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Friday, April 21, 2023

04/21 Links Pt2: Don't 'All Lives Matter' the Holocaust; Lawsuits are key to fighting antisemitism; Yom Ha’atzmaut echoes in ‘The Mandalorian’

From Ian:

Don't 'All Lives Matter' the Holocaust - opinion
IT IS a basic human instinct to seek ways to connect events that appear, on the surface, to be similar to one another. But to do so when it comes to collective memory is to risk diminishing the uniqueness of each group’s experience.

In 2022, the White House issued a well-intentioned but poorly-worded statement about Holocaust remembrance that recalled “the six million Jews who were systematically and ruthlessly murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators,” as well as “the millions of Roma, Sinti, Slavs, disabled persons, LGBTQ+ individuals, and political dissidents who were killed during the Shoah.”

This past Tuesday night, after I tweeted about Yom Hashoah, a South African Twitter user with a timeline full of antisemitic tweets responded with a screenshot of the Wikipedia entry for “Holocaust victims.” On that page is a table that lists 12 different groups defined by the crowdsourced encyclopedia as victims of the Holocaust.

They include Soviet POWs (2.8-3.3 million), Freemasons (80,000-200,000), and Spanish Republicans (3,500), alongside Jews. Taken together, the 11 non-Jewish groups vastly outnumber the six million Jews noted on the page – which is, of course, exactly the point. My Twitter interlocutor’s message was clear: the Jews weren’t even the primary victims of the Holocaust, so they should really stop harping on about it.

This needs to be said: the Holocaust, the Shoah, was the mass murder of Jews. That the Nazis also murdered millions of other people – whom they viewed as racially inferior, sexually deviant, politically incompatible or simply undesirable – is a series of horrors of stunning magnitude that took place in parallel to, not as part of, the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was an event without parallel in human history and the Nazi drive to murder Jews was singular and obsessive. The entirety of the Nazi state was dedicated to the erasure of the Jewish people from the face of the earth. The German nation – a highly advanced society at the pinnacle of cultural, scientific and intellectual achievement – was fed a steady diet of poisonous propaganda meant to dehumanize Jews and condition their non-Jewish neighbors to support, facilitate and participate in their murder.

The murder itself was mechanized and methodical, carried out on an industrial scale and with staggering precision. Even toward the end of the war, as supplies dwindled and German commanders clamored for materiel to enable them to make a last stand, Nazi leaders continued to dedicate enormous resources to rounding up, transporting and murdering as many Jews as they possibly could.

That combination of factors, coupled with the millennia of pervasive antisemitism that led to them, set the Holocaust apart from both concurrent atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and other acts of mass murder that have taken place throughout history. There had been nothing like the Holocaust before it happened and there has been nothing like it since.

But the Jews are far from alone; every group that has experienced collective trauma is entitled to the uniqueness of its pain. The Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Darfur genocide, the Yazidi genocide, and every other genocide in modern history has had its own unique characteristics and constitutes a unique source of pain for the people it sought to destroy. Similarly, every act of mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis against any of the groups they despised should be understood in its own unique context and remembered as such.
Phyllis Chesler: Lawsuits are key to fighting antisemitism
For the last 20 years, many of us have been documenting the overwhelming rise of hostility on American campuses towards Israel, Jewish students and professors who do not toe the party line.

The hostility seems to be based on the extraordinary effectiveness of long-term propaganda online, in mass media, at the United Nations, among NGOs, in textbooks about anti-racism (which do not include Muslim Jew-hatred), in countless campus-wide spectacles such as Israel Apartheid Week and BDS campaigns, biased curriculum, textbooks on prejudice (which do not include Jew-hatred in general), well-funded anti-Israel speakers and extraordinarily vulgar and vicious rhetoric against Israel and Jewish students from both activists and professors.

How does one dismantle Big Lies that are believed to be living truth? How does one open minds—if not hearts—when reason no longer prevails and “free speech” is expressed by shouting, rioting, overwhelming the platform and trying to hold speakers hostage, when chaos is utilized to eliminate opposing ideas?

One way is by bringing lawsuits that demand an end to such sub-par education and that the documented humiliation, harassment and persecution of Jewish students and professors be remedied.

