Rabbi Leopold Cohn, D.D. Life began for Leopold Cohn in the little town of Berezna, in the eastern part of Hungary. At the age of seven a great calamity befell the young lad; he lost both his parents in the same year and was left to shift as well as he could for himself. In later years he often recalled how those days of terrible loneliness and bitter struggle for existence taught him to trust in God with all of his heart. It seems natural, then, to find young Cohn, after his confirmation at the age of thirteen, determined to enter upon a course of study with a view to becoming eventually a rabbi and leader among his people. That he gave a good account of himself as a student we conclude from the fact that at the age of eighteen he graduated from the Talmudic academics with a record of high scholarship and with commendations as a worthy teacher of the Law. Following the completion of his formal studies and the subsequent receipt of smicha or ordination, Rabbi Cohn contracted a very happy marriage and, in keeping with the custom of the time, became installed in his wife’s paternal home, there to devote himself to the further study of the sacred writings. Through the years of almost ascetic religious study and devotion, the burning problems of his people, the problems of the Galut [exile] and of the promised, but long-delayed, redemption through the coming of the Messiah, had become deeply etched upon the rabbi’s spirit. Now that he had obtained leisure and could follow the call of his heart, he gave himself to earnest prayer and research in the hope of finding a solution. A part of his morning devotions was the repetition of the twelfth article of the Jewish creed, which declares, "I believe with a perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah and, though He tarry, yet will I wait daily for His coming." The regular use of this affirmation of faith fanned to a flame the desire of his heart for the fulfilment of God’s promises and the speedy restoration of scattered Israel until, no longer satisfied with the formal prayers, he began to rise up in the midnight watches and sit on the bare ground to mourn over the destruction of the temple and to implore God to hasten the coming of the Deliverer. The Time of Messiah’s Coming "Why does the Messiah tarry? When will He come?" These questions continually agitated the young rabbi’s mind. One day, while poring over a volume of the Talmud, he came upon the following citation: "The world will stand six thousand years. There will be two thousand years of confusion, two thousand years under the law, and two thousand years of the time of the Messiah." With quickened interest he turned for light on the passage to the writings of Rashi [Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac, 1040-1105], the foremost Jewish commentator, but the explanation he found there seemed to him to be of little help: "After the second two thousand years, the Messiah will come and the wicked kingdoms will be destroyed." When he turned away from the ponderous volumes, the solution of his problem appeared to him to have become more difficult than ever. According to Talmudic reckoning the Messiah should long since have come; yet, there was the exile, still the bitterest fact of Jewish life, to be accounted for. "Can it be possible," he asked himself, "that the time appointed by God for the coming of the Messiah has passed and the promise has not been fulfilled?" Sorely perplexed, Rabbi Cohn decided to study of the original predictions of the Prophets, but the very contemplation of the act filled him with fear, for, according to the teaching of the Rabbis, "Cursed are the bones of him who calculates the time of the end." And so it was that with trembling, hands, expecting at any moment to be struck by a bolt from heaven, but with an eagerness irresistible, he opened the book of the prophet Daniel and began to read. When he reached the ninth chapter, light began to dawn upon him. He had struck a mine of hitherto concealed truth, covered up by the commentaries of the revered doctors of the law. From the twenty-fourth verse of the chapter before him he deduced without difficulty that the coming of the Messiah should have taken place 400 years after Daniel received from the divine messenger the prophecy of the Seventy Weeks. The scholar, accustomed to the intricate and often veiled polemical treatises of the Talmud, now found himself strangely captivated by the clear and soul-satisfying declarations of the Word of God, and it was not long before he began to question in his mind the reliability of the Talmud, seeing that in matters so vital it differed from the Holy Scriptures. It was neither an easy nor a pleasant matter for Rabbi Cohn, the leader of a Jewish community, daily gaining in popularity among his people, to entertain doubts concerning the authority of the Talmud. Quite apart from the disquietude that

