John Bolton and His Plan For Israel

 Nadene Goldfoot                                             

            John Bolton in 2018 b: November 20, 1948 in Baltimore, Maryland.  

John is an American attorney, diplomat, Yale educated for his BA and JD, Republican consultant, and political commentator. He served as the 25th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, and as the 26th United States National Security Advisor from 2018 to 2019 under President Donald Trump. 

            John Bolton with Netanyahu in August 2018 

John Bolton  is known for his strong support for Israel. Bolton opposes the two-state solution of creating an independent Palestinian state alongside the existing state of Israel. Bolton supported moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in accordance with the Jerusalem Embassy Act, (The Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 is a public law of the United States passed by the post-Republican Revolution 104th Congress on October 23, 1995. The proposed law was adopted by the Senate, and the House. The Act became law without a presidential signature on November 8, 1995)

 and he testified in front of Congress in 2017 on the matter. In 2010, Bolton co-founded the Friends of Israel Initiative with 12 other international figures.  (The Friends of Israel Initiative is an international effort, to "seek to counter the attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel and its right to live in peace within safe and defensible borders", initiated and led by former Prime Minister of Spain and People's Party leader José María Aznar in 2010.)

Bolton supports what he calls the "Three State Solution" in order to determine the political status of Gaza and the West Bank. Under Bolton's Three State Solution, 

1. Israel would annex settlements it has built in the West Bank since the conclusion of the Six-Days War in 1967, 

2. Egypt would annex and administer the Gaza Strip, and 

3. Jordan would annex and administer the remaining portion of the West Bank not annexed by Israel. 

Bolton's Three State proposal would not result in the creation of an independent Palestinian state."  For that matter, Jordan has taken in so many Palestinians and

 the king has married one, so that it could be considered as a

Palestinian state already.  They've already had one war with

them called Black September.  

  Bolton and Bush in 2006 when he was ambassador to the UN.

In 2006, Bolton attempted to bring prosecution against Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide in the International Court of Justice, along with Alan Dershowitz, Dore Gold, and other experts from the United States, Canada, and Israel, based on Ahmadinejad's comments that "Israel must be wiped off the map".

Bolton was dominating headlines in 2015 with his new tell-all book, “The Room Where It Happened,” in which he depicts Trump as a know-nothing prone to placing his personal fortunes above the country’s and seeking political favors from Ukraine, China, and Turkey. In response, Trump is threatening his former national security adviser with criminal action for allegedly disseminating classified information (Bolton says the book was cleared by censors for publication; the White House disagrees). My library copy shows 2020 on the copyright.  

Bolton is tough.  He tells it like he sees it.  He seems to me to be a highly organized man-after all-a Yale graduate, and was quite shocked with Trump's completely unorganized way of doing things, and Trump  doesn't take direction.  That was Bolton's job; advice.  Bolton  served as the National Security Advisor to President Donald Trump from April 2018 to September 2019.

The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), commonly referred to as the National Security Advisor (NSA), is a senior aide in the Executive Office of the President, based at the West Wing of the White House. The National Security Advisor serves as the principal advisor to the President of the United States on all national security issues. The National Security Advisor is appointed by the President and does not require confirmation by the United States Senate. An appointment of a three- or four-star General to the role requires Senate confirmation to maintain that rank in the new position. The National Security Advisor participates in meetings of the National Security Council (NSC) and usually chairs meetings of the Principals Committee of the NSC with the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense (those meetings not attended by the President). The NSA also sits on the Homeland Security Council (HSC).The National Security Advisor is supported by NSC staff who produce classified research and briefings for the National Security Advisor to review and present, either to the National Security Council or directly to the President.

The Trump-Bolton clash puts Jewish Republicans and right-wing pro-Israel groups in an especially tricky situation. They have long hailed Bolton as a voice of moral clarity willing to speak hard truths in defending Israel, often in the face of international consensus. But this time, Bolton is fixing his aim on a president whom many of his erstwhile pro-Israel allies view as the best friend Jerusalem has ever had in the White House.  Bolton holds the same views that I do about Israel and a Palestinian State. It's been 74 years since Israel's birthday and the Palestinians are still attacking Israel with their favorite rockets, missiles and mortars, tunnels and fire-starters.    

