Author: Jesse Orine

(JTA) — Israeli leaders rarely criticize a law passed by an ally government as outright “antisemitic.” But that’s what Foreign Minister Yair Lapid did on Aug. 14 in response to a newly passed law in Poland that indirectly makes it impossible for Jews and others to sue for property stolen from their families in World War […]

RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) – Hackers posting death threats, including “I’ll enter synagogues and kill everyone,” broke into the online mourning ceremony for a former Jewish school principal in Rio de Janeiro. “Death to Jews,” “I’ll explode,” “Sieg Heil” and “dirty Jews” were also part of the attack during the shiva session Sunday on Google […]

MADRID (JTA) — Bernardo Pulido spent over $29,000 on genealogical documentation, Jewish heritage certificates, attorney fees and trips to Spain to prove his Sephardic heritage.  But last month, like so many others attempting to gain Spanish citizenship through a 2015 law promising to right the wrongs of the Spanish Inquisition that expelled Jews, Pulido received […]

(JTA) — An 18-year-old Jewish man wearing a kippah in Cologne, Germany, was beaten by a group of 10 attackers in a public green space and taken to the hospital with a broken nose and cheekbone. Police arrested two suspects in what they are deeming an antisemitic hate crime. The attack was captured on police […]

(JTA) – Police in London are looking for a man who was filmed assaulting a Jewish man and a child on the street in separate incidents on the same day last week. Security footage shows a tall suspect punching a 64-year-old haredi Orthodox Jewish man as they pass one another on the street in the […]

(JTA) — The Jewish community of Bahrain celebrated the country’s first bar mitzvah since 2005. The bar mitzvah ceremony took place in the House of the Ten Commandments in Manama, the kingdom’s only operational synagogue, according to a release from the Association of Gulf Jewish Communities, which coordinates and promotes Jewish life in the region. […]

(JTA) — Praises for Adolf Hitler were etched on a grave-shaped monument in Poland for Holocaust victims whose bodies were burnt. Meanwhile, in Spain, police arrested a man whom they say was filmed spraying swastika graffiti at the entrance to a synagogue in Madrid, the news Madrid 24 Horas reported last week. In Poland, the […]

(JTA) — Employers may forbid workers from wearing religious clothes or symbols on the job, a top European Union court ruled, spurring protest by Muslin and Jewish groups. The ruling last month by the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg “is a step backwards from religious freedoms,” Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of […]

(JTA) — The Argentines who placed stones in front of the Casa Rosada government building this week were marking a grim milestone in their country’s COVID-19 experience: crossing the 100,000-death threshold. They were also echoing a Jewish ritual whose telltale signs — small rocks perched atop gravestones — can be seen in any Jewish cemetery […]

(JTA) — Amid the Taliban’s total takeover of Afghanistan this week, some had specific concerns about one person: that country’s last remaining Jew, 62-year-old Zebulon Simantov. Simantov, who has in recent years lived in Kabul’s only synagogue, said earlier this year that he would leave before the Taliban arrived, possibly for Israel. He has also […]