A moving account of survival and faith from Israel Meir Lau, a Holocaust survivor and former Chief Rabbi of Israel, with forewords by former President of Israel Shimon Peres and the bestselling author of Night, Elie Wiesel—both Nobel Peace Prize laureates.   One of the youngest survivors of Buchenwald, Israel Meir Lau was just eight years old when the camp was liberated in 1945. Descended from a 1,000-year unbroken chain of rabbis, he grew up to become Chief Rabbi of Israel--and like many of the great rabbis, Lau is a master storyteller. Out of the Depths is his harrowing, miraculous, and inspiring account of life in one of the Nazis’ deadliest concentration camps and how he managed to survive against all possible odds. Lau, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, also chronicles his life after the war, including his emigration to Mandate Palestine during a period that coincides with the development of the State of Israel. The story continues through the present day, with that once-lost boy of eight now a brilliant, charismatic, and world-revered figure who has visited with three popes, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, and countless global leaders, including Queen Elizabeth, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, and Tony Blair.   Lau’s insightful reflections on his experiences during the Holocaust and World War II make Out of the Depths a compelling tribute to the strength and resilience of the human spirit. Originally published in Hebrew under the title Do Not Raise a Hand Against the Boy, this is a deeply inspiring and powerful memoir for readers of Holocaust books such as The Daughter of Auschwitz and Man’s Search for Meaning.  

This book instructively introduces the reader to the basics of Jewish law. It gives a detailed, cutting-edge analysis of contemporary public and private law in the State of Israel, as well as Israel's legal culture, its system of government, and the roles of its democratic institutions: the executive, parliament, and judiciary. The book examines issues of Holocaust, law and religion, constitutionalization, and equality.

This book provides a concise introduction to the basics of Jewish law. It gives a detailed analysis of contemporary public and private law in the State of Israel, as well as Israel's legal culture, its system of government, and the roles of its democratic institutions: the executive, parliament, and judiciary. The book examines issues of Holocaust, law and religion, constitutionalization, and equality. It is the ultimate book for anyone interested in Israeli Law and its politics. Authors Shimon Shetreet is the Greenblatt Professor of Public and International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He is the President of the International Association of Judicial Independence and World Peace and heads the International Project of Judicial Independence. In 2008, the Mt. Scopus Standards of Judicial Independence were issued under his leadership. Between 1988 and 1996, Professor Shetreet served as a member of the Israeli Parliament, and was a cabinet minister under Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. He was senior deputy mayor of Jerusalem between 1999 and 2003. He was a Judge of the Standard Contract Court and served as a member of the Chief Justice Landau Commission on the Israeli Court System. The author and editor of many books on the judiciary, Professor Shetreet is a member of the Royal Academy of Science and Arts of Belgium. Rabbi Walter Homolka PhD (King's College London, 1992), PhD (University of Wales Trinity St. David, 2015), DHL (Hebrew Union College, New York, 2009), is a full professor of Modern Jewish Thought and the executive director of the School of Jewish Theology at the University of Potsdam (Germany). The rector of the Abraham Geiger College (since 2003) is Chairman of the Leo Baeck Foundation and of the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Scholarship Foundation in Potsdam. In addition, he has served as the executive director of the Masorti Zacharias Frankel College since 2013.The author of "Judisches Eherecht" and other publications on Jewish Law holds several distinctions: among them the Knight Commander's Cross of the Austrian Merit Order and the 1st Class Federal Merit Order of Germany. In 2004, President Jacques Chirac admitted Rabbi Homolka to the French Legion of Honor.

This book focuses on the systematic modeling of complex situations characterized by escalating disruptions, and on cycles of dynamic collaboration for the best handling of disruptions. What can we do about disruptive events and their cascading effects? Thanks to the evolution of intelligent technologies for interaction, communication, sharing, and collaboration, cyberspace is a rapidly expanding world. Our systems of machines, software services, and human organizations have become increasingly interdependent, in other words - networked. As a result, disruptions that initially affect only a small part of any network tend to escalate. At the same time, cyber solutions can support first responders and emergency handlers, enhancing their responsiveness and ability to collaborate with one another in controlling disruptions and preventing their escalation. In this book, we are chiefly interested in how effectively these collaborations can be supported and how we can further optimize such support. Solution guidelines for optimizing collaborations are illustrated with examples in various application domains: agricultural robotics, civil cyber-physical infrastructure, visual analytics, manufacturing automation, and supply chains. Open-source simulation tools are also provided to supplement the main content.

