That’s a local legend.

Pilgrims enjoying the Hiloula celebration at the El Ghriba Synagogue in Tunisia, May 2012.

Another is that the miracle worker is buried beneath the foundation stone of the El Ghriba Synagogue, one of the oldest continuously used synagogues in the Diaspora and the site of an annual pilgrimage that typically brings thousands to Djerba seeking answers to their prayers.

This year, amid political uncertainty and security concerns, the two-day celebration held last week on Lag b’Omer drew more journalists and police than pilgrims.

“We have about 300 people here from abroad today, but most are locals,” said Rene Trabelsi, a Paris-based organizer of the celebration whose family oversees the synagogue. “What’s important is that we are having this event this year because last year it did not happen. I hope we can slowly increase the number of people attending each year.”

Last year, in the aftermath of Tunisia’s revolution that overthrew the country’s long time autocrat Zine El Abddine Ben Ali and killed more than 300 Tunisians, the celebration was canceled.

Pilgrimages in previous years had attracted thousands of visitors to Djerba. After the El Ghriba Synagogue was attacked in 2002, the pilgrimage was vastly scaled back, but the number of pilgrims steadily increased until nearly 10,000 came in 2010.

Heavy security accompanied this year’s event, and those coming by car faced some dozen checkpoints en route.

Elias al-Fakhfakh, Tunisia’s minister of tourism and a member of the center-left Ettakatol political party, attended on the second day.

The crowd, which had been singing kabbalistic tunes outside the synagogue, switched to the Tunisian national anthem as al-Fakhfakh approached.

Entering the El Ghriba sanctuary, al-Fakhfakh put on a kabbus, a red traditional Tunisian hat that many Tunisian Jewish men wear as a kippah.

Before cameras from almost every Tunisian television station, al-Fakhfakh viewed both the sefer Torah and holy area where the foundation stone is believed to be.

“It is great that Muslims and Jews can celebrate this occasion together,” he told a cheering crowd before heading off to a meal with local Jewish community leaders. “After the Tunisian revolution we adopted new democratic values. We have a new country with a deep heritage that accepts people with different cultures and religions.

“As a government,” he said, “we want to embrace good relations between Jews and Muslims in the new free Tunisia.”

During the pilgrimage, El Ghriba’s sanctuary becomes a holding place for people’s wishes, which are written on paper and placed inside cracks of the wall — similar to the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Coins are placed inside oil lamps for tzedakah,

charity.

Women seeking to marry or have children visit El Ghriba and write their wishes on boiled eggs, symbolizing life. Candles are lit for those asking for good health and a long life.

A door to the foundation stone, which is beneath the ark, is opened during the pilgrimage, so the candles and eggs may be placed on the stone.

Newlywed Vanessa Mamou, whose father is from Djerba, traveled from Paris for the celebration.

“I put an egg in the synagogue because I am married and want to have a baby,” she told JTA. “My sister is here because she wants to meet someone and get married.”

The El Ghriba legend is important not only for Tunisian Jews but for Muslims as well.

“This is a holy place for all Djerbians, not just the Jews,” a woman named Khalija said as she was leaving the sanctuary. “I came to light a candle with my Jewish friend.”

Unlike previous years, when the celebration attracted Tunisians and non-Tunisians from abroad, nearly all of this year’s pilgrims were Tunisian.

Many were local Djerbians; others came from Tunis. The remaining were Tunisians visiting from Europe, although the visitors included a couple of French pilgrims.

“My family left Tunisia when I was 10 years old, but I spent almost every summer growing up in Tunisia,” said Isabel, who came with her husband and daughter from Paris. “No one will scare me away from coming here because this is my country. I am Tunisian and will never be afraid of my country.”

Adjacent to the synagogue is a building that once served as an inn housing visitors, primarily Libyan Jews visiting El Ghriba. With the growth of the tourism industry and the establishment of vast hotels in recent years, the building is mostly abandoned year-round.

But during the two-day Hiloula, the inn becomes a center of celebration. Live traditional Tunisian music, in Hebrew and Arabic, is sung to the beat of the darbouka drum.

The smell of fried brik — a flour envelope of potatoes, Tunisian hot sauce known as harissa, parsley and egg — is present in the air. Families sit together on benches and munch on fresh almonds, apricots, oranges, cantaloupe and mulberries that are sold in nearby stands.

For some Tunisians who have been abroad for many years, the celebration is a chance to reconnect with Tunisia. On sale are CDs of famous Tunisian Jewish singers from the community’s past as well as DVD collections of recent Tunisian sitcoms.

Previous celebrations have attracted many Israeli pilgrims, but this year Israel issued a travel warning advising its people not to attend.

Perez Trabelsi, El Ghriba’s president, criticized the Israelis in the local French language Tunisian newspaper, Le Press, for not attending this year.

According to some foreign attendees, many foreign visitors canceled after the Islamist Tunisian party Ennahda invited Youssef Al Qaradawi, a Qatar-based Egyptian sheik well known for his endorsement of suicide bombings, on a multi-city speaking tour of Tunisia in the week leading up to the Hiloula.

An anti-government demonstration in Budapest, December 2011. (Ruth Ellen Gruber)

BUDAPEST (JTA) — The debate over anti-Semitism in Hungary has sharpened since the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish and anti-Roma (Gypsy) Jobbik movement entered Parliament two years ago as the country’s third largest party.

Seeking scapegoats and channeling paranoia at a time of severe economic, social and political woes, Jobbik’s lawmakers regularly — and loudly — spout xenophobic, anti-Roma, anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Outbursts in Parliament, in local councils and in the media have demolished taboos and increasingly serve to legitimize hate speech in both private conversation and public discourse.

But for the Jewish community, anxiety over anti-Semitism is only one toxic element of a broader and much more complex national crisis that touches all parts of society two years after the 2010 elections swept the conservative Fidesz party to power.

“The danger is about Hungarian democracy, not about anti-Semitism,” Rabbi Istvan Darvas told JTA.

“Everybody feels the crisis,” said Mircea Cernov, CEO of Haver, a foundation that fights anti-Semitism and teaches schoolchildren about Judaism and the Jewish people. “The financial and economic challenges, unemployment and poverty, social, education and health system crisis, democratic system in turbulence — there is no difference between people influenced by all this.”

With a two-thirds majority in Parliament, Prime Minister Victor Orban and his government rewrote the constitution and pushed through controversial new laws that sharply polarized the country and also drew tough criticism from the European Union and other international bodies.

These included new legislation regulating the media, changing how judges are appointed and reducing the number of officially recognized religious bodies. Three Jewish streams have such recognition.

Other new laws cut social benefits, nationalized private pension funds and even outlawed homelessness.

The government said the new laws were needed to consolidate the legal and judicial system. But critics claimed they contributed to a “democracy deficit” and undermined democratic rights.

Jobbik and other extremists have capitalized on the economic uncertainly and social and political polarization to push a virulently nationalist message that stigmatizes Jews, Roma, immigrants and other minority groups.

Fidesz is not formally allied with Jobbik and has condemned anti-Semitism.

But a defense of Hungarian national honor is one of Fidesz’s platforms. Many Hungarian Jews, who traditionally have gravitated toward leftist-liberal parties, are deeply troubled by appeals to nationalism, even by mainstream parties.

And there is a perception among Fidesz opponents that some of its members may be sympathetic to Jobbik’s more extreme stance. This month, for example, the Israeli ambassador to Hungary canceled an official visit to the town of Eger after an audio recording came to light in which a Fidesz town councilor slammed a prominent actor as a “filthy Jew” with leftist-liberal sympathies.

“Intolerance is growing, radical narratives and voices are powerful, and many people feel that the risk of a greater conflict is real,” said Cernov.

The country, he said, faces a “moral crisis” along with its other woes.

“There are no real credible voices and opinion-influencing figures,” he said. “No role models and no people who can set positive reference points. The lack of a minimum platform of common understanding among all democratic parties and civil groups is the real weakness of the Hungarian society.”

In a recent incident, addressing Parliament just before Passover, a Jobbik lawmaker went so far as to advance the blood libel — the accusation that Jews kill Christian children and use their blood for ritual purposes.

And in a February interview with the London Jewish Chronicle, Jobbik foreign affairs spokesman Marton Gyongyosi called Israel a “Nazi system based on racial hatred,” accused Jews of “colonizing” Hungary and stressed Jobbik’s support of Iran.

These developments have ratcheted up the anxiety level for Hungary’s 100,000 Jews, the largest Jewish community in central Europe.

“The gravity of the situation is unprecedented in the past two decades of Hungarian democracy,” Rabbi Shlomo Koves told The Associatied Press. “Although the safety and well-being of Hungarian Jews in their daily life is not physically in danger — or no worse than in any other European country — anti-Semitic public speech has escalated to a point which cannot be ignored by a single decent person.”

Rabbi Andrew Baker, the representative on anti-Semitism to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said it is not simple to gauge the extent and impact of anti-Semitism in Hungary.

“There are real problems and a high degree of uncertainty,” he told JTA after a fact-finding mission to Hungary in April. But, he added, “It is not easy to separate the anxiety that Jews feel together with many other left-of-center Hungarians at current political developments and unease at what are more directly anti-Semitic rumblings.”

Members of the Jewish community said anti-Semitism was widely expressed verbally but there have been few episodes of physical violence.

“Many people are afraid,” said Andras Heisler, a former president of the Federation of Jewish Communities. “But in normal daily life there is not any danger.”

Indeed, unlike in many Western countries, little security is evident at most of Budapest’s 20 or so active synagogues, prayer houses and other Jewish sites.

And Jewish life is lived openly. Budapest may be one of the only capitals where a program linked to this year’s March of the Living was publicized on an advertisement that covered the entire side of a downtown building.

Still, a report released before Passover by the Anti-Defamation League added fuel to alarmist fires.

Based on a telephone survey in which callers asked 500 people in 10 countries four questions regarding anti-Semitic stereotypes, the ADL found that 63 percent of Hungarians held anti-Semitic attitudes.

The report grabbed headlines. But sociologist Andras Kovacs, Hungary’s foremost researcher on anti-Semitism, slammed the report for employing what he called a faulty methodology that favored responses from hard-core anti-Semites, giving a skewed result that fed alarmism.

According to his research, he said, the proportion of anti-Semites in Hungary is 20 to 25 percent.

Cernov called the ADL report “superficial” and “even irresponsible.”

It could, he said, have a negative impact on organizations like Haver that were trying to carry out serious social action and other educational work to combat prejudice and counter extremist trends.

Rabbi Tamas Vero and his wife, Linda Ban Vero, outside Budapest's Frakel Leo street synagogue, where they head a growing congregation mainly made up of young families like themselves. (Ruth Ellen Gruber)

BUDAPEST (JTA) — Linda Ban is a rebbetzin, but with a mass of curly hair and chunky rings on the fingers of both hands, she hardly fits the stereotype of a Central European rabbi’s wife.

A mother of two in her mid-30s, Ban is married to Tamas Vero, the 38-year-old spiritual leader of Budapest’s Frankel Leo Street Synagogue, a neo-Gothic building hidden in a courtyard near the Danube.

The congregation may hold a key to the Jewish future in Hungary.

“My husband and I are building a Jewish community at our synagogue,” Ban says. “But my goal is that our members take Judaism home — into their homes.”

Frankel Leo is among a handful of Budapest synagogues that has seen an upsurge of membership and communal engagement in recent years thanks to active young rabbis and a family-friendly focus.

“A year-and-a-half ago, after I took over as rabbi, our synagogue was almost empty, with just eight or nine people coming on Friday nights,” said Rabbi Istvan Darvas, 38, of the Dozsa Gyorgy Street Synagogue. “Now we have 60 or more each Friday, and we are still growing.”

