— Fifteen Jewish groups joined an interfaith coalition in calling on the Senate Judiciary Committee to consider President Barack Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. During a conference call Thursday, 40 national and state religious organizations urged senators to hold a swift hearing and vote on the nomination of Merrick Garland, who is Jewish, to fill…
Amid a public debate about the complicity of Poles in the murder of Jews in the Holocaust, Poland’s education minister implied that historical accounts of such atrocities are inconclusive. In an interview Wednesday with the TVN24 network, Anna Zalewska spoke of “biased opinions” in describing Jedwabne, where on July 10, 1941, at least a few…
— The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations is seeking an apology from the White House for having compared Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Ron Dermer, with the new British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. At a press briefing Thursday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest referenced Dermer while discussing British Prime Minister Theresa May’s…
A high rabbinical court in Israel sentenced to five years in prison a man who for years has refused to give his wife a divorce. The High Rabbinical Court in Jerusalem passed on Thursday the sentence, which is one of the harshest meted out in recent years to an intransigent spouse, the news site NRG…
(JTA) — A person playing the Pokémon Go game on his smartphone discovered a dead human body behind a Holocaust Memorial in New Hampshire. A young man found the body floating in Salmon Brook near Rotary Common Park in Nashua, New Hampshire, while hunting for cartoon monsters using the Pokémon Go app, WMUR reported Thursday. Authorities…
Donald Trump praised the Republican Party platform as “the most pro-Israel of all time!” — a signal to pro-Israel Republicans that he embraces their outlook. Trump’s tweet Wednesday appeared to be aimed at assuaging doubts among pro-Israel Republicans that the party’s presumptive presidential nominee will hew to its pro-Israel trajectory of recent decades. He followed…
Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the prominent modern Orthodox rabbi who oversaw Ivanka Trump’s conversion to Judaism, has withdrawn from speaking at the Republican National Convention next week. In a letter to members of his community Friday, Lookstein wrote that he had accepted Ivanka Trump’s invitation to deliver an invocation at the convention “out of respect for…
— Nice’s Jewish community decided to hold Shabbat activities as planned despite the slaying of dozens of people in the city in southern France, in what French President Francois Hollande said was a terrorist attack directed at revellers celebrating the country’s national day. The attack was carried out by a 30-year-old man who drove a rented white…
VILNIUS, Lithuania — An international team of archeologists unearthed part of the complex that housed the former Great Synagogue of Vilnius, which Soviet authorities destroyed after World War II. An underground floor of a building belonging to the complex that housed the 17th century synagogue was exposed for the first time since 1957 earlier this…
WASHINGTON — Cornel West, whose appointment by Bernie Sanders to the Democratic Party platform drafting committee raised pro-Israel hackles, said he is endorsing the Green Party candidate for the presidency. “I am supporting Jill Stein,” the philosopher wrote Thursday in The Guardian. “I have a deep love for my brother Bernie Sanders, but I disagree…
WASHINGTON (JTA) — The Republican Party convention is asking Sheldon Adelson to cover a $6 million shortfall triggered by sponsors walking out over the nominee, Donald Trump. Politico reported Thursday that the appeal to the casino magnate came July 12, just six days before the July 18 launch of the convention in Cleveland. The convention…