It's true that with people like Bolton and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is a friend of PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump accomplished many things for Israel that others didn't do but had promised.  I had feelings that he wasn't doing it out of love for Israel or admiration, but in thinking of getting the American Jewish votes that were Democrats.  Trump isn't known for his level of reading, but his daughter had converted to Judaism in marrying Kushner.  Their children are Jewish.  Seeing Trump dining at home with 2 well-known anti-Semites that has caused us all to almost have a heart-attack and is enough to let everyone Jewish know what Trump's mind concerns itself with.    

Resource;

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

Book: The Room Where It Happened-a White House memoir 

by John Bolton, former National Security Advisor of the US. 

Kanye West and His Buddy, Nick Fuentes Who Dined With Buddy Donald Trump

 Nadene Goldfoot                                          

The Mar-a-Lago Club is a 20-acre estate with 128 rooms. The heiress to Post Cereal built it in 1927.  Trump bought it in 1985 for $8 million dollars.  

Donald Trump just did the unthinkable and had two anti-Semites for dinner, Kanye West and Nick Fuentes.  

His comment when asked about it?  Trump acknowledged the dinner in a post on Truth Social Friday stating: “This past week, Kanye West called me to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Shortly thereafter, he unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about. We had dinner on Tuesday evening with many members present on the back patio. The dinner was quick and uneventful. They then left for the airport.”

Most people have heard about Kanye West being an anti-Semite.  Every organization who had been supporting him financially has dropped him because of this.

Nicholas Joseph Fuentes born August 18, 1998 in Illinois, making a big name for himself by being hateful,  is a young  American white supremacist political commentator and live streamer. A former YouTuber, his channel was permanently suspended in February 2020 for violating YouTube's hate speech policy. He holds antisemitic views and denies the Holocaust, the most documented event on the face of this earth.   Fuentes self-identifies as a member of the incel movement (Incel (/ˈɪnsɛl/ IN-sel; an abbreviation of "involuntary celibate"), or sometimes incels, is an ideology, an online subculture, an identity, an online community, and/or a movement characterized by public displays of sexual and/or romantic frustration.

and as a supporter of authoritarian government.) 

 Nicholas Fuentes is a white supremacist leader and organizer and podcaster who seeks to forge a white nationalist alternative to the mainstream GOP.  .2) Nicholas Fuentes believes that he is working to defend against “leftist” cultural changes that are destroying the “true America:” a white, Christian nation. 3) Fuentes has used his platforms to make numerous antisemitic and racist comments. For example, he has referred to Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh as “shabbos goy race traitor” because he works for Jews (Ben Shapiro, a Jewish conservative, runs the Daily Wire). On a livestream episode, Fuentes “jokingly” denied the Holocaust and compared Jews burnt in concentration camps to cookies in an oven. On May 24, 2021, Fuentes participated in a debate on right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones’ InfoWars with Robert Barnes, a man described as a “constitutional lawyer” who has legally defended both Jones and Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse. During the debate, Fuentes made numerous antisemitic remarks, including, "I don’t see Jews as Europeans and I don’t see them as part of Western civilization, particularly because they are not Christians.” In April, Fuentes appeared to urge mainstream Republicans to champion an antisemitic focus on “Jewish control,” tweeting, “The next big frontier for populist and conservative inc [sic; this is the America First term for establishment GOPers] to coopt [sic] is discussing Jewish Power. Somehow I don’t think they’ll broach that one!” 

My comment:  Since when is it okay for Trump to have anti-Semites over to his house for dinner without causing an uproar?  How does Jared, his son-in-law feel about this?  For what reason is Trump dining with anti-Semites?  Is he still only after votes?

"Trump's saying West invited himself and brought 3 others with him and Trump said nothing?  Had Trump ever said to Kanye West, If you're ever in the neighborhood, come on over for dinner?  It's an open invitation?  

