VIENNA (JTA) — Austria’s far-right Freedom Party will “probably be a part of the coalition” despite pleas by Jews to keep it out, the president of the Jewish Community of Vienna said. Oskar Deutsch made the prediction last week in the aftermath of Oct. 15 elections that saw the Freedom Party finish third behind the…
A Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia that was vandalized in February is now fully repaired, according to a statement from the Jewish Federation of Philadelphia, which led the restoration. The $145,000 restoration project fixed damage to the nearly 275 tombstones found toppled and broken earlier this year. The funds came out of $288,000 donors gave to…
Officials in the New York State county of Rockland want local or state officials to shutter an Orthodox Jewish day school in the village of New Hempstead over its failure to connect its trailer classrooms to water and electric facilities, the Journal News reported. The school, Ateres Bais Yaakov Academy, had received a temporary certificate…
(JTA) — Thirty-eight women have accused director and writer James Toback of sexual harassment in a Los Angeles Times report spurred by the account of an incident by a rabbi’s daughter. Toback, 72, who is Jewish and received an Oscar nomination for writing “Bugsy,” denied the allegations to the Los Angeles Times. He also said…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel Police wrote numbers on the hands of more than two dozen haredi Orthodox protesters who were arrested during riots, spurring a comparison to Nazis. The demonstrators, among 120 arrested Thursday during rallies against the arrest of haredi draft dodgers that blocked roads in Jerusalem and other cities, refused to identify themselves. The…
Israel accused Hezbollah on Monday of orchestrating shelling across the Golan Heights frontier in order to stoke Israeli-Syrian fighting, and called on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his big-power ally Russia to curb the Lebanese guerrillas. Twice last week, mortar rounds or rockets launched from Syria hit areas of the Golan that Israel has held…
The director of the Netflix documentary “One of Us,” about formerly ultra-Orthodox Jews, apologized last week for inaccurate comments she made about the Holocaust, the Jerusalem Post reported. In an appearance on the Charlie Rose show, Heide Ewing made it seem as though Hasidic Jews were targeted at a higher rate than non-religious Jews. “The…
An organizer of campus tours for white nationalist Richard Spencer is suing Ohio State University in federal court after the school refused to rent campus space to Spencer, citing a “substantial risk to public safety.” “The University values freedom of speech,” the school wrote in a letter to Spencer’s tour organizer Cameron Padgett. “Nonetheless, the…
An influential Chinese blogger wept as he met with Holocaust survivor and author Solomon Perel, Ynet News reported. Yan Jingsheng has millions of followers on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, and Perel is author of the book “Europa, Europa.” The two met when Perel gave a talk to a delegation of Chinese bloggers in Israel…
(JTA) — The booking agent for white nationalist Richard Spencer has filed a federal lawsuit against The Ohio State University for refusing a request to rent space on campus for a speech by the controversial far-right figure. The lawsuit, filed on Sunday, comes after the university on Friday informed Cameron Padgett, a graduate student at…
Four years of drought have overtaxed Israel’s unmatched array of desalination and wastewater treatment plants, choking its most fertile regions and catching the government off-guard. “No one imagined we would face a sequence of arid years like this, because it never happened before,” said Uri Schor, spokesman for Israel’s Water Authority. The Sea of Galilee,…
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