Jewish History

JERUSALEM (WJC)–Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin on Wednesday released several documents, including a handwritten request for clemency from Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann sent to then President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Eichmann, one of the masterminds of the Holocaust, was captured by the Mossad in Argentina and sentenced to death by an Israeli court in 1961. At a ceremony in Jerusalem to mark

ROME (WJC) Pope Francis on Sunday paid his first visit to a synagogue as Catholic pontiff, greeting Rome’s Jewish community in a show of interfaith friendship. Rome’s Great Synagogue is home of the oldest Jewish community in the Diaspora. The pope joined a standing ovation of the congregation when Holocaust survivors wearing striped scarves reminiscent

By Michael Freund PALERMO, Italy — Something extraordinary is happening in Palermo, the capital of Sicily. More than five centuries after the forced conversion to Catholicism of large numbers of Sicilian Jews, followed by the expulsion of the rest, a nascent rebirth is well underway, as growing numbers of Sicily’s Bnei Anousim (whom historians refer