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News Poland’s Jewish Revival Marred by Anti-Semitism of All Stripes
Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi of Poland, was on hand to affix the mezuza at the entrance to Warsaw’s first Jewish community center at its grand unveiling, October 27. The act of opening the building and cutting the ribbon was not his, however, but given over to a young boy while Schudrich helped hold the band…
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Fast Forward Polish Synagogue Defaced With Swastikas on Kristallnacht Eve
Unidentified vandals painted several swastikas and other anti-Semitic symbols on a synagogue building in Gdansk, Poland. Police are investigating the case and do not exclude the possibility that it may be the same vandals who three weeks ago set fire to a mosque in the city. Swastikas were noted on the facade of the building…
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The Schmooze Can Soy Products Turn You Gay?
An ultra-Orthodox sect has banned its Yeshiva students from eating soy products on the basis that the levels of estrogen found in soy beans could turn the men gay, the Haredi World newspaper reported on Tuesday. School officials are concerned that eating anything containing soy, even just one a week, “can cause unwanted arousal,” and…
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Fast Forward Topless Photo Shoot at Jewish Cemetery Didn’t Break Poland Law
A Polish photographer did not break the law by conducting a photo shoot with a half-naked model at the Jewish cemetery in Checiny. The city prosecutor in the Polish city of Kielce decided this week that Polish photographer Lukasz Szczygielski did not intend to insult the religious sensibilities of the cemetery of the Jewish community…
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Fast Forward Fake Hasidic Professor Busted in Poland
A 46-year-old man who pretended to be an Israeli professor has been arrested in Poland for having defrauded three Polish colleges in 2010, the Polish media reported. The reports say that the man, identified as Mariusz K., was arrested last week in Krakow, where he had fled when the case came to light. The Rzeczpospolita…
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Books A Uniquely Israeli Vision of the Afterlife
The World of the End By Ofir Touché Gafla Translated by Mitch Ginsburg Tor Books, 368 pages, $16.98 A recent cartoon published in the New Yorker shows a group of people standing by a grave. A woman is speaking, and the caption reads, “Wherever he is, I know he’ll be upgraded.” Might the afterworld —…
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Books Unread Family Letters Open Window Onto Life on the Eve of the Holocaust
On my first trip to Israel, just hours after I landed in Tel Aviv, my Israeli cousin Benny told me that he had nearly 300 family letters dating back to the 1930s and ’40s. I had come to Israel to research a book about the family that Benny and I have in common, and this…
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Fast Forward Polish Jews Compare Torching of a Local Mosque to Kristallnacht
Representatives of the Jewish community of Gdansk, Poland, said the torching of a mosque had “frightening connotations” of the Nazi-inspired Kristallnacht pogroms against Jews. The association was inescapable, three of the city’s Jewish leaders wrote in a statement Thursday. “On the eve of the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, during which synagogues were burned in the…
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