Three-fifths of Israeli religious Zionists prioritize safeguarding Israel’s Jewish majority over keeping control of the West Bank. According to a survey of religious Zionists conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute think tank, 62 percent believe maintaining Israel’s Jewish majority is more important than controlling the “entire Land of Israel from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.”…
President Barack Obama said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had not offered “any rebuttal” to his administration’s argument for the success of Iran nuclear talks. “I don’t think there’s been any rebuttal of my argument,” Obama told Fareed Zakaria on CNN’s New Day in an interview to be broadcast Sunday. Zakaria had asked Obama about…
French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala will stand trial for saying that a Jewish journalist should have died “in the gas chambers.” Known as Dieudonné, the comedian was filmed with a hidden camera in 2013 making the comment about French journalist Patrick Cohen, according to the New York Times. The footage, which was broadcast on French…
The president of the Jewish community of Rome and a well-known Italian journalist were detained overnight by Polish police after recording an interview at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Roman Jewish Communal President Riccardo Pacifici and Italian journalist David Parenzo conducted the interview for an Italian television station Tuesday, following a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary…
New York State Assemby Speaker Sheldon Silver, who is facing corruption charges, will resign from his position. Silver, 70, was arrested Jan. 22 for allegedly receiving payments from a law firm, Goldberg & Iryami, without properly disclosing them. The arrest stems from an anti-corruption investigation launched by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2013. Silver…
(JTA) — What kept you alive? Did your non-Jewish friends reject you? Could you ever forgive? Those were some of the questions posed by Jewish young adults to Holocaust survivor Marcel Tuchman on Monday at the Galicia Jewish Museum here. “What kept me alive was having my father with me,” said Tuchman, 93, a physician…
Dozens of survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague returned to the site for a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of their rescue. Tuesday’s commemoration took place on International Holocaust Memorial Day, which the United Nations set in 2005 for Jan. 27 because it was on that day in 1945 that Russian army troops…
Panos Kammenos, a right-wing politician who said Jews don’t pay taxes, was appointed the defense minister of Greece. Kammenos, who heads the ultranationalist Independent Greeks, was appointed to the post in the new government on Tuesday after joining the coalition of the newly elected far-left Syriza party, which won handily in Sunday’s national elections. While…
The presidential palace in Bulgaria’s capital will remain lit throughout the night of International Holocaust Memorial Day to encourage actions against anti-Semitism. The symbolic act at the Sofia residence was announced Tuesday by Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev at a meeting organized by the European Jewish Congress in Prague on the 70th anniversary of the liberation…
The Temple Mount in Jerusalem saw nearly 11,000 Israeli Jewish visitors last year, an increase of 28 percent over 2013. The figures were released by Israel Police through a freedom of information request to the Temple Institute, an organization that encourages Jewish visits to the site and aspires to rebuild the Jewish Temple there. According…
(Reuters) — World leaders joined around 300 Auschwitz survivors at the site of the former Nazi death camp on Tuesday to mark 70 years since its liberation by Soviet troops, an anniversary held in the shadow of war in Ukraine and a rise in anti-Semitism in Europe. Tuesday’s gathering in southern Poland marks perhaps the…
