Friday, March 31, 2023

03/31 Links Pt2: The “Good Jews” Are Never Good Enough; UN Testimony: UNRWA Teachers Call to Murder Jews; How the Palestinians got their name

From Ian:

We must keep the memory of the Holocaust alive
THESE DANCING, Bavarian coopers receive applause from the delighted crowd. I stare at the figurines. No longer are they 16th-century coopers but 20th-century hassidim, pious Eastern European Jews who are dancing and singing themselves into ecstasy to come closer to God. The sound of the chimes starts to warp into a distant rumbling that seems to be coming closer.

I hear the staccato of machine gun fire. Its volume increases with each chime. I hear the cries of the dancing Jews as they fall into the pits they have dug with their own hands. I see my distant relatives in Pinsk being shot by the drunken officers of the mobile killing units, the Einstazgruppen, in July 1941. I hear the machine gun fire, the screams and the sobbing of one million victims of the four Einsatzgruppen.

The chiming continues as the coopers dance and the screams continue as old photographs I have seen return from memory: Jews, young and old, being led to their execution in Ponary, the ninth Fort, Babyn Yar and Lvov, as SS men laugh as the victims attempt to cover their nakedness. I hear the screams of Jews in Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Chelmno and the cries of terror from death by gas. The screams and the chimes of the Glockenspiel fuse – they are one. A feeling of shame passes over me: my own vague nightmare seems to belittle the suffering of one million Jewish children, five million Jewish adults and millions of other humans whom the Nazis murdered.

The chiming of the Glockenspiel pauses and the horrible cries leave me. The uppermost level of the balcony presents its lone, small figurine: a crowing cock. The sound of the chime changes slightly and mimics the sound of a bird at cockcrow. Yet, I can only hear the whistle of trains packed with human cargo.

I can only see 300,000 Warsaw Jews being loaded like cattle onto trains for Treblinka by smiling SS men brandishing truncheons. I see 400,000 Hungarian Jews destroyed in Birkenau in 10 weeks during the summer of 1944. The mouth of the bird opens but it is not his crowing chime that I hear, only the whistle of trains heading for the death camps of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka.

The whistling disappears. The chiming stops. The tourists applaud and begin to disperse. In envy, I look at them and ask myself: Can’t a Jew in Munich who stands at Marienplatz 8 listening to the chimes of the Glockenspiel simply enjoy the beauty of the colorful figurines, the aesthetics of the Rathaus facade and the clarity of the chimes without thinking of mass graves, gas chambers and crematoria? No.

For the destruction of European Jewry – the systematic murder of one out of every three Jews living on earth – took place in our epoch, a minute span in the history of mankind. Memory must overcome the ravages of time. We must see photographs of the Holocaust period and read the accounts of those who lived through it.
The “Good Jews” Are Never Good Enough
Jewish Anti-Zionist Excuses
Diving into the most plain assertion of Jewish Anti-Zionist tokens, we can also unpack further. Many of them today may assume innocence by repeating the talking point that “Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism” (a foundational lie for token Jewish opponents to the majority-consensus [IHRA] definition of antisemitism). Similar to the concept of “racial colorblindness”, it is problematic to assert that Zionism and Judaism have no connection (even if coming from ignorance, fear, or good intentions). Zionism: the belief in the Jewish right to revive self-determination in [at least part of] the indigenous, ancestral homeland of the Jewish people is an inherent element of Jewish heritage, not only because half of the world’s Jews live in and rely on the State of Israel for refuge and freedom, but because there would be no Jewish people without the establishment of the Kingdom of Israel, over 3,000 years ago. Zionism isn’t only part of Jewish heritage. It is a moral value to embrace — not an abstraction to feign estrangement from.

To drive the point home, out of 613 laws in Judaism, only around 270 can be practiced today outside the land of Israel. Observant Jews worldwide have prayed for return (some even attempting return) to Israel from forced exile by many empires for centuries (secular and religious alike). The hypocritical, numerically microscopic ultra-Orthodox faction of Neturei Karta (less than a third of one percent of world Jewry) have only around 100 members who actively protest against Israel and have many more who’ve returned to live in Israel — only denying the State of Israel’s right to exist until the arrival of the Messiah.

