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Wednesday, June 01, 2022

06/01 Links Pt2: A Palestinian Celebration of ‘Empress of Terror’ Fusako Shigenobu; On woke political indoctrination and antisemitism; U. Chicago SJP Condemns Pro-Israel Newsletter as 'Hate Speech'

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: A Palestinian Celebration of ‘Empress of Terror’ Fusako Shigenobu
Her champions, some of whom were waiting outside the jailhouse to cheer her newfound freedom, disagree. They don’t think that she has anything to regret.

On the contrary, the PFLP stated that the “Palestinian people will never forget the sacrifices of this freedom fighter and her comrades in the Japanese Red Army for Palestine and the cause. Their revolutionary and humane principles, and their anti-imperialist sentiment, led them to join the ranks of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and fight alongside its freedom fighters.”

The PFLP also lauded the JRA for committing the Lod Airport massacre.

Hamas joined the rhetorical festivities, with spokesperson Jihad Taha saying that “Shigenobu’s support for Palestine will forever be recorded alongside all the honorable and free people of the world that supported the just Palestinian cause and the rights of the downtrodden Palestinian people against the fascist, racist and criminal occupation.”

Then there’s the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). The self-described “transnational, independent, grassroots movement of young Palestinians in Palestine and in exile worldwide” only rues the fact that Shigenobu is unable to continue her life’s work, as she is ill with cancer and says that she wishes to devote her time to her treatments.

“On this glorious occasion for Shigenobu and her loved ones, we uplift her as a shining example of the power of international solidarity and anti-imperialism to unite our struggles and defeat our oppressors, no matter where in the world they may be,” PYM tweeted.

The Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network chimed in, “express[ing] its strongest support and solidarity to Fusako Shigenobu, internationalist prisoner of the Palestinian liberation struggle.”

There is nothing novel about radical Palestinians heaping kudos on fellow killers. It won’t be long before the head dispatchers in Ramallah and Gaza start naming schools and sports arenas after this one. The only question is whether they’ll need to do it in Kanji.
BBC News erases PFLP from Lod airport massacre
On May 28th the BBC News website’s ‘Asia’ and ‘Middle East’ pages carried a report tagged ‘Israel’ and titled ‘Japanese Red Army founder Shigenobu freed after 20 years’ which was illustrated with a photograph of its topic draped in a keffiyeh.

No explanation of Shigenobu’s sartorial choice was provided and unlike other media outlets, the BBC did not report that some of those waiting for her outside the Tokyo prison were “waving Palestinian flags” or that Palestinian NGOs celebrated her release.

A caption to one of the other photographs in the BBC’s report informs readers that Shigenobu “spent 30 years living in the Middle East”. The report itself tells readers that:
“Her once-feared group had aimed to provoke a global socialist revolution through high-profile terror acts.

They carried out a series of hostage-takings and hijackings, as well as a deadly attack on an Israeli airport. […]

She has previously expressed regret for 26 deaths caused by an attack on Tel Aviv’s Lod Airport in 1972.”

At no point does the BBC’s report mention that the May 1972 terror attack at Israel’s international airport was carried out by Japanese Red Army members recruited by the PFLP. However archive material shows that the corporation is well aware of that fact:
“The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine said they had recruited the gunmen from the Japanese Red Army and said they “came from thousands of miles away to join the Palestinian people in their struggle”.”

“The gunmen were hired by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who said they had recruited the trio from Japan’s Red Army terror group, to carry out the attack, in revenge for the killing of two Arab hijackers earlier in May.”

“It is 40 years since Japanese gunmen attacked the Lod airport in Tel Aviv, Israel. They were left-wing militants working for a Palestinian organisation.”

Indeed, just two days after this article was published, on the 50th anniversary of that terror attack, BBC World Service radio’s ‘Witness History’ aired a programme with the following synopsis:
“In May 1972, Japanese gunmen attacked Lod airport in Tel Aviv, Israel. They were left-wing militants working for a Palestinian organisation. Twenty-six people were killed that day and more than 70 others were injured.”
Terrorist attacks not surprising given Palestinian suffering, says EU envoy
Terrorist attacks against Israelis should not be surprising given the depth of Palestinian suffering from the 74 years of conflict with Israel, according to European Union Representative Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff.