I reviewed ten such lawsuits brought from 2018-2023 by the American Center for Law and Justice (City University of New York, 2022); the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (University of Southern California, 2020, the University of Vermont, 2021 and SUNY New Paltz, 2022), StandWithUs (University of California Los Angeles, 2020, Hunter College (CUNY), 2021 and George Washington University, 2023), student Sasha Westrick (Temple University, 2022), the law firm Winston & Strawn, LLP and the Lawfare Project (San Francisco State University, 2018) and private attorneys Joel Siegel and Neal M. Sher (New York University, 2019).

The grounds for the lawsuits were diverse: Students being expelled or refused membership in student groups based on their pro-Israel and/or Zionist viewpoints. Exclusion from campus events. Social media posts that read “all Zionists [need] to die,” leading to the closure of the campus Jewish center. Physical injuries to Jewish students and desecration of Jewish centers. Professors and students espousing, cheering and clapping for pro-Palestinian views that falsely label Israel a “white supremacist” nation that engages in “ethnic cleansing.” Hijacking a Zoom class background by posting Palestinian flags. The vandalism of a Jewish student’s campaign posters.
Yom Ha’atzmaut echoes in ‘The Mandalorian’
Eagle-eyed fans of the Disney series “The Mandalorian” and television writers have noted several instances when the show (the third season ended on April 19), which develops characters similar to those in “Star Wars,” recalls Jewish content.

The series is a production of Golem Creations that recalls the Jewish folklore figure associated with 16th-century Rabbi Judah Loew, Prague’s Maharal. Its producer and lead writer, Jon Favreau, is Jewish.

The Mandalorian warrior culture, whose most “Orthodox” members never remove their visor-helmets, evoke kippot and head coverings that many married, observant Jewish women wear. The more “liberal” Mandalorians only don their headgear in battle, just as many Jews only cover their heads in synagogue and ritual contexts.

Others have noted what JNS observed in the show, too—that the Mandalorian mantra “This is the way” could be a translation of the Hebrew halachah; that a character Bo-Katan Kryze’s given name is Hebrew for “come small”; and that her father, a Mandalorian Duke, is named Adonai (one of God’s Hebrew names). And that Mandalorians have a despised profession as bounty hunters, as Jews throughout history served as money-lenders.

The tribal leader, The Armorer, has the show’s protagonist, bounty hunter Din “Mando” Djarin, repent for uncovering his face by bathing in Mandalore’s “living waters,” which recalls Jewish mikveh practices. And when Mando saves a child named Grogu—fans call him Baby Yoda—from scientists who want to experiment upon him, others, too, have noted parallels to Josef Mengele and Nazis.

The eighth and final episode of the show’s third season is the culmination of the Mandalorian reclamation of its homeland after years of exile. That plot development happens, coincidentally, days before Israel’s Independence Day, Yom Ha’atzmaut, and the prior episode, where the Mandalorians undertook the reclamation, transpired on Passover.

The show is not literally Jewish, but readers of Jewish scripture will be reminded of Moses bringing the Israelites to the Promised Land after crossing the Sinai Desert in the Mandalorian “Wandering Jews,” who have sought to find their way home after dispersing across the galaxy.


The Mandalorthodox
Beyond the lore, there is plenty of specific language — presumably written by Favreau — with deep, and specific, Jewish resonances.

Early in the show’s run, Michal Schick was struck by the “use of the phrase ‘this is the way’ in connection with the lifestyle-observance of keeping the helmet on. This obviously recalls halacha” — which can be translated as the Way as well as the Law.

And then there was the division between Djarin’s sect of Mandalorians and less observant Mandalorians, who took their helmets off.

Schick, a Stern College graduate who is a writer for the Netflix animated series “The Dragon Prince,” will be hosting a panel on YouTube on Sunday, April 23, at 7 p.m., called “Mandalorthodox: Jewish History and Modern Practice in the Mandalorian.”

You can expect to hear about how after taking off his helmet, the Mandalorian had to immerse in “living waters” to atone — a clear parallel to the Jewish mikveh practice.

And you can hear about the thematic relevance of the verses from Exodus that were revealed when a tablet with “Mandalorian” writing that appeared in a recent episode was decoded.

“I suppose this is just supposed to be an Easter egg, not sure why they would put a Bible verse in Star Wars, but here it is,” wrote the Reddit user who first decoded it — and clearly hadn’t gotten the memo that this is the Jewish Star Wars show. Nor the memo that, as per National Jewish Book Award winner and former Star Trek showrunner Michael Chabon, when we find such Jewish tidbits hidden in space drama, we don’t call them Easter eggs (goyish!). Refer to them properly, and perhaps reverently, as afikomen.


Jewish Students at Yale Law School Invited an Israeli Politician To Speak About Anti-Semitism. Then They Caved to Pressure.
A Jewish student group at Yale Law School pulled out of an event with a centrist Israeli politician, Michal Cotler-Wunsh, after deciding the talk would be too controversial, according to Cotler-Wunsh and two professors with knowledge of the situation.

Yale’s Jewish Law Students Association agreed in February to host Cotler-Wunsh for a lecture on anti-Semitism and human rights, one of several planned stops on a speaking tour organized by the Academic Engagement Network, a pro-Israel advocacy group. But on April 14–one week before Cotler-Wunsh’s talk, which is scheduled for Friday—Yale’s Jewish Law Students Association told the Academic Engagement Network that it would no longer be able to sponsor the event, according to Miriam Elman, the network’s executive director.

The drama follows a string of anti-Semitism controversies at the Ivy League university, which just this month hosted Houria Bouteldja, an anti-Israel activist and outspoken defender of Hamas, on the second night of Passover. The event’s timing sparked blowback from Jewish students—though not from the Jewish Law Students Association—who said their religious obligations prevented them from organizing a counter-event or from attending the talk to pose questions.

Though the Jewish Law Students Association gave no reason for its about-face, Cotler-Wunsh and two Yale law school professors said they understood that the group succumbed to pressure to call off her lecture.

It is not clear who was applying that pressure, and Morgan Feldenkris, the president of the Jewish Law Students Association, did not respond to a request for comment. The talk would have been canceled but for deputy dean Yair Listokin’s willingness to step in and host the event himself, Elman said. Listokin declined to comment.

The behind-the-scenes drama surrounding the event demonstrates the extent to which pro-Israel speakers—even those who criticize the Jewish State’s government—are increasingly unwelcome at America’s top law school.
A Campus Expert on Equity and Social Justice Labeled a “Dirty Zionist” for Hosting a Talk about Anti-Semitism
Tabia Lee describes herself as “a black woman with decades of experience teaching in public schools and leading workshops on diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracism”—exactly the sort of person whom De Anza Community College would hire for the position of faculty director for the Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education. But after merely two years, Lee was fired for not holding to a sufficiently extreme and uncompromising view of what social justice entails. Among the many accusations leveled against her, and taken seriously by her employers, was excessive sympathy with Jews:

When I brought Jewish speakers to campus to address anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, some of my critics branded me a “dirty Zionist” and a “right-wing extremist.” When I formed the Heritage Month Workgroup, bringing together community members to create a multifaith holiday and heritage-month calendar, the De Anza student government voted to support this effort. However, my officemates and dean explained to me that such a project was unacceptable, because it didn’t focus on “decentering whiteness.”

When I later sought the support of our academic senate for the Heritage Month project, one opponent asked me if it was “about all the Jewish-inclusion stuff you have been pushing here,” and argued that the senate shouldn’t support the Heritage Month Workgroup efforts, because I was attempting to “turn our school into a religious school.” The senate president deferred to this claim, and the workgroup was denied support.


Annual Psychology Conference Invites Bevy Of Anti-Israel Commentators
The American Psychological Association’s Division 39: Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (SPPP) invited several speakers who have a history of anti-Israel comments to its upcoming spring conference, according to an event program.

The conference titled “Our Beautiful Struggle” will take place in New York from April 26th to the 29th and discuss”destruction, creation and psychoanalysis,” according to the event program. SPPP invited George Washington Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology Lara Sheehi, her husband Willam and Mary College’s Professor of Middle East Studies Stephen Sheehi and Rutger’s Gender and Women’s Studies Professor Jasbir Puar to speak despite all three having a significant history of anti-Israel rhetoric. (RELATED: Hours-Long House Committee Hearing Fails To Acknowledge Report Alleging US Funding Of Palestinian Terrorism)

Lara Sheehi is speaking at a roundtable talking about “State Violence, Debility, and the Embodied Struggle” along with Puar. Stephen Sheehi is the keynote speaker for a discussion “On the Dread of Psychoanalytic Repair,” which explores racism and colonialism, according to the event itinerary.

