An array of Jewish organizations are set to endorse President Obama’s call for military strikes against Syria, although the degree of support is not yet clear. A number of organizations — including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Zionist Organization of America, Americans for Peace…
A Ukrainian ultranationalist movement is organizing a march in Uman against the presence of Jewish pilgrims there, Ukrainian media reported. “The Hasidim colonize Uman, with help from authorities,” Yuri Botnar of the Svoboda party was quoted as telling the news site timeua.com on Monday. Botnar, the local representative of Svoboda in Uman, said he was…
Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, David Lau, called for better treatment of the chickens used in the pre-Yom Kippur kapparot ritual. Lau in a letter addressed to ritual organizers and participants wrote that causing the chickens to suffer before and during kapparot would be a “mitzvah through a transgression,” which he said “was not the intention…
(JTA) — On the rooftop of a Soviet-era apartment block, a young man straps into climbing gear and rappels down the side as a small gathering of city workers and police officers watch from below. On the way down, the climber stops at a balcony and tears loose one of the thousands of banners hung…
One of Russia’s most prominent gay rights activists made anti-Semitic statements on his Twitter and Facebook accounts. The tweets appeared last week on Nikolai Alexeyev’s account in connection with an article about him in OUT Magazine. Alexeyev re-tweeted comments calling the author of the article, Michael Lucas, a “Jewish pig” and “Israeli monkey,” and calling…
A life-size wax figure of Holocaust diarist Anne Frank has gone on display at Madame Tussauds in Vienna. The display shows Anne writing in her diary at a desk in the attic of the house in Amsterdam where the teenager’s family hid from the Nazis. The diary was discovered after the Holocaust and published. Anne…
LUDWIGSBURG, Germany- German justice officials called on Tuesday for 30 former Nazi guards to face prosecution for their role in facilitating mass murder at the Auschwitz death camp during World War Two. The Nazis killed some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews but also Roma, Poles and others, at Auschwitz in occupied Poland between 1940 and…
JERUSALEM/MOSCOW – Israel tested a U.S.-backed missile system in the Mediterranean on Tuesday but did not announce the launch in advance, prompting a disclosure by Russia that kept the world on edge as the United States weighed an attack on Syria. The morning launch was first reported by Moscow media that quoted Russian defence officials…
A Jordanian government minister condemned Israel’s construction of a new prayer space south of the existing Western Wall Plaza. Jordan’s State Minister for Media Affairs Mohammad Momani on Monday called the construction of a platform in the area for egalitarian prayer “a blatant attack on the Muslim monuments and Wakf land which is an integral…
It took 10 date pits and one olive pit to come to the conclusion that the heyday of the copper mines at Timna, near Eilat, was indeed during the reign of King Solomon, in the 10th century B.C.E. The samples, which were dug up by a Tel Aviv University team headed by archaeologist Erez Ben…
The Education Ministry has asked textbook publishers to eliminate chapters on human reproduction, pregnancy prevention and sexually transmitted diseases from science textbooks used in state religious junior high schools as well as from their teacher manuals, Haaretz has learned. Several publishers have already started making the changes, which were requested in late June. The revised…