For thousands of years, Jews have practiced land-specific Israelite rituals, including in diaspora for holidays like Sukkot, Shavuot, Hanukkah, Tisha B’Av, Pesach (Passover), and more, focusing on our connection with the land of Israel, its sacredness, the capital of Jerusalem, and our return. Among many more reasons, we can confidently affirm that Zionism is intrinsic to Jewish heritage.

Some Anti-Zionist Jews who actually recognize these innate ties, try to eliminate these parts of Jewish identity or try to fabricate new traditions in their place. Saying the mourner’s kaddish for neutralized armed Palestinian terrorists, performing justice Havdallah ceremonies in daylight while widely known to be meant for nighttime, manipulating the traditional Passover seder to omit the Exodus and the age-old saying “L’shanah ha’ba’ah bi’Yerushalayim” (“Next Year in Jerusalem!”), redacting mentions of the word “Israel” in Jewish siddurim (prayer books) and texts are but a fraction of losing practices. Ultimately, these are all losing practices because there is nothing that can save “The Good Jews” from antisemites.

What we’ve learned is that Anti-Zionism, like many fads of antisemitic and totalitarian conformity, is futile. No matter the alibi at the time or the place in question, to the antisemite, it’s not just about our insistence on specific elements of particularity and peoplehood that will never be acceptable, it’s about our existence at all. (h/t L_King)
How the Palestinians got their name
Before Israel was founded, several prominent Jewish and Zionist organizations used the name “Palestine.” These included The Palestine Post newspaper and the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, which are now The Jerusalem Post and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

At the time, many Arabs in British Mandatory Palestine considered themselves part of Greater Syria rather than “Palestinians.” In 1937, a local Arab leader told the Palestine Royal Commission, “There is no such country [as Palestine]. Palestine is a term the Zionists invented! Our country for centuries was part of Syria.”

Arab historian Philip Hitti echoed this sentiment shortly before Israel declared independence, saying, “There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not.”

The watershed moment for the “Palestinian” national movement came after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel won control of Judea and Samaria from Jordan. The words of author Walid Shoebat of Bethlehem sum up the profound shift in local Arabs’ identity: “On June 4, 1967, I was a Jordanian, and overnight I became a Palestinian.”

Since 1967, a whole national mythology has been created around the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian.” For example, the Palestinian Arabs have claimed to be descendants of the Canaanites who preceded the ancient Israelites and Philistines in the Holy Land.

In 2018, Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas told the United Nations’ Security Council, “We are the descendants of the Canaanites that lived in the land 5,000 years ago and continued to live there to this day.”

But most Palestinians trace their origins to prominent tribes in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Egypt. Yasser Arafat was born in Egypt. Even the Kanaan family in Nablus (Shechem) traces its ancestry to Syria. In any case, the Canaanites had disappeared more than 1,600 years before the Arabs first arrived in the Holy Land.

Preposterously, Palestinians have even asserted that Jesus was a Palestinian. In a 2013 Christmas message, Abbas called Jesus a “Palestinian messenger.” In 2019, Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour posted on Twitter, “Jesus was a Palestinian of Nazareth.”

We beg the pardon of Mr. Abbas and his fellow fantasists, but Jesus was a Jew from Judea, which was named Judea because it was and still is the homeland of the Jewish people.

While the Arabs of the region are free to call themselves whatever they want, they are not free to hijack the 3,000-year history of the Holy Land for themselves. In the end, the name “Palestine” represents the Jews’ original dispossession of their homeland 1,900 years ago.


UN Testimony: UNRWA Teachers Call to Murder Jews
Testimony by United Nations Watch to 52nd Session of the Human Rights Council, on the systematic hatred, violence and antisemitism preached at UNRWA’s schools, delivered by Jillian Rolnick on 30 March 2023:

The United Nations was founded to promote peace and fight racism. Yet our new report, produced jointly with IMPACT-se, demonstrates how UNRWA, the UN agency that runs schools for Palestinians, continues to hire teachers who openly incite to racism, hatred, and violence.

