Wednesday Links Part 2

From Ian:

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Ariel Students Excluded from Obama Talk
Obama’s staff sends speech invites to Israeli schools, but Ariel University students off the list. MK protests to ambassador.

“If the president invites students from every Israeli university, he should invite representatives from Ariel University as well,” Chetboun declared. Ignoring Ariel University is a sign of non-recognition of the Israeli government’s decision to give it university status, he said.
Chetboun has written to U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro in protest. “I cannot understand or accept your decision,” he wrote. “Ariel University was recognized as a university by Israel’s government. In excluding students from Ariel, the American government is taking a clear, one-sided stance, while declaring that the visit is not political.

The apartheid libel
Israel Apartheid Week kicked off this year in Europe on February 25 and runs through March 17 in South Africa.

However, as noted by Gideon Shimoni – the former head of the Hebrew University’s Institute of Contemporary Jewry, who was born and raised in Johannesburg – the term “apartheid” has become “a code word that is not being used to analyze a sociopolitical phenomenon, but rather as a rhetorical weapon... to demonize and excoriate the State of Israel, a political entity that defines itself as Jewish and democratic.”

Brother of Infamous Nazi Hermann Goering Up for Prestigious Righteous of the Nations Award

Albert Goering, the brother of infamous Nazi Hermann Goering, is now among the candidates to receive the Righteous Among The Nations award. Albert was a German businessman who died in 1966.
According to accounts, Albert saved hundreds of Jews and political dissidents during the Second World War by helping them obtain exit permits and through other means.

Film looks at NY Times and Holocaust
A student documentary about the paper’s shallow coverage of the genocide — just six front-page stories throughout the war — will premiere at one of America’s most prestigious festivals

In promotional materials, the young filmmaker notes that she’s not breaking entirely new ground, acknowledging that the project was “inspired” by “Buried By the Times,” Laurel Leff’s critical study of how the paper chose to cover — and not cover — the genocide.
Both the book and the film allege that the Sulzberger family, the Times’ Jewish owners, feared becoming closely associated with Jewish causes, and restricted the prominence of reports on the killing. A scholar interviewed in the film notes that the Times printed six front-page stories on the Holocaust during all of World War II, an average of one per year.

In New York, Signs Of A Quiet Exodus Of Jews From France
Last March's killings at a Jewish elementary school in Toulouse shocked many, but French Jews have been feeling less secure for years. Some leave, though security isn't the only reason.

Every Saturday at around 12pm on the sidewalks of the Upper West Side you can hear French being spoken. It’s coming from groups of people who are coming out of the synagogues on 75th, 78th and 84th streets, where increasing numbers of French Jews are appearing each week.
They’re families with kids, young people, teachers and executives. The consulate on Fifth Avenue hasn’t estimated the exact numbers of this phenomenon but it’s definitely increasing. In the “Manhattan Day School” the teachers are showing the daughter of a family around, who just arrived with very few days warning.

Jewish Leaders Call for Further Measures to Protect Mount of Olives Cemetery

Leaders of Jewish groups including the Rabbinical Council of America, the National Council of Young Israel, Agudath Israel of America, the Orthodox Union, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations wrote a letter to Netanyahu commending the prime minister “for the great strides made by his government to secure and protect the ancient Jewish cemetery—which has increasingly come under attack in recent years with continuous violence against visitors, rampant grave desecration, dumping of refuse and gross defilement of the cemetery by local Arab youths,” the International Committee for the Preservation of Har Hazeitim (ICPHH) said in a press release.

Polish Jewish museum unveils reconstructed shul roof
Scheduled to open next year, Warsaw cultural center hopes to join ranks of Yad Vashem and US Holocaust Museum

A Jewish history museum in Warsaw has unveiled a reconstructed synagogue roof with an elaborately painted ceiling modeled on a 17th-century structure, presenting the first object that will go on permanent display in the highly awaited museum.
The wooden roof, with its frescoed ceiling, will be a key attraction in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is due to open next year in the heart of the city’s former Jewish quarter. Reporters in Warsaw were invited to view it Tuesday.

Drug candidate to enhance bone marrow transplant success
The drug makes the donor tissue less likely to destroy the patient’s organs, while allowing the regular immune activity against the cancer.

In bone marrow transplants, between 30 to 70 percent of all patients develop a disease caused by the immune system in the donor tissue. Like in a sci-fi horror movie, the tissue transplant starts attacking the patient’s own organs. This graft-versus-host disease (GvHD) means a lifetime of immune suppressant drugs – chemicals that come with their own bag of problems.
But the Israeli company Enlivex has developed a new trick to help a patient accept foreign tissue more readily, improving the odds and outcomes for people suffering from leukemia, lymphoma and other blood cancers requiring bone marrow transplants.

NYC Event Raises $27 Million for IDF
Donors give millions to IDF, honor commander who lost arm.

Attendees honored Captain Ziv Shilon, who was badly wounded in a Hamas attack near Gaza in October 2012. After losing an arm and suffering significant injury to his other arm in the initial attack, Shilon charged the terrorists who had attacked him, using his mouth and nose to help operate the gun.
Shilon inspired Israel with his positive attitude and determination in wake of the attack.

Israel’s Bold New Queen
The latest Miss Israel, Ethiopian-born Yityish Aynaw, says it’s about time a black woman wore the crown

Aynaw will get a taste of foreign relations this year: This week she flies to New York to address a gala at the Waldorf Astoria for the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces. This winter, she’ll be in Paris. And pageant director Cohen says organizers of this year’s Miss World competition in Indonesia—a country with which Israel shares no diplomatic relations—are working on securing a visa for her to compete.