Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on April 20, 2024

Taipei, April 17 (CNA) Israel and Germany's top representatives to Taiwan on Wednesday warned of rising antisemitism around the globe as both countries remembered victims and survivors of the Holocaust during an annual memorial event in Taipei attended by President Tsai Ing-wen ().

Speaking during her address at the event held at the Taipei Guest House, Israel's representative to Taiwan Maya Yaron said the memorial was held at "a time of great sorrow and tension, when antisemitism and violence are evident in so many places in our world."

According to Yaron, 2023 marked the year with the highest number of antisemitic incidents around the world for many years, not only on social media platforms but also in terms of direct physical assaults.

She mentioned the terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed more than 1,200 Israelis, with 139 still held as hostages as of Wednesday.

"The atrocities of Oct. 7 brought back the darkest memories that my own grandparents -- similar to all of Israel's grandparents -- experienced during the Holocaust," she said at the 2024 International Holocaust Remembrance Day event.

According to the envoy, International Holocaust Remembrance Day reminds people of commitment to promote respect, understanding, tolerance and knowledge.

"It is in our hands to build bridges and not deepen divisions," she added.

German representative to Taiwan Jrg Polster said the Holocaust is a "horror without comparison in its atrocity and brutality."

"On the basis of a racist and antisemitic ideology, 6 million Jewish people perished by the hands of Nazi Germany."

It is important that mankind always honor the victims and to make sure nobody forgets what happened back then, he said.

"We have to keep the memory alive to what happened then in order to make sure that we make the right choice today and in future."

Polster also warned that Germany has witnessed "polarization leading to especially accentuated if not extreme opinions" over the past years.

"As one of the consequences, almost 80 years after the end of World War II, antisemitism is on the rise again," he said.

Despite the alarming development, the envoy said there is still hope as governments and civil society have jointly demonstrated that they are against extremism.

"The message, loud and clear, is 'never again.' And nobody in his right mind could possibly think otherwise," he said.

Attending the annual event for the last time in her capacity as president, outgoing President Tsai said each year people come together for the memorial event "to remember those who perished in the Holocaust, as well as those who endured unimaginable suffering because of this tragedy."

"We must pledge to never forget the spirit and history while human dignity is cast aside for political ideology," Tsai said.

The president added that the fight against "discrimination and bigotry" needs to continue.

"We must also be reminded that there are still countless people who continue to suffer authoritarianism and dictatorship just because they are of different ethnic origin, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or political ideology," she added.

Tsai also said her administration over the past eight years has made an effort to promote transitional justice with the examples of Israel and Germany in mind.

Wednesday's International Holocaust Remembrance Day event was co-hosted by the Israel Economic and Cultural Office in Taipei and the German Institute of Taipei together with the government-funded Taiwan Foundation for Democracy to raise public awareness of the Holocaust.

Taiwan has since 2016 observed International Holocaust Remembrance Day, designated by the United Nations in 2005, to remember the victims of the genocide committed by Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945.

The U.N. chose Jan. 27 as the remembrance date, as that was when the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland was liberated by the Russian army in 1945.

(By Joseph Yeh)

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Envoys warn of rising antisemitism at Taipei Holocaust Remembrance event - Focus Taiwan

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Posted By admin on April 20, 2024

By Robert Zaller

The island of Zakynthos, the next to southernmost of the Seven Islands archipelago in the Ionian Sea, is among the most beautiful and cultured in all of Greece. Its great national poets, Dionysios Solomos, Ugo Foscolo, and Andreas Kalvos, celebrated the coming of Greek independence. Their tradition continued into ours with the twentieth-century author, Grigorios Xenopoulos, and into this century with the poet and playwright he mentored, the Hellenic News own Lili Bita, and my beloved late wife. Lili had many stories of Zakynthos to tell me, many of them in the wonderful memoir she wrote, Sister of Darkness. One of those stories she lived through herself as a child, and thought it would particularly interest me. It is now a rather famous one, the subject of books and films. And there is no better time for me to tell it than now, on Greek Easter, when Christianity celebrates the hope of humanity and what salvation can mean here on Earth.

Jewish populations were distributed widely throughout the Roman Empire after the expulsion from their historic homeland. They remained so during the Byzantine period, and with the Ottomans particularly encouraging their settlement in Saloniki, they were instrumental in developing the commercial, financial, and industrial preeminence of the city. This made the Jewish community particularly vulnerable to the Nazis after their conquest of Greece. One of its few survivors was the famed stage director Karolos Koun, with whom Lili would study drama after the war. For at least a time, however, the Jews of the Seven Islands had a degree of protection, as Fascist Italy was assigned their occupation and Mussolini offered at least passive resistance to the Holocaust. With his fall in 1943, however, Germany replaced the Italians, and immediately demanded a census of the Jewish population, for ultimate deportation to Auschwitz.

As elsewhere, the Germans operated in Zakynthos through local community leaders, the islands bishop, Dimitrios Chrysostomos, and the mayor of its capital, Loukas Carrer. Chrysostomos had had a controversial career. As a student of theology in Munich, he had met the young Adolf Hitler, with whom he exchanged political views. Named Secretary of the Holy Synod of the Greek Church, he was temporarily suspended for heterodoxy. In the mid-1930s, he joined the Old Calendarists, a sect that insists on the traditional Julian calendar of Church observances to the present day. This, too, put him in trouble, and he was once again suspended from his Metropolitan functions in 1942-43 and sent to Athens. He had only recently returned to Zakynthos when the Germans arrived.

The purpose of the census demanded of Chyrsostomos and Carrer was clear. Some 50,000 Jews had already been sent to Auschwitz from Saloniki; the fate of those of Zakynthos would not long differ. Chrysostomos tried to defer the census, and was reported to have written directly to Hitler, asserting that he had been given full authority over the Jews of Zakynthos, that they were well-regarded by the general population, and that any attempt to alter their status would provoke civil unrest. This letter has not survived, although there is testimony that it was indeed written. It was, obviously, an act of extraordinary defiance if sent, but Chrysostomos was known among his colleagues as long supportive of the Jews, and his superior, Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens, made a powerful declaration of his own: I have taken up my cross, I spoke to the Lord, and made up my mind to save as many Jews as possible.

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These pronouncements were epochal as statements of moral sentiment, but they could have little practical effect in themselves: the Holocaust would be especially severe in Greece, killing more Jews than almost anywhere else in Nazi-occupied Europe. Chrysostomos, who spoke German well and had impressed the military commandant of Zakynthos as a man with authority over his flock, was not a man to be lightly brushed aside, but it seemed he could do little to divert the Final Solution on a single island. With Carrer, however, he did.

While delaying the census as best he could, Chrysostomos alerted the Jewish community to it, urging them to flee the ghetto in Zakynthos town where they lived and ordering his own faithful to shelter them or assist their escape to remoter parts of the island. When the census was finally demanded, he presented the commandant with a sheet of paper containing two names: his own, and Loukas Carrers.

For such insubordination, both men could easily have been shot. Its not clear why they werent. Perhaps the commandant realized that, with the Jews already in hiding, searching them out would be no easy task for a limited garrison with no reinforcements likely. Perhaps the possibility that Chrysostomos might write personally to Hitler gave him pause too. In any case, making a martyr of the bishop would not have made German governance easier. There was more than one example of accommodation between occupiers and occupied on the Greek islands. On Psara, the site of a famous massacre in the Greek War of Independence, Lili and I heard stories of how islanders had provided intelligence to the British navy while the Germans looked the other way. The resistance of Crete was famous. Still, the deportation order hung over the island, including the stipulation that anyone caught sheltering a Jew would be executed. That the Jews remained safe in hiding for nearly a year was a tribute to the humanity and courage of their fellow islanders, and to the diplomacy, resourcefulness, and immense moral authority of Chrysosthomos himself. A last attempt to enforce the order was made in the late summer of 1944, but with little result. A month later, the Nazis evacuated Greece as Russian and Allied armies advanced. Virtually all of the 275 Jews of Zakynthos had survived.

