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→ 22 April 2020
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‘Plague on a Biblical Scale’: Hasidic Families Hit Hard by Virus | NY Times

In the New York area, the epidemic has killed influential religious leaders and torn through large, tight-knit families.

Neighborhoods in Brooklyn with large Hasidic populations have some of New York City’s highest levels of positive Covid-19 test results.Credit…Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times

One of the first people Shulim Leifer knew who died of the coronavirus was his great-uncle. Then his grandmother fell ill, as did two of his cousins. The man who lived next door to his childhood home died on a Tuesday, and by Friday the neighbor on the other side was dead as well.

Each neighbor was given a small funeral, with a handful of mourners standing six feet apart on their front lawns in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Borough Park.

“There is not a single Hasidic family that has been untouched,” said Mr. Leifer, 34. “It is a plague on a biblical scale.”

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→ 21 April 2020
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Netanyahu and Gantz sign agreement for ‘national emergency government’ that keeps Netanyahu as prime minister for now | JTA

JERUSALEM (JTA) — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz signed a deal Monday to form a “national emergency government” that keeps Netanyahu as the prime minister for now.

Israel has spent more than a year under a caretaker government as neither Netanyahu, who heads the right-wing Likud party, nor Gantz of the center-left Blue and White could assemble a coalition government. With the agreement, the country avoids a fourth national election in less than a year and a half.

The agreement also accedes to Likud demands that Israel annex parts of the West Bank, according to an Israeli TV report. That could happen as early as July.

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→ 21 April 2020
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Yom HaShoah 2020 Memorial Service | ZFNZ

Last night the Zionist Federation of New Zealand organized a memorial service to honour the victims of the Holocaust.

In case you missed it, you can catch the service here:

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→ 21 April 2020
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How COVID-19 Is Changing Israel’s Business Culture | Forbes

Eyal Younian

NZFOI: Under COVID-19, new norms are forming everywhere…

[IAI is Israel’s largest aerospace company. IAI’s Deputy CEO, Eyal] Younian said that while it may be possible to manage COVID-19 in the future, Israel must change its culture because a more serious virus could emerge in the future.

For Israel’s businesses, this will mean less face-to-face interaction. “There will be more video conferences, we will have fewer people in meeting rooms, and there will be less business travel. Israel is a country based on exporting and 80% of IAI’s sales come from outside Israel. We are a defense company and negotiations must be done in person. We must find a creative solution,” he said.

Israel’s non-business social life will also change. There will be “less hugging and kissing [which will be difficult because] we are a warm people,” he said.

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→ 21 April 2020
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Coronavirus Spy Apps: Israel Joins Iran And China Tracking Citizens’ Smartphones To Fight COVID-19 |Forbes

Benjamin Netanyahu

NZFOI: As New Zealand considers how technology can be used to combat COVID-19….

“All means will be used to fight the spread of the coronavirus,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on March 14, “including technological means, digital means, and other means that until today I have refrained from using among the civilian population.” As Haaretz reported, this means Israel will now unleash cyber tech “usually used for counter-terror” to enforce quarantines and to check the movements of people testing positive for the virus.

Following the announcement, the country’s Attorney General “approved the use of cyber measures to track patients’ phones,” essentially green-lighting Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, to actively track citizens by geolocating their cellphones and, one can assume, to build a database of where and when. The same intel can also be used to determine who else was in the vicinity of a known patient on a timeline, establishing potential infections, although such measures were not spelled out in any of the announcements today.

And, just like, that Israel joins Iran and China in the deployment of state-level intel gathering tools to track its population as it tries to prevent its coronavirus outbreak from getting out of control. Geolocating phones is a simple tech—in tandem with the carriers, the granularity can be pretty precise in urban locations. The fact this is being presented as a counter-terror intel tool suggests it is more than just a basic policing-level solution, more than just simple geofencing.

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→ 20 April 2020
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Anti-Semitic graffiti on Ōwairaka/Mt Albert targets Tūpuna Maunga Authority chair Paul Majurey ‘abhorrent act’ | NZ Herald

Tūpuna Maunga Authority chair Paul Majurey has called the graffiti an “abhorrent act”. Photo: Russell Brown

Anti-Semitic graffiti has appeared atop an Auckland maunga targeting the Tūpuna Maunga Authority chair Paul Majurey in what has been called an “abhorrent act”.

Since October, protesters have been occupying Ōwairaka/Mt Albert to prevent the removal of hundreds of exotic trees as part of a major cultural and native restoration project that has the backing of the city’s mana whenua and Auckland Council representatives.

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→ 14 April 2020
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Garson v Cumin and Bing

Marilyn Garson has taken her anti-Israel rhetoric to the NZ International Review, where she repeats her accusations of Israel’s illegal occupation of Gaza.  

To be fair, the NZIR has also published a rebuttal from David Cumin and Dov Bing.

Here Sheri Oz reviews both articles.

 

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→ 8 April 2020
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A very different kind of Passover, in lockdown New Zealand | Spinoff

Juliet Moses

This Passover, we won’t be attending synagogue, we won’t be participating in large raucous dinners and sharing our food with our extended family and friends, we won’t be welcoming strangers into our homes, as Jewish people are instructed to do, writes Juliet Moses.

Tonight, on what is hopefully the halfway point of our lockdown period, Jewish people in New Zealand will sit down at their Seder dinner tables and mark the start of the festival of Passover. As we do every year, we will ask “why is this night different from all other nights?” and recite the reasons.

Many of us will also be thinking about why this Passover is different from all other Passovers. This Passover, we won’t be attending synagogue, we won’t be participating in large raucous dinners and sharing our food with our extended family and friends, we won’t be welcoming strangers into our homes, as we are commanded to do; we will be sheltering in our homes, with the people we are self-isolating with. It’s just one of many sacrifices, of varying degrees of magnitude, we must all make at this time.

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→ 6 April 2020
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‘I would have canceled’: 3 weeks after Purim celebrations, coronavirus is hitting Jewish communities hard | JTA

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK – MARCH 10: A Hasidic family, dressed up for the jewish holiday purim, crosses the street on March 10, 2020 int he Williamsburg neighborhood Brooklyn, New York. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

NEW YORK (JTA) — The day before the Hasidic folk band Zusha performed before a crowd of 300 in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights on the evening of March 9, the band’s manager thought about canceling the event.

The concert was to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Purim, a one-day festival marked by dressing in costume, communal dancing and feasting — often in crowded and raucous settings. But the incipient spread of the novel coronavirus in New York was giving the manager, Paltiel Ratzenberg, second thoughts.

No government body had advised against large gatherings — that would come nearly a week later — but the virus already was making its presence felt among New York Jews. An outbreak that began in late February in New Rochelle, a suburb just north of New York City, led to some synagogues canceling services and others announcing that they had nixed their Purim parties.

So Ratzenberg called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to ask for guidance. He also called a local rabbi.

Ratzenberg told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that both gave him the go-ahead. The band also wanted to play. So the show went on — with plenty of hand sanitizer available.

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→ 3 April 2020
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COVID-19: A Pesach Message from Rabbi Sacks

R Jonathan Sacks

This is a very, very difficult time and it becomes really acute when we see it from the perspective of Pesach.

This year we’re clearly dealing with an enormous phenomenon. Just today, the General Secretary of the United Nations has called this “the greatest challenge facing humanity since World War II”.

So anything that I have to say, I say with absolutely humility and with hesitancy, because none of us know for sure what all of this means. But let me, in any case, share some thoughts with you.

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