Jewish people’s contributions to humanity

Throughout world history, the Jewish people─even though small in number─have contributed much to humanity. The values of the Torah, especially the Ten Commandments, still represent the moral foundation of most Western societies. The revelation of the God of Israel as the Creator of the universe has transformed entire nations, even in the most remote parts of the earth.
Through the centuries, great Jewish thinkers, artists and scientists have contributed much to mankind. While the Jews make up only 0.25 percent of the world population, one-quarter of all Nobel laureates in medicine, chemistry, physics and the coveted peace prize over the past 100 years have been awarded to Jews.
This great tradition is continued in the modern State of Israel. Only recently, Prof. Dan Shechtman, from the Technion Institute in Haifa, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his ground-breaking research on crystals.
As stated in the book Israel in the World, Israel is probably the only country that already had a world-class university, scientific, medical and agricultural research institutes, and an internationally acclaimed symphony orchestra all before the state was even founded, in 1948.
The agricultural development of the Land of Israel is historic. Israel is the only nation whose desert region is constantly receding. Israel is also the only nation that has more trees on its territory today than 100 years ago.
As a result, Israel’s agricultural know-how is being exported to many African and Asian countries, including China. The Israeli patented “drip irrigation system” is used all over the world. The scientific and technical achievements of the young nation are incredible. Today, Israel’s technological products and advanced systems have become an integral part of the global high-tech revolution If you are among the 100 million users of ICQ who chat online with your friends around the world, you might not know that the software code for this ground-breaking utility was written by three young Israelis. If your computer uses a Pentium, Centrino or Quad Core Processor, they also have been designated and developed in Israel. Did you know that the very first anti-virus software package was developed in Israel? And if your computer is protected from hackers, then you are most likely shielded through a software code developed by the Israeli company Check Point.
Today, many civilian airliners are protected from ground-launched terror attacks through cutting-edge Israeli surveillance software.
It is, therefore, no wonder that all prominent high-tech companies─Microsoft, Motorola, Visco, Intel, IBM and many others─have major research facilities in Israel. Kurt Hellstrom, President and CEO of Ericsson, a world leader in mobile systems, recently said: “We must be in Israel today! It is an innovative and competent country. We are here to stay!”
Today, Israel’s medical research has saved the lives of hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Approximately one medical drug out of 15 being sold in the U.S. comes from an Israeli pharmaceutical company.
Israel’s medical research teams have become world leaders in non-intrusive check-ups and operations and in medical NMR scanning equipment. The medical research laboratories of the Haifa-based Technion and the Weizmann Institute are on the forefront of combating Alzheimer’s disease and multiple sclerosis. Israel truly has become a light to the nations!
(Excerpts: “Israel: a light to the nations” by Dr. Juergen Buehler, The Jerusalem Post Christian Edition, December 2011.)

Seventy years since the “Final Solution” was set in motion

Wannsee of 1942 revisited

On January 27, numerous events were held worldwide to observe the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day that was established by the European Union and United Nations to coincide with the date of the liberation of the Auschwitz
concentration camp.
The month of January also marked the 70th anniversary of the infamous Wannsee Conference of 1942 in Germany, where a small group of top Nazi bureaucrats set in motion the implementation of the “Final Solution.”
The passing of seventy years since Wannsee comes at a time when Germany has been shocked by news of the arrest of a militant neo-Nazi terror cell, which is suspected of a string of racist murders and bank robberies across the country over the past decade. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has described the exposure of the radical right-wing gang as a “disgrace” which has brought shame on the nation.
This begs the question why any German would want to return to the abhorrent evil of Nazism, represented by the cold and calculating decision taken at Wannsee, to systematically murder not just those Jews under Nazi occupation but all of the estimated 11 million Jews of Europe and northwest Africa.

The dark legacy of Wannsee

The Wannsee Conference was a meeting of fifteen senior Nazi officials held at a plush villa on Lake Wannsee just outside of Berlin on January 20, 1942. The meeting was convened by Reinhard Heydrich to inform the administrative heads of various German government departments, with some level of jurisdiction over the Jews, that he had been appointed as the chief executor of the “final solution to the Jewish question.” In the course of the meeting, Heydrich presented a plan, presumably approved by Adolf Hitler, for
…the deportation of the Jewish populations of Europe and French North Africa to German-occupied areas in Eastern Europe, and the use of the Jews fit for labor on road-building projects, in the course of which they were expected to eventually die. According to the recorded Conference minutes, any surviving remnant would be annihilated.
This plan was soon altered as subsequent events unfolded during the war. When Soviet and Allied forces began pushing back the German lines, most of the Jews of German-occupied Europe were sent to extermination or concentration camps, or killed where they lived.

Nonetheless, the Wannsee Conference stands as the clearest single evidentiary proof on which the entire Nazi leadership can be indicted for a collective genocidal plot to eradicate all of European Jewry. Although no written order by Hitler to exterminate all Jews has ever been found, certain comments he made around this time made it clear he wanted to rid his realm of them.
Holocaust deniers claim that the Wannsee Conference decided on no more than the “evacuation” of the Jewish population of Europe to the east, with no reference to killing them. However, Heidrich went on to say that in the course of the “practical execution of the final solution,” Europe would be “combed through from west to east” to avoid “a new Jewish revival.”
Afterwards, Adolf Eichman sent copies of the conference minutes, styled the “Wannsee Protocol,” to all the participants. It was not until 1947 that a copy of the minutes was found by an American prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials.
Germany shocked by festering neo-Nazism
In November 2011, authorities in eastern Germany stumbled by chance onto a group of fanatical neo-Nazis called the “National Socialist Underground.” The discovery of the hate cell─committing violent crimes mostly against Jews and foreigners─has been a wake-up call for the entire nation. Much of the problem centers around youth in eastern Germany, where the former Communist regime did not install in schools a sense of national guilt about the Nazi era, as the government did in West Germany.
Instead, the Soviet satellite focused on railing against the evils of capitalism, leaving a door open for the Hitler cult to re-emerge. There was also less exposure to foreigners in communist East Germany.
Meanwhile, in a related development, Israel and Germany are cooperating in a new legal campaign to locate and put on trial thousands of suspected Nazi war criminals, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Yet is should come as little solace that, while some Nazi war criminals have reached old age without ever paying a price for their crimes, a new generation of Germans is longing to emulate their deeds. On the 70th Anniversary of Wannsee, we should all take note.
(Based on “Wannsee revisited” by David Parsons, The Jerusalem Post Christian Edition, January 2012. For additional news and articles, visit www.jpost.com.)

And the nations will see your righteousness… (Isaiah 62:2)

Israel’s ties with Africa

Theodor Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement, revealed in his book Altneuland (Old New Land) that he not only carried a burden for founding a Jewish state, but that he also had a heart for Africa. “Once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my own people, I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans.”
Once Israel won its independence in 1948, Herzl’s vision of working to better the lot of Africa was carried out, to some extent, by some of the nation’s early leaders. Foremost among them was Golda Meir, who led the drive to establish close bonds with sub-Saharan Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. But in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, Arab rulers sought to exact revenge for their defeat on the battlefield by forcing African countries to sever diplomatic ties with Israel. Later Arab states promised newly independent nations of Africa to provide them with cheap oil and financial aid─promises which never materialized.
In the years since, Israel has slowly sought to repair the rupture in relations with African countries, but many on both sides of the equation sense it is now time for Africa to fully reconnect with Israel. “In the coming years, Africa will be a big player on the international arena. We need to develop the continent. We need a new kind of partnership [with Israel] based on mutual benefit, a win-win partnership,” said Congo’s minister of energy and hydraulics, at a meeting in December of Israeli diplomats and African ambassadors stationed in Tel Aviv. Israel has managed to cause the desert to blossom, as foretold in Scripture (Isaiah 35:1,”the wilderness and the desert will be glad…”). In fact, Israel’s vanguard drip irrigation systems and desalination plants can be found across the globe. (Excepts: Emanuel Mfoukou, JPost.com)
Thank you, Lord, that this Isaiah 35 prophecy has come to pass.

Seeking new friends to counter Islamism

Theodor Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement, revealed in his book Altneuland (Old New Land) that he not only carried a burden for founding a Jewish state, but that he also had a heart for Africa. “Once I have witnessed the redemption of the Jews, my own people, I wish also to assist in the redemption of the Africans.”
Once Israel won its independence in 1948, Herzl’s vision of working to better the lot of Africa was carried out, to some extent, by some of the nation’s early leaders. Foremost among them was Golda Meir, who led the drive to establish close bonds with sub-Saharan Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. But in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, Arab rulers sought to exact revenge for their defeat on the battlefield by forcing African countries to sever diplomatic ties with Israel. Later Arab states promised newly independent nations of Africa to provide them with cheap oil and financial aid─promises which never materialized.
In the years since, Israel has slowly sought to repair the rupture in relations with African countries, but many on both sides of the equation sense it is now time for Africa to fully reconnect with Israel. “In the coming years, Africa will be a big player on the international arena. We need to develop the continent. We need a new kind of partnership [with Israel] based on mutual benefit, a win-win partnership,” said Congo’s minister of energy and hydraulics, at a meeting in December of Israeli diplomats and African ambassadors stationed in Tel Aviv. Israel has managed to cause the desert to blossom, as foretold in Scripture (Isaiah 35:1,”the wilderness and the desert will be glad…”). In fact, Israel’s vanguard drip irrigation systems and desalination plants can be found across the globe. (Excepts: Emanuel Mfoukou, JPost.com)
Thank you, Lord, that this Isaiah 35 prophecy has come to pass.
“Israel is actively looking for friends and allies further afield to counterbalance dramatic Islamic gains in the immediate neighborhood,” a senior government official said in December as the Islamists coasted to a sweeping victory in Egypt’s parliamentary elections.
According to the official, the collapse of so many Arab regimes in the region─coupled with Iran and Turkey sitting on the sidelines waiting to exploit the situation for their own benefit─has Israel looking at clusters of states as allies and possible counterweights.
The first is the eastern Mediterranean circle, made up of Greece, Cyprus, Romania and Bulgaria. These countries, historic rivals of Turkey, are concerned about Ankara’s widening reach and intentions, and this has brought them into a relationship with Israel.
As mentioned, a number of African nations form a group that is concerned about Islamic terrorism at home and that has led them to growing political and security co-operation with Israel. The third cluster includes yet unnamed countries in the region that are in contact with Israel on issues regarding Iran and the changes in the region.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently made a couple of opaque references to ties with these countries, believed to be Persian Gulf countries. One Israeli official said the prime minister was signaling to the Israeli public that, despite the turmoil roiling the Middle East, there were some “points of light.” And even as Israel is casting its eyes elsewhere for friends, it has not closed the door on ties with Egypt, the government official was reported as stating.
(Excerpts: Shifting sands, changing alliances, Herb Keinon)
We praise the Lord that among the world nations He has preserved a few who may come to Israel’s aid.

CFI Jerusalem Conference, June 4–7, 2012 Understanding the times

Israel and the Church

Bible prophecy is the key to the end times, and the Church should be setting aside regular Sunday services and meetings during the week to inform everyone how to pray for Israel. All end time events center around the Epicenter, Jerusalem─the signal for the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus. We know that when the Lord builds up Jerusalem, He will appear in His Glory (Psalm 102:16). Israel’s restoration is also a key to unlocking untold blessings to the Church.
Join us for our May 29–June 10 Abraham’s Journey tour to Israel. We will travel from north to south and learn about Abraham’s life in the Land. In Jerusalem we will participate in CFI’s conference and hear Lance Lambert, Israeli Government representatives and others.
This Year in Jerusalem! Contact us at cfiusa@cfi-usa.org or 704.552.1283.
Space is limited.
Call now!