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Mussolini and the Hungarian Rabbi of Rhodes

Feb. 22 2016

Born in Hungary in 1887, Isidore Kahan embarked on a successful rabbinic career, eventually taking a position as rabbi of Gorizia, Italy. His subsequent peregrinations reflect the rapidly changing fate of Italian Jewry between the world wars, as Ty Alhadeff writes:

In December 1928, the governor [of the isle of Rhodes, then under Italian rule], Mario Lago, established the Collegio Rabbinico. Mussolini personally intervened to ensure that funds [originally] directed to the [rabbinic] seminary in Rome went to Rhodes in order to spread Italianità, Italian culture, to the Italian colonies—even among Jews. Within months, Rabbi Kahan was recruited by the Italian government to be the administrator and head teacher of the Rhodes [rabbinic] seminary. . . .

The school educated approximately 25 to 30 students who came from Izmir, Aleppo, Beirut, Sarajevo, Cairo, and Ethiopia to study in this modern yeshiva. . . .

Kahan served in the Rhodes seminary until 1933, when he was hired as a pulpit rabbi in Rome, a position he held until 1939. However, as the tide in Europe turned, Kahan worked tirelessly to save his family from impending doom.

With the help of American Jewish contacts, Kahan fled to Seattle, where he became the rabbi of a Rhodesli synagogue.

Read more at Stroum Center for Jewish Studies

More about: Benito Mussolini, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Hungarian Jewry, Italian Jewry, Rhodes

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic