Category: World News

When things finally began returning to normal in Australia after nearly three years under one of the world’s strictest Covid protocols, Australian Jews didn’t hesitate to celebrate. In November, Jews with the roots in the former Soviet Union who live in Australia heralded their heritage with a pair of long-awaited festivals in the country’s two […]

BERLIN (JTA) — The head of Germany’s main Jewish organization may have been staked out by a spy for Iran’s secret service, German security investigators have revealed. The newsmagazine FOCUS has reported that Josef Schuster, recently elected to a third four-year term as president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, may have been […]

(JTA) — Lithuania’s prime minister made what one Jewish organization called an ”important step” by introducing legislation to allocate more than $38 million as restitution for Holocaust survivors and their heirs.  Ingrida Šimonytė introduced the bill in the Seimas, Lithuania’s legislature, earlier this month. If passed it would nearly double the money the government had […]

BERLIN (JTA) – The city of Erfurt in central Germany is home to an impeccably restored medieval synagogue made possible because local Jews had been expelled long before the Nazis began their campaign to destroy Jewish sites. Now, Erfurt’s long-hidden Jewish past is again offering new insights — this time about the genetic history of […]

(JTA) — Nearly seven months after they were denied boarding in Frankfurt, a group of more than 100 Hasidic Lufthansa passengers are getting paid for their troubles. The airline is paying each passenger $20,000 plus giving them $1,000 to reimburse them for expenses incurred during the May incident, according to Dan’s Deals, the discount travel […]

(JTA) — When Janet Jagan, an immigrant from the United States, made history by becoming Guyana’s prime minister in 1997, she was thought to be the country’s only Jew. In fact, another Jew had recently purchased an island off the coast of Guyana, and 25 years later, there are at least two Jews living in […]

(JTA) — Australian-Jewish teenager Harry Sheezel made headlines Monday for getting drafted into the Australian Football League and for facing a barrage of online antisemitism in the wake of his selection. The 18-year-old medium forward was picked third overall by last-place North Melbourne, which finished the 2022 season with only two wins in 22 matches. […]

BUCHAREST (JTA) — When Michael Shafir moved to Israel from his native Romania as a teenager in the 1960s, it wasn’t because the Jewish teen was burning with Zionist fervor. Instead, it was the first country that agreed to take him. “I would have left for wherever there was no communism, because I could no […]

(JTA) — Qatar may have caused an uproar by banning alcohol at the World Cup soccer tournament in Doha this month, but for religious Jewish fans, some kosher offerings will be available, thanks to two rabbis.  Rabbi Marc Schneier, from New York, and Rabbi Mendy Chitrik, the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement’s emissary to Istanbul, worked with […]

(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month. It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished […]