Talk:Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm

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[edit] NPOV rewrite needed

The following information needs a serious NPOV rewrite before it can be posted on the article under the "Legends" section:

"There were many miracle stories about Rabbi Elijah Ba'al Shem. It is told that before his death he left a will that after his demise when his coffin would be led past the Russian Church (apparently there was no other road to the cemetery), and Christian hooligans started throwing stones - as is their habit for many years - no one should run away but they should stop with the coffin and not move.

As a continuation, it is told that when Rabbi Elijah Ba'al Shem expired, his will was honored. When his funeral procession approached the Church, gentile hooligans ran out of the Church and began to throw stones at the coffin and at the Jews who accompanied the saintly man. Nobody ran away. Rabbi Elijah sat up and looked into the Torah scroll that was in the coffin, and a few minutes later the Church sank together with the hooligans. Right after that the Ba'al Shem Tov stretched out in the coffin like a corpse. The frightened Jews looked at one another in astonishment and the funeral procession continued.

It was said that since that miracle the hooligans no longer threw stones during Jewish funerals.

About the church that sank, boys who studied in the kheder of the teacher Leib Paks would say that when one goes down to the cellar and starts jumping on the wooden floor, one can hear a kind of echo of a bell sound which is the reverberation of the sunken church.

This version went around among the children. It was also said that the Leib Paks house was built on the same place of the sunken church.[1]

I'm NOT applauding what the Christians did to the funeral procession, but "Christian hooligans" is not very NPOV for an encyclopedia. It also needs a major grammatical work over. I would make the changes myself, but I'm just too lazy (!Mi luchador nombre es amoladora de la carne y traigo el dolor! 03:38, 16 August 2006 (UTC))

I did it just now. It's now in the article. (Ghostexorcist 07:59, 21 February 2007 (UTC))