Abe from Out In Style, an online retailer of camping, military, and law enforcement related products, has been kind enough to offer Jews in Green readers a 10% discount on all orders.

FYI: They sell kosher meals and rations!

Abe is offering this purely as a gift from one Jew to another.  Just follow this link and use coupon code: HH1818 when you check out and you will receive a 10% discount on your order.

Stars and Stripes has an interesting article about Rabbi Brett C. Oxman’s (LTC, USAF) recent travels to Sasebo, Japan.

It shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise that Sasebo has a very small Jewish military community.  Lt. Howard Polanski, a dentist at the base’s Navy Branch Dental Clinic, and his wife Nina, helped to organize chaplain Oxman’s visit.  Lt. Polanski volunteered to serve as the Jewish lay leader in Sasebo and requested some help from Rabbi Oxman on how to engage the other Jews on base.

So far they have established regular kiddush meetings with a few of the Jews on base.  Nothing works quite like food to bring people in…

The JWB Jewish Chaplains Council has a supply of hard-back Silverman High Holiday prayer books (Conservative) available for lay leaders who need them.  If you don’t have a lay leader at your base and still have a significant need for the prayer books, I would let them know your situation and you may be able to work something out. 

To order the books, send an email to Rabbi Landman.  Be sure to indicate the quantity requested and to whom they should be shipped.

* On a similar note, they are also in need of the pocket-szie JWB High Holy Day prayer books (small, green or black cover).  These are no longer available and may well be wasting away in some carton in a chapel storeroom.  If you know of any not being used, the JWB JCC is always in need of them.  Contact Rabbi Landman with any information.

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Captain Alan Bright (USAFR), a rabbi from a Montreal congregation, was recently called up to active duty to serve as the Jewish chaplain at Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

For those that don’t know, Ramstein is the main spot for medevacs from Iraq that need critical care as well as the first stop for most bodies before their return to the States.  While not the most pleasant duty, serving as the sole Jewish chaplain at the hospital is certainly an important role to fill.

You can read more about Rabbi Bright in the Canadian Jewish News.

The following are excerpts of an article by Jennifer Kavanaugh from the Metro Daily West News*

Life sometimes forces choices that are too awful to be considered real choices, and William Feinberg weighed his fate as a 19-year-old Army soldier in a World War II prison camp.

“It was dangerous, no matter which way you go,” Feinberg said. “If I said I was Jewish, the Germans were going to treat me badly. If I threw away my dog tags, possibly I could have been executed for being a spy. So I finally decided to step forward and admit my religion.”

Feinberg’s choice led to a three-month ordeal of starvation, slave labor and exposure to the German winter, as well as painful memories and a horrible front-row view of inhumanity. But it also may very well have saved his life.

Feinberg served in the 423rd Infantry Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division, and he and thousands of his fellow soldiers became surrounded and captured by Germans a few days into the Battle of the Bulge.

The Germans marched the prisoners for days, refusing to give them gloves. Feinberg remembers going that entire winter without gloves.

“They wouldn’t let us put our hands in our pockets,” Feinberg said. “They were sadistic.”

Feinberg said the Germans packed the prisoners into freight cars, where they rode for days without bathroom facilities, and were fed cabbage soup and roughly sliced pieces of bread. They arrived in the German prison camp Bad Orb on Christmas Day 1944.

After Feinberg revealed his Jewish ancestry, his captors sent him to Berga Am Elster, an offshoot of one of the death camps. There, he and about 350 other people were forced into manual labor, digging tunnels into the side of a mountain for a munitions factory.

Read more...

We’ve reached a milestone here on Jews in Green.  We just had our first official news story about the site.  An interview I did with Dan Sieradski is on the front page of Jewsweek! 

You can read the specific Jewsweek article HERE.

A special thanks to Dan and Jewsweek for such a great article!

UPDATE: Dan’s article was bought by Hillel and is now on thier website too.  See it HERE

UPDATE 2: We’re now on the Hillel Homepage!

The following are excerpts of an article by Andrew Lightman from the Newton Tab*

Sixty years after his assault on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, Melvin Bloom remembers the noise and smell most vividly.

The dunes were steep and high, like a wall, said Bloom, an 81-year-old Navy veteran. The Germans had dug in and were blasting the beach with a cannon, machine gunners littering the water and sand with a slew of bullets.

The night before the invasion, as the ship crossed the English Channel towards Normandy, the water was so rough from the wind and the rain that nobody slept.

And as the coast, D-Day and H-Hour drew nearer, Bloom’s boat was at the front of the line and hit the waters at Omaha Beach more than an hour before the invasion was set to begin.

Aboard his ship was Wallace Maske, an enormous man of German descent, with hands twice the size of Bloom’s.

“I was Jewish and we were going to fight the Germans and another kid on the boat was German and were the closest friends, to this day,” he said. “It shows that a German and a Jew could be friends through the war.”

“Wherever I went, he went with me. He wanted to make sure I was taken care of.”

Read more...

While browsing Amazon.com the other day, I happened to come across this readers list of books of interest to Jews in the military.

The list is simply titled, Jews in the Military and was complied by jmpersons, “A Jew in the Military.” I haven’t read many of the books myself, but it does seem like a pretty comprehensive list.

Nate Bloom of the Jewish World Review recently wrote a story honoring the Jewish service members who have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

In addition to describing the lives (and deaths) of the soldiers, marines, and sailors, Bloom talks about the challenge of distinguishing Jewish casualties from non-Jews.  Mainly because, “the Defense Department no longer keeps statistics on the religion of their personnel. Moreover, Jewish chaplains observe a policy of strict confidentiality regarding the faith of service personnel and will neither confirm nor deny whether a war casualty was Jewish.” This is complicated by the fact that some Jews hide their religion because of fear of discovery by the enemy.

While some may see the difficulty of tracking Jewish personnel as a good thing, it can make the work of organizations like the Jewish War Veterans very difficult.  If you have a thought on the topic, leave a comment below.