Entitled “UNRWA Education: Reform or Regression,” our 100-page report documents how teachers and schools at this agency regularly call to murder Jews, and create teaching materials that glorify terrorism and encourage martyrdom.

The report identifies more than 200 perpetrators, and captures evidence taken from inside UNRWA classrooms, including pictures of blackboards, showing the teaching of materials that glorify terrorists such as Dalal al-Mugrabi.

All of this is in breach of the agency’s stated policies of zero tolerance for racism, discrimination and antisemitism.

In wake of our report, UNRWA already suspended one of the perpetrators, a teacher who endorsed the 2014 murder of Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Jerusalem. We commend Dorothy Klaus, UNRWA’s director in Lebanon, for taking this action.

However, despite numerous prior reports, UNRWA has failed to fire any of the perpetrators.

UNRWA downplays all of this as a trivial matter of social media infractions.

But in truth, the core problem is that a $1 billion dollar UN agency is systematically hiring teachers who preach racism, hatred and violence — thereby poisoning the hearts and minds of young Palestinians.




Lawmakers at European Parliament speak out against antisemitism
A group of pro-Israel lawmakers gathered in the European Parliament in Brussels on Thursday to speak out against the oldest hatred and the increasingly contemporary convergence of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

The parliamentary event came two days after news emerged that an international terrorist cell that planned a major attack against Jewish institutions in Greece had been arrested.

Titled “The Multiple Faces of Antisemitism in Europe,” the conference was led by members of the European Parliament and of national parliaments throughout Europe, and various pro-Israel organizations.

“Antisemitism is a threat not just for the Jewish people, but it is a poison for our society, our values and our democracy,” European Parliament member Niclas Herbst of Germany told the audience in the jam-packed parliamentary conference hall at the opening of the event. “It is a topic that does not need any introduction.”

“Many Europeans live with distorted views of Jews and the Holocaust,” said MEP Bert-Jan Ruissen of the Netherlands, citing multiple surveys showing a lack of knowledge of the Holocaust among young people eight decades after the murder of 6 million Jews.

“It is unfortunate that fighting antisemitism is still a topic that is relevant today,” said Valeriu Ghileţchi, president of the European Christian Political Movement, who is from Moldova.

“Antisemitism is an age-old societal scourge that continues to reinvent itself in new forms, often today in the guise of anti-Zionism,” said Oriana Marie Krueger, director for European affairs at the Combat Antisemitism Movement. “We must work together in a broad collective effort leveraging creative approaches to confront and ultimately defeat this menace threatening Jewish communities both in Europe and across the globe.

“Antisemitism is not a problem for Jews to solve,” said Krueger, noting that she is both a non-Jew and a German. ”We need an alliance of all faiths.”

“Faith-based diplomacy in support for Israel is one of the most powerful tools available today to combat the steady rise of antisemitism around the world, including its most recent manifestation, anti-Zionism,” said Josh Reinstein, president of the Israel Allies Foundation.

He said that institutional antisemitism had taken root in places such as the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and the European Parliament, where Israel is singled out as an alleged aggressor.

“We learn from history that it always starts with the Jews but never ends with the Jews, said Reinstein.

Duplicitous double standard
Others in attendance said that the European Parliament was exhibiting a duplicitous double standard by being silent on Palestinian antisemitism.

“We cannot sit here in the European Parliament condemning antisemitism without calling out Palestinian antisemitism,” said Arsen Ostrovsky, CEO of the International Legal Forum. ”Members of the European Parliament speak out against antisemitism but turn their back on Palestinian hatred, incitement and violence against Jews.”

He argued that the age-old classic antisemitism prevalent in many quarters of Europe is simply masquerading as anti-Zionism and that the two are in essence the same.

“Anti-Zionism is antisemitism, no if’s, buts or maybes,” said Ostrovsky.


Podcast: Neil Rogachevsky and Dov Zigler on the Political Philosophy of Israel's Declaration of Independence
Nearly 75 years ago, on May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israel’s sovereignty: a renewed Jewish state, the political expression of the national home of the Jewish people, located in their ancestral homeland.

