A leading Vatican official slammed breakaway traditionalist Catholics for anti-Semitic positions. Cardinal Kurt Koch, president of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, in an interview Tuesday with the Italian religious news agency SIR slammed the followers of the renegade Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X for rejecting the Vatican II policy on…
A West Bank settler dubbed “The Jewish Terrorist” by the Israeli media was convicted on Wednesday of killing two Palestinians in 1997. Yaakov “Jack” Tytell, a U.S. immigrant to a settlement in the occupied West Bank, confessed to the killings. Efforts by his lawyers, one whom quoted him as saying he had been on a…
The Chabad-Lubavitch movement asked a U.S. judge to fine Russia for refusing to hand over confiscated Jewish scriptures, but the U.S. Justice Department opposed the move. According to the Associated Press, Chabad lawyer Seth Gerber last week asked Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court in Washington to fine Russia for not transferring…
Israel’s Supreme Court gave the government the go-ahead on Wednesday to remove tents Palestinian activists pitched on a patch of West Bank land marked for Jewish settlements. On Sunday, Israeli police evicted 50 Palestinian protesters from the site, in the “E1” area outside the Arab suburbs of East Jerusalem, where Jewish settlements could split the…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has allowed a record level of settlement expansion since his 10-month construction moratorium expired two years ago, an anti-settlement watchdog said on Wednesday. The Peace Now group, publishing a report before Israel’s Jan. 22 parliamentary election, said construction of 6,676 settler housing units in the occupied West Bank was approved…
The heartbroken father of internet activist Aaron Swartz blamed the government for his son’s suicide in an emotional eulogy at his funeral in suburban Chicago. “Aaron did not commit suicide — he was killed by the government,” Robert Swartz said to 200 mourners packing Central Avenue Synagogue in Highland Park, Ill., the New York Post…
Jewish leaders representing the Reform, Conservative, Orthodox and Reconstructionist movements are all answering the nation’s call for ideas to end gun violence. Together, they have held news conferences, written to Vice President Joe Biden’s gun control task force and sent letters to Congress. On Jan. 15, which would have been Martin Luther King Jr.’s 84th…
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called on the White House to withhold aid to Egypt over President Mohamed Morsi’s insulting comments about Jews In a statement released on January 15, the anti-Semitism watchdog asked the government to make a consignment of F-16s and other military hardware bound for Egypt conditional on Morsi’s promising to curb…
Former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel appears increasingly likely to be confirmed as U.S. defense secretary, thanks to support from two key senators and the lack of an overt campaign against him by mainstream pro-Israel groups. Hagel, whose comments on Israel, Iran and gay rights have sparked opposition to his candidacy, on Tuesday won the backing…
The youngest person saved by German industrialist Oskar Schindler has died. Leon Leyson, who Schindler called “Little Leyson,” died of lymphoma on Jan. 12 in Whittier, Calif., at 83, the Los Angeles Times reported. Leyson was 13 when he went to work at Schindler’s factory in Krakow, Poland, where he had to stand on a…
A 37-year-old New York woman was indicted by a federal grand jury Tuesday on charges she lied to federal agents investigating fraudulent fundraising schemes tied to the Sandy Hook school shooting. Authorities say Nouel Alba used her Facebook account, telephone calls and text messages to falsely claim she was an aunt of one of the…