Come on..Who's going to believe this?  .Trump's other comments were that he liked them. "The ex-president sought to distance himself from Fuentes after West claimed in a video posted Thursday that “Trump is really impressed with Nick Fuentes.”

I've noticed that Trump always likes people that he thinks likes him first, and this evidently includes people that are such anti-Semites!  Oy vey!"    

.David Melech Friedman, Trump’s former Ambassador to Israel, also condemned the former president’s association with West and Fuentes.

“To my friend Donald Trump, you are better than this. Even a social visit from an antisemite like Kanye West and human scum like Nick Fuentes is unacceptable. I urge you to throw those bums out, disavow them and relegate them to the dustbin of history where they belong,” he said in a pair of tweets Friday afternoon. “Antisemites deserve no quarter among American leaders, right or left.”

David Friedman was an advisor to Trump during his successful presidential campaign. In December 2016, President-elect Trump's transition team announced that Friedman was Trump's nominee for ambassador. He was narrowly confirmed by the Senate, officially sworn in by Vice President Mike Pence on March 29 and presented his credentials on May 15.  

Resource:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/25/politics/trump-kanye-west-nick-fuentes-mar-a-lago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Friedman

https://nypost.com/2022/11/25/donald-trump-kanye-west-joined-by-nick-fuentes-at-mar-a-lago/

Update information:4:a37pm,  https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-26-2022?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader....Letters from an American, November 26, 2022....Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian and professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She previously taught history at MIT and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Dachau Concentration Camp and Joe Biden On Arming Ukrainians

 Nadene Goldfoot                           

Dachau Concentration Camp-work shall make you free-really???

A difference in political opinions has led to death and destruction throughout the world's history.  Europe has suffered from it since the beginnings of the 1st millennium CE (AD).  It's disheartening.  Look at the USA's Civil War that started in 1861 between the North and the South.  A common explanation is that the Civil War was fought over the moral issue of slavery. In fact, it was the economics of slavery and political control of that system that was central to the conflict. A key issue was states' rights.  It's power.  Who's got power over others?  That's central in political differences.  

Hitler passed his Emergency Decree on February 5, 1933 and all hell broke loose.  In just 3 weeks after this, he took his 2nd step towards dictatorship as by the 27th, the Nazis demanded new rules about "protective custody" and legalized imprisonment without warrant or trial came into effect. The Germans had given an inch and the Nazis took a mile.   

Speaking of differences, Joe Biden wanted to arm Ukrainians in their fight against Putin without getting the USA into trouble.  Senator Ted Cruz, who rarely agreed with anything Biden had to say when he was a Vice President, agreed with him about providing support to beleaguered Ukrainian fighters, as did Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.  Chancellor Merkel of Germany, on the other hand,  "can't see how arming people who are willing to fight and die for their freedom makes things better,"  while Lindsey Graham told reporters in Munich that "he did see how it makes things better."  This was back when John McCain was leading the US congressional delegation at Munich and Biden had given a speech to our NATO allies.  “I refuse to accept the demise of our world order...  I refuse to accept that our values are morally equivalent to those of our adversaries. I am a proud, unapologetic believer in the West.” These are the words of Senator John McCain from his address at the 2017 Munich Security Conference.  It was his last one.  (Open Link in new window)

By 1933, Dachau was the 1st concentration camp put into operation by the Nazis. It's location was in Bavaria of southern Germany, 10 miles NW of Munich.   The 1st prisoners were Hitler's political opponents, not the Jews unless they were part of that opposition at the time.  The Nazi opponents happened to be German communists, social democrats, and trade unionists.  then came Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, and other people the Nazis deemed as "Undesirables."

Prisoners lived in constant fear of brutal treatment and terror detention including standing cells, floggings, the so-called tree or pole hanging, and standing at attention for extremely long periods. There were 32,000 documented deaths at the camp, and thousands that are undocumented. Approximately 10,000 of the 30,000 prisoners were sick at the time of liberation.

