WASHINGTON — A bill aimed at isolating the Hamas-led Palestinian government has triggered a major fight between the Jewish community’s main pro-Israel lobby and a member of the House Committee on International Relations. Rep. Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat, is refusing to meet with representatives of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee until she receives…
Yad Vashem’s chairman, Avner Shalev, reportedly called on Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to let refugees from Darfur remain in Israel. Shalev wrote to Olmert on Sunday, stating that “as members of the Jewish people, for whom the memory of the Holocaust burns, we cannot stand by as the refugees from the genocide in Darfur…
Like many top-tier philanthropists, Moshe Kantor was tired of listening to staffers at charitable organizations tell him how to spend his considerable wealth. So the Russian business tycoon came up with a solution: the creation of a “House of Jewish Lords” that would serve as a place for well-to-do donors to throw their philanthropic money…
As world leaders struggle to halt the mass killing in Darfur, former general and 2004 presidential candidate Wesley Clark is calling for NATO to intervene in the conflict and for the United States to commit a small detachment of ground troops. Clark served as the supreme allied commander of the NATO forces that drove Serbian…
WASHINGTON — Despite receiving warm embraces in Congress and in the White House this week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert returned home with mounting opposition and a lack of clear American support for his plan to have Israel determine its borders unilaterally. President Bush effusively praised Olmert during a White House meeting Tuesday, and Olmert was…
Jerzy Ficowski, a peerless advocate for the arts and letters of a decimated Polish Jewry, died in Warsaw on May 9, at the age of 82. Following World War II, during which he served in the Home Army and participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Ficowski published nearly 20 volumes of poetry, including the acclaimed…
TEL AVIV — A judicial commission investigating police ties to a reputed crime family sent a letter of warning May 23 to the office of Israel’s national police commissioner, Moshe Karadi, one of the officers at the center of the inquiry. Additional letters were sent to other police commanders and to several prosecutors. Letters of…
The Israeli political shakeup caused by the emergence of the centrist Kadima party is complicating negotiations over control of the three nonprofit agencies primarily responsible under Israeli law for the Jewish state’s relations with Diaspora Jewish communities, according to a report on Ynet, the Web site of the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot. The three…
As calls for divestment from Israel continue to ripple through mainline Protestant denominations, several of the world’s most prominent Catholic leaders are making high-profile overtures to the Jewish community. During a trip to Poland that started this week, the German-born Pope Benedict XVI is set to visit the Auschwitz death camp on May 28. Next…
A Democratic candidate for Alabama’s attorney general’s office has been exposed as a Holocaust denier less than a month before the state’s June 6 primaries. Larry Darby believes that there were no more than 140,000 Jewish deaths during World War II — most of them having been brought on by typhus — and that the…
Exhibit Cloistered World: It might seem strange for a Jewish woman to spend significant amounts of time in the company of nuns, but in the context of Israeli-born photographer Lili Almog’s work, it’s completely logical. Almog, who is currently based in New York, has dedicated much of her artwork to capturing women’s private lives on…