Another of these congregations, Bet Shalom, had such an increase in membership that it outgrew its premises.

The week before Passover, Bet Shalom, which in the past decade or so has jumped from about 20 members to approximately 250, celebrated the gala inauguration of a rebuilt synagogue complex that includes a new sanctuary that doubles the seating of the previous one to 169.

The event received mainstream media coverage; speakers included the Israeli ambassador.

“It’s the first time in 80 years that a congregation has grown so much that it needed a bigger synagogue,” said Jozsef Horvath, 43, Bet Shalom’s president. “Our old synagogue was too small for the number of people, and there was no place for kiddush and no space for learning.”

With an estimated 80,000 Jews, Budapest has the largest Jewish population of any central European city. It is home to about 20 Jewish congregations, ranging from the dominant Neolog (moderate Conservative) stream to traditional Orthodox and Chabad, to American-style Reform, to informal minyanim such as Dor Hadash, an independent egalitarian congregation that is associated with the Masorti (Conservative) movement.

As in other post-communist countries, there has been a revival of Jewish life and identity since the Iron Curtain came down more than 20 years ago. But the rate of intermarriage remains high — according to surveys about 50 percent — and most of the city’s Jews have nothing to do with organized Jewish life.

Studies show that those who do affiliate often experience Jewishness outside the home and outside the synagogue through organizations that range from the city’s Jewish community center, to youth groups, to the Jewish summer camp at Szarvas in southern Hungary.

Many self-identifying young Jews reject established Judaism and gravitate toward an alternative Jewish youth scene that focuses on cafes and cultural events in the trendy downtown Jewish quarter.

Against this background, the Frankel Leo, Dozsa Gyorgy and Bet Shalom synagogues are, some say, changing the face of Jewish religious life in Hungary.

Led by local rabbis who came of age after the fall of communism, they are attempting to engage young people within the organized mainstream and promote the synagogue as the focus of community, learning and long-term Jewish continuity.

“Real and strong communities can grow around synagogues where families are engaged,” said Mircea Cernov, an educator who attends the Dozsa Gyorgy synagogue. “Probably the children raised in this environment will have an influence in future years.”

Horvath, a civil engineer whose wife is a convert to Judaism, agrees. “This is the future,” he said.

He said he had grown up in an unaffiliated, nonreligious home. It wasn’t until he was about 20 that he learned his mother, a child survivor of the Holocaust, was Jewish. He drew closer to the Jewish world, and to Judaism, when he began to play basketball for the Maccabi sports club in his 20s. He eventually served as the chairman of Maccabi in Hungary for 12 years.

“It was when my first son was born that we decided to start keeping more Jewish rules at home, to light the candles,” Horvath said. “And then, two or three years ago we started coming to Bet Shalom as a family.”

Each of the growing congregations has a different orientation, but all three come under Mazsihisz, the official Jewish umbrella organization. Vero, Darvas and Zoltan Radnoti, the rabbi at Bet Shalom, were all trained at the Neolog Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest.

Radnoti now regards himself as Modern Orthodox, and the new Bet Shalom sanctuary includes a mechitzah, the ritual barrier separating men and women.

He and Darvas both reach out to intermarried families or other non-Jews who wish to convert.

Most of the congregants at Frankel Leo are young couples and families who joined Jewish youth organizations and went to the Szarvas Jewish summer camp as children and teens but had little else to do with organized Jewish life afterward. Now that they are married and have children, said Linda Ban, they are coming back.

“Our congregation is totally based on people we knew at Szarvas or other youth activities, but some of them we haven’t seen for 15 years,” she said. “When they become a family, they want to be Jewish again. But they don’t know how to bring Judaism home, how to have a Jewish home. And I find that sad.”

A rarity in Hungary, Ban and her husband both grew up in traditional Jewish homes. They use their own lives and upbringings as examples in their teaching of Jewish values, traditions and culture to the young families now joining their congregation.

In particular, Ban has incorporated her own family history and experiences in a series of illustrated children’s books that explain and explore Jews, Jewishness and Judaism in simple yet meaningful terms geared toward everyone in any extended modern family.

“Countless parents have difficulty talking to children about Judaism because they are full of unanswered questions themselves,” she wrote in “What Does It Mean to Be Jewish,” one of her books that also was published in an English-language edition.

“I would like to create opportunities,” she wrote, “for all members of the family — grandparents, parents, step-parents and children, Jews and non-Jews, believers and non-believers alike — to talk to each other openly and honestly about Judaism, without taboos, expectations or prescribed answers.”

These days he keeps kosher, wears the long beard and black hat typical of some Orthodox Jews, and assists Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich.

Pawel Bramson, left, at the Jewish cemetary in Warsaw. (Kuba Wyszynski)

Bramson’s transformation — documented in the film “The Moon Is Jewish,” which recently received the Warsaw Phoenix Award at the Jewish Motifs International Film Festival for the best film showing modern Jewish life in Poland  — began when he was 22.

Co-written by Bramson and Michal Tkaczynski, the documentary takes its title from a Marcin Swietlicki song that tells of a fabricated Jewish plot to claim that everything — the pillow, the moon — is Jewish.

“The script for this film was written by life,” says Bramson, 36, who discusses his life, past and present, in the documentary.

“The Moon Is Jewish,” which has been screened at several festivals in the United States, “was like a confession on which I say some bad things I did in my life,” he says. “This film can be treated a bit like my public confession, a self-critical lynching.”

As a young man, Bramson wasn’t particularly interested in his roots, having had no reason to think his family had hidden anything from him.

“I was an Aryan, maybe not the blond one, but for sure not Jewish,” he says. As far as he knew, he was the son of practicing Catholics. “The thought of being Jewish was not even on my mind.”

Not until his wife, Aleksandra, began researching her own roots.

“She started looking for her ancestors in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. She was checking her roots and at the same time she checked mine,” Bramson says. “When she found out, she came home and showed me the documents” indicating that both their families had been Jewish.

Bramson sought verification from his parents. The information his wife had found was true, they told him. His maternal grandparents had been Jewish.

The young man began to turn his life around, saying that he realized he wasn’t the person he had thought.

Like other young Poles who have discovered their Jewish roots, Bramson began going to the Jewish Historical Institute, to synagogue, speaking with a rabbi to learn as much as possible about Judaism. He became increasingly involved in the life of Warsaw’s Jewish community.

“My father was delighted when I became Jewish because he always wanted me to be religious, no matter in which religion,” Bramson says.

Now he is a mashgiach, a kosher supervisor, and an assistant to Schudrich.  The chief rabbi calls him a “unique human being.”

“Every day he tries to improve himself as a better human being using his religion, Judaism, as a way to become closer to God and kinder to human beings,” Schudrich says.

Przemyslaw Szpilman, who manages the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw, met Bramson 11 years ago at the city’s Nozyk Synagogue.

“The change in Pawel’s life is huge,” Szpilman says. “It took him many years to become such person he is today. When we met for the first time in the synagogue, he wasn’t sure it is his way of life.”

But Bramson’s wife was going to synagogue daily, and he decided to join her, Szpilman says.

“Like every other Jew here, Pawel is important for Jewish community,” he says. “Every new person is well welcome here.”

Michael Traison, an American lawyer who is involved in numerous projects commemorating Jewish history and culture in Poland, has known Bramson for years.

“Pawel Bramson has been the subject of numerous news reports around the world for several years. Each time his story appears it seems comparable to a news bulletin that life has been discovered on Mars,” Traison says. “Indeed, for much of the Jewish world, believing that all Jewish life in Poland was extinguished almost several decades ago, Poland is Mars and Jewish life is as unlikely as finding a thriving city on a remote planet circling a distant star.”

The symbolism of Bramson’s story, he says, “resonates much like the rebirth of Israel itself.”

There was a time, Bramson acknowledges, that he used to shout anti-Semitic chants at soccer games of his beloved Legia Warsaw club — much like the 18 Legia fans who were charged in March with inciting religious hatred for screaming slogans at fans of Widzew Lodz such as “Hamas, Hamas, Juden auf den Gas” (“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas”). Several have admitted their guilt.

Despite the club’s rowdy and, in some cases, racist fans, Bramson stands with Legia.

“Yesterday I met a friend with whom I did some crazy things when we were younger,” he says. “We talked about our memories and the fact that they are not the best. Now I see these things in a different way.”

His son, who attends the Talmudical Academy of Baltimore, is also a Legia fan. “I can’t even imagine he couldn’t be. It’s something that must be given in our family from generation to generation,” Bramson says with a laugh.

“When he arrives to Poland and there’s soccer, he goes to the match. Just not on Saturday.”

Asked how difficult it was to change his former life to the one he lives today, Bramson says the evolution isn’t over.

“I’m still changing my life, and I think I will never stop,” he says. “It’s not so simple.”

Jacob Ostreicher (Courtesy Miriam Ungar)

NEW YORK (JTA) – Supporters say he’s an innocent man caught up in the tentacles of a corrupt Latin American regime.

Authorities in Bolivia, however, allege that he’s a shady businessman with ties to drug dealers and money launderers.

What’s certain is that Jacob Ostreicher, a 53-year-old Chasidic Jew from New York, is in a state of limbo, sitting in a jail in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz waiting to be tried or released on bail.

Four weeks ago, in a bid to pressure authorities to expedite the handling of his case, Ostreicher began a hunger strike.

“Every human rights violation is being broken in my case,” he told JTA this week in a telephone interview from prison. “I have no alternative to getting my freedom unless I become ill and it becomes a humanitarian issue.”

The hunger strike he launched April 15 follows 10 months of appeals to the U.S. State Department. His wife, Miriam Ungar, organized a protest on Ostreicher’s behalf on May 3 opposite Bolivia’s United Nations mission.

Ostreicher, a father of five from the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, belonged to a group of investors led by Andre Zolty of the Swiss firm Lexinter that sunk $25 million into growing rice in lush eastern Bolivia. He was arrested last June by Bolivian police. During his arraignment, the judge alleged that Ostreicher did business with “people wanted in their countries because of links with drug trafficking and money laundering.”

The judge also determined that Ostreicher should not be allowed to post bail because “being free, the accused could destroy [or] change evidence that could lead the attorney general to discover the truth.”

Since then Ostreicher, who maintains his innocence, has been waiting. He has cycled through multiple court hearings, three judges, three prosecutors and four defense attorneys. One judge released him from jail in September, only to retract the order and send him back less than a week later. As of now the case is without a judge.

While the case has dragged on, some of the 40 million pounds of rice harvested from Ostreicher’s fields and later seized by the Bolivian government have begun to disappear.

The head of the Bolivian agency in charge of seized property, Moises Aguilera, told The Associated Press in December that the rice had to be sold because otherwise it would spoil. But Ostreicher’s partners accuse the Bolivian government of trying to profit from the confiscated rice.

“They’re trying to put their hands on our assets,” Zolty told JTA. “The lawyers are all corrupted.”

Transparency International, a global corruption monitor, ranks Bolivia 118th out of 183 countries on governmental transparency.

Bolivian authorities have declined to discuss the details of the case publicly.

“We sent inquiries regarding this case to the Bolivian judicial system, but we haven’t got any answer,” Pablo Menacho, Bolivia’s consular officer in Washington for political affairs, told JTA.

Ostreicher’s saga began when he joined Zolty’s partnership in June 2008 and traveled to Bolivia to see the rice business firsthand. Over the course of several trips from 2008 to 2010, Ostreicher says he was never able to inspect the books of the Bolivian rice fields because the manager, Claudia Liliana Rodriguez Espitia, was never around.

“She always gave excuses,” Ostreicher said.

Eventually, Ostreicher said, he came to believe that Rodriguez was stealing millions of dollars from the investors. He convinced Zolty to fire Rodriguez, and Ostreicher took over the business.

