Lucija Rajner last saw her father, Vladislav, on Nov. 14, 1941, through a barbed-wire fence at a concentration camp in Belgrade. That autumn, Rajner and her mother passed food, letters and bedding to him, until a guard told them he wouldn’t need such supplies anymore. Rajner never learned his fate, but assumes he died the…
A Hungarian court found four men guilty on Tuesday of killing Roma families in a spree of racist violence in 2008 and 2009 that shocked the country and led to accusations that police had failed to protect an historically persecuted minority. Six Roma were killed and several wounded in the attacks, which created a climate…
Progressive laws and generous benefits have long made Canada a haven for refugees. But the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been raising the drawbridge with laws that strip new immigrants of health-care benefits – and restrict immigration from countries that are supposedly “safe” to stay in. Jewish leaders have formed an advocacy…
A controversial Canadian Jewish television host apologized for a rant against the Roma people. Ezra Levant of the Sun TV network sparked widespread outrage in September when he referred to Roma as “gypsies” and “a culture synonymous with swindlers…one of the central characteristics of that culture is that their chief economy is theft and begging.”…
Germany remembered the Holocaust’s forgotten victims on Wednesday by opening a memorial in the heart of Berlin to the half a million ethnic Sinti and Roma murdered by the Nazis. As the mournful strains of a solo violin sounded through the trees, political leaders and frail survivors approached a dark pool close to the German…
Blaming Roma for everything from petty crime to trash on the streets, thousands of supporters of the far-right opposition Jobbik party rallied in Hungary on Wednesday in the eastern city of Miskolc. Local Roma in Hungary’s second largest city simultaneously held a counter-rally rejecting what they said were typical right-wing slurs while police kept the…
A joint Hindu-Jewish crusade against the abuse of European Roma issued a statement Monday calling on European leaders to stop treating the ethnic group as “pariahs.” Rabbi Jonathan Freirich, a California- and Nevada-based rabbi, and Rajan Zed, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, argue that European governments repeatedly scapegoat Roma, also known as Gypsies;…
Canada is home to less than three percent of the world’s Jewish population, but every other year, Jewish artists from around the world congregate in Toronto for the Ashkenaz Festival, which returns this year from August 31 to September 6 at the city’s Harbourfront Centre. The festival was created in 1995 as a forum for…
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