There was a failed attempt to prevent you from receiving this week's issue of the newsletter. Some anti-Semitic disruptors surreptitiously joined our list and then filed false "spam" complaints against us last week, but the situation has been resolved with G-d's help, and we are back on track.

In response to last week's question ("How many death camps are currently active in Soviet Russia?"), we received answers ranging from 100 to 2500. Although the guess of 2500 was accurate as to the total confirmed number of concentration camps in Soviet Russia, the number of those camps that are confirmed death camps is 41, according to camp survivor Avraham Shifrin, Jerusalem-based author of The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union. Just as 6 of the 35 total Nazi slave-labor camps of World War II are considered death camps for their significantly higher death rates, so too these 41 Russian camps are distinguished by the cruel efficiency of their killing machines—even though the death rate is also shockingly high in the remaining 2500 concentration camps today.

Therefore, the winner of last week's contest is Nathaniel of northern California with his guess of 100, which came closest to the confirmed number of 41.

And now this week's question:

(Hint: Neither one was "Al Qaeda.")

Be sure to e-mail your answer, name, and location to [address withheld] by Sunday, Jan. 9, 2005, 12pm (noon) PST.

...Our Fan Mail

"Thanks for your very educational and helpful site. It was one of the first I discovered when I began the long walk down the path of the righteous gentile."—BH

"Thanks for your fine site. I (a former Christian) should like to learn more about participating as a gentile in the Jewish festivals."—AV

...and Anti-Semitic Hate Mail

[In response to the anti-PLO information on our site] "you really SHOULD be worried about your personnal security. you are of YOUR father the DEVIL.... Yashua the C----- warned us about snakes like you and it seems a great many Israelites are waking up to ye generation of vipers...."—"Justin"

"...I have never believed that Soviet repression fell entirely.... The entire Nation of Russia will be turned into a death camp for Jews and true Christians. How sad. I do not rejoice in this...."—NB

"There is no such place as Soviet Russia."—JR

Our response: Much confusion has been generated by the ongoing but ever less credible claims by the Soviet Russian regime that it has collapsed—despite the fact that every Russian leader for the last 14 years has been a long-time official of the Communist Party, including Boris Yeltsin, Yevgeniy Primakov, and Vladimir Putin (indeed, Primakov and Putin are "former" heads of the KGB secret police, which continues to operate the more than 2500 concentration camps in that nation). Socialism, police-state terror, and militaristic mobilization for war remain unchanged throughout the Soviet republics. In fact, in the early 1980s, top Soviet KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn accurately predicted the theatrical "self-collapse" of Communism—because he was one of the original planners of the entire scenario back in the 1950s.