Our Magen David: Star of David and The Trump Controversy

Israel's flag has a Magan David smack in the center.  

Nazis recognized the meaning of the 6 pointed star, the Magan David, and forced all Jews to wear one for their identification tag.  

Star of David, Shield of David: this is our 6 pointed star, a Jewish symbol.  

We're talking about King David who ruled Israel in 1010BCE to 970 BCE.  That was a good 3,000 years ago.  

                                                                                   

Israel's flag, seen since 1958.  It's hard to read about current events in Israel and not be familiar with the flag.

It's made of 2 superimposed triangles forming a star or hexagram and has been regarded as a Jewish symbol for at least the past 300 years or longer.        

The Star of David in the oldest surviving complete copy of the Masoretic text, the Leningrad Codex, dated 1008 CE.

One found such a star in a Capernaum synagogue in the 3rd Century C E.   The name of Magen David comes from the 13th Century in Kabbalah.
                                                                                 

Historical flag of the Jewish Community in Prague

It occured  in a specifically Jewish context in Prague in the 17th Century.

                                                                           

The Star of David is a generally  recognized symbol of  modern Jewish identity  and Judaism.

                                                                                 

I look at this sheriff badge and see our Jewish star with the same 6 points in the same places.. 

5 pointed star such as seen on the American flag.  

Finally, the Magen David was adopted by the First Zionist Congress in 1897 as a symbol, and was used on the flags of the Zionist Organization and of the State of Israel, so at least since 1948, people all over the world have known its association with the Jewish State.
                                                                             

Who does not remember seeing such a symbol from the Holocaust?  It was used by the Nazis, in the form of a yellow 6 pointed star, as the Jewish "Badge of shame" for identification purposes.  All Jews had to wear them on their clothing where Nazis were.  Today we use it proudly as our ID.

The outline of the Star of David is very well known, copied by many Sheriff Departments in the states.  It's still the star of David to me when I see the shape.
                                                                     

Why use a Magan David in connection with words-"most corrupt candidate ever"?  His charge is that the Clintons made money illegally, so I don't appreciate the star on a background of dollar bills, either.  Too often anti-Semites attack Jews about being money lenders or some such monetary squabble.
It was changed to a circle quickly after the uproar over it.  
What's worse is the site that they borrowed this from, a white supremacist site, which is also very anti-semitic as well as being against Blacks or Browns or people of any color.  It was they who originally chose the shape of the Jewish star- or sheriff's star, more likely because it's basically Jewish identification.   

       Donald Trump's tweet of late showed a 6 pointed star as the outline for something negative about Hillary Clinton, Trump's opposition in the Presidential race.  He evidently took a defensive posture by denying that it was a star of David.  But Donald and whoever is responsible for using such a star, our star of David is so well known, at least to anyone calling himself a Jew, that it is highly doubtful that it could not be taken for anything else when seen.

Israel's existence has been a struggle for the whole 67 years since its birth on May 14, 1948.  We are sensitive to slurs.  About the only country standing with us has been the USA.  We know that Trump is not anti-Semitic and that his daughter, son-in-law and children are Jewish and that he regards Israel highly.  We hope he has brighter people than the one who chose the outline of the star of David working for him, that's all.  This boo-boo was really quite an affront to many of us.

Updated 7/5/16
Resource: The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_David
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/donald-trump-s-star-david-tweet-about-hillary-clinton-posted-n603161

Jews of Tunisia

Nadene Goldfoot                                               

Tunisian synagogue in Ghriba.  Today, Marcia Fine, author, said, "This is one
 of the places  (Tunisia) where Jews and Muslims live together in harmony. .
They work together, their children play together, they accept the other's traditions.
 Yes, it can work if people remain calm and caring."

Carthage was first a settlement founded by the Phoenicians in North Africa, directly across the sea from Italy.  It probably was the biblical Tarshish.  Tarsus, a town, was in Cilicia to the north of which were situated large forests and copper mines in biblical days.  Possibly, the ships of Tarshish were made there.  Some scholars maintain that the ships of Tarshish refer to vessels traveling to the Phoenician colonies in Sardinia and Spain.                                            

Carthage-notice the amp hi-theaterCarthage, today is a seaside suburb of Tunisia’s capital, Tunis

 Jews were first mentioned here about in 200 CE, but by then were already long-established.  There was a Jewish cemetery in Carthage from the Roman period which had 3,000 Jewish tombs.  Jewish proselytization was "apparently active in the 3rd and 4th centuries. The city started as one of a number of Phoenician settlements in the western Mediterranean that were created to facilitate trade from the city of Tyre on the coast of what is now Lebanon. 
                                                                         

