Anti-Semitism

Spanish soccer antisemites

2009-12-16T06:02:00.003-05:00

Spanish soccer fans chant anti-Semitic slogans at Israeli goalkeeper

By Haaretz Staff and Agencies
Wed., December 16, 2009 Kislev 29, 5770
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1135179.html

The Spanish soccer federation is set to haul Osasuna before a disciplinary panel this week, after the referee at the team's game against Real Mallorca over the weekend reported that home fans subjected Mallorca's Israeli goalkeeper, Dudu Aouate, to anti-Semitic abuse.

Aouate kept a clean sheet in the game, as his team recorded its first road victory of the season, winning 1-0.

According to referee Alfonso Alvarez Izquierdo, "From the 14th minute and on five other occasions in the first half, (anti-Semitic) chants... were directed at the visiting goalkeeper by the home fans behind the goal, every time he touched the ball," the referee said in his match report posted on the Spanish federation Web site. Izquierdo informed the match delegate and a message was put out over the stadium PA system calling for the chants to stop. They were not repeated in the second half.

The fans waved Palestinian flags and also shouted "murderer" at Aouate.

Aouate sounded unfazed by the chanting, telling local media that, "This happens to me every time I play here in Pamplona. It really makes me happy that we won."

This is not the first time that the Israeli 'keeper has been subjected to anti-Semitic taunts by Osasuna fans. In 2006, while playing for Deportivo La Coruna, he also came in for some untoward treatment.

Aouate joined Mallorca last year, when the team was facing relegation. The Israeli international helped Mallorca finish mid-table last season, while this year the team has placed fifth, and is challenging for a top-four Champions League qualification place.

Australian Anti-Semitism Report Reveals anti-Jewish Violence

2009-12-02T03:59:00.006-05:00

Spike in number of anti-Jewish incidents

Posted on 01 December 2009
CHANTAL ABITBOL
http://jewishnews.net.au/2009/12/01/spike-in-number-of-anti-jewish-incidents/9990

AUSTRALIA has seen an alarming spike in the number of anti-Jewish incidents during the past year, according to new research released this week.

The 144-page Anti-Semitism Report revealed 962 accounts of anti-Jewish violence, vandalism, harassment and intimidation in the past 12 months.

“That’s more than twice the annual average. [It's] unprecedented,” said Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council’s director of international and community affairs and former ECAJ president, Jeremy Jones, who compiled the report.

He released his findings at the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) annual conference in Sydney on November 29.

“More than in any other 12-month period, Jewish-Australians walking to and from synagogue were abused by passing motorists, Jewish people were confronted with incitement against them in Australian cities, and abusive, offensive and intimidatory emails were received by Jewish-Australians at their homes and workplaces.”

Jones, who has been tracking anti-Semitic incidents in Australia for the past 20 years, also noted that anti-Jewish propaganda in fringe publications and from extremist organisations remains an “ongoing concern”.

The results were backed by testimonies from heads of Jewish security groups in both Sydney and Melbourne, who said they have also noticed a surge of incidents in recent years.

David Rothman, head of Sydney’s Communal Security Group, said: “Since 2001, there has been a yearly increase in anti-Semitic incidents, verbal abuse and assault that we see on the ground, and reports from the community.”

Amit Bar-Giora, head of Melbourne’s Community Security Group, added: “Although most of these incidents are not of a violent nature, the fact that there has been an increase is of a great concern. We ask [the community] to be alert to any suspicious activity and report them accordingly.”

On a more positive note, Jones disclosed a marked decrease in reports of physical violence against Jewish individuals and property — with 27 incidents reported this year, compared with 58 and 46 in the previous two years.

Telephone threats, hate mail and graffiti were also reported at “below average rates”.

“It is important to emphasise that my research over 20 years indicates Australians are fundamentally tolerant and opposed to discrimination, vilification or harassment of Jews and other segments of the population, but that a relatively small number of fanatic and offensive individuals are increasingly active in trying to diminish the quality of life of Jewish-Australians,” he said.

“Internationally, Australia scores very well as a successful multicultural society,” he added.

Venezuela's Anti-Semite in chief spews Anti-Israel hatred in public

2009-11-26T03:12:00.004-05:00

Chavez calls Israel "murderous" U.S. arm

Wed Nov 25, 2009 8:48pm EST
By Frank Jack Daniel and Andrew Cawthorne
http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-Iran/idUSTRE5AO03520091126

CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez used a visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Wednesday to brand Israel as a murderous agent of Washington.

Chavez and Ahmadinejad, on the last leg of a tour of three left-leaning South American nations, hugged, held hands, and praised each other as fellow revolutionaries.

The Venezuelan singled out a comment by Israeli President Shimon Peres during a visit this month to South America that his and Ahmadinejad's days in power may be numbered.

"We know what the state of Israel stands for -- a murderous arm of the Yankee empire," Chavez told joint news conference. "What the president of Israel said, we take as a threat."

Chavez broke relations with Israel this year. He won praise in the Muslim world after branding an Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

His fierce speeches against Israel are taken by some supporters as a green light for anti-Semitism and walls in Caracas are often daubed with anti-Jewish slogans.

Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust and has called for Israel to be wiped off the map.

OPEC members Venezuela and Iran have grown much closer in recent years. Chavez supports Ahmadinejad's controversial nuclear program, while Iran is helping Venezuela map uranium deposits.

The two leaders signed a raft of business and industrial agreements relating to 129 joint projects that Chavez said ranged from assembling bikes and producing car-parts, to processing milk and building houses.

Ahmadinejad clinched a second term after a disputed June election brought the worst unrest in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution and a heavy-handed clampdown on opponents.

His trips to left-leaning Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela this week have helped cement ties with countries that back Iran's right to develop atomic power for peaceful purposes.

Iran is under pressure to accept a U.N. plan aimed at checking nuclear ambitions which it says are peaceful but the West fears could be intended to create atomic weapons.

"What do the imperialists say? That Ahmadinejad is here because we are making the atomic bomb here too," Chavez said.

"They're the ones with the atomic bombs, and remember the Yankee imperialists dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki," he added, referring to the bombings of Japanese cities that ended World War II.

A leading Chavez critic and newspaper director, Teodoro Petkoff, mocked Ahmadinejad's visit, saying past cooperation deals had led to little of substance, not even the planned production of bicycles.

Karen Hooper, Latin America analyst for Stratfor consultancy, agreed that the worst fears in Washington about Venezuela and Iran's ties may be overblown.

"There is little danger of Venezuela being able to help Iran proliferate," she said.

"Although Iran is short on uranium and Venezuela might have some, even if Venezuela were to deliver sufficient quantities, the real problem for Iran is the enrichment process, which requires technology that Venezuela could not possibly wield."

(Writing by Andrew Cawthorne; Editing by Alan Elsner and Walker Simon)"

[Note how Ms. Karen Hooper can't help herself from acting as an apologist for evil even when it's smacking her between the eyes!]

Anti-semite hosted by J Street

2009-09-23T03:51:00.003-04:00

J Street should rescind its invitation to Al-Marayati

By Morton A. Klein
Jewish Journal.com
September 21, 2009

"Is J Street a pro-Israel group? The lobbying organization never tires of claiming it is., Yet what pro-Israel group would invite a man to speak at its forthcoming conference who has called for Israel’s destruction, stating that “the establishment by force, violence and terrorism of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948” was “unjust” and “a crime, ” and vowed to “work to overturn the injustice”?

The man who signed this Sept. 17, 1993 statement by the Muslim Public Affairs Council was its executive director, Salam Al-Marayati, who will be speaking next month at J Street’s Oct. 25-28 conference.

Marayati and MPAC have made numerous other hateful anti-Israel and anti-American statements:

* A few hours after the 9/11 attacks, Marayati said on a radio show in Los Angeles, “We should put the State of Israel on the suspect list” of possible 9/11 perpetrators.

* After a suicide bombing at a Jerusalem pizzeria on Aug. 8, 2001, his organization issued a statement calling the attack “the expected bitter result of the reckless policy of Israeli assassination that did not spare children and political figures.”

* Marayati’s group condemned the U.S. strikes against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Sudan following the bombings in 1998 of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as “illegal, immoral and illogical.”

* He has likened Israel’s supporters to Hitler.

Marayati also has condemned France’s fining of Roger Garaudy for Holocaust denial as “persecution of his right to express an opinion” and in 1997 gave a chilling, anticipatory justification for anti-American terrorism, saying, “Where Israel goes, our government follows. ... What is important is whether the American people are aware of and ready for the consequences.”

Some of these statements caused Marayati’s 1999 appointment to a U.S. congressional committee on terrorism to be rescinded.

J Street’s invitation to Marayati makes one wonder whose side the organization is on.

J Street pressures Israel to make concessions, yet says virtually nothing specifically about the 16-year failure of the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority to dismantle terrorist groups. The lobby group also said nothing about Fatah’s recent conference, which proclaimed the legitimacy of terrorism against Israel and honored, by name, killers of Jews as heroes.

Additionally, J Street showed its animus toward Israel by citing polls inaccurately to bolster its claim that Israelis and American Jews want greater Israeli concessions and agree with President Obama’s pressure on Israel to stop Jews building in eastern Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria—the land known as the West Bank.

In June, J Street’s campaign director, Isaac Luria, misleadingly claimed that “Israelis want the president to stand up to the settlers.”

Luria said, “A poll recently showed that 52 percent of Israelis want a freeze on settlement construction and 56 percent want Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to agree to President Obama’s call for an end to settlement construction.”

In fact, the Dahaf Institute poll to which Luria referred actually showed that Israelis favor continued natural growth of Jewish communities by 54 percent to 42 percent, and that they believe that Obama’s policies are not good for Israel by a margin of 53 percent to 26 percent.

J Street simply buried the evidence of actual support for natural growth and cited only a contradictory general finding of support for a construction freeze. More damning still, the only other partial truth in J Street’s claim—that 56 percent of respondents said they wanted Netanyahu to agree to Obama’s demands—left out the major point that they favored this only if the alternative meant U.S. sanctions.

J Street misrepresents polling data and ignores other polls that show majority Israeli and American Jewish opposition to Obama’s demands. For instance, a recent Smith Research Institute poll shows that Israelis, by a decisive 69 percent to 27 percent margin, oppose freezing construction within large Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and that only 4 percent of Israelis favor Obama’s policies.

Additionally, a July Global Marketing Services poll of American Jews who are Democrats shows 55 percent believe that Obama is naive in thinking Palestinians want peace. Only 27 percent supported Obama’s promoting of a Palestinian state and 52 percent said Israel should be allowed to build in existing settlements.

While the poll also showed that 58 percent of Jewish Democrats believe Obama is “doing a good job promoting peace in the Middle East,” the question isn’t specific to Israel and may include Obama’s policies on Iraq, Iran, Egypt, etc. The poll also showed 55 percent of respondents believe Obama is not “too tough on Israel”—but they disagree with Obama’s specific policies on Israel, as other answers in the poll indicate.

Most disturbing, despite strong support by most Israeli and American Jews for Israel’s campaign last January to stop Hamas’ rockets from Gaza, J Street opposed the operation. It even has challenged the adoption of more robust sanctions against Iran right now.

All these issues have enhanced relevance in view of the fact that J Street receives tens of thousands of dollars in donations from dozens of Arab and Muslim Americans, according to the Federal Election Commission filings cited by the Jerusalem Post, as well as money from individuals connected to Palestinian and pro-Iranian advocacy groups.

J Street continues to relentlessly display its support for the Palestinian cause. We urge the group to start doing the right thing by rescinding its invitation to Salam Al-Marayati and ceasing to accept donations from those hostile to Israel.

Morton Klein is the president of the Zionist Organization of America."

Muslims invade Sweden and Jew-hatred rises

2009-05-17T07:49:00.004-04:00

Jews Leaving Malmo, Sweden

by Yated Ne'eman Staff
20 Iyar 5769 - May 14, 2009
http://chareidi.shemayisrael.com/amalmobhr69.htm

Jewish out-migration is on the rise in Malmo, Sweden's third largest city. One-third of the southern port city are Muslims, forming a population group that has created a considerable challenge due to their reluctance to integrate and adopt local norms. In Stockholm, Sweden's largest city, the population is 20% Muslim.

In recent years Malmo has become a symbol of intolerance toward Jews. The situation worsened significantly following the recent war in Gaza and continued to deteriorate following the protests against allowing Israeli tennis players to participate in Davis Cup matches held in the city.

In recent interviews, young members of the local Jewish community, which currently numbers 900, said Jewish residents feel they would be better off leaving the city than being subject to harassment and threats by Muslims.

"We're leaving," one young Jew declared during an interview on a news program at a local radio station. "It's not a question of if but when, and maybe not just Malmo, but Sweden, too."

The Jewish community is not only disappointed by its treatment by the Muslim neighbors. That would have been bearable, they said, since they expect the situation to improve in the future. Rather they are more disappointed by city leaders, who are largely dependent on the Muslim vote.

It was the mayor of this traditionally working-class city, socialist Ilmar Reepalu, who justified the criticism of Israel during the recent Davis Cup protests, saying the city must display solidarity toward Palestinian residents whose relatives were affected by the war. Yet the protesters in Malmo demonstrated not only against Israel, but against the Jews as well. The Judisk Kronika ("Jewish Chronicle") recently published a transcript from one of the demonstrations where calls to wipe out the Jews were clearly audible. "It's unfortunate such shouts are heard, but they are not from Palestinians, but from members of neo-Nazi organizations," said Mayor Reepalu, choosing to totally overlook the city's Jewish-Muslim tensions.

The Muslim population is a source of problems elsewhere in Sweden, whose non-Muslim citizens are also largely unfriendly towards Israel and Swedish Jews. Growing public support for the Social Democratic Party (SAP), which is highly critical of Israel, has boosted Party Chairman Mona Sahlin, known for her extreme views against Israel.

"I don't want to be among those who didn't leave the city on time," another young Jew said during the radio program. "The situation in Malmo today might not be quite the same as what was happening in Germany during the 1930s. There, too, many people fled the rising wave of hatred, but many other stayed and were washed away. I don't want to be one of them," he said cryptically.

Not all Scandinavian Muslims are hostile toward Jews and not all of the Jews are packing their bags to leave. Just 40 miles away in Copenhagen the atmosphere is totally different. But the sense of fear and uncertainty palpable in Malmo is liable to reach epidemic proportions if left unchecked, and today Sweden has no leader brave enough to step forward and take a firm stand.

Egyptian & Jordanian Anti-Semitism

2009-05-15T04:56:00.004-04:00

PMW: Jordanian Media Report 'Jews Descend from Pigs'

by Hana Levi Julian
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/131356
Published: 05/14/09, 12:22 PM

(IsraelNN.com) Jordanian media last week quoted Egyptian clerics who declared that Jews are the descendants of pigs -- the only point of debate was whether they are direct descendants or not.

According to a report broadcast May 10 on the Al-Moheed Arab News Network and translated by the media watchdog group, Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), "pigs in our time have their origins in Jews who angered Allah... and it is obligatory to kill and slaughter them."

The report quoted Sheikh Ahmed Ali Othman, supervisor of the Da'awa (Islamic Indoctrination) of the Egyptian Waqf (Authority of Islamic Holy Places), and head of its slaughtering division.

Othman based his ruling on a Koranic verse (Koran sura 5, verse 60) that refers to those that Allah (G-d) has cursed and "made into monkeys and pigs, and who have served abominations. Their place is worst of all, and their deviation is the greatest of all..." He added that this verse referred to the nation of the descendants of the prohet Moses.

An article published May 9 in the Jordanian newspaper Al-Hakika al-Dawliya also quoted the Egyptian cleric: "I personally tend towards the view that the pigs that exist now have their origins with the Jews, and therefore their consumption is forbidden..."

A second view, expressed by sheikh Ali Abu Al-Hassan, head of the Fatwa Committee (which issues rulings) at Al-Azhar [Sunni Islamic] University, does not draw a relationship between today's pigs and Jews.

Al-Hassan explained "when Allah punishes a group of people, He punishes only them. When Allah grew angry with the nation of Moses, He turned them into pigs and monkeys as an extraordinary punishment... but they died without leaving descendants."

Belgium breeding antisemitism

2009-05-11T05:31:00.005-04:00

Watchdog group says anti-Semitism skyrocketing in Belgium

By Cnaan Liphshiz, Haaretz Correspondent
10/05/2009
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1084452.html

Anti-Semitic attacks have skyrocketed in Belgium in 2009, according to a local government watchdog. The agency's director compared the hike to "the anti-Muslim hate campaign after 9/11."

The Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism last week said that the number of anti-Semitic incidents in the first four months of 2009 has equaled the number of such incidents recorded in the whole of 2008.

According to Jozef De Witte, director of the government agency, which is under the direct responsibility of Belgium's prime minister, the hike owes to the Middle East conflict between Israel and some of its enemies.

Between 2004 and 2008, the Centre recorded around 60 anti-Semitic incidents every year. The same number of incidents was recorded in the first four months of this year. Incidents include violent attacks but also hate-mail. About one third of the incidents are hate-mails. The remaining two thirds are hecklings or physical abuses.

A few cases are of severe violence. The perpetrators mostly belong to Muslim groups, but also to extreme right organizations and persons.

The impact of what de Witte defined as "the conflict between Israel and Palestine" is according to the director "comparable with the hate-campaign against Muslims in Belgium" which followed the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York. This statement irked some Belgian Jews.

"The two realities are incomparable," said David Lowy, founder of the JOBI group for Belgian youth in Israel. "There were some deplorable attacks against Muslims after 9/11 by extreme rightists, but mosques were not lit on fire as synagogues had been in January. Muslims were not threatened on the street."

Lowy noted that the attack in 9/11 was perpetrated in Islam's name, while Israel's invasion into Gaza was "in self-defense, unconnected to Belgian Jewery." He also remarked that no Belgian Jew or Belgian American attacked any Muslim after 9/11. "The same cannot be said about Belgian Muslims during Operation Cast Lead."

The Middle East conflict, de Witte said, is "a dormant issue which could still erupt and add new worries in the form a new wave of incidents under the mandate of the Centre." The Centre has commissioned a new report designed to delineate the manner in which the Middle East conflict is affecting racism in Belgium.

----

Belgian opera shows Jew raping woman in anti-Israel piece

By Cnaan Liphshiz
01/05/2009
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1082365.html

By portraying a religious Jew raping a woman in a show about Israel, the state-funded Flanders Opera is in danger of encouraging anti-Semitic stereotypes, leading members from Belgium's Jewish community told Haaretz.

The highly-controversial scene appeared in the premier of "Samson and Delilah" in Antwerp on Tuesday evening. The contested show was created by two Israelis, who turned the biblical tale of Samson into a reverse-role protest against Israel's occupation of Palestinians.

Belgium's Jewish community has condemned the opera directed by Omri Nitzan and Amir Nizar Zuabi for dressing Philistine conquerors in Western garb while Hebrew fighters like Samson wear Arab clothes.

The rape scene shows a Philistine religious priest dressed up as a religious Jew while raping Delilah, who was Samson's lover. The rapist was the only man in the show wearing a skull cap. The Flanders Opera could not be reached for a comment.

Samson lived in the 11th century BCE as a partisan under occupation of the Philistines - a powerful and technologically-advanced people of European roots. The Bible says he died at the hands of his occupiers, while killing many of his captors. This, according to the opera's creators, makes him "the world's first shaheed," or martyr.

"From conversation with the creators, I gather the rape scene was meant to protest religious coercion inside Israel," said Michael Freilich, editor-in-chief of the Dutch-language Jewish affairs newspaper Joods Actueel. "But most people in Belgium don't make such distinctions. To them a man wearing a skull cap in a show about Israel is a Jewish Israeli."

Another image from the show showed occupying soldiers clad in black combat suits and armed with M-16 assault rifles stroking the weapons while placing them horizontally against their crotches.

Israel's ambassador to Belgium, Tamar Samash, was invited to the event but eventually canceled. Sources involved with the embassy's work in Belgium said the ambassador felt it was "inappropriate" for her to attend on Tuedsay night, the eve of Israel's 61st anniversary.

"I have not seen the show so I would rather not comment on the specifics," Eli Ringer, vice-chairman of the forum of Jewish Organizations of Belgium, told Haaretz. "But I gather it portrayed a man wearing a skull cap in the ugliest way possible and of course this is not helpful to combat anti-Semitism."

Ringer also said that he is concerned about the use of holy scriptures to promote political causes. "History tells us this is not a good idea," he said. A number of members of Jewish organizations attended the premier to report on it. They said the production provoked members of the crowd to boo the cast at certain points. This was confirmed by Dutch radio. The Jewish onlookers said the jeers did not come from the delegation.

Meanwhile, most Belgian media offered negative criticism of the opera on artistic grounds rather than ideological ones. "If you go to the opera, close your eyes because the music is wonderful," one critic wrote.

Another connoisseur said the role reversal is too complicated to follow because the original text of the opera was not changed to fit it. "Imagine seeing a production of Little Red Riding Hood where a wolf who is dressed up like a little girl meets another little girl while he is on his way to visit her granny," the opera-lover said.

----

Flemish Jews irked by state-funded `anti-Israel` Samson opera

By Cnaan Liphshiz, Haarez Correspondent
25/04/2009
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1080929.html

Prominent figures from the Jewish community in Belgium and Israel have harshly criticized the Flemish Opera for staging what they regard as an anti-Israeli, political event disguised as a première. The contested show was created by two Israelis.

The production of Samson and Delilah is scheduled to premiere Tuesday, along with a political debate. The community has condemned the opera directed by Omri Nitzan and Amir Nizar Zuabi - for dressing the Philistine conquerors in Western clothing while Hebrew fighters like Samson wear Arab clothes.

Samson, who lived in the 11th century BCE, was a partisan living under occupation of the Philistines a powerful and technologically-advanced people of European roots. The bible says he died in Philistine hands while killing many of his captors.

Zuabi and Nitzan's reverse-role adaptation of his love story with a Philistine woman leads Samson to become "history's first shaheed" (or martyr, in the Islamic tradition), the say. "Samson is a shaheed, and Delilah is his lover from the enemy camp," the directors explained.

"This isn't the first time public Flemish culture institutions stage unabashedly anti-Israel events," David Lowy, founder of the JOBI group for Belgian youth in Israel, told Haaretz. "Israel is misunderstood in Belgium and distorting bible stories will only compound this. The analogy's ludicrous and state-funded bodies mustn't help it."

Guido Joris from the Dutch-language Jewish-affairs newspaper Joods Actueel condemned the event's political character, and a planned screening of a film calling Israel's 2002 military operation in the West Bank a "blood bath" at the event.

The paper also criticized the involvement of a state-funded institution in the show. "I imagine we are in store for Israeli flags burned, as we've seen in the past in Belgium," Joris said.

Nitzan insists that the opera's political messages are not an attempt to jump on Europe's pro-Palestinian bandwagon. A spokesperson from Flanders Opera said his institution isn't anti-Israeli and that the criticism is "premature," adding: "We may argue about the Mideast conflict, but there will be no flag burning."

----

Belgium to stop exporting 'arms that bolster the IDF' to Israel

By Cnaan Liphshiz
01/02/2009
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1060366.html

Belgium's government has agreed to ban the export to Israel of weapons that "strengthen it militarily," a Belgian minister said on Thursday. A Brussels-based research group accused Israel of enlisting child soldiers.

The Belgian daily De Morgen quotes Minister Patricia Ceysens from the Flemish regional government as saying: "There's a consensus [among ministers] not to approve exports that would strengthen Israel's military capacity."

Ceysens said this after a discussion on policy regarding weapons exports to Israel following the operation in Gaza. A final resolution has not been passed yet, but Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht already said recently that "given the current circumstances, weapons cannot be shipped from Belgium to Israel."

According to a recently-released report by the European Institute for Research and Information on Peace and Security on Belgian arms exports to the Jewish state, Israel is the fourth largest importer of Belgian arms in the Middle East. In 2007, Belgium sold Israel weapons (mostly light firearms) to the tune of $5,409,223, according to the report.

The report, which accuses Israel of human rights violations, also says that Belgium's major weapons clients in the Middle East are Saudi Arabia (69 percent), Jordan (17 percent) and the United Arab Emirates (4.2 percent). The 15-page report does not deal with human rights violation in those countries.

Quoting a 2003 amendment to Belgian law which forbids the sale of weapons to armies with child soldiers, the report says that Israel "accepts and arms underage volunteers." Further on, the report mentions "use of underage Palestinians as informants and sometimes human shields."

The Israeli Defense Forces' Gadna program runs a one-week military training session on a base as part of the curriculum at most Israeli high schools. The army accepts volunteers from the age of 17 into non-combat posts.

Meanwhile, 13 Belgian politicians, authors and scholars released a statement that calls for a more evenhanded approach to Israel.

----

Report: Belgian court petitioned to arrest Livni upon arrival in Brussels

By Barak Ravid and Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondents
21/01/2009
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1057485.html

European attorneys have reportedly petitioned a Belgian court to arrest Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni upon her arrival in Brussels later Wednesday, according to the Jawalan.com Web Site.

The complaints was apparently lodged on behalf of Belgian and French nationals with relatives who were either wounded or killed in Gaza, and calls for Livni to be arrested for war crimes.

The Foreign Ministry is looking into the report and the Israeli embassy in Brussels has not yet been involved in the matter, sources said.

Belgian law does not actually allow the arrest of a foreign official with high standing, but the matter could bring embarrassment to Israel and may represent the first in a string of lawsuits now being prepared by pro-Palestinian elements around the world.

Israeli human rights activists: Arrest Olmert, Livni, and Barak for war crimes

Meanwhile, anonymous self-described Israeli human rights activists have set up an Internet site detailing alleged war crimes committed by senior government officials and Israel Defense Forces officers.

No known human rights organization is behind the site, whose founders refuse to give their names.

The site, www.wanted.org.il, includes "arrest orders," complete with pictures and personal details, for Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert,Livni, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai, Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, National Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and his two predecessors, Dan Halutz and Moshe Ya'alon, former air force commander Eliezer Shkedy and others.

It also explains how to inform the International Criminal Court in The Hague of when the "suspects" are outside Israel, and hence vulnerable to arrest.

The "arrest order" for Barak, for instance, states: "On December 27, 2008, the suspect ordered an aerial assault on all of Gaza's population centers.

The assault included hundreds of sorties by fighter jets that dropped hundreds of tons of bombs on residential areas of Gaza, which led to the deaths of 1,200 people - men, women and children.

Some 5,300 people were wounded and hundreds of thousands became refugees. On December 10, 2008, a formal complaint was filed against Ehud Barak to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Holland ... on suspicion of war crimes and crimes against humanity because of the siege of Gaza."

----

Jewish groups blast Belgian TV for comic's Holocaust jokes

By The Associated Press
25/12/2008
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1050092.html

Jewish groups have condemned a Belgian public broadcaster for airing a show in which a standup comedian jokes about the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews.

The protest marked the third time in two months the VRT broadcaster was
accused of gross insensitivity toward Jews. On October 27, protests forced it to scrap a TV show about Adolf Hitler's supposed favorite dish - alpine trout in butter sauce - as part of a series about famous people's favorite foods.

In the 2008 review show Het Besluit - which aired December 21 and is available on the VRT web site - comedian Philippe Geubels accused Belgians Jews of overreacting to the food show.

"What are they going to do if there is a big gas leak in Antwerp?" asked Geubels referring to the Belgian port city, which has a large Jewish community. "Take the city to court for provocation? Preemptively file charges against anyone who dares joke about that?"

Geubels also said the Holocaust cannot happen again because Jews are much
smarter now.

"They have spread across the world. Try rounding them up! Most are in America so you cannot send them by train to Germany to die in gas chambers."

"What a comedian does is up to him, but the VRT decides to include it in the show. At that point, the question can be asked, is this the task of a public broadcaster?" asked Michael Freilich, the head of the Jewish group Joods Actueel.

The VRT also came under criticism for a recent ad about a travel show focusing on Berlin.

It showed a drawing of Hitler as a male stripper giving the Nazi salute in front of a swastika flag, the banner of Nazi Germany. That incident triggered a protest by the German embassy, which called it totally tasteless.

The CCOJB, a Jewish umbrella organization, said the VRT's multiplication of anti-Semitic provocations disguised as humor dishonored its role as a public broadcaster.

It said it planned legal steps against the VRT and asked the government of Dutch-speaking Belgium, which is responsible for the VRT, to act against those responsible for the broadcast.

Repeated phone calls and two messages left with the VRT were not immediately answered.

Austrian hotel bars Jews (in 2009)

2009-05-11T05:25:00.002-04:00

'No Jews' policy employed at Austria hotel

By DPA
10/05/2009
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1084458.html

A hotel in the Austrian region of Tyrol that said it does not accept Jewish guests has caused shock in the local media and tourism industry, the daily Tiroler Tageszeitung reported Sunday.

A Vienna family of seven had had tried to make a reservation at the Haus Sonnenhof apartment hotel in the village of Serfaus, but the owner replied by e-mail that although the room was free, she did not want to take in Jewish guests because of "bad experiences" in the past.

The region around Serfaus has become popular among orthodox Jewish tourists in recent years, and several hotels in Tyrol have begun offering kosher food.

At Hotel Alpenruh-Micheluzzi, owner Petra Micheluzzi told the German Press Agency DPA that the rejection by the Sonnenhof was "bad for the image" of Serfaus.

One such incident could destroy all the hard work by others in the travel industry, she said, a view echoed by local and regional tourism officials.

"That's terrible," said Esther Fritsch, the president of the regional Jewish community. So far there have been no such incidents, she told the newspaper.

Irmgard Monz, the owner of the Haus Sonnenhof apartment hotel, could not be reached for comment on Sunday. In an interview with Tiroler Tageszeitung, she offered no justification for her e-mail.

For his part, the rejected father of five has decided to spend the
summer elsewhere: "I don't want to spend my vacation in such a racist
nest, and I will inform all my friends about what is going on in
Tyrol," the unidentified man was quoted as saying.

Spanish antisemitism against Israeli ambassador

2009-05-06T02:14:00.002-04:00

Israeli ambassador to Spain called 'Jew dog' at Real Madrid game

By Barak Ravid
05/05/2009
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1083065.html

A torrent of anti-Semitic epithets met Israel's ambassador to Spain, Rafi Shotz, Saturday evening as he walked home from a Real Madrid-Barcelona soccer match in the Spanish capital. Shotz said the three perpetrators, patrons of a pub, shouted slurs like "Jewish dog" and "dirty Jew" until they were driven off by Spanish police escorting Shotz.

Shotz and his partner Michal chose to walk from Madrid's Santiago Bernabeu Stadium to their nearby home. Three patrons of a pub noticed the ambassador, whom they apparently recognized from having seen him on television.

In a wire report Shotz sent the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem under the heading "Anti-Semitism - a personal testimony," Shotz wrote the perpetrators stood mere meters from him, shouting slurs like "Jewish dog," "dirty Jew" and others "which cannot appear in print."

The ambassador and his partner ignored the slurs and continued walking; meanwhile dozens of bystanders watched the scene, but did nothing to stop the verbal assault.

Shotz told Haaretz yesterday, "It was an ugly incident, the kind one hears about or reads about in a newspaper, but to experience personally the force of hatred and anti-Semitism is difficult and emotionally charged."

Spain's ambassador to Israel, Alvaro Iranzo, told Haaretz that "Spanish security forces protected the ambassador and prevented any harm coming to him."

Spain has seen an upsurge in anti-Israel sentiment in recent years, fueled by critical media reports about Israel Defense Forces operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including Operation Cast Lead earlier this year.

British airline's antisemitism and pro-Arabism

2009-04-30T18:12:00.004-04:00

British Airline Removes Israel from the Map

Iyar 6, 5769, 30 April 09 04:27
by Avraham Zuroff(IsraelNN.com)
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/131122

"The British airline, BMI, has removed Israel from the electronic maps displayed to passengers in some of its planes, Army Radio reports. The report claimed that the reason was to avoid offending Muslim passengers. However, the maps showed passengers the direction of Mecca.

Israel does not appear in maps on BMI flights between London and Tel Aviv, and Khefa, the pre-independence Arabic name for Haifa, appears on the maps.

In addition, the electronic maps display the distance between the plane and Mecca. The airline claims that the map has not been changed due to a “logistical problem.” Instead, it has presently been removed from the two planes that transport passengers to Tel Aviv.

“For this reason, the inflight entertainment system in the two planes was made to adapt to the passengers flying to and from those destinations and therefore the map showed mainly places holy to Islam,” the airline company said in a statement.

BMI denied that it had a political agenda. “If BMI had any political agenda in order not to anger neighboring countries, it would not have invested so much in the Tel Aviv line,” the company stated.

“This is a fault. The electronic map will be removed from the airline’s two planes that operate the route to Tel Aviv,” BMI stated. “We make every effort to take passengers’ sensitivities into account through an apolitical policy.”

The airline has flights to Syria, Lebanon, and even Iran, whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has vowed “to wipe Israel off the map.” BMI has recently received an agreement with Israel’s Ministry of Tourism for expanding its flight operations to Israel.

Transport Minister director-general Gideon Sitterman told Army Radio, “Doing business with Israel has its advantages and disadvantages, but we will not agree to a situation where they hide the existence of Israel but want to do business with Israel.”

When in Saudi Arabia, Do What the Saudis Do…
BMI is apparently bending over backwards to accommodate the sensitivities of its Saudi passengers. The British weekly Sunday Times reported last week that a stewardess was fired because she refused to don an abaya head covering and to walk behind male flight attendants on a flight bound for Saudi Arabia, regardless of rank.

The BMI internal document issued to crewmembers bound for Saudi Arabia stated: “It is expected that female crew members will walk behind their male counterparts in public areas such as airports no matter what rank.”

The flight attendant, Lisa Ashton, refused to abide by BMI’s policy, and was fired when she refused to travel to Saudi Arabia if she would be required to don an abaya."

Anti-Semitism in modern Norway

2009-04-29T04:27:00.002-04:00

Anti-Semitism at Supermarket Checkout Counter in Norway

Iyar 4, 5769, 28 April 09 11:54
by Ernie Singer(IsraelNN.com)
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/131079

Anti-Semitism is taking subtle and not-so-subtle forms in Norway, according to a report published Sunday by blogger Bennett Epstein of the Cleveland News.

Managers of a number of supermarkets in the Scandinavian country are drawing attention to the Israeli origin of oranges and other products, reported Epstein, who said the move was designed to help anti-Israeli citizens avoid them. The managers deny that anti-Semitism is a motive.

