One of Germany’s 16 states has declared circumcision legal. Berlin, Germany’s capital and itself a state, is the first to declare the practice legal following Cologne court ruled in June that non-medical circumcisions on children amounted to a criminal offense, according to DPA, a German news wire. National legislation is also pending to legalize circumcision….
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unexpectedly canceled a security cabinet meeting on Wednesday morning, telling ministers that information from the first part of the meeting, held the day before, was leaked. “A short while after the meeting yesterday something serious happened,” Netanyahu said. “A leak from the cabinet discussions… someone severely damaged the trust that Israel’s…
In response to a report of some 20 Eritrean migrants trapped between the Israel-Egypt border, Interior Minsiter Eli Yishai declared, “We will not bring the Eritreans into Israeli territory.” “It is hardest for me, of anyone, to see these pictures, and return families to their homelands. It is hard for me to see these pictures,…
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who helped save up to 100,000 Jews during the Holocaust, was honored in an Australian parliament. New South Wales Premier Barry O’Farrell marked the centenary since Wallenberg’s birth Wednesday by announcing an annual human rights award in Wallenberg’s name. “It is important the New South Wales Government pays tribute to a…
The European Union has launched an online survey into how Jews experience anti-Semitism in nine member states. Results will be published in an EU report next year, Henry Nickels of the European Union for Fundamental Rights Agency said on Tuesday at a conference in Brussels. His Vienna-based inter-governmental body and the Institute for Jewish Policy…
Edward I. Koch, the former three-term mayor of New York City, was hospitalized on Tuesday for anemia, the New York Times reported. Koch, 87, has been “extraordinarily weak” recently, the paper quoted George Arzt, his former press secretary and longtime friend as saying. “He used to eat like a horse, and now he just pushes…
Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, “categorically denied” that he specified the Republican Party when he described as harmful making Israel a partisan issue. “I categorically deny that I ever characterized Republican policies as harmful to Israel,” Oren said in a statement emailed Tuesday to reporters. “Bipartisan support is a paramount national interest for Israel,…
The president of the European Jewish Congress, Moshe Kantor, urged dozens of imams and rabbis to accept “compromises” in negotiating religious liberties in Europe. “We are ready to compromise in dialogue with European leaders,” Kantor said Tuesday at a event attended by dozens of Muslim and Jewish religious leaders in Paris. Recent compromises are “a…
The Western Wall checked out fine in a test of its stability by engineers. The office of the rabbi of the Western Wall, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, said there were no abnormal findings in Tuesday’s test. The check was made less than two weeks before the start of the High Holidays, when hundreds of thousands of…
Guma Aguiar, a Florida businessman and philanthropist who went missing in June, left his tefillin on his abandoned boat. All of the life jackets also were accounted for, the Coast Guard reported, according to the Sun-Sentinel, after getting the records through a Freedom of Information Act request. His wedding ring and watch were left at…
Jewish school girls were verbally assaulted with anti-Semitic slurs in Berlin on Monday, in the second attack on Jews reported in the German capital in less than a week. Last week, Daniel Alter, a Berlin rabbi, was assaulted by youths in West Berlin in a suspected anti-Semitic attack, witnessed by his 6-year-old daughter. Alter told…
