Jewish World Features- - Israel News

Meet the Jewish billionaires shaping the 2016 presidential election
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A quick look at the list of top political donors for 2014 reveals a striking fact: At least a third of the most generous 50 mega-givers were Jewish. In fact, contributions from Jewish billionaires and multi-millionaires dominated the top 10 spots on the list.

EasyJet Zionism in the 21st century - Jewish World Features - Israel News | Haaretz
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When a black German woman discovered her grandfather was the Nazi villain of ’Schindler’s List’ - Jewish World Features - Israel News | Haaretz

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In the mid-1990s, near the end of the period during which she lived in Israel, Jennifer Teege watched Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List.” She hadn’t seen the film in a movie theater, and watched it in her rented room in Tel Aviv when it was broadcast on television.

“It was a moving experience for me, but I didn’t learn much about the Holocaust from it,” she tells me by phone from her home in Hamburg, mostly in English with a sprinkling of Hebrew. “I’d learned and read a great deal about the Holocaust before that. At the time I thought the film was important mainly because it heightened international awareness of the Holocaust, but I didn’t think I had a personal connection to it.”

#nazis #holocauste #amon_goeth

’Censored Voices’ film tears apart Israel’s heroic narrative of Six-Day War - Jewish World Features - Israel News | Haaretz
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C’est du Oz a l’état pur : Des saloperies d’accord, mais ce sont les Arabes qui ont commencé et nous aurions subi un génocide si nous n’avions pas réagi,

In the wake of Israel’s seemingly miraculous triumph in the Six-Day War in 1967, the country’s victorious soldiers were lionized as heroes.

But in private, even just one week after the conflict, many of them didn’t feel that way. One describes feeling sick to his stomach in battle and collapsing into a trench.

“I wanted to be left alone,” he says. “I didn’t think of the war.”

Another talks about watching an old Arab man evacuated from his house.

“I had an abysmal feeling that I was evil,” the soldier says.

The voices come from tapes made just weeks after the war’s conclusion and now presented, some of them for the first time, in the powerful new documentary “Censored Voices,” which premiered Jan. 24 at the Sundance Film Festival here.

Piece by piece and story by story, they tear apart the heroic narrative of Israel’s great victory in favor of something far messier, more chaotic and more human.

The tapes were made by fellow kibbutzniks Avraham Shapira and the novelist Amos Oz, who were driven by a sense that amid the triumphalism, more ambivalent emotions were not being expressed.

“It was a sadness that could only be felt in the kibbutz because we were living so close to each other,” Shapira recalls in the film.

Traveling from kibbutz to kibbutz with a borrowed reel-to-reel tape recorder, Shapira and Oz convinced fellow veterans to open up about their feelings, their memories and their misgivings from the war. But when they moved to publish what they had gathered, the Israeli government censored 70 percent of the material. Shapira published the remaining 30 percent in his book “The Seventh Day: Soldiers’ Talk about the Six-Day War.”

Now, thanks to the efforts of director Mor Loushy, who convinced Shapira to give her access to the tapes, all of the soldiers’ stories can be heard. Films in Israel can be subject to censorship, but according to producer Hilla Medalia, “We were able to release the film as we wanted it.”

The voices from the tapes are combined to great effect with archival footage, photographs, contemporary news accounts and film of the now-aged veterans to tell the story of the war and its aftermath.

What emerges is a vivid portrait of the war as it was lived by those who fought in it. In the tradition of soldier’s-eye narratives like “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Red Badge of Courage,” the movie allows the soldiers to depict themselves as confused, selfishly afraid, often stupefied by the sight of death and dying, and morally troubled when they encounter the enemy as fellow humans.

Conflicting emotions

There is little doubt that prior to the war, the soldiers saw the build-up of hostile Arab forces on their borders as an existential threat.

“There was a feeling it would be a Holocaust,” one says.

Yet once the battle was joined, the soldiers find themselves besieged by a welter of conflicting emotions. They watch their comrades die. They feel terror. They find themselves killing.

