World

(JTA) — A man who tried to break into a Jewish school in southern France while shouting insults about Jews was prevented from entering by the guard and arrested after fleeing the scene. In the incident Tuesday at the Or Torah school in Nice, the man had come intimidate… Read more »

(JTA) — French President Emmanuel Macron and leaders of the country’s Jewish community inaugurated a $17 million Jewish community center in Paris that has been in the works for 20 years. The European Center for Judaism was opened on Tuesday, “amid painful times of terrorism and anti-Semitism,” said Joel… Read more »

COLOGNE, Germany (JTA) — When the breaking news from Halle started to pour in on Oct. 9, the Jewish community around the world was still in the midst of commemorating the holiest day of the year in Judaism, Yom Kippur. Equipped with a rifle, ammunition and other military gear, the… Read more »

MEXICO CITY (JTA) —More than 10 years ago, Ilan Stavans scandalized language purists of the Spanish-speaking world by translating a chapter of “Don Quixote” — into Spanglish. Since then, the so-called czar of Latino culture has become one of the most important interlocutors for Hispanics in the United States. In… Read more »

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent an official request to Russian President Vladimir Putin to pardon an Israeli-American woman sentenced in Russia to 7 1/2 years in prison after being convicted of smuggling marijuana into the country. The request submitted on Sunday to pardon Naama Issachar, 26,… Read more »

(JTA) — More than 10,000 people marched in Berlin against anti-Semitism and in a show of support for the victims of anti-Semitic violence in the city of Halle. The march on Sunday left from Bebelplatz, significant as a site of Nazi book-burning, to the New Synagogue in central Berlin.… Read more »

WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — Students at the University of Warsaw, one of the largest Polish universities, commemorated the victims of a segregation policy against Jews introduced there 82 years ago. The university’s rector did not participate in the commemoration on Sunday. Ghetto benches, as they were called, were an… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — When Ceen Gabbai argued with her first-grade teacher about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, she didn’t realize how big of a risk she was taking. The year was 2000 and students across the world held strong opinions about the Second Intifada, an outbreak of violence that claimed… Read more »

BRUSSELS (JTA) — At a parade here in March, revelers danced to a song about Jewish greed while standing on a float shaped like an Orthodox Jewish man with a rat on his shoulder holding money. In August, an op-ed in a major Belgian newspaper called Jews in Israel… Read more »

The town of Yurburg, Lithuania, dedicated a new Synagogue Square Memorial on July 19. Tucson genealogist and author Joel Alpert and his wife, Nancy Lefkowitz along with 10 of his relatives from Israel, Canada, and the United States, represented the descendants of emigres from the once-thriving Jewish community. “It… Read more »

Tucson Holocaust survivor  Sidney Finkel will lead Southern Arizona teens on the 2020 March of the Living. Participants will retrace his steps through his childhood home of Piotrkow, Poland, including the first Nazi decreed ghetto in occupied Poland, where he and his family were forced to live. Finkel is… Read more »

After Hitler’s regime was defeated, many Holocaust survivors and liberated forced laborers wanted to leave Europe. Along with the United States, the most desirable emigration destinations included Canada and Australia. Most of the emigrants were carried by nearly 400 ships the Allies supplied for this mass migration movement; some… Read more »

The first Arab to visit the International Space Station launched there on Wednesday with the daughter of an Israeli father. Hazzaa al-Mansoori, 35, of the United Arab Emirates and Jessica Meir, an American, took off on the historic trip from Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on a Soyuz rocket. They will remain… Read more »

Israel’s public security minister presented a report at a conference in Brussels on Wednesday that includes 80 examples of what he called anti-Semitism by key European promoters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. In one example from April, Jenny Tonge, a lawmaker in the upper chamber… Read more »

NEW YORK (JTA) — The prime minister of Malaysia defended his past anti-Semitic statements and questioned the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust in a speech at Columbia University. “I am exercising my right to free speech. Why is it that I can’t say something against the Jews,… Read more »

(JTA) — Bulgaria’s Jewish community opened its first Jewish school in over 20 years. The opening last week of the Ronald S. Lauder Day School in Sofia is a significant development for the some 6,000 members of the Jewish minority in Bulgaria. Lauder, the president of the World Jewish… Read more »

(JTA) — A rabbi in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, is opening there what he says is the city’s first yeshiva, or Jewish religious seminary, since World War II. The Vilna Yeshiva will have about a dozen students when it opens this fall, Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky, the Chabad-Lubavitch… Read more »

(JTA) — Construction on the first official synagogue in the United Arab Emirates will begin in several months. The synagogue, slated to be completed by 2022, will be part of a multi-faith complex called the Abrahamic Family House in the capital Abu Dhabi, Reuters reported, citing the Abu Dhabi-based… Read more »

(JTA) — Lev Tahor, a fringe haredi Orthodox sect, requested political asylum from the Iranian government. In its request, the group “declared their loyalty and submission to the Supreme Leader and Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” It asks for “asylum, protection and religious freedom of the families… Read more »

(JTA) – Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis in Hungary opened two new synagogues in the Budapest area. The larger synagogue in Újlipótváros, a central area of the capital city, is housed in a riverside building overlooking the Danube River. It will be part of a three-story Jewish community center and worship complex… Read more »