Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

In partnership with Nefesh B'Nefesh

They immigrate to Israel alone, far away from family and friends, and land straight into Israels melting pot - the IDF. Along with the need to adapt to the military framework, they also face language, cultural and bureaucratic difficulties.

A unique program operated by Nefesh BNefesh and the FIDF - staffed by advisors who themselves were once lone soldiers - guarantees these new and future lone soldiers a soft landing.

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L-R: Leo Loeffler, Antastasia Medvedovsky and Elie Grob

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About 3,000 young people between the ages of 18 and 22 immigrate to Israel every year and enter the IDF - Israels melting pot. Many of them come alone, without family, out of the love of the land and a strong desire to contribute to the state.

"I didn't know anything about Israel before I arrived, but I saw my future here," says Elie Grob (39), who immigrated from Strasbourg, France 20 years ago and enlisted in the IDF as a lone soldier.

"I studied for a year in Israel, and after a few months I decided to make Aliyah and join the army. I didn't know anything about the army. I arrived at my Tzav Rishon (First Notice pre-draft call up) with a very low level of Hebrew."

After three months of intensive Hebrew studies at the Michvei Alon base, he wanted a significant service. Elie was an only child, and therefore exempt from combat, and so decided to serve as a medic.

It was 2002, and Elies intense introduction to the IDF came at the end of Operation Defensive Shield, when a wave of terrorism struck across Israel. "It was a very stressful time," Elie admits.

"I served in Samaria, and it was not easy for the medical forces in the area. Every week there was an attack or two, and every day we treated newly wounded soldiers."

Military service is an intense and challenging time for any young Israeli, so imagine how a young man who comes from another country feels, without speaking the language, or having any family or friends, and without understanding the Israeli mentality.

Elie reminisces about a time when he was in the hospital for a few days with pneumonia: "There werent that many cell phones back then. None of my friends knew I was hospitalized, and they didn't come to visit me, not even from the military. Today, however, things are different.

When Elie says that the situation today is different, he knows what he is talking about - he is among those pursuing change as a part of the Lone Soldiers Program run by Nefesh B'Nefesh and the FIDF.

"This is a holistic program run in cooperation with the IDF. The program aims to answer many of the needs of new Olim who join the IDF as lone soldiers, explains Noya Govrin, director of the program.

The program is unique because it consists of advisors who speak different languages (English, French, Russian, Spanish), who themselves are new immigrants, served as lone soldiers, and have gone through the military and navigated the various obstacles themselves.

Govrin says that the program begins even before the future lone soldiers immigrate to Israel, and the assistance continues after they are released from the army. Ninety percent of the lone soldiers who immigrate to Israel, she notes, participate in the program.

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Elie Grob

(Photo: Courtesy)

"A lone soldier has many mental, emotional and physical challenges. They experience great longing for family and also find there are both language and cultural gaps."

But the biggest difficulty is what Govrin calls the dream, the reality and what is in-between.

"Many of the soldiers come motivated, they want to serve in elite units, but do not always get accepted which can cause great disappointment. Their service is undoubtedly a roller coaster with ups and downs, and we are here to give them all the tools and support to succeed."

Elie, who currently serves as a coordinator for French-speaking lone soldiers, agrees with the phenomenon described by Govrin.

"We do seminars and try to synchronize expectations - what the military expects of them, and what they likewise expect from the military. There are those who have big dreams, and it is important for us to explain to them that the military has its own system.

"Many of them have a chance to reach these desired units such as elite combat forces, the IDF spokespersons division and Oketz (an elite K9 unit), but they might not have enough time to prepare to get accepted."

What were you missing as a lone soldier that you provide today as an advisor?

I don't regret my military service, but if there was an organization that would have given me more information about the military, it would have opened my mind to more options. Israelis have a few years to prepare for the military, new immigrants only have a few months.

Unlike Elie Grob, who did not have a supportive framework as a lone soldier, many advisors are also graduates of the Nefesh B'Nefesh program, which was founded 11 years ago.

Leo Loeffler (29), coordinator of the advisors to English-speaking soldiers in the program, immigrated to Israel from Boca Raton, USA, seven years ago, after graduating with a bachelor's degree in business administration at the age of 22.

"All my life I had wanted to enlist and even have a picture of myself at the age of four with an IDF shirt."

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Leo Loeffler

(Photo: Courtesy)

Leo testifies that he came with good preparation for the army. He didn't have big ambitions to be in combat, he admits.

"I came with an older perspective, out of a desire to contribute to the country. I didn't care if I would be a fighter or a cook. I already had a college degree, and I had lived away from home for over five years. There are a lot of 18- to 19-year-olds who are away from home for their first time, and it's hard for them to have to deal with everyday things.

He was assisted by the Nefesh B'Nefesh - FIDF Lone Soldiers Program back in the United States and sought to expedite the recruitment process. After a few months, he landed in Israel, skipped Ulpan (Hebrew Class) and entered into the Netzach Yehuda military unit.

"As soon as I arrived, I told myself that I needed to learn Hebrew fast. I would write words in my notebook and would choose someone to follow every day in order to see what he does and how he speaks."

How did you benefit from the Lone Soldiers Program while in the army?

"At the beginning of my service I received a grant and used it to pay rent and throughout my service I had an English-speaking advisor who I could talk to and was familiar with my story.

Leo completed his service in 2016, got married and began working as an analyst at a high-tech company.

"But after six months, I realized that's not what I wanted. I felt like I had a lot more to contribute. I started as an advisor and today I am a team leader. The work gave me a different perspective on the whole army process. I realized how important it is to have advisors, who will understand the side of the soldiers. We're kind of a big brother."

Aside from many language and cultural difficulties, many of the new immigrants encounter additional difficulty, which seemingly sounds trivial, but can for many be a serious and despairing challenge the bureaucracy.

"When you dont know the language, it's hard to deal with the bureaucracy," explains Anastasia Medvedovsky (29), an adviser to Russian-speaking lone soldiers.

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Anastasia Medvedovsky

(Photo: Yohanatan Ben-David)

"I, for one, did not know that there was such a thing as a preference questionnaire, and that is why I was drafted into a random position. In retrospect, I found there were a lot of interesting roles for me. But because I didn't know the language, I missed the stage where I would have been able to fill out the questionnaire stating my preferences of where I would like to serve."

She immigrated from Russia with her family at the age of 17. Her family left after a year, and Anastasia, who graduated from high school early, chose to stay in Israel alone and join the army.

"At that time, I lived alone in Holon and came home every day. It was very difficult for me - so I asked to change to a closed base, to make friends and be less alone at home. I moved to Artillery, to the Moran unit, and served as a company clerk. I had great commanders there who were very supportive of me. Then I went to an officers' course and it was very interesting."

She completed her military service in 2013 with the rank of captain, worked and studied for a bachelor's degree in political science and communications at Tel Aviv University, and after graduating, she received an offer from Nefesh B'Nefesh to serve as an advisor.

"And I couldn't say no because I know what it's like to be a lone soldier. It is important to have such support, a team who can help you navigate your military service in your own language."

About 3,000 Russian-speaking youth are currently benefiting from the Nefesh B'Nefesh FIDF program, says Anastasia - ranging from the pre-draftees who are in the early stages of the process, lone soldiers in active duty and even veterans.

"Before they make Aliyah, we explain to them about the recruitment process, make it clear to them that it takes time [it can take at least eight months]. We assist them in understanding how to find work and where to live. During their service, we have weekly personal conversations and assist with bureaucratic difficulties, such as submitting documents. After the military, many consult with us regarding higher education and life in Israel.

