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At the head of the entire operations of The CJN has been the general manager, chief operating officer Gary Laforet. Like Huckleberry Finn, he has twinkling mischief in his eyes but sharp-witted savvy in his mind. His experience and knowledge of the newspaper industry are little rivalled, if at all, in Canada. And if it is true that the editorial department gave the paper its content, it is equally true that Gary gave the paper its life. Through economic recessions and downturns, he always found an elegantly meaningful way to make the paper work. Until the advent of the digital tsunami. As most of us know from our own experiences, friends prove themselves in difficult times. In the newspaper world - especially the world of a weekly newspaper serving the lewish community - difficult times come in many different ways and often: short deadlines, truncated holiday-related production schedules, angry readers, crusading readers, threatening readers, missing copy, errors in copy, misplaced ads, miss-sized ads, power outages, computer server shutdowns and numerous other such inconvenient mini-crises. As a result, most of us in the four departments are more than colleagues. We are also friends.

\"What then, is the role of the weekly Jewish newspaper at a time when interest in Israel is waning, assimilation at home is growing and fewer people are reading newspapers? This is not an academic question. If we don't have people who care about Jewish life, we're out of business. So part of our job is to promote and highlight the vibrancy of Jewish life, in as many forms as possible.\" \"One role that Jewish newspapers can and should place greater emphasis on is education for adults as well as children. We have the opportunity, through our pages, to inform about Jewish heritage and history as well as politics and art... There is a need not to neglect the Jewish component of a Jewish newspaper. It's not just about Jews, but about what it means to be Jewish.\" Being true to the \"J\" in \"CJN\" has indeed always meant our striving to be a \"precious lifeline of information\" about Jews in Canada and around the world. And in this I believe we succeeded, even though, it is clear we may not also have been that coddled treasure under the arms of all our readers.

In his prime, the young man's voice was a musical blend of the resonant emotions of a Richard Tucker and the more sonorous, earthy stability of a Ian Peerce. And in an uncanny coincidence of nature, he even resembled the two, in hybrid, combining Peerce's short, stocky, barrel-chested stature with Tucker's warm, inviting eyes, dark wavy hair and melting, mischievous smile. As he fed the material under the driving needle of the spindle, the tailor sang to the heavens, transformed by the privacy of the moment into a starry-eyed lewish Rudolpho, his passion suddenly awakened by the beautiful Mimi standing before him in the doorway of his cold, bohemian's attic studio. Che Gelida Manina, How Cold Your Hands Are, he sang to her with the passion and the purpose of a man deeply in love. They determined to sing. Yedid Nefesh, Companion of My Soul; Lecha Dodi, To You My Love; songs of the prayerbook; songs of lewish eastern Europe; any songs that he might have once sung, too, because they knew how much he had loved to sing and how he had loved to hear them sing. They sang loudly. They sang fiercely. They sang the choking songs of farewell.

* The behaviour of the Jews in Israel has disqualified them from claiming a right to build a Jewish state there because the land was given by God on trust of good behaviour. But the Zionists have not demonstrated good behaviour. \"As long as Zionists think that Jewish people are serving God's special purpose and that abuses by the state [sic] of Israel, however wrong and regrettable, don't invalidate the Zionist project, they will believe themselves more entitled to the land than the Palestinian people.\" (The government's policies disqualify the Jews.) * The promises and premises of the Hebrew Bible regarding the Jewish people and our relation to the Land of Israel have, in any event, been replaced, superceded by the promises and premises of the New Testament. The report is quite explicit in underscoring this point. \"Jesus offered a radical critique of Jewish specialness and exclusivism, but the people of Nazareth were not ready for it. John's gospel speaks of Jesus being lifted up and drawing all people to himself. Jesus' 'cleansing' of the Temple means not just that the Temple needs to be reformed, but that the Temple is finished.\" (That is to say, that Judaism is finished, no longer relevant.)

\"The academic boycott against Israel is outrageous and improper, certainly from someone for whom the spirit of liberty lies at the basis of his human academic mission,\" conference chair Israel Maimón, said. And then Maimón added what should have been the trumping point against the boycotters of the lewish state: \"Israel is a democracy in which all individuals are free to express their opinions, whatever they may be. The imposition of a boycott is incompatible with open, democratic dialogue.\" \"[[Stephen Hawking]'s] whole computerbased communication system runs on a chip designed by Israel's Intel team. I suggest that if he truly wants to pull out of Israel, he should also pull out his Intel Core i7 from his tablet,\" wrote Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of Shurat HaDin - Israel Law Center, an organization dedicated to enforcing human rights. [Alterman], alas, also suffers from ALS, the disease that has stricken Hawking. Alterman photographed Hawking when the famous scientist visited Israel in 2006. He posted a moving cri de coeur to Hawking on Facebook.

