Category: World News

(JTA) — A member of the European Parliament was turned around at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv on Tuesday and sent back to her native Spain after attempting to enter the country on a diplomatic mission to the Palestinian Authority.  Israeli officials cited the fact that the politician Ana Miranda, who represents the Galicia […]

ODESSA, Ukraine (JTA) – A year after Rabbi Mendy Wolff spirited 120 children and staff away from the Mishpacha Orphanage in this war-torn country to the safety of Berlin, he is preparing to bring them home. That’s not because the war is over — far from it. One year after Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine, […]

TRUSKAVETS, Ukraine (JTA) — Nearly 600 Jews stand shoulder-to-shoulder, eyes trained on the young man leading the service to close out Shabbat. The crowd sings a soulful havdalah tune that lifts up its final words: “hamavdil ben kodesh l’chol” — “the One who divides between sacred and ordinary.” It looks like a Shabbat gathering anywhere […]

(JTA) — In the months after Russian tanks rolled into her country last February, the music largely stopped for Elizaveta Sherstuk. The founder of a Jewish choral ensemble called Aviv in her hometown of Sumy, in the northeastern flank of Ukraine, Sherstuk had to put singing aside in favor of her day job and personal […]

(JTA) — Moses Elisaf, thought to be the first Jewish mayor of a city in Greece, died at 68 on Friday after a brief battle with cancer. Elisaf, mayor of Ioannina since 2019, was hospitalized during a work trip to Athens in December, the Kathimerini newspaper reported. He extended his hospital stay on Dec. 19, […]

(JTA) — The United Kingdom’s Labour Party is no longer being monitored by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, as the public watchdog announced Wednesday that the party had taken sufficient measures to root out an antisemitism problem that plagued it for years under former leader Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn’s successor Keir Starmer hailed the announcement […]

(JTA) — The remaining few Jews of Antakya have been transferred to Istanbul, where they are staying in a Jewish nursing home thanks to a collaboration between the Turkish Jewish community there, a Kazakh-Israeli billionaire and Israel’s fundraising organization Keren Hayesod. While there have been a variety of ways for survivors to leave Turkey in […]

BERLIN (JTA) — The prominent German rabbi who was found to have abused his authority at the seminary he ran also appears to have plagiarized a portion of his 1992 dissertation. That’s according to a new investigation into Rabbi Walter Homolka published this week in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper. More than 60 […]

(JTA) — The first post on Rivky Hertzel’s Instagram account — which she and her husband signed up for last year ahead of a planned move to Zambia — depicts a classic Chabad activity: a mock matzah bake for children that the couple organized in Lusaka, the country’s capital, ahead of last Passover. But like […]

TAIPEI (JTA) — Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese diplomat stationed in Vienna who helped thousands of Jews escape from Europe during World War II, never met Adolf Eichmann. But in “Night Angels,” a novel based on his life, Feng-Shan comes face to face with Eichmann several times — and his wife Grace’s Jewish tutor, Lola, tries to […]