Dawn Arnall Elected First Chairwoman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center

Businesswoman, Investor, Philanthropist Dawn Arnall Elected First Chairwoman in the 45-year History of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and its Museum of Tolerance. Gordon Diamond and Aaron Marzwell elected to serve as Co-Chairmen of the SWC’s Board of Trustees.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center Board of Trustees has unanimously elected Dawn Arnall as our new Chair of the SWC and its Museum of Tolerance.
“We are thrilled to welcome Dawn as our new Chairwoman. She, along with her late husband, Roland, have been key supporters of the Simon Wiesenthal Center since its inception. She is exactly the right leader at the right time. A proud American, an activist on behalf of social causes, a fierce Zionist and defender of the Jewish people, Dawn is the right choice at the right time.
She assumes this leadership role at a time when the Center is growing in new and dynamic directions,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, Simon Wiesenthal Center Founder and CEO. “Dawn is the perfect choice to shepherd us into a new era."...
Whole text at the SWC site (Feb 10, 2022)

Cooper & Brackman: Bernie Sanders’ criticism of Israel makes him ideal candidate for opponents of Jewish state

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who takes to the debate stage Wednesday night with other Democratic presidential hopefuls, recently said: “I am very proud to be Jewish and look forward to being the first Jewish president.” But many of Sanders’ fellow Jewish Americans don’t look forward to what they see as that frightening possibility.
According to a Morning Consult poll released in May, only 11 percent of Jewish Democrats supported Sanders. One reason for this low level of Jewish support is Sanders’ record of strongly opposing many Israeli actions and polices, along with his threats to reduce vital U.S. aid to Israel.
This is combined with Sanders’ failure to take a strong stand opposing the global rise of anti-Semitism, along with his warm embrace of anti-Semites and forces hostile to Israel here at home...
Whole text at the Fox News site (Nov 20, 2019)

Kirk Douglas Turns 100: A Tribute to the Screen Legend and 6 Essential Movies

Kirk Douglas resembles an Easter Island monolith, only with blue eyes and a cleft chin. His face, disproportionately large, is primeval, while his acting is intense and modern.
While not (yet) as enduring as the South Seas statuary, the prolific actor celebrates his 100th birthday on Dec. 9. He is one of the last great 1950s stars still standing.
Douglas once boasted that he made his career playing sons of bitches. This is not quite accurate. What is true is that he was a star who didn’t much care about cultivating a sympathetic persona. Mostly he played tenacious guys, like the real-life gladiator-hero that led a slave uprising against Rome in Spartacus. Or like Jonathan Shields, the opportunistic producer estranged from friends and lovers in The Bad and the Beautiful. Or Vincent van Gogh, the moody post-Impressionist who pushes away those who care for him in Lust for Life.
The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Douglas was born Issur Danielovitch in 1916 in the upstate New York hamlet of Amsterdam. He was the fourth child - and only boy - of seven siblings...
Whole text at the Yahoo site (Dec 9, 2016)

Amos Oz: Saying Israel should not exist is anti-Semitic

One of Israel's great living writers, Amos Oz, says people who say Israel should not exist are anti-Semitic.
Speaking in an interview with BBC Newsnight, he said strong criticism of Israel is legitimate, but to argue there should be no Israel "that's where anti-Zionism becomes anti-Semitism".
Oz's books have been published in more than 40 languages.
He is regarded as a liberal and is firmly in favour of a two-state solution for Israel.
In recent months, the Labour Party in the UK has been embroiled in a row over anti-Semitism, and whether the party has a problem on the issue.
Oz told Newsnight's Kirsty Wark: "I can tell you exactly where I draw the line. If people call Israel nasty, I to some degree agree. If people call Israel the devil incarnated, I think they are obsessed - they are mad. But this is still legitimate."
Whole text at the BBC site (Sep 14, 2016)

