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No. 50. — Vienna, 11 December 1903 — 22 Kislev 5664. — 7th Year.

Maccabee.

"With God, our good sword in our hand, And onward, the Syrians to chase! Though our leaders betrayed their land, We others will now the venture face.

They preached of peace. We stood prepared To keep the country's peace secure. And now our wage! The Temple profaned, The foeman's hosts upon our soil!

And our leaders? They feast at their ease. What care they for burning and plunder? We bore the heaviest and held our peace — But now it is freedom and faith we fight for!

So, whoever will stand for freedom and faith, To me! Though it lead to our ruin! And onward, our good sword in our fist, To blessed victory or to dying!"

Siegmund Werner.

Modern Maccabeanism.

By Dr. phil. Isaak Mirkin.

In every part and corner of the world, during the days of Chanukah, our fellow Jews and fellow Zionists gather in groups and societies, in order to celebrate together, in a joyful and exalted mood, the Maccabean festival.

What is it that we celebrate?

We celebrate the heroic deeds, the fearless struggles, the wondrous and glorious victories of our forefathers, the Maccabees, which were won more than two thousand years ago. Yes, when we Jews tell of events of our past, we speak not, like other peoples, of centuries, but of millennia. More than two thousand years have swept over the lands since those struggles of the Maccabees. Who can survey the immense chain of generations that have succeeded one another in life since then? Who can count the nations that have replaced one another in their homes, who the endless series of states that have formed and dissolved again during this span of time and have made room for one another in turn upon our earth?

Countless forms has life since then assumed and cast off again. Countless ideas and views of the world have since then contended with and supplanted one another. Countless deeds have since then been accomplished and, for the greater part, forgotten again!

But we Jews celebrate today, as two thousand years ago, the struggles and the victories of our forefathers, the Maccabees, in the same manner, in the same fashion, and so shall our descendants still celebrate them after thousands of years!

How do we celebrate them?

Has our people raised temples to these Maccabean heroes, consecrated splendid edifices? Have we set up monuments of stone and bronze to them? Do we, to glorify them and their deeds, kindle beacon-fires upon the heights, visible far and wide and reddening the sky for miles around?

No! Nothing of all this!

We kindle a few, a very few, tiny little lights. But what magic power these little lights possess, what enchantment they shed! These small, faint little flames seem to scatter the dense mists of the millennia, to part the heavy, dark veils of the long-vanished past and to bring this past into our immediate presence. By the faint glow of these tiny lights we see, vividly and in the flesh, our fearless forefathers fighting and wrestling with a foe tenfold, nay a hundredfold, their superior in numbers and in the art of war, wrestling and vanquishing him. By the faint glow of these little lights we see all this so vividly, so directly, that we believe ourselves to be upon the battlefield, nay, to be fighting alongside them.

Is that mere illusion?

No, it is no illusion, it is true and actual fact! We are still fighting the old Maccabean fight today; we find ourselves today in the same situation as our forefathers, the Maccabees — we are fighting for the same good, we are striving for the same goal!

What moved these men and women, otherwise so harmless, what fired them on to so unequal a struggle? Did they wish their power over foreign nations