myBlessedHope

One of the end time prophecies is the return of the Jewish people to the land God promised them.  Ezekiel foretold of the concept of Aliyah and we are seeing it fulfilled right before our eyes…

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Late Kabbalist, Jewish Org Team Up To Promote Aliyah

As part of their mission to impress upon world Jewry the importance of returning to the Land of Israel, an innovative Jewish organization dedicated to the resurgence of the spirit of Zionism has teamed up with a late Jerusalem kabbalist to spread a long-hidden message of Aliyah (immigration to Israel).

Kumah, an enterprise initiated to reinvigorate a proud Jewish spirit in Israel, took up the project of translating a short and little-known book by kabbalist Rabbi Mordechai Atiyah, when Kumah founder Yishai Fleisher received it as a gift.  Entitled “Lech Lecha”, after this coming week’s Torah reading in which G-d instructs Abraham to leave his home and journey to the Land of Israel, the treatise expounds on the tremendous merit of making Aliyah – and the misfortune of those who will not.

Rabbi Mordechai Atiyah was born in 1898 in Syria. He later moved to Mexico City to lead the Jewish community there, before making Aliyah with his wife and nine children in 1936. Before his death in 1978, he founded the “HaChayim VeHaShalom” (The Life and The Peace) yeshiva of kabbalah, the esoteric and mystical discipline in Rabbinic Judaism, and wrote prolifically, urging Jews to return from the exile and lauding the miracles of Israel’s War of Independence.

“My neighbor, who knows I am passionate about Aliyah, brought me Rabbi Atiyah’s book one day,” said Fleisher.  “I was awestruck.  I knew right away that we had to get this lucid yet mystical message out to the English-speaking Diaspora community.”

Fleisher took on author, translator, and long-time Israel National News editor Hillel Fendel to translate the book into English.

Now, Kumah is publishing Rabbi Atiyah’s “Lech Lecha” just before the Torah portion of that name.  In a modern twist, the English version will not be in print, nor will it be for sale. The new translation will be available for download on the Kumah website, and free of charge.

“Our single hope is that the masterwork of this venerable rabbi will inspire our brothers and sisters to reunite with us here on our ancestral land,” said Fleisher.  “We want them to understand – every single one of them – how very important they are to the future of the Jewish people. And that future is in the Land of Israel.”

Rabbi Atiyah’s work draws from sources in European and in Middle Eastern Jewry, as well as from both Hassidic and Lithuanian scholars.

In “Lech Lecha”, Rabbi Atiyah emphasizes the greatness of those Jews who choose to come home to Israel, and likens them to the patriarch Abraham.  “Fortunate is one who prepares himself properly and merits to hear the Heavenly Voice announcing to him, “Lech Lecha – Go to your Land.”  As the saintly Gerrer Rebbe wrote in his seminal work Sfat Emet on Parashat Lech Lecha:  The Ramban [Nachmanides] asked why the Torah tells us that Avraham was told to go to the Land and receive all the blessings, etc. – without having told us beforehand why Hashem chose him in the first place.  Based on the Zohar, the answer appears to be that this itself is Avraham’s praise. For G-d tells everyone ‘Lech Lecha’- but they don’t hear it!”

He also warns against slandering Israel or those who live upon it.  “If we would like to know the motivation of those who, throughout the generations, stubbornly remain outside the Land or write against the settlement of the Land, it is found in the Zohar (Vayechi, page 225a): ‘For the sacred air and the holy spirit has been removed from them, and they breathe the air and ambience of the impure “other side” outside the Land.’  And if this is said about the holy [Talmudic sages], then how much more so is this true in our own day.”

The Lech Lecha translation project was sponsored by Yossi Gove in memory of Chaim ben Shlomo Gove, his father, and Yoseph ben Yishayahu Masri, his uncle.  The brothers-in-law were both born in Mexico, and were interred in Israel after their deaths.  Many of their descendants have recently made Aliyah, settling in the Land of Israel.

“Both my father and my uncle had an unbounded love for their fellow man,” said Gove.  “And it came from a love of the Jewish people.”  Yet both men were very different.  One, Gove’s uncle Yoseph, did not live a religious life. However, he instilled in his family a strong desire to connect to the Jewish people, a lesson which ultimately led his son to marry a Jewish woman, become religious, and make Aliyah with his family.

His own father, Chaim, was a very pious man, often staying up late into the night to cry over the destruction of the Holy Temple.  On his death bed, Gove’s father extracted a promise that his son would bury him in Israel and come visit him annually on his yartzeit.  Just a few years after making the promise, Gove himself made aliyah with his family.  “My father always said – better to be a ditch digger in the Land of Israel than a doctor in America.”  According to Gove, his father would have made aliyah himself, but had medical problems which Israel was not equipped to deal with at the time.  “My father always missed Israel, though – even though he never even visited.”

Ultimately, says Rabbi Atiyah, our greatness – and our mark in the world – are measured by our actions.  “…G-d’s return to Zion is up to us; He feels bad that we are distancing ourselves!,” says the rabbi.  “It is all up to us… since G-d “goes into exile” with Israel wherever they go, therefore He anxiously awaits Israel’s return to Zion, so that He, too, will be able to return.”

Fleisher encourages everyone to visit the Kumah website to download a free copy of “Lech Lecha” in time for this week’s Torah portion.  “The modern State of Israel is the most exciting project of the Jewish people in 2,000 years,” enthused Fleisher.  “I am proud to be pushing it forward even further by disseminating the work of the late great Rabbi Atiyah.  Together, we can all accomplish his dream, the aspiration of the whole Jewish people.”