Boikott Israel I, a group that has urged Norwegians to avoid Israeli oranges since the beginning of the 1990's, recently extended its boycott to all Israeli products. A number of labor unions are also refusing to handle products imported from the Jewish State.

In addition, Norway’s Youth Labor Movement organized a demonstration against Israeli participants in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Norway has served as a neo-Nazi niche and free zone for European anti-Semites since the 1930's, when many people supported the Nazis, even though many others opposed them.

The second largest party in the country’s parliament today is an extreme right group which opposes the Jewish ritual of circumcision, among other things. Only 30 of Norway's pre-Holocaust communities remain. Most of the country's 1,500 Jews live in the nation’s capital, Oslo."

Pope Benedict XVI Pardons Holocaust-denying Bishop

2009-01-27T02:42:00.014-05:00

British bishop – whose excommunication was lifted by the Pope - denies the Holocaust

European Jewish Press
http://www.ejpress.org/article/34054
Updated: 23/Jan/2009

STOCKHOLM/ROME (AFP)--A British bishop, whose excommunication has been canceled by Pope Benedict XVI, gave an interview to Swedish television in which he appeared to deny the Holocaust.

"I believe there were no gas chambers... I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers," said 68-year-old Richard Williamson during an interview with the SVT channel.

"There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!"

"There was certainly a great exploitation of these facts. Germany paid billions and billions of deutschmarks and now euros because Germans suffer from a culpability complex for having gassed six million Jews, but I don’t think that six millions died in gas chambers," he said in the interview aired Wednesday evening.

Lars-Goran Svensson, the programme's producer, said the interview had been pre-recorded in Germany last November and its airing at this time was "pure coincidence."

"Our reporter went to Germany and did this interview last November. The bishop agreed... we didn't know that the pope would make this decision (to lift his excommunication) yesterday. It's pure coincidence," Svensson said.

According to the Italian daily Il Giornale, Pope Benedict XVI has decided to cancel the excommunication of four bishops, including Williamson, ordained in 1998 by the controversial French bishop Marcel Lefebvre.

The pope has already signed the decree lifting the excommunication, which will be made public later in the week, said the paper's Vatican specialist Andrea Tornielli.

The Vatican has neither confirmed nor denied the report.

Since assuming office in April 2005, Benedict has made great efforts to heal the schism with the more traditionalist Catholic movement, granting a private audience to Bishop Fellay in mid-2005.

Lefebvre, who died in 1991, was excommunicated in 1988 by pope Jean Paul II for having ordained the bishops in defiance of the Vatican's authority.

Lefebvre led a schism from the Church over the more ecumenical approach reflected in the Vatican II reforms (1962-65) and in particular the abandonment of the traditional Latin mass.

He founded the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, which claims 150,000 followers across the world, mainly in France and Brazil.

----

British bishop faces German probe for Holocaust denial

European Jewish Press
http://www.ejpress.org/article/34062
Updated: 23/Jan/2009

BERLIN (AFP)---German prosecutors said Friday they had launched a probe against a controversial British bishop on suspicion of inciting racial hatred for comments he made about the Holocaust on Swedish television.

A spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in the southern city of Regensburg said it had opened an investigation against Richard Williamson, 68, for remarks he made in an interview broadcast this week.

"I believe there were no gas chambers... I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers," said Williamson during an interview with the SVT channel.

"There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!"

Six million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany during World War II including vast numbers by systematic extermination in gas chambers.

This week, Pope Benedict XVI reportedly decided to cancel the excommunication of four bishops who were consecrated in 1998 by the conservative French bishop Marcel Lefebvre, including Williamson.

The pope has already signed the decree lifting the excommunication, which will be made public later in the week, according to the Italian report Thursday which the Vatican neither confirmed nor denied.

Lefebvre, who died in 1991, was excommunicated in 1988 by pope Jean Paul II for having consecrated the bishops in defiance of the Vatican's authority.

Since assuming office in April 2005, Benedict has made great efforts to heal the schism with the more traditionalist Catholic movement.

Lars-Goran Svensson, the Swedish programme's producer, said the interview had been pre-recorded in Germany last November and its airing at this time was "pure coincidence."

----

Yad Vashem slams rehabilitation of Holocaust denying bishop by Pope Benedict XVI

European Jewish Press
http://www.ejpress.org/article/34104
Updated: 25/Jan/2009

JERUSALEM (EJP)---Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre on Sunday slammed a Holocaust-denying English bishop whose ex-communication has been cancelled by Pope Benedict XVI.

"The reinstatement is an internal Church matter.However, it is scandalous that someone of this stature in the Church denies the Holocaust.Denial of the Holocaust not only insults the survivors, memory of the victims, and the Righteous Among the Nations who risked their lives to rescue Jews, it is a brutal attack on Truth," Yad Vashem said in a statement, referring to Bishop Richard Williamson who has publicly denied the murder of six million Jews during World
War II.

"Even if the revocation of the excommunication is unrelated to Williamson’s comments regarding the Holocaust, what kind of message is this sending regarding the Church’s attitude toward the Holocaust? Although we understand that Williamson’s statements do not represent the Church’s stance, we continue to hope that the Church will vigorously condemn these unacceptable and odious comments.," it added.

The Simon Wiesenthal Centre, an international Jewish human rights body, said: "The Pope's decision to welcome back such a hater into the Church lends moral credence to deniers of history's worst crime.

"In addition to Bishop Williamson's Holocaust denial looms the unchanging virulent anti-Semitism of the Society of Saint Pius as a whole," it said.

The pope cancelled the ex-communication of Williamson and three other bishops in a bid to heal a 20-year schism with traditionalists led by rebel French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

The Roman Catholic Church published an edict lifting the 1998 sanction on Lefebvre's successor Bernard Fellay and three other bishops in his breakaway conservative movement, including Williamson.

He is on record as denying the existence of the gas chambers.

"I believe there were no gas chambers.... I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers," Williamson was quoted as saying in an interview with Swedish SVT television.

"There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!"

Italian Jewish groups criticised the decision as a "negative, worrying and incomprehensible signal" on Saturday.

Uneasy relations between the Vatican and Israel have been further strained by plans to declare Nazi-era Pope Pius XII a saint, despite widespread criticism of his inaction during the Holocaust.

----

Pope Lifts Excommunication Of Holocaust Denier

http://hamercaz.com/hamercaz/site/news_item.php?id=3603
Jan 22, 2009

Vatican -- According to local media sources, Pope Benedict XVI has signed a decree lifting the excommunication of four Catholic bishops of the ultra-conservative Society of St Pius X, including one who believes the Holocaust never happened and the gas chambers were a myth.

Richard Williamson, an English former Anglican and graduate of Winchester and Cambridge, gave an interview to Swedish TV this week in which he said: “There were no gas chambers.” He has also made comments endorsing the anti-Semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The Vatican is neither confirming nor denying reports that the Pope has cancelled the excommunication. A source close to the Vatical told the media: “It is extremely sensitive. There is something going on.”

If Benedict XVI goes ahead with lifting the excommunication in spite of Bishop Williamson’s comments, he may wreak havoc on more than 40 years of attempts to rebuild relations with the Jewish community after centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.

The damage will be doubled, coming as it will on top of the Pope’s revival of the Tridentine Mass with its Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews [see story HERE].

----

Jewish-Catholic Relations Strained After Pope Forgives Holocaust Denier Bishop

http://hamercaz.com/hamercaz/site/news_item.php?id=3630
Jan 25, 2009

Vatican City, Rome -- Pope Benedict XVI's rehabilitation of a traditionalist bishop who denies the full extent of the Holocaust could lead to a crisis in Jewish-Catholic relations [see story HERE].

“By welcoming an open Holocaust denier into the Catholic Church without any recantation on his part, the Vatican has made a mockery of John Paul II's moving and impressive repudiation and condemnation of anti-Semitism," R' David Rosen, the chairman of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, said in a statement.

Over the weekend, the pope rescinded the 1988 excommunication of British-born Richard Williamson and three other traditionalist bishops who were followers of Marcel Lefebvre, the late French archbishop who rejected Vatican reforms including those recognizing the validity of Judaism as a living religion.

Williamson has made several statements over the years questioning the reality of the Shoah. Last week he told Swedish television, "I believe there were no gas chambers," adding that only up to 300,000 Jews were killed in Nazi camps.

The pope's action came just days before the annual international Holocaust Memorial Day on Jan. 27 – the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Jewish leaders in Italy and elsewhere had warned that rehabilitating Williamson could prove a serious setback to Jewish-Catholic relations, already strained by controversy over the wartime role of Pope Pius XII and last year's reintroduction of an Easter prayer that some see as calling for conversion of the Jews.

Rome's Chief Rabbi Riccardo Di Segni said that rehabilitating Williamson would open a "deep wound."

Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, said in a statement released Sunday: "The reinstatement is an internal Church matter. However, it is scandalous that someone of this stature in the Church denies the Holocaust. Denial of the Holocaust not only insults the survivors, memory of the victims, and the Righteous Among the Nations who risked their lives to rescue Jews, it is a brutal attack on truth. Even if the revocation of the excommunication is unrelated to Williamson’s comments regarding the Holocaust, what kind of message is this sending regarding the Church’s attitude toward the Holocaust? Although we understand that Williamson’s statements do not represent the Church’s stance, we continue to hope that the Church will vigorously condemn these unacceptable and odious comments."

----

Vatican Condemns Anti-Semitic Remarks Of Rehabiliated Bishop

http://hamercaz.com/hamercaz/site/news_item.php?id=3662
Jan 26, 2009

Vatican City -- The Vatican said Monday that comments by a recently rehabilitated bishop that no Jews were gassed during the Holocaust were "unacceptable."

The Vatican stressed in its newspaper, the Osservatore Romano, that removing the excommunication by no means implies that the Catholic Church shares Williamson's anti-Semitic and Holocaust-denying views.

The statement was issued after Pope Benedict XVI last week lifted the excommunication of a traditionalist bishop, Richard Williamson, who has denied that 6 million Jews were murdered during World War II [see story HERE]. Williamson has also made comments endorsing the anti-Semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The rehabilitation prompted a storm of outrage from Jewish groups [see story HERE].

In a recent interview on Swedish television, Williamson said that historical evidence "is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler." He cited what he called the "most serious" revisionists who he said had concluded that "between 200,000-300,000 perished in Nazi concentration camps, but not one of them by gassing in a gas chamber."

On Monday, the head of the Italian bishops' conference, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, defended Benedict's decision to rehabilitate Williamson. But he decried Williamson's views as "unfounded and unjustified."

The German Bishops' Conference also denounced Williamson's views. "We object in the strongest terms to this explicit denial of the Holocaust," Bishop Heinrich Mussinghoff, the head of a commission at the German Bishops Conference responsible for relations with Jews, said in a statement.

----

Pope decision to rehabilitate Holocaust-denying bishop sparks Jewish-Catholic row

By Haaretz Service
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1058524.html
Last update - 25/01/2009

Pope Benedict is still due to visit to Israel in May, an Israeli official said on Sunday, despite angering Jews worldwide by re-admitting a bishop who has denied the full extent of the Nazi genocide of six million Jews.

The Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum and Memorial in Jerusalem decried as
"scandalous" Benedict's decision to lift excommunications on British-born bishop, Richard Williamson, who has said there were no gas chambers and only 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps in World War Two.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor, said, however, the pontiff's planned visit in May to Israel was not in doubt. "This has nothing to do with relations between states," he said.

The Israeli museum's fury marked another step in the row between the Catholic Church and world Jewish groups, who were outraged by announcements of the rehabilitation.

"The reinstatement is an internal Church matter...[however] denial of the Holocaust not only insults the survivors, memory of the victims, and the Righteous Among the Nations who risked their lives to rescue Jews, it is a brutal attack on truth," Yad Vashem said in a statement.

A senior official in the Jewish Agency on Sunday also slammed the decisions, calling it a "scandal."

"It is something we cannot understand," said Amos Hermon, head of the Task Force Against Anti-Semitism at the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency.

Bishop Williamson was one of four traditionalist bishops to have his excommunication lifted Saturday, just days after he was shown in a Swedish state TV interview saying that historical evidence is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The four bishops were excommunicated 20 years ago after they were consecrated by the late ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre without papal consent - a move the Vatican said at the time was an act of schism.

"Even if the revocation of the excommunication is unrelated to Williamson's comments regarding the Holocaust, what kind of message is this sending regarding the Church's attitude toward the Holocaust?" Yad Vashem wrote. "Although we understand that Williamson's statements do not represent the Church's stance, we continue to hope that the Church will vigorously condemn these unacceptable and odious comments."

Jewish groups denounced the Vatican for having embraced a Holocaust denier and warned that the pope's decision would have serious implications for Catholic-Jewish relations as well as the pontiff's planned visit to the Holy Land later this year.

"I do not see how business can proceed as usual," said Rabbi David Rosen,
Jerusalem-based head of interrelgious affairs at the American Jewish Committee and a key Vatican-Jewish negotiator late last week.

He called for the pope or a senior adviser to issue a clear condemnation of all Holocaust denials and deniers.

Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris said he understood the German-born pope's desire for Christian unity, but said Benedict could have excluded Williamson. He warned that his rehabilitation will have a political cost for the Vatican.

"I'm certain as a man who has known the Nazi regime in his own flesh, he
understands you have to be very careful and very selective," Samuels said.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Williamson's views were absolutely indefensible. But he denied that rehabilitating Williamson implied that the Vatican shared them.

"They are his personal ideas ... that we certainly don't share but they have nothing to do with the issue of the excommunication and the removal of the excommunication," Lombardi told AP Television News.

----

Jewish leaders urge Pope not to rehabilitate Holocaust-denying bishop

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1058212.html
Sat., January 24, 2009 Tevet 28, 5769

Jewish leaders on Friday urged Pope Benedict not to rehabilitate a traditionalist bishop who denies the Holocaust, saying it would foment anti-Semitism and open a deep wound in Christian-Jewish relations.

Italian media have said the pope could this weekend revoke the excommunications of four traditionalist bishops from the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) in his latest attempt to heal a 20-year-old schism in the Roman Catholic Church.

The rift became a crisis in 1998, when the late French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre illegally consecrated four bishops in defiance of the late Pope John Paul.

One of the four bishops, the British-born Bishop Richard Williamson, has made a number of statements denying the full extent of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, as accepted by most mainstream historians. In comments to Swedish television
broadcast on Wednesday, he said: "I believe that the historical evidence is hugely against 6 million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler...I believe there were no gas chambers".

Williamson said he agreed with "revisionists" who say that "between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but not one of them by gassing in a gas chamber".

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, said the possibility that the pope would accept Williamson back into the mainstream church "has been received with shock and consternation".

"For the Jewish people and all persons who feel the pain of the terrible years of the Shoah, this development marks a dangerous blow to interfaith dialogue and encourages hate-mongers everywhere," he said.

Rome's chief rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni, said he was "shocked by such a horror of denial, which is even more grave since it comes from a bishop".

Di Segni told the newspaper La Stampa that Williamson's re-admission into the Church would open "a deep wound in dialogue with Judaism".

The traditionalists bishops reject many reforms of the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council, notably its decision that Mass should be said in local languages rather than Latin, and its advocacy of dialogue with other religions.

A statement from the traditionalists said the implication they are racist was "entirely false and unjust".

But it said the group had the right to "pray for conversion (of Jews) to the true faith, to study their recent and tragic history, or to question some of their political objectives".

At the end of the Swedish interview, William says he realizes he could go to jail for Holocaust denial in Germany.

Pope Benedict has already made several gestures of reconciliation to the schismatic group, including allowing the unconditional return of the old-style Latin Mass.

That move angered Jews because the ceremony includes a Good Friday prayer for their conversion.

----

Bishop Who Denied Holocaust Apologizes to Pope Without Retracting

Vosizneias.com
News Source BBC
Published on: January 31st, 2009

Vatican City - A UK-born cleric who denied the existence of Nazi gas chambers has apologised to the Pope for causing any distress - but without retracting.

Richard Williamson also thanked Pope Benedict for allowing him to rejoin the Roman Catholic Church after being excommunicated on an unrelated issue.

He apologised for his "imprudent remarks" in a Swedish TV interview.

Pope Benedict has reiterated his "full and indisputable solidarity" with Jews on the subject of the Nazi death camps.

He has been under pressure from Nobel Peace Prize winner and death camp survivor Elie Wiesel among others to distance himself from Mr Williamson, who was promoted to bishop along with others by the breakaway Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre of France.

Mr Williamson, who lives in Argentina, blogged his apology in an open letter to Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, the mediator between the Vatican and the breakaway Catholic faction.

"Amidst this tremendous media storm stirred up by imprudent remarks of mine on Swedish television, I beg of you to accept... my sincere regrets for having caused to yourself and to the Holy Father so much unnecessary distress and problems," he said.

He made no mention of the Holocaust in the brief letter.

In an interview with Swedish TV, he had said: "I believe there were no gas chambers... I think that two to three hundred thousand Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers."

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi, contacted by AFP news agency, refused to comment on the content of the letter, saying only: "The Vatican has asked nothing of Monsignor Williamson, who is not an 'ordinary bishop' of the Catholic Church."

Mr Williamson and three other "bishops" whose excommunications were lifted are members of the Society of St Pius X, which was founded by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1970 as a protest against the Second Vatican Council's reforms on religious freedom and pluralism.

The late Archbishop Lefebvre made them bishops in unsanctioned consecrations in Switzerland in 1988, prompting the immediate excommunication of all five by the late Pope John Paul II.

When it recently lifted their excommunication, the Vatican said the four men had been asked to recognise the authority of the Pope and the Second Vatican Council.

----

German-born pope under fire in his homeland over tolerance of Holocaust denial

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1061193.html
Last update - 03/02/2009

Nearly four years after a rare outburst of national pride over the election of a German pope, Germans are falling out of love with Pope Benedict because of his rehabilitation of a bishop who denies the Holocaust.

Prominent Catholics, politicians and newspaper commentators in Joseph Ratzinger's homeland are pulling no punches in their criticism of his lifting of the excommunications of four bishops, including one who denies the extent of the Holocaust.

In a rare move, even Chancellor Angela Merkel criticized him, saying that the Vatican must make clear that it does not tolerate any denial of the Holocaust.

"I do not believe that sufficient clarification has been made," Merkel said.

"Worldwide criticism of the Pope," read the front page of top-selling German daily Bild which devoted most of its second page to the furore. It was a stark contrast to the jubilant "We are the pope!" headline in April 2005 to celebrate his election.

"The pope has made a serious mistake. That he is a German pope makes the matter especially bad," read its editorial.

"Pope Benedict XVI is inflicting great damage on Germany... The pope must correct his mistake, reverse his decision and excuse himself," it said, in comments echoed by other papers.

Former foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher wrote in the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung: "Poles can be proud of Pope John Paul II. At the last papal election, we said "We are the pope!" But please -- not like this."

The Vatican on Tuesday moved quickly to counter any suggestion that the pope has been unclear in his stance on the Holocaust. "The pope's thinking on the subject of the Holocaust has been expressed very clearly," said Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi.

He cited Benedict's visit to a synagogue during his first visit to Germany as pope in 2005, a visit to Auschwitz in 2006 and his remarks during last week's general audience.

Lombardi quoted from what he called the pope's unequivocal words at that public audience. "I hope that the memory of the Shoah leads humanity to reflect on the unpredictable power of evil when it conquers the heart of men," he quoted the pope as saying. "May the Shoah be a warning for all against oblivion, against denial or reductionism."

Lombardi said that during the audience the pope himself clearly explained the purpose of lifting the excommunication, which has nothing to do with any legitimization of positions denying the Holocaust, which were clearly condemned by Benedict.

More than 60 years after the end of World War Two, Germans are still struggling to come to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust, in which Nazis deliberately killed 6 million European Jews, and relations with the Jewish community are highly charged.

Last week, Germany's Central Council of Jews said it was breaking off ties with the Catholic Church over the pope's move.

The rehabilitated bishop at the centre of the storm is Richard Williamson, who belongs to the ultra-traditional Society of Saint Pius X and denies the extent of the Holocaust.

Last month, the British-born bishop told a Swedish broadcaster he believed there were no gas chambers and no more than 300,000 Jews perished in concentration camps.

Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany and state prosecutors in the southern city of Regensburg are investigating Williamson for incitement. German neo-Nazi websites and blogs have published contributions supporting Williamson's stand.

In his commentary, Genscher argued that Ratzinger, forced to join the Hitler Youth as a boy though his parents opposed the Nazis, was making a habit of offending non-Catholics.

He has shown little respect to Protestants and angered Muslims by hinting Islam was violent and irrational in a 2006 speech in Regensburg, Genscher said.

"This is a deep moral and political question. It is about respect for the victims of crimes against humanity," he wrote.

Other politicians joined in and in an unusual intervention Chancellor Merkel, daughter of a Protestant pastor, called on him to make clear he rejected any Holocaust denial.

"It is a fundamental question if, through a decision by the Vatican, the impression arises that the Holocaust can be denied," she said, adding she wanted the pope to issue a clarification.

The pope has also faced harsh criticism from German Catholics. Hamburg Archbishop Werner Thissen was quoted as saying the decision risked undermining trust in the church.

Cardinal Karl Lehmann, former chair of Germany's Catholic bishops' conference and head of Germany's 26 million Catholics, has described the affair as a catastrophe. Others say it has exposed flaws in the pope's detached governing style.

"It's an unforgivable mistake, and also a political error that Swiss, German and French bishops' conferences, where most people of the brotherhood live, were not informed beforehand," widely respected theologian Hans Maier told Vatican Radio.

----

Cardinal slams Pope for restoring bishop who denied Holocaust

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1061178.html
Tue., February 03, 2009 Shvat 9, 5769

The cardinal in charge of relations with Jews has acknowledged that the Vatican handled the rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop very badly and complained that Pope Benedict did not consult him.

"There wasn't enough talking with each other in the Vatican and there are no longer checks to see where problems could arise," said Cardinal Walter Kasper in a blunt interview with Vatican Radio's German program, broadcast on Monday night.

Benedict on Jan. 24 lifted the excommunications of four traditionalist bishops, including Richard Williamson, a Briton who denies the full extent of the Holocaust, to try to heal a 20-year-old schism in the Church.

Among those who condemned Williamson and the pope's decision were Holocaust survivors, progressive Catholics, members of the U.S. Congress, Israel's Chief Rabbinate, German Jewish leaders and Jewish writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

Vatican sources and officials had said privately the decision was taken without wide consultation. Kasper, who was left in the dark, appeared to be venting his frustration.

"Of course, explaining something after the fact is always much more difficult than if one did it right away. I would have also liked to see more communication in advance," said the cardinal, who like Pope Benedict is German.

"I'm watching this debate with great concern. Nobody can be pleased that misunderstandings have turned up. Mistakes in the management of the curia (Vatican administration) have certainly also been made. I want to say that very clearly," he said.

Leading Catholic commentators have said the Williamson affair shows fundamental flaws in Benedict's governing style.

"This and other controversies point to a fatal systemic flaw in the Benedict papacy that is destroying his effectiveness as pope: He does not consult experts who might challenge his views and inclinations," said Father Tom Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

"He is surrounded by people who are not as smart as he is and who would never think of questioning him."

Father Eberhard von Gemmingen, head of Vatican Radio German service, said: "There are obviously shortcomings in the Vatican's organization and communications ... Such a misunderstanding and debacle must never happen again."

Williamson told Swedish television in an interview broadcast on Jan. 21: "I believe there were no gas chambers". He said no more than 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, rather than the 6 million accepted by mainstream historians.

He later posted on his blog a letter apologizing to the pope for the "unnecessary distress" he caused him but he did not take back the comments. Jews said the apology was not enough.

The controversy has led many to take a closer look at the traditionalist group, the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), its view of Jews and its future place in the Church.

Traditionalists reject most of the teachings of the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council. One of its key documents, "Nostra Aetate" (In Our Times) repudiated the concept of collective Jewish guilt for Christ's death and urged dialogue with all major religions.

----

Vatican: Holocaust denier must recant

AP
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3666849,00.html
Published: 02.04.09

Day after German chancellor calls for clear rejection of Holocaust denials, Vatican demands bishop who denied Shoah recant before being fully admited to Roman Catholic Church.

Pope Benedict XVI reportedly unaware of bishop's views when lifting excommunication

The Vatican demanded Wednesday that a bishop who denied the Holocaust recant his positions before being fully admitted into the Roman Catholic Church.

The Vatican also said in a statement that Pope Benedict XVI didn't know about Bishop Richard Williamson's views when he agreed to lift his excommunication and that of three other ultraconservative bishops January 21.

The statement was issued by the Vatican's Secretariat of State a day after German Chacellor Angela Merkel urged the pope to make a clearer rejection of Holocaust denials, saying there hadn't been adequate clarification from the Vatican.

Williamson was shown on Swedish state television days before his rehabilitation was made public saying historical evidence "is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed" during World War II.

Williamson subsequently apologized to the pope for having stirred controversy, but he did not repudiate his comments, in which he also said only 200,000 to 300,000 Jews were killed during World War II and none were gassed.

The Holy See said when it announced the rehabilitation of the bishops January 24 that removing the excommunication did not mean the Vatican shared Williamson's views. But Jewish groups voiced outrage and demanded that Williamson recant his views.

In the statement Wednesday, the Vatican said that while Williamson's excommunication had been lifted, he still had no canonical function in the church because he was consecrated illegitimately by Lefebvre.

"Bishop Williamson, in order to be admitted to episcopal functions within the church, will have to take his distance, in an absolutely unequivocal and public fashion, from his position on the Shoah, which the Holy Father was not aware of when the excommunication was lifted," the statement said.

In addition, the Vatican said that the society as a whole must fully recognize the teachings of Vatican II and the teachings of all the popes who came during and after it in order to have a legitimate canonical function in the church.

----

Top cardinal: Vatican botched Shoah affair

Reuters
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3666160,00.html
First Published: 02.03.09

Cardinal in charge of relations with Jews says in radio interview that Catholic Church handled rehabilitation of Holocaust denying Bishop Richard Williamson badly, adds he was not consulted by Pope Benedict

The cardinal in charge of relations with Jews has acknowledged that the Vatican handled the rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop very badly and complained that Pope Benedict did not consult him.

"There wasn't enough talking with each other in the Vatican and there are no longer checks to see where problems could arise," said Cardinal Walter Kasper in a blunt interview with Vatican Radio's German program, broadcast on Monday night.

Benedict on January 24 lifted the excommunications of four traditionalist bishops, including Richard Williamson, a Briton who denies the full extent of the Holocaust, to try to heal a 20-year-old schism in the Church.

Among those who condemned Williamson and the pope's decision were Holocaust survivors, progressive Catholics, members of the US Congress, Israel's Chief Rabbinate, German Jewish leaders and Jewish writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

Vatican sources and officials had said privately the decision was taken without wide consultation. Kasper, who was left in the dark, appeared to be venting his frustration.

"Of course, explaining something after the fact is always much more difficult than if one did it right away. I would have also liked to see more communication in advance," said the cardinal, who like Pope Benedict is German.

"I'm watching this debate with great concern. Nobody can be pleased that misunderstandings have turned up. Mistakes in the management of the curia (Vatican administration) have certainly also been made. I want to say that very clearly," he said.

'Fatal systematic flaw'

"This and other controversies point to a fatal systemic flaw in the Benedict papacy that is destroying his effectiveness as pope: He does not consult experts who might challenge his views and inclinations," said Father Tom Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

"He is surrounded by people who are not as smart as he is and who would never think of questioning him."

Father Eberhard von Gemmingen, head of Vatican Radio German service, said: "There are obviously shortcomings in the Vatican's organisation and communications ... Such a misunderstanding and debacle must never happen again."

Williamson told Swedish television in an interview broadcast on January 21: "I believe there were no gas chambers". He said no more than 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, rather than the 6 million accepted by mainstream historians.

He later posted on his blog a letter apologising to the pope for the "unnecessary distress" he caused him but he did not take back the comments. Jews said the apology was not enough.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Pope Benedict XVI for a "very clear" rejection of Holocaust denial after he rehabilitated a bishop who questioned its existence.

Merkel said Tuesday that she does not believe there has been sufficient clarification after the rehabilitation of Richard Williamson, who questioned whether 6 million Jews were gassed. The German-born pope has expressed solidarity with Jews and warned against any denial of the horror of the Holocaust.

----

Rabbinate cuts ties with Vatican

Reuters
http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3663261,00.html
Published: 01.28.09

Chief Rabbinate of Israel cuts ties with Vatican over pardon of Holocaust denier until apology is made, Vatican's position clarified. Survivor Eli Wiesel also comes out against pontiff's pardon of known Holocaust denying bishop, says slight may even have been 'intentional.' Pope reaffirms 'solidarity' with Jewish people
Reuters

The chief Rabbinate of Israel sent a letter to the Vatican saying that dialogue with Catholics could not continue as before "without a public apology from Bishop Williamson and recanting his deplorable statements".

The Rabbinate said it would not attend a meeting scheduled for March "until this matter is clarified".

Chief Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said he hoped the pope's words at the audience would be "sufficient to respond to the doubts expressed about the position of the pope and the Catholic Church" on the Holocaust.

Lombardi said he hoped the Israeli Rabbinate would now rethink its position and continue "fruitful and serene dialogue".

British-born Richard Williamson, one of four traditionalist bishops whose excommunications were lifted on Saturday, has made several statements denying the full extent of the Holocaust of European Jews, as accepted by mainstream historians.

Williamson told Swedish television: "I believe there were no gas chambers" and only up to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, instead of 6 million. His comments caused an uproar among Jewish leaders and progressive Catholics, many of whom said it had cast a dark shadow over 50 years of Christian-Jewish dialogue.

Pope Benedict has given credence to "the most vulgar aspect of anti-Semitism" by rehabilitating a Holocaust-denying bishop, said Elie Wiesel, the death camp survivor, author and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

In an exclusive interview with Reuters, Wiesel also said there was no way the Vatican could have not known about the bishop's past and it may have been done "intentionally".

"What does the pope think we feel when he did that? That a man who is a bishop and Holocaust denier - and today of course the most vulgar aspect of anti-Semitism is Holocaust denial - and for the pope to go that far and do what he did, knowing what he knows, is disturbing," Wiesel said by phone from New York.

"The result of this move is very simple: to give credence to a man who is a Holocaust denier, which means that the sensitivity to us as Jews is not what it should be," he said late on Tuesday.

"It's a pity because Jewish-Catholic relations, thanks to John XXIII and John Paul II, had never been as good, never in history," Wiesel said, referring to the popes who revolutionized relations with Jews after 2,000 years of persecution and mistrust.

Vatican 'had to know'

Asked if he believed it was possible that the Vatican did not know that Williamson was a Holocaust denier, Wiesel, who won the Nobel in 1986 and survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, said, "Oh no! The Church knows what it does, especially on that level for the pope to readmit this man, they know what they are doing. They know what they are doing and they did it intentionally. What the intention was, I don't know."

Since the fury over the pope's decision to lift the excommunication, the Vatican has condemned Williamson's comments as "grave, upsetting (and) unacceptable", restating the Church's -- and Benedict's -- teachings against anti-Semitism.

Wiesel said he could not offer the Vatican any advice on how to put things right with Jews but something had to be done.

On Tuesday, Williamson's superior in the traditionalist movement publicly apologised to the pope and said William had been disciplined and ordered to remain silent on political or historical issues.

Pope Benedict on Wednesday reaffirmed his "full and unquestionable solidarity with Jews" in an attempt to relieve tensions with Jews after a Catholic bishop denied the Holocaust.

Speaking at his Wednesday audience, the pope said the attempt to exterminate the Jews in the Holocaust should remain a warning for all people.

----

German Leader Talks With Pope About Holocaust

By RACHEL DONADIO
The New York Times
Published: February 8, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/09/world/europe/09pope.html?ref=world

ROME — Pope Benedict XVI and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany have had a “cordial and constructive” phone conversation, just days after Mrs. Merkel openly criticized the pope for rehabilitating a bishop who has denied that the Holocaust happened, the German government and the Vatican said Sunday.

Two weeks ago, Benedict provoked wide outrage by revoking the excommunications of four schismatic bishops from a traditionalist society, including one, Richard Williamson, who has said he does not believe the Nazis had gas chambers.

A joint statement issued Sunday by the Vatican and the chancellor’s office said that both the pope and Mrs. Merkel referred to Benedict’s Jan. 28 remarks condemning Holocaust denial and expressing solidarity with Jews.

A statement released Wednesday by the Vatican Secretariat of State called on Bishop Williamson to recant his comments. In a rare case of the Vatican’s diplomatic arm furthering remarks by the pope, the Secretariat of State also made clear that the traditionalist bishops would not be welcomed back into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church unless they accepted the liberalizing teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

Last week’s statement by the Secretariat of State seemed to repair relations with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, which said it planned to continue its dialogue with the Vatican, according to the Chief Rabbinate’s director general, Oded Wiener. The body had asked to postpone a March meeting with the Vatican in protest.

Vatican officials are expected to meet Thursday with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, an umbrella organization.

----

Holocaust-denier removed from Argentine seminary

Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE5180FH20090209
Sun Feb 8, 2009

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - An ultra-traditionalist Roman Catholic bishop who has drawn sharp criticism from the Vatican and Jewish groups for denying the extent of the Holocaust was removed as the head of an Argentine seminary, a Catholic Church official said on Sunday.

Pope Benedict angered Jewish leaders and progressive Catholics last month when he lifted excommunications on the bishop, Richard Williamson, and three other traditionalists to try to heal a 20-year-old schism within the Church.

The Vatican has since ordered the bishop to publicly recant his views questioning whether the Nazis used gas chambers and the number of Jews who died.

But Williamson, who is British-born, recently told Germany's Spiegel magazine he must first review historical evidence before considering an apology.

In a statement, Father Christian Bouchacourt, the head of the Latin American chapter of the Catholic Society St. Pius X, said Williamson had been relieved as the head of the La Reja seminary on the outskirts of the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires.

"Monsignor Williamson's statements do not in any way reflect the position of our congregation," it said.

The decision came hours after Pope Benedict and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who publicly criticized the pontiff for his decision to rehabilitate the bishop, spoke by telephone.

The two had a "cordial and constructive" conversation on the issue, the Vatican said.

The Vatican has been at pains since the excommunications of the four bishops were lifted on January 24 to contain damage provoked by Williamson's comments, which he made during an interview with Swedish television last month.

The Vatican has said Pope Benedict, who expressed his full solidarity with Jews, was not aware of Williamson's denial of the Holocaust when he rehabilitated the bishops.

(Writing by Kevin Gray, additional reporting by Silvia Aloisivy, editing by Vicki Allen)

Antisemitism in Belgium

2009-01-07T08:01:00.004-05:00

Death Threats In Antwerp Cause Jewish And Muslim Leaders To Call For Peace

Jan 06, 2009
http://hamercaz.com/hamercaz/site/news_item.php?id=3257

"Antwerp, Belgium -- The Jewish community in Antwerp has received about a dozen death threats over recent days. They appeared on the website of the Jewish monthly magazine Joods Actueel.

Joods Actueel also received death threats by an anonymous man who claims to be willing to sacrifice himself to avenge the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza. He threatened a suicide attack: "You are not safe. I know where to find you. Child by child," reads the menacing message with a slew of anti-Semitic slurs.

The editor-in-chief of Joods Actueel, Michael Frellich, was not planning to make the threats public at first. He changed his mind though after the arson attempt on the home of a Jewish family in Antwerp yesterday.

Unknown persons shoved rags with lighter fluid through the mailbox of a Jewish family home and tried to light it. Luckily the fire did not catch on. The incident has been confirmed by the Antwerp public prosecutor's office.

The perpetrators have not yet been identified, but the police are investigating clues. The Antwerp police are stepping up patrols in the Jewish neighborhoods in Antwerp.

Freilich is attempting to join hands with the Muslim community in Antwerp to call for peace. He and Hicham El Mzairh, a Muslim member of the Flemish liberal party differ in their opinions on the conflict in the Middle East but they stress that protest here is not a solution. They held a joint press conference, both calling on their communities to restore peace and calm in Antwerp.

"What we both share is our concern as inhabitants of Antwerp. We think it's not good to import the conflict here. Unrest here will not help the suffering of the people in a dramatic situation in Gaza," says Hicham El Mzairh.

"Our first aim is show people that the Muslim community and the Jewish community co-exist peacefully here. We have a lot in common - we are all Flemish, we are all Antwerp inhabitants, on a lot of other issues too we have common ground - and it's important to stress this," says Michael Freilich."

----

Vandals Set Belgian Synagogue On Fire

Jan 06, 2009
http://hamercaz.com/hamercaz/site/news_item.php?id=3270

"Brussels, Belgium -- In the latest of a string of anti-Semitic incidents aimed at Belgian Jews, unknown people attempted to set fire to the Beth Hillel Reform synagogue in southern Brussels using paper and petrol as accelerants.

“The fire set to the door of the synagogue was rapidly extinguished after police intervened,” a police spokeswoman said Tuesday.

A Belgian government spokesman said security forces were taking additional precautions as street protests against Israel's operation in Gaza grow in size and in anger.

"We note that the situation is becoming more explosive," he said. "Police patrols in Antwerp, Brussels and Uccle, where the Israeli embassy is located, have been reinforced, as well as around buildings housing Jewish institutions."

In a statement, CCOJB, the umbrella representative body of Jewish organizations in Belgium, expressed its deep concern about the surge of anti-Semitic acts reported over the last days. It called for a meeting with the Belgian authorities to discuss the government’s response to the situation."

----

Unknown assailants set fire to the door of Brussels synagogue

by: Maud Swinnen
European Jewish Press
Updated: 06/Jan/2009
http://www.ejpress.org/article/33379

"BRUSSELS (EJP)---Unknown people attempted to set fire to the Beth Hillel Liberal synagogue in southern Brussels using paper and petrol as accelerants, a police spokeswoman said Tuesday.

“The fire set to the door of the synagogue was rapidly extinguished after police intervened,” Fany Wellens said.

A Belgian government spokesman said security forces were taking precautions as street protests against Israel's operation in Gaza grow in size and in anger.

"We note that the situation is becoming more explosive," he said.

Scuffles broke out last week following a pro-Palestinian march in the northern city of Antwerp, which has large Jewish and Muslim communities.

Police forces have been put on high alert in the country.

"Police patrols in Antwerp, Brussels and Uccle, where the Israeli embassy is located, have been reinforced, as well as around buildings housing Jewish institutions,” the government said.

In a statement, CCOJB, the umbrella representative body of Jewish organizations in Belgium, expressed its deep concern about the surge of anti-Semitic acts reported over the last days. It called for a meeting with the Belgian authorities to discuss the government’s response to the situation.

The group said the “partial analysis by political, media and association leaders of the Mideast events developments “contributed to import the conflict in our country".”

----

French and Belgian Jews concerned about growing number of anti-Semitic acts in wake of Gaza events

by: Maud Swinnen
European Jewish Press
Updated: 06/Jan/2009
http://www.ejpress.org/article/33350

"PARIS/ANTWERP (EJP)---Concern is growing in Jewish communities in France and Belgium following a spate of anti-Semitic incidents in the wake of the conflict in the Gaza Strip.

The National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism (BNVCA) reported that in Paris and several other French cities, Jews have been targeted since the beginning of Israel’s military operation.

Attackers launched two cars packed with petrol bombs at a synagogue in south-western city of Toulouse, Monday night, causing damage but no casualties. One car was set on fire and pushed by the other until it hit the door of the synagogue, at a time when about a dozen people were attending a class with a rabbi. The building caught fire but all those inside escaped unharmed.

Police found unexploded petrol bombs inside the second car, which did not catch fire. They said they were investigating the attack and had not made any arrests.
"Nobody was hurt in the blaze which has not been claimed," said Anne-Gaelle
Baudouin-Clerc, spokeswoman for the district prefecture.

“We consider that incitement to hatred of Israel from those who take part in anti-Israeli demonstrations as the cause of the anti-Jewish crimes,” Samy Ghozlan, head of the National Bureau for Vigilance against Anti-Semitism said.

Pro-Palestinian rallies have been held in several French cities since Israel began its operation.

“The conflict between Israel and Hamas is exploited by some extremists who support the Islamist-terrorist Hamas under the pretext of supporting the Palestinian people. They express hatred against Israel which leads to anti-Jewish acts like in 2000 after the beginning of the second Intifada,” he added.

The BNVCA also reported that a rabbi’s car was vandalized and anti-Jewish graffiti painted on the wall of a shopping center.

French Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who called the attack against the Toulouse synagogue "stupid and revolting," met Monday with leaders of France's Jewish and Muslim communities and security chiefs to deliver a message that the Gaza Strip conflict should not lead to violent acts in France.

France has Europe’s largest Jewish and Muslim communities.

Leila Shahid, the Palestinian representative to the European Union, had no doubt that Monday's attack in Toulouse was linked to rising anger among France's five million Muslims at news coming from the conflict. "Look at the awful incident yesterday in Toulouse with this car rammed into a place of worship, which is unacceptable, but a result of images from Gaza," she told Radio Monte Carlo radio.

Richard Prasquier, head of CRIF, the umbrella representative body of Jewish organizations in France, told Le Figaro newspaper that the aggressive behaviour by some protesters at pro-Palestinian rallies had worried him.

'We must really not import the conflict here. It must not, it cannot happen,' Richard Prasquier, who attended the meeting with the minister, said.

In Belgium, too, the Gaza events and protest demonstrations against Israel’s operation prompted a wave of anti-Semitic acts, rising fear in the Jewish community.

Last week, unknown attackers attempted to torch the house of a Jewish Orthodox family in Borgerhout, a suburb of the city of Antwerp where around 18,000 Jews live. An eyewitness who resides nearby alerted the police to the place and they managed to extinguish the flames before the house caught fire.

In Britain, a spokesman for a group that monitors anti-Semitic attacks said violence against Jews and their property was running at four times the normal level since the Gaza campaign began. "Over the last week, we've now seen over 20, perhaps 25, anti-Semitic incidents that appear to be related to the violence in Gaza and southern Israel," said Mark Gardner, of the Community Security Trust (CST).

On Saturday, during a large demonstration in the centre of the city by Muslims and left-wing activists against Israel and in support of Hamas, protesters set Israeli flags aflame, vandalized a Chabad Chanukah menorah and sprayed swastikas and hate graffiti on Jewish-owned shops.

According to Jewish monthly “Joods Actueel”, several members of the Jewish community received death threats from an anonymous man who claimed to be willing to sacrifice himself to avenge the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza. They appeared on the website of the magazine.

The man threatened a suicide attack: "You are not safe. I know where to find you. Child by child," reads the message with a slew of anti-Semitic slurs .

Michael Freilich, the weekly’s chief editor, and Hicham El Mzairh, a local politician of Moroccan origin, made a joint appeal for calm and peace in Antwerp.

"Our first aim is to show people that the Muslim community and the Jewish community co-exist peacefully here and that it is important to maintain good relations,” they said during a press conference.

The Belgian Jewish community is planning a large demonstration in support of Israel and “for a real peace in the Middle East” Wednesday in front of the embassy of Iran in Brussels.

Iran is considered as the main sponsor of Hamas, the Islamist movement which controls the Gaza Strip."

----

Belgian Public Broadcaster Under Fire For Offensive Holocaust Jokes

Dec 25, 2008
http://hamercaz.com/hamercaz/site/news_item.php?id=2996

"Belgium -- Jewish groups have condemned a Belgian public broadcaster for airing a show in which a comedian jokes about the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews.

On Oct. 27, the VRT broadcaster was forced to cancel a TV cooking show about Adolf Hitler's supposed favorite dish — alpine trout in butter sauce — as part of a series about famous people's favorite foods [see story HERE].

In the 2008 review show, which aired Dec. 21 and is available on the VRT web site, comedian Philippe Geubels accused Belgians Jews of overreacting to the food show.

"What are they going to do if there is a big gas leak in Antwerp?" asked Geubels, referring to the Belgian city which has a large Jewish community. "Take the city to court for provocation? Preemptively file charges against anyone who dares joke about that?"

Geubels also said the Holocaust cannot happen again because "Jews are much smarter now."

"They have spread across the world. Try rounding them up! Most are in America so you cannot send them by train to Germany" to die in gas chambers.

The CCOJB, a Jewish umbrella organization, said it planned legal steps against the VRT for its "multiplication of anti-Semitic provocations disguised as humor." It also asked the government of Belgium, which is responsible for the VRT, to act against those responsible for the broadcast.

"What a comedian does is up to him, but the VRT decides to include it in the show. At that point, the question can be asked, is this the task of a public broadcaster?" asked Michael Freilich, the head of the Jewish group Joods Actueel.

The VRT also came under criticism recently for an ad about a travel show focusing on Berlin. The ad featured the show’s host wearing a swastika armband and a Hitler mustache, giving the Nazi salute in front of a swastika flag."

----

Hezbollah To Speak At Belgian Parliament

Dec 16, 2008
http://hamercaz.com/hamercaz/site/news_item.php?id=2775

"Brussels, Belgium -- Representatives of Hezbollah are scheduled to speak in the conference hall of the Belgian Parliament.

The Hezbollah representatives and the manager of the terrorist organization's Al Manar TV will address a symposium on Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

The CCOJB, which represents Jewish secular organizations in Brussels, and the Forum of Jewish organizations in Antwerp are organizing a protest, sources say.

The conference has nothing to do with the Belgian government, but is sponsored by the International Union of Parliamentarians for Palestine. It reportedly was organized by Fouad Lahssaini, a Belgian parliamentarian from the Ecolo Green Party who requested the use of the room last month and received approval on Dec. 9.

The articles of association of the International Union of Parliamentarians for Palestine refer to Israel as "the Zionist entity" and calls for its "expulsion ... from international institutions."

The Belgian Parliament is not endorsing the event, sources report.

The American Jewish Committee condemned the parliament's willingness to turn a blind eye to the speech in their seat of government.

"Hezbollah has the blood of thousands of American, French, Israeli, Lebanese and other citizens on its hands. It is simply disgraceful that Hezbollah officials were permitted to address a meeting in the parliament building of a leading European democracy," said AJC Executive Director David A. Harris."

----

Belgian Ad Featuring Hitler Outrages Jewish Groups

Nov 24, 2008
http://hamercaz.com/hamercaz/site/news_item.php?id=2304

"Belgium -- An advertisement for a Belgian travel show features an image of Hitler.

The show with the offensive ad is part of a public broadcast channel that recently canceled a cooking show on Adolf Hitler’s favorite meal. The planned show outraged Jewish groups across the country [full story HERE].

The ad, featuring a caricature of the travel show’s host wearing a swastika armband and a Hitler mustache, was published in a national magazine.

The channel belongs to the Flemish broadcaster VRT.

"They obviously weren’t happy with our response [to the cooking show], so [they] have added Hitler for no obvious reason other than getting attention and angering the Jewish community and the 15,000 Belgian non-Jews who were deported during World War II," Michael Freilich, the editor of the Antwerp Jewish weekly newspaper Joods Actueel, said. "The Jewish community is furious. Some are even considering whether they want to live here"."

----

Belgian Jews Outraged At TV Show Featuring "Hitler's Favorite Meal"

Oct 27, 2008
http://www.hamercaz.com/hamercaz/site/news_item.php?id=1767

"Berchtesgaden, Bavaria -- A Belgian television show will prepare Adolf Hitler's favorite meal on the air. Television chef Jerien Meus of the VRT station reportedly plans to prepare the meal, which includes trout in butter sauce, at Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, the former site of Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" alpine headquarters and now a tourist attraction and museum.

Meus, 30, reportedly catches the fish himself and prepares it on "Favorite Dish," which is scheduled to air Tuesday. Meus on past programs has explored the culinary preferences of other celebrities.

The act has angered Belgian Jewish community and survivor groups.

Michael Freilich, the editor-in-chief of the Antwerp Jewish paper Joods Actueel, deplored the show as a "banalization" of Hitler and called Meus "naive" about the dictator's crimes against humanity. Associations representing Belgian deportees and former political prisoners also have voiced dismay.

Jan Stevens, the director of the Canvas broadcasting company, told the French press agency that he hoped the show would lead to a "better understanding of the dictator," but he also apologized in advance for any hurt feelings.

Neo-Nazi Web sites reportedly are spreading the word about the show."

----

Antwerp Jews Warned Of Terror Threat

Oct 12, 2008
http://hamercaz.com/hamercaz/site/news_item.php?id=1681

"Antwerp, Belgium -- Police met with leaders of Antwerp's Jewish community last week to alert the community of the possibility of a terror attack.

Police officials said they have received a number of threats directed at Antwerp's Jewish institutions. Just last week, police said, they arrested two suspicious Palestinian individuals who were parked across from an assisted living facility for the elderly.

Potential attackers are familiar with the Zmanei Tefillah of local Shuls, police officials warned, as well as the times and locations of various events planned for the Yomim Tovim.

Last Shabbos, Gabbaim passed on the message in local Shuls, warning members of the community to be especially cautious and alert due to to this serious threat.

Police have increased patrols around local Jewish institutions and set up barriers to prevent parking around the Shuls."

Nazi era Pope Pius XII sainthood opposed by Jews

2008-11-09T05:18:00.013-05:00

Row over sainthood of Nazi-era pope intensifies

By News Agencies
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1029919.html
Wed., October 22, 2008 Tishrei 23, 5769

Making Nazi-era Pope Pius XII a saint could open a "wound difficult to heal" between Jews and Catholics, a top Italian Jewish leader said yesterday. Pius, who reigned from 1939 until his death in 1958, has been accused by some Jews of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust during World War II, a charge his supporters and the Vatican deny. The Vatican has called on both Catholics and Jews to stop putting pressure on Pope Benedict over the issue.

Italian newspapers yesterday ran front-page stories about what some called a new chill in relations between Israel and the Vatican over Pius, sparked by comments from a priest who is a key promoter of sainthood for Pius.

"At issue is whether Benedict should let Pius proceed on the road to sainthood - which Catholic supporters want - by signing a decree recognizing his "heroic virtues." This would clear the way for beatification, the last step before sainthood.

Benedict has so far not signed the decree - approved last year by the Vatican's saint-making department, opting instead for what the Vatican has called a period of reflection.

Some Jews want the procedure frozen until more historical research can be done about the period, with many saying Pius should have spoken out more directly.

Amos Luzzatto, president emeritus of Italy's Jewish communities, told La Repubblica newspaper that Hungarian, Danish and Bulgarian leaders spoke out openly against the deportation of Jews during the war and Pius should have done the same.

"I ask myself why Pius didn't do the same thing to call European Catholics to action. These are questions that haunt us Jews," he said.

"So if they want to beatify (Pius) before clearing up all doubts about his silence, they are free to do it. But the Vatican should know that for the Jewish world, this would open up a wound that will be difficult to heal," he said.

The Vatican says while Pius did not speak out, he worked behind the scenes to help because direct intervention would have worsened the situation by prompting retaliations by Hitler.

Benedict has repeatedly defended Pius, saying he worked "secretly and silently" during World War Two to "avoid the worst and save the greatest number of Jews possible."

Peres urges papal visit

Meanwhile President Shimon Peres yesterday urged the Vaticano not to let a contentious reference to Pope Pius XII stand in the way of a visit to the Holy Land by the present pontiff.

A caption accompanying a photograph on display at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial alleges Pius did not act to save Jews from the Nazi genocide.

A Catholic official promoting the sainthood cause for Pius says the caption is an obstacle to a visit by Pope Benedict XVI. But a spokesman for Benedict said Saturday that although no visit was currently planned, the spat with Yad Vashem would not be the deciding factor.

Peres yesterday stood by Israeli criticism of Pius but told reporters the issue should not be a barrier to a trip by Benedict.

"We have reason to believe that Pius XII didn't do enough to save Jewish life, I don't want to pass judgment. If there is evidence then it should be checked carefully," Peres said in English. "The visit to the holy country is nothing to do with anger or disputes. It's holy all the time, it is holy for all of us."

Benedict has a long-standing invitation from Israel for a visit.

The Holy See and Israel established diplomatic relations in the early 1990s, but they must still resolve the status of expropriated church property, tax exemptions for the Church and permits for Arab Christian clergy traveling to and around the West Bank. The late John Paul II visited Israel in 2000.

The Vatican has asked authorities at the Holocaust memorial to make a new, objective and in-depth review of the caption, which says Pius did not use the weight of his office to try and halt the activities of the Nazi death camps.

"While the (gas) ovens were fed by day and by night, the most Holy Father who dwells in Rome did not leave his palace," the caption states.

About six million Jews were killed by the Nazis and their accomplices during the war.

Yad Vashem said in a statement that a papal visit is strictly a political matter and the museum display has no bearing. "Pope Pius XII's activity during the Holocaust is an issue debated among historians throughout the world," the museum said. "The presentation of the subject in the Holocaust History Museum at Yad Vashem is based on the best research regarding this topic."

----

Pope pious?

By Eliahu Salpeter
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/pages/ShArtStEngPE.jhtml?itemNo=872888&contrassID=2&subContrassID=5&title=
Last update 20/06/2007

Efforts to canonize Pope Pius XII as a saint of the Catholic Church are in high gear. The pope who reigned during the Holocaust, whose detractors have called him "Hitler's Pope" and defenders say used his moral and political influence to save thousands of Jews, is once again dominating conversations in the Vatican.

In recent weeks, both supporters and critics have increased their activities relating to the plan to declare the former pope a saint. While Jewish organizations and figures have called on Pope Benedictus XVI to stop the move, conservative circles in the Vatican have been spreading information intended to revive the canonization process. It is possible that this renewed activity is connected to Benedictus XVI's election to the Holy See. The pope had once been viewed as a representative of conservative streams in the church and the assumption is that he would be open to Pius XII's sanctification. At the same time, Jewish circles hope that Benedictus XVI, as a person of German origin, will be sensitive to a Holocaust-related issue and be careful not to offend the Jewish community.

Many Jewish leaders see this as an internal Christian affair in which Jews have neither the authority nor the duty of intervening. All the same, since the debate over Pius XII primarily revolves around his attitude toward the Holocaust, the Jews have the right, and perhaps even the duty, to voice their opinion, particularly given the Catholic Church's historical role in persecuting the Jews.

The Pius XII and Holocaust affair first made headlines in 1963 when Rolf Hochhuth's play, "The Deputy," was performed in Europe. In the play, a young clergyman implores the pope to intervene on behalf of the Jews during the Holocaust, but he is dismissed coldly. Dozens of research projects, articles and books, written by Jews and non-Jews, were published on the heels of the play. All the works - from Saul Friedlander's book, "Pius XII and the Third Reich" to John Cornwell's "Hitler's Pope" - ostensibly prove that the pope had supported the Nazis. Pius XII's decision to shelve an edict issued by his predecessor, Pius XI, which supposedly condemns Fascism and Nazism, is likewise proof of his attitude. But books and articles have also been published in defense of Pius XII, most of them written by Catholic clergymen, but some by rabbis and Jewish authors.

Under his very windows

One of the most lethal attacks on the silence of the pontiff during the Holocaust came from Susan Zuccotti, whose book "Under His Very Windows" was published in 2002. In her book, Zuccotti examines the pope's silence even as the Italians began arresting the Jews of Rome. The Vatican intervened only in cases where a Jewish man was married to a Christian woman and had himself converted to Christianity. Additional studies reveal that Pius XII also did not protest when the Nazis banished 1,000 Italian Jews to the extermination camps. However, he did take real steps before the start of World War II to help some 3,000 Jews who converted to Christianity from different parts of Europe obtain immigration visas to Brazil.

Pius XII was born Eugenio Pacelli. He was suspected of being pro-German even before the outbreak of World War II. Before his election to the papacy, he served as cardinal secretary of state in the Vatican and in this capacity, signed an agreement with Hitler in 1933 according to which the Nazis would not intervene in the church's internal affairs in Germany. In return, the church would refrain from intervening in the Nazi regime.

The defense of Pius XII comes from members of the Catholic Church, but a few Jews have also chimed in, most notably Rabbi David Dalin, whose book "The Myth of Hitler's Pope" refutes the attacks on the pontiff.

The defenders' main contention is that the pope carried out all his actions secretly because he feared that openly criticizing the Nazis would only worsen the situation of the Jews and Catholics in occupied Europe. Other historians confirm that the pontiff did act secretly, but that he did so only after 1942, when the Americans warned that those who had participated in the persecution of the Jews would face punishment, and when it became clear to the Vatican that the Allies would win the war.

A virulent attack on Pius' detractors was published a few weeks ago by Peter Gumpel, a Jesuit priest who is in charge of the canonization process. In an interview with the Polish Catholic weekly, Niedziela, the priest explains that at the special committee meetings that ended in Rome in May 2007, all those in attendance "expressed a favorable opinion" about the 6,000-page report on the "saintly acts" of Pius XII. If incumbent pope Benedictus XVI gives his approval, they will begin to analyze the miracles attributed to Pius XII. At least three miracles are required for the pontiff to be canonized. Until now, none has been made public.

The reporter who interviewed Gumpel asked: "What interest do Jewish groups with influence and authorities in the State of Israel have in disseminating slander about Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church?" Gumpel's response: "Certain Jewish circles feel hostility toward the Catholic Church and toward Christianity in general. Ultra-Orthodox Jews share our fears. I recently met an ultra-Orthodox leader who represents some 8,000 rabbis in the United states and Canada, and he gave me an extremely important declaration in writing. It states that ultra-Orthodox Jews are not of the same opinion as their brethren of the same religion who interfere in the internal affairs of the church. We have done out utmost to improve relations with the Jews, but the other side also must make such efforts."

Later in the interview, thick with anti-Semitic overtones, Gumpel was asked how it was possible to explain that the world media shows such a critical attitude toward Pius XII. He responded: "A large part of the world media is in the hands of people who are hostile to the church. Let us not distract ourselves with illusions. Everyone is afraid of being described as being anti-Semitic."

He knew about the extermination

From what is known today about Pius XII, it is difficult to describe him as a supporter of the Jews. Despite repeated demands by historians and Jewish organizations, the Vatican has published only a small portion of its archival materials from the World War II period. Therefore, on both sides of the scale, there are only partial testimonies to the acts and the omissions of the pontiff.

There is no doubt that from the reports of church representatives in occupied Europe, the pope knew full well what was happening to the Jews at the hands of the Germans and their various puppet governments. Some of these governments defined themselves as Catholic, such as those in Croatia and Slovakia, which were headed by Catholic priests. It is also clear that most of the acts of intervention mentioned in the pontiff's defense were made on behalf of Jews who had converted to Christianity.

The pope's problematic attitude continued even after the victory of the Allies. A monastery where two Jewish brothers had been hidden and baptized during the war refused to return the boys to their family on the grounds that they were now Christians. A letter sent by the Vatican in the name of the pope to the heads of Catholic churches in Europe was published in the wake of this story. The letter instructed the churches not to return children who had been hidden and baptized to their Jewish parents. It is also known that the Vatican assisted many Nazi war criminals in escaping from Europe to South America after the war.

On the other hand, it is also well-documented that Catholic monasteries all over occupied Europe hid thousands of Jews, mainly children, and it is difficult to assume that many would have done so had the pope expressed his opposition. There also has been discussion that Pius XII tried to conscript several dozen Jewish youths to the Vatican guards ("the Swiss Guard") to save their lives but that the Germans prevented this.

In the last year of the war, when the Russians were already advancing in the direction of Hungary, Pius XII was among the world leaders who tried to pressure Admiral Miklos Horthy to stop the expulsion of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. (The expulsions stopped on July 9, 1944 after more than 400,000 Jews had already been expelled). It is also known that as early as 1942, Pius XII had advised the German and Hungarian cardinals to condemn the murder of the Jews. In the long run, it will be to their political advantage if this is recorded in their favor, the messages stated.

It is doubtful whether it is possible to decide one way or the other on this matter as long as the Vatican denies access to all the documents in its archives from the period of the war.

The fate of these archives will also serve as a sign of how Benedictus XVI will act during his tenure as pope, and not merely on the issue of the Jews and Pius XII.

----

Vatican: Jewish charges against Nazi-era pope are 'outrageous'

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1035057.html
Sun., November 09, 2008 Cheshvan 11, 5769

Jewish accusations that Nazi-era Pope Pius XII turned a blind eye to the Holocaust are "outrageous" and no one can tell the Vatican whether he should be made a saint, Pope Benedict's deputy said on Thursday.

Some Jews have accused Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, of being indifferent to the Holocaust. The Vatican says he worked silently behind the scenes and helped save many Jews from certain death during World War Two.

"The depictions of Pius XII as indifferent to the fate of the victims of Nazism - Poles and above all Jews and even going as far as saying he was 'Hitler's pope' are first of all outrageous," said Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

Bertone, who is known as the 'deputy pope' because he ranks only second to Pope Benedict in the Vatican hierarchy, told a conference that such accusations "could not be supported from a historic point of view".

Differences over what Pius did or did not do during the war have haunted Catholic-Jewish relations for decades and conflict has resurfaced over whether Pius should be made a saint.

The Vatican has shown signs of chafing and irritability recently as some Catholics have pushed for the Pope to expedite his sainthood process and some Jews wanted it frozen pending the opening of Holy See archives in about seven years.

Last week a Jewish leader urged the Pope to put the sainthood process on hold and Benedict reportedly said he was "seriously considering" the possibility.

Jewish leaders have called on the Vatican not to make Pius a saint until all doubts about his so-called silence are cleared up, with one saying it would open a "wound difficult to heal."

But Bertone was short with such requests. He said the sainthood process was "a religious matter that must be respected by all (and) the exclusive jurisdiction of the Holy See."

At issue is whether Benedict should let Pius proceed on the road to sainthood - which Catholic supporters want - by signing a decree recognising his "heroic virtues". This would clear the way for beatification, the last step before sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church.

Benedict has so far not signed the decree - approved last year by the Vatican's saint-making department, opting instead for what the Vatican has called a period of reflection.

The Vatican says while Pius did not speak out against the Holocaust, he worked behind the scenes to help Jews because direct intervention would have worsened the situation by prompting retaliation by Hitler.

In his speech at Rome's Gregorian University, Bertone offered a long defence of Pius, saying that in 1939-1940 he secretly supported a British-German plot to overthrow Hitler.

The Vatican says he saved several hundred thousand Jewish lives by ordering churches and convents throughout Italy to hide Jews and instructing Vatican diplomats in Europe to give Jews false passports.

Bertone defended Pius's lack of public outcry after Nazis occupying Rome massacred 335 men and boys in retaliation for a partisan attack that killed 33 German soldiers.

He said Rome convents were full of refugees, including Jews, and a public denunciation by Pius of the Nazi massacre would have led to "catastrophic" raids on the convents.

----

Jewish delegate to Vatican: Pope ignored request to freeze Pius XII sainthood

By Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz Correspondent, and News Agencies
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1032935.html
Last update - 30/10/2008

A member of the Jewish delegation to the Vatican told Haaretz on that Thursday's meeting with Pope Benedict dedicated to freezing the sainthood process of Nazi-era pope Pius XII was "very disappointing."

Seymour Reich, a New York attorney and a Jewish leader, said that the pope "completely ignored" the issue and did not even speak about declassifying archives that might shed light on Pius XII's conduct during the Holocaust.

Some Jews have accused Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. The Vatican says he worked behind the scenes and helped save many Jews from certain death during World War Two.

Reich said that when he shook the pope's hand, he told him that he hoped he would not declare Pius XII a saint. The pope allegedly said that he would take that into account.

Rabbi David Rosen, the leader of the delegation, said that Pope Benedict is "seriously considering" freezing the sainthood process until historical archives can be opened.

Rosen said the subject came up in conversations after formal speeches were delivered.

"One member of our delegation told the pope 'please do not move ahead with beatification of Pius XII before the Vatican archives can be made accessible for objective historical analysis' and the pope said 'I am looking into it, I am considering it seriously'," Rosen told reporters.

The Vatican, however, has so far rejected Jewish groups' requests for the immediate opening of its secret archives on Pius XII's papacy.

It says it will take at least six more years before scholars can consult the archives, which historians and Jewish groups have been clamoring to study.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said the requests to see the wartime archives were understandable.

But he said Thursday that cataloguing some 16 million documents is expected to take another six or seven years.

Beatification is the last step before sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church. Some Jews have asked the pope to hold off on beatifying Pius until more information on his papacy can be studied.
----

Israeli official weighs into row with Vatican over Nazi-era pope

By Adi Schwartz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1030557.html
Sat., October 25, 2008 Tishrei 26, 5769
Last update 23/10/2008

Cabinet minister Isaac Herzog declared his opposition on Wednesday to the proposed beatification of Pope Pius XII - a highly unusual move in the often delicate relationship between the Israeli government and the Vatican.

Pius served as pope during World War II, and many Jews believe that he could have saved thousands of lives had he publicly condemned the Holocaust instead of keeping silent.

"The intent to turn Pius XII into a saint is unacceptable," said Herzog, who in addition to his main job as social affairs minister is also in charge of Diaspora affairs, the fight against anti-Semitism and ties with Christian communities.

"Throughout the period of the Holocaust, the Vatican knew very well what was happening in Europe," said Herzog in an exclusive interview with Haaretz. "Yet there is no evidence of any step being taken by the pope, as the stature of the Holy See should have mandated. The attempt to turn him into a saint is an exploitation of forgetfulness and lack of awareness. Instead of acting according to the biblical verse 'thou shalt not stand against the blood of thy neighbor,' the pope kept silent - and perhaps even worse."

Herzog was responding to reports that the Vatican plans to accelerate Pius' beautification process. Earlier this month, the current pope, Benedict XVI, said he hoped the process of declaring Pius "blessed" - the final stage before sainthood - would be successful.

Pius served as pope from 1939-58. His beatification process began in the 1960s, but has been repeatedly delayed by objections from Jewish groups. The Vatican claims that while Pius was afraid to speak out publicly, lest this lead to Nazi reprisals against Christians, he secretly saved thousands of Jews. However, it has consistently refused to open its archives for the years of Pius' papacy, making it impossible for scholars to verify this claim.

----

Vatican fumes at Israeli minister's remarks on Nazi-era pope

By Adi Schwartz, Haaretz Correspondent and Staff
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1030971.html
Fri., November 07, 2008 Cheshvan 9, 5769

Vatican officials are furious over Minister Isaac Herzog's statement in Thursday's Haaretz that the planned beatification of Pope Pius XII, who headed the Catholic Church during the Holocaust, is "unacceptable."

Cardinal Andrea Lanza di Montezemolo told the Italian paper Corriere della Serra yesterday that "Israel's interference in the matter of Pius XII must stop. We've had it with this interference. Outside opinions are liable to disrupt [the process], and they look like an attempt to force Pope Benedict XVI to make a decision. The decision to declare someone a saint is an internal decision of the church."

Father Paolo Molinari, a priest involved in the the beatification process, told the paper Il Messaggero that "Minister Herzog's statements constitute intervention in the process of declaring Pius XII 'blessed,' which is an internal affair of the Catholic Church." Beatification, or being declared blessed, is the final stage before achieving sainthood.

Moreover, Molinari claimed, "such statements contradict what others in the Jewish world have said, including [former Israeli prime ministers] Moshe Sharett and Golda Meir, who left no room for doubt about the positive part played by Pius XII during the Nazi era."

Another paper, Il Foglio, quoted anonymous Vatican sources as saying that the beatification process is well advanced, and a final decision might be made before the end of this year.

Ever since the Holocaust, a battle has raged over Pius XII's efforts, or lack thereof, to save Jews. Many historians, as well as Jewish organizations, argue that had Pius publicly condemned the Holocaust or publicly urged Catholics to shelter Jews, many thousands could have been saved. The Vatican, for its part, says that while Pius was afraid to speak out publicly, lest this lead to Nazi reprisals against Catholics, he secretly saved thousands of Jews. However, the Vatican has consistently refused to open its archives for the years of Pius' papacy (1939-58), making it impossible for scholars to verify this claim.

----

Kadima supporters' website brands Pope Benedict with Nazi swastika

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1030132.html
Mon., October 27, 2008 Tishrei 28, 5769
Last update 21/10/2008

A photograph of Pope Benedict XVI emblazoned with a superimposed Nazi swastika appeared on Monday on a website run by self-proclaimed supporters of the Kadima party.

It was later removed, and replaced with a picture of a smiling Benedict overlooking a crowd-filled St. Peter's Square in the Vatican, after what "the Yalla Kadima" site said was a request from Kadima's leader, prime minister-designate Tzipi Livni.

"Tzipi Livni strongly condemns this and we are working to remove this shameful picture. We strongly oppose this. It doesn't represent Kadima," spokesman Amir Goldstein said shortly before the photo was changed.

It was the latest twist in a controversy over whether the German-born Pope should promote the sainthood of his Nazi-era predecessor Pius XII.

Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, has been accused by some Jews of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust during World War II, a charge his supporters and the Vatican deny.

"Yalla Kadima", which describes itself as a portal for "activists and supporters" of the Kadima party, had carried the swastika-emblazoned photo of Benedict alongside an article on the sainthood controversy.