After the war, the Jewish community endowed a stained-glass window in the islands Church of St. Dionysius in gratitude to Chrysosthomos, still its bishop. But many of its members migrated, some to Athens and some of the new state of Israel. When the great earthquake of 1953 struck, Zakynthos town was almost wholly destroyed, including its Jewish Quarter, where a synagogue had stood since 1489. But Israel did not forget Chrysosthomos and Carrer, and in 1978 a plaque was installed in their honor in Yad Vashem, where Israel honors the Righteous Among the Nations, the gentiles who saved Jews during the Holocaust. A monument to Chrysosthomos and Carrer also stands in the rebuilt Zakynthos town of today. It honors by implication all Zakynthians too, as it should.

Id add a postscript to the story. In 2009, Leora Goldberg, a Jewish visitor to Zakynthos who previously knew nothing of its history, mistakenly received $10,000 in euros from a bank teller when cashing a $1000 travelers check. When she discovered the mistake and came back to return the excess, the bank manager offered her a dinner in reward for her honesty. Goldberg declined, saying shed learned of a debt to the island she could never repay. Another bank official came up to her at that, and introduced himself with tears in his eyes. I, he said, am the grandson of Loukas Carrer. Memory lives.

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How Zakynthos Saved Its Jews from the Holocaust - Greek Portal - Hellenic News of America

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Posted By admin on April 20, 2024

The main action in Irenas Vow is triggered by a chilling scene in a Polish street where a Nazi officer murders a baby in front of its mother. Chilling but predictable: This new Holocaust drama about a Polish nurse who successfully hid a dozen Jews in the home of a Nazi commander treads familiar ground.

A co-production between Poland and Canada, lead by Quebec director Louise Archambault and written by Canadian Dan Gordon based on his own play, it includes many scenes where the tension feels rote. The soldiers sweep into a Polish town; the hidden cower in a basement; the car with Jews in the back covered only by a tarp approaches a checkpoint. Like many a Hollywood Holocaust movie of the type that unfolds in English spoken with a European accent, the films undifferentiated suspense is built entirely around the risk of discovery until a third act twist finally complicates the plot.

Irenas Vow, also a 2009 Broadway play, is based on the true story of Irene Gut Opdyke, who was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations in 1982 for her role helping Jews from the ghetto in Tarnopol, then part of Poland, now Ternopil in Ukraine.

In the film version, Irena (Quebec actress Sophie Nlisse) is trained as a nurse but forced to work in a munitions factory by the Nazi occupiers until the local commander, Major Rugmer (Scottish actor Dougray Scott), discovers her apparent diligence. He moves her into the kitchen of the officers club and also puts her in charge of a group of Jews working in the laundry before promoting her to the comfortable role of housekeeper in a gracious villa he has commandeered for himself.

A still from the film Irena's Vow. The movie, which opens Friday, tells the true story of a nurse who risked her life to rescue a dozen Jewish people during the Second World War.HO/The Canadian Press

However, a traumatized Irena has witnessed the babys slaughter and vowed she will save any life she can: When she and the laundry workers recognize the ghetto is about to be cleared, she comes up with a daring scheme to move them into the villas cellars.

The rest of the film revolves around the villa. In a ghastly version of Upstairs Downstairs, the action alternates between those hiding in the basement and the majors pleasant existence in spacious living quarters overseen single-handedly by his remarkably capable housekeeper. (When the commander is away, the houses secret inhabitants help cook and clean.)

Of course, discovery is inevitable, but what rescues the film is the complex figure of Major Rugmer, his ambivalence toward Nazism tempered by his wartime pragmatism. Scott does excellent work portraying this compromised but not unsympathetic character, placed in sharp contrast to Maciej Nawrockis classic Nazi, devoid of any natural human feeling as he murders his way through the town. This officer coolly announces he must have the zone Jew-free by July 22; Rugmer, who is charged with meeting industrial quotas, complains that the roundups will deprive him of workers.

Interestingly, this character may be fictitiously flawed: The real Eduard Ruegemer wasnt recognized as Righteous Among Nations until 2012, long after his death, but Yad Vashems account of his activities suggest that he and Irena were co-conspirators and that he was aware of the people in his basement because he hid them there, as well as aiding many others in the plant he oversaw. However, other accounts stick closer to the films ambiguous figure, suggesting he was not initially involved in the scheme.

The avuncular Andrzej Seweryn plays an older Polish worker who represents the bystander philosophy: He is willing to overlook disappearing food but tells his young colleague to look out for herself.

Irena Gut, as she was known until her postwar marriage to an American UN worker named William Opdyke, is sometimes described as humorous or witty but that is not how Nlisse plays her in a solid performance that anchors the film. She makes Irena earnest, as the righteous often are, and so certain of her moral core that she never hesitates when the situation demands she take larger and larger risks.

Nlisse treads an interesting line between observing the social compliance that keeps Irena safe under Nazi occupation, and the secret determination to do the right thing. As master and servant, she and Scott dance an intriguing waltz that leaves the viewer to wonder who is leading whom.

If moments in Irenas Vow rise above the self-congratulatory empathy and predictable plots of the standard Holocaust drama, it is thanks largely to these two performances portraying complex human reactions in the face of evil.

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Posted By admin on April 20, 2024

Dozens of FBI agents in L.A. learned what happens when anti-Semitism gets out of control as 101-year-old Holocaust survivor Joe Alexander told them his story Wednesday.

KNX News' Emily Valdez reports - Alexander was 16 years old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1938. His family was forced to live in the Warsaw Ghetto, and he was sent to work camps and death camps.

During the Holocaust, Alexander spent six years across 12 concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and during that time, he saw unthinkable things.

"I saw people running to the electric fence to get electrocuted. I saw people being beaten to death because they gave up," Alexander recalled.

But he said the camps were only part of the story, pointing out that 30-40% of people wouldn't survive the long, cramped, foodless, waterless train rides.

So, how did Alexander manage to make it? "I lost my family. I lost five siblings, my parents, hundreds of cousins, and aunts and uncles. So I said I have to survive," he said.

Alexander recounted one instance that required him to make a split-second life-or-death decision when he and other Auschwitz captives were being sorted in two lines - one for work detail, the other destined for the gas chambers.

Alexander was marching toward certain death, but when the infamous Nazi Josef Mengele turned his back, Alexander snuck into the line for people being sent to work.

According to Alexander, the one factor that truly allowed him to survive was help from others. "The only way I survived was with the help of other people," he said. "In all the jobs you did, you worked with civilians, and you can manage to survive if you manage to get a little extra food; that's the only way you could survive."

Alexander said, "I have to talk for 6 million who can't talk," so he spends his time giving talks, primarily to children in schools, 70% of whom he says have never even heard of the Holocaust.

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101-year-old Holocaust survivor is speaking for the 6 million who no longer can - Audacy

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Posted By admin on April 20, 2024

The new film Irenas Vow tells the amazing true story of Irena Gut Opdyke (Sophie Nlisse), a Polish Catholic nurse who risked her own life to hide Jews being persecuted by the Nazis during World War II.

Irena was 17 years old and a nursing student living away from home when the Russians and Germans invaded Poland in 1939. She joined a band of Polish resistance fighters, but one day she was seen by Nazi soldiers who chased her, gang-raped her, and beat her unconscious. She recovered and moved back to her family. But two years later, at 19 years old, she was forced to work hard labor at a factory.

