The public Hanukkah candle lighting at Sydney’s Martin Place was canceled for the first time in 30 years following the terror attack that killed two Australians. Chabad, which has erected a giant 33-foot Hanukkah menorah in downtown Sydney for the past three decades, issued a statement Thursday, saying: “Due to the very recent terror attack…
An Australian Royal Commission will investigate how rabbis and senior leaders of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Sydney and Melbourne handled the child sex abuse scandal. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse confirmed this week that Chabad in Sydney and Melbourne will be the focus of a public hearing, starting Feb. 2…
People run with hands up from the Lindt Cafe during a hostage standoff in Sydney, Australia / Getty Images My ears perked up when I heard the news about a potential terror attack at the Lindt Chocolat Cafe in Sydney. “Potential” terror attack, because for a while the nature of the situation was unclear. And…
Jewish communities in Australia remained under lockdown as a hostage crisis continued at a café in Sydney. The Community Security Group, which handles security for the Jewish communities of Australia, raised the threat level to severe on Monday after an apparent Islamist gunman entered a café in downtown Sydney and took dozens of hostages, the…
One of the five youths arrested for terrorizing Jewish children on a school bus earlier this year agreed to visit the Sydney Jewish Museum as part of an agreed punishment. In the juvenile justice system in Sydney, the offender – who cannot be named because he is a minor – also agreed to participate in…
Jewish leaders in Australia scolded an attempt to recognize a Palestine state in federal parliament as “an exercise in empty symbolism.” Labor lawmaker Maria Vamvakinou, a co-convener of the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine group, tabled the private members’ bill in Canberra Monday calling on the Liberal government of Tony Abbott, one of Israel’s staunchest allies,…
Anti-Semitic incidents in Australia soared by more than a third in the past year. The annual Report on Anti-Semitic Incidents in Australia, presented Sunday at the Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s annual general meeting, logged 312 incidents between October 2013 and September 2014, about a 35 percent increase from 231 incidents the previous year. Much…
A highway expansion project in Israel has led to the discovery of a nearly 2,000-year-old mikvah. The ritual bath was discovered at Ha-Ela Junction, near the city of Beit Shemesh, during archaeological excavations conducted prior to widening Highway 38, the Israel Antiquities Authority said in a news release. In addition to the 1,900-year-old mikvah, archaeologists…
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