Many essays and books have been published about the words Ben-Gurion spoke that day—Israel’s Declaration of Independence. But Professor Neil Rogachevsky and his co-author Dov Zigler take a new angle on the declaration and what it means.

In a new book from Cambridge University Press, Israel’s Declaration of Independence: The History and Political Theory of the Nation’s Founding Moment, they look at the drafting process and distill from the elements that endured from draft to draft—as well the elements that were changed or removed—a political theory of Israel’s founding, in which the political purposes of the Israeli project are made most clearly manifest.

How, in other words, did Israel’s founders think about rights, about citizenship, about the justifications of Israel’s sovereignty, an Israeli view of freedom, of civil order, and of religion? That’s the subject of their new book—and the subject of the conversation they have here with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver.
PodCast: Einat Wilf: ‘Anti-Zionism is a destructive idea by its very definition’
Einat Wilf has been in the public eye for nearly 15 years as a prominent voice espousing liberal Zionism. A former foreign policy advisor to then-Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Wilf sat in the Knesset from 2010 to 2013, first with the Labor party and later with the Independence party, which she helped form.

Wilf, 52, who in August 2022 published her most recent book, a collection of essays titled, We Should All Be Zionists: Essays on the Jewish State and the Path to Peace, joined JI’s podcast this week to discuss Zionism and anti-Zionism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the state of Israeli democracy today.

Below are excerpts from the conversation.
On the state of Zionism today: “A few months ago, I published a collection of essays, [a] book titled We Should All Be Zionists. And it was the culmination of four years of writing essays that spoke about the importance of Zionism to Jews abroad, the importance of Zionism to the Arab world as a path to peace, but, I had not imagined that the title of the book, We Should All Be Zionists, would actually become relevant inwardly, and I think this is much of what’s happening now. It’s a kind of revival of secular Zionism that for so many years, even decades, was almost taken for granted, viewed as something that is no longer relevant. Zionism became associated with the more religious, even extreme right-wing elements of Israeli politics and society. And you could hear them even say things like that the descendants, the heirs of the secular Zionism that basically built the state, were a bunch of ‘left-wing globalists, rootless cosmopolitans, who have no real connection to the land. If anything doesn’t go their way they’re gonna leave at the first opportunity. They all hold second passports.’ So you have this kind of demonization, this notion that this is a [completely] irrelevant group on its way to just being a dying minority. Even when the first protests happened, much of the commentary from the right was like, ‘this is a bunch of aging people, the median age of the protests is 75. They’re just lamenting a country that is no longer theirs,’ and what I think has happened is that all of that was just proven to be absolutely and completely wrong. And in many ways, this is the most hopeful thing that I take from what’s been happening.”
J-TV: The Man Who Confronts Anti-Jewish Protesters - Joseph Cohen
Meet Joseph Cohen - founder of the Israel Advocacy Movement - who bravely confronts anti-Jewish and anti-Israel protesters. Why does he do it? Does he change minds? Ollie speaks to Joseph to find out... Check them out here - http://www.israeladvocacy.net/


Josh Hammer: From Stanford to Israel, Mobocracy Triumphs Over Deliberation
Earlier this week in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose conservative governing coalition has for months been pushing a set of anodyne, sorely needed, and long-overdue reforms to the unaccountable and almighty Israeli Supreme Court, agreed to pause his legislative push amidst unprecedented pushback and widespread societal meltdown. The at-times hundreds of thousands of rioters in the streets, who blocked highways and tracked down and physically intimidated leading pro-reform legislators and even Netanyahu's wife, had reached a debilitating fever pitch. A disturbing number of Israel Defense Forces reservists had reneged upon their military duties. Powerful unions had successfully temporarily grounded all departing flights from Ben Gurion International Airport. Venture capitalists had pulled billions of U.S. dollars' worth of investment out of Israel's thriving high-tech sector. All this, despite the left-wing opposition categorically refusing to sit down and negotiate in good faith on the judicial reform legislation.