“I was impressed at the calmness with which I was shooting,” says one veteran, recalling himself gunning down Egyptian soldiers. “I felt like I was at an amusement park.”

The veterans also graphically describe multiple instances of Israeli soldiers — including themselves — shooting unarmed soldiers and civilians.

“Several times we captured guys, positioned them and just killed them,” one veteran recalls.

They also recall the shock and anguish of being forced to confront the humanity of the men they were killing. One tells of sorting through the papers of a dead Egyptian officer and finding a picture of his two children on the beach. Another recounts captured Egyptian soldiers pleading for water and mercy, and frightened teenage soldiers who soil their pants. One watches Arab families carrying their belongings from Jericho and thinks of his own family fleeing the Holocaust.

Even the recapture of the Old City of Jerusalem and the Western Wall evokes mixed feelings far from the iconic images of conquering soldiers weeping for joy. One participant says that when a shofar blows at the wall, it “sounded like a pig’s grunt.” Others are troubled by the sense that they are conquering not soldiers in the Old City but civilians in their homes.

“It wasn’t a freed city, it was an occupied city,” one says.

It is that sense of occupation and displacement of Palestinian natives — that Israel was not merely defending itself, but acting as a conqueror — that troubles the soldiers.

“I was convinced the war was just. It was about our existence,” one says. “But then it became something else.”

There is so much raw, varied and shocking material in the movie that parts can easily be wielded or attacked to serve particular political arguments. But the film is courageous enough to embrace contradictions and leave them unresolved. It offers an unflinching look at Israeli atrocities without being unpatriotic or anti-Zionist, recounting the horrors of the war without suggesting that Israel should have refused to fight it. It is critical of the Israeli occupation, yet doesn’t claim to offer answers.

“This film is about listening,” producer and co-writer Daniel Sivan puts it after the screening.

At the end of the film, Oz, now 78, is asked what he thinks of the tapes.

“I feel we spoke truth,” he replies.

Black and Jewish? Try explaining that to Israel’s airport security - Jewish World Features Israel News | Haaretz
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He teaches Hebrew in Jewish schools in the United States, underwent an Orthodox conversion to Judaism and has been profiled in major Jewish newspapers everywhere (including Haaretz, on December 19, 2014). He was in #Israel during Hanukkah as a special guest of the Jewish Film Festival held at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. But when Michael Twitty arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport to fly back to the U.S. he was interrogated rudely, his Judaism was called into question, his personal effects were taken from him – and he seethed with anger and humiliation.

#racisme

Of biblical proportions: How maps of the Land of Israel never lost their roots - Jewish World Features Israel News | Haaretz

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Pay wall hélas

A new Hebrew-language book featuring old Jewish maps of the Land of Israel contains a treasure trove of colorful maps, revealing gems both large and small. Printed on chrome pages in a wide format, Prof. Rehav “Buni” Rubin’s “The Shape of the Land” offers real pleasure to map lovers or to anyone interested in the visual representation of the Holy Land for the past millennium.

#israël #frontières #cartographie

Many French Jews eyeing U.S., not Israel, as emigration destination, attorney says -
By Haaretz | Sep. 10, 2014 |
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/1.615051

Even as French Jews now make up the largest source of immigrants to Israel, a move driven partly by anti-Semitism, one Manhattan attorney says he’s getting an increasing number of inquiries from wealthier members of that community about moving to the U.S.

Usually, Marlen Kruzhkov, an attorney at Gusrae Kaplan, gets two to three such calls a year. But “I’ve gotten calls from two to three dozen people in the last three months,” he told Algemeiner. Israel’s seven-week conflict with Hamas in Gaza ended August 26 in a cease-fire.

“The first thing we ask a client is, ‘why are you here?’ ‘why now?’ ‘why all of a sudden?’ ‘what is your goal?’” he told Algemeiner. “And almost all of them answer” that they don’t feel safe anymore.

The anti-Semitic incidents in France have been widely reported: the two girls arrested for plotting a suicide attack at a Lyon synagogue; the riots in and around Paris; the firebombing of a synagogue in a Paris suburb, among others.

“France is a weird country because it has a large Jewish and large Muslim population, so there is a real tension, a real undercurrent of hostility and a threat,” the lawyer told The New York Observer. “Now, it has become a lot easier for people to become a lot more open about their anti-Semitism and hate.”

Kruzhkov’s clients – currently several dozen families – tend to have assets of $50 million to $70 million, the Observer reported.

For most of them, the choice is the U.S. or Israel, with business opportunities often the determining factor, he told the Observer.

“Israel is a small place, business opportunities are less, there is much more red tape," he told the Observer. "The U.S. is easier; it’s a great place to do business, less red tape.”

Kruzhkov says that while his clients invariably move their assets out of France, half of them don’t emigrate. In some cases the assets go to the U.S. and the family goes to Israel.

’Holding this medal insults my relatives, slain in Gaza by Israel’
91-year-old Henk Zanoli returned his Righteous Among the Nations medal to Israel after six members of his Palestinian family were killed in a bombing in Gaza.
By Amira Hass | Aug. 19, 2014 Haaretz
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In a few words, a letter that arrived by messanger at the Israeli embassy in Holland on Thursday afternoon told the story of three bereaved families whose lives were intertwined: Zanoli, Pinto and Ziadah. Enclosed in the letter was the Righteous Among the Nations medal that was granted to Johana Zanoli-Smit (posthumously) and her son Henk for hiding and rescuing a 12-year-old boy, Elhanan Pinto, during the Nazi occupation of Holland.

On Thursday, Henk Zanoli, 91, returned the medal to the State of Israel because, he wrote, the state murdered six of his relatives, members of the Ziadah family from the El Boureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip.

Zanoli, a lawyer, wrote to Ambassador Hayim Davon that “...for me to hold on to the honour granted by the State of Israel under these circumstances, will be both an insult to the memory of my courageous mother who risked her life and that of her children fighting against suppression and for the preservation of human life as well as an insult to those in my family, four generations on, who lost no less than six of their relatives in Gaza at the hands of the State of Israel.”

At his mother’s request, Henk set out for Amsterdam one day in 1943 and returned with Pinto, whose parents had been sent to concentration camps from which they would not return. The trip by train to their village in the Utrecht region was difficult and frightening; the campaigns to catch Jews were at their height. The Zanolis were already involved in resistance to the occupation. Johana’s husband was arrested and exiled to Dachau, and a few months before Germany surrendered, he died in the Mauthausen concentration camp. The Nazis executed her son-in-law in the dunes of The Hague for his participation in the Dutch resistance movement. Another of her sons was engaged to a Jewish woman, who was arrested for the crime of being Jewish and murdered. Elhanan Pinto was saved and eventually emigrated to Israel.

Johana Zanoli and Henk didn’t talk much about the years of the occupation, said Angelique Eijpe, 41, Zanoli’s great-grandniece, who is a diplomat in the Dutch foreign service. Johana Zanoli died in 1980. She didn’t expect to receive a prize for her deeds, nor did her son initiate the receipt of the Righteous Among the Nations award at a ceremony held in 2011 at the Israeli embassy in The Hague.

The initiator was the survivor, Pinto.

“Only recently did I discover that they were actually traumatized after losing three family members: a husband, a son-in-law and a fiancee,” said Eijpe. “The entire family was involved in resistance to the occupation, but they didn’t talk about it much. I only remember that they disliked Germans.”

In the late 1990s Eijpe was studying at Birzeit University on the West Bank where she met Isma’il Ziadah, an economics student who was born in the El Boureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. The family originated from the village of Faluja (on whose land is present-day Kiryat Gat and other Israeli communities). They married several years later and since then have been living together abroad. Since 2012 they have been living with their three children in Oman, where Eijpe works as the deputy head of the Dutch diplomatic mission. In June they went to The Hague for their summer vacation and often spoke with their family in Gaza via Skype.

Skype is a poor substitute for a real meeting. But a real meeting is almost impossible due to the limitations that Israel imposes on the movement of residents of the Gaza Strip. Isma’il and his two older sons (ages 6 and 7), who were registered in the Palestinian population registry, are not allowed to leave or enter the Strip to travel to the West Bank via the Erez checkpoint, to land at Ben-Gurion International Airport, to enter the West Bank via the Allenby terminal on the Jordanian border, or to stay on the West Bank.

As a Dutch woman, Eijpe, the wife and mother, is allowed to land at Ben Gurion, enter the West Bank via Allenby and visit there. She is not allowed to enter the Gaza Strip via the Erez checkpoint or the Rafah terminal, which aside from a short period after the revolution in Egypt has been open only to Palestinians who are residents of the occupied territories. Isma’il and his two sons last visited the Strip in 2010, entering via Egypt. The Egyptians denied entry to Eijpe. “For us the siege of Gaza is a very concrete, very personal matter,” said Eijpe, who last saw her mother-in-law in 2005.

In Oman the Skype connection is blocked, so they all particularly enjoyed the unlimited conversations from The Hague. Isma’il spoke with his brothers in Gaza and with his mother, Muftiyah, 70. The children spoke a lot with their cousins and their grandmother, whom they called “Tiyah.” “How you’ve grown,” she said proudly, never tiring of looking at the third grandson who appeared on the computer screen, and whom she didn’t know yet. Since the start of the July 8 assault, they have become more emotionally dependent on these Skype conversations.

On Sunday, July 20, at noon Isma’il Ziadah spoke to the daughter of one of his brothers who lives in Gaza City. She suddenly received a phone call informing her that “something has happened in El Boureij,” and then the Skype connection was interrupted. That morning it was reported that in the Shujaiyeh neighborhood in Gaza seven Israeli soldiers were killed, as well dozens of civilians living in the neighborhood, whose homes were bombed with their occupants inside or who were shot while fleeing from the neighborhood. Ziadah was unable to contact his family in El Boureij.

Maybe it’s an electricity blackout, he thought, perhaps a problem due to the bombings. He asked his sons to go play downstairs in the yard. Their games interfered with his feverish attempts to renew contact with his home. And still he didn’t imagine the worst.

Isma’il’s brother Hassan, 50, a psychologist who lives and works in Gaza, told Haaretz this week: “That night there were many bombings and shellings in the eastern part of El Boureij. Nobody slept, not those in the camp and not us in Gaza. We considered the possibility that they had left the house. Mother and four brothers, their wives and children, live in the house. Khaled, who is a nurse, was in the clinic all the time in any case. His wife and children had gone to her family. The other three brothers, Jamil, 53, Youssef, 43 and Omar, 32, decided in the end to remain, along with our mother. Jamil’s wife, Bayan, also remained, and their 12-year-old son, Shaaban, insisted on staying with them.

“Two of the wives and their young children, and five of Jamil and Bayan’s six children, drove to Gaza, although the road from the camp was also difficult and frightening, with continuous bombings and shellings.”

At about 12 noon Hassan spoke by phone with his brother Jamil, to make sure that the children had arrived safely in Gaza. “See you,” said Jamil.

At about 2:30 p.m. a friend contacted Hassan to tell him that he had heard that the home of someone called Abu Suhayb Ziadah had been bombed. Hassan didn’t imagine that it was the house in El Boureij and that Abu Suhayb was his brother Khaled. He thought that it was one of his relatives, also Abu Suhayb, who lives in Gaza.

Hassan contacted several relatives — and then he got a call from his brother Sa’ed, who also lives in Gaza. He was crying: “Our home in El Boureij was bombed.” It was a four-story house, the pride of the mother and her sons, a house built on land purchased with savings they all contributed, and to which they moved only in 2003 from a small asbestos-roofed home provided by UNRWA.

“We all assumed that the army gives people a warning — by phone, with a warning missile — before it bombs a house or shells a neighborhood, that the army would give them time to leave,” Hassan said. “The grandson Shaaban, who is very close to my mother, remained in the house with them. If my mother had had any suspicion that our house was among Israel’s targets, for some reason that I can’t imagine, she wouldn’t have allowed her sons and her grandson to stay. I’m convinced of that.”

They drove to the hospital in Dir Al Balah to identify the bodies: Four arrived immediately; another two were identified later and brought to the mosque next to the cemetery, just as the funeral was about to begin. Another body was discovered in the ruins of their home: that of Mohammed Maqadmah, 30, a resident of the camp. According to B’Tselem — the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories — he was a member of the military arm of Hamas.

Hassan Ziadah has been working at the mental-health center in Gaza since 1991. He treats trauma victims and knows how to diagnose his condition and that of his family at present. “Mourning always takes time, but how do you deal with it when the loss is of six family members?” Hassan says. “You’re overwhelmed. You think about mother and then you’re angry at yourself for forgetting your elder brother, or think about your nephew and immediately reprimand yourself for not thinking of your younger brother.

“And besides, even before we lost them we lived in a situation of tremendous fear, insecurity and a sense of imminent death. This situation didn’t change even after they were killed. So we couldn’t yet begin to mourn naturally. Mourning has its own rituals, both religious and social, that make things easier. But like thousands of others, we were unable to observe these rituals because of the bombings and shellings.”

One of the trademarks of an Israel Defense Forces assault is the killing of entire families or many members of the same family, inside their homes. B’Tselem has documented 60 such families that were killed during the four weeks of the war: 458 people, including 108 women under the age of 60, 214 minors and 18 men and women aged 60 and over. On July 20 the IDF killed nine families, a total of 73 people.

The IDF spokesman did not reply to Haaretz’s question as to whether the Ziadah home was bombed by mistake — and if not, which family member was the target of the bombing, and whether the killing of the six civilians in the house is considered legitimate “collateral damage.” The spokesman replied that the IDF invests great efforts to avoid harming civilians, is working to investigate complaints about irregular incidents, and will publish the results after the investigations are concluded.

Gaza war pushes some to the left of J Street
Ex-staffers say the liberal group is now less vocal in quest for mainstream acceptance.
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen | Aug. 5, 2014
Haaretz
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NEW YORK — The Israel-Hamas conflict has been good for groups at the far-left edge of American Jewish Israel-related activism, propelling some people for whom J Street is now too moderate to more radical affiliations.

The platform of Jewish Voice for Peace, which is part of the global boycott-divestment-sanctions movement, calls on the U.S. government to suspend military aid to Israel. The group, whose members propelled the Presbyterian Church (USA) into divesting from companies used by Israel in occupied territories, says its membership and support have rapidly increased since the latest Israel-Hamas round of violance in Gaza began.

“We’re seeing a really incredible rate of growth,” Rebecca Vilkomerson, the group’s executive director, tells Haaretz. Dues-paying membership is up 20 percent in the past month. Five of its 40 chapters are brand new and 16 more are in development. JVP’s Facebook likes have tripled and its Twitter following doubled in the past month, says Vilkomerson. JVP members have been conducting protests they call “actions.” On July 22 a number of its members were arrested inside the midtown Manhattan office of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces when they lay down in the street in a “die-in.”

’Zionism has been kidnapped by the far right,’ says Holocaust historian Friedlander -
By Anshel Pfeffer | May 18, 2014 |
Haaretz
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“I am connected to this country. My eldest son and grandchildren live here but I can’t call myself a Zionist. Not because I feel estranged from Israel but because Zionism has been taken, kidnapped even, by the far right. You could say I was a normal Zionist until 1968, when I wrote a short book in French about Israel’s future. I don’t think it was especially daring, but I already then I wrote that we couldn’t continue holding on to territories with Arab population; no one called them Palestinians then. I thought and still do that it would ruin the values of Israeli society from within.”

Friedlander is aware that many Israelis and Jews find it difficult to reconcile his historical research, much of which has focused on the nature of Nazi anti-Semitism and the inaction of German society and the Vatican throughout the Holocaust, with calling upon Israel to relinquish its hold on more defensible borders. “Already in 1974 when I gave a lecture at Hillel in Los Angeles and spoke about my research and also about Israeli policy someone from the audience asked: ‘how can a man who is so aware of the Holocaust’s lessons have such dovish views?’ I answered that learning about the Holocaust may lead some to right-wing conclusions but it can be the other way around and lead you to emphasize more the moral imperative in accepting ‘the other.’ But I have never asked myself why none of this has ever made me paranoid or nationalist. For me the paramount question has always been how the individual man deals with his conscience when faced with injustice and crimes.”

’The right excels at using the Holocaust’

As an early member of Peace Now, Friedlander regrets that his colleagues in the Israeli left prefer not to base their arguments more on the lessons of the Holocaust. “It’s a mistake of the left to keep clear from such a major part of our history. They are afraid of dragging the Holocaust into the political game but we can turn around the way the right uses it.”

Friedlander is fundamentally opposed to making political use of the Holocaust, but believes the left has no choice, since the right has been doing so for over 30 years. “Since the 1970s when Menachem Begin described Yasser Arafat as a ‘second Hitler,’ we have seen how the political right in Israel has been using the Holocaust and its memory to justify more and more radical positions. It caused the left to refrain from even mentioning the Shoah. Personally, it caused me a dilemma when I saw how the subject which I devoted my life to has been used to prop up the most repulsive political attitudes.”

The fine line between criticizing Israel and anti-Semitism
ceux qui critiquent Israël et ne sont pas juifs, sont des antisémites ; et même parmi les juifs qui critiquent Israël il y a beaucoup d’antisémites !
By Anshel Pfeffer | Oct. 31, 2013
Haaretz

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Einat Wilf arrived in London last week, preparing for what she called on her Facebook page “The war of ideas, words and images waged against Israel.” She was not to be disappointed.

Wilf, a media-savvy former Knesset member (who left Labor together with Ehud Barak in January 2011 and was left without a party earlier this year when Barak retired from public life) eager to be involved in Israeli politics again, has made it her duty in recent months, while being employed as a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) in Jerusalem, to be a one-woman hasbara machine. She will soon be releasing a paper on how the European left has recycled old anti-Semitic tropes and is now using them against Israel. And London was to provide her with additional research material.

There are no transcripts yet from the Global Diplomatic Forum round-table event at the House of Commons where Wilf spoke, but what was said by one of the participants, Jack Straw, a Labor member of parliament and former foreign secretary, is not disputed. Straw spoke of what in his opinion are the obstacles to the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians: Israel’s construction of West Bank settlements, which are illegal according to official British policy (Straw branded them as “theft” of Palestinian land); the fact that the European Union has failed in the past to formulate a joint position regarding the occupation, partly due to Germany’s reluctance to pressure Israel (according to Wilf, he used the term “Germany’s obsession with Israel”); and the influence of the pro-Israel lobby over U.S. foreign policy due to American laws that allow lobby groups to use large sums to back political candidates that support their goals.

New Israeli film debunks myth that Nazis made soap from Jews - Jewish World Features - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper
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“Soaps,” a new film by director Eyal Balas, searches for the root of the myth that Germans used the bodies of Jews to manufacture soap.

Contemporary historians think the Nazis did not produce soap on an industrial scale using dead human bodies, a position shared by Yad Vashem. But the myth continues to hold sway with the big segments of the public.

The movie shows that in many places in Israel and the world, people light memorial candles beside soaps they believe were created from the bodies of Jews. Chemical analyses show they are actually made of vegetable materials.

The soap myth dates all the way back to World War I, when Germans were first rumored to be turning bodies into the stuff. During World War II, SS guards often tormented concentration camp prisoners by threatening to turn them into soap. The rumor gained further credence when at the end of the war the Soviet Red Army discovered a horrifying laboratory near Gdansk, Poland, with body parts alongside soap made from humans.

Some experts believe the institute served to test the feasibility of creating soap from human fat but never reached the stage of industrial production.

Yehuda Bauer, Israel’s leading Holocaust historian, says it is more likely that the soap was a byproduct of the decay of the bodies and that it was used to clean the institute on local initiative.

Either way, the institute did not use the bodies of Jews, but those of Poles and Germans from the not-far-away Stutthof concentration camp.

Admitted Holocaust obsessive

Balas, 43, admits to being obsessive about the Holocaust.

“I think about the Holocaust a number of times every day, for example, when my son cries,” he said.

Balas is not a second- or third-generation descendant of survivors. His family is from Syria. He came to the soap myth by chance. As an amateur chess player, he visited a chess club at a nursing home in Givatayim, where he found a Hebrew book titled “Sights of the Destruction” - a treatise from 1946 on the annihilation of European Jewry.

“The book, which sat on a very dilapidated shelf, included pictures arranged by chapters,” said Balas. "The last chapter was called “Factory for Soaps” and presented pictures that bothered me. I started to investigate the matter and film. My wife told me I was crazy. That encouraged me even more."

At least 10 cemeteries and memorial centers in Israel have graves containing soap either believed to have been made from Jews or used as symbols of Jewish communities ravaged by the Nazis. Such sites exist in Afula, Hod Hasharon, Nahariya, Bat Yam, Mazkeret Batya, the Chamber of the Holocaust on Mount Zion in Jerusalem and the archives of the Ghetto Fighters’ House at Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta’ot, among other places. Holocaust memorials including such soap can also be found in a number of Eastern European cities.

“Soaps” shows that one thing that contributed to the myth was confusion over the markings on some bars of soap. Certain German soaps produced in the Third Reich had the initial “RIF” imprinted on them, which was thought to stand for “Reichs Juden Fett,” which means “State Jewish Fat.” In fact, RIF stands for "Reichsstelle f?r industrielle Fettversorgung, or “National Center for Industrial Fat Provisioning,” the German government agency responsible for the wartime production and distribution of soap and washing products. RIF soap contained no fat at all, human or vegetable. The Holocaust Museum in Bat Yam exhibits an RIF soap bar donated by a Holocaust survivor, though the museum’s director, Prof. Yuri Lyakhovitsky, does not claim to be sure it is made from Jewish fat. He says the charismatic personality of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal influenced the development of the myth.

Yad Vashem has sent mixed signals about the soap myth. On one hand, the center has released chemical analyses of soaps and vehemently denied the claims that they are made from the bodies of Jews - thereby helping to dispel the myth. On the other hand, three photographs of soap burials appear on its website. One of them has the caption, “In this grave is buried soap made from pure Jewish fat ... A silent testimony to the Holocaust and the brutality of the Germans.”

Yad Vashem: Pure myth

A Yad Vashem spokesman said the incorrect information on the website was a technical and temporary manner.

“We are trying to refute the soap myth at every opportunity and occasion,” the spokesman said. “We are working on a new version of the picture bank, but regretfully the update that includes a comment alongside the picture concerning the soap myth still does not appear in the Internet version; only at the museum at Yad Vashem. The website will be updated during the summer.”

Meanwhile, Holocaust deniers are taking advantage of the soap myth, using it as straw man to question the Nazis’ destruction of European Jewry in general.

“I am very careful in the movie,” said Balas. “I believe the viewers are intelligent and will understand the complexity of the myth. I think it is worthwhile for people to hear the truth. It may ease the fears of those who believe the story. The Nazis did so many horrible things; there is no need for another one. If Yad Vashem explains how the myth was created, that will damage the claims of Holocaust deniers.”

Said Bauer: “Already at the Nuremburg Trials it was clear that this was not [true]. They saw the laboratory in Danzig was only experimental. The rumor about soap was a psychological plot against the Jews - classic viciousness of the Nazis. [People] ask me endlessly about the matter.”

Bauer argues that the soaps should be removed immediately from all Holocaust memorials. He is eagerly awaiting the release of Balas’ film. Anything that weakens and refutes such myths is good, he says. But he doubts the soap myth will be put to rest so easily.

At the climax of the film, people who have believed for their entire lives that the soaps are made of Jewish fat are confronted with the overwhelming historiographic consensus that they are not. Even when the believers are told that Yad Vashem has declared the soap myth baseless, they stubbornly refuse to change their minds, arguing that the studies which disprove it were paid for by Germans. Israeli poet Yisrael Har, who is interviewed in the film, says the refutations of the soap myth come from Holocaust deniers and Wikipedia.

In one hard-knock British city, a secret Muslim donor helps save a synagogue

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Quand Israël armait la dictature de Videla en Argentine

Videla and the Jews of Argentina: The closing of a painful circle -

Haaretz Daily Newspaper

▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/videla-and-the-jews-of-argentina-the-closing-of-a-painful-circle.premium-1.

“The community’s behavior bordered on apathy. The Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires at the time kept a stance of non-intervention in internal affairs, even though its members demonstrated that they could save some Jewish prisoners from death by sending them to Israel”.

Many sources in Argentina testify that Israel was supplying the regime with arms and other military supplies. I’ve read testimonies in Buenos Aires newspapers, given by retired pilots in the Argentine national airline, regarding flights from Tel Aviv carrying arms to Argentina during the Falklands/Malvinas war. What effect did this have, if any, on the community or on Jewish prisoners?

“Yes, many details have emerged regarding this issue. There was even a book published by the investigative journalist Hernan Dobry, called Operacion Israel I think that it is impossible to assess whether this had any impact on events in Argentina.

Divestment movement gaining ground on California campuses - Jewish World Features - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper
▻http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/divestment-movement-gaining-ground-on-california-campuses.premium-1.510088

“The news was a shock to the Jewish community on campus; no one had expected their ’friends’ to deceive them and keep their plans a secret,” wrote Jacqueline Zelener, a member of the campus group Highlanders for Israel in a letter to the university newspaper for members of Students for Justice in Palestine, the group behind the resolution, which Zelener said had been in dialogue with Jewish groups on campus.

Amal Ali, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Riverside, said keeping the resolution under wraps was the only way to “level the playing field,” noting that similar resolutions on other campuses had been quashed by well-funded major Jewish or pro-Israel organizations.

“We are aware that the Jewish lobby is very powerful and know BDS is something they fight against,” said Ali, the daughter of Palestinian refugees from the West Bank. “We knew national figures would have come in … and that students could be swayed by someone from AIPAC or Congress. We wanted to focus on student impact.”

A growing movement?

A week later and some 100 miles down the California coast, the University of California, San Diego student senate approved a similar, but more conservatively worded resolution. The vote, again advocating the University of California’s divestment from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation, came after 21 hours of debate among student leaders and a very public four-year battle.

On both campuses, students said the resolutions received a boost from allies that included Mexican, black and LGBT student organizations, which see the Palestinian struggle as mirroring the histories of their own communities.

The two resolutions bring to three the number of University of California schools – of which there are ten – that have voted in favor of divestment, a pillar of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement known as BDS. Proponents say the resolutions prove that the divestment campaign is gaining momentum and speaking to a new generation of students who identify with the Palestinian cause and do not want to see their tuition money invested in companies they see as abating the Israeli occupation.

Torah-based help for porn addicts, free and confidential - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper
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Torah-based help for porn addicts, free and confidential
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When E. found religion in his early 20s, he discovered that he was able to break many of the “bad habits” he had acquired while growing up in a secular environment in Boston. Except one.