World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder congratulated Cardinal Jorge María Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, on his election as Pope Francis I on Wednesday.

“Pope Francis I is no stranger to us. In recent years he attended many inter-faith events co-organized by the WJC and our regional affiliate, the Latin American Jewish Congress,” he wrote, adding he had met him in Buenos Aires in 2008.

Lauder praised the new pope as “an experienced man, someone who is known for his open-mindedness…a man of dialogue, a man who is able to build bridges with other faiths”.

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Ed Miliband, the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, has pledged to oppose boycotts of Israel and to protect Jewish customs, including circumcision and ritual slaughter.

Speaking Thursday before a crowd of 300 at an event organized by Britain’s main Jewish umbrella group, the leader of the British opposition, who is Jewish, warned of the need to be “ever-vigilant” against anti-Semitism, the Jewish Chronicle reported.

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An Israeli air attack staged in Syria this week may be a sign of things to come.

Israeli military officials appear to have concluded that the risks of attacking Syria are worth taking when compared to the dangers of allowing sophisticated weapons to reach Hezbollah guerrillas in neighboring Lebanon.

Tzachi Hanegbi, an incoming lawmaker in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and a former chairman of parliament’s influential foreign affairs and defense committee, signaled Thursday (local time) that Israel could be compelled to act on its own. While Israel’s preference is for Western powers to gain control over Syria’s arms stockpile, he said there are no signs of that happening.

“Israel finds itself, like it has many times in the past, facing a dilemma that only it knows how to respond to. And it could well be that we will reach a stage where we will have to make decisions,” Hanegbi told Israel’s Army Radio Thursday.

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Armed fighters linked to the Syrian opposition have detained more than 20 UN peacekeepers Wednesday in the increasingly volatile zone separating Israeli and Syrian troops on the Golan Heights, a new escalation in the spillover of Syria’s civil war.

The U.N. Security Council demanded their immediate and unconditional release.

The NZ Defence Force said none of its personnel in the Middle East were involved in the incident.

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When Elie Wiesel emerged from quintuple heart bypass surgery, still wired to monitors, he immediately started writing a book about the ordeal – “in my head.” In French.

A year later, as he recuperates from post-procedure fatigue and depression, “Open Heart” is being published, in English. And the 84-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Holocaust activist is busy in the Manhattan office of his foundation, which also is recovering – from financial ruin by Bernard Madoff, who had invested the money funding its humanitarian efforts.

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…The substance is drearily familiar, though it is particularly gratuitous. It is (yawn) an “Israel-Apartheid” story, and it pegs off moves by the Israeli authorities to take the completely reasonable step of introducing extra Palestinian buses to ferry Palestinian workers into Israel from the West Bank.

There are two reasons for the move. First, there’s the obvious security issue: there is a dreadful history of Palestinian suicide bombing on Israeli buses. Israelis are understandably afraid, especially in the context of mass incitement by the Palestinian Authority, and would rather Palestinians took their trips to Israel on their own buses. (Are you absolutely sure you wouldn’t feel the same way?)

The second reason, which explains why Israel has made its move now, is that due to more generous arrangements for the Palestinians, Israel is now granting more work permits. More workers, more buses. More Palestinian workers, more buses for Palestinians. Not one of life’s great mysteries… unless you smell a conspiracy.

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Researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have discovered the scale of the Holocaust is more extensive than previously known, the New York Times reports.

Over the past 13 years all the Nazi ghettos, slave labour sites, concentration camps and killing factories have been catalogued and found to number an astonishing 42,500, the newspaper reports. The sites spanned Nazi-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany from 1933 to 1945.

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The core characteristic of anti-Semitism is the assertion that everything the Jews do is wrong, and everything that is wrong is done by the Jews.  For the anti-Semite every rich Jew is exploitive, every poor Jew a burden on society.  For the anti-Semite, both capitalism and communism are Jewish plots.  For the anti-Semite, Jews are both too docile, allowing themselves to be led to the slaughter like sheep, and too militant, having won too many wars against the Arabs.   For the anti-Semite, Jews are too liberal and too conservative, too artsy and too bourgeois, too stingy and too charitable, too insular and too cosmopolitan, too moralistic and too conniving.

To the anti-Semite, every depression, war, social problem, plague must have been the fault of the Jews…

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Prime Minister John Key shared tales of his Jewish mother’s escape from Nazi-controlled Austria at the United Holocaust Memorial Day event this morning.

Mr Key addressed a crowd of about 200 people, which included Holocaust survivors, politicians and Israel’s Ambassador to New Zealand, Shemi Tzur, in Auckland.

His mother, born in Vienna, Austria, moved to the United Kingdom in 1938…

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