On Saturday, the Vatican urged both Catholics and Jews to stop creating "pressure" over the issue of sainthood for Pius.

Last year, the Vatican's saint-making department voted in favor of a decree recognizing Pius' "heroic virtues", a step in a long process toward possible sainthood that began in 1967.

Benedict has so far not approved the decree - which is needed for beatification, the last step before sainthood - opting for what the Vatican has called a period of reflection.

He has repeatedly defended Pius, saying he worked "secretly and silently" during World War Two to "avoid the worst and save the greatest number of Jews possible".

In remarks on Monday, President Shimon Peres said: "If the former Pope Pius helped the Jews, it can be proven, but if he didn't this should also be proven.

"I know the current Pope and I am convinced he will go into the subject in depth and that we can all live with the facts and whatever necessary conclusions are drawn," Peres told reporters.

----

Vatican defends wartime pope against charge he turned blind eye to Holocaust

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1027629.html
Last update - 08/10/2008

The Vatican on Wednesday rejected charges that wartime Pope Pius XII turned a blind eye to the Holocaust, saying it was a "black legend" not backed up by history.

An editorial in the Vatican newspaper defended Pius two days after the first Jew to address a Church synod, Haifa's Chief Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen, told the gatheringthat Jews "cannot forgive and forget" Pius's silence.

The Osservatore Romano called him a "man of peace" who tried to do his best during one of the most violent periods in history. The editorial was published on the eve of commemorations to mark the 50th anniversary of his death.

"He confronted the wartime tragedy like no leader of his time did. Even when faced with the monstrous persecution of the Jews [he worked] in a suffered silence which is understandable and whose aim was an efficient endeavor of charity and undeniable help," the newspaper said.

Some Jews maintain Pius did not do enough. The Vatican says he worked quietly behind the scenes to help Jews because more direct intervention would have worsened the situation.

The newspaper denounced what it called "black legend about a pope who was insensitive to the Shoah, or even pro-Nazi."

It rejected such accusations, saying they were "above all inconsistent from the historical point of view, apart from being denigrating".

The papacy of Pius, from 1939 to 1958, was one of the most difficult issues in Catholic-Jewish relations. Many books have been written about it, with most defenders saying the situation would have been worse for Jews if he had spoken out forcefully against Hitler.

Last month, Benedict said Pius "spared no effort" to help Jews.

He spoke to the U.S.-based Pave the Way Foundation, a mixed Jewish-Catholic group which prepared a 200-page compilation of documents, diplomatic cables and newspaper clippings from the period - some of them previously unpublished - showing Pius did much to help Jews during the war.

Urged by historians to open all its archives from World War II, the Vatican says some are closed for organizational reasons but most of the significant documentation regarding Pius is open to scholars.

Last year, the Vatican's saint-making department voted in favor of a decree recognizing Pius's "heroic virtues", a major hurdle in a long process toward possible sainthood that began in 1967. But Pope Benedict has so far not approved the decree.

Some Jewish groups say the Vatican should freeze the process of beatification. Others say it is an internal Church matter.

----

Haifa Chief Rabbi at Vatican: Wartime Pope let Jews down

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1026980.html
Last update - 06/10/2008

The first Jew to address a Vatican synod on Monday told the gathering that Jews "cannot forgive and forget" that some major religious leaders during World War Two did not speak out against the Holocaust.

Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen's words, spoken in the presence of Pope Benedict, were a clear reference to wartime Pope Pius XII, who many Jews say did not do enough to help them.

Rabbi Shear-Yashuv Cohen told Reuters earlier Monday that wartime Pope Pius XII should have done more to help Jews during the Holocaust.

Cohen he might have stayed away if he had known the major Church gathering coincided with ceremonies to honor Pius on the 50th anniversary of his death.

"We feel that the late pope [Pius] should have spoken up much more strongly than he did," said Cohen, 80, in an interview hours before he was due to address the gathering of Catholic bishops from around the world.

Cohen said that in his speech he planned to make an indirect reference to Jewish disappointment about Pius as well as an appeal to all religious leaders to denounce Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Last month Pope Benedict forcefully defended Pius, saying he "spared no effort" on behalf of Jews during World War II.

Some Jews maintain Pius did not do enough to save Jews while the Vatican says he worked behind the scenes to help because more direct intervention would have worsened the situation.

"He may have helped in secrecy many of the victims and many of the refugees but the question is 'could he have raised his voice and would it have helped or not?'" Cohen said.

"We, as the victims, feel yes. I am not empowered by the families of the millions of deceased to say 'we forget, we forgive,'" said Cohen, who is chief rabbi of Haifa in Israel.

Pius is one of the most difficult issues in Catholic-Jewish relations. On Thursday the Vatican marks the 50th anniversary of his death, Benedict celebrates a Mass in his memory and there will be a conference and photo show on his papacy next month.

"I did not know [the anniversary commemorations] happened during the same meeting. If I had known ... I might have refrained from coming because we feel that the pain is still here," Cohen said.

"I have to make it very clear that we, the rabbis, the leadership of the Jewish people, cannot as long as the survivors still feel painful agree that this leader of the Church in a time of crisis should be honored now. It is not our decision. It pains us. We are sorry it is being done," he said.

Cohen said only God knows if Pius spoke out enough against the Holocaust: "God is the judge ... he knows the truth".

War archives

Urged by historians to open up all its archives from World War II, the Vatican says some are closed for organizational reasons but that most of the significant documentation regarding Pius is already open to scholars.

Last year, the Vatican's saint-making department voted in favor of a decree recognizing Pius' "heroic virtues", a major hurdle in a long process toward possible sainthood that began in 1967. But Pope Benedict has so far not approved the decree.

Some Jewish groups say the Vatican should freeze the process of beatification but others say it is an internal Church matter.

Cohen said he would also appeal to the synod to denounce Ahmadinejad, who made another virulent anti-Israel speech last month at the United Nations. He said he would "appeal to the leaders of religion not to keep quiet, not to stand aside".

"He says that he wants to annihilate Israel and destroy it. The problem in the days of the Second World War was that people didn't believe that what Adolf Hitler was saying, he really meant to fulfill".

"Unfortunately we had the Holocaust and I am sure that if we have a painful memory it is because we don't feel that enough was done by the leadership of the religions in the world and other powerful leaders to stop it at that time. We expect them to do it today," he said.

----

Jerusalem and Babylon / Should Pope Pius XII be made a saint? Leave that to the Vatican to decide

By Anshel Pfeffer
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1031158.html
Last update 24/10/2008

Should Pope Pius XII be made a saint?

The simple answer to that: It's none of your business.

The more theologically accurate answer is that it doesn't matter, what you, I, or anyone else thinks on the matter - not even the current pope. According to the rules of the Catholic Church, Pius XII either is a saint already or is not and can never be.

All that's left to the powers that be in the Vatican is to recognize him as the saint that he either is or is not.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's get back to the unseemly argument that seems to have broken out between the Jewish people and the Holy See. Only, once again, that too is not very inaccurate.

There are a number of arguments going on in that realm. One is between historians over facts and their interpretation. Not surprisingly, there are Jews on both sides of this argument.

Another debate is raging between Catholics and Catholics on matters of faith and religious politics.

There is also a third argument in the works between elements in the Vatican and some Jewish organizations, but this is just as much about style then about substance.

As for the historic debate, there is little an amateur can add. After reading two books, interviewing a number of experts and reading countless newspaper on the subject, I am no closer to reaching my personal conclusion on why Pius kept quiet during the Holocaust.

Was it because he wasn't very troubled by the extermination of the Jews and secretly prayed for a Nazi victory? Or was his silence rather a cover for valiant rescue efforts carried out with his encouragement?

Neither side has managed to produce enough evidence to convince me either way. And, I doubt they ever will since the only major remaining source of documents are the Vatican archives - and even when those open, you can almost be certain there will be nothing there to change anyone's mind.

If there was a document clearly showing Pius' involvement of behalf of the Jews, the Vatican would have displayed it prominently, and if there was a "smoking gun" proving him to be a collaborator, rest assured, it has long ago been removed.

The internal Catholic debate is especially interesting, both because it puts the entire Pius problem into context and because it neatly mirrors similar issues within the Jewish religious establishment.

Pius' WWII record is not the major consideration within the Vatican over his canonization. Those who revere him do so for his image as the last century's leading Catholic conservative. His adoration is a central tenet for those who believe in the most extreme version of papal infallibility.

If Pius XII has still not been recognized as a saint, it means for many Catholics that there is still a question mark looming over the historical role played by Rome during the entire era before, during and after the War.

It is a dispute that has been going on for centuries. The promulgation of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council in 1870 caused Lord Acton to write his famous dictum: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

Since then, subsequent popes have never retreated from the principle of infallibility, and, as a rule, were prudent in using it. The one striking exception to this rule was in 1950, when Pius XII ruled that the "assumption" of Mary is an article of faith of the Catholic Church.

Like Acton in 1870, infallibility still causes many Catholics discomfort, and for the conservative hardliners, his canonization is imperative to confirming their ascendancy within the church.

The current Pope Benedict XVI is quite rightly seen as a conservative but he is also a clever politician and is trying to tread a careful path between the factions in the church. He has infuriated the hardliners by not acting to bring Pius' beatification, the crucial step towards canonization, forward.

Judaism as a religion generally has a less developed sense of dogma than the Catholic Church, but many who rail against the paralysis of Orthodox rabbinical thinking, hidebound by relatively new concepts such as Da'at Torah (knowledge of the Bible), emunath hachamim (faith in the sages)and hadash asur min hatorah (anything new is forbidden by the torah), will sympathize with Catholics who struggle to preserve their faith in the face of papal infallibility.

As a response to haskalah (Jewish enlightenment), the rabbinical establishment tried to stifle debate by commanding allegiance to tradition and strictures that were to suddenly stop evolving.

All this leads to the latest acrimonious round of charges between elements in the Vatican and Jewish representatives over the caption in the Yad Vashem Museum on Pius, the supposed cancellation of Benedict's visit to Israel and the threats of what might happen to Jewish-Catholic dialog if Pius is indeed canonized.

Yad Vashem certainly should not allow itself to be bullied into changing what its experts believe to be the historical facts - and the future of Israel-Vatican relations cannot be hostage to that. The threats of Jewish leaders of the harm that will be caused by the canonization are equally out of order.

The diplomatic and inter-religious issues between Israel, Jewish organizations and the Vatican and the historical debate over what the pope did in the Holocaust should not be connected to the question of whether Eugenio Pacelli is to become St. Pius or not.

That is quite simply a matter of Vatican political power games and Jews really have no business getting involved in them.

----

Peres urges Pope to ignore row over Pius XII and visit Israel

By News Agencies
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1029650.html
Last update 19/10/2008

President Shimon Peres on Sunday urged the Vatican not to let a contentious reference to World War II Pope Pius XII put off a visit to the Holy Land by the present pontiff.

A caption accompanying a photograph of Pius in Jerusalem's Yad Vashem museum of the Holocaust says that Pius "abstained from signing the Allied declaration condemning the extermination of the Jews" and "maintained his neutral position throughout the war".

A Catholic official promoting the cause which could lead to sainthood for Pius has said the caption is an obstacle to a visit by Pope Benedict XVI. But a spokesman for Benedict said that the spat is not standing in the way of a visit.

Peres on Sunday told reporters the issue should not be a barrier.

"The visit to the holy country is nothing to do with anger or disputes," Peres said. "It's holy all the time, it's holy for all of us."

Earlier Sunday, a top Italian Jewish leader said on Sunday that making Pius XII a saint could open a "wound difficult to heal" between Jews and Catholics.

Pius, who reigned from 1939 until his death in 1958, has been accused by some Jews of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust during World War II, a charge his supporters and the Vatican deny.

The Vatican has called on both Catholics and Jews to stop putting pressure on Pope Benedict over the issue.

Italian newspapers on Sunday ran front-page stories about what some called a new chill in relations between Israel and the Vatican over Pius, sparked by comments from a priest who is a key promoter of sainthood for Pius.

At issue is whether Benedict should let Pius proceed on the road to sainthood - which Catholic supporters want - by signing a decree recognising his "heroic virtues". This would clear the way for beatification, the last step before sainthood.

Benedict has so far not signed the decree - approved last year by the Vatican's saint-making department, opting instead for what the Vatican has called a period of reflection.

Some Jews want the procedure frozen until more historical research can be done about the period, with many saying Pius should have spoken out more directly.

Amos Luzzatto, president emeritus of Italy's Jewish communities, told La Repubblica newspaper that Hungarian, Danish and Bulgarian leaders spoke out openly against the deportation of Jews during the war and Pius should have done the same.

"I ask myself why Pius didn't do the same thing to call European Catholics to action. These are questions that haunt us Jews," he said.

"So if they want to beatify [Pius] before clearing up all doubts about his silence there are free to do it. But the Vatican should know that for the Jewish world this would open up a wound that will be difficult to heal," he said.

The Vatican says while Pius did not speak out, he worked behind the scenes to help because direct intervention would have worsened the situation by prompting retaliations by Hitler.

Benedict has repeatedly defended Pius, saying he worked "secretly and silently" during World War Two to "avoid the worst and save the greatest number of Jews possible."

The Vatican says he saved several hundred thousand Jewish lives by ordering churches and convents throughout Italy to hide Jews and instructing Vatican diplomats in Europe to give many Jews false passports.

On Saturday chief Vatican spokesman Reverand Federico Lombardi issued an unusual statement after an Italian news agency ran an interview with the Reverand Peter Gumpel, a Jesuit who is a major proponent of bestowing sainthood for Pius.

Gumpel said Benedict had put the sainthood process on hold because he feared repercussions on relations with Jews.

"In this situation, it is not opportune to exercise pressure on him [the pope] from one side or the other," Lombardi said in a statement that appeared to be at pains to distance the Vatican from Gumpel's remarks.

Vatican: Stop pressuring pope over Pius XII sainthood

The Vatican on Saturday called on both Catholics and Jews to stop piling "pressure" on Pope Benedict over whether he should or should not promote the sainthood of his controversial Nazi-era predecessor Pius XII.

Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, has been accused by some Jews of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust during World War II, a charge his supporters and the Vatican deny.

Chief Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi issued an unusual statement after an Italian news agency ran an interview with the Rev. Peter Gumpel, the Vatican's chief judge investigating Pius' sainthood cause.

Gumpel, a major proponent of sainthood for Pius, was quoted as saying that Benedict had put the sainthood process for Pius on hold because it would harm relations with Jews.

Last year, the Vatican's saint-making department voted in favor of a decree recognizing Pius' "heroic virtues", a step in a long process toward possible sainthood that began in 1967.

Benedict has so far not approved the decree - which is needed for beatification, the last step before sainthood - opting for what the Vatican has called a period of reflection.

"In this situation, it is not opportune to exercise pressure on him (the pope) from one side or the other," Lombardi said.

The Vatican appeared to be at pains to distance itself from the remarks attributed to Gumpel, including one that Benedict would not visit Israel unless the caption of the photograph of Pius in Yad Vashem was changed.

Objectionable caption

The Vatican statement said that while the Catholic Church has made it clear to Israeli authorities that it found the caption objectionable, it was wrong to consider it "a determining factor" in the decision about a papal trip.

Some say Pius did not do enough to save Jews. The Vatican and his Jewish defenders say he worked behind the scenes to help because direct intervention would have worsened the situation.

Benedict has repeatedly defended Pius, saying he worked "secretly and silently" during World War Two to "avoid the worst and save the greatest number of Jews possible".

At an Oct. 9 commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Pius' death, Benedict said he prayed the process which could lead to Pius' beatification "can proceed happily".

Four days before the anniversary, the chief rabbi of Haifa, Shear-Yashuv Cohen, told Benedict during a synod that Jews "cannot forgive and forget" that some major religious leaders at the time did not speak out against the Holocaust.

Cohen, who was the first Jew to address a Vatican synod, separately told reporters Pius "should not be seen as a model and he should not be beatified".

Pius' papacy is one of the most difficult issues in Catholic-Jewish relations.

Many books have been written about it, with most defenders saying the situation would have been worse for Jews if he had spoken out forcefully, prompting retaliations by Hitler.

They say he ordered churches and convents throughout Italy to hide Jews and that Vatican diplomats in Europe also helped give many Jews false passports.

----

French Jewish group: Pius XII sainthood would be blow to Catholic-Jewish relations

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1029609.html
Sun., October 19, 2008 Tishrei 20, 5769

France's main Jewish organization warned on Friday a Vatican plan to put wartime Pope Pius XII on the road to sainthood would deal a severe blow to Catholic-Jewish relations if completed.

Holocaust survivors felt "profound hurt" because Pius never openly denounced the Nazi slaughter of Jews and his failure to do so after the war was "profoundly shocking," the CRIF umbrella group of Jewish organizations said.

Its statement came a week after Pope Benedict defended the diplomatic approach Pius took as the best way to save the greatest number of Jews and said he hoped his beatification - the first step to sainthood - could proceed without problem.

"The plan to beatify Pius XII, who was pope from 1939 to 1958, would deal a severe blow to relations between the Catholic Church and the Jewish world if it is carried out," said CRIF, the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions.

"Concerned about burning his bridges with Germany, Pope Pius XII never delivered a clear speech denouncing the singular monstrosity of the extermination of millions of Jews," it said.

"Furthermore, he did not do it after the war either, which is profoundly shocking."

The long-simmering dispute between Catholics and Jews, whose relations have otherwise improved greatly in recent decades, flared last week when an Israeli rabbi told bishops meeting in Rome that Jews could not forgive and forget Pius's silence.

Founded as an underground aid network for Jews during the German occupation, CRIF is the public spokesman for the 600,000-strong French Jewish community, the largest in Europe.

Its statement was much stronger than a recent appeal by the United States-based Anti-Defamation League, whose National Director Abraham Foxman urged the Vatican to open its wartime archives fully before making any decision on Pius.

Not model behavior

CRIF said Pius did help to hide "a certain number of Jews" in Rome during the German occupation and that "the magnificent role played individually by some clergy, notably in France, to save Jews" should not be underestimated.

But it argued that Pius should have played the role of a prophet denouncing Nazi crimes rather than a prudent diplomat.

CRIF criticized the Vatican for not publishing all its Holocaust-era archives and said most independent historians did not agree with the official Catholic position that Pius worked ceaselessly to save Jews.

"As long as no new documents indisputably change the historical view of this era -- and none have yet been provided -- Jewish survivors of the Shoah will suffer a profound hurt if the silence of the magisterium in the face of the genocide of the Jews is presented as model behavior," it said.

Pius's defenders, including some Jews, say the oppression of Jews would have been worse if he had openly condemned it. They cite the rise in deportations of Dutch Jews to death camps after Catholic bishops there denounced Nazi policy in 1942.

"He often acted in a secret and silent way precisely because, given the real situations of that complex moment in history, he realized that only in this manner could the worst be avoided and greatest number of Jews be saved," Benedict said at an Oct 9 Mass marking the 50th anniversary of Pius's death.

The Vatican also says it has published most of the significant documents about Pius and keeps some closed to researchers only for organizational reasons.

----

Pope Benedict: Pius XII 'spared no effort' to help Jews during WWII

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1022494.html
Sat., September 20, 2008 Elul 20, 5768

Pope Benedict on Thursday forcefully defended his wartime predecessor Pius XII against accusations that he did not do enough to help the Jews, saying Pius "spared no effort" on their behalf during World War II.

The pope spoke to members of the U.S.-based Pave the Way Foundation, a mixed Jewish-Catholic group which held a symposium in Rome on the papacy of Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958.

The symposium prepared a 200-page compilation of documents, diplomatic cables and newspaper clippings from the period -- some of them previously unpublished -- showing Pius did much to help Jews during the war and was thanked by Jewish leaders.

"Thanks to the vast quantity of documented material which you have gathered, supported by many authoritative testimonies, your symposium offers to the public forum the possibility of knowing more fully what Pius XII achieved for the Jews persecuted by the Nazi and fascist regimes," Benedict said.

"One understands, then, that wherever possible he spared no effort in intervening in their favor either directly or through instructions given to other individuals or to institutions of the Catholic Church," Benedict told the group at his summer residence south of Rome.

Some Jews have maintained that Pius did not do enough to save Jews, while the Vatican and those Jews who support him say he worked behind the scenes to help because more direct intervention would have worsened the situation.

But Benedict praised the symposium for drawing attention "to his many interventions, made secretly and silently, precisely because, given the concrete situation of that difficult historical moment, only in this way was it possible to avoid the worst and save the greatest number of Jews."

Gary Krupp, an American Jew who is president and founder of
Pave the Way, told the pope the group's investigation "directly contradicts the negative perception of the pope's war time activities."

Camp survivors thanked the pope

Pope Benedict noted that in November 1945, some six months after the end of the war, 80 delegates of German concentration camps came to the Vatican to thank Pius.

The symposium's documents included numerous newspaper clippings of Jewish leaders thanking Pius during and after the conflict and former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir saying: "When fearful martyrdom came to our people in the decade of Nazi terror, the voice of the pope was raised for the victims."

The issue of Pius' papacy is one of the most difficult in Catholic-Jewish relations and the pope said that nearly five decades after his death "not all of the genuine facets of his diverse pastoral activity have been examined in a just light."

The Vatican will on Oct. 9 mark the 50th anniversary of Pius' death with a conference and photo exhibition.

Historians have been calling on the Vatican to open up all its archives on the period.

The Vatican says while some of the archives of the period are still closed for organizational reasons, most of the significant documentation regarding Pius is already open to scholars.

Last year, the Vatican's saint-making department voted in favor of a decree recognizing Pius's "heroic virtues," a major hurdle in a long process toward possible sainthood that began in 1967. But Pope Benedict has so far not approved the decree.

Some Jewish groups have said the Vatican should freeze the beatification process but others say it is an internal Church matter.

----

ADL urges Pope to suspend Pius sainthood over Holocaust inaction

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/858217.html
Sat., October 11, 2008 Tishrei 12, 5769
Last update - 11/05/2007

A U.S.-based group that fights anti-Semitism urged Pope Benedict on Thursday to suspend the sainthood process for Pope Pius XII, whom critics accuse of turning a blind eye to the death of Jews during World War Two.

The Anti-Defamation League said the process should stop until secret World War Two Vatican archives are declassified and fully examined "so that the full record of the Pope's actions during the Holocaust may finally be known."

The Vatican's saint-making Congregation has voted in favor of a decree recognizing Pius' "heroic virtues," a major hurdle in a long process toward sainthood that began in 1967.

"We urge Pope Benedict XVI to suspend the sainthood process for Pope Pius XII for the sake of historical truth and the deepening friendship between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people," said Abraham Foxman, the league's national director and a Holocaust survivor.

"While we understand that the process of sainthood is an internal matter for the Church, the issue of what Pius XII did or did not do to help save Jews during the Holocaust is a profound question that must be resolved first for the sake of the Jewish-Catholic relationship," he said in a statement.

According to the Vatican Web site, it is up to the Pope to decide the "liberalisation" of access to documents on the basis of an entire papacy. Documents have been "liberalised" up until -- and including -- the papacy of Pius XI, which ended in 1939.

If the documents are "liberalised," only scholars are granted access to the papers.

If German-born Pope Benedict approves the Congregation decree, as expected, Pius XII would be officially given the title "venerable." The Vatican would then move toward beatification by looking for miracles performed by the late Pope.

The pontificate of Pius has been one of the trickiest problems in postwar Roman Catholic-Jewish relations.

Jewish groups have accused Pius of being indifferent to the Holocaust and diplomatic ties between the Vatican and Israel were briefly tested last month over a depiction of him at a state Holocaust memorial in Israel.

Before being elected Pope in 1939, Pius XII was Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli. He served as the Vatican's ambassador to Germany in 1917-1929 and was Vatican secretary of state in 1930-1939. Pius died in 1958.

The Vatican maintains that Pius did not speak out against the Holocaust more forcefully because he was afraid of worsening the fate of Catholics and Jews and worked behind the scenes to save Jews.

Jewish groups have pressed the Vatican for years to either freeze the sainthood process of Pius XII or shelve it altogether for fears that it would harm Catholic-Jewish relations.

Pope Benedict is in Brazil for a five-day visit to reinforce the Roman Catholic message on traditional family values and try to halt a tide of defections to Protestant religious groups.

----

Vatican: Pius XII sainthood process not stalled

By Reuters
https://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/955533.html
Fri., March 07, 2008 Adar2 1, 5768
Last update 19/02/2008

The Vatican's top saint-maker said Monday he was moving ahead with the
beatification of wartime Pope Pius XII, despite criticism Pius did not speak out against the Holocaust.

Some critics accuse Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, of being indifferent to the Hitler's plans to systematically destroy the Jewish people. However, his supporters consider him a holy man who worked behind the scenes to help Jews throughout Europe.

Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins denied that Pius' sainthood process has until now been halted over the controversy, as a newspaper report last year suggested.

"It has not been staggered, much less stopped," Martins, who heads the Vatican department that oversees the sainthood process, told reporters.

But he left the timing of any progress on the case unclear, and confirmed there would be renewed research into the late Pope on the 50th anniversary of his death.

Last May, the Vatican's saint-making department voted in favor of a decree recognizing Pius's "heroic virtues," a major hurdle in a long process toward sainthood that began in 1967.

But Pope Benedict has so far not approved the decree, meaning that the process is effectively stalled and that Pius cannot move on to beatification, the last step before sainthood.

Martins said people should not read too much into that. "Some people talk about problems that in reality don't exist, I believe. Many say: 'It's not going forward because he is famous for his silence in condemning Nazism, that he didn't condemn Nazism," he said.

"This is not historically accurate. Instead of silence, I would speak of 'prudence.' There was not silence."

The Vatican maintains Pius did not speak out more forcefully against the Holocaust because he was afraid of provoking Nazi reprisals and worsening the fate of Catholics and Jews.

Supporters say Pius ordered churches and convents in Rome to take in Jews after the Germans occupied the city in 1943.

----

New biography of Pope Pius XII rejects charges of anti-Semitism

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/864308.html
Wed., May 30, 2007 Sivan 13, 5767
Last update 29/05/2007

Accusations that wartime Pope Pius XII was an anti-Semite who turned a blind eye to the Holocaust are part of a "black legend" not supported by historical documents, the author of a new biography says.

The book by Italian journalist Andrea Tornielli, his fourth on Pius, is being published weeks after the Vatican put Pius a step closer to sainthood, a move that angered some Jews.

Some Jews have accused Pius, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, of being
indifferent to the Holocaust and not speaking out against Hitler. His
supporters consider him a holy man who worked behind the scenes to help Jews throughout Europe.

"This is a black legend that refuses to die. Pius XII has become a lightning rod for all the presumed responsibilities of the Catholic Church in that period," Tornielli said.

Tornielli, a journalist with the newspaper Il Giornale, has called his
650-page biography "Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, A Man on the Throne of St
Peter." Eugenio Pacelli was Pius' name before he became pope.

In the book, Tornielli cites new documents from the Pacelli family archives showing that as a high school student Eugenio had a close friendship with a Jewish classmate, Guido Mendes.

Pacelli, then a cardinal and Vatican secretary of state, helped the Mendes family slip into Switzerland, from where they moved to Israel, the book says.

The Anti-Defamation League has asked Pope Benedict to suspend the sainthood process until the Vatican declassifies its Second World War-era archives.

Tornielli's latest book, published by Mondadori, also includes excerpts from letters the future pope wrote to his family in the early 1930s when he was Vatican ambassador in Germany, expressing concern over the rise of Hitler.

----

Pius XII told churches not to return Holocaust war babies

By Amiram Barkat, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=521178&contrassID=1&subContrassID=9&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
Last update 30/12/2004

The Vatican instructed the Catholic church in France not to return Jewish children to their families after the Holocaust, according to a letter dated November 20, 1946, that was published Tuesday in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera.

The children had been placed in the church's care to save them from Nazi murder, but after the war the church was instructed to return them to surviving parents only if they had not been baptized.

The letter containing these instructions was sent by the Holy Office to Angelo Roncalli - later Pope John XXIII - who was then the papal representative in Paris.

"Please note that this decision has been approved by the Holy Father," the letter emphasizes, referring to Pope Pius XII.

The letter reveals how the controversial wartime pope sought to restrict the number of children the church returned to their families by, among other things, instructing that baptized children "may not be entrusted to institutions that are not in a position to guarantee them a Christian upbringing."

As for orphans who had not been baptized, the church must not hand them over to any "persons who have no rights over them".

Roncalli had a reputation when previously serving as the Holy See's envoy to Istanbul for favoring Jews.

In Paris he helped many Jews escape to Israel, and disobeyed the Vatican instructions by helping to return Jewish minors to their families.

On July 19, 1946, he sent a letter to the chief rabbi in Israel, Isaac Herzog (father of Israeli president Haim Herzog), in which he gives him permission "to use his [Roncalli's] authority so these children can return to their original environment."

Amos Luzzato, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, said in response Wednesday: "The documents indicate that the Vatican completely ignored the Holocaust and murder of Jews. There is a sticking to theological arguments as though this were an ordinary situation, when in practice these children were not entrusted to churches to convert to Christianity but to save them from murder."

The publication of the letter to Roncalli will only add to the controversy surrounding Pope Pius XII, making it difficult for the Vatican to ignore accusations that the Vatican under his tenure did not do enough to combat Nazi persecution of Jews, and even helped Nazi war criminals to evade justice.

The latest revelations are also likely to hamper efforts by Pope John Paul II to lay the groundwork for beatifying Pius XII.

----

Pope praises Nazi-era pontiff who Jews say turned blind eye to Holocaust

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1042282.html
Last update - 30/11/2008

Pope Benedict paid tribute on Sunday to Nazi-era pontiff Pius XII, who is at the center of a controversy with Jewish groups accusing him of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust.

The pope was giving mass at Rome's San Lorenzo basilica, which was partly destroyed by massive Allied bombing on July 19, 1943 that killed at least 3,000 people across the neighborhood. He said Pius had rushed to the scene to assist the victims.

"The generous gesture on that occasion by my venerable predecessor, who immediately ran to help and comfort the stricken population in the smoldering rubble, cannot be erased from historical memories," the Pope said in his homily.

The Nazi-era pontiff, who ruled from 1939 until his death in 1958, has been accused by some Jews of inaction over the Holocaust during World War Two, a charge his supporters and the Vatican deny.

Several influential Jewish groups have called on Benedict to freeze the process that could one day make Pius a saint until more Vatican archives on the wartime period are opened, with one Italian Jewish leader saying that making Pius a saint before information is available would open a "wound difficult to heal."

At issue is whether Benedict should let Pius proceed on the road to sainthood - which Catholic supporters want - by signing a decree recognizing his "heroic virtues." This would clear the way for beatification, the last step before sainthood.

Benedict has so far not signed the decree - approved last year by the Vatican's department in charge of saints, opting instead for what the Vatican has called a period of reflection.

The Vatican says while Pius did not speak out against the Holocaust, he worked behind the scenes to help Jews because direct intervention would have worsened the situation by prompting retaliation by Hitler.

----

Pope to make rare visit to Israel in May, following months of Jewish-Catholic tension

By Anshel Pfeffer
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1041322.html
Last update - 27/11/2008

Pope Benedict XVI is set to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories in May 2009 after accepting an invitation by President Shimon Peres. The Vatican and Israel are said, thus, to hopefully end the high tension of recent months between the Catholic Church and the Jewish people over the initiative of canonizing Pope Pius XII.

This visit, which would be the third visit of a pope to Israel since the establishment of the state, has not yet been officially confirmed.

Peres met about two weeks ago with Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Antonio Franco, the pope's envoy to Israel. Franco told the president that Benedict would respond positively to an invitation from Israel. The president sent the invitation, and a positive response was indeed reportedly received.

Since the visit has not yet been publicly confirmed, no preparations are underway in the Foreign Ministry or the Vatican. However, the Pope's arrival is apparently planned for the second week of May.

The tension began after calls came by ultra-conservatives at the Vatican to expedite canonization on the 50th anniversary of Pius' death. The process began during the time of the previous pope, John Paul II, but both he and the present pope were aware of the harsh criticism such a move could engender in the Jewish world, which accuses Pius XII of remaining silent and not protesting the extermination of European Jewry during the Holocaust.

The debate was fanned by the Jesuit Father Peter Gumpel, who said a month ago that the pope would not visit Israel until a change was made in the caption to two pictures of Pius XII in the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, which state that Pius' response to the murder of Jews during the Holocaust is controversial. The captions also state that when Jews were deported from Rome to Auschwitz, Pius did not intervene.

The caption caused a diplomatic storm in the past when the papal nuncio threatened to boycott the Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem in protest over the caption, although he did attend the ceremony.

The Vatican has since distanced itself from Gumpel's statements. Pope Benedict's spokesman said the caption is not a factor in his decision on whether to visit Israel or not. Social Affairs Minister Isaac Herzog also contributed to the dispute when he told Haaretz a month ago that Pius' canonization was "unacceptable." The Vatican demanded that Herzog apologize for the statement.

However, Benedict praised Pius' actions during the Holocaust and criticized historians who said he did not help to save Jews. In a meeting a few weeks ago with Jewish leaders, Benedict was asked to delay the canonization process until all the documents in the Vatican archives involving the period of the Holocaust were released, a process that is expected to take about another seven years. The pope told the delegation he was "seriously considering" the matter.

In other meetings at the Vatican, understandings were obtained that the canonization process would not be rushed.

Another source of tension between Jews and the Vatican was Benedict' decision to bring back the ancient Latin mass which calls for the Jews to recognize Jesus. Following Jewish protests and the announcement by Italy's Jewish community that they were severing ties with the Vatican, a representative of the pope said the verse in question was a wish, and not a call on Catholics to missionize among Jews.

The pope is also expected to visit the Palestinian Authority, apparently in Bethlehem. This could be one of the diplomatic obstacles of the visit because of the legal ambiguity of the PA's presidency in light of the struggle between Fatah and Hamas.

Another stumbling block could be a papal visit to Yad Vashem because of the controversial captions. This matter might be resolved by having Benedict visit only the monuments at Yad Vashem, not the museum.

Rabbi David Rosen, head of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations said of the expected visit: "If the information is correct, I am sure the pope will be warmly received by Israel's leaders and its people."

The President's Residence declined to comment on the report. The secretary of the Apostolic Nuncio's office in Israel said he could neither confirm nor deny the report.

Pope Paul VI visited Israel in 1964, even before the Vatican recognized the state. In 2000, Pope John Paul II visited the country.

----

Italian MP says Vatican didn't do enough to help Jews in WWII

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1047228.html
Tue., December 16, 2008 Kislev 19, 5769

One of Italy's most prominent conservative leaders said on Tuesday the Roman Catholic Church did not do enough to oppose Fascist-era race laws under dictator Benito Mussolini.

