Judea and Samaria communities won’t be evacuated in peace deal, Netanyahu says
(JNS.org) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a Likud party faction meeting on Monday that there would be no evacuation of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria in a peace deal resulting from the current U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian conflict negotiations.
“A settlement freeze during negotiations is not on the agenda,” Netanyahu said. “The talks are not about dismantling settlements and I have no intention of evacuating any settlements in Judea and Samaria.”
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Israel naming visitor center after Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper
(JNS.org) The soon-to-be-built visitor center at the Hula Nature Reserve will be named after Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in recognition of his ongoing friendship with and support for Israel, when he visits the Jewish state in two weeks., Israel Hayom reported.
The center, established by the Jewish National Fund, will be built from funds collected in Canada at a fundraising event that Harper attended. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to accompany Harper during his visit.
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Pipe bomb thrown at Rachel’s Tomb wounds Israeli man
(JNS.org) An Israeli man was wounded in the face on Monday after a pipe bomb thrown toward the upper parking lot at Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem exploded, Israel Hayom reported. The bomb was thrown from the Palestinian side of the complex.
The man, 25, had gone to the site to pray. After he was wounded, he refused to be taken to the hospital, and received medical treatment at the scene from Magen David Adom medics who had arrived from Jerusalem.
The past year has seen a rise in the number of security-related incidents at Rachel’s Tomb, with Palestinians there hurling rocks, fire bombs, and sometimes homemade pipe bombs almost every day toward the walled complex.
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Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s Talmud set to go up for auction
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) When Rabbi Ovadia Yosef died last October, the former Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel and spiritual leader of the Shas political party left behind a unique Talmud set originally published in Munich in 1949. Later this month, the Kedem Auction House in Jerusalem will publicly auction the set, a series of 19 books that is the first Talmud edition printed in its entirety after the Holocaust in Germany.
The set is expected to fetch between $40,000 and $50,000, and was designed to commemorate the fact that it was printed on German soil, featuring illustrations of a Jewish township and a concentration camp with the caption, “A labor camp in Ashkenaz in the days of the Nazis,” and a passage from Psalms (119:176) reading, “I have gone astray like a lost sheep. Seek thy servant; for I do not forget thy commandments.”
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Brandeis professor Jonathan Sarna elected president of Association for Jewish Studies
(JNS.org) Brandeis University Professor of American Jewish Studies Jonathan Sarna has been elected as the next president of the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS).
Founded in 1969, the AJS is an academic organization that focuses on research and teaching in Jewish studies and has nearly 1,800 members worldwide. Sarna’s father, Nahum Sarna, was president of the association from 1984-85. “I consider myself, for that reason, the ‘John Quincy Adams’ of the AJS,” Jonathan Sarna told JNS.org, referring to the sixth U.S. president, whose father, John Adams, was the second president.
Sarna, one of the foremost experts on American Judaism, said his main goals as AJS president would be “one, to strengthen the financial base of the association; two, to raise fellowship funds for graduate students and to promote research; three, to survey the field so as to better understand the needs of our members; four, to work with the Jewish Book Council to help promote our members’ books.”
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University officials who opposed ASA boycott of Israel asked to follow suit for MLA measure
(JNS.org) Ahead of the consideration of a resolution condemning Israel at the Jan. 9-12 Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Chicago, the leaders of Hillel International and the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC) asked nearly 100 American university presidents, provosts, and campus officials who spoke against the American Studies Association’s (ASA) recent endorsement of an academic boycott of Israel to also publicly oppose the MLA measure.
The MLA resolution condemns Israel for “arbitrary denials of entry to Gaza and the West Bank by U.S. academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.” In a letter to university officials obtained by JNS.org, Hillel President and CEO Eric Fingerhut and ICC Executive Director Jacob Baime note that in MLA’s resolution, Israel is “being singled out for actions other Western nations pursue routinely.”
“The United States, Great Britain, France, Canada, and Australia, not to mention Western-leaning nations in the Middle East, such as UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia (which regularly partner with Western universities), all deny entry to individuals, for any number of reasons,” they wrote.
Baime stressed the importance of taking pre-emptive action against the potential passage of the resolution.
“I don’t think we need to wait for the MLA to take action to speak out,” he told JNS.org. “I think that the MLA should hear from the academic community loud and clear that this is not something that our colleges and universities support.”
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German op-ed: Israel cannot be a Jewish state
(JNS.org) A German newspaper, Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung (Neue OZ), published an op-ed last week titled “Israel as Jewish state: Unacceptable demand” that has sparked outrage in the German Jewish community. Author Franziska Kückmann compared the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state by the Palestinians with the creation of either a theocracy like the Islamic Republic of Iran or an “apartheid state” where non-Jews would become second class citizens.
“Both versions are incompatible with [Israel’s] claim to be a modern state, and may not be accepted by the world community. As long as Israel provides such unreasonable conditions, [its] assertion to be interested in a two-state solution is not worth nothing,” Kückmann wrote, as translated from German by JNS.org.
A representative from Israel’s embassy in Germany told the Jerusalem Post, “Every attempt to define Israel as a two peoples’ state—and not to be defined as a Jewish state—misjudges the reality and damages the chances for success in the peace process.” Michael Grünberg, head of the Jewish community in the city of Osnabrück, said the article is a “new form of anti-Semitism” and that the author “denies Jews the right to their own state.”
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Dutch soccer team leaves Israeli player home before competing in Abu Dhabi
(JNS.org) Dutch soccer club Vitesse has come under fire for its decision to travel to Abu Dhabi without star Israeli defender Dan Mori after United Arab Emirates officials barred Mori’s entry.
According to the Vitesse spokeswoman Esther Bal, the club originally had permission to bring Mori, but UAE officials withdrew the guarantee the day before the trip, DutchNews.nl reported.
“As a football club, we steer clear of politics and religion,” Bal said.
Israel’s Dutch embassy condemned the move, saying “such discrimination in sports is regrettable when sports should be beyond politics.”
Dutch nationalist politician Geert Wilders also criticized the club. “Vitesse did not have to go,” Wilders tweeted. “They are now accepting the Emirates’ Jew-hate. Cowardly.”
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Jewish teens return from Young Judaea winter break community service trips
(JNS.org) Young Judaea’s Alternative Winter Break program sent more than 100 North American Jewish high school students to partake in community development projects over winter break. One group of students went to New Orleans, where they helped renovate homes and rebuild the parts of the city still affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Another group traveled to Los Angeles to volunteer in shelters and food banks.
“Alternative Winter Break ensures that participants develop a sense of building community, get the chance to further explore their Jewish identity, and ultimately go home more committed and better equipped to offer service where it is most needed,” said Andrew Fretwell, Young Judaea’s Alternative Winter Break program manager.
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Orthodox patriarchs arrive in Bethlehem to celebrate Christmas
(JNS.org) The heads of several ancient Eastern Orthodox Churches arrived in Bethlehem on Monday to celebrate the Orthodox Christmas.
Patriarchs from the Greek Orthodox, Assyrian, Coptic, and Ethiopian churches arrived separately in various celebrated processions to Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, the traditional birthplace of Jesus.
Unlike Christians in the West who follow the Gregorian calendar and celebrate Christmas on Dec. 25, Eastern Orthodox Christians use the older Julian calendar and celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7.
The Christmas celebrations come amid tremendous upheaval for many Middle East Christians— especially Christians in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq—who have come under attack from Islamic extremists.
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Preceding provided by JNS.org