‘No more silence; no more compromise, no more acquiescence; no more vacillation, no more appeasement’. So spoke a young deputy at a Board of Deputies meeting in September 1982, defiantly challenging its leadership. It was directed at the Board’s Israel policy in the aftermath of the massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists in the Lebanese … Read more
The remarks of Sergei Lavrov to Italian television last Sunday that Hitler was of ‘Jewish blood’ and that ‘the most ardent antisemites were Jews’ shocked Jews around the world. Deliberate or not, they caused a rupture between Moscow and Jerusalem. Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid reacted personally — as Jews. The late father of the … Read more
LONDON THEATRE-GOERS have been flocking to see the revival of Cabaret and marvelled at the decadence and hedonism of the famed Kit Kat Klub in Weimar Germany. The production was, of course, characterised by the rise of Nazism and dark visions of an impending doom. Yet in the minds of many a mesmerised audience during recent weeks, … Read more
On the day of the German capitulation (in 1945), the entire youth of Bethlehem (in Galilee) marched through the colony, singing Nazi songs while the memorial service for Hitler, held in that colony on VE Day was essentially a rededication by the locals for the lost Führer. So wrote the enraged author of a Jewish … Read more
“PUTIN IS ABSOLUTELY insane! He is the super villain of today!” So spoke Volodomyr Vysotski of the Jewish Social Initiative in the Ukraine in a recent interview with the BBC. This is a blunt assessment with which the vast majority of Jews will agree. The threat to use tactical nuclear weapons and the presence of … Read more
THE RECENT VISIT of Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the “Religious Zionism” party in Israel, to Britain, provoked an unprecedented strong response from leading Jewish organisations and an embarrassed silence from many orthodox rabbis. Smotrich met quietly with representatives of Bnei Akiva and Mizrahi, the Religious Zionists’ movement and the chief executive of Chabad in … Read more
Seventy years ago this week, Mordechai Oren, an Israeli emissary of the left wing Zionist party, Mapam, mysteriously disappeared in Prague. He was due to go by train to Vienna and then take the next El Al flight to Israel. As the days went by, his friends and family became increasingly worried at the sound … Read more
New Year, 1953. British Jews looked forward to a year far better than the one that had just passed. In the summer of 1952, they had watched in horror the trial in Moscow, and subsequent execution, of Jewish writers and poets. This was followed by the false conviction and killing of Jewish communists in Prague … Read more
LAST WEEK, THE killer of 85-year-old Mireille Knoll was sentenced by a French court to 22 years without parole. The courtroom was told that the assault in March 2018 on this aged Jewish woman started out as a petty robbery but was transformed into a frenzied attack — and that this was fuelled by “a … Read more
THIRTY YEARS AGO, the Soviet Union passed into history. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned, a new Russia was born and a plethora of new republics came into existence. The abrupt end of 74 years of Lenin’s experiment gave birth to chaos and collapse. Oligarchs emerged from the subterranean depths. Diehard commissars became diehard capitalists overnight. While many … Read more