“When you are a Palestinian child living next to the separation wall, what do you think this child will grow up with,” he said Tuesday at an Alliance for Middle East Peace conference in Jerusalem.

“What do you think a child who sees the houses of their parents, their brothers and sisters demolished because he or she was a suspected or real terrorist” will feel? he asked. “What kind of hatred will burn in this child? What do you think will happen?”

Burgsdorff cited the spate of terrorist attacks that have rocked the country since the start of the year.

“We saw, a few months ago and the last few weeks, terrible terror attacks perpetrated on Israeli territory,” he said. “Twenty Israeli innocents lost their lives. But don’t be surprised, because there is hatred burning in many of these young Palestinians.”

Burgsdorff gave a brief but impassioned speech about the overall toll the Israel-Palestinian conflict has taken on the lives of Palestinians and the particular danger that exists now, given the absence of any peace process.

He spoke to a gathering of diplomats and activists who gathered to explore the role civil society can have in ending the conflict.


Jonathan Tobin: On woke political indoctrination and antisemitism
However, a new lawsuit about ethnic studies in Los Angeles illustrates not only how radicals are trying to use the public education system to impose their toxic theories on schoolchildren but the deceptive manner they are using to do it. It also shows that the Jewish stakes in the battle over CRT are much higher than many people understand.

The background to this case – in which the public-interest law firm, the Deborah Project, has sued the "Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum et al" on behalf of the Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles – involves a fight that most of the organized Jewish community thought they had already won.

In the spring of 2021, a long-running controversy over the content of California's proposed ethnic-studies curriculum in the spring of 2021 ended with the Jewish community being satisfied. The first draft of a proposed curriculum had erased the Jews as a group worth recognizing, as well as included anti-Israel and antisemitic content. A battle in the legislature and a veto by Gov. Gavin Newsom spiked that proposal and resulted in a new framework for the subject that would supposedly ensure that courses that taught the subject in public schools would be free of anti-Jewish bias, as well as radical leftist critiques of Zionism and other politicized material. The approved curriculum included lessons on Jews, the Mizrachi experience and antisemitism, with study of the latter rooted in the International Holocaust Remembrance Association (IHRA)'s widely approved working definition.

But as I wrote at the time, confidence that the state's decision ended the controversy was misplaced. The question remained how the curriculum would be implemented in the state's school districts, and how school boards and teachers would interpret the guidelines. Moreover, there was reason to believe that the entire idea of interjecting ideas about ethnicity was being pushed by educators with a political agenda rooted in the same toxic ideas that animated the curriculum that California had rejected. Those who were behind the drive to install ethnic-studies courses in schools were dedicated to using public education to have CRT and intersectional ideology go mainstream. That meant that it was more than likely that the approved curriculum would be manipulated by extremists to do exactly what Newsom and the California legislature had thought they had stopped.

As Deborah Project legal director Lori Lowenthal Marcus laid out in an article in the Los Angeles-based Jewish Journal, what's been going on is that a group promoting something they call the "Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, have with the help of the teachers union in Los Angeles been working covertly to have courses taught in the schools conform to a worldview in which leftist ideas about the need to resist "empire, white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism and anthropocentrism" became the focus of education in California.

As JNS reports, this effort centers on having ethnic studies only touch on black, Latino, Native Americans, and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The latter group includes people from the Middle East but pointedly excludes Jews. It sets aside the long history of oppression, religious hatred and ethnic cleansing carried out against Jews because, according to the CRT worldview, Jews are white and therefore privileged oppressors.