When she fainted one day, she gained the compassion of German army Major Eduard Rugemter. Over time, he told her he was moving to a villa outside of town and wanted her to be his housekeeper, where she worked against her will. She had learned Jewish families were about to be forced out of the Jewish ghetto and knew how being at the villa could allow her to help. She sheltered Jewish friends and colleagues in the basement of the majors house for two years until she was able to help them escape.

ME.Opdyke.hands.D.121198.KRHIrene Gut Opdyke of Yorba Linda has filed a lawsuit against her manager over her life story rights. As a teenage Polish Catholic teenager, she saved the lives of twelve Jewish people she saved by hiding them in the cellar of a German majors house where she worked as a housekeeper during WWII. Opdyke was hoping to have her story told in a movie. (Photo by Kari Rene Hall/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Despite one mans asthma nearly exposing them all and marking them for certain death, all was well for a while, and no one discovered the group. However, one of the young women then announced she was pregnant.

Because of the risks that would come with keeping a baby in hiding, the other members of the group convinced the young woman to seek out an abortion for the sake of everyones safety.

Irena stood up to all of them, telling them she would not allow the abortion to be carried out. They wanted Irena to gather the supplies that would be needed to commit the abortion, telling her that they couldnt bring a baby into this. It would be endangering all of our lives. Yours too.

They knew that the babys cry would certainly give them away. They believed killing that child before birth was the only option.

Irena tells them, I cant. I cant do this. You dont have to do this. She asked the pregnant woman, Ida, everyones talking but you. Everyone seems to have an opinion. What about you? Do you want to have this baby?

Ida said, Yes, of course. But not now. Not under these conditions. It will be too dangerous for all of us.

Irena shared with the group that she had once seen a baby ripped out of its mothers arms by a soldier, tossed into the air, and shot out of the air. There was nothing she could do to stop it.

I made a vow then that if I ever could save a life, I would, she said.

The baby, instead of being aborted, was born safely. However, the group was eventually discovered. Irena again stepped in to save them, despite any suffering that it would cause her. She agreed to be the majors mistress in return for his silence. She would later call that time in her life worse than rape.

According to the National Catholic Register (NCR), Irena received several recognitions for her efforts to protect Jewish persons during the Holocaust. Irenas daughter, Jeannie Smith, told NCR, [God] would open a path and she would walk in it and then it was up to him to take care of her, and her job was just to do what she was supposed to do to follow. She kept that her whole life. It just was part of her. It wasnt even something she had to think about.

Roman Haller is the baby that Irena saved. Now in his late 70s, he once said, Irena Gut is like a second mother to me. Without her, I wouldnt be alive.

Lila Rose, founder and president of Live Action, reacted to the film, saying, Its incredible what one person can do if they are willing to stand up for life, especially when it may be painfully difficult and unpopular. I did not expect the ending of this clip and it makes me marvel at how fragile life and death decisions can be needing that one person to stand in the gap.

The DOJ put a pro-life grandmother in jail for protesting the killing of preborn children. Please take 30-seconds to TELL CONGRESS: STOP THE DOJ FROM TARGETING PRO-LIFE AMERICANS.

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'Irena's Vow' includes true story of baby saved from abortion during Holocaust - Live Action

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Posted By admin on April 20, 2024

Earlier this year, the LGBT news outlet Pink News published an article in which it claimed the persecution of trans people by the Nazis was devastating and that it still echoes down the ages.

However, the article named just five alleged transgender victims of the Holocaust, only one of whom, who was also persecuted for homosexuality, died in a concentration camp.

Two others survived the war, one committed suicide and the fate of the fifth is unknown.

Rowling had last month questioned a claim made by one social media user who said: The Nazis burnt books on trans healthcare and research, why are you so desperate to uphold their ideology around gender?

She replied: I just how. How did you type this out and press send without thinking I should maybe check my source for this, because it mightve just been a fever dream.

Trans activists often accuse gender-critical women of being influenced by far-Right ideology or of having links to neo-Nazis.

