Holocaust awareness program at Auschwitz museum launches in Arabic and Farsi
(JNS.org) The Auschwitz museum, which is located at the site of the former Nazi death camp in Poland, says it has launched an online program on Holocaust awareness in the Arabic and Farsi languages.
The museum says it gets very few visitors from the Arab world or Iran, areas where Holocaust misinformation and denial are the highest.
“We want to address groups of people who often have little knowledge of this subject or who even advocate revisionist views,” museum spokesman Pawel Sawicki told AFP.
In addition to Arabic and Farsi, Spanish and Portuguese were added to the program’s website. English and Polish versions have been offered since 2010, when the program was launched.
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Pope Francis may open Vatican’s controversial WWII archive
(JNS.org) A close friend of Pope Francis believes that the pontiff will open up the Vatican’s sealed archives from World War II.
The archive, which details the church’s activities during the war, has been a point of controversy for several decades. Many Jews accuse the Vatican and former wartime Pope Pius XII of staying silent during the Holocaust.
Argentinian Rabbi Abraham Skorka, who is a close friend of Pope Francis and co-authored the 2010 book On Heaven and Earth with the pontiff, said he believes the pontiff will keep his word and eventually open the archives.
“The Pope is consistent with all he said as a cardinal, and as pope he will undoubtedly make happen what he said he would as cardinal. What we said to each other was between us, but I believe that, yes, he will open the archives,” Skorka told the Sunday Times.
In his 2010 book, Pope Francis, who was then known as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, wrote that the Vatican “should open them [the WWII archives] and clarify everything.”
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Millions of Israelis at risk in event of earthquake, minister warns
(Israel Hayom/Exclusive to JNS.org) Millions of Israelis are at risk in the event of an earthquake because of unsafe buildings, Homefront Defense Minister Gilad Erdan warned Monday.
“Across Israel today, there are more than 800,000 households which do not meet the [construction safety] standards—meaning that millions of citizens are at risk during an earthquake,” Erdan told the Knesset Interior Committee.
“Included among the dangerous structures are 1,600 schools that do not meet the standards,” said Erdan. “The government is not doing its job responsibly, because responsibility is dispersed between too many authorities.”
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Israel to create kosher supervision authority
(JNS.org) Israel’s Religious Services Ministry intends to create a kosher observance authority to put an end to the practice of business and restaurant owners having to pay individual kosher inspectors directly, Israel Hayom reported.
According to the plan, expected to be presented for government approval in the coming weeks, business and restaurant owners seeking kosher certification will pay a fee to the government, which will supervise and pay the inspectors. The authority will function under Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, which answers to the Religious Services Ministry.
The purpose of the plan, initiated by Deputy Religious Services Minister Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan, is to fight the phenomenon of underhanded deals between inspectors and business owners, and to ensure that state employees work independently of vested interests.
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Two rockets fired from Sinai toward Eilat
(JNS.org) Two rockets were fired on Monday night from Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula toward the southern Israeli city of Eilat, Israel Hayom reported. Security forces were unable to locate the rocket shells in the arid, open areas around the Red Sea city. No injuries were reported.
Thousands of Eilat’s residents rushed to protected spaces in their homes when they heard explosions.
“The whole house shook,” said Moshe, an Eilat resident. “I immediately understood it was a rocket. It sounded like it had landed in our backyard. I looked out the window looking over the bay, but I didn’t see anything because it was dark.”
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Stephen Harper at Knesset: Canada will stand by Israel ‘through fire and water’
(JNS.org) Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made history on Monday by becoming the first Canadian leader to address the Israeli Knesset, saying Canada will stand by Israel ‘‘through fire and water.”
“Canada supports Israel because it is right to do so,” said Harper. “This is a very Canadian trait, to do something for no reason other than it is right even when no immediate reward for, or threat to, ourselves is evident.”
“Support today for the Jewish state of Israel is more than a moral imperative. It is also of strategic importance, also a matter of our own long-term interest,” he said.
Harper criticized world leaders who single out Israel because it is the popular thing to do.
“It is all too easy ‘to go along to get along’ and single out Israel,” Harper said.
“This is really something we have not seen before, a prime minister of Canada taking a really strong position at a great political cost. He knows that this could really hurt him in some areas, but he doesn’t care, because this is what he really believes,” Rabbi Philip Scheim of Toronto’s Beth David Synagogue, part of Harper’s delegation to Israel, told JNS.org.
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Israel and Egypt working together in Sinai and Gaza to defeat Hamas
(JNS.org) Israel and Egypt are working together to defeat Hamas in Gaza and in the Sinai Peninsula, according to reports.
“Cooperation is growing tighter on the intelligence and operational level—in fact, on all military levels,” an anonymous Israeli official told the Times of Israel.
“Both countries want to crush Hamas,” the official added. “But we need to be smart about it.”
Under the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Egyptian military forces are not permitted to operate in the Sinai. But with the increase of lawlessness and terrorism in the region, Israel has quietly permitted the Egyptian army to patrol the region.
Egypt’s military-backed government has long accused Hamas of supporting terror organizations in the Sinai and cooperating with the Muslim Brotherhood. Former Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, along with several dozen other Muslim Brotherhood officials, are set to face trial for cooperating with Hamas and other foreign terror groups.
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Several European pension funds considering Israel divestment
(JNS.org) Several large European pension funds are considering divesting from Israeli banks.
According to the Financial Times, the pension funds are concerned “that the banks finance illegal Israeli settlements in Palestinian-occupied territories.”
The Dutch fun ABP, the world’s third-largest pension fund, and two other major European investors, Nordea Investment Management and DNB Asset Management, want more information from the Israeli banks.
Additionally, Norway’s largest pension fund, KLP, said it would discuss its investments in Israeli banks. PGGM, Holland’s second-largest pension fund, earlier this month became the first large European investor to divest from holdings in Israel’s five largest banks.
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Romanian President Traian Basescu expresses support for a secure Israel
(JNS.org) Romanian President Traian Basescu, during his second visit to Israel in less than four years, told Israeli President Shimon Peres on Monday that both Israel and the Palestinians must jump on the chance for peace. Basescu expressed his support for a Palestinian state, but emphasized that any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must include a secure Israel.
“I see the results of compromise in Europe,” Basescu said, referencing German-French peace since the Second World War. “All of us put part of our sovereignty in one basket to develop the European Union,” he said, according to the Jerusalem Post.
Yet it is “obvious that the guarantee of Israel’s security is a basic condition to negotiations because without security the peace won’t come,” Basescu said, Israel Hayom reported.
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Two violent anti-Semitic attacks alarm Ukraine’s Jewish community
(JNS.org) Two violent anti-Semitic incidents in Kiev have alarmed the Ukrainian Jewish community. On Jan. 11, two men attacked 26-year-old Israeli teacher Hillel Wertheimer when he left a synagogue after Shabbat. He did not suffer serious wounds. On Jan. 18, a 33-year-old yeshiva student from Russia, Dov-Ber Glickman, was also attacked after he left a synagogue.
Sam Kliger, the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) director of Russian Jewish community affairs, believes the incidents could be a “sinister sign indicating that some are trying to use anti-Semitism in political confrontation in Ukraine.”
When the Maidan protests began in November 2013 against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to freeze plans to join a free trade agreement with the European Union, there was little indication of anti-Semitism among protesters, despite the fact that ultra-nationalist Ukrainian political opposition party Svaboda was participating in the protests.
Yet historically, “in this part of the world, a political confrontation sooner or later starts to exploit the ‘Jewish question’ and to play the Jewish card,” Kliger told JNS.org.
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Preceding provided by JNS.org