Category: World News

(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.” […]

BERLIN (JR) — Police in Berlin have arrested a 23-year-old man alleged to have attacked and seriously wounded a Jewish student in a bar, in what the Jewish student and his family say they believe was a hate crime. The victim, Lahav Shapira, 30, who was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries to his face, is the […]

(JR) — I am and always have been an American Jew. But working in Washington, D.C., after the 2016 election, a shift in the city became noticeable. I found myself having more meetings in the lobby of the Trump Hotel, and with people now pardoned by the former president whose name it bears, than I […]

(JR) — Israeli fencer Yuval Freilich won a gold medal at the 2024 Qatar Grand Prix on Wednesday, becoming a champion in a country that is home to the leadership of Hamas. Freilich, 29, won the epee title in Doha while wearing a uniform with an Israeli flag and the message “Am Israel Chai,” Hebrew […]

(JR) — For decades after World War II, a famed Jewish house of study in Poland was consigned to oblivion. The Nazis set fire to thousands of books stored at the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva in 1939, the popular story went, leaving no trace of its enormous library even as its students were sent to their […]

(JR) — A Moscow court extended the pretrial detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich through March 30, meaning he will have spent at least a year behind bars before his trial begins. Gershkovich, the 32-year-old American son of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union, has been held on espionage charges since March 29, […]

(JR) – To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day this weekend, several prominent Holocaust survivors and Jewish leaders headed to the site of a different genocide — that of Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s. They were there alongside Bosnian Muslim leaders to launch a new initiative aimed at advocating for peace and preventing future genocides. “While […]

LONDON (JR) — Workers and shoppers at a family-owned kosher supermarket in one of London’s most Jewish neighborhoods fended off a knife-wielding attacker who was demanding to know whether its owners supported “Israel or Palestine” on Monday. Police arrested a 34-year-old man on suspicion of “racially-aggravated affray” after the man allegedly returned to the supermarket […]

(JR) — In his retirement, Jacob Rosen-Koenigsbuch is passionate about surnames. Specifically, the last names of Jews who were living in the Arab world before the Mizrahi exodus in the middle of the 20th century around the establishment of Israel.  Rosen-Koenigsbuch spends much of his time with his head buried in archival material from bygone […]