What Israeli Jews Are Made Up Of; Comparing People to USA

Nadene Goldfoot                                                  

Jews who survived the attack  in 70 CE taken as slaves, forced to carry the spoils of war from the Temple in Jerusalem to Rome.  This is on the arch of Titus in Rome today.    Arch of Titus, Rome, after 81 C.E., marble, 7 feet,10 inches high.      The start of living in the Diaspora.  

                                                       

These people above could have some Jewish genes.  We've scattered throughout the world, just now finding Pashtuns of Pakistan, Afghanistan and India who have the oral history pointing to being the Lost Ten Tribes.  We've been in China but I don't know about Japan.  We've been in South Africa and Northern Africa, but the center?  Yes, we have found some from there, too.  

                                                  

The big question has always been, what is a Jew?  Is it a religion, race or a nationality.  It is both.  It started being told by G-d through Moses to live in Canaan, which was what Eretz Yisrael was first called.  They probably came there from Egypt in 1151 BCE as Moses died in 1271 BCE at age 120.  They had arrived in Egypt from Canaan some 400 years earlier as the  family of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham. 

                                                   

 According to DNA's autosomal DNA testing today, we are finding out that we are an endogamous society, having done a lot of intermarrying among our family members throughout time due to societal circumstances. Our marrying has mainly been happening with cousins, not siblings like Egypt had practiced.   

                                                  

 Israel is 73 years old,  born May 14, 1948.    In 2019, those from 0 to age 14 made up 27.89% of the population,  Those from 15 to 64 made up 59.91% and from age 65 up made up 12.21% of the population.   

The demographics also show us that the population as of July of last year, 2020, was 9,227,2000 with 74.2% being Jews.  That amounts to 6,829,000 of Israel are Jews, which is why Israel came into being in the first place.  In 1948, there were 101,828 immigrants in Israel of which 758,702 were Jews and 126,000 were non-Jews with a total of 872,000.  That's coming into Israel made up of about 8,000 sq miles.  By 1971, immigration was 42,000 of which 2,636, 600 were Jews and 458,500 were Jews  with a total of 3,095,100.  Jewish immigrants continue to enter.  Israel must keep the 80%-20% Jewish identity of the country.  After 3,000 some years of history, we find that the past 2,000 without a home has been destructive.  If we are to continue, so must our country. That's why I'm a nationalist.  Our society has value.

                                             

Albert Einstein was a German Ashkenazi Jew from Germany with an IQ of 180. 

Albert Einstein and all other Ashkenazi Jews can trace their roots to a group of about 330 people who lived during the Middle Ages, a new study finds.

(Associated Press)

                                                   

 Sephardi Jews (Hebrew: סְפָרַדִּי, Modern Sfaraddi Tiberian Səp̄āraddî) is a general term referring to the descendants of Jewish settlers who trace their origins to the Israelite tribes of the Middle East, who lived in the Iberian Peninsula until the Spanish Inquisition. It can also refer to those who use a Sephardic style of liturgy, or would otherwise define themselves in terms of Jewish customs and traditions from the Iberian Peninsula.

As of 2010, there were about 14 million Jews around the world, representing 0.2% of the global population. In 2050, the Jewish population is expected to number about 16 million. The share of the world’s population that is Jewish – 0.2% – is expected to remain about the same in 2050 as it was in 2010.

By continents, from 1919 Jews making aliyah were mainly from from the Americas, Europe and Oceanica in the amount of 385,066, and from Asia and Africa were 44,809 with a total of 452,158.  From 1965 to 1969, immigration from the Americas, Europe and Oceania was 48,609; and from Asia and Africa were 56,035 with a total of 104,955,  

                                                        

You'd have to study the "Old Testament" carefully to understand our history of being one of the Jewish people.  Those are our ancestors.  We'll look at what has happened to Jews of today. We're a people, a family, and  a religion differing from all others in the world.  

   Both are Jews in Israel.  Both could be Orthodox. Jews make up only 0.02% of the world population. One could be Ashkenazi, the other Sephardi.  They could find that they share segments of their DNA.   

                                                  

 Israel was created as a haven in 1948 for the scattered Jews of the world of which most were  under threat of extinction by their host countries, for very few of them had allowed Jews citizenship by 1920, the time after World War I. Zionists, that is, people believing that Jews needed to return to their ancestral original home that was now Palestine but had been Israel. In the past it was called Judah, the southern part of Israel, and even that went through name changes as Rome overcame Judah and renamed it Judah or Judaea in 70 CE.  From then on, Jews have been scattered,  with a large group having being led to Rome, while others headed for Spain which gives us the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi groups of Jews.                          

Mazkeret Batya's Great Synagogue on 1 Eliyahu Boulevard, designed by architect Pinhas Nit, is one of the most beautiful temples in Israel. It was built almost 100 years ago and is located in a dramatic place – the entrance to the central Israeli town.  The building has a beautiful entrance with a large arch welcoming its visitors. It is an interesting building with beauty marking the end of the 19th century. It has an atmosphere of the past and a lot of simplicity. The place is reminiscent of synagogues in Europe, with towers on the sides – almost as if it was brought in from Poland, but with a local flavor. Its compactness resembles the spirit of the rural houses of the baron's colony.  A Temple usually signifies being a Reform Synagogue.  Mazkeret Batya is a local council in central Israel located southeast of Rehovot and 25 kilometres from Tel-Aviv. Mazkeret Batya spans an area of 7,440 dunams. In 2019 it had a population of 14,837. The mayor of Mazkeret Batya is Gaby Gaon.

                                                                              

This is the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem.  I was in it and was wowed!  As early as 1923 the Chief Rabbis of Israel, Abraham Kook and Jacob Meir, mooted plans for a large central synagogue in Jerusalem. It was over 30 years later in 1958 when Heichal Shlomo, seat of the Israeli Rabbinate, was founded, that a small synagogue was established within the building. As time passed and the need for more space grew, services were moved and held in the foyer of Heichal Shlomo. Soon afterwards, when the premises could not hold the number of worshippers attending, it was decided that a new, much larger synagogue be built. Here it is.  

it is not important today in Israel whether you are Ashkenazi or Sephardi, Conservative or Orthodox.  Today, being religious or secular seems to be the dividing measuring stick of more use in matters.  It's something important to Prime Ministers as to how to budget for a coming year.      

In Israel, very few Jews identify with Conservative (2%) or Reform (3%) Judaism, while half (50%) identify with Orthodoxy – including many Jews who are not highly religiously observant but may still be most familiar with Orthodox Judaism.   Therefore, at least half of the Jewish population may have identified 

themselves with thereligious.                                         

  Our apartment building across the street from my junior high in Safed; with my German Shepherd that we flew there with us, and our new Fiat shipped from Italy.  We bought it out of a catalogue at the dealer's store.  I loved it.  After going a year without a car, this spoiled American was so grateful to finally have it.  As I said, Israel is very conscious of whether you were religious or not, and my head-scarf shows that I am religious-a learning one, as in the USA we were conservative.  We moved to Israel after a scare of real anti-Semitism that had hit in my husband's high school in Adrian, Oregon and to help help Israel being English-speaking teachers.  Danny was very helpful as in high school, English is a priority to get into many colleges or universities.  Israeli pilots have to have such a degree.  Though he was an outstanding teacher in Oregon, teaching was too difficult for Danny. He had only been an Oregon teacher for a few years in Oregon, and didn't have enough skills needed in handling such situations where he was limited verbally.  I think the change was hardest on men.  At least it was in our small group of immigrants of 40  attending classes in Hebrew.  

