Dianim, Rabanim, Presidents of the United Synagogue, the Board of Deputies, the Federation,

Your Worship the Mayor of Barnet, MP's distinguished guests.

Friends, this year, we remember and celebrate and commemorate not only the 65th anniversary of the State of Israel, but we remember the 70th anniversary of

the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. And those two events are profoundly interlinked. And I want

very simply this evening to explain the connection.

And to do so, I ask a very simple question.

About this period of the calendar in which we stand,

Svirata Homa, the counting of the days between Pesach and Shabuwoot.

We know that we observe a custom. the counting of the days between Pesah and Shuru.

We know that we observe a custom during those days of public morning, without having a haircut, without having a wedding, but why?

Nowhere in the Torah is there even the hint of a suggestion that this should be a period

of sadness. On the contrary, whether we see Sviratoma and agricultural terms as the

ripening of the grain harvest, or we see it in historical terms as the journey from Egypt to

Sinai.

It is a time of expectancy and of joy.

Why then is it a period of mourning?

All the commentators refer us to an oblique and enigmatic passage in the Gamaray of Vamot,

which says that during this period, 12,000 pairs of students of Ravi

Akiva died. Because Shillanagukavazza, because they didn't honor one another. Now, this is a very, very strange passage.

Nowhere else is their reference to 24,000 rabbinical students die.

Number two, if it were indeed an epidemic, it would not have only struck the students of

Rabbi Akiva.

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