Sheehi, who is also the president of the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Society, is currently under investigation by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights for allegations that she discriminated against Jewish students and encouraged anti-Israel rhetoric. Sheehi reportedly told one student that it wasn’t “your fault that you were born in Israel” and invited a speaker to one of her classes that accused Israel of testing its weapons on innocent Palestinian children.

GWU conducted an internal investigation and claimed that it found “no evidence” of discriminatory conduct, but students that filed the initial complaint accused the university of punishing them for reporting Sheehi.

Sheehi’s husband, Stephen Sheehi, has also made his fair share of anti-Israel comments, including appearing to praise members of Palestinian and Lebanese terrorist organizations, according to several recorded interviews. In one panel discussion with the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa in 2022, Sheehi said that ” As Arabs… we pay deference and honor our ancestors and our martyrs, but also our living elders like Leila Khaled and the imprisoned Georges Abdullah.”

Khaled is one of the leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which was designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization in 1997, according to the Canary Mission. Abdullah is a Lebanese terrorist that killed an American military company and an Israeli diplomat in 1982 and is also believed to also be a member of PFLP.
Parent files complaint against New Jersey education board official’s anti-Israel screeds
Sahar Aziz, vice president of the Westfield Board of Education and a professor at Rutgers University, has expressed anti-Israel views on social media and by signing a public manifesto that calls Israel “apartheid” and refers to “racial supremacy of Jewish-Zionist nationals.”

That’s according to a formal complaint that Stephanie Siegel, a mother in Westfield, N.J., filed with the New Jersey School Ethics Commission. The Deborah Project assisted in the effort.

Aziz’s published views “grossly violate” the state requirement that education officials refrain from making remarks that suggest “apparent bias,” which might discourage the public from engaging with the board, according to the nonprofit Deborah Project.

Lori Lowenthal Marcus, legal director of the Deborah Project, told JNS that Aziz hasn’t been able to implement her antisemitic views in educational policy.

“Whether or not Aziz has yet followed through on her commitment to support BDS and insert the Palestinian narrative into policy in the Westfield School District as yet, the fact that she has committed to do that is enough to justify a complaint,” she said.

“What’s more, the inflammatory and false narrative attested to by Ms. Aziz in the manifesto she signed makes clear her animus towards Jews and the Jewish state,” added Lowenthal Marcus. “Such publicly expressed animus in a board of education member, let alone one who is an officer, violates both New Jersey law and common decency.”
David Baddiel: Thank God I’m an atheist… and so is my rabbi
One of the things that my new book, The God Desire, is trying to break down is what it means to be a Jewish atheist. Interestingly, I would say as a concept, this is something more likely to confuse Gentiles, who think being Jewish is about religion, than Jews, who of course know it’s mainly about Mel Brooks, lokshen pudding, and having an absurdly low threshold for physical discomfort.

I did a musical of my film The Infidel in 2014, at the end of which each character revealed in song that they weren’t as religious as they might have seemed during the rest of the show, and one of the Jewish characters sings, “I’m an atheist, like most Jews.”

Obviously, that might be overstating it. But the internet tells me that a 2011 survey suggested that 50 per cent of Jews had doubts over the existence of God, which compares to 10-15 per cent in the case of other religious groups. Meanwhile, a couple of Chanukahs ago, my local rabbi phoned to ask me if I would come and light the menorah outside the shul that year. I didn’t much fancy doing that, so played what I thought was my trump card. “Sorry to tell you this rabbi, but I’m an atheist.” “So am I,” he replied, brightly. I thought, blimey, this is more widespread than even I thought.

The rabbi may have been joking, of course, but it still points to something, which is that to be Jewish, you perhaps need to have less of a sense of God and more a sense of ritual. And there are a lot of rituals. Judaism has, as of course you know, 613 Mitzvot, of which 248 are positive (dos) and 365 negative (do not).
Bali Governor Reiterates Ban of Israeli Athletes From His Island This Time for 2023 World Beach Games
The Governor of Bali Wayan Koster will not allow Israeli athletes on the Indonesian island to compete in the 2023 ANOC World Beach Games, clarifying an earlier statement he made about the international multi-sport event that will be held Aug. 5-12 on the island.

