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The Schmooze

Campaign To Free Pollard Just Gets Odder

The campaign to free Jonathan Pollard just gets odder, and more disturbing.

Pollard started serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison in 1987 for passing military secrets to Israel while working as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy. The Shmooze reported back in December that his wife Esther Pollard claimed that the enormous forest fire in Northern Israel came to rebuke Israel for not working hard enough to free him. Now we have a religious study project that has seen 250,000 people across Israel take on extra study in the name the release of Pollard and… Gilad Shalit.

The project draws a parallel between Pollard, who was tried and sentenced by a transparent American legal system, and Shalit, who is held by Hamas, his whereabouts and state of health unknown and Red Cross visits denied. “I’m sure our learning will help bring Jonathan Pollard and Gilad Shalit home. They have been in prison too long,” said one of the speakers last Monday when some 700 people gathered in Jerusalem’s Great Synagogue, in the presence if Israel’s Ashkenazi Yona Metzger, to mark the end of the project.

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