At Stanford Law School, Judge Duncan's struggle session resulted in a heckler's veto outright precluding civil colloquy and the legitimate contestation of ideas. The tyranny of an emotive mob, in short, won the day. In Israel, foes of the judicial reform rebuffed direct political engagement, preferring instead to shriek "authoritarianism!" at the top of their lungs and gin up international incitement—indeed, an attempted color revolution—against the Netanyahu government. The tyranny of an emotive mob, in short, yet again won the day (at least for now).

An old lawyer maxim goes: "If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table." Left-wing activists increasingly find neither the facts nor the law on their side, but they have certainly become proficient at pounding the table.
From The River To The Sea: A Violent Palestinian Chant Misrepresented By Anti-Israel Groups
It’s a common phrase uttered at anti-Israel rallies around the world: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” While anti-Israel groups maintain the chant is little more than a call for support for the Palestinian cause, the truth is much darker: it’s a call for the destruction of Israel, the world’s only Jewish State. It’s time that the news media show the true face and intent of this hateful chant.


Chicago’s Jewish community could swing mayoral race
Elsewhere in the forum, Johnson weighed in on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement targeting Israel. He was asked specifically if he would support anti-BDS legislation in Illinois as well as a resolution passed by the City Council in 2015 urging a pension fund in Chicago not to invest in companies that engage in boycotts of Israel. While he did not explicitly commit to either, he clarified that he is opposed to BDS. “The divestment movement is not aligned with my values,” he said.

For his part, Vallas, who faced the same questions while meeting with the federation recently, said he is against BDS and would support the legislation and the resolution, according to two attendees who were present for the discussion. In explaining his own view of antisemitism, meanwhile, Vallas deferred to the working definition promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

While neither candidate “has a long history of Jewish communal engagement or involvement,” said Daniel Goldwin, the executive director of public affairs for the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago, the city’s federation, they have both “been active in reaching out to different parts of the Jewish community.”

On Saturday, for example, Vallas appeared before congregants of Anshe Emet Synagogue, a Conservative congregation in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago, where he spoke with the senior rabbi, Michael Siegel. In response to a question about how he intends to address antisemitic incidents, Vallas said his “first order of business would be to pass” a public safety ordinance that allows the city to “prosecute and impose sentences for people who commit hate crimes.”

“We have the power to do that,” he explained, noting that his administration would have “zero tolerance when it comes to hate crimes.”


BBC WS again promotes a partisan NGO’s talking points in protests coverage
Copnall made no effort to remind listeners that under the terms of the Oslo Accords signed three decades ago, the vast majority of Palestinians actually live in areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority (and later Hamas in the Gaza Strip) and that while a minority of Palestinians – by no means “millions” – live in Area C which is under Israeli control, the final status of that area is subject to negotiations which the Palestinian leadership has been avoiding for over twenty years.

Copnall also failed to challenge the false claim that Israel discriminates against “anyone else who is not Jewish”.

The conversation continued with Givati claiming that a discussion “must be held not only about the judicial issue but also about other democratic problems that we have to improve in order to become a functioning democracy in the future maybe” and later referring to “our discrimination and our oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories using apartheid mechanisms”.

One can of course only speculate why the BBC World Service chose to give a four-minute platform to a representative of a fringe political NGO in order to promote talking points that are not central to the story this item purports to be about. But once again we see that the BBC’s long-standing over-reliance on partisan political NGOs in coverage of Israel has now seeped into reporting on the internal Israeli story about the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been demonstrating for three months.


Social Media Influencer Uses Her Online Platforms to Educate Millions About Holocaust
An American social media activist and influencer with over 12 million followers on her combined social media platforms said she is inspired by her maternal grandparents who are Holocaust survivors to use her online presence to teach the younger generation about antisemitism and all forms of hatred, she told The Algemeiner.

Montana Tucker — an award-winning singer-songwriter, actress and former professional backup dancer who describes herself as a “proud Jewish woman” — recently shared on social media her visit to the White House to speak with Jewish Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff about combating hate and bias, and how their respective trips to the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland changed their lives. The 30-year-old also created a video series last year for TikTok, which went viral, about her trip to Auschwitz and now visits schools to talk to students about Holocaust education.

“I find that a lot of times on social media, when people are passionate about something, they start attacking the other side, and that’s just continuing to fuel the fire,” she said. “It’s really important to say you’re educating, these are the facts, this is what’s going on, versus attacking the other side. We did the [Holocaust] series and it’s definitely not stopping there.”

Tucker used to post mostly dance videos on her popular TikTok page until she visited the former Auschwitz concentration camp in late 2022 to chronicle her grandparents’ experiences during the Holocaust and share their story with her social media followers, in order to educate them about the Nazi atrocities of World War II. Tucker’s grandfather, who died three years and a half years ago at the age of 97, survived a Nazi labor camp and her grandmother, who survived Auschwitz, is 94 but has been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for 14 years.

“Their goal was always to educate, educate, educate,” Tucker said about her grandparents. “It wasn’t until my Zaidy passed away and I rewatched their testimonials … that we decided ‘OK, we’re going to go to Poland and to Auschwitz … and I have millions of followers. The potential of people actually learning and seeing this series is pretty high. If we can make a difference, why not use my platform for that?
Stanford University digitizes thousands of pages of Nuremberg trial documents
Stanford University has digitized thousands of pages and documents from the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed the defeat of the Nazis and the end of World War II in 1945.

The archive is a collaboration with the library of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. It relied on funding from Taube Philanthropies and cataloging assistance from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“The idea is to present to the public, without any cost, information that is directly derived from these trials, directly derived from the prosecution of people who have committed crimes against humanity,” Michael Keller, a librarian at Stanford, told NBC’s Bay Area affiliate.

The Taube Archive of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1945-46, includes a digital version of Nuremberg courtroom proceedings, films, audio recordings of the proceedings, and about 250,000 pages of digitized English, French, German and Russian documents, according to its website.

The more than 9,900 items—searchable and viewable in digital form—also include “evidence exhibits filed by the prosecution and the defense” and “documents of the Committee for the Investigation and Prosecution of Major War Criminals,” as well as the judgment.
80 Years Ago, Pageants at Madison Square Garden Sought to Halt Nazi Genocide Against European Jews
On March 9, 1943, a pair of sold-out pageants at Madison Square Garden sought to pressure the U.S. and its allies to halt the Nazi genocide against European Jews. The "We Will Never Die" pageant was repeated in several cities, including Washington, D.C., where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, 200 members of Congress, and seven Supreme Court justices attended. The cast of hundreds included 20 rabbis rescued from European ghettos and actors portraying Jewish soldiers fighting for the American military. The backdrop was an enormous display of the Ten Commandments, each tablet 40 feet high.

The New York Times reported on the "dramatic mass memorial to the 2,000,000 Jews killed in Europe" by that date. "The memorial was staged to stir the Allied nations to stop the slaughter of a people by the Germans."

The final scene depicts the end of the war, as a narrator predicts: "There will be no Jews left in Europe....The four million left to kill are being killed, according to plan....No voice is heard to cry halt to the slaughter, no government speaks to bid the murder of human millions end." The pageant ended with participants singing the Jewish prayer for the dead, the kaddish.
Berlin museum displays works by artist who grapples with Germany’s Nazi past
A new show of works by one of Germany’s most famous living artists, Gerhard Richter, opened at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie museum on Friday.

“Gerhard Richter. 100 Works for Berlin” shows for the first time the long-term loan from the artist’s foundation. At the center of the exhibition is Richter’s 2014 series “Birkenau,” the result of the artist’s decades-long engagement with Germany’s Nazi past and the Holocaust.

The four large canvases of the Birkenau series are abstract paintings with many gray and black surfaces, but also some red and green dashes.

The basis of the paintings are four photos secretly taken in 1944 by Jewish prisoners at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, who risked their lives doing so. Richter transferred the four photographs with charcoal and oil onto the canvas and then gradually painted over them with oil paint until their content was no longer visible.