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Leo Loeffler: It is important to have advisors who understand the soldiers

(Photo: Courtesy)

With the understanding that bureaucracy can be challenging, Nefesh B'Nefesh-FIDF's Lone Soldiers program pushed to establish a Yom Siddurim (Errands Day) for the new immigrants.

"Once every two months, any lone soldier can request a days leave to address their personal needs, such as their personal banking, the DMV, the Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, etc.," explains Noya Govrin.

As a result of the success of this implementation, the Lone Soldiers Program created an annual centralized Yom Siddurim.

"Every year, all government ministries and agencies gather in one place. 2,500 lone soldiers come to Beit HaChayal in Tel Aviv, visit the various stations, and organize all their administrative affairs under one roof, in one day."

Why is it important to support immigrants who enlist in the military?

"Most of the lone soldiers left their friends and family, some of them graduates of academic institutions like Harvard and Yale, and made the decision to serve in the military. It is important that they have a good military experience, because if the service is good, chances are they will remain afterwards and lead successful lives as Israeli citizens.

Military service in the IDF is difficult and challenging for every soldier, and even more so for Lone Soldiers. The decision to enlist in the IDF is a brave and noble act - one rooted in a deep sense of mission and love for the State of Israel, said Steven Weil, Friends of the IDF (FIDF) National Director and CEO.

Together with Nefesh B'Nefesh, FIDF is committed to continuing to assist these brave Lone Soldiers through a variety of unique programs during and after their military service. We are grateful for each of them and salute them for their important contribution to the State of Israel. We will continue to ensure that none of them ever feel alone.

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Language, culture and bureaucracy: the challenges of lone soldiers - Ynetnews

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Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

An election campaign billboard for the Likud party shows its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left), and opposition party leader Yair Lapid, in Ramat Gan, Israel, days before that country's election in March. The banner reads "Lapid or Netanyahu." Spray paint on Netanyahu's portrait reads, "Go home." Oded Balilty/AP hide caption

An election campaign billboard for the Likud party shows its leader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (left), and opposition party leader Yair Lapid, in Ramat Gan, Israel, days before that country's election in March. The banner reads "Lapid or Netanyahu." Spray paint on Netanyahu's portrait reads, "Go home."

JERUSALEM Israeli President Reuven Rivlin on Wednesday tapped centrist opposition figure Yair Lapid to try to form a new government, sparking potentially weeks of political negotiations that could break Israel's cycle of inconclusive elections and lead to the end of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's record-breaking uninterrupted 12-year tenure.

But there are "many difficulties" to forming a new government, Rivlin acknowledged, leaving open the possibility of an unprecedented fifth election in the span of two years.

Netanyahu spent a month trying to form a right-wing governing coalition following March elections, but it required the support of an Arab Islamist party, which one of his ultranationalist Jewish political partners refused to accept.

After Netanyahu failed to assemble a parliamentary majority by a midnight deadline late Tuesday, nearly half the parliament gave its support to Lapid, a 57-year-old former journalist and finance minister who has served in the opposition for the last six years.

Lapid said he would seek to form a unity government of ideologically diverse parties, ending "two years of political paralysis" in which Netanyahu struggled to win a new term after four inconclusive elections.

"A unity government isn't a compromise or a last resort. It's a goal, it's what we need," Lapid said in a statement.

He is offering to share power with the right-wing Naftali Bennett, a religious Jew and former defense minister, even letting him serve as prime minister first in a rotation.

Such a government would require Jewish parties from the left, right and center to cooperate and to accept the support of an Arab party as well. One of Bennett's party members has rejected the notion of cooperating with the left wing, and Bennett, a former entrepreneur, must weigh the risks of upsetting his voters with such a broad coalition.

"It now depends if Bennett is serious about change," said veteran political consultant Ayelet Frisch. "Almost all the details [of the coalition] have been finalized. The ministries have already been divided between the parties."

Yohanan Plesner, president of the nonpartisan Israel Democracy Institute think tank, said the parties' common desire to unseat Netanyahu could outweigh differences of ideology. He suggested such a government would not weigh in on sensitive questions such as the power of Israel's Supreme Court or the future of Israel's occupation of the West Bank, but rather would focus on the post-pandemic economy.

"I think we are on the way there," Plesner said.

Netanyahu tried to delegitimize that option. "The truth is simple. This will be a dangerous left-wing government, a lethal combination between a lack of a path, a lack of capability and lack of responsibility," he said in a videotaped statement.

If Lapid does not succeed in forming a government within a month, Israel's parliament, the 120-member Knesset, will have three weeks to suggest a prime ministerial candidate. If no candidate wins the support of the majority of the parliament, Israel would hold yet another election in several months.

Sami Sockol in Jerusalem contributed reporting.

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Netanyahu Opponent, Yair Lapid, Given 4 Weeks To Form New Government In Israel - NPR

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Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

PARDES HANNA, IsraelWith its world-leading vaccination program, Israel has offered other countries such as the U.S. a glimpse into a post-pandemic future. But holdouts in towns such as Pardes Hanna are slowing the race to stamp out Covid-19, giving the virus time to linger and mutate in potentially dangerous ways.

This leafy suburb north of Tel Aviv has vaccination rates lower than the national average. Around 56% of the towns population have had at least one shot, 10 percentage points less than Jewish Israelis elsewhere, excluding the Ultraorthodox. That shortfall has left the town vulnerable to fresh infections, including a surge that recently accounted for 20% of new cases in the entire country, reaching a peak of 50 active cases, according to Health Ministry figures.

Throughout this entire period, Ive had zero confidence that Im being told the truth. And when I feel Im not being told the truth, I simply dont play the game, said Micha Raz, a wood artist in the town, in a television interview with Kan News following the flare-up. I dont believe in corona. In my opinion, theres no such thing as corona.

Much of the rest of Israel has been on a different trajectory. After reaching 100,000 new cases a day in January, it is now averaging fewer than 100 a day. Its vaccination drive has inoculated nearly two-thirds of its population with at least one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, making the country a useful case study for how effective the vaccines are.

In March, Israel began to unlock its economy after a series of debilitating lockdowns and some 6,000 deaths. Vaccination certificates known as green passports made it easier for bars, restaurants and other sites to open up. Officials say they plan to lift most of their remaining coronavirus restrictions in the coming days.

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Most of Israel Is Getting Back to Pre-Covid-19 Life. Not This Town. - The Wall Street Journal

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Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

Israel, aworld leader in COVID-19 vaccination rates, has the kind of problem most countries would love to be facing.

In November 2020, while the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine was still in its trial phase, Israel contracted to purchase ten million vaccine units from the British-Swedish company. Jerusalem has since decided it will not use the vaccines, relying instead on the more expensive Pfizer and Moderna versions. But the millions of doses are on their way, and Israel is still not sure what it is going to do with them.

Coronavirus czar Nachman Ash said that Israel was looking into the possibility of diverting the vaccines to other countries, and has hinted that the doses might even be thrown away if they arrive. This talk of tossing the vaccines might well be bureaucratic posturing to send a message to other Israeli government ministries, but theres no question that the fate of millions of doses remains up in the air.

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Israels closest neighbor, meanwhile, faces the opposite problem.

The Palestinian Authority is struggling to vaccinate its population. As of last week, only 3.6% of Palestinians had received at least one dose, and less than 1% were fully vaccinated.

An AstraZeneca vaccination kit is placed on a table at a vaccination center in Bucharest, Romania, April 7, 2021.(AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

Those figures include the more than 100,000 Palestinian workers that Israel has vaccinated since March, as they come into regular contact with Israelis at their workplaces. But Israel has refrained from initiating a campaign to vaccinate the general Palestinian population, despite calls from Israeli nonprofits, a petition to the High Court of Justice, and senior health experts urgings that it do so.

