The struggle for women to pray as they see fit at the Western Wall will be the focus of High Holy Day sermons at congregations across the United States, as part of an organized campaign to galvanize support for greater religious tolerance in Israel. The campaign is being spearheaded by Jewish Voices Together, a New…
JERUSALEM – Israel has disciplined a group of soldiers for partying with Palestinians while armed and in uniform at a nightclub in the West Bank city of Hebron, a military spokesman said on Wednesday. Israel’s Channel 2 television broadcast a film in which two helmeted soldiers, at least one armed with a rifle, were shown…
The head of the Jewish federation in Vancouver and the Canadian city’s transit agency are at odds over the legality of an anti-Israel ad campaign on buses there. The ads, which went up Tuesday, purport to show the “disappearance of Palestine due to Israeli occupation over the past 65 years.” The ads — 15 bus…
Israel is preparing to start a large-scale campaign to pressure immigrants from Sudan and Eritrea to voluntarily leave the country after the September holidays, Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced on Wednesday. According to Sa’ar, the measure comes in the wake of a third country’s agreement to take in the immigrants or serve as a transit…
Federal complaints accusing the University of California campuses in Berkeley and Santa Cruz of failing to curb hostile environments for Jewish students were dismissed. A complaint filed last year with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights against the Berkeley campus by two recent graduates referred specifically to the annual February Apartheid Week…
A prisoner’s cap from the Majdanek concentration camp — likely stolen decades ago from the museum there — was found in the United States. The gray-and-blue-striped cap was scheduled to be transferred to the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage on Thursday and returned to the museum. Experts who checked the cap confirmed its…
The final two charter flights of new immigrants from Ethiopia landed in Israel. The two airplanes carrying the 450 new Israeli citizens arrived Wednesday at Ben Gurion Airport. A steady trickle of approximately 200 Ethiopian immigrants per month has been coming to Israel since 2010, when Israel launched Operation Wings of a Dove after checking…
Jewish staffers for the campaign of Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny have denied reports that he praised the Holocaust. “To my knowledge, he never made the statement attributed to him,” Maxim Katz, deputy director of the Navalny campaign for the September 8 mayoral election, told JTA Tuesday. Katz, a 29-year-old Moscovite local politician who had…
A Jewish lawmaker in Australia is under fire for changing his sample ballot cards in deference to the large Orthodox Jewish community in his electorate. Michael Danby, a junior minister in the Labor government, placed the Sex Party last in sample ballot cards he sent to Orthodox Jewish voters in his Melbourne electorate ahead of…
The U.S. Department of Education dismissed a complaint against the University of California Berkeley that claimed anti-Israel protests on campus created a hostile environment for Jewish students, and that the university was legally obligated to curb them. The 2012 complaint, filed with the education department’s Office of Civil Rights by two recent graduates, alleged that…
Khader Abu al-Kian’s dusty village of Atir has never existed on any official map, and now it is disappearing before his eyes. For decades he and his fellow Arab Bedouins eked out a meagre existence in the Negev desert, largely under the Israeli government’s radar. But soaring property costs and a housing crisis are driving…
