PRAY FOR ISRAEL
When I was small, I saw Jewish men that had been liberated from Nazi concentration camps. They had the tattoos on the inside of their forearms. Every Jew was tattooed with a number to identify them. Yet without the tattoo, they looked like anyone else. You could not tell a Jewish man from any other man without that tattoo.
How I saw them was in a cafe that my mother and father used to take me to for lunch. It was one of those small cafes with tables and chairs and a lunch counter. There was no air conditioning back then. There were ceiling fans. And they had screen doors because they would leave their main door open for people to come in. It was very casual yet formal at the same time.
The first time I saw one of these men, I asked my mother why he had numbers on his arm. She told me about the concentration camps. The one thing I noticed is that these men were always very, very silent. Silence radiated from their being. I know now it was because they had trained themselves that way in order to survive, to blend into the shadows, to not be noticed by the Nazi guards. I have never forgotten those men. I used to see them quite often.
I love Jewish people, not only because I got to know some of these men, but because of reading the Diary of Anne Frank, and watching the Nuremberg trials on the news. They would show some of the horrors that they found in the concentration camps. All of the Jews in Europe had been rounded up by Hitler and sent to these camps. Most did not survive. The Nazis gassed them and did other horrible things to them. The ones that survived were taken by ship back to their homeland, Israel.
They were promised by the United Nations that they would never again suffer such horrors and that they would never have to leave their homeland again. And now this is happening. And now the world has turned its back on Israel.
This was all predicted in the Bible. But I never thought I would see it in my lifetime. It was always something that was happening in the future. But here it is.
I place my hope in the God of Israel. His is called Hashem, Adonai (my Lord) and Yahweh (but that is a very special name and not to be uttered.) When asked his name by Moses for the children of Israel, who at that time were captives in Egypt, Hashem replied: 'My name is 'I am who I am.'' So He is who He is. He is my deliverer. He is Israel's deliverer. Please pray for Israel.
Catherine Cummings Bandera, Texas
