (Arthur Kurzweil Book).

1. I had always thought, as did most American Jews, that Sally Preisand of Reform Judaism was the first woman formally ordained in the early 1970s.
   
   I was astonished to learn, in the 1990s, that the first woman rabbi was actually Regina Jonas, an Orthodox woman who was ordained by Liberal (Reform) Judaism in Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s.
   
   After an extremely dramatic and fascinating life, Rabbi Jonas vanished from history after her death at Auschwitz in 1944. Records of her life and achievements gathered dust in an East German archive, until her files were discovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.
   
   Concealed in those dusty files was a story that would make a good film. Jonas was born and brought up as an Orthodox Jew in a dangerous, poverty-stricken Berlin slum. As a child, she was so determined to become a rabbi that none of her classmates thought of laughing at her.
   
   She struggled resolutely through Berlin's Reform rabbinical seminary, supporting herself by teaching endless Hebrew and religion classes to restless schoolchildren and finally triumphed when she received Reform ordination and a rabbinic pastor job with the Berlin Jewish community in her early thirties.
   
   Her triumph was short-lived. She assumed a back-breaking workload, caring for hundreds of German Jews whose rabbis had been forced to flee abroad or been sent to Nazi prisons. Jonas felt unable to leave Germany because she could not abandon her widowed elderly mother or her desparate congregants.
   
   And then -- as if her life were not complicated enough --- Jonas, a pretty and very intense woman in her late thirties, who had hitherto avoided involvements with men, believing that a woman rabbi should remain single to demonstrate the seriousness of her commitment --- Jonas fell passionately and happily in love with a much older male Reform rabbi, a widower who had been called out of retirement to serve as the last pre-WWII rabbi of Hamburg.
   
   During the last chapters of her biography, I was alternated between admiration at her wonderful care of her distraught congregants, gladness that she found a supportive and admiring fiance, and a deep sadness knowing that I would lose this remarkable woman to the concentration camps. But the story had yet another twist.
   
   Deported to Theresienstadt, Jonas joined a group of people working for psychologist Viktor Frankl, who assigned her the toughest rabbinical job of her life: greeting newly arrived Jews, helping them get oriented, and keeping their morale up.
   
   By the time Jonas and her mother were deported to Auschwitz and their deaths in 1944, Regina Jonas had packed more adventure --- and certainly done more good in the world --- into 42 years of life than most of us experience in eighty years.
   
   And Jonas is not presented as a plaster saint. She had a strong sense of humor; a bit of a temper; was deeply spiritual but could be quite aggressive; and based on her rise from slum child to middle class rabbi, she possessed a kindness and ability to empathize with people from all walks of life.
   
   I started crying at the end of the book. I felt as if I'd lost a friend. As the lay leader of a Jewish Renewal women's havurah (prayer and study group), I did a report on the book for my group and they loved the book. It's good reading not only for women interested in spirituality, but also for anyone male or female who admires a hero in any field.
   
   I gave this four stars instead of five only because the author could have provided a little more background on Germany, the Nazi era, the camps Jonas was sent to, etc. As a German Jew, I think this era of German history is so familiar to her, that she may not have been aware that many English-speaking readers born long after WWII have little specific knowledge of that era.
   

No comments about David: The Shepherd King II.

1 comments about I AM Love: From Nothing...to All Things.

1. Excellent spiritual lessons from a life lived for God in the midst of challenging circumstances.

1 comments about Who's Who in Jewish History (Who's Who (Routledge)).

1. This is a reprint of an earlier book. Comay surveys all of Jewish history and selects out hundreds of important figures for inclusion here. Most of the entries are a paragraph or so but the length grows with the importance of the figure. She writes clearly.
   This is an excellent reference book.

No comments about And Yet I Still Have Dreams : A Story of Certain Loneliness.

No comments about Feldafing.

1 comments about Portrait of a Young Forger: An Incredible True Story of Triumph over the Third Reich.

1. Marian Pretzel was a young jew living in Lvov in Poland when war broke out in 1939. This is his story, and that of his family told with simplicity and without indulging in over-emotion. The bleakness of the observations make it extremely powerful and moving story.
   
   Pretzel tells of his life in Poland prior to the war, of the Russian invasion and his suddenly increased opportunities, and then the invasion of the Nazi's and the sudden increase in nastiness from the Polish who were once his friends and neighbours. Of bribery, blackmail, violence and the slow descent which eventually led the Jewish population to the concentration camps.
   
   Marian Pretzel got transported to a concentration camp nearby, but managed through luck and the interference of Simon Wiesenthal, to escape. On the run he realised that he could pass as an aryan and his forging skills and knowledge of the right stamps for various things allowed him to be fed, clothed and housed by the Nazis. This is the story of his wartime survival, but it is also tempered with the realisation at the time that despite his survival, thousands, if not millions of other Jews were suffering, starving, dying in cities and concentration camps. He says that the worst thing was the slow death which was wreaked on many, rather than a fast end.
   
   His story makes sobering reading. The guilt of survival has pursued him over the decades, that at times he has had to let his friends, and family go, simply because their will to survive was not greater than their will to remain where they were, or to do rash and idiotic acts which led to their demise. His sister Giza refused to accompany him into flight and did not survive, as many of his friends. Despite their parents already being shipped off to certain death.
   
