Shula Cohen

Shula Cohen , the true story of a Jewish Lebanese woman living, in the 1940s, in Wadi Abu-Jmil, an area in Beirut that used to gather a big community of Lebanese Jews.

For those of you who never heard of her, Shula Cohen was born in Jerusalem; at seventeen she married a wealthy Beirut merchant, with whom she raised seven children. She became a spy for Israel in Beirut, where her acceptance in Lebanese / Syrian social circles gave her unprecedented access to secret intelligence information.

It started in 1947, on the eve of Israel's war of Independence, when she stumbled on some military intelligence and sent it on to Israel. Immediately, the nascent intelligence services tapped her to smuggle Jewish refugees from Syria across the Lebanese border.
Shula helped thousands of Jews from Syria and Iraq come through Lebanon to Israel. She found escape routes for them by land, sea and air.

In the 1950s, she organized a spy ring based in a Beirut nightclub (Rambo Club), and obtained for the Mossad secret Lebanese and Syrian documents.

She was able to work for fourteen years before she was caught

Shula was arrested and convicted by the Lebanese government in the late 1950s, she spent seven years in prison –where she was repeatedly tortured- and was released in 1967, following the Six Day War as part of a prisoner's exchange.

Amazing that a movie, entitled “Shula Cohen, The pearl”, was playing in cinema theatres in Lebanon.

The reason they allowed it to play is that it distorts the truth and presents Shula as a prostitute/Madam/spy, who slept with high government officials, who gave away young girls to trap important Lebanese personalities; and who smuggled Jewish thieves into Israel.

Because of course, when Jews escape pogroms, it can’t be only to save their lives. In the narrow minded Lebanese mentality, they must be guilty of something. In the movie, the Lebanese Jews are accused of stealing and embezzling money, while escaping; and they are accused of doing a huge damage to the Lebanese economy (!).
In fact, the money they took along was only theirs and their only asset while they left behind lands and houses.

Shula, at the end of the “movie” is shown in prison, as a privileged convict.
The torture scenes are omitted.

Needless to specify that it is an amateur movie with a horrible music background. Costumes are catastrophic. Even the wig of the main actress is of a cheap halloween costume standard.
The acting is a disaster.

This cheap amateur movie was in cinema theatres in Lebanon, while Waltz with Bachir, who has been nominated and has won several important awards, has been banned…

Posting my Passover Seder a bit late...

Thank you Qawer for the Matsot :)

Waltz With Bashir

Waltz with Bashir. by Ari Folman

Because it is forbidden, here in Lebanon, it is more sought-after and therefore one can find it almost everywhere...

I saw it the first time in Paris.

After watching it again, a few days ago, I wondered what got the Christian militias to commit this act. What pushed them to this horror. Why did they choose these victims in specific.
I googled.
From one info to another, from one site to another, I found myself reading on other horrible massacres.

Why haven’t I ever heard of these massacres? Why was it always about Sabra and Chatila?

What about the Karantina and Tel el Zaatar massacre (perpetrated on Palestinian camps too), and what about the Dammour massacre, Dahr al-Wahsh, and October the 13th?
In the name of which selective morality of the Arab press and European press did these other massacres-in which the Israelis had nothing to do- been ignored?

Even when Israelis are mere observer and not directly implicated in a massacre, they are highly judged. This is to confirm their moral superiority, and the high expectation from the public opinion.

But when arabs kill arabs, no one interferes. It is normal. And amnesia hits the press…
Lebanese kill Lebanese, Syrians kill Lebanese, Syrians kill Syrians, Hamas kills Fatah… This, is tolerated. No one asks questions about it. It is in history books.

But Sabra and Chatila is still commemorated in Lebanon.
Go figure.

During the Gaza offensive, at least 620 people were brutally massacred in Congo with axes, bats and machetes in less than three weeks between December and January. Most of them women and children.
Has anyone heard of this? Or the third world doesn’t count…
Africans kill Africans. The world’s attention was too busy judging and focusing on Israelis…

Reality hurts

Is he saying, in other words, "forget about it?"

That's depressing, hopeless but then again, maybe realistic...

Please follow the link below.It was broadcasted on CNN on the 21st of December. It's about Lebanon's lost community.

http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/12/21/perry.lebanon.jews.cnn

Another candle...

Another candle and the world becomes brighter...

Thank you

I’m grateful to my Lubavitch friend who is full of ideas and resources, and who watches out that I’m not being cut out of the rest of the world.

Thanks to him and to the Chabad mouvement that organised the event, I had the chance to watch, live via internet, a public lighting for Channuka, on Sunday and Yesterday.

And for that, I would really like to thank all the Chabad movement, and all it has done and is still doing all over the world, for Jews worldwide, reaching out to them even in the darkest corners of the world…

Keep on lighting the world.

Chag Sameach

I love Hannuka.

This is the Hannukia I found in the attic of my grandmother.

It was about time it came out of the darkness...

Have a brilliant Hannuka