Frankfurt was a layover for 4 hours where I raced out of the airport after an hour of getting off the plane and processed and quickly checked out the Jewish part of the East side. I had one hour to enjoy. Then I raced back to the airport two hours before the flight and took off to Portugal where I raced around again to get kosher food, figure out how the transportation worked, and went to half of the activity that I came for only to fly out the next morning. There was no time for relaxation but there was civilization because I was any place but Israel.
Frankfurt is a lovely city even though it's mostly a rebuild after the war. They have had less time to build a city than Israel has had and they built it from ruins but the place is far nicer, more efficient, and classy than anything in Israel. And the people are so polite. The airport security is a bit much, but they are very polite about it. The Germans are the opposite of Israelis and I mean that as a complement to the Germans. (I'm not forgetting what Germans are capable of in the negative sense.) The Frankfurt airport is massive and runs to perfection, every last piece of it. And what about Portugal, not the perfection of Germany, but elegant, quaint, and full of the sweetest people I have ever met in my life. Lovely architecture too. I stayed in a very clean and quaint hotel: $65 for the night. Try to find something in Israel for less than $100.
But the trip was over in a flash. With heavy hearts we headed back to Israel. Already in the waiting area at the Frankfurt airport we got the whiff of the Israel style, people who have no consciousness of one another. Nobody talks to each other but they stare. It caused me to realize that in Germany and Portugal nobody stares at you. If they catch your eye they smile or say hello. Not so the Israelis. They stare and when they catch your eye they glare.
I saw a guy with a Brooklyn Dodgers cap and I said, "Hey Brooklyn Dodgers." He said nothing. The only person who talked to us was the German lady at the magazine store. She was friendly and helpful, a total contrast to everyone in the waiting area. Oh, one American yeshivish man walked over and asked if we could do Maariv. He disappeared for twenty minutes and then returned and said it again. I said, "Boarding is in 10 minutes. I doubt that there's time." He said, "You think the plane will leave on time?" i reminded him that we were in Germany where punctuality is the national pastime. If he were a normal person, he would have said, "Oh good point." But he had his comeback line of course, "If that's the case they should have started boarding at 4:30." Hey guess what, they did start boarding at 4:30, an hour and a half before the flight. In fact this confused me because it was supposed to be a two hour layover and as soon as I left the plane from Portugal and looked at the flight board it said boarding. I realize now that the boarding for this international flight from the Frankfurt airport starts really early, not 15 minutes before. That's one of the secrets to being on time, you get there very early and wait. So this one person who spoke to us, and only about Maariv, was clueless on every point and crazy making.
There was a youth soccer team that was very loud and the person I was with noted the difference from the Portuguese youth team that we had seen in Portugal that was so well behaved.
We wondered how the Israeli boys would be on the flight, and we learned. They were out of control, shouting, having pillow fights, punching one another. The flight attendant - this was Lufthansa - begged them to sit down. The plane had balancing issues and needed everyone to stay in their seats. In fact, as I was boarding one of the attendants told a man that she had to switch his seat because of weight balancing issues. But these wild boys would not sit. And their coaches made at most meager attempts to quiet them, as this woman struggled with them. One coach said 'shush' one time. Another muttered "shev," one time. The wildness went on for four hours. The coaches were nowhere to be seen.
One of the boys grabbed a bottle of water from the serving cart, which is such a no-no on a plane or in most places in the world. You don't just grab things. Another poured ice all over the floor. The attendant, trying to stay calm said to him, "This is not nice what you have done." She, like every German I met, spoke incredible English. The boys knew only Hebrew.
They had to be told about a dozen times to wait their turn for this or that. They pressed the service button again and again. We weren't even in Israel yet and we were all suffering from Israelis. People couldn't sleep. The whole flight like this. The chilul Hashem was off the charts.
The boys, who were not wearing yamulkas, ate the traife chicken that was served. An elderly Haredi woman offered one of them her meal. I don't know if she was hungry or not but apparently in her tzidkus she wanted that one boy should eat something kosher once in his life. That was the one bright spot of the flight to Israel.
While the view above Frankfurt and Portugal was full of greenery and water, the view about Tel Aviv is all congestion, apartments packed together. Ugly.
When we landed I went to apologize to the stewardess on behalf of the boys but there was an Israeli woman already doing that. However, she was full of emotion of course, and anger. She was outraged by the boys, outraged I tell you. I don't imagine that her histrionics were much of a comfort to the exhausted stewardess. When I got my chance I told her, "I'm sorry the boys were so wild. You were very good with them." The attendant next to her thanked me. The whole crew was aware of yet another Israeli chillul Hashem, the kind that goes all over the world, to the point where some vacation spots refuse to serve Israelis. NO, it's not antisemitism. It's anti-animalistic behavior.