Koster originally said in a released statement last week that he supports the World Beach Games following a meeting with Indonesian Minister of Youth and Sports Dito Ariotedjo and Indonesian Olympics Committee (KOI) chairman Raja Sapta Oktohari. In that statement he said the World Beach Games “will run smoothly in line with the Constitution,” but made no mention of his stance regarding Israel’s participation.

Koster recently also refused to allow Israeli athletes to enter Bali for the FIFA Under-20 World Cup set to start in May. His actions, along with protests took place in the country’s capital against Israel’s involvement in the World Cup, resulted in FIFA stripping Indonesia as the host of the soccer competition. Hosting rights were instead given to Argentina.

Indonesia has no diplomatic relations with Israel, refuses to recognize the Jewish state and is a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause.

On Saturday, Koster added to his earlier statement about the upcoming World Beach Games, which is organized by the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC). He said that he will once again refuse to allow athletes from Israel on his island, according to the Asia News Network.

“I remain consistent in refusing the Israeli team’s participation in the 2023 World Beach Games in Bali,” he said in a written statement cited by the news outlet. He also denied a remark Ariotedjo said earlier about Bali being fully committed and giving “1,000 percent of their support” to the World Beach Games. “I emphasize that this news is not true,” Koster said on Saturday, adding that he must keep in line with Indonesia’s Constitution, which “means that the 2023 World Beach Games in Bali should be held without the Israeli team.”
Two men charged with hate crime for 'Khaybar' chant at anti-Israel demo
Two men have been charged with behaviour likely to stir up racial hatred for allegedly threatening to kill Jews at an anti-Israel protest in London during the 2021 conflict between Hamas and Israel, the Metropolitan Police have confirmed.

They are accused of chanting slogans that refer to a massacre of Jews by a Muslim army at the seventh-century battle of Khaybar in Arabia. It has long been acknowledged by police and the Crown Prosecution Service that the chant, which is often heard at anti-Israel protests in Britain, amounts to incitement to racial hatred, but until now, prosecutions have been rare.

Khaldoun Ahmad El-Ali, 27, and Mohammad Jihad Al Safi, 25 have been bailed to appear at Westminster magistrates court on May 17. If convicted they face a maximum sentence of seven years in prison.

The Arabic chant, “Khaybar, Khaybar Ya Yahud, Jaish Mohammed Sauf Ya’ud” means “Watch Out Jews, Remember Khaybar, the Army of Mohammed is returning”.

The two men are accused of uttering the chant at a demonstration in west London on May 22, 2021, which was addressed by the former Labour Party deputy leader John McDonnell.

The chant’s use in Britain dates back at least to 2010, when it was shouted at the then-Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon when he spoke at the Oxford Union. The JC reported this at the time, and the Community Security Trust (CST) stated then it should be treated as a crime.

The 2021 conflict – in which Hamas fired more than 4,000 rockets at Israel, followed by Israeli air strikes on Gaza – saw a series of protests across Britain in which the chant was heard frequently.

The police investigation that has led to the men being charged followed a CST complaint.
Israel Advocacy Movement: Muslim fakes being Jewish
Towards Eternity recently uploaded an outrageous video of a Jewish convert to Islam. In this video, we expose him as a fraud and debunk his outrageous claims.


House Dems Complain of Arrest of Sheikh Who Called for War on America
Remember when Congressmembers would actually appeal on behalf of the human rights of actual political dissidents, not terrorists, murderers and enemies of the United States?

The Arab Spring and its horrors are mostly in the rearview mirror but the Muslim Brotherhood and its imitators are not gone and they haven’t given up. And the D.C. political class has not given up on Islamists.

After the arrest of Tunisia’s Islamist leader Rashid Ghannouchi, House Democrats, under the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a statement “following the sudden arrest of #Tunisia’s opposition leader, Rachid al-Ghannouchi”. The statement blathers on about “forcibly closures of political party offices and bans on free assembly of certain political groups” without ever mentioning that those certain groups are Islamists and quite dangerous.

The pro-Ghannouchi statement was issued by Rep. Gregory Meeks and Rep. Dean Philips. They neglect to mention anything about the monster they’re defending.

And that escalated to an outright call for genocide.

Sheikh Rashid Ghannouchi, of Tunisia’s equally moderate Islamist Ennahda Movement, said, “There are no civilians in Israel. The population—males, females and children—are the army reserve soldiers, and thus can be killed.”

This is what Meeks and Philips and the Democrats are defending.


