INDIA - The Last Jewish Community

"Preserving what's left of a once-thriving Jewish community in India" PBS NewsHour 8/4/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  The coastal Indian city of Cochin was once home to a thriving Jewish community; immigrants came for the spice trade and ended up settling there.  But in 1955, the community largely vanished as its residents departed en masse to the newly founded state of Israel.  Now, it's a struggle to preserve the structures and relics of Jewish heritage that remain.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO (NewsHour):  In its nearly 900-year history, this synagogue had never seen an observance like this one.  They came from four continents to this unlikely location, the coastal Indian city of Cochin, for the first Sabbath service in decades — and possibly the last one ever.

A once thriving Jewish community of several thousand has mostly faded into a bittersweet history in the age of modern-day Israel, said Yeshoshua Sivan, a British-born Israeli.

YESHOSHUA SIVAN, Israeli tourist:  I'm very sad to see communities disappear.  On the other hand, I'm very happy to see that after all these years of dispersion the prophecy of the return to the land of Israel is in my time being — I'm part of it — is being realized.  At least we see the synagogues, we see the streets, we see how life was once here.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO:  Jewish life along India's Malabar Coast dates back to the ancient spice trade that drew explorers from across the sea.

They come now as tourists, but they came in ancient times to trade, and, in the case of some Jews, to settle — from Yemen, Mesopotamia, and later a few from Spain and Portugal after the Inquisition.

Away from tourist enclaves, there's a struggle to preserve what remains of the Jewish heritage here.

I'm standing in what was the women's section of a synagogue in Mala, about four or five miles in from the coastline.  There was a thriving Jewish community here until 1955, when they decided, all of them, en masse, to emigrate to Israel.  And they turned this building over to local municipal authorities.

C.  KARMACHANDRAN, Historian:  They were very good friends.  They were very good neighbors.  They were very good traders.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO:  Some left for religious fulfillment in the new Jewish homeland, says retired Professor C. Karmachandran, who heads a local historic preservation committee.  Others thought Israel had better economic prospects, he adds, but none left in fear.  Scholars agree that there's little history of anti-Semitism in India.

C.  KARMACHANDRAN:  They were given all the protection by the rulers as well as the local people to maintain their culture, their religion, their belief and their practices, and this in fact is the living symbol of that particular lofty tradition.

FRANCE - Jewish Community

"French Jewish community ‘shocked but not surprised’ by attacks on kosher market" PBS NewsHour 1/12/2015

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Even before last week's attack in Paris, attacks on the Jewish community in France have been on the rise, prompting many to flee the country.  Gwen Ifill talks to the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg about the growing threats facing Jews in France.

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  As we reported earlier, thousands of French police were dispatched today to secure Jewish sites throughout France.

Friday’s attack on the kosher grocery came as a shock to many around the world.  But many French Jews were less surprised.  Anti-Semitic attacks in the country, often violent, were on the rise in 2014.  They included beatings, improvised grenade attacks and even rape.

The number of Jews fleeing France to make a new home in Israel more than doubled last year, growing from 3,400 in 2013 to 7,000.

“The Atlantic's” Jeffrey Goldberg is just back from a reporting trip to Paris, where he has been reporting on the growing threats to the country’s Jewish community.

Jeffrey, welcome.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG, “The Atlantic”:  Thank you.

GWEN IFILL:  Are these specific new threats or is this something that’s just been continuing?

JEFFREY GOLDBERG:  No, the French-Jewish community has been living a certain reality for quite a long time already.  Two years ago, there was a horrific attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse.  Three children murdered by a returning Syrian jihadist.

So, there is nothing — this is in the category of shocking, but not surprising, to I think much of the French Jewish community.  The rest of France is sort of coming on board to the realization of what’s going on.

GAZA - Dutch 'Righteous Among the Nation' Returns Award in Protest

"Dutch Nonagenarian Returns ‘Righteous Gentile’ Medal to Protest IDF Killing of Gaza Relatives" by Boruch Shubert, Jewish Political News 8/15/2014

As reported in Ha’aretz, a 91-year-old Dutch man who was honored with the special status of Righteous Among the Nations for going out of his way to rescue a Jew during the Nazi takeover of his country returned his medal and certificate on Thursday to protest the killing of six of his relatives by an Israeli bombing in the Gaza Strip last month.

In 2011, Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum declared Henk Zanoli and his late mother, Johana Zanoli-Smit, as members of the elite group known as Righteous Among the Nations for having saved a Jewish child, Elhanan Pinto, during the Nazi occupation of Holland.  Pinto, who was born in 1932, was hidden by the Zanoli family from the spring of 1943 until the Allies finally liberated Holland in 1945.  The boy’s parents perished in Nazi death camps.

