Category: World News

TIRANA, Albania (JR) — Hidden behind a wooden gate in Tirana’s Toptani district, construction workers are busy converting a 19th-century Ottoman mansion into the Besa Museum — a long-planned shrine to Albania’s embrace of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution during World War II. About 100 miles south, in the Adriatic port city of Vlora — nestled […]

(JR) — French President Emmanuel Macron visited Jerusalem on Tuesday, attempting to balance his solidarity with Israel alongside his calls for humanitarian aid in Gaza and a political peace process with the Palestinians. Thirty French citizens were killed in the Hamas incursion into Israel on Oct. 7, which left over 1,400 people in Israel dead […]

(JR) — Italian officials are reportedly investigating dozens of antisemitic incidents in Milan tied to the Israel-Hamas conflict, including one in which called for killing Jews in the bathroom of a nightclub. Messages translated in Italian media to “Jews to death, rats we are coming to get you in your sewers” and “Nazi Jews you […]

(JR) — London’s Metropolitan Police Service said that antisemitic offenses are up 1,353% in the city since fighting erupted between Israel and Hamas. Between Oct. 1 and Oct. 18, antisemitic crimes surged from 15 to 218 incidents compared with the same period last year, police said on Friday. Islamophobic crimes went from 42 to 101, […]

MADRID (JR) — Political tensions escalated between Israel and Spain this past week as Spanish Jews reeled from a series of incidents outside synagogues. Ione Belarra, Spain’s acting social rights minister, called to “urgently suspend diplomatic relations with the state of Israel” on Wednesday, citing Israel’s response in Gaza to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks that […]

(JR) — When Jennifer Podemski’s Indigenous mother gave birth at 17, social workers removed Podemski from a Toronto hospital and put her into the foster care system. It was only through the efforts of one social worker, who was retiring, that she was reunited with her mother at three months old. The social worker had […]

(JR) — In what’s being touted as a first for a Jewish organization, the World Jewish Congress advocacy group opened an office in Vatican City to liaise with Catholic leaders and further Catholic-Jewish relations. WJC President Ronald Lauder visited Pope Francis while inaugurating the organization’s “representative office to the Holy See” on Thursday. Lauder, a billionaire […]

(JR) — The installation stretches across the entire plaza outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art — a table for 200, pristinely set for Shabbat yet searingly empty. The high chairs at a handful of seats, the children’s cups in other settings and the white roses alongside some of the plates make the symbolism painfully […]

(JR) – A historic but defunct synagogue in Tunisia was reduced to rubble on Tuesday amid mass rioting after an explosion in Gaza that Hamas blamed on Israel. Hundreds of people were filmed setting fire to a synagogue in the central Tunisian city of Al Hammah in the hours after the explosion, at a Gaza […]

BUENOS AIRES (JR) — The U.S. and Israeli embassies in Argentina’s capital received bomb threats via email on Wednesday, including one that read “Jews we are going to kill you all.” Federal police evacuated the areas around the two embassies — one in the city, the other in a suburb — and helicopters patrolled the […]