Washington Post ‘confuses facts’ equating reality of Jewish Temples, Muhammad’s night journey
An article that appeared in The Washington Post just before Passover seems to equate the historical reality of the Jewish Temples in Jerusalem and that of the Muslim prophet Muhammad’s miraculous “night journey” to heaven.

“In Jewish tradition, the Temple Mount is the site where the First and Second Temples once stood. For Muslims, it [sic] known as the Noble Sanctuary, the place where the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven,” wrote Louisa Loveluck, Niha Masih and Miriam Berger. “The night of violence at the al-Aqsa compound, known to Jews as the Temple Mount, adds fuel to an already combustible situation.”

An earlier version of the story had noted: “In Jewish tradition, it is the site where the faith’s First and Second Temples once stood. For Muslims, it is the place from which the prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.”

Professors with relevant expertise told JNS that there is no debate in the scholarly community about the reality of the two Jewish Temples, whereas the question about whether Muhammad was a prophet who took a miraculous heavenly journey is not seen as a matter of fact, particularly for those who are not believing Muslims.

“There is zero debate that two temples stood in that place in scholarly literature. Mohammed’s ascent ‘happens’ from there only because it is the Temple site,” Lawrence Schiffman, professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, told JNS.
Financial Times legitimizes 'dual loyalty' trope
An April 19th Financial Times review, by John Sawers, of a book by former US official Steven Simon, “Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East”, includes the following:
Ensuring Israel’s security has been a point of continuity between US administrations. But attempts to find a solution to the Palestinian question were left until late in the day — and all of them foundered. Simon, who is Jewish himself, raises the sensitive question of whether the largely Jewish team that led US policy on Israel-Palestine through successive administrations was so committed to meeting Israel’s goals that they were never able to deliver a result.

Simon’s Jewish background doesn’t excuse the fact that he evidently promoted the dual loyalty charge – the accusation that Jewish citizens of the US, UK or elsewhere are more loyal to Israel than their own country – a toxic trope that is casually legitmised by the FT writer.

The reason why the IHRA Working Definition defines, as an example of antisemitism, “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations”, a variation of the more general antisemitic accusation that Jews can’t be trusted, is because its been used for centuries to discriminate against, vilify and massacre Jews.

As we’ve noted on these pages, the dual loyalty charge was previously employed by the Financial Times in 2017 – a fact that was noted in CST’s annual report on antisemitic discourse in Britain.

Dispiritingly, polls show that the dual loyalty trope still resonates in many democratic countries – including in the UK, where one-third of the population believes that “Jews are more loyal to Israel than to [this country/to the countries they live in]”.
Tagged a day before Yom Hashoah, Seattle temple keeps anti-Israel graffiti as message
A Seattle congregation that was vandalized with anti-Israel graffiti the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day left up the message for more than a day as a reminder of the hate that still exists in the world, its rabbi said.

It’s a familiar scene for Temple De Hirsch Sinai, the last major Jewish congregation located in the city’s once-heavily Jewish Capitol Hill neighborhood, just up the hill from its downtown and historic Pike Place Market. The historic Reform synagogue had also been tagged with antisemitic graffiti six years ago.

The synagogue said the latest vandal spray-painted a number of phrases and imagery on Sunday night. The messages were put up in a fenced-off part of the congregation, meaning the perpetrator had to breach synagogue property to leave them, and security cameras captured the act on video.

Among the messages left on the property: a Star of David, the word “apartheid,” a phrase that appears to read “Israel has lied,” and a face with “Im [sic] still here” written underneath.

“It was with great deliberation, great preparation,” Rabbi Daniel Weiner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “They were very nonchalant and very deliberate about what they were doing. It was timed to be as hurtful as possible.”

The FBI and the local police department are investigating the incident, but Weiner said the temple didn’t clean up the graffiti right away. They wanted to remind the community about the present dangers of antisemitism.


Can COP28 Expand Israeli Water for Arab Peace?
The top UN Development Program official in Baghdad warned that an increase in global temperature will decrease the fresh water available to Iraqis by 20 percent. Basra, Iraq’s second most populous city, which sits at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, is already dying of thirst, its water contaminated and its population decreasing.