All men and women have to serve in the IDF, the Israel Defense Force. They do this from age 18 to possibly age 55. Danny had been in the Air Force in Florida and guarded planes but didn't pass the physical in Israel with his lung condition.                                            

    Our apartment in Safed with bars on the windows-ground floor apartment.  I had the use of the building's merapeset, the outside patio.  Here I am in 1981 waiting for my lift to be delivered with our furniture from Oregon.  I'm sitting on an Israeli cot-bed that I have thrown a throw over, using it as the living-room sofa temporarily.  

 During times of stress, though they may have already served their time, can be called in to serve for that period of stress.  This happened when I lived in Safed (Tzfat) when all available teachers were called back in.  I as an American newbie, ran to my junior high and replaced those called in without even being told to do so.  The children were showing signs of great stress, curling up in corners of the classroom and crying, telling me to keep talking, while we could hear the helicopters overhead landing on the roof of the hospital across the street of David Eleazar, delivering their fathers, uncles, brothers and even the injured enemy to be made whole again.  

Part of my duty as a new immigrant was to give blood soon after arrival, an insurance to receive if ever I needed some.  My older students in the  (Zion, Khet Tet)  group acted as linguists, translators from Arabic to Hebrew for the doctors.  They returned to me, telling me all about their experience as best as they could.  I got the idea that they saw some shocking cases. 9th graders in the USA would have had such an experience.  That group of 9th (Tet) graders was the lowest in English but the highest in behavior.  They were so patient and quiet, made up mostly of Circassian Arabs.    

This is the time of Return of Jews to Israel from all over the world.  It was prophecized to happen at just about this time, surprisingly to most of us, amazed that prophecy was correct.  The USA has always stood as the MELTING POT OF THE WORLD.  Now, it appears, that Israel has also become the JEWISH MELTING POT, and the pot is ever so much tinier!  

So now we have a multiplicity of languages being spoken which are highlighted by speaking basically  either Yiddish or Ladino who are all using Hebrew as their day to day language of their newly revitalized Israel.  My paternal grandparents who made it from Lithuania/Poland to the USA could only speak Yiddish and that was that.  Neither could read nor write.  Such was their life.  They were among the poor who made it to the USA on or before 1905.  

 Arriving at Ben Gurion Airport in September 1980 from Portland, OR

I made Aliyah in 1980.  So who else returned besides us?  Right across the street in another building, a couple from Portland had moved in, and his father had known my father, but we had never met.    They were in the same business!  Of course we had the Sam Singers over for dinner and he was already in the Israeli IDF.  Later on, in another apartment building across the street moved in people that were Black Ethiopians.  We shared the same supermarket.  This was such an exciting period.  I even wrote a book about it all.  

Update: 6/7/2021  I found my 3rd cousin in Jerusalem, Stanley Goldfoot, who had been in Israel since before 1948.  In fact, he was the chief of Intelligence for the Stern group.  We met in the King David Hotel.  He had written, A Letter To The World.  He gave me inspiration.  

Golda Meir announcing the birth of their nation, Israel.  

So we have strong Zionists who made it to Palestine starting in the 1880's who arrived through 5 Aliyah groupings.  They were mostly Ashkenazis.  Palestine still had Jews living there that stayed on after 70 CE and kept things going through many attacks from different groups, with the Ottoman Empire taking the land and holding it for 400 years, a time that ended with World War I after they lost with their axis Germany by 1918.  These people would be the Mizrachi group who knew how to read and write Arabic as well as Hebrew and had come from the surrounding area in and beyond Palestine in the Middle East.

                                               

 Out of a POW camp and into Israel, fighting another war

Israel would never have appeared on the scene again after 2,000 years of hoping, waiting and praying 3 times a day without a drastic reason to leave host countries, and the impossible happened with the Holocaust.  It's like an island set aside for an endangered species, the Jews.  The difference between an animal's life and the Jews' lives in Israel is that they forgot to take out the people who wanted to destroy them, the Palestinians, who were used as the main ammunition to use against them.  Now , the ones who stayed and didn't leave when their leaders ordered them to have left their descendants who are learning to live together in peace.  That still allows our refuge to be about 80% Jewish and 20% Arab Israelis.   