Though Israel does not believe it is legally required to vaccinate the Palestinians, there are plenty of reasons why doing so would serve its own interests, not to mention the humanitarian reasons for initiating such a campaign.

With Israeli officials floating even the possibility that it might be forced to dump millions of COVID-19 doses, the question must be asked: Why not make them available to the PA?

The PA has begun receiving vaccines through COVAX, a global vaccine program for poor and middle-income countries backed by the World Health Organization. The program aims to provide enough free doses to immunize up to 20 percent of a participating countrys population; around 90 countries have signed up for the program.

Soeren Brostroem, head of Denmarks National Board of Health, explains during a press conference why the country has stopped using AstraZenecas coronavirus vaccine, on April 14, 2021, in Copenhagen. (Philip Davali/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP)

The PA has received 271,000 doses for use in the West Bank to date, including 100,000 from China and 58,000 from Russia. Most of the remainder were AstraZeneca doses sent through COVAX.

Israel also donated 5,000 Moderna doses and 200 Pfizer doses for Palestinian medical workers.

The Hamas-run Gaza Strip has received 111,000 doses to date, including 50,000 from COVAX, 60,000 Russian Sputnik V doses from the UAE, and 1,000 Sputnik V doses from the PA.

In addition, Israel vaccinated107,000 Palestinian workers employed by Israelis.

COVAX intends to eventually provide about 400,000 AstraZeneca shots to the Palestinians, according to UNICEF.

Boxes of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by the Serum Institute of India and provided through the global COVAX initiative arrive at the airport in Mogadishu, Somalia, March 15, 2021. (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh)

AstraZenecas vaccine rollout has been rocky, to say the least. The company is embroiled in controversy over its failure to deliver promised doses to the European Union, and over the shots efficacy and safety profile. Last week, the European Unions executive branch said it had launched legal action against AstraZeneca for failing to respect the terms of its contract with the 27-nation bloc.

The AstraZeneca vaccine is cheaper and easier to use than rival shots from Pfizer and Moderna and has been endorsed for use in over 50 countries, including by the 27-nation EU and the World Health Organization. But US authorities have yet to approve the vaccine.

A British trial of the AstraZeneca vaccine on children was paused in April, as global regulators rushed to assess its possible link to rare blood clots in adults. Britains medicine regulator sees the vaccine as safe and effective, but has advised that individuals under 30 use an alternative vaccine.

According to an Army Radio report, Israeli officials have been in contact with the UK-headquartered pharmaceutical company about canceling the contract, but AstraZeneca is reluctant to comply, fearing the bad publicity that would ensue.

At first blush, it seems like a win-win for Israel to transfer unwanted AstraZeneca doses to the PA.

A medic administers a Moderna COVID-19 vaccine to a fellow medic during a campaign to vaccinate front-line medical workers, at the health ministry, in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on Feb. 3, 2021. (AP/Nasser Nasser)

An outbreak in the West Bank poses a risk to Israel, where more than 35% of the population, especially children, still hasnt been vaccinated.

The PA declared a state of emergency in areas of the West Bank under its control in March, which is still in effect. Many businesses are shuttered, and Palestinians movement is restricted.

The Palestinians suffered their worst COVID-19 wave in March and April, which peaked at almost 3,000 new cases a day. By late April, that figure had dropped to 1,000 new cases a day. Hamas-run Gaza, where figures are unreliable, reported record-high infection rates last month.

Though the security barrier separates most of the West Bank from Israel, and there is a near-hermetic fence between Israel and Gaza, the entire region is seen as one epidemiological unit. For instance, the US Centers for Disease Control and Preventions travelers health section lists Israel, including the West Bank and Gaza. Because Israel and the territories are grouped together, the US State Department last month included Israel among 116 countries on its Level Four: Do Not Travel advisory list, citing unprecedented risk due to a very high level of COVID-19.

Israeli epidemiologists told The Times of Israel in January that it is in Israels overall interest to ensure Palestinians are vaccinated as quickly as possible, as the populations are too intertwined to allow one to gain herd immunity without the other, despite some claims to the contraryby Israeli leaders.

Then Health Ministry director general Moshe Bar Siman-Tov speaks during a press conference about the coronavirus COVID-19, at the Health Ministry in Jerusalem on May 31, 2020. (Flash90)

The message is very simple: We are one epidemiological unit. As much as we can, we have to help them address this matter, the former Health Ministry Director-General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov told The Times of Israel at the time.

It is in our common health and economic interest, as we live in a single epidemiological region, and we all need to take part in the effort to stop the spread of COVID-19 in the region, said COGAT director Kamil Abu Rukun in a statement announcing the operation to vaccinate Palestinian workers. The same logic would seem to apply to the Palestinian population in general.

They have to be part of the picture. We ignore them at our peril. We are really endangering our population if we do so, said Dr. Manfred Green, an expert in vaccines who was the founding director of the Health MinistrysIsrael Center for Disease Control.

There are Palestinians who come to work in Israel and movement of Israeli Arabs who go to Palestinian areas, something that is a lot more common than realized for shopping, to hold weddings, and to see family, said Amnon Lahad, chairman of the National Council for Community Health.

Prof. Gabi Barbash, former director general at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, on April 7, 2020. (Channel 12)

The rule is very clear with the coronavirus if the virus is anywhere, its everywhere. Weve seen how easily the virus jumps across the Green Line, to Kafr Qasim, Netanya, Haifa, agreed former Israeli Health Ministry director-general Gabi Barbash.

The COVID-19 situation in the West Bank affects Israels economic recovery as well. As long as the virus remains out of control among Palestinians, other countries may recommend against or even ban travel to Israel. An effective Palestinian vaccine campaign could hasten the return of tourists to Israels hotels and restaurants.

There could be other benefits. Israel faces moderate but persistent diplomatic pressure over its policies toward the Palestinians. International organizations continue to target Israel for policies both real and imagined. Human Rights Watch released a scathing report last week, alleging that Israel is committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution and saying Israel had an overarching policy to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians.

The UN Human Rights Council in Geneval discusses a resolution condemning Israeli actions on the Golan Heights, March 22, 2019 (screen shot UN WebTV)

In March, the UN Human Rights Council approved four resolutions condemning Israel. France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy all supported the motion, which expressed grave concern at reports of serious human rights violations and grave breaches of international humanitarian law, including of possible war crimes and crimes against humanity, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.

Though the US Biden administration has rejected anti-Israel resolutions and the HRW report, its approach to Israel and the Palestinians is seen as far less in line with Israeli government policy than that of the Trump administration. Biden restored funding to UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, which his predecessor had severed; the Israeli government says the agency perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem by defining millions of Palestinian refugee descendants as refugees. Shortly after Bidens inauguration in January, the United States said it would restore the Palestine Liberation Organizations liaison office that was shut down by Trump.

US President Joe Biden at the Capitol in Washington, April 13, 2021. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, Pool)

But Biden has held off on any major peace initiative, with supporters of a two-state solution expecting near-term chances for a breakthrough to be slim, especially amid turbulence in Israel following its latest election.

Though Israel enjoyed an unprecedented round of diplomatic breakthroughs as it signed normalization agreements with Arab states in the Gulf and North Africa, some of its new partners seem to want to move slower than Israel does, other potential partners are holding back, and it remains unclear when the ties will reach their full potential.

