Jewish Russian Telegraph

Lech Walesa Unveils Ronald Reagan Statue in Warsaw

The Telegraph:

Ronald Reagan statue unveiled in Warsaw

A statue to former US president Ronald Reagan, who is highly respected in Poland for having helped hasten the fall of the Iron Curtain, was unveiled by Communist-era opposition icon Lech Walesa in Warsaw yesterday.

A statue of former US president Ronald Reagan has been unveiled in Poland 

2:44PM GMT 21 Nov 2011

"Let us bow before Ronald Reagan for the fact that our generation was able to bring an end to the great divisions and conflicts of the world," Mr Walesa said in a ceremony in the heart of the Polish capital Warsaw.

"What happened seemed impossible or unthinkable. The older generations still remember," the Nobel Peace laureate said.

"In Poland, we had more than 200,000 Soviet soldiers. Across Europe, there were more than a million, as well as nuclear weapons. Major changes without a nuclear conflict seemed unlikely," he added.

Reagan, who was president from 1981 to 1989, is celebrated in former Soviet satellite states for a tough line credited with having hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union. [Read more]

posted by: jrtelegraph

Bibi On a Peace Mission Between Avigdor Lieberman's Foreign Ministry And Mossad

Jerusalem Post:

PM attempts to ease Foreign Ministry-Mossad tension

By HERB KEINON 11/21/2011 03:44 

Turf battles have long been fixture in relationship between 2 agencies; ministry officials say Mossad doesn't keep them in loop, takes their responsibilities.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman andMossad head Tamir Pardo to a meeting Sunday to iron out turf issues badly straining relations between the agencies the two men lead.

The meeting followed Yediot Aharonot reports last week that Lieberman had issued a directive calling on ministry staffers not to cooperate any longer with the Mossad. [Read more]

posted by: jrtelegraph

Holocaust Memorial in The Town of Lubavitch

Chabad.org:

Holocaust Memorial Erected in Lubavitch

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

By Tamar Runyan

A Holocaust memorial commemorating the 483 local Jews who were murdered in November 1941 was dedicated in the Russian city of Lubavitch.

Erected at the behest of the Russian Holocaust Center and the Russian Jewish Congress’ Restore Dignity Project, the memorial marks the spot where Nazi forces gathered residents in a small ravine by the city’s slaughterhouse before massacring the lot. The monument, which was unveiled last Thursday, includes the names of 74 people whose names could be confirmed by Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust museum and research institute.

At the unveiling ceremony, Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Yitzchak Kogan, director of Moscow’s Bronnaya Synagogue, and Smolensk regional Chief Rabbi Levi Mondshine led attendees in a traditional memorial prayer. The town of Lubavitch served as the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement until the Fifth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Shalom Dovber Schneersohn, moved to Rostov in the early 20th century.

The ceremony was attended by Smolensk deputy Gov. Sergei Goryunov and other local officials, Russian Jewish Congress President Yuri Kaner, Israeli diplomats and Jewish community members. [link]

posted by: jrtelegraph

Miami Mayor in Israel: Don't Call Them Settlements

Vos Is Neas:

Miami, FL - Israel should be describing Jewish communities beyond the Green Line as developments, not settlements, Carlos Gimenez, the recently elected mayor of Miami-Dade County, said on Friday.

Gimenez, on a six-day visit to Israel with four other mayors of large US cities as part of Project Interchange, an educational institute of the American Jewish Committee, said the reality of the settlements – as opposed to the stereotype that the word invokes – was what surprised him most during his first visit to the country.

“When you conjure up the word ‘settlement,’ you think about the Old West, pioneers and all that,” he said in an interview just after visiting Efrat in the West Bank.

“It is really more like a development, that is all it is,” he said. “Settlement is the wrong word to use. If you want to describe it to Americans, it is really a development.

“We spoke to someone who lived in a settlement. Just a normal person. Basically just someone who wants to live in a suburb. That’s it. Is there conflict there? Obviously. But [Efrat] is not what I thought it was going to be.” [Read more]

posted by: jrtelegraph

Numbers Speak: Islamophobia vs. Anti-Semitism

Commentary:

FBI Statistics Belie Islamophobia Hysteria

Jonathan S. Tobin | @tobincommentary

It has become an accepted trope of contemporary journalism that American Muslims are under siege and beset by hatred and prejudice. But the evidence for this conventional wisdom is lacking. The story line of Muslim persecution in the United States has always been a matter of anecdotes and perception, not facts. That truth was confirmed this week when the FBI released their annual crime statistics report which showed once again that hate crimes against Muslims remain rare and are far outnumbered by attacks on Jews.