What happened was that a number of radicals behind this curriculum have, with the help of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, sought to bypass rules about transparency and public accountability, and impose their own CRT-inspired agenda on ethnic-studies courses. As Marcus discovered during the course of her investigation, the Liberated curriculum group advised teachers to "fly under the radar" and hide their goals, methods and details about their course material only to those administrators, teachers and parents who were ready to back their transformation of the schools into bases for leftist activism.
U. Chicago SJP Condemns Pro-Israel Newsletter as 'Hate Speech'
In a brazen and unintentionally ironic letter printed in the Chicago Maroon, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) at the University of Chicago condemned the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s distribution of a newsletter on campus exposing the terrorist associations of SJP and the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and urged university officials to thwart future attempts to distribute alleged “hate speech.”

The University of Chicago was recently named as one of the Top Ten Jew-Hating Colleges and Universities in a report published by the Freedom Center, and there was no shortage of evidence to support their place on that list.

UChicago SJP recently published an art zine titled “Cheers to Intifada,” referring to the violent Palestinian uprisings during which Jewish citizens of Israel were slaughtered because they were Jews. The zine contained violent imagery including a graphic of two lit Molotov cocktails raised in a toast under the heading “Cheers to Intifada.”

The zine was also rife with anti-Semitism including an image of a pig wearing a policeman’s hat with a Jewish star on it. Poems in the publication promoted ancient blood libel tropes against Jews such as one describing a fictional Polish teenager, understood to be Jewish and part of the IDF, who holds Palestinians captive while shooting "perverted bullets shot with animalistic lust yearning to rape bodies."

The student government at Chicago published a statement promoting the anti-Semitic BDS movement against Israel and used genocidal language calling to “free” Palestine “from the river to the sea,” a call to annihilate the entire state of Israel along with its Jewish citizens.

The Center for Middle East Studies at Chicago has also held multiple events featuring anti-Semitic speakers such as Rashid Khalidi and Michelle Hartman who demonized Israel and endorsed BDS.

And the same Chicago Maroon which printed SJP’s letter calling on the university to censor the Freedom Center’s pro-Israel newsletters removed an op-ed written by Jewish students objecting to “SJP’s Online Anti-Semitism” and published an apology for printing it in the first place.


South African Jewish Outlet ‘Expelled’ From Press Group After Reporting on ‘Antisemitic’ Cartoon
The Press Council of South Africa (PCSA) said on Friday it expelled a South African Jewish outlet after it refused to apologize for describing a pro-BDS caricature as antisemitic, drawing a swift response from the publication.

Judge Phillip Levinsohn, the PCSA chair of appeals, said the press group kicked out the South African Jewish Report (SAJR) after the outlet did not heed its rulings on a complaint over a November 2020 article covering the controversial cartoon.

In a statement on Friday, SAJR chairperson Howard Sackstein said the publication in fact withdrew from the PSCA six months ago, “after it became evident to us that the Press Council lacked the skills to perform their job competently, fairly and without prejudice.”

The original complaint against the Jewish paper was filed on behalf of the South African Boycott, Divestment and Sanction Coalition (SA BDS Coalition) — a movement of anti-Israel organizations in South Africa affiliated with the Palestine BDS National Committee — and the General Industrial Workers Union of SA (GIWUSA), both of whom created and published the political cartoon on their social media pages.

In November 2020, the SAJR published an article titled “Antisemitic Clover cartoon is BDS’s sour ‘last gasp.'”

At the time, Israel’s Central Bottling Company was set to take over the dairy company Clover Industries. The caricature encouraged South Africans to boycott Clover, and was described by the SAJR as displaying a “greedy, overweight giant of a man eating a pile of money while the ‘man on the street’ is drawn as a small, insignificant figure sitting in front of an empty plate.” The image was accompanied by a caption that said in part, “Greedy bosses connected to apartheid Israel. Blood curdling milk [and cheese, yoghurt, etc.]. Every reason to boycott Clover!” according to SAJR.

In its report, the Jewish publication cited antisemitism expert and University of Cape Town scholar Milton Shain, who called the cartoon antisemitic, and also quoted South African Jewish Board of Deputies Associate Director David Saksas, who slammed the image for using “stereotypes of greedy, exploitative Jews … to fuel the radical anti-Israel positions.”
PreOccupiedTerritory: J-Street Head To Lead Conference Of Presidents Of Minor Jewish Organizations (satire)
The director of a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobbying group that somehow manages never to support pro-Israel or pro-peace candidates or policies, and which pretends to exercise influence but in fact exerts no discernible policy impact despite sympathetic voices in prominent media, will take the helm of an umbrella group of associations that also produce little to no documentable effect on American Jewish life.

