Following Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s call to allow Jews to pray freely, police appear to have normalized defying the status quo at Temple Mount, under which Jewish worship is prohibited at the site. A police officer ignored a Jewish man who bowed while praying at the holy Jewish site on Wednesday. Jewish activists say that the police allowed them to pray as they wished.

Although the police turned a blind eye in the eastern side of Temple Mount, a Jewish activist was arrested after defying the status quo in the western side, near the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The eastern side is considered to be less provocative and holier to the Jewish people, which would explain the police’s attitude to the status quo there. However, the western side is frequented by more Muslims which would prompt the police to arrest any Jew who tries to stir controversy.

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Source: https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bycxzo7ja

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Shabbat candles and challah bread – iStock

From November 15-16, 2019, more than 1 million Jews in over 1,500 cities around the world will unite for the annual international Shabbat Project.

Last year, the Shabbat Project attracted more than 1 million participants in 101 countries across 1,511 cities and towns. This year, organizers believe the initiative will top those numbers. New cities joining the 2019 Shabbat Project include Meknes, Morocco; Kigali, Rwanda; Nahariya, Israel; and Le Grand Mort, France.

This year’s Shabbat Project calls on Jews all over the world to “Jump Together” in response to rising levels of violent anti-Semitism in the U.S. and worldwide, most recently the shooting that claimed two lives outside a synagogue during Yom Kippur in Halle, Germany. The deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history, meanwhile, occurred in Pittsburgh on the weekend of last year’s Shabbat Project.

“We must not let our Jewish identity be defined by the evils of anti-Semitism. Our strongest and most powerful response to the darkness of Halle, Pittsburgh, Poway and other recent inhuman attacks is to boldly spread light in the world — to redouble our humanity and inspire a more uplifting Jewish identity,” says South African Chief Rabbi Dr. Warren Goldstein, the founder, and director of the Shabbat Project. “We cannot be intimidated or paralyzed by the darkness. We mourn and we pray, but we are not defeated or afraid.”

Shabbat Project challah bakes, havdallah concerts, family and community dinners, festive prayer services, children’s activities, and even week-long celebrations will be coordinated this year by a team of more than 8,000 partners in participating cities as well as tens of thousands of volunteers on the ground.

In France, a Shabbat Project hotspot each year, organizers will be working alongside celebrated tech mogul and advisor to President Emmanuel Macron, Jeremie Berebie, to bring the initiative to more than 50 French cities.

Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, the youth movement EnerJew will coordinate a Shabbat experience that brings together Jewish teenagers in 40 cities in the former Soviet Union.

Challah bakes will again be a key rallying point for the Shabbat Project, with organizers challenged to innovate on the concept’s traditional formula. Previous iterations have included a cross-border, silent disco, and glow-in-the-dark challah bakes. This year will see a mindfulness-and-meditation bake in Mexico City; “pink challah bakes” to raise breast cancer awareness in more than 20 U.S. cities, and an attempt by organizers in Melbourne, Australia, to break the Guinness World Record for the world’s longest challah (currently 20ft).

In another new development, the Shabbat Project has deployed dedicated Facebook and Instagram pages for Spanish, French and Russian speakers, with content curated and customized for each region.

Further, to help first-time participants navigate the details of Shabbat observance, the Shabbat Project team has developed a simple seven-step guide, replete with rich ideas and philosophical reflections, fleshing out the meaning and methodology of the various Shabbat practices. The guide has been translated into four different languages and tailored for diverse audiences.

“Our approach is predicated on the idea that the real energy of Shabbat — its transformative power — is wholly dependent on immersing oneself in the full Shabbat experience,” says Rabbi Goldstein. “Over the past six years, through the power of that experience, we’ve seen individuals and communities do great things — things that before were not thought possible. We’ve seen walls torn down, families rejuvenated, deep feelings awakened, deep friendships formed. The power of doing that together, all across the Jewish world, is simply incredible.”

Rabbi Goldstein adds, “It’s time for the Jewish world to jump together. To recommit to our heritage, to the grand idea of what it means to be a Jew — and to find our way forward to a future filled with inspiration and determination, a future that will see us defeat those who seek to destroy our values. When we do that, we move the world.”

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/270184

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Jews and Muslims clashed Sunday morning on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City, with police detaining Jewish visitors who had raised an Israeli flag at the outset of what is set to be one of the most politically sensitive and volatile weeks this year.

According to eyewitnesses, a group of Jewish visitors began singing after they entered the site — holy to both Jews and Muslims — on Jerusalem Day, the anniversary of the day when Israeli forces took control of the Old City and Arab-majority East Jerusalem in 1967.

Muslims at the site — known to them as Haram al-Sharif or the Noble Sanctuary — chanted “Allahu Akbar” at the Jews, with police forces separating both groups.

A video showed young Israelis, dressed in blue and white festive clothes, raising an Israeli flag and immediately being confronted by police officers. Another video showed visitors prostrating themselves on the ground in contravention of regulations barring Jewish prayer at the site.

One of the youths was the son of the ultranationalist lawmaker Bezalel Smotrich of the Jewish Home party, who praised his son for his “bravery and national respect.”

“There will come a day, my son, when the Israeli flag will be raised proudly on the Temple Mount, in the Temple,” Smotrich tweeted.

Footage from the scene showed the officers removing members of the Jewish group from the site.

A police spokesperson said that “a number of visitors were removed from area after not keeping to the guidelines of behavior during the visit,” adding that officers were “questioning the individuals who were removed from the Temple Mount.”

The Temple Mount is the holiest site in Judaism and the third-holiest site in Islam. High-profile visits by Israeli officials and rumors of changes to the status quo have preceded outbursts of violence. Under an arrangement in place since Israel’s victory in the 1967 war, non-Muslims are allowed to visit the site but not pray there.

Jews are allowed to enter during limited hours, with police officers guiding them through a predetermined route and forbidding them from praying, displaying religious symbols or raising the Israeli flag.

Security in Jerusalem has been bolstered ahead of a politically tense week that will see Israel celebrate 51 years of the city’s reunification on Sunday, the US move its embassy to the capital on Monday, and the culmination of over six weeks of protests along the Gaza border, when Palestinians mourn the “catastrophe” of the creation of the Jewish state.

A new road sign indicating the way to the new US embassy in Jerusalem is seen on May 7, 2018. (AFP Photo/Thomas Coex)

Later on Sunday, thousands of Israelis are expected to take part in the annual Jerusalem Day parade celebrating 51 years since the reunification of the city during the 1967 Six Day War.

The march, in which primarily religious teenagers march through the Old City decked in white and blue, the colors of the Israeli flag, has raised tensions over its route through the Old City’s Muslim Quarter. In previous years, the march has sparked sporadic incidents of violence between Israeli revelers and local Palestinian residents.

This year, as in years past, the left-wing NGO Ir Amim sent a letter to authorities requesting that they reroute the march so that it doesn’t go through the Muslim Quarter.

Amid fears that the demonstration could inflame tensions with local Arab residents, a police official told the Ynet news site on Friday that officers would show “zero tolerance for verbal abuse or physical violence” during the event.

He urged revelers to be mindful of the political sensitivities of the march, and to “maintain law and order.”

Israelis wave the Israeli flag as they parade through Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City on May 24, 2017 to commemorate Jerusalem Day, marking the reunification of the city following the Six-Day War of 1967. (AFP PHOTO / Menahem KAHANA)

Thousands of uniformed police and Border Police officers were deployed throughout Jerusalem on Sunday. The officers will secure the perimeter of the US embassy during Monday’s opening, assist in securing the visiting American officials and help direct traffic.

On Sunday, major roads in the city will be blocked between 3 p.m. and 11 p.m. due to Jerusalem Day events. They will include Bar Lev Boulevard and Sultan Suleiman Street around the Old City; Jaffa, Hillel, Bezalel and King George streets near the city center; and Ben Zvi Boulevard, which leads to the city’s main entrance.

Israel is also girding for possible violence during Nakba Day protests, a national day of Palestinian mourning marking the “catastrophe” of Israel’s founding, commemorated every year on May 15. Due to the beginning of the month of Ramadan, protests have been moved up to Monday.

Last week, Hamas’s leader in Gaza Yahya Sinwar said he hoped that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would breach the border fence from Gaza into Israel during the protests.

In recent Fridays, Palestinian protesters have burned tires along the fence, hurled stones at Israeli troops and flown incendiary kites over dry fields on the Israeli side of the border. Some of the protesters, mainly youths, brandished wire cutters, a popular tool in weekly attempts to cut through the border fence.

According to the Hamas health ministry, 48 Palestinians have been killed since protests and clashes began along the Gaza border on March 30 and hundreds of others have been wounded from gunfire. Israel says it only opens fire when necessary to stop infiltrations, damage to the fence, and attacks.

Israel has repeatedly expressed concern over the possibility of a mass breach of the Gaza fence, in which Palestinians would stream across with terrorists among them, wreaking havoc. Sinwar has vowed in the past that protesters would “breach the borders and pray at Al-Aqsa” mosque on the Temple Mount.

Source: https://www.timesofisrael.com/police-boot-jews-from-temple-mount-for-raising-israel-flag-on-volatile-day/

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When I was a child in the 1970s, we used to visit my Great Uncle Sam and Auntie Goldie at their little house in Toronto’s Kensington Market. They seemed very old and Sam seemed very sad. I didn’t know why then, but now I understand that Sam looked the way you would probably look if someone put your wife and kids into an oven and turned on the gas.

They were Polish concentration camp survivors whose, first spouses and children were killed in the holocaust. They met after the war, married and came to Toronto.

We would drink tea and eat cookies, while my parents made conversation, and I stared at the wall full of framed black-and-white photographs of all the people in our family who had died at the hands of the Nazis.

NIR ELIAS / REUTERS

Honestly, it didn’t have much of an impact at the time. It was only after I grew up, had a child of my own and started paying attention to the global refugee crisis that I started thinking a lot about the Holocaust; about the children (the mass killings of children is the hardest part to stomach,) about how badly the world failed the refugees and about what “never again” really means.

My father was born in 1929 to parents who immigrated to Canada from Poland in the 1920s. The rest of their families remained in Europe; by the time they realized what was happening, it was too late. Most of the world had shut its doors. So, they died. All of them.

Consider the 900 Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis who, in 1939, were denied entry to Cuba, the United States, and Canada before being sent back to Europe, where an estimated quarter of them died in death camps.

Consider Adolph Eichmann, a Nazi SS lieutenant colonel, offering one million Jews to the British in exchange for 10,000 Allied trucks, to which Lord Moyne, British Deputy Minister of State, responded, “What would I do with one million Jews? Where would I put them?”

The best way to honour these dates is to do something to help those who are displaced around the world right now

Consider the unidentified Canadian immigration agent who, when asked in 1939 how many Jews would be allowed in Canada after the war, replied, “None is too many.”

While I’m not entirely on board with comparing current crises with the Holocaust, my personal connection to this is what motivates my involvementwith refugee causes today. “Never again” requires that we never turn our backs again. It means going beyond liking things on Facebook, beyond “thoughts and prayers,” to opening our doors to let people into our houses.

I have “Tzedakah” — the Hebrew word for “righteousness,” but which is commonly used to mean “charity” — tattooed on my left forearm, to remind me. It’s hard to be ungenerous when you permanently ink this word on your body.

April 12, 2018 is the 27 of Nisan on the Jewish calendar, observed as Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, by many around the world. It also falls in the middle of Refugee Rights Month in Toronto. The best way to honour these dates is to do something to help those who are displaced around the world right now, including, but not limited to Syrians, Africans and the Rohingya.

JENS SCHLUETER VIA GETTY IMAGES

Syrian refugees go through the entrance to the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial to commemorate victims of the Holocaust on January 26, 2018 near Weimar, Germany.

The refugee crisis isn’t always front and centre like it was a couple of years ago, but it’s far from over, as there are 22.5 million refugees in the world. The seeming insurmountability of this might be the cause of some of the increasing apathy.

But it might help to understand that each of those 22.5 million people is more than a simple statistic, and that you can make a huge difference in one life, two, or even dozens of lives. It will also change your own life. Sponsoring of a family of refugees last year (with another one pending arrival) is the most rewarding thing I have ever done, besides raising my daughter.

You don’t have to be Jewish to honour the people who lost their lives in the Holocaust by helping others. You just have to be human.

Source: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/elizabeth-bromstein/holocaust-refugee-remembrance_a_23408992/

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One of the world’s most fraught relationship triangles is the one connecting Germans, Jews, and Muslims. Suspended over that triangle is of course the Holocaust. For seven decades, post-war Germans thought they understood their unique burden and responsibility. It was and is to atone for Auschwitz by taking it as a mandate to be and to do good — at home and abroad, today and tomorrow.

But the passage of time has a funny way of confusing old certitudes. One question that was never clarified — because it never needed to be asked — is whether German atonement should be particular or universal.

The particularist conclusion says that Germans must never again harm Jews. They must protect their former victims wherever they can, on the streets of Berlin or Tel Aviv, at the United Nations or on the Golan Heights.

The universalist lesson is general: Germans must never again discriminate against any minority — white, brown or purple; Jewish, Muslim, or Wiccan; Western, Eastern or exotic. And Germany, which once not only murdered millions but also turned millions more into refugees, must be a haven to those human beings who legitimately deserve refuge today.

For decades, there was no conflict between the particularist and the universalist responses to the German past. Germany has stood by Israel more reliably than any other country in the EU. Germans have also become the world’s most avid commemorators. They memorialize the Holocaust in their cities, on their buildings, on their streets. (The form I find most moving is Stolpersteine, the little brass “stumbling stones” that I described here.)

At the same time, Germany for a long time pretended that other minorities pose no major dilemma. Muslims started coming to Germany in large numbers in the 1960s, mainly as Turkish “guest workers”. They have kept coming ever since, from various countries. (In the Neukölln borough of Berlin, the latest buzz is about Syrians driving out Turks.) Today about 5 million Muslims live in Germany.

And yet Muslims were never accepted as “belonging to” or “being part of” Germany. When a former German president used that exact phrase in 2010, a controversy erupted that still rages, and even strains the current governing coalition.

But then there was the autumn of 2015. Nobody who was in Germany during that refugee crisis will ever forget the experience. Many Germans in late summer of that year got goosebumps as they saw on the TV news — and pay attention to the iconography — crowds of dark-skinned men, women and children in tattered clothes, camped on the platform of an eastern-European train station (in Budapest) where they were trapped, waiting for … trains.

The trains they were waiting for promised to take the huddled masses not east but west, not toward death but toward liberty and safety, in a land called Germany. “Germany, Germany,” the wretched masses were chanting, right through the cameras and into German living rooms. Victims of war atrocities were using the English name of the country that had once run trains from the same place toward the camps. Now the name meant salvation. History appeared to have symmetry. Germany was good at last.

Out poured emotions that had been bottled up for decades. As the refugees disembarked from their trains in September 2015 — in Munich, the site of Hitler’s failed putsch of 1923 and the unofficial Nazi capital — Germans were lining the exits and streets. Entire families had turned out. They bore teddy bears, candy, bottled water. Above all, they bore smiles. All across the country, Germans volunteered — their money, clothes and time — to help the refugees.

But historical narratives are clean in a way that real life is not. A few months later, on New Year’s Eve 2015, hordes of young Muslim men in Cologne assaulted, molested and violated scores of German women who had turned out for the fireworks. Most of the men were neither refugees nor Syrians, but economic migrants from northern Africa. But the distinctions were lost in the outrage that followed.

Out poured countervailing emotions, also bottled up for a long time: Fears of “the other”, of alien men bringing misogyny or even terror. And also bringing hatred of Jews.

To say that all or even most Muslims hate Jews is untrue and grossly unjust, just as it was to tar all Germans as anti-Semitic in the 1930s. But to pretend that hatred of Jews does not run like a deep current through Muslim culture today as it ran through German culture then is panglossian, naive, delusional — and probably just disingenuous. Just visit a few schoolyards in Berlin, where the children of Muslims use “Jew” as a catch-all slur and harass the children of Jews.

And there it is: The universalist German responsibility (don’t stereotype minorities like Muslims) has slammed right into the particularist duty (protect Jews). And the “Germans”, from teachers and deans to parents and politicians, have frozen up, like deer in headlights. Some can’t even bring themselves to admit the distinction — on the playground, Muslim, Jew and gentile alike are probably German citizens.

In that helplessness, mainstream Germans resemble people everywhere who genuinely try to do right in a world that just isn’t. And they prove, yet again, what Karl Popper called “the paradox of tolerance”, that bane of liberal progressives in particular. If society values tolerance above all, Popper observed, it will eventually be destroyed by the intolerant. The only answer, he thought, is to be resolutely intolerant of intolerance.

A first step is for Germans to find words for their dilemma. In so doing they must steer between the Scylla of anti-Muslim populism and the Charybdis of politically correct waffle. It may take new and fresh faces to do so.

Perhaps a young, female, Muslim face such as Sawsan Chebli’s. Today, she is an up-and-coming politician in Berlin. But she was born in Germany as a stateless daughter of Palestinian refugees. She is German and Islamic, part of the majority and the minority, a former refuge seeker who is now among the refuge givers. The other day, she suggested that asylum seekers trying to integrate into German society should, like Germans, be required to to go on field trips to former concentration camps. Among native-born Germans her idea proved controversial. It shouldn’t be.

Andreas Kluth is editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global. You can reach him at a.kluth@handelsblattgroup.com

Source: https://global.handelsblatt.com/opinion/germans-jews-muslims-and-the-paradox-of-tolerance-908064

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That’s because Germany has taken extraordinary steps since the end of World War II to atone for the Holocaust and prevent anti-Semitism from taking hold again. The country has paid reparations to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, erected dozens of memorials to those murdered and turned anti-Semitic speech into a crime.

Yet Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to open the nation’s arms to 1 million mostly Muslim refugees has created a double threat for Germany’s roughly 120,000 Jews: rising anti-Semitism from the newcomers and a resurgent right-wing nationalist movement spawned by the arrival of so many immigrants.

The anti-Semitic sentiment has become more pubic and virulent, said Tanaev, 32.  “When I arrived in Germany … I never saw such displays.”

Last week, thousands of protesters in Berlin burned Israeli flags to protest President Trump’s decision on Dec. 7 to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The flag-burning prompted a national outcry.

Other instances of anti-Semitism in Germany have become more common and brazen recently. Last month, thieves in Berlin made off with more than a dozen cobblestone-sized plaques embedded in sidewalks memorializing victims of the Holocaust. And the German military found Nazi memorabilia in soldiers’ barracks over the summer.

In 2016, Germany recorded 1,468 anti-Semitic incidents, an increase from previous years that has put Germany’s Jewish community on edge, According to a recent survey by the Bielefeld University in western Germany, 62% of Jewish respondents said they experience anti-Semitism in their everyday lives, while 28% said they were victims of verbal attacks or harassment in the past year.

The survey points to increased anti-Semitism by Muslim newcomers and a strengthened right-wing nativist movement, said Andreas Zick, who led the study.

Underscoring that trend is the rise of the anti-immigrant  Alternative for Germany (AfD), now the third-largest political party in Parliament four years after its founding. The AfD drums up support with nationalist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.

“Germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital,” senior AfD member Björn Höcke said this year about the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.

Other party members want Nazi soldiers remembered as patriots.

Zick also noted anti-Semitic remarks posted on social media by right-wing groups. The comments fuel misconceptions among new immigrants that Germany tolerates such behavior, despite strict laws requiring social media giants such as Facebook to delete posts categorized as hate speech, he said.

Such sentiments prompted a Jewish community center in Berlin to launch an initiative to combat anti-Semitism.

More: Anti-Semitic chants, images soil Serie A soccer match, reading from Anne Frank’s diary

More: Giant swastika unearthed under German sports field

“Here, we put in concrete terms that ‘the Jew’ is actually a normal person — that he looks like you and is someone you can have a normal conversation with,” said Rabbi Daniel Fabian of the Kahal Adass Jisroel Jewish community center and synagogue.

Members of the community center have been spit on and harassed in predominately Muslim neighborhoods since 2014, Fabian said. And his synagogue recently received a bomb threat from right-wing radicals. The compound housing the synagogue and community center are now under 24-hour police surveillance.

Jewish leaders are pushing for changes in the education system to head off anti-Semitism, including history lessons with visits to concentration camps. Bavaria is the only German state that now requires such visits.

“We are looking for modern means to convey what has happened and to keep the memory alive,” said Josef Schuster, president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews.

Tanaev said it also is important to draw parallels between the history of Jewish immigration and the current influx of newcomers. “That’s the history of our people, and it’s important to show others that fact,” he said.

Fabian, whose grandmother was in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, called for support from Muslim groups as well as the government to fight anti-Semitism.

“We can’t be the only ones who are constantly reminding everyone else to look at what’s happening right under your noses,” he said.

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/12/21/anti-semitism-germany-jews-discrimination-muslims-right-wing-nationalists/962383001/

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