Category: World News

MELBOURNE (JR) — Ruth Hannah has lived in the Australian coastal town of Mallacoota for more than 30 years. The 72-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors knows of only one other Jewish person in her town, which has a population of 1,183 people. Known for its beautiful beaches and wildlife, Mallacoota is located near the middle […]

(JR) — A catalog of calamities is central to the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Jewish High Holidays that begin later this week. We Jews are asked to imagine ourselves perched on the precipice of life and death. Nothing frames it as starkly as Unetaneh Tokef, the roll call of ruin enumerating various […]

(JR) – A prominent member of an American neo-Nazi group has been extradited to the Netherlands, where he will stand trial for projecting an antisemitic message onto the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Robert Wilson is accused of being behind a February incident in which a message was laser-projected onto the house where Anne Frank […]

(JR) — Jews and Jewish sites appear to have largely been spared following the devastating earthquake that struck Morocco late Friday, killing at least 2,100 people and plunging some of the poorest areas of the Northwest African country into ruins. The export of etrogs, the citrus fruit harvested locally and used ritually in the upcoming festival […]

PORTO, Portugal (JR) — In this city on Portugal’s northwestern coast, a small Jewish community has dedicated years to identifying its predecessors who were killed or expelled in the Portuguese Inquisition of 1536 to 1821. Drawing on newly digitized records, the community was able to identify 842 people, ranging from 10 to 110 years old, […]

(JR) — In a blistering letter, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that he no longer deserves a medal she gave him eight years ago — her city’s top honor — because of what she called his willful Holocaust denial. Hidalgo’s letter to Abbas, delivered on Thursday, comes after U.S., German […]

(JR) – The city of Buenos Aires will rename a major subway station in honor of Raquel Liberman, the Jewish woman who played a critical role in the dismantling of an infamous Argentine sex-trafficking ring and in the move to outlaw prostitution in the country. According to La Nación, the Callao station in the upscale […]

(JR) — Over 20 Jewish groups from the United States and Spanish-speaking countries are calling on Spain’s linguistic authority to drop two antisemitic definitions from its official dictionary. The 300-year-old Madrid-based Academy, or RAE, oversees the evolution of Spanish through its Dictionary of the Spanish Language. In the entry for the word “Jew,” the fifth […]

(JR) – Newly uncovered documentation appears to confirm that Catholic convents and monasteries sheltered more than 3,000 Jews from the Holocaust following the Nazi takeover of Rome in 1943. The papers, which have yet to be made public, were discovered at Vatican City’s Pontifical Biblical Institute and announced on Thursday. They contain the names of […]

(JR) — Since he was arrested by Russian authorities in March, one of Evan Gershkovich’s few connections to the outside world has been a stream of letters from his friends and family. But soon, his circle of correspondents is due to expand. In the days surrounding Rosh Hashanah, people from around the world will be […]