In this environment, an Israeli initiative that significantly contributes to the Palestinians gaining control over the pandemic especially as the international community proves slow to act can only help Israel diplomatically. No one is under the illusion that the UN and other international organizations will stop targeting the Jewish state, but it might be easier to persuade European partners and the US to push back against such efforts if Israel is the one saving hundreds or thousands of Palestinian lives while the UN fails to deliver. Moreover, if the Biden administration does choose to throw its muscle behind a fresh peace initiative between Israel and the Palestinians, it could cause significant tension with Israel. Transferring large quantities of vaccines it can spare to the PA could buy Israel some goodwill in Washington before the sides reach such bumps in the road.

And, of course, there are the pure humanitarian reasons to help the Palestinians fight the pandemic. Yes, Israel argues that this is not its legal responsibility. And yes, the PA government, widely seen as corrupt and ineffective, may be exacerbating the COVID crisis in the West Bank, not to mention Hamass rule of the Gaza Strip.

In this undated photo provided on July 19, 2017, an IDF soldier feeds a Syrian baby in Israel as part of the armys humanitarian aid program to assist Syrians impacted by the civil war in their country. (Israel Defense Forces)

But Israel has shown that it sees saving lives around the world as one of its missions as a nation, regardless of politics. It sent 60 tons of aid to Indonesia after the December 2004 tsunami, even though the two countries do not have diplomatic relations. The next year, Israeli organizations were on the ground in Pakistan after an earthquake in Kashmir. MASHAV, Israels international development organization, saves countless lives in Africa and elsewhere with its agriculture and public health initiatives. IDF missions have operated in Turkey, Nepal, Haiti, and beyond, totaling 27 humanitarian missions since 1953.

Even when civilians in enemy countries are in need, Israel has proven willing to devote its expertise and resources to save lives. Groups such as Save a Childs Heart and Shevet Achim bring children from places like Syria, Iraq, and the Gaza Strip to Israeli hospitals, where Israeli doctors work overtime to treat them. After Syria, Israels bitter enemy, descended into bloody chaos in 2011, Israeli medical teams treated wounded Syrians at field hospitals near the border and at hospitals across northern Israel.

And Israel has already contributed meaningfully to the Palestinian effort to combat the pandemic. Much of Israels aid to the Palestinians went through the IDF.

A Palestinian worker gets vaccinated by Israeli Magen David Adom staff at the Shaar Efraim checkpoint in the West Bank, March 4, 2021 (COGAT)

With the outbreak of COVID-19 in Israel, Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip, the Unit for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, initiated a wide range of activities to stop, to the extent possible, the spread of the virus, a COGAT official told the Times of Israel. As part of these activities, the entry of test kits for detection of COVID-19, along with ventilators and medical equipment, all donated by the international community, was coordinated by COGAT.

Moreover, joint training of Israeli-Palestinian medical teams took place, out of the understanding that these measures are necessary for the common interest of protecting the health of all of the residents of the entire region, the official said.

Diverting the AstraZeneca doses to the PA would be in keeping with the values that have guided Israels policies since its founding, at almost no cost to the Israeli taxpayer.

Israels guiding principle is that the Palestinians are responsible for vaccinating their own people according to the 1993 Oslo Accords between the two sides, although some officials have said that Israel would consider providing doses once all Israelis are vaccinated.

There are other significant obstacles besides the legal one.

Many Israelis dont see sending COVID-19 doses to the PA or Gaza as an ethical act at all. I think we have to admit that they are not nice neighbors, said Efraim Inbar, president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. We dont have any moral responsibility to care for neighbors who pay money to terrorists, who turn to international organizations like the ICC in order to fight against us. We are in a war with them. I dont remember the Americans sending vaccines to the Germans in World War II. I think the demand on Israel to aid its enemies is immoral.

I prefer to send them to India, not to the PA, he continued. India doesnt pay terrorists.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (r), welcomes Rajaei Haddad, who spent 20 years in Israeli prisons for his involvement in a 1997 terror attack which killed Gabriel Hirschberg, April 2018. (WAFA/Thaer Ghanaim)

Even if Israel did decide to transfer millions of doses, it is unclear that the PA has the necessary infrastructure to safely store and transport the vaccines, even though the AstraZeneca vaccines do not need the ultra-cold conditions that the Pfizer doses do.

This might also be part of the reason why the vast majority of the doses pledged to the Palestinians by the international community have yet to arrive in PA areas. If it was so simple, then they would have received many thousands of vaccines from multiple sources, and would have vaccinated, said Kobi Michael, senior research fellow at INSS and former head of the Palestinian desk at the Ministry for Strategic Affairs.The fact that it hasnt happened means there is some difficulty, on the level of infrastructure, on the technical level, and also on the political level.

With the logistical challenges, the PA would need significant cooperation with Israeli officials, something the Palestinian leadership would likely be uncomfortable with. The PA twice last year rejected cargoes of medical supplies from the UAE because they were flown into Israels Ben Gurion Airport.

In the West Bank, the Palestinians prefer relatively limited cooperation, argued Michael. There are implications for the political leadership in terms of public opinion: Look, Israel is doing what the PA is incapable of doing. Once again the PA proves it doesnt know how to operate, that it needs Israel to deal with the health issue as well. So what do we need the PA for? Lets dismantle it.'

Palestinians working in Israel receive a Covid19- vaccine shot, south of Tulkarm in the West Bank on March 8, 2021. Israel is giving vaccines to around 100,000 Palestinians in the West Bank with permits to work in Israel. (Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90

The PA, which has put great effort into delegitimizing Israel internationally, also sees benefits to its position against Israel when its neighbor faces criticism for not doing more to help, Michael said.

Even if Israel wants to do more, the Palestinians will limit it, Michael posited. In their eyes, it legitimizes the occupation.

PA officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

There is also the question of how many complex issues Israeli decision-makers can focus on at one time. Israel has been facing an extended election season since 2019, one that doesnt look like its about to be resolved soon. It has its own COVID-19 challenges, while fighting a shadow war with Iran as its closest ally, the US, works to re-enter an agreement with Tehran. On top of those issues, Israel suffered its worst peacetime tragedy last week when dozens of worshipers were crushed to death at a religious celebration on Mount Meron. Was [Israels] approach to the [sensitive issue of the now canceled] elections in the Palestinian Authority serious? Michael also asked, rhetorically. We didnt do what we were supposed to do there either.

A man lights candles arranged in the shape of the number 45 on May 2, 2021, in honor of the 45 people killed in a deadly crush at Mount Meron three days prior. (Judah Ari Gross/Times of Israel)

Even without formally and publicly transferring the doses, Israel could certainly do more to help the Palestinians battle the pandemic, and specifically with vaccinations. It could, for instance, open vaccination centers on the borders between Israeli and PA-controlled areas. These could be staffed by both Israeli and Palestinian health workers in order to protect the PAs image in the eyes of the Palestinian public. Sharing Israeli computer programs and AI would also be a quiet way to meaningfully assist the Palestinians without causing too much of a stir.

This type of cooperation can also create momentum, said Michael, a feeling that there is significance to cooperation on all sorts of wider regional issues, around health, environment, water, and energy.

Right now, at least, it would appear that the decision-makers have other priorities.

Aaron Boxerman and Nathan Jeffay contributed to this report.

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New regulations banning travel to seven countries over fears of importing COVID-19 variants into Israel went into effect on Monday, the Health Ministry announced.

Effective Monday, Israelis cannot travel to India, Mexico, South Africa, Brazil, Ukraine, Ethiopia, or Turkey unless they receive special permission. Israelis may take connecting flights through those countries, provided the layover is shorter than 12 hours.

Special permission may be provided for those with humanitarian reasons, athletes or emissaries for national institutions.

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Israelis returning from those seven countries even those vaccinated or recovered from the virus must enter 10 days of isolation with two negative PCR tests, or 14 days with one test taken upon arrival in the country. The vaccinated or recovered do not need to self-isolate if they merely took a connecting flight through those countries, provided the layover was shorter than 12 hours.