Note, they weren't evil boys. If you spoke to them, they weren't terrible, like the one who plopped down in the seat in my row when my travel companion went to the bathroom for a minute and asked me if someone was sitting there. He seemed to feel bad about it, and he got up. That shows you how bad their chinuch is, that they are not terrible kids by nature, it's the Israeli culture that is destroying them. As for the one who was insulting another guy, calling him ugly and a ben zona even though it seemed to hurt feelings, I'm not so sure.
We left the plane and entered the airport which is such a dump compared to Frankfurt. We go to the passport machine and it doesn't work. We go to the next machine and it doesn't work. The third one worked. We go to the ATM machine and it doesn't work. What was that about the incredible Israeli technology and all the modern inventions?
We figure, at least in Israel we can get kosher food but we couldn't. Three food places were open in the unsecured area at the late hour. The first place wasn't kosher at all. The next had some kind of certificate that I didn't recognize but it didn't have much food anyway. 9 soups were listed, none were available at that time. There was only some boxed salads. The third place didn't have a certificate.
We left the airport and tried to board the train but the next one was in two hours. This was quite a contrast to Germany and Portugal both of which had clean, efficient, and regular train service. We were told to go the shuttle. And so we walked to it only to find a bunch of very sketchy looking Arabs who seemed to run it. I am not one of those who walks around with hatred of Arabs. I have found living here that some of them appear to be most decent people around. But these guys looked scary. I recall the incident where a young woman got on a taxi van in India and was sexually molested for three hours along with her male companion. There was a hashish machine, a hookah, I don't know what they call it, on the floor of the van! I wasn't about to board this with my travel companion.
So we went to the taxi area, passed a tower that had the ribbon symbol for hostages. Back to the land of pain I thought. We got a cab that ripped us off. He was supposed to use the meter but didn't and he overcharged us.
So what are the advantages of the State of Israel? There are none. It is not elegant, it is disorderly, the people are wild and rude, and you can't even get kosher food so easily. It's not even Jewish. It's full of halacha violating people. This is a Jewish state? The airport is named for a murderous heretic. In the baggage area is a mural of an Israeli soldier, long haired with his hair in a bun, kissing his equally non-religious bride. So in the airport, where we couldn't find any kosher food, there is an immodest mural of a secular soldier. There were no murals of religious people. That's Israel, war and traifkite.
Israel is a delusion. It's not a real country. It is the manifestation of the yetzer hara of some disturbed rebels who have no regard for the lives of other people.
I say again, and I say it deeper every time, aliyah pushers are devils. Anybody who lives in this mental asylum and doesn't warn others away is a devil. The early Christians were Torah observant in the sense of keeping mitzvos and studying Torah. That's what aliyah pushers are like. They fool you because they wear yarmulkes and talk the frum talk. Some, like Hershel Schachter, are Torah scholars. So you give him credibility as he tells you that Israel is a wonderful place to live and that you should and must move here. He doesn't live here of course. He lives the life of Riley in New York with world class medical care, yearly earnings of several hundred thousand dollars as he studies Torah and teaches and relishes in cavod. When he comes to Israel he's escorted around. Many of his kids live in affluence in North America. Evidently, they didn't take his brainwashing about Israel seriously or maybe his fatherly instincts made him hold back. He lives the life of a Harvard professor basically and he's as out of touch with reality as a college professor. William F. Buckley once said something like, “I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” So it goes. Anybody who tells you to live in Israel is as trustworthy about reality as a college professor (less actually) or about religion as a Jews for J. Not just RHS, but half the faculty at YU, many other rabbis not all of whom are Modern Orthodox, the entire staff at Nefesh b'Nefesh (they kill one soul after the next). These are dangerous people who pretend to be Orthodox Jews for they push you to move to Israel which is a dangerous place on every level.
Afterthought from Rav Moshe Sternbuch:
We can understand why Eisov wanted to come out, but Yaakov was being taught Torah by an angel at the time, so why would he have wanted to come out? The Brisker Rov is said to have commented that even being taught Torah by an angel is not worthwhile at the cost of having to live in close quarters with an evil person. Even though there was no obvious detrimental effect, just being in close proximity to a person like Eisov is damaging, especially for someone like Yaakov, whose image is engraved underneath the Kisei Hakavod.Rav Sternbuch was once asked whether a child should be sent to a cheder with excellent teachers and a very high academic level, but the class in question also has some boys with bad middos, or to another institution with a much lower level of learning but in which the boys in the class did not have bad middos and came from strong homes. Rav Sternbuch instructed the parent to choose the institution with the better boys because that was the most important issue, since even a minority of children with bad middos can have a very detrimental effect on their friends.
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