Police Scotland has faced criticism for inventing a fictional scenario for a hate crime event in which a gender-critical campaigner called Jo, whom it was claimed was a thinly veiled parody of Rowling, called for trans people to be sent to gas chambers.

The national force has not denied that the character, who was described as having a large social media following, was modelled on the writer, who is called Jo by her friends.

Womens groups accused Police Scotland of reinforcing false tropes that gender-critical people wish to kill trans people and backing bizarre claims that trans people are victims of a modern-day genocide.

Previously, Rowling had raised the prospect of taking legal action against Brown, telling her she would be delighted to meet you in court, Rivkah, to discuss Holocaust denial.

The author has called for those claiming the Nazis specifically targeted trans people, as distinct from gay people, to supply evidence to back up their claims.

Brown, who is a commissioning editor and reporter, said: On 13 March I tweeted that JK Rowling is a Holocaust denier.

That allegation was false and offensive. I have deleted it and apologise to JK Rowling.

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JK Rowling: It is baseless and disgusting to claim I am a Holocaust denier - The Telegraph

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Posted By admin on April 20, 2024

J.K. Rowlings denial of the Holocausts impact on trans people has taken another turn (or two): the author has successfully threatened a journalist into retracting a tweet in which she called Rowling a Holocaust denier.

Just when you think J.K. Rowling couldnt possibly sink any lower, she proves us wrong by pulling another heinous take out of the trash receptacle where her brain should be. This time, theres an unsurprising twist to her transphobic rhetoric: Holocaust denial. After she referred to the Nazis regimes burning of books on trans healthcare and research as a fever dream, several social media users, including UK journalist Rivkah Brown, called Rowling out for denying a documented event from the Holocaustor, to put it in simple terms, for engaging in Holocaust denial. Rowling responded by threatening to sue Brown for libel. Brown has now deleted the original post and issued the following statement:

UK laws make it easier for people (with money) to sue over libel and defamation, thus making it easier for certain public figures to effectively silence their critics.

Of course, Rowlings legal threats have only brought more attention to the issue, particularly on social media sites like X, where JK Rowling is a Holocaust is trending.

The whole thing startedwhere else?on X, where Joanne Rowling referred to the Nazis burning of books containing trans healthcare and research as a fever dream. Rowling re-posted a comment that reads, The Nazis burnt books on trans healthcare and research, why are you so desperate to uphold their ideology around gender? Its a reasonable question, Joanne!

I just how? writes Rowling, a professional author. How did you type this out and press send without thinking I should maybe check my source for this, because it mightve been a fever dream?

The commenter is referring to a well-documented incident: In 1933, just months after the Nazi government of Germany opened its first concentration camps, the Nazis organized book burnings. A group of students participating in the Nazi government censorship program attacked the Institut fr Sexualwissenschaft, or the Institute for Sexual Science. Located in Berlin, the ISS was the first of its kind in the world, a research center dedicated to sexology, or the study of human sexuality. Headed by Magnus Hirschfeld, the ISS conducted groundbreaking research and developed treatments for issues affecting gay, transgender, and intersex people, among others.

The institute had been open for well over a decade when the Nazis destroyed it and burned its archives, which contained books pertaining to sexuality and research materialsincluding, notably, materials related to trans healthcare. As the only facility of its kind, you can probably understand why the destruction of the ISS archives was so devastating; its impossible to know how different things might be for the trans community had these documentsand their implications for trans healthcaresurvived.

Six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. An estimated 10-15,000 gay men were sent to concentration camps, where the majority of them died. Due to the Nazis recordkeeping its impossible to know exactly how many queer peopleincluding trans men and womenwere killed during the Holocaust. Based on court documentation and research, we know that some trans women were persecuted based on the Nazi governments criminalization of homosexuality.

According to Joanne Rowling, the Nazis didnt burn the ISS archives, nor did they specifically target trans people. She even re-posted a thread filled with blatant misinformation about Hirschfeld (to call its contents offensive would be an understatement), much of which is often parroted by conservatives in their attacks on trans rights.