Medical technicians test passengers for COVID-19 at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv on March 8, 2021. (Flash90)

In the face of thenew coronavirus variantdevastating India, the Health Ministryproposed new travel restrictions for Israelis last week; however, the urgent restrictions were not immediately implemented.

The original recommendation included requiring noncitizens entering Israel from the specified highly infected countries to self-isolate in quarantine hotels, but that measure was not ratified.

Last week, Israel identified 41 cases of the Indian coronavirus variant, including five in children, and five among people who were fully vaccinated.

A top health official said Wednesday that it was not clear that COVID-19 vaccines offer protection against the Indian variant, and cited the concern as a key reason Israel must ban travel to countries with high coronavirus infection rates.

According to a ministry statement, 24 cases of the mutated strain were found among people who returned recently from abroad, including 21 foreign residents. But 17 of those infected hadnt been abroad, and some of them had no obvious links to anyone who did, indicating that the variant is spreading undetected.

Children wearing face masks study in a classroom of the Kramim school in Jerusalem on their first day back to classes after a national lockdown, November 1, 2020. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

Moreover, five kids from five schools were diagnosed with the Indian variant. Since the vast majority of children under 16 are not being vaccinated, this has raised fears of a new outbreak after infections have been steadily dropping for several months following the countrys rapid inoculation campaign.

Still, Israel recorded the lowest positive infection rate in 14 months, with only 13 new coronavirus cases diagnosed in the country on Saturday, according to Health Ministry data released Sunday.

Late last month, the Jewish statepassed the milestoneof over 5 million people having received both vaccine shots.

And on Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces declared itself coronavirus-free, as it recorded zero active cases of the disease among its ranks for the first time since the outbreak of the virus.

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Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

An Intel Tiger Lake chip is displayed at an Intel news conference during the 2020 CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S. January 6, 2020. REUTERS/Steve Marcus

Intel Corp (INTC.O) said on Sunday it will invest another $600 million in Israel to expand its research and development (R&D) and confirmed it was spending $10 billion on a new chip plant.

The announcement was made during a one-day visit to Israel by Intel Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger as part of a European tour that included Germany and Belgium last week. read more

Intel is investing $400 million to turn its Mobileye unit headquartered in Jerusalem into an R&D campus for developing self-driving car technologies.

Another $200 million will be invested in building an R&D centre, called IDC12, in the northern port city of Haifa next to its current development centre.

Intel said the "mega chip design" facility will have a capacity of 6,000 employees.

Gelsinger, on his first European tour since taking charge of the company in February, in a statement issued on Sunday predicted "a vibrant future for Intel and Israel for decades to come".

In recent years, Intel has bought three Israeli tech companies - Mobileye in 2017 for more than $15 billion, artificial intelligence chipmaker Habana in 2019 for $2 billion and Moovit a year ago for $1 billion.

During his brief visit, Gelsinger met with Intel and Mobileye management and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel's Finance Ministry in early 2019 said Intel would get a $1 billion grant to build an $11 billion chip plant, although at the time Intel would not confirm the amount.

On Sunday, Intel said investment would be $10 billion and the first phase of construction has begun.

Its current Fab 28 plant at the company's Kiryat Gat site produces 10 nanometre (nm) chips.

Intel has not disclosed whether the new plant will produce smaller chips, which can increase efficiency, but in March it said it was building two 7 nm chip plants in Arizona for some $20 billion.

Intel Israel's exports grew to a record $8 billion in 2020 from $6.6 billion in 2019, accounting for 14% of total high-tech exports and 2% of Israel's GDP.

Intel is the largest employer of Israels high tech industry with nearly 14,000 workers.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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The Prime Ministers Office (PMO) of Israel published a new bill in February entitled Cybersecurity and the National Cyber Directorate. If passed by government committee and the Knesset, this law will redefine cybersecurity governance in Israel. The PMO officially tabled an earlier version of the bill in June 2018, but that bill did not advance through the legislative process given the strong objections it raised both in the professional cybersecurity community and among other government authorities. In particular, stakeholders raised concerns about the broad scope of authority sought by the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) under the 2018 bill. Other concerns included the lack of proper safeguards over the nature and scope of invasive computer protection actions taken by the INCD in response to cyberattacks, the potential for privacy infringements in the name of national security, and the interface between the activities of the INCD and other law enforcement agencies. The process of affording the INCDwhich is currently a policy-setting bodywith operative powers has been controversial even within Israels security establishment. One publicized example of this controversy was a 2017 leaked memo to the prime minister from the Mossad, the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), Israel Defense Forces and the Defense Ministry declaring their opposition to the expanding authorities of the INCD.

The new bill is an abbreviated formulation of the 2018 version and is framed as temporary legislation with a two-year sunset clauseperhaps to avoid some of the opposition that emerged in response to its earlier iteration. The PMO wants to move fastsomewhat insincerely in our viewbecause of increased cybersecurity risk while teleworking during the coronavirus pandemic and the associated digitization of workplaces in both the public and private sectors. A string of recent attacks on Israeli companies, which two of the authors discussed in a previous Lawfare post, also generated a sense of urgency for providing the INCD with unprecedented and controversial legal tools to respond to the new risk environment. These steps, however, come at the risk of compromising Israels established rule of law safeguards and oversight mechanisms.

The bill aims to regulate the INCDs functions and powers in providing professional cybersecurity guidance to public and private entities. Those functions and powers were established in order to prevent future cyberattacks that could affect, in the bills language, vital public interests and to respond to impending or ongoing attacks. As with the 2018 bill, members of civil society have expressed serious questions about the exceptionally intrusive powers granted to the INCD to undertake computer protection actions in a private computer network, or to instruct a private business to undertake such actions. Those same authorities also have implications for privacy and intellectual property rights. In the event that private companies do not cooperate, the INCD may seek a court order allowing it to access company servers without consent, without assumption of liability on the part of the INCD and at the companys expense. Article 9 of the bill contains another exceptional power that allows the INCD to receive the personal data and details of clients of private companies, if they are also exposed to a severe cyberattack.

Nationalization of Cybersecurity in the Private Sector?

At a general level, we have concerns about the paradigmatic shift the bill introduces in the interrelations between the INCD and private entities in Israel. Until now, the INCD has embraced a policy that puts the ultimate responsibility for cybersecurity in the private sector. Such companies currently have a strong incentive to protect their data, clients and servers. The INCDs role has been to support these companies as they face cybersecurity challenges, serving as a hub of technological information and professional expertise. With the exception of entities providing critical infrastructure, which are subject to direct regulation, the INCD has operated with private entities primarily under a cooperative model. This is mostly due to the INCDs lack of formal regulatory powers and its declared policy of relying on existing regulatory bodies for a sector-based cybersecurity enforcement regime.

The 2021 bill, like its 2018 predecessor, introduces a radical change in the relations between the INCD and private entities. While exercise of the requested authority depends on judicial authorization, the bill allows the INCD to obtain such authorization in ex parte court proceedings even in instances without the relevant companys presence.

This new authority is probably unnecessary. Until this proposed legislation, Israels cyber ecosystem had been characterized by a high degree of government-private sector cooperation. We have seen no strong indications of past incidents in which private companies refused to cooperate with the INCD when confronting a cybersecurity crisis, let alone one involving national security interests. There appears to be no need to radically shift the current cooperative relationship between the INCD and the private sector to one of coercion. Such a shift puts significant and unjustified pressure on the right to privacy of data subjects operating on private servers, on intellectual property rights and on other business interests. While the bill limits access, use, and retention of private data and metadata gathered by the INCD from companies, it gives the INCD and the court system considerable discretion in the application of such limits. On a practical level, the shift of responsibility from private entities to the INCD sends an unintentional message: that private businesses providing important public services can become more complacent about cybersecurity, since they can now rely on the government to come to their rescue in times of need and take over the protection of their servers.