The Conference of Presidents of Minor Jewish Organizations announced Wednesday that Jeremy Ben-Ami of the progressive J-Street organization will assume the Conference chairmanship in September. He will succeed Rabbi Levi Wilensky of the Mikva Association of Nassau County, a not-for-profit that funds and manages ritual baths in western Long Island.

“This is an exciting achievement for J-Street,” gushed Ben-Ami at a press conference that CNN, MSNBC, and CBS covered, but that most real news outlets ignored. “I hope to leverage J Street’s impressive list of accomplishments to help lead our organizations to a better place, even if the vast majority of the constituency in this umbrella group belong to folks who, in their ignorance or wickedness, disagree with J Street politically.”


Author John Green Presents Fiction About Israel as Fact
Despite Green’s claims to the contrary, religion continues to play an important role in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. As alluded to in the passage above, a major Palestinian terrorist organization (Hamas) dedicated to the destruction of Israel and responsible for murdering numerous Israeli civilians and precipitating multiple conflicts with the State of Israel self-identifies as the Islamic Resistance Movement while openly contradicting Green’s aforementioned claims about theology and land in stating, “The Palestinian cause is not about land and soil, but it is about faith and belief.”

Green laments that “portraying the conflict as […] religious makes it feel intractable in a way that, frankly, it isn’t.” Green dislikes the feeling of intractability that he believes is fostered by portraying the conflict as religious, but disliking this feeling of intractability does not reduce or eliminate the role religion continues to play in the conflict. In fact, by ignoring the religious motivations of important actors in the conflict, like Hamas, one arguably makes the conflict that much more intractable by obscuring the very factors that need to be addressed in order to resolve the conflict.

Green omits important historical context for understanding the origins of Zionism.
Given that Green indicates at the outset of the video that his analysis of the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis “follow[s] the lead of historians like James Gelvin,” it is perhaps not surprising that Green’s analysis, like Gelvin’s, includes omissions of historical context and inaccuracies. Green contends that Theodor Herzl, living in a “hyper-nationalistic” milieu, “became convinced that the Jewish people needed to leave Europe and settle their own state.” This explanation for Herzl’s motivation fails to account for the expectation of Jewish return to the land of Israel found in biblical and rabbinic texts as well as Jewish liturgical practices, all of which long predate the rise of modern nationalism. Moreover, Green omits the fact that factors beyond nationalism contributed to Herzl’s belief in the need for Jews to have a state of their own. For example, the scholar Anita Shapira, Professor Emerita of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, has noted how resentment toward Jews, or antisemitism, not simply nationalist ideas, contributed to Herzl’s belief in the necessity of a state for Jews.[4]

Green mischaracterizes Jewish acquisition of land in British Mandate Palestine.
Green claims that between 1920 and 1939, “the growing Jewish population focused on purchasing land from absentee non-Palestinian Arab landowners and then evicting Palestinian farmers who were living and working there,” leaving viewers with the impression that Jews purchasing land evinced little concern for others living there. However, this picture Green paints could not be further from the truth.


After unearthing social media posts, French prosecutors now suspect antisemitism in elderly Jew’s death
Prosecutors in France said they are considering antisemitism as a possible factor in the death of an elderly Jewish man in Lyon, who police initially said had died in a dispute unconnected to his religion.

The Tribune Juive Jewish paper on Friday reported on the development in the investigation of the May 17 death of Rene Hadjaj, who was found dead after falling from the 17th floor of his apartment building. He was 89.

Police arrested a 51-year-one neighbor, Rachid Kheniche, in connection with the incident. Kheniche and Hadjaj knew each other and had an altercation that ended with Hadjaj’s death, prosecutors told the Le Progres daily.

The police introduced antisemitism as a possible motive after seeing social media posts by Kheniche. Kheniche had made multiple derogatory references to “sayanim,” the transcription in French of the Arab-language word for Zionists, on social media in recent years.

“Elements that were collected on social networks became known to the prosecutors, who have decided to broaden the scope of the examining magistrates to the aggravating circumstances of a crime committed due to an ethnic, national, racial or religious affiliation,” Nicolas Jacquet, the Lyon regional prosecutor, told the AFP news agency Friday.

A coalition of French Jewish groups known as CRIF said it welcomed the development but questioned why the press, not the police, first identified the social media posts.
French Court Sentences Imam for Antisemitic Sermon Following Appeal
The imam of a mosque in the French city of Toulouse has been found guilty in appeal of “inciting violence and racial hatred” for a sermon he delivered in 2017 in which he talked about killing Jews.

The sermon delivered by the Imam of the Grand Mosque of Toulouse, Mohamed Tataiat, quoted a hadith, or saying, of the Prophet Muhammad which proclaims, “The day of judgment will come only when the Muslims fight the Jews. The Jew will hide behind the tree and the stone, and the tree and the stone will say: ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him, except Algharqada, which is one of the trees of the Jews.'”

The same hadith is often quoted by Islamist preachers in sermons dealing with the conflict in the Middle East or in relation to conspiracy theories about outsize Jewish influence.

Tataiat’s initial trial last September resulted in a not guilty verdict after six civil associations — among them CRIF, the main French Jewish organization, as well as the National Office for Vigilance Against Antisemitism (BNVCA) and the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism (LICRA) — launched a case against the imam.

On Monday, an appeals court decided that Tataiat had engaged in incitement, issuing the imam with a 10,000-euro fine and a suspended prison sentence of six months.

Prosecuting lawyer Alix-Marie Cabot-Chaumeton pointed out that the trial was taking place in Toulouse, where in March 2012, the Islamist terrorist Mohamed Merah shot dead three young children and a teacher at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish school during a 10-day terror spree. She accused Tataiat of having violated his “moral authority” among the local Muslim community.
‘A normalised culture of antisemitism’: students sue Melbourne school, alleging Jews were bullied
A Melbourne school principal has been accused of giving speeches endorsing Nazis, calling Jewish people subhuman and failing to protect his students from racial discrimination.

Five former Brighton Secondary College students are suing the school, alleging they were subjected to years of antisemitic bullying, discrimination and negligence.

Defence barrister Chris Young has said the school, the state of Victoria and the other respondents denied all of the allegations.

The students, who include Joel Kaplan and Liam Arnold-Levy, along with three minors, allege they experienced physical and verbal bullying by students and teachers between 2013 and 2020.

The principal, Richard Minack, and two teachers Paul Varney and Demi Flessa are also named in the suit.

The school was “littered” with swastika graffiti, drawn on students hands and desks, the students’ barrister Adam Butt told the federal court on Wednesday. Students were subjected to Nazi salutes, he said.

Minack allegedly gave multiple speeches endorsing his father and grandfather, who had connections to the German army during the second world war, the court heard.

“He endorsed his Nazi father as a good man and at least once referred to Jews as subhuman, evil, the N-word,” Butt said.

The state is also being sued, accused of condoning the behaviour.


Microsoft VP: ‘The Israeli Economy Is So Strong That It’s Worth Investing In’
“Israel earned the nickname ‘Startup Nation’ and I’m always pleased to discover what’s new in the Israeli startup scene, and how Microsoft’s cloud operations can help startups develop and grow faster,” Ulrich Homann, a Corporate Vice President in the Cloud and AI business at Microsoft, told Calcalist in an interview during his recent visit to the country.

Homann, who works closely with Scott Guthrie, who serves as Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of the Cloud and AI group, arrived in Israel to hold a series of meetings with local startups that sparked his interest. Homann has been working at Microsoft for 30 years. “I began working there before we launched our first Windows operating system. When I joined, the program was on the horizon but wasn’t being sold yet. I worked with all of Microsoft’s current and former CEOs: I really loved Bill (Gates), Steve (Ballmer) was interesting, but maybe not everyone’s cup of tea. And Satya (Nadella) was everyone’s favorite. He’s also eloquent, considerate, his empathy is genuine, and of course, he’s super smart.”

