In a pugnacious speech to a gala dinner given by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein urged Jews to organize and fight back against anti-Semitism. The famously combative Weinstein, who was being presented with the organization’s Humanitarian Award at its National Tribute Dinner on Tuesday night, announced to the attendees that Jews “better…
An Israeli lawmaker called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to fire the country’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer. Firing Dermer would be a first step to repairing the U.S.-Israel relationship, Erel Margalit of the Zionist Union party said in a letter sent to Netanyahu on Wednesday. Dermer played a key role in organizing…
A Palestinian teenager died on Wednesday of a gunshot wound sustained a week ago during a confrontation with Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank, hospital officials said. The officials at Ramallah Hospital said Ali Safi, 17, had been shot through the chest. Witnesses said soldiers had responded to stone-throwing at a protest against a…
Two paintings confiscated by the Nazis from their Jewish owners will be returned to their heirs in separate restitution deals. On Tuesday, the Commission for Looted Art in Europe and Art Recovery International announced that the oil painting “Portrait of a Gentleman” by El Greco had been returned to the heirs of Viennese industrialist Julius…
The Spanish government is inching closer to providing an expedited path to citizenship for Sephardic Jews. The initiative, first proposed in November 2012, is expected to clear a major hurdle today, as the Spanish newspaper El Pais reported it would pass the lower house of the Spanish parliament. It must still be passed by the…
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin seemed to chide Benjamin Netanyahu for the prime minister’s Election Day comments about Arab-Israeli voters before tasking him to form the next government. On Wednesday, Rivlin received the official results of last week’s national elections showing Netanyahu’s Likud with 30 Knesset seats to lead all parties. Shortly after receiving the results,…
The prosecution concluded its arguments in the trial of a leader in the Syracuse Jewish community accused of murdering his wife. Prosecutors finished up their case against Dr. Robert Neulander in upstate New York’s Onondaga County Court on Tuesday. They contend that he killed his wife, Leslie, in their bedroom in DeWitt in 2012 and…
Workers at the Western Wall removed the notes placed in the cracks by worshippers in advance of Passover. The notes were removed Wednesday morning under the supervision of the rabbi of the Western Wall, Shmuel Rabinovich. They will be buried in the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem. The Western Wall Institute also receives tens…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israel is freezing the construction of 1,500 housing units in the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa, an Israeli newspaper is reporting. The report of the construction freeze, by the popular Israeli daily Yediot Acharonot comes after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week visited the suburban Jerusalem Jewish neighborhood, where as prime…
JERUSALEM (JTA) — Four members of Israel’s Joint Arab List elected to the Knesset met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank. Ayman Odeh, the Arab-Israeli party’s leader, headed the delegation that visited the Muquata, the P.A.’s headquarters in Ramallah, on Tuesday evening, the Palestinian Maan news agency reported Wednesday. The others…
When the domes of Edirne’s abandoned Great Synagogue caved in, Rifat Mitrani, the town’s last Jew, knew it spelled the end of nearly two millennia of Jewish heritage in this Turkish town. As a boy, Mitrani studied Hebrew in the synagogue’s gardens and, in the 1970s, dispatched its Torah to Istanbul after the community shrank…
