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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 3 months

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by Kassy Dillon

“We’re trying to get people to speak up,” Charlie Rich told Poupko when asked why the couple was on the street outside his home. “We’re advocating for peace.”

“How? By harassing Jews?” Poupko asked. “Harassing Jews is peace? What the heck is wrong with you?”

Poupko accused Thabisa Rich of engaging in “Nazi behavior,” to which Charlie Rich responded, “well, you do have a sign that says you support Israel.”

Thabisa Rich encouraged others to come back to the street with her during a livestream after she left the scene.

“You tell me when you want to come back and ask for a ceasefire and ask for this people to stop their hate because they think that they are white and privileged and that they think that their religion is superior than the rest,” she stated. “I need people to show up to this very same street. We need to find a time to come back and show up in numbers and say no, enough is enough.”

“America is a country full of hate and racism and people need to just be honest and understand that is just what it is,” she said.

Poupko said the mayor called him on Monday over concern about the incident.

“The reason he called is because there are many Jews in the neighborhood, and many were very shaken and felt targeted,” Poupko said, adding that his family recently moved to New Haven and had their first pro-Israel sign stolen last month.

Thabisa Rich invoked anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish power and said she would not condemn the terrorist group Hamas in now-deleted posts to her Facebook.

Since Hamas’s October 7, massacre of over 1,000 Israelis, Rich has frequently commented on the war, including stating on February 3 that she does “not condemn Hamas.”

On November 20, she voiced her frustration with people who are not speaking up about the war by invoking anti-Semitic tropes about Jewish money and power.

“Your silence is starting to signify complacency,” she wrote. “I promise I understand that some of y’all have your pockets lined with bosses who are Jewish.”

During the Super Bowl on Sunday, Rich said she was “sick of these Jew focused ads [sic].”

“We have been witnessing Jewish folks inflicting hate,” she said in another post the same day. “It’s not made up.”

Thabisa Rich, who often discusses her status as an immigrant, had multiple now-deleted posts to her Facebook about her disdain for the United States.

In multiple posts to her Facebook she expresses her disdain for America, despite living in the country as an immigrant from South Africa, including calling the U.S. “Amerikkka” and claiming it is run by “DICKtators.”

She commented on the situation with Poupko as well, stating that she was “insulted and intimidated by the jewish family (that just moved in 3 months ago) [sic].”

“She wrote on social media she is being harassed by a Jewish family when she is the one who showed up with a megaphone in front of my house,” Poupko said.

#thabisa rich #harassment #hamas #gaza #south africa #rabbi elchanan poupko #new haven connecticut

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the-garbanzo-annex-jr · 4 months

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by Elchanan Poupko

For centuries, rabbis around the world get up on Shabbat Zachor and speak about memory, never about violence. Not once in the past 2000 years of Jewish history – and that is a vast record to draw on – was the Biblical account of Amalek used to evoke revenge. It was always used to evoke memory. The imperative to remember the unprovoked atrocities committed against our own innocent communities.

The name of Amalek was invoked to remind us of the ubiquitous nature of antisemitism, the only hate in the world directed against people who are unknown to those seething with hate for us. People like the Houthis in Yemen who never saw a Jew in their life, yet are determined to destroy the Jewish state; Nazis in Germany who traveled hundreds of miles away from home to kill Jews in Belarus, Lithuania, Hungary, and Morocco even though they had never seen or known much about those Jews, that is the kind of evil we speak about when invoking the memory of Amalek.

In our generation, when speaking about that kind of senseless hate, we speak about the Hamas terrorists who woke up on the morning of October 7th and were willing to gable away their lives and futures to murder and burn alive people like Canadian peace activist Vivian Silver, someone who spent her life driving Palestinians from Gaza to medical appointments in Israel’s best hospitals. We invoke the memory of Amalek when we encounter something so evil it defies any logical explanation.

It is appalling to see how many people rushed to the Bible to judge Israel’s use of the memory of Amalek before looking at its use for the past 2000 years, most notably during the Holocaust.

While Germany starved to death and killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, Jews secretly published a newsletter called Kol Hamidbar in which the emaciated Jews wrote: “Many nations waged war against the Jews and did bad unto them, but Amalek, that is something absolutely different. Amalek put the destruction of Jews as a goal, a program, a method; premeditated, in cold blood, sadistically, according to a plan, organized, and with laws… Amalek and their grandson Haman are not satisfied with the killing of individual Jews…they would like to destroy the entire nation and eliminate Judaism.”

These words ring powerfully to any Jew who has seen what Hamas terrorists did on October 7th. The senseless hate that defies any logic or pattern of human conflict is simply unexplainable. The kidnapping of grandmothers from their homes and burning of babies and little girls alive with no reason whatsoever has no other language.

Jews invoke this language of Amalek when we encounter the world’s oldest hate, acted on with cruelty no human can explain. Jews have done so countless times while remembering the Holocaust and also did so while seeing the evils of Hamas on October 7th.

Like Jews after the Holocaust, the memory of Amalek’s unforgivable horrors reminds us of the need to take action. How does that action look? Years ago, speaking to congregants in synagogue, here is what I said as I spoke of the story of Amalek, and I was not the only one:

“The greatest heed to the call ‘Yidden, Nekama – Jews, Revenge’ inscribed in blood in Slabodka, Lithuania, is not going back to that town and place or to those perpetrators; it is that there are today thousands of students in Israel learning in Yeshivas named Slabodka. It is that we are undeterred in leading proud Jewish lives, laser-focused on the future while refusing to forget the past.”

Jewish revenge never looks like the acts of our enemies. We never follow in the inhumane footsteps of those who committed the unthinkable against us. This is true also concerning the horrors of October 7th.

#amalek #amalek libel #jews #revenge #october 7 #hamas #gaza #shabbat zachor

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