In July 2008, Beijing was rife with extremes—of pride and rage, of professed political stability and underlying social unrest. Jin Min was pedaling a bicycle home along a street in Zhong Guan Cun—a busy and hustling area in Haidian District, Beijing, known as China’s Silicon Valley. She and her husband had a small home there. It is where China's two most prestigious universities, Peking University and Tsinghua University are located. To enter these two universities, one needs to score in the top 0.03 percentile among close to 10 million students who take the National College Entrance Examination. Jin Min graduated from Peking University with a degree in economics. Her husband studied architectural engineering at Tsinghua University. Her eyes were filled with busy colors and images - of gigantic banners, slogans, balloons, red icons professing national pride in hosting the Olympics. Her mind was on a different world beneath the surface of China’s much vaunted “Peaceful Rise to Great Power Status.” From a letter smuggled out of Xin An Labor Camp and word of mouth from the Tian He Labor Camp, she had learned that some of her friends had been transferred out of Beijing. The labor camps had run out of space to hold the newly arrested Falun Gong practitioners. To prepare for a “stable” Au Yun (Olympic in Chinese, a homonym of “bad luck”), the Chinese Communist Party issued the order to “strike hard at hostile forces at home and abroad, such as ethnic separatists… and ‘heretical organizations’ like the Falun Gong." The heavy-handed strike led to deaths. One of them was Min’s Beida alumni, Yu Zhou, 42, a popular folk singer. Yu was arrested with his wife Xu Na, a poet and painter, on their way home from a performance by his band. Eleven days after their arrest, Yu died in police custody. Min was worried about her friends in the labor camps. She knew the “strike hard” also applied to those already incarcerated—increased torture and harsher treatment. She knew it because she had been a prisoner before. Jin Min was arrested in June 2001 with her husband when they were placing information pamphlets about Falun Gong in bicycle baskets in a residential area on Tsinghua Campus. Two plainclothes police caught them and took them to Zhong Guan Cun Police Station. The couple were asked to curse Falun Gong’s founder and promise not to practice it any more. The police told them if they followed the order, they would be released. If not, they would be sentenced. The couple refused. Both were sent to labor camps. “Practicing Falun Gong is my right,” Jin Min said. “I want freedom and don’t want to be jailed. But what kind of freedom is it if you have to give up your unalienable rights for it?" Min was sent to a women’s labor camp and her husband was sent to a men’s labor camp. More than 90% of inmates in the labor camps were Falun Gong practitioners. In her year and half of imprisonment, Jin Min experienced and witnessed various kinds of abuse: beating, electric shocks, slave labor, sleep deprivation, violent brainwashing, humiliation, and complete isolation from family. She was up before dawn and made to work on disposable chopsticks until midnight. Three meager meals were served. The meal was usually a steamed bun with a bowl of soup of water with cabbage leaves. To get the meal, inmate were asked to chant the following “My name is so and so. I am detained here because of my misconduct. Please give me some food.” Min also knitted luxury wool gloves. The guards told them, “Be careful of your work. These are luxury products to be exported to Europe.” During the first six months of imprisonment, Jin Min’s parents, both doctors of traditional Chinese medicine, had no information about where their daughter was. All they knew was she had been arrested as a Falun Gong practitioner. Having experienced and witnessed the torture and tragedies of the Cultural Revolution, when millions of intellectuals were persecuted to death and insanity, Jin Min’s parents almost broke down. They asked friends, colleagues, and acquaintances to help search for Jin Min. They spent money and effort to get to speak to Party officials - people whom they thought had the power to influence their daughter’s fate. They spoke to a People’s Congress Representative. The answer was the same – nothing can be done. “We could save your daughter even if she were a criminal sentenced to death penalty. But since she is Falun Gong, we can do nothing about it. The handling of Falun Gong is beyond our control—they don’t follow normal judicial process. It is directly handled by the 610 Office,” one government official told Min’s parents. Established by the former Chinese Communist Party head Jiang Zemin, the 610 Office—named after the date of its creation on June 10, 1999—is an extralegal police task force responsible for carrying out the mission of eliminating Falun Gong. Min was released from the labor camp on October 7, 2002