Six people have been arrested in Scotland for creating an anti-Semitic Facebook page. The five men and a 15-year-old boy from Glasgow and East Renfrewshire were arrested on May 11, according to reports on Wednesday. They were arrested after complaints from the Jewish community in Giffnock, which was mocked on the Facebook page called: “Welcome…
A Toronto Islamic school has lost the right to use a public school for its classes after anti-Semitic teachings were discovered in its curriculum and posted on its website. One of the lessons taught at the East End Madrassah referred to Jews as “crafty” and “treacherous,” contrasted Islam with “the Jews and the Nazis,” and…
Defense officials plan to recommend that the Yizkor text that was the subject of a dispute last year be officially included in Memorial Day services at military cemeteries. The dispute centered around whether the words “Yizkor Elohim” (“May God remember” ) or “Yizkor Am Yisrael” (“May the nation of Israel remember” ) should be used….
A Jewish woman suing her congregation over the burial of a non-Jewish black woman in its cemetery has settled her lawsuit. Maria Balaban, 73, settled her lawsuit with Congregation Ahavath Achim in Colchester, Conn., on Wednesday after two days of negotiations in the middle of the trial, which began last week. Balaban, a member of…
Talks between Iran and world powers that will end in agreed-upon measures that would nonetheless allow Tehran to continue and pursue military aspects of its nuclear program are “ridiculous,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said in an interview on Wednesday. Barak’s comments, made during an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, came ahead of next week’s round…
Citing personal reasons, Gideon Aronoff, the CEO of HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, is resigning. Aronoff, who has served as president and CEO of the organization for the last six years, made the announcement Wednesday in a letter to friends. “For personal reasons I must seek other opportunities to serve that better enable me…
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs expressed concerns about “fracking,” a technique used to extract underground deposits of natural gas. The JCPA statement issued Tuesday noted that last week’s annual plenum of the consensus-driven public policy umbrella approved a resolution highlighting the potential benefits and drawbacks of the process known as “hydrofracking,” which extracts “vast…
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak will meet with his U.S. counterpart, Leon Panetta, in Washington amid reports that Iran may have achieved the capability to build a nuclear bomb. Israel has said that such a capability is a “red line” that could trigger military action. The defense chiefs are scheduled to meet Thursday. The Associated…
The activist group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is planning to return to the gay pride parade in Toronto, setting up another battle with Jewish groups and the city. Queers Against Israeli Apartheid withdrew from last year’s Pride Toronto parade after city officials demanded assurances that the group would not take part amid rumblings that funding…
The Tel Aviv municipality provoked public ire this week when, in a bid to advertise Gay Pride Day, it painted a city-center crosswalk in rainbow colors and posted photos of the stunt on Facebook – only to repaint it white a few hours later. The municipality launched its advertising campaign ahead of next month’s Gay…
Arno Lustiger, a Holocaust survivor and historian who put a spotlight on Jewish resistance against the Nazis, has died. Lustiger died Tuesday in Frankfurt, Germany, at the age of 88. Lustiger’s “greatest contribution for all time” was in “rescuing from oblivion the story of Jewish resistance in the Shoah,” Dieter Graumann, head of the Central…