                                   Hamas hitting Israel :  By 22 September 2005, Israel's withdrawal from the entire Gaza Strip to the 1967 Green Line, and the eviction of the four settlements in Samaria, was completed. In June 2007 Hamas took over the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority.

It doesn't consider the Palestinian Gazans  who have been making war on Israel ever since Jews expelled themselves from the area to allow Arabs to live there.  The act gave no peace at all to the Israelis who only wound up giving the enemy a closer place in which to fire their rockets from.  All the while in the background, the other nations call out, create a Palestine, as if that will change their minds after signing onto an agreement to not ever make peace with Jews.  This is what Jews of Israel have to deal with.  Already an enemy, hateful Palestinians on their border who keep on shooting led by Hamas, terrorists.   What kind of Jew in Israel is all for this distorted state of affairs?  Note that there are 20% Arabs who also vote in elections.  

The USA was born through discovery of the continent and then later knowing that all that land was there for the picking.  Any overcrowded and disturbed or unhappy person was free to take their chances and enter as long as they were healthy enough.  The United States became a country in 1776 and had enough of a population by then, starting with 13 colonies.  They have grown to have 50 states.  Israel's size can be compared with their smallest state of Rhode Island.  

The religion of the USA was started by Christians who were dissatisfied with Christianity in England and had moved to Holland with their own branch of Christianity.  Though they don't announce it, the USA is a Christian state just by % of the people.  Following them were all the other branches of Christianity while Islam stayed in the Middle East.  In the early days when New York was called New Amsterdam, a small boat-load of Jews arrived and were denied entrance.  Finally, that was cleared up and Peter Stuyvesant had to allow them entrance, though they were Jews, a people he hadn't much contact with, since Jews had not been allowed to live in England from 1290 until 1655, a total of 365 years, and we all know that the Mayflower sailed to America in 1620 with the Puritans and a few others. 

 I'd say that we Jews have entered a land already conditioned not to accept us, and our ancestors had to win them over.  Jews have faced discrimination in the US ever since in different degrees.

                                                  

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed an IDF officers' course graduation ceremony today at IDF Training Base #1.

Israelis seem to have identified with Netanyahu's brand of seeing what Jews were for the past 12 years, and are now going for a change and are leaning away from the more dominant Orthodox view of themselves.  Netanyahu had coalesced with the more orthodox though he isn't himself.  He had to do a lot of appeasing, in my opinion to last for 12 years straight under dire conditions.   We shall see what the future has in store with a new coalition formed under Bennett and Yapid who are pasting together quite a diversity. They sound a little like the old Labor group to me.  I think anyone against Netanyahu today gives the whole voting scene a superficial scan.  So far the paste has only been the dislike of Netanyahu.  That may turn out to be a very weak paste. We await the results for many things, the respite  in the Gazan War, Netanyahu's chances to stay in government and etc.   

Jews in the USA, South Africa, England, etc, have to think of themselves and ask the question of what's important:  Are they religious or secular and where does Israel fit into their picture of themselves. So are we Zionists or not?  Another question:  What do you think will happen if Israel disappeared or was not a Jewish state anymore?  All this depends on the make-up of today's Israelis.  

The question of being religious or secular comes from our beginnings which were religious history, recorded by Moses himself for the first 5 books.  Judaism is on the line, defended only by our handful of Jews and our friends.   

Jews born and raised in Israel are called "Sabras".  It a tough cactus.  They are on the outside, but they are soft inside.  

Watch the news about Israel on TV:  There's more to us than being just a Democratic Society like England or the USA.  

ILTV Israel News - YouTube

i24NEWS English - YouTube

TV7 Israel News YouTube Channel

- 12 minutes daily

Resource

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/roman/early-empire/v/arch-of-titus-relief

https://www.statista.com/statistics/526596/age-structure-in-israel/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stuyvesant

http://www.globalreligiousfutures.org/religions/jews

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Israel

Letters From Israel, by Nadene Goldfoot