When Rodriguez disappeared soon after leaving the venture, Ostreicher took out a full-page ad in a major local newspaper offering a $25,000 reward to whoever could find her.

While police investigated Rodriguez for corruption, they discovered that she had purchased a portion of the rice fields from the brother of her drug dealer boyfriend, Maximiliano Dorado.

Bolivian federal prosecutors began to question Ostreicher in March 2011. He continued to travel back and forth to the United States, and approached the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia; Ostreicher says U.S. officials told him not to worry.

“The embassy told me I should be honest with the investigation. That’s what I did,” Ostreicher said. “I wish the U.S. Embassy had told me to get the hell out of the country.”

An embassy official told JTA that he could not comment on private conversations.

On the eve of Shavuot last year, when Ostreicher was scheduled to fly home to New York, prosecutors called him in for another round of questioning. Anxious to get home for the holiday, Ostreicher asked if he could come to their office to finish the deposition as soon as possible. He arrived on June 3, responded to questions and thanked the prosecutor for adjusting his schedule.

Moments later, Ostreicher was arrested. The grandfather of 11 says he was shoved into a cell with no toilet or shower that stank of urine and feces.

The next day at his arraignment, the judge charged Ostreicher with being “the representative of Andre Zolty” and having “commercial relations with Maximiliano Dorado, both people wanted in their countries because of links with drug trafficking and money laundering … proving the circle between Andre Zolty, Maxi Dorado … and Claudia Liliana Rodríguez Espitia.”

Ostreicher claims he has given the court documentation proving the legal origin of his business’ funds and submitted proof from Interpol that Zolty has never run afoul of the law.

Bolivian authorities apparently were not convinced. In March, one federal prosecutor told AP that the case was still in its “preparatory phase.”

Ostreicher’s wife says State Department officials have told the family only that they are monitoring the situation and have raised the case with the Bolivian foreign minister.

By launching his hunger strike, in which he drinks only water, Ostreicher is trying to turn the case into a humanitarian issue. The family has not tried to enlist Jewish organizations to lobby on Ostreicher’s behalf because they want it to be a diplomatic, not a parochial, issue.

“I’ve never asked anybody for help,” Ostreicher said. “My children are lying to my grandchildren that the reason I’m not coming home is that I have a farm and I need to take care of my cows. That’s why I’m going to people I don’t know.”

With most of the ballots counted, Golden Dawn received nearly 7 percent of the vote in Sunday’s elections as Greeks punished the mainstream parties they blame for the country’s financial crisis and accepting harsh European austerity measures.

“It is very disappointing that in a country like Greece, where so many were killed fighting the Germans, that a neo-Nazi party is now in parliament,” David Saltiel, president of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece, told JTA.

It was a major victory for Golden Dawn, whose flag closely resembles the Nazi swastika. In the 2009 elections, the party garnered just 0.29 percent of the vote. In Greece, a party needs more than 3 percent of the vote to make it into parliament.

According to the final results published Monday evening, Golden Dawn had 6.97 percent, which would give the party 21 seats in the 300-member parliament.

But with no party getting more than 20 percent, there are fears that the major parties will be unable to cobble together a coalition. The biggest party, the conservative New Democracy (18.85 percent), has three days to form a government. The runner-up Coalition of the Radical Left (16.78 percent) would get the next chance. If both fail,
fresh elections will be called.

Saltiel said Golden Dawn entering the parliament was of ” very great concern because they are extreme right,” but he expressed his hope that the party may now moderate its positions.

“We are looking at how the situation will be in parliament and what their positions will be,” he said.

Speaking to a news conference on Sunday, Golden Dawn leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos warned Greece’s enemies — inside and outside the country — that they should be “very afraid.”

“We are coming,” said Michaloliakos, one of the party’s only nationally known leaders. He came to prominence when he won a seat on the Athens City Council in 2010 and celebrated by giving the Nazi salute at the first City Hall meeting.

The party had campaigned on an anti-austerity, anti-immigrant platform, preying on the fears of ordinary Greeks who have seen their neighborhoods overrun by the nearly 1 million immigrants who have flooded the country from Asia and Africa hoping to use it as a gateway to the European Union.

During the elections, young party supporters with shaved heads and wearing black shirts with the Golden Dawn symbol set up vigilante groups to protect Greeks from  immigrants. They have been blamed for several attacks on foreigners; the party denies the charges.

The party’s election platform included plans to landmine Greece’s borders, immediately arrest and expel illegal immigrants, and set up special labor camps for legal immigrants who commit crimes.

Its manifesto does not specifically mention the country’s small Jewish community, saying only that the party would tolerate religious freedom “except in cases that affect national interest and undermine Hellenism.”

However, the party openly displays copies of “Mein Kampf” alongside works on Greek racial superiority at party headquarters and the party symbol has been found at the sites of anti-Semitic attacks in the past.

The lower part of the Schindler factory next to a demolished 19th century building (Eva Munk)

The windows are smashed, the doors stand agape and the keys in the rusting padlocks have not been turned for years. Still, despite the plaster clinging to the crumbling bricks in leprous sheets, the front looks salvageable.

The back, however, tells a different story. Piles of debris block gaping holes knocked through the walls when the owners tore out the big textile machines. Nearby, the erstwhile camp hospital decays in a sodden mess.

This is the place where in the waning days of World War II, Oskar Schindler saved 1,200 Jews from near-certain death.

The Schindler buildings were last used by a company called Vitka, a once-thriving textile manufacturer. But after Vitka went into bankruptcy in 2004, a series of corporations sold off its machines for lump iron and stripped the buildings of anything of value.

In the course of last year, the latest owner of the property, Blue Fields, razed 80 percent of the factory buildings. Blue Fields also failed to pay the bank, which put a lien on the property. The bankruptcy administrator immediately put a halt to further demolitions, and the entire property, including the Schindler buildings, is now mired in litigation that could take years to resolve.

“Those buildings are going to stand there in that condition for years to come,” said the bankruptcy administrator, Jiri Krejcerik. “No one is going to invest into property that isn’t theirs.”

Blahoslav Kaspar, the mayor of Brnenec, the town where the factory stands, long has dreamed of turning the Schindler buildings into a Holocaust memorial. The town submitted a plan for the center to the regional authorities with a request for about $1 million. But it has no chance of acquiring the funds until the ownership issues are resolved.

Horrified by the rapid destruction, historical preservationists scrambled to have the site declared a national monument. But the request, now pending in the Czech Culture Ministry, hinges upon the concurrence of Blue Fields, which has stopped communicating except via an electronic mailbox. Until a company representative re-emerges, the authorities say their hands are tied.

Though a preliminary ban on demolition has been placed on all buildings, Blue Fields still destroyed several 19th-century buildings in better shape earlier this year, Eliska Rackova of the Pardubice Historical Authority told JTA.

“The owner produced a statement from the construction authorities saying that the buildings were decrepit and a danger to the public, and we were powerless to stop it,” she said.

Now there is concern that the same fate awaits the rest of the Schindler buildings, possibly condemning a key piece of Jewish history to the dustbin.

In the winter of 1944, as the war neared its end and the Nazis rushed to destroy concentration camps and prisoners, Schindler moved some 1,200 Jews from his enamelware factory in Krakow, where they faced near-certain death in Auschwitz, to Brnenec in the Czech Sudetenland.

At the time, Brnenec resident Eduard Kubin was a 17-year-old worker at a munitions plant adjacent to the Schindler buildings. Kubin, now 86, still remembers the freezing winter night when the transport arrived.

“It was the coldest winter anyone could remember, and 15 prisoners froze to death on the way,” he recalled. “They took them to the cemetery in the village of Brezova, but the priest wouldn’t let them be buried on cemetery ground. They had to dump them in a nearby hollow and pile old wreaths on them.

“After the war, the Czechs made the local Germans dig them up with their bare hands and place them in a mass grave inside the cemetery. Schindler even brought in a rabbi to consecrate the ground.”

Relics of those cruel times are everywhere: the latticework balcony where the guards took their smoke breaks; the courtyard where prisoners assembled; the iron gate with the peephole that still creaks open to grant a glimpse of the world; the low door (now marked with a sloppily painted D) that Schindler would emerge from for the review.

“Around back there’s a window where we used to leave loaves of bread,” said Kubin, pointing to a narrow alley next to the factory wall. “It was next to the electrified fence, in a spot where the guards in the towers couldn’t see. We’d wrap them in oily rags to camouflage them.”

“Giving them food was tricky,” said Petr Henzl, 83, whose father worked at the factory during the war. “A lady who lived behind the wall threw them some fruit once, but the guards caught them picking it up and gave them an awful beating.”

Both Henzl and Kubin give much of the credit for the survival of the prisoners to Schindler’s wife, Emilie.

“He was off on business mostly,” Kubin said. “She ran the kitchen and the hospital and got the headman at the mill to give them the leftover groats and husks to make gruel. She was also the one who took in the last transport in December.”

The few local residents who remember that time now look on in frustration as the property falls into further and further disrepair.

JTA’s efforts to contact Blue Fields, which does not list telephone or e-mail contacts, were unsuccessful.

The Czech Jewish community says it would welcome a memorial in Brnenec.

“It’s a world-famous site, and it would be a shame not to use it for educational purposes — there can never be enough of those,” said Tomas Kraus, spokesman for the Federation of Jewish Communities. “In the history of the Czech Jews it is but one stone in the mosaic, but a very important one.”

“Reading hate speech is part of the job,” says Olmer, who reports on intelligence services for Holland’s largest circulation daily, De Telegraaf.

It’s an explanation he may need to repeat for security services on future visits to France, if that country’s parliament passes legislation aimed at making it illegal to visit hatemongering websites.

The legislation was among several measures proposed following the March 19 slaying of three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse. Parliament is to vote next month on the measures aimed at stopping “self-radicalized lone wolves” like the killer from Toulouse, Mohammed Merah. Leftist parties said they’d oppose the bills.

Researchers and European politicians are split on France’s post-Toulouse legislation push.

Some want to use this opportunity to introduce similar legislation elsewhere in Europe while the Toulouse shooting is still in people’s minds. Others find it risky and “emotionally motivated,” favoring better law enforcement rather than new legislation.

“In Western Europe we have the legislation we need: Murder and incitement are illegal,” said Mike Whine of the Community Security Trust, the defense agency of Britain’s Jewish community. “We need better application of existing laws. We need to ban more hate preachers from entering our countries, for instance.”

Bruno de Lille, a Belgian minister from the Flemish Green Party who is a campaigner for gay rights, said legislation that originates in emotions should be avoided.

“It’s often ineffective and jeopardizes basic values and liberties in a manner disproportionate to the contribution to collective security,” he said.

Whine and de Lille made their remarks at a conference last week in Brussels on monitoring hate speech and hate crimes in Europe. Titled “Facing Facts,” the conference was organized by a Brussels-based nonprofit called CEJI: A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe. The goal of the conference was to talk about how countries and nongovernmental organizations can better cooperate on monitoring discrimination.

Joanna Perry, hate crimes officer for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, or OSCE, said at the conference that too many governments take a negative view of local watchdog NGOs that present them with figures about hate crimes that often are politically unsavory.

Ten governments — including Greece, Estonia, Latvia, Moldova and Ukraine — reported to the OSCE that their police forces had recorded fewer than 10 hate crimes in 2009. Portugal and Macedonia said they did not compile any data on hate crimes.

Only nine members of the OSCE, the world’s largest security-oriented intergovernmental organization, submitted official data on anti-Semitism in 2009, compared to 48 member states that did not.

Other than in France, Perry said she “couldn’t point to any direct impact on policy or legislation” following the Toulouse shooting, though “it does raise awareness to the issue.”