What types of startups interest Microsoft in terms of the cloud?

“I devote plenty of time to meeting with startups in Israel that interest me in three different aspects. The first is whether these startups are capable of growing rapidly through their cloud infrastructure. The second is spotting new developments that Microsoft’s customers can also benefit from. We also love to connect our customers with startups to speed up their growth and locate new customers too.”
Israeli, British Disabled Veterans Square Off in Fourth Annual Veteran Games
Some 70 British military veterans with disabilities are competing this week against their Israeli counterparts in the fourth annual Veteran Games.

The week-long event is being hosted by the IDF Disabled Veterans’ Organization in conjunction with Beit Halochem UK (BHUK) at the Beit Halochem rehab, recreation and sports center in Tel Aviv.

The Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women (AJEX) is among the sponsors of the Veteran Games and associated conference, which will feature experts in the field of mental health and PTSD from both Britain and Israel.

The British veterans landed in Israel on Sunday and will be in the country until Thursday, when they will also attend a ceremony at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation.

As part of the program, the participants are also scheduled to visit several sites around the country, including Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and the Dead Sea.

Among the British delegation are former commandos, paratroopers, police officers and sailors, all wounded during tours of duty in Afghanistan, Iraq or Kosovo, or in terrorist attacks and other military operations.
Families of Munich Massacre Victims Threaten to Boycott 50th Anniversary Commemoration Amid Compensation Row
Families of the Israeli coaches and athletes murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, Germany, are threatening to not attend the 50th anniversary commemoration of the massacre until a longstanding dispute over compensation is resolved.

“None of us will come unless the question of compensation is finally clarified,” said Ankie Spitzer, spokesperson for the families, as reported by the German-language publication Süddeutsche Zeitung over the weekend.

Her late husband, Andre Spitzer, was one of 11 Israeli coaches and athletes killed after the Palestinian terrorist group Black September stormed the Olympic Village on September 5, 1972. The group shot dead two members of Israel’s Olympic team early in the assault, while the remaining 9 hostages were killed during a failed German rescue attempt, along with one German police officer.

The city of Munich is planning a series of events and exhibitions to commemorate the massacre this year, with each month dedicated to one of the 12 victims. Munich will additionally host the 2022 European Championships from August 11-21, which will be the largest sporting event in Germany since the 1972 Summer Olympics. The upcoming competition will take place in the Olympic Park, the same location where the Olympic Games were held.

In 2002, Germany paid $2.98 million in compensation to relatives of the Israeli victims of the attack, even though the families demanded $29 million and an apology. Spitzer said the families have been asking for years for “normal compensation according to international standards,” Süddeutsche Zeitung reported.

The families cited as an example the $10 million compensation paid per victim to the relatives of those killed in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight that exploded over Scotland, killing 270 people on board. Three Libyan intelligence operatives were charged in the bombing.


Do not open: Odd 1,800-year-old grave marker for Jacob the Convert found in Galilee
Eighteen hundred years ago, a convert to Judaism called Jacob wrote a grave marker in red ink, warning the world against opening his grave in the prestigious Jewish Beit She’arim cemetery in the Galilee.

The marker, discovered a year ago in the national park, was published in a joint press release from the University of Haifa and the Israel Antiquities Authority ahead of a one-day conference on June 1. The inscription was delivered to the IAA, which is working to preserve it in the hopes of one day putting it on display, according to IAA head Eli Eskosido.

While over 300 inscriptions in four languages have been discovered in the Beit She’arim necropolis to date, this “convert” inscription and another written on a wall beside it are the first to be identified in the past 65 years. Additionally, this is the first that unequivocally states that a convert is buried there.

Dating from the late Roman or early Byzantine period, the inscription idiomatically states, “Jacob (Iokobos) the convert swears upon himself that any who open this grave will be cursed.” Following that statement, there is a thick red line drawn and another scribe wrote, “Aged 60.”