The Tunnels of Gaza’s Next War
By Ruth Margalit

By all accounts, Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, is on a tunnel-building streak. Hamas has boasted of building fifty tunnels since the Israel–Gaza conflict of July, 2014, though Israel insists those numbers are exaggerated. But residents of kibbutzim that border Gaza are increasingly warning of clattering and drilling noises under their homes. “I’ve heard the sound of a hammer and chisel, and my neighbor says she can hear them digging under the cement,” one resident told Reuters. They are worried about a scenario in which Hamas militants emerge outside an Israeli kibbutz or village, and attack.
Two Hamas operatives died from a tunnel collapse earlier this month, according to reports coming out of Gaza. A week earlier, seven Hamas members were killed when another tunnel caved in, apparently because of heavy rains and flooding. “East of Gaza City, heroes are digging through rock and building tunnels, and to the west they are experimenting with rockets every day,” Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader in Gaza, said while attending the funeral of the seven operatives...
Whole text at the New Yorker site (Feb 27, 2016)

Top Ten Worst Anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Incidents 2015

A representative of the growing menace that threatens the Jewish people and democratic values such frightening occurrences.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center document

Kerry's 'one state' comments cause consternation in Israel

JERUSALEM (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has set off a furor in Israel by suggesting that Israel was destroying itself as a Jewish state.
Kerry told a conference on Israeli affairs in Washington on Saturday that through its continued occupation of the West Bank, Israel could make it impossible to partition the land between Jewish and Palestinian states. He said the alternative would have to be a "binational state" in which Jews and Palestinians live together in one state, ending Israel's Jewish majority.
"The one-state solution is no solution at all for a secure, Jewish, democratic Israel living in peace, it is simply not a viable option," Kerry said.
The U.S., along with most of the international community, has long argued that a "two-state solution" — establishing a Palestinian state and ending Israel's control over millions of Palestinians in territories occupied in the 1967 war — is the best way of creating a long-term peace...
Whole text at the Yahoo Newssite (Dec 7, 2015)

Netanyahu’s’ 44-second silence at the U.N. is being mocked with musical interludes

During his speech at the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did something unusual: He stood in complete silence for 44 seconds.
That silence was designed, Netanyahu implied, to show how much of the world had been responded with "utter" and "deafening" silence when while "Iran pledged to murder" Israeli citizens. During those 44 seconds, the Israeli prime minister glared at the audience.
To supporters of Israel and many others, it was a remarkably powerful moment, showing how the world was ignoring the risks posed by a nuclear deal with Iran. To critics of the sometimes divisive Netanyahu, it was laughable...
Whole text at the Washington Post site (Oct 1, 2015)

Israeli officials fail to quell Democratic revolt
By Edward-Isaac Dovere

Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer and Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein rushed to meetings on Capitol Hill on Wednesday trying to calm a furor created by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned speech to Congress next month and quell a Democratic revolt that has dozens threatening a boycott.
It didn’t work.
If anything, Democrats finished the day more frustrated. According to a source in the room, one Jewish Democratic member of Congress even accused Dermer of being insincere when he claimed not to have anticipated the partisan uproar he’d ignite when he skirted protocol and went around the White House and scheduled the speech only with House Speaker John Boehner.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest, meanwhile, dangled the possibility that the White House would have Vice President Joe Biden skip the speech in what the West Wing acknowledges would be a serious snub...
Whole text at the Politico site (Apr 4, 2015)

This Year’s Tally: 21 U.N. Resolutions on Israel, 4 on Rest of World Combined

GENEVA, Nov. 29 – According to a comprehensive UN Watch study of all U.N. General Assembly draft resolutions of its current 67th session, counting the one just approved today, the world body plans to adopt a total of 21 resolutions singling out Israel for criticism in one form or another (see draft texts below) — and 4 resolutions for the rest of the world combined.
The four are: one on Syria, a regime that has murdered 40,000 of its own people, and one each on Iran, North Korea and Burma, whose government was largely praised in the U.N. text.
There will be no UNGA resolutions at all on China, Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela, Pakistan — and all the rest...
Whole text at UN Watch site

IN MEMORIAM

Danilo Fogel (1923-2012.)

The eldest member of the Jewish Community in Zemun, Danilo Fogel died on August 13th 2012, at the age of 89. He was buried on August 17th in the Jewish Cemetery in Zemun.

On behalf of the gathered mourners, the honorary President of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Serbia, Mr. Aleksandar Nećak paid his last respects to Danilo. In his tribute he said:

“Today we take leave of Danilo Fogel, a worthy and venerated member of the Jewish community, a devoted and goodhearted parent, a committed member of the community in which we live and for the good of which he actively fought from his early years of life. His long professional life, as well as the years of his retirement was pledged to an unyielding preservation of veracity, of attained social values, as well as to endeavors to point this world, within the bounds of his capabilities, toward ethical perfection.
This said, it becomes understandable that Danilo Fogel nurtured deep within him all the genuine values of Judaism and that in context with the times, and social and political circumstances he applied and unobtrusively weaved such values into his everyday life.
A Jew by birth, he attended the Jewish primary school in Zemun and became a member of the Hashomer Hacair, the organization whose goal was to physically and psychologically prepare Jewish youths for life in the Palestine in order to restart life in the homeland and build a socialist society…
Like most Jews survivors from these parts of the world he lost his dearest, father, mother and two brothers inside the death camp of Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška. He joined the Partisan movement and was the bearer of the 1941 Spomenica award, a recognition which has sadly today become obsolete.
Among other, the Jewish Community is indebted to Danilo Fogel for his serious research work in compiling a large number of documents and photographs relevant to and depicting the life of the Jewish Community in Zemun from its beginnings up to contemporary times. His contributions are present in nearly all of the twenty editions published by the Jewish Community in Zemun.
He was awarded II parity award, in the 45th award wining contest of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia in 2001 (the first award not being decided), for his work “The Jewish Community in Zemun”. This publication is a chronicle of the life of the Jewish Community in Zemun from the time of initial Jewish settlement in 1739 up to 1954. It must be noted that in this literary award contest, one of the oldest in our country, participants and awardees were also Danilo Kiš, David Albahari and other renowned authors.
Today our friend, our dear and honored Danilo Fogel enfolds his long, prosperous and useful life together with his Jewish cycle, in accord with our tradition and takes leave of us as the MASTER OF RETURN as contained in the wording of our old books BAAL TESHUVA. Zihrono livraha!     
Zemun, this day of August 17th 2012/29 av.5772.

Aleksandar Nećak
Honoray President of The Federation of Jewish Communities in Serbia

IOC President with “Palestinian” flag

The World Olympic Committee head vigorously opposed to a minute of silence during the opening games in London Olympic Games in memory of the late 11 Israeli athletes murdered at the Munich Olympics in Germany in 1972.

Note the scarf he's carrying around his neck, the PLO flag.

(August 2, 2012)

On the margins of the Limmud Keshet Conference – The Return of the Pink Panther

With due recognition for the mere idea of organizing Limmud Keshet Ex Yu Conference meetings, the above stated meeting was nevertheless marked by an apparent  antagonism among certain Communities from Croatia. The fierce dispute concerning the attendance/exception of lecturer Ivo Goldstein from Bet Israel Community ended in the cancellation of meeting attendance of two major Croatian Communities, that of Zagreb and Osijek. That we too, are not immune to poor inter-relations was reflected in the atmosphere of apparent offensiveness between members of various communities from Serbia. While some conspicuously hugged and kissed, others were at times stared at up to the point of unveiled hatred. In this “poisonous” atmosphere the president of JC Pančevo, David Montias made an attempt to organize a meeting of Serbian JC presidents. The intention to overcome disputes and dissent failed to receive the approbation of the newly appointed Federation Deputy, Ruben Dajč. Primarily conceived as an official meeting, in the end, at the insistence of the Deputy, it landed an “off the record” classification tag. In the thus acquired unofficial atmosphere, a number of different versions of the recent tempestuous events that took place in JC Beograd, the Federation and of our relations with JDC and its director for Serbia, Mr. Robert Đerasi were voiced. Ruben Dajč’s overwhelming desire to hold the floor resulted in the, “off the record”, walking out from the meeting of myself and JC Subotica president, Tomika Halbrorh. The envisaged official meeting with the entire Federation Executive Board announced by Mr. Robert Đerasi will provide the writer of this text the opportunity to air his views.
Finally, appreciating the fact that no gathering had ever taken place to the content and expectations of all concerned, I nevertheless suggest that the organization of the next meeting should be entrusted to Ruben Dajč. Who knows, maybe his acquired expertise and competence will see us enjoying our next Limmud Keshet Ex Yu on the sandy beaches of the Marshall or Cayman islands! If so, I cooperatively apply to volunteer, and instead of organizing outings like that to the Orlovača cave, shall foresee visits to local banks, placing emphasis on associated research work!