World

NEW YORK (JTA) — The Pacific island nation of Samoa is taking 186,000 citizens through a national time warp by moving west of the international dateline, forfeiting the last Friday of 2011 and jumping straight from Thursday into Saturday. For Samoans, this solves a practical question: Why remain 18… Read more »

Jack Rosen, second from left, the chairman of the American Council for World Jewry, in Pyongyang with a top North Korean official and other members of an ACWJ delegation in this undated 2009 photo. (Courtesy ACWJ)

  WASHINGTON (JTA) – When a delegation from the American Council for World Jewry went to North Korea, its agenda was typical of visits by Jewish organizations to developing nations: promote outreach to Israel, offer to broker assistance and training, gently raise problematic defense relations with Israel’s enemies. Pyongyang’s… Read more »

Memorial candles in Prague for Vaclav Havel, who died this week. Jewish groups and leaders said the former Czech president was a symbol of freedom, Dec. 18, 2011. (David Short via Creative Commons)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Vaclav Havel was a friend of the Jews and of Israel, but prominent Jews who mourned his passing this week said the Czech leader’s greatest legacy was his universal message of freedom. “Vaclav Havel was one of the few islands of intellectual freedom in the sea… Read more »

PALMA, Spain (JTA) — A stone’s throw from the majestic Cathedral of Santa Maria of Palma, commonly referred to as La Seu, is a dusty cobblestoned alleyway that serves as a hidden reminder of Mallorca’s complex Jewish past. Carrer de Monti-Sion, or Mount Zion Street, has borne witness to… Read more »

LOS ANGELES (The Jewish Journal) — The USC Shoah Foundation Institute is home to more than 52,000 videotaped testimonies about the Holocaust, and people searching the archive’s index enter a single keyword into their queries more than any other: “Auschwitz.” “Auschwitz seems to be the one that people go… Read more »

Members of Gibraltar's largely Sephardic, largely Orthodox community pick up children from the communiyt's primary school, which is seeing record enrollment. (Alex Weisler)

GIBRALTAR (JTA) — Four synagogues, a mikvah, a kosher coffeehouse and separate boys and girls religious high schools. Combined, they suggest a community far larger than just 750 Jews. But Gibraltar — the tiny British overseas territory of 30,000 that sits at the foot of Spain and at the… Read more »

Silvio Berlusconi (left) toasts with Israeli President Shimon Peres at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem in February 2010. (Photo: Miriam Alster/FLASH90/JTA)

Crowds on the streets of Rome jeered and cheered when their long-serving, scandal-plagued prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, stepped down earlier this month. A choir even sang Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” in front of the presidential palace as he handed in his resignation. Italian Jews don’t expect Berlusconi’s ouster to have… Read more »

Jewish leaders in Britain have outlined the process they will follow in seeking to identify a successor to the current chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks. (Office of the Chief Rabbi)

LONDON (JTA) — Increased transparency and the inclusion of women’s voices will be cornerstones of the process that Orthodox leaders in Britain have devised to find a replacement for the country’s longtime chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, who will step down in September 2013. Stephen Pack, the president of… Read more »

Carolina Duer, known as "The Turk," defended her boxing title Nov. 12 in Buenos Aires. (Facebook)

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (JTA) — In many ways, Carolina Raquel Duer is a typical middle-class Jewish kid from Buenos Aires. She attended a Jewish day school, spent time working and traveling in Israel and celebrated her Bat Mitzvah at a Conservative synagogue. But when she stepped into the ring… Read more »

(New York) — American Jewish World Service (AJWS), an international development and human rights organization, unveiled its new Reverse Hunger campaign last month. The campaign seeks to rally the American Jewish community to challenge and change a critical factor contributing to global hunger — U.S. food aid policy. Developing… Read more »

Ava Sarah Keyrallah was born in Paris on Oct. 31, 2011, the day the United Nations celebrated the 7 billionth child being born. (Courtesy Celine Abisror)

NEW YORK (JTA) — Could the 7 billionth person on the planet be Jewish? According to the United Nations Population Fund, the Earth welcomed its 7 billionth resident on Oct. 31. Statistically, the newborn was most likely a boy in India or China. The symbolic title was given to Danica… Read more »

A destroyed Jewish clothing store in Magdeburg, Germany, after Kristallnacht, Nov. 11, 1938. (H. Frederick, Hanover)

NEW YORK (JTA) — Before it was called Kristallnacht, it was known simply as “the pogrom.” Designated “the night of broken glass,” the 14-hour wave of Nazi violence on Nov. 9-10, 1938 left hundreds of Jewish storefronts and synagogues across Germany and parts of Austria in shards and splinters,… Read more »

The late philanthropist Mendel Kaplan showing former South Africa President Nelson Mandela around the South African Jewish Museum, which was opened by Mandela in 2000. (Shawn Benjamin/Ark Images)

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (JTA) – When anti-apartheid activist Lorna Levy first became involved in politics as a student in the late 1950s, she remembers being the target of hostility from the Jewish community in her native South Africa. In the 1960s, she and her husband, Leon, made their… Read more »

Secular protesters march against Islamism in Tunis ahead of the Oct. 24 elections in Tunisia, Oct. 14, 2011. The placard reads "Free to speak to say nothing." (Houda Trablesi for Maghrebia, via Creative Commons)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — It was an orderly, peaceful election — a rarity in the Arab world. And it was won by Islamists. How observers view the Tunisian elections and what they mean for the West, Israel and the North African country’s tiny Jewish community depends in part on which… Read more »

In this undated photo David Gerbi poses in front of Sla dar Bishi, the synagogue in Tripoli that he hopes to renovate. Gerbi, an Italian Jew born in Libya, played a central role in 2002 in the rapprochement between Moammar Gadhafi and Libyan Jews. (Courtesy David Gerbi)

WASHINGTON (JTA) – Now it can be told: For the last decade or so, the Jews had secret back channels to Moammar Gadhafi. What led the pro-Israel community into a careful relationship with Gadhafi 10 years ago were considerations of U.S. national interests, Israel’s security needs and the claims… Read more »

ROME (JTA) — Auschwitz,  the most notorious camp in the Nazi killing machine, may soon claim success in its campaign to preserve the legacy of the Holocaust. The foundation supporting the site in southern Poland has attracted tens of millions of dollars from donor countries, and the camp’s barracks… Read more »

Newly arrived Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia attending a rehearsal for a Passover Seder at the absorption center in Mevasseret Zion, April 14, 2011. (Kobl Gideon/Flash 90)

MEVASSERET ZION, Israel (JTA) — It’s a typical Friday morning in Israel’s largest absorption center: A handful of local residents, all immigrants from Ethiopia, mill about examining wares for sale at a small, unofficial souk. Located in Mevasseret Zion, a town just outside Jerusalem, the center has become more… Read more »

The Klezmer fusion band Butterfly Effect entertaining Israelis on Herzl tour at Fogashaz, one of the "ruin pubs" of Budapest's Jewish quarter. (Alex Weisler)

BUDAPEST, Hungary (JTA) — Sometimes it takes a Zionist organization to show Israeli Jews that Israel isn’t the only place where Jews have a future. At least that’s what the World Zionist Organization and Habonim Dror, the labor Zionist youth organization, managed to do with a whirlwind trip this… Read more »

VILNIUS, Lithuania (JTA) — Faina Kukliansky entered the theater alone, waved at a few friends and sat down to watch “I Shot My Love,” the Israeli documentary film that kicked off Lithuania’s first gay film festival. Some other Lithuanian Jews, she said, have told her to avoid such events… Read more »

BUDAPEST, Hungary (JTA) — It’s not easy to decipher the complicated trajectory of Jewish life in post-communist Europe. “There are claims and counterclaims about contemporary European Jewish life,” Jonathan Boyd, the executive director of London’s Institute for Jewish Policy Research, said. “At one end of the spectrum there are reports… Read more »