One Regulator to Rule Them All?

Another concern about the 2021 bill involves the interplay between the different government regulators involved in regulating cybersecurity. As mentioned above, the approach of the Israeli government has been to empower existing sectoral regulators (in the fields of banking, insurance, communications, health and financial services) to require organizations and companies operating in their respective fields to develop adequate cybersecurity policies, with the INCD serving as a coordinator and a professional hub. The 2021 bill, unlike the 2018 bill, does not address the INCDs current relationship with the sectoral regulators and will most likely disturb the current balance between them. This confusion will be especially pronounced when multiple regulators try to prescribe preventive measures.

While the bill does allow sharing of collected data across government bodies (which presumably include the sectoral regulators), the data sharing raises even more concerns about data protection and leakage. It is not clear whether the data can be shared with foreign intelligence services, again raising privacy, intellectual property and other concerns.

Conclusion

The 2021 bill clearly demonstrates the governments interest in quickly providing new legal tools to the INCD to safeguard the national security interests of Israel in cyberspace. This desire is made even more urgent at a time when Israel is confronting a heightened risk of cyberattacks (due, presumably, to intensified tensions between Israel and Iran and its proxies). Yet the bill makes a radical departure from previous practice by shifting the ultimate responsibility for cybersecurity from the private sector to the government, usurping the powers of sectoral regulators. These sweeping reforms are even more peculiar given the two-year sunset clause. It makes little sense to introduce such drastic changes for such a short time (although it is possible that the sunset clause provision was introduced into the bill only to facilitate its quick passage, in the hope that it could be extended at the end of the two-year period).

We believe that the bill raises grave concerns about privacy and intellectual property rights and interests. These concerns cannot be swept aside even at times of enhanced cybersecurity risks. Now that life in Israel is gradually returning to pre-coronavirus patterns, the time for urgent temporary legislation has passed and the bill should be reintroduced in a modified form as a permanent, not short-term piece of legislation. Its final form should feature a sustainable, balanced and cooperation-based cybersecurity policy for the private sector within established rule of law and oversight constraints.

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Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) has sought special permission to fly an Israeli team of experts to India to train and install a rapid COVID-19 identification solution it acquired from an Israeli start-up for USD 15 million.

The delegation from Breath of Health (BOH) has already received an emergency approval at Reliance's request given the spike in coronavirus related cases in India and will be flying out soon, company sources told PTI here.

Israel has put a temporary ban on its citizens from flying to seven countries, including India, which have seen a surge in coronavirus cases. The experts from the Israeli medical technology company will guide Reliance's team in India in operating the innovative system developed by it to identify coronavirus carriers and patients in the early stages of the disease by exhalation.

The results will be available within seconds.

Reliance Group signed a USD 15 million deal in January with BOH to distribute the firm's swift COVID-19 breath testing system.

According to the agreement, the Indian corporate giant will purchase hundreds of systems from the Israeli company in a deal valued at USD 15 million and will use them to conduct millions of tests a month at a cost of USD 10 million per month.

BOH is said to have developed the breath test system that identifies COVID-19 at a success rate of over 95 per cent.

Preliminary results from clinical trials it is conducting with Israeli hospitals Hadassah Medical Center and the Sheba Medical Center at Tel HaShomer have shown a success rate of 98 per cent compared to the standard PCR test authorised by global medical organisations.

"The equipment has already reached India and its operationalisation will help India in its fight against the pandemic," a spokesperson for the company said.

Israeli Deputy Health Minister Yoav Kish visited BOH Laboratories in the northern Israeli city of Rehovot to closely monitor the preparations of the delegation that will leave for India to complete the installation of the first system that landed in India about a week ago.

The Minister himself went through an exhalation test and congratulated the BOH team on its achievements.

"The company staff will train Indian teams to use technology which is considered as a breakthrough in the field and may help the Indians to take control of the Indian variant outbreak", the Israeli company said.

"The aggravation of the corona crisis in India has led Reliance and the Israeli company to advance the flight of the Israeli delegation to India to help the Indian government overcome the outbreak of the plague that has so far claimed the lives of over 200,000 Indians and continues to spread across the country", it said.

A record 3,780 fresh COVID-19 fatalities were registered in a single day in India on Wednesday taking the death toll to 2,26,188, while 3,82,315 new coronavirus infections were recorded.

With the fresh cases, the total tally of COVID-19 cases in the country climbed to 2,06,65,148.

This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text. Only the headline has been changed.

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On Wednesday 3 August 1938, a short advertisement appeared on the second page of the Manchester Guardian, under the title Tuition.

I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family, the advert said, under the name Borger, giving the address of an apartment on Hintzerstrasse, in Viennas third district.

The small ad, costing a shilling a line, was placed by my grandparents, Leo and Erna. The 11-year-old boy was my father, Robert. It turned out to be the key to their survival and the reason I am here, nearly 83 years later, working at the newspaper that ran the ad.

In 1938, Jewish families under Nazi rule were scrambling to get their children out of the Reich. Newspaper advertisements were one avenue of escape. Scores of children were advertised in the pages of the Manchester Guardian, their virtues and skills extolled in brief, to fit the space.

The columns read as a clamour of urgent, competing voices, all pleading: Take my child! And people did. The classified ads dense, often mundane notices that filled the front pages, and coffers, of the Guardian for more than 100 years also helped save lives.

Richard Nelsson, the Guardians information manager and archivist, emailed me a picture of the ad in January. Its existence had been the subject of family myth, but I had never seen it before. Its emotive impact took me by surprise three lines of anguish, from parents willing to give up their only child in the hope he would be safe. The Nazi annexation of Austria, the Anschluss, had taken place five months before my fathers ad was placed, while the Nuremberg race laws had been imposed in May, stripping Jews of basic rights. Groups of Nazi Sturmabteilung, the brownshirted SA, had free rein in Vienna to beat and humiliate Jews.

My father was identified as a Jew by his classmates and at one point was grabbed by an SA gang, who locked him inside the local synagogue. My grandfather Leo, who owned a radio and musical instrument shop, was summoned to Gestapo headquarters to register. He was ordered, like other Viennese Jews, to get down on his hands and knees and wash the pavement, in front of jeering crowds.

The SA still captures Jews in the streets and makes them scrub floors and lavatories, the Manchester Guardian reported on 1 April 1938. Many prominent Jews commandeered for such work have appeared in top-hats and morning coats with all their decorations on.

The next time my grandfather was called, he was held overnight. He may have been held for longer periods after Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, when Jewish businesses were ransacked and most of Viennas synagogues were destroyed. Many perhaps most Viennese Jewish men were taken to Dachau, the camp in Bavaria, and had to be ransomed out.

The Nazis were keen to drive Jews out of the Reich, but did not make it easy. Emigrants had to fill in the right forms and were fleeced of almost everything they owned.

By late summer in 1938, many Viennese Jews were advertising themselves in the Manchester Guardians Situations Wanted column as butlers, chauffeurs and maids. There was a shortage of domestic workers in the UK at the time, with the expansion of prosperous suburbs and the opening up of other work opportunities for British women creating vacancies for outsiders.

Scrolling through the classified ad pages of the newspaper, you can see the wave of panic gather pace. Prior to May 1938, the only references to Vienna concerned tourism and opera. On 10 May, Erna Ball offers herself as a housekeeper, then, a fortnight later, Julie Klein describes herself as a distinguished Viennese lady, Jewish, good appearance, blond, 35.