"We must ask ourselves why Italian society wholly embraced the anti-Jewish legislation and why, beyond laudable exceptions, there were not demonstrations of real resistance. Not even, it hurts me to say, by the Catholic Church," said Gianfranco Fini.

Fini, himself a former Fascist, was speaking at an event marking the 70th anniversary of Mussolini's race laws.

Introduced in 1938, the laws expelled Jews from public schools and offices and eventually led to the deportation of thousands to Nazi concentration camps.

Fini's remarks were challenged by Catholic scholars and reignited debate about the Vatican's wartime record.

Church scholars say Pope Pius XI opposed the race laws at the time and they also defend his successor, Pius XII, from accusations he turned a blind eye to the Holocaust.

"I can't see any reason to accuse the Church, which instead openly and firmly condemned the anti-Jewish legislation," said professor Agostino Giovagnoli at Catholic University.

He added that Pius XI, who died in 1939, gave public speeches against the race laws that "led in July 1938 to an open conflict with Mussolini".

Often the debate has involved Pius XII, who Jewish groups accuse of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust.

They are lobbying the Vatican to freeze his sainthood process even though Vatican officials say he worked silently behind the scenes and helped save many Jews.

Fini convinced his own party in the mid-1990s to dump neo-fascism and enter the mainstream of Italian politics. He has also visited Israel and the death camp at Auschwitz.
----

Hitler Led Kristallnacht

2008-11-02T09:30:00.002-05:00

NEWS

Hitler Led Kristallnacht

by Yated Ne'eman Staff
http://chareidi.shemayisrael.com/akrstlnchtnch69.htm
1 Cheshvan 5769 - October 31, 2008

A German historian researching the diaries of Josef Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, has revealed that Hitler himself led the Kristallnacht pogrom in Munich on November 9, 1938 as head of a Nazi group that razed Ohel Yaakov, the central synagogue of Munich, capital of Bavaria. Angela Hermann, a researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich, managed to decode a mysterious passage that has stumped scholars ever since this section of Goebbels diaries was retrieved from Moscow in 1992.

"We have real evidence now that Hitler pulled the strings, that he personally directed Kristallnacht," she said.

In his diary entry for November 9, the Nazi propaganda minister recounts a rally at the Munich Town Hall in which Hitler told him the police should let people vent their anger over the vom Rath assassination. "Hitler's Stosstrupp [Storm Troopers company] goes out immediately to clean up Munich...and a synagogue is smashed," he wrote.

This had historians puzzled, as there was no force known as ''Hitler's Stosstrupp'' in 1938, but Dr. Hermann found letters and documents showing that the term referred to the veterans of Hitler's failed attempt to seize power in 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. She uncovered invitations to Hitler's former comrades to attend a demonstration held on November 9th — the same 39 people who later razed the beis knesses under his command.

In a parallel development Israeli reporter and researcher Yaron Svoray recently found a massive dump north of Berlin that he claims was used as a dumpsite for Jewish property stolen and destroyed by the Nazis. Citing reliable sources he says most of the findings at the site arrived there following the looting of botei knesses and Jewish stores during Kristallnacht. Among the items found were mezuzas, wine bottles stamped with a Star of David and parts of windows and engraved chairs from a shul. Now the Holocaust Remembrance Museum at Kibbutz Lochamei HaGeta'ot is planning to send a youth delegation to the site to continue the digging.

Less than two weeks away is the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which marked a new low point in the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. The massive countrywide pogrom broke out after a Jewish teenager named Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris and shot dead diplomat Ernst vom Rath. By November 10th at least 92 Jews had been killed, over 200 botei knesses had been desecrated and thousands of Jewish businesses across the country had been looted."

Anti-Semitism in Romania today

2008-11-02T08:28:00.005-05:00

Anti-Semitism is alive and kicking in Romania

By Cellu Rozenberg
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1033348.html
Sun., November 02, 2008 Cheshvan 4, 5769

"Anyone in need of additional reminders of how much Romanians love the Jews could have found it in the recent destruction and desecration of some 200 graves in the great cemetery in Bucharest. Even though there are almost no Jews in Romania (their number is estimated at a mere few thousand, excluding Israelis who have gone there on business), anti-Semitism is nevertheless alive and kicking.

The graves that were destroyed and desecrated - a reminder of the large Jewish community, numbering some 800,000 people, half of which was destroyed in the Holocaust not by the Germans, but by Hitler's loyal allies, the Romanians - give no rest to some Romanians. This is not the first time such things have happened in Romania, but everyone keeps quiet, as if this were merely a bit of mischief.

The roots of Romanian anti-Semitism are planted deep in the country's soil, which is soaked with Jewish blood. In almost every city and town where Jews lived, they were routinely subject to murder and looting - carried out by ordinary citizens, but backed by the regime - both before World War II and after it. It is no wonder that historian Hannah Arendt described Romania as the most anti-Semitic country of all.

On the morning of June 29, 1941, 12,000 Romanian Jews, who were almost blindly loyal to the state, were led through the streets of the city of Iasi, humiliated and hungry, to the local police station, which became their slaughterhouse. It was the government that ordered the terrible massacre, in which my family, too, was murdered when the security forces began shooting in all directions. That, we will never forget.

By the end of World War II, most of the rest of Romania's Jews had also been systematically deported and eliminated. Thus following that war, many of the surviving Jews preferred to abandon communist Romania and move to Israel, albeit shorn of all their possessions. The communist regime did a thriving trade in Jews, demanding thousands of dollars for each one. They thereby stole additional money and property from the Jews. Under the communist regime, the Holocaust was never taught in Romanian schools. Only in 2004, due to external pressure, was the subject added to the curriculum.

But if anyone thought that a change had finally occurred over the last few years, if anyone hoped that anti-Semitism had been relegated to the boors who desecrate graves rather than pervading the government, then President Traian Basescu's remarks at a press conference at the Bucharest Airport upon his return from Syria a week ago reminded us that there is another Romania besides that of pastrami and wine - the Romania of anti-Semitism. Syria, Basescu said, is bordered by the following countries: Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine.

It is well known that Romania's president is not particularly well-educated, but as a former sea captain one would have expected him to at least know a little geography and history. Has it escaped him that there is as yet no country called Palestine, but that another country, admittedly small, nevertheless exists on Syria's border - one called Israel? It is a pity that the Foreign Ministry did not see fit to respond sharply to these remarks. It is still not too late.

Cellu Rozenberg is a historian who specializes in national security."

Muslims attack Jews in France

2008-09-15T18:31:00.003-04:00

Muslim immigrants attack three Jewish teens in Paris

By Yair Ettinger, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz Service and DPA
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1018853.html
08/09/2008

Three Jewish teens were attacked by a group of Muslim African immigrants in Paris on Saturday evening, a French police spokeswoman said Sunday.

The Jewish teens, ages 17 and 18, who have been identified as Dan Nebet, Kevin Bitan and David Boaziz, are leaders of the Bnei Akiva youth group in Paris' 19th District.

Thiery Nebet, Dan's father, told Haaretz over the phone that according to what his son had said, as they were walking down the street, "Four or five Arabs of African origin started to throw walnuts at Kevin. When he went up to them to ask them why they did it, they surrounded him and knocked him down. Kevin and David moved in and very quickly more Arabs joined in and started to beat the three with their fists and with chains."

The Jewish teens were hospitalized, one with a broken nose and jaw and all three with bruises, and filed a police report after their release. Police opened an investigation and are looking for the Muslim teenagers allegedly responsible for the attacks.

According to the chairman of the Jewish Students Union in France, Raphael Haddad, barrages of stones were thrown at the three teens during the attack. Haddad also said the incident occured on Petit Street in the 19th District, not far from where a 17-yea-ar-old Jewish youth was attacked and seriously injured by immigrants on June 21.

The attack is one of a long series of racial attacks in Europe in general and in France in particular. France has Western Europe's largest population of both Jews and Muslims.

The assault was condemned by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and was described by Jewish organizations as an act of anti-Semitism. The Jewish Agency's envoy in Paris, Rafi Zaush, told Army Radio that attacks in the 19th District are common but most incidents are less violent and therefore not reported by the media.

The French ministerial committee to fight racism and anti-Semitism showed concern over the incidents in the 19th District and turned to the mayor, requesting he beef up police presence ahead of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The French Ministry of the Interior confirmed that the attack was motivated by anti-Semitism, saying the incident ended with relatively little damage.

According to Thiery Nebet a large number of Jews live in the 19th District and, "The atmosphere here is difficult. Now I need to protect our sons so they will not talk a great deal, because that is what we were told by the community's security people. This time it was my son; it can be anyone. The Jews want to live in peace but it's impossible with the Arabs here. We go around with a skullcap and that bothers them, but we don't care. If we have to take off our skullcaps to live better, it's better to leave now."

Benjamin Touati, head of the French desk of World Bnei Akiva, said Sunday: "The situation is very worrisome. One hundred meters from the place of the attack is a Chabad school with 1800 female students."

----

Jewish teen brutally beaten in apparent anti-Semitic attack in Paris

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/995088.html
22/06/2008

A 17-year-old French Jew was attacked on Saturday night in Paris, an assault condemned by President Nicolas Sarkozy and said by Jewish organizations to be an act of anti-Semitism.

The young man, identified as Rudy Haddad by one Jewish organization, was attacked by youths of African origin, a police source said, and the National Agency of Vigilance Against Anti-emitism said he had been attacked with iron bars.

Police said five youths had been held for questioning, and one police source told Reuters the victim was suffering "serious neurological problems."

The Union of French Jewish Students said Haddad had been identified as Jewish because he was wearing a kippa (skullcap), and had suffered several broken ribs and a fractured skull and was in intensive care at a hospital in central Paris.

"The victim was wearing a kippa and was on his way back home when his attackers, after identifying him as Jewish, started to beat him," the union said.

The number of attackers was not known, varying from 6 or 7 to 30, depending on sources. Haddad's father told French radio RTL there were around 15 attackers.

Two police sources said the attack took place right after a skirmish between two groups of youths, one Jewish and the other of North African origin. They said it was unclear whether Haddad had taken part in the confrontation.

They said such skirmishes were a regular feature in the multi-confessional Buttes Chaumont neighbourhood in the 19th arrondissement of Paris.

The assault was immediately condemned by French President Nicola Sarkozy, who began a three-day visit to Israel on Sunday aimed at reinforcing his
image as an ally of the state.

"[Sarkozy] assures the victim and his family of his support and renews his total determination to fight all forms of racism and anti-Semitism," said a statement from Sarkozy's office.

Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie expressed her "profound emotion" and announced in a statement the opening of an investigation to determine the circumstances of the attack.

A 23-year-old French Jew, Ilan Halimi, was found naked, tortured and covered in burns near Paris on February 13, 2006, after being held captive for three weeks. He died on the way to the hospital.

The crime shocked France and raised fears of surging anti-Semitism among French Muslims.

In February of this year, another Jewish teenager was tortured in the same town in which Halimi was killed, in yet another anti-Semitic attack.

Antisemitism at the Pentagon

2008-08-05T23:20:00.006-04:00

Pentagon: We thought engineer was Israeli spy because he's a Jew

By Ofra Edelman, Haaretz Correspondent, and The Associated Press

(Left: David Tenenbaum, age 43, of Southfield, Michigan, is the Orthodox Jew who was accused of betraying United States military secrets to the Israelis back in 1997. (Detroit Free Press, via newscom.com) .)

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1008704.html

Wed., August 06, 2008 Av 5, 5768

The Pentagon has admitted in an internal report that it wrongly accused an army engineer from Michigan of spying for Israel because he was a Jew.

David Tenenbaum of Southfield is an Orthodox Jew and fluent in Hebrew. The Defense Department put him on paid leave in 1997 while it and the FBI investigated his ties to Israel.

He eventually was cleared of leaking military secrets, but says he has been vindicated by the report.

Tenenbaum was hired as an engineer by the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) in Warren, Michigan. The Pentagon report said Tenenbaum's knowledge of Hebrew made him a more attractive candidate, since it would facilitate working with Israel on various joint military projects, the Free Press reported.

"It was well known that Mr. Tenenbaum was Jewish, lived his religious beliefs and by his actions appeared to have a close affinity for Israel," the Pentagon report, which was released three weeks ago, said. "We believe that Mr. Tenenbaum was subjected to unusual and unwelcome scrutiny because of his faith and ethnic background, a practice that would undoubtedly fit a definition of discrimination."

In 2000, Tenenbaum filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, accusing it of employing "Naziesque" surveillance methods against Jews, according to the Detroit Free Press. Tenenbaum, who had sought more than $20 million in damages, said he was the subject of a federal investigation that "literally terrorized" him and his family, according to the Free Press.

Tenenbaum's lawyer told the Free Press that the investigation led the Army to shelve his client's Humvee armor project in 1995, a move that he said cost the lives of ill-equipped American soldiers deployed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tenenbaum still works at the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command in Warren. He told the Detroit Free Press he wants an apology from the Army and his accusers punished.

----

The Detroit News
Oakland County

Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Southfield

Pentagon affirms that man's faith led to spy accusations

Army employee was suspected of working for Israel because he was Jewish, a report says.

Gregg Krupa / The Detroit News
http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080805/METRO02/808050351

SOUTHFIELD -- A report from the Office of Inspector General of the Pentagon affirms what David Tenenbaum tried to tell people for 11 years: that being a Jew led to the false suspicions he was a spy for Israel.

During an investigation, including interrogations by the FBI in 1997, Tenenbaum was publicly suspected of providing classified information to Israel while he worked for the Tank Automotive and Armaments Command in Warren. Subsequently, the U.S. Department of Justice said it did not have evidence to prosecute, and Tenenbaum retrieved his security clearance -- at a higher level. But his lawsuit, aimed at establishing that he was wrongly suspected from the start, in part, because of discrimination, was rejected by federal courts.

"It is kind of hard to get back a reputation," Tenenbaum said. "When I came back to work in 1998, I was told by high-level people that my career was over. What I have seen is that was true."

Now, Tenenbaum has a 62-page report from the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Defense declaring that he "was subjected to unusual and unwelcome scrutiny because of his faith and ethnic background."

The report was issued July 13 after U.S. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Detroit, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, intervened.

Early newspaper reports of the accusations against Tenenbaum were published based on legal documents that federal officials later said should have been kept under seal.

"He's gone through hell," said lawyer Mayer Morganroth. "He still works for TACOM but they don't give him any meaningful assignments, anymore."

The inspector general's report includes an extensive appendix on a program that Tenenbaum had started to make Humvees and other equipment safer for soldiers. The lack of armor in the Humvees has been criticized as causing casualties during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which roadside bombs are frequently used.

When he was targeted, Tenenbaum and his lawyers say, the program was closed and never restarted.

"I knew there was a problem and I was working on it," Tenenbaum said. "The Department of Defense is going to have to explain why, when they knew there was a problem, no one was working on it."

Officials of the Department of Defense issued no comment Monday on Tenenbaum's assertions.

----

ABC News
Law & Justice

Army Engineer Cleared of Spying for Israel

Pentagon Report: Tenenbaum Wrongly Accused of Spying for Israel

http://www.abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=5516449&page=1
August 5, 2008

DETROIT (AP) - An Army engineer from Michigan says he's been vindicated by an internal Pentagon report that says he was wrongly accused of spying for Israel.

David Tenenbaum of Southfield is an Orthodox Jew and fluent in Hebrew. The Defense Department put him on paid leave in 1997 while it and the FBI investigated his ties to Israel. He eventually was cleared of leaking military secrets.

The Defense Department's Inspector General Office reported three weeks ago that Tenenbaum "was subjected to unusual and unwelcome scrutiny because of his faith and ethnic background."

Tenenbaum still works at the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command in Warren. He told the Detroit Free Press he wants an apology from the Army and his accusers punished.

Antisemitism in UK rises

2008-07-31T08:36:00.005-04:00

British Jewish watchdog: Anti-Semitic incidents in U.K. up 9% in 2008

By Haaretz Service
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1007372.html
Thu., July 31, 2008 Tamuz 28, 5768

The first six months of 2008 have seen a 9 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the United Kingdom compared to the same period last year, according to a U.K. organization for the defense of British Jewry.

The Community Security Trust (CST) stated in a press release that it recorded 266 anti-Semitic incidents during the first half of 2008. It recorded 244 such cases in the corresponding period in 2007.

According to the organization, the rise was based in smaller Jewish communities beyond the main centers of London and Manchester, and as such may reflect improved reporting from those areas.

CST spokesperson Mark Gardner said: "These figures reflect the fact that
Anti-Semitism can affect British Jews in the smallest communities as well as the largest."

There was also a significant increase in the number of reported incidents involving students, both on and off campus, the organization stated.

However, the CST did note that the number of violent anti-Semitic assaults has fallen by 24 per cent compared to the first six months of 2007, from 54 to 42 incidents.

Gardner added that, "The rise in anti-Semitic incidents affecting Jewish students is of particular concern and we will work with the Union of Jewish Students, university authorities and the government to tackle what is clearly a growing problem."

----

Jewish trust: Anti-Semitic attacks in U.K. soared during Lebanon war

By Assaf Uni, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/758156.html
03/09/2006

LONDON - The number of anti-Semitic incidents in Great Britain has risen sharply since the start of the Lebanon war, according to an organization dedicated to the safety of Britain's Jewish community.

According to Mark Gardner, spokesman of the Community Security Trust, there were over 90 incidents of anti-Semitism in Britain during July, including attacks on Jewish-owned stores, hate mail sent to representatives of the Jewish community and verbal and physical attacks on Jews in public. Over the past few years, the monthly average has been 10 to 30 such attacks.

The British report is merely the latest in a series of reports documenting an increase in anti-Semitic incidents throughout Europe in the past two months.

On Thursday, an all-party parliamentary inquiry into anti-Semitism in Britain will publish a report that is expected to declare anti-Semitism a serious problem and call on the government to fight it. Committee Chair Denis MacShane MP said in Saturday's London Times that the CST's figures "confirm the evidence given to us that anti-Semitic attacks are a very real problem."

Gardner told The Times that the July incidents "were more dispersed than usual," noting that "it is usually a small number [of people] responsible for a large number of attacks, but these were very widespread across the country and included graffiti attacks on synagogues in Edinburgh and Glasgow."

Hate mail sent to senior Jewish figures blamed them for the deaths of Lebanese children in Beirut, Gardner told The Times.

The public debate in Britain over the Israel Defense Forces' operations in Lebanon during the war was heated. It included mass antiwar demonstrations, political denunciations of Israel's "disproportionate use of force" and attempts to prevent the transfer of American weapons to Israel via Scottish airports.

Last week, Lord Janner was attacked in the House of Lords by fellow peer Lord Bramall during an argument over Israeli actions in Lebanon. "The number of anti-Semitic attacks reflects the mood music around Jews and Israel," Gardner told The Times.

The past two months have brought a steep increase in reported incidents of anti-Semitism around the world. The Australian Jewish Council reported a fivefold increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the country. Synagogues in Italy and Norway have been defaced and vandalized in recent weeks, and a monitoring organization in the Netherlands reported a "steep rise" in the number of anti-Semitic incidents there.

France: Two Arabs and a black man from a Muslim gang arrested and charged with assault

2008-07-21T02:11:00.004-04:00

Arab Primary Suspect in Assault on French Jew

By Arnon Yaffeh, Paris
Dei'ah veDibur: Information and Insight
14 Tammuz 5768 - July 17, 2008
http://chareidi.shemayisrael.com/afrancepnc68.htm

Two Arabs and a black man from a Muslim gang were arrested and charged with assaulting Rudy Ilan Haddad, 17, in Paris' 19th arrondissement. The first brought before the police lineup was a hulking skinhead who was identified as a career soldier in the French military. Fouad O., 26, was brought before the investigating judge as the primary suspect who allegedly struck Ilan Haddad on the head with a metal rod as he was on his way to the shul. The Arab soldier continued hitting the victim even after he lost consciousness, nearly killing him.

Last week policemen raided his parents' apartment, but didn't find him there. Later armed policemen arrested him while sleeping in his quarters at a French Air Force base, where he serves as a technician.

The fact that this time the French police made a concerted effort to arrest a suburban Arab who attacked a Jew indicates a change in government policy. Previously the government would try to downplay the severity of violent attacks against Jews. Still, the press is depicting the assault as a fight between Muslim and Jewish gangs.

According to reports President Sarkozy himself ordered the three arrested. The judge charged Fouad with "attempted murder and collective violence with antisemitic overtones under aggravated circumstances," as the charge sheet reads, and ordered his arrest for interrogation. The antisemitism she noted makes the charges more severe. His parents claimed he lived on the violent fringes of society until he enlisted in the military as a technician.

Another Muslim, referred to as Sekou M., is facing the same charges. He admits he was present when the group of Arabs and Africans attacked Haddad, but claims he stood off to the side and was not among the three assailants. The police reported he has a criminal record. The third suspect, a 27-year-old from Mali, was accused of injuring another Jew on that same Shabbos with a machete. Despite being charged with excessive violence he was released immediately. The judge rejected the prosecutor's request to keep him in custody as a menace. She also released four other suspects following their arrests for interrogation.

Despite the grave-sounding charges the assailants won't rot in jail for years pending trial, as is common in France, sometimes even in the case of light charges. But not for assaulting Jews. Five other Arabs charged with attempted murder were released one day after their arrest and were back on the streets. Judges don't stand up to the pressure, taking pity on the assailants and releasing them from custody.

The background and ages of the three suspects disprove reporters' claim the attack was part of a turf battle between local gangs, since the suspects are already several years past adolescence. Still, journalists insist on referring to them as "youths."

The victim, Rudy Haddad, was discharged from the hospital. His mother reports he suffers from memory loss and headaches. She accused the press of disseminating false reports. Her son was making his way to the synagogue alone when he was attacked and does not belong to a gang, not even Beitar. He had never been involved in gang fights. "It's not enough that they almost killed my son, but now they're also defaming him and tainting his reputation," she told a Jewish radio station.

Antisemitism in modern France grows

2008-06-22T16:19:00.005-04:00

Jewish teen brutally beaten in apparent anti-Semitic attack in Paris

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/995088.html
Sun., June 22, 2008 Sivan 19, 5768

A 17-year-old French Jew was attacked on Saturday night in Paris, an assault condemned by President Nicolas Sarkozy and said by Jewish organizations to be an act of anti-Semitism.

The young man, identified as Rudy Haddad by one Jewish organization, was attacked by youths of African origin, a police source said, and the National Agency of Vigilance Against Anti-emitism said he had been attacked with iron bars.

Police said five youths had been held for questioning, and one police source told Reuters the victim was suffering "serious neurological problems."

The Union of French Jewish Students said Haddad had been identified as Jewish because he was wearing a kippa (skullcap), and had suffered several broken ribs and a fractured skull and was in intensive care at a hospital in central Paris.

"The victim was wearing a kippa and was on his way back home when his attackers, after identifying him as Jewish, started to beat him," the union said.

The number of attackers was not known, varying from 6 or 7 to 30, depending on sources. Haddad's father told French radio RTL there were around 15 attackers.

Two police sources said the attack took place right after a skirmish between two groups of youths, one Jewish and the other of North African origin. They said it was unclear whether Haddad had taken part in the confrontation.

They said such skirmishes were a regular feature in the multi-confessional Buttes Chaumont neighbourhood in the 19th arrondissement of Paris.

The assault was immediately condemned by French President Nicola Sarkozy, who began a three-day visit to Israel on Sunday aimed at reinforcing his image as an ally of the state.

"[Sarkozy] assures the victim and his family of his support and renews his total determination to fight all forms of racism and anti-Semitism," said a statement from Sarkozy's office.

Interior Minister Michele Alliot-Marie expressed her "profound emotion" and announced in a statement the opening of an investigation to determine the circumstances of the attack.

A 23-year-old French Jew, Ilan Halimi, was found naked, tortured and covered in burns near Paris on February 13, 2006, after being held captive for three weeks. He died on the way to the hospital.

The crime shocked France and raised fears of surging anti-Semitism among French Muslims.

In February of this year, another Jewish teenager was tortured in the same town in which Halimi was killed, in yet another anti-Semitic attack.

----

Jewish teen tortured in French town where Ilan Halimi was killed

By Daniel Ben Simon, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/961212.html
Wed., May 28, 2008 Iyyar 23, 5768

The incident of brutal abuse began at 10 A.M. on February 22. Mathieu Roumi, 19, whose father is Jewish, was strolling through his neighborhood in the Paris suburb of Bagneux, which has been the site of violent riots by immigrants in the past two years. The suburb became notorious as the scene of Ilan Halimi's 2006 murder, which horrified France.

Roumi ran into two youths he knew. They discussed a sum of money that he supposedly owed them. An argument ensued, after which they beat him and, with the help of a third friend, dragged him to a dark basement. The three assailants were joined by three other youths, all neighborhood residents and neighbors of Roumi.

For two hours the attackers tortured the young man. One shoved cigarette butts into his mouth, another took issue with Roumi's Jewish origin, grabbed correction fluid and scrawled "dirty Jew" on his forehead. The six men proceeded to scream at him and threaten that he would die the way Halimi did.

They identified themselves as members of the "Barbarians," the same gang that kidnapped Halimi from his store, demanded ransom for his release, and when that was not forthcoming, tortured the 23-year-old over the course of three weeks. Moments after he was dumped on the street, Halimi died.

Roumi told police investigators that throughout his ordeal, his assailants employed measures with sexual and sadistic connotations. When the issue of his sexual orientation arose, one of them placed a condom on the tip of a stick and shoved it in Roumi's mouth.

"We admire Youssouf Fofana!" they shouted at him, referring to the leader of the gang that murdered Halimi. Fofana and 29 other suspects are on trial for abduction, torture and murder. If convicted, they can expect a life sentence.

Roumi's life was spared because one of the assailants, who owned the basement space, had to leave and take the key with him. Roumi was set free and returned home, battered and broken. When he got to his parent's home, they sent him immediately for a medical examination.

The next day Roumi went to the police. In a matter of hours, the six assailants were arrested. Most are in their 20s, two come from Muslim homes, two are "fully" French, and another two are African and Portuguese immigrants. They told interrogators that they had not meant to hurt Roumi.

Sami Gozlan, a former police investigator appointed by the Jewish community to monitor anti-Semitic incidents, visited the Roumi family the day after the incident.

"The family was in a terrible state," he told Haaretz Wednesday. "The father was weeping like a baby and couldn't believe that such a thing could happen to his son in France. The mother was also deeply upset. They told me that their younger children were forced to stay with relatives outside the neighborhood. Mathieu himself is still in shock."

"Sadly the lesson of Halimi's murder has not been learned," Gozlan added. "The fact that angry immigrant youth can kidnap a Jew in broad daylight and abuse him proves that the lesson has yet to be learned."

Jewish organizations condemned the attack and urged the authorities to increase police vigilance in mixed immigrant neighborhoods, where fear of attacks against Jews runs especially high.

----

Swastika drawn on French Jewish woman in anti-Semitic attack

By Yair Ettinger, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/852843.html
Last update - 16:36 27/04/2007

A young Jewish woman was viciously attacked on Thursday by unidentified assailants in a train station in Marseilles. The attack was described by one observer as the "worst anti-Semitic incident in France since the murder of Ilan Halimi" over a year ago.

French police investigating the incident have imposed a gag order on all details of the attack, but David Roche, a Jewish Agency representative in France who is in touch with officials there said the incident is being described as an anti-Semitic attack.

According to details received from Roche, the attack occured in the afternoon when a 22-year-old woman arrived at the metro station of the La Rose district - which has a mixed Muslim and Jewish community.

According to reports, two unidentified men of Middle Eastern appearance approached the woman and began abusing her. At some point, they began hitting her, and one report states that she was dragged by the hair.

When they saw a Star of David on her neck, they lifted her shirt and drew a cross on her abdomen. One of the witnesses said it was a swastika.

The two assailants fled the scene.

In a telephone interview from Paris, Roche told Haaretz that Marseilles police have set up a special investigation squad and are searching the La Rose district.

The young woman gave testimony to the police for many hours, and sources at the Jewish Agency say she was confused and found it difficult to tell her story.

----

Halimi murder sparks increased interest in immigration among French Jews

By Amiram Barkat
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=696519
Last update - 01:40 21/03/2006

The number of French Jews who are looking into the possibility of immigrating to Israel has doubled since the torture-slaying of Ilan Halimi last month. According to David Roche, European general director for the Jewish Agency, since the murder, dozens of French Jews have contacted the Jewish Agency to inquire about immigration.

In 2005, some 3,000 French Jews moved to Israel, compared to 2,400 in 2004.

Jewish Agency chairman Ze'ev Bielski, who is currently visiting Jewish communities in France, met yesterday with Jewish leaders, who told him of their concerns in the aftermath of the murder. Bielski also met with Halimi's mother, Ruth, and offered the Jewish Agency's assistance to her and the rest of the family.

"There is no hysteria among France's Jews," Bielski said, "but there is certainly an upturn in the number of people taking an interest in visiting Israel, as well as in housing and employment.

"The issue of employment is of the most concern," he added.

----

21 charged with kidnap, murder of Jewish man

By Haaretz Correspondent and Reuters , By Daniel Ben-Simon
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/955962.html
Thu., February 21, 2008 Adar1 15, 5768

Twenty-one people will be tried in France for the 2006 kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi, a French Jew, in a trial expected to generate a great deal of interest in the country's Jewish and African communities.

Another seven suspects face trial for failing to report a crime, while one will be tried in a court for children because she was under 16 at the time of the attack on Halimi.

Halimi, 23, was found naked, tortured and covered in burns near Paris on February 13, 2006, after being held captive for three weeks in a crime that shocked France and raised fears of surging anti-Semitism among French Muslims. He died of his injuries soon afterward.

The African community, which gave rise to the self-styled "gang of barbarians" accused of killing Halimi, says the suspects were motivated by money rather than anti-Semitism. The suspects include Muslim immigrants from North Africa, and immigrants from Congo and the Ivory Coast.

The self-proclaimed "brain of the Barbarians," Youssouf Fofana, was eventually arrested in the Ivory Coast. Fofana told police that he led the gang and organized Halimi's kidnapping, but has denied killing him. If he is convicted, he is expected to receive a life sentence.

Fofana and 18 other suspects are in jail pending the trial, which will be heard before a juvenile court because some were youths at the time of the attack. The other suspects have blamed Fofana for the abduction and murder, telling police he recruited them to the gang and that they joined because they didn't have anything better to do.

"We were bored," one of the suspects said.

No trial date was set, and a judicial source said it might not be held until 2009.

Police say the gang attempted to kidnap several Jewish youths before capturing Halimi. They then sent a series of ransom demands to his parents, asking for as much as 450,000 euros, but lengthy negotiations failed to secure his release.

The kidnappers used a pretty young woman - a blonde of Iranian descent - to entice Halimi into a trap, dragging the telephone salesman to a cellar where they proceeded to beat and torment him. Police investigators said the kidnappers acted with indescribable cruelty.

2007 rise in Anti-semitism

2008-06-02T23:41:00.004-04:00

Anti-Semitic incidents in Canada hit record high in 2007

By Rhonda Spivak
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/989445.html
Tue., June 03, 2008 Iyyar 29, 5768

WINNIPEG - Anti-Semitic incidents in Canada hit a record high in 2007, according to a recently released report by the League of Human Rights of B'nai Brith Canada.

The group recorded 1,042 anti-Semitic incidents in Canada in 2007, up 11.4% since 2006. A 59.1% increase was noted on Canadian college and university campuses.

In Montreal, anti-Semitic incidents increased 16 percent from 2006 to 2007, and regional Quebec showed a significant increase of 282 percent from the previous year.

The study also showed that over the past 10 years anti-Semitic incidents have jumped 400 percent in Canada.

Nearly 30 percent of all incidents in 2007 were attributed to internet activity. Of these, nearly one-third involved threatening or harassing communications.

Synagogues were targeted in 22 incidents, in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Richmond British Columbia, Hamilton and Barrie, Ontario. There were 28 incidents of violence in 2007, down from 30 in 2006. Incidents of harassment were up from 588 in 2006 to 699 in 2007.

"The 2007 findings indicate that anti-Semitism is not just at the fringes of Canadian society," Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B'nai Brith Canada said in a news release. He also noted that incidents are no longer "primarily confined to urban centers."

----

Anti-Semitic incidents rise in Germany, Australia, U.S. in 2007

By Anshel Pfeffer and Asaf Uni, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/948267.html
Thu., February 21, 2008 Adar1 15, 5768

The annual global report on anti-Semitism being presented to the cabinet Sunday morning points to a rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Germany, Australia, the United States and Ukraine together with an overall decrease in Western Europe. The largest number of incidents were recorded in Britain, followed by France.

Under pressure from Diaspora Jewish community leaders, particularly the Board of Deputies of British Jews, it was decided this year not to cite numbers of incidents but only to report general trends. In previous years there were discrepancies between the numbers in the Israeli report and data published by other countries.

The report, a joint government and Jewish Agency project, indicates a decline in anti-Semitic incidents in 2007 after the steep jump registered for 2006 in the wake of the Second Lebanon War. In countries where an increase did occur, such as Germany and Australia, this was tied to the strengthening of the radical right, along with aggression by local Muslim communities.

Rising anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S., including a 30-percent increase in New York, is also associated with racist activity by right-wing extremist groups.

In Ukraine, last year saw a move from spontaneous anti-Semitic acts to more organized activity within parties with anti-Semitic platforms and the distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda at universities and colleges. Contrary to President Victor Yushchenko's declarations during his visit to Israel two months ago, the government only recently began countering such activity.

Similar trends can be seen in other Eastern European countries. Anti-Semitism is rife in Russia, alongside general racism and xenophobia, but the central government has cracked down on the phenomenon over the past year.

The security director for the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Michael Whine, declined to comment on Britain's topping the list of anti-Semitic incidents in the Israeli report, saying only, "we are still going over our data."

In related news, the Muslim Council of Britain will participate for the first time in today's National Holocaust Memorial Day, chosen for the date that Auschwitz was liberated. The large umbrella organization decided two months ago to end its six-year boycott of the memorial day, a decision that followed accusations in recent years by the British government and Jewish organizations that its positions were anti-Semitic.

The city of Liverpool will host the main event, where speakers will include Britain's Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams.

----

Report: British Jews facing more anti-Semitic sentiment than ever

By Assaf Uni, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/759754.html
Mon., February 18, 2008 Adar1 12, 5768

LONDON - Britain's Jewish community faces an unprecedented level of anti-Semitism and feels more threatened than ever, according to the report of the all-party parliamentary inquiry into anti-Semitism, which is to be released Thursday.