For a professional author and someone who generally appears to be literate, Rowling is very bad at reading comprehension. It is well known that, in addition to Jews, the Nazi regime targeted Roma, disabled people, and gay and queer people. (I learned this in grade school. In Texas.) To suggest that Nazis did not burn books and research materials related to trans (and queer) healthcare is to engage in Holocaust denial. And Id be surprised, except that Rowling is a proud transphobe, an ideology shared by neo-Nazis, so it was only a matter of time before she stopped living around the corner from Nazis and started sharing an address with them.

And it probably goes without saying, but it is wild to see a woman who wrote a whole series of childrens books about the dangers of fascist regimes subscribe to Nazi ideology and casually engage in Holocaust denial.

This article has been updated.

(featured image: Stuart C. Wilson, Getty Images)

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J.K. Rowling's Legal Threat to Journalists for Calling Out Holocaust Denial Backfires - The Mary Sue

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Posted By admin on April 20, 2024

Karma can be many things, depending on who you ask: a chameleon (according to Boy George,) a cat purring on your lap because it loves you (Taylor Swift) your checks bout to bounce (Ice Spice, per the remix) or simply, a b*tch (JoJo Siwa.) But one thing is certain about Karma: it has a tendency to come back around. Which is why Im personally howling at this latest JK Rowling development.

Not long ago on Twitter, JK Rowling dug herself so deep into an anti-trans hole that she came out the other side claiming that queer and trans folks were not targeted by the Nazis. Now anyone with a remedial knowledge of Kristallnacht and other book burnings will tell you that yes, queer, disabled, trans, and nonbinary lives were threatened and eventually taken alongside the many Jewish lives that were claimed during Hitlers reign. But Rowling doesnt want to hear it.

In fact, after queer and trans folks in the UK started to speak up about her Holocaust denial, Rowling threatened to sue for libel, which only exacerbated the problem.

After British journalist Rivkah Brown posted a formal apology, Twitter fought back with the truth.

Plus, if its libel to say that Rowling denies part of the history of the Holocaust, why are right-wing Holocaust deniers suddenly obsessed with her?

Its hard to deny the truth when it shows itself!

We have the receipts, and were not afraid to use them.

And get this, kids: its not the only time Rowling has plead the fifth when it comes to basic WWII knowledge:

The moral of the story is: dont mess around with trans Twitter. And maybe crack a single history book while youre at it!

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Holocaust deniers are now claiming JK Rowling as one of their own - INTO

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Posted By admin on April 20, 2024

(April 19, 2024 / JNS)

U.S. President Joe Biden recognized Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, on Thursday and declared Friday Education and Sharing Day, USA.

Schneerson was born 122 years ago on April 18. The 30th anniversary of his death is June 12.

We honor the Rebbes birthday every year, but we know this year is different. Violence and cruelty have reminded us that hate never goes awayit only hides, the president stated. Silence is complicity, and America will not be silent. As Americans, we reject terrorism and will keep working unequivocally to combat antisemitism at every turn.

The Rebbe knew that education is fundamental to cultivating understanding and acceptance. It opens us up to one another, and it builds not just knowledge but character, as well as an awareness of something bigger than ourselves, Biden said.

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Posted By admin on April 20, 2024

Fred Neulander, the former senior rabbi of a Cherry Hill synagogue who promised to pay $30,000 for two hitmen to kill his wife so he could pursue an affair with a local radio personality, has died.

Neulander was found nonresponsive by correctional police officers Wednesday in an infirmary unit where hed been housed in New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, according to a statement released Friday afternoon by the New Jersey Department of Corrections.

Staff immediately administered CPR and applied an automated external defibrillator, then transported Neulander by Trenton EMS to Capital Health Regional Medical Center.

State officials were notified of his death at 6:13 p.m. on Wednesday. No cause of death has been given.

