Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, has been accused of blaming the Jewish community for flouting social distancing regulations during the current coronavirus pandemic. This is a patently unfair accusation. Last month, de Blasio personally supervised the dispersal of a large, tightly packed ultra-Orthodox funeral procession in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Two thousand […]
Lamentably, 2019 will go down in history as a sobering year, judging by the number of known antisemitic incidents reported in the United States by the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL recorded 2,107 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism, an increase of 12 percent over 2018. It was the worst tally since the ADL began tracking […]
Last year, following his announcement that the wartime papers of Pope Pius XII would be released, Pope Francis declared, “The Church is not afraid of history.” Maybe it should be. One of the most controversial pontiffs of the 20th century, Pope Pius XII led the Roman Catholic Church from 1939 until 1958. During World War […]
A year has elapsed since a heavily-armed neo-Nazi thug, John Earnest, burst into a Chabad center in Poway, California, and fatally shot Lori Gilbert-Kaye, 60, as she shielded Rabbi Yisrael Goldstein with her body. The April 27 attack occurred about six months after a white supremacist assailant murdered 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life […]
Israel has been hit hard by the novel coronavirus, which has so far killed 79 Israelis, infected nearly 10,000 and virtually shut down the country, in the worst natural disaster to befall it since its creation 72 years ago. The group most affected by this deadly pandemic has been Israel’s insular ultra-Orthodox community of 1.1 […]
My parents, David and Genia, passed away in Toronto in 2016, leaving two less Holocaust survivors in a dwindling population of some 400,000 around the world. Mostly in their 80s and 90s, they are the last living links to an unprecedented tragedy — the systematic, industrial-scale extermination of six million European Jews from 1939 to […]
At long last Holland has apologized for its abject failure to protect Jewish citizens during the German occupation. At a Holocaust commemoration event in Amsterdam recently, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte issued a formal apology, belatedly acknowledging that Holland had failed to provide either “justice” or “security” for the Jewish community during that terrible period. […]
An appeals court in Germany has handed down a very disappointing verdict. In a ruling on February 4, a state court in the town of Naumburg rejected a Jewish man’s complaint that a 700-year-old antisemitic sculpture should be removed from the Stadtkirche (City Church) in Wittenberg, the home of the Protestant Reformation. Michael Duellmann, the […]
Mohammad bin Abdulkarim al-Issa, the secretary-general of the Muslim World League, an organization subsidized by Saudi Arabia, visited the former Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland a few days ago in a ground-breaking interfaith trip that could open the door to improving Muslim-Jewish relations and normalizing the discussion of the Holocaust in the Muslim and Arab […]
The leaders and representatives of more than 40 countries descended on Israel to attend the fifth World Holocaust Forum, which took place at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem on January 23, but only a handful were permitted to address the conference. The speakers represented the four Allied powers of World War II — the United States, […]