The report is not perfect, since not all parts of the country do a good job compiling the data, but it provides an important snapshot of the state of the nation regarding bias crimes. But the numbers speak for themselves. In 2010, only 13.2 percent of religion-based attacks were directed at Muslims. By comparison, 65.4 percent of such crimes were directed at Jews. This shows a slight increase over the last two years (the raw numbers show 887 anti-Jewish attacks with only 160 anti-Muslim attacks), but is not a statistical fluke. [Read more]

posted by: jrtelegraph

Argument At Jewish Agency Over 900 Russian Emigres

The Jewish Week:

Intense Debate At Jewish Agency Over 900 Russian Emigres

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Intense debate erupted at a Jewish Agency meeting over a group of Russian Jews who want to emigrate to Israel.

Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, the chairman of the agency's Aliya and Rescue Committee, said it was shameful that a $300 million organization had failed to bring 900 would-be immigrants from Russia to Israel, The Jerusalem Post reported.

“If this body is not committed to having aliya as the sin que non of what the Jewish Agency does, then what does it do?” Eckstein said.

According to the Post, Misha Galperin, the agency's CEO and president, fired back that strenghtening Jewish identity is necessary to promote immigration to Israel and is also part of the agency's mission. [Read more]

posted by: jrtelegraph

Occupy Boston Storms Israeli Consulate

Arutz Sheva:

Anti-Israel Group 'Invades' Boston Israel Consulate

Dozens of anti-Israel activists attempted to barge into the Israeli consulate in Boston over the weekend.

By David Lev

First Publish: 11/5/2011, 10:16 PM

IDF soldier helps flotilla member off ship

IDF Spokesperson

Dozens of anti-Israel activists attempted to barge into the Israeli consulate in Boston over the weekend in protest over Israel's seizure of the Canadian-Irish flotilla ships that attempted to sail to Gaza. Bearing PA flags, the activists attempted to storm the building but were turned back. They swore to return, shoutingslogans about how the “apartheid regime in Israel must fall.”

The activists were “spillovers” from the Occupy Boston protests, one of many Occupy Wall Street protests, some with anti- Semitic undertones, being held in the U.S. demanding social justice. 

[Read more]

posted by: jrtelegraph

Charles Jacobs: ADL is Missing In Action

In brief: our sages teach us that a Jew is supposed to learn from any situation. What can we learn from the Arab spring? Perhaps we can learn that outdated, sclerotic insitutions have to change to adapt to new conditions or to go away completely. ADL is the biggest Jewish agency with  a mission to defend the Jews against anti-Semitism, it raises $55 million a year. But, as story below documents it,  "only 3 percent of ADL’s press releases focus on Islamic extremism and Arab anti-Semitism." Abe Foxman, the head of ADL, has been at its helm for forty years.

It is time for him to go. In this recessionary times, we need young blood at the head of ADL. Somebody who would work harder for the money. The last time we checked $55 million was quite a pile of money, even in Barak Obama dollars.

Charles Jacobs:

Jewish Advocate, Boston  

November 3, 2011

Only 3 percent of ADL’s press releases focus on Islamic extremism and Arab anti-Semitism.  Only another 5 percent deal with domestic and international terrorism. By contrast, fighting for causes unrelated to Jewish defense accounts for 31 percent of ADL’s press release output.

We sorely need the ADL … to do its job 

Charles Jacobs

Last week I attended Boston’s premier screening of “Unmasked: Judeophobia.” I didn’t sleep well that night. Gloria Greenfield, the director and producer, has fashioned a Klieg light that pierces the fog of denial insulating America’s comfortable Jews from having to deal with the unpleasantries of the threats gathering against us. Words cannot convey the power of this film to drive home a message so obvious yet so long resisted. It would be an act of negligence for any Jewish leader not to urge his community to see it.

The film opens with Elie Wiesel telling us with crushing sadness that the Jew-hatred he assumed had perished with the closing of Auschwitz, is now back. Yet even that fails to prepare the audience for what follows: 90 minutes of riveting revelations by dozens of the most eloquent scholars and activists of our time, describing the movements and the ideologies that now threaten Jewish life emanating from the Muslim world, paralleled by leftist Israel-hatred, growing rampantly in Europe and now even reaching our shores. Anyone who has not known or sensed that there is a serious problem will be changed by this documentary.

The film does beg a central question: How did people who have advocated effectively for almost every other righteous cause fail to protect itself from the webs of lies, blood libels and moral inversions that now ensnare Jewry? Why are so few speaking of this Islamist-based anti-Semitism?

In the film, Harvard professor Ruth Wisse describes how modern liberal creeds strenuously resist data about today’s anti-Semitism. Almost from kindergarten, we are drilled to think that humans are basically the same: good, self-interested and essentially reasonable. It’s a secular catechism: Just be sensitive enough to understand the other fellow’s point of view, and we can all get along. But since irrational Jew-hatred (and much else) cannot be solved through discourse and reason, acknowledging the reality of anti-Semitism would force many to break (painfully) with these deeply held beliefs about how the world is supposed to work. Most prefer denial.

The film documents that the greatest threat to Jews today is the rampant spread of Islamic anti-Semitism, funded chiefly by Saudi petro dollars and propagated through Muslim Brotherhood ideology among multitudes throughout the vast Muslim realm. But this truth is blocked: Muslims are seen exclusively through the liberal lens as victims of Western colonialism and so cannot be blamed for their conduct. This gives the Islamic world a free hand in attacking the Jews, whose “occupation” of Palestine then becomes the accepted “logical reason” for their Jew-hatred. This is the big lie of our time: Jews were hated, attacked and massacred throughout the Middle East long before 1948. But painful facts cannot easily trump comforting dogma.

And so even Jewish defense agencies, wary of upsetting their own liberal frameworks (and their liberal donors!) shy away from the most important task this era has set before them: exposing Islamic anti-Semitism and creating plans to counter it. It can only be for such reasons that the Anti-Defamation League, the largest and best funded Jewish defense organization (at $55 million a year 2009, the last reported year), has flinched from this task. Yes, ADL head, Abe Foxman has said that the most alarming danger to Jews since WWII comes from Muslim anti-Semitism, but apart from a few such statements, ADL remains essentially silent on the issue.

My colleague Ilya Feoktistov and I have just completed an empirical study of ADL press releases from 1995 to the present (see my blog, www.charles jacobs.org). It’s a good if not perfect indicator of ADL priorities. Here are a few central findings, expressed in the nearby pie chart: Only 3 percent of ADL’s press releases focus on Islamic extremism and Arab anti-Semitism.

Only another 5 percent deal with domestic and international terrorism. By contrast, fighting for causes unrelated to Jewish defense accounts for 31 percent of ADL’s press release output. Instead of warning the Jews about Islamic anti- Semitism, these days, the ADL is often warning us about the dangers of “Islamophobia,” a term created and employed by radical Islamists to block and stain with the racist label, any public concern about Islamist beliefs and conduct.

Jews, including ADL, have effectively challenged American and Europe’s political leaders and clerics to stand up against anti-Semitism in the Western world, but we’ve almost entirely ignored the anti-Semitism gushing in the Muslim world.

Charles Jacobs, president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, wrote this column with researcher Ilya Feoktistov.

posted by: jrtelegraph

Davai! Being Russian Jewish in America

Yourjewishnews.com:

They don't use Yiddish and Hebrew words, as U.S. Jews often do. But they do mix around their English and Russian. Religion is a tricky question for this group of young Russian-Jewish Americans, most of whom left the Soviet Union or one of its successor states between the ages of 5 and 14. Some of them lived for a few years in Israel before their parents decided to move on.

They still feel they’re stuck between two cultures. After Kiddush at the northeast Philadelphia apartment of Dmitry Moverguz, who set up the nonprofit group Davai for young Russian Jewish professionals, about a dozen young people sit at a long table. When I say "Shabbat shalom" they burst out laughing. Some of them wear skullcaps for Shabbat dinner, and the food they bought is kosher, even though they cooked it during the Sabbath. The TV is on –- a baseball game.

"Davai" is Russian for "Let's!" – so they come together for Shabbat, Halloween, Hanukkah and Russian New Year , some with the same Christmas tree that horrified Israel’s religious authorities during the massive influx of Russian Jews two decades ago. "As long there’s a reason to drink!" they proclaim, the old Russian joke. They arrange Hebrew lessons and martial arts sessions led by an Israeli instructor. They frequently partner with local Jewish organizations for educational and entertainment events or trips to Israel, but they take pains to keep their independence.

Some of their concerns are similar to those of their U.S.-born Jewish peers; marriage, for example. "If I stayed in Russia by now I’d probably be married to some Russian girl and wouldn't care what religion she was," says Misha Vinogradov. "But now I can't imagine myself having kids who aren’t Jewish." If he has a son, he’ll name him after his grandfather Yudel. "It's Yiddish, so maybe Yehuda. It would be a pity to have come to a free country and not marry a Jewish girl."

But marrying a Jewish American is a bit tricky. "U.S. Jews are a little strange; I don’t totally get their mentality,” he says. We talk, but – how can I explain it? – it's not talking from the soul. But there is some hope: We have some mixed couples – some guys who married Jewish American girls. They’re lucky because they have more girls to choose from."  [Read the rest]

posted by: jrtelegraph

Yoram Ettinger: Redeeming Hostages – Not At Any Price

Israel Hayom:

Redeeming hostages – not at any price

A recent spree of acquisitions of Israeli startups by Intel, IBM, Microsoft, GE, Johnson & Johnson and Siemens has triggered a powerful tailwind for thousands of young Israeli entrepreneurs who aspire to establish new startups that could also be acquired by global giants.

The recent awarding of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Israeli scientist Professor Dan Schechtman has produced much enthusiasm among thousands of young Israeli scientists, all of whom wish to follow in his footsteps.

The recent swap of 1,027 Palestinian terrorists for one Israeli soldier, and the royal welcome for the terrorists by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has put adrenaline into the veins of thousands of young Palestinians who consider joining the ranks of PLO or Hamas terrorists.

Get the Israel Hayom newsletter sent to your mailbox!

The swap deviates sharply from the morally driven, security-based, reality-tested and commonsense-guided Jewish approach to hostage redemption that existed from the ancient era of the Patriarchs through the Second Temple period until modern times.

The Jewish preference for national security over private security is a derivative of real-life Judaism: making daily “no free lunch” choices between blessing and curse, good and evil, life and death.

Abraham the patriarch did not pay a ransom for his nephew, Lot. According to this week’s Torah portion, "Lech Lecha," Abraham attacked King Chedarla’omer and rescued Lot.

The 220 C.E.-redacted Oral Torah, the "Mishnah," and the 5th-century Talmud, which analyzes and contains the Mishnah, state that the enhancement of global well-being prohibits paying excessive ransoms for hostages, lest this encourages further kidnappings and radicalizes kidnappers’ demands.

In the 12th century, Maimonides, one of the greatest Torah scholars and a luminary on Jewish laws and the ethics of warfare, maintained that the greatest precept and virtue is redeeming hostages, but not at all costs. Redemption of hostages is not an absolute value. A country that is involved in a war for its survival must consider the impact of hostage redemption on future hostilities.

According to Maimonides’ teachings, a country that fights for its survival in the Middle East -- which has been plagued by wars, volatility, treachery and intolerance toward non-Muslims for the last 1,400 years -- must not subordinate its vital national interests to personal predicaments. While a rescue operation risks the lives of soldiers -- as happened in Entebbe, where Yonatan Netanyahu lost his life -- it can bolster Israel’s posture of deterrence. On the other hand, a terrorists-hostage swap yields heavier pressure, erodes deterrence, encourages further kidnappings, intensifies terrorism, subverts the legal system and issues a setback to the overriding goal -- for which soldiers are drafted -- of enhancing national security. Israel’s refraining from a hostage-driven military operation, such as the kidnapping of top leaders of Hamas, was registered by the Arabs as weakness.

Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, who was kidnapped in 1286 by Germany’s King Rudolph and was the leading sage of that era, issued a directive prohibiting his followers from paying the exorbitant ransom demanded by the king. He died in captivity seven years later.

Dr. Michael Wygoda, head of the Jewish Law Department at Israel’s Justice Ministry, provided more examples in the spring 2010 issue of Justice Magazine, published by the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists.

The kidnapping of hostages and the systematic and intentional murder and intimidation of civilians is a means, and not the goal, of terrorists. Terrorists aim to erode the confidence of free societies in the ability of their governments to secure safety and to defeat terrorism. The wholesale release of Palestinian terrorists in return for an Israeli soldier has emboldened terrorists, advancing their goal.

In order to secure public safety and defeat and deter terrorism, governments must reject pressure, immediate gratification and personal sensitivities, which led to this morally wrong and strategically reckless swap. Governments should embrace the Jewish values of morality, security, realism and common sense, which are consistent with long-term national security interests.

Yoram Ettinger is a former ambassador and head of “Second Thought: a U.S.-Israel Initiative.” [link]

posted by: jrtelegraph