 Justinian, the Byzantine emperor from 527-565 who was so intolerant towards religious minorities and brought about a thoroughgoing anti-Jewish policy,  brought on a conquest in 535 and so the Jewish community declined due to persecution by him. Jews were not allowed to serve in civil or military posts, to own Christian slaves, to give evidence against Christians, or to celebrate Passover at the same time as Easter.  In 553, he issued an edict regulating the synagogue service and forbidding the DEUTEROSIS, the rabbinic expositions.  Justinian didn't allow the rabbinic interpretation mentioned in the synagogue.  This would have been anything under the title of Targum, Mishnah or Midrash, and probably any rabbinic exposition.  In Africa, he outlawed synagogues in 535 and forcibly converted the Jews of Borion.
                                                                         

Samaritans living in Israel now-and their Judaism is more of a basic form of ours today.

 There was an unsuccessful revolt by the Samaritans (the Talmud called them the Kutim, people with their capital at Samaria, originally calling themselves Bene Yisrael or Shomerim-the keepers of the Law, descendants of the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh with an admixture of non-Israelite colonists) and Jews against his rule in Caesarea in 556.   There were many scholars mentioned in the Talmud from Carthage.  Now this area is part of Tunisia.

The city of Kairouan was the greatest center of rabbinic scholarship in the west.  The position deteriorated under the Almohades when many Jews accepted Islam in the 12th century.  These were Moslem sectaries who rose in north Africa and conquered southern Spain in 1149-1174.  In both areas they compelled all non-Moslems to become converted.  Though north African Jewry ultimately recovered from the blow, in Spain it brought final disaster to the communities living under Moslem rule, who embraced Islam or fled to Christian Spain.  Thus, today,  the descendants who are still Muslim could find Sepharic Jewish  DNA in their tests.  Of course, the Spanish Inquisition occurred in 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue.  Jews were forced to convert to Catholicism under penalty of death if they remained in Spain, so many didn't stay.  Many moved next door to Portugal.  .

.  Spanish refugees who settled in Tunisia were different in their customs and way of life from the native Tunisian Jews and founded separate communities.  The 2 groups merged later.

When Tunisia was under Spanish rule from 1535 to 1574, many Jews died or were sold into slavery.  The discriminatory legislation was lifted a little during the 19th century.  Tunisia passed under French protection in 1881, and its Jews were permitted to have French citizenship since 1910.

The community suffered from Vichy laws and the German occupation during World War II.  The members of the Bet Din curt in Tunis are appointed by the bey and their decisions are executed by the authorities.  The Great Council of Tunisia has 3 Jewish representatives.

There were 67,000 Jews in Tunisia in 1959 with 55,000 living in the town of Tunis.  Most of the Jews are merchants, storekeepers, and office workers, but by 1990, the total for the country had dropped to 2,500. as a result of emigration to France and Israel.
                                                                       

Tunisian Jewish lady praying in oldest synagogue-Ghriba 2015
She really looks like my Ashkenazic grandmother.  

Jews on the Tunisian island of Djerba (Jerba) (an island off the coast of Tunisia) trace their roots all the way back to Babylonian exile of 586 B.C., and still pray at Africa's oldest synagogue.  The Jews were saved in 1943 from extermination at the hands of the Nazis by paying a gold ransom.  Most of its Jews left for Israel in 1949.  Less than 1,000 remained by 1990, mostly pious and some deeply learned.  The ancient synagogue in the former place is a renowned center of pilgrimage and the subject of many legends.  

Resource: The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conquest_of_Tunis_(1535)
facebook: author, Marcia Fine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Carthage

Difficulties with Venezuela and Latin America Taking in Jewish Refugees in 20s and 30s.

Nadene Goldfoot                                                                              

Goldfoot, Robinson and Oster Fathers and children, c1945. 
The man on the right holding a little girl is my uncle, Werner Oster, who left Boppard, Germany
for the USA on May 4th, 1939 on the ship, Washington.They landed in New York on May 13th.
He was only 23, but was one of the last Jews to get out of Germany in 1939.
He had been a great soccer player in Germany.

He came to the USA, which was hard to do.  He had to have a sponsor (my great Uncle Max Turn,

who had to take all economic responsibility for him.)  Werner was single then.  A butcher and sausage maker, Max got him a job with my father, a fledgling in the business and 31 years old at the time. 

