(JTA) — Municipalities throughout Israel are heeding officials’ calls to ban Lag b’Omer bonfires because of dangerous weather conditions days after 10 Israeli teens died in flash floods during a hike despite warnings of such danger. The hot and dry conditions, with winds, have blanketed the country for two days. Officials are concerned that the…
Alan Dershowitz speculated on CNN Tuesday that Rod Rosenstein, the embattled Deputy Attorney General of the Department of Justice, could recuse himself from the Russia investigation, the Washington Examiner reported. Dershowitz suggested that the case for Rosenstein’s recusal after the publication of 49 questions Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller wants to ask Donald Trump as…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned what he “another anti-Semitic speech” by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “With utmost ignorance and brazen gall, he claimed that European Jews were persecuted and murdered not because they were Jews but because they gave loans with interest,” Netanyahu said in a statement issued on Wednesday,…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — The head of a pre-army academy has resigned a week after 10 teens died in a flash flood during a school-sponsored hike. Yuval Kahan, the principal of the Bnei Zion pre-military academy, released a statement on Wednesday, in which he said he was “torn and broken” over the deaths of the entering…
(JTA) — An impending vote in the Danish parliament on non-medical circumcision of boys risks splitting the country’s ruling party, local media are reporting. The internal conflict is over an online petition from February calling for a ban on the practice. The petition has received 92 percent of its authors’ goal of collecting 50,000 cosignatories…
NEW YORK (JTA) — If you’re an Orthodox Jew with a mortgage from Quicken Loans, you might be in trouble. Agudath Israel of America, a major haredi Orthodox organization, issued a Jewish legal ruling last month prohibiting Jews from taking out loans from the Detroit-based company because it is majority-owned by Jews. Quicken Loans, which claims…
(JTA) — For the third time in three weeks, a person affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement was assaulted in Crown Heights. The victim, a 22-year-old yeshiva student, was walking home from the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights when he was attacked at around midnight on Tuesday night. The Crown Heights Info…
(JTA) — Anti-Semitic and white supremacist posters were removed from downtown Durham, North Carolina near the Duke University campus. City workers removed the posters on Monday, the local Herald Sun newspaper reported. One of the posters showed a silhouetted man pointing a gun at an image of a bearded man with a long nose, wearing…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said the Holocaust was caused by the “social behavior” of Jews, such as money lending, and not by anti-Semitism. Speaking Monday in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Abbas also said that Jews do not have a historical connection to the land. “Israel is a colonial project…
A prominent Washington, D.C. rabbi broke into a city council meeting on Tuesday to decry officials’ lack of action against anti-Semitism. Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld, the leader of the modern Orthodox congregation Ohev Shalom, was outraged over the Council not censuring councilman Trayon White after he claimed last month that a snowstorm was caused by the…
What should we make of the fact that Ivanka Trump has so far not been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller? The first daughter has been in the middle of several incidents that Mueller is probing, including the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russian operatives and the ill-fated damage control effort that followed. Yet Ivanka…