Robert Trestan of the Anti-Defamation League said he believes the Toulouse attack helped European governments and authorities “better understand that people who target Jews will often also target law enforcement agents. It’s something American authorities know very well.”

Two weeks before the attack at the Ozar Hatorah school, Merah murdered three French soldiers at Montauban. Merah admitted to all the killings during a daylong siege at his apartment on March 22, before he was killed by police in a shootout.

“This understanding further motivates law enforcement agencies to monitor hate crime and hate speech because it helps them protect their own agents,” Trestan said at the conference.

NGOs monitoring racism and hate speech also need to improve their performance, according to findings published at the conference.

A survey conducted by conference organizers showed more than half of watchdog NGOs in the European Union have no working definition for what constitutes a hate crime. Of the 44 NGOs surveyed, 27 reported that they had no system to verify complaints, and 17 did not share information with police.

Beyond legislation, the Toulouse shooting already is changing how European governments monitor radicals, according to a Belgian civil servant who attended the conference. Since April 1, the Belgian secret service has been scrutinizing the comings and goings of suspected radicals more closely.

“Before the shooting the issue was marginal. Now it’s a priority,” said the civil servant, who spoke under condition on anonymity.

The post-Toulouse legislation in France also aims to outlaw trips abroad for weapons training. After the killing, security services learned that Merah had trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Hate crimes tragedies like the Toulouse shooting sometimes serve as a catalyst for change in the fight against extremism, according to Superintendent Paul Giannasi, manager of the UK interministerial program for fighting hate crime. He attended the CEJI conference as a representative of the British police.

Public outcry following the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, a black boy from London, by a gang of white extremists “brought on massive change” in how hate crimes are handled in Britain, Giannasi said. “Since then, authorities are actually encouraging more people to complain about discrimination.”

It was a major change in policy for British crime fighters, whose performance is usually judged on crime statistics.

“It was realized that more complaints about hate crimes don’t mean greater prevalence, just more awareness and trust in the authorities,” Giannasi said.

The Socialist Party candidate Francois Hollande eked out a 1.4 percent victory on Sunday over Sarkozy, the center-right president, although Jewish community leaders said Sarkozy was the undisputed favorite among Jewish voters.

Hard figures on the Jewish vote are scarce, as French pollsters are not allowed to ask about religion in election surveys, and the number of French Jewish voters is negligible.

Jewish representatives and politicians say they would have full confidence in Hollande as president, but not in his political associates.

Hollande won 28.6 percent of the vote, Sarkozy had 27.2 percent and Marine Le Pen, leader of the French extreme right, had 18 percent — the best showing ever for the National Front party founded by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The second and final round pitting Hollande against Sarkozy is scheduled to take place in two weeks; polls shows Hollande with a commanding lead.

In Tel Aviv, voting results released Monday by the French Embassy showed Sarkozy receiving 81 percent of the 9,302 votes cast there. Eight percent voted for Hollande and 4 percent for Le Pen.

Sarkozy, according to Richard Prasquier, president of the umbrella of French Jewish organizations known as CRIF, was the community’s favorite in the 2007 elections because of his firm stance on anti-Semitism, positive attitude toward Israel and, perhaps, Sarkozy’s Jewish grandfather.

French Jewry is approximately half a million strong, accounting for 0.6 percent of the national electorate, according to a study by the Cevipof polling company.

Despite some disappointments during his term, Sarkozy regained the appreciation of the Jewish community with his quick response to the Toulouse shooting last month, in which a Muslim radical killed three children and a rabbi at a school.

French authorities captured and killed the suspected perpetrator within two days, arrested dozens of suspects, barred radical preachers from entering and announced new anti-jihadist legislation.

“For the general vote, the Toulouse shooting and the appearance of radical Islam in Europe played a minor role. Not so for the Jewish community,” said Ivan Rioufol, columnist in the French daily Le Figaro.

Sarkozy would “have a tough time winning” against Hollande, but it was still be possible, Rioufol added, depending on how the  Le Pen voters cast their ballots in the second round.

If Hollande is elected president, “France would be more politically aligned with the Arab countries, and this could have an effect on its relations with Israel,” he said.

“Hollande represents the center-right wing of the Socialist Party,” said Joel Rubinfeld, a Jewish politician from Belgium. “If he becomes president, the question for French Jews and for Israel is which wing of the Socialist Party prevails.”

Prasquier concurs, saying “We have absolutely no problem with Hollande as president, [but] if some leading members of his party appear to be more against Israel than the previous UMP party of Sarkozy, this might have consequences on the general opinion.”

He added that traditionally, Jews tended to vote Socialist, but “It changed with Sarkozy.”

In January, Socialist MP Jean Glavany grabbed headlines as the author of a parliamentary report accusing Israel of “water apartheid” and theft in the Palestinian territories. CRIF rejected the document, calling it biased.

The French Jewish weekly Actualite Juive ran interviews with Hollande and Sarkozy last week in which both vowed to fight anti-Semitism and support Israel as the Jewish state. Asked whether they regarded Jerusalem as the capital of that state, Sarkozy said Jerusalem should be the capital of both Israel and the Palestinian state. Hollande said “the parties needed to decide on that.”

On April 2, CRIF organized a meeting in Paris for the community with Pierre Moscovici, national secretary of the Socialist Party.

“The Socialist Party has many rigorous men and women of principle who are both friendly and demanding when it comes to Israel. They firmly oppose anti-Semitism,” said Moscovici, who is Jewish.

But Professor Shmuel Trigano, an expert in French Jewry and lecturer at Paris-Nanterre University, speaks of “a near total silence of the Socialist Party on hundreds of anti-Semitic attacks.” In parallel, he complains of “disproportionate criticism of Israel.”

Still, many Jews are displeased with Sarkozy. A study of Jewish voters by Cevipof showed that over the past two years, Sarkozy’s approval rating has dropped 19 percentage points among Jews — from 62 percent in 2007-09 to 43 percent in 2009-11. Among non-Jews, Sarkozy’s popularity fell by 14 percentage points, to 32 percent in January.