By the late 1930's, the Nazis began to fill the camp with Jews.  Nazi beliefs and ideas about race shaped all aspects of everyday life and politics in Nazi Germany. In particular, the Nazis embraced the false idea that Jews were a separate and inferior race. This belief is known as racial antisemitism. Jews and Arabs are related distantly;  just read the Old Testament (Torah).  They are both Semitic people, but no one seems to recognize this fact because it was the Jews who were blamed for killing Jesus-the Christian "God." or God's son, as the New Testament tells. 

The number of Jewish prisoners also grew. After Kristallnacht of November 9th to 10th,  1938, over 10 000 Jews from all over Germany were brought to Dachau. They were released a few weeks later after promising to leave Germany. Most of them, following their experiences in the concentration camp, were only too glad to emigrate. But getting out was about impossible. 

My uncle had been picked up and placed in Auschwitz, and it wasn't until May 4th 1939 that he had the papers and money to get out but had to leave his parents and 16 year old red-headed sister who then all perished.  He may have been the last Jew to get out of Germany in 1939, boarding the SS Washington.  

The combined set of Nazi beliefs and ideas about race is sometimes referred to as “Nazi racism” or “Nazi racial ideology.” Like other forms of racism, Nazi racism was based on prejudices and stereotypes.  Because of anti-Semitism, Jews had become small business owners, working for themselves as it was hard to get hired by Christians.  Some became very successful.  When the Nazis attacked Jews, they were destroying their businesses which affected their Christian workers by putting them out of jobs and adding to their financial woes.  By destroying Jews, they were ultimately destroying themselves.  

Almost 30,000 prisoners were worked to death or murdered at Dachau between 1940 and 1945.  

                                  Niemoller in Berlin, 1936

"But, Nazi persecution quickly expanded to encompass a variety of other people and groups, including Niemöller himself. Most Germans did not object to Nazi actions. Rather, they either supported the regime or ignored the plight of their fellow citizens.

Niemöller believed that after the war many Germans were reluctant to confront their complicity with Nazism. In his lectures, he bemoaned that individual Germans failed to accept responsibility for Nazism, German atrocities in German-occupied countries, and the Holocaust. According to him, individual Germans were passing the blame onto their neighbors, superiors, or Nazi organizations like the Gestapo."

Martin Niemoller, a Protestant pastor,  was thrown into a German concentration camp at the end of the war who had written a famous well-repeated poem of warning:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out----

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out----

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out----

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me----and there was no one left to speak for me.  

The Jews of Germany had been among Europe's most assimilated, most cultured, most active contributors to the national life of the state in which they lived.  Hundreds of thousands of them had become an integral part of German society. Albert Einstein was one.   They had made significant contributions to German medicine, literature, science, music and industry.  They could not possibly believe, Benno Cohn later recalled, that this cultured German nation, the one which was the most cultured of the peoples of the world since time immemorial, would resort to such iniquitous things."  

"As the threat of Nazism spread throughout Europe, Jews were faced with a difficult decision, whether to leave their homeland or remain in the face of oppression. Many scientists made the decision to leave. In fact, between 1930 and 1941, twelve Nobel prize winning scientists came to the United States because of the threat of Nazi Germany. Seven of these twelve Nobelists were Jewish. These Jewish scientists included physicists Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, James Franck, and Eugene Wigner, and biologists Otto Loewi, Otto Meyerhof, and Otto Stern.  Upon arriving in the United States, the majority of the scientists worked on the east coast, at universities such as Princeton, New York University, Cornell, Fordham, Carnegie Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania (Schlessinger, 1996). Bohr, who had been forced to flee Denmark, Pauli, and Dam spent the war years in the United States but left America and conducted their research after the war. "

The people Nazis abhorred, Jews, communists, etc, could not protect themselves.   They didn't have a chance.  The Nazis made sure of that.  Those being attacked, like Israelis, and today's Ukrainians,  deserve the chance to protect themselves from aggressors.  Hitler's invasion of Poland in September 1939 drove Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany, marking the beginning of World War II. Over the next six years, the conflict would take more lives and destroy more land and property around the globe than any previous war.  

