Former Israeli Prime Minister and Freedom Fighter Yitzhak Shamir
Yitzhak Shamir, former four-term Israeli prime minister, died at the age of 96 on June 30. According to a statement from Israeli President Shimon Peres, Shamir was “a brave warrior before and after the founding of the state of Israel. He was loyal to his views, a great patriot and a true lover of Israel who served his country with integrity and unending commitment.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Shamir one of the “giants” who “established the state of Israel and fought for the freedom of the Jewish people in its land.” Shamir, who fought for Israel’s statehood, never wavered from his belief in the right of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.
Described by some as “the most successful terrorist of the 20th Century,” Shamir was part of an underground group that helped to drive the British out of Palestine and then part of Mossad. He is also known for bringing more than a million Former Soviet Union Jews to Israel and evacuating more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews overnight to Israel in the airlift known as Operation Solomon.
Rabbi Cantor David Kane
of Temple Beth Shalom
in Long Beach
Rabbi Cantor David Kane, a Holocaust survivor who served for many years at Temple Beth Shalom of Long Beach, passed away on June 25. Kane and his wife, Yetta, recently completed a book, How To Survive Anything.
“Rabbi Cantor Kane’s passing is a sadness for the whole world,” said Rabbi Cantor Glenn Gelman, a protégé of Rabbi Cantor Kane. “He was a precious link with a lost culture and vast buried treasures of Torah wisdom and of Jewish life and learning. RCK was a storehouse of information, of stories from Europe, of music and lore. His command of languages spanned old and new worlds. He was the best, the cream of the She’erit Haplaitah, the “Remnants of the Survivors.’”
Gelman added, “Rabbi Cantor Kane picked himself up and built a fresh life with fresh energy in a foreign land as though the past were nothing but a bad dream. He was walking proof of the verse, ‘Behold a people that springs up like a lioncub…” (Numbers 23:24)