Imagining my fate in Venezuela

It was 1976 or so when they knocked on the door of the apartment my parents were renting out to a young couple. The neighbors said people without uniforms came and kidnapped the terrorists. That was a time when it was enough that one's phone number was in the phonebook of a suspected person to be sentenced to death. May be they were in fact looking for me? The same day I burned all my books and went to the Venezuelan consulate in Buenos Aires to get a visa. Venezuela was then a most prosperous democratic country, with fantastic oil income, many young professionals were leaving Argentina and moving to Caracas. Others went to Spain, Mexico, Italy, Brazil. The consulate was crowded and I could not even get inside. I talked to the people in the corridor and got the impression that the situation was much more urgent than I had thought. People were crying of fear and desperate to escape. I had a valid visa to the USA and an open Lufthansa ticket, so next day I was in New York.

The point is that Venezuela has self destroyed and seven or ten million have escaped and found refuge in Colombia and other hellholes. Almost all the Jews have left for Miami, certainly those who arrived from Argentina to share Venezuela's (temporary) oil bonanza and safety. Venezuela has been thoroughly ruined by Chavez and Maduro, the currency is worth nothing (pic) and its prospects are infernal as its oil production is falling and the price of the oil - collapsing. I did not like New York, and spent time drinking in the YMCA, then took the drunk decision to move on to Israel. Israel just had emerged from a big war and I was not sure it could survive. I was always Zionist, but my Aliyah - like everybody's - was not a clear-cut rational decision. In my drunken way, I had taken the best decision. I am at home. 

Vaca Muerta: The Cow is Dead

Vaca Muerta (Neuquén, Argentina) fracking project went in three years from discovery to full development (13,000 workers) and now to decay. With the current price of Brent at 56 dollar a barrel, Vaca Muerta cannot compete and is  sacking 1000 workers. Just as in the times of Rockefeller, the oil industry is suffering from cyclical chaos.  

Geffen

Corchito in Monte Hermoso beach

The short man is Corchito, a. Jorge Sogden, a local celebrity, with us the lifeguards. Corchito had crossed swimming the Laguna Sauce Grande, and before that, swam from Spain to Morocco. The pic was taken by the beach photographer fifty plus years ago, to his right (in the pic) it is me and then Socchi, my assistant lifeguard. I would not recognize myself today. The pic is in the local history museum, I am so old that have turned into a museum exhibit. 

Shakedi

The marrying kind

The grandson of the Chief of the Toldot Abraham Itzhak congregation  married the granddaughter of the Head of the Lelow Hassidic group. Toldot Abraham Itzhak is based on Jerusalem and grew out of the old Hungarian Yishuv of Jerusalem, while the Lelow Hassidim follow the old Rebbe from that Silesian (Polish/Prussian) village.

The old Hungarian Yishuv in Jerusalem was no more than a small extremely poor synagogue of old people who moved in the 17 and 18th centuries from Hungary to pray, die and be buried in the holy land of Jerusalem. Apparently, some married here and had issue. They subsisted from alms that were divided among themselves. The division of the alms was a permanent focus of strife, and there is a vast literature of letter in Hebrew and Yiddish accusing each other of laxness and sinfulness, and don't give to him but sent money to me. It is astonishing that from that community of poison-pen letters-writing pious beggars grew out the current dynamic (pic) group.

Lelow is a small village (population 2100) on the Bialka river. The Nazis killed almost all the Jews of the place, but the few that survived the Holocaust are rebuilding the community. I presume they are now more numerous than ever. Once a year they visit the tomb of the founding rebbe, to the astonishment of the native Poles of the village. They had not seen a Jew in ages. Once a Gur Hassid told me about his visit to the Polish village of Gur, where his sect was founded. He could not believe that such remote, muddy, small village out in nowhere could have been the cradle of their current community. But that is the power of the compound interest equation. 

Israel Without Ashkenazim

Following Prof. Jamal's attack on European Zionists, lets imagine what would happen if the one and half million Ashkenazim leave Israel to Europe and America. They can easily do it, today even Sudan (!) invites the Jews to come back and settle in that country.

I don't want to bring up South Rhodesia as an example what could happen here. Thirty years after the English left, the richest country of Africa became a "failed state" with no electricity nor food.

Should European Jews leave Israel, "Oriental" Jews surely would not because they have nowhere to go, and probably also the Russian/Ukrainian non-Jewish population would stay. Oriental Jews are harder ("more primitive") than we are and would immediately impose a Middle Eastern style clerical-military dictatorship. The Islamic clerics associated with the Jewish theocrats would accuse Prof. Jamal of slandering Allah and he would never heard about again. Ethiopian Jews would implement the Bible mandates, and you know what it says about what to do with conquered females and subject tribes. The Russians are the best (probably better than Germans) fighters and they would coalesce in military formations and go sacking Arab villages here and there. Northern Europeans just love fighting. Like the Vikings, they would sail down the Red Sea and sack the wealthy coastal Saudi towns. Without steady inflow of Israeli subsidies, the King of Jordan shall not be able to pay the salaries of his Bedouin army and the country would fall into chaos. The High Priest in Jerusalem would declare that Edom is ours and always was, and so it will be.

Decadent, depopulated, impotent West would protest and do nothing, as does nothing when Third World peoples commit their policies, like the Indonesian army taking over Papua New Guinea, or Burmese military exterminating the natives. No one expects anything different from them. Arab and Persian dictatorships would easily accommodate fellow clerical/military regimes, that is, a poor oppressed Israel would stop exciting their envy and hate like we do.