Category: World News

(JR) — The top rights court in Europe has ruled that bans of ritual slaughter in parts of Belgium can stand, ending the hopes of Jewish advocates who had said the bans were an unfair infringement on Jewish practice. Two of Belgium’s three regions banned slaughter without stunning in 2017 and 2018, saying that the […]

(JR) — The head rabbi of Britain’s Masorti movement published a statement Tuesday opposing a threatened Israel invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza and urging “another, political, path forward.” The statement makes Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg possibly the highest-profile European Jewish leader to express misgivings about Israel’s war in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on […]

(JR) — A London theater has apologized after a performer allegedly singled out an Israeli audience member who refused to applaud a Palestinian flag during a comedy set on Saturday night. Comedian Paul Currie also riled up his audience to shout “Free Palestine” and “Get out” as multiple Jewish audience members exited, according to an […]

(JR) — In December 1941, a petite, elegant woman left her home in Eastern Galicia, where she was known as the Jewish mathematician Janina Spinner Mehlberg. Three days later, she arrived in Lublin — soon to be an epicenter of Nazi extermination in occupied Poland — with a new identity. She was now Countess Janina […]

BERLIN (JR) – Germany’s major international film festival has turned the spotlight on the country’s biggest far-right political party, saying they are not wanted at festival’s upcoming gala launch. The Berlinale festival announced Feb. 8 that it had disinvited five politicians from the far-right Alternative for Germany party from the opening event. The 10-day film […]

(JR) — Australian police are investigating threats against a 5-year-old Jewish child amid an uproar over the publication online of a list of hundred of Jewish creatives’ personal information by pro-Palestinian activists. Hundreds of Jewish academics and creatives who joined a private WhatsApp group last year had their personal information shared publicly by prominent pro-Palestinian […]

(JR) — French President Emmanuel Macron presided over a somber ceremony in Paris on Wednesday to honor the 42 French nationals murdered during the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel. France flew relatives of the victims on a special flight to the ceremony, held in pouring rain in the courtyard of Les Invalides, the […]

(JR) — On his first day of his visit to Israel, Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, told Israeli authorities that his country would move its embassy to Jerusalem. Milei had vowed during his campaign to move the embassy from its current home in Herzliya, in a sign that Argentina recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. If […]

(JR) — In 1967, Canada’s justice minister was asked to strip citizenship from a former Nazi who had been sentenced to death in the Soviet Union. The minister, Pierre Trudeau, declined to do so. Although the USSR had convicted the Latvian man of murdering Jews in the Holocaust, Trudeau argued that Canada had not erred […]

(JR) — In an open letter addressed to the Jewish community in Israel Friday, Pope Francis decried the “terrible increase in attacks against Jews around the world” in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, calling it a “piecemeal world war” that has created “divisive positions, sometimes taking the form of anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism.” […]