The Arab world did not wait for the British to quit Palestine before attacking the lews. With the exhortation of the Nazi Haj Amin Husseini, the Mufti of lerusalem, to kill the lews still ringing in their ears, Arab fighters launched their war of genocide against the Palestinian lews, even as the votes for partition were being counted by the members of the UN General Assembly. It was always King Abdullah's intention to add the West Bank to his own Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan. Apart from Great Britain, no other country thought this was a good idea. Ironically, for the sake of a tranquil border with lordan, Israel might have acquiesced in that armistice configuration, had [Abdullah]'s grandson, Hussein, not joined in the fighting against the lewish state in 1967. Despite the pleas of the Israeli government to stay out of the war, the young King Hussein attacked at various points along his border with his 19-year-old western neighbour. Notably, lordanian snipers fired across the no-man's land separating east from west lerusalem. \"For more than 3,000 years we have been in love with lerusalem,\" he writes. \"She occupied our hearts, filled our prayers, pervaded our dreams. Continually mourning her loss, our grief was not subdued when celebrating festivities, when arranging a dinner table, when painting our homes. No meal was concluded without imploring: \"Build lerusalem speedily in your own days...\" (He writes so much more. It is absolutely imperative reading.)

The respective staffs in Toronto and Montreal were assembled last Monday morning. The president of The CJN, Don Carr, personally delivered the shocking news to the Toronto staff. Typical of Mr. Carr, it was the menschlich, honourable, courageous way to impart such bitter news. After he spoke with the Toronto staff, he spoke by telephone with the Montreal employees. One of the senior Toronto managers was with the Montreal team to answer their questions. It was a very difficult assignment for her, too. Studies have shown that the under-40 age group is unwilling to pay for news. Thus, the logic flowed, they would also be unwilling to pay for The CJN And thus, it was further assumed, this cohort of young adults cares very little for The CJN \"The CJN,\" [DJ Schneeweis] wrote, \"has always served as a shared space for the Jewish community of Canada to express and enrich itself and also to express and enrich its ties and connections to Israel.\"

[Sergio DellaPergola] reports that some 119,600 Jews live in Australia and New Zealand and that 75,300 in Africa. Of this latter number 70,200 live in South Africa. In the once flourishing Jewish communities north of the Sahara in the Arab countries of the Maghreb, there are now only 3,600 Jews. And finally, DellaPergola notes that 40,000 Jews live in Asia. \"While the transition of Israel to the status of largest Jewish population in the world is grounded on solid empirical foundations, the United States remains a very large, culturally and socioeconomically powerful, creative, resilient and influential centre of Jewish life. The aggregate weight of other Jewish communities globally - aside from their continuing cultural relevance - is gradually decreasing. In a Jewish world that has become demographicaily more bipolar, but also more individualistic and transnational, the cultural and institutional projection and influence of the two major centres, Israel and the United States, tends to become more significant in other geographical areas of Jewish presence.\"

The post-Pesach period is an ideal moment to take a snapshot of the state of the Jewish People. What better time than now - after Pesach, Yom Hashoah v'Hagvurah, Yom Hazikaron and Yom Ha'atzmaut, quintessential occasions of Jewish Peoplehood - to take note of current \"Jewish People\" facts? Prof. Sergio DellaPergola of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, perhaps the Jewish world's pre-eminent demographer, has just published his assessment of the world Jewish population for 2012. It was published by the Mandell L. Berman Institute North American Jewish Data Bank, at the Center for Judaic Studies and Contemporary Jewish Life, University of Connecticut, for the American Jewish Yearbook. \"The world's total population increased nearly threefold from 2.315 billion in 1945 to 7.075 billion in 2012. Thus, the relative share of Jews among the world's total population steadily diminished from 4.75 per 1,000 in 1945 to 1.94 per 1,000 currently.\" (My emphasis)

\"The first stages of the war seemed to bode ill for Israel's cause. The danger came from the north, where Syrian Lebanese, Iraqi and Jordanian armies planned to move on Haifa and capture its port and refineries. Meanwhile, the Egyptians attacked along the coast while the remnants of the Arab Liberation Army harassed Jerusalem and assaulted Jewish settlements in the rest of the country. And the ring was growing tighter around the new city of Jerusalem.\" The gritty defenders of the Jewish state repulsed the attackers from the north and from the south. But they could not save the Jewish quarter of the Old City. The Jordanian army captured the Old City, expelled the Jews, destroyed the synagogues and desecrated the countless markers and vestiges of Jewish life in Jerusalem. For the first time in more than a millennium, the Jewish presence in the ancient city of Jerusalem ceased to exist. That presence, however, would be once again restored 17 years later in 1967. \"The hour of choice had come and it had been seized,\" [Abba Eban] wrote. \"No matter what ensued, something of great moment had been enacted of which future Jewish generations would never cease to speak and dream.\"