Thirty years ago, on 5 November 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defence League (JDL) in the US and the Kach party in Israel, was gunned down by an Egyptian Islamist, El Sayyed Nosair, at the Marriot Hotel in Manhattan. He was 58 and a father of four. Kahane had repeatedly proclaimed his … Read more
IN MARCH 2019, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, told the Christian Broadcasting Network he believed that God was acting through President Trump to protect the Jews of Israel. While Queen Esther had saved the Jewish people from certain Persian annihilation during Purim, today, Pompeo argued, President Trump was saving the Jews from the wrath of … Read more
There have been many explanations for the rapid spread of antisemitic utterances within the British left. For some, the explanation is that it is ideologically ingrained since the birth of socialism; for others, sheer ignorance about Jewish history exacerbated by social media; for still others, an indifference to the Jews per se, that Jews are … Read more
Sylvia Becker née Rosenhead Born 26 April 1925 Died 13 February 2019 Sylvia Becker was one of ‘those wonderful women in black’ – the 35s Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry – who quietly changed the course of Jewish history. Never one to push herself to the front, she spent the 1970s committed to this cause before … Read more
One of the celebrated Women in Black, the 35s Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry, Sylvia Becker, who has died aged 93, spent the 1970s committed to the cause before moving to Israel in 1980 and fading back into family life. Leeds-born Sylvia Rosenhead studied dispensing at Leeds University and was evacuated to Stoke Poges and … Read more
The fact that no state in western Europe could ensure the elementary rights of the Jewish people or defend them from the violence of the Fascist executioners, explains the aspiration of the Jews to set up a state of their own. It would be unjust if we were to reject the right of the Jewish … Read more
The nerve agent attack in Salisbury — synthesised at the Skhikany Institute in the city of Volsk, by the river Volga, in 1973 — continues a century long tradition. Last June, Vladimir Putin gave an address to mark the founding of the illegal intelligence service in 1922. He read out a roll-call of legendary Soviet … Read more
Last Sunday Masha Slepak was buried in Jerusalem’s Har HaMenuchot cemetery alongside her husband, Vladimir. For virtually the entire duration of the Soviet Jewry campaign in the UK, they were the central figures among the Moscow refuseniks. For Jewish “tourists” to the USSR, their apartment on Moscow’s Gorky Street was a fixed destination. Masha’s name … Read more
EIGHTY YEARS ago this month, Boris Ginsburg was arrested while walking along a street in Proskurov, a city in western Ukraine.Mr Ginsburg was one of the last leaders of the underground Zionist movement in the USSR. It is believed that he died under interrogation by the GPU, the forerunner of the KGB, in Kaminets-Podolsk. He … Read more
ON CHRISTMAS Day 1970, a few Jewish students and some British members of Menachem Begin’s Herut party, stood shivering in the snow outside the Soviet Embassy in London’s Bayswater Road. We had gathered at short notice to protest against death sentences meted out in Leningrad to two Soviet Jews, Mark Dymshits and Edward Kuznetsov, the … Read more