Erdogan delays Gaza visit until after Obama meeting
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday that he would delay a planned trip to the Gaza Strip until after he meets with U.S. President Barack Obama at the White House in Washington on May 16. Earlier this week, Erdogan met with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. According to the Turkish daily Hurriyet, Kerry advised the Turkish prime minister to reconsider the timing of his planned visit to Gaza. Following Israel’s apology to Turkey last month over the May 2010 deaths of nine Turkish militants who attacked Israeli soldiers aboard the Mavi Marmara vessel, which tried to break Israel’s blockage of Gaza, Erdogan announced his intention to visit the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. A Turkish official said on Wednesday that U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel would try to rekindle Israeli-Turkish military cooperation during his upcoming visit to the Middle East. He will be in Israel from April 21-23. Military cooperation between Israel and Turkey suffered following the Gaza flotilla incident and became largely limited to deals that had been signed previously.
Lauder heir’s donates to New York’s Met museum
(JNS.org) Leonard Lauder, the Jewish-American heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, has donated a $1 billion art collection to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met). The collection includes cubist works by legendary artists Fernand Leger, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, and will go on public display in the fall of 2014, the museum announced Tuesday. “[Lauder’s collection is] one of the most significant groups of Cubist art ever assembled,” The Met said in a statement, according to the Associated Press. Some of the paintings to be featured include Picasso’s 1909 “Oil Mill” and the 1913 “Woman in an Armchair,” and Braque’s 1908 “Trees at L’Estaque” and the 1912 “The Violin.” “I feel that it’s essential that Cubism—and the art that follows it, for that matter—be seen and studied within the collections of one of the greatest encyclopedic museums in the world,” Lauder said in The Met’s statement. Lauder also donated money toward a $22 million endowment to The Met for a new modern art research center.
Mezuzah burnings suspect apprehended
(JNS.org) New York’s police department is questioning a suspect in the mezuzah burnings that occurred in Brooklyn on Monday, which was Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. Orthodox-Jewish residents in several Williamsburg buildings had discovered at about 4:45 p.m. Monday that 12 mezuzahs hanging on their doors were torched. “It’s devastating. It’s very sad and such things shouldn’t happen,” resident Raizy Fogel told New York’s local CBS 2 News. Local news channel Long Island News 12 reported that police have placed 35-year-old Rubin Ublies in custody and are questioning him on the arson. “This is a blatant act of anti-Semitism with a clear attempt to instill fear and intimidate the victims in their homes,” said Etzion Neuer, the Anti-Defamation League’s acting New York regional director.
Turkey erects refugee camps
(JNS.org) Turkey is erecting new refugee camps to accommodate the growing number of Christians fleeing the Syrian civil war. Turkey has seen an influx of 250,000-400,000 Syrian refugees, the majority of whom are from Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority. But a growing number of Syria’s minority groups, including Christians and Kurds, are fleeing as well. As a result, two new refugee camps are being erected that will have a capacity to house 2,500 people, mainly Assyrian Christians and refugees from other Christian denominations, Reuters reported. The camps are being built near the Turkish town of Mardin, which has its own small Assyrian Christian community as well. Separately, in a meeting with French President Francois Hollande in Paris, Maronite Lebanese Cardinal Beshara Rai expressed his concern over Syria’s beleaguered Christian population. “I am concerned about the situation of Christians in Syria: 60 percent of the [Christian] population that has left is from the Orthodox sect,” Rai told Hollande, according to the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper. France, a former colonial power in the region, has traditionally been seen as protector of the region’s Christian minority. “France remains very attentive to the situation of Christians [of the Levant] who are important to the identity of the country in which they live,” Hollande said in a statement.
Western Wall egalitarian prayer section proposed
(JNS.org) At the Western Wall, a new plan has emerged for the creation of an egalitarian prayer section in a bid to end a longtime dispute over prayer access among Jewish sects. The Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site, has been the center of a decades-old dispute between the Orthodox, who control the site, and Jews seeking egalitarian practices there, mainly Conservative and Reform Jews from the United States. In recent months, the dispute reached new heights when members of a Jewish group called “Women of the Wall” were arrested for praying with religious garments only traditionally worn by men under Orthodox practices. Natan Sharansky, Chairman of the Executive for the Jewish Agency for Israel, was tasked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to find a solution to the issue. Under Sharansky’s proposal, a new area will be created at Robinson’s Arch, which is currently an archeological site south of the Western Wall Plaza. This new area would allow egalitarian prayer as well as be expanded and connected to the existing Orthodox-supervised men and women’s prayer sites. The new site would be open 24 hours a day for prayers, events and mass ceremonies. “I presented it to the government ministers, to the leaders of the Jewish movements in the U.S., to the Western Wall rabbi, and each of them have their own reservations but they all understand that the situation in which the Western Wall is a place of conflict and dispute must end and that it must be rebuilt as a uniting place,” Sharanky told Yedioth Ahronoth. The proposal will be submitted to Netanyahu for his consideration.
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