The picture shows that he married my father's sister and these children are my cousins.  I'm sitting on the 

grass of our back yard and am the oldest.  My father is behind me holding my brother. 

Nazism was not only threatening all Jews on this planet,  it was already starting to take lives in the 30s in Germany.  Some Jews, seeing the writing on the wall, sought out countries that would take them in.  Werner made it to the USA, but his parents and 16 year old red-headed sister died in the Holocaust.

It had been difficult to get into the USA if you were Jewish.  There was a bill in 1921 and another in 1924 to cut the numbers of Jews entering.  " The 1921 measure capped the number of immigrants allowed in at roughly 350,000 per year. It also established quotas from  individual countries, derived from their percentage of the U.S. population. This was a rigged system, as those percentages included how many Americans were descended from that group’s original settlers. Some nations therefore received unusually large quotas, despite minimal immigration in the few years before the bill’s enactment. If ten people had arrived in 1750 from Great Britain, the number of that original cluster’s descendants would be huge by the 20th century. The base year, moreover, was set back a decade to 1910 to exclude from the figures all those who had recently arrived from war-torn Europe after the sea lanes were safe again in 1918. It was not immigrants in general who were blocked, but certain nationalities and religions (JEWS).   Fiorello LaGuardia branded the 1924 act “the creation of a narrow mind that was nurtured by a hating heart.”  We Jews remain as 2% of the USA population.  

So, South America seemed like a good place to go, but they found that most of the countries there required a person to show their baptismal certificate to make sure that they were Christians.  They were not anxious to take in Jews.  Many of the South American countries had already been populated by Germans, and many of those followed the Nazi persuasion.  Naturally, after the war, the Nazis became the refugees and they populated the South American countries easily.
                                                               

Jacobsthal family with aunt and uncle in Amsterdam
 ready to immigrate to Chile February 1938

"These attitudes were reflected in increasingly tight immigration laws introduced throughout Latin America in the late 1930s (Mexico in 1937; Argentina in 1938; Cuba, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Paraguay, and Uruguay in 1939). The results of these laws were striking. Argentina, which had admitted 79,000 Jewish immigrants between 1918 and 1933, officially admitted 24,000 between 1933 and 1943. Another 20,000 Jews entered Argentina illegally, crossing the border from neighboring countries. Brazil admitted 96,000 Jewish immigrants between 1918 and 1933, but only 12,000 between 1933 and 1941."

After Kristallnacht in November 1938, many Jews within Germany decided that it was time to leave. Though many German Jews had emigrated in the preceding years, the Jews who remained had a more difficult time leaving the country because emigration policies had been toughened. By 1939, not only were visas needed to be able to enter another country but money was also needed to leave Germany. Since many countries, especially the United States, had immigration quotas, visas were near impossible to acquire within the short time spans in which they were needed. For many, the visas were acquired after it was too late.
                           

Saturday, May 13, 1939 these Jews had sailed.
Hopeful to land in Cuba,  from Germany on St. Louis escaping
Nazi persecution

                                                 

St. Louis in Havana, Cuba's port

In this climate, Cuban authorities denied entry to most passengers on the ship the St. Louis, when it docked in Havana in May 1939. "With a diminishing supply of food and pressures from Hapag to return to Germany, Captain Schroeder ordered the ship to change heading to return to Europe."  They sailed to their deaths.  Before they had left Cuba, about 2 people had jumped into the ocean committing suicide, knowing what would happen to them.  In November 1941, the German government virtually cut off the flow of Jewish refugees into Latin America when it banned all Jewish emigration from territories under its control.
                                                                   

Coro, Venezuela 

                                                        Venezuela
"The History of the Jews in Venezuela dates to the middle of the 17th century, when records suggest that groups of marranos (Spanish and Portuguese descendants of baptized Jews suspected of secret adherence to Judaism) lived in Tucacas, Caracas and Maracaibo."  Marranos would have originally been Sephardim Jews.  

