Dear staff and leadership, members and donors, campers and supporters of Camp Solomon Schechter:
As I finish off an ash-dipped, hard-boiled egg and begin a 24-hour fast in memory of the destruction of the first and second Temples, I wanted to take a moment to belatedly thank you for your welcoming stance on raising the Palestinian Liberation Organization flag at a Jewish summer camp mere days after a hideous Shabbat-eve slaughter of an Israeli Jewish family by a Palestinian terrorist as they sat down to the festive meal; after days of ecstatic Palestinian Authority-incited rioting on the Temple Mount itself by thousands of other Palestinians waving said flag, all this in the wake of the shooting death of two Israeli Druze police officers by Palestinian-supporting Israeli Arabs – again – upon the selfsame Temple Mount.
Thank you for providing a trenchant lesson in the astonishing ability of Jews abroad to be so breathtakingly tone-deaf to murderous events transpiring in Israel against their co-religionists, while they nobly applaud themselves on their inclusiveness and diversity towards a Palestinian “kids4peace” delegation – while the groups’ co-religionists back home are still – inclusively and diversely, of course – reveling in the kill, and planning more.
My deepest appreciation for your – wittingly or unwittingly – providing Israelis (including some of the young campers themselves!) and Jews worldwide with an object lesson for your young charges – on erev Tisha B’Av no less – in institutional Jewish moral autism and disregard for the lives and deaths of Israelis, while you cravenly curry favor with those who – in Arabic, of course, and not English – avidly support the reasons for the fast, and its continuance.
You’ve performed a marvelous service in reminding us of what the painful loss of the first and second Jewish Commonwealth wreaked on the collective Jewish psyche, and where the agonies of millenia-long national exile, amnesia and rampant assimilation can lead – and why we must never give up hope of reversing those trends, at least in the sovereign State of Israel and on the Temple Mount, if not at your institution and elsewhere abroad.