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Israel unlikely champ in global real estate

 

JERUSALEM (AP) – Israel, despite perennial fears of war, has emerged as one of the hottest – and least likely – property markets in the world: Since real estate collapsed around the globe in 2008, at least one industry watchdog lists it as the fastest-rising property market on earth.

But with global economic meltdown – and the subprime mortgage fiasco that precipitated it – still fresh in people’s minds, officials are stepping up efforts to rein in its overheated property sector. The fear is that a property bubble could shake confidence in an economy that withstood the worst of the world’s financial crisis.

In the span of months, the central bank has raised interest rates several times and the government is rallying to build new units in this land-strapped country.

“The housing market has set off enough crises, and we’re not going to let that happen in Israel,” Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer said earlier this month in announcing his sixth rate hike in just over a year.

According to Global Property Guide, a trade magazine that monitors the housing market, Israeli housing prices in the second quarter of 2010 rose sixth-fastest in a ranking of 36 countries. Four of the top five, including Singapore and Latvia, were rebounding from sharp price drops. So looking at the past two years ended in June – the last period for which there is data – Israeli real estate clocks in at No. 1.

For Israel, where high-tech and science are booming businesses, the property price spike is the latest claim to fame. But it’s one officials aren’t boasting about, given ample evidence of how an imploding bubble can shatter decades of economic growth.

Examples of the danger of an overheated market litter the globe. From Dubai to Detroit, housing prices plummeted amid the global meltdown beginning in 2008. Defaults on mortgages surged in the United States while in Dubai, the one-time Arab boomtown, property prices tumbled by about 50 percent in 2009.

Amid that downturn, Israel stood firm, shielded in part by the fact that its property price gains were late in coming. While many countries were on a property high during the middle part of the decade, its market was largely stagnant.

Its banks offered nothing close to the U.S.-style subprime mortgages, and Israel’s financial market is not intertwined with the mortgage market – the main reason for the U.S. housing meltdown. Down payment requirements remained high, often equal to more than 40 percent of a house’s value.

Adding to the mix was a conservative local banking sector whose broader dislocation from the global market helped to shield Israel from the worst of the global meltdown.

What fueled the boom, however, were rock bottom interest rates and a relatively low supply of housing. The result was a nearly 30 percent jump in property prices since September 2008.

For Israelis, those gains are hard to swallow.

After extensive house hunting, Ami Kaufman and his wife stopped looking at the “good” neighborhoods of Tel Aviv: At $600,000 for an unrenovated, three-bedroom measuring about 1,000 square feet (100 meters), it’s simply out of reach.

Instead, the couple are looking at a working-class area in the hope it will gentrify like other down-and-out Tel Aviv neighborhoods did. They’re hoping to find something within the year, before they’re pummeled by rising mortgage prices on top of rising housing prices.

“The problem … is demand versus supply,” Kaufman said. “Too many people want apartments. Nothing is going to stop these rises.”

Housing supply, says Vered Dar, chief economist at the Psagot-Ofek investment house in Tel Aviv, was “thrown out of whack” by the mass immigration of some one million immigrants from the Soviet Union 20 years ago. Housing starts surged excessively in the ensuing years, leaving contractors and the government struggling to find a balance.

Over the past five to six years, “they didn’t build enough,” she said, adding that housing was not something that could be imported to balance supply and demand.

“It takes time,” she said.

But it’s time that Israelis, increasingly, can’t afford.

Today, a three-bedroom apartment in Tel Aviv, with its beaches, balmy weather and freewheeling spirit, fetched an average 2.15 million shekels, or $560,000, in June, compared with 1.73 million shekels a year earlier, according to government statistics.

The price of an average apartment in Jerusalem, with its holy sites and mixture of ancient and new, rose 19 percent to 1.55 million shekels, or $403,000, at the end of June from 1.31 million shekels a year earlier.

The prices seem out of sync with the average income in a country where the per capita GDP of some $30,000 is around the OECD average, but taxes are very high.

Parents, once able to buy their children apartments outright or give big chunks of down payments, are no longer able to do so. Even professionals are struggling to come up with the cash for housing. As a result, many find themselves simply unable to buy or are compromising on their dream houses.

The central bank’s efforts to rein in prices with interest rate hikes have provoked government resistance, with the Finance Ministry worried that Fischer’s rate hikes could hurt the economy by strengthening the shekel against world currencies and battering the vital export-oriented high-tech industry.

But officials have also not sat idle. The country’s skyline is dotted with apartment towers and cranes, and a recent reform in the government-run Israel Lands Administration is designed to free up more land for construction.

Even before that reform was enacted, housing starts were up more than 20 percent in the second quarter of 2010 from the first three months of the year. Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, however, told a business conference on Tuesday that it would take up to two years to solve the supply-side problem.

Dar, the economist, has long disputed assessments that Israel was experiencing a housing bubble. She describes it as “more babble than bubble” because the recent boom follows roughly a decade of stagnant prices in inflation-adjusted terms.

If prices continue to rise at the current pace, however, “it will start to bubble,” she said, while predicting that price rises would taper off as supply increases and interest rates climb.

There are signs that might already be happening: Shekel-denominated prices in the second quarter of the year inched down 1 percent from the first quarter.

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