Richter’s process of abstraction was based on his conviction that he could not do justice to the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust with direct depiction.

During the Holocaust, the Nazis and their henchmen murdered 6 million European Jews.
Montreal’s oldest synagogue building vandalized with swastikas
Vandals defaced Quebec province’s oldest synagogue building with Nazi swastikas over the weekend, prompting a Canadian Jewish watchdog to call on Montreal mayor Valérie Plante to do more to fight antisemitism.

Leaders of the Bagg Street Synagogue — located just off of Saint Laurent Boulevard in the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, at the former heart of Montreal’s Jewish community — reportedly met Wednesday with Montreal police’s hate crimes unit. Photos taken by B’nai Brith Canada show swastikas spray painted on the synagogue’s front doors.

The Bagg Street synagogue, or Congregation Temple Solomon, traces its history back to 1906. But it moved into its current location in 1921, where it has remained and become the oldest synagogue building in continual use in Quebec. It inherited furnishings from the historic Shaar Hashomayim synagogue when that congregation moved to a new location in 1922, according to archivist Hannah Srour-Zackon.

While formal membership has dwindled, the Bagg Street synagogue holds free holiday services and welcomes tourists visiting to explore the city’s former Jewish neighborhood. In the first half of the 20th century, a Jewish immigration boom led to the establishment of at least a dozen synagogues in the area.


US tech giant Cisco to buy Tel Aviv cybersecurity startup Lightspin
Cisco Systems Inc., a US maker of networking software and hardware, said in a blog post late on Wednesday that it intends to acquire Israel’s Lightspin Technologies Ltd., a developer of cloud security software.

No financial details were provided, but Hebrew media reports estimated the deal to be worth between $200 million and $250 million.

Founded in 2020 by Vladi Sandler and Or Azarzar, Lightspin has built a cloud security management platform using graph-based proprietary algorithms to protect from the risks of potential cybersecurity attacks in cloud environments by mapping the potential attack paths and remediating the most critical security issues from build to runtime. Through graph-based visualization, the system identifies attack paths hackers could take to steal critical data stored in the cloud.

“We raised funds, we built a strong team, and we provided amazing value to our customers, but the most important thing is that we kept crafting our vision of being the most widely-adopted cloud security solution for engineers at any stage of their cloud security journey,” Sandler commented.

To date, the startup has raised a total of $25 million in capital, including from two funding rounds led by Dell Technologies Capital, the venture capital investment arm of Dell Technologies, and Ibex Investors, and is backed by IBM. Tech companies such as Imperva, ITV, Kaltura, PageUp and Riskified are among businesses using Lightspin’s cloud security platform to protect their data and workloads in the cloud.


Mel Brooks, Theodor Herzl, and a Chance Encounter at the Bellagio Hotel - Opinion
As Israel turns 75, I’m reminded of how much the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, achieved in his 44 short years. While Herzl’s achievements are celebrated and well known, shortly before he died, he shared with a friend, “It was my mistake I began too late…If you knew how I suffer at the thought of the lost years.”

On March 6, Mel Brooks released "History of the World: Part II,” the sequel to his original 1981 hit. The original film was replete with Jewish references including some epic comedy including skits of "Jews in Space" and "Moses."

In the early 2000s, I was in Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel when I passed none other than Brooks and his son. Stopped in my tracks, I did a complete 180 and walked after them. Once I caught up, I asked: "Are you Mel Broo-..." he cut me off and said while rolling his eyes, "Just say hello, don't make it awkward!"

I laughed at that. Then I explained that History of the World Part I was my favorite movie as a kid and for years I looked at our local video rental store for Part II, but it was never there. I demanded to know when the sequel was coming. This time, Mel laughed, and said, "it's coming, it's coming."

Finally, after all this time, Part II has arrived!

The odds of my brief interaction with Brooks may have had zero impact on the sequel coming to fruition. But what if it had?

What if Mel, while he couldn't explain why, who, or how; deep down knew that he was supposed to make Part II and our interaction helped push it into becoming reality all these years later?




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

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