In hiding a Jewish child, the Zanoli family knowingly took a double risk, because it was already being closely watched by the Nazi authorities for having opposed the German occupation.  Zanoli’s father was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in 1941 because of his opposition to the occupation, and he eventually died at the Mauthausen concentration camp in February 1945.  The Nazis executed Henk Zanoli’s brother-in-law because of his participation in the Dutch resistance, and one of his brothers had a Jewish fiancée, who was also murdered by the Nazis.

Zanoli’s great-niece, Angelique Eijpe, is a Dutch diplomat who currently works as deputy head of the Netherlands’ diplomatic mission in Oman.  Eijpe’s husband, economist Isma’il Ziadah, was born in the al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza; the couple has three children.  Ziadah’s parents were born in Fallujah, the area that now hosts the town of Kiryat Gat.

On Sunday, July 20, during its ongoing military action against Hamas targets, an Israeli fighter jet dropped a bomb on the Ziadah family’s home in al-Bureij.  The bomb killed the family matriarch, Muftiyah, age 70; three of her sons, Jamil, Omar and Youssef; Jamil’s wife, Bayan; and their 12-year-old son, Shaaban.  The bombing thereby orphaned Jamal and Bayan’s other five children, four daughters and a son, while orphaning Omar’s two sons, and Youssef’s three sons and a daughter, of their fathers.  The bombing additionally killed Mohammed Maqadmeh, who was visiting the family that day.

Zanoli, an attorney, learned of the killing of the Ziadah family from his niece.  As a means of expressing his shock and anguish, he decided to return the medal and certificate that honored him and his mother (posthumously) as Righteous Among the Nations.  Due to his age and poor health, Zanoli did not do so in person, but instead sent them by messenger to the Israeli Embassy in The Hague – the same place where he had been presented with them in an official ceremony three years ago.

In the accompanying letter, addressed to Israeli Ambassador Haim Davon, Zanoli began by describing the price his family paid for resisting the Nazis and their successful attempt to save a Jewish child.  “Against this background it is particularly shocking and tragic that today, four generations on, our family is faced with the murder of our kin in Gaza.  Murder carried out by the State of Israel,” the elderly Dutchman wrote.

“The great- great grandchildren of my mother have lost their [Palestinian] grandmother, three uncles, an aunt and a cousin at the hands of the Israeli army,” he further stated.  “For me to hold on to the honor granted by the State of Israel, under these circumstances, will be both an insult to the memory of my courageous mother who risked her life and that of her children fighting against suppression and for the preservation of human life as well as an insult to those in my family, four generations on, who lost no less than six of their relatives in Gaza at the hands of the State of Israel.”

Commenting that Israel’s actions in Gaza “have already resulted in serious accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity,” he went on, “as a retired lawyer it would be no surprise to me that these accusations could lead to possible convictions if true and unpoliticized justice is able to have its course.  What happened to our kin in Gaza will no doubt be brought to the table at such a time as well.”

The Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit did not respond to Haaretz’s questions about whether the Ziadah home was bombed in error, or if not, who in the house was considered a target and whether the IDF’s legal department considers the death of six civilians to be legitimate collateral damage.  The unit’s response said only that the IDF invests great efforts in trying to avoid civilian casualties, is currently working to investigate all allegations of irregular incidents and will publish its conclusions after this investigation has been completed.

RELIGION - Pope Francis Reaches Out to Jewish Community

"The Pope reaches out to the Jewish Community" PBS Newshour 10/19/2013

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Pope Francis made several overtures to the Jewish community this week, sending an email to the son of two Holocaust survivors to laud him on a lecture discussing faith and the Holocaust, and refusing to grant a former Nazi war criminal a funeral mass.  Kim Lawton from PBS's Religion and Ethics Weekly.

RELIGION - Muslims & Jews

"The Jewish school where half the pupils are Muslim" by Jonathan Margolis, The Independent

It's infant prize day at King David School, a state primary in Moseley, Birmingham. The children sit cross-legged on the floor, their parents fiddling with their video cameras. The head, Steve Langford, is wearing a Sesame Street tie.

A typical end-of-term school event, then. But at King David there's a twist that gives it a claim to be one of the most extraordinary schools in the country: King David is a strictly Jewish school. Judaism is the only religion taught. There's a synagogue on site. The children learn modern Hebrew - Ivrit - the language of Israel. And they celebrate Israeli independence day.

But half the 247 pupils at the 40-year-old local authority-supported school are Muslim, and apparently the Muslim parents go through all sorts of hoops, including moving into the school's catchment area, to get their children into King David to learn Hebrew, wave Israeli flags on independence day and hang out with the people some would have us believe that they hate more than anyone in the world.

More evidence that the fanatics of the world (Muslim, Jewish, or Christian) believe in a lie of hatred.