Philanthropist Steinhardt to auction huge Jewish history and art collection
(JNS.org) Sotheby’s auction house in New York City plans to sell an enormous art and culture collection assembled by Jewish philanthropist and former Wall Street money manager Michael Steinhardt. Five hundred pieces, including textiles, manuscripts and paintings, will be put on sale in April and are estimated to bring in about $11 million.
“This is an incredibly exciting event in the field of Jewish art. I’ve been immersed in the world of Jewish material and culture for the last two decades and a collection of this scope and scale and quality has not come on the market in half a century,” Elke Deitsch, curator of the Judaica collection and museum at Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan, told the Times of Israel.
Some of the materials are 1,000 years old, with items representing regions all over the world. One of the pieces is a 15th-century Torah book, the Frankfurt Mishneh Torah, which includes text by Middle Age Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides. It is the second of a two-volume manuscript, the first of which is housed in the Vatican. It is estimated to be worth between $4.5 million and $6 million. Other items in the collection are a 12th-century North German bronze lion-shaped hand-washing jug with Hebrew inscriptions that is now valued at $200,000 to $400,000.
“Now, at 72, it is time for the collection to be passed on to a new generation, in the hopes that it will encourage them in turn to discover a rich Jewish heritage and the joy of owning a piece of the past,” said Steinhardt in a press release from the auction house.
Steinhardt is the co-founder of Taglit-Birthright Israel.
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Netanyahu: Abbas does not seek peace
(JNS.org) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced his lack of confidence in Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas as a peace partner on Thursday after Abbas met with Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal in Cairo as part of a Fatah-Hamas reconciliation effort mediated by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.
“Abbas embraces the head of a terrorist organization that declared just one month ago that Israel needs to be wiped off the map,” Netanyahu said, according to Israel Hayom. “That is not how someone with their eyes toward peace behaves.”
Meanwhile, President Shimon Peres rekindled his recently controversial support for the PA as a peace partner.
“I do not accept the assertion that Mahmoud Abbas is not a good negotiating partner,” Peres told the New York Times Magazine. “In my mind, he is an excellent partner. Our military people describe to me the extent to which the Palestinian forces are cooperating with us to combat terror.”
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For first time, two Israeli films vie for single Oscar
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) In an unprecedented achievement for the Israeli film industry, two of the five documentary features nominated for Academy Awards this year are Israeli submissions: The Gatekeepers, which features candid interviews with retired Israeli spymasters, and 5 Broken Cameras, which tells the personal story of amateur Palestinian cameraman Emad Burnat, who documents clashes between his fellow villagers and Israeli soldiers.
The 85th Academy Awards will be held in Los Angeles on Feb. 24.
While Israeli submissions have become a near fixture in the foreign film category of the Academy Awards (Beaufort, Waltz with Bashir, Ajami, Footnote), this year will be the first time since 1975 that an Israeli documentary is up for the prestigious award. Thirty-eight years ago it was The 81st Blow—the first film in the Israeli Holocaust Trilogy—that was nominated for the prize in the documentary feature category, but it did not win. This is the first time that two Israeli films are competing for the same Oscar.
“This is an extremely emotional moment for me,” Dror Moreh, The Gatekeepers director, said Thursday following the announcement. “I never dreamed that this journey, which began four years ago, would turn in to a movie that would compete for an American Oscar. It is an enormous honor. Every person in the film industry dreams of getting this news.”
Food banks see growing number of Jews in need of kosher food
(JNS.org) Directors of Jewish food pantries are reporting a growing need for food assistance among American Jewish families.
Although there is no current data, a survey of New York Jews conducted in 2011 showed that one in five of the 1.7 million Jews in the New York area live in poverty or near poverty, particularly Orthodox Jews who must send their children to Jewish schools and keep a strict kosher diet.
The most recent National Jewish Population survey also showed that 21 percent of kosher-keeping Jews in America overall are facing scant meal options in the hard-hit economy, particularly since the rules behind the production of kosher food make it more expensive than regular food. As a result, kosher food banks are seeing an upsurge of need all over the nation.
“If you don’t need kosher meat or juice, you can go to any public food pantry. If you’re kosher, you need a kosher chicken,” Bonnie Schwartzbaum, coordinator of the Jewish Community Services Kosher Food Bank in North Miami Beach, told Religion News Service.
Schwartzbaum estimates a 20-percent increase in the number of people her food bank has served in the last three years. Out of 1,000 people a month she feeds, 119 are Holocaust survivors.
Some normally kosher-keeping families have resorted to eating non-kosher food to survive due to the Jewish view that rules can suspended when there is a danger to human life. “If you’re starving you can eat all the shrimp and bacon you want,” said Don Meissner, community outreach coordinator at the Harvey Kornblum Jewish Food Pantry in St. Louis.
Meissner also says that many people do not believe that Jews are struggling in this country. “There’s this misconception that Jews are uniformly successful,” he said, “and that’s never been the case.”
Abbas: Let Palestinians die in Syria rather than giving up ‘right of return’
(JNS.org) Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has said he has rejected a United Nations’ brokered deal with Israel to allow Palestinian refugees living in Syria to resettle in the West Bank and Gaza.
Speaking to a group of journalists in Cairo, Abbas told them that in December he reached out to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to contact Israel on his behalf to resolve the status of Palestinians caught in the Syrian civil war.
Abbas, however, said that Israel conditionally agreed as long as the Palestinian refugees forfeit claims to “return” to Israel, which he rejected.
“So we rejected that and said it’s better they die in Syria than give up their right of return,” Abbas reportedly told Egyptian journalists, the Associated Press reported.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and Foreign Ministry declined to comment to the Associated Press.
As part of the 1948 War of Independence, more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs became refugees as a result of the conflict they initiated. Today, the refugees and their descendants (estimated to be around 5 million) remain largely stateless in refugee camps throughout the Arab world.
The UN’s typical policy is that only those who flee their countries themselves are considered “refugees,” not their descendants. However, the UN makes an exception for descendants of Arabs who fled Israel.
In Syria, it is estimated that about 150,000 Palestinians have fled the country as a result of the civil war.
Israel has called for the Palestinian refugee situation to be resolved as part of a comprehensive regional peace deal, while Palestinian leaders have maintained calls for the unconditional return of all refugees to the pre-1948 homes inside of Israel.
Mother Nature’s wrath floods Gaza smuggling tunnels
(JNS.org) After days of intense rainfall and heavy snow, the latest storm has taken its toll on a region unaccustomed to such fierce weather. But the storm’s effects could be even worse for the terror group Hamas, and Israel may reap the benefits.
According to Egyptian officials, many of Gaza’s notorious smuggling have tunnels been flooded or collapsed, forcing its illicit activity to halt, Ma’an News Agency reported.
Hamas relies heavily on the tunnels underneath the Gaza-Egyptian border to circumvent Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. It uses the tunnels to smuggle rockets and other weapons from Iran to target Israel. Additionally, other goods and materials are smuggled in and taxed by Hamas, which relies on it as one of its primary sources of revenue.
As a result, the tunnels have been repeatedly targeted by the Israeli Air Force for several years, including during the recent Operation Pillar of Defense. But Israel may not have to worry for some time after Mother Nature’s wrath.
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