While it is very common to have a formulaic curse warning against the opening of a grave — which were generally shared by several corpses — this marker was composed in “odd,” redundant Greek, said Tel Aviv University Prof. Jonathan Price, who deciphered the inscription. “That’s how he spoke, apparently,” Price told The Times of Israel.

In the ancient world, said Price, it was not uncommon for individuals to compose their grave markers prior to their death. Therefore, it is fair to treat the “curse” as the speech of Jacob himself.

“I’m sure he prepared his stone before he died. Whether he wrote with his hand or not, we can’t know,” although the shape of the letters is “pretty good relative to other homemade inscriptions,” said Price.
National Library shows off rare Torah scrolls, including one mufti saved from Nazis
The public will be able to see videos of four ancient Torah scrolls — including fragments from a 1,000-year-old Yemenite scroll and others with remarkable background stories — just in time for the upcoming Jewish holiday of Shavuot, as part of a new initiative from the National Library of Israel.

Shavuot, the Jewish holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah, is observed this year from the evening of June 4 until nightfall the following day (with an extra day observed by many Jews outside of Israel).

The Torah scrolls, which are not available for public viewing due to their delicate condition, were brought out from the library’s vaults for a few minutes to be filmed and photographed under close supervision by conservation experts.

The items featured include the 1,000-year-old Yemenite scroll, fragments of which had been repurposed as raw material for bookbinding, which is where they were found; as well as one of the world’s smallest legible Torah scrolls, measuring just 6 centimeters (2 1/3 inches) in height.

According to the National Library, one of the scrolls is from the Greek island of Rhodes and was rescued after it was given to a local mufti for safekeeping just before the Nazis deported the Jewish community.

Scholars believe that the “Rhodes Torah” was written in Iberia in the 15th century, and that Sephardic refugees brought it to Greek island, where it was used for hundreds of years in the Kahal Shalom Synagogue, now considered the oldest known synagogue in Greece.

Just a few days before the Nazis deported nearly all of Rhodes’ Jews in 1944, the scroll was smuggled out of the synagogue and placed in the custody of the local mufti, Sheikh Suleyman Kasiloglou.

The mufti is said to have hidden the Torah under the pulpit of a local mosque, and the scroll subsequently survived the war, though the vast majority of the members of the Rhodes Jewish community did not.
181 Ethiopian immigrants land in Israel as aliyah from African nation restarts
Just over 180 Ethiopian immigrants landed at Ben Gurion Airport on Wednesday afternoon, some after waiting decades to arrive in Israel and reunite with family members.

The flight kicked off the resumption of immigration from the civil war-torn nation after more than a year following a series of delays. A second flight on Thursday from Addis Ababa is slated to bring a further 160 new immigrants, with more flights expected throughout the summer and fall.

A government decision in late 2021 approved bringing 3,000 total new immigrants from Ethiopia to Israel. Jewish Agency officials say they are all slated to arrive by November.

With many dressed in their most festive attire and overcome with emotion, the 181 new arrivals were greeted by a welcoming ceremony to mark the first aliyah flight from Ethiopia since March 2021, when Israel completed the first half of Operation Tzur Yisrael (Rock of Israel), which brought around 2,000 such immigrants.

Almost everyone on board Wednesday’s flight will be reuniting with family members, many of whom they haven’t seen in years. Zemenu Atalele will finally get to see his mother, who moved to Israel 10 years ago. He is traveling with his wife, Yeshihareg, and their three young children, ages 8, 3 and just over a year old – who have never met their grandmother.

Teshager Gerem and Alemitu Belew’s two older daughters moved to Israel 17 years ago. Now, they and their seven adult children – ranging in ages from 17 to 35 – will be reunited with them in Israel. They will relocate from a one-room apartment in Gondar with sporadic electricity to one of 12 absorption centers around the country. There, all of the new immigrants will begin months of Hebrew language courses and other instructional activities as well as the process of formally converting to Judaism.




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