The panel found an increase in "anti-Semitic discourse," particularly among leftist groupings, and recommends a series of actions to prevent the situation from deteriorating further.

Panel chairman Denis MacShane, who will present the report's conclusions to Prime Minister Tony Blair Thursday, told Haaretz Wednesday that the report rings the "alarm bells" for Britain.
The committee was created about a year ago in order "to investigate the current problem, identify the sources of contemporary anti-Semitism and make recommendations that we believe will improve the current situation."

Over 100 written statements were submitted to the 14 committee members, who span the political spectrum. Experts, politicians and public figures testified before the panel in four separate hearings.

The panel was initiated by members of Parliament and not intended to be an official inquiry.

According to the report, the number of anti-Semitic incidents reported in Britain has risen since 2000, accompanied by a decline in public support for Jews.

The panel attributed the escalation to flare-ups in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (but did not specify a direct connection), as well as the "anti-Semitic discourse" being held openly among Muslims, the extreme left and, to a lesser extent, the extreme right.

"It is this phenomenon that has contributed to an atmosphere where Jews have become more anxious and more vulnerable to abuse and attack than at any other time for a generation or longer," the report said.

"We are ringing the alarm bells for Britain," MacShane told Haaretz, to tell the people that the country's Jews are unable to live lives free of fear and to enjoy cultural, community and religious life without the constant fear of being attacked.

He said that one of the most important findings of the panel is that most Britons are simply unaware of the serious problem of anti-Semitism in their country.

Great Britain is home to 300,000 Jews, two-thirds of whom live in the Greater London area. The recommendations in the 66-page report include better reporting of anti-Semitic incidents on the part of the police and an investigation of why only ten percent of such incidents result in a suspect being accused.

"The Panel recommends that the Home Office require police forces nationwide to record such incidents using the current Metropolitan police model of categorizing such incidents as both racist and anti-Semitic."

It "calls on the Department for Communities and Local Government to commission an annual survey of attitudes and tensions between Britain's communities to be monitored by the Commission for Racial Equality," and places great emphasis on combating anti-Semitism on university campuses and on limiting "traditional broadcast and internet access to racist, including anti-Semitic, material."

One of the more interesting chapters of the report deals with the public mood in Britain, which, according to the authors, changes markedly "when Jews are discussed, whether in print or broadcast, at universities, or in public or social settings."

The report warns against the growth of a "new anti-Semitism" that transfers the traditional stereotypes about Jews to Israel, as a Zionist state. "We heard evidence that contemporary anti-Semitism in Britain is now more commonly found on the left of the political spectrum than on the right."

MacShane believes that the academic boycott of Israel by the Association of University Teachers (which was later reversed) and the decision by the Anglican Church to re-examine its investments in companies with ties to the Israel Defense Forces contribute to anti- Semitism.

He said the decision to focus on Israel while ignoring all the non-democratic regimes in the world is hypocritical and contributes to the Jews' feeling like "second-class citizens" who are spurned by certain elements in the country.

The publication of the report coincides with the celebration this month of the 350th anniversary of the Jewish presence in Britain. "I've been here for 11 years and I never thought it would get so bad," said Linda Cohen, an Israeli who was assaulted about two weeks ago in an anti-Semitic incident in the largely Jewish London neighborhood of Golders Green.

Cohen, the owner of a Jewish-Israeli cafe, said, "I didn't know there was anti-Semitism in Britain until two young men assaulted me verbally and physically after asking whether this was a Jewish cafe."

According to the report, anti-Semitism in contemporary Britain is a complex issue. "Anti-Semitism is not one-dimensional. It is perpetrated in different ways by different groups within society and for this reason it is hard to identify."

MacShane hopes the report will draw a lot of attention to the situation of Britain's Jewish community. He says another MP on the committee told him that his constituents are completely unaware of the things heard by the panel over the last year.

Palestinians depicting Jews as enemies

2008-05-13T07:45:00.001-04:00

Cartoon film on Nakba describes Jews as 'enemies of homeland'
By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/982336.html
Tue., May 13, 2008 Iyyar 8, 5768

Jewish fighters are shown shooting Palestinians and bombing their villages in an animated film by Gaza-based women marking 60 years since Israel was founded and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced.

"The Tale of a Key" describes the Jews as "enemies of the religion and enemies of the homeland" and is meant to highlight what the illustrators called the "holy" right of dispossessed Palestinians to return to land that is now part of Israel.

The women behind the film, who run a production company in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, say they are not politically aligned but want to teach Palestinian children and adults about the events that drove them from their homeland.

"It tells of the suffering, the killing and displacement," said Moamena Abu Hamda, director of the JohaToon company in Gaza City. "It shows that the Palestinian people did not leave their land by their own will but they were forced to do it."

Hamas's Al-Aqsa Television drew Israeli and international censure last year for using cartoons and puppet-shows featuring Mickey Mouse and Lion King lookalikes to illustrate the Islamist movement's battle against Israel, which it does not recognise.

JohaToon plans to screen the 32-minute film, which it says is for adults as well as children, in Gaza this month and hopes to market it in other Arab countries and further afield.

Some 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in the war that led to the founding of Israel in 1948.

About 4.5 million refugees and their descendents now live in squalid camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Most of the Gaza Strip's 1.5 million residents are either refugees or their descendants and live in eight densely populated camps and four cities.

Refugees cling to a "right of return" and their fate is one of the thorniest issues facing negotiators who are trying to reach a deal this year to create a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank -- land Israel occupied in 1967 Middle East war.

While Israel celebrates its 60th birthday with fireworks, parties and military display this month, Palestinians hold rallies to mourn the "Nakba", or "catastrophe" of displacement and to highlight the refugee problem.

Abu Hamda insisted "The Tale of the Key" - which refers to the keys many Palestinians carry as symbols of their lost homes - was not meant to incite violence against Israelis but to recount stories passed down from previous generations.

"We have laid down facts as we heard them from our grandfathers and grandmothers," Abu Hamda told Reuters. "We told the tale as we heard and as people saw it."

Confonting anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism on Facebook, YouTube, Google and the web

2008-02-22T04:08:00.006-05:00

Anti-Semitism 2.0 Going Largely Unchallenged

Old-guard groups seen slow in recognizing viral threat from Facebook, YouTube.

by Tamar Snyder
Staff Writer
http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c37_a4553/News/National.html
02/20/2008

More than 35,000 people have joined the Facebook group “Israel is not a country! ... Delist it from Facebook as a country!”

Type “Jew” into the search function on YouTube, and you’ll discover a host of anti-Semitic videos, including “911 Jew Spy Scandal 3” and a video clip in which National Polish Party’s Leszek Bubel declares himself a “proud anti-Semite.”

And Google Earth, the satellite-mapping program, recently came under fire when officials from Kiryat Yam filed a lawsuit against Google after the Internet giant refused to take down a note posted by user Thameen Darby claiming that the northern Israeli town was founded on the remains of the Arab village of Ghawarina.

This is the new face of anti-Semitism: Anti-Semitism 2.0. And it’s potentially more hazardous than the relatively straightforward smear campaigns and petitions of yesteryear.

Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and Google Earth thrive on communities in which users generate and share information in the form of videos, photos and blog posts, which are subject to vague terms of service and seemingly arbitrary censorship.

This leaves the door open for anti-Semites across the globe to co-opt these applications to spread messages of hate, often failing to distinguish between Jews and Israel when comparing Jews to Nazis and Israel to apartheid South Africa, observers say.

“This phenomena is spreading anti-Semitism and acceptability of anti-Semitism in new and increasingly effective ways,” says Andre Oboler, a Legacy Heritage Fellow who runs ZionismOnTheWeb.org and is a post-doctoral fellow studying online public diplomacy at Bar-Ilan University.

“Now in the Web 2.0 world, the social acceptability of anti-Semitism can be spread, public resistance lowered and hate networks rapidly established,” Oboler said.

What’s worse, Oboler contends, Jewish organizations are behind the times and are not devoting the resources necessary to stop the hate virus from spreading.

Many at the helm of these large organizations have yet to sign up for a Facebook account, don’t spend much time on YouTube and aren’t all that sure what Google Earth is.

“Community leaders tend to be the sort of people who are too busy to spend time looking at YouTube videos,” Oboler says. “They are very, very focused on old media, which is a bit strange, since a lot of people their age are online.”

The average American YouTube viewer is 39, and 33.5 percent of Facebook users are between 35 and 54 years old.

The more tech-savvy among community leaders realize just how grave the situation is — but have all but shaken their heads at the impossibility of making a dent in the large volume of hate messages being spread. As Myrna Shinbaum, spokeswoman for the Anti-Defamation League retorted, “We can’t sit here all day monitoring YouTube and Facebook.” (The organization does report objectionable material to service providers. “But the minute they do the right thing and pull something down, another pops up,” says Deborah Lauter, ADL’s national civil rights director. “It takes constant vigilance and policing.”)

Yet we live in a world in which “truth” often belongs to the Web site with the highest Google ranking and the most hits, regardless of its credibility. Therefore, anti-Semitism 2.0 is arguably far more serious than its previous Web incarnations. And when it comes to social networking sites, the stakes are higher since the reach is that much greater, Oboler contends.

On Facebook, for example, information spreads in a viral fashion. When users join a group or sign up to promote a cause, their friends are automatically notified in their “news feeds.” They then have the option of joining, too, spreading the message even further. “The message thus spreads not only across geographic boundaries, but also across social groups,” explains Oboler.

The “Israel is not a country!” group, for example, attracted 35,000 members as of press time. Assuming each member has approximately 150 friends (a lowball estimate), then the group — which decries Israel as an apartheid regime and claims that Israel has no right to exist — will have been advertised to more than 5.25 million people.

In response, several Facebook users established counter-groups, such as the “Palestine is not a country” and even “causes” such as “Facebook needs to delete the group ‘Israel is a terrorist country we all hate Israel!’” which more than 19,000 people have joined. Although “Israel is not a country!” no longer shows up in search results, “Israel: Terrorist State,” “I Hate Israel,” and some 75 groups like it still exist.

With larger Jewish organizations largely failing to combat anti-Semitism 2.0, much of the legwork has been left to individuals (many of them under 40) who lack both financial backing and the time to devote themselves fully to tracking and wiping out anti-Semitism in this new medium for spreading hate. “They see something, get annoyed and have to do something about it,” Oboler says. “But there’s no greater strategy behind it.”

Dovid, an Orthodox businessman in his late 30s, is one of the lone rangers on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site that — according to Alexa, a company that measures Web traffic — is the second-most visited site on the Web. He has posted more than 150 pro-Israel videos on YouTube, generating more than 1.3 million video views — and thousands of hateful and insidious comments (which is why he requested that The Jewish Week not print his last name).

“A little over a year ago, I was searching YouTube and there was so much really, really vile stuff out there,” he says. So he posted trailers from the 2005 movie “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.”

“I wanted to get the message out there,” he says.

Using the name “CheckItOutNowNYC,” he continued to spend hours each week searching for videos that highlighted a positive image of Israel and the Jews, including one featuring Bob Dylan performing “Hava Nagilah.” More than 50,000 people have viewed his video, “See the Humane Treatment of a Palestinian Woman by Israel,” a three-minute NBC News clip about a female suicide bomber who entered Israel using a special medical permit but was caught with 20 pounds of explosives.

Dovid labels each video with background information and resources for those interested in learning more. The number of page views is staggering, as are the more than 100 comments he receives a day. But it’s very time-consuming, he says.

“I wish there were 50 guys like me downloading videos and reposting them,” Dovid said.

He’s since posted videos promoting Jewish organizations including Nefesh B’Nefesh and Efrat C.R.I.B. (Committee for the Rescue of Israel’s Babies). Yet he wonders why these organizations aren’t creating their own YouTube channel and posting their videos themselves.

“Super-large Jewish organizations are really slow,” he says. “But the goal is to get the videos out there. We need Jews to take a proactive stance to educate the public.”

A few Jewish organizations are warming up to Facebook. The Consulate General of Israel in New York and the Embassy of Israel in Washington, D.C., both have Facebook pages, but they’ve each garnered less than 1,000 “fans.” The ADL has a Facebook page, too, but it’s a rather dormant unofficial page created by a high school student.

Among the handful of organizations that are first beginning to explore social networking as a possible avenue for promotion, most lack a comprehensive understanding of how Web 2.0 works.
“Various organizations have a policy that they won’t link to other sites,” Oboler says. “This is counterproductive. Web 2.0 is about sharing. The way a Web site gets popular is partly related to the number of links and how high up they are on Google.”

“Organizations — especially the younger ones — are now realizing that Facebook, YouTube and other such Web sites are an important medium for reaching out to Jewish and non-Jewish students alike to talk about Israel,” said Dani Klein, campus director of the pro-Israel activism group StandWithUs. StandWithUs often records on-campus events and lectures and posts them on the Web.

“There will be 50 to 100 people in the room hearing the lecture, but the number of people who can watch it on the Web grows exponentially,” Klein said.

Since 2005, StandWithUs has been actively using Web 2.0 to connect with Jewish and pro-Israel students on campus. It created a Facebook page, posts events and uploaded videos to the Web site, including the protest against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad’s speech at Columbia University. In addition to the StandWithUs Facebook page, the organization created a Facebook page for Israel, where Klein posts YouTube videos highlighting Israel’s technological innovations and humanitarian efforts, as well as important links and resources.

In what may be viewed as a hopeful sign, the organization is in the process of creating a multinational online task force to monitor Facebook, YouTube and other Web 2.0 applications and find problematic videos and groups that need responses. The task force would then work on posting educated, rational comments on these pages, hoping to sway those who joined anti-Israel groups out of peer pressure.

“The people who started these groups are most likely in the top 10 percent who are staunchly anti-Israel,” Klein said, adding that they are probably not easily swayed. Instead, StandWithUs will reach out to the majority of the group, who he calls “casual Palestinian supporters” who joined because their friends invited them or because “it’s hip to be anti-Israel.”

“We’ve always known it was a problem,” said Klein. “As individuals, we try to combat it. But we need to do more.”

Antisemitism in Sweden

2008-02-20T02:12:00.002-05:00

Sweden accused of persecuting civil servant for pro-Israel views

By Cnaan Liphshiz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/956205.html
Wed., February 20, 2008 Adar1 14, 5768

An employee of the Swedish Migration Board sued the organization last month for what he considers unlawful demotion for his support of Israel and the U.S., which he expressed in his personal Web site. The parties met last week at the Goteborg District Court for a first hearing on the case.

Lennart Eriksson, 51, told Haaretz by phone that his boss, Eugene Palmer, had demoted him last September from the position of manager of an asylum assessment unit - which he had held for six years - to manager of one of the board's shelters. Eriksson maintains that in effect, the demotion constitutes dismissal.

The board - the government body handling immigrants - disagrees with this.

Eriksson, who is not Jewish, also said he viewed his demotion as a form of political persecution.

According to Eriksson, Palmer told him he had seen Eriksson's Web site and that Eriksson's views were both "unusual and controversial." According to Eriksson, Palmer told him he was being demoted because of the Web site, and that running such a site was inappropriate for a senior official of the migration board.

He said his site "does not and has never contained hateful or acrimonious ideas."

The board's press officer, Marie Andersson, said the board "strongly denies that it persecutes any of its employees." She added: "Under the Swedish Secrecy Act [Sekretesslagen], the board is not at liberty - and we do not find it appropriate either - to discuss one of our employees and the specifics of this particular case."

The board had confirmed in previous queries by the Swedish media that Eriksson had been "transferred" as a result of the opinions he expressed on his Web site. Andersson said the board finds it "crucial to preserve people's confidence in the organization."

This, she says, makes it essential "for employees to not show that they are in favor of one side in a conflict which leads people to seek refuge in Sweden." It is particularly important for staff in leading positions to "show impartiality," she said.

But Eriksson says that at least one of his former colleagues, Arne Malmgren, is a veteran pro-Palestinian activist working against human rights violations in the West Bank and Lebanon. Malmgren and his wife, Birgitta Elfstrom - who also worked at the board until retiring recently - are quoted in the international media in this context.

The board never approached Malmgren on this issue and has even recently promoted him, says Eriksson. Press officer Andersson would only say on this issue that "Mr. Malmgren has not been promoted to a position as head of any unit."

Israel's former ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, said he was not surprised by the incident.

"The people who fired Eriksson took the lead from a prevalent anti-Israel atmosphere in Sweden's corridors of power," he said. Dr. Mikael Tossavainen, a Swedish-born researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said he considered the incident a danger to free speech.

Upon hearing about the case, the vice chair of the Sweden-Israel Friendship Society, Ilya Meyer, launched a public campaign to raise awareness about what he calls political persecution apparent in Eriksson's case.

"If someone from another country had suffered the treatment to which Eriksson has been subjected, the victim would be granted political asylum in Sweden on the grounds of political persecution," Meyer said.

Killers of French Jew arrested

2008-02-18T23:33:00.003-05:00

France sends 29 to trial over kidnap and murder of Jewish man

By The Associated Press
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/955527.html
Tue., February 19, 2008 Adar1 13, 5768

French judges are sending 29 people to trial for the torture and killing of a young Jewish man two years ago, judicial authorities said Monday.

The 2006 kidnapping, torture and killing of Ilan Halimi revived concerns about anti-Semitism in France.

Authorities found the 23-year-old naked, handcuffed and covered with burn marks near railroad tracks in the Essonne region south of Paris.

He died on the way to the hospital after being held captive for more than three weeks.

Authorities said 21 of the suspects, including alleged ringleader Youssouf Fofana, would be tried by a youth court, because two of them were minors at the time of the killing in February 2006.

Their trial is expected to be held behind closed doors, and is not expected before next year.

Eight others will be tried by other courts.

Chief suspect Fofana, 27, risks life imprisonment. He faces charges of kidnapping and of acts of torture and murder with religious, racial or ethnic motives. He is also accused of five other attempted kidnappings.

Fofana, a Frenchman of Ivorian descent, fled to Ivory Coast and was arrested there and extradited to France.

Halimi, a resident of a Parisian suburb, was lured by a young woman who entered the shop where he worked and persuaded him to meet her in another suburb, where he was kidnapped by a gang of youths, most of them immigrants.

He was laid to rest at the Givat Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem exactly a year after the murder in a ceremony attended by hundreds of people.

Lithuanian parade mocks Jews

2008-02-09T20:54:00.000-05:00

Vilnius Catholics derogatorily portray Jews in holiday parade

By Michael Casper, The Forward
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/952553.html
Sun., February 10, 2008 Adar1 4, 5768

VILNIUS, Lithuania - Last month, a samba group in Rio de Janeiro caused an international furor when it announced its intention to participate in the city's Carnival event on a float depicting Holocaust victims. After outcries from the Brazilian Jewish community, a judge banned the group from using the float.

Although less well known, a similarly questionable effort to celebrate the same holiday takes place in this city, once known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania because of the breadth and piety of its Jewish community.

During Carnival - or Uzgavenes, as it is known in Lithuania - Catholics from around the world congregate for a feast of foods prohibited during Lent. The festival usually involves a parade or circus, with attendees in masks and costumes. But in Vilnius - commonly known to Jews as Vilna - participants traditionally dress and act "as Jews," a feat that generally calls for masks with grotesque features, beards and visible ear locks and that is often accompanied by peddling and by stereotypically Jewish speech.

Perhaps even more shockingly, the "festivities" extend beyond the parade itself and into a Halloween-style trick-or-treating. When Simonas Gurevicius, the 26-year-old executive director of the Jewish Community of Lithuania, opened the door to his house during last year's Uzgavenes, he was greeted by two children dressed in horns and tails, reciting a song that translates as, "We're the little Lithuanian Jews/We want blintzes and coffee/If you don't have blintzes/Give us some of your money." (It rhymes in Lithuanian.)

"They understand it as Halloween, a time to have fun and adventures," Gurevicius said. "On the one hand, it is important to respect the traditions of the country. On the other hand, psychologically it stays in their brain: The image of the Jew will be closely associated with the image from the festival."

Jewish history in Lithuania, centuries long and distinguished by a profusion of yeshivas and Torah scholars, nearly ended when most of the country's Jewish community was exterminated during the Holocaust. Today, the small but close-knit community hosts school groups at its center for educational sessions on Jewish life.

But according to Gurevicius, members of the Jewish community do not speak out against the parade, because they wish to avoid conflict with Lithuanians. "For sure, the Jewish people don't like so much the way Jews are shown with the other creatures," he said. But "someone could say we don't understand the humor. People think it's normal."

Diana, a 20-year-old Jewish medical student from Vilnius who did not wish to give her last name, was surprised to learn that Lithuanians dress as Jews during Uzgavenes. "It's not the most pleasant thing, but it could be worse" she said, adding that "they could be smashing menorahs" - a reference to protests surrounding the erection of a large menorah in the Lithuanian town of Siauliai last December.

Last Saturday, hundreds gathered in front of city hall in the capital to celebrate. The Web site of the Vilnius City Municipality promised that during Uzgavenes, which is an official holiday in Lithuania, "creatures wearing different masks - devils, witches, deaths, goats, Gypsies, and other joyful and scaring characters - hang around." Claiming to be dressed as a Jew, one woman tried to convince spectators to buy dirty handkerchiefs.

Although typical costumes include farm animals and monsters, masquerading is sometimes broadly referred to as "eiti zydukais," or "going as Jews," regardless of how one dresses.

The Roma do not fare better. Participants who masquerade as "Gypsies" wear gaudy makeup, hold babies and ask bystanders for money.

Last Friday, Vilnius's Center of Ethnic Activity hosted an exhibition of Uzgavenes masks and screened archival footage of past celebrations. Masks of Jews were displayed between those of witches and animals, and shown with no apparent compunction to cultural delegates from Latvia and Denmark. In a video shot in Vilnius last year, a man dressed as a Jew carrying a briefcase full of toilet paper haggled with cab drivers as he led a group of people made up as beasts through the streets.

"From my point of view," said Svetlana Novopolskaja, director of the Roma Community Centre of Vilnius, "Lithuanians like to dress as Roma, like their music and habits, but don't like Roma as people. They accept them as personages from fairy tales - as hobbits, for example - and are surprised and afraid when they meet real Roma."

Ethnologist Inga Krisciuniene, who works at the Centre of Ethnic Activity, led the event, explained how she believed that in earlier times, Jews and Gypsies dressed alike. Revelers wore the same mask on Uzgavenes to depict them, so that the characters were distinguishable only by performers' actions. When asked whether it could be seen as offensive to mock these minorities, Krisciuniene replied, "No one has ever complained." The intent, she said, is humorous.

"Besides," she added, "it's true that Gypsies steal."

Holocaust carnival float in Brazil

2008-02-09T20:41:00.000-05:00

Brazil judge bans carnival float depicting naked Holocaust victims

By The Associated Press
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/950111.html
Sat., February 02, 2008 Shvat 26, 5768

A judge issued an order Thursday prohibiting a Rio samba group from parading during carnival with a float depicting naked bodies of Holocaust victims.

Judge Juliana Kalichsztein issued the injunction against the float in response to a lawsuit by the Jewish Federation of Rio de Janeiro, which asked for the float be removed from this city's famed carnival parade next week, a spokeswoman for the judge told reporters.

The Jewish Federation of Rio de Janeiro filed the lawsuit under federal laws prohibiting Nazi propaganda and racism in Brazil, said Lara Voges, a court spokeswoman.

Viradouro, a top Rio samba group who planned the float, said it would not comment until its president saw the court's decision. The float was designed to remind carnival-goers of past horrors to prevent them from happening again, the group said.

But Jewish leaders were outraged by the float, which contained piles of naked mannequins meant to depict corpses of Holocaust victims.

"It's inadmissible that they could have a parade float depicting dead Jews and a live Hitler on top of them," said federation spokesman Jose Roitberg.

Rio de Janeiro state Judge Juliana Kalichszteim agreed, calling Viradouro's plans a clear trivialization of barbaric events.

Carnival should not be used as a tool for the cult of hate, any form of racism, the judge said.

Rio's two-night Samba parade, featuring thousands of scantily clad and elaborately plumed dancers, is the high point of Brazil's carnival celebrations and is televised nationally in a country of 185 million people.

During the event, Rio's 12 top-tier samba groups each present an 80-minute parade featuring hundreds of drummers and thousands of dancers who compete to be the year's champion.

Each group chooses a theme reflected in music, costumes and floats.

Viradouro, which is scheduled to parade early Monday morning, chose the theme, It Gives You Goose Bumps, featuring floats depicting the shock of birth and cold, along with the pile of Holocaust victims.

Although the samba group refused to say whether it had planned to have a dancing Hitler, it was listed in the official parade description as part of the float.

According to Kalichszteim's decision, the group would face fines of 200,000 reals ($113,000) if it ignored her order by parading with the mannequins and 50,000 reals ($28,000) for each dancer dressed as Hitler.

News of the float drew worldwide attention. Earlier this week, the international Jewish human rights group Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a statement of protest.

On Wednesday, a second-division samba group agreed to remove swastikas from dancers' costumes following complaints from the Rio Jewish federation. The group, Estacio de Sa, also agreed to drop a section of the parade named after Hitler.

"I think it's in terribly bad taste," said sociologist and carnival scholar Roberto DaMatta. "But it makes sense considering the festival's sacrilegious origins," he added.

"The only problem is we're not in the Middle Ages anymore. It doesn't work in a modern society," DaMatta said.

Past carnival groups have had to change floats because of the Roman Catholic Church, which doesn't want depictions of the Virgin Mary or Christ.

In 2004, the Grande Rio group had to alter a float depicting Adam and Eve having sex and another featuring sexy scenes from Hinduism's Kama Sutra after the Catholic Church sued over its parade advocating condom use.

----

Holocaust carnival float shocks in Brazil

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/01/30/2149858.htm?section=justin
Posted Wed Jan 30, 2008 11:39am AEDT
Updated Wed Jan 30, 2008 12:25pm AEDT

Jewish groups in Brazil have expressed disgust over a controversial float to appear in Brazil's upcoming carnival parade that depicts dead victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

The display, by the Unidos da Viradouro school, will be sandwiched among 11 others that are to parade along the city's carnival avenue on Sunday.

In dramatic contrast to the floats carrying sequined, scantily clad dancers smiling and gyrating, the Holocaust entry will show only motionless, skeletal figures piled on top of each other.

Its creator defended the float, which will move along under the theme "It's Horrifying".

"It's a very respectful float. It's going to depict it [the Holocaust] as a sort of alarm, so that it never be repeated," the creator, Paulo Barros, said.

"I believe the carnival is also a way of showing what happens in the world," he said.

But Brazilian Jewish groups are not seeing it that way.

'Tragedy in their skin'

Sergio Niskier, the president of the Israelite Federation of Rio de Janerio, said it was "inappropriate" to punctuate the festival atmosphere of carnival with a scene symbolising the systematic murder of 6 million people in Nazi concentration camps between 1938 and 1945.

"Really, it makes no sense to highlight this issue with drums and dancing girls when there are still survivors of that horror and many of their descendants who carry the mark of that tragedy in their skin," he told reporters.

Barros, however, said he informed the Jewish group of his plans months ago.

"They were anxious about putting this float in a carnival atmosphere," he admitted.

But, he predicted: "When the float goes by, people will feel respect."

A counterpart at the rival Grande Rio samba school, Roberto Szaniecki - himself of Polish Jew descent - disagreed.

"It's insensitive. The parade is going to be broadcast in Europe. I don't have grandparents because of the Holocaust," he told the newspaper O Dia.

- AFP

More Antisemitism in: United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, United States

2008-01-26T21:22:00.000-05:00

Anti-Semitic incidents rise in Germany, Australia, U.S. in 2007

By Anshel Pfeffer and Asaf Uni, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/948267.html
Sun., January 27, 2008 Shvat 20, 5768

The annual global report on anti-Semitism being presented to the cabinet Sunday morning points to a rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Germany, Australia, the United States and Ukraine together with an overall decrease in Western Europe. The largest number of incidents were recorded in Britain, followed by France.

Under pressure from Diaspora Jewish community leaders, particularly the Board of Deputies of British Jews, it was decided this year not to cite numbers of incidents but only to report general trends. In previous years there were discrepancies between the numbers in the Israeli report and data published by other countries.

The report, a joint government and Jewish Agency project, indicates a decline in anti-Semitic incidents in 2007 after the steep jump registered for 2006 in the wake of the Second Lebanon War. In countries where an increase did occur, such as Germany and Australia, this was tied to the strengthening of the radical right, along with aggression by local Muslim communities.

Rising anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S., including a 30-percent increase in New York, is also associated with racist activity by right-wing extremist groups.

In Ukraine, last year saw a move from spontaneous anti-Semitic acts to more organized activity within parties with anti-Semitic platforms and the distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda at universities and colleges. Contrary to President Victor Yushchenko's declarations during his visit to Israel two months ago, the government only recently began countering such activity.

Similar trends can be seen in other Eastern European countries. Anti-Semitism is rife in Russia, alongside general racism and xenophobia, but the central government has cracked down on the phenomenon over the past year.

The security director for the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Michael Whine, declined to comment on Britain's topping the list of anti-Semitic incidents in the Israeli report, saying only, "we are still going over our data."

In related news, the Muslim Council of Britain will participate for the first time in today's National Holocaust Memorial Day, chosen for the date that Auschwitz was liberated. The large umbrella organization decided two months ago to end its six-year boycott of the memorial day, a decision that followed accusations in recent years by the British government and Jewish organizations that its positions were anti-Semitic.

The city of Liverpool will host the main event, where speakers will include Britain's Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams.

Ms. Magazine accused of being anti-Israel

2008-01-18T02:03:00.000-05:00

‘Feminist Moment Of Truth’

Ms. magazine’s refusal to print pro-Israel ad raises questions about the ‘Palestinianization’ of the women’s movement.

by Stewart Ain
Staff Writer
The Jewish Week
http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c36_a2011/News/New_York.html#

Ms. Magazine’s rejection of an ad celebrating three Israeli women leaders has prompted Jewish feminists here to charge that the magazine has adopted an anti-Israel posture.

“This is a feminism that has been utterly Palestinianized,” said Phyllis Chesler, one of five Jewish feminists who lashed out at the magazine this week.

Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance founder Blu Greenberg told a press conference at the offices of the American Jewish Congress, whose ad Ms. Magazine rejected, that the leaders of the magazine “have aligned themselves with those on the political far left whose agenda is to totally de-legitimate Israel on the stage of world opinion.”

Francine Klagsbrun, an author and Jewish Week columnist, termed this a “feminist moment of truth.” “I call on Ms. to stand up to the pernicious pressures of anti-Israel prejudice among its readers,” she said. “If it fails in this and caters to anti-Israel sentiments, then it has failed the revolution and those of us who have continued to believe in it.”

But Katherine Spillar, the executive editor of Ms. Magazine, defended the magazine’s rejection of the proposed ad that featured pictures of Dorit Beinisch, the president of Israel’s supreme court; Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, and Dalia Itzik, the speaker of the Knesset. Under their names were the words, “This is Israel.”

“We don’t do pro-country ads,” Spillar said. In addition, she suggested, it is misleading.
“Israel does not have equality [between men and women],” she explained in a phone interview. “There is no country where women share power equally with men. The ad implies” otherwise.

And in a statement, Spillar said the ad could be seen as favoring certain political parties over other parties because two of the women belong to the same party.

Harriet Kurlander, director of the AJCongress’s Commission for Women’s Empowerment, said none of those reasons were given to her when she tried to place the ad. “They said we can’t take the ad because it’s too controversial,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Why, we are saluting three women who have achieved high office in Israel. This is not about settlements or borders or Jerusalem.’ I was in a state of shock.” The magazine’s representative later told her, Kurlander said, that if the ad were accepted, “it would create a firestorm.”

Kurlander said the magazine’s rejection of the ad has created a firestorm of a different kind. She said that more than 4,300 people have e-mailed a form letter to the magazine protesting its action. (Spillar said the figure was closer to 2,000). And Kurlander said it has galvanized Jewish feminists across the country.

Novelist Cynthia Ozick sent a letter to the AJCongress criticizing Ms. Magazine and saying it is “now conspicuously exposed as having joined the anti-democratic anti-Israel totalitarian radical Left. A journal that once stood for free and open opportunity for all now shows itself to be among the haters: closed, narrow, insular, and above all cowardly.”

And Susannah Heschel, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., issued a statement saying she was “profoundly disheartened by this foolish decision” of the magazine.

“Silencing the voices of women from the State of Israel who are struggling for political and economic parity is a betrayal of our feminist solidarity,” she added. “Moreover, a boycott of Israel, motivated by a repudiation of Israeli politics, is an unacceptable rejection of Jewish women and our efforts to achieve Middle East peace.”

But Spillar insisted that the magazine is not disregarding Israel but rather has written numerous stories about it. She said that in the 16 issues that have been printed in the last four years, the magazine has covered the Israeli feminist movement and women leaders there “no fewer than 11 times.”

She cited a story in the current issue about Livni and a feature story in the spring of 2006 by Israeli feminist Alice Shalvi in which she “catalogued the ongoing struggles to rectify” inequalities in Israeli society, including the need to increase women’s representation in the Knesset and at the negotiating table for peace.

Klagsbrun pointed out at the press conference that Livni heads the Israeli team conducting the peace negotiations. And she said she knew of no other country in the world in which women “have the top posts in the legislature, the judiciary and the executive branch.”

Chesler said she stopped reading the magazine several years ago but read some articles in back issues before coming to the press conference. They convinced her, she said, that the magazine is “consistently and sickeningly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.”

“Apparently, Palestinians are the sacred victims who are pure and can do no wrong,” she added. “Israelis are the Nazi-like aggressors and occupiers who can do nothing right. This is not the Ms. I once knew so long ago.”

She said the Palestinization of the feminist movement began after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War in 1967 because “Israel was no longer the little David” standing up against the Goliaths — the Arab states that surrounded it.

The controversy has also been a wake-up call to Jewish feminists, according to Greenberg.

“We have kept our heads in the sand for too long,” she said. Klagsbrun agreed that she and some other Jewish feminists have “separated our feminism” from concerns about attacks on Israel.

And Chesler said this incident should become an “opportunity to start asking American Jewish and non-Jewish voters how important is the demonizing of Israel.”

“I would like people to begin asking the candidates for president where they stand on the demonization of Israel ... and where they stand on Iran and its extermination delusions,” she said.

