Jewish News

Anne Frank Museum Must Give Up Family Archive, Dutch Court Rules

A Dutch court on Wednesday ordered one Anne Frank charity to give the Frank family archive back to another charity in Switzerland, following an uncomfortable public dispute over the Jewish teenager’s legacy.The Amsterdam District Court ruled the Anne Frank Foundation in Amsterdam must give the archive back to the Anne Frank Fund in Basel, Switzerland, by Jan. 1.The archive contains 25,000 letters, ...

Tradition Today: Rebuilding the Temple

One hears a great deal these days – especially in this season of Tisha Be’av – about the restoration of the Temple. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to contemplate some facts concerning the building of the Temple in the past.The construction of a permanent building to replace the Mishkan, the tent that had been erected in the wilderness and was ...

Kosher Café Project in Auschwitz Town

A kickstarter campaign from the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Poland has raised nearly $25,000 to convert the last Jewish home in the town of Auschwitz into a kosher vegetarian café.The Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site in southern Poland registered a record 1.43 million visitors in 2012, and the new café adjacent to the Auschwitz Jewish Center hopes to provide for some of the tourists visiting the ...

Twitter Hands Over ID Info on Anti-Jewish Postings

Twitter said Friday it had handed over data to French authorities to help identify the authors of anti-Semitic tweets, following a complaint from a Jewish students’ group.A French court in January ordered the company to provide the data after legal action by France’s Union of Jewish Students (UEJF).Twitter said in a statement that it had given information to judicial authorities ...

New England Shluchim Gather in Connecticut

“Varm” and “Tochendik” were two of the words used by some of the 150 participants to describe the New York New England regional Kinus in West Hartford, Connecticut, co-hosted by Rabbis Yosef Gopin, Mendel Samuels, Yosef Wolvovsky, Shaya Gopin and Yosef Kulek.In the spirit of Poschim B’dvar Malchus, the day began with an inspiring Chasidus Shiur by Rabbi Yosef Lustig, a perfect way to ...

Jewish Groups Assail Polish Ban on Kosher Slaughter

Jewish groups voiced outrage on Friday after Poland’s parliament rejected a government-backed bill that would have allowed slaughterhouses to produce kosher meat, angering Jewish groups who said the decision violated their religious rights.Lawmakers who opposed the bill said they did so because kosher slaughter is cruel to livestock. Jewish groups said prejudice about their faith – a sensitive subject in a country where occupying Nazis killed ...

Bones of Polish Pogrom’s Victims Reburied in Jedwabne

The remains of victims from the Jedwabne pogrom were reburied at a ceremony marking the 72nd anniversary of the massacre in the Polish town.Dozens of people gathered Wednesday at the site in Jedwabne where Poles murdered hundreds of their Jewish neighbors on July 10, 1941.Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and Piotr Kadlcik, the president of the Union of Jewish Communities ...

Trove of Ancient Jewish Tombstones Unearthed in Vienna

Vienna’s Jewish community says a historically important trove of hundreds of ancient Jewish tombstones have been recently unearthed, including some dating back to the 16th century.Senior Jewish community official Raimund Fastenbauer said Wednesday that the headstones have “high historical value.” He describes their significance as comparable to that of the ancient Jewish cemetery in Prague, the oldest known graveyard of ...

AllJewishLinks.com Newsletter Issue # 84 – July 10, 2013

Most people immigrate to Israel for spiritual, religious or familial reasons, and medical care doesn’t usually factor into the equation. In the case of Iris Kowen’s family, that was not the case. Living in the Holy Land was always the ideal, but it was the issue of medial necessity, and special needs potential that prompted the family to consider it seriously. Kowen’s ...

“Try Crown Heights.. They’re More Open There”

Photographer Richard Renaldi is a ‘matchmaker’ for tense times, asking complete strangers to pose together for a portrait. On a recent afternoon in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, it was not going well. He wanted to pose an Orthodox Jewish man with someone from outside the Orthodox community.“It’s going to take all the cajoling I can do,” Mr. Renaldi, 45, said. “There’s a lot of ...

Lau Asserts His Universal Credentials in Race for Chief Rabbinate

Rabbi David Lau, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Modi’in, is one of the two leading candidates for the position of Israel’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi.He is the officially endorsed candidate of the haredi rabbinic and political leadership but has been touting his credentials as a candidate for all, based on his record in Modi’in as a rabbi who has embraced nonreligious, ...

Forgotten WWII Fighters Commemorated

When one thinks of a ghetto uprising, the first thing that comes to mind is Warsaw. But historians have already determined that the Warsaw Ghetto fighters were not the first to revolt against the Nazis – they were preceded by the fighters of the Nieswiez Ghetto in eastern Poland.In order to create awareness and honor the ghetto fighters, an event marking ...