NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Fighting racial intolerance in New Zealand and beyond
There are very few Jews in Israel who do not light Hanukkah candles. These numbers are from a research project called “Israeli Jewry” by the Jewish People Policy Institute. The survey was based on an extensive survey of Jews in Israel.
A new book recently published by Dvir is based on the project and is entitled “Israeli Jewry, A Portrait of a Cultural Revolution”.
The data shows that almost three out of every four Jews in Israel (73%) say they light Hanukkah candles “every evening”.
Anti-Semitic stereotypes are alive and well in Europe, while the memory of the Holocaust is starting to fade, a sweeping new survey by CNN reveals. More than a quarter of Europeans polled believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance. Nearly one in four said Jews have too much influence in conflict and wars across the world.
One in five said they have too much influence in the media and the same number believe they have too much influence in politics.
Meanwhile, a third of Europeans in the poll said they knew just a little or nothing at all about the Holocaust, the mass murder of some six million Jews in lands controlled by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s.
Those are among the key findings of a survey carried out by pollster ComRes for CNN. The CNN/ComRes poll interviewed more than 7,000 people across Europe, with more than 1,000 respondents each in Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Poland and Sweden.
Benjamin Netanyahu
In another twist in a roller-coaster week for Israeli politics, a key ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided not to quit as had been expected, allowing the right-wing Government to limp along and possibly avoid new elections.
Even in the best of times, Israeli politics is polarised and fractious, but the events of the past few days have been particularly fraught.
The turmoil was sparked by an intense bout of fighting with militants in the Gaza Strip last week and capped by an ultimatum from Education Minister Naftali Bennett. It is still unclear whether the Government will survive even the next few days, let alone finish its term a year from now.
KFAR ADUMIM, West Bank (AP) — Israel is threatening vacation rental company Airbnb with high taxes and legal repercussions over its decision to remove listings from Jewish West Bank settlements.
The threats step up Israel’s fight against a global movement advocating for boycotts over the country’s treatment of the Palestinians.
Israeli Tourism Minister Yariv Levin says Tuesday that Israel will seek to impose “very high taxes” on the company in order to restrict its operations in the country. He also says Israel will encourage hosts in settlements to sue the company to make it “pay” for its decision.
Airbnb’s decision on Monday sparked outrage among Israeli officials and settler leaders, but was welcomed by Palestinian officials and human rights groups that had long pressured the company to end its contentious West Bank settlement listings.
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) — Hundreds of Ethiopian Jews gathered in the capital, Addis Ababa, to protest the Israeli government’s decision not to allow all of them to emigrate to Israel, leaving their families divided between the two countries.
Representatives of the 8,000 Jews in Ethiopia urged the Ethiopian Jews living in Israel to think carefully before voting for Israel’s ruling party, the Likud, over the delays in repatriation to Israel.
The Ethiopian Jews claim they are being blocked from emigrating to Israel, despite a 2015 pledge to allow them to do so by the Israeli government.
PARIS (AP) — The U.N. culture and education agency has teamed up with the World Jewish Congress to launch a website to counter Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.
UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay and WJC President Ronald Lauder unveiled the interactive “Facts about the Holocaust ” site at the cultural agency’s Paris headquarters on Monday.
The man killed in a Palestinian rocket attack in southern Israel has been identified as a 48-year-old Palestinian laborer who had been working in the Israeli city of Ashkelon.
Relatives say Mahmoud Abu Asbeh had worked in Ashkelon for 15 years, leaving his West Bank village of Halhoul each Sunday and returning home on weekends.
His cousin Jihad Abu Asbeh called it a “big shock” and says the entire village is sad. He says it was “God’s will and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Mahmoud’s body was found in the rubble of a building struck by a rocket fired from Gaza. His cousin says Mahmoud was married with six children.
In the past 24 hours, Israel has been attacked by the terrorist organization Hamas. More than 400 rockets have been fired from the Gaza Strip. This number is the highest recorded on any day since Hamas began firing rockets into Israel more than 10 years ago. The previous record was 192 which fell in one day during Operation Protective Margin.
Stan Lee, the Jewish writer whose creations revolutionized comic books, died on November 12, 2018, at the age of 95. Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Black Panther, Ant Man, The Mighty Iron Man, Daredevil and other comic book heroes were born from Lee’s fervid imagination.
Lee’s career spanned decades in the comic book industry as it transformed from a smaller scale business that employed many first-generation Jews to today’s sprawling multi-billion dollar superhero industry dominated by global blockbuster movies featuring many of the heroes invented by Lee.
Stanley Lee was born Stanley Lieber in 1922 in New York. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Romania; he later described his mother as a “nice, rather old-fashioned Jewish lady”. Lee was a voracious reader as a child, reading Shakespeare by the time he was ten and devouring both serious and pulp literature. He initially wanted to be a serious writer but when he graduated high school he was hired by Martin Goodman, a relative who’d worked in the magazine industry and was starting to publish comic books at Timely Publications.
A new round of hostilities triggered by a botched Israeli covert operation into the Gaza Strip pushed the territory’s fragile security situation to the brink today.
Palestinian militants launched hundreds of rockets towards Israel and Israeli jets carried out bombing raids.
Israel’s military said it had rushed extra infantry troops and air defences to the boundary with Gaza as at least 200 projectiles were launched towards Israeli territory in less than three hours.
At least two projectiles hit houses, while an anti-tank missile hit a bus transporting soldiers near the border, the military said, critically injuring a 19-year-old soldier.