Resource:

Book:  Joe Biden----Promise Me, Dad, by Joe Biden, p.108-109

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

The Holocaust-a history of the Jews of Europe during the 2nd World War, by Martin Gilbert, p. 35

https://www.holocaust.cz/en/history/concentration-camps-and-ghettos/dachau-2/

https://www.mccaininstitute.org/resources/blog/remembering-senator-john-mccains-message-in-munich/

https://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/physics/brau/H182/Term%20Papers/Eric%20Weiss.html

http://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/feature/causes-of-the-civil-war/index.html#:~:text=A%20common%20explanation%20is%20that,key%20issue%20was%20states'%20rights.

https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/world-war-ii-history#:~:text=Hitler's%20invasion%20of%20Poland%20in,globe%20than%20any%20previous%20war.

Confessions About My Learning Hebrew

 Nadene Goldfoot                                             

I just got up at 11:30pm to write this, but I have to get it off my chest.  It's about my attempts at learning to read and write Hebrew.

I'm not a stupid woman.  I skipped twice in grammar school, graduating high school and starting college at 16, being the youngest in my freshman class and making a speech with the oldest professor at Lewis & Clark College, but my struggles with Hebrew was something else again.

I attended Neveh Zedek, a conservative Synagogue's kindergarten class in 1939, and it's 1st grade in 1940 when I started learning Hebrew.  It was easy and fun.  The only problem I was having was that it happened in Sunday school once a week, and school lasted from 10am to 12:00.  Two hours was stuffed with songs, stories and probably if lucky, 20 minutes of Hebrew.  Then I remember not getting up in the morning and missing a class.  The next week, the class was ahead of me, and I couldn't catch up.  That happened enough times for me to be completely in the dark and never did catch up.  My parents couldn't help me as they couldn't read.  Dad had been kicked out of Hebrew school being too wild, I imagine.  His father had died when he was 4 years old and his mother spoke Yiddish but could not read or write in any language.

That was my Hebrew as a child.  As a girl, I went through Confirmation at age 13 which was all in English.  I had memorized my part about Ruth and Naomi.  

Along comes 1980 when Danny and I made aliyah at age 46 and moved to Israel.  We were on a program to retrain and teach English.  We were both teachers as I had been teaching for the past 22 years in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th grades and Danny for about 3 years in high school.  

Danny, from Brooklyn, New York, had been bar mitzvahed and had the experience of helping boys study for their bar mitzvah.  I had studied Latin for a year, then had learned a little Spanish, so attempted to teach myself Hebrew as we were living in Eastern Oregon at the time and I had no way of taking a class in Hebrew to prepare myself.

I made flash cards and wrote out the words in English to learn Hebrew words, so I was learning a few words of Hebrew. My first Hebrew class at the Ulpan in Haifa went through the words I had taught myself in the first hour of class and it had taken me months to learn those words at home.  I knew I was in trouble. I had given up my teaching position with 10 year and couldn't return home.  I had to keep on trying to learn Hebrew.  There are only a few words I can sight read, like Shabbat.  We English readers do a lot of sight reading and it's easy because our letters are of such different shapes; a b g...I am sounding out every letter in Hebrew. Sheket (quiet): שקט shin, quf tet, .  

Incidently, in Israel, there are newspapers that leave out the vowels.  

Both Dan and I were placed in kitta gimel!!!  It was a smaller group of slower students.  Even Danny!  Here he was, a bar-mitzvah boy and he was having trouble with speaking Hebrew.  The trouble was, he had been such a great speaker of English for a man, an actor in Florida, a debater in high school, that he couldn't make the transition to speak in a new language.  We saw several American men drop out and return to the states, leaving their wives and children in Israel.  They couldn't manage the language.  I continued taking Hebrew in classes 3 times a week to continue learning new words.  I got so I could speak a little to carry on a conversation but it was minimal.  Reading did not get improved upon.  

We lasted over 5 years of living in Israel.  Dan taught in high school but couldn't discipline the students and they were wild.  We had graduated, passed the Hebrew written test, had our teaching certificates and all, and I just kept teaching in the junior high across the street from our apartment in Safed. 

                  Rabbi Mark S. Golub of Jewish Broadcasting Service

This week I was writing and had the TV on in the living room.  I forgot to turn it off and noticed Rabbi Golub  beginning to teach Hebrew.  I sat down to watch his program.  It was about an hour long and he taught Hebrew very slowly, covering the letters in Shabbat;  shin, bet and tuf  שבת. 

 It was a terrific program.  I even learned a few things about the diacritical marks of ah and aw, and a silent letter : that had been left out in my previous life.   Now I want to see the whole program covering the whole alphabet even though I've covered it all in Israel and then some.   

I thought, this may be the way I can tell the rabbi what a wonderful teacher he had been with this program.  I note that he was quite a bit younger when he made it, and it's still a great program.  He's a rabbi on JBS, one of its leaders that I watch when I can on youtube.  I never knew he had also taught Hebrew.  I am proud to say that at age 88, I can still learn Hebrew and this is sticking !!

Mark S. Golub is an American rabbi, media entrepreneur, television personality and educator. He created the first Russian language television channel produced in America, RTN and the Jewish television channel Shalom TV.  Golub is the rabbi of Chavurah Aytz Chayim (Stamford, CT), and is the host of L'Chayim, a talk show he created in 1979 in which he interviews prominent Jewish figures.  Golub attended Hebrew Union College for Reformed Jews – Jewish Institute of Religion for rabbinical school after he graduated from Columbia.

Rabbi Golub is also a historian.  He shares all my knowledge about the history of Israel and feels the same way that I do about it. He's much like our former Rabbi Emanuel Rose of Beth Israel in Portland, Oregon who held a class in debating about Israel.  It was Rabbi Rose that got me reading so many books about Israel and her history, and I wasn't even a member of his congregation, but I did teach for him after returning to Portland from Israel.   

Cyrus II Who Was Persia's King of the World, A Nice Guy, Creator of Human Rights

 Nadene Goldfoot                                                       

                     Cyrus  was born about 589 BCE, II died in 529 BCE in Shushan, Persia.  In the Bible, he is referred to in the Hebrew language as Koresh (כורש‎).   

Darius the Great, the ninth king of the dynasty, traces his ancestry to him, declaring "for this reason we are called Achaemenids". According to Jewish records, Darius I(name of 3 kings of ancient Persia) reigned from 522-486 BCE) inherited the throne of Cyrus.  At the beginning of his reign, he permitted Zerubbabel and the Jews who had returned to Jerusalem to resume reconstruction of the Temple.  

Cyrus II, King of Persia, thought he truly was the king of the world.  He had many conquests, so of course he would have thought that.  He overran the Babylonian Empire, including Palestine, and that in itself was one huge and important empire.  The empire created by Cyrus was the largest the world had yet seen.  

                      Working on rebuilding the Temple 

He kept an enlightened policy towards his subject peoples and in 538 BCE,  granted permission to the exiles of Judah in Babylon to return to their homeland and rebuild the Temple.  This is recorded in the Bible under Ezra 1:1-44;  and in II Chron. 36:22-23. The Edict of Restoration, a proclamation attested by a cylinder seal in which Cyrus authorized and encouraged the return of the Israelites to the Land of Israel following his conquest of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, is described in the Bible and likewise left a lasting legacy on the Jewish religion due to his role in ending the Babylonian captivity and facilitating the Jewish return to Zion. According to Isaiah 45:1 of the Hebrew Bible, God anointed Cyrus for this task, even referring to him as a messiah (lit. 'anointed one'); Cyrus is the only non-Jewish figure in the Bible to be revered in this capacity.

How the Ayatollah's have taken Persia's history and turned it around 180 degrees to be the 2nd worst on the face of the earth after Nazism is such a horrible crime. Today, Iran's citizens have had enough of it and are rebelling. Cyrus must be turning over in his grave.

Cyrus is also recognized for his achievements in human rights, politics, and military strategy, as well as his influence on both Eastern and Western civilizations. We could easily say he was the Father of Human Rights.   The Achaemenid influence in the ancient world would eventually extend as far as Athens, where upper-class Athenians adopted aspects of the culture of the ruling class of Achaemenid Persia as their own. Having originated from Persis, roughly corresponding to the modern-day Fars Province of Iran, Cyrus has played a crucial role in defining the national identity of modern Iran (up to the time of the ousted Shah by the Ayatollahs).

 He remains a cult figure amongst modern Iranians, with his tomb serving as a spot of reverence for millions of people. In the 1970s, the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, identified Cyrus' famous proclamation inscribed onto the Cyrus Cylinder as the oldest-known declaration of human rights, and the Cylinder has since been popularized as such.

 This view has been criticized by some Western historians as a misunderstanding of the Cylinder's generic nature as a traditional statement that new monarchs make at the beginning of their reign.

 Cyrus ruled for about 30 years before he died in 529 BCE, possibly in his capital of Persepolis.  He was succeeded by his son, Cambyses II, who managed to conquer Egypt, Nubia and Cyrenaica during his short rule.

The Jewish exiles regarded Cyrus II as a divine agent for allowing them to return home after being taken in 597 and again in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, possibly thinking he was angelic.  Therefore, some Jews that returned home were the descendants of Jews that had been  gone for almost 60 years and others 48 years. Probably none of them except maybe the very oldest returnee had seen Jerusalem.  For this reason, there were Jews who hadn't wanted to leave Persia and didn't.                                          

Was Cyrus trying to get rid of his Jewish population?  No, he was extending his own power and knowledge over Jerusalem in this way.  What did he know about it since that time span when the Babylonians had conquered Jerusalem through Nebuchadnezzar?  And before the Babylonians, it was  Sargon of the Assyrians in 721 BCE who had taken by force  27,290 Jews of the best quality from their homes back to Assyria.  The Jewish king Hosea of Israel in 726 BCE  had tried to stop Shalmaneser V's siege of Samaria but he had taken it. 

For the next 2 centuries, both the mass of Jews in in Exile in Mesopotamia and in the homeland in Palestine were under Persian rule.  It was under Persian auspices that there took place the return from exile to Palestine which, however, continued to be a Persian province with some degree of local autonomy.  Persia ruled.  

Moreover, the political unity of the Middle East under Persian rule made inevitable considerable movements of population from one part of this area to another which is important for population geneticists today to know about. 

The Book of Esther describes Jews living throughout the 127 provinces of Persia's empire and describes them as being numerous and influential in the capital of Susa  (Shushan). In fact, Haman, the king Ahasuerus's chief minister, felt a lot of resentment towards Mordecai, a Jewish palace official.  Mordecai may have felt fairly important due to the fact that his niece, Esther, was married to the king and Haman had found out about that.  Haman's anti-Semitism carried him to the point of instigating an assassination of all Jews of the empire, and Esther heard about it as it had already started, told the king, and Haman and all his sons were hung.  Mordecai then became the king's chief minister.  Mordecai and Esther were of the Benjamite  tribe. They had tried to keep their Jewishness a secret as the king never knew until Esther told him of Haman's plot.  Haman had been spying on Mordecai. 

I've been brought up thinking that Cyrus was the son of Esther and the king, making Darius also Jewish.  Ahasueros must be the Jewish name as one can't find that in the Persian history books of kings.  

The Book of Ezra narrates a story of the first return of exiles in the first year of Cyrus, in which Cyrus proclaims: "All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD, the God of heaven, given me; and He hath charged me to build Him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah."(Ezra 1:2)

British historian Charles Freeman suggests that "In scope and extent his achievements [Cyrus] ranked far above that of the Macedonian king, Alexander, who was to demolish the [Achaemenid] empire in the 320s but fail to provide any stable alternative." Cyrus has been a personal hero to many people, including Thomas Jefferson, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and David Ben-Gurion.

In 1948, many Jews moved to Israel.  Their numbers fell from 80,000 in 1978 to 20,000 in 1989.  Although the Jews were not persecuted (they said while being watched and heard) after the Khomeini revolution in 1978, many felt uncomfortable under the strict Islamic regime and left for Israel and the west.

Resource:

Youtube: 3 ancient mysteries of ancient cities long lost-world history

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

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

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/cyrus-the-great