Shalom My Gantseh Megillah Family and Friends,

John Paul II’s death monopolized the news this week. The major television networks and all of the 24 hour cable news services devoted enormous swaths of air-time to this event. This raised my curiosity. Undoubtedly, the Pope is an important and influential figure, even for those of us who do not follow his religious teachings. But, why is so much attention being paid to this man who was essentially the leader of one religious sect? Most other religious leaders receive barely a fraction of this attention either in life or in death.

All I had to do was open my online encyclopedia and one graph gave me my answer. There are 1.1 billion Roman Catholics in the world today. 1.1 billion! I can’t even comprehend such a huge number of people. By sheer number, the Pope is one heck of an important world figure.

This got me thinking about us Jews. When I began publishing the Gantseh Megillah my purpose was to bring together an online Jewish community and to promote our culture, heritage and lifestyle. The Internet is a marvelous opportunity to connect world-wide and building a cyber-shtetl seemed to me an important thing to do.

Looking at the graph I found in the encyclopedia brought that concept home to me like a klop in kup. Although I always realized Jews were a minority in the world, it never really sunk in just how much of a minority we really are. While Catholics number 1.1 billion and all of Christianity adds up to over 2 billion, we Jews number a mere 14 million. We are number 6 out of the world’s top ten organized religions coming in between Sikhs and the Bahai Faith.

What I am trying to say here friends, is that we really must stay connected. Jews have contributed a vast amount of good to our world, and we should be extremely proud of the tremendous influence and achievements we have attained. At the same time, we must always be aware of our vulnerability. We cannot take our place in the world for granted. Anti-Semitism has been around for a very long time, and I don’t think it is going to disappear any time soon.

It does not matter if you are a highly Orthodox Jew, or a non-religious Jew. The key word is and always should be; Jew. When Hitler tried to annihilate us from the face of the earth, his troops did not interview us individually to discover whether we were oriented toward religion or not. If you had Jewish blood in your veins, you were a Jew. That has always been the case and always will be.

I personally do not practice religion per se, but I am profoundly proud of my Jewish heritage. There is nothing that could ever cause me to deny being a Jew. I refused to deny it when a member of the Chasidic sect once told me that because I did not practice the religious aspects of Judaism I had no right to call myself a Jew. Nor would I deny it in any other test of my heritage. We are all free to address and live our Judaism in the manner that makes sense to us. But overall, we must all remember we are Jews. What is important is that we identify as being Jewish. To me that means being a person who is honest, compassionate and willing to help those in need. It is a person who values family and friends, and looks upon strangers as friends we have yet to meet.

Our Megillah family, for the most part, is comprised of friends, many of whom we have not yet met or may never meet. But we connect through the spirituality of sharing our beliefs and values and forming a continuum of the Jewish community around the world via the miracle of the Internet.

Realizing how few of us there are in the world compared to so many other organized religious and cultural groups, makes it all that much more important to participate in the act of joining together as a force of good in the world as well as a force to be reckoned with.

Much love to all of you.

Michael