Kurlander said the AJCongress has heard from Jews who feel “personally betrayed” by the magazine’s action. She said there are feminists in Israel, such as Shalvi, who side with the magazine and believe “Israel should be shown as the terrible country it is vis a vis women and who don’t believe in showing Israeli women’s accomplishments.”

But she suggested that these are the same women who would want the world to lament the Palestinian olive groves that were destroyed by Israel to prevent them from being used to conceal Palestinian gunmen. But the “core of Israel’s feminist movement would be pained by this and antagonistic to Ms.,” Kurlander added.

----

American Jewish Congress

Ms. Magazine Blocks Ad on Israeli Women

http://www.ajcongress.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6709

January 10, 2008 — Ms. Magazine has long been in the forefront of the fight for equal rights and equal opportunities for women. Apparently that is not the case if the women happen to be Israeli.

The magazine has turned down an AJCongress advertisement that did nothing more controversial than call attention to the fact that women currently occupy three of the most significant positions of power in Israeli public life. The proposed ad (The Ad Ms. Didn't Want You To See) included a text that merely said, “This is Israel,” under photographs of President of the Supreme Court Dorit Beinish, Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni and Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik.

“What other conclusion can we reach,” asked Richard Gordon, President of AJCongress, “except that the publishers − and if the publishers are right, a significant number of Ms. Magazine readers − are so hostile to Israel that they do not even want to see an ad that says something positive about Israel?”

When Director of AJCongress’ Commission for Women’s Empowerment Harriet Kurlander tried to place the ad, she was told that publishing the ad “will set off a firestorm” and that “there are very strong opinions” on the subject − the subject presumably being whether or not one can say anything positive about Israel. Ms. Magazine publisher Eleanor Smeal failed to respond to a signed-for certified letter with a copy of the ad as well as numerous calls by Mr. Gordon over a period of weeks.

A Ms. Magazine representative, Susie Gilligan, whom the Ms. Magazine masthead lists under the publisher’s office, told Ms. Kurlander that the magazine “would love to have an ad from you on women’s empowerment, or reproductive freedom, but not on this.” Ms. Gilligan failed to elaborate what “this” is.

“The only conclusion that one can reach from this behavior is that Ms. Magazine feels that an ad highlighting the accomplishments of three incredibly talented and dedicated women would offend their readership. Since there is nothing about the ad itself that is offensive, it is obviously the nationality of the women pictured that the management of Ms. fears their readership would find objectionable. For a publication that holds itself out to be in the forefront of the Women’s Movement, this is nothing short of disgusting and despicable,” stated Mr. Gordon.

Ms. Magazine has a long record of publishing advertisements rallying readers to support reproductive choice; opposing the Religious Right; highlighting the fragility of the pro-Roe v. Wade majority on the Supreme Court; charging that “Pat Robertson and his Religious Right cohorts don’t like individual freedom;” announcing support for the “struggle for freedom and human rights;” opposing the Bush administration’s campaign to fill federal courts with judges who “will reverse decades of progress on reproductive rights and privacy, civil rights, religious liberty, environmental protection and so much more;” as well as accusing the Bush administration of being “bent on rewarding big corporations and the rich, turning back the clock on women’s rights and civil rights, and promoting a U.S. empire abroad.”

“This flagship publication of the American women’s empowerment movement publishes ads that are controversial in the general culture but not so among its readership,” Ms. Kurlander said. “Obviously, Ms. believes our ad would enflame a significant portion of their readers.”
Mr. Gordon added, “What really amazes me is that just recently, in their Winter 2007 issue, Ms. ran a cover story with a picture of Congresswomen Nancy Pelosi with the heading in big letters: “This is What a Speaker Looks Like.” While Ms. has every reason to be proud of Speaker Pelosi and her accomplishments, as are we, the only discernable difference between Speaker Pelosi and Speaker Itzik apparently is that Speaker Pelosi is not Israeli.”

Mr. Gordon noted that while Israel was apparently too hot to handle, Ms. Magazine did not extend that taboo to Arab and Moslem women. “What is even more amazing is that, while refusing to publish a simple ad praising three very notable women, women who embody the ideal that Ms. Magazine seemingly espouses, Ms. has run a cover article in the Fall 2003 issue on Queen Noor of Jordan, has featured a number of articles on Muslim women, and even ran an article in the Winter 2004 issue entitled, ‘Images of Palestine,’ which discussed the Ramallah Film Festival and gave sympathetic reviews to films concerning ‘the liberation of South Lebanon’ from Israel as well as numerous films which portrayed terrorism as legitimate ‘revolutionary’ activity against Israel and miscast Israel’s activities to counter terrorism as ‘oppressive.’”
“Clearly Ms. has changed a great deal from the days when AJCongress members and leaders of the AJCongress’ Commission for Women’s Equality − including Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug and Ms. co-founder Letty Pogrebin − were at the forefront of the Women’s Movement that led to the creation of Ms. Magazine.”

AJCongress President Gordon concluded, “Ms. has the right to turn down our ad. But in exercising that right, it has spoken loudly about itself and its readership, and their lingering hostility to Israel.”

----

Ms. magazine Responds to American Jewish Congress Ad Controversy

For Immediate Release January 14, 2008
http://www.msmagazine.com/AJCongress.asp

Statement of Katherine Spillar, executive editor
Ms. magazine concerning the AJCongress ad

Ms. magazine has been criticized for not running an ad submitted by the American Jewish Congress (AJCongress) featuring the photographs of three prominent Israeli women leaders with the statement “This is Israel.” In its press release, AJCongress claims that Ms. therefore must be ‘hostile to Israel’. This is untrue and unfair.

Ms. covers women leaders across the globe. Ironically, the current issue just now hitting newsstands features a major story profiling Israel’s Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni, highlighting her career and accomplishments. Livni was one of the women pictured in the AJCongress ad. Ms. had previously reported on Dorit Beinish, also pictured in the ad, becoming the first woman president of Israel’s Supreme Court. Over the past four years (16 issues) Ms. has covered the Israeli feminist movement and women leaders in Israel no fewer than eleven times.

The mission of Ms. is to report on U.S. and global struggles to combat sex discrimination and oppression and to provide feminists everywhere with the information they need to take action to win equality for women and girls. Ms. policy is to accept only mission-driven advertisements from primarily non-profit, non-partisan organizations that promote women’s equality, social justice, sustainable environment, and non-violence.

In Ms. magazine’s judgment, the ad submitted by AJCongress for consideration was inconsistent with this policy. Not only could the ad be seen as favoring certain political parties within Israel over other parties, but also with its slogan “This is Israel,” the ad implied that women in Israel hold equal positions of power with men. Israel, like every other country, has far to go to reach equality for women. As the Israel Women’s Network notes: “Women have consistently received symbolic representation in Israeli politics, at least sufficient enough to generate the myth of an open and egalitarian system.”

Indeed Israeli writers have reported in the pages of Ms. on the continuing efforts of the Israeli feminist movement to combat discrimination and achieve a larger voice for women in the country’s political arena.

In a feature length story in the Spring 2006 issue of Ms., Israeli feminist scholar/activist Alice Shalvi catalogued the ongoing struggles to rectify such inequalities, including increasing women’s representation in elected office and at the table negotiating for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Women only comprise 14% of the Israeli Knesset, placing Israel 74th in the world for women’s representation in government.

The AJCongress press release compared its ad with the cover story Ms. ran when Congressmember Nancy Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House. However, when Ms. featured Speaker Pelosi on its cover with the words “This is What a Speaker Looks Like,” we did not claim that “This is what the USA looks like.” Far from it, since women comprise only 17% of the Congress, ranking 65th in the world in women’s representation, and continue to face discrimination in every aspect of American society.

----

Wikipedia article about Ms. magazine

Ms. is an American feminist magazine founded by American feminist and activist Gloria Steinem, which first appeared in 1971 as an insert in New York magazine. The first stand-alone issue appeared in January 1972 with funding from New York editor Clay Felker. From July 1972 to 1987 it appeared on a monthly basis. During its heyday in the 1970s it enjoyed great popularity, but was not always able to reconcile its ideological concerns with commercial considerations. Since 2001, the magazine has been published by the Feminist Majority Foundation, based in Los Angeles and Arlington, Virginia.

Origins of the title

The title of Ms. magazine came from a friend of Gloria Steinem's who heard the term in an interview on WBAI radio and suggested it as a title for the new magazine. Modern use of Ms. as an honorific was conceived in 1961 by Sheila Michaels, thinking it was a typographical error. Michaels, who was illegitimate, and not adopted by her stepfather, had long grappled with finding a title that reflected her situation: not being "owned" by a father and not wishing to be "owned" by a husband. Her efforts to promote its use were ignored in the nascent Women’s Movement. Around 1971, during a lull in an interview with "The Feminists" group, Michaels suggested the use of the title "Ms." (having chosen a pronunciation current for both in Missouri, her home).

Controversy raged in the early 1970s over the "correct" title for women. Men had Mr. which gave no indication of their marital status since the formal address term "master" for an unmarried man had fallen largely into disuse; etiquette and business practices demanded that women use either Miss or Mrs. Many women did not want to be defined by their marital status and, for a growing number of women who kept their last name after marriage, neither Miss nor Mrs. was technically a correct title in front of that name.

Historic Milestones

Ms. made history when it published the names of women admitting to having had abortions when the procedure was still illegal in most of the United States. Running before the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, the 1972 statement was an action of civil disobedience.[citation needed]

A 1976 cover story on battered women made Ms. the first national magazine to address the issue of domestic violence. The cover photo featured a woman with a bruised face.

Ms. magazine's credibility was damaged in the 80s and 90s when it became swept up in the day care sexual abuse hysteria and moral panic about Satanic ritual abuse.[1]

The "We Had Abortions" petition appears in the October 2006 issue as part of the issue's cover story. The petition contains signatures of over 5,000 women declaring that they had an abortion and were "unashamed of (the) decision", including actresses Amy Brenneman and Kathy Najimy, comedienne Carol Leifer, and Steinem herself.[2]

Recent Ownership

In 1987, it was bought by Fairfax, an Australian media company, headed by Sandra Yates. In 1989, concerned about a perceived 'Cher cover'-centered editorial direction under Anne Summers, American Feminists bought it back and began publishing the magazine without ads.

Robin Morgan and Marcia Ann Gillespie served respective terms as Editors in Chief of the magazine. Gillespie was the first African American woman to lead Ms. For a period, the magazine was published by MacDonald Communications Corp., which also published Working Woman and Working Mother magazines. Known since its inception for unique feminist analysis of current events, its 1991 change to an ad-free format also made it known for exposing the control that many advertisers assert over content in women's magazines.

In 1998, Gloria Steinem and other investors created Liberty Media and brought the magazine under independent ownership. It remained ad-free and won several awards, including an Utne award for social commentary. With Liberty Media facing bankruptcy in November 2001, the Feminist Majority Foundation purchased the magazine, dismissed Gillespie and staff, and moved editorial headquarters from New York to Los Angeles. Formerly bimonthly, the magazine has since published quarterly.

In the Spring 2002 issue commemorating the magazine's 30th year, Gloria Steinem and Feminist Majority president Eleanor Smeal noted the magazine's increased ability to "share research and resources, expand investigative journalism, and bring its readers the personal experience that has always been the source of the women's health movement."

In 2005, under editor-in-chief Elaine Lafferty, Ms. was nominated for National Magazine Award for Martha Mendoza's article "Between a Woman and Her Doctor". Despite this success, Lafferty left the magazine after only two years following various disagreements including the editorial direction on a cover story on Desperate Housewives,[3] and a perceived generation gap towards third-wave feminists and grunge music, a genre that Lafferty had trashed as being oppositional to feminism.[verification needed]

Over the years the magazine has featured articles written by and about many women and men at the forefront of business, politics, activism, and journalism. Writers have included Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Susan Faludi. The cover has featured comedian Wanda Sykes, performance artist Sarah Jones, Jane Fonda, actress Charlize Theron, Queen Noor of Jordan and former First Lady and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. The magazine's investigative journalism broke several landmark stories on topics including overseas sweatshops, sex trafficking, the wage gap, the glass ceiling, date rape, and domestic violence.

References

"All the babies you can eat: Ms. magazine's reporting of unsubstantiated satanic rituals" by Brian Siano, Humanist, March-April 1993.

David Crary (October 3, 2006). Women Sign "We Had Abortions" Petition. Associated Press. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.

Sheelah Kolhatkar (April 14, 2005). 'Desperate Housewives' Causes Another Breakup. New York Observer. Retrieved on 2007-04-12.

----

Nazi Archives open

2008-01-18T01:57:00.000-05:00

Museum Provides Detail From Nazi Archive

WASHINGTON, Fri Jan 18, 12:38 AM
Associated Press

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is offering to help survivors and their families navigate a vast Nazi archive that promises to document their persecution and provide clues to the fate of loved ones.

After months of work on more than 100 million digital images from the International Tracing Service archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany, the museum announced that it would begin answering requests from survivors and their families.

"This moment is a wonderful victory for survivors, although long overdue," museum director Sara J. Bloomfield said Thursday in a statement. "But the significance of ITS extends far beyond the survivor generation. With an increase in Holocaust denial and minimization, the evidence in this massive archive will serve as an authentic witness to the scope of the crimes of the Holocaust for many generations to come."

In August, the ITS began transferring the documents to the Washington museum and two others — Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem's outskirts, and the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, Poland. The International Committee of the Red Cross administers the ITS archive.

The Washington museum will be the first of the three museums to begin answering large numbers of requests that researchers hope will help survivors and their families get long-sought answers to bitter questions. They believe even small details could prove invaluable to aging survivors.

"The reason that we got into this in the first place is that we heard from so many survivors and families that it was important for them psychologically," said Paul Shapiro, director of the museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. "Having a copy of a real document in your hand, perhaps seeing the signature of someone who you lost — that may be the only connection to a moment when that person was alive that you have got."

The museum has been accepting requests for information from survivors and their families since last month. It also has provided information to a small number of people as part of its efforts to learn how to search the immense archive and to train its researchers. Now it will begin responding on a larger scale.

Survivors and their families can make requests online on the museum's Web site. The museum also will provide request forms by mail or through a toll-free number, 866-912-4385.

The museum is warning that while the documents — transportation lists, Gestapo orders, camp registers, slave labor booklets, death books — refer to about 17.5 million people, they are not a comprehensive documentation of the fates of the millions of victims and survivors.

Most of the documents in the archive are written by hand, sometimes in old German script. They also contain variations in the spelling of names, many of which are recorded phonetically. That makes it impossible, for now, to convert large numbers of files to a digitally searchable form.

Shapiro says survivors who hope the files will contain important information on lost life insurance policies also may be frustrated, as researchers have not found evidence that the files contain that information.

Those hopes have been reflected in legal action by survivors. In a multimillion-dollar settlement between victims and the Italian insurance company Assicurazioni Generali, a federal judge ruled last year that a deadline for victims to file claims, now expired, could be extended until August if the Arolsen files turned up relevant information.

Despite the archive's limitations, historians believe the files' data on the 17.5 million individuals will add texture to the narrative of misery in the camps, where millions of people were worked to death or were simply exterminated with industrial efficiency. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust, one of every three Jews on Earth at the time.

Allied forces began collecting the documents even before the end of World War II and eventually entrusted them to the Red Cross. The archive has been governed since 1955 by a commission of 11 nations that ratified an accord in November that unsealed the archive.

The ITS has completed digitizing some 50 million index cards from shelves that would stretch 16 miles and fill a half-dozen buildings in Bad Arolsen. The remainder of the collection, relating to slave labor and displaced persons camps, will be transferred to the museums in installments between 2008 and 2010.

On the Net:

International Tracing Service: http://www.its-arolsen.org/

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/

Yad Vashem: http://www.yadvashem.org/

Institute of National Remembrance: http://www.ipn.gov.pl/wai/en/10/5/

Nazi Archives Reveal Real Horrors

2008-01-16T01:13:00.000-05:00

German archives' opening helps Israeli man track his father's death in Holocaust

By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/945047.html
Wed., January 16, 2008 Shvat 9, 5768

The last time 74-year-old Moshe Bar-Yoda saw his father, Avraham Kastner was about to be sent to a Nazi labor camp in Slovakia along with other residents of his Czech village.

The Yad Vashem Holocaust museum archives have a record of Kastner being sent to the camp on March 27, 1942, but there the documentary trail ended.

Although a witness testified before the rabbinate in 1948 that Kastner had been killed in a concentration camp during the Holocaust, Bar-Yoda, a journalist and Jewish Agency emissary, did not know any of the details and had no record of his father's death - until now.

Two weeks ago, Bar-Yoda became the first Israeli to receive information about the fate of family members via Yad Vashem since Germany's International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen opened its World War II archives to the public at the end of November.

The tracing service says it serves victims of Nazi persecutions and their families by documenting their fate through the archives it manages.

The archives include more than 50 million references that contain information about more than 17 million people.

Although relatives of Nazi victims had previously been allowed to examine the archives, the records are now open to researchers around the world and have been digitally transferred to the Yad Vashem archives, making it easier for family members to conduct more precise searches and find out exactly what happened to their loved ones.

After searching the International Tracing Service records, Bar-Yoda discovered that his father's name appears on the list of the dead whose bodies were incinerated at the Majdanek death camp in Poland on September 7, 1942, six months after the two last saw each other.

Now, Bar-Yoda said, he can finally commemorate his father's passing on his yahrtzeit the day of his death instead of on the day designated for those who do not know the day of their loved one's death.

"Ater having said kaddish [the Jewish mourner's prayer] for him for 60 years on the general kaddish day on the fast of Asara B'Tevet, now I have a specific yahrtzeit," said Bar-Yoda. "And while it doesn't comfort me or make me happy, there is a kind of satisfaction here, that I can move forward."

Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev said Bar-Yoda's tale shows how the newly expanded collection of records can help the families of Holocaust victims.

"This story demonstrates how the tens of millions of documents collected by the Yad Vashem archives, in conjunction with the millions of new documents that have recently arrived and will arrive from the International Tracing Service archive in Germany over the next two years, will be able to help individuals fill in the picture about the fate of their loved ones in the Holocaust."

Yad Vashem had previously received many documents from the International Tracing Service, but will be bolstering its collection over the next two years. Bar-Yoda had looked through the Yad Vashem archives, which include microfilm of some 20 million documents received from the tracing service at the end of the 1950s. However, the Majdanek document did not reach the Bad Arolsen archives until the mid-1960s.

President Bush: Auschwitz railtracks should have been bombed

2008-01-13T04:08:00.000-05:00

At Yad Vashem, Bush says U.S. erred in not bombing Auschwitz

By The Associated Press
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/943955.html
Sun., January 13, 2008 Shvat 6, 5768

President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial Friday and told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz to halt the killing, the memorial's chairman said.

Bush emerged from a tour of the Yad Vashem memorial calling it a "sobering reminder" that evil must be resisted, and praising victims for not losing their faith.

Wearing a yarmulke, Bush placed a red-white-and-blue wreath on a stone slab that covers ashes of Holocaust victims taken from six extermination camps. He also lit a torch memorializing the victims.

Bush was visibly moved as he toured the site, said Yad Vashem's chairman, Avner Shalev.

"Twice, I saw tears well up in his eyes," Shalev said.

At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said.

The Allies had detailed reports about Auschwitz during the war from Polish partisans and escaped prisoners. But they chose not to bomb the camp, the rail lines leading to it, or any of the other Nazi death camps, preferring instead to focus all resources on the broader military effort, a decision that became the subject of intense controversy years later.

Between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were killed at the camp.

"We should have bombed it," Bush said, according to Shalev.

Upon viewing an aerial shot of Auschwitz, taken during the war by U.S. forces, Bush called the ruling not to bomb it "complex." He then called over Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's decision, clearly pondering the options before rendering an opinion of his own, Shalev told the Associated Press.

"We were talking about the often-discussed 'Could the United States have done more by bombing the train tracks?'" Rice told reporters later aboard Air Force One. "And so we were just talking about the various explanations that had been given about why that might not have been done."

Rice did not say what those reasons were.

Tom Segev, a leading Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, said the Bush comment, which appeared spontaneous, marked the first time an American president had made this acknowledgment.

"It is clear now that the U.S. knew a lot about it," he said. "It's possible that bombing at least the railway to the camps may have saved the lives of the Jews of Hungary. They were the very last ones who were sent to Auschwitz at a time when everybody knew what was going on."

But Segev said the question of a bombing is not so clear cut, noting that "it wasn't clear that the United States had the ability to carry out such an operation."

Eliezer Schweid, a professor of Jewish Thought at Israel's Hebrew University, said the question of a bombing is irrelevant in retrospect.

"World Jewish leadership was afraid to ask publicly for the Allies to bomb the death camps, believing that would turn the conflict into a war for the Jews," Schweid said.

In the memorial's visitors' book, the president wrote simply, "God bless Israel, George Bush."

The memorial was closed to the public and under heavy guard Friday, with armed soldiers standing on top of some of the site's monuments and a police helicopter and surveillance blimp hovering in the air overhead.

"I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls - young and old - stood strong for what they believe," Bush said.

"I wish as many people as possible would come to this place. It is a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it," he said.

It was Bush's second visit to the Holocaust memorial, a regular stop on the visits of foreign dignitaries. His first was in 1998, as governor of Texas. The last U.S. president to visit was Bill Clinton in 1994.

Bush, making the most extensive Mideast trip of his presidency, was accompanied on his tour by a small party that included Rice and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

At the compound, overlooking a forest on Jerusalem's outskirts, Bush visited a memorial to the 1.5 million Jewish children killed in the Holocaust, featuring six candles reflected 1.5 million times in a hall of mirrors. At the site's Hall of Remembrance, he heard a cantor sing a Jewish prayer for the dead.

Shalev presented Bush with illustrations of the Bible drawn by the Jewish artist Carol Deutsch, who perished in the Holocaust.

Deutsch created the works while in hiding from the Nazis in Belgium. He was informed upon, and died in 1944 in the Buchenwald camp. After the war, his daughter Ingrid discovered that the Nazis had confiscated their furniture and valuables but had left behind a single item: a meticulously crafted wooden box adorned with a Star of David and a seven-branched menorah, containing a collection of 99 of the artist's illustrations of biblical scenes.

The originals are on display at Yad Vashem. The memorial recently decided to produce a special series of 500 replicas, the first of which was to be presented to Bush.

Debbie Deutsch-Berman, a Yad Vashem employee whose grandfather was Deutsch's brother, said she was proud that Bush would be given her relative's artwork.

"These are not just his paintings, they are his legacy, and the fact that they survived shows that as much as our enemies tried to destroy the ideas that these paintings embody, they failed," she said.

Later Friday, Bush was to wrap up his three-day visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories with a visit to Christian holy sites in Galilee before departing for Kuwait, the next stop on his Mideast tour.

Modern German youth hate Jews

2008-01-13T04:04:00.000-05:00

Holocaust scholar: 'Jew' has become curse word among German youth

By Ofer Aderet, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/943953.html
Sun., January 13, 2008 Shvat 6, 5768

German schools are failing in educating students about the Holocaust, a new study by a political education center has found, as German youth, who one historian said use the word "Jew" as a common curse in daily discourse, are increasingly distant from the suffering of the victims of Nazism.

According to a study commissioned by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, a political education center known by its German acronym BPB, history courses no longer manage to teach Germany's younger generation of the horrors of the Nazis.

In the report, which appeared in the German educational magazine Focus-Shula, teachers are quoted as saying that they are having trouble impressing upon school children the horrors of the Holocaust, and have stated that their tools for teaching about the Shoah are not effective.

"The entire time we stood before the crematoriums of Auschwitz, the students took more interest in the types of pipes used to pump in the lethal Zyklon B gas, and not the fate of the Nazis victims," a teacher was quoted as saying.

In their words, this generation's students are less sensitive to the horrors of the Holocaust than any before.

The research also examines the role that immigrants have played in the changing attitudes towards the Shoah. Experts are quoted in the study as saying that there is a marked rise in the number of Muslims in Germany, many of whom see the teaching of the Holocaust as a veiled endorsement of the policies of the state of Israel.

"Out of fear of the students' reactions, many of the teachers avoid teaching this chapter of history in order to not be viewed by some students as supporters of Israel."

"The word 'Jew' has turned into one of the most common curse words among students in both east and west Germany," said Gottfried Cosler, a Frankfurt-based Holocaust scholar.

Robert Sigel, a historian who contributed to the study, is of the opinion that students are taking a great interest in the Holocaust, but that the methods in which the subject is taught today are in need of improvement.

"Often time the teachers, especially the more devoted ones, get carried away, and demand way too much of themselves," Sigel told Focus magazine. "They want to teach the facts and at the same time get across a moral message, call for education and tolerance, deal with the extreme right and prevent anti-Semitism. They put all this material into the subject, and it's too much."

Susan Orban, a historian at Yad Vashem, says that the Holocaust should be taught using methods that have proved successful in the past.

"Today's kids live in different times than that of Anne Frank," Orban said. In order to bridge the generational gap, she submits a different approach, "for example, asking them to imagine that they have to abruptly leave their homes and start a new life elsewhere." Such a method, according to Orban, would speak more directly to the children's hearts and minds than descriptions of the horrors of the concentration camp.

Sigel expressed similar sentiments, adding that the children of immigrants have shown particular interest to the victims of Nazism given that many of them suffered from racial persecution, religious intolerance, and even genocide in their native lands.

Debating Antisemitism in Sweden

2007-11-11T01:29:00.000-05:00

Anti-Semitism, in Sweden? Depends who you're asking

By Cnaan Liphshiz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/922248.html
Fri., November 09, 2007 Cheshvan 28, 5768

The Swedes are not anti-Semitic, the Rabbi of Stockholm's Orthodox Jewish community, Meir Horden, told AngloFile on a visit here this week. According to Horden, Swedish Jews have only hostility from local Muslims to fear.

But Zvi Mazel, a controversial figure in Sweden ever since he served there as Israel's ambassador in 2004, strongly disagrees.

"It's not true to say that the Swedes are anti-Semitic. Some of them are hostile to Israel because they support the weak side, which they perceive the Palestinians to be," Horden said. The capital's Orthodox community numbers 4,500.

In an interview on one of his frequent trips here, Horden went on to say that "generally speaking," Swedish support for the Palestinians comes from the same place that led the Swedes to help Holocaust survivors.

"Of course you can't compare the two things, but that's their way of thinking," Horden explained at his Modi'in home after delivering a lecture on Swedish Jewry at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. "It's frustrating because the Swedes don't look too much into historical facts."

Mazel, however, speaks of a deep-rooted anti-Semitic sentiment that he says is inherent to Swedish culture. "If it weren't for this lingering anti-Semitism, the incident would arguably never have happened," Mazel said in reference to his interference with a work of art at a Stockholm museum in early 2004, during his term as ambassador.

Believing that an art exhibit celebrated Palestinian suicide bombers, Mazel caused the installation to short-circuit, and was forcibly removed from the museum as a result.

Blind hatred

Some days later, Mazel told a Swedish newspaper that "Sweden is among the most severely anti-Semitic places" with "daily agitations in the media to kill Jews."

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon supported Mazel's actions. Mazel retired several weeks later.

"I'm very surprised by Rabbi Horden's statements," Mazel said. "Anti-Semitism is prevalent in Swedish society as it has always been, and is apparent in cases of blind hatred of all things Israeli."

Mazel denied that his perspective on Sweden is warped because of the museum incident, and points to the first-ever systematic study on anti-Semitic images and attitudes in Sweden, released in 2005.

The poll of 5,000 adults in Sweden on their attitude to Israel and Jews found that over a third had "somewhat ambivalent attitude towards Jews," with 5 percent admitting to strong anti-Semitism.

Horden clearly disagrees with the assessment of the former ambassador. "Mazel does speak of anti-Semitism in Sweden," the rabbi said, but I don't think that's a problem," Horden says.

"Six percent of the population is Muslim and this causes problems, like attacks in graveyards, but you don't feel an anti-Israel situation."

Horden, an Israeli-American who was trained to serve in Sweden by the Rothschild Foundation, says that regardless of anti-Semitism, being a religious Jew in Sweden is tough. "Shabbat starts at noon at summer, and kosher food is hard to get."

Other problems are rooted in Sweden's ultra-liberal atmosphere, Horden says. When he, together with Muslim and Christian leaders, signed a petition in 2004 against same-sex marriage, the Reform Jewish community told the media that Horden's action did not represent the Jewish community as a whole.

"It was just important for the Reform stream to show Swedish society that they were indeed liberal and not extremists or fanatics," Horden claims.

Smiling, he adds: "I was surprised to see gay Jewish couples who wanted to get married in synagogue. In Israel the homosexual community is so anti-religious."

Anti-semitism in the USA

2007-11-05T20:13:00.000-05:00

ADL survey: 15% of Americans 'unquestionably anti-Semitic'

By Haaretz Service
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/919518.html
Mon., November 05, 2007 Cheshvan 24, 5768

The Anti-Defamation League on Thursday released recent survey results which it says show 15 percent of American adults hold "unquestionably anti-Semitic" views.

The figures represent an increase of one percent since last time the survey was conducted in 2005, and contradicted a decade-long trend of reduced anti-Semitism.

The ADL, which is an international organization aiming to reduce anti-Semitism through programs and services, conducted the telephone survey of 2,000 Americans registered as voters in October. A similar survey conducted by it in 1998 showed anti-Semitism dropped from 20 percent to 12 percent over the preceding six years.

Presenting the results of the survey at the ADL National Commission's annual meeting, National Director Abraham Foxman expressed his concern at the apparent reversal of previous trends away from anti-Semitism.

"These findings, coupled with the ongoing acts of anti-Semitic incidents and hate crimes, suggest that anti-Semitic beliefs endure and resonate with a substantial segment of the population, nearly 35 million people."

The survey found that 31 percent of participants believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than America, down from 33 percent in 2005, and that 27 percent believe Jews were responsible for the death of Christ, down from 30 percent in 2005.

A further 15 percent believed that Jews have "too much power in the U.S.", which remained unchanged from 2005, while 20 percent and 18 percent respectively believed Jews have too much influence in business and on Wall Street.

"When it comes to Jews, old stereotypes die hard," said Foxman, adding that "Jewish power" has replaced many ethnic stereotypes previously attributed to Jewish Americans.

Death records of Jews executed by Nazis

2007-10-29T21:32:00.000-04:00

Systematic mass murder of Jews detailed in huge Nazi archive

By Assaf Uni,
Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/918079.html
Mon., October 29, 2007 Cheshvan 17, 5768

BAD AROLSEN, Germany - Twenty days of systematic murder of prisoners in the Majdanek concentration camp are detailed in a thick office binder in the huge archive of Nazi documents in this central German city.

The binder contains hundreds of pages written on both sides. Each one has a table containing the following information: first name, last name, date of birth, address, date of death - all written out in a careful longhand. The blue ink has faded over the years, but the Jewish names jump out. Lists upon lists of towns and cities throughout Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany. In the last column, the date of death, there is not much variety: one of 20 days in September, 1942. The title on the binder reads: Lublin-Majdanek, crematorium list 08.09-1942-28.09.1942.

The lists were apparently brought out of the Majdanek concentration camp after it was liberated by the Russians. On the shelves around this one binder, on the first floor of the International Tracing Service (ITS) complex, are thousands more binders - the original records of the dead at the Buchenwald and Matthausen concentration camps, lists made by the Gestapo of deportees from Holland, who were captured at its headquarters after Germany surrendered, etc. All the documents are cataloged according to the names of victims and survivors, reflecting the efficiency of the Nazi bureaucracy.

This is the largest archive of Nazi documents in the world - more than 33 million pages of records, stored in six buildings in Bad Arolsen, a Baroque town north of Frankfurt. The archive was established after World War II by the Allies, taking advantage of the town's location between Germany's four areas of occupation, and the fact that it had suffered practically no damage from bombardment. It is funded by the German government and operated by the Red Cross. Searching among the 17.5 million names recorded there, staffers assist people seeking information on the fate of their families or submitting demands for reparations from the German authorities.

For more than 60 years, the archive was open only to survivors and their families, international Holocaust organizations, scholars and journalists. Last week Greece, one of the 11 countries who are members of the archive's council, became the last to approve an agreement opening it to the public.

At a time when neo-Nazis are burning copies of "The Diary of Anne Frank," there is significance to one line concealed here among the names of Jews brought to Holland's Westenbork camp on the way to Auschwitz: "Frank, Annelise."

The archive contains four collections. The 'imprisonment list' is the most interesting in terms of the information that it provides. It includes documents from concentration camps, ghettos and prison camps dating from 1933 to 1945. It was copied in its entirety in the 1950s by the Yad Vashem Holcaust Memorial and transfered to Jerusalem, but at Bad Arolsen it's more accessible. It has also been copied digitally in recent years and transfered to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and to Yad Vashem, and may soon be accessible on the Internet.

The second collection contains 'documents from the period of the war,' with information about forced laborers in Germany beginning in 1939, including places of work and illness reports. The third collection, which is the largest, contains 'documents after the war,' with lists of all refugees and displaced persons who passed through Germany and all of Europe after the war. The fourth collection is information concerning lost children.

Inquiries can be submitted by telephone, mail or email. For example, an inquiry about a Jewish survivor of Buchenwald who immigrated to Israel could be answered by a list of deportees from the ghetto, information detailing a certain period in the camp or describing its liberation by the Americans, or lists from transit camps of people immigrating to Israel.

The ITS staff will conduct a search according to name, date and place of birth, and send the results to the inquirer, or invite him/her to the archive to look at the original documents. The ITS promises a response within eight weeks. Last year, it received 800 inquiries from Israel.
Last weekend, in one part of the archive, a book of the victims of the Matthausen concentration camp in Austria lay open on a table, where a staffer was working on an inquiry. The book reveals that on April 20, 1942, in honor of Hitler's 53rd birthday, 53 prisoners were executed. Their names were listed with times of death about two minutes apart between 11:20 and 12:54. Cause of death: 'Shot by order of the Reich defense ministry,' with space-saving 'ditto' markings beneath the first entry.

One of the names that came up randomly in the Auschwitz death book was M. Schlusser, a Jewish locksmith, who died on February 11, 1943. His parents' names and his place of birth were also noted, along with his age, 22, and cause of death: "exhaustion."

"There are apparently no new historical revelations about the Holocaust hiding here," Reto Meister, the ITS director says. "But there is an abundance of private historical information waiting for families of victims and survivors. We want to be a center to which families can come to get answers to the questions that trouble them."

And what does Meister say about the huge collection itself? "There is no doubt that human society has a strong need for order, which expresses itself in the recording of history. What for me is inconceivable is how this need was utilized so horrifically to destroy human beings. The obsessive recording of the Nazis was a kind of terrible way to pretend that something completely ordinary was going on."

