Category: World News

BERLIN (JTA) — For second gentleman Douglas Emhoff, the final hours of a five-day working trip to Poland and Germany brought everything into focus. It was here in the underground information center in Germany’s central Holocaust memorial that Emhoff sat down with several survivors, including two who had recently fled war-torn Ukraine. Sitting in a […]

BERLIN (JTA) — A federal German cultural organization has returned a 16th-century sculpture to the heirs of its pre-war Jewish owner who faced Nazi persecution. The Berlin-based Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, or SPK (for Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz), announced today that the “Maria Lactans” statuette depicting Mary nursing an infant Jesus would be given back to […]

(JTA) — A Muslim man put off a protest that would have involved burning a Torah scroll in front of Stockholm’s Israeli embassy this past weekend. The man, identified in reports only as a 34-year-old Egyptian writer living in Sweden, had reportedly received approval from Swedish authorities for the protest, which would have come in […]

(JTA) — Just before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Milan’s Holocaust memorial debuted an eye-grabbing new addition on some of its exterior walls: murals of characters from “The Simpsons” dressed as Jews under Nazi rule. But the Shoah Memorial Foundation said the well-known Italian pop artist who painted the murals didn’t reach out before creating the series […]

BERLIN (JTA) – Europe’s main Jewish student organization is fed up with the antisemitism, Holocaust denial and other hate speech burgeoning on Twitter — so they are taking the social media company to court. The Brussels-based European Union of Jewish Students and the Berlin-based HateAid non-profit group on Wednesday announced they have sued Twitter in […]

(JTA) — In a speech to the European Union parliament tied to commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said that criticism of his country, which has drawn renewed international scrutiny over its new right-wing government, is legitimate. Questioning Israel’s right to exist, he added, is “antisemitism in the full sense of the […]

BERLIN (JTA) – The embattled Rabbi Walter Homolka, accused of abuse of power at the liberal rabbinical seminary he founded, has suffered yet another consequence: expulsion from Germany’s liberal rabbinical association. The expulsion does not affect any work that Homolka might do as a rabbi or professor in Germany or beyond. But it strips him […]

(JTA) — Doug Emhoff’s itinerary on an upcoming trip to Poland and Germany includes a stop at the factory where Oskar Schindler saved over 1,000 Jews, a Shabbat dinner with local Jewish leaders and a visit to a United Nations center housing refugees from Ukraine. Senior administration officials outlined the trip’s details in a call […]

(JTA) — A recent study of the Dutch population conducted by the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany showed an alarming lack of education around the Holocaust in the Netherlands. For one, a majority of Dutch respondents, across all age groups, did not cite their own country as a place where the Holocaust took […]

(JTA) — Grigory Kanovich, a Lithuanian-born Jew and award winning author who endeavored to tell the story of his people despite Soviet pressure, died on Friday at 93 in his home in Tel Aviv. Kanovich’s repertoire includes more than 30 plays and screenplays, a dozen novels and several collections of poems and short stories, almost […]