Prior to the election, Philippe Karsenty, a Jewish-French politician and media analyst said “There isn’t a single candidate the Jews can wholly welcome. Sarkozy has some responsibility for what happened in Toulouse because he let anti-Zionist propaganda of the French public media outlets grow.”

Sarkozy has disappointed the French Jewish community in other ways, too: the French vote in favor of Palestinian membership in UNESCO, condemnations of Israeli settlements and when he called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “liar.”

That disappointment may partly explain an apparent shift in how some Jews view the National Front, France’s largest right-wing party. On March 27, the French branch of the Jewish Defense League publicly expressed support for the anti-Muslim party, which has a history of anti-Semitism.

“An important National Front delegation visited the Grande Synagogue de la Victoire in Toulouse,” the branch’s website said.

Founded in the 1970s by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, JDL is considered a terrorist group in the United Statesa

Supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy awaiting his arrival at the Place de la Concorde in Paris, April 15, 2012. (Philippe Agnifili via CC)

but is legal in France. Amnon Cohen, JDL’s Paris spokesman, says it has dozens of activists.

Cohen says the National Front “isn’t perfect but isn’t dangerous. We’ll work with those willing to fight the Islamic threat.”

Since assuming the leadership of the National Front last year, Marine Le Pen has distanced herself from the anti-Semitic rhetoric of her father and predecessor, who has called the Holocaust a “detail in history” and been convicted several times in France for Holocaust denial. Jean-Marie Le Pen also said the German occupation of France was “not particularly inhumane.”

Marine Le Pen, by contrast, has reached out to French Jews and Israelis, describing them as “natural allies.” Even before that, in 2007, the National Front received nealy 5 percent of the Jewish vote.

Zerbib, a radio journalist for Radio J, the French Jewish radio station, says the Toulouse shooting could bring more Jews to vote Le Pen.

“They would be protest votes by Jews who feel abandoned,” he says. “More Jews feel like that after Toulouse and they are seriously thinking about emigrating to Israel.”

This month, 70 years on, Lithuania finally passed historic compensation legislation to provide some $50 million in compensation to Jewish families whose property was confiscated during the Holocaust. Jewish groups hailed the move as a milestone for Lithuanian-Jewish relations.

But lingering bitterness on both sides over the discussion of Lithuanian complicity in the Holocaust remains an obstacle to better ties.

Some Jews are concerned that Lithuania has yet to confront its own role in the Holocaust.

“Relations have to be promoted within a context that is based on mutual respect and respect for historical truth,” said Jonathan Brent, the executive director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which was founded in prewar Lithuania. “Everywhere you go searching for the truth, the truth cannot be found without conflict.”

On the flipside, many Lithuanians say Jews focus too much on the Holocaust.

Three years ago, during negotiations over Holocaust compensation between the Lithuanian government and the Jewish community, a Lithuanian tabloid ran a cover featuring an oversized American Jewish official demanding money from a miniaturized Lithuanian prime minister. “Give it now!” screamed the headline.

The president of a Lithuanian museum in Chicago, Stanley Balzekas Jr., said Jews should not take Lithuanian anti-Semitic inclinations “personally.”

“The Jewish leaders have to be sensitive,” he said. “The terrible consequences that happened with the Holocaust aren’t going to go away. That shouldn’t be forgotten. But it shouldn’t cloud the future.”

Harley Felstein, an American Jew with Lithuanian roots who lives in Washington, wants to focus on positive aspects of Lithuanian-Jewish history. Last fall, he launched a campaign called the Sunflower Project to promote Lithuanian-Jewish events in the United States and organized Jewish trips to Lithuania, including exchanges of high school students between Israel and Lithuania.

Last week, Felstein convened a group of Lithuanian and Jewish community leaders for a discussion in Chicago focused on improving ties.

“If you’re going to do a reconnection between the Lithuanian and the Jewish people, you don’t want to enter into the situation through conflict,” Felstein said. “You want to do it through learning and nurturing. If our project is successful, there won’t be any negativity left.”

The idea for the project was born when Felstein’s 16-year-old, Benjamin, traveled to Lithuania in 2010, found Jewish cemeteries in disrepair and sent photos to his father. Felstein, who works for a cemetery as a funeral counselor, was inspired.

“We want to reconnect the Jewish world back with the Lithuanian people,” Felstein told JTA. “If we don’t take action now, the next generation won’t have that information available to them. Our time with survivors who have that linkage is limited.”

Lithuania has a rich Jewish history. The country’s capital — Vilnius, known to Jews as Vilna — was the center of Orthodox Judaism in Eastern Europe, home to the original YIVO and the hometown of Rabbi Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalman Kramer, the 18th-century Jewish sage known as the Vilna Gaon.

Today, only about 3,000 Jews live in Lithuania.

In recent years, ties between Lithuania and Israel have been improving. Between 2009 and 2011, Israeli and Lithuanian diplomats visited each other 20 times. Last year, Lithuania designated 2011 as the year of commemorating the Holocaust. And this month’s compensation decision will send a portion of the $50 million to support the upkeep of Jewish heritage sites in Lithuania, including cemeteries and synagogues.

The Lithuanian ambassador to the United States, Zygimantas Pavilonis, said he believes that differences between the communities will dissipate as Lithuania, which has been independent for about 20 years, moves away from the anti-Semitic legacy of the Soviet Union.

Just as it took countries in Western Europe decades to examine their roles in the genocide of the Jews, so too it will take time in Lithuania, Pavolonis said. “It took some time to build from scratch, from the distortion of reality,” he said.

Already, Pavolonis said, the Lithuanian government is training teachers to educate schoolchildren about the Holocaust.

Alexander Domanskis, past president of the Lithuanian World Center in Chicago, said Lithuanians should learn about the Holocaust.

“I’m agonized because this is part of my own tradition,” he said. “This is not Lithuania as a people.”