The main feeling one gets from leafing through the well-ordered documents with their careful writing is how those 20 days at Majdanek, or those three years of the Final Solution, were truly ordinary for those who inscribed these lists.

Jew attacked in Lakewood, New Jersey

2007-10-12T03:54:00.000-04:00

Orthodox rabbi beaten with baseball bat in New Jersey town

By The Associated Press
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/912277.html
Fri., October 12, 2007

LAKEWOOD, New Jersey - A man wielding an aluminum baseball bat attacked an Orthodox Jewish rabbi walking to synagogue last week, critically injuring the 53-year-old man and threatening to strain the already tense ethnic relations in a New Jersey city, officials and residents said.

The beating of Mordechai Moskowitz, reportedly at the hands of am African-American man, has put residents on edge in Lakewood, a diverse city of 70,000 near the Jersey Shore that is home to a large Orthodox Jewish population, as well as black and Hispanic communities.

An Orthodox Jewish middle school teacher was found not guilty this summer of assaulting a black teenager. And a few weeks ago, a group of Orthodox Jews was pelted with eggs by teenagers from another town, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Authorities have arrested no one and have no motive in the beating of the rabbi, police Lt. Joseph Isnardi said.

There's a very, very strong feeling of revulsion and horror that this attack happened here, said Rabbi Moshe Zev Weisberg, who belongs to the council of local Jewish leaders called the Vaad.

Witnesses told police they saw an African-American man walk by Moskowitz and without saying a word turn on the rabbi, beating him in the head and body with the baseball bat. Moskowitz remained in critical condition Thursday, his face disfigured.

Lakewood has seen large growth in its Orthodox Jewish and Hispanic communities, while the black population has shrunk, officials said.

"We have a very large population of Orthodox Jewish residents. And we get our share of spray painting, people riding down the road yelling epithets - all kinds of different things like that," Isnardi said.

Some Jewish residents said Thursday they feared the latest attack would exacerbate long-standing tensions between ethnic groups in the town.

Abraham Sasson, 15, was with a friend who quickly pulled out a flier critical of the police department's handling of safety. Sasson recounted how a woman at an area store had asked him the night before to walk her to her car only about 30 meters from the store.

"She was very scared to walk out by herself. That's part of the reaction of the township against the horrifying attack that took place two days ago," Sasson said.

As he pushed a stroller with his son down the street, 25-year-old Alexander Spira said residents were horrified by the attack. But he also noted there were places in the world that are less safe "People are going to Israel, where people are blowing up buses," Spira said.

The New Anti-Semitism

2007-10-07T18:47:00.000-04:00

Identifying the New Anti-Semitism

by Irwin Cotler
http://www.aish.com/jewishissues/jewishsociety/Identifying_the_New_Anti-Semitism.asp

Israel and the Jewish people have been singled out for discriminatory treatment in the international arena -- and worst of all -- singled out for destruction.

This paper was written for and published by the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute in November 2002.

What we are witnessing today -- which has been developing incrementally, almost imperceptibly, and sometimes indulgently, for some 30 years now -- is a new, virulent, globalizing and even lethal anti-Jewishness reminiscent of the atmospherics of the 1930s, and without parallel or precedent since the end of the Second World War. This new anti-Jewishness overlaps with classical anti-Semitism, but is distinguishable from it. Anchored in the "Zionism is Racism" resolution, but going beyond it, the new anti-Jewishness almost requires a new vocabulary to define it. It can best be defined as the discrimination against, denial of, or assault upon, national particularity and peoplehood anywhere, whenever that national particularity and peoplehood happens to be Jewish. In its more benign form (if it can be called benign), it finds particular expression in the singling out of Israel and the Jewish people for differential and discriminatory treatment in the international arena -- where United Nations human rights bodies are used as the mask or protective cover for this anti-Jewishness (e.g. The 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban). In its most lethal form, it refers to the singling out of Israel and the Jewish people for existential or genocidal assault, as evidenced by the suicide-bombers -- or what I prefer to call genocide-bombers -- since their own acknowledged and asserted intent is the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews wherever they may be -- the convergence of both politicide and genocide.

In a word, classical or traditional anti-Semitism is the discrimination against, or denial of, the right of Jews to live as equal members of a free society; the new anti-Semitism - incompletely, or incorrectly, as "anti-Zionism" (since not all critiques of Zionism are anti-Semitic) -- involves the discrimination against, denial of, or assault upon the right of the Jewish people to live as an equal member of the family of nations. What is intrinsic to each form of anti-Semitism -- and common to both -- is discrimination. All that has happened is that it has moved from discrimination against Jews as individuals -- a classical anti-Semitism for which there are indices of measurement (e.g., discrimination against Jews in education, housing, or employment) -- to discrimination against Jews as people -- a new anti-Semitism -- for which one has yet to develop indices of measurement.

Accordingly, what I would like to propose is a set of indices by which we can identify, pour content into, and monitor the nature and meaning of the new anti-Jewishness. These indices are organized around a juridical framework and draw upon principles of discrimination and equality as they find expression in both domestic and international law. There are 13 indices that may serve to illustrate this new anti-Jewishness. As this is in the form of an "alert," they are here treated in a more abbreviated form, but they will appear elsewhere in a more expanded juridical analysis.

Genocidal anti-Semitism

The first and most lethal is existential or genocidal anti-Semitism. I am referring here to the public call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. Examples include the covenants of terrorist organizations like Hamas which publicly call for, and incite to, the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews anywhere; religious fatwas -- or execution writs -- issued by radical Islamic clerics, which not only call for the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews, but proclaim it also as a religious obligation(Israel, then, has emerged as the Salmon Rushdie of the nations); and calls by member states of the international community -- such as Iran or Iraq -- for the destruction of another member state, such as Israel and its people, as evidenced in the statements by their respective political leadership that call not only for the destruction of Israel but also express the intent to use nuclear weapons to accomplish this genocidal purpose.

In a word, Israel is the only state in the world today, and the Jews the only people in the world today, that are the object of a standing set of threats from governmental, religious, and terrorist bodies seeking their destruction. And what is most disturbing is the silence, the indifference, and sometimes even the indulgence, in the face of such genocidal anti-Semitism.

Political anti-Semitism

There are three manifestations of this phenomenon. The discrimination against, denial of, or assault upon the Jewish people's right to self-determination which, as Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, "is the denial to the Jews of the same right, the right to self-determination that we accord to African nations and all other peoples of the globe. In short, it is anti-Semitism..." To the extent that Israel has emerged as the "civil religion" of world Jewry -- the organizing idiom of Jewish self-determination -- this new anti-Semitism is a per se assault, in contemporary terms, on the religious and national sensibility of the Jewish people.

This involves the discrimination against, or denial of, the legitimacy, if not the existence, of the State of Israel. Indeed, it may be regarded as the contemporary analogue of classical or theological anti-Semitism, which discriminated against and denied the very legitimacy of the Jewish religion. In other words, if classical anti-Semitism was anchored in discrimination against the Jewish religion, the new anti-Jewishness is anchored in discrimination against the Jews as a people -- and the embodiment of that expression in Israel. In each instance the essence of anti-Semitism is the same -- an assault upon whatever is the core of Jewish self-definition at any moment in time -- be it the Jewish religion at the time of classical anti-Semitism, or the State of Israel as the "civil religion" of the Jewish people under this new anti-Jewishness.

There is yet another, and third, variant of political anti-Semitism. I am referring here to the "demonizing" of Israel -- the attribution to Israel of all the evils of the world - the portrayal of Israel as the enemy of all that is good and the repository of all that is evil.

This is the contemporary analogue to the medieval indictment of the Jew as the "poisoner of the wells." In other words, in a world in which human rights has emerged as the new secular religion of our time, the portrayal of Israel as the metaphor for a human rights violator is an indictment of Israel as the "new anti-Christ" -- as the "poisoner of the international wells" encompassing all the "teaching of contempt" for the "Jew among the Nations," this new anti-Semitism implies.

Ideological anti-Semitism finds expression not only in the "Zionism is Racism" indictment -- and the singling out of Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and Israel's ideological raison d'etre, for discriminatory treatment -- but the further criminal indictment of Israel as "an apartheid state," and the calling for the dismantling of this "apartheid state" -- a euphemism for Israel's destruction.

If the proclamation of "Zionism as Racism" gave anti-Semitism the appearance of international sanction, the calling for the dismantling of the apartheid state of Israel is even more toxic and virulent, once again giving anti-Semitism the appearance of international sanction. Indeed, the increased characterization or libeling of Israel as a "Nazi state" is tantamount to transforming ideological anti-Semitism into a duty -- the obligation to remove this Nazi state, Israel.

Theological anti-Semitism

This refers to the convergence of state-sanctioned Islamic anti-Semitism, which characterizes Jews and Judaism, let alone Israel, as the perfidious enemy of Islam (in this regard, see the recent publication by Robert Wistrich, a distinguished scholar of anti-Semitism, called Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger) and which finds expression in the proclamation made by Yasser Arafat-appointed and funded Imam, Ahmed Abu Halabiya, from a mosque pulpit and broadcasted on Palestinian state television -- "The Jews must be butchered and tortured: Allah will torture them with your hands. Have no mercy on the Jews... wherever you meet them... kill them." Similarly, the doctrine of Christian replacement theology -- which holds that the Jews have been replaced by the Church in God's favor, so that all of God's promises to the Jews, including the land of Israel, have been inherited by Christianity -- is another expression of theological anti-Semitism. According to this doctrine, an illegitimate Israel has usurped and betrayed Christian theology.

As for cultural anti-Semitism, I am referring here to the melange of attitudes, sentiments, innuendo and the like -- in academe, in parliaments, among the literati, public intellectuals, and the human rights movement -- the discourse of the "chattering classes" and enlightened elites - as found expression in the remarks of the French Ambassador to the U.K. to the effect of, why should the world risk another world war because of "that shitty little country Israel"; or as British journalist Petronella Wyatt put it, "Anti-Semitism, and its open expression, has become respectable at London dinner tables" once more - not just in Germany or Catholic Central Europe.

When it comes to European anti-Semitism, we are witnessing an explosion of European anti-Semitism without parallel or precedent since World War II, whose atmospherics are reminiscent of the 1930s. Some examples, to which I can personally attest to, following my visits to European capitals these past two years, include assaults upon and desecration of synagogues, cemeteries and Jewish institutions; attacks upon identifiable Jews; convergence of the extreme left and the extreme right in public demonstrations calling for "death to the Jews"; atrocity propaganda against Israel and Jews (e.g., Israel injects the AIDS virus into Palestinians); the ugly canard of double loyalty; the demonization of Israel through the escalating ascription of Nazi metaphors; indifference or silence in the face of horrific acts of terror against Israel and the threatening of sanctions against Israel for exercising its right of self-defense against these acts of terror.

In the words of Joel Kotek of the University of Brussels: "One's position on the Arab-Israeli conflict has become a test of loyalty. Should he become a supporter of Israel, he becomes a supporter of a Nazi state."

Denying Israel equality before the law

I am referring here to the singling out of Israel for differential, if not discriminatory, treatment amongst the family of nations; with Israel emerging, as it were, as "the collective Jew among the Nations." Some examples include the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, which turned into a conference of racism against Israel, where Israel was the only state singled out for indictment; the UN Commission on Human Rights, where Israel is the only country singled out for a country-specific condemnation even before the annual session begins, where 30 percent of all resolutions condemn Israel alone, while the major human rights violators enjoy exculpatory immunity; the Conference of the Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions, where Israel became the first country in 52 years to be the object of a country-specific indictment, while the perpetrators of horrific killing fields -- be it Cambodia, Sudan, etc. -- have never been the object of a contracting party's enquiry; the systemic and systematic discrimination against Israel in the major decision-making bodies of the United Nations and its specialized agencies; the exclusion of Magen David Adom, Israel's humanitarian aid agency, from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies; the conversion of refugee camps under UNRWA's management into bases and sanctuaries of incitement and terror, in breach of fundamental principles of international humanitarian and refugee law.

The denial of international due process to Israel and the Jewish people in the international arena refers to the disenfranchisement of Israel in the international arena, where, for example, Israel emerges as the only country denied "standing" in any regional grouping in the United Nations, which resulted in Israel (and Jewish NGOs) being excluded from the Regional Conference in Iran, where the regional Asian position for the World Conference Against Racism was prepared.

"Legalized" anti-Semitism refers to the international "legal" character of this anti-Semitism, in which, in a kind of Orwellian inversion of law and language, United Nations human rights bodies become the mask under which this "teaching of contempt" is carried out. If anti-Semitism is no longer respectable, and anti-Zionism in the form of the "Zionism is Racism" resolution has been exposed as a cover for anti-Semitism, what better mask than human rights -- and the UN as repository of human rights -- to carry out this process of distortion and defamation.

Economic anti-Semitism

This refers to the economic coercion and discrimination practiced through the Arab boycott, which emerges as the contemporary economic analogue of classical economic anti-Semitism.

Classical economic anti-Semitism involved discrimination against Jews in housing, education, and employment; the new economic anti-Semitism involves the extra-territorial application by Arab countries of an international restrictive covenant against corporations conditioning their trade with Arab countries on their agreement not to do business with Israel (secondary boycott); or not doing business with another corporation which may be doing business with Israel (tertiary boycott); or even, in certain instances, conditioning the trade with such corporations on neither hiring nor promoting Jews within the corporation (I was able to document this in the course of my chairing a Commission on Economic Coercion and Discrimination.)

The cutting edge of this new anti-Semitism is in the form of Holocaust denial, which moves inexorably from denying the Holocaust, to accusing Jews of fabricating the "hoax" of the Holocaust, to indicting Jews for extorting false reparations from the innocent German people, to the building of their "illegal" State of Israel on the backs of the real indigenous owners, the Palestinians. Let there be no doubt about it, those who would seek to deny the Jewish people their past are the same people who, if given the chance, would deny the Jewish people their future. Racist terrorism against Jews refers to the state-orchestrated incitement to violence and terrorism against Jews, including the singling out of Israelis and Jewish nationals as targets of international terrorism.

This racist terrorism has been ratcheted up into an alarming case of "mega" or "catastrophic terrorism" as exemplified by the recent attempts to literally incinerate thousands of Israelis by blowing up fuel and gas storage facilities in the Herzliya area and blowing up the Azrieli office towers in Tel Aviv; the attempted use of cyanide poison in a Jerusalem restaurant; the attempted blowing up of residential apartment areas in Haifa; and the recent disclosure of Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda connected plans to target Israeli institutions and Jewish nationals in the Western hemisphere.

State-sanctioned anti-Semitism

This refers to the state-sanctioned "culture of hate" -- integrating both old and new forms of anti-Jewishness -- that finds increasing expression in the incitement to hatred in state-controlled mosques, media, schools, and other institutions, including such recent examples as the broadcasting of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the blood-libel, and the appropriation of symbols and motifs from classical anti-Semitism to demonize Israel and the Jewish people today.

In the words of Professor Fouad Ajami: The suicide bomber of the Passover massacre did not descend from the sky; he walked straight out of the culture of incitement let loose on the land, a menace hovering over Israel, a great Palestinian and Arab refusal to let that country be, to cede it a place among the nations, he partook of the culture all around him -- the glee that greets those brutal deeds of terror, the cult that rises around the martyrs and their families.

None of this is intended to suggest, nor would one wish to have it inferred, that Israel is somehow above the law, or that Israel is not to be held accountable for any violations of law. On the contrary -- Israel is accountable for any violations of international law or human rights like any other state; and the Jewish people are not entitled to any privileged protection or preference because of the particularity of Jewish suffering.

But the problem is not that Israel as the "Jew among Nations" seeks to be above the law, but that it has been systematically denied equality before the law; not that Israel must respect human rights -- which it should -- but that the human rights of Israel have not been respected; not that human rights standards should be applied to Israel -- which they must -- but that these standards have not been applied equally to anyone else.

Israel and the Jewish people have been singled out for differential and discriminatory treatment in the international arena -- and worst of all -- singled out for destruction.

The time has come to sound the alarm -- not only for Israel and the Jewish people, whose safety and security is under existential threat and attack -- but for the world community and the human condition as a whole. For as history has taught us only too well, while the persecution and discrimination may begin with Jews, it doesn't end with Jews.

Author Biography:

Professor Cotler is a member of Canada’s parliament and its former Minister of Justice. He is a distinguished academic and a prominent human rights lawyer, whose dedication to humanitarian causes has earned him the Order of Canada and many other awards.

Venezuela's Jewish community is becoming increasingly worried

2007-09-30T22:10:00.000-04:00

Caracas Jews fear planned state curriculum will hurt religious school

By Anshel Pfeffer
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/908072.html
Mon., October 01, 2007.

Venezuela's Jewish community is becoming increasingly worried about President Hugo Chavez's plans to redraft the country's constitution and centralize the education system. Sources in the community say that since Chavez rose to power eight years ago, some 20 percent of Jews have left the country.

Over the past month, Chavez has advanced a raft of far-reaching amendments to the constitution, which he amended through a referendum shortly after he was elected to his first term as president in December 1998. Chavez aims to amend the constitution to remove the limitation on the number of times a president can run for reelection.

Chavez is also preparing a list of amendments making the Venezuelan economy more socialist and centralized, giving the government more control of certain sectors. Some of the amendments include nationalization.

Earlier this month, Chavez announced a new mandatory socialist schooling program. Schools that do not adhere to the government's curriculum would be closed and the pupils transferred to state-run institutions. This would affect private schools attended by children from affluent homes.

In recent media statements as well as in his weekly TV program, Chavez said that "private schools will have no choice but to comply." The ultimatum has worried the local Jewish community of some 12,000 people.

More than 90 percent of all Venezuelan Jews reside in the capital, Caracas. The two prominent Jewish institutions in the city are the community's club and a Jewish school, Ebraica, with some 1,300 pupils of all ages.

Changes to the schools' modus operandi could constitute a blow to Venezuela's Jewish community, prominent members say. "We don't think these plans are directed against Jews, but we could be affected by this general trend," a community activist told Haaretz.

"The school is an essential issue that unites all of the community around it," says another activist for an international Jewish organization who frequently visits Venezuela. "We expect Chavez's plan to make it more difficult to teach the school's specific Jewish subjects."

"Everything is blacker and whiter here," says one of the community's members. "You're either for Chavez or against him. And Jews are regarded as the opposition." The man, who requested anonymity, says that in Chavez's Venezuela Jews are also identified with Israel, which isn't on Chavez's list of favorite countries.

Until now, the local Jewish community has been able to weather the socialist storm. "Socialism and all, the community has never enjoyed such wealth before. The demand for imported goods is record high," the Jewish community member says.

But with thousands of Jews contemplating leaving for the United States, Israel and elsewhere, the community's stability under Chavez remains to be seen.

Anti-Semitism in Europe persists

2007-07-19T00:59:00.000-04:00

ADL poll: Classic anti-Semitic attitudes in Europe persist

By Haaretz Correspondent and Agencies , By Amiram Barkat
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/883342.html
Thu., July 19, 2007 Av 4, 5767

Fifty percent of Europeans in six countries believe that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home country; 34.5 percent agree that Jews have too much financial and business clout; and 43 percent said Jews talk too much about the Holocaust, according to a poll released yesterday by the Anti-Defamation League.

The survey of respondents in Austria, Belgium, Britain, Hungary, the Netherlands and Switzerland showed a rise in anti-Semitic attitudes, but also a rise in positive views of Israel, in contrast to the Palestinians, since a similar poll was conducted in 2005.

ADL National Director Abraham Foxman called the questioning of Jewish loyalty the most distressing, disturbing, and frightening issue, as it was liable to fuel anti-Semitic incidents.

"Millions of Europeans continue to accept a wide range of traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories, including the charge that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home country," Foxman said at a news conference in Jerusalem. "Despite the fact that individual governments and the EU have condemned anti-Semitism and sought ways to counteract it, these attitudes die hard and help incite and legitimize anti-Semitic acts, including violence against Jews."

According to the survey, an overall 49.7 percent of respondents said it was probably true that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home countries, compared with 38.2 percent in 2005. A breakdown of the results showed that view was most widely held in Austria and Belgium, where 54 percent of those polled agreed, compared to Switzerland, with 44 percent.

Other questions showed wider differences between countries. The research showed that anti-Semitic attitudes were particularly marked in Hungary, where 61 percent of respondents said that it was probably true that Jews have too much power in international financial markets, up from 55 percent in 2005, and that 60 percent believed that Jews have too much power in the business world. Only 11 percent in the Netherlands held the same view.

An average of 34.5 percent across the six countries agreed that Jews have too much financial and business clout, compared with 26.7 percent two years ago.

Asked about recent initiatives to boycott Israel by academic and journalists' unions in Britain, 43 percent of U.K. respondents said they opposed such attempts, while 37 percent favored them.

In Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, respondents said they viewed Israel more favorably than in 2005. The favorable rating for Israel dropped, meanwhile, in Austria and Hungary.

Foxman said he was "especially concerned that the survey found a large percentage of all respondents, and a majority in Austria, Hungary and Switzerland, believe that American Jews control U.S. policy on the Middle East, an old canard that has been resurrected in mainstream America and bolsters existing European attitudes."

The survey conducted by Taylor Nelson Sofres between May 29 and Jun 18 interviewed 500 adults in each of the six countries, and had a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.

Nazi horrors uncovered in Ukraine

2007-06-05T11:24:00.000-04:00

Mass grave found in Ukraine with thousands of bodies of Jews

By The Associated Press
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/867388.html
Tue., June 05, 2007 Sivan 19, 5767

A mass grave believed to contain the remains of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis has been found in southern Ukraine, a Jewish community representative said Tuesday.

The grave was found by chance last month when workers were digging to lay gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near Odessa, said Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community.

He said that the Nazis established a concentration camp near the village in November 1941 and killed about 5,000 Jews at or near the site.

Several thousand Jews executed by the Nazis lie there, Shvartsman told The Associated Press.

Ukraine's Jewish population was devastated during the Holocaust. Babi Yar, a ravine outside the capital Kiev where the Nazis slaughtered some 34,000 Jews over two days in September 1941, is a powerful symbol of the tragedy.

Jew stabbed to death in Russia

2007-05-13T17:17:00.000-04:00

Rabbi: Murder of Jewish teacher in Russia was ethnically motivated

By Reuters
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/859011.html
Sun., May 13, 2007 Iyyar 25, 5767

A Jewish teacher in the Russian city of St Petersburg was stabbed to death on Saturday in an attack a leading rabbi has said he suspects was ethnically motivated.

Rabbi Berel Lazar said the teacher had been killed at the door of his apartment. He had been stabbed several times on the face and the chest.

"The information currently available leads to serious suspicion that the crime was ethnically motivated," Lazar said in a statement on Sunday. "The victim sustained more than a dozen stab wounds and nothing was stolen."

Russia has witnessed a rise in racist attacks in recent years. Observers say resurgent Russian national pride and the collapse of communist order have fuelled this increase.

President Vladimir Putin has described the rise in racist attacks as a threat to national security. He has called for the legal system and the police to step up efforts to stamp them out.

Last year a man shouting "Heil Hitler" burst into a synagogue and stabbed nine people, and Jewish graves have been desecrated with swastikas in recent years.

In 2005, five teenagers beat a Jewish man to death with a metal bar.

Under the rule of the Soviet Union, passports belonging to Jews were specially marked, and Jews were often discriminated against when applying for places at top universities and prominent companies.

Lazar said the authorities needed to punish racist attacks and behavior harder in order to cut them out.

----

Local yeshiva student stabbed to death in St. Petersburg

By Amiram Barkat, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/858539.html
Sat., May 12, 2007 Iyyar 24, 5767

A 22-year-old Jewish man was stabbed to death on Saturday at the entrance to his apartment in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The motive of the murder is still unclear however the local Jewish community believes that it may have been due to anti-Semitic sentiment.

If true, this would be the most severe case of anti-Semitic violence in St. Petersburg in the last few years.

Dmitri Mikolinski , a biology and yeshiva student, was murdered outside his parent's home while on his way to synagogue. His mother, who left the apartment a few minutes after him, found Mikolinski bleeding heavily after being stabbed in the neck.

Police are investigating whether a security camera installed in the building has footage of the murder.

Jews in the community told Haaretz that Mikolinski was a quiet and shy man and it is highly unlikely that he was involved with criminals.

According to the Jewish community, the manner in which Mikolinski was murdered - a stabbing in the neck - is characteristic of a group of skinheads in the city.

In the past few years, a number of foreign students and civil rights activists were murdered in St. Petersburg, apparently by neo-Nazi skinheads.

In most cases, the perpetrators were not apprehended or got off with light punishments.

----

Jewish teacher murdered in Russia

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/breaking/101795.html

A Jewish day school teacher was murdered in St. Petersburg, in what some in the Jewish community believe to have been an ethnically motivated attack.

In an official statement on Sunday, the Jewish community of St.Petersburg said the details pertinent to the murder "were too scant to make any conclusions," yet community leaders pointed out the rise of xenophobia as a possible reason behind the crime.

Dmitri Nikulinsky, 22, a St. Petersburg native who taught biology at a Chabad-run school, was found heavily bleeding by his mother outside his apartment around 10 a.m. Saturday. Nikulinsky, a biology student in addition to his teaching role, had been stabbed in the neck.

"People are very upset and shocked," St. Petersburg's Chief Rabbi Mendel Pevzner told JTA.

As of Sunday, police had not informed the community of any leads in the ongoing investigation.

The community has no plans to increase security at its centers and has issued no statements recommending that its members take any greater precautions. "Until we have any further information about motives, we re not going to come out with such statements," Pevzner said.

In recent years, St. Petersburg has been known as a hotbed of nationalist and neo-Nazi activity in Russia, and several racially motivated murders were committed in the city, though Jews had not yet been among targets of these attacks. Those targeted were mainly foreign students from Asian and African countries and ethnic minorities from former Soviet republics.

They lifted her shirt and drew a cross on her abdomen

2007-04-27T01:49:00.000-04:00

Swastika daubed on French Jewish woman in anti-Semitic attack

By Yair Ettinger, Haaretz Correspondent
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/852843.html
Fri., April 27, 2007 Iyyar 9, 5767

A young Jewish woman was viciously attacked on Thursday by unidentified assailants in a train station in Marseilles. The attack was described by one observer as the "worst anti-Semitic incident in France since the murder of Ilan Halimi" over a year ago.

French police investigating the incident have imposed a gag order on all details of the attack, but David Roche, a Jewish Agency representative in France who is in touch with officials there said the incident is being described as an anti-Semitic attack.

According to details received from Roche, the attack occured in the afternoon when a 22-year-old woman arrived at the metro station of the La Rose district - which has a mixed Muslim and Jewish community.

According to reports, two unidentified men of Middle Eastern appearance approached the woman and began abusing her. At some point, they began hitting her, and one report states that she was dragged by the hair.

When they saw a Star of David on her neck, they lifted her shirt and drew a cross on her abdomen. One of the witnesses said it was a swastika.

The two assailants fled the scene.

In a telephone interview from Paris, Roche told Haaretz that Marseilles police have set up a special investigation squad and are searching the La Rose district.

The young woman gave testimony to the police for many hours, and sources at the Jewish Agency say she was confused and found it difficult to tell her story.

Whitewashing the Nazi past

2007-04-23T02:40:00.000-04:00

They won't allow history to be rewritten

By Leonie Schultens
Haaretz
Mon., April 23, 2007 Iyyar 5, 5767

How do you turn a former Nazi prosecutor into an opponent of Hitler's regime? It seems that Gunther Oettinger, the minister president of the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, thought the death of former German politician Hans Filbinger at age 93 justified such historical revisionism. In a eulogy honoring Filbinger's life, Oettinger said: "Hans Filbinger was no National Socialist. On the contrary, he was an opponent of the Nazi regime. However, he was unable to evade the regime's tight control, as were millions of others."

Hans Filbinger, it should be recalled, enjoyed a very prosperous postwar career in the ranks of Germany's Christian Democratic Party (CDU) of current Chancellor Angela Merkel. Filbinger led Baden-Wuerttemberg from 1966 until he was forced to resign in 1978 after the media uncovered his activity as a naval judge in Hitler's Germany.

In his graveside speech, Oettinger claimed that contrary to popular belief, no verdict issued by Filbinger ever led to the death of German soldiers. As it happened, many Germans, and especially the German media, disagreed with his evaluation, especially in light of the fact that the sister of one of Filbinger's victims expressed her outrage at the eulogy. In 1945 Filbinger oversaw the execution of 22-year-old Walter Groeger for intending to desert to Scandinavia.

The amount of pressure German politicians and the media exerted on Oettinger after his speech was remarkable. The "Filbinger Affair" remained front-page news a whole week, prompting calls for Oettingers resignation and even the establishment of a fact-finding committee to investigate Filbinger's role in Nazi Germanys naval courts.

The head of the opposition Social Democrats in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Ute Vogt, called for Oettinger's resignation. "It is one thing that Filbinger was unable to recognize his injustice, quite another that Oettinger is also unable to differentiate," she said. Chancellor Merkel also publicly criticized her fellow party member, saying that while Filbinger's achievements should be honored, his eulogy should have raised several critical questions with regard to Germanys Nazi past.

The German historian Hans Mommsen accused Oettinger of "national blasphemy," a fitting description for the minister president's eulogy which turned Filbinger from a spineless Nazi follower - and implementer, as the judgment against Groeger shows all too clearly - into someone who was opposed to the Nazi regime.

While Oettinger could have very distastefully claimed that during the Nazi era Filbinger was forced to act in certain ways - and even this would have been a poor argument - it is impossible to turn the former marine judge into an opponent of the Nazi era. Because the war was nearly over, Filbinger did not need to issue a death sentence on Groeger, and he certainly did not have to be present to witness the execution.

It is encouraging to see Germans of all political convictions rally together to oppose the rewriting of history. Oettinger tried to justify his speech by saying that cultural norms hold that when eulogizing someone, the positive aspects of the person's life should be highlighted. While this may be true for people outside the public limelight, it is not applicable to public figures, and it is certainly not permissible for politicians to whitewash or even erase the dark spots in a person's biography - even more so if these are marked by swastikas.
While it is regrettable that ministers of Oettinger's standing consider it "permissible" to make such statements today, viewing the past as water under the bridge, what should be remembered about this episode is not the view of one individual, but the great extent of public pressure brought to bear on him.

True, the German political establishment cannot make an example of every individual who wishes to forget about or even glorify the Nazi past. To some, this may be a serious shortcoming, but one which, sadly, is difficult to rectify, especially considering that public discourse and education have for years condemned Nazi horrors. But by not allowing Oettinger to get away with his statements, the German government is showing that such attitudes are neither tolerated nor condoned.

Oettinger, in the end, had to issue a public apology for his remarks. He has not likely heard the last about his sympathetic speech honoring Filbinger's death. For one, the union for the victims of Nazi military justice has announced that it will file a petition against him for insulting and defaming Nazi victims. And when, one day, people will write Oettinger's eulogy, they will be sure to mention the short, but intense, debate that turned a conservative German politician into a historical revisionist.

Attacks on Jews rise during 2006

2007-04-17T02:27:00.000-04:00

'Alarming' rise reported in attacks on Jews in 2006

By Yigal Hai
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/848737.html
Mon., April 16, 2007 Nisan 28, 5767

The number of physical attacks on Jews worldwide last year was more than double those that occured in 2005, according to an annual report released yesterday by Tel Aviv University's Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism.

The 270 assaults recorded took place primarily in schools, in the work place and near Jewish institutions, according to the report, which classifies the rise as "perhaps the most alarming finding that emerges from the 2006 data." Compiled in coordination with the World Jewish Congress and released to the public on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, the report states that crime-scene evidence indicates that Muslims constitute a disproportionately high amount of the perpetrators.

Some 590 acts of violence and vandalism against Jewish targets around the world took place in 2006, compared to 400 in 2005 - marking a record high in anti-Semitic incidents since October 2000, the report found. It said 19 of the incidents were classified as major attacks perpetrated with a weapon and involving intent to kill, an increase over the 15 such incidents recorded in 2005. The total number of anti-Semitic incidents in 2005 totaled 400.

Prof. Dina Porat, who heads the institute for the study of anti-Semitism and racism, cited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial and this summer's war in Lebanon as the major factors spurring anti-Semitic violence.

The greatest increase in the incidence of such violence, according to the report, took place in Australia, Canada, Britain and France. Of the 442 incidents in Australia, 47 were violent attacks targeting individuals and community facilities, while Canada saw the number of violent incidents rise from 44 to 74.

The report found that anti-Jewish sentiments have been increasing particularly in the French-speaking areas of Canada.

The level of anti-Semitism in South Africa hit a peak in 2006, when it recorded the highest number of related incidents since officials began keeping detailed records two decades ago, according to the report.

It said 79 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded there last year, compared to 20 in 2005 and 37 the previous year, and that they reached a peak during and after this summer's war in Lebanon. The number of major incidents of violence and vandalism also rose, from three in 2005 to 15 last year, the report found.

Hunt for Iranians who mass-murdered Jews in Argentina

2007-03-07T04:28:00.000-05:00

Interpol may help nab Iranian suspects in JCC bomb

By The Associated Press
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/834061.html
Wed., March 07, 2007 Adar 17, 5767

PARIS - Interpol will discuss next week whether to issue "red notices," or international wanted requests, calling for the arrest of nine former prominent Iranian officials sought in connection with Argentina's worst terrorist attack.

The nine wanted in Argentina in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center there include former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani, as well as Iran's former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati and former intelligence minister Ali Fallahian.

Argentina has requested help from Interpol in the case, while Iran has denied any involvement in the bombing and said it would oppose any attempt to detain Iranian citizens. Both countries are member countries of the France-based international police agency.

Mark Giles, Interpol's chief press officer, said the body's executive committee will take up the dispute March 13-15.

At that point they will either come up with a decision or potentially refer it to the general assembly, which meets next year, Giles said.

A red notice is an Interpol request that a wanted person be arrested with a view to extradition. While the measure cannot force countries to arrest or extradite suspects, people with red notice status appear on Interpol's equivalent of a most-wanted list.

At the meeting next week, Interpol experts will hear arguments from both Iran and Argentina, he said. They will also take into account a report by Interpol's office of legal affairs.

Eighty-five people were killed and 200 wounded when a van packed with explosives blew up outside the seven-story Jewish community center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994.

In 2006, Argentine Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral said he was seeking the detentions of Rafsanjani and eight other Iranian officials for the bombing. Argentine prosecutors have alleged that the attack was orchestrated by leaders of the Iranian government and entrusted to Hezbollah.