Jews came to a country that "is predominantly Roman Catholic and speak Spanish. The majority of Venezuelans are the result of a mixture of Europeans, Africans and Amerindians. 51.6% of the population are Mestizos of mixed European, African and Amerindian ancestry and 43.6% of Venezuelans consider themselves White of European ancestry and/or Middle Eastern. Another 3.6% is Black African, while 2% is of full Amerindian ancestry and around 1.2% other races "

Venezuela was one South American country that received Jews back in 1850.  They were West Indian Sephardim.  Like with all places with a Christian population, there were anti-Semitic outbreaks of resentment in this country which is situated on the northern part of the continent on the Caribbean Sea.  Such anti-Semitic outbreaks occurred in Coro in 1855 and again in 1902.  "Coro is the capital of Falcón State and the oldest city in the west of Venezuela. It was founded on July 26, 1527 by Juan de Ampíes as Santa Ana de Coro.  As Neu-Augsburg, it was the first German colony in the Americas under the Welsers.  The temperature in Coro for the whole year continues to range in the high 90s and low 100s.  "The Jewish Cemetery of Coro is the oldest Jewish cemetery in continuous use in the Americas.  Its origin can be located in the 19th century, when Sephardic Jews from the Dutch colony of Curaçao began to migrate to the Venezuelan city of Santa Ana de Coro in 1824."

In the 20th century, eastern Europeans and German Jews (Ashkenazim Jews)  entered the country until barred after World War II  " In 1907, the Israelite Beneficial Society, which became the Israelite Association of Venezuela in 1919, was created as an organization to bring the Jews who were scattered throughout the country together.  Jewish prayer and holiday services took place in small houses in Caracas and towns like Los Teques and La Guaira. By 1917, the number of Jewish citizens rose to 475, and to 882 in 1926." 

.Jews could enter after World War I from 1918 to 1933.   However,  from 1933 to 1945, only 84,000 Jewish refugees were able to come into South America and this was less than half of the number that had come in 15 years before 1933.  Some even managed to enter through illegal channels.
                                                                         

Tiferet Israel Synagogue, Caracas, attacked in 2009

The reason they found such difficulties in entering was of anti-Semitism.  Then, the population feared the economic competition of too many people looking for jobs.  Those that were allowed to come in had to find work in agriculture, but after a while most found there way to cities where they could use some of the business skills.  The populations were made up of a lot of Germans, and they went along with the Nazi's lack of morality.
                                                                       

However, many Jews remained and in Venezuela, they played a leading role in developing the country's trade and in modernizing the capital, Caracas.

By 1990, the Jewish population was about  20,000, and most lived in the capital then.  some 90% of the Jewish youth attended Jewish schools.  "Currently, some 9,000 Jews live in Venezuela, down from about 25,000 in the 1990s. " 

Recently, anti Semitic graffito appeared near a Caracas Metro station: "Be patriotic, kill a Jew." Elsewhere in the city, another reads: "Jewish pigs, another 6 million." this is going on in Venezuela most likely because " Venezuelan President,  Nicolás Maduro,  organized a rally labeled the "March Against Israeli Genocide." There, the Venezuelan president called upon "the Jews that live in our lands" to "stop the massacre, and the murder of those innocent boys and girls."  

He was referring to the Palestinians, which shows he doesn't understand that it's been the Palestinians from Gaza who have been shelling Israel with rockets, mortars and missiles.  These past few weeks the Palestinians in Jerusalem have been stabbing Jews and ramming crowds with their cars.  Just yesterday they stabbed an Uruguayan Jewish  tourist and police.  The Jews in Venezuela are powerless to stop any killings going on in Israel, and this President should knew that.  What he's doing is just instigating more attacks on Jews, both in Israel and in Venezuela.  

Resource: https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007824
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia: Venezuela
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Venezuela
http://jewishcurrents.org/americas-first-illegal-immigrants-39913
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/stlouis.html
http://www.timesofisrael.com/uruguayan-jew-stabbed-to-death-in-suspected-anti-semitic-attack/

Brazil's attitude Towards Jews and Israel

Nadene Goldfoot                                           
The beaches of Fernando de Noronha are promoted for tourism and recreational diving in Brazil.  The archipelago of Fernando de Noronha in 2005 had a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of R$22,802,000 and a per capita income of R$10,001. Based on the written record, Fernando de Noronha island was discovered on August 10, 1503, by a Portuguese expedition, organized and financed by a private commercial consortium headed by the Lisbon merchant Fernão de Loronha.   Marranos had moved to Lisbon, Portugal from Spain.  

The Spanish Inquisition had a great affect on South America's populating the land by Europeans. It was created by the Catholic Church and its function was to punish Jews for heresy.  The Catholic Church held forced conversions, and if the Jews were caught practicing their Judaism, were considered heratics and killed.  As our generation has created fantastic modes of travel, the Inquisition generation had created the most cruel of apparati to punish people to the death.  Thomas de Torquemada was the inquisitor-general in 1483.  His role in this was spelled out from the Papal Bull of 1478.  Portugal was where the Inquisition started their cruelty practices.  Spain was not forgotten. They managed to stamp out the native Judaizers almost entirely by the end of the 16th century.