Neulander, 82, had been in the Trenton prison since 2002 when he was sentenced to life behind bars after a conviction on murder charges. An initial trial ended in a hung jury.

Neulanders death comes 30 years after Carol Neulander, 52, the mother of Neulanders three children, was bludgeoned to death with a lead pipe in the couples home in 1994. The scene was staged to look like a robbery but nearly nothing in the house had been disturbed, a detail that investigators found suspicious at the time. Neulander was talking on the phone to her adult daughter, Rebecca Neulander Rockoff, when the assailants entered the familys home.

A beloved volunteer in South Jerseys tight-knit Jewish community and the cofounder of Cherry Hills Classic Cake bakery, Carol Neulander was mourned by more than 2,000 congregants, relatives and friends who came to her funeral.

The case stunned the Philadelphia region and gradually morphed into a grisly piece of popular culture after the trial became a fixture on cable television, inspired multiple true-crime docudramas and, in 2022, a true-crime musical, A Wicked Soul in Cherry Hill. The production, written by playwright Matt Schatz and described by the Los Angeles Times as charming albeit troubling, was protested by officials at the Neulanders former congregation and the Neulanders children before a brief run at a Los Angeles theater.

For two decades, Fred Neulander had been a prominent figure in Cherry Hill. In 1974, he cofounded Congregation Mkor Shalom, now called Congregation Kol Ami.

On Friday, Kol Ami Rabbi Jennifer Frenkel released a statement, saying, Fred Neulanders ... leadership of the congregation ended many years ago under well-publicized circumstances that ran counter to the values our congregation holds dear.

Rather than dwell on the past, we at Congregation Kol Ami ... choose to focus on our future. ... We are building a vibrant and inclusive Jewish community guided by shared values and traditions, supporting each other through lifes joys and sorrows, and finding purpose and connection through prayer, learning, and acts of compassion and kindness.

At Neulanders trial, Len Jenoff, a former Collingswood resident, testified that he and an accomplice, a troubled man named Paul Michael Daniels, were hired to kill Carol Neulander. The Neulanders marriage had interfered with an affair the rabbi was having with Elaine Soncini, who had been on the air at WPEN-FM.

Soncini, who met Neulander when he officiated at the 1992 funeral of her husband, Ken Garland, testified for the prosecution at both of the rabbis trials, in 2001 and 2002.

Jenoff was a private detective who battled with alcoholism and at times claimed falsely to have worked for the CIA, and for the Mossad, the Israeli secret service agency. He also told people he had connections to Oliver North, a central figure in the politically charged Iran-Contra scandal.

He had confessed his role in the killing to Inquirer reporter Nancy Phillips, now an editor at the newspaper.

Neulanders serial marital infidelities were detailed in court. During testimony, a friend of Neulanders with a criminal record and underworld ties said the rabbi had asked him if he knew someone who could arrange for the murder.

The defense sought to discredit Jenoff and tried to convince the jury that Jenoff and Daniels acted on their own.

In his testimony, Jenoff said the rabbi in May 1994 asked him to kill Carol Neulander in their residence, allegedly saying that he wanted to come home one night and find his wife dead on the floor.

As she was being struck, Jenoff said in court, Carol Neulander asked, Why? Why?

When Neulander was convicted, the jury could not agree on the death penalty and he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Jenoff and Daniels have completed their prison sentences. Both were released from custody in 2014.

Daniels admitted to being an accomplice in the killing so he could get $7,500 to buy drugs. After his release, he remained guilt-ridden, according to his attorney, Craig Mitnick.

He wants to live his life never forgetting what he did to another human being and a family, Mitnick said at the time.

In 2016, a state appeals court rejected a request to overturn Neulanders murder conviction.

Robert English, a spokesperson for the Camden County Prosecutors Office, said at the time: The opinion only reaffirms the jurys sound belief in a guilty verdict in this case.

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N.J. Rabbi Fred Neulander, convicted of a murder-for-hire plot to kill his wife, has died in prison - The Philadelphia Inquirer

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