Israel, too, faces tremendous environmental stress on its water supply, yet has mastered the process of desalination. Its efforts are so successful, it has been pumping desalinated water into its natural reservoir, Lake Kinneret. So advanced is Israeli desalination that former Arizona governor Doug Ducey described the Jewish state as “the world’s water superpower.” Accordingly, the arid southwestern state has awarded Israel contracts to deal with Arizona’s water shortage. Azerbaijan is also an Israeli customer.

Why not Iraq? Water can become the basis for formal peace between Israel and Iraq. The latter could reap the rewards of peace as soon as November when the United Arab Emirates (UAE) hosts the UN climate conference COP28.

At COP27, held in Egypt in November, the UAE brokered a water-for-energy deal between Israel and Jordan. Jordanian farms produce 600 megawatts of solar energy that it exports to Israel, which in turn uses the energy to desalinate sea water and pump it to Jordan, the second most arid country in the world. This water is just one of the benefits that flowed from Amman’s decision to make peace with Israel in 1994.
Brazil’s Speedbird to use Israeli drone traffic system for food delivery network
Israeli startup High Lander, the developer of an autonomous air traffic control system, has inked a partnership to help one of Brazil’s largest UAV operators to safely steer a drone-based network for the delivery of fast-food and groceries across the country.

High Lander has signed a memorandum of understanding with Speedbird Aero for the Franca-based drone operator to deploy the Israeli startup’s unmanned traffic management (UTM) platform. Speedbird manufactures unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for transport and delivery of goods for commercial, industrial and medical purposes. The drone delivery provider is working with Brazil’s largest food delivery app iFood, making thousands of food deliveries throughout the country.

“Speedbird is adapting High Lander’s technology as their drones are flying very heavily in in many urban areas througout Brazil, so they need to effectively monitor the airspace to prevent conflicts and collisions,” High Lander founder and CEO Alon Abelson told The Times of Israel.

“Fast food delivery needs to be cheap by making it faster than by traditional transportation means and in this sense drone delivery is helping companies like iFood deliver packages with greater speed, efficiency, and safety to different and complex locations that they weren’t able to do before.”

For example, in Brazil there are many locations where you need to drive around a river to deliver packages which can take you around 40 minutes, or you can get stuck in rush hour, while drones can cross a river, and shorten delivery to a few minutes, and the last mile delivery is managed by traditional delivery, Abelson added
Chaim Topol's family: ‘Our Dad wasn't a secret agent'
Growing up, Adi Topol never gave it much thought when Israeli strangers would show up at her family’s flat in London and stay the night.

“If an Israeli comes knocking on your door in the diaspora and says ‘I’m stuck’, you invite them in and make up the spare bed.”

But now the youngest daughter of Fiddler on the Roof star Chaim Topol, who died last month aged 87, wishes she could gently probe her beloved Abba about the mysterious people who walked through the door of their Maida Vale flat in the 1970s.

For while his depiction of Tevye on stage and on screen was extraordinary, Chaim’s off-stage life was equally remarkable.

His widow Galia, son Omer and daughters Anat and Adi thought it “hilarious” when media outlets across the last week portrayed him as a Mossad agent. But there is no doubt that he took the Israeli cause supremely seriously.

“Dad would go to Russia, film a rather obscure movie, and return with files, photos and tiny undeveloped films, the ones that go in spy cameras,” Adi, 56, said.

But the trips behind the Iron Curtain were about getting Jews out and not about spying on anyone, she said.

“My father was always very concerned about Jews who were in need of any help. He was a socialist who thought you should always do everything you could for your people.”

On one occasion, doing everything he could for his people entailed travelling to Lebanon to try to rescue air force navigator Ron Arad, who had been missing since his plane went down behind enemy lines in 1986.

It was a mission from which one of Israel’s greatest actors almost never returned. “A foreign press guy said he had information about Ron that he would only share with Topol,” said Adi.

“But when he crossed the border into Lebanon something told him that it was a trap.

“Posing as a British tourist, he managed to get to Beirut from where he called his office in New York — you couldn’t phone Israel from Lebanon — who put him on the line to Mum. She screamed at him to ‘get home now’.
‘Godfather’ meets ‘Shtisel’: New Netflix thriller delves into Haredi diamond dealers
A new TV series showcasing the Yiddish language hits Netflix this week – and it’s not set in Brooklyn or Jerusalem.

“Rough Diamonds” is an eight-part crime thriller co-produced by Keshet International and Belgium’s De Mensen. Based around the Hasidic Jewish community in Antwerp’s diamond district, the show builds a storyline with a vibe somewhere between “The Godfather” and “Shtisel.”