 As for Brazil, one of the first Brazilian pioneers in 1503 was Fernando de Loronha/ Noronha, thought to be a hidden Jew called a Marrano in those days.  "The history of Brazil starts with indigenous people in Brazil.   Europeans arrived in Brazil at the opening of the 16th century.

The first European to colonize Brazil was Pedro Álvares Cabral on April 22, 1500 under the sponsorship of Kingdom of Portugal. From the 16th to the early 19th century, Brazil was a colony and a part of the Portuguese Empire.

We don't use this word, Marranos" today, but instead they are called Anusim.  Marranos is Spanish for "swine," pigs which are not eaten by Jews.  The term was used in Spain and Portugal for the descendants of baptized Jews suspected of secretly following their Judaism.  Jews there felt they had to hide their religion after the 1391 massacres and the Dominican campaign led by Vicente Ferrer at the beginning of the 15th century.  The Inquisition was introduced into Spain in 1480 and began a horrid campaign of repression, which continued unremittingly after the expulsion of Jews from their country of Catholicism in 1492-yes, the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue.  Today we see most Anusim reuniting with their Jewish heritage and turning out to be avid Jews relishing the freedom of being able to practice their faith openly.

Forced conversions in Portugal began in 1497, which converted almost the whole population of Jews living there as most had moved to Portugal from Spain after living through their horrors.  What the Inquisition did was create Jews into titular but insincere Christians.  The Inquisition came to Portugal's Jews in 1540.  Portuguese immigrants were the objects of persecution in Spain down to the close of the 18th century.

Fugative Marranos escaped overseas to Italy, North Africa and many emmigrated to Turkey where they joined up with other Jews who had moved their earlier.   They even hunted Marranos down in Mexico.

Later on, there were Marrano immigrants from Portugal that came to Brazil.  Those that were deported by the Inquitisition started up the sugar and tobacco industries and developed rice and cotton plantations.

The Inquistition heads in Spain got wind of where these hidden Jews had moved to, like Brazil, and made inquisitional "visitations" which means  head-hunting those who had escaped punishment in 1591 to 1595 which in 1618, finally led many Marranos to leave for other safer countries.

Though Jews have been living in Brazil, the country hasn't really changed their attitude. In 1933, German Jews had escaped persecution and moved there.  Many moved there after WWII.  By 1990 the Jewish population was 150,000 of which 20% were Sephardim.  Their occupations were that of merchants, manufacturers, factory and property owners as well as professional workers.  55,000 lived in Rio de Janeiro, 75,000 in Sao Paolo, 15,000 in Porto Alegre, and others were scattered into smaller communities.

Update 2/12/16: "Brazil's Reaction to the racial laws of the Nazis-

Jews did not have the needed Baptismal certificates in order to get into South American countries from Germany in 1939.  

In 1939, the newly elected Pope Pius XII appointed several prominent Jewish scholars to posts at the Vatican after they had been dismissed from Italian universities under Fascist leader Benito Mussolini's racial laws.  Pius later engineered an agreement —formally approved on June 23, 1939 —with Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas to issue 3,000 visas to "non-Aryan Catholics."

However, over the next eighteen months Brazil's Conselho de Imigração e Colonização (CIC) continued to tighten the restrictions on their issuance—including requiring a baptismal certificate dated before 1933, a substantial monetary transfer to the Banco do Brasil, and approval by the Brazilian Propaganda Office in Berlin—culminating in the cancellation of the program fourteen months later, after fewer than 1,000 visas had been issued, amid suspicions of "improper conduct" (i.e. continuing to practice Judaism) among those who had received visas."

                                                  

Egon Albrecht was a German Luftwaffe ace and recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross during World War II.^[ Albrecht was born in Curitiba, Brazil.^[
After the Holocaust, Brazil granted asylum to thousands of Nazi war criminals.  1,500 to 2,000 Nazis had escaped to Brazil, only one of other South American countries that took Nazis in after WWII.  

Last December, Brazil refused to accept Dani Dayan, Israel’s candidate for ambassador to Brazil, because he lives in, and works on behalf of, Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.   And just last week, Brazil opened an embassy for the PA, with a structure that resembles the Dome of the Rock. The not-so-veiled message is that Brazil supports the Palestinian goal of separating the Temple Mount from its Jewish and Biblical origins.

"Until recently Catholicism was overwhelmingly dominant. Rapid change in the 21st century has led to a growth in secularism (no religious affiliation). Just as dramatic is the sudden rise of evangelical Protestantism to over 22% of the population. The 2010 census indicates that fewer than 65% of Brazilians consider themselves Catholic, down from 90% in 1970. The decline is associated with falling birth rates to one of Latin America’s lowest at 1.83 children per woman, which is below replacement levels. It has led Cardinal Cláudio Hummes to comment, "We wonder with anxiety: how long will Brazil remain a Catholic country?"
                                                                     
Now people are afraid to go to Brazil for fear of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, one of the transmitters of the Zika virus, for Brazil is the first country to be invaded by this mosquito.  Already, states in the USA have found it.  The virus causes "mental retardation and other intellectual deficits in the newborn." "Since it was first discovered in Uganda in 1947, Zika virus was known mostly as a short-lived and mild illness. In 2015, that all changed. An outbreak in Brazil is suspected of causing cases of a serious birth defect, microcephaly, and a potentially crippling disease, Guillain-Barre syndrome." 200 million people are at risk on the globe for they live in the environment condusive to mosquitos' presence.  

'The 2016 Olympics are scheduled for Aug. 5-21 in Brazil, where the Zika virus is spreading rapidly. Speaking at a news conference in advance of the U.S. team's tournament opener against Costa Rica, coach Jill Ellis said there have been "constant conversations behind the scenes" about the virus. Hope Solo, who is on the USA soccer team, is thinking of cancelling out because of this virus."                            
                                                                             
Another way Brazil will be hurt is during Carnival time in Rio de Janeiro.  Although Carnival (Carnaval in Portuguese) is celebrated in towns and villages throughout Brazil and other Catholic countries, Rio de Janeiro has long been regarded as the Carnival capital of the world. The Rio Carnaval is not only the biggest Carnival, it is also a benchmark against which every other carnival is compared and one of the most interesting artistic events on the globe. Almost everyone has heard of Rio Carnaval. Foreign visitors to it alone number around 500,000 every year.  

Rio Carnival is a wild 5-day celebration, 40 days before Easter. 
It officially starts on Friday and finishes on Fat Tuesday with the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday after which one is supposed to abstain from all bodily pleasures.  Good Friday is on the 25th of March this year and Easter is on the 27th, a Sunday.  Fat Tueday, it's beginning is on the 22nd of March and the next day-Lent-is also Purim, the Jewish holiday of celebration and parades and costumes commemorating the freeing of Jews from the clutches of Haman who had the extermination  day of all Jews in the Persian kingdom already in the plans.   This historical episode was written about before 330 BCE.  

Carnival Time is almost here.  Are many going to attend?  As of February 10th, the USA has had 52 reported Zika virus-caused flu cases due to traveling.  Brazil has amended their report and now say "that just 270 were confirmed as microcephaly (baby born with smaller odd shaped head-mentally impaired) that appears to be linked to Zika or other infectious diseases, according to the latest ministry bulletin."

Read more at http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/61096/is-zika-divine-retribution-for-brazils-actions-against-israel-jewish-world/#WPxSq8VoLXsT1S9o.99
Resource: http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/61096/is-zika-divine-retribution-for-brazils-actions-against-israel-jewish-world/?utm_source=Breaking+Israel+News&utm_campaign=7260fd0f2e-BIN_morning_2_16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b6d3627f72-7260fd0f2e-83518689#fwurxUuArLXRG57j.97
Read more at http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/61096/is-zika-divine-retribution-for-brazils-actions-against-israel-jewish-world/#WPxSq8VoLXsT1S9o.99
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Brazil
http://6abc.com/sports/hope-solo-may-skip-olympics-in-brazil-due-to-concern-over-zika-virus/1194985/
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/02/10/466127813/zika-virus-what-happened-when
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/why-the-united-states-is-vulnerable-to-spread-of-zika-virus/2016/01/26/a8c6a9b4-c440-11e5-8965-0607e0e265ce_story.html
http://www.cdc.gov/zika/geo/united-states.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Brazilian
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2117093/Secret-files-reveal-9-000-Nazi-war-criminals-fled-South-America-WWII.html
http://krwg.org/post/fractured-faiths-spanish-judaism-inquisition-and-new-world-identities
Update: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_XII_and_the_Holocaust