   A well written memoir which makes disturbing reading. At the end of this I wonder how people can be so cruel - how could so many people act so inhumanly - and with people they already knew. I hope that the experiences from WWII remain with us, that everyone should learn and know what can be, that it never happens again.

3 comments about The Blood Tattoo.

1. This book is the story of a young lady, that survived the Holocaust. With her mother and one out of three brothers she survived. Her mother would have been died if it worent for a Jewish Kopo who keep the secret of a her surviving mother. I personally experienced the story of this strong at heart lady, she visited my school as a volunteer Holocaust survivor.



2. Okay, Okay...you'll say I'm biased because it tells my Aunt's story and how she survived together with my most loving grandmother after removal from their home, imprisonment in a ghetto, and then the train deportation to Auschwitz. I have loaned my copy to so many people and each person returns it to me stunned. It is truly a gripping story and you will know my aunt through this book--she will touch you too. Please buy it, read it and then loan it to someone who wants or needs to learn more about modern man's greatest atrocity.



3. I am from the UK and have had great priveledge in meeting Ebi and becoming a friend to her. She has been my inspiration in devloping my knowledge on the Holocaust. Her book evokes all the emotions one can imagine. She has written from the heart and when one reads her book one can anly imagine what she and her family were going through. A must read. Thankyou Ebi for sharing your story with us, I know it must have been a harrowing experience when you wrote this but I am so glad you did.

5 comments about Zvi (Spanish Version).

1. A book that will touch your heart and stay with you for the rest of your life. Don't miss this one!



2. This book touched me in ways I had not expected. Zvi survived the atrocities of the holocaust and lived to tell the world what really happened. His life was nearly destroyed by Hitler's evil regime, but God had another plan in mind for the life of little Zvi. This book is a golden triumph!



3. My review is about the first edition of this book which ended with Zvi and his wife Esther having a beautiful daughter named Ruth. I loved this story. I was stunned at how it started, with little Henryk being taken to an orphanage by his mother, never to see her or the rest of his family again. I was moved to tears while I read this book which described how Henryk survived during the war. What he thought was his wits, he later realized was the LORD delivering him from certain death. The God we serve is a very powerful God and this book is a testimony to His greatness. Henryk lost everything except his life, but he met Jesus and the LORD restored him. A very wonderful story.



4. This is an amazing biography of an amazing life retrieved and restored by his encounter with the Jewish & Gentile Messiah, Yeshua ben David/Jesus Christ. Zvi is a holocaust survivor who overcame tremendous obstacles and the bitterness of that trial to become one of the most powerful witnesses for the Lord Yeshua in the Land of Israel.
   You will want to get the outstanding video/DVD {ZVI: THE RETURN} documenting his sojourn to Poland and a rememberance of his life both before and after returning to the Land of Israel in the midst of tremendous turmoil.
   There are few lives that are more inspiring than this one. Highly recommended to both Christians and Jews.
   Pastor Len Hummel
   Clearlight Ministries, Intl.



5. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. This book was that to me. I could not put it down until reading the entire book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a true story of triumph of a young boy growing up in Poland during World War II.

5 comments about Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968.

1. Clive James, in "Cultural Amnsia' - his magesterial review of literature and totalitarianism - said: "Given thirty seconds to recommend a single book that might start a serious young student on the hard road to understanding of the political tragedies of the twentieth century, I would choose this one". It tells a remarkable personal tale of a Jewish girl in Prague caught up by the Nazis and going to Auschwitz, then her escape and return to her beloved Prague, and subsequent worse sufferings under the communist government in the 1950s and 1960s. Her husband was a high ranking government official but later was put on a show trial and killed.
   
   "Under a Cruel Star" (also called "Prague Farewell" in some editions) is not as bleak as the story sounds. It is a slim volume of hope and understanding, written elegantly by a woman who later in life worked as a translator from English and finished her working life in the Harvard Law School library.



2. it is a great book use in my world civ class, and highly recommmand by my professor and TAs.



3. I would recommend this book to anyone. Even if you think you don't like reading about history, you'll like this book. In fact, it is books like these that are the reason I love history so much, and why I'm majoring in it. It isn't about the politics or the wars or whatever else (although those are certainly important), it is the story of a woman trying to survive through a hell most of us cannot even imagine has existed on this earth, especially not in the last 50 years. Peoples' lives are what connect us to the past, and what make it relevant to the future. It gives a little meaning and heart behind all the dates and events that you have to memorize in class...make them more personal. And furthermore, you will be inspired by this woman. Her strength and character is admirable, to say the very least. Actually, I don't think even a fictional writer could invent a heroine more honorable than this one.
   
   So please, read it. stories like these deserve to be shared.



4. This is a well-written, quick read. Heda's 27 years of suffering - first at the hands of the Nazis & then under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia - is heart rending. It's a book that should be part of high school curriculums to raise awareness of what too many people had to endure in the middle of the last century. It would be much more effective than relying on a history textbook that deals only with the 'facts.'



5. I read this about 6 years ago when it was assigned in one of my undergrad classes. There are enough online reviews for you to read about the plot and like. Rather I want to tell you how her voice has stuck with me. I think of her ability to see the slivering when everything is just gray, and her amazing capacity to keep going. Whenever I think I can't go on, this death/or lost/ or series of unfortunate events as shattered the very last of my will I remember her words. I highly recommend it. I regally give this as a gift, I know I'm not just giving someone a powerful story, but really I'm giving someone a packet of extra strength for when they need it most in life.