On 7 June, the first of the children appeared: Gertrude Mandl, a young Viennese Girl not Aryan who seeks position as Cook Housekeeper.

She was the first of 60 Viennese Jewish children advertised in the newspaper over the following nine months, rising to a peak in August, September and October and then falling off after November 1938, when the UK launched the Kindertransport scheme for groups of unaccompanied minors. This brought 10,000 Jewish children to Britain in the months leading up to the outbreak of war.

The Guardian ads in early 1939 reflect the plight of those left behind. On 14 January, under the new section Refugee Advertisements, there is a three-line plea: Father in concentration camp, three boys, 8-12 and three girls, 13-16, have to leave Germany. Is anybody willing to help?

On 11 March, another ad issued an urgent appeal. Who will help to get out of concentration camp two Viennese boys, age 21 and 23, by offering trainee posts.

Similar appeals were placed in the Times and the Telegraph, but the Manchester Guardian was seen as more sympathetic by those seeking to flee. The city was home to the biggest UK Jewish community outside London; it had ties to Vienna through the textile trade, as well as an energetic Quaker community that set up a refugee committee after Kristallnacht, which helped resettle large numbers of central European Jews.

The Guardian also focused more than the rest of the British press on the plight of Jews under Nazi rule and the hardships of those in the UK. It ran an anonymous column about a Jewish maid in a British home, by a writer identified only as J, giving the view from below stairs.

The Manchester Guardian had a justified reputation for being supportive of the Jewish plight and especially being pro-refugee, so it would be a natural place to advertise in, especially if there were commercial agencies and also refugee organisations at either end, says Tony Kushner, a University of Southampton professor and the author of Journeys from the Abyss, a book about the Holocaust and forced migration.

Certainly, the way the Manchester Guardian reported Nazi antisemitism and supported the entry of refugees and then their protection in Britain during the Nazi era can be regarded as one of the proudest moments in the newspapers history, adds Kushner.

A couple of Guardian-reading Welsh schoolteachers, Nancy and Reg Bingley, responded to the ad for my father and fostered and educated him through his teen years in Caernarfon.

My grandmother Erna (Omi to us) got a job as a maid for a family in Paddington, so was able to get a visa and make the train and ferry journey to the UK with her son, but not to live with him once they arrived.

In March 1939, with the help of the Bingleys, a visa was also secured for my grandfather Leo, as well as a job as a cutter at Silhouette, an underwear factory run by a German Jewish family that employed refugees, first in London, then in Shrewsbury, after the war started.

Leo stayed in the same job the rest of his working life; there were always bales of offcut knicker elastic in our cellar. My father would speak German with his parents, but if they reminisced much about the old days in Vienna, they rarely told us.

Having read the ads, I set about looking into what had become of the other children who had appealed for help alongside my father. He had been relatively lucky, it turned out. Many of the children did not settle happily and spent their first years in Britain, at the age of 12, 13 or 14, searching, with little help in a foreign language in a strange land, for ways to save their parents.

Liese Feiks, an 18-year-old girl advertised on 28 June 1938 as a multilingual shorthand writer and typist, was saved by a British family, but struggled with the domestic work she was given. Her son, Martin Tompa, a computer science professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle, says: She told me many times they were the most miserable years of her life.

Lieses parents waited too long to leave Vienna. By spring 1940, escape westwards was no longer an option. Instead, they headed for Shanghai, which would take Jews without visas, on the Trans-Siberian railway. From Shanghai, they tried to get to the US, but were captured by the Japanese and spent the rest of the war in an internment camp near Manila in the Philippines.

In his advertisement on 29 July 1938, Adolf Batscha, a Viennese dry goods merchant, appealed for a family to take in his only daughter, 14-year-old Gertrude, who was well mannered, able to help in any household work, speaks German, French, and a little English and played the piano.

A Somerset family called the Partingtons responded and agreed to take her in. In February 1939, Adolf and his wife, Walburga Vally saw Gertrude off at Viennas main railway terminus.

I hope never to know such desperation as prompted them to decide to part with me and send me away alone, Gertrude would later write in a memoir for her children, decades after she had emigrated to Israel and become Yehudit Segal.

She would never see them again. Gertrudes daughter, Ruthie Elkana, told me her grandparents did not act in time. It was just too late for them, Elkana says. They prepared themselves. He prepared himself to be a butler and she prepared to be a housekeeper, to sew and all that, so they could earn money in the UK. But it didnt help them.

In October 1942, Adolf and Walburga were deported to the Maly Trostenets death camp, outside Minsk in the Nazi-occupied Soviet republic of Belarus. Gertrude didnt give up hope for them until she received a letter from the Red Cross after the war, confirming their deaths. In her memoir, she said the dread of losing them was compounded by the fear of forgetting what they all looked like.

Elkana says she was overcome by emotion when she saw the small ad for the first time, in 2014. Our mother told us about this advert, she says. It was really so exciting to find it. Its heartbreaking.

None of the other children of Viennese refugees whom I contacted had seen the Manchester Guardian ad that had been their parents lifeline. Most had a similar reaction to mine: elation at seeing their mother or fathers name; and the sick realisation of the sacrifice, despair and loss underpinning each message.

I had no clue. Im very rarely silent, but I was stunned into silence, says Sandra Garfinkel, the daughter of Alice Lindenfeld, advertised on 1 August 1938 as Jewess, 13 years, good family, on the phone from New York.

Garfinkel had heard that her mother and grandmother had escaped to the UK, but never how. I need a word bigger than stunned to express my unbelievable astonishment at seeing that ad, she says. The emotional, psychological, financial punishment they must have endured because prior to that they lived a wealthy life with servants and a beautiful home, and suddenly they were scraping the sides of the barrel by advertising themselves: Will someone take my child?

The first of the Manchester Guardian children I was able to track down was George Mandler. Unusually, his full name was in the ad on 28 July 1938, which asked: Will an English family be kind enough to take au pair [sic] my son, aged 14 (out of grammar school), with knowledge of English and to procure him employment?

George was easy to find, as he had become a prominent psychologist in the US and UK before he died in 2016. I sent his son, Peter, a picture of the ad and called him at his home in Cambridge, where he is a history professor.

I suspect my dad probably did this on the sly because he knew his father wouldnt approve, he said. He would have been really horrified that he would be giving up schooling, because you know he was asking for employment.

In the end, family friends found a place for George in a boarding school in Bournemouth.

Like Gertrude, George wrote a memoir in later life, called Interesting Times. He described life in Vienna after the Anschluss, lining up outside embassies from 4 oclock in the morning and writing letters to Mandlers he found in the New York telephone directory in the hope of sponsorship.

As with many Viennese Jews, the US was the preferred destination, but Washington had strict annual quotas for immigrants. For most, the UK was a halfway house, a place to wait for your American number to come up.

George recalled travelling out of Vienna alone aged 14 and described the tense moment when the train reached the western border of the Reich at Aachen. He had a passport issued before the big J stamp was compulsory and no such stamp was available at the frontier.

He was taken to Cologne and instructed to wait until morning. He ended up staying the night in a hotel where the rooms had beds, but hardly any other furniture. I spent the first night of my emigration in a bordello! he wrote.

George left for the US in 1940, to join his parents and sister, who had managed to get a boat from Italy. He sailed out of Liverpool on a transatlantic liner armed with big naval guns. Until they were out of U-boat range, its lights were turned off and the passengers wore life vests.

By 1943, he was back in Europe with the US army, in the military intelligence service, interrogating captured German soldiers and evacuating German scientists before they were captured by the Red Army.

Another boy from the Guardian ads, Alfred Rudnai, joined the Royal Air Force, first as a mechanic, then as a machine-gunner in the belly of a Lancaster bomber. In reminiscences recorded by his family months before his death last year, Alfred recalled his unorthodox, but visceral, contribution to the last stages of the war.

I could see below, and I became a bomber because I got empty food tins and I filled them with rubbish and dropped them out in Germany, Rudnai recalled.

Ernst Schanzer was 16 in November 1938, when his parents described him as well-bred, an excellent stenotypist and a good sportsman. He was given a place at a commercial college in Newcastle before being interned on the Isle of Man (like my grandfather and most other male Jewish refugees) as an enemy alien in 1940, when public opinion turned against the strangers in their midst. He was then evacuated to Canada.

As Ernest Schanzer, he became a renowned Shakespearean scholar and a professor in Munich. Unable to obtain a visa to the west, his parents and his elder brother, Peter, got as far as Latvia, but were captured there by the invading Soviet troops and deported to Siberia in 1941.

Ernests parents died there, but Peter somehow survived six years of near starvation and bitter cold. He made his way back to Vienna after the war, but it would be many years before the brothers were reunited. Canada denied Peter entry, seemingly because of forgiving comments he made about some of his Soviet jailers. He emigrated to Australia instead and raised a family there.

Ernest never married, but he enjoyed life as a single man in Munich. He had a rich social life, staging himself as a playboy, as it were, being invited by many and inviting his friends to celebrations of his clematis in flower on his balcony overlooking the fairly posh Englschalking suburb of Munich, says his closest friend, the English professor Manfred Pfister. Pfister says he and his wife visited Vienna often, but Ernest, without spelling out his reasons, understandably never joined us on these trips.

Speaking to other descendants of refugees, fellow children of the Manchester Guardian small ads, some common themes emerged. Most of us had been taken, at some point in our lives, on melancholic visits to Vienna. We went in the mid-70s, when I remember staring up at the apartment block where the family had lived; the nearby park, with its huge concrete gun emplacements, too big and solid to destroy; and the site of the old shop, Radio Borger, which became a stationers shop and now sells discount womens clothing.

Another common strand was the lifelong burden our parents had carried, from the experience of separation from their parents in a foreign land to the weight of surviving while countless relatives, left behind in Vienna, perished.

When my father took his life, it was my task to call his foster mother, Nancy. After a sharp intake and a pause, Nancy said he had been the Nazis last victim. There were certainly other factors: his career did not work out as he had hoped, and he had made a mess of his family life. But she always saw the 11-year-old boy who had arrived in Caernarfon, so scared they had to take the whistle off the kettle as it reminded him of the SA doing their roundups.

The longest-surviving child of the classified ads died in February. Karl Trommer, and his sister Hella, appeared in an ad on 11 November 1938, their parents calling for any kindhearted family to take them in. They survived and moved to Palestine after the war. Karl, as Akiva Trommer, fought in the Palmach, the Jewish special forces before the creation of Israel.

Hella died in 1980, but online records showed Akiva was still alive, with a home telephone number. When I called in late March, his son answered. I was a few weeks too late. I offered my condolences and sent a copy of the Manchester Guardian ad.

For most of the descendants to whom I spoke, the ad was a poignant footnote in family history, a reminder of the delicate chain of events that made the difference between survival and obliteration.

It held particular sway for me, as the reverence for the Guardian in our childhood home no doubt shaped my ambition to work here. At the time my dads ad appeared, my mother, his future wife, was growing up in the Rusholme district of Manchester. Her father would bring the Manchester Guardian home from his job as a railway shipping clerk and tell her the newspaper offered a reward for readers who could find any spelling mistakes.

In August 1938, she would have been a bit young for spellchecking, but I like to think of her running her finger over those lines on the second page: I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy.

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'I seek a kind person': the Guardian ad that saved my Jewish father from the Nazis - The Guardian

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Posted By admin on May 8, 2021

From its start in 1906, A Bintel Brief was a pillar of the Forward, helping generations of Jewish immigrants learn how to be American. Now our columnists are helping people navigate the complexities of being Jewish in 2020. Send questions to bintel@forward.com.

Dear Bintel,

Okay, whats the deal are Moroccan Jews Arab, or is my dad white? I had to fill out a survey about whether I thought I was included in diversity metrics at my company, and I told my (white, non-Jewish) boyfriend that I grew up in a multi-racial household and he was like: Did you though? Because I guess Sephardic Jews came from Spain, which is European?

Im confused. My dad was born in Casablanca, and his parents met in Morocco but I dont know anything beyond that about his grandparents. My mom is a white, Jewish Ashkenazi woman. So is my dad Sephardic or Mizrachi, and are Sephardic Jews Arab? Also, what is the difference?

Signed,Who, Where, What Am I?

In further correspondence, the letter writer elaborated that her father moved to the United States from Morocco as an adult, currently lives in Israel, and that she has many Moroccan family members.

Dear What,

I dont want to rag on your boyfriend if that is not what you came here for, but my goodness, yes, of course Moroccan Jews would be part of any survey definition that asked about Arab ancestry. So would any Jews who come from the Jewish communities of Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and countless other communities in the region. The heritage of Moroccan Jews encompasses the traditional language, foods, dress, and culture of the country. These communities are ancient, part and parcel of the history of this region. Your father might have a distinct identity as a Moroccan Jew, but this does not make him any less Arab, nor any less Jewish. Your boyfriend seems too clever by half, but well get to that in a moment.

Now, Im definitely not the person to parse what should count as a multi-racial versus multi-ethnic home, or the ethics of claiming that you think you were perceived as diverse though, for what its worth, the stakes here seem pretty low. If I understand correctly, the survey is asking if you thought you were included in the diversity metrics of your company, not if you think you bring diversity to the workplace. (Its a strange, complicated concept in of itself to inquire whether a person is diverse.)

But lets talk definitions. In the simplest form, most Jews today use the terms Sephardic and Mizrachi interchangeably to refer to Jews with origins in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. The term Sephardic technically refers to the religious traditions of Jews from Spain and Portugal, while Mizrachi is a broader geographical term, and refers to the ancient Jewish communities in Arab lands.

There are Sephardic families today who take great pride in tracing their lineage back to the Jewish communities of Spain, but the term originated back when Spain was a Muslim country, with more frequent movement between other Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority countries.

Later, when Spain became a Catholic country, and then expelled its Jews, the Jews of Spain escaped to many different countries, such as Holland, the Americas, and more to the point North Africa and the Middle East, taking their specific Jewish traditions with them. This is how Sephardic Jewish practices spread across the world, and why they are associated with Jews that have ancestry is in the Arab world.

But Mizrachi Jewish communities actually have many of their own, distinct Jewish traditions, separate from the Sephardic traditions that were brought to the Middle East after the Inquisition, so it is important to note how much diversity exists within these terms as well. As a Moroccan Jew, your father would be considered both Mizrachi and Sephardic, unless he identifies otherwise for some reason.

Then again, what might be clear-cut for a survey definition is not always so simple in lived reality. As a religious minority, and especially since the creation of the State of Israel, the relationship between many Arab Jews and their countries of origin have been fraught, to say the least. If you are interested in learning more, this seems like an ideal time to reach out to your father and ask him more about his own identity. This is part of your heritage, and it might be the right time to learn more about this means for him, and for you.

Shira Telushkin lives in Brooklyn, where she writes on religion, fashion, and culture for a variety of publications. She is currently finishing a book on monastic intrigue in modern America. Got a question? Send it to bintel@forward.com.

My dad is a Moroccan Jew and I think of him as Arab. But is he really?

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My dad is a Moroccan Jew and I think of him as Arab. But is he really? - Forward

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