Around the Jewish world

By JTA

article created on: 2010-09-01T00:00:00

NATION

Wiesel to teach at Chapman
    
LOS ANGELES (JTA)—Elie Wiesel will teach at a Southern California university that features a large bronze bust of the Nobel laureate at its library entrance.
    
The Holocaust survivor and author was named a distinguished presidential fellow at Chapman University, a private institution founded by devout Christians. Chapman President Jim Doti made the announcement Aug. 25.
    
Wiesel, a New York resident and professor of humanities at Boston University, will take up temporary residence in Southern California next spring and in each of the following four years to teach at Chapman.
    
Wiesel is expected to interact extensively with faculty at the university’s Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education and with students in Chapman’s three Holocaust courses and related classes, Chapman spokeswoman Mary Platt said.

Campaign targets Shalit
    
(JTA)—A leading American Jewish umbrella group has started a national campaign in support of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
    
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations launched the website www.giladgreetings.org to allow people around the world to send birthday and High Holidays greetings for Shalit.
    
The soldier, 24, captured in a cross-border raid in June 2006 and reportedly held by Hamas in Gaza, on Aug. 28 marked his fifth birthday in captivity.
    
Greetings can be submitted through the website or by mail to the Presidents Conference, which will deliver the greetings to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Red Cross has been denied the right to visit Shalit.
    
The site was designed to support and encourage efforts by the Red Cross to press Hamas to allow its representatives to visit Shalit, in compliance with international law.
    
Printed greetings can be sent to Shalit in care of the Conference of Presidents, 633 Third Ave., 21st Floor, New York, NY 10017.

Heeb to cease print edition
    
NEW YORK (JTA)—The print edition of Heeb magazine has been suspended, its publisher announced on the magazine’s website.
    
Heeb, which became the unofficial authority for hipster Jews, has suffered from financial distress in the past couple of years.
    
Prior to the recent announcement on Heebmagazine.com of the shutdown, publisher Joshua Neuman had insisted repeatedly that Heeb was going to maintain the print edition despite slowdowns in production. Neuman, also the editor in chief, said the website would continue.

Talks seen as ‘fateful moment’
    
JERUSALEM (JTA)—World Jewish Congerss President Ronald Lauder called the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority “one of the most fateful moments” in the history of Israel.
    
Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, spoke Aug. 31 in Jerusalem before 200 delegates of his group’s Governing Board at its annual meeting on the eve of peace negotiations in Washington between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
    
He said world Jewry continues to actively support Israel.
    
“The international threats to Israel only serve to make us stronger,” Lauder told the delegates to the two-day conference.

Jews’ Obama approval dips
    
WASHINGTON (JTA)—Nearly two-thirds of Jews still approve of President Obama’s performance, but his approval numbers have dipped.
    
A Gallup Poll of religious groups in the United States found that Muslims gave Obama the highest job approval rating, while Mormons gave him the lowest. Jews and those affiliated with other non-Christian religions gave Obama above-average ratings, as did those with no religious affiliation.
    
The poll was released Aug. 27.
    
From January to July this year, Jews gave Obama a 61 percent approval rating, down from 66 percent from July to December 2009. Muslims gave the president a 78 percent approval rating during the first half of 2010, and Mormons a 24 percent rating.
    
The overall approval rating of 48 percent is down 15 points from the first half of 2009.
    
Obama received average job approval ratings from Catholics, and below-average ratings from Protestants.
    
Despite drops in the overall job approval rating from January 2009 to July 2010, Muslims have consistently given Obama the highest rating and Mormons the lowest. Jews’ approval ratings have remained above average.
    
The results are based on phone interviews with a random sampling of 276,123 adults with a 1 percent margin of error. Jews, Muslims and Mormons each made up about 2 percent of respondents. Jews accounted for 6,746 of the respondents, with a margin of error below 2 percent.
    
The interviews were conducted between January 2009 and July 2010 as part of Gallup Daily tracking.

Buy-Israel campaign launched
    
SAN FRANCISCO (JTA)—A pro-Israel group has launched an online campaign to buy Israeli goods.
    
StandWithUs announced the Buy Israeli Goods campaign to counter the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which calls for boycotting and divesting from companies that do business with Israel and sanctioning Israel for actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
    
“This is a movement to counter BDS with positive energy,” said StandWithUs executive director Roz Rothstein.
    
In its online flyer, the group states that boycotting Israel hurts the peace process by encouraging hard-liners and “does nothing to help the Palestinians improve their lives,” adding that shoppers should buy both Israeli and Palestinian products as “an investment in peaceful coexistence.”
    
StandWithUs has released an online button promoting the campaign for supporters to post to their Facebook walls.
    
The campaign website, which will be live in about a month, will include a list of products made in Israel that are available in North America. Supporters are asked to speak with local merchants and request that they carry the listed products.

MIDDLE EAST

UN extends Lebanon force
    
JERUSALEM (JTA)—The United Nations voted to extend the mandate of its peacekeeping operation in southern Lebanon for another year.
    
The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Aug. 29 to keep the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon on patrol in southern Lebanon on the border with Israel until Aug. 31, 2011.
    
The council based its decision on what it considers the unstable situation on the border between Lebanon and Israel.
    
UNIFIL has been deployed in southern Lebanon since 1978. Its mandate was strengthened in 2006 following the Second Lebanon War to monitor the U.N.-brokered cease-fire. Nearly 12,000 UNIFIL personnel are serving in the area.

Academics back boycott
of West Bank cultural center
    
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Some 150 academics and authors have thrown their support behind a boycott of a new West Bank cultural center.
    
In a letter released late Aug. 30, the academics said they would not lecture in settlements and expressed their support for the theater professionals’ refusal to perform in Ariel.
    
“We will not take part in any kind of cultural activity beyond the Green Line, take part in discussions and seminars, or lecture in any kind of academic setting in these settlements,” the letter read.
    
“We support the theater artists refusing to play in Ariel, express our appreciation of their public courage and thank them for bringing the debate on settlements back into the headlines.”
    
More than 50 Israeli theater professionals signed a petition over the weekend saying that they will not perform in the Ariel center when it opens in November. The center, which cost more than $10 million, was built with public funds.

Rabbi Yosef remarks assailed
    
WASHINGTON (JTA)—The Obama administration condemned what it said was incitement by an influential Israeli rabbi.
    
“We regret and condemn the inflammatory statements by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Aug. 28 in a statement.
    
On the eve of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Yosef, a former chief Sephardic rabbi and the spiritual leader of the Shas Party, which is part of the Netanyahu government, wished for the demise of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
    
“Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this world,” Yosef reportedly said during his weekly Saturday night sermon at a Jerusalem synagogue, using Abbas’ byname. “God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.”
    
Yosef has no formal government role.
    
“We note the Israeli statement that the Rabbi’s comments do not reflect the views of the Prime Minister.” Crowley said, who characterized the remarks as “deeply offensive.”
    
U.S. officials in the past have condemned incitement by the Hamas terrorist group, which governs the Gaza Strip, and by bodies associated with the Palestinian Authority.
    
The Anti-Defamation League also condemned Yosef’s statements as “offensive and incendiary.”

Egypt seizes weapons
    
JERUSALEM (JTA)—Egyptian police intercepted weapons intended to be smuggled into Gaza.
    
About 190 anti-aircraft missiles were discovered at three weapons depots in central Sinai, the Ma’an News Agency reported Aug. 28. About 1,500 bullets of various sizes also were discovered there.
    
Other stores of weapons, including anti-tank landmines, and a cache of machine guns were discovered in towns on the border with southern Gaza, according to the report.
    
Meanwhile, Egypt reportedly destroyed 12 smuggling tunnels into the Gaza Strip over the Aug. 29 weekend.

WORLD

French railroad archives open
    
(JTA)—In the wake of California legislation requiring companies to disclose their activities during the Holocaust, the head of France’s national railroad said lawmakers were welcome to review its archives.
    
France’s national railroad, known by the acronym SNCF, carried French Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
    
Railroad chief Guillaume Pepe told Radio France Internationale that the archives, which have been open for 20 years, are available to U.S. lawmakers, UPI reported.
    
The California Legislature recently passed The Holocaust Survivor Responsibility Act, which would require bidders to disclose their involvement in transporting victims to concentration camps during World War II. The measure requires the California High-Speed Rail Authority to consider that fact in its deliberation of contract awards.
    
The legislation is awaiting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signature.
    
SNCF is seeking part of a $43 billion project to build a high-speed rail line between Sacramento and San Diego.

New Mumbai Chabad House under construction
    
(JTA)—Construction has begun on a new Mumbai Chabad House.
    
The building will include a synagogue, kosher kitchen, mikveh and educational spaces, according to a Chabad-Lubavitch official in New York.
    
It also will include a memorial to directors Rabbi Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg and four visitors who were killed in the Nariman House in the November 2008 attacks on several Mumbai sites, including luxury hotels, a train station and a popular cafe. More than 170 people were killed in the attacks.

Daniel Libeskind to design
St. Louis monument
    
TORONTO (JTA)—Renowned architect Daniel Libeskind was chosen to design and create a Canadian monument to the Holocaust-era ship the St. Louis.
    
To mark Canada’s refusal to accept the ship and its Jewish refugees, the monument will be housed at Pier 21, Canada’s Immigration Museum, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
    
The steamship fled Nazi Germany in 1939 with 907 Jewish passengers bound for Latin America. No country in the region, including Canada and the United States, accepted its passengers, and the St. Louis was forced to return to Europe just as war broke out.
    
Ultimately, according to estimates, at least one third of its passengers were killed in the Holocaust.

Glasgow grocery stores boycott Israeli products
    
(JTA)—About 30 stores in Muslim communities in Glasgow, Scotland, are refusing to stock Israeli products.
    
The stores, owned by Muslim and Asian shopkeepers, are displaying signs stating that “No Israeli produce sold here,” The Herald Scotland newspaper reported.
    
The campaign, which is focusing on Israeli produce, especially dates, is led by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Friends of Al Aksa Glasgow.
    
Supporters are distributing flyers to shoppers saying that stores continuing to stock Israeli goods will be “named and shamed,” according to the Herald.
    
The campaign is expected to go national.