Mismatch or best match? This book demonstrates that best matching of individual entities to each other is essential to ensure smooth conduct and successful competitiveness in any distributed system, natural and artificial. Interactions must be optimized through best matching in planning and scheduling, enterprise network design, transportation and construction planning, recruitment, problem solving, selective assembly, team formation, sensor network design, and more. Fundamentals of best matching in distributed and collaborative systems are explained by providing: Methodical analysis of various multidimensional best matching processes Comprehensive taxonomy, comparing different best matching problems and processes Systematic identification of systems' hierarchy, nature of interactions, and distribution of decision-making and control functions Practical formulation of solutions based on a library of best matching algorithms and protocols, ready for direct applications and apps development. Designed for both academics and practitioners, oriented to systems engineers and applied operations researchers, diverse types of best matching processes are explained in production, manufacturing, business and service, based on a new reference model developed at Purdue University PRISM Center: "The PRISM Taxonomy of Best Matching". The book concludes with major challenges and guidelines for future basic and applied research in the area of best matching.

Collaboration in highly distributed organizations of people, robots, and autonomous systems is and must be revolutionized by engineering augmentation. The aim is to augment humans' abilities at work and, through this augmentation, improve organizations' abilities to accomplish their missions. This book establishes the theoretical foundations and design principles of collaborative e-Work, e-Business and e-Service, their models and applications, design and implementation techniques. The fundamental premise is that without effective e-Work and e-Services, the potential of emerging activities, such as e-Commerce, virtual manufacturing, tele-robotic medicine, automated construction, smart energy grid, cyber-supported agriculture, and intelligent transportation cannot be fully materialized. Typically, workers and managers of such value networks are frustrated with complex information systems, originally designed and built to simplify and improve performance. Even if the human-computer interface for such systems is well designed, the information and task overloads can be overwhelming. Effective delivery of expected outcomes may not occur. Challenges and emerging solutions in the context of the recently developed CCT, Collaborative Control Theory, are described, with emphasis on issues of computer-supported and communication-enabled integration, coordination and augmented collaboration. Research results and analyses of engineering design methods and complex systems management techniques are explained and illustrated.

Life in Transit is the long-awaited sequel to Shimon Redlich's widely acclaimed Together and Apart in Brzezany, in which he discussed his childhood during the War and the Holocaust. Life in Transit tells the story of his adolescence in the city of Lodz in postwar Poland. Redlich's personal memories are placed within the wider historical context of Jewish life in Poland and in Lodz during the immediate postwar years. Lodz in the years 1945-1950 was the second-largest city in the country and the major urban center of the Jewish population. Redlich's research based on conventional sources and numerous interviews indicates that although the survivors still lived in the shadow of the Holocaust, postwar Jewish Lodz was permeated with a sense of vitality and hope.

In three main divisions the book covers combinational circuits, latches, and asynchronous sequential circuits. Combinational circuits have no memorising ability, while sequential circuits have such an ability to various degrees. Latches are the simplest sequential circuits, ones with the shortest memory. The presentation is decidedly non-standard. The design of combinational circuits is discussed in an orthodox manner using normal forms and in an unorthodox manner using set-theoretical evaluation formulas relying heavily on Karnaugh maps. The latter approach allows for a new design technique called composition. Latches are covered very extensively. Their memory functions are expressed mathematically in a time-independent manner allowing the use of (normal, non-temporal) Boolean logic in their calculation. The theory of latches is then used as the basis for calculating asynchronous circuits. Asynchronous circuits are specified in a tree-representation, each internal node of the tree representing an internal latch of the circuit, the latches specified by the tree itself. The tree specification allows solutions of formidable problems such as algorithmic state assignment, finding equivalent states non-recursively, and verifying asynchronous circuits.