Co-created by Israelis Rotem Shamir and Yuval Yefet, the series centers on the Wolfson family – Belgian Hasidic Jews who have worked in the diamond business for generations. When the youngest Wolfson sibling takes his own life, his estranged brother, Noah, returns to Antwerp 15 years after he left the ultra-Orthodox lifestyle behind to discover the family business under threat from all sides.

“It’s a very interesting setting for drama and for a television show… it’s like a falling empire situation,” series director Shamir said in a recent Zoom interview with The Times of Israel. Whereas the Orthodox Jewish community in Antwerp once dominated the industry, all sorts of changes over the past 25 years “took the ground out from under the feet of this community, and left them in turmoil.”

The series is shot largely in a mix of Flemish and Yiddish, with smatterings of French and English. Neither Shamir nor Yefet – who previously worked together on “Fauda” as well as the police drama “Line in the Sand” – speak either language, but both were eager to immerse themselves in a new world.

“We’re not from an ultra-Orthodox background, and we’re not from Belgian backgrounds, so it’s one of those projects where you know it’s going to be a long way to develop and write it,” said Yefet, who served as lead writer on the show. “Because you have to kind of submerge yourself in this world to learn about it – and to have a lot of advisers and translators.”


Germany sets up panel to review 1972 Munich Olympic massacre of Israeli athletes
The German government said Friday it has set up an international commission of experts to review the events surrounding the 1972 attack on the Munich Olympics, a panel that was part of an agreement reached last year with relatives of the 11 Israeli team members who were killed by Palestinian terrorists.

The Interior Ministry named an eight-member panel of historians, most of them based in Israel or Germany. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser underlined Germany’s commitment to “a thorough reappraisal of what happened.”

The commission will also “rigorously examine the period before and after” the attack, Faeser said in a statement. “It is particularly important to me for their work to also thoroughly address the treatment of the family members after the attack.”

In September, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier apologized for multiple failures by his country before, during and after the attack as he joined his Israeli counterpart and relatives of the slain athletes at a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary.

An agreement days earlier for the relatives to receive a total of 28 million euros ($30.7 million) in compensation — a sum that includes much smaller payments made earlier — headed off a threatened boycott of the event. Germany also agreed to acknowledge the failures by authorities at the time and to set up the review by historians.
A Poet’s Recollections of How Jews Hid from the Nazis
Between 1944 and 1946, the great Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever produced a brief memoir of the Vilna Ghetto, which the Nazis created in September 1941 and destroyed two years later—after murdering most of its inhabitants or sending them to concentration camps, and letting countless others die of disease and starvation. In this selection from Justin Cammy’s translation, Sutzkever describes the malines (pronounced mah-LEE-ness), or underground hideouts, the inhabitants constructed to avoid the Germans and their local helpers. These makeshift bunkers were a testament to Jewish inventiveness and determination to live—and also, as Sutzkever relates, the locations of bone-chilling horrors all their own.

At the HKP concentration camp [just outside the ghetto], around 80 children managed to escape the killing. They were not allowed to show themselves in the camp [lest they be murdered]. Children’s skin was sought after for cosmetic operations. Their parents agreed to wall in a portion of a side room, behind which their offspring could live. Access to them was through a tin stove that was purposely pushed up against the wall. The stove was on all day so that it would not occur to German inspectors to check it.

A school was opened for these 80 walled-in children in the maline. In the morning, their teacher, Opeskin, would crawl through the stove in order to hold class for the young pupils until evening. He organized a performance with them. The stage was decorated in greenery, and they were dressed festively. There, in that walled-in room in a concentration camp, Opeskin’s children performed his song “The Maline Jew.” . . .

Food was often provided by those neighbors in whose cellars malines were constructed. From time to time, those in hiding would slip into town to purchase supplies. A synagogue and a cemetery were also created during the year spent underground. Six people were buried in a makeshift cemetery located in the maline at Glezer Street 9. Celebrations were also held in the sewers. They lit candles on Hanukkah, and ate latkes.


Israel gears up for 75th Independence Day festivities
Israel looks ahead to the 75th Independence Day, and to celebrate,12 torches, symbolizing Israel's dozen